FIRST SESSION
Revolution is not for the weak of heart.…
Nora: I’ll start the ball rolling if you like. I take my cue from those two unambiguous words they throw onto the silver screen moments before the houselights come up: The end. That’s where I’ll begin—
Tatiana: Are you seriously suggesting the end of a story is more instructive than the beginning?
Nora: Don’t be thickheaded, Tanik! I’m suggesting that the end is discernible from the beginning. And in that sense the end and the beginning are more often than not indistinguishable from each other.
So: You know what he can do with his pompous Comrade Government, ensure a decent life for them. The son of a bitch can shove it up his delicate poetic asshole is what he can do. The cunt! The prick! Hang on, I’m one jump ahead of you, ladies. You will want to know how is it possible to be both cunt and prick simultaneously. I grant you it defies logic, it defies common sense, it defies conventional wisdom about male versus female anatomy, for all I know it defies gravity, but what the fuck, he managed it. The Poet was both cunt and prick when he did what he did to us. Christ, when he did what he did to me!
Lilya: As for me, I’m more comfortable starting at the start:
In the years before the Revolution, our lifelines had crossed now and then, here and there—the occasional literary soiree in the airless cellar of the Stray Dog, the notorious poetry reading in the Polytechnical Museum that turned into a free-for-all (punches were exchanged, chairs broken, the police had to be summoned), a cabaret performance of Georgian folk dances by the teenage prodigy Georgi Balanchivadze, impromptu picnics on the Moskva River when Mayakovsky was courting my gorgeous younger sister, Elsa, ah, yes, I mustn’t forget that deliciously furtive Bolshevik district committee meeting in the Kotov Textile Factory outside of Moscow—but I never paid much attention to him, perhaps because he never paid much attention to me, perhaps because he basked in attention and took it as his due, and I never give the male of the species his due if the withholding of it can make him uncomfortable. Truth is Vladimir Vladimirovich seemed to be more interested in my husband, Osip Maksimovich. The two of them had been drafted in 1916 and served in the same Petrograd motor brigade. Neither ever heard a shot fired in anger. Their job was to meet the trains coming up from the great military base at Mogilev in Byelorussia and ferry majors and colonels and generals, all of them weighted down with colorful medals, to the city’s grand hotels for a night of passion with their mistresses. The way Osip told it, the two chauffeurs spent the nights stretched out on the backseats of French Renaults waiting for their charges to emerge from this or that hotel deluxe, with Osip reading, by flashlight, all twelve novels and twenty-nine short stories of Leon Tolstoy and Mayakovsky whiling away the endless hours writing verse in his Day Book. God knows how but Osip managed to get himself promoted to the rank of Commissar, an event the two motor brigade drivers promptly celebrated by going on a binge in a Petrograd whorehouse. My Osip and Volodya kept in sporadic touch after their less than glorious military careers came to an end. More recently Osip had arranged, at his own expense, to get several of the Poet’s poems printed in journals and was trying to organize the publication of a collection of Mayakovsky’s verse in pamphlet form, an undertaking worthy of Sisyphus given the rationing of paper due to the Great War.
This absence of personal chemistry between us changed the night Osip and I showed up at the Poet’s Café on the Arbat in Moscow for what had been billed as a mano a mano: the two young titans of Russian poesy would be facing off on the future of Futurism. I can still conjure the scene in the café’s main room. It was jam-packed with what my Osip (who, like most intellectual snobs, instantly recognizes other intellectual snobs when he is obliged to rub elbows with them) called the Great Tongue-Tied: highbrows bound into the intellectual’s straightjacket of grammatical correctness and casual incivility. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, the floorboards were littered with a carpet of cigarette ends and reeked of stale beer, which is what the Tongue-Tied drink when they manage to pocket an advance against royalties for something they might or might not actually write. From time to time slivers of soundless lightning, evidence of a distant thunderstorm, turned the café’s art nouveau stained glass windows opaque for a fraction of a second. Several of the Tongue-Tied, seeing the bursts of light, speculated that revolution, expected any day, might have begun. Alas, they were mistaken by several months and had to be laughed down by individuals with umbrellas who recognized inclement weather when they saw it. In the back, under the storm-illuminated windows, stood a gaggle of factors gesticulating with their hands and fingers as if they were deaf and dumb. Osip supposed them to be selling tsarist bonds to finance a new stretch of the Trans-Siberian rail line. He was dead wrong. They turned out to be betters laying odds on who would emerge the winner from the poetic confrontation.
The wooden chairs in the large square room had been arranged as if two primitive tribes were facing off against each other. Set slightly forward from their respective camps were two bar stools for the principals. In the one corner, at twenty-six, lean, long-jawed with deep-set burning eyes, sat Boris Pasternak, only just arrived in Moscow on a sledge from the Urals, still wearing a long coat covered with dust kicked up by the troika of horses. In the other corner, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the enfant terrible of Russian poetry who carried a chip on his shoulder and wore his anger on his sleeve, and somehow managed to look as if he had just come away from a street brawl. Several years younger and half a head taller than his rival, he was dressed in a threadbare city suit with one of his signature radishes jammed into the buttonhole—Mayakovsky, you see, had a dark side, he claimed a metaphorical affinity for people and plants that grew into the ground. Oh, he certainly stood out in the crowd with that yellow bow tie fastened to a dirty cardboard collar, the hem of his long coat weighted down with dried mud, his mop of thick uncombed (and presumably unwashed) black hair awry, a scruffy stubble of a beard on his pasty cheeks. Rocking agitatedly on his bar stool, he fetched a small notebook from an inside pocket of his long coat, moistened a thick thumb on his thick tongue and flicked through the pages to the one he wanted. He studied it for a long moment, then closed the notebook and, squinting sightlessly over the heads of the Tongue-Tied, clearing his throat as if he needed to cough up an obstruction in it, he began declaiming his poem, in turns ranting, whispering, raging, mumbling, mocking, whining, winnowing, all the while gasping for breath when he ran short of it. (I run short of breath just remembering it.) I had heard poetry read out before but never like this. He seemed to be trying to startle his audience into the poem, to detonate cultural revolution with words forced out of context, with metaphors that defied common sense. It was a revelation of what poetry could be when it wasn’t hostage to tense or grammar or syntax or rhythm or rhyme or reason or our miserable preconceptions of what verse ought to sound like. At moments it came across as a whirlwind of what the future might hold when revolution reached Russia, at others a dry gust that stirred remembrances of the lovers who had recently committed suicide together so their skeletons, buried in the same coffin, would be intertwined for eternity. Here’s the thing: Stolypin’s tie (which is how we’d christened the hangman’s noose of Imperial Russia), the endless Great War, the foothills of Russian corpses that the Hun stacked in front of his trenches in place of sandbags, the Tsar’s obliviousness to the craving for land and bread and an end to the slaughterhouse—all of this had conspired to make conventional poetry pointless. Osya thought it a matter of the Tongue-Tied writing on the wrong subjects in a dumb way. And suddenly this ruffian poet with the fists of a pugilist, this frowzy émigré from an allegorical steppe, seemed like the right person writing on the right subject in an original way. Stripping poetry of its traditional poetic diction, he crafted a language all his own, one that corresponded to a world distorted by great wars, by industrial revolution, by city slums infested with poverty and misery. Invented words bubbled to the surface—to quote Mayakovsky—like a “naked prostitute fleeing a burning brothel.” The poem he blurted out over the heads of the Tongue-Tied—the poem that changed my life!—was his Cloud in Trousers, a delirious depoetisized declaration of anguished love that he had composed for one of his countless mistresses but eventually dedicated to me. I stumbled across that little detail when my Osya paid to get a small edition of Mayakovsky’s Cloud in Trousers into print and I discovered “To you, Lilya” on the title page. My parents had named me Lili after one of Goethe’s beloveds, Lili Schönemann, but from that moment on, anointed by the Poet Mayakovsky, I became Lilya to Vladimir Vladimirovich, Lilya to Osip, Lilya to my sister Elsa, Lilya to everyone. If today I am Lilya to all of you here in this hotel room, it’s thanks to Mayakovsky’s dedication. Here are several of the lines that are seared on my brain:
There’s no gray in the hair of my soul,
no fogey softheartedness!
The very sound of my voice makes the earth quake
As I stride across it—me, a beautiful
twenty-two-year-old.
Ah, and this:
If you want,
I can be consummately tender,
not a man, but—a cloud in trousers!
Already something of a celebrity, Mayakovsky had a knack for taking possession of a room crammed with people, then inciting them to riot with his poetry. The Poet was known to argue insolently with people who contradicted him or identified seeming inconsistencies in his point of view. Which is why Osip had dragged me against my will to the Arbat café and the mano a mano. He expected tantrums. He expected pandemonium. He expected fisticuffs. He expected, metaphorically speaking, blood would be spilled and there would only be one poet still on his feet at the end of it.
Curiously, it didn’t quite turn out the way Osip expected.
Pasternak listened intently as Mayakovsky declaimed his Cloud in Trousers, nodding all the while in what could have been taken (depending on which camp you were in) for appreciation or exasperation. There was a deafening silence when he reached the last line and, drained of energy, sank back onto his bar stool. Pasternak appeared to suck in the silence through his flaring nostrils. Then, to the general bewilderment of the spectators, he began slowly slapping one hand against a knee in what could only be interpreted as applause. “Interspersed with your stormy, imperfect passages,” he said, “one constantly stumbles upon fragments of art, suggesting a talent that occasionally rises to the level of genius. May-a-kov-sky,” he added, articulating each syllable of each word, “is a po-et’s po-et.”
“He is a pathetic poet,” snarled a bearded magazine editor who was known to detest Mayakovsky. “He woos fame as if she were a woman, then pretends, when he has beguiled her into his bed, he isn’t sure she suits him.” Spittle glistened on two silver teeth in his lower jaw as he spat out the word pathetic a second time.
In the airless room you could actually hear people pulling apprehensively on their cigarettes. Mayakovsky slid off his stool and waded into the Tongue-Tied, a ghost of a grin visible on his bloodless lips, his coal black eyes fixed on the magazine editor as he grabbed his lapels and lifted him clear of the chair. Seeing the terror in the man’s eyes, Mayakovsky settled him with exaggerated gentleness back into his seat. “I came across a man begging on the Arbat this morning,” he said as he made his way back to his stool. “He was dressed in rags that once passed for an army uniform, with a tin cup at his feet to collect money, and sang operatic arias a cappella so off-key it was pathetic. And because he was pathetic people understood he was desperate and stooped to give him a coin. If I am, as he says, a pathetic poet, the same people will understand, when I read my miserable poems in public, how desperate I must be, and I shall gain my livelihood better than an authentic poet like Pasternak here.”
Grinning in satisfaction, the Poet hefted himself onto the stool. “In any case,” he said, eyeing the offending magazine editor, “neither I nor the singer on the Arbat are nearly as pathetic as the editor of a pseudo-intellectual rag of a magazine that honest citizens buy so as to have a supply of toilet paper.”
Mayakovsky had the Tongue-Tied in the palm of his hand now. Fortified by the mocking laugher he had incited, he hollered “Settle down, my kittens,” and, turning to Pasternak, invited him to recite something not yet published. Pasternak, formal to a fault, bowed from the waist in the style of a Russian peasant, then, rising to his feet, said, “I shall say the poem, which I call ‘Hamlet,’ and then repeat it a second time as I am never understood at the first reading. Here,” he went on, “is the Danish Prince Hamlet speaking to his father’s ghost. Or Christ speaking to His Father in the garden of Gethsemane. Or me speaking to you. Who can be sure?”
I am trying, standing in the door,
To discover in the distant echoes
What the coming years may hold in store.
But the plan of action is determined,
And the end irrevocably sealed.
I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood:
Life is not a stroll across a field.
When he reached the last line and looked up, I remember murmuring to my Osya, “So much for the fireworks you promised.”
“Wait,” he said, and hoping to light the fuse that would ignite the powder keg, Osip—who, in his youth, had been expelled from school for spreading Bolshevik propaganda—called out, “There are things afoot more important than poetry. Instead of lulling us into a nonalcoholic stupor with your verses, incite us with your views on revolution.”
“Make no mistake about it, friends,” Mayakovsky said, his eyes suddenly feverish, “revolution, not evolution, is the solution to our tribulations. It’s not a matter of impatience. It’s a matter of justice. Those of us who can see further than our noses embrace the chaos of revolution, we embrace the risk of revolution, we embrace Marx’s dazzling dream of liberating man from ignorance, religious dogmatism, and the class prison into which he was born. Revolution will change the way we perceive this world, the way we relate to one another, the way we love our lovers. Women will be the equal of men in bed and in the workplace. It will free artists from having to drag around fetid creeds like medieval balls and chains. It will permit us to spit out the past, which is stuck like a bone in our throats. It will transform the language we use to describe the world we see. Revolution is the last, best hope for Tsarist Russia. And revolutionary Russia is the last, best hope for the petrified fossil Europe.”
It was an electrifying moment. This hooligan, this ruffian, this jailbird, this jawbreaker, was saying aloud what many of us were thinking but only dared articulate in the isolation of our flats. I sucked in my breath. I thought I caught a general sucking in of breath and grabbed Osip’s arm, fearing there wouldn’t be enough oxygen left in the room to sustain life. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“Everything is right,” I murmured as a trill resembling a whirlwind passing through the rigging of a sailing ship rose from the crowd.
A woman’s shrill voice pierced the commotion. “The illustrious anarchist Mikhail Bakunin predicted that Marx’s cure—this Utopian dictatorship of the proletariat that you are so impatient for us to embrace—would make Russia sicker than it is under tsarist rule.”
Shaking his head in disgust, Mayakovsky said, “It is well known that revolution is not for the weak of heart, little lady. Bakunin had a weak heart. He lost his nerve when—”
Another woman cut him off before he could finish the sentence. “The French took to chopping off the heads of those who lost their nerve for revolution—historians speak of forty thousand executions. If the Bolsheviks resort to Dr. Guillotin’s contraption to preserve our Russian Revolution—”
I swear to you I can still hear Mayakovsky’s gruff voice in my inner ear responding. Flashing what in other circumstances might have passed for a pained smile, he said, “Our revolution will be shielded from devouring its children by its truth-tellers—”
“By its poets,” Pasternak corrected him in a stage whisper heard round the room. “What century is it outside? The eighteenth? No, no, the last time I looked it was the twentieth. We Russians have not entombed ourselves in the catacombs of the Kiev churches all these years, oblivious to the real world aboveground. We will not repeat the blunders of those who made revolution in France.”
A gaunt gentleman, fifty something judging by his close-cropped ash gray hair, politely raised a hand. He was standing with his back against the back wall of the room. I’d noticed him when we first stepped foot in the café—he had a fine Israelite nose not unlike Osip’s and wore a pair of perfectly round steel spectacles that, when they caught the light, transformed his otherwise deep-set eye sockets into two silver coins. Somehow he looked familiar though for the life of me I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before. The Tongue-Tied, eyeing the raised hand and the gentleman raising it, turned out to be tongue-tied after all. Pasternak called across the room to the man, who was attired in an unseasonably thick brown collarless Viennese jacket and a collarless white shirt buttoned up to a conspicuous Adam’s apple, “There is no need to raise your hand, gospodin—we are not in a schoolroom here. Pose your question.”
“I don’t have a question, esteemed poet, only a presentiment.”
Mayakovsky must have recognized the gentleman because he told Pasternak, “We have heard his lyrics before, Boris Leonidovich. He doesn’t believe revolution will change things in Russia.”
The Israelite at the back of the room smiled wryly. “The carnival that you call revolution—this celebration of Marxist ends justifying morally repugnant means—may or may not change things in Russia for the Russians,” he said. “It most certainly will not change things in Russia for the Jews.”
And then it hit me where I had seen him. His face had been splashed across posters publicizing a Zionist conference in Moscow several weeks earlier. Osip and I, with our very secular Israelite roots and our abiding interest in things Jewish (I had been deeply involved in the making of the documentary film about Jewish agricultural settlements in the Crimea entitled Jews Work the Land), would have participated, if only to glimpse things from a Zionist perspective; my father, Yury Aleksandrovich, was a prominent Jewish jurist and an ardent anti-Zionist inasmuch as he considered assimilation, not emigration, to be the solution to Jewish tribulations. Yes, we would, as I said, have caught this Israelite’s act at the conference except we had a previous engagement in Petrograd at the time. I regretted not being able to attend. The gentleman with the Israelite nose was known to have been a member of the Zionist delegation that had been trying to convince the British, who had seized Palestine from the Ottoman Turks during the Great War, to look with favor (the wording of a proposed declaration printed in Pravda) on a Jewish national homeland in the Holy Land.
The Tongue-Tied parted like the Red Sea as the gentleman closed the gap between himself and the poets sitting on their stools. “You, esteemed Boris Pasternak, being Jewish, ought to concentrate on the condition of your fellow Jews. You ought to hear their groan, which is the loudest sound in Europe, louder even than trench mines exploding on the Eastern Front. You are barking up the wrong tree with these Bolsheviks, who are only comfortable with change and turmoil, who propose to make things better for the Russians but say nothing about eradicating twenty centuries of Christian anti-Semitism that fuels pogroms in shtetl after shtetl, year after year.”
In a commotion of arms and legs, Mayakovsky came flying off his stool. “It goes without saying—”
The Israelite, clearly a practiced orator with a sharp tongue, turned on the ruffian poet. “It goes with saying, esteemed Mayakovsky, which is what makes your refusal to say it eloquent in a peculiar way.” He approached Pasternak and talked to him directly but in a tone loud enough for everyone to hear. “Jews, whether they be esteemed poets like yourself or lawyers like myself or kulaks who clean the shit out of chicken coops, need to answer the call of the eminent Zionist Theodor Herzl and emigrate to Palestine. We are sick and tired of crawling into the narrow bricked-in spaces we build between two walls to survive the pogroms. Only in their own homeland can Jews find shelter from the Cossacks of the world. Our Zionist slogan sets out the path for Jews: Palestine is a land without people, the Jews are a people without a land.”
What can only be described as a churlish murmur arose from the Tongue-Tied, which didn’t surprise me: The Russian intelligentsia doesn’t have a reputation for pro-Jewish bias. Mayakovsky, clearly distressed by this groundswell of anti-Jewish agitation, quelled it with an angry wave of his hand. “After our revolution, there will be no need for Jews to emigrate,” he exclaimed. “The Jew, the Christian, the Muslim, the infidel, the atheist, the agnostic, the pagan, the heretic, the freethinker, the Marxist-skeptic like you, friend, will all belong to the ruling proletariat. This proletariat will own the factories and run the organs of government. The ultimate goal, the ambition of this dictatorship of the proletariat is the abolition of both the dictatorship and the state. Under Communism, neither will exist. At which point discrimination of any color or shape in our classless society will become an artifact of a discredited past.”
Pasternak’s response to a problem he had obviously thought about was more measured. There was something almost Germanic in his style of speaking—he summoned his words cautiously and delivered them formally, as if lecturing from a podium in a university amphitheater. “The solution to the Jewish question must be found here in Russia if it is to be found at all,” is, as near as I can recollect, what he said. “A democratic and Marxist Russia will pull the rug from under you Zionists by eliminating the need for a Jewish homeland that, in any case, will never see the light of day. For the simple reason that Palestine is not a land without people. According to an article, by a Jewish journalist I might add, in the historical society’s Evreiskaya Starina, there are something like six hundred thousand Arabs presently living in Palestine. Six hundred thousand! What do you Zionists propose to do with this community other than act as if it doesn’t exist?”
“We will bring European civilization to the native population—we will build schools and hospitals and sewage plants, we will bring tractors to plow their fields, we will bring water from Lake Tiberias to irrigate their crops. In a word, we will pull them along with us into the twentieth century.”
Mayakovsky was beside himself with scorn for the Zionist project. “You delude yourself into thinking the Muslim masses will accept a Jewish homeland,” he exclaimed. “You delude yourself into thinking Palestinian Arabs will abandon their ancestral lands without a fight.”
The lawyer, if that’s what he was, angled his head to look at Mayakovsky. Again his eyeglasses caught the light and his eyes were replaced by two silver coins. “If we must take up arms to establish a Jewish homeland,” he said with quiet determination, “rest assured, esteemed poet Mayakovsky, we will.”
As I reconstruct the scene in my head, I hear Pasternak starting to disburse words, phrases urgently, as if time were running out to dissuade a mischievous child from climbing onto a limb. “If your handful of Zionist settlers were to take up arms against a sea of Arabs, you will certainly lose. If by some miracle you were to win, the winning will surely corrupt your attitude vis-à-vis the colonial project, and this corruption of attitude is bound to prejudice the Arab rights that the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, appears so keen to protect. And that, in turn, will create a vicious cycle of violence. There is an alternative, gospodin: take up arms with us here in Russia. Struggle alongside us to create the planet’s first Communist state, after which none of the millions of Jews living in the Jewish Pale will think it necessary to emigrate.”
“I am familiar with your poetry, esteemed Boris Pasternak, which explains my presence here tonight. But I never thought I would hear the author of My Sister, Life defend the violence of revolution.”
“You conveniently forget that I am also the author of Lieutenant Schmidt. The poem’s hero—who is also my hero—naval lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt, was hanged for leading a mutiny on his warship Ochakov during the bungled 1905 revolution in Russia.” I remember Pasternak kneading his brow as if he were suppressing an ache. “You and I have more in common than you are comfortable admitting,” he insisted. “You defend the inevitable violence of your colonial project. I defend—by circuitous means, with difficulty, in muffled tones—what naval lieutenant Pyotr Schmidt defended: the violence of idealism.”
The Israelite gentleman turned away in disgust. “Not since Voltaire blamed the Jews for inventing Christianity have I heard such utter gibberish. Your precious Marxism is nothing more than a Cinderella story devised to lure the masses with this fairy tale of a workers’ paradise. History teaches nothing to poets who think they can change its course. Gai mit dein kop in drerd—go with your head in the ground, esteemed poet. See how far it gets you.”
Mayakovsky regarded the gentleman as he shouldered his way past the Tongue-Tied and disappeared through the double doors. “Boris Leonidovich is correct,” he said, breaking the edgy silence that had muted the café. “Revolution is idealism by another name. Hang on my every word: our revolution—for which I have fought since I was thirteen, for which I spent three hundred sixty-seven days, fourteen hours, and twenty minutes in solitary confinement in Butyrka prison cell number 103—our revolution will end the criminal exploitation of the working masses, it will liberate women, it will asphyxiate anti-Semitism and protect the Israelite community. And it will not put a foot wrong in the process. There will be no Thermidor here because there will be no Russian Robespierre, no guillotine in front of the Kremlin, no Reign of Terror.”
“Does he speak for you, Citizen Pasternak?” a naval cadet wearing an ensign’s uniform hollered from the doorway.
Pasternak laughed under his breath. “Out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse into the last century and grasp the need for change. I stand ready to give revolution in Russia a try as long as it is seen to be in the service of poetry.”
“You have it ass backward, Boris Leonidovich,” Mayakovsky cried. “The dull roar of the sea, the rotation of the earth, the shrill whistle of a strong wind—everything must be in the service of the Revolution. Poetry, like all the arts and all the crafts, must also be in the service of the Revolution.”
I remember, as if this all transpired yesterday, Pasternak wagging a finger at Mayakovsky. “You err when you lump art in the same basket with craft,” he said. “The two are a world apart, which is something Pushkin’s Salieri understood when he poisoned Mozart.”
“It was Salieri who got it right,” I can hear Mayakovsky insisting. “The artist is essentially a craftsman, and literature is essentially a craft no different from other socially useful occupations. It follows, then, that the highest form of literary activity is the most socially useful, which is to say that it helps in the construction of socialism. Thus the activity of the craftsman-poet-revolutionist V. Mayakovsky must serve our mutual client, the proletarian state. Poetry is useless, even immoral if it does less.”
Pasternak snickered good-naturedly. “You are too ardent by half, Vladimir Vladimirovich. You will revise the lyrics to your song when you experience revolution as opposed to rant about it. You will come to understand that Futurist poetry must serve a higher master than the state. It must offer up an image of the world suffused with the joy of living for a noble cause. Byt na sedmom nebe ot radosti—To be in seventh heaven with joy. Only from the summit of this seventh heaven can the poet purify the Revolution, after which the Revolution can begin to purify the state.”
I have this image in my mind’s eye of Mayakovsky’s nostrils flaring, a sure sign, I was to discover, that he was stifling his volcanic temper. “You are patronizing me—but I pardon you,” he said.
I remember Pasternak exploding with laughter, I can hear it in my mind’s ear as I describe it for you. “I accept your pardon,” he intoned in a priest’s voice, and he signed Mayakovsky with the Orthodox cross.
A short story writer in Pasternak’s camp—I happened to know he had been a priest in a previous incarnation but had been defrocked for sodomizing choir boys—called out, “God willing, poetry will purify our corrupt state!”
The mere mention of God was enough to send Mayakovsky off into an antireligious tirade. Lunging from his stool, throwing off his greatcoat so that it fell across the knees of one of his several female seconds, he cried out, “If God exists, willing or not He must be judged.”
“Who amongst us would dare to judge God?” Pasternak challenged.
“I will dare,” Mayakovsky roared. “I have examined the evidence—the mad rush to get creation over and done in six days, the eviction of Adam and Eve from a rent-free Eden for violating the terms of their lease, Noah frantically laying the keel to his floating zoo before God could get around to murdering all of humankind, the torture of the poor lickspittle Job, Abraham’s willingness to murder his own son to appease the thug who went by the patronymic Yahweh. I find this Yahweh guilty of incompetence, guilty of hubris, guilty of arrogance, guilty of complicity in murder (think of Job’s ten children!), guilty of self-indulgence by creating playthings He can lord over to make the eons pass more quickly.”
A young woman with hair nearly as red as mine (though hers, unlike mine, was obviously dyed) stoked the Poet’s flame. “You are a fine one to talk of hubris, Mayakovsky. There are some who would say you invented it.”
“I am certainly guilty,” the Poet shot back. “Guilty of wanting to create an Eden on earth ruled by man and not some vengeful God. I am guilty of wanting to create a new, modern poesy suitable to revolution. We call this scandalous bohemian wrecking ball that will unhinge the future from the past Futurism.”
Clambering onto my chair at the back of the room I called out, “If, as the poet Rilke suggests, the real Russia has buried herself under our perma-frosted ground, will your Futurism become an instrument of excavation? To put it simply, Mayakovsky, does this Futurism of yours actually work?”
It was here that the ruffian poet appeared to notice me for the first time. “Futurism works in practice,” he replied, speaking to me directly over the heads of the Tongue-Tied, a mischievous leer moistening his lips. “I leave it to comrade-poet Pasternak to figure out how to make it work in theory.”
“Count on me!” Pasternak exclaimed. “There is no difference between us on the future of Futurism. Mayakovsky will concentrate on its day-to-day practice, I will tend to the theory.” The two poets, laughing a conspiratorial laugh, embraced in a bear hug of friendship.
It was well past midnight before Osya managed to pry Mayakovsky loose from the mob of Tongue-Tied at the bar. Gripping his elbow, he steered him toward our corner table. I caught the telltale tap-tap of metal reinforcements on the tips of the Poet’s soles, a clear indication, if one were needed, of his working-class origins. The two stopped mid route to argue about something. It must have had to do with me because they both kept glancing across the room in my direction, Osip tossing his head in cranky satisfaction, the Poet belly-laughing. The conference, if that’s what it was, ended in a handshake. Knowing Mayakovsky’s reputation—he was said to be ready to wager on the turn of a card, on the heads or tails of a coin, on the number of ticks that can be pulled from a dog’s ear on a summer’s day—they had obviously bet on something.
“You surely know my wife, Lili,” Osya said when they reached my table.
In my mind’s eye I can still conjure the Poet scrutinizing me with his coal black eyes.
Tatiana: Excuse me for interrupting, Lilya, but you’re mistaken about the color of his eyes. They were the first thing I remarked when our paths crossed in Paris. How could you get it so wrong! The Poet’s eyes were a deep sea-green, the color of brackish water where a river and the sea meet in an estuary.
Nora: Holy shit, his eyes were blue. When he was angry, which was most of the time, the pupils turned cerulean.
Elly: Are we talking about the same person? I made a pastel of his face once—the eyes that I painted were pure gray, the color of ash, the color of lead, the color of sky on an overcast day.
Lilya: Can we agree that, when it came to his eyes, Mayakovsky was something of a chameleon?
Nora: The fucker was something of a chameleon with far more than his eyes.
Lilya: At the risk of interrupting your interruptions, I shall attempt to pick up the thread of my story: The Poet stood before me, his head slightly angled, the faintest trace of a recent smile clinging to his lips. I recall his telling Osip: “Our paths have crossed—I took the red in her hair for a Bolshevik bonfire—but we have never been formally introduced.” (So he had noticed me after all!) The Poet thrust out what could have passed for a paw. “Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” he announced.
I bequeathed my hand into his. “Brik, Lili Yuryevna,” I said. We lingered until the moment turned awkward, the skin of our palms touching in the hollow of our hands, before I managed to slip my fingers free. “I am pleased to finally come face-to-face with you, the Bolshevik who, so legend has it, ate his address book during a police raid so the names of his comrades would not fall into the hands of the Tsar’s secret police,” I said. (Curiously, I found myself addressing the Poet, an utter stranger, using the intimate ty. Osya instantly raised a mischievous eyebrow to salute the slip.)
I can imagine the Poet reacting with a half-smothered whinny. “That particular legend, unlike the great majority of legends, happens to be factual. They raided our illegal printing press in Gruzini. Investigator Voltanovsky decided, as I didn’t shave yet, I was too young to arrest and let me off with a stinging slap on the wrist from his riding crop and a reprimand.”
“But it never crossed my mind the legend wasn’t true!”
I could see the Poet sizing me up. His gaze drifted to my chest. I was dressed as usual in my reform apparel, which consisted of a hip-hugging washed-out rose-streaked ankle-length skirt fabricated from a thick window curtain, along with a black turtleneck sweater that clung to my rib cage and, as I eschewed undergarments, didn’t put undo strain on the male imagination. He didn’t appear to be displeased by what he saw. “Let us together create another legend,” he was saying. “I propose to put to you a particularly intimate question in the expectation that you, a hostage to compunctions, will refuse to answer it.” (Following my lead, the Poet addressed me with the ty, which set the pulse in my forehead to throbbing.) “You will refuse within earshot of a room filled with Moscow intelligentsia who will have nothing better to do than repeat what they overheard. Within hours all of Moscow will know what I asked, all of Moscow will know you told me to fuck off. All of Moscow will know that Osip here is out of pocket forty rubles. So here goes nothing: from time to time do you—”
“Do I what?”
Osya, of course, knew what the Poet was asking. “My dear Lili, he wants to know if you swallow.”
“He is convinced I will not answer.”
“He has wagered forty rubles you will not answer.”
There is an old Iraqi proverb that holds you should create your reputation and then live up to it. The Poet was living up to his reputation for pissing on decorum. I thought it would be appropriate to live up to mine for pissing on those who piss on decorum. (I am, after all, the great-great-granddaughter, on my mother’s side, of Genghis Khan’s favorite concubine who was notorious for pissing on decorum.) “What is it you imagine you can get from me?” I asked quietly. “A fellation before drifting off to sleep? A one-night fling, then? Oh, dear, surely not a love affair that will last a lifetime?”
“What I want from you—What I have wanted from you since that evening I spotted the woman with flaming red hair at Kotov’s execrable Textile Factory listening to me trying to persuade illiterate workers to sack the Tsar—Christ, what I absolutely must have from you, Lili Yuryevna, I do not see myself settling for less, is resuscitation.”
“And what precisely do you expect me to resuscitate?”
“Erections. Poetry. Revolution. Though I have not yet worked out their order of importance.”
Osip, snickering, elaborated. “He needs a new muse, Lili. The previous title holder, that theater actress who lisped when she read Pasternak’s first tentative translation of Shakespeare, has only just emigrated to Berlin.”
“Judging by your rush to replace her, you must be seriously oversexed,” I remember remarking.
“I am unquestionably oversexed,” the Poet confessed. And in full view of my husband—in full view of the bedazzled Tongue-Tied gawking from the bar—he permitted the back of his left hand to graze the nipple of my right breast, which set the pulse in my forehead to hammering.
I blurted out the first words that came into my flustered brain. “Fuck you.”
“By all means, fuck me,” he agreed instantly.
The arrogant son of a bitch made it sound as if we had sealed a contract.
This foreplay—clearly that’s what it was—took place under the long Jewish nose of my lawful wedded husband. But Osya was not offended. He had been down this road with me before. It was widely known that the traditional marriage vows we exchanged that arctic winter in 1912 had, with time and by mutual consent, been redefined in the Chernyshevsky manner—
Tatiana: Surely you are intending to explain Chernyshevsky manner for those of us who may not be familiar with the term.
Lilya: Damn it, who’s telling this story, you or I?
Tatiana: I was led to believe all four of us were telling the story.
Lilya: I agreed to all four, but each in turn. Thanks to you, I’ve lost the thread of my thoughts. Where was I?
Nora: Chernyshevsky manner …
Lilya: Yes. The nineteenth-century Russian political theoretician Chernyshevsky was one of the first to publicly encourage what we have come to call open marriage. Osip and I aspired to be the new people—suppressing jealousy, respecting the sexual freedom and intellectual independence of each member of the tribe—that Chernyshevsky postulated in his novel What Is to Be Done?
Tatiana: Am I to understand that sexual fidelity was not a condition of your marriage vow to Osip? What on earth would move one to marry if this were the case?
Lilya: There are other things beside sexual fidelity to recommend matrimony—
Elly: Can I assume you will instruct us?
Nora: Knowing her, you can. She will.
Lilya: Loyalty, companionship, camaraderie, connivance, intellectual stimulation, friendship. Yes, perhaps above all, friendship. I can say that living as we were in the Chernyshevsky manner, Osip accepted my serial infidelities and I, to show my gratitude, opened my thighs to his occasional fidelity.
So, with or without your permission I shall forge ahead: Mayakovsky was growing visibly impatient with this foreplay that was going nowhere. “Answer,” he suddenly ordered, his brows arching into the top of his nose, a gesture that I would come to identify with exasperation. “I will be pleased to lose my little bet with your husband,” I recall his adding, his voice reduced to a frog’s croak of a whisper. “My question should be seen as shortcut—when I meet an attractive woman for the first time I try to imagine how she makes love. Does she draw up her knees? Does she lock her ankles around her lover’s thigh? Knowing how someone makes love tells you volumes about the person. It permits you to become intimate without having to kill the better part of an otherwise passionate evening on small talk.”
“But why this obsession with small talk?”
“It happens to be one of my pet hates. Life is too short—at least mine will be too short—to waste any of it on small talk. So, Lili Yuryevna Brik, do you or don’t you?”
I decided then and there to rise to the occasion that the Poet (as a furtive glance at his trousers confirmed) had already risen to. “You’re curious to know if I swallow. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. It depends on who is attached to the penis.”
Oh, I confess I took visceral pleasure from looking into the startled deer-eyes of the Poet Mayakovsky. Osip, for his part, was choking on laughter. I turned toward the Tongue-Tied within earshot, who appeared spellbound by our conversation. “The secret, ladies, is to keep a cup of warm water by the bed—a sort of chaser, if you see what I mean. You must absolutely try it if you haven’t already. Men are so grateful when you swallow their sperm. They are like puppies—they eat out of your hand for days.”
Subscribing, as I do, to the school of repartee that believes once you go hog you are more or less obliged to go whole hog, I couldn’t in good conscience curb my tongue. And so, turning back to Mayakovsky, I rushed recklessly on: “I have never forgotten the tart taste of that first penis between my schoolgirl’s chapped lips. For a neophyte like me, sucking the circumcised penis had a lot in common with licking licorice sticks, sucking the uncircumcised penis felt more like licking licorice with its wrapper still on. Though it soon came off.” By then even Osip was staring at me wide-eyed, which only roused me to riot. “Early on, as my husband and not a few of my lovers will confirm, I insisted on reciprocity—I taught myself to give head so as to get head.”
Nora: I must accord you your due, Lilya Yuryevna. You are an epicurean at the table of carnal love.
Lilya: I accept your compliment, Nora.
Nora: It wasn’t intended as a compliment, only a description.
Tatiana: Let her get on with her story, for God’s sake! What happened then, Lilya Yuryevna?
Lilya: What happened was that Osya began pounding the table triumphantly. I remember him announcing, “You owe me forty rubles, Mayakovsky.”
Laughing under his breath, the Poet reached for his wallet, extracted a crisp new forty-ruble bill and handed it to my husband.
“I propose we spend the forty rubles on supper and good French wine for three,” Osip declared.
“Splendid idea,” the Poet said. “I eagerly accept.”
Both of them turned to me. Knowing me, I will surely have asked myself what did I have to lose. “What do I have to lose?” I hear myself saying. And I hear myself providing the answer to my own question. “Certainly not my innocence, which has long since been lost.”
With a wave of his paw the Poet cut me off before I could make more of a fool of myself. “Would you find it again if you could?” he demanded.
“I have no expectation of finding it again.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Osip gleefully provided the echo. “Respond to the question he asked, Lilya.”
I can see myself shrugging, which is what I usually do when I feel destiny has trumped free will. “If I could, if it were within the realm of possibility to go back in time, yes, I would find innocence but only to have the exquisite pleasure of losing it again.”
Mayakovsky nodded as if I had confirmed something he supposed. I nodded back, sealing the contract.
I can honestly say that that was the moment our lives departed from the beaten pathway: Volodya’s, mine, Osip’s. Do you recall Mayakovsky’s Backbone Flute?
If I am called to be Tsar—
On the sunlit gold of my coinage
I shall order my people
To mint
Your face!
As a young girl I had daydreamed of having my profile on a coin of the realm. Mayakovsky discovered this and his Backbone Flute was a wink in the direction of my childhood fantasy. When I grew up—when I first grasped the power I had over men, when I noticed them disrobing me with their eyes—I distracted myself with another fantasy: I dreamed of being muse to a great poet. Fate had presented me with the opportunity and I am not ashamed to say I was ready to swallow my pride and the Poet’s sperm to seize it. God knows I had consumed both before and survived. Osip, for his part, dreamed of becoming the impresario of a great act. Volodya was certainly a great act. Osip once remarked that Mayakovsky was not a person but an event. Osya and Volodya turned out to be two sides of the coin: Where Osya was understated, subtle, shrewd, sober-minded, painstakingly meticulous, Mayakovsky was overstated, passionate, unashamedly emotional, bursting with creative energy, painstakingly careless. Volodya came to trust Osya’s literary instincts. He would sometimes rework a poem after Osya put it through his analytical meat grinder. As for dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, he moved in with us straight away and never looked back, abandoning the lady with whom he’d been living in Finland, abandoning the books he’d left there, abandoning his clothing at a laundry shop. And so we came to be what the French call a ménage à trois that would last a lifetime, however short life turned out to be. I do not know of friends and comrades who were truer to each other or loved each other more. From that day on, we were pretty much inseparable until he commended me, along with assorted others, to the tender loving care of Comrade Government.
Elly: In my experience the tender loving care of Comrade Government has a lot in common with the kiss of death.
Lilya: (whispering urgently) May I remind you, Elly, that the walls in the Hotel Metropol are said to have ears. We would be wise to weigh our words.
Litzky: (in pidgin Russian, spoken with a Brooklyn accent) I advocate tea break to give me time to change wire on dictaphone.
Nora: You didn’t say he spoke Russian, Elly.
Elly: You didn’t ask me.
Lilya: But I thought you said he was American.
Elly: He is American. From what I gather, he’s an American Communist studying Russian literature at Moscow State University. I don’t have the impression he speaks it well enough to follow our conversation.
Tatiana: Thank heaven for small gifts.
Copyright © 2016 by Robert Littell