In every way, that period marked the height of my career. The Hitlerites hadn’t attacked us yet, so even I of all people still got to embrace an illusion or two about “peace” and “freedom”; meanwhile, we’d finally made an impression on our spoiled darling Anna Andreyevna! In corroboration, N. K. Danchenko, whom we often stationed there, reported to me that Akhmatova appeared malnourished (not that I hadn’t seen that for myself) and that her face resembled the shining of a yellow dress at a window.
To return to my report, by the time those two relics of bourgeois gentility took off their shabby coats and sat down facing one another at the kitchen table, I was invariably ready for them.
Her attempts to deceive us had become desperately pitiful by then. How many times can’t I remember Akhmatova handing a new scrap of illicit poetry to Lidiya Chukovskaya, who read it hurriedly and silently, memorized it, then passed it back to her hostess, who burned it over an ashtray? I was flat on my belly on the floor of the apartment above, watching them through a hole in the chandelier.20
How early autumn came this year, said Akhmatova, setting fire to another memorized scrap of “Requiem.” I’d already noted it down. Come to think of it, we knew “Requiem” by heart before she’d even finished it; it’s fair to say that we wrote it ourselves.
Sometimes Chukovskaya used to beg her to recite something.
It’s all the same to me, Akhmatova would reply.—It was all the same to me, too. I’m not claiming that she didn’t occasionally achieve certain effects (I’m speaking here as someone who knows art—professionally, of course).
Please don’t trouble yourself if you’re tired, my dear Anna Andreyevna! How are you feeling?
It’s extremely good that I’ll be dead soon, said Akhmatova.
Chukovskaya stared at her, her eyes filling with tears. Oh, it was love, all right! As far as I was concerned, they could both go where we’d sent Gumilyev.
In fact, from any practical point of view, they should have ceased to exist. Only the war saved them. Poor Lidiya—when should I bring her in? Poor Anna Andreyevna with her broken heel and missing teeth! I felt as an 
-doctor must when he broods over his collection of Jewish skulls, for these two women were ghosts, gliding over the red velvet carpets of olden times. Sometimes they did nothing but stare into each other’s eyes, and then I’d eat my lunch, for there’s an ancient Russian custom of meals at a graveside.
Sometimes she recited from Rosary, which I have always considered her weakest collection, thanks to its religious trash. I have a copy right here, and according to the title page it was published in March 1914, when I was still in what it’s best to call street business. I’m not averse to informing you that my life wasn’t easy in those days. But who cares about me? In 1914, I hated anybody Orthodox. When we were putting the priests on trial in the twenties, my attitude hardened beyond mere hatred; I argued that possession of Rosary should be grounds for a death sentence. But something about the religiosity of those two pathetic women almost disarmed me.
When we arrested Gumilyev, we found an old volume by Masaryk in his study. I don’t feel embarrassed about informing you that when I was searching it for marginalia, I learned a few things about my country. On the subject of Dostoyevsky he writes: It is not Christ but rather the Russian Christ who is his idol. Right away, I understood that this emblematized Akhmatova’s position also. And, frankly, even committed Stalinists such as myself are proud to be Russians deep down, although we can’t always show it. The world-wide conspiracy of the priests against the people, naturally we have to stamp that out. But if Akhmatova’s Christ is a Russian Christ, why not let her kiss Him goodbye a little longer? If she’s lucky, she’ll die before He does.
Masaryk also argues that Russian atheism is not positivist agnosticism, but rather a kind of embittered skepticism which revels in the laceration of the soul. I do admit his point. Whenever I’ve been working over a priest (lacerating him, let’s say), I come home in a particularly foul mood. So even when Akhmatova and Chukovskaya knelt down to pray, I didn’t feel as disgusted as I would have expected. This speaks for my fairness and neutrality.
Besides, I’m a lover of the arts.
All this is a way of leading up to the fact, which fails to embarrass me in the least, but which for obvious reasons I wouldn’t confide to just anyone, that on one freezing December afternoon—dead black by four-o’-clock—when Akhmatova happened to be in a delicately happy mood because on my instructions we’d accepted her parcel that day (it was Pyotr Alexeev’s turn to take that one home, not that Akhmatova’s parcels ever offered us many treats) and Chukovskaya took full advantage of that success to ask her oracle for an elucidation of “At the Seashore”—she seems to have heard about it from M. Shaginyan, whose file I haven’t studied but whose acquaintances seem to place her in suspicious proximity to anti-Soviet circles—a sincere joy overcame me, because that’s my favorite poem; and a quarter-hour later, when Akhmatova, shivering there in her black dressing gown with the silver dragon on the back, agreed to recite the poem, I could hardly believe my luck; then she began: Bays wounded the low shore and my heart thrilled.
In the summer of 1914, as the Romanovs, blinded by mysticism and bad alliances, led Russia ever closer to war’s edge, Gumilyev was in the second year of his affair with the young T. Adamovicha, who wanted to marry him and to whom he dedicated his next book of poems, which no one has studied more closely than I. Ever since his voyage to Africa, as I know from reading his diary, he’d had nightmares about the future. In one dream, about which I reminded him at his interrogation, he found himself condemned for complicity in a palace revolution in Abyssinia; after his decapitation, he clapped his bloody hands at the goodness and simplicity of it all. In Tanya’s arms, of course, he dreamed other dreams. As for Akhmatova, left alone with their child in Slepnyovo (not that she hadn’t begun her so-called “friendship” with N. Nedobrovo), she lay on the couch and wrote “At the Seashore.” What a parasite!
The notion that there is a “soul” which can express itself through poetry has long since been ringingly disproven; all the same (doubtless on account of my Russian nationality), “At the Seashore” is sufficiently beautiful to bring tears to my eyes. The first line: Bays wounded the low shore.
20
It wasn’t until 1945, on the day after that foreign snake Isaiah Berlin departed, that we screwed a microphone into her ceiling. We made it visible on purpose; that saved us trouble. Next time he came to our country, she wisely refused to meet him.