PARTISAN REVIEW
461
Their response was LO scold her for smoking too much, and not eating
enough. They warmed some beef and peas. She refused LO eat.
"Please give me mayonnaise, " she begged.
" No ," said one of the women , " mayonnaise is poison."
" Please."
"No."
"I won't ea t. "
" Let her have a touch ," the other woman said.
They ha nded Mme Mandelstam a jar. She ladled mayonnaise all over her
food, then lit up a cigarette, and didn 't eat a bite.
" I leave the house less and less, but 1 try," she said, "to go for a walk,
mostly in the shops, every day. My heart is bad-"
"And your body suffers from lack of food ," one of the women interrupted.
" It cou ldn 't be any other way," said Mme Mandelstam. " I knew too much
what was hunger. All we needed then was bread. But bread existed in those
days only in great cities. Your American wheat will make bread for the cities
now, too."
I asked her why the Soviet Union would allow Solzhenitsyn to leave the
country, but not her-an unwell woman of seventy-three (she'll be seventy-five
on October
31, 1974).
" I am not less dangerous than Solzhenitsyn," she said. "More."
Read ing
Hope Abandoned
I came to understand what she meant. Sol–
zhcnitsyn 's nationalistic, nostalgic call for a return LO something resembling
Czarist authorita rianism is, from the Soviet point of view, a program pitched
LO emigres, not the young. Nadezhda Mandelstam honors Solzhenitsyn, shares
hi s religiolls commitment, but does not agree with his political prescriptions.
She is more dangerous than Solzhenitsyn because she is looking for safeguards
aga inst the terror
now .
She, like Sakharov and Medvedev, though in search of
sta ndards, fears absolutist stances.
Her message, ultimately, is
remember the past, but don't try to return to it.
And perhaps as significant as that program is the appeal that shouts above
hi story 's sounds, "Look! See! Record! Remember!" Blindness is as great a fear
as terror.
As I left her stretched out on her bench, and, later, when, on the way to the
a irport I phoned to say good-bye, I had, again, the feeling of someone visiting
in a prison those sentenced to life. God, birds, butterflies, poetry sustain people
behind bars, and one uncomforting consolation, that nobody stays on in
prison for ever. Nadezhda Mandelstam's writing doesn't falsify her past life,
nor does she, in the present, lie to herself about the nature of existence in the
Soviet Union.
She had a visiLOr shortly before I saw her. He asked about life in the Soviet
Union.
"We a re permitted," Nadezhda said, " to tell lies."
