This was why I dreamed of a cow. Thanks to the vagaries of our economic system, a family could support itself for many years by keeping a cow. Millions lived in wretched huts, feeding themselves from the products of their tiny plots of land (on which they grew potatoes, cabbage, cucumbers, beets, turnips and onions) and their cow. Some of the milk had to be sold to buy hay, but there was always enough left over to add a little richness to the cabbage soup. A cow gives people some independence and, without over-exerting themselves, they can earn a little extra to buy bread. The State is still in a quandary about this relic of the old world: if people are allowed to buy hay to feed their cow, then they do only the very minimum of work on the kolkhoz; if, on the other hand, you take their cows away, they will die of hunger. The result is that the cow is alternately forbidden and then permitted again. But the number of cows is gradually decreasing, because the peasant women no longer have the strength to fight for them.
A cow would have saved us, and I was sure I would be able to learn how to milk it. We would have merged with the background somewhere, living very obscurely and never leaving our house. But to buy a house and cow you needed money—even now I wouldn't be able to afford them. Peasant women came to us in Savelovo, offering us their frame houses for a song, and nothing could have been more tempting. But to settle in the countryside you need to have been born there and inherit a hut with a leaking roof and a broken fence from some old peasant woman. Perhaps in capitalist countries there might be people eccentric enough to give an exiled poet the money to buy himself a peasant hut and a cow, but there could be no question of it here. To do so would have been regarded as a crime, and the benefactors themselves would speedily have ended up in a labor camp.
M. was not keen on my plan. Apart from the fact that we had no money to bring it about, the idea itself did not appeal to him. "Nothing ever comes of such schemes," he said. His plan was the reverse of mine—instead of merging with the background, he wanted to attract attention to himself. He believed that if only he could induce the Union of Writers to arrange a public reading of his poetry, then it would be impossible to refuse him work. He still harbored the illusion that you could win people over with poetry. This was something he had felt in his youth, when he once said to me that nobody could deny him anything if he wrote verse. It was probably quite true— things had been good for him in those days, his friends valued and protected him. But it was of course meaningless to apply those standards to the Moscow of 1937. Moscow no longer had faith in anything, and the order of the day was: every man for himself. Moscow now had no time for any civilized values, let alone for poetry. We knew this well enough, but M. was restless by nature and could not just sit waiting on events. Morever, an outcast could live only if he kept on the move—M. was not to be given a moment's respite until his death.
Lakhuti seized on the idea of a poetry reading, which he too thought might save M. I know nothing at all of Lakhuti, except that he was friendly and kind to us. In the brutal atmosphere of those days, his friendliness seemed like a miracle. Neither he nor Stavski could decide the question of a reading without consulting higher authority. While this matter of State was being considered "up above," we waited in Savelovo, occasionally coming in to Moscow and going to the Union to see whether there was any progress. On one of these visits M. had a conversation with Surkov in the corridor, and when he came out, he found 300 roubles in his pocket. Surkov must have put them there without M. noticing. Not everybody would have risked such a thing—the consequences could have been very unpleasant. In any final estimate of Surkov, one should not forget this gift of money to M. It was rather like the onion which, in Russian tradition, the sinner must hang on to if he wants the Virgin to pull him into heaven at the last moment.
For a long time there was no word about the poetry reading, but then suddenly M.'s brother Evgeni had a phone call from the Union and was asked to inform M. urgently that it had been fixed for the next evening. Cables were very unreliable and, rather than take chances, Evgeni rushed to the station and caught the last train out to Savelovo. At that moment he too no doubt thought that M. might be
saved by a poetry reading.
The next day we traveled to Moscow and went to the Union of Writers at the stated time. The secretaries were still there, but nobody knew anything about a poetry reading—they had only heard some vague rumor, but couldn't remember exactly what. All the rooms it could have been held in were locked, and there were no posters announcing it.
It only remained to find out whether anybody had received a circular about it. Shklovski told us that nothing had been sent to him, but he advised us to ring one of the poets—invitations were generally sent around only to members of the relevant section. We happened to have Aseyev's telephone number and M. phoned him to ask whether he had received a notice. After a moment or two M. turned pale and hung up: Aseyev said that he had heard something vaguely, but that he couldn't talk just now because he was about to leave for the Bolshoi Theater to see The Snow Maiden. . . . M. didn't have the heart to try anybody else.
We were never able to unravel the mystery of the poetry reading. Somebody had certainly rung Evgeni from the Union of Writers, but we never discovered who. It might have been the personnel department (always closely connected with the secret police) which had not bothered to inform the secretaries and given them no instructions—it was they who usually attended to the practical arrangements for such things. But why would the personnel department have been involved? The thought crossed our minds that it had all been a trap designed to lure M. from Savelovo for the purpose of arresting him in Moscow, but that nothing had come of it because somebody had forgotten to get top-level clearance—perhaps from Stalin himself. Since Stalin had been personally interested in M.'s case, this may well have been so. Otherwise M. might have been picked up in a way which had now become common practice for the overworked secret pohce—instead of going to arrest people in their homes, they lured them on some pretext to a convenient place from which they could be sent straight to the Lubianka. There were many stories about such cases. But there was no point in speculating about it, so we returned to Savelovo and pretended to be vacationers again.
Both our plans for salvation thus collapsed—M.'s suddenly, and mine more gradually. Such dreams offered no way out.
It was quite natural that Aseyev should have mentioned The Snow Maiden, rather than some other opera, as his excuse for not being able to talk: the poetic faction to which he belonged had once shown a weakness for pre-Christian Russia. But we omitted to inquire what was being performed that evening at the Bolshoi Theater and whether, indeed, it had not already been closed for the summer. I am told that in his old age Aseyev was lonely and isolated. He explained his isolation by saying that he had lost his standing because of his fight against the "cult of personality." Friends of Kochetov write articles to say that even he (Kochetov) fought against the "cult of personality." It now seems there were no Stalinists at all, only brave fighters against the "cult of personality." I can testify that nobody I knew fought—all they did was to lie low. This was the most that people with a conscience could do—and even that required real courage.
65 The Old Friend
he fiasco over the poetry reading did not break M.'s will.