Europe Central (116 page)

To be sure, our
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
continues to state that the Seventh
played an important role in rallying the world against fascism.
But encyclopedias are subject to revision. Thus we find Shostakovich playing the second movement of his less famous Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden, his dark-suited shoulders squared as he sat at the piano, his face hunching forward, his mouth stiffly downcurved: First a chord as warm as the streak of white foam in a
café au lait,
and then, you know. He couldn’t understand the simplest things Americans said, even though he’d once taken English lessons with Elena Konstantinovskaya.
It gives me the creeps.
That was all he remembered. How many years ago was that?—I don’t feel much enthusiasm, he said to himself as his widespread fingers began to hurtle down on the piano’s white-and-black terrain. Somebody in the front muttered: That guy looks like a weirdo.

Afterward, there’d be more reporters, insinuations and petty-bourgeois stupidity, when all he cared about was keeping his family out of, why say it? America being a capitalist country, the various civic choirs sing
a cappella
there, meaning without instrumental accompaniment. In a well-ordered zone, such license would never be tolerated. High time to harden our line against the Americans! They’re very . . . Oh, me! Anyhow, why the Fifth? Because we’re on Fifth Avenue, stupid! That symphony got me in trouble, too, because the audiences applauded too loudly when I was officially a, a, what was it, oh, yes, a cultural alien. Elena had already been taken to the, you know.—Second movement. An hour more; then I can sit in a corner and drink champagne. Maybe some American woman will consent to, you know, pop out the cork! The shot heard round the world . . .
Pizzicato.

The Fifth was hardly his, so to speak, favorite—I mean, to hell with it. It was subtitled
a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism
—precisely the motif he sought to sound today.

He played adequately. We all did, or else. Even Akhmatova wrote her chirpy odes in praise of
that bastard.
Well, not everyone: Brave Tsevtaeva had actually, I don’t need to say it. He’d heard that it didn’t hurt, unless they were doing it to you and they used piano wire. Vlasov must have . . . But we don’t talk about that. In one of her last poems, written when the sleepwalker’s army marched into Prague, Tsevtaeva had written, “in anger and in love,”
I refuse to be.
That sentiment would be mortared into the grey chamber of Opus 110.

Decrescendo.
The Americans applauded—hypocritically, he thought. His foot kept jerking sideways when he bowed. They say that you keep twitching for a long time, even after you, well. Then he read out denunciations upon command, all the while twisting an unlit “Kazbek” cigarette. He attacked among others a certain D. D. Shostakovich, who’d committed various errors. His mouth grew dry, and he could not finish the speech. A pleasant male voice completed it for him.

17

Yes, he grew pale when he drank vodka. He grew paler when he drank the future. To be sure, it wasn’t as bad as those Moscow nights at the beginning of ’45 when there was no electricity from six in the morning to six at night, so that by three in the afternoon, when the winter sun failed, he’d had to sit in cold darkness, unable to compose by that pale kerosene-light; later on he’d be tense, unable to sleep before midnight, awaking in the dark with his heart stuttering like a machine-gun. Now he . . . In fine, his major task nowadays consisted in preparing responses to various foreseeable criticisms. Once in awhile he got the odd job: Now, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, there’s going to be a twenty-four-gun salute in Moscow for the liberation of each capital, so the world will know that it wasn’t just Leningrad, that it was Minsk, Kiev, Stalingrad and all the rest! We’ve decided, and no doubt you’ll agree, that your fanfare ought to consist of twenty-four-note chords, which will undoubtedly create an impressive tonal effect, much wider than the bass theme which you’ll be called upon to write to symbolize the Fascist German command. Then it was time for another dream of leaving home on a rainy night, Nina screaming and shaking her fist at him through the glass of the front door, Maxim and Galya silently mouthing
Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!
as he went through the darkness to Elena’s house where she let him kiss her through the window but didn’t allow him in.

How long could he remain in step? A hundred times a night he’d torture himself with his fears. Glikman dragged him off to see Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Kazakhstan,” which was reliably spectacular. Naturally he dreaded to find Elena at the Kino Palace; he felt crushed not to find her.

In 1950, shortly after the reactionary powers defeated our blockade of Berlin, he wrote a soundtrack for the film “Belinsky,” scoring the orchestration with the same confident rapidity in which the former German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus once drew up his orders of battle: a row for each subunit, motorized or not, each division assigned its own measure, then those measures clustered together into corps which he indrew to make his armies; the armies coalesced into
Heeresgruppen
; and the apparatchiks loved it. Much the same happened with
Hamlet.
The black telephone rang; Roman Karmen wished him to know that his scoring was perfect, superb.

But Karmen sounded sad! His voice was very . . . He was still, perhaps, getting over Elena, just like the rest of us—oh, me! But it wouldn’t do to, well, especially given that he and I, er, and besides, I need him to call Arnshtam for me; I need work; I need a favor, dear Leo Oskarovich! Because all that “Zoya” money’s gone. The children are so . . . By the way, whatever became of your actress Vodyanischkaya? An excellent Zoya! She reminded me a little of Elena. But what does this apparatchik
want
from me? Why won’t he get off the line? Especially when I’m starting to feel a bit, you know,
panicked
? My dear Roman Lazarevich, if I’m permitted to, to—ahem!—to use a musical metaphor, not that I, well, one gets, so to speak,
tuned
to the person one loves. And then even though one clings to any stranger, or even takes her to bed and then, you know, all to, just to block that artillery barrage of, how should I say, loneliness, one feels bored and, and—a proxy just can’t carry the tune! That’s why I
do not like
too friendly or too antagonistic relationships between people. Or even if a proxy manages to carry the tune after all, a different key has a different, I don’t know. So one says goodbye. But the instant one’s alone again, the craving for the person one’s tuned to comes back and then, don’t think I don’t know! How can I say any of this to you, my dear,
dear
Roman Lazarevich? By the way, next time you happen to see Leo Oskarovich, please do greet him for me and ask him if he has any, er, you know. And that child-actress who played Zoya when she was a little girl, what was her name? It’ll come to me. Was it Katya Skvortsova or was it Elena Skvortsova? Elena is such a common name; it keeps coming up.

He composed the music to that cinema spectacular, “The Fall of Berlin,” whose protagonist was Comrade Stalin. Roman Karmen wasn’t involved, he claimed, because he was too hard at work on “Soviet Turkmenistan,” but it might have been because he’d fallen out with the bastards at Mosfilm, because I’ve heard that what you say is not what we want to hear, so he said, and Karmen replied, after which they both fell silent; well, so kind of you to trouble yourself, my dear,
dear
Roman Lazarevich! Thank you for speaking with Leo Oskarovich on my behalf, even though, well. Does he still play the piano? And how is—never mind, I just wanted to, to, and please accept my very best wishes.

He agreed with the wise decision to withhold his new Fourth String Quartet from publication, due to its Jewish intonations.

18

They sent him to East Germany as the principal Soviet delegate to the Bach Festival. He didn’t want to go, but he was on the jury. (He thought he heard somebody calling.) A Russian would win. He’d already promised to take the appropriate “class approach.”

His escort of German Communists clicked their heels and saluted him. They asked if he needed anything.—Thank you, thank you, but please don’t trouble yourselves, he replied. The other jurors called him
esteemed comrade.
He remembered Nazis tall and grinning. He remembered white blurred faces in the winter twilights of Leningrad, dark eye-sockets of starvation. He remembered all the newsreels he’d seen of milk-pale children getting hanged, the German Fascists fussily adjusting each noose beforehand to get it perfect. Luckily, Comrade Stalin had liquidated their state apparatus.

East Berlin remained much damaged, thanks to the senseless resistance of the Hitlerite remnants. Laughing, somebody remarked that Dresden looked worse. Comrade Alexandrov wanted to know why the Bach Festival was in Leipzig when Leipzig was the city of the proto-Fascist Richard Wagner. Shostakovich kept silent, feeling worms crawling in his heart. He decided to avoid Dresden forever. He didn’t want to see any more, you know. About Berlin, which was, after all, merely our transit point, he didn’t care. Years ago, his teacher Glazunov had praised the city’s stone gates, but their grandiosity had long since tarnished into something like earth. Was the western sector any less ruined? Well, why shouldn’t it be? How close was it?—Right over there!—And had they . . . ? Better not to ask. He felt as if he were suffocating and bleeding at the same time. What was that sound? He wanted a piano to compose on. What was that sound? On the windowsill of the car, his fingers began to tap out the
allegro molto
of Opus 110.

He didn’t care about Bach, either, not then; over the decades he’d tried to learn what he could from Bach the craftsman, who put one note after the other, then fitted the third note perfectly into place; but this innocuously banal observation proved to be the spearhead of something inimical which now breached his mind’s defenses, namely, the axion of that Nazi mediocrity Paulus, who if you don’t keep up with such things was the Field-Marshal we’d captured at Stalingrad; apparently he used to aphorize:
It’s merely a question of time and manpower.
That was how Bach must have built his compositions; it’s what we all do, and when I myself, when I . . .

The next time he saw Glikman, he asked whether we’d shot Paulus; Glikman wasn’t sure; he might have missed the announcement in
Pravda.
It’s just a question of . . . and for the rest of that day, Bach was spoiled for him. What if there were no difference between people who created bit by bit and people who murdered piece by piece? Nobody would agree, of course; anyhow it was better to think of something else, Elena Konstantinovskaya for instance. Her hair was fire and her skin was milk. What if she’d been in Dresden when the Anglo-Americans came? Why had she divorced Roman Lazarevich? Glikman said . . . Actually, he probably shouldn’t think about Elena.

Intermission! Time to write a postcard to Glikman:
Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to write about.

After they gave him a tour of Stalin-Allee he asked for permission to return to the hotel to rest, because thanks to his Leningrad education he already possessed an intimate comprehension of the way that the corners of bombarded buildings, being stronger than the rest, survive to form grisly spires whose churchlike effect is accentuated at night when the stars delineate the nave of an immense cathedral of niches, crypts, galleries, freestanding stone doorways in which one half expects to see a Russian icon, a marble likeness of a German Catholic saint, a Kaiser’s sarcophagus; but there is nothing to make an offering to, no reason to lay down even a withered flower in memory of Europe Central’s dead. Now a whitish-yellow light comes glaring: a military patrol. This is closest we can come to gilded grillework, comrades! Save your gold for Opus 110.

Please, Comrade Schostakowitsch, a German woman begged in secret, my little brother’s being denazified because everybody in his school had to join the Hitler Youth. It wasn’t his fault; what was he supposed to do? This letter, I received it last month, it says that his apartment got taken away and since then I haven’t . . .

To be sure, to be sure. Dear lady, I’m very sorry. That is the reality . . .

And a train bore him away across the flat green of the German heartland.

19

In Leipzig he stood beside the pianist T. P. Nikolayeva, who was fresh from Moscow.

Would you like to tour Dresden, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? inquired an individual in raspberry-colored boots. We’re quite close. It’s good for the Russian soul, actually, to see it so smashed up. I hate all these Germans. You do, too, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten Leningrad, have you?

Comrade Alexandrov, you’re completely on the mark, so to speak, and if I have time after the competition—well, well, who’s to say how long it’ll last?

And then they all went into the Thomaskirche, where Bach’s remains had just been reinterred.

Nikolayeva waited rigidly; she must have been nervous. Although since ’45 he’d passed her many times in the half-real darkness of the Conservatory, his own weariness, which breeds narrowness, and the various persecutions raining down on him like sizzling steel fragments, had isolated him; this young woman might as well have been a stranger; after all, she’d studied with Goldenweiser, not with him. His eyes were dull, round-cornered triangles of light splayed out upon his spectacles. He’d better not flirt; he was getting too old! A long, long time ago, once upon a time, in fact, Akhmatova had licked her lips, and he’d laughingly cried: Very good, Anna Andreyevna, yes, very good. The embouchure
must
be kept wet, since you’re about to play my French horn . . .—No, those days are buried. This fine young Nikolayeva, far too lively to be homely, maybe it actually wasn’t too late to, never mind, smiled beside him, showing her upper teeth. What sort of person was she? Another devotee of white keys and black keys who knew her in childhood remembers her as
this typical Russian girl, with her two braids, always serious, friendly and neat.
Nationals of the capitalist powers make each other’s acquaintances (at least, so I’m told) by asking how they prefer to spend money: Do you collect stamps? I like to watch war movies. But to know somebody in our Soviet land, which now includes half of Germany and will in the measurable future include all of it, one need only learn what form her suffering happened to take during the Great Patriotic War (husband hanged in Minsk, sister starved to death in Leningrad, all four sons killed in battle at Stalingrad); however, since such communications are painful both to transmit and to receive, it’s better that we all share a tacit commonality of horror, speaking only with our eyes or by means of music. So again, what sort of person was she? When she began to play, she did not fill the Thomaskirche with soulful gloom; instead, something light, distinct, aloof constructed itself: a castle, not a fountain, an artifact whose tessellated surface possessed a precise and nearly perfect geometry of notes; her rendition contained no chiaroscuro, only skill. Without haste or melodrama, with the seemingly simple harmony of a Roman inscription, she built her castles in the air, nakedly showing herself, unashamed and unafraid as he could never be; even in his youth, when he’d been the future’s darling from whom all misfortune would forever withhold itself, his nature had tended to express itself extravagantly—hence the mischievous grotesqueries of “The Nose,” the rapid fire of “Bolt,” the complex dissonances of “Lady Macbeth,” none of which were strained or “wrong,” simply hyperactive, a trifle anxious, maybe; this was D. D. Shostakovich, to be sure; this was “honest,” but, but, how should I say? Nikolayeva made music as a Tsarina must have carried herself, with calmly unhurried grace. It was as if she were saying to him: All that’s happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there’s only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions. Castle succeeded castle.