Kolyma Tales

Cherry Brandy

So who cares? I don’t, of late,

Let me tell it to you straight:

Life is candy, cherry brandy,

Ain’t that dandy, sweetie-pie?

Where to a Hellene

Gleamed beauty,

To me from black holes

Gapes shame.

Where Greeks sped Helen

Over waves,

Salt foam spits

In my face.

Emptiness

Smears my lips,

Poverty

Thumbs its nose.

Oh yeah? Oh ho! Oh no!

This ale ain’t no cocktail,

But life is candy, cherry brandy.

Ain’t that dandy, sweetie-pie?

Osip Mandelstam, March 2, 1931

The poet was dying. His hands, swollen from hunger with their white bloodless fingers and filthy overgrown nails, lay on his chest, exposed to the cold. He used to put them under his shirt, against his naked body, but there was too little warmth there now. His mittens had long since been stolen; to steal in the middle of the day all a thief needed was brazenness. A dim electric sun, spotted by flies and shackled in a round screen, was affixed to the high ceiling. Light fell on the poet’s feet, and he lay, as if in a box, in the dark depths of the bottom layer of bunks that stretched in two unbroken rows all around the walls of the room. From time to time, clicking like castanets, his fingers would move to grasp for a button, a loop, a fold in his pea jacket, to sweep away some crumbs and come again to rest. The poet had been dying for so long that he no longer understood that he was dying. Sometimes a thought would pass painfully, almost physically through his brain, a simple, strong thought – that they had stolen the bread he had put under his head. And this was so acutely terrible that he was prepared to quarrel, to swear, to fight, to search, to prove. But he had no strength for this, and the thought of bread became weaker… And now he was thinking of something else – that they were supposed to take everyone abroad but that the ship was late and that it was a good thing that he was here. And in the same haphazard fashion his thoughts shifted to the birthmark on the face of the barracks orderly.

He spent a large part of his days thinking of the events that filled his life here. The visions that rose before his eyes were not those of his childhood, youth, success. All his life he had been hurrying somewhere. It was wonderful now that he did not have to hurry anywhere, now that he could think slowly. And in a leisurely fashion he began to think of the great monotony of death. He thought of the things that had been understood and described by doctors, before artists and poets had come to them. The face mask of the dying Hippocrates is known to all medical students. This mysterious monotony of movement before death launched Freud into the boldest of hypotheses. Monotony and repetition form the compost essential to science. But as for that which is death, the search was led not by doctors but by poets. It was pleasant to realize that he could still think. The nausea of hunger had long since become a habit. And it was all the same – Hippocrates, the orderly with the birthmark, and his own dirty fingernails.

Life was entering into him and passing out of him, and he was dying. But life came back, his eyes opened, thoughts appeared. Only desires were absent. He had long lived in a world where people were frequently returned to life by artificial respiration, glucose, camphor, caffeine. The dead lived again. And why not? He believed in immortality, in real human immortality. He often thought that there was no biological reason for a man not to live for ever… Old age was merely a curable disease, and if it were not for this still unresolved tragic misunderstanding, he could live for ever. Or at least until he got tired. But he wasn’t at all tired of living – even now, in these transit barracks.

The barracks were a harbinger of horror, but not horror itself. On the contrary, the spirit of freedom dwelled here, and this was felt by all. Ahead was the camp, and the prison was a thing of the past. This was the ‘peace of travel’, and the poet understood this.

There was still another path to immortality, that of the poet Tiutchev:

Blessed be he who has passed

through this world

In its fateful moments.

But though he was evidently not destined to become immortal in his human form, as a physical entity, he had nevertheless earned creative immortality. He had been called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, and it occurred to him often that this was really true. He believed in the immortality of his verse. He had no pupils, but what poet can tolerate pupils? He had also written prose – badly; he’d written articles too. But only in verse did he find anything that seemed new and important to him. His past life had all been fiction, a book, a fairy tale, a dream; only the present was real.

These thoughts arose calmly, secretly, from somewhere deep within him. There was no passion in these meditations. Indifference had long since possessed him. What trivia this all was, what nit-picking in comparison with the ‘evil burden’^* of life! He was amazed at himself – how could he think of poems when everything was already decided? He knew all this, he knew it better than anyone. Better than who? Who cared about him, and who was his equal? Why did all of this have to be understood? He waited… And he understood.

In the moments when life poured into his body and his clouded, half-open eyes began to see, when his eyelids began to quiver and his fingers to move, in those moments thoughts came to him, but he didn’t think they would be his last thoughts.

Life entered by herself, mistress in her own home. He had not called her, but she entered his body, his brain; she came like verse, like inspiration. And for the first time the meaning of the word ‘inspiration’ was revealed to him in its fullness. Poetry was the life-giving force by which he had lived. Yes, it had been exactly that way. He had not lived for poetry; he had lived through poetry.

Now it was so obvious, so palpably clear that inspiration had been life; on the threshold of death it was revealed to him that life had been inspiration, only that: inspiration.

And he rejoiced that he had learned this final truth.

Everything – work, the thud of horses’ hoofs, home, birds, rocks, love, the whole world – could be expressed in verse. All life entered easily into verse and made itself comfortably at home there. And that was the way it should be, for poetry was the Word.

Even now stanzas rose easily, one after the other, in a sort of foreordained but at the same time extraordinary rhythm, although he had not written them down for a long time, and indeed could not write them down. Rhyme was the magnet with which he selected words and concepts. Each word was a piece of the world and lent itself to rhyme, while the whole world rushed past with the speed of a computer. Everything shouted: ‘Take me!’ ‘No, me!’ There was no need to search – just to reject. It was as if there were two men – one who composed, who spun the wheel, and another who from time to time stopped the machine. And seeing that he was two men, the poet understood that he was composing real poetry. And who cared if it was written down or not? Recording and printing was the vanity of vanities. Only that which is born selflessly can be without equal. The best was that which was not written down, which was rejected and disappeared, melted without a trace, and only the creative labor that he sensed and could not possibly confuse with anything else proved that the poem had been realized, that beauty had been created. Could he be wrong? Could his creative joy be an error?

He remembered how bad, how poetically helpless Blok’s last poems were, and how Blok did not seem to understand that…

The poet forced himself to stop. It was easier to do that here than somewhere in Leningrad or Moscow.

Now he realized that for a long time he had not been thinking at all. Once again life was departing from him.

He had been lying motionless for many hours when he suddenly saw something near him that looked like a shooting target or a geological map. The map was mute, and vainly he strained to comprehend what was depicted on it. After a considerable period of time he realized that he was looking at his own fingers. His fingertips were still stained by the home-made cigarettes that he smoked and sucked to the very end. The pads of his fingers revealed a clear dactyloscopic drawing like the relief map of a mountain. The drawing was identical on all ten fingers – concentric circles like those of a sawn-off tree trunk.

He remembered once how a Chinese man from the basement laundry in the building in which he grew up had stopped him on the street. The man had chanced to take him by one hand, then seized the other. The man turned the palms upward and excitedly shouted something in Chinese. It turned out that he was declaring a child so marked to be unquestionably very lucky. The poet often recalled that sign of luck – especially when he published his first collection of verse. Now he remembered the man without anger or irony; he just did not care.

The main thing was that he still had not died. Incidentally, what did it mean when they said someone has ‘died a poet’? There must be something childishly naïve in such a death. Or something intentional – as in the case of Esenin or Mayakovsky.

‘Died an actor’ – that was more or less comprehensible. But ‘died a poet’?

Yes, he had an inkling of what awaited him. At the transit prison he had understood a lot and guessed at still more. And he rejoiced, rejoiced quietly in his own weakness and hoped he would die. He remembered an argument that had taken place a long time ago, in prison, as to which was worse – camp or prison? No one had the experience to make a judgment, and the arguments were speculative. He remembered the cruel smile of a man who had been brought from camp to the prison. That smile stuck so clear in his memory that he was afraid to recall it.

If he were to die now, he thought, how cleverly he would have deceived those who had brought him here. He’d cheat them of ten whole years. He had been in exile several years before, and he knew that his name had been entered into special lists for ever. For ever!? The scale by which he measured everything had shifted, so that the meaning of the words changed.

Again he felt a nascent tide of strength, rising just like the tide from the sea, a flood-tide that lasted for many hours. Later came the ebb. But after all, the sea doesn’t retreat from us for ever. He would still recover.

Suddenly he wanted to eat, but he lacked the strength to move. Slowly and with difficulty he remembered that he had given today’s soup to his neighbor, that that mug of hot water was his only food that day. Except for bread, of course. But the bread had been handed out a very, very long time ago. And yesterday’s bread had been stolen. There were some who still had enough strength to steal.

He lay like that – light and ethereal – until morning came. The electric bulb grew dimmer, more yellow, and bread was brought on large plywood trays, as it was brought every day.

But he could not rouse himself any more, and he no longer watched out for the heel of the loaf or cried when he didn’t get it. He didn’t stuff the bread into his mouth with trembling fingers. The smaller of his two pieces slowly melted in his mouth, and with all his being he felt the taste and smell of fresh rye bread. The bread was no longer in his mouth, although he hadn’t managed to swallow or even make a movement with his jaw. The smaller piece had melted and disappeared. It was a miracle – one of many local miracles. No, he was not upset. But when they put the daily ration into his hands, he seized it with bloodless fingers and pressed the bread to his mouth. He bit the bread with teeth loose from scurvy; his gums bled, but he felt no pain. With all his strength he kept pushing it into his mouth, sucking it, tearing it, gnawing…

His neighbors stopped him: ‘Don’t eat it all. Leave some for later. Later…’

And the poet understood. He opened his eyes wide, not letting the bloodstained bread slip from his dirty, bluish fingers.

‘When later?’ he said clearly and distinctly. And he closed his eyes.

He died toward evening.

They ‘wrote him off’ two days later. For two days his inventive neighbors managed to continue getting his bread ration. The dead man would raise his hand like a puppet. So he died before the recorded date of his death – a not insignificant detail for his future biographers.