Great Historical Novels (76 page)

Nina Bronnikova
. He repeated it like a mantra.
Nina Bronnikova.
The intimacy he’d felt on waking was caused by nothing more than
lust and a ridiculous sense of romance. ‘Do you care to dance?’ That was all she’d said. He knew even then she was partnering him out of pity, but his tongue had been loosened by alcohol, as well as relief at escaping Shostakovich’s unexpected attack, Mravinsky’s cool stare and Sollertinsky’s jokes. So they’d chatted — about what? About the dacha she owned south of the city, left to her by her grandparents after her parents were killed in a train crash. It was deserted now: dacha owners had been ordered to destroy all crops and food stores, lest they provide sustenance for the enemy. What had Nina done when she left for the last time? She’d locked the door and the garden gate, then cycled back into the city with jam jars and pickles in her basket, and a sack of potatoes on her back. At the checkpoint, the soldiers had searched her belongings and told her she wouldn’t be allowed to pass this way again. ‘A series of lock-ups,’ she said. ‘A series of retreats.’ She’d clamped her mouth shut and her eyes looked sad. Quickly, Elias had told her of a recent rehearsal when Fomenko had struck the kettle drums so hard that the end flew off his drumstick, bouncing smartly off Marchyk’s bald head and into the open mouth of his tuba. Nina had laughed at this, and he’d noticed that her teeth were slightly crooked, and he’d almost kissed her for her beautiful imperfections.

God, he felt ill. He tried to sit up, but the room whirled. He had to get to work. Cautiously, he reached for his watch — and a piercing scream came from the outer room.

‘I won’t go!’ It was his mother, shouting in what sounded like genuine distress.

Just swinging his legs over the edge of the bed made fresh sweat break out on his back. Automatically, he checked the time: barely an hour before he was due at rehearsal.

‘Karl! Karl!’ His mother sounded panicky. ‘For God’s sake, help me!’

He pulled on his coat and blundered out. ‘What is it, Mother? What on earth is happening?’

Olga Shapran stood in the middle of the room. She was bending over Elias’s shrieking mother, pulling at her, half-lifting her out of the chair.

‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Elias’s head felt as if it would explode.

Olga looked at him disapprovingly, taking in his bare feet and his dishevelled hair. ‘I tried to wake you. You were snoring like a pig. You’ve got to help me — your mother’s due at the station in less than two hours.’

‘Today?’ He glanced at the calendar above the stove. ‘You’ve got it
wrong. The train leaves next week, not today.’

‘The timetable has been changed. Clearly, you’ve been too busy carousing to listen to the news.’ Olga began pulling at his mother’s shoulders again. ‘Stand up. Get dressed. Do you want to be sent out of Leningrad in your nightclothes?’

‘Leave her alone!’ Elias’s nausea was made worse by his intense dislike of the interfering Olga. ‘I’ll get her dressed. She doesn’t need to be bullied by you.’

‘Just trying to help.’ Olga’s mouth turned down further until she looked like a large and wily trout. ‘Just looking out for my neighbours. If it weren’t for me, you’d both have slept through your mother’s chance at evacuation. One of you snoring from old age, and the other —’ she eyed Elias suspiciously, as if sensing his lustful dreams — ‘through
over-indulgence
.’

Mrs Eliasberg whimpered and shifted in her chair. ‘This is my home. I won’t be evacuated like a refugee. I wish to stay here, in my neighbourhood where I belong.’

‘Mother.’ Elias straightened her woollen shawl. ‘We’ve been through this already. The situation’s becoming more dangerous by the day. Have you looked outside recently? Your street is unrecognisable. There’s a tram filled with sandbags at your intersection. Your park has become a trench. Your trees are shelters for snipers.’ He went to the window and raised the blind, though vomit rose in his throat at the sharpness of the light.

His mother rolled her eyes. ‘I’m too ill to travel.’ She held out a wavering hand. ‘See how it shakes?’

Triumphantly, Olga turned to Elias. ‘You see? She’s becoming infirm. Which is why we have to get her out of the house and onto that train. You weren’t here for the last air-raid practice, so you have no idea what we went through with your mother.’

‘No, I wasn’t here. In that, at least, you’re correct. I was at work, carrying out my duties as a citizen of Leningrad.’ He spoke as coldly as he could, trying to ignore his churning bowels.

‘Had you been here, you’d have witnessed the near-impossibility of carrying an old woman in a chair down four flights of stairs. Fortunately,
some
men were around to help — my husband, for one.’

‘Yes, I understand Mr Shapran has been out of a job for some time now.’ Elias gripped the windowsill. ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t volunteered for a labour battalion by now.’

‘He’s duty bound to stay with us as long as possible. He’s been voted warden of this building.’

‘Oh.’ Already Elias was tiring of the fight. ‘I hadn’t realised. I —’

‘You artistic types with your heads in the clouds.’ Olga seemed slightly mollified. ‘Lucky for you you’ve got practical neighbours. When the real air raids start, you’ll be even more grateful we’re looking out for you. Now, where’s your mother’s suitcase?’

‘No!’ Mrs Eliasberg began banging her head against the back of her chair. ‘I won’t go. I — will — not — go.’ There was fear in her eyes, and she clutched her chair so tightly that her knuckles shone white through her skin.

‘You will go!’ Olga’s temper returned. ‘You’re another mouth to feed! Another useless body to carry to the air-raid shelter!’ She rushed across the room and grabbed Mrs Eliasberg by the ankles. ‘See, you can’t even move by yourself. You’re a liability!’

‘That’s enough!’ Elias launched himself away from the windowsill. ‘How dare you touch my mother in such a way!’ Grabbing Olga by the hair, he flung her sideways so she staggered against the table. His jar of batons crashed to the floor. ‘She’s not going. She’ll stay here with me. I’ll be responsible for her. If we have to endure frequent air raids —
if
, for we still don’t know what the Germans are planning — then I’ll carry her to the cellar. If I’m not here, Mr Shapran will do it. Is that clear?’

Olga’s ruddy face was pale; her freckles stood out like crumbs on a white cloth. She nodded but said nothing.

‘What a scene.’ Elias glanced down at his bare bony ankles and then, guiltily, at the sparse handful of hair pulled from Olga’s head. ‘Being at war with barbarians turns us into barbarians ourselves. I apologise.’

Olga shuffled her feet amid the batons and broken glass. She spoke gruffly. ‘Can you still conduct with those?’

‘The orchestra will neither notice nor care. They rarely do what I ask, even when commanded by batons of a full length.’

A smile twitched at the corner of Olga’s trout mouth.

‘We’re still neighbours, eh?’ said Elias. ‘Regardless of what the next few months may bring. We’re still human beings, rather than liabilities or statistics. Now you must excuse me. I have to go to work.’

Protectively, he stood beside his mother until Olga had disappeared, then he, too, stepped out onto the landing. He made his way up the three small stairs to the blue-painted door and rapped on the wooden panels. Mercifully, there was no one in there. Bolting the door behind him, he knelt on the floor and, with his head in the lavatory bowl, was instantly, copiously sick.

The plea

Shostakovich’s paper supply was running low. Three mornings in a row, straggling back to Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street in the early morning, he’d detoured to the Composers’ Union. Three mornings in a row, he was met with blank expressions and empty hands. Everything was running out. Even the farcical old plaster replicas had reappeared in the windows of grocery stores, and bread rations had been cut once again.

‘But why has score paper run out?’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Now, of all times? Especially as Prokofiev’s no longer in Leningrad to hog it all.’

The clerk gave an uncertain laugh.

‘I wasn’t joking.’ Shostakovich spoke morosely. He had an increasing and not irrational fear of being stopped in his tracks. Stopped by military developments, as the crucial battle at Mga was still raging and the German lines were coiling closer around Leningrad. Stopped by Nina, demanding they leave the city. Stopped by lapsed concentration, exhaustion or illness. The music he’d written over the past weeks was like a steam train at his back, bearing down, forcing him on. It was bad enough thinking about what he still had to write, without fretting about what he was supposed to write
on
. ‘Can’t you give me something?’

The clerk shuffled through logbooks as if to postpone the bad news. Finally he looked up. ‘It appears our deliveries have been temporarily halted.’

Shostakovich sighed. ‘Please try to get me some, by whatever means you can. It’s extremely important.’

In recent days the clerk, having witnessed the departure of almost all regular Union visitors, had become increasingly gloomy. The building was a ghost-ship with his puny reluctant self at the helm, and outside a fearsome storm was brewing. But now his chin lifted. ‘You mean to say you’re still
composing
? And it’s something
important
? I suppose it’d be impertinent to enquire what it … might be.’ His sentence ended in a nervous squeak.

Shostakovich dropped his fire helmet with a clang. ‘I’m not sure. That is, I can’t speak about it.’ By the time he’d stooped, banged his head on the desk and retrieved his helmet, his dislike of the clerk was complete. His wife and his best friend: these were the only two who’d possibly earned the right to enquire about his work in progress. In fact, due to past experience, neither Sollertinsky nor Nina had asked very much at all. How would a spindly idiot behind a desk have any insight into Shostakovich’s rough black notation?

‘Just move heaven and earth to get me some paper,’ he said curtly.

‘I’ll try, sir. I hear that you’re fire-watching now?’

‘Yes, I’m keeping watch on the roof of the Conservatoire.’

‘How ironic!’ The clerk peered at him deferentially. ‘For so long you’ve nurtured our city from inside that building, and now you’re protecting us from its heights.’

More than ever, Shostakovich wished someone else would enter the room and save him. But the Union, once full of people he wished to avoid, was dismayingly empty. ‘I suppose it’s ironic,’ he muttered.

The clerk was beginning to look elated. Never before had the chance arisen to talk to Shostakovich at such length! ‘I’m hoping to join you at your post, perhaps as early as next week. Now that most of our musical best have departed, my work here has almost disappeared. And physical disabilities prevent me from going to the Front.’ He stuck out a thin leg. ‘Polio. Struck when I was six. My mother feared for my life — but now, perhaps, it’s saved me.’

‘Your limbs, my eyesight.’ Shostakovich spoke with the fearsome civility he reserved for the overly familiar. ‘Any firebombs that fall on our city will be dealt with by crocks and cripples.’

‘Indeed. We, too, have our part to play.’ The clerk’s expression was almost coquettish.

Shostakovich stepped back. The pull of comradeship, so desired by others, aroused in him a kind of physical repulsion. ‘I must go,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got work to do, though all too little paper on which to do it.’

The streets, bathed in early sunlight, were relatively calm. Tanks lay under tarpaulins and the trams overturned across intersections looked as if they, too, were sleeping. Sandbags were piled around the bases of statues, while boarded-up monuments floated like unwieldy arks on the cobblestones. Shostakovich knelt beside one to retie his bootlace and realised he could no longer remember what was concealed behind the boards. He’d always been in such a hurry, rushing to the Conservatoire, rushing back to the apartment.

A sudden roar made him jump. Fuel trucks with flags fluttering from their roofs — ‘Defend the gains of the October Revolution!’ — were rumbling across the square in the direction of the train station. Glimpsing the faces of the men behind the streaked windscreens, Shostakovich could tell that some of them were no more than seventeen or eighteen. What did the Revolution mean to them? Well, now they’d have their own battle to tell tales about — if they survived. He wiped his eyes and hurried away.

When he got home, the apartment was quiet and dark. Very quietly, he laid his helmet in a corner and pulled off his boots. The bedroom door remained closed.

He tiptoed to the side table. The top drawer was locked: was the key still hanging in the crockery cupboard? He opened the cupboard door little by little and groped along the wall. A cup spun on the edge of the shelf; he caught it in mid-air. Thank God! The door behind him was still closed — and there it was under his fingers, the small iron key, the shape of work to come. His clenched stomach eased.

No sooner had he unlocked the drawer than the bedroom door flew open, and out rushed Maxim, loud and furious in his calico nightgown. ‘I
won’t
stay in bed any more!’

Nina appeared, her hair in a glossy ponytail. ‘Sorry. I tried my best.’ Half-apologetic, half-defiant, she padded across the room and began unhooking the blackout curtains from the top windows.

Next came Galina, her face lighting up at the sight of her father. She twirled in front of him and began singing in a slightly self-conscious way. (Sollertinsky was to blame for this; ever since he’d announced that her voice was promising, she preferred singing to speaking.) ‘Where was Papa all night long?’ she sang. ‘Does he like my morning song?’

Shostakovich tried to smile. ‘Yes, Papa likes it, but he’s very tired. He’s been on a rooftop all night, looking out for fires, and now he has to work on his music.’

‘If I couldn’t find a fire,’ sang Galina, ‘I’d go and join a choir.’

‘I’m hungry,’ growled Maxim. ‘Damn hungry.’

‘Don’t swear,’ said Nina, ‘or you’ll stay hungry all day.’ Simultaneously she boiled water, mixed porridge and combed Galina’s hair. Watching her, Shostakovich thought she looked like a beautiful, severe, many-handed Madonna.