Europe Central (108 page)

27

In the first week of August 1971, Comrade Mielke himself picked up the telephone. The call originated on Majakowskiweg 18/20. The ancient female voice on the line was so hysterical that for a long time he could hardly understand what it was saying.

She had in any case been sleeping very poorly that summer on account of a recurring dream, that dream of the black iron box which none could open; and then the first anonymous telephone call came, very early at morning:
Your coffin is ready, Comrade Benjamin.

Shuddering, she disconnected the line with a clang almost as loud as the sleepwalker’s; and then she sat on the sofa, trembling.

The telephone rang again.
Comrade Benjamin, your coffin is right outside.

And again, and again! Each time her coffin was coming closer. Finally she called the special number at the Stasi. That was when Comrade Mielke decided to handle this business personally.

Our People’s Police have always honorably fulfilled their duty against German Fascists; moreover, she was
one of us,
so they arrested somebody just to satisfy her, but then the telephone rang again. The undertaker was calling for Comrade Benjamin.

It’s because I’m a Jew, isn’t it? she whispered to Comrade Mielke. Tell me frankly, just because I married a Jew do you consider me a Jew? ‣

WE’LL NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN

Everywhere that Torah is studied at night one thread-thin ray appears from that hidden light and flows down upon those absorbed in her.

—Kabbalah (13th century)

1

Every time she said no to him, that no was as perfect as her cheekbones.

There was about her something comfortably immovable, reassuringly merciless—still, silent, slender and incorruptible, hence ultimately fragile; since she was too good to bend, she would have had to shatter if she’d ever said yes; which was why to the very end he remained able to be proud of himself for accepting her refusals with his best if fallible grace, loving and respecting her all the more for not giving him all of herself. He cherished her, so he must cherish the coherence which she’d created with the other man and which his touch would accordingly have broken. He loved her; he would not damage her.

He asked her for her photograph at least and she gazed at him across the table, then said so quietly: No.

Not long after that, his First Cello Concerto in E-flat Major premiered, so there were any number of women, not that at his age he could always, you know, and so, forty minutes after the embarrassing recording session with Rostropovich, there was a woman who pretty soon was kissing him and kissing him, lying on top of him on the big hotel bed, holding him tight so that some of the loneliness oozed away, leaving him sufficiently clearheaded to win some chance of not committing errors if he only considered rapidly and logically what on earth he wanted, this woman, this kind woman who liked him and who had already told him that after the merest four hours of his company, for three hours of which she had seen him only across a loudly crowded room which shone with liquor-glasses (my dear lady, thank you for your, your, you know, but I, I, well, I simply took a simple little theme and I did my simple,
simple
best to develop it!), she now felt jealous of all the other women who might be in his life (he never told her about the one with the dark, dark hair), this woman who was lying on top of him might help him; because what he needed was something sexual so that he could relieve a portion of his desire for the woman with the dark hair and thereby alleviate the nuisance which his passion inflicted upon her, although I don’t quite mean nuisance, I mean anguish, misery, outright harm, because she
cared
for him; and since he himself had, so to speak, reciprocal feelings, the something sexual which he now sought from the woman on top of him must not be
too
sexual, for he would not betray, lapse in fidelity to, the woman with the dark, dark hair, whose unmade double bed (at that time she’d still been married to R. L. Karmen) he’d once seen with an agony (not of jealousy, only of a sensation we can’t call loss, since he no longer possessed any fragment of her to lose) which for an instant he mistakenly supposed that he couldn’t bear. That was before Nina died. And now the darkhaired woman was married to Professor Vigodsky. He bore it; he composed a string quartet. Later he would telephone the darkhaired woman—oh, how much he loved telephones! Then he married Margarita, who did her narrow best to fill Nina’s place; she wasn’t very, well, you understand what I mean. So he asked the woman on top of him whether she would kindly do him the favor of laying her gentle fingers on his throat, then strangling him just a little and a little more, which between smiles, whispers and long kisses she affectionately did, assuring him that she didn’t mind one way or the other if it was what he needed, and because she hadn’t been told how dangerous it was, she went farther than Galina Ustvolskaya ever had, farther than his first love Tatyana Glivenko, farther even than the other one, his darkhaired one who’d left him forever and from whose memory a continuing and even now not entirely unrequited love had saved him with shocking power. So the woman on top of him, kissing his mouth again and again, dreamily reached for his throat whenever she felt like it, smiling at his smile of grateful anticipatory happiness; then she laid down her soft hands just below his chin and began to squeeze,
legato, dolce,
her eyes so intent on his eyes as her fingers began to dig into him and take hold of his wildly worthless life which he yearned to lay down at the feet of the darkhaired woman for her to keep or break as she chose, the keeping or breaking equally conformable to his thrilling acceptance because he was hers and if she destroyed him, he would remain hers completely whereas if instead she raised him up to her starshine face for awhile, then he could knowingly be with her that much longer. Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me. A red spot was spinning. By now somebody unfamiliar to him was uttering involuntary noises from a throat, deeper than the noises which he himself made in orgasm, yet broken like a scattering of cylindrical beads which had once made up a necklace; these staccato, somewhat unpleasant, not really liquid sounds, neither coughs nor gurgles nor metronome-clicks which he would represent musically in the third movement of Opus 110, seemed to substitute quite well for the breathing which he no longer could or desired to accomplish; he sank into a delightful swoony feeling which should have never ended but always did, at which point his heart broke because he found himself alone, meaning without the darkhaired woman.

Lying alone on that big empty bed with his hands ice-cold and his heart and throat so tight with the tension of waiting for the black telephone to ring or not ring ever again anymore, he eventually realized that it would not ring, because the darkhaired woman must have finished at the Conservatory hours ago, so he dialed the number without worrying about anybody in raspberry-colored boots, not to mention that other man, Vigodsky; when the other man answered he hung up; an hour later he called again, this time succeeding in hearing her sleep-husky voice, a voice
ritenuto,
to which he choked out: I want so much to have you on top of me here on this bed, Elena; I need you on top of me, kissing and kissing and
kissing
me . . .

Then he turned out the light and lay there beginning to taste blood inside his throat. He switched on the radio, just to, you know. It was Klavdia Sulzhenko singing “The Blue Kerchief”:
The machine-gunner fights for the blue kerchief those dear shoulders wore.
He silenced her, not that she didn’t have a certain something; it was just that he, anyhow, our life is such a comedy. The next morning he put on a highcollared shirt because his neck was bruised by the kind woman’s fingers, which had been almost as white and perfect as the darkhaired woman’s teeth.

2

Last October, when they’d met around the corner from the Eliseyev department store three hours before the premiere of his Eleventh Symphony, it had been snowing and they were both late. She had adjusted his necktie just like a wife. He requested her to please leave him gently if she ever left him, to which she replied that they no longer were and never would be together anyway.—Oh, you’re a wise one! he laughed. Give me another English lesson!—Then, overcoming his agony, he insisted,
mezzo piano,
that of course they were together. He knew what he knew; didn’t she know it, too? Hadn’t she herself admitted that she sometimes kept silent instead of saying whatever it was that she might be feeling? Whenever he came to Leningrad, which was often nowadays, there always being something new to rehearse, she saw him either every day or else almost every day, and when she sat across from him at the hard currency bar she nearly always smiled so tenderly! How could she deny that? Therefore, he explained to her, she probably still loved him, at least to a degree, which was precisely why he had telephoned her so late that night to tell her how much he longed for her to be with him now in this hotel room, lying on top of him, kissing him, kissing him, to which on the next day, after Rostropovich had driven him to Komarovo, she had replied by telephoning him there (he’d given her his itineraries, hotels, residences and numbers, especially his sister Mariya’s) to declare in her soft firm voice that she didn’t want him to whisper any more messages like that into her ear ever again because they were too sad.

The pain which this caused him was nearly beyond expression, but only nearly; musically there’s always a way to, how should I say. He could never “have” her in his intended sense of having her lie down on top of him in an empty room and hold him tight, not even for one hour, let alone for ever and ever. Even at the Philharmonic he didn’t dare to, if you see what I’m saying, take any chances which might, so to speak, make him noticed. He’d sent her a pair of tickets for the premiere last October. It was nice of them to come; Vigodsky bestowed upon him that strangely French smile of his. If only she could have, well, but he himself had to sit next to Margarita, who’d really tarted herself up, the little . . . Sometimes he hardly knew why he . . . Akhmatova could inevitably be spotted in the audience, usually in the company of her friend Z. B. Tomashevskaya. Was her son still
away
? Poor lady; poor lady! She was extremely, well, you know. He steered clear of both those ladies, fearing that Akhmatova in particular might have learned too many of his secrets. There in the fourth row sat the darkhaired one; she smiled at her husband, impersonally he hoped, then, unfortunately, laid down her head on his shoulder. Why couldn’t she at least . . . ? Once upon a time, on a linden alley at Tsarkoe Selo, they’d been kissing on a bench and then she’d rested her head on his shoulder and her hair, oh, my God, her long, dark hair. And now she was doing it with Vigodsky, which he found extremely . . . When he sat alone at these Leningrad rehearsals he always wished that she were beside him, but of course that would have been especially, so to speak, demonstrative. Perhaps if Glikman could act as go-between once again she might at least sort of, I mean, but even that would be impossible; one aspect of her he especially admired was how quietly and immovably she could say no. Nina had also been like that. On the other hand, in every other sense he did have Elena; he could love her; he could think about her; better yet, just as the gentle arch of the Blue Bridge offers us the way to Saint Isaac’s domes, so Opus 40 helps us over the cold dark waters of reality to the place where Elena is; Lyalka she liked me to call her, when we still . . . Elena, help me! Elena, I can’t bear this! But you’re the one person who must never comfort me for the same reason that you’re the only one who could. Isn’t that curious? I have represented this dilemma many times with
ostinato.
Tonight I’ll . . .

I’ve already said that when he stayed over in Leningrad she met him almost every day, so that he could gaze into her beautiful eyes and sit close enough to touch her, on condition that he not touch her; he could tell her anything; she told him some things; in short, he could go on and on proudly loving her and being with her as long as he could tell her everything. But now she was saying that they had never been together and that he was not permitted to tell her everything. That was why he felt the strangling pain.

3

When the richly plump girl, who was even darkhaired, started kissing him so deeply with her paddle-shaped tongue, he stroked her hair and desired her, which is to say that he didn’t desire her in and of herself; he simply needed to sojourn in any woman’s body; so he took her into his arms on one of those empty double beds he slept in, but the instant he began to ride her,
prestissimo con moto
if he could say so himself, he saw the face of the woman he loved gazing at him right through the flesh of the substitute, whose whiteness might have been tracing paper, so little did it conceal that intensely looking and listening face of the darkhaired woman with its not quite sad quarter-smile of red, red lips which crazed his desire into something which could be expressed only chokingly, by falling on his knees when she wasn’t there to be molested by his prayers; yes, so little could strange flesh conceal the dark, dark hair which glowed through it; and so his hands withered and fell away.