Europe Central (25 page)

Even in the Conservatory, as I’ve implied, he’d excited jealousy. Certain other students (epoch-tuned, let’s call them) sought to strip him of the stipend which armored him against outright hunger. All the same, they didn’t win. His mother tried to fight them when they took away his borrowed piano, but he told her not to worry; he could hear each chord in his head as soon as he wrote it on paper. Beethoven hadn’t let deafness stop him, so Mitya himself could still, well, you know. Ever since his thirteenth birthday he’d consecrated himself in our Revolution’s unheated classrooms. His mother almost starved to feed him; older girl students in threes and fours protected him, fluttering their fingers around long white cigarettes. The worst taunts of his peers (which is to say, their comradely criticisms) hardly ruffled him. It’s easy enough to say that he “believed in himself,” but that means nothing; don’t we each seek our own interest, and dread being crossed? Or, as Mitya would put it, each one composes his own score, and then we all compare versions. Can’t I say that he believed in the power of music? The Civil War meant this to him: Sailors from our Baltic Fleet got serenaded by Beethoven’s Ninth, then sailed directly to the front to fight the Whites! He was there on the quay, aged fifteen; he thought that the orchestra handled its task reasonably well, although the chorus was, well, one must make allowances for hungry people. And the sailors, you see, they were more than interested, because some of them even, how can I begin to tell you? For example, he wouldn’t forget the grizzled pirate who’d clapped his hands like a child. Some of them were so happy that they cried. Their deputies said it was the first time that anyone had ever, you understand. And we had no bread to give them, not even that! All the same, they, they, how can I put this; they
thanked
us! Then they went off and, I think you can imagine. Many didn’t come back.—In short, Shostakovich scorned practicality. The whole Revolution did, or claimed to; but in this life we find people who, no matter how zestfully they imitate Raskolnikov by murdering the old pawnbroker, only pretend to be, as the Rascal convinced himself he was, one of the gods, the arbiters, the “extraordinary men”; their real motive for murder, as we know quite well, is greedy gain. Shostakovich would never be one of them. Nourished by the melodies he composed, he kept up his fighting strength, such as it was (to look at him, you’d think him far from formidable), his expectations guarded and comforted by the knowledge that should the pressure ever become more than he could bear, the world within the black keys would shelter him.—You’re just a masturbator, sneered one of his rivals. The way your music sounds, I’d bet anything you don’t come from the working class!—Mitya felt hurt by their malice, to be sure, especially since his grandfather had been a revolutionist in Siberia! Regardless, nobody broke through his defenses. Rapidly wiping his glasses, he faced the other boys down in calm awareness of his own worth.

It began to be said of him that he was an individualist. His allegiance to collective life was only a pretense. He could not overcome his addiction to the transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale.

At about the time that we won the war, shot Kolchak and those scum, and established Soviet power forever, Shostakovich was playing piano for money at the Bright Reel cinema palace, his fingers rushing ahead of the so-called “action” in those silent movies whose mediocrity oppressed him into a fury; when the hero died he’d tinkle out some merrily banal improvisation; when the heroine got kissed he’d pound out a motif or two from Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” meanwhile trying to stifle his tubercular cough. Oh, he had his fill of playing to order, thank you! It was all the same and it always
would
be the same, so he’d show them! Sometimes the patrons complained; more often they were so busy groping each other, or so, how should I say,
ignorant,
that they didn’t notice. At times they even complimented him. One legless ex-colonel who came to each film half a dozen times always shook a finger at him and said: With more feeling, my boy! Make us laugh; make us cry!—But I, yes, yes,
yes
! replied our high-pitched owl. Next time I’ll get it right! More feeling; let me just write that down, so that I can, um, you know.—Then he’d regurgitate the tale into the projectionist’s ear, laughing and coughing. Every afternoon on the way to work he said to himself: If I’m doing this five years from now, I deserve to be, if you see what I mean,
scorned.
The tiny bare bulb over the piano almost warmed his hands. Here came Lenin to the rescue! He’d played this part forty-two times. At this point he’d really better pay attention, because if you mock Lenin you might be in for it. All right, all right; now Lenin’s gone I can cut more capers; Dmitri and Elena are parting forever, so let’s play a wedding march! When the management finally let him go, after a whole month, it was a relief.

Before he was even twenty, his First Symphony premiered with the Leningrad Philharmonic. As might be imagined, a faction opposed the debut. Objections of immaturity and grotesquerie he met with his usual implacable courtesy.—A very original approach, said the conductor, N. Malko. From an instrumental point of view, it’s as compressed as chamber music. The Philharmonic would be honored to perform this, Mitya.—Our prodigy squirmed, staring rigidly down at the piano.—One small matter, however, Malko continued. Would you mind playing the finale for me again? . . . As I thought. You play very precisely, young man, with consideration for the notes. That’s good. But the tempo of the finale is impossibly rapid.—The boy smiled, rolling his owl-eyes.—So you agree to alter that much, at least, Mitya? You see, it’s rehearsal time, and . . .—Yes, comrade conductor, I promise to take your advice in my next symphony. . . .—Without difficulty, the musicians played the finale as written.

On the day of the premiere, Mitya did not show any nervousness whatsoever, aside from a tremor in his left leg. He went to the library and read about the sexual habits of insects. To his friend I. Sollertinsky, with that customary half-offensive mischievousness, he proposed orchestrating a “Dance of Shit.” At the Lion Bridge he flirted with a girl named Tatyana Glivenko. To be specific, he informed her that she was a pouting-faced lyre with crab-claws, and that he longed for her to pinch him while he tickled her strings—the correct approach, it would seem, for she kept him company all the way to Nevsky Prospect. After three kisses, he checked his watch. They kissed goodbye; then he permitted her to adjust his scarf for him and button his jacket all the way up to his throat. Then he had to run, and I do mean run, to the Great Hall of the Philharmonia (later to be named after him) in order to avoid being late, which would have hurt his dignity. Tatyana looked after him laughing, not quite forlorn. Needless to say, he arrived right down to the minute. Malko, to whom the boy already considered himself superior, now had to lend him his own belt, and whiten up his shoes with tooth powder. Then Mitya rushed to the mirror. He bulged his cheeks out just for fun. Twenty-seven minutes to spare! Malko kept telling him not to be nervous. Actually he was dwelling on Tatyana Glivenko, who was really, truly, you get the idea. Malko adjusted his tie. Twenty-six minutes. Satisfied with the impression he made, he tried to tease the orchestra by pretending that he wanted to speed up the finale even more. (Well, he certainly knows what he wants, remarked the conductor, smiling. I’d have to say that’s all to the good! Our rehearsals have confirmed the correctness of his conception.) Then it was time for them all to take their positions.—It’s going to be all right, said Malko, and Mitya, suddenly feeling sick to his stomach, nodded expressionlessly.

Ovation followed ovation! I don’t know what his mother said, but everybody else was rapturous; they had to encore the scherzo . . .

After that, Mitya’s harmonic experiments only grew more daring, almost obscene, as was the case with his first opera, “The Nose” (Opus 15)—“no accident” that
that
got denounced as a piece of formalist decadence.
Boom!
There’s the Nose himself, wearing a tophat, singing crossed-legged under a Modigliani-like nude.—Tatyana laughed so hard she almost threw up. Then she pulled Mitya into bed, calling him her little genius. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one. But he had to run away now; he had an interview with
Proletarian Musician.
Could he please explain his intentions to the public?—Well, giggled Mitya, but why shouldn’t I give them a little, you know? I mean, I, I, well, when you consider Rodchenko’s spatial constructions, they’re like, um, plywood robots! So why can’t I get wacky?
He
didn’t experience any repercussions. Those so-called “non-objective sculptures” are really . . . There’s one that raises its arm like a railroad signal, which for some reason gives me a, a, so to speak, a hard-on . . .—Long before dawn on a winter morning, Mitya spied them crowding excitedly beneath the stone awning of the Kirov Theater, although naturally it wasn’t called that yet; Kirov was still alive: old ladies hobbling on aching feet, tall men in fur caps, students, intellectuals. Gazing at the schedules in the glass boxes, they waited to buy their tickets to “The Nose.”—Please forgive me, he said to the activists who tried to point out his errors. “The Nose” was just a, let’s call it a mere prelude! Wait till you see my . . . I mean, now that you’ve enlightened me, I’ll follow the Party line more closely in all my subsequent operas . . .—The activists were satisfied. On the other hand, what if he were being sarcastic? Throughout Leningrad (a city riven into semiautonomous zones by its canals) it was said that he and his friends all belonged to that faction which fetishizes the so-called “freedom of the artist.” Those were Akhmatova’s half-wild days; even Mandelstam was still allowed to sing. But Mitya, permeated with restless vulnerability, appeared so unself-reliant, thanks to his awkwardness, that he
must
be docile. His well-wishers at the Conservatory continued to advise him for his own good, and thought they must be going crazy when each note remained nonetheless his own. Women committed similar errors. Because he loved so passionately, they were sure of bringing him round to fidelity. I’ve read that he often recollected with longing and regret his summer of free love with the nubile Tatyana Glivenko. Stretching out her arms like the double bars which lock ascending notes into a kindred beat, she called him Mitenka. In her orgasms he heard her moaning
coloratura.
She craved to take him brightly and forever, but, refusing to be trapped in only one key, he equivocated until she’d married somebody else. After that, he kept trying to coax her back. This phase ended only when her husband got her pregnant. Then Mitya tumbled into a confused darkness.

Let’s call him a soloist. If he’d only lived in ancient times (and, of course, been blueblooded), what a life he could have composed! Until the end of the eighteenth century, so I’ve read, any leading symphonist remained free to show off his virtuosity by improvising a
cadenza
near the end of the last movement. Beethoven became the first composer to abrogate this liberty. He wrote all the
cadenzas
himself. Lenin and Stalin composed still stricter rules; for in order to safeguard the Revolution, we needed to consolidate, not deviate. Comrade M. Kaganovich sounded the theme:
The ground must tremble when the factory director enters the plant.
Meanwhile,
Proletarian Musician
said that if Shostakovich failed to admit that he’d taken a wrong turn,
then his work will infallibly reach a dead end.
But he wouldn’t understand that, even though in his interviews with the press he dutifully recited: To be sure, I, I, obviously music cannot help possessing a political basis . . .—Dark hair curled down his brow in a sea-wave. The talent which bubbled so purely from his heart intoxicated him. It gave him such joy that he—poor boy!—thought himself entitled to exercise his genius in his own way. But the black court carriages of the old regime had fled, and their red lanterns were dimmed forever. No dissonance before the common chord!

2

Looking out the Conservatory window, he saw a troop of gleeful boys come running up Theater Square, flying a kite which some Komsomols had made for them out of Bible pages (confiscated perhaps from the Smolny Convent) whose illuminated majiscules and heavy dark characters in Old Church Slavonic took on a happy rather than ludicrous appearance in the air, larking about high over those young faces. To Mitya, who’d always considered religion a joke, there was something almost inexpressibly pleasing about this spectacle. He could almost imagine that it was one of his own orchestral scores soaring up there, which would have been quite, you know. Not that he wished to be torn, scattered, cut and then glued into diamond-shapes, not by any means! But why couldn’t he compose a diamond-shaped concerto or trio which already flew? Wasn’t this the Country of the Revolution, where not to innovate was to desecrate?

In the years when Stalin’s accolytes were busily exterminating Ukrainian kulaks by the millions, Shostakovich did his stint at the Leningrad Workers’ Youth Theater, trying to create proletarian art. Pale, boyish fingers flowed out of the dark sleeves, touched the piano, and made music happen. He really did mean well. Although he gazed steadily through his round glasses at the score, he never needed it. The musicians around him with their violins wedged like rifle-stocks against their shoulders each gazed into a private pit of suffering, discovery or joy. As for him, he got lost in each world he made. His tuberculosis lasted for a decade, but nobody ever heard him complain. Slender, formal, almost elegant (although he never got the hang of bowing gravefully), he produced his flawless sounds. When others sought to help him, he listened politely.—Dmitri Dimitriyevich,
pizzicato
might be even more effective here, they’d say.—Yes, yes,
yes
! he replied with an ingratiating smile. You’re correct!
Pizzicato
would be a tremendous, um, improvement. But please keep it
arco
just this once . . .—
Arco
was the way he’d written it.