True as this is, however, I never cease to marvel at our hardiness. After Stalin's death my brother Evgeni said to me: "We still do not realize what we have been through." Not long ago, as I was traveling in an overcrowded bus, an old woman pushed up against me and I found my arm was bearing the whole weight of her body. "That must be killing you," she said suddenly. "No," I replied, "we're as tough as the devil." "As tough as the devil?" she said, and laughed. Somebody nearby also laughingly repeated the phrase, and soon the whole bus was saying it after us. But then the bus stopped and everybody started to push toward the exit, jostling each other in the usual way. The little moment of good humor was over.
In the period of the Yezhov terror—the mass arrests came in waves of varying intensity—there must sometimes have been no more room in the jails, and to those of us still free it looked as though the highest wave had passed and the terror was abating. After each show trial, people sighed, "Well, it's all over at last." What they meant was: Thank God, it looks as though I've escaped. But then there would be a new wave, and the same people would rush to heap abuse on the "enemies of the people." There was nothing people wouldn't say about the victims in order to save themselves. "Stalin doesn't have to cut heads off," said M., "they fly off by themselves like dandelions." I think he said this after reading an article by Kossior and then learning that he had been arrested nevertheless.
In the summer of 1937 we lived in the country like vacationers— as M. said, "It's always easier in the summer." We went into Moscow fairly often, and we even visited friends at their dachas in other parts of the country around about. We went, for instance, to see Pasternak at Peredelkino.* He told us he thought his wife was baking a cake down in the kitchen. He went to tell her of our arrival, but came back looking glum: she clearly wanted to have nothing to do
* A writers' colony in the country near Moscow.
with us. A few years later, when I had returned from Tashkent and tried to telephone Pasternak, she answered the phone and said: "Please don't come out here to Peredelkino." After that I never tried to call him again, but whenever he ran into me on Lavrushinski Street, near the house where I lived for a long time with Vasilisa Shklovski, he would come up to see me in the apartment. He was also the only person to come and see me on hearing of M.'s death.
On that last visit that M. and I made to Pasternak in Peredelkino, he came to see us off at the station and we spent a long time talking on the platform, missing train after train. Pasternak was still obsessed by Stalin and complained that he could not write poetry any more because he had not been able to get a personal meeting with him as a result of their famous telephone conversation. M. smiled sympathetically, but I felt nothing but dismay. After the war it appears that Pasternak rid himself of this obsession—at least he never mentioned it again in conversation with me. As regards his novel, Dr. Zhivago, the idea must have come to him well before the war—every time we met him he told us he was writing a prose work "about us all." As one can see from the novel itself, the basic idea may have changed in the course of the years, but it was a time in which people were always frantically changing their minds, never sure who was right.
During the years of the terror Shklovski had no illusions, but he always hoped that the arrests reflected mainly a "settling of accounts" within the ruling group. For instance, when Koltsov was arrested, he said it did not affect us, but he was terribly upset whenever real intellectuals were picked up. He was anxious to survive so that one day he could be a "witness." But by the time the Stalin era was over, we had all grown old and lost the keenness of vision one needs to be a witness. This is what happened to Shklovski.
Lev Bruni, when we went to see him at this time, shoved some money into M.'s pocket and said: "Who needs this cursed regime?" Marietta Shaginian pretended that she hadn't heard anything about arrests: "Who are they arresting? What for? Why are the wretched intellectuals making such a fuss because half a dozen people have been arrested for conspiracy?" Her own daughter shouted into her ear about the Tretiakov family, but, taking refuge in her deafness, she affected not to hear.
Adalis was scared to let us stay the night, which was natural enough, but then she put on a silly act of trying to persuade us to go and spend the night at our old apartment in Furmanov Street: "I'll come along with you, and if the militia trouble you, I'll explaineverything to them—I promise I will." People were quite beside themselves and said the first thing that came into their heads, in sheer self-defense. The ordeal by fear is the most terrible there is, and people never recover from it.
We had nothing to live on and we had to go and beg from our friends. We spent part of the summer on money given us by Katayev, his brother (Evgeni Petrov) and Mikhoels. Mikhoels embraced M. and vied with Markish in trying to console him. Yakhontov gave us money all the time, until he went away.
Every time we came into Moscow for the day, M. went to the Union of Writers, trying to get an interview with Stavski, but Stav- ski wouldn't see him and sent him instead to his deputy, Lakhuti.
e everybody else, we tried to devise ways of saving ourselves.
Lakhuti did his best to arrange something for M. He even sent him on commission from the Union of Writers to the White Sea Canal, begging him to write a poem about it. This is the poem that Akhmatova empowered me to burn. It would not, incidentally, have satisfied those who commissioned it: M. was only able to turn out something on the landscape.
64 Cow or Poetry Reading?
It is only in the East that people voluntarily throw themselves into the flames, but we still thought of ourselves as Europeans. Both M. and I had different plans—all they had in common was their absolute unfeasibility.
My plan was summed up by the word "cow." In our country, where all means of earning a livelihood are in the hands of the State, there are only two ways of maintaining a private existence: begging, or keeping a cow. We had tried begging, but found it unbearable. Everybody shies away from beggars and nobody wants to give alms, particularly as all they have comes to them by courtesy of the State. There had been a time when the ordinary people in Russia always took pity on prisoners and convicts, and the intelligentsia regarded it as a duty to support anyone persecuted for political reasons. All this disappeared together with "abstract humanism." Apart from this, people were frightened of us—we were not only beggars, we were also lepers. Everybody was afraid of everybody else: not even the"safest" person was immune—they could even come at night for someone who had just published an article in Pravda denouncing the "enemies of the people." Every arrest was followed by a chain reaction of others—the relatives and friends of the arrested man, as well as those whose telephone numbers were scribbled in his notebook, or in whose company he had celebrated the New Year. . . . People were frightened of every meeting and of every conversation, but they gave a particularly wide berth to people like us who had already been touched by the plague. And we ourselves felt that we were spreading the infection and wanted nothing more than to hide away and not see anybody.