"We'll have to wait until the fall now," he said. It was already July and Moscow was empty, so we no longer hatched plans of salvation but thought only of how we could hold out till the fall. "We must change our profession—we are beggars now," M. declared, and he proposed we make a trip to Leningrad
It was noteworthy that in this last year M. and I no longer conversed as we had always done earlier, when I had often remembered things he said and the exact words he used. Now we exchanged inarticulate phrases or short interjections ("I'm tired . . . must lie down . . . can't go on . . . must do something . . . Lord, who will they arrest next? . . ."
When life becomes absolutely intolerable, you begin to think the horror will never end. In Kiev during the bombardment I understood that even the unbearable can come to an end, but I was not yet fully aware that it often does so only at death. As regards the Stalinist terror, we always knew that it might wax or wane, but that it might end—this we could never imagine. What reason was there for it to end? Everybody seemed intent on his daily round and went smilingly about the business of carrying out his instructions. It was essential to smile—if you didn't, it meant you were afraid or discontented. This nobody could afford to admit—if you were afraid, then you must have a bad conscience. Everybody who worked for the State—and in this country even the humblest stall-keeper is a bureaucrat—had to strut around wearing a cheerful expression, as though to say: "What's going on is no concern of mine, I have very important work to do, and I'm terribly busy. I am trying to do my best for the State, so do not get in my way. My conscience is clear—if what's- his-name has been arrested, there must be good reason." The mask was taken off only at home, and then not always—even from your children you had to conceal how horror-struck you were; otherwise, God save you, they might let something slip in school. . . . Some people had adapted to the terror so well that they knew how to profit from it—there was nothing out of the ordinary about denouncing a neighbor to get his apartment or his job. But while wearing your smiling mask, it was important not to laugh—this could look suspicious to the neighbors and make them think you were indulging in sacrilegious mockery. We have lost the capacity to be spontaneously cheerful, and it will never come back to us.
When we arrived in Leningrad, we went straight to see Lozinski, who was living in an isolated dacha near Luga. He immediately gave us 500 roubles so we could return to Savelovo and pay the rent for our room there till the end of the summer. There had never been any stability about money and prices. On a free market the rise and fall of prices is governed by natural trends, but we could never make sense of the constant fluctuation of prices in our planned economy, where prices were always being raised or lowered in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. It was therefore difficult to say what the worth of these 500 roubles was, but there was still a certain magic in denominations of hundreds or thousands, and when Lozinski gave us 500 roubles we no longer felt like ordinary beggars, but like very superior ones who collected their alms wholesale instead of stretching out their hands for kopecks.
We had dinner with Lozinski, who played the fool and joked. Both M. and he laughed as in the old days at the Poets' Guild. Then M. read his poems for a long time. Afterward Lozinski saw us back to the station. The road at first went through woodland, but when we came to streets where there were people about, we did not want him to come any further in case somebody saw him with two suspicious strangers. The worst would have been to run into someone from the Union of Writers who knew M. by sight. We did not want to compromise Lozinski and left him at the edge of the woods.
Born in the nineties of the last century, Akhmatova, Lozinski and
M. found that in the thirties they already constituted the oldest generation of the intelligentsia—their elders had perished, emigrated or completely faded out of the picture. These three were therefore looked upon as ancients, while some of the Fellow Travelers like Kaverin, Fedin and Tikhonov, who were actually only a few years younger, were regarded as mere striplings. Babel stood apart from the rest, and was not thought of as being either young or old. As though to confirm the public attitude toward them, both Lozinski and M. aged very early. In 1929, when M. was working for the Moscow Komsomol newspaper on Tverskaya Street, the doorman there once said to me, as I was looking for him: "The old man has gone to the buffet." He was still not forty at the time, but his heart was already giving him trouble. Ehrenburg, incidentally, is wrong when he says that M. was short in height—he was in fact taller than Ehrenburg, and though I myself am of medium height, I scarcely came up to his ears, even when I wore high heels. Neither was M. as frail as Ehrenburg makes him out to be. He was in fact quite broad-shouldered. Ehrenburg remembered him as he was in the Crimea when he was starving, and he was also aiming at a journalistic effect by describing him as a puny, delicate Jewish type like Ashkenazi*—so weak and helpless, and look what they did to him! But M. was not like Ashkenazi at all—he was much more robust.
M.'s heart succumbed to the impossible demands made on it by our life and his own unruly temperament. Lozinski, on the other hand, was stricken by a mysterious kind of elephantiasis—it was like something Biblical and seemed out of place in Leningrad. His fingers, tongue and lips had swollen to twice their normal size. I had first seen him in the middle of the twenties, when he came to see us on Morskaya Street. He seemed to sense the approach of his illness already, and he was saying that after the Revolution everything had become difficult and people tired from the slightest exertion—talking, walking or just meeting someone. Lozinski, like M., had already tasted prison by this time, and he was one of those who always kept a bag packed in case of arrest. He was picked up several times—once because some of his students at a seminar on translation had given each other nicknames. Nicknames made the Cheka unhappy and put thoughts of conspiracy into their heads. The whole seminar was clapped in jail. Fortunately, Lozinski's wife had a good contact in Moscow, and whenever her husband was arrested, she at once rushed to her protector. The same thing was true of Zhirmunski's wife and
• Vladimir Ashkenazi, the Soviet pianist, now resident in the West.
it was only owing to this good fortune—the protecting hand of someone in Moscow—that both got off so lightly in those days. Both Lozinski and Zhirmunski seemed marked men from the beginning, and everybody was pleased to see Lozinski's name in the list of the first writers ever to receive Soviet decorations. He was quite out of place in this company, and it soon turned out that in any case such decorations were no guarantee—you were simply stripped of them on your arrest. But Lozinski was lucky and died of his own terrible and improbable disease.
We all emerged shaken and sick from the first years of the Revolution. At the beginning it was the women who were affected most, but in the long run they were the tougher and the more likely to survive. The men seemed stronger and withstood the first shocks, but then their hearts gave out and very few lived to be seventy. Those spared by war and prison were carried away by heart attacks or the sort of fantastic diseases from which Lozinski and Tynianov suffered. Nobody here will ever believe that cancer is not connected with the shocks to which we are constantly exposed. We have seen too many cases in which someone has been publicly hounded and threatened, only to hear shortly afterward that he has cancer. The statistics keep talking about the rise in the average life expectancy, but this must be due to the high proportion of women—we are certainly as tough as the devil!
66 Tania, the Non-Party Bolshevik