Nadezhda Mandelstam - Hope Against Hope

this time, in May 1934, they had nothing to be cheerful about.

The day dragged on with excruciating slowness. In the evening the translator David Brodski turned up and then just wouldn't leave. There wasn't a bite to eat in the house and M. went around to the neighbors to try and get something for Akhmatova's supper. We hoped that Brodski might now get bored and leave, but no, he shot after M. and was still with him when he returned with the solitary egg he had managed to scrounge. Sitting down again in his chair, Brodski continued to recite the lines he liked best from his favorite poets, Sluchevski and Polonski (there was nothing he didn't know about both Russian and French poetry). He just went on and on, quoting and reminiscing, and it was only after midnight that we real­ized why he was being such a nuisance.

Whenever she came to see us, Akhmatova stayed in our small kitchen. The gas had not yet been installed and I cooked our sem­blance of a dinner on a kerosene stove in the corridor. In honor of our guest we covered the gas cooker with oilcloth to disguise it as a table. We called the kitchen "the sanctuary" after Narbut had once looked in there to see Akhmatova and said: "What are you doing here, like a pagan idol in a sanctuary? Why don't you go to some meeting or other where you can sit down properly?" Akhmatova and I had now taken refuge there, leaving M. to the mercy of the poetry-loving Brodski. Suddenly, at about one o'clock in the morn­ing, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. "They've come for Osip," I said, and went to open the door.

Some men in civilian overcoats were standing outside—there seemed to be a lot of them. For a split second I had a tiny flicker of hope that this still wasn't it—my eye had not made out the uniforms under the covert-cloth topcoats. In fact, topcoats of this kind were also a sort of uniform—though they were intended as a disguise, like the old pea-green coats of the Czarist okhrana. But this I did not

* See page 419.

know then. All hope vanished as soon as the uninvited guests stepped inside.

I had expected them to say "How do you do?" or "Is this Mandel- stam's apartment?" or something else of the kind that any visitor says in order to be let in by the person who opens the door. But the night visitors of our times do not stand on such ceremony—like se­cret-police agents the world over, I suppose.

Without a word or a moment's hesitation, but with consummate skill and speed, they came in past me (not pushing, however) and the apartment was suddenly full of people already checking our identity papers, running their hands over our hips with a precise, well-practiced movement, and feeling our pockets to make sure we had no concealed weapons.

M. came out of the large room. "Have you come for me?" he asked. One of the agents, a short man, looked at him with what could have been a faint smile and said: "Your papers." M. took them out of his pocket, and after checking them, the agent handed him a warrant. M. read it and nodded.

In the language of the secret police this was what was known as a "night operation." As I learned later, they all firmly believed that they were always liable to meet with opposition on such occasions, and to keep their spirits up they regaled each other with romantic tales about the dangers involved in these night raids. I myself once heard the daughter of an important Chekist,[1] who had come to prominence in 1937, telling a story about how Isaac Babel had "seri­ously wounded one of our men" while resisting arrest. She told such stories as an expression of concern for her kindly, loving father whenever he went out on "night operations." He was fond of chil­dren and animals—at home he always had the cat on his knees—and he told his daughter never to admit that she had done anything wrong, and always to say "no." This homely man with the cat could never forgive the people he interrogated for admitting everything they were accused of. "Why did they do it?" the daughter asked, echoing her father. "Think of the trouble they made for themselves and for us as well!" By "us," she meant all those who had come at night with warrants, interrogated and passed sentence on the ac­cused, and whiled away their spare time telling stories of the risks they ran. Whenever I hear such tales I think of the tiny hole in the skull of Isaac Babel, a cautious, clever man with a high forehead, who probably never once in his life held a pistol in his hands.

And so they burst into our poor, hushed apartments as though raiding bandits' lairs or secret laboratories in which masked car­bonari were making dynamite and preparing armed resistance. They visited us on the night of May 13, 1934. After checking our papers, presenting their warrants and making sure there would be no resist­ance, they began to search the apartment. Brodski slumped into his chair and sat there motionless, like a huge wooden sculpture of some savage tribe. He puffed and wheezed with an angry, hurt ex­pression on his face. When I chanced at one point to speak to him— asking him, I think, to get some books from the shelves for M. to take with him—he answered rudely: "Let M. get them himself," and again began to wheeze. Toward morning, when we were at last per­mitted to walk freely around the apartment and the tired Chekists no longer even looked searchingly at us as we did so, Brodski suddenly roused himself, held up his hand like a schoolboy and asked permis­sion to go to the toilet. The agent directing the search looked at him with contempt. "You can go home," he said. "What?" Brodski said in astonishment. "Home," the man repeated and turned his back. The secret police despised their civilian helpers. Brodski had no doubt been ordered to sit with us that evening in case we tried to destroy any manuscripts when we heard the knock on the door.

2 Confiscation

M

often repeated Khlebnikov's lines: "What a great thing • is a police station! The place where I have my rendezvous with the State." But Khlebnikov was thinking of something more innocent—just a routine check on the papers of a suspicious vagrant, the almost traditional form of meeting between State and poet. Our rendezvous with the State took place on a different, and much higher, level. Our uninvited guests, in strict accordance with their ritual, had immediately divided their roles between them, without exchanging a word. There were five people altogether—three agents and two witnesses. The two witnesses had flopped down on chairs in the hall and gone to sleep. Three years later, in 1937, they would no doubt have snored from sheer fatigue. Who knows by what charter we are granted the right to be arrested and searched in the presence of members of the public, so that no arrest should take place without due process of law, and it could never be said that anyone had just disappeared at dead of night without benefit of warrant or wit­nesses? This is the tribute we pay to the legal concepts of a bygone age.

To be present as a witness at arrests had almost become a profes­sion. In every large apartment building the same previously desig­nated pair would regularly be roused from their beds, and in the provinces the same two witnesses would be used for a whole street or district. They led a double life, serving by day as repairmen, jani­tors or plumbers (is this why our faucets are always dripping?) and by night as "witnesses," prepared if need be to sit up till morning in somebody's apartment. The money to pay them came out of our rent as part of the expense of maintaining the building. At what rate they were paid

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