Europe Central (115 page)

But at the same time he
detected
this feeling and expertly reduced it to its component metals, in order to trim it into artful strips and weld it onto the most strategic chord-walls of Opus 110, he couldn’t feel it. It possessed no reality.

Good Communists wrote him letters saying that he ought to be exterminated. Well, weren’t they correct? Wasn’t he a formalist, an American lapdog, a Vlasovite? They mentioned his thick black glasses; they categorized him as a bourgeois decadent aesthete, a Zionist apologist.—He winked at Nina like a sad old crow when he heard this last, and then he whispered in her ear: That makes me, so to speak, proud. Because, you see, do you know what Comrade Hitler said?
Conscience is a Jewish creation.
—And Nina jerked away from him as if she’d been burned. His suicidal cynicism appalled her.

Comrade Khrennikov had long since labeled him “alien to the Soviet people.” They destroyed his recordings and scores wherever they could . . .

11

In that same year, just when Comrade Stalin began sealing off Berlin against the capitalists,
⁴¹
Shostakovich finished his cycle
From Jewish Poetry,
which, of course, given that second word, could never be publicly performed so long as Comrade Stalin was alive, and maybe not afterward, either. When his friends expressed determination to find a venue, he said: Why waste our efforts? This is our life . . .

His besieged hopes, like semi-skeletonized buildings glimpsed through the smoke of burning tanks, secreted themselves deeper and deeper behind his tics and his meaningless murmured assents to everything.

Activists said to him: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, we thought you’d learned your lesson in 1936, when we exposed the errors of “Ledi Makbet.”

Yes, yes, exactly.

But we’d hoped you’d taken your punishment to heart! Certainly in your Seventh Symphony you placed your art in the service of the people.

Thank you, thank you—

It wasn’t meant as a compliment. Frankly, you’re not living up to your own former ideals.

I appreciate your valuable critical observations, he said to them humbly, comforted only by the thought of Nina’s pillow-choked laughter tonight when he whispered all this mummery to her. Oh, he was a clown, wasn’t he? They could never breach
his
defenses!

Do you understand the sanctions you face?

Naturally, comrades, and I’m sure those sanctions will, mmm, to speak, inspire me to, to (Ninusha will love this!) future creative work and provide, er,
insights—

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re in grave danger of becoming an enemy of the people again!

I appreciate the warning, comrades. But don’t worry about me; please don’t worry. Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak (Ninotchka will die laughing; actually Ninotchka will be terrified)
forward—

Actually he didn’t care anymore; he almost wanted them to shoot him, as long as Nina and the children wouldn’t be harmed. Galina Ustvolskaya, well, she wasn’t as close to him as Elena had been, and . . . Although her compositions were very . . . Do you remember Dziga Vertov’s
heart of machines
sequence in “Stride, Soviet”? That must have been in 1926, because it was right before my Second, you know, Symphony. A fine filmmaker, really, although he was also very, well, like Roman Lazarevich, he was too much the true believer. I wonder if Vertov’s still alive. I suppose he’s
disappeared.
Roman Lazarevich would know, but I don’t dare ask him. I want a
heart of machines
for Opus 110. It’ll be a machine for, I don’t know, let’s say for pulverizing human bones; Roman Lazarevich filmed that; I remember that for some reason I was in the Kino Palace with Ninusha, who cried—very unlike her, if I may say so. Give me eight grams! Or is it nine? Then they can pulverize my . . . He’d never felt
that
way before! When would he need that underwear in the suitcase? Back in ’37 they liked to leave a disgraced man at liberty for weeks or months, to wear him out with worrying until the Black Maria came. Now life was more confusing, comrades, LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.

But, Mitya, wailed his wife, they’re reaching out their hands to you! Please join them! I’ve never begged anything of you before—

Oh, me, oh, my! But a hand can also, you know,
grab
you!

There he was, almost rigid in the chair, anchored by his pear-shaped flesh, his white fingers outspread on the piano while G. A. Ilizarova stared worshipfully at him, her dark hair tucked back around her pale face like a helmet of chastity.—Dmitri Dmitriyevich, don’t ever join the Party! she whispered. We’re so proud of you! Keep fighting!

What if someone were listening? Quickly (but winking at Ilizarova) he began praising the ever brilliant victories of our Soviet people.

12

At this very same moment, his “Song of the Forests” (Opus 81), which celebrated Soviet labor (and incidentally praised Comrade Stalin), resounded in almost every factory of the USSR. Ninusha loved it, she actually loved it! That was the worst. He could hardly . . . Whereas “Lady Macbeth,” which he’d dedicated to her, well, the point is that Ninusha now got her hair waved and smiled like a chiseled image above her starched white collar, seated compactly in the velvet padded box beside her husband, who might be arrested this very instant and who’d just won the Stalin Prize: ten thousand rubles! Poor woman, didn’t she deserve her moment of fame?

Opus 81 was, from an artistic point of view, the opposite of conspicuous. Don’t you remember how Saint Isaac’s Cathedral used to be visible all the way from Finland, thanks to its golden dome? That was why we’d had to grey it down during the Nine Hundred Days—a very dark grey, as he remembered, which made the victory garden of cabbages all the greener. Opus 81 was good music greyed down for the sake of survival—greyed down to gaudy gold. And Nina didn’t even care. But what was he saying? Nina loved him; she wanted him to succeed and thrive; as for the ten thousand rubles, she knew how to get through those; it’s only a question of time and manpower. Now he could go out, get drunk and, you know. He’d also like to send some money to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who Glikman said had been impoverished ever since she divorced Roman Lazarevich. This Professor Vigodsky didn’t earn much, and they had a daughter now. Elena had a child! Imagine that! How time, you know,
flies.
He only hoped that she never heard “Song of the Forests.” Oh, me! How could she not hear? And I used to tell her that I’d never . . . Well, we were young. But it’s really, I mean I’m not too thrilled about this.

After the premiere in Leningrad, he rushed to his hotel room, accompanied by his pupil-mistress Galina Ustvolskaya, and hid his head beneath a pillow. Then he began weeping wretchedly with shame and self-disgust.

13

Ustvolskaya stood at the side of the bed. She knew him so well. Trying to suppress the loathing which rose up between her ribs like nausea, she said: You’re being unfair to yourself. So what if you have to throw them a bone once in awhile? Don’t forget your genius. You’ve accomplished so very very many of your dreams . . .

Thank you; thank you. But how can you love me now?

She hesitated.

Don’t say it, he said, fearing the answer. Now let’s talk about you. I fear you haven’t been composing enough—

Dmitryosha, I’d rather keep worrying about you—

His lips vibrated like a brass player’s. He finally said: Don’t throw away your efforts.

14

He went home, and instantly got into an argument with his wife. (Someday she too would be a skeleton.) She said that she was sick and tired of his moping about the success of “The Song of the Forest.” He didn’t see what she was driving at. He said so. She said:

Did you really not think, or do you enjoy being self-destructive? When you make a mess, you ought to sweep up after yourself.

Ninotchka, don’t be harsh, no, no, no, no, not now—

No! Stay there and listen. You look just like a cheap bourgeois in the movies; it’s almost comical. You can’t hide your secrets from me, Mitya. When you were sleeping with that slut Elena I could literally smell her on you. That cheap, catty smell of her—ugh! You’re a man who has to have affairs. Maybe I would have preferred to love somebody different, but that’s how it is, right? Well, are you going to answer me or not?

I, I don’t see what this has to do with—

Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he’s got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That’s just how it goes. Sometimes I think you’re not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, and you can’t help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker—

Nina, you’re
killing
me, that’s what you’re doing. Not that you even—

I’m not complaining. I knew what I was getting into. As soon as you married me you had to step out.
That bastard
tells you to zig; he even warns you in
Pravda,
and so you zag. All that trouble we got into over “Lady Macbeth,” you
knew
you were bringing it on us! Oh, I’m not saying it was anything personal—

Nina!

Nina, what? You’re a genius and all that, but you don’t know the first thing about yourself. You’re always looking for a Muse to follow, and she’s got to be a dark-eyed Muse from someplace else. Any other Soviet composer would be thrilled by the success of “The Song of the Forest,” but
you—

I can see it’s no use continuing with this talk, no, no, no. I’m going round to see Lebedinsky . . .

Mitya, stop acting childish. You know that I love you. Hopefully you’re aware that I even respect certain things about you. I’m only the slightest bit angry with you; I’m not asking you to change your ways. After all, you’re going to sleep with whomever you sleep with.

Excuse me, but what’s the purpose of this conversation?

I don’t know. As you always say, why waste one’s efforts? And yet, when you come back all rapturous from your little Galisha, who by the way is never going to marry you, and you think that you’re hiding it from me even though she
studied
with you for ten bloody years, and your other little Galisha, the one you and I are raising together, knows perfectly well what’s going on, as does Maxim, and meanwhile you feel angry that I’m me and not her, so you get all strict and silent with me, why, then I guess I want to tell you what you are.

Very well then, he cried, so pale and agonized that she couldn’t decide whether to slap his face or burst out crying, what am I?

You’re a—well, well, you don’t follow the Party line, that’s for sure! My God, but you’re a free spirit, Mitya! You’re a
formalist.

15

Dmitryosha, would you like some tea? I could make it for you very quickly. A nice, hot cup of tea—there’s comfort in it, especially on a cold dark night . . .

She had served in a military hospital during the war. She knew how to tend the sick even when she felt very angry.

He said to her: Can music attack evil or not?

Certainly not. All it can do is scream.

He laughed gruesomely.—You
formalist,
you! But still, I wonder what it all means, if there’s no, so to speak, no purpose in—

Ustvolskaya’s face wore an expression of pity, irritation and perhaps repulsion; he couldn’t make it out. She said to him: Please don’t cry anymore, Dmitryosha. You’ll suffer much less when you stop hoping for the impossible. There’s no hope for any of us, whether they shoot us or not.

But illusions don’t die all at once—

I never had any.

It’s a long process, like a toothache. And then the illusions rot and stink inside us, like—

You’ve told me all that before. Drink your tea now.

I’ve seen you hold your teacup when you compose, and I’ve seen you wrap your long white fingers around the warmth.

Whenever she had an orgasm, her mouth reminded him of a certain little round window in the Kirov Theater about which he used to have friendly feelings.

16

In January 1949, Comrade Stalin finally began his campaign against Jewish influences. Maybe it was only now, with the distractions of the war years more or less mastered, that he’d found the time to read
Mein Kampf.
In February, Galina Ustvolskaya completed her Sonata No. 2, whose dreary fetters of quarter-notes left her lover almost beside himself with gloom. In March, at
that bastard
’s express wish, Shostakovich was sent to New York as a member of the Soviet peace delegation. All his works had been un-banned four days before. (We’ll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich.—This was exactly what Stalin had said on the telephone. Oh, me, oh, my, he’d, so to speak, authorized the operation!) And the composer, who’d forgotten nearly everything except how to be most vigilantly afraid, suddenly began to hope that if he only acted sufficiently obedient and broken, maybe his music might be performed again.

Meanwhile, what was he supposed to play? Probably not the incidental music to “Lady Macbeth”—
that
would be a joke! And Opus 40 would only make me sad and get Elena in trouble. What about my crowd-pleaser? But you-know-who is taking measures, so
Pravda
informs me, to transform the Soviet sector of shattered Nazidom into an All-German Republic subservient to the needs of, how shall I put this, history. Therefore, my Seventh Symphony might have, er, outlived its
usefulness,
you see. Because we need Germans again! Time to renew the, how shall I say, the Nazi-Soviet Pact! Ha, ha! Ninusha, don’t glare at me with your mouth open like that, because it makes you, um, but seriously, in these
happy, happy
times, wouldn’t it be better to forget about the siege of Leningrad? And Vlasov never existed, either. If only I’d composed a fluffy little trio or something in honor of Operation Citadel! Because that would be really, really . . . Please don’t look at me like that, Galina!