I am guilty. Here there can be no two opinions. I shall not wriggle out of this guilt. I live in insolvency. I save myself by evasion. How much longer am I to go on evading?
When a tin subpoena arrives, or a reminder, Greek in its austere simplicity, from a social organization—when they demand that I name my accomplices, stop my thieving, tell where I get my counterfeit money, and sign a warrant not to travel beyond certain designated limits—I agree immediately, but then I start evading again right away, as if nothing had happened. And so it goes.
In the first place: I ran away from somewhere, and I must be sent back, settled, investigated, and corrected. In the second place, they assume I am somebody else. No way of proving my identity. In my pockets, trash: cryptic notes from the previous year, telephone numbers of dead relatives and addresses of God knows whom. In the third place, I signed a pact, either with Beelzebub or the State Publishing House, grandiose and unfulfilled, on Whatman paper, smeared with mustard and emery-powder pepper, in which I bound myself to return twice over everything acquired, to regurgitate fourfold everything I misappropriated, and to perform sixteen times running that impossible, that unthinkable, that unique thing that might, in part, acquit me.
I became more stiff-necked every year. As though by a streetcar conductor’s steel punch, I am riddled with holes and stamped with my own surname. Whenever anyone calls me by my first name and patronymic, I tremble. I simply cannot accustom myself to such honor! To be called Ivan Moiseich, even if just once in my life! Hey, Ivan,24 go scratch the dogs! Mandelstam, go scratch the dogs! Some little Frenchman might be called “cher matîre” dear teacher—but me? “Mandelstam, go scratch the dogs!” To each his own.
I grow old, and with the stump of my heart I scratch the master’s dogs, and they never get enough, they never get enough . . . With canine tenderness, the eyes of Russian writers look at me and they implore: drop dead! Where does it come from, this lackey’s malice, this sniveling contempt for my name? Even the gypsy had a horse, but I am horse and gypsy in one person . . .
Tin subpoenas under my little pillow . . . The forty-sixth little old contract instead of a halo and a hundred thousand lighted cigarettes instead of candles . . .
XVI.
No matter how much I work, no matter if I carry horses on my back or if I turn millstones, I shall never become a worker. My work, no matter what form it might take, is seen as mischief, as lawlessness, as incidental. But that’s the way I want it, and so I agree. I subscribe with both hands.
Here’s a different approach: for me, it is the hole in the doughnut25 that has value. What of the dough of the doughnut? You can devour the doughnut, but the hole will remain.
That’s what real work is: Brussels lace. The main thing is what supports the pattern: air, punctures, truancy.
In my case, brethren, work does me no good; it doesn’t go on my record.
We have a Bible of work, but we do not appreciate it. I mean Zoshchenko’s stories. He’s the only man who has shown us a worker, and we’ve trampled him in the dirt. But I demand monuments for Zoshchenko in every city and boondock of the Soviet Union, or at the very least, as for Grandpa Krylov, in the Summer Garden.26
Now there’s a man whose work reeks with truancy, in whose work Brussels lace lives!
At night on the Ilinka when the department stores and the trusts are asleep and conversing in their native Chinese, at night anecdotes go walking along the Ilinka. Lenin and Trotsky walk arm in arm as though nothing has happened. One has a little pail and a fishing rod from Constantinople in his hand. Two Jews go walking, an inseparable pair. One asks questions, the other answers; and the one keeps asking, always asking, while the other keeps evading, always evading, and in no way can they be parted.
A German organ-grinder walks by with his Schubertian barrel-organ—such a failure, such a parasite . . . Ich bin arm. I am poor.
Sleep, my dear . . . M.S.P.O.27 . . .
Viy28 is reading the telephone book on Red Square. Lift up my eyelids . . . Give me the Central Committee . . .
Armenians from Erevan walk by with green-painted herrings. Ich bin arm. I am poor.
And in Armavir on the town coat of arms there is written: A dog barks and the wind carries it.29
Journey to Armenia
Journey to Armenia
SEVAN
On the island of Sevan, which is conspicuous for two most dignified architectural monuments that date back to the seventh century, as well as for the mud huts of flea-bitten hermits only recently passed away, thickly overgrown with nettles and thistles, but not scarier than the neglected cellars of summer houses, I spent a month enjoying the lake water that stood at a height of four thousand feet above sea level and training myself to the contemplation of the two or three dozen tombs scattered as if they were a flowerbed amidst the monastery’s recently renovated dormitories.
Daily at five o’clock on the dot, the lake, which teems with trout, would boil up as though a huge pinch of soda had been thrown into it. It was what you might fully call a mesmeric seance for a change in the weather, as if a medium had cast a spell on the previously tranquil limewater, producing first a playful little ripple, then a bird flock twittering, and finally a stormy Ladogan frenzy.
It was at such a time impossible to deny oneself the pleasure of measuring off three hundred paces along the narrow beachpath that lay opposite the somber Gunei shore.
Here the Gökcha forms a strait five times broader than the Neva. The superb fresh wind would tear into one’s lungs with a whistle. The velocity of the clouds kept increasing by the minute, and the incunabular surf would hasten to issue a fat, hand-printed Gutenberg Bible in half an hour under the gravely scowling sky.
Not less than 70 percent of the island’s population consisted of children. They would clamber about like wild little beasties over the monks’ graves, bombard some peaceful snag on the lake bottom, whose icy spasms they took for the writhing of a sea serpent, or bring out of their murky tenements the bourgeois toads and the grass snakes with their jewellike feminine heads, or chase back and forth an infuriated ram who could in no way figure out how his poor body stood in anybody’s way and who would keep shaking his tail, grown fat in freedom.
The tall steppe grasses on the lee hump of Sevan Island were so strong, juicy, and self-confident that one felt like carding them out with an iron comb.
The entire island is Homerically strewn with yellowed bones—remnants of the local people’s pious picnics.
Moreover, it is literally paved with the fiery red slabs of nameless graves, some sticking up, others knocked over and crumbling away.
At the very beginning of my stay the news came that some stonemasons digging a pit for the foundation of a lighthouse on the long and melancholy spit of land called Tsamakaberda had come across a cemetery containing burial urns of the ancient Urartian people. I had previously seen a skeleton in the Erevan Museum, crammed into a sitting position in a large clay amphora, with a little hole drilled in its skull for the evil spirit.
Early in the morning I was awakened by the chirring of a motor. The sound kept marking time. A pair of mechanics were warming the tiny heart of an epileptic engine, pouring black oil into it. But the moment it got going, its tongue twister—something that sounded like “Not-to-eat, not-to-drink, not-to-eat, not-to-drink”—would fizzle out and extinguish itself in the water.