On the way to borrow money, we would go to the post office and send off some of M.'s poems to the literary magazines in Moscow. We only once got an answer—when we sent "The Unknown Soldier" to 7,namia [The Banner] and got back a letter pointing out that wars may be just or unjust, and that pacifism as such cannot be approved. But to us even this stilted reply was very welcome: at least somebody had bothered to communicate with us!
The poem about the shadow which wanders among men, "warming itself with their wine and their skies," was sent, by way of an exception, not to Moscow but to Leningrad (probably to Zvezda). Among the copies of M.'s poems that now pass from hand to hand I sometimes find missing versions that must go back to these copies we sent to the literary magazines at that time. People working on the magazines in question must have purloined these forbidden poems, with the result that they found their way to readers.
The journalist Kazarnovski, who met M. in a transit camp after his second arrest, has told me that one of the accusations against M. was that he had circulated his verse (which was described by some utterly damning word) among the staffs of the literary magazines. Though what does it matter what he was accused of? When I was summoned to the Prosecutor's office in 1956 to be told that M. had been cleared of the charges brought against him after his second arrest, I actually saw the file on his case and the whole thing seemed to take up only two small sheets of paper. I should like to be able to read what is written there and, even more, to be able to publish it as it is, without commentary.
3 9 Moving Lips
I
n 1932 I was coming home one day from the offices of the newspaper For a Communist Education on Nikitski Street. At that time we were living on Tverskoi Boulevard. On my way I saw M. sitting on the front steps of a shabby house. His head was twisted around so that his chin almost touched his shoulder; he was twirling his walking stick with one hand and resting the other on one of the stone steps to keep his balance. The moment he saw me, he jumped up and we walked along together.
When he was "composing" he always had a great need of movement. He either paced the room (unfortunately we never had very much space for this) or he kept going outside to walk the streets. The day I came across him sitting on the steps, he had just stopped to rest, tired of walking around. He was then working on the second part of his "Verses About Russian Poetry." For M. poetry and walking were closely connected. In his "Conversation About Dante" he asks how many pairs of shoes Alighieri must have worn out while writing the Divine Comedy. The same theme occurs in his poems about Tiffis, of which he says that they "remember the worn splendor" of a visiting poet's shoes. This is not just about his poverty—the soles of his shoes were always worn—but about poetry, too.
I only once saw M. composing verse without moving around. This was in Kiev at my parents' home, where we spent Christmas in 1923; he sat motionless by the iron stove for several days, occasionally asking me or my sister, Anna, to write down the lines of his "January 1, 1924." The other time was in Voronezh at a period when he was terribly exhausted by his work and had lain down to rest. But a poem was still buzzing in his head and he could not rid himself of it—it was the one about the singer with the deep voice at the end of the "Second Voronezh Notebook." Not long before this he had heard Marian Anderson on the radio, and the previous day he had visited a singer who had been exiled from Leningrad—the same one for whom he did some free translations of Neapolitan songs, which she sang on the radio, where they both made a little money from time to time. We had rushed around to see her on learning that her husband, recently released after five years in a camp and allowed to come to Voronezh, had again been arrested. This was the first time we had heard of someone being immediately re-arrested like this, and we wondered what it could portend. The singer was lying in bed. People are always literally prostrated by this kind of misfortune. My mother, who as a doctor was mobilized after the Revolution to help with famine relief in the Volga region, told me that the peasants just lay quite still in their houses, even in parts where there was already something to eat and people were not totally exhausted by hunger. Emma, a teacher at the Chita Teachers' Training College, once told me how she had gone out to work on a kolkhoz with some of her students, and that all the kolkhozniks were lying down. It is the same with students in their hostels, and with office workers when they get home in the evening. We all do this. I have spent my whole life lying down.
The singer frantically made plans for the future—as often happens when we are overwhelmed by someone's death or arrest, by a summons to the secret police, or a similar calamity. Perhaps this kind of delirious talk about the future helps us to get over such incomprehensible things as the death of someone close, or his removal to one of our twentieth-century prisons. She kept telling us that her husband could not possibly have been sent back to a camp, since he had only just returned from there. They must be going to exile him, and that didn't really matter. Wherever he was sent, she would go after him. And she would carry on with her singing—she could always sing anywhere: it was just as easy in Ishim or Irgiz as it was in Leningrad or Voronezh. In whatever Siberian village they went to, she would sing and earn enough to buy flour and bake him bread.
Her husband was the victim of a general directive ordering the rearrest of all those who had already been in prison. There was also an order at that time (or it may have been in the fifties, I don't remember) under which everybody who was sent to the camps must be kept in permanent exile after their release. The singer soon disappeared herself. She was sent somewhere—we never learned the details—either to sing or to fell timber.
M. told me that in his poem about the singer with the low voice there was a merging of two images: the woman from Leningrad and Marian Anderson. On the day he was composing this poem, I didn't realize he was working, because he was lying as quiet as a mouse. Restlessness was the first sign that he was working on something, and the second was the moving of his lips. In one poem he says that his lips can never be taken away from him, and that they will still move when he is dead and buried. This has indeed happened.
Since he works with his voice, a poet's lips are the tool of his trade, and in his poem about the flute player who "treads with his lips," M. is also speaking about his own whispering lips and the painful process of converting into words the sounds ringing in his ears.
The poem is actually about a flute player we knew. He was a German called Schwab and he was terribly frightened in case anything should happen to his only flute, which had been sent to him from Germany by an old comrade from the conservatory. We went to see him occasionally and he would take his flute out of its case and bring great comfort to M. by playing Bach or Schubert for him. He was loved by all the musicians who came to Voronezh on tour. Once, in the days when M. still had his job at the theater and he had finished his work for the day, we went into one of the balconies to listen to a symphony concert. From above we had a perfect view of the orchestra, and I suddenly saw that Schwab's place had been taken by another flutist. I bent over to M. and whispered to him. Despite hisses from the people around us, we went on whispering. "Could he have been arrested?" M. asked, and in the interval he went behind the scenes to find out. The assumption proved correct, as such assumptions always did—to the extent that we superstitiously feared to voice them in case this made them come true. Schwab, as we learned later, had been accused of espionage and sent to a camp for common criminals near Voronezh. He was already an old man and he ended his days there. M. kept wondering whether he had taken his flute with him or whether he had been afraid in case it should be stolen from him by the thieves there. Or if he had taken it, what did he play to his fellow prisoners? M.'s poem was inspired by the sound of Schwab's flute and his wretched fate, as well as by his own anxieties about "the beginning of dreadful deeds."