At the end of December 1938 or in January 1939, according to some journalists from Pravda, who mentioned it to Shklovski, someone in the Central Committee said in their hearing that it now appeared that there had been no case against Mandelstam at all. This was shortly after the dismissal of Yezhov and was meant to serve as an illustration of his misdeeds. . . . The conclusion I drew was that M. must be dead.

Not long afterward I was sent a notice asking me to go to the post office at Nikita Gate. Here I was handed back the parcel I had sent to M. in the camp. "The addressee is dead," the young lady behind the counter informed me. It would be easy enough to establish the date on which the parcel was returned to me-it was the same day on which the newspapers published the long list of Government awards-the first ever-to Soviet writers.

My brother Evgeni went that same day to tell the Shklovskis in the writers' apartment building on Lavrushinski Street. They went to call Victor from the apartment downstairs-Katayev's, I think it was-where Fadeyev and other "Fellow Travelers" were drinking on the occasion of the honor done them by the State. It was now that Fadeyev shed a drunken tear for M.: "We have done away with a great poet!" The celebration of the awards took on something of the flavor of a surreptitious wake for the dead. I am not clear, however, as to who there (apart from Shklovski) really understood what M.'s destruction meant. Most of them, after all, belonged to the generation which had changed its values in favor of the "new." It was they who had prepared the way for the strong man, the dictator who was empowered to kill or spare people at his own discretion, to establish goals and choose whatever means he saw fit for their fulfillment.

In June 1940, M.'s brother Alexander was summoned to the Registry Office of the Bauman district and handed M.'s death certificate with instructions to pass it on to me. M.'s age was given as forty-seven, and the date of his death as December 27, 1938. The cause was given as "heart failure." This is as much as to say that he died because he died: what is death but heart failure? There was also something about arteriosclerosis.

The issue of a death certificate was not the rule but the exception. To all intents and purposes, as far as his civil status was concerned, a person could be considered dead from the moment he was sent to a camp, or, indeed, from the moment of his arrest, which was automatically followed by his conviction and sentence to imprisonment in a camp. This meant he vanished so completely that it was regarded as tantamount to physical death. Nobody bothered to tell a man's relatives when he died in camp or prison: you regarded yourself as a widow or orphan from the moment of his arrest. When a woman was told in the Prosecutor's office that her husband had been given ten years, the official sometimes added: "You can remarry." Nobody ever raised the awkward question as to how this gracious "permission" to remarry could be squared with the official sentence, which was technically by no means a death sentence. As I have said already, I do not know why they showed such exceptional consideration to me by issuing a death certificate. I wonder what was behind it.

In the circumstances, death was the only possible deliverance. When I heard that A had died, I stopped having my nightmares about him. Later on, Kazarnovski said to me: "Osip Emilievich did well to die: otherwise he would have gone to Kolyma." Kazarnovski had himself served his sentence in Kolyma, and when he was released in 1944 he turned up in Tashkent. He lived there without a permit or ration cards, hiding from the police, terrified of everybody and drinking very heavily. He had no proper shoes, and I gave him some tiny galoshes that had belonged to my mother. They fitted him very well because he had no toes on his feet-they had become frozen in the camp and he had chopped them off with an ax to prevent gangrene. Whenever they were all taken to the baths, their clothes froze in the damp air of the changing room and rattled like sheets of tin.

Recently I heard an argument as to who was more likely to survive the camps: the people who worked, or those who managed not to. Those who worked died of exhaustion, and those who didn't starved to death. This much was clear to me, though I had neither arguments nor personal observations of my own to support either side in the discussion. The few people who survived were exceptions who proved the rule. In fact, the whole argument reminded me of the Russian folk ballad about the hero at the crossroads: whichever way he goes, he will perish. The main feature of Russian history, something that never changes, is that .every road always brings disaster-and not only to heroes. Survival is a matter of pure chance. It is not this that surprises me so much as the fact that a few people, for all their frailty, came through the whole ordeal like heroes, not only living to tell the tale, but preserving the keenness of mind and memory that enables them to do so. I know people like this, but the time has not yet come to name them-apart from the one whom we all know: Solzhenitsyn.

life and a few disjointed recollections. He had arrived at the camp in Kolyma in the winter and remembered that it was an utter wilderness which was only just being opened up to receive the enormous influx of people being sent to do forced labor. Not a single building or barracks existed yet. They lived in tents and had to put up the prison buildings themselves.

I have heard that prisoners were sent from Vladivostok to Kolyma only by sea, which freezes over in winter-though quite late in the year. I am puzzled, therefore, as to how Kazarnovski could have arrived at Kolyma in winter, after the sea route was no longer navigable. Could it be that he was first sent to another camp, somewhere in the neighborhood of Vladivostok, because of overcrowding in the "transit" camp? At this period the Vladivostok transit camp, where prisoners were held temporarily before being sent on to Kolyma, can hardly have coped with the prison trains arriving all the time. Everything was too confused in Kazarnovski's disordered brain, and I could not clear this point up, though in trying to establish the date of M.'s death it was very important to know at exactly what moment Kazarnovski left the transit camp.

Kazarnovski was the first more or less authentic emissary I had met from the "other world." Before he actually turned up, I had already heard about him from other people and knew that he had really been with A in the transit camp and had apparently even helped him in some way. They had occupied bunks in the same barracks, almost next to each other. This was the reason I hid Kazarnovski from the police for three months while I slowly extracted from him all the information he had brought to Tashkent. His memory was like a huge, rancid pancake in which fact and fancy from his prison days had been mixed up together and baked into an inseparable mass.

I already knew that this kind of affliction of the memory was not peculiar to the wretched Kazarnovski or a result of drinking too much vodka. It was a feature of almost all the former camp inmates I have met immediately after their release-they had no memory for dates or the passage of time and it was difficult for them to distinguish between things they had actually experienced themselves and stories they had heard from others. Places, names, events and their sequence were all jumbled up in the minds of these broken people, and it was never possible to disentangle them. Most accounts of life in the camps appeared on first hearing to be a disconnected series of stories about the critical moments when the narrator nearly died but then miraculously managed to save himself. The whole of camp life was reduced to these highlights, which were intended to show that although it was almost impossible to survive, man's will to live was such that he came through nevertheless. Listening to these accounts, I was horrified at the thought that there might be nobody who could ever properly bear witness to the past. Whether inside or outside the camps, we had all lost our memories. But it later turned out that there were people who had made it their aim from the beginning not only to save themselves, but to survive as witnesses. These relentless keepers of the truth, merging with all the other prisoners, had bided their time-there were probably more such people in the camps than outside, where it was all too common to succumb to the temptation to make terms with reality and live out one's life in peace. Of course those witnesses who have kept a clear memory of the past are few in number, but their very survival is the best proof that good, not evil, will prevail in the end.

There is nowhere I can make inquiries and nobody who will tell me anything. Who is likely to search through those grisly archives just for the sake of Mandelstam, when they won't even publish volume of his work?* * *

All I can do, therefore, is to gather what meager evidence there is and speculate about the date of his death. As I constantly tell myself: the sooner he died, the better. There is nothing worse than a slow death. I hate to think that at the moment when my mind was set at rest on being told in the post office that he was dead, he may actually have been still alive and on his way to Kolyma. The date of death has not been established. And it is beyond my power to do anything more to establish it.