Fourth Prose

I.

Benjamin Fedorovich Kagan1 approached this matter with the spare, sage prudence of a wizard or that of an Odessite Newton. All of Benjamin Fedorovich’s conspiratorial activity rested on infinitesimals. Benjamin Fedorovich saw the law of salvation as a matter of maintaining a tortoiselike pace. He allowed himself to be shaken out of his professorial cubicle, answered the telephone at all hours, neither renounced nor refused anything or anyone, but for the most part what he tried to do was hold back the dangerous course of the disease.

The availability of a professor, what’s more a mathematician, in this improbable affair of saving five lives by way of those cognizable, yet utterly imponderable integral progressions that are called “pulling strings,” evoked expressions of satisfaction everywhere.

Isaiah Benediktovich2 behaved himself from the very first as if the disease might be contagious, something catching, like scarlet fever, so that he, too, Isaiah Benediktovich, might, for all he knew, be shot. Isaiah Benediktovich went bustling about without rhyme or reason. He seemed to be racing from doctor to doctor, imploring them to disinfect him immediately.

If Isaiah Benediktovich had had his way, he would have taken a taxi and driven all over Moscow at random, without any plan, imagining that that was how one performed the ritual.

Isaiah Benediktovich would keep asserting and constantly recalling that he had left a wife behind him in Petersburg. He even managed to acquire a secretary of sorts, a small, stern, very sensible companion, a woman who was a relative of his and who had already begun to baby him. To put it briefly, by appealing to different people at different times, Isaiah Benediktovich seemed, as it were, to be inoculating himself against the firing squad.

All Isaiah Benediktovich’s relatives had died in their Jewish beds of carved walnut. As a Turk will travel to the black stone of Kaaba,3 so these Petersburg bourgeois descended from rabbis of patrician blood, brought into touch with Anatole France by way of the translator Isaiah, made pilgrimages to the very most Turgenevian and Lermontovian spas, preparing themselves by taking the cure for their transition to the hereafter.

In Petersburg Isaiah Benediktovich had been living the life of a good Frenchman, eating his potage, choosing acquaintances as innocuous as the croutons in his bouillon, and making visits, according to his profession, to two stock jobbers in junk translation.

Isaiah Benediktovich was good only at the very beginning of the “string pulling,” during the mobilization and, as it were, the alarm. After that he faded, drooped, stuck out his tongue, and those very relatives of his pooled their money and sent him back to Petersburg.

I have always wondered where the bourgeois gets his fastidiousness and his so-called probity. Probity is the quality that relates the bourgeois to the animal. Many Party members relax in the company of a bourgeois for the same reason that grown-ups need the society of rosy-cheeked children.

The bourgeois is of course more innocent than the proletarian, closer to the uterine world, to the baby, the kitten, the angel, the cherubim. In Russia there are very few of these innocent bourgeois, and the scarcity has a bad effect on the digestion of authentic revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie in its innocent aspect must be preserved, entertained with amateur sports, lulled on the springs of Pullman cars, tucked into envelopes of snow-white railway sleep.

II.

A boy in goatskin booties, in a tight-fitting velveteen Russian coat, with his locks combed carefully back, stands there surrounded by mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, and beside him stands a cook’s brat or a coachman’s waif—some kid from the servants’ quarters. And this whole howling pack of sniveling, pulling, hissing archangels is urging Little Lord Fauntleroy on:

“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it!”

Now Vasenka lets him have it, and the old maids, the vile toads, nudge each other and hold back the mangy little coachman’s kid.

“Go on, Vasenka, you let him have it, and we’ll grab him by the curly-locks and we’ll waltz ‘im around . . .”

What’s this? A genre painting in the manner of Venetsianov? A scene by some serf-artist?

No, this is a training exercise for a Komsomol baby under the guidance of his agit-mammas, grandmammas, and nursemaids, so Vasenka can stomp him. Vasenka can let him have it, while we hold the scum down, while we waltz around . . .

“Go on, Vasenka, let him have it . . .”

III.

A crippled girl approached us from a street as long as a streetcarless night. She puts her crutch to one side and sits down as quickly as she can, so she can look like everybody else. Who is this husbandless girl? She is the light cavalry . . .4

We shoot cigarettes at one another and adjust our Chinese dialect, encoding into brute-cowardly formulae the great, powerful, forbidden concept of class. Brute terror pounds on the typewriters, brute terror proofreads a Chinese dialect on sheets of toilet paper, scribbles denunciations, hits those that are down, demands the death penalty for prisoners. Like little kids drowning a kitten in the Moscow River while a crowd watches, our grown-up kids playfully put on the pressure; at noon recess they give it the big squeeze: “Hey, come on and push it under. So you can’t see it any more.” That’s the sacred rule of lynch law.

—A shopkeeper on the Ordynka short-weighted a working-woman: kill him!

—A cashier shortchanged somebody a nickel—kill her!

—A manager signed some nonsense by mistake—kill him!

—A peasant stashed away some rye in his barn—kill him!

A girl approaches us, limping on her crutch. One of her legs is foreshortened, and her crude prosthetic shoe reminds one of a wooden hoof.

And who are we? We are school children who don’t study. We are a Komsomol volunteer. We are rowdies by permission of all the saints.

Filipp Filippych had a toothache. Filipp Filippych had not and would not come to class. Our notion of study has as much to do with science as a hoof with a foot, but this doesn’t bother us.

I have come to you, my artiodactylous friends, to stomp with my peg leg in the yellow socialist arcade-complex created by the unbridled fantasy of that reckless entrepreneur Giber out of elements of a chic hotel on Tver Boulevard, out of the night telegraph and telephone exchange, out of a dream of universal incarnate bliss disguised as a permanent foyer with a buffet, out of a permanently open office with saluting clerks, out of a postal-telegraph, throat-tickling dryness of the air.

Here we have a permanent bookkeepers’ night under the yellow flame of second-class railroad lamps. Here, as in Pushkin’s tale, a Jew and a frog get married, that is, we have a wedding ceremony permanently going on between a goat-hoofed fop spawning theatrical fish eggs and his unclean mate from the same bathhouse, the Moscow editor-coffinmaker, who turns out brocade coffins on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He rustles his paper shroud. He opens the veins of the months of the Christian calendar that still preserve their pastoral-Greek names: January, February, March . . . He is the terrifying and illiterate horse doctor of proceedings, deaths, and happenings, and he is pleased as can be when, like a fountain, the black horse blood of our epoch spurts forth.

IV.

I went to work for the newspaper Moscow Komsomol straight from the caravanserai of TSEKUBU.5 There were twelve pairs of earphones there, almost all broken, and a reading room without books, remodeled from what had been a chapel, where people slept like snails on small round sofas.

The service staff at TSEKUBU hates me because of my straw baskets and because I’m not a professor.

In the afternoon I would go to observe the high water and I firmly believed that the obscene waters of our Moscow River would flow over the scholarly Kropotkin Embankment and TSEKUBU would telephone for a boat.

Mornings I would drink pasteurized cream right on the street, straight from the bottle.

I would take somebody else’s soap from the professors’ shelves and wash myself in the evenings, and I was not caught once.

People would come there from Kharkov and Voronezh and would be on their way to Alma-Ata. They accepted me as one of their own and took counsel with me as to which republic might work out best for them.

At night TSEKUBU was locked up like a fortress and I would bang my stick against the window.

Every decent man received telephone calls at TSEKUBU, and in the evening a servant would hand him his messages as if he were giving a priest a funerary list of souls to be prayed for. The writer Alexander Grin6 lived there, and the servants cleaned his clothes with a brush. I lived at TSEKUBU like everybody, and no one bothered me until I myself moved out in the middle of summer.

When I moved to another apartment, my fur coat7 lay draped across the cab, as it does when a patient has been dismissed from hospital after a long illness, or a convict released from prison.

V.

Things have reached the point where in the literary trade I value only raw meat, only the crazy excrescence:

And by the falcon’s cry, the entire

Gorge was wounded to the bone.

That’s the sort of thing I need.

All the works of world literature I divide into those that have been authorized and those that have been written without authorization. The former are all trash; the latter, stolen air. As to writers who receive authorization first, and then write, I would like to spit in their face; I would like to beat them on the head with a stick and sit them all down around a table in Herzen House,8 and put a glass of police-tea in front of each one of them and hand each one of them personally a steaming sample of Gornfeld’s9 urinalysis.

I’d forbid such writers to marry and have children. How can they have children? Our children, after all, must carry on for us, must finish saying what was most important for us to say. And how can they, when their fathers have sold out, to a pock-marked devil, for three generations to come?

Now that’s a tidy little literary page.

VI.

I have no manuscripts, no notebooks, no archives. I have no handwriting, because I never write. I alone in Russia work from the voice, while all around me the pack of accomplished pig-dogs writes. What the hell kind of writer am I? Get out of here, you fools!

On the other hand, I have a lot of pencils and they are all stolen and of different colors. One can sharpen them with a Gillette blade.

The blade of the Gillette razor with its slightly notched beveled edge has always seemed to me one of the noblest products of the steel industry. The good Gillette blade cuts like sedgegrass, bends but doesn’t break in the hand, something like a Martian’s calling card, or a note from some punctilious devil, with a hole drilled in the middle.

The Gillette razor blade is the product of a dead trust, whose shareholders include packs of American and Swedish wolves.

VII.

I am a Chinaman; nobody understands me. Hack-shmack!10 Let’s go to Alma-Ata, where the people have raisin-eyes, where the Persian has eyes like fried eggs, where the Sart has sheep’s eyes.

Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!

I had a patron once—People’s Commissar Mravian-Muravian,11 antic People’s Commissar of the Armenian land, that younger sister of the Land of Judea. He sent me a telegram.

Dead is my patron, the People’s Commissar Mravian-Muravian. Gone from the Erevan anthill is the black ant-commissar. No longer will he come to Moscow, in the international car of the train, as naïve and curious as a priest from a Turkish village.

Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!

I had a letter for People’s Commissar Mravian. I took it to the secretaries in the Armenian residence in the cleanest, most ambassadorial street in Moscow. I was just about to depart for Erevan on an assignment from the ancient People’s Commissariat of Education to conduct a terrifying seminar for those roundheaded youths in their poor monastery of a university.

If I had gone to Erevan, for three days and three nights I would have been hopping off the train to eat buttered bread with black caviar at the station buffets.

Hack-shmack!

On the way I would have read Zoshchenko’s very best book and I would have been happy as a Tatar who had just stolen a hundred rubles.

Hack-shmack! Let’s go to Azerbaijan!

I would have taken fortitude with me in my yellow straw basket with its great heap of clean-smelling linen, and my fur coat would have hung on a golden nail. And I would have gotten out at the station in Erevan with my winter coat in one hand and my elder’s walking stick—my Jewish staff12—in the other.

VIII.

There is a splendid line of Russian poetry which I will never tire of declaiming in the dog-smelling Moscow nights, a line from which, when uttered, as from a spell, the unclean spirits disperse. Guess what line, friends. It inscribes itself on the snow like sleigh runners, it clicks in the lock like a key, it darts into a room like frost: “. . . I didn’t shoot the poor bastards in the dungeons . . .”13 There you have a symbol of faith, there you have the genuine canon of a real writer, a true mortal enemy of Literature.

In Herzen House there is a certain lactile vegetarian, a philologist with a Chinaman’s noggin, of that breed that tiptoes about our blood-soaked Soviet land intoning hao-hao, shango-shango, while heads are being lopped off, a certain Mitka Blagoi,14 a piece of high-school rubbish, authorized by the Bolsheviks, in the name of the advancement of science, to stand guard in a special museum over the length of cord with which Seriozha Esenin hanged himself.

And I say: Blagoi to the Chinese! To Shanghai with him! To the Chinks—that’s where he belongs! Ah, to think, what Mother Philology once was, and what she has now become . . . Pure-blooded and uncompromising she was; cur-blooded and all-compromising she has become.

IX.

To the number of murderers and apprentice-murderers of Russian poets, the murky name of Gornfeld has been added. This paralytic d’Anthès,15 this Uncle Monia from Basseiny Street, who preaches morality and statesmanship, carried out the orders of a regime completely alien to him, orders which he accepted about as he would a touch of indigestion.

Dying of Gornfeld is as foolish as dying because of a bicycle or a parrot’s beak. But a literary murderer can also be a parrot. I, for instance, was almost killed by a polly named after His Majesty King Albert and Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko.16 I am quite pleased that my murderer is alive and has in a sense survived me. I feed him sugar and listen with pleasure as he recites aloud from Eulenspiegel, “The ashes are knocking at my heart,” alternating this phrase with another not less beautiful: “There is no torment in the world greater than the word . . .” A man who can title his book Torments of the Word is born with the Cain’s mark of the literary murderer on his brow.

I only met Gornfeld once, in the dirty editorial office of some unprincipled rag where, as in the buffet at Kvisisan, some spectral figures hovered. There was still no ideology then and nobody to whom to complain if somebody insulted you. When I recall that orphaned state—how did we manage to live then!—huge tears roll down my face . . . Somebody introduced me to this two-legged critic, and I shook his hand.

Dear Uncle Gornfeld, why did you go complain to the Stock Exchange News, I mean to the Evening Red Gazette,17 in the Year of Our Soviet 1929? You would better have gone weeping to Mr. Propper, into his pure literary Jewish waistcoat. You would better have told your woes to your banker, with his sciatica, kugel, and tallith . . .

X.

Nikolai Ivanovich18 has a secretary. And, in truth, to tell you the truth, she is quite a squirrel, a tiny little rodent. She nibbles a nut with every visitor and goes running to the telephone like an inexperienced young mother to her sick baby.

A certain scoundrel told me that truth was mria in Greek.

And so our little squirrel is genuine truth with a capital letter in Greek; and at the same time she is that other truth, that stern card-carrying Virgin—Party Truth . . .

The secretary, frightened and attentive, like a hospital nurse, doesn’t so much work there as live in the office’s anteroom, in the telephone-dressing-room. Poor Mria from the anteroom with her telephone and her classical newspaper!

This secretary differs from others in that she sits like a nightnurse on the threshold of power, defending the wielder of power as if he were gravely ill.

XI.

No, really, bring me to court by all means! Allow me to be submitted as evidence! . . . Permit me, so to speak, to put myself on file. Do not deprive me, I implore you, of my own trial . . . The legal proceedings aren’t over yet and, I make so bold as to assure you, they never will be. What happened before was only the overture. Bosio19 herself will sing at my trial. Bearded students in checked plaids, mingling with policemen in capes, under the baton of their goat of a choir director, ecstatically chanting a syncopated version of the Eternal Memory,20 will carry a police coffin with the remains of my case out of the smoke-dimmed halls of the district court.

Papa, papa, papochka,

Where, oh where is Mamochka?

From the Writers’ Union, down two blocks,

She came home with the black pox.

Mama’s eye has lost its sight

And the case is sewn up tight.

Alexander Ivanovich Herzen! . . . Allow me to introduce myself . . . It seems that in your house . . . As host, you are in some sense responsible . . .

You deigned to go abroad, did you . . . Something disagreeable has happened here in the meantime . . . Alexander Ivanovich! Sir! How can it be! There is absolutely no one to turn to!

XII.

In a certain year of my life, grown men from a tribe I despise with all the strength of my soul, and to which I neither wish to nor ever will belong, conceived the intention of collectively committing against me an ugly and repellent ritual. The name of this ritual is literary pruning, or dishonoring, and it is performed according to the custom and the calendrical needs of the writers’ tribe, and in it a sacrificial victim is designated by vote of the elders.

I insist that writerdom, as it has taken shape in Europe and especially in Russia, is incompatible with the honorable title of Jew, of which I am proud. By blood, burdened with its inheritance from shepherds, patriarchs, and kings, rebels against the shifty gypsydom of the writers’ tribe. A creaking camp of unwashed Romanies kidnapped me when I was still a child and for a certain number of years dawdled along its obscene routes, vainly trying to teach me its only craft, its only art—stealing.

Writerdom is a race with a revolting smell to its hide and the very filthiest means of preparing its food. It is a race that camps and sleeps in its own vomit, expelled from cities and hounded in villages; yet anywhere and everywhere it is close to the authorities, who always grant it special accommodations in red-light districts as they do to prostitutes. For, anywhere and everywhere, literature carries out one assignment: it helps superiors keep their soldiers in line, and it helps judges dispose arbitrarily of the condemned.

A writer is a mixture of parrot and priest. He is a polly in the very loftiest sense of that word. He speaks French if his master is French, but, sold to Persia, he’ll say “Pol’s a fool” or “Polly wants a cracker” in Persian. A parrot has no age and knows not day from night. If he bores his master, he’s covered with a dark cloth, and, for literature, that becomes a surrogate for night.

XIII.

There were two Chénier brothers.21 The despicable junior belongs entirely to literature; the executed senior himself excluded literature.

Jailers love to read novels, and more than anyone else have a need for literature.

In a certain year of my life, bearded adult men in peaked fur caps brandished a flint knife over me, with the aim of deballing me. Judging by the evidence, these were the priests of the tribe: they smelled of onion, novels, and goatmeat.

And it was all as frightening as in a child’s dream. Nel mezzo del’ cammin di nostra vita22—midway on the journey of our life, I was stopped in the dense Soviet forest by bandits who called themselves my judges. They were elders with veins protruding from their necks and little goose-heads unfit to bear the burden of their years.

For the first and only time in my life, literature had need of me, and it crumpled me, pawed me, and pressed me flat, and it was all frightening, as in a child’s dream.

XIV.

I bear moral responsibility for the fact that the ZIF publishing house did not write out a contract with the translators Gornfeld and Kariakin. I—dealer in precious furs, practically suffocating under a load of literary pelts—bear moral responsibility for the fact that I inspired a Petersburg lout with the desire to allude in a libelous anecdote to that warm Gogolian fur coat, torn by night in the open square from the shoulders of that most ancient Komsomol member, Akaky Akakievich.23 I tear off my literary fur coat and trample it underfoot. In nothing but my jacket, and in thirty-degree frost, I will run three times around the concentric boulevard rings of Moscow. I shall flee from the red-light district hospital of the Komsomol arcade into a mortal chill, if only not to see those twelve lit Judas-windows of that obscene house on Tver Boulevard, if only not to hear the clink of silver and the counting of printer’s sheets.

XV.

Honored Romanies of Tver Boulevard, we have written a novel together, you and I, of which you have not even dreamed. I am very fond of coming across my name in official papers, in court-ordered subpoenas and other stern documents. Here the name has a completely objective ring to it: a sound new to the ear and, I must say, quite interesting. From time to time, I, too, am a bit curious to know what it is I am forever doing wrong. What kind of apple is this Mandelstam anyway, who’s supposed to have been doing such-and-such for so long, and who—the scoundrel—keeps on evading the issue? . . . How much longer is he going to keep on evading the issue? That’s why I profit nothing with the passage of the years; others gather dignity and respect with every passing day, while for me, quite the contrary, time flows backward.

I am guilty. Here there can be no two opinions. I shall not wriggle out of this guilt. I live in insolvency. I save myself by evasion. How much longer am I to go on evading?

When a tin subpoena arrives, or a reminder, Greek in its austere simplicity, from a social organization—when they demand that I name my accomplices, stop my thieving, tell where I get my counterfeit money, and sign a warrant not to travel beyond certain designated limits—I agree immediately, but then I start evading again right away, as if nothing had happened. And so it goes.

In the first place: I ran away from somewhere, and I must be sent back, settled, investigated, and corrected. In the second place, they assume I am somebody else. No way of proving my identity. In my pockets, trash: cryptic notes from the previous year, telephone numbers of dead relatives and addresses of God knows whom. In the third place, I signed a pact, either with Beelzebub or the State Publishing House, grandiose and unfulfilled, on Whatman paper, smeared with mustard and emery-powder pepper, in which I bound myself to return twice over everything acquired, to regurgitate fourfold everything I misappropriated, and to perform sixteen times running that impossible, that unthinkable, that unique thing that might, in part, acquit me.

I became more stiff-necked every year. As though by a streetcar conductor’s steel punch, I am riddled with holes and stamped with my own surname. Whenever anyone calls me by my first name and patronymic, I tremble. I simply cannot accustom myself to such honor! To be called Ivan Moiseich, even if just once in my life! Hey, Ivan,24 go scratch the dogs! Mandelstam, go scratch the dogs! Some little Frenchman might be called “cher matîre” dear teacher—but me? “Mandelstam, go scratch the dogs!” To each his own.

I grow old, and with the stump of my heart I scratch the master’s dogs, and they never get enough, they never get enough . . . With canine tenderness, the eyes of Russian writers look at me and they implore: drop dead! Where does it come from, this lackey’s malice, this sniveling contempt for my name? Even the gypsy had a horse, but I am horse and gypsy in one person . . .

Tin subpoenas under my little pillow . . . The forty-sixth little old contract instead of a halo and a hundred thousand lighted cigarettes instead of candles . . .

XVI.

No matter how much I work, no matter if I carry horses on my back or if I turn millstones, I shall never become a worker. My work, no matter what form it might take, is seen as mischief, as lawlessness, as incidental. But that’s the way I want it, and so I agree. I subscribe with both hands.

Here’s a different approach: for me, it is the hole in the doughnut25 that has value. What of the dough of the doughnut? You can devour the doughnut, but the hole will remain.

That’s what real work is: Brussels lace. The main thing is what supports the pattern: air, punctures, truancy.

In my case, brethren, work does me no good; it doesn’t go on my record.

We have a Bible of work, but we do not appreciate it. I mean Zoshchenko’s stories. He’s the only man who has shown us a worker, and we’ve trampled him in the dirt. But I demand monuments for Zoshchenko in every city and boondock of the Soviet Union, or at the very least, as for Grandpa Krylov, in the Summer Garden.26

Now there’s a man whose work reeks with truancy, in whose work Brussels lace lives!

At night on the Ilinka when the department stores and the trusts are asleep and conversing in their native Chinese, at night anecdotes go walking along the Ilinka. Lenin and Trotsky walk arm in arm as though nothing has happened. One has a little pail and a fishing rod from Constantinople in his hand. Two Jews go walking, an inseparable pair. One asks questions, the other answers; and the one keeps asking, always asking, while the other keeps evading, always evading, and in no way can they be parted.

A German organ-grinder walks by with his Schubertian barrel-organ—such a failure, such a parasite . . . Ich bin arm. I am poor.

Sleep, my dear . . . M.S.P.O.27 . . .

Viy28 is reading the telephone book on Red Square. Lift up my eyelids . . . Give me the Central Committee . . .

Armenians from Erevan walk by with green-painted herrings. Ich bin arm. I am poor.

And in Armavir on the town coat of arms there is written: A dog barks and the wind carries it.29

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