The Russian Jerusalem (5 page)

In his apartment in Central Moscow, Mirsky sits at a table with a pile of books and a bottle of vodka. His hand is a little shaky, but he is not drunk. A month has passed. His curtains are open to the June night. He cannot sleep and cannot work. In the street below a Black Maria is already drawing up at his door. 

The charming domestic game is over. The flat with its books and papers has disappeared. We are in another climate. A fairytale winter in Voronezh. Calm. Cracking frost. Blue snow.

Mandelstam is allowed to live in any town more than 100 kilometres away from Moscow. But he has been mad, and is still ill; his asthma is bad; at night he struggles to breathe and has to sleep propped up on pillows. He and Nadezhda have no money for food. Their room is a
glassed-over
veranda in a large, rundown house.

On the narrow, crooked streets, he is stared at, and suspected. His eyelashes are gone, and his eyelids red; the snow scalds his eyes. He does not have the physiology for heroism. In the Lubianka he recited the poem about Stalin to his captors at once. They had a copy anyway.

The pathos of memory.

Sometimes he imagines himself in The Stray Dog, at a side table with Akhmatova. There is a scarf thrown across her shoulders. Her hair is drawn back harshly; her tender mouth and huge grey eyes are sombre. She is smoking one cigarette after another. When Mandelstam takes the stage to read a poem, he walks with his head thrown back, a lily of the valley in his buttonhole. The room stills to listen. As he returns to the table, Akhmatova's eyes darken and she whispers to him.

‘Most poetry is so boring. But when you read, Osip …'

They are not lovers. She has teased him out of that. He offers his love instead to Princess Salomea Andronikova, his Solominka, and allows himself to break his heart over her beauty.

He does not recall the first days of Revolution, or the Civil War. What he remembers is a sanatorium in Detskoye Selo some years later. Nadezhda is sitting on a veranda in March, huddled under heavy blankets. She is taking her temperature every hour of the day. When the doctors shake their heads, he becomes agitated and questions them until she begs him to stop. He is so deeply in love, he stays in a nearby
pension
to be with her, even though he dislikes the landscape of straggly grey trees.

He asks her advice on every word of his poetry.

Akhmatova sits in another deckchair close by. She has had tuberculosis since childhood; the years of the Moscow famine have made her dangerously thin. The two women gossip about Akhmatova's current lover, Nikolai Punin. To Mandelstam, Nadezhda repeats with delight Akhmatova's ironic words: ‘Men are always so charming and considerate when they come courting.'

When Nadezhda is sturdy enough, she and Osip make for Moscow even though his work is no longer sought after and they have nowhere to live. For a time, they lodge with Emma Gerstein, whose father is a consultant in a good hospital and therefore has a large flat. Mandelstam lets grey stubble grow on his cheeks, neglects his health and wears crumpled collars. No lily of the valley in his lapel now. They allow the room they occupy to fall into squalid disorder. No one wants his poetry. It is like meeting a posterity which has already forgotten him, has no need of him, would prefer not to consider what has become of him.

‘It's hard to move between people pretending to be alive,'
he remarks, referring to the local editors of journals and those who control the publishing houses.

It is Nadezhda who secures their miraculous flat in Nashchokin Lane by dragging a mattress into it before any rivals. For a time they are happy there. They set out favourite books. Entertain friends.

Akhmatova often stays with them. And she is there when they come to arrest him: still calm, strong and generous. He had begged and boiled a single egg from a neighbour for her supper. While the NKVD begin their searches and announce they have a warrant for his arrest, she gives the egg back to him, saying he will need all his strength. He peels it, puts salt on it and eats it.

In the Lubianka, he confesses everything at once. They tortured him nevertheless: with bright lights and lack of sleep. The screams they told him were Nadezhda's sent him mad. Even in Cherdyn high in the Urals he has hallucinations about her suffering. And Akhmatova too: he imagines her thrown down a cliff, and calling for help.

Here in Voronezh, his lips move as he walks. Sometimes he is writing poems. Sometimes he talks to an invisible companion, perhaps Gumilyov, Akhmatova's first husband, shot by the Bolsheviks more than ten years ago.

‘Nikolai,' he murmurs. ‘We were right. Only
things
are real. Forget symbols and mysticism. All a poet needs is an axe head. Starlight. A frozen rain butt. Nikolai. My friend. Are you there? There are not many people I can talk to when Nadezhda goes to Moscow. It is a pity that you are dead.

‘You cannot write to the dead. And the living often don't reply either. I think of my brother as a child in the Tenishev School in St Petersburg. We played soccer in shorts, wool socks and English blouses, and were taught the
Anglo-Saxon
virtues. I remember the heavy, sweetish smell of gas in the laboratories, the snowball fights in the playground. Everything else I had to find out for myself. Our childhood loyalties. Now, dear brother, you write that you can send me no money. You plead your own family responsibilities. As if I were not your family.

‘It was my mother who arranged the Tenishev school. She knew what she wanted for us. And she spoke the Russian language in all its purity. I knew Pushkin in her voice. The excitement of that. Even now, when I talk about Pushkin, Nadya has to take my pulse. My father still had a thick Polish accent; a prosperous Warsaw leather merchant barely out of the ghetto. His German was good, though; he could read Goethe, was in love with German philosophy. I see him in his top hat and synagogue clothes hustling us all into a carriage for the September Holy Days.

‘I did not even know the letters of the prayer book. My grandfather covered my shoulders with a yellow shawl, and was disappointed in me. I did not like the odours of my grandparents' house, the closed-in mustiness of their small rooms. And their food was spiced too strongly for my taste. My father's study, too, was an alien world, with a Turkish couch covered with ledgers of flimsy paper, and bookshelves of Hebrew books not stacked side by side but thrown together one on top of the other every which way.

‘Strange what comes to mind. Just now I remembered the Jewish quarter in Petersburg just behind the Mariinski Theatre. On Tergovaya Street. The synagogue has conical caps, onion domes and an exotic fig tree. You could see shop signs in spiky script, and Jewish women with false hair poking out under their headscarves.

‘To become a Russian poet, you have to give up all that rubbish. When I went to St Petersburg University, I let
myself be baptised without a qualm. I was giving my allegiance to Christian Art and the Russian calendar: decorated eggs, Christmas trees. The Jewish festivals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were harsh sounds in my ear. A commonplace treachery, irrelevant now in our new Soviet world where no religion is allowed.

‘So much simpler to love the Lutheran Church, however, not the Russian Orthodox. My only regret, now, is losing the melody of Yiddish. I did not hear it at home. I learned that music only from the genius of Solomon Mikhoels. Late. Late in my life. In the Yiddish State Theatre. How can I describe the charm of the language? It has an upward curve; the sentences are interrogative, and yet somehow disappointed at the same time. Such absurd lines Mikhoels could make with his body, how elegant he was.

‘It was in Kiev I saw him first. A magician. He created his own props: a needle and thread, a glass of pepper-vodka. In Kiev, a city of golden domes and pogroms, with candles in the chestnut trees and the down of lindens in the air. The city where I found my love. If you take a tram to the Podol where the Jews and gangsters live, you will think it the liveliest part of the city, but remember: the Podol has often been set in flames. The Podol has often flooded. But any Jew is fragile as porcelain. I doubt Mikhoels will survive.'

For a moment, Mandelstam is silent. The path is steeper and he has to pause to catch his breath.

Nadezhda is in Moscow, finding work as a translator. Without her earnings they could not eat. But he needs her with him. When she is away, he has attacks of panic. Will there be a telegram from Nadya today? Their last telephone call, he was shamefully quarrelsome. He did not even thank her for the roubles she had wired at the beginning of the
week. She is working too hard, his angel. She should be here at his side. Sudden anxiety for her clutches like an unfriendly hand on the airsacs of his lungs.

Madness to hang around Moscow in 1937 without the right to live there. She tries to sell his work, but editors are not interested in him. His surname does him no good. At
Noviy
Mir
someone suggests he change his Jewish surname to something more Russian.

There is no telegram. Wildly, extravagantly, he writes to her, sending his love, apologies and desperation, and leaves himself no money for the fuel he will need tomorrow.

Back in the room, he makes a fire with the wood that is left. The effort makes him wheeze. He glances up from time to time with a quick, almost furtive glance, as if he sensed an alien presence. But as he huddles in front of the flames drowsily it is Nadezhda he talks to.

‘This is Voronezh, in the region of the Black Earth. There are ravens in the name of that city, can you hear them? And a robber's knife. Rooks scatter like flicks of burnt sugar across the sky. The houses are painted pistachio green. I can fly and sing, but I crawl along these streets afraid to fall in a snow drift.'

When his temperature begins to rise, he dreams of hot fresh bread, pine baths and a river flowing into an inky forest. Or an open window in the Podol, where he can make out a loaf of
challah
bread, some herring and some tea. No. Moscow is his home now; he longs to be back in the flat on Nashchokin Lane. But not St Petersburg.
To live in St Petersburg is like living in a coffin.

He moans in his sleep.

‘I cannot bear to be alone. Nadenka. Nadenka, my breathing is difficult if you are not here with me. Only with you am I able to draw breath normally. Without you I suffocate. I am a shadow. I do not exist. Who will visit me?'

It is a long train journey from Moscow to Voronezh. Akhmatova made the trip once. It took thirty-six hours, she said. And my brother did not even buy pillows or blankets for her. She endured the discomfort without complaint. When we met, we were both like ghosts, but after a while there was laughter again. Electricity. Perhaps too much electricity?

There are moments of happiness even for a disgraced poet. A hand is waking him. It is Nadezhda, dressed in her beret and a short leather jacket, who has come from the train and sets her bags on the carpet. She is down-to-earth and unladylike, and he holds on to her like a baby.

She explains there is no good news; she no longer dares to speak to friends in case she incriminates them. But she has brought money for the week's food and more. He tells her about the sanatorium where they treated the frostbite on his ears with the dark-blue light of a quartz lamp. She soothes him but even so they come close to quarrelling when he says, matter of factly, without rancour:

‘Aren't you ashamed? You'll write memoirs about me after I am dead but you don't care enough to stay here and look after me.'

They are soon wrapped deeply in one another's arms, and begin the whispering reminiscence of a long marriage.

Tsvetaeva puts her hands over her ears. ‘I do not want to hear them talk of me. I know why he left me, of course, but I don't want to hear Nadya reminding him how badly I behaved, how I ignored her, how rudely I took him to see Alya as if he belonged to me. I know, and I don't want to stay here any longer.'