Europe Central (112 page)

It’s
himself,
starved, choking and weeping in an airless room. In the wise judgment of
Sovetskaya Musika
:
It is impossible to forget that Shostakovich’s work has a certain tendency to close in upon itself, that the popular roots of his music are not deep enough.
His pale and shining face sinks down toward the music-paper, which he’s anchored to the desk by his suitsleeves, elbows outward; he doesn’t resemble a boy anymore; his hairline’s receding; he needs another cigarette. What ought to cause him agony he no longer feels; he’s but the catalyst of a biochemical reaction which turns pain into music.—What’s that sound? A D-note, probably.—To his right, from the long black jawbone of the best piano, music-teeth grin at him; when the time comes, when Opus 110 is ready for execution, they’ll know what to do! Fuzzy fibrous tree-roots will eat his flesh. Right now they’re neither popular nor deep enough. No fear; they’ll bite deeper. What’s that sound? The mournful, sinister groanings of the strings comprise a
largo
of suffocation. Less grisly than the
allegretto
of skeletons when the soul is pursued and caught by death,
that sound
is sadder: Death having done its work, we must now suffer through the dying. Thus Opus 110.

We might note that this quartet opens with the four-note signature
D, E-flat, C, B,
which is to say in inappropriately German notation
DSCH,
and which therefore is also to say
Dmitri Shostakovich.
Assertion of self-characterized Soviet artists who were persecuted for following their private Muses. In the case of Akhmatova, who was proscribed from publishing for many years and who lost both son and lover to prison camps, not to mention that ex-husband whom we’d shot long before, the shrill
I am
approaches megalomania. Had she been, say, an Englishwoman, her egocentricity might have proved insufferable. She versifies about the strophes, streets and monuments which posterity will name after her. But she was
Russian.
She was not free. What could she assert but herself? In the world of
we,
the failing
I
repeated her name, defiant. She became a heroine; her poems were memorized secretly in Black Marias and Arctic camps. She wrote
I,
and Shostakovich wrote
DSCH.

Not long before Opus 110, she composed a poem to him. She wrote that his music kept her company in the grave
as if every flower burst into words.
Then, slowly, she sank into decrepitude, weeping and drinking tea for years in an airless room.

2

When they heard the hideous news that the Americans had detonated two “atom-bombs” over Japan, killing thousands or hundreds of thousands (as usual, the numbers of the dead varied with the teller), Shostakovich said with a horridly gloomy smile: It’s our task to rejoice.

Younger musicians had begun to draw away, on account of that diabolical cynicism of his, which seemed almost to ape Stalin’s, swelling until it overshadowed Moscow’s new heroic columns; while his own generation, who knew him better, simply worried about his will to live. No need: He’d already survived. To him they were all blue morning shadows on new snow, silhouettehued people gliding cautiously along the icy sidewalks, an occasional camel-brown or blonde-furred coat like a surprise, a bareheaded woman steaming breath ahead of her; he watched them from his redoubt beneath the piano keys. Peering out and up, ready to duck back behind his glasses, he exchanged courtesies even with the ones in raspberry-colored boots—dear Shostakovich! He was as moderate as Comrade Stalin. Those caustic, hideous things that wailed out of his twitching smile with the suddenness of violin-shrieks
(it’s our task to rejoice)
—well, well . . .

As early as 1944, the cellist V. Berlinsky, while praising his astounding musical memory, had felt forced to describe him as
a lump of nerves.
And now, with the Germans crushed under their own rubble, Shostakovich, half-smoothfaced, smoothhanded and perfectly pallid as he sat at the piano with his wrists in corpse-white parallels, listened again and again within his skull-bunker to the Eighth Symphony (soon to be denounced as
repulsive, ultra-individualist
); when he’d arrived at that resolute call to arms of the fourth movement, that tense, sweet thrumming of all-sacrificing sincerity, he bit his lips for self-disgust, to think that he could have believed in anything! He’d stood up to be counted. He’d even hoped. Now he composed fugues (and here we might note that the Latin source-word
fuga
means quite simply
flight
).

We know that Hitler had actually considered sealing off Leningrad with an electric fence. Now the whole country was sealed off, even better than before. Specters whirled through the Summer Garden in ever-narrowing spirals, but it wasn’t summer. And Shostakovich, taking his first breaths of peacetime air, found himself in the situation of the shaggy peasant in his banned opera “Lady Macbeth” who breaks into the cellar in search of wine to steal, and staggers out overcome by the stench of a murdered corpse.

In 1945 we find him writing the popular song “Burn, Burn, Burn” especially for the NKVD Ensemble. Even then he still kept a change of underwear and an extra toothbrush in his briefcase, against the eventuality of arrest. Just for, you know,
fun,
he liked to imagine that they’d knock on the door in a 5/4 theme, which would be very . . . Nina likewise had prepared herself. When the children were sleeping he sometimes entered her bed, pressed his lips against her ear and began to whisper curses against Comrade Stalin. Her eyes opened. In a low voice she entreated: My God, what are you saying? Think of what could happen to us!

Could it have always been like this? A nineteenth-century French traveler whose prose was as purple as an NKVD agent’s identification card once declared:
The Russians are not ghosts, but specters, walking solemnly beside or behind one another, neither sad nor glad, never letting a word escape their lips.
Those words were written when all the six hundred and twenty-six church-bells of Petersburg still rang. Could they have been tuned? He wished he could have, you know. And now, when Petersburg was Leningrad and the noble-born girls of the Smolny Convent were dead, even silence was unsafe. Everybody had to sing hosannas. D-flat-C-D-flat was how
he’d
sung, ever so nastily, in the
allegretto
of the Eighth Symphony. At the premiere they’d seemed nervous. He’d wanted to blow them all up! He was a loyal citizen of our great Soviet land; he hummed along. Then he went to sleep in the other room.

3

In 1946, Stalin’s enthusiastically ruthless shadow Comrade Zhdanov (who was soon to die under peculiar circumstances) announced to the Leningrad Union of Soviet Writers:
Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent, cannot be “art for art’s sake.”
They got quiet then; they knew what was coming. In truth, the only wonder was that it hadn’t come sooner. When the motif has already sounded, how can the opus go on without it? Folding his arms across his massive breast so that he resembled one of our KV tanks, Comrade Zhdanov forthwith demanded that there be no further deviation from the task at hand on the literary front—namely, to create art
to light the way ahead with a searchlight.

Reading this directive in the pages of
Pravda,
Shostakovich understood that it was only a matter of time before they turned their attention back to music. It would be “Lady Macbeth” all over again.

Nina tried to lay her hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off in a terrified rage. What a ridiculous man he was!
With a searchlight.
And in the dark, when everything’s frozen, it’s not so easy to dig down under the snow and hide before the searchlight comes; I’d probably represent it by a B-flat between two C-notes, in a humming, thrumming base, since that would be very, as Elena used to say in her favorite English phrase,
creepy.
—Oh, dear, oh, me, what brilliant arguments they’ll muster against all of us! he muttered, cocking his head like a wind-up owl, drinking vodka until he turned pale.

Slamming the door, Nina went out to her “special friend,” the physicist A. Alikhanyan.

He lit another “Kazbek” cigarette, his hair rushing carelessly down his face as he played with his children. Galisha was getting spoiled, but he couldn’t bring himself to be firm with the girl; she’d soon enough find out how the world, you know,
operated.
He remembered her as a baby in Leningrad, hungrily sucking on a piece of oilcake. She used to cry and hide her head in his lap when the Fascists let off their eighty-eights. And Akhmatova had said . . .—How would they develop the offensive this time? They’d probably use Khrennikov to denounce him on the radio. The man loved that sort of work. He was perfectly adapted to our time, like one of those blowflies which specialize in, no need to spell it out. Why even . . . ? But I saved Galisha from that—Maxim, too, who by the way needs to write something for the wall newspaper of his Pioneer brigade. He’s extremely . . . And even though Nina won’t forgive me; she says I didn’t do enough for my own family, I never stopped, well, I should have just . . . And all for nothing! The
sincerity
of that Seventh Symphony, whenever I hear it I can hardly bear it! I’m so ashamed of it now. With a, a, a
searchlight,
so to speak; that’s how they’ll . . . Even though Lebedinsky will say . . . Leo Oskarovich informs me that wherever Stalin’s daughter goes, she has a bodyguard, of course, and this man especially hates concerts! When she goes to the Conservatory to listen to, for instance, compositions by the former and future enemy of the people Shostakovich, this Mikhail Nikiforovich complains:
Begging your pardon, my dear Svetlana Alliluyeva, now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again.
It must be the string instruments that he’s referring to, don’t you think? And then Svetlana Alliluyeva replies—what does she reply? It’s
hilarious
! I suppose that’s what they all think. Then Khrennikov! He knows how to do it—right in the nape of the neck, they say, so that there’s no . . . And here come the blowflies. Next they’ll shut me out of the cinema, where I make my money. “Zoya” just won a Stalin Prize, so they’ll regret that I wrote the music for that monstrosity. I’d better compose one more film score while I still can. Roman Lazarevich might help me, out of pity. He gets invitations to drink with Stalin’s children, so I hear. He’s quite the . . . If not, I could hope that Leo Oskarovich, or perhaps Simonov, to hell with Simonov.

Maxim kept drawing sailing-ships whose outlines he copied from photographs in the newspaper. The father tried to smile. He attached the best drawings to the wall.

Who was the lead actress in “Zoya”? I can almost remember her name. Was it Galina Vodyanischkaya or Galya Vodyanischkaya? That was when Roman Lazarevich affronted me. He told me to, to, actually I forget what he told me. Had I better telephone him? But he’s a good boy. Now that I’m a leper again, he’ll keep his distance. That’s what he did last time. But last time there was a woman, so to speak, between us, and therefore . . . But she’s still between us. Her voice always sounds so sad! If I could only pick up the telephone and, and, you know, she’d be extremely . . .

He was, I swear it, almost ready to divorce Nina, I mean, not next year but this year, and ask Elena Konstantinovskaya to marry him; but he had a nightmare that Maxim was struggling to run to him but Nina wouldn’t let the child go; suddenly she became a crocodile who bit off Maxim’s arm and Maxim was screaming! Who else screamed like that? My God, it was only a dream! At least it wasn’t the dream of the red spot. Sometimes one simply has to . . .

Without warning, his mind rang with a chord as beautiful as a flamethrower’s red river gushing into an enemy dugout! Fourteen years later, that sound, which everybody else would find terrifying, hideous, shrieked out of Opus 110. Well, but what is Opus 110 anyhow? It’s not the, the so-called
climax
of my life, because that would be very . . .

Nina had urged him not to undertake any new friendships, especially with officials, but he already knew that. In her short skirt and rakish hat, she’d looked quite glamorous at his side in Prague. (Comrade Alexandrov’s assessment:
A young, pretty blonde woman with gentle brown eyes and a good figure.)
When he thought about Nina, he experienced his guilt and compassion at a distance, as why shouldn’t he, because otherwise they couldn’t, you know. When he got sick or sad or, or, that was when he knew that Elena would have been the one. Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me. Nina slammed down another bowl of her excellent mushroom soup in front of him; he wondered where she’d found the . . . Maxim was quarreling with Galisha, who said . . . He wondered if they’d ever have another vacation together. It was impossible to predict who’d turn criminal next. That knocking in a 5/4 theme should have come back in ’36, and his underwear was still packed! That was why he couldn’t stop drinking. It was all part of the, the, you know. Anyhow, he had to; otherwise his colleagues would be, why say it? Apparatchiks, propagandists, chauvinists, functionaries and drones clinked glasses with him; and two bullies of the secret police, languidly unzipping their lambskin-lined jackets, strolled up to the frightened composer and kissed him on both cheeks. The taller one shouted out: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re as Russian as red gold!—Perhaps this was meant to warn him away from straying any farther into the illicit darkness of his new project, the cycle entitled
From Jewish Poetry.

4

What drew Shostakovich to Jewish harmonies? The simplest answer, and the truest, might be
their sadness.
Leave this aside for the moment. Although I cannot forbear to discern insectoid shapes in musical notation, within a score there dwell many human forms. A treble clef, for example, resembles a Muscovite or Leningrader in a bulky hooded parka. A bass clef bends as simply and painfully as a silhouetted widow in Leningrad drawing water from the whiteness of a frozen canal. I myself can’t explain why this should be so, unless those figures somehow indicate or represent an underlying content, perhaps the Infinite Cause of Causes. Why not? After all, Kabbalists believe that the very letters of the alphabet are emanations of God; and in our Soviet Union we accept the Marxist conception that art, and indeed all culture, comprises a mere superstructure founded on economic realities. What was the
content
of D. D. Shostakovich? Wherein did his meaning lie? He struggled rhythmically for his freedom, but what would he do with it if he ever got it? Or was there, as the new Existentialist movement implied, no aspect to freedom excepting the struggle itself?