When we left Voronezh, M. asked Natasha to destroy the "Ode." Many people now advise me not to speak of it at all, as though it had never existed. But I cannot agree to this, because the truth would then be incomplete: leading a double life was an absolute fact of our age, and nobody was exempt. The only difference was that while others wrote their odes in their apartments and country villas and were rewarded for them, M. wrote his with a rope around his neck. Akhmatova did the same, as they drew the noose tighter around the neck of her son. Who can blame either her or M.?
44 Golden Rules
A
t the beginning of January 1937, just after M. had written his poem "Smile, angry lamb," he was visited by a youth, a real guttersnipe, who sat down in front of us and announced that "writers must collaborate with their readers." This was a familiar tune: he wanted M. to give him his new verse so he could make copies of it. This is what he had been sent for, but he had been badly briefed and was too confused and tongue-tied to explain what he needed.
We are all very long-suffering people and we have one golden rule: if they start badgering you, never resist—just do what they want, whether it is voting in "elections," signing some public appeal or other, or buying State bonds.* When you are talking with a police spy, always answer all his questions, so that he can duly report to his superiors, otherwise you will "never hear the end of it"—and they'll get what they want anyway. The main thing in these situations is to get rid, as politely as possible, of the person sent to badger you. M. also observed this rule, but on this occasion he was so angry that, to use Akhmatova's expression, he "burst his banks." Against the general background of our isolation from the outside world, visitors of this type were utterly unbearable. M. lost patience with our uninvited guest and told him to leave. Later he laughed at himself for being so fastidious and expecting them to send agents who really knew their stuff! But when the next one appeared and turned out, though a little older, to be just as ill-suited for the job, M. no longer thought it funny and—to use Akhmatova's expression —"had an epileptic fit."
It was not done to expose police spies. The agency which sent them would not put up with any attempt to discredit its operations and sooner or later wreaked vengeance on people who did so. Even now, many people who have been in prisons or camps prefer to keep quiet about their "godfathers" t—they know that to be indiscreet about such things is asking for trouble. In those years people were even more careful. The rare exceptions only proved the rule. Everybody knew, for instance, that Marietta Shaginian never allowed any
* Under Stalin, all Soviet citizens were obliged to buy State bonds, "volunteering" at factory and office meetings to subscribe a month's salary. It was a kind of recurrent capital levy.
t Officers of the secret police charged with the surveillance of prisoners.
police spy to come near her. If one tried to, she made a terrible fuss, not caring who heard her. In 1934 she created a scene in my presence, and I thought I could see what her game was. We had come out of the State Publishing House together and she started asking me about life in Voronezh—this was in the early days of M.'s exile there, when nobody was yet afraid of being seen with us because the story of Stalin's conversation with Pasternak had spread far and wide. Suddenly the poet B. came running after us—he also wanted to inquire about M. But Marietta rounded on him fiercely. "I have friends in the Central Committee," she shouted, "and I will not put up with police spies." I tried to stop her, saying that I knew B. well. But she wouldn't listen to reason, and I had the suspicion that the whole scene had been deliberately contrived by her: she attacked completely decent people in the hope of frightening off real police spies, whom she would not of course have dared to treat in this way. But, as I say, Marietta was an exception, and for the most part the informers who surrounded us had a completely free hand and became more and more brazen.
The Voronezh police spy—the one sent to replace the guttersnipe thrown out by M.—dropped in on us without warning any time he liked. The door in the seamstress' house was never closed because her son Vadik—the young bird-fancier who bought goldfinches and bullfinches at auctions—was always running in and out. The new police spy would appear so unexpectedly in the doorway that we were always caught unawares with manuscripts lying all over the table. Without taking his coat off, he would sit down at the table and start going through everything. He made comments such as "Why are there so many couplets here?" or "I can't make out a thing in this handwriting—hers [that is, mine] is much better." M. would snatch the sheets of paper from him and angrily tear them to pieces. Later we had to reconstruct whatever it was from memory—which only made us even more furious.
"Why do you come in working hours?" M. asked him. The man was posing as a factory worker of some kind—a fitter or a lathe operator. He replied that he had got off work, or that he was on the night shift. "So they let you leave the factory whenever you like?" we asked. But it was all like water off a duck's back, and he just said the first thing that came into his head, not even trying to be plausible. Every time M. threw him out, he said: "That's the end, he won't turn up again." He just couldn't believe that the man would have the impudence to come back after being so thoroughly exposed. But it was a vain hope: two or three days later we would have to go through the same business all over again. He wasn't such a fool as to tell his superiors that he had failed—an agent who has been exposed is scarcely worth his salt.
M. was working on the poem about begging alms from a shadow when he suddenly decided to ring the GPU and ask for an interview with the Commandant. Most unusually, his request was granted. The normal thing would have been for him to be told to write out his complaint and leave it in the special box at the GPU office—this is how we are used to communicating with our authorities: by dropping petitions in boxes. I learned about this move of M.'s only after the interview had been arranged, and I went with him to the GPU building (always known in any Soviet city as "the Big House"). After his bout of heart trouble in the summer of 1936, M. never went out alone. He would not have gone out to phone the GPU without me if the telephone exchange had not been very close to our house. Natasha Shtempel later told me that while they had been out walking together M. had gone to phone the GPU to find out whether the interview was going to be granted. He had asked her not to tell me anything about it—he knew I would be against it and argue that, apart from being futile, it was wrong to draw attention to oneself.
After a brief exchange of words in the GPU guardroom, we were given passes for both of us—they knew that M. was sick and couldn't go out unaccompanied. We were received by the Deputy Commandant, who looked like an ordinary Red Army officer. Men of this type are often found in the higher secret-police posts. M. was convinced that people like this were employed specially for relations with the outside world—so that, seeing their broad, open faces, nobody would guess what went on "inside." The one who received us was shortly afterward transferred to the film industry, where, according to Shklovski, he was quite easy to get along with. The same was probably true of Furmanov's younger brother, who had a similar career—the film world is swarming with such people. There are also a great many of them in the universities and institutes, where they work in the faculties of literature, philosophy, economics and so forth. They are always gladly given places on the pretext of what is known as "staff consolidation." I have the impression that as a matter of deliberate policy great numbers of young people are given their early training by the secret police before being let out into the world at large—where they never forget their alma mater. Among them there were some perfectly decent kids who in a drunken state would tell you amusing tales about their service with the "organs" (as the secret police is often called). I knew one such splendid fellow when I taught at the Chuvash Teachers' Training College. He was writing a dissertation about the "material base" of the Chuvash kolkhozes and complained that it was a subject of which no one could make head or tail. He told me he had gone to work for the "organs" as soon as he left school. He had done so in search of "adventure," but his first job had been to stand for hours, come fair weather or foul, in front of the house where a certain old man lived, with orders to take note of any visitors. But the devil of it was that nobody ever came to see the old man and he never came out himself—the only sign of life he gave was to pull back the curtain and peep out occasionally. My young acquaintance even wondered sometimes whether the old man hadn't been instructed to keep an eye on him—making sure he didn't sneak off to have a beer while on duty. His job was the same as that of the "tails" I have already mentioned whom we saw loitering in front of Akhmatova's house—only they had a more cheerful time, because she at least had fairly frequent visitors! The old man, incidentally, had been described to my young colleague as a former Menshevik.