Europe Central (36 page)

35

A lamp’s snow-white incandescence, his own pale, pudgy reflection-silhouette upon the piano lid, his score glowing like a slab of light, the long white jawbone of piano keys which sang to him who caressed it, so ran his world which was guarded to a precarious security by the outward spiralings of squat little bombers with red stars at flank and tail, twelve planes to a squadron, three squadrons to a regiment, four regiments to a division, two divisions to a corps. The children were asleep. Nina came to the piano and laid her hand upon his shoulder. He gazed out the window.

Since the Fascists had come, the coldness between her and him no longer mattered, so perhaps it was not even coldness anymore, this dissonance, chemical incompatibility; they rarely quarreled now for much the same reason that they almost never slept together; necessity discouraged it, and Leningrad’s agony chilled their selfishness and anger.

In November, three thousand inhabitants of that city starved to death from sunrise to sunrise. They’d cut the rations for the fifth time by then. Moscow was badly off too, of course . . . Haunted by thoughts of his mother cutting a hole in the frozen street to find water, of puffy-eyed children, crazed old ladies shivering, he gorged himself with semi-secret statistics which were meaningless and already obsolete: three hundred barrage balloons, nine hundred tons of burnt sugar. He had thought that music was the most important thing in the world, but now he realized that he would do almost anything, even compromise his talent, to help Leningrad, formerly known as Petrograd, and before that Saint Petersburg, which is to say City of the Periodic Table—city of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofieff, Shostakovich! So what if he wrote bad music? No, he’d never . . . It could still be his, given sincerely and unstintingly, and also something they could use. In short, if they wanted program music they’d get program music. He’d make it good in spite of itself. Convenient and effective was what they wanted; all right, but he actually, excuse me for saying so, loved Leningrad, so what they were also going to get in that symphony was, you know,
Leningrad.

Lev Oborin, who seemed very tired, came by unannounced for an hour of four-handed piano. He was smiling; not only had he tracked down five hundred grams of horsemeat sausage, but we’d just liberated Kalinin! Galya jumped up and down, screaming:
Kalinin, Kalinin!
It was past her bedtime, actually. And she couldn’t get over that cough, the “Leningrad cough” they called it. Kalinin, so now I’ll have to compose a . . . What’s that sound? Oh, it’s only . . . Moreover, said Oborin, at Leningrad we’d now gained an ice-bridge across Lake Ladoga; refugees went out and food came in, a little, not enough, and sometimes the Fascists strafed our trucks, but Shostakovich couldn’t help wondering at the pride and hope he felt, when he read the confirmation in
Pravda.
Years later, when he returned to Leningrad, just to visit (he never lived there again), his friends told him that on some occasions people had torn bread from each other outside the bakeries, but usually they starved in silence. They didn’t want to compromise either, you see. And when he heard that he, well, he grew emotional.

There were many new common graves now in Piskarevskoye Cemetery. In December it got worse. Some calculated that six thousand perished every day of that month; others said four, or ten. No one had the strength to count. Like ripe pears falling off trees, frozen bodies dropped out of windows into the snowy streets. Cannibals were said to be killing stray children every day; steak-meat was cut from the shoulders, thighs and buttocks of corpses abandoned at the cemetery. On 17 December the radio announced that the Volkhov Front had been formed under General Meretskov, but even the announcer failed to express much hope. Now back to the ticking of a metronome; that was all Leningrad had the strength to broadcast. Children’s sleds kept getting dragged to the cemetery, with dead children on them. Poets collapsed and died from the exertion of standing upright to read their verses on Radio Leningrad. Then came the metronome again. That was why he wanted to build his symphony not out of music, but out of snow and explosions.

It’s almost finished, he told his wife.

Then you’ll have accomplished a great thing. And you’ll tell me everything you’ve been thinking, or at least your music will tell me. You have so much to tell me and you never say anything.

But it’s the war, Ninochka, just the war. And Maxim never lets go of you—

I know, darling. After the war we’ll be freer—

Don’t create illusions.

Leaning out the window, he heard two drunken Red Army men bellowing Blanter’s song “In the Frontline Forest.”

36

At the beginning of December, the defenders of Moscow regained the offensive and began to drive the enemy back; but the siege of Leningrad went on and on. Thirty degrees of frost was as warm as it got there; so he heard. He tried not to, to, you know. In his heart he could see the Philharmonic’s raspberry, gilt and white. That was where his symphony must be performed, for his sake and he hoped for theirs. Screaming patriotic slogans, wounded Red Army men crouched in their spider-holes, hoping to kill just one more German Fascist. He wrote that into the third movement, beneath the floor, so to speak, where his chords took snipers’ aim and fired before the ear knew they were even there. Cossacks with upcurved sabers threw themselves at bullet-rain. Homes became stage-sets more avant-garde than the long-suppressed theatrical productions of Meyerhold and Shostakovich, walls and bodies getting slashed away from bedrooms in which every knickknack remained in place; women and children hunkered there, waiting for the iron frost to fall on them. (Their men were at the front.) Bundled-up women belly-crawled through the snow between frozen tramcars, hoping to find a frozen rat or a scrap of oilcake which would give them the strength to rise. Shostakovich had nothing to give them except his symphony, whose fourth movement glittered as brilliantly as the nickel-plated door handles of the late Marshal Tukhachevsky’s automobile.

37

The last note of the Seventh Symphony was written on 29 December 1941, in tired, crowded Kuibyshev. On the radio, Comrade Stalin said slowly:
Death to the German Fascist invaders. Death, death, death.
And Shostakovich arose from the music bench. A number of his well-wishers, the same who wondered why he hadn’t yet hung Comrade Stalin’s portrait above the piano, advised various mutually contradictory alterations to the finale, all of which he promised to insert in the Eighth Symphony. Nina had to run to the toilet to conceal her laughter; he heard the water come on. Again they urged him to join the Party, because doing so would help the Seventh to be more widely understood. And Comrade Alexandrov said . . . He agreed to take that under advisement. Maybe after he’d achieved a better comprehension of, of, you know, Leninism . . . He was a bigshot again; he could stall them forever! Anyhow, they owned a more important triumph to report: The bread ration in Leningrad had just been doubled.

On 5 March 1942 the first performance was broadcast by radio. Although the concert took place in Kuibyshev, the announcer followed orders and pretended to be at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. (Other sources claim that this first performance took place in Novosibirsk.) We see Shostakovich cross-legged and nervous in the sixth row, with his arms tightly folded in, his suit wrapped tight around him, his dark necktie almost hidden. Nothing but reflections can be seen within the lenses of his round spectacles. The music stands of the orchestra appear as dazzling squares of blankness in this photograph; they might as well be bomb-flashes. At home, number 2a Vilonov-sky Street, Nina sits with the children and the neighbors, listening in utter silence. She knows that Glikman and the other members of the Leningrad Conservatory are listening in Tashkent. She supposes that Elena Konstantinovskaya is listening, too. Now here comes the Rat Theme; at the fifth iteration she hears Panzer IIIs surging up riverbanks. Strange to say, on most days, and even most nights, she bears the other woman no ill will. Didn’t she make Mitya happy, and even inspire his music?

Nina knows her husband better than Elena ever could. She knows his selfishness, his ugly spitefulness, his narcissism. Elena only knows his penis. She may believe she knows his genius, but no one does, not even Mitya himself; he doesn’t even know what makes him happy! He’s not very self-aware, actually. (Now he lights up another “Kazbek” cigarette.) For instance, when he used to come home with Elena’s perfume all over him, he had no clue that she noticed anything. And when Nina herself steps out, he doesn’t catch a thing! Once he wore a purple lovebite on the side of his neck; for days he kept scratching at it. Mitya, you idiot child, if only I could keep you safe . . . In short, he needs her far more than he knows, and that’s why she’s ready for anything.
Of course Mitya—for this would be the duty of everyone to society, for the sake of art—disregarding all personal feeling.
Then there are the children to consider.

Akhmatova is also tuned in; she’s sure of it. Akhmatova’s sweet on Mitya. Well, what woman wouldn’t be? And Nina’s got him, lucky Nina! His grip on her life is clammy. Maybe his soccer player pals from the Dynamos have tuned in, too, if any are still alive. And of course, who knows what Comrade Stalin hears? Two violinists, seen in profile, grip the bows of their instruments determinedly, pointing them outward like bayonets. It’s a grey and dreary picture.

In Leningrad, the poetess Olga Berggolts, who in due time would find herself reciting Stalin odes to her fellow prisoners, proclaimed of Shostakovich:
This man is stronger than Hitler!
—Stalin himself is said to have commented that the Seventh was of as great striking power as a squadron of bombers.
Pravda
called it
the creation of the conscience of the Russian people.
Shostakovich’s fame was as blinding as the snowdrifts iced over against Leningrad walls. (I seem to see his whitish, half-boyish face blazing awfully close to pretty B. Dulova’s, both of them rapt in their concert seats in 1942.) Toscanini conducted the Seventh in Radio City, New York. The director of the Boston Symphony proclaimed:
Never has there been a composer since Beethoven with such tremendous appeal to the masses.
The émigré Seroff, who seems never to have met him, rushed out a biography, which begins with this justification:
Today the “average” American can not only pronounce that name but even spell it.
Bartók parodied the Seventh with bitter disgust—a compliment of sorts. The British
Dictionary of Musical Themes
quoted no less than eleven of its motifs. The bourgeois critic Layton denounced the Rat Theme, insisting that
this naive stroke of pictorialism reduces the Seventh to the impotence of topical art.
In the postwar era, other intellectuals who’d never been compelled to pitch their tents in necessity’s winds would soon disdain the Seventh Symphony more loudly, hearing in it a musical battleground occupied by two utterly irreconcilable antagonists: Shostakovich’s desire to express reality, and his need to please his masters. Reader, which would you choose?

38

Although D. D. Shostakovich was neither a Jew nor a Pole, Comrade Stalin himself has stated that the very concept of nationality is but a smokescreen used by the capitalists to prevent us from seeing class differences. As for the Party’s dictum that art must be national in form, socialist in content, that’s a mere transition scheme to wean the people gently from their hidebound categories. Therefore, I make no apologies for ending this fable with an extract from the sixteenth-century musings of a Warsaw Kabbalist named Moses Cordovero. In his
Tomer Devorah,
commonly translated as
The Palm Tree of Deborah,
it is written:
God does not behave as a human being behaves. If one person angers another, even after they are reconciled the latter cannot bring himself to love the one who offended him as he loved him before. Yet if you sin and then return to God, your status is higher. As the saying goes, “Those who return to God occupy a place where even the completely righteous cannot stand.”
And so it came to pass that on 11 April 1942, Shostakovich received the Stalin Prize, First Class.

39

At seven-o’-clock in the evening of 9 August 1942—the day that we lost the battle of Maikop—the Seventh Symphony was performed in Leningrad. How should I tell that tale? Adoring Glikman has left us a full account of his ten-day train journey from Tashkent to Kuibyshev, subsisting all the way on twenty insect-ridden meat pies; apparently there was no easier way for the refugees from the Leningrad Conservatory to obtain a copy of the score than to send him personally. Shostakovich met him at the station and then they walked home because the trams were infested with typhus. To Glikman, it was all, as usual, perfect, right down to the
decent-sized divan on which I slept very comfortably for a month . . . I was happy just to be sitting near him and to be able to shoot covert glances at his handsome, animated face.
Several days later, his hero played the Seventh on the piano, just for him, then said: You know, Isaak Davidovich, to be sure, on the whole, I, I’m happy with this symphony, but . . .—Glikman gazed at him in astonishment. Clearing his throat, the host refilled both glasses and murmured (Nina and the children had already withdrawn behind their curtain for the night): I believe that Elena Konstantinovskaya has been, you know, evacuated to Tashkent. Perhaps you could greet her for me. Sometimes her, um, friends call her Lyalya. Perhaps you also—no, forgive me, forgive me; that would have been personal. But do send her my respects, you understand. Just my . . . Actually, on second thought, it might be better not to. You’re very . . . But do send everyone my best wishes, and express my, um, apologies for the fact that this symphony isn’t more, you know, optimistic . . .—By the middle of May, the score was safely in Tashkent. (That was when Shostakovich was finally beginning to hear which of his colleagues in Leningrad had died.) In June, while the German Fascists launched Operation Blau (Kharkov had already fallen), our countervailing musicians learned their parts.