* The Party decree of 1946—see the note on Zhdanov in the Appendix.
obviously got caught in the web, was clearly very upset and anxious to explain things to me. I managed to avoid this confrontation, but I will never forget how the girl sent to spy on me kept sighing and repeating: "I adore Akhmatova and your hubby"—the vulgar tone was typical of her milieu. All this relates to a much later stage; in 1934 we hadn't even heard the word "tail," and therefore we did not suspect who had informed the police agent about our return to the apartment.
5 Shopping Baskets
manuscripts for the second time, the agent did not even notice that Piast's poems were missing—it was this that might have alerted him to the fact that we, too, had removed a few things. Akhmatova's shrewdness in advising me not to tidy the room had paid off—if I had put all the papers back in the trunk, the agent might have got suspicious.
Piast's poems were very long, and it was these we had had to take away in shopping baskets. They were divided into chapters called "Fragments." M. liked them—perhaps because of the way in which Piast denounced the concept of the lawful wedded life. He referred to his own wife as his "wedded" one, and refused to live with her. When we settled for the first time in a normal apartment, tiny as it was, M. too was minded to rebel against the trammels of married life and began to praise Piast inordinately. Noting his enthusiasm, I asked: "And who is your 'wedded' one? Not I, surely?"
To think that we could have had an ordinary family life with its bickering, broken hearts and divorce suits! There are people in the world so crazy as not to realize that this is normal human existence of the kind everybody should aim at. What wouldn't we have given for such ordinary heartbreaks!
hile rummaging in our trunk and going through all the
Piast had given me two of his poems to keep, after writing them out in long hand: typewriters were expensive and neither of us could afford one. He had given me the only fair copies and refused to believe me when I tried to convince him that he could hardly have chosen a worse place to keep them in. After his exile our apartment seemed to him the epitome of stability, security and calm, almost likea fortress. When he saw our night visitor pick up the "Fragments," M. sighed sadly, fearful of what might happen to Piast. It was at this point that "the strength came over me," as Akhmatova put it, to retrieve from the agent and thus virtually preserve for posterity Piast's curses on "wedded wives" and his paeans to the illicit beauties of the kind he preferred—for some reason, they were all as tall as guardsmen. He had brought the most recent of these female giants to our apartment to hear him recite his "Fragments." Is it possible that she kept a copy of the manuscript? Actually, I believe she was less interested in Piast than in the fees he was then extorting from the State Publishing House for a translation of Rabelais. I also remember Piast complaining at that time about his wayward stepdaughter; I am told that she is still living, though somewhere far away, and has fond memories of her rather eccentric stepfather. Perhaps she still has the poems that I rescued?
Just before M.'s arrest we had constant visits from the ordinary police because of Piast: he had given our address when he registered with them and got permission to spend a few days in Moscow to straighten out his literary affairs. His permit had expired and the police were now looking for him to make sure he left the city for the place he was allowed to live in. Luckily for him, he was not with us during the searches—as he would have been if he hadn't been frightened off by the visits from the ordinary police. If he had fallen into the hands of our agents, they would have hauled him off together with our manuscripts. He was lucky. Just as he was also lucky not to survive till the next wave of arrests and die in his bed or a hospital ward in Chukhloma or some other such place he was allowed to live in. Like the dramas of family life, this was normal and hence could be regarded as happiness. To understand this one had to go through a certain schooling.
As to M.'s manuscripts, we rescued a small number of drafts from various years. After this we never kept them in the apartment again. I took some of them out to Voronezh in small batches in order to establish the texts in final form and to compile lists of the unpublished items. I gradually got this done together with M. himself, who had now changed his attitude toward manuscripts and drafts. Previously he had no time at all for them and was always angry when, instead of destroying them, I threw them into the old yellow trunk that had belonged to my mother. But after the search of our apartment and his arrest, he understood that it was easier to save a manuscript than a man, and he no longer relied on his memory, which, as
he knew, would perish with him. Some of these manuscripts have survived to the present day, but the bulk of them disappeared at the time of his two arrests. What do they do in the bowels of our Halls of Justice with all the papers which in the early days they took away in briefcases and then, later on, in sacks? But why speculate about- the fate of papers when we don't know what happened to their owners? It is a miracle that a few witnesses and a handful of manuscripts have survived from those times.
6 "Integral Moves'
here was no third search and we were not arrested. We there
fore started the same routine as everybody when their relatives have been picked up. After running around the city all day, we came back exhausted and, instead of making a proper dinner, opened a can of corn. This went on for three days. On the fourth day my mother arrived from Kiev. She had vacated her apartment there, sold off the unwieldy family furniture, and come to spend the rest of her days with her daughter and son-in-law now that they had at last settled in a nice apartment of their own. Nobody met her at the station, and she was very angry and hurt. But when she learned what had happened, all her resentment vanished and she was once again the student radical of pre-revolutionary days who knew exactly what to think about the Government and its police activities. Throwing up her hands, she gave us a piece of her mind on the theory and practice of Bolshevism, made a rapid survey of our household resources, and, declaring that even in her day the doctors attributed the high incidence of pellagra in Bessarabia to the excessive consumption of corn, took some money out of her purse and ran off to buy provisions. Now that we had someone to look after us, we pursued our routine with even greater energy.
I had gone to see Bukharin right at the outset. When he heard what had happened, he changed color and bombarded me with questions. I had not realized that he was capable of getting so upset. He paced rapidly up and down his huge office, occasionally stopping in front of me to ask another question. "Have you been to see him?" I had to explain to him that visits to relatives in prison were no longer allowed. Bukharin did not know this. Like all theorists, he