I was now struck by the light-heartedness with which M. made fun of his illness and how quickly he managed to forget the days he had spent in a state of delirium. "Nadia," he said a month and a half after our arrival in Voronezh, complaining about a bad meal I had made for him, "I just can't eat stuff like this—I'm not out of my mind now, you know."
The only thing that seemed to me an aftereffect of his illness was an occasional desire he now had to come to terms with reality and make excuses for it. This happened in sudden fits and was always accompanied by a nervous state, as though he were under hypnosis. At such moments he would say that he wanted to be with everybody else, and that he feared the Revolution might pass him by if, in his short-sightedness, he failed to notice all the great things happening before our eyes. It must be said that the same feeling was experienced by many of our contemporaries, including the most worthy of them, such as Pasternak. My brother Evgeni Yakovlevich used to say that the decisive part in the subjugation of the intelligentsia was played not by terror and bribery (though, God knows, there was enough of both), but by the word "Revolution," which none of them could bear to give up. It is a word to which whole nations have succumbed, and its force was such that one wonders why our rulers still needed prisons and capital punishment.
Fortunately, M. was only seldom overcome by these bouts of what is now called "patriotism," and once he had come to his senses he himself dismissed them as madness. It is interesting to note that in the case of people concerned with art or literature, total rejection of the existing state of affairs led to silence, while complete acceptance had a disastrous effect on their work, reducing it to mediocrity. Unfortunately, only their doubts were productive, but these brought down the wrath of the authorities on their heads.
Another factor which made for reconciliation with reality was simple love of life. M. had no taste for martyrdom, but the price one had to pay to live was much too high. By the time M. had decided to pay a first installment, it was in any case too late.
To come back to my own illness, I was put in the wing for spotted- typhus cases. I overheard the head doctor saying to some superintendent or other that I was very sick, and that I was "in the charge of" the secret police. At first I thought I must have imagined this in my delirium, but the doctor, who was to prove a good friend, later confirmed to me after my recovery that he really had said these words. Subsequently, during my wanderings around the country, I was often told by people connected (whether openly or secretly) with the secret police—officials of personnel departments and informers—that I was "in the charge of Moscow." What this meant I do not know. To understand it, one would have to learn more about the structure of the agency in whose charge I was. Personally, I think it is better not to be in anybody's charge, but I just cannot imagine how to achieve this. It would be interesting to know whether we were all accounted for in the same way, or only a select few of us.
The kindly woman doctor who looked after our ward told me that her husband, an agronomist, was at that time coming to the end of his sentence in a camp, to which he had been sent, together with many others of his profession, for allegedly poisoning the wells in his village. This is not the invention of a lively mind, but a fact. Later on, when I was better, and began making trips to Moscow, she gave me packages to mail to him in his camp. In those years such food parcels could be mailed only from Moscow, whereas nowadays they can be sent only from small provincial towns. For a number of years Emma Gerstein used to go out to all kinds of outlandish places, lugging heavy parcels which Akhmatova wanted mailed to her son Lev.
When the "poisoner of the wells" returned at the end of his sentence, we were invited to a party in his honor and toasted him in sweet wine while he sang songs in his soft baritone and rejoiced in his freedom. In 1937 he was arrested once more.
I got a lot of attention in the hospital from a nurse called Niura. Her husband worked at a flour mill. Once he had brought home a handful of grain for his hungry family and been sentenced to five years. The nurses greedily ate anything the typhus and dysentery patients left on their plates, and they were always talking about their misfortunes and poverty.
I came out of the hospital with a shaved head, and M. said that I looked like a real convict.
ЗО The Disappointed Landlord
I
came back not to the hotel, but to a "room" which M. had managed to find to serve us as a temporary accommodation. It consisted of a glassed-over veranda in a large tumbledown house that belonged to the best cook in town. He had managed to hang on to it as a private owner because he was the chef in a "closed" restaurant in the exclusive category. In this connection, M. said to me that we might at last be able to find out who actually used these mysterious "closed" restaurants. In the spring of 1933, during a trip to the Crimea, we had been refused admittance to restaurants in Sebastopol and Feodosia, on the grounds that they were "of the closed type." But from the cook we learned nothing about it—for him it was no joking matter. He was a tired, sick old man who no longer had any appetite for food, and lived in one room of his house—all the others were occupied by tenants who for a long time had been paying him the nominal rent fixed by law. As the owner, he had to do all repairs at his own expense, and in summer he let the veranda just to make ends meet. His one hope was that the place might be pulled down or taken over by the housing department of the local Soviet, but no local Soviet in its right mind would want to saddle itself with a ruin like this. So the last private owner of a large house in Voronezh was miserably going to the dogs, and his only dream was to become an ordinary tenant in his own house, which would in any case soon be pulled down.
The Voronezh of 1934 was a grim place, badly off for food. Dispossessed kulaks and peasants who had fled the collective farms begged in the streets. They stood by the bread stores and stretched out their hands. They had long since eaten their supplies of dry crusts brought with them in bags from their native villages. In the cook's house there was an old man called Mitrofan who was frantic with hunger. He wanted to get a job as a night watchman, but nobody would take him. He put this down to his name: "With a name like this they think I must have something to do with the church." In the middle of the city there was a half-ruined cathedral of St. Mitrofanius, and he was probably right. When we moved out of the house that winter, the old man hanged himself. With our departure his last means of earning a little money had gone: he had helped us to find our new room by bringing along old women who acted as go-betweens for owners of rooms, or corners of rooms (or simply beds), and potential customers.
One had to search for such accommodation in houses that were still privately owned or owned by the housing department of the local soviet. This was illegal and counted as speculation. Owners and tenants always hated each other even before they met. The tenants wanted to pick a quarrel as soon as possible so they would have an excuse to refuse to continue paying rent at a rate twenty times higher than what the housing department would have charged, and the owners, once they had made a few urgent repairs out of the rent money, suddenly began to feel they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage and took fright in case their tenants might stay on for good. This, in fact, is what generally happened. Once he had his residence permit and had reached the end of the few months originally agreed on, the tenant would make his own agreement with the housing committee (this often involved a little greasing of palms) and was given permanent title to the accommodation in question. This was in the case of housing run by the local soviet. In a privately owned place, the tenant just refused to move out, and since it was never possible to get a court order against him, he simply stopped paying rent. This was how most people eventually got a permanent place to live, and it was, so to speak, a natural process of re-distribution of living space. As such, it was a much more passionate affair than the earlier phase of outright confiscation had been. It was attended by constant rows and scenes and the writing of mountains of denunciations, by means of which both tenants and owners sought to get rid of each other. Nowadays such things cannot happen because living-space is rented out privately like this only to people who have no residence permit—a tenant in such a situation, living like a bird in a tree, cannot easily make any claims. The only scope left for trouble-making is for a neighbor to denounce a tenant who lives without a permit, but the authorities have begun to take a lenient view of such cases. Times have changed.