Read Great Historical Novels Online
Authors: Fay Weldon
Shostakovich’s face was a white blur in the darkness. ‘It’s never been quiet in my head. So perhaps it is easier for me.’
‘Not easier,’ said Nikolai, resting his head against the bricks. ‘Just different.’ He was so tired that it was all he could do to string two words together. How long could he go on like this? At rehearsals, after sleepless nights, even placing the bow on the strings felt like too great an effort; it was as if his fingers weren’t even attached to his hands.
I feel dismembered
, he thought.
‘Coffee?’ Shostakovich held out a tin cup. ‘You look as if you could do with some.’
Nikolai shook his head. ‘It gives me the shakes.’
‘Not this stuff! It tastes like one part coffee and five parts mud.’
Nikolai took a swig. ‘Disgusting,’ he agreed, though he could taste nothing at all.
‘Isn’t it? Apparently one of our neighbours has started making pancakes using old coffee grounds. Nina found her going through the rubbish.’
‘So we’re back to this. Cabbage soup by the gallon, rotten meat in the borscht — if there’s any meat at all.’
‘Watered-down porridge, watered-down vodka.’ Shostakovich sighed. ‘Substitute sugar, substitute fat, substitute everything. One would think we’d be used to it, from the earlier days, but how quickly we forget!’ He drained the coffee into his mouth, then spat over the edge of the building. ‘I was about to say we can get used to almost anything, but I refuse to get used to this muck.’
It was true, Nikolai reflected; human nature was extraordinarily adaptable. What had once seemed strange — putting on a helmet, climbing to a rooftop with a pail of sand — had become routine. People who’d once sewed fine linen coats now threaded fuses into artillery shells. Those who’d suppressed their urge to pray were being officially urged to enter churches. There was only one thing to which Nikolai was unable to adjust: the terrible pain that had been with him ever since he’d prised Sonya’s fingers from around his wrist and handed her into the train carriage, into someone else’s arms. That pain was as raw as it had ever been, and its strength and ferocity surprised him. When he entered his apartment, it leapt upon him; when he dozed off from exhaustion, it was waiting in his dreams. It burned through his numb, sleep-deprived state like frozen metal on skin. He would never get used to her not being there, and he looked for her when he turned every corner and boarded every tram. ‘I’ll never get used to the absence,’ he whispered, scraping his boots on the guttering to cover his words.
In spite of the vast sweeping arms of the searchlights, it was just possible to make out the delicate points of stars. ‘It’s quiet enough now,’ said Shostakovich. ‘Maybe we’ll be allowed a night of silence.’
He was right. Even the muffled thud of faraway artillery was stilled. It had been a bad day, with waves of Junkers sweeping in and dropping showers of incendiaries over the city. All evening, fire brigades had been fighting the flaring white flames. Passing a local park, Nikolai had seen children frantically digging up soil and heaping it over a cluster of fires.
Shostakovich leaned back on a chimney pot, and a loose tile fell on his
helmet with a loud crack. ‘The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich,’ he said in a broadcaster’s voice, ‘spent the winter of 1941 preventing incendiaries from falling on his workplace. The only thing to fall on him was a piece of the roof.’
Nikolai smiled. ‘Perhaps the Germans feel they’ve treated us to sufficient indignities for one day.’
‘Let’s hope so. The city can’t take much more heat. Do you want to get some sleep, while the coast is clear?’
The thought of lying down made Nikolai feel both better and worse. He’d spent the previous night in a chair in Sonya’s room, with a rug over him; by pretending he wasn’t interested in sleep, he’d hoped he might succumb to it. The trick hadn’t worked. Already he knew every detail of the room, had replayed every conversation he and Sonya had ever had, but still his eyes roamed around restlessly, hoping for something new. By the time the dawn crept around the blackout blind, he was sick from nostalgia and grief.
‘Well, what about it?’ suggested Shostakovich. ‘You going below?’
‘I think I’ll just grab a cat-nap here.’ He pulled his helmet low over his eyes so that he wouldn’t appear duplicitous or ungrateful. For fifteen minutes he tried not to think of Sonya and what might have happened to her; instead, from the small, unrestricted corner of his sight, he watched Shostakovich sitting with his shoulders hunched and his profile set. Was he thinking about his unfinished work, his scattered friends? It was impossible to tell.
Suddenly Shostakovich gave a loud exclamation. ‘What the hell —?’ He threw off the blanket around his shoulders and leapt up, staring across the city. ‘What the bloody hell is
that
?’
Nikolai also sprang to his feet. To the south, the sky had turned a deep, sinister red. Billowing smoke plumed upwards, lit from below by a searing orange light. ‘What can they have hit to cause a bonfire like that?’ he asked, aghast.
Immediately, as if in reply, shouts rose from the alleyway below. ‘Send for help! The Badayev warehouses are burning! All available men needed!’
Shostakovich grabbed Nikolai’s arm. ‘If the warehouses have gone up in smoke, we’re lost. The whole city is lost. What happens to sugar when it burns?’
‘It melts,’ said Nikolai slowly, ‘and then it solidifies. Leningrad will be left with nothing but four acres of hard candy.’ The immense fire was mesmerising, horrifying, spreading along the horizon like a forest.
‘Look at it — it’s like a bloody beacon. It’s going to attract the attention of the Luftwaffe. They’ll soon be here. How can they resist an opportunity like that?’
Already lorries and handcarts were crawling through the streets, heading towards the long red line on the edge of the city. ‘And what about all the other fires?’ Nikolai felt a new despair.
‘They’ll be ignored.’ Shostakovich’s glasses flickered, reflecting the sickly orange light. ‘The Badayev warehouses are made of wood and stuffed with food. They’re the perfect fuel. If the fire brigades can’t put out the flames, there’ll be nothing left by morning but scorched ground.’ He sounded angry, but it was difficult to tell whether his anger was directed at the German bombers or the shortsightedness of the city officials.
Silently, shoulder to shoulder, they watched as Leningrad’s food supplies — flour, cooking oil, butter, lard, meat — fed the unstoppable fire. Dense black smoke stained the night sky. The sounds of distant panic floated across the city: bells, loudhailers, shouting men and barking dogs.
Then, as if set off by the chaos, the air-raid sirens shrieked into life.
‘Here they come,’ said Nikolai grimly. ‘Moths to a literal flame.’ He looked at Shostakovich’s anxious face, and then at the chaos that lay before them. For the first time, he was almost glad that Sonya was no longer in Leningrad.
When Shostakovich was a boy, he’d invented an ingenious game called the Pebble. Whenever he wanted to escape household chores he took the sacred pebble from its tin and challenged one of his sisters to guess which hand it was in. Soon he had this down to a fine art, puffing up his empty fist to make it look as if it contained something, or flattening his fingers to suggest attempted concealment.
After some weeks of constantly choosing the wrong hand, Mariya began to complain. Dmitri was cheating! The cleaning forced on her by fate and the Pebble became noisy and obtrusive. She bumped her brother’s chair as she swept, and scrubbed roughly over his feet as he sat reading. She flurried his pencils with her duster and wiped the piano keys when he was playing. The commotion became too disturbing; after all, the whole point of escaping chores was to gain uninterrupted practice time. Thus Shostakovich had learnt to shut himself away, not physically but mentally. A smooth second skin emerged from his spine, crept around his ribcage and sealed itself around his heart. Noise-proof, emotional-blackmail-proof, it blocked him off so he could neither hear Mariya banging the scrubbing brush on the pail, nor smell the strong carbolic soap. In this way, he was able to continue with his important composing (this was the year of his piano piece, ‘Funeral March in Memory of the Victims of the Revolution’) and he heard only the notes in his head.
Long after the Pebble had disappeared, along with his father (dead and buried) and the piano (sold to pay the rent), Shostakovich’s ability to seal himself off saved him. When, in a narrow white bed in the
Gaspra Sanatorium, he’d lost his virginity to Tatyana Glivenko and she’d inexplicably laughed — well, then the cool skin had grown over his uncertain teenage body and saved him from mortification. When, standing at Arkhangelsk Station on an icy morning in 1936, he’d opened
Pravda
to see the headline ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ (not only the death knell for his opera but his first public fall from grace), again he’d closed himself off. The avalanche of criticism, composed of voices once fervent with praise, now running like dogs after Party opinion — he was a formalist, an anti-socialist, and an enemy of the people! — all this fell around him, but it didn’t seep into his heart.
He’d tried to describe this to Nina.
Lady Macbeth
was, after all, dedicated to her. He’d held her in his arms and explained, in his clumsy way, how it was that the repeated blows of the critics hadn’t killed him.
‘I know,’ she said, stroking his forehead and his rough chin. ‘I see the way you do it. You simply … go away.’
At that time, amidst the passion of their recent reunion, she didn’t seem to mind. Later, she resented his escapes, the way he disappeared into the knotted heart of his work. She called it ‘hiding’, while he called it a retreat.
And so it was now, as day after day Leningrad burned and the streets erupted under the shells. After the Badayev fire had raged for six hours, the warehouse cellars flowing with several thousand tons of burning liquid sugar and the Junkers returning in successive waves, Shostakovich closed off the world. For the next two weeks, he kept his head down and his ears closed. He wrote fast, sometimes right through the air raids, as plaster poured from the ceiling and books fell off shelves, and the single light bulb above the piano swung. The nights of fire-watching were filled with action — kicking incendiaries off the roof, pouring sand on flaring magnesium fires — but they seemed like relief from the pressure of existing inside his symphony.
‘I’m consumed by it,’ he confessed to Sollertinsky down a crackling phoneline. ‘It’s too much to carry alone. If only you were here!’
‘You should be here, my friend.’ Sollertinsky, in a post office in Novosibirsk, had waited three hours to get a connection — and a bad one at that. ‘I’m not the only one who thinks you should leave Leningrad. Rumour has it that the authorities are —’ His voice was lost in a maelstrom of hissing, but already Shostakovich knew enough. Any day now a Party official would give him evacuation orders that he had little intention of obeying.
The sound of Sollertinsky’s voice brought tears to his eyes. ‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘I really miss you.’
‘Change your mind,’ urged Sollertinsky. ‘Siberia isn’t as fearsome as depicted by our writers. It’s not filled with convicts. We even have food — that is, if you don’t mind rock-hard pies garnished with Central Asian ants. Are you getting enough to eat?’
‘Enough for now.’ Just that morning, Shostakovich had had to fasten his belt several notches tighter. ‘But it doesn’t look good. Bread rations are going to be cut again — to five hundred grams, I think.’ The truth was, he was barely aware of what he’d eaten in the last weeks: a bit of sausage chopped into red cabbage, dried mushrooms in watery broth, bread with sunflower oil rather than butter. The main thing was that mealtimes were now less of a palaver, meaning he could eat quickly without losing track of the work. While he was wasting time shovelling food into his mouth, the violins were hovering in his workroom, marking time above a pizzicato bass.
The phoneline was worsening. Soon all he could hear was an odd exclamation or the fragment of a word, yet he couldn’t bear to say goodbye. When the line suddenly went dead, he swore.
Goddamn it!
He’d wasted an opportunity to talk about real things, had babbled on about food rations and an air raid the previous evening which had trapped them in the cellar for two hours, when he should have been asking about Mravinsky, and whether the Philharmonic might start rehearsing his symphony, and how one might transport a score to Siberia, and how many copies could be made of what would amount to thousands of pages. ‘Ivan Ivanovich!’ He kicked the wall in frustration; the sound of his friend’s name filled him with foreboding. Suppose he never again felt that solid arm around his shoulders, nor saw the crumpled collar and badly knotted tie, nor benefited from Sollertinsky’s informed conversations on topics ranging from Sanskrit to Sophocles?
He knew he should start working again, but he felt a reluctance so strong it surprised him.
Keep going
, he commanded himself.
This is the reason you’re still in Leningrad!
Before he could begin, he heard a small knock on the door. It was Nina, who’d been gone for hours, queuing for bread. She looked closely at him. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I just talked to Sollertinsky.’ He noticed, for the first time, how her cheekbones stood out in her thin face. She’d stopped suggesting they leave Leningrad; in fact, she’d stopped saying much at all. But it was
obvious that, every day, she was hoping someone else would help her fight this particular battle.
‘Is he all right?’ Nina rarely entered his workroom; this was his territory and he kept it as free as possible from the clutter of family life. But now she came over to him and laid her head against his chest.
He could feel her shoulder blades jutting through her coat, and the sharp steps of her ribs. Shamed, unprotected by work, he saw that this was also his fault. Maxim had started wetting the bed, Galina had become afraid of the dark. Single-handedly, he was destroying his family.