‘And one day you’ll acknowledge the facts. You’re too blind for the battlefield, and I’m too fat.’
Shostakovich laughed reluctantly. ‘Regardless of facts, I’m going back for another try. I’ve already made a second appointment for an eye test.’
‘I expected nothing less of you.’ Sollertinsky sloshed more brandy in his glass. ‘Your extreme pigheadedness warrants a new toast.’
‘As if you need an excuse! You toast as readily as a dog farts.’ It was a poor joke, and unnecessarily sharp. But for some reason he was struggling to keep up with the flow of witticisms. As familiar as it was to be sitting at his usual table, bantering with his old friend, it felt somehow wrong.
‘Feeling under the weather? Your wits seem a little dull.’ Sollertinsky, in spite of numerous brandies, seemed to sense his friend’s mood.
‘The advantage is yours,’ replied Shostakovich. ‘You have all the time in the world to sharpen your wits, for you do little else.’ Again, he sounded more acerbic than he intended. But the sight of Sollertinsky cracking jokes, apparently disregarding the mounting chaos in the streets, made him envious — and also afraid. Did he really want to push his way out onto a violent and bloody battlefront?
Sollertinsky chose to disregard the insult. He dug Shostakovich in the ribs and gestured out the window. ‘Look there.’
It was Karl Eliasberg, walking across the cobbled square with his
pigskin briefcase clasped in his hand. As if sensing he was being watched, he quickened his pace, throwing his legs out in front of him in an almost military style.
‘They say,’ mused Sollertinsky, ‘that Eliasberg has walked the same way every day of his life.’
‘What, to the Radio Hall?’
‘He’s walked the same way since the day he was born,’ cackled Sollertinsky. ‘With his head up his arse!’
Suddenly the door flew open so violently that the windows shook and the lunchtime drinkers looked up in alarm. There, framed against the light, was a young man with a scrubby beard. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes startlingly blue.
‘Who’s that?’ Shostakovich felt alarmed.
‘I’ve got no idea,’ said Sollertinsky, frozen in mid-laugh, the bottle poised in his hand.
‘It has begun.’ The young man’s voice was harsh, the death-croak of a raven. ‘It’s all over for us.’
Sollertinsky put the bottle down with a crash, and an arc of brandy flew in the air. ‘What’s happened?’
‘The Volchov pocket has been smashed,’ announced the young man. ‘General Vlasov is captured. The Germans are advancing towards the Luga River, and in a couple of days they will be not seventy miles from our gates. We are doomed.’
O
nce, Shostakovich had walked along a street into the setting sun and thought he was walking into the end of his life. The low orange dazzle of light, the silhouettes of the lamp-posts: these seemed so strange that, in those moments, he could conceive of nothing beyond them. But his feet had gone on rising and falling, just like the sun. And soon the world settled back into its usual patterns, alternating between the mundane and the dramatic.
He remembered that evening more as if he’d dreamt it than lived it. He thought of it with the fierce longing of a soldier, hands clenched, thinking of safety and home. For a second, the world had opened up to him. He could have stepped through and been rid of it all, the constant demands of the body and the never-ending pressure to succeed. The pressure to be the best, to play Chopin’s third Ballade more tenderly and Beethoven’s Appassionata more brilliantly than either had ever been played — and then to remain at the piano, long after the audience had gone, composing a work to put both Chopin and Beethoven in the shade.
His dream had been one of escape. And it wasn’t until he met Nina that he could say, quite truthfully, he was glad he hadn’t disappeared on that unearthly evening. Glad that the sun had been pressed below the horizon and he’d been restored to the ordinary streets of Leningrad, a little out of breath, out of sorts, relieved, disappointed, resentful.
The things that first struck him about Nina Varzar were her ferocious intelligence and her lack of deference. How tired he was, already, of deference! Tired of searching for truth behind every face, of standing
in concert-hall foyers and listening to a chorus of approval from his acquaintances —
Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Allow me to pay my respects!
Behind Nina’s pale face there was nothing but a seeming indifference for his reputation. She discussed other men’s music but not his, offered opinions on others while remaining oblivious to what they thought of her. After the pretty mincing girls who usually gathered around him, laughing too loudly at his jokes, stifling him and breathing his air, Shostakovich found her irresistible. Towards the end of the party, a little drunk, he’d drawn her behind the Steinbergs’ curtains and kissed her. The clash of her slightly crooked teeth against his! The heat of her breath! Even now, many years later, he felt lustful at the memory. The velvety dark, the chilly windowpane, the keen blade of Nina’s intelligence: these things convinced him that he was a man first and foremost, and a composer second. The relief of shedding the official mask had brought tears to his eyes. After they returned to the crowded room, he’d excused himself and had gone to the bathroom to wipe his spectacles with slightly trembling hands.
When she’d finally agreed to marry him, as the spring rain ran down the window, her ‘Yes’ had the clarity of an oboe. Turning his head on the pillow, he heard their future. There it was, mapped out in a series of arpeggios, rising and falling with stormy certainty.
‘Dmitri?’ she’d said. ‘What are you thinking?’ But he couldn’t explain, could only mutter how happy he was, while the wild music merged with the rain. Once the fights began — with plates flung against walls and the servants hiding in the kitchen — the sounds were more like clashing cymbals and snare drums.
‘Just because you’re a talented composer,’ Nina would say, throwing on her coat, ‘doesn’t mean you’re a talented husband. Just because you’re beloved by the people doesn’t mean you’re loveable.’ She’d storm off to find her own place in the laboratory lit by yellow flickering lights. Often she stayed away all night, working alongside colleagues who talked about physics rather than ranting about domestic mess or excessive noise. Returning in the morning, she’d refuse to speak to him. His throat would ache and his eyes smart with the effort of remaining silent and retaining his pride.
After their long separation, before the children were born, there were nights when he no longer expected to hear her key in the door. He didn’t even try for sleep. Instead, he sat up miserably over his orchestration, drumming his pencil on the desk to fill up the silence. He could no longer
hear what he wrote. The lines were sullen before they reached the stave, refusing to speak separately or work together. In bars of rest, he waited without hope for her footsteps.
‘I can’t live without you,’ he said, having lurked outside the laboratory building for two hours, waiting for her to leave work. This was the truth — for how could a man live without sleep, and how could a composer continue without sound? His reflection in the glass laboratory door was a mess: his eyes were red-rimmed from wasted working nights, and from mornings spent awake on a lonely mattress.
Nina looked at him with no sign of softening. ‘I’ll come back to you, but only on my terms.’
The sheet-ice in his head cracked and he could hear again. The soft rain dented the ground, the leather soles of his shoes squelched. ‘I can work again!’ he said with relief. And then it seemed wholly right, as he stood there in his sodden coat, that he and Nina should be together for the rest of their lives.
The rages continued, of course. He’d never known such fights. Doors slammed, windows fell like guillotines. Nina was fiercely combative, could freeze him like the hardest frost and burn him with a look. More than once, as payback for her temporary desertions, he disappeared for a night of drinking. ‘Nina is a gift,’ said Sollertinsky, even while encouraging him into vodka-induced disarray. ‘You should be more careful of her.’ Shostakovich, losing count of the drinks he’d had, would slump over the table, hoping she was missing him.
Today, walking through a city preparing for a German invasion, he wondered how to break the news to Nina. He felt guilty, as if his negligence alone had permitted the breaking of the defence lines. Had he been too preoccupied with his work to keep an eye on the bigger things? Now that he’d raised his eyes from his music, it was too late. The enemy was inexorably advancing, and the surface of everyday life was tearing apart.
The brandy sloshed uneasily in his stomach. He hoped the caretaker of their building had already alerted the residents to the news, or that Fenya had heard it at the market. He didn’t want to be the one to announce it.
As soon as he shuffled in the door, it was clear that Nina knew. She sat at the long scrubbed table, sewing an ear back on Maxim’s teddy bear. ‘An early casualty of war,’ she said, in lieu of a greeting. ‘To be precise, a tug-of-war.’ Her hand was quite steady.
‘Nothing’s certain yet.’ Shostakovich inhaled as he kissed her forehead,
so she wouldn’t smell the brandy on his breath. ‘Look at what our tanks did at Pskov. Everyone says the Germans are underprepared for our strength.’ Anxiously, he rolled a pencil between his palms. ‘We could push them back. We could still crush them.’
Nina re-threaded her needle. ‘There may be a chance that we can all get out. There’s talk of evacuating prominent citizens and their families, perhaps to Tashkent.’
He dug the pencil into the table and felt the lead snap deep inside the wood. ‘No. Absolutely not. I won’t desert. I couldn’t live with myself.’
‘Allow me to help you.’ She looked up sharply. ‘Rather than thinking in terms of desertion, think of it as saving your children’s lives.’
When he opened his hand, the pencil fell away in two halves. ‘Nina,’ he said. ‘The only woman I’ve ever known who stands up to me.’ He returned to her end of the table and kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were as warm and full as they’d been on that first night, but her hands stayed in position like a surgeon’s, the silver needle in her right hand and her left hand on the head of the wounded bear.
‘You’ve been drinking.’ She spoke into his mouth. ‘And you haven’t slept with me for weeks. Not even in the same room.’
The combination of accusation and desire was too much; he drew back. He wanted her desperately, but he needed to work.
Galina ran into the room. ‘Can we eat? I’m starving!’
‘Yes, it’s lunchtime.’ Nina started tidying away her sewing.
‘Papa!’ Maxim ran in circles around him. ‘Look!’ He dived under the table, and a moment later emerged with a gas mask over his face.
Shostakovich stepped back. ‘Where the hell did you get that?’ His son looked horrifying, a tiny body swaying under an enormous bovine head. ‘Take it off. Take it off now! It’s not a toy.’
‘They’re issuing them at military headquarters,’ said Nina. ‘Eugene used our ID cards. He managed to get one for everybody in the building. It’s better to be prepared.’
‘There’s one for you, too, Papa.’ Like a dog wanting to please its master, Galina brought over an armful of heavy rubber masks.
‘Put them back in the box, Galina,’ said Nina. ‘You heard what your father said; they’re not play-things.’
Straight-backed with disappointment, Galina walked away again, her long braid swinging like the pendulum of a clock. ‘Don’t shove, Maxim. Be careful. They are not toys.’
‘Nottoys,’ repeated Maxim. ‘Nottoys.’
As they chattered on — ‘The breathing holes should face the left. No, not like that!’ — Shostakovich stopped listening to their words and heard the counterpoint in their voices. Was it two violins, or a violin and viola? The first line soared away and fell back: a yearning for distance, a desire for intimacy, until, for one perfect second, both strands became one —
‘What did you say?’ he said, startled.
His children stood in front of him, and beside them was his wife, a ladle in her hand. All three faces displayed a similar exasperation. For a second, he had no idea who they were.
‘Mama was asking if you’d like some cabbage soup.’ Galina spoke slowly and deliberately, as if he were deaf.
‘Galina asked if you’d teach her some more sonata after lunch,’ said Nina.
‘Maxim ask if he can go to Grandma,’ chirped Maxim.
Shostakovich felt a tightening in his chest. ‘Sorry! I just drifted away for a minute. Thinking about something else.’
‘Obviously,’ said Nina. ‘Soup?’
‘No soup, no thanks,’ he babbled. ‘You know how I feel about lunch before work. Not good for the mental faculties.’
‘Sonata?’ queried Galina, without much hope.
‘Grandma!’ demanded Maxim, going red in the face.
Shostakovich took a deep breath. ‘I’ve got an excellent idea. Why don’t we ask Fenya to take you to Grandma’s this afternoon? Then Grandma can help Galina with the sonata. She’s a far better teacher than I am.’
Masterfully done!
he heard Sollertinsky say wryly.
Galina’s shoulders drooped. ‘I wanted you.’
‘A brilliant plan.’ Nina clashed glasses about on the table. ‘Flawed by the fact that Fenya hasn’t been coming to us for over a week. Nor will she be returning in the foreseeable future.’
‘She’s been … drafted?’
‘The city’s forming a female construction brigade. Fenya will have more important things to do than cook for us.’
‘Poor Fenya! She’ll be worn to the bone!’ Shostakovich sounded shocked.
Don’t lie, you’re envious!
laughed Sollertinsky.
You want a piece of the action yourself!
‘I expect digging ditches is no more strenuous than visiting your mother,’ said Nina, tying a napkin round Maxim’s neck.
Shostakovich backed away towards his workroom. The warmth in
the kitchen, the babble and the steam, the information, accusations —
‘I have to work,’ he said faintly. And then defiantly, ‘I must work. I have work to do.’