It took us a few days to wind up our affairs in Voronezh. Despite the poverty of our existence, we had accumulated some possessions: buckets, a frying pan, a flatiron (M. wrote to Benedikt Livshitz about how well I ironed his shirts), a cooker, a lamp, a kerosene stove, a mattress, jars, plates and a few saucepans. We had bought all this in the market and it had cost us a lot of money: every purchase was an event. But it would have cost us even more to take it all with us—cab drivers and porters would have ruined us, if that word meant anything in our situation. Some of the things we sold, and others we gave away. What use would we have for buckets in Moscow, where we would get water simply by turning a faucet? We had no doubt that we should be going back to Moscow: if M. had not been given an additional sentence at such a difficult time, it could only mean he was being allowed back to the capital. It suddenly appeared significant to us that for some reason we had been able to keep possession of our Moscow apartment during these three years. Other writers in the building, tired of living only in one room, had often asked to be given more space at our expense and had tried toget my mother to show them what was available in the apartment. She would never let them inside and gave them a lecture on the doorstep about how writers should behave toward an exiled colleague under the traditional code of the old intelligentsia. We did not worry about Kostyrev, who had been given one of our rooms right at the beginning: he had been vouched for by Stavski himself, and, still believing in his elementary good faith as a representative of the Writers' Union, we assumed that the room would be vacated the moment we needed it back. We also recalled Stalin's remark in his telephone conversation with Pasternak: "Mandelstam will be all right." But we completely forgot the warning Vinaver had given us. We had also forgotten where we were living.
e opened the door of our apartment with our own key and
A few days later we were sitting on a pile of our belongings at the Voronezh railroad station. My mother and I had brought just enough money from Moscow to buy tickets for all three of us. There was nobody to see us off. Fedia was at work, and Natasha, who was a teacher, was giving lessons at that time of day. M. was always composing comic doggerel about her ("If God knew that Natasha was a pedagogue, he would say: Take this pedagogue away, for the sake of God"). The evening before, we had drunk a bottle of wine with her and M. would just not let her go home, though she complained that her mother would be worried. About this, too, he made up some lines:
"Where've you been?" asks Mother dear, "Eating and drinking, I do declare," And black as night she sniffs the smell of Wine and onion in the air.
We left in good spirits, full of the rosiest hopes, quite forgetting how insidious and delusive is the one whose name I bear. . . .
46 "One Extra Day
were pleasantly surprised to find it empty. On the table there was a brief note from Kostyrev saying he had moved out to a dacha with his wife and child. He had left nothing at all to remind us he had ever lived here and sat copying out M.'s verse, listening in as Italked with my mother, brother, or the few friends who had still dared to come and see me on my trips from Voronezh. We had no idea why Kostyrev had decided to clear out. It was certainly not from tact. We could only regard it as a good sign—it must mean that all restrictions on M. had really been lifted.
The absence of Kostyrev and the reality of the familiar walls and belongings—beds, curtains, shelves with a handful of books on them —suddenly blotted out the whole memory of Cherdyn and Voronezh. We had the illusion that this was a real home to which we had returned after a time of incomprehensible and needless wandering. The process of rejoining past and present took no more than a second—the intervening period that had been forced on us from outside and not freely chosen, suddenly faded away. Thanks to his ability to live for the moment, M. easily passed, without looking back, from one part of his life to another—as one can see from his poetry with its clear division into different phases. Hence, when he entered our apartment, his three-year exile at once ceased to have any reality for him, and the business of fitting together the two parts of his life was achieved straightaway, on the spot, without any preliminaries.
Sometimes the two parts of one's life come together again like this, but sometimes the opposite happens—as when we were setting off for Cherdyn. Now, back in Moscow, we felt as though we had never been away. It is a common enough experience, known, for instance, to prisoners returning from the camps—as long as they have a home to return to. But enormous numbers of them have been away so many years that when they come back they find nothing: their wives have been sent away, their parents are dead, and their children have disappeared or grown up as strangers. Such people have to begin life all over again, piecing it together from whatever may be left to them. Sometimes, after many years of forced labor, they can reconstruct their lives, even if they have no home or family, by returning to their former profession. Although I escaped the camps myself, I know what it is to go through this process of remaking one's life. It means that you can become yourself again and throw off the mask which you have been forced to wear for so long. Many of us were only able to survive on condition that we concealed our true nature and pretended to be like those around us. It was essential not to betray one's past. A deported kulak, for instance, could save himself only by taking up manual labor and forgetting about the land. Twenty years went by between the time of M.'s death and the moment when I was able to take from their hiding place all the poems I had managed to save and put them openly on the table (or, rather, the suitcase which served me as a table). During all those years I had to pretend to be someone else, wearing, as it were, an iron mask. I could not tell a soul that I was only waiting secretly for the moment when I could again become myself and say openly what I had been waiting for, and what I had been keeping all these years.
If the severed parts of my life were to come together in 1956, there could be no question of it in 1937: the trend of the times was not toward mending broken lives, and on that day when we came back to Moscow we were the victims of an optical illusion, a pure hallucination. But, thanks to this hallucination, M. was granted his "one extra day." *
In our sort of life everybody gladly falls for illusions or seeks some belief that gives a sense of reality. If the life around you is illusory, you take refuge in illusory activity, entering illusory relations with others, embarking on illusory love affairs—you must have something to hang on to. Once, long before his first arrest, M. had said to me as we waited at a tram stop: "We think that everything is going along as it should, and that life continues—but that is only because the trams are running." Our empty apartment with its bookshelves was an even greater invitation to delude ourselves than the sight of our overcrowded tramcars. We also cheered each other with reminders of what Stalin, or Stavski, had said—as though we didn't know that such promises were the most terrible illusions of all. But we tried to close our eyes to this—anything to maintain our sense of false security. Instead of sitting down to consider our position soberly, which would only have meant upsetting ourselves with gloomy thoughts, we deposited all our things in the middle of the room and went off to the small gallery in Kropotkin Street to see "the French."