In Voronezh M. had often said to me: "If I ever get back, the first thing I shall do is go and see the French." Maria Veniaminovna Yu- dina had noted how much he missed the French painters. Whenever she came to Voronezh, he would ask her about them, even while she was playing to him. She once sent him an album put out by the gallery, but the reproductions were very bad, and they only whetted his appetite. Now, without changing after the journey, pausing only to drink some tea, he went straight to the gallery. He also talked of going to see Tyshler: "I must have a good look at everything while
• Quoted from the end of Mandelstam's "Journey to Armenia." there is still time." He had appreciated Tyshler very early, when he had seen the series of drawings at the first OSZ [18] exhibition. Later, after he had joined me in Yalta, he said: "You still don't know what this Tyshler of yours is capable of." The last time he went to see him and look at his paintings was just before the end, in March 1938.
47 The "Bessarabian Carriage
he first person to come and see us was Akhmatova. This was
on the morning of the day we arrived. She had timed her own arrival in Moscow to coincide with ours. I lay on a mattress in the kitchen with a fearful headache while M. paced rapidly round the tiny "sanctuary," as we called it, and recited to Akhmatova. He was giving her an account of what he had written in Voronezh (the Second and Third Notebooks)—from the early days of their friendship, they had always told each other of every line they wrote. In return Akhmatova read him the poem she had written about him in Voronezh. It ends with the lines:
But in the room of the banished poet Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn and the night falls without the hope of dawn.
It was quite true that while Akhmatova had been visiting us, we had all been overcome by a sudden paroxysm of wild and senseless terror. It had happened in the evening as we were sitting in the room we rented from the "agent" (the one who threatened to roast mice on our grill). As often happened in the provinces, the electricity had been cut off, and we had lit an oil lamp. Suddenly the door opened and in came Leonov, the biologist from Tashkent, together with another man. Though this happened without any warning at all, there was no reason for us to be frightened—we knew Leonov had a father in Voronezh and that he often came to see him. He was a kind of Russian dervish who was always a little drunk, but we trusted him absolutely. He had first been brought to us by Kuzin, and often
Poem by Anna Akhmatova written after her visit to Mandelstam in Voronezh (1936)
Voronezh
And the town stands locked in ice:
A paperweight of trees, walls, snow.
Gingerly I tread on glass;
the painted sleighs skid in their tracks.
Peter's statue in the square points to
crows and poplars, and a verdigris dome
washed clean, seeded with the sun's dust.
Here the earth still shakes from the old battle
where the Tartars were beaten to their knees.
Let the poplars raise their chalices
for a sky-shattering toast,
like thousands of wedding-guests drinking
in jubilation at a feast.
But in the room of the banished poet
Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,
and the night falls,
without the hope of dawn.1
Translated by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward
1 The last four lines have been omitted in the Soviet edition of Akhmatova's verse.
our life was at last secure.
My memory of those days in Moscow is strangely fragmented—I can recall very vividly several moments, like stills from a film, but in between there are gaps which I can no longer reconstruct. One such "still," which also features Akhmatova, was the time when we waited endlessly for Khardzhiev to arrive at the apartment. He had promised to come and bring some wine with him, but he was intolerably late, as only Muscovites can be—particularly in those days when nobody had watches and the trams and buses ran very erratically. Akhmatova decided not to wait for him any longer, and set off back to where she was staying—with Tolstaya on the Prechistenka. She had to go back all the way on foot—it was the rush hour and she could not get on a tram, but the moment she arrived she was called to the telephone. It was M. ordering her to return to our apartment again: Khardzhiev had come after all. She immediately started out, like Phoebus Apollo in the anthology of mock-classical verse that M. had made up together with Gumilev, Georgi Ivanov and Lozinski in their carefree younger days: "Phoebus in his golden carriage rolls across the sky./ Tomorrow he'll come back again in the same old way."
We had been sitting in our large room (which we had now dubbed the "Kostyrev room"), but when Akhmatova came back, we moved to the narrow passage which we preferred. We had partitioned it with a cupboard and put in a small table and a mattress on a wooden frame with castors—in our cramped conditions we had soon learned to do without proper beds. The mattress was usually placed lengthwise, but for fear of bedbugs we had put it crosswise, with the head against the wall. There was only a narrow gap at the other end through which one could get to the large window, always kept wide open. While I busied myself in the kitchen, the three of them sat talking on the mattress.
"Look at our Bessarabian carriage," M. said as I came in, "and the impoverished lady of the manor with her steward. ... I am just the Jew."
When he was with Akhmatova, one could always see that their relations went back to the madcap days of their youth. Whenever they met, they both became young again and made each other laugh with words from their private vocabulary. Some of these went back to certain episodes. For instance, when Akhmatova was posing for Altman's portrait of her, M. occasionally looked in, and one day they told him how Altman's neighbor, also an artist and an Italian by origin, had come in, heard them laughing, and used a macaronic form of the Russian word for "laughter" which they found very funny. This was the word by which Akhmatova and M. described the fits of giggling that came over them whenever they met.
The scene on the "Bessarabian carriage" was the last with Akhmatova. She probably went back to Leningrad to have things out with Punin—she had been on bad terms with him for a long time and I can't remember when it was she first told me how difficult she found life with him. In Moscow she had also been to have a talk with Gar- shin, and this had brought on her final break with Punin. After she left, her place on the mattress was taken by Yakhontov, who brought his girl friend Lilia along with him. Lilia could easily have been taken for a Bessarabian "lady of the manor," but she would not have been amused by the comparison. She earnestly tried to re-educate M. in a spirit of sentimental Stalinism (there was such a thing!). In her opinion, a writer who did not devote himself to Stalin's service was finished. Who would read such a writer? He would be barred from literature and forever consigned to oblivion. Lilia had no doubt whatsoever that Stalin was the savior of mankind. She also wanted, incidentally, to write a letter to Stalin saying he ought to help M. to mend his ways, and that the best way to achieve this would be to let him publish his verse. This kind of thing later came to be known as "Gaponism." * Lilia was very well read in Party literature because she had to write sketches for Yakhontov. Every day she turned out some new story about the miracles performed by the Leader. Yakhontov didn't share her views, but said nothing, preferring to joke and act funny little scenes for us. One of his best turns was an imitation of his own father, a large, fat, perspiring man—in Czarist times he had been an official and was always terrified of his superiors (Lilia's commentary on this was: "All officials were cowards in Czarist times"). Sometimes Yakhontov recited Lermontov's "Prophet," manipulating his walking-stick like a puppet—an imaginary crowd would timidly part before it and it went up to Lilia and bowed, while Yakhontov recited the line: "He is poor and naked," pointing at M. as he did so. Yakhontov was himself by no means rich, but if we had no money difficulties during those days, it was because of him.