Each piece of paper meant at least two visits to the relevant office: first to apply for it, and then to collect it. Often one had to come again because it wasn't yet ready. When they were ready, all these references had to be handed to the head of the identity-papers section of the local police, where there was always a long line. Two or three days later M. again had to stand in line there to collect his temporary identity paper, which then had to be taken next day and stamped with the residence permit. This meant standing in line once more at the appropriate window in the police station. Fortunately, the girl clerk who entered residence permits was very kind to M. Ignoring the murmurs of concierges fretting in the line with their enormous registers under their arms (all arrivals and departures had to be entered in them), she always called M. to the window straightaway and took his identity paper so that she could return it to him next morning, duly stamped, without his having to wait in line.
In the summer of 1935 M. was granted the favor of receiving an identity paper valid for three months, accompanied by a residence permit for the same period. This made our lives much easier, particularly since the lines for papers had lengthened considerably after the purge in Leningrad: the lucky ones, who had been sent no farther than Voronezh, now had to go through the lengthy ordeal of getting permits and papers to live there.
People who live in countries without identity papers will never know what joys can be extracted from these magic little documents. In the days when M.'s were still a precious novelty, the gift of a benevolent fate, Yakhontov came to Voronezh on tour. In Moscow M. and he had amused themselves by reading from the ration books which were used in the excellent store open only to writers. M. refers to this in his poem "The Apartment": "I read ration books and listen to hempen speeches." Now Yakhontov and M. did the same thing with their identity papers, and it must be said that the effect was even more depressing. In the ration book they read off the coupons solo and in chorus: "Milk, milk, milk . . . cheese, meat . . When Yakhontov read from the identity papers, he managed to put ominous and menacing inflections in his voice: "Basis on which issued . . . issued ... by whom issued . . . special entries . . . permit to reside, permit to reside, permit to reside . . ." Ration books reminded one of the literary fare that was doled out to us in the magazines and by the State publishing houses, and every time he opened Novy Mir [New World] or Krasnaya Nov, M. would say, "Today they're dishing out Gladkov" (or Zenkevich or Fadeyev). The line quoted above was intended in this double sense. Allusions to his identity papers are also to be found in M.'s verse: "Clutching in my fist a worn year of birth, herded with the herd, I whisper with my bloodless lips: I was born on the night between the second and third of January in the unreliable year of eighteen ninety something or other, and the centuries surround me with their fire."
Another amusement of this type (it was rather like a schoolboy thumbing his nose behind the teacher's back) took the form of a public stage performance by Yakhontov. In a turn entitled "Traveling Poets" he read passages from Pushkin's "Journey to Erzrum" and from Mayakovski in such a way as to suggest that poets could travel abroad only under the Soviet regime. The audience reacted with total indifference: nobody then imagined that anybody could travel abroad and as they left at the end of this baffling evening, the only comment they could manage was: "That's what comes of living too well." To keep his spirits up in the face of such an impassive audience, Yakhontov had to keep playing little tricks. At one point he would recite from Mayakovski's poem about the "Soviet Passport" and, taking his own identity papers from his pocket, brandish them in front of the audience, looking all the time straight at M. M. took his brand-new papers out of his pocket, and they exchanged knowing glances. The authorities would have taken a poor view of such antics, but they are very literal-minded, and there were no instructions to cover cases of this kind.
Another thing about identity papers was that they gave rise to guessing games. Since every general renewal of people's papers was also the occasion for a quiet purge, I decided not to go to Moscow to renew mine, but to do it in Voronezh. The result of this was that I lost my right to live in the capital and did not recover it until twenty- eight years later. But in any case I had no hope of getting my Moscow papers renewed—where would I have got a reference about my employment, how would I have explained the whereabouts of my husband, in whose name the title to our Moscow apartment was made out? When we both got our brand-new Voronezh papers, we noticed that they had the same serial letters before the numbers. It was thought that these letters were a secret-police code indicating the category to which one belonged—i.e., that one was an exile or had been convicted of some offense. "Now you are really trapped," M. said, examining the numbers and serial letters. Our more optimistic friends consoled us by saying that it wasn't so, but rather that the police had forgotten that M. was an exile and failed to mark his papers accordingly. We were so convinced that all citizens were numbered and registered according to categories that it never occurred to any of us to doubt the significance of these letters and numbers. Not until a few years after M.'s death did it turn out that these serial numbers had no special significance—apart from showing that my frightened fellow citizens had imaginations more lively than even the GPU and the police.
We were not too upset by the loss of my Moscow residence permit. "If I return," M. said, "they'll register you as well. But until then they won't let you live there in any case." Sure enough, I was thrown out of the capital in 1938 and after that was allowed to come back only for brief periods of a month or so on academic business. At last Surkov proposed that I return ("you've been in exile long enough"). Throwing up my work, I returned to Moscow to move into the room offered me by the Union of Writers. I was kept hanging around for six months, and then Surkov informed me that there would be neither a room for me nor a permit to reside in the city. "They say that you left it of your own free will," he explained to me, adding that'he had no time to "talk with the comrades about you." And it is only now at last, in 1964, that I have suddenly been granted the right to live here. No end of people have written letters and pleaded on my behalf, but perhaps it has only happened now because a certain magazine[10] is about to print some of M.'s poems. This means that he has at last returned to Moscow. During thirty- two years not a line of his work has appeared in print. It is twenty- five years since his death, and thirty since his first arrest.
It really was a great relief when M. was given proper papers in Voronezh. The business of renewing the temporary ones not only took up a great deal of time, but was accompanied by constant anxiety and speculation as to whether it would be issued or not. In the GPU office and the police station one heard the same conversations all the time: some complained to the man behind the window that they had been refused a permit to reside, others begged for it to be granted. But the official never argued—he just stretched out his hand for your application and told you when it had been turned down. Those who were refused permits to live in Voronezh had to move into the countryside, where it was impossible to earn one's living and conditions were unbearable. And every time we joined all the other people making the rounds of offices to get our bits of paper, we trembled in case we should be unlucky and be forced to move on in some unknown direction for reasons not revealed to us. "And clutching in my fist a worn year of birth, herded with the herd . . ." When M. read these lines to Mikhoels, he took out his papers and held them in his clenched hand.