Europe Central (12 page)

—Käthe Kollwitz (1932)

1

In our Soviet literature of today (nationalist in form, socialist in content), there is scant room for epics and suchlike old trash. However, the twelfth-century
Song of Igor’s Campaign
does contain a passage which I find relevant to my context. Addressing
eight-minded Yaroslav of Galich,
whom I myself couldn’t care less about, the anonymous bard sings:

You reign high upon your throne of gold;
you have locked closed Hungary’s mountains,
bolting them with your iron troops;
you have barred the King’s way;
you have shut the Danube’s gates.

It’s true; he had shut the Danube’s gates, and you know who I mean; you understand what the Danube stands for.

The king he’d barred the way against was presently gazing down a long tree-lined gunbarrel whose steel was comprised of angled cobblestones; the rifle’s mouth gleamed gold; and through that gunbarrel roofed with trees came the Condor Legion straight ahead, bearing arms and standards as they marched like bullets through the gunbarrel’s mouth. It was their victory parade. —I wasn’t there. I was guarding the Danube’s gates.

I did have observers in place by the swastika-buntinged Brandenburg Gate when the Condor Legion came marching through; that night the black telephone rang, and when I lifted the receiver, my Red Orchestra began to play me a song, not Shostakovich but Hindemith: closing my eyes, translating program music into pictures, I got to see it all: First came that trio of scowling young warriors in canted berets and shiny calf-length boots. The center man bore the standard, which was topped by an eagle and swastika. All three of them were decorated. At a discreet distance behind them strode the columns with their upraised rifles.
Prestissimo,
now! The Condor Legion came goose-stepping forward with bayonet-fixed rifles pointing straight up, passing a line of drummers in uniforms and steel helmets.

2

Call me a Kirov made of bronze, burly in my worker’s jacket, broad, smiling and hatted. Elderly women are susceptible to me. My duties are as tedious as Leningrad’s dogs, snow, horses. I wander amidst the booksellers on Nevsky Prospect, making sure that all’s well with our Danube’s gates. Yezhov rings me up on the big black telephone:
Send me more little ballerinas!
That’s not my job, but I’ll do it. My job’s everything long and low.

Have you been to the neutral countries? Not I. To me there are no neutral countries. That’s why listening to foreign broadcasts in Leningrad will soon be a capital offense.

I turned in my report on Operation Magic Fire and went home. Yezhov’s ballerinas were already whispering to me about Operation Barbarossa, but Case White hadn’t even been opened yet; we still had infinite time. The future doesn’t exist until it happens.

I live alone, and that’s by choice. My one desire is to aggravate the contradictions of capitalist culture.—Are you stupid enough to believe that?—What I really like to do is listen to the Red Orchestra. And whenever they tell me to, I’ll drive over to listen in at Akhmatova’s. I’ll bet that Lidiya Chukovskaya’s over there again tonight. No one’s ever caught them doing it, but I know they’re both lesbians. If it were up to me, they’d both be shot.

The humble secretary on his throne of gold had shut the Danube’s gates. I know what I know, so I didn’t argue. The Red Orchestra said that the King would sign a treaty with us first, so he didn’t have to fight a two-front war. Well, that would be logical.

The King could never get through. We were safe. You-know-who would reign forever on his throne of gold.

3

Pyotr Alexeev, with whom I sometimes do wet work, told me a funny one yesterday. It seems that a herd of kolkhozniks with fresh manure on their shoes get to Moscow; you know; they’re shock workers; they’ve won the prize! Think of them as Rodchenko’s robotlike abstract paper cutouts painted with dark oil and mounted on circular wooden bases. The guide explains that they are now in the world capital of progress, abundance, freedom, you name it. Eventually one of the farmers comes up timidly and says: Comrade Leader, yesterday I walked all over the city and didn’t see any of those things! The guide has just the right answer. He replies: You should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers!

That’s what I tell myself. He’s shut the Danube’s gates, so all’s well. It doesn’t feel that way to me, but I should spend less time walking around and more time reading newspapers. Unfortunately, my job is to walk around.

Tukhachevsky informs Comrade Stalin that the next war will be fought with tanks. Very good—let’s experiment with tanks in Spain. Straightaway sixty of our tanks get captured by the Condor Legion, mostly with the assistance of Moors to whom the Fascists paid five hundred pesetas each. To this provocation, Comrade Stalin has an answer: Shoot Tukhachevsky. Tukhachevsky should have spent more time reading the newspapers. Then he would have known that tanks will never be any threat. And the Condor Legion goosesteps forward.

I lift the big black telephone. All the better to listen in, my dears! Chukovskaya is saying, in that peculiarly arch tone she adopts whenever she’s trying to impress Akhmatova: The streets are so wet and gloomy now . . .

I’m thinking: Lidiya Korneeva, you don’t know the half of it!

Akhmatova says: One might say that Leningrad is particularly suited to catastrophes . . .

I’m thinking to myself: What horseshit! It offends me that such a person ever got published.

Akhmatova’s running on: That cold river, those menacing sunsets, that operatic, terrifying moon . . .

Chukovskaya whispers: The black water with yellow flecks of light . . .

Under the black water’s where you deserve to be. That’s what I thought. Of course, nobody gives a shit about
my
opinions.

4

The Danube’s gates are safely frozen, just as the sleepwalker’s frozen with his left hand on his belt and his right arm up and out, the fingers slightly open, while facing him, Generalmajor Freiherr von Richthofen mirrors him, and the Condor Legion is frozen in its multiple goosestep, one leg up in the air, its hydra-faces grimacing; this is a sailor’s dance. ‣

ELENA’S ROCKETS

The children invented a game for themselves that involved hurling a stocking, which has been tightly packed with dust, through the air like a rocket, and as it falls it creates an entire cloud of dust. The youngsters play this game a lot, although it has been forbidden by the management.

—Anonymous, Memorandum to Deputy Chairman of Moscow City Children’s Commission, re: Children’s Commune, Barybino (1936)

1

Even then there was something about Elena Konstantinovskaya which rendered her an object of obsessive desire. In the fantasies of Shostakovich, whom she was not to meet for several years yet, she occasionally resembled a certain Rodchenko angel whose long dress was a tipi-like construction of electric-blue slats; atop this triangle, which is to say right at her infinitesimally narrow waist, she outstretched pure white skeleton-arms which resembled picket fences; these blessed the world with their triangular golden hands. (For the sake of completeness I want to tell you that this particular angel also possessed a crimson scapula, not to mention a triangular crimson head whose only feature was a single strawlike white protrusion.) Elena might not have looked much like that to anyone but Shostakovich, and even to him only on certain days, when the music she inspired achieved its extreme limit of formalism. As has been written about the rocket scientist F. Zander,
one of the tragedies of this outstanding intellect was that his engineering solutions, however mature, did not correspond to the technical possibilities of his time.

Well, what did Elena
really
look like? Akhmatova, who met her briefly, compared her to a church—specifically, to one of the
forty times forty
churches in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Moscow.
¹³
Remember that in those days it was unwise even to mention churches; they were getting demolished or converted into museums of atheism all over our Soviet land.
Church times church, all those forty times forty,
Akhmatova couldn’t stop chanting that nursery rhyme, which certainly cost Tsvetaeva dearly and may have helped bring about Akhmatova’s own punishment later on, but at this point in the story the fact of the untrustworthiness of those three people—Shostakovich, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, I mean—feels less important to me than the fact that they couldn’t stop comparing one thing with another. Rodchenko made avant-garde “constructions”—an act which also seems slightly untrustworthy, now that I come to think of it, but all right; let’s suppose that they were correctly conceived—why did Shostakovich have to distort her into one of them? What was wrong with Elena just being Elena? Why did she have to be a church? One theory I have—this is Comrade Alexandrov speaking—is that Akhmatova had so many women in her life that they might as well have been the forty times forty churches of prerevolutionary Moscow! This gets to the root of what makes intellectuals dangerous. We use them to add
newness
to life, which is what keeps it bearable, but newness shouldn’t mutate into utter alienation; a woman never ought to become a church. And now I beg your pardon and will get out of the story.

Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva were all, insofar as it was possible to be without getting liquidated (Tsvetaeva liquidated herself), rebels. Elena Konstantinovskaya was more the good girl. I see here that her parents applied on her behalf for membership in the Little Octobrists, but she was a few months too old. In the Young Pioneers (“Carpenter” link, N. K. Krupskaya Brigade) she became a leading force among the other children, thanks to her enthusiasm for making floats and banners. Her excuse for not immediately entering the Komsomol, namely dedication to her schoolwork, strikes me as plausible. When she did join, at age fifteen, her marks continued to be excellent. One of her professors, the widow Liadova, seems to have been responsible for the girl’s decision to take up linguistics. In the course of preparing this summary I have reviewed Elena’s translations of German military documents,for in 1941 I myself had unfortunate occasion to learn that other language; in spite of the adverse report of Lieutenant N. K. Danchenko, which I also happen to have here, I can testify to her literalness and neutrality. Such qualities cannot be taken for granted, particularly in translators of the front echelon, whose perfectionistic quest for exactly the right word sometimes gets corrupted into expression of self.

Konstantinovskaya’s work reassures me with its touch of stiltedness: Here is a professional who is more concerned with correctness than with style. Furthermore, she lived the quiet life. I am creditably informed that when Shostakovich uttered rash, irreverent and at times even provocative speeches against Soviet power, she urged him to be more pleasant. She disapproved of his more extremist acquaintances, and in the course of a quarrel informed him: I’m glad that your friends aren’t my friends! which I myself will always count in her favor. Her expressions of support for his formalist-individualist Opus 40 may be excused, since he dedicated it to her. When we sent her north in ’35, it was simply to put pressure on Shostakovich, to
remind
him. Take it from me: We had nothing against her. We arrested Akhmatova’s son and boyfriend in the same year and for equivalent reasons. It was my pleasure to help her get an early release, not that she ever knew about my help. My work tends to leave me with the worst thoughts about people. I’m left with only good thoughts about Elena Konstantinovskaya.

Nonetheless, and this may have been one of the qualities which attracted Shostakovich, she bore her own not so secret deviation—a harmless one, to be sure. How should I say it? (I’ve said it more bluntly about Akhmatova, but that’s because I never liked that woman.) In 1928, when rocket projectiles were first launched from our Soviet land, Elena was abnormally close to her schoolmate Vera Ivanovna. A report on those two stated that
we noticed two black and blue marks on the neck of Elena Konstantinovskaya. First Elena did not want to explain the reason for those marks, but then with embarrassment she said that Vera Ivanova had kissed her in the woods, which resulted in the blue marks on her neck.
This incident impels me to reconsider the girl’s relationship with Professor Liadova, who by the way introduced her to the poems of the bisexual Tsvetaeva.

After Vera, a whole year later in fact, the year that Shostakovich married Nina Varzar and Comrade Stalin’s wife shot herself; the year after Hitler’s niece shot herself and the year before Hitler became Chancellor, there would take place a conference in international linguistics, one of whose delegates would be a German comrade named Lina, a woman with brown eyes and brown bangs who that very first time would sit on the soft red armchair of that hotel room in Leningrad, watching Elena and pushing the collar of her sweater up around her throat with both hands; for the previous half hour Lina and Elena would have been engaged in a fervent discussion as to the best Russian rendering of the following thirteenth-century verse:
Isolde’s secret song was her marvelous beauty, whose invisible music crept through the windows of the eyes.
Aside from the sweater, Lina would be naked with her white knees drawn up almost to her shoulders and her white thighs shining and the long white lips of her vulva as irresistible as candy to Elena, and her anus was a white star. In a moment, Elena was going to kneel down and bury her face in the German girl’s flesh; she knew it and so did Lina. Just before that happened, Lina was going to say: We have almost the same name, don’t we? and Elena, hardly able to bear her desire for the other woman, would nod rapidly while Lina let go of her sweater with her right hand and slowly reached out, rested her fingers in Elena’s hair, twisted it in a knot, and forced her head down; no, no, it wouldn’t be that way at all; Elena, who had won a prize in the Komsomol fencing competition, would be lunging for Lina’s cunt like a pikefish striking at bait; then Lina would be stroking the top of Elena’s head, murmuring: We’re both so white, aren’t we?—And
then
Lina would wrap her hand in Elena’s hair and pull her head more firmly against her, whispering: Oh, baby, but you’re white like snow and I’m white like a cloud . . .—and before she’d even finished uttering these words, Elena would begin to melt from the heat of Lina, while Lina would turn to rain in Elena’s mouth. There would be a second time and a third (by which point Elena would be ready to die for Lina), then a fourth and a fifth, all in the space of a long white night. At midmorning Lina would set out sleepless to Berlin and Elena would never even know what happened to her.