At the time Luppol's decision did not bring us to our senses—we still hoped that everything would somehow come out all right. Narbut had gone, so had Margulis, Klychkov and many others. M. kept muttering Gumilev's line: "Woe, woe, fear, the snare and the pit," but then he would again look on the bright side and tell me that everything would be all right. "Why are you moaning?" he would ask. "Live while you can, and then we'll see. It just can't go on like this!" For many years this phrase had been the only source of optimism: "It can't go on like this. . . ."
Reading the Bible, Akhmatova discovered that the words of Gumilev's poem are taken almost literally from the prophet Isaiah: "Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, О inhabitant of the earth."
• State Publishing Ноше for literature.
59 А "Convicted Person"
D
o firemen die?" M. had once been asked by his young niece Tatka. He had later echoed her by asking: "Do the rich die?" —in Voronezh it occurred to him that money and comfort increase one's chances of living longer. "Do people have to register in Moscow as well?" he asked, when I reminded him that it was time we got our residence permits. It so happened that Kostyrev came back at that moment for a couple of days, and this made M. realize that there was no time to waste. He went down to the house committee office, but came back almost at once and asked for my papers. It turned out that after I had returned to Voronezh after a visit to Moscow earlier in the year, Kostyrev had got them to cancel my permit to live in the city: this was his way of preparing for our homecoming. Until then I had counted officially as a Moscow resident, while in Voronezh I had the status of a "visitor." The house committee did not know I had last renewed my papers in Voronezh, but I had managed to get away with this. Kostyrev had obtained a residence permit as occupant of a room in our apartment, and his temporary permit had now been made permanent even though he had not been here the required length of time—as they told us in the house committee office, the rule had been waived in his case. The building was a co-operative, and we had paid a large sum of money for our apartment. In law we were the owners of it, and theoretically nobody could be registered for residence in it without our permission. The authorities were now having trouble with cooperatives, because the families of arrested people referred to their legal rights in an attempt to stay put and prevent new tenants being moved in with them. A new law was in preparation to abolish these "rights." So far there had only been talk about it in high quarters and it was not actually passed until the end of 1938, but in this country they don't wait until laws are passed before putting them into effect! The fact that Kostyrev had been registered for residence in our apartment showed that he was being encouraged to take over the whole place, and this was a bad sign. But for some reason M. was not at all upset. He had become a fatalist of the Soviet type: "Everything will be all right if they want it that way. If they don't, there's nothing we can do about it." This fatalism began to affect me as well. Not long before, he had said to me: "You will return to Moscow if they let me back. They won't let you back alone." Now, a quarter of a century later, they have indeed allowed me to reside in Moscow again—although M. himself is still not "allowed back," if one doesn't count the publication of a few of his poems in the magazine Moskva.
Kostyrev was only a cog in a complex mechanism. He was a faceless person—the sort you would never notice on the street or in a bus, but he looked like many others of the same kind. In an earlier historical period he would have worn a pea-green overcoat,* but in our day such people rise to greater heights, and he became both a writer and a general. Having settled in our apartment, he spent all his time at the typewriter, writing his stories about the Soviet Far East —and copying out M.'s verse. Once, as he was typing one of M.'s Crimean poems, he said to me: "Osip Emilievich only likes the Crimea because he's never been to the Far East." In his view, it was important for every writer to visit the Far East. This was said at a time when endless prison trains were going east to Vladivostok, and Kolyma was being converted into a vast penal colony—as we all knew perfectly well. Anybody to whom the secret police had attached someone of Kostyrev's rank had every prospect of seeing the Far East. But at the moment we were worried more about getting a residence permit than about Kolyma.
The district militia refused us the permit with unusual speed. They said we could try the Central militia station on Petrovka. "If they refuse," M. said, "we'll go back to Voronezh." We even phoned our old landlady there to ask her to keep our room for us, just in case. At the Petrovka station they also refused to give us the permit and explained why: M. could not be allowed back in Moscow because he had been a "convicted person." Nowadays, I am told, a past conviction no longer counts against someone if his sentence did not exceed five years and he has not been specifically deprived of his civic rights by the court, but in those days, and until recently, not only ex-prisoners but their families as well were marked for life by the fact of having been convicted. I have often had to fill in forms with a question about whether I or any close relative has ever been convicted of an offense. To cover up such unpleasant facts, people were always inventing new life stories for themselves. Whether children should mention that their father had died in prison or in a camp was a constant theme of family discussions. For several years I have been free of the stigma of M.'s conviction, but the literary stigma is still there.
At the Petrovka station we first learned all the implications of M.'s
* Such coats were worn by police spies in Czarist times.
status as a "convicted person." "Where are you going now?" asked the militia official as he handed M. a slip of paper rejecting his application for a permit: he was supposed to enter our next place of residence in our file. "Back to Voronezh," M. replied. "Very well," said the official, "but you won't get registered there either." We now discovered that while as an exile M. had been barred from only twelve towns, as a "convicted person" he was banned from over seventy, and for life at that!
"And what would have happened if I had stayed in Voronezh?" M. asked. The official explained that because "we still have deficiencies in our work" M. might have been overlooked for a while, but he would sooner or later have been expelled. This sort of thing no longer surprises us: we are now familiar enough with the residence permit as a high barrier which only the most agile can clear. Nobody can just go and settle in the town of his choice (unless he has been sent there to work), and there is no question of a residence permit at all without identity papers—which means that vast categories of people—such as collective farmers—cannot move at all. Not everybody realizes, even now, what a great privilege it is to have identity papers. But in 1937 we were learning for the first time about this "progress," as M, called it.
When we came home, M. said to me: "Why don't you try to register without me? You are not a convicted person."
This was the first and only occasion on which he ever suggested we act as separate persons. And—in the hope of saving our apartment—I agreed to try my luck, just this once.