HOPE

ROBERT L. FISHER

Hope

My name, Nadezhda, in Russian it means hope. In these bleak times what reason is there for hope?

or one thing, that even those grey, heartless men in the Kremlin, sitting around the great table polished to a mirror finish, plotting under the brilliant czarist chandeliers, their paths to the pinnacle of power strewn with corpses and the emaciated inmates of slave-labor camps — that even these brutal men, who if exposed to some spiritual light would glow up to their necks in blood, are afraid of poetry. There is still some hope for us if tyrants fear poets.

My husband and I long ago gave up sleeping at night, for it is in the night that men in black leather coats, like their brothers in the Gestapo, swoop down on the slumbering populace like Grendel bursting into Hrothgar’s hall and dragging off to the marsh warriors who were never heard of again. And like the aftermath of Grendel’s raids, apartments were wrecked, the contents of emptied drawers scattered about, closets and trunks ransacked, and the survivors left numb and weeping. But Grendel was driven by hunger, and later his mother by revenge, but the NKVD is driven by the fear of anapests and rhyming couplets, and not warriors but poets are their prey, dragged off to be swallowed up in the maws of the ‘black mariahs’, as the cars of the secret police are called.

lake in Armenia, long ago. An island. Old Khachaturian, the scholar had devoted his life to deciphering cuneiform texts, handed me the binoculars.

‘They’re Zeiss,’ he said proudly.

The distant shoreline leapt in front of me. I involuntarily stepped back, as if to avoid a collision.

Figures strolled along the beach, their mouths moving, their arms gesticulating, but no sound, as in a silent film. At a café a man in a white suit sipped his coffee and occasionally snapped his newspaper back into shape whenever a gust of wind caught it. Raising the binoculars I saw dark foothills splashed with white and pink houses, hills marbled with streaks of roads swirling down their slopes. Above, and in the sunlight, were snow-covered peaks, where the ark had come to rest and Noah had launched his doves.

When I compared the view with the unaided eye with the magnified view, the latter’s colors were brighter, like the primary colors of a child’s toy.

I handed the binoculars to Khachaturian and suddenly, as if it had been waiting to surprise me, a swan rode the waves, appearing out of nowhere like a creature in a fairytale. I fully expected the swan to ask a riddle or deliver a magic wand.

Rybakov loved Armenia, the closest he ever could get to experiencing the Mediterranean. But we both knew this would be his last visit to Armenia. Just to the north millions were starving, the roadsides lined with peasants in rags, straggling off by some instinct to die alone like pathetic, small elephants drawn to their secret graveyard. In the north, in Moscow, was someone already typing our names on an arrest warrant? Was some true believer with white teeth and hair pulled back in a severe bun denouncing Rybakov to men prepared to believe the worst?

I looked at old Khachaturian, drank him in. He was as much a ghost as the gods he resurrected from the wedge-shaped impressions in his clay tablets. He was to disappear in 1937 (a year in advance of R.), his corpse and his erudition dumped in a frozen pit excavated by cursing men weeping with cold.

Speak, swan, pronounce your gnomic oracle, warn us, but most of all, deliver your magic wand. Let me take it from your orange beak and wave it over old Khachaturian, spin a cocoon of silk about him and store him in some secret cavern near Ararat, to await the day when it is safe to emerge, parting the filaments and brushing them off his old-fashioned black suit and fedora. Let him make his way to the lecture hall and say to the young, ‘With my binoculars I can look back in time and watch tyrants rise and fall, watch imperial armies pillage and carry off in chains an entire population, force them in a clanking procession down a cerulean avenue past the swollen monarch, whose skull, a little later, will be inlaid with rubies and carnelian and handed to a servant who will fill it with wine and pass it to the conqueror. I have seen it all before.’

In Moscow they arrested R., took him to Lubyanka, to a dungeon underground. They wanted to put a bullet in the back of his head to stop the poetry. They wanted to spray his blood-red verses on the tiled walls and hose them down a drain, force them to flow at night down to the Black Sea. But Pasternak said something to Stalin, something that stayed the bullet and ‘mercifully’ banished us to Voronezh on the Don.

oronezh — three years of happy poverty. In time R., though missing Moscow terribly, began to transmute this provincial town: he loved its space and especially loved its seasons, whose transitions he monitored minutely, like a pediatrician following the development of a fetus to full term. He delivered each season, easing them from the womb. Voronezh was a woman encompassing Russia — in her, forest met steppe.

R. began to write poems again. He read them to me and I memorized them. He wrote them on scraps of paper and put them in a wicker basket. A lady at the provincial office took pity on us and gave us a hundred sheets of old forms, blank on one side. The paper was grey and felt as if it might evaporate in a week. I kept on memorizing, hoping I would be a more durable archive. To this day I can see those grey sheets, flimsy and spotted with ink — in my mind’s eye I see every version, can count every stanza. When he was arrested, the interrogators, as R. told me upon his release, had confronted him with one of his poems. From the number of stanzas I knew exactly which version, which scrap of paper and could therefore trace who had seen it and when; who had gotten his hands on the only copy of that particular version, and thus I knew the identity of the informer.

I, unlike R., was allowed to travel to Moscow from Voronezh. I made the rounds of our poor friends, begging for money, food, clothing. R. called me the beggar-friend. Then a windfall — the provincial radio station commissioned R. to write radio plays about the life of Goethe. It meant eggs and sausage, rye bread and vegetables. It meant bouquets of flowers bought from a vendor on the spur of the moment.

Over tea we reminisced. In the twenties we had to keep our marriage a secret from R.’s father, the patriarch who had dreams of his son’s marrying into wealth and status. Anyway, it was more fun to be secretly married. At the fairs held on the grounds of the Mikhailov Monastery in Kiev, we bought for a kopek apiece two blue rings, our ‘wedding rings’, we dared not wear — R. carried his in his pocket and I mine on a chain hidden in my bosom. R. wrote a poem about the hideous Kazan boots I clomped around in — we had no money for proper shoes — and he compared me to Sappho ‘putting on her brightly colored boot’.

Odd jobs came our way. A provincial newspaper got wind of the fact that a famous poet was in Voronezh and R. was hired as a journalist. The newspaper sent us to cover the ‘de-kulakization’ of the countryside, which meant praising collectivization and turning a blind eye to the millions — some said ten millions — of starving kulaks and their families wandering aimlessly, ever weaker, ever more despairing.

The kulaks dug rectangular pits into the steppe, then covered them with scraps of lumber and rusty sheets of metal. These zemlyankas were the pathetic descendants of the varas R. told me about: semi-subterranean dwellings the ancient Iranian nomads lived in during the winters on the steppes three thousand years ago. We were

called in to document the destruction of these zemlyankas, in the name of progress. But all we could see was the endless stream of men and women, babies and the elderly, all in rags, pouring out from their huts as they were demolished about their ears. The sovkhoz leader, the new Soviet man, saw ‘units’, not people, saw anti-revolutionary shirkers and saboteurs, parasites shooed away like vermin.

R. in the third and last year of our exile in Voronezh, judging by the poems he wrote, foresaw his death. He stared across the steppe. He saw the ghosts of the starved kulaks and of the millions more of men and women deported to certain death in Siberia. Perhaps he saw his own ghost trudging toward the camps. He also saw the future ghosts — the Hungarians slaughtered in their tens of thousands, the Germans surrounded in their hundreds of thousands, frozen corpses on the fields, other still standing.

By May, back in Moscow, in our old apartment on Furamanov Street. Like a cowbird who lays its eggs in another bird’s nest and whose young, growing to an enormous size, grotesquely masquerading as the original chicks, now starving or crowded out of the nest, a ‘writer’, barely bothering to conceal his identity as a secret police agent, had taken up residence in a large part of our apartment.

Another summons to the police station, where R. was told he must live no closer than 105 kilometers to Moscow. Not 100, but 105! We moved northwest to Savelovo in June, and in the autumn to Kalinin, which will always be Tver to me, just as Kaliningrad will always be Königsberg of Kant’s philosophical walks.

R. frequently took the train into Moscow to beg for work.

ow in a large office he sat across from Fadeyev, secretary of the Writers’ Union. Two dead men stared at each other: Fadeyev saw a condemned man, and R. looked at a suicide. In the office, behind R.’s chair, Yesinin was hanging as they

found him in his Leningrad hotel room, and next to Yesenin friends carry Mayakovsky, who has just shot himself, to a couch and cross his arms on his chest. In front of his chair R. sees Tsvetaeva, worn out just as he is by a nomadic life of begging, hanging from a beam in a little house in a place no one ever heard of, Yelabuga, on the Kama River. Tsvetaeva says, ‘At my childhood home my favorite lime tree still grows.

If they find out they will surely cut it down, surely pull it up by the roots. My secret is safe with you.’ And directly in front of him, Fadeyev, as yet unaware of the rope around his neck and the overturned chair at his feet, promises R. a few months in the

Writers’ Union rest home.

‘About 200 kilometers due east of here, in Samatikha, near Murom.’

We arrived in Samatikha on April 30^th. On the morning of May 1^st they came for R. I never saw him again, never received a letter. It was as if the whole world were suddenly desolate, as if the grand boulevards, the seashores, the factories, trains and schools were devoid of people. Everything in working order, but stalled, abandoned, silent.

I asked myself if Fadeyev had known all along, had lured us there.

‘But, my love, Fadeyev had not seen the rope around his own neck,’ I could almost hear R. saying.

I gave myself over to some instinct which operated me like a machine. I found myself on the next train to Moscow, transferred to another train bound for Kalinin. Hundreds of kilometers, endless platforms and garbled announcements, decelerations, station signs, accelerations, finally Kalinin. I made straight for our old apartment. My object was to retrieve the wicker basket which held R.’s poetry, every scrap that had never been published. They would not only arrest R., they would destroy any trace of his ever having existed, erase him as one erases a wrong digit.

The basket was in plain sight, but the lock was broken and several poems, written on the best paper of the lot, were missing. It was only much later that I learned that R.’s brother, Shura, had been playing cards in the apartment with his loutish soldier-friends. The

latter had broken the lock in search of paper with which to roll cigarettes.

Perhaps the missing poems will turn up someday in someone’s diary or memoirs. At the time all I could think of was the soldiers’ thick fingers holding R.’s poems. I watched the handwriting turn to ash like trees torched by an advancing fire line, his words, ordinary words, but put together as no one would ever have thought of doing, floating above the cards, curses and vodka fumes.

As I sat on the train back to Moscow the secret police with a warrant for my arrest were pounding on the door of our old apartment in Kalinin. I had expected as much: frequently, within a day or two, the wives, or should I say, the widow-to-be, of arrested men were themselves arrested. This is why recently R. had been very much opposed to my memorizing anymore of his poems: the less I knew the better. But I realized my duty to preserve his poetry was all the more urgent.

In Moscow I gathered a few things then headed out of the city, this time northeast, to the little town of Strunino. There I eventually got a job in a textile factory on the night shift, so that my days would be free to stand in line with food parcels at the various prisons in Moscow, trying to find out, unsuccessfully as it turned out, R.’s whereabouts.

Months of long lines inching forward toward prison gates: the biting wind, the heartache of not knowing if R. were dead or alive; my fingers cut through by twine as I held the food parcel hour after hour, there being nowhere but the slush to set it down. Each woman’s face magnified the grief of the next one to her in line. Mostly silence, too dispirited to talk. The feeling of acting as a grotesque chorus, our purpose to send the message of terror to all who saw us.

In this vast empire I became faceless, made myself tiny, unremarkable, all the time hoping that I could stay one step ahead of the ponderous bureaucracy of the secret police. When people in the personnel office started asking questions I went directly to the train station and bought a ticket for Moscow. The rest of my long life has been one unending flight over the back roads of the province, through

a succession of towns, some on the periphery of Moscow if I was lucky — Maly Yaroslavets, Kalinin and so on — but others in Kazakhstan during the war years, even Ul’yanovsk on the Volga, Lenin’s birthplace, and one town, Chita, among the Buryats, north of Mongolia, east of Lake Baikal.

Little was I to suspect that those three years in Voronezh would be our happiest, and last, time together, despite the poverty and isolation. Our rooms were like cells — one scratched, dented all-purpose table covered with stains, a gas ring, two chairs, a bed, odd pieces of crockery, an icon painting, pens…

How content I was to write the poems and stories R. dictated! We understood that each moment was precious, to be savored like a childhood summer or a falling in love in the spring when Moscow thundered with the sounds of ice breaking up in the river and bashing its way under the bridges.

In a little box I have stones we collected in Koktebel on the Black Sea. I scolded R. for passing up the carnelians and oddly shaped stones for ordinary ones. But later in Voronezh, when we came into that treasure trove of discarded bureaucratic forms, he dictated to me how he had arranged those stones into patterns to help him understand the structure of Dante’s Commedia and how he had never been able to part with them ever since.

I would gladly take a vow of silence and obedience to have him back, just to sit by his side and take dictation and serve tea while he held forth to his friends.

Even this is too much to ask in an empire where its subjects are executed or worked to death in their millions, where millions more died in a brutal war and where no one trusts another and every natural bond of family, neighborhood, church and culture has been dissolved. We are an empire of frightened brutes suspiciously watching one another, contemplating pre-emptive denunciations. It is worse that the Stone Age, worse than the lex talonis.

Now I am in R.’s beloved Armenia, waiting out another purge, hoping I am too insignificant for them to search hard for me.

I have a photographic memory. I remember every poem he wrote, even versions and drafts of them. I close my eyes and hear his voice dictating, see the words flowing from my scratchy pen. We are now in an age of samizdat and I plan to make the most of it before a new generation comes to maturity without knowing R.’s poetry. They want the young to have no sense of history. Old Khachaturian and everything he stood for has been expunged from homo sovieticus. With her characteristic wit, Akhmatova called our age ‘the pre-Gutenberg epoch’. I have learned a lesson from another murdered poet, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Kluyev. When his prison term was coming to a close, Kluyev was informed he must return to Moscow from Siberia because his case was being re-opened. At a remote railway station he was found dead. His only possession, a suitcase containing his manuscripts, had disappeared. It was a favorite ruse of the NKVD to lure a prisoner about to be released to a remote railway station where they would murder him. Kluyev’s poetry would be completely unknown to us if he had not , years before his arrest, managed to entrust another suitcase of his works to a visiting Italian communist, who published them in the West. Kluyev was murdered in 1937, just one year before R.’s death.

There is much I would like to forget: the minutest detail of the day R. was arrested; the money order that was returned to me marked ‘Addressee Deceased’; the conversation in Tashkent with a former prisoner who gave me the details of R.’s last days: R. lying on the planks of his bunk, or rather shelf or pigeonhole in which three prisoners were stored like logs; weak, unable to keep up; unfed; his heart failing. He died in a transit camp, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, December 27^th, 1938. Had he lived, he would have been

thrown into the hold of a ship to swelter in the stench until they reached Magadan, or perhaps transferred to the gold mines in Kolyma. In our world a weak heart or a bullet is a mercy.

t is late afternoon and down here the valley is already in deep shadow, but in the peaks a waterfall gushes from a cleft and its spray arcs across the coppery rays of a sun which, for us, has already set. Amethysts, rubies and opals sparkle like motes in a sunbeam and then are lost in the abyss.