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that pretty much summarizes my attitude toward Soviet power. The wolf-hound century leaps at my throat . I could see Ehrenburg’s eyes searching feverishly for the way out of our
flat,” Osip said gloomily. “He didn’t believe a word I said.”
    We spotted an empty bench next to a trolley car stop and sat down on it. A woman pushing a child in a stroller stood in the sun nearby, waiting for the next trolley. As she had her back turned
to us, we took no notice of her.
    “I feel as if the world is closing in on me,” Osip said, his brow knitting. Then he added, “I suppose I mustn’t complain. I have the good fortune to live in a country
where poetry is respected—people are killed for reading it, for writing it.”
    Osip was inadvertently opening old wounds with this reference to my first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, who was shot by the Bolsheviks as a counterrevolutionist one dreadful day in 1921.
There was also the brilliant Yesenin, who evoked peasant life like nobody else of his generation and drowned himself in alcohol before he committed suicide in 1925. And there was the insufferably
clever Mayakovsky, who killed himself in 1930 after becoming disenchanted with the Revolution he had passionately championed. Osip must have seen me close my eyes. “I beg your pardon,
Anna,” he said, touching my elbow. “It was not my intention—”
    “Spilt milk,” I remember saying, “always makes me want to weep. But I shall resist, lest I discover that I am unable to stop.”
    He favored me with one of his tight-lipped smiles, pleased to see I remembered his observation about crying.
    “What are you up to these days, Borisik?” I asked, hoping to move the conversation onto dryer ground.
    “My life has become a theatrical performance,” Pasternak moaned. “I am beginning to understand why alcoholics get drunk hoping they will never sober up. I am exhausted, not
from the difficulties of today’s living conditions, but my existence as a whole. I am worn down by the unchangeability of things. I live in faith and grief, faith and fear, faith and
work.”
    “What work?” Osip demanded.
    “By all means, tell us what work?” I said.
    “I’ve been reading into Shakespeare’s Hamlet again. I dream of translating it someday.”
    Osip said, “You should be writing your own poetry, Boris, not translating the poetry of others. The effect of a Pasternak poem on another poet is liberating—it frees one’s
voice, one’s spirit, one’s imagination. In any case, poetry is what gets lost in translation.”
    “One of the many things I like about you, Osip—one of the many things I love about you—is that it doesn’t matter who has written a poem, you or another. If
it’s true poetry, you take pride in it. Unlike me, you are free of envy.”
    Osip shook his head. “I envy you your being published. I envy you your reviews.”
    “My reviews! You are rubbing salt in my wounds. Only last week a literary magazine accused me of standing on the wrong side of the barricades of class warfare, of glorifying the past at
the expense of the present.”
    To Osip’s delight, I immediately convened a mock court. “Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, how do you plead?”
    Borisik announced, “I shall plead madness, in both senses of the word.”
    Osip said, “What’s the difference how he pleads—he is clearly guilty as charged. There’s nothing left to do but come up with an appropriately inappropriate
sentence.”
    “As we are under no obligation to have the punishment fit the crime,” I said, enjoying the game, “I propose the only rational sentence.” And to Osip’s immense
pleasure, I quoted a line from a gem of a poem he once dedicated to me: “I’ll find an old beheading axe in the woods.”
    “A beheading axe!” Osip exclaimed. “Now we’re getting into the Bolshevik spirit of things.”
    “And where th’offense is, let the great axe fall,” Boris proclaimed in English, quoting, as he told