460
JACK LUDWIG
the SALT ta lks? the scientific and techno logical exchanges? the Bolshoi tours?
the Soviet musicians?
Mme Mandelstam repea ts: "Most Americans are po litica l idio ts, I think."
And mos t East Europeans a re something worse, people who want to forget the
past and want, too, to remain blind to the present. "We a ll lived on a volcano,"
she says in
Hope Abandoned,
"and still do." The di ssidents I met in Moscow
quoted the KGB interrogators: "We have brought Sta lin back to life in order
to
take care of you," and "Existing laws are o ut o f date for people like you. We
will make n ew ones till you lose your fooli sh respect for the protection o f the
law." The same day I saw Nadezhda Mandelstam countless pa rents, children,
wives, husbands, friends, brothers, sisters, asking for diss idents who had dis–
appeared and were presumed arrested, met with the same blankness Nadezhda
Mandelstam records in h er memo irs. The terror was in effect. Vera Belo tserk–
ovsky, Vadim's wife, described Vadim 's arrest, which took place ten feet in
front o f her, but which she, instinctively, didn 't react to openly because she
couldn't ri sk the arbitrary power arrestin g her too, and leaving her apartment
empty when her sma ll son return ed from school.
Nothing o f this kind surpri sed Nadezhda Mandelstam . " No one," she
writes, "should lightly di smiss o ur experience, as complacent foreigners do,
cheri shing the ho pe tha t with them-who are so clever and cultured-things
will be different. " Tha t experience, she argues, " is the only thing that can give
immunity-like a vaccine or inoculatio n." The real danger is if "we continue
to hide our experience-it canno t be tapped without making a certa in effort .. .
Best of a ll would be if we could g radua ll y accumulate powers o f resistance to
the use o f brute fo rce, until the machinery ground to a ha lt and began to rust.
But thi s would be a very long p rocess for people like us with no language, no
standard s, no light to guide u s. All we have is our craven fea rs."
In the memo irs Sleeping Beauty forces herself to wake without a kiss from
Prince Charming. Prince Charming has disappeared and is presumed dead.
But his ta lisman exists, forever: " Now," Nadezhda concludes, Mandelstam 's
poetry is printed a nd, therefore, " indestructible, and I therefore feel tota lly and
absolutel y free, and I ca n brea the easily (despite the lack of air)."
When I asked her wha t she was writing at the moment, she said, " I want
very much to write a third book .
It
will be about Soviet educa tion and Soviet
washrooms.
It
will be a hi storica l book. I traveled very much from 1934 to 1965
and I saw different kinds of washrooms. It will be a work of art if I can write it.
It is strange. I never tho ught of writing such a book before. Now it seems
almost necessary."
I reminded her o f Ka fka's answer to the question " Do you have hope?"
" Yes, but no t for u s." She la ughed . "Our men," she said, "are impo tent, and
our women hungry for love. Our men are no t only impo tent-they are idio ts,
liars, and a fra id of Lubianka. These women," she motio ned to two of her
young fri ends, "are afra id o f nothing. "
