Europe Central (117 page)

The jury had instructed her to play whichever one of Bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues she’d best prepared; she played them all. Shostakovich lost himself. He no longer saw the grey heads like eggs in the wooden pews. He felt, how should I say, quite heartened, because . . . Actually (I hope it’s appropriate to reveal his secret), he felt as if he’d found a new companion to dwell with him in the secret world beneath the piano keys! Not that he and she could ever . . . Besides, he’d never let himself be caught again. Because after Elena, with all that, you know, it was better not to even . . . She’s Elena Vigodsky now, imagine! And how could I hope for anything? At least I can . . . And so Tatyana won the competition. Flowers for her! More flowers for Bach’s grave . . . His spectacles kept slipping down his nose. He felt very . . . Then and there he resolved to compose a cycle of preludes and fugues (Opus 87), dedicated to her and arranged in ascending fifths. The brief, happy flame of the Fugue in A Minor, which he’d write the following year, became his special homage to her soul.

Esteemed comrade . . . said a German, but already Shostakovich’s inner life was winging away with careful subtlety, in just the same way that the first prelude, the
moderato
in C major, begins with the very notes of Bach himself, sweet and melodious, classical, like a good Communist composer following the correct harmonic line; and then comes a dissonance. The melody returns, but muted and misted by chromatism. The prelude begins to soar farther and farther into the sky of absolute music, until that ordered landscape has been interred beneath clouds, and we rise beyond atonality into a sacredness beyond comprehension. Flashes of green and golden orderedness reveal themselves far below, then vanish because we are in the sky. We have escaped. We are beyond them. We have died.

20

In 1951 he was elected deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic. Taking his bench, he felt the gaze of the pale, titanic Lenin behind him. Lenin was stone. He was stone. They asked him when he would consecrate his symphony to Lenin, and he muttered something. His thoughts were as dull and brittle as war-metal. On the way home he took a detour toward Lebedinsky’s to pay him back for the bottle of vodka he’d borrowed last week, and a few old women, members of the former possessing classes who’d somehow escaped prison camps, were huddled against an icy wall, begging. With a shy grimace, Shostakovich approached them. He gave the nearest crone a few rubles, his face flushed with embarrassment, and rushed away, trying not to hear the others’ imploring cries. And then on the other side of the street, in a nice coat with a silver fox-fur collar,
there she was,
Elena Konstantinovskaya I mean, her hair now grey but only the more, what can I say, I’m afraid to say beautiful, because, well, she was as perfect, and as unlikely for being so, as a gold-framed prerevolutionary icon; and she saw him but both of them had been educated by those niches in corridors in which passing prisoners can be placed, faces to the wall, so that they won’t recognize each other. He hoped that she was better off with this, this, whatshis-name, this Vigodsky; their daughter must be very, well, he could ask his sister Mariya. Anyhow, hadn’t he possibly glimpsed her at the premiere of Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Georgia”? Because nowadays one’s eyes, you know, were not so very . . . He rushed home and collapsed. Thank God Ninusha was out! He sobbed for his life and for himself. He tried to keep silent at all times, but every now and then they gave him a speech to read, and he had to stand up and mumble it. In musical language, the phrase
da capo al segno
means
repeat these measures until you reach the sign S.
The sign S was Stalin. It was for D. D. Shostakovich to repeat and repeat what he’d been told.

He sat down. He reassured himself: There is no form. There is no content. No words mean anything.—His foot twitched, and his face erupted in grimaces.

He could not forget that time when the NKVD had interrogated him about his connection with Marshal Tukhachevsky. Down the hall he’d heard somebody screaming—very pure screams mostly in B-flat; in due time he’d wring them into Opus 110. Now he was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Tomorrow he’d be lying next to Tukhachevsky if that was what they wanted. How did that jingle go?
It’s not enough to love Soviet power. Soviet power also has to love you.

He drummed his fingers on his knee, working out the cadences of his preludes and fugues, for which the Union of Composers would denounce him again as a “formalist.” At his summons, Nikolayeva came rushing to his flat to hear each composition as he completed it: Do have some more pancakes, darling. Ninusha really knows how to, that’s right, with sour cream. Sometimes she sat at the other piano and watched his flickering fingers; sometimes she sat on the sofa beneath Akhmatova’s portrait. When it was just him and her he was always able to play
con fuoco,
with fire.

The very first time she came, he’d finished the C major pair, which he played quite boldly, she thought; and then without a pause, gazing into her eyes, he commenced the Prelude in A Minor. When he played the accompanying fugue for her, richly
allegretto,
a deep flush began to ascend from the base of her neck. She understood that this music signified
her.
Even now, after Stalin and Zhdanov, no deficit barred him from the perfect world within the black keys, the chromatic world of sharps and flats and skittering celestial evasions, the place between yes and no. Needless to say, this piece got singled out for special criticism at that recital in the Union of Composers, whose flowerbeds are planted so that the blossoms form likenesses of Lenin and Stalin.

I absolutely reject such music, began our Union Secretary, a certain malignant S. Skrebov. And in my view, the A minor fugue sounds distorted and false, erroneous in its modulations and chords. As for the G major prelude . . .—

Nikolayeva turned the pages for him as he played.—Thank you, Tatyana, he whispered, his new spectacles sitting more heavily than ever on his flesh which was now of grandfatherly coarseness. In consequence of his anxiety he played extremely badly.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich needed to remember (his colleagues explained, as he sat at the piano with his head between his knees) that the intelligentsia no longer existed for itself; it was only an advance detachment of the working class. He was making the same errors he’d made with “Lady Macbeth” back in 1936. He was running a serious risk of being considered a deserter from the cultural front.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, not only did you play atrociously, but the works are so gloomy that they’re going to impede your creative rehabilitation.

You’re absolutely correct, of course, replied the composer, while Nikolayeva stood comfortingly beside him, as if she were about to turn another page. You need, how should I put it, loyal lyrics and sanitary symphonies, people’s preludes and, and—let’s see now—

At least he understands that much.

If you don’t mind my saying so, you ought to listen to your own Seventh Symphony, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! There you succeeded in drawing your music from the life of the masses. I’m told that you based the third movement entirely on indigenous folksongs of our fraternal peoples. Isn’t that so?

Yes, yes, I assure you, whispered Shostakovich. He smiled faintly, and his spectacles flashed. He tried to light a cigarette, but his trembling fingers kept breaking the matches.

Now, this formalist trash you’ve just subjected us to, this is, well—why can’t you be guided by Party spirit?

I much appreciate your guidance, comrades. You certainly know how to, um,
to light the way ahead with a searchlight.
And what luminescence! It’s very . . . Could you recommend—

If you keep it simple you’ll never go wrong, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. For instance, do you know that song “Chapaev the Hero Roamed the Urals”? That’s a real Soviet classic.

Oh, yes, oh,
oh,
yes, I’ve heard that on the radio. There seems to be quite a demand for it.

Or Pokrass’s ditty—you know, “The Red Army Is Most Powerful of All.”

Perhaps Dmitri Dmitriyevich should also pay more attention to the heroic epics of oppressed Slavic peoples.

We already told him that, comrade. And, to give him his due, that Seventh Symphony does, after all—

Thank you, thank you!

We’re all in favor of internationalism, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but there’s a difference between internationalism and
cosmopolitanism,
if you see what I’m saying. You’re playing into the hands of the Zionists!

The Zionists! But I never—I mean, in that case what a terrible, er,
error
I’ve committed!

He sat there at the piano bench, smiling at them over his shoulder, and his fidgety hands trembled over the keys with the fingers dangling down, each hand like the burned half-skeleton of a warstruck bridge, until Nikolayeva finally laid her hand on him and whispered in his ear. He leapt gratefully up and found a chair in the corner of the stage.

And he keeps himself aloof from us. He won’t apply to the Party—

Succeeding at last in lighting a cigarette, Shostakovich admitted the absolute justice of all their criticisms. Then he went home with Nikolayeva.

She said to him: How are you feeling, Dmitri Dmitriyevich?

Agitato,
he laughed, writhing his fingers.

When no one could see, she took his face in her hands and kissed him,
affettuoso.
But it wasn’t, you know.

21

Nearly despairing of his unteachability, they nonetheless assigned him an old tutor to come to his home and quiz him on his knowledge of the works of Comrade Stalin. The tutor was horrified to find no portrait of Comrade Stalin in his study. Shostakovich stammered and apologized, behind his back all ten fingers lashing like the tentacles of a fresh-caught cuttlefish; beneath the flurry, with a cool cruel humorousness, his defensive apparatus was already preparing sentences of insidiously mocking abnegation: To be sure, Comrade Ivanov, I must have been asleep all these years, but it’s only because I, well, you see, I knew that Comrade Stalin had worked everything out, so I thought that he, I mean, I suppose I’ve been lazy (if I could simply make it up to him and be his, his—ha, ha, ha! percussion instrument!), so now it’s time for this old fool to
learn
; and since everything has been analyzed for all time by Comrade Stalin’s genius, perhaps if you taught me the high points, I could, so to speak, take three steps forward instead of two steps back, because it’s all a question of time and manpower, and then once I understand the subtleties my music will doubtless attain, um, perfect
melodiousness.

Glikman prepared cribs of the odious volumes, so he didn’t have to read them. The tutor was astounded at his progress. He promised to hang a portrait of Comrade Stalin just as soon as he found the right one,
to hang him, I said,
he whispered that night to Ninusha, chuckling so helplessly that she feared he might choke.
Oh, that, that murdering bastard.

He wanted the whole cycle to be played together—everything from scherzo to sarabande—but didn’t dare to do it himself. The devoted Nikolayeva did. He dreamed that she was summoning him to her side.

In 1952, the year of Roman Karmen’s classic “Aerial Parade,” he won another Stalin Prize, category two, for his choral work “Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets” (Opus 88). Meanwhile he finished his Fifth Quartet, wearing his heart on his musical sleeve by quoting from the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano of his beloved Galina Ustvolskaya.

22

What are you dreaming about now? asked his wife.

You might better ask me what I’m hearing. I can’t get the third movement of my Seventh out of my head. Well, well, excuse me, my dear, take no notice . . .

It’s those pastoral passages that you’re ashamed of listening to on the sly—

How on earth did you know?

Because you have to compose them to keep the apparatchiks off your back and so you write ugly music all the time just to protest, but deep down you’d rather—

Untrue, untrue, he sighed, lighting up a “Kazbek” cigarette. I always preferred ugly music! Even “Lady Macbeth” wasn’t diatonic at all, and that was before I felt compelled to be anything in particular—

Then why do you hear that third movement now? You told me at the time that you wrote it just so the masses would—

And that’s why I can’t bear to listen to it now, don’t you see? I’m getting tired of—

Oh, I think you rather like it.

23

In 1953, the Jewish composer Weinberg was arrested. With almost suicidal courage, Shostakovich opened his desk, withdrew a single sheet of music-paper as thin as that with which we blacked out windows back in Leningrad, turned it over and wrote a letter directly to Comrade Beria on his colleague’s behalf. Something sealed off the tunnel between face and soul—something did, surely, like an impermeable steel cofferdam on a petroleum freighter. Because the spouse of an enemy of the people automatically became an enemy, too, Weinberg’s wife Natalya would be arrested next—at dawn, no doubt; Lebedinsky whispered to him that that was the fashion now.—I’m sure that he’ll take a “camp wife,” sobbed poor Natalya; he’d gotten her drunk, not knowing what else to do for her.—Of course not, my dear lady. You’re far too beautiful for him ever to, you know. Don’t worry, don’t worry . . .—And probably all this time he was on a slave ship bound for, say, Kolyma. Or had they shut down Kolyma?—Shostakovich made quiet arrangements to adopt the couple’s seven-year-old daughter Vitosha. A man in raspberry-colored boots advised him to let the matter go, and he said: Oh, me! What a, a
preposterous
error I’ve just committed!—at which the apparatchik understood all too well that this unmanageable Shostakovich would never alter, would never stop doing whatever he could to save Vitosha.

No wonder it was so cold in here! The paper around the windows had started to crack. I’ll have to be sure and remind dear Ninusha to glue down some new strips of
Isvestiya
; that hot air should keep us warm! And if not, let’s send for Rostropovich and his cello.
Now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again.
What a joke—oh, me! Have I already told Mstislav Leopoldovich? Nina thought it was stupid. Nina’s ready, thank God; she’s always been brave. Let them open up with their eighty-eights!