Europe Central (130 page)

As a matter of fact, he lived until 1975, when, three-quarters paralyzed and in terrible pain, his masklike face now trembling more than ever, emitting ripples around the blurry reflection of itself, he still managed to create his Viola Sonata (Opus 147), which he himself accurately described as “bright—bright and clear.” A month later, lung cancer asphyxiated him.

When his death began, it was as if successive shrouds, each one so gauzy as to be nearly transparent, kept settling over his face, strangling away the breath almost tenderly, with Irina bending over him in the hospital ward, screaming his name like a shrilling telephone. He could hear her longer than he could see her, for the shrouds kept swirling down so that her image steadily greyed into a blackness deeper than meaning, and although for a little while longer he could almost perceive the reflection of her presence swimming on the nightstruck waters, she was fading very rapidly now; indeed, before he had time to mistake her for a certain other woman, she’d vanished with an almost playful suddenness, so that he sank irremediably alone into his velvet agony which drowned and tickled him while a blood-red spot rushed before him in ever-narrowing spirals.

By coincidence, E. E. Konstantinovskaya died that same year.

They buried him in Moscow, of course. Roman Karmen was there, and so were the Glikman brothers, of course; so was the white-uniformed girl in Produce Store Number Thirty-one. Although he was granted a funeral in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and extolled not only as the composer of the Seventh Symphony and the “Counterplan,” but also as a good Communist, the “organs” who played all tunes might not have grieved overmuch. A detachment of men in raspberry-colored boots is said to have entered his flat within two hours of his death; they emerged with an armload of private papers, which have never been seen again. The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
accords him a respectful entry, in keeping with his various honors, medals and decorations (each Stalin Prize tactfully altered to a State Prize of the USSR. Was he ever called upon to return the old trophies to have them re-engraved?) His works, we’re told,
affirm the ideals of Soviet humanism.
In the long article on Soviet music, he receives a number of dutiful acknowledgments. The Seventh Symphony, needless to say, is labeled
an immortal monument of the period.
Even his most egregious formalist error, the opera “Lady Macbeth,” now gets called “a Soviet classic.” No doubt the castrated revision is being referred to. Now that he was safely dead, there was no need to disgrace him; for that matter, he’d been dead ever since he composed Opus 110.

One might think that his reputation was embalmed as safely as was Lenin in the mausoleum (Stalin, I’m afraid, had been secretly taken out once
his
fame decayed). And yet the regime might have felt some bitterness about his formalist infidelities. I may be imagining things. However,
The Soviet Way of Life,
published the year before his demise, mentions the
interesting results obtained from a poll conducted in industrial enterprises in the Urals.
The workers were asked to name their favorite artists. Of the composers, Tchaikovsky gets mentioned first, and Mussorgsky last, with a couple of foreigners in between. Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich does not appear. After all, no one individual can be indispensable in our Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, greatest and most perfect country in the world, whose borders touch a dozen seas. ‣

A PIANIST FROM KILGORE

It can’t hurt you, so what are you getting excited about? You’re a skeleton; nothing hurts a skeleton.

—Jakov Lind, “Soul of Wood” (1962)

In 1958, one year after the launch of the atomic ice-breaker
Lenin,
there was a musical competition in the USSR. Among the gamblers came a young American from Kilgore, Texas, named Van Cliburn.

His playing was as perfect as the stainless steel from the Krasni Oktiabr’ Stalingrad Metallurgical Works (now, of course, known as the Krasni Oktiabr’ Volgograd Metallurgical Works). And if you wish to know precisely how perfect that would be, I need only tell you that the factory received the Order of Lenin in 1939 and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1948. Shouldn’t he have won first prize, then? Well, thanks to the great power chauvinism of the Anglo-Americans, a so-called “Cold War” had developed. (What’s cold war, really? We Russians know. It’s a soldier’s corpse frozen head-first into the snow. Can a piano express this? Yes, under Van Cliburn’s hands the piano keys seemed to be made sometimes of ice, sometimes of steel, and sometimes of fragrant toffee. And the notes passed by like summer clouds.) Those who with spurious “objectivism” dare to argue that laurels should get bestowed upon a provincial bourgeois lackey, merely because Moscow audiences shout:
First prize, first prize!
and
Vanyusha, Vanyusha!
miss the point: for the purpose of competitions is not to reward individual “merit,” but to educate the masses. Our Soviet Union must be seen as a winner on the cultural front! Nor could some judges and spectators fail to react disdainfully to the way the young fellow craned over the piano, his white-collared neck bent almost horizontal, for he was a full hundred and ninety-three centimeters tall; he had to push back the piano bench; to D. D. Shostakovich, for instance, he resembled an old engraving of a racehorse straining at the gate—which is not to imply that Cliburn’s interpretation of the concerto ever sounded strained. The opening’s almost military strictness and grandeur were realized with as much control as Operation “Little Saturn” had been at Stalingrad. The
andantino simpico
of the second movement “flowed” in patterns as unpredictable as they were perfectly right, the flow first glittering in a frozen way, like a massive shower of crystal, then lightly fluttering toward something as sweetly unattainable to every listener as a little child’s happiness. Wouldn’t it be sad if we could actually feel so happy? Van Cliburn kept smiling as if he did. Softspoken but never moody, dressed in the respectful orthodoxy of darkness intensified by narrow slivers of whiteness at neck and sleeves, he must be an innocent. After all, he was American, and moreover had been born too late to get called up for the war. (Good, really very good, said the juror Oborin, but, you know, he’s shaking his head a lot, rather sentimentally . . .—Three days later, this very same Oborin appeared in a photograph in the
New York Times,
smilingly gripping the hand of the tall, weary American.)—No question about it: Cliburn was a callow creature, an ignoramus, a pianist from Kilgore, Texas . . . For these and other reasons, several selfless functionaries conspired to give that gold medal, which happened to be accompanied by twenty-five thousand rubles cash, to one of the three Soviet contestants, or, failing that, to the pianist from the People’s Republic of China (with whom our differences had not yet become acute); but the distinguished juror S. Richter demanded that this faction be overruled, I think on account of the way Cliburn performed the third movement, the
allegro con fuoco:
Commencing with perfect neutrality (cold in execution, warm in conception), the piano suddenly took on a passion alternating with glissandos of a different sort of neutrality like ripples on a sunny Arctic lake; then came the breathless erotic haste of the finale, which never stopped being clear and careful at the same time, like a lover’s deliberate touch.

So much for the Tchaikovsky. Cliburn paused. His hands hovered over the black-striped pianoscape with the same solitary tension which afflicts the pilots of reconnaissance planes when they drone over enemy territory, gathering in the coordinates of railway yards, cathedrals and apartment blocks for the convenience of master bombardiers. A slow, rapturous smile trembled across his face. His hands descended. He began to play the Rachmaninoff. The judges closed their dreamy eyes. The audience wept. An apparatchik rushed to the telephone. Within twenty minutes, militiamen had surrounded the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, holding back the yearning, adoring crowds. What a debacle! In the end, somebody had to call Comrade Khruschev himself. The matter got decided in the American’s favor then, I believe because a calculated magnanimity appeared to be the least embarrassing stance. After all, even the jurors were applauding! The bravos lasted eight minutes. Cliburn was embraced by E. Gilels and K. P. Kondrashin . . .—It was the eleventh of April—the selfsame day when, in contradistinction to the American warmongers, we withdrew our last forty-one thousand troops from East Germany. Not long after midnight the sixteen jurors reached agreement (which is to say, they were informed of the decision of Comrade Khruschev). On the thirteenth, a loudspeaker said:
Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Junior.
The crowd screamed:
Vanyitchka, Vanyitchka!

Oh, dear, oh, dear, said Shostakovich. He was quite surprised, because the paragraph they’d prepared for publication over his signature rhapsodized about “this latest Soviet victory.” Already it had come out that Cliburn’s father was the hireling of an oil company, and that the son’s travel allowance had been provided by a front organization of the international capitalist Rockefeller.

Mitya, please relax, said Oborin. That’s not your problem. They’ll get you to sign something else. At least he played Russian music . . .

You’re correct! the composer replied, much relieved. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear . . .

He trusted Oborin because he knew him. They’d been evacuated together from the siege of Leningrad, on that long, long train ride which they could never forget, having been accompanied every now and then by the
vibrato
of the Fascist bombers.

Moreover, continued Oborin, it wasn’t just the Cliburn kid who played well. The Radio Symphony members truly surpassed themselves . . .

Lev, what did you really think? To be honest, I wasn’t exactly, how should I say, listening to the Rachmaninoff, because my son—

Well, I’d have to say the Tchaikovsky concerto was superb to the extent that that’s possible with Tchaikovsky, although most of the judges preferred the Rachmaninoff, which I found really cloying. Maybe he laid on the
rubato
a bit thick . . . no, I’m just jealous. The kid’s a master.

You don’t say! murmured Shostakovich, twiddling his fingers. Who would have thought it? Well, well, well. An American boy from Kilgore, Texas. Can you imagine?

On the eighteenth Van Cliburn gave his first public recital as a winner. (Meanwhile, the United States Navy fired a dummy Polaris warhead from underwater.) Raising his hands and gazing dreamily down at his outstretched fingers as if he’d never seen them before, he repeated the Tchaikovsky concerto, which the
New York Times,
still using the language of war, described as
a big, percussive attack that dominated the orchestra.
While it’s true that he peppered the first movement with powerfully booming chords whose metronome-like steadiness overwhelmed the romantic warmth of the strings, he was no war machine. His loudest hammer-blows remained somehow bell-like, controlled. Moreover, that opening thunder soon gave way to crystalline arpeggios, each note of which glittered as distinctly as an ice-crystal. Whenever the score permitted, Cliburn showed a still gentler touch, lingering a little, deviating from the first stern sweetness, confident enough to give the orchestra a place in the sun, sometimes following, sometimes leading, like a dancer showing good manners to his partner. Oh, he was always clear; his every note was glass. They applauded in a frenzy. Then he repeated the Rachmaninoff.—Another ovation! For an encore he played his own composition, “Nostalgia.”

And so the time came when Shostakovich had to meet him, at the congratulatory dinner. Come to think of it, he’d already met him twice, first at the opening ceremonies and then when the prize was presented, for, as I may have neglected to tell you, Shostakovich was the Chairman of the Organizing Committee for this First International Tchaikovsky Competition (an appointed position, whose bestowal underlined the Party’s confident expectation that his rehabilitation would never be a source of regret), and so it was actually he who’d been required to stand at the podium, praising Van Cliburn, and he who’d transmitted the medal and the envelope of cash into the boy’s sweaty hand while newsmen’s flashbulbs exploded like antiaircraft rounds. Truth to tell, he was less interested in Cliburn than in the pretty violinist from Volgograd who sat across the table. Something about her lips—well, she wasn’t really that young, but Shostakovich had begun to find that every woman now appeared in his eyes a virgin, plus or minus. He couldn’t believe how girlish the forty-year-olds had started to look. Yesterday he’d been chatting with E. V. Denisov about what made up a real Russian girl’s face: a pleasing prominence of the cheekbones, in youth anyway (or was that just because until just recently Russian children had never gotten enough to eat?); Denisov, less enthralled by this subject, because more concerned about the Central Committee’s new Decree on the Correction of Errors, yawned, opened and closed both pianos, ate a herring and directed their mutual consideration to the poor complexions of many Russian females, but Shostakovich counterattacked by praising those wheat fields of hair blonde or auburn or black, not to mention the dark eyebrows which went so well with pale hands (not very proletarian! laughed Denisov).