Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

Only in Russia Is Poetry Respected—

On Tuesday, Mandelstam was met with applause; on Thursday, Mandelstam never existed. Even saying his name felt like tempting fate—like walking on a very fine line between survival and annihilation. And yet there I was, unable to forget this fictitious man’s passionate speeches, his poetic ramblings, his terrible laugh.

I was never one to follow in his path of madness, but I did know him well. He was a teacher, then a contemporary, then a distant, fleeting memory. I had worked with him until I secured a job at the press, which is where the disagreements began. Mandelstam had a very … blatant way of going about things. He despised my work from then on and made it known.

“Have you forgotten everything I taught you?” he yelled one day, not at me, but at the neat stack of papers at my desk. “So many papers, yet you say nothing!”

“Well, press writers can’t write whatever they want—”

“You’re not a writer then, you’re a scribe. Just another thoughtless mouthpiece for them! You’ll be no better than a cog in a machine.”

“… I write what’s … safe.” The word felt small and brittle on my tongue. The deadly implications hung in the unspoken syllables between us like a dangling noose.

“Safe?” he scoffed. “Are you not the same person who smuggled witness accounts of the Holodomor to Moscow, the same boy who wrote poems about the suffering masses? That wasn’t safe, that was honest. Where is that boy?”

“He grew up,” and wants to live, I thought. He heard it.

He met my eyes, his face a mixture of disappointment and a sort of understanding sympathy.

“Burn it then,” he said, shortly. “Burn every page and go work the fields for all I care. The world you write about doesn’t exist. And the one you’re living in will eat you alive.”

He turned to leave.

“Nothing is safe, my boy. Not even Perilaus was safe from the Brazen Bull he built.”

He turned and walked away, the door closing behind him with a quiet thud. That was the last time we spoke.

***

His disappearance a few years later didn’t come as a shock to me. He was the sort of person who stirred up trouble, the sort of person the authorities did away with, softly and swiftly. Still, it didn’t fail to send a chill down my spine. Usually, when someone is taken, their associates often disappear as well, like clockwork. For years, I’d abided by every rule they put forth, no matter how restrictive, yet the fact that I knew his name could still put me in the gulag or the grave.

It was a chilly morning at the Pravda Building, and something felt off. I started work early to avoid speaking to anyone. I was editing an article for a regional issue when I heard a loud bang. I flinched.

“C-come in.”

“Good morning, comrade Smirnov,” said a familiar voice.

“Ah, it’s just you—I mean—”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry, I’m—I’m having trouble—uh, migraines, you see.”

“Ah, how … unfortunate. Is the May Issue ready?” she asked in her rather impersonal tone.

“It’s almost done. It’ll be ready by tomorrow.”

“I should hope so. As of now, it’s three days late.”

“Well, some articles on the collectivisation statistics needed to be revised—”

“Revised?”

“Yes, some of them aren’t—”

“I’ll have you know that those figures were provided by Gosplan officials, meaning they should not be tampered with.”

“Yes … yes, I’ll—”

“Leave the manuscript on my desk when you leave today. I’ll send it for printing tomorrow.”

“Of course, Ms Morozova.”

“And don’t you go changing things you don’t need to.”

The nervousness I felt before paled in comparison to what it became after she left. One more slip and I’m dead, I told myself. If Mandelstam were here, he’d call me a coward. I had started to hear his voice more often since he vanished, a persistent ghost haunting the corners of my mind. What absolute lies! Agriculture hasn’t gotten better since collectivisation. The peasants’ lives haven’t improved and you know it, you’ve seen it, He’d say. Look around you … Why do you let others believe the lies too?

***

As dusk approached, I found myself drawn to a local recreation centre—a spot Mandelstam frequented. I hadn’t been there in a while, but as I entered, I spotted an old man whom I’d known in another life.

“Igor …?”

“Nikolai? Is that you, my boy?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“Oh, oh how long it’s been! When I last saw you, you were with … with …” mentioning Mandelstam was a crime in itself. “And you were very short, I remember. Now look at you!”

“Mandelstam … Do you know what happened to him?”

His smile faded. “We shouldn’t talk about these things in public, my boy. How are you, though? Still writing poetry—?”

“Not anymore,” I said, cutting him off. “Not anything that matters—Igor, please. Can you tell me what happened?”

Suddenly, he lowered his voice and pushed my head down. “The usual thing, my boy. He wasn’t careful. He was reading his latest piece in front of an audience, damned fool. One of them was an NKVD officer. That night, the Ravens took him.”

“So he’s—”

“Yes. I was there. Some clapped at the end, some didn’t. I think he knew already … and he mentioned you.”

“Really?”

“Yes—he wanted you to have this.”

He handed me a crumpled sheet of paper. He burned his poems for safety. This was his last. It read, “Only in Russia is poetry respected,—

“—It gets people killed.” I remembered what he used to tell me. I remembered everything.

***

At once I rushed to the office with the paper. I slid it into the May Issue and sent it for printing without a second thought. This was it. I thought. It would be only a matter of hours.