Europe Central (149 page)

What about Elena Konstantinovskaya? She remains an enigma to me. But I certainly love her as much as I can love someone I never knew. I had various reasons for making my version of her to be capable of love for both men and women. One motive was to make her as infinitely lovable as I could. As I’ve written in this book, “above all Europa is Elena.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my father for our three days in Berlin and Dresden during July 2001. “The Last Field-Marshal,” “Opus 110” and “Woman with Dead Child” were the principal beneficiaries. It was wonderful to see both my parents in Berlin in 2003, when I got to take a few more notes.

The American Academy in Berlin very kindly made me writer-in-residence for September 2003, a highly fortuitous, almost voluptuous circumstance which benefited almost all the German stories. The person who made this happen was George Plimpton of the
Paris Review.
Mr. Plimpton died before I returned home from Germany; I wish I had been able to thank him at greater length. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the Academy for their friendship. In particular, the eth-nomusicologist Philip Bohlman, professor of music and Jewish studies at the University of Chicago, who was a fellow at the American Academy, helped me considerably, both in translating certain musical terms from East German critical essays on Shostakovich and in answering several of my questions about motif and
leitmotiv
in music. Juliane Reitzig, an intern at the Academy, answered some questions about growing up in the DDR.

Although I paid her well, and I am usually too sour to acknowledge people I pay, the more I think about the help she gave this book, the more grateful I am to Fr. Yolande Korb at the Academy. This research assistant and interpreter beyond dreams took me to Ullstein Bilderdienst and to several other places, got me whatever library books I wanted, etcetera. She was also very patient with my stumbling confusion (I was on narcotic painkillers the entire time she knew me, thanks to a broken pelvis).

The photographic archives of Ullstein Bilderdienst in Berlin proved to be as rich as the Nibelungen hoard. I hereby express my gratitude to that establishment, without which I would never have seen quite so many images of the Condor Legion, Operation Zitadelle, Hilde Benjamin, Fredrich Paulus, Kurt Gerstein, and various German tanks; nor certainly would I have known such splendors as the eyelashes of Lisca Malbran.

Dr. Gudrun Fritsch, curator at the Käthe-Kollwitz-Museum in Berlin, put up with my poor spoken German and gave me useful references and advice for “Woman with Dead Child.”

Mr. Thomas Melle, also of Berlin, very kindly and exactly corrected quite a number of mis-Germanisms, mainly of syntax but once or twice of personality as well. He also gathered a heavy load of books about Hilde Benjamin for me when I couldn’t carry much myself, thanks to a broken pelvis. I am extremely grateful to him.

I appreciate the last-minute help of Nina Bouis; whose advice about
vruchka
versus
ruchka
I ultimately followed.

(Now that I have written the previous paragraph, I hereby double and triple it, for Thomas has since read the entire manuscript, patiently saving me from many more of my multifarious ignorances. Thank you so much, my friend.)

Chris Chang of
Film Comment
magazine in New York was very helpful with Roman Karmen contacts and references. He also caught two inconsistencies in my draft of “The White Nights of Leningrad.” Among other favors, he introduced me to University of Chicago film expert Yuri Tsivian, who gave me his views on the professional accomplishments of Roman Karmen, and I have accordingly quoted this verbatim in “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.”

Mr. Heinz Riedel Lehmann of Berlin told me some interesting stories about Paulus in his Soviet captivity; bits of these found their way into this book. In Berkeley, Kara Platoni, whom I hired to do some research on Elena Konstantinovskaya, was very efficient and nice; through her I certainly ought to thank Alan Mercer, editor of the
DSCH Journal.

Jean Stein was her usual altruistic self with books and introductions.

David M. Golden was extremely generous with his books, his knowledge about Judaism and the Holocaust, and his time. He even found me three excellent German translators, who were all a pleasure to work with and whom I’d like to thank here: Pastor Andreas Pielhoop, Elsmarie Hau and Tracey Bigelow, the last of whom put me in contact with Sergi Mineyev, whose rapid translation from the Russian of some selections in Khentova’s biography of Shostakovich saved me much worry and strain.

Meagan Atiyeh said nice things about the stories and encouraged me to keep working on them. I have the happiest memories of our time together. When she praised the stories, that meant the world to me. She kept me company in several European venues. I wish I could better express how kind and calm and steady she was, how pleasant it was for me to rush off another story to her, to share with her my latest Stalinist verbal tic, to search with her for old German newspapers or new Russian books. She will always be special to me.

Mandy Aftel, Jenny Ankeny, Amel Boussoualim, Moira Brown, Kate Danaher, Jake Dickinson, Takako Kawai, Paula Keyth, Mayumi Kobana, Mechelle Lee, William Linne, Larry McCafferey, Shannon Mullen, Lori Nelson, Ben Pax, Terrie Petree, Vanessa Renwick, Tom Robinson, Deborah Triesman and Becky Wilson were very supportive, both to this book and to me, during a difficult time.

I would like to thank Paul Slovak, Susan Golomb, Amira Pierce, Kim Goldstein and Sabine Hrechdakian for their work on
Europe Central
. And I am very lucky that Carla Bolte is the designer for this book. This fine, gentle, intelligent woman has also been a patient friend and confidante for a number of years. Carla, thank you so much for caring about me.

Lizzy Kate Gray expertly advised me on some matters of musical terminology and instrumentation connected with the Shostakovich stories. I will always be grateful to her for the times we listened together to the selections I was studying of the Seventh, the Eighth, the Fourteenth, Opus 110 and the Preludes and Fugues. Her father Gary and I had a nice chat about the pitch of World War II airplanes.

1

If this organism does in fact reside in Moscow, then I presume that the cranial casing partakes of Soviet duralumin—an excellent variety, called
kol’chugaliuminii,
which was developed by Iu. G. Muzalevskii and S. M. Voronov.

2

Exegesis easily uncovers other ironies: The purple-cloaked priest, it is written, was as exasperated as his victims, because this marriage prevented him from renting the extra room of Lenin’s house which the bride and her mother would now occupy. (Had she remained unmarried, Krupskaya would have been remanded to the locality of Ufa.) And perhaps he scented the godlessness of the convict spouses. What must he have made of Krupskaya’s abashedness, Lenin’s sarcastic smiles? How might he have proceeded, had he understood that this church of his, by sealing the union of these two helpmeets, was hastening its own destruction, and his?

3

Upon his own escape from Siberia to England in 1902, Trotsky had likewise found them working in separate quarters. “Nadyezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya . . . was at the very centre of all the organization work,” he writes in his memoirs. “In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read.”

4

Blind faith, one might say. In Siberia she went literally and mysteriously blind for three years, but upon her blindness was engraved the secret alphabet of her cause. Under the influence of the terrorist Spiridovna, she swore to be patient, and someday to execute justice. And then, as if by magic, the world revealed itself once more to her sight.

5

Arguably Fanya Kaplan had, as exegetes like to say, “wrought better than she knew,” since the bullet remaining in Volodya’s neck proved to be a time bomb. Nearly three years later, the doctors finally decided to remove it, and although the operation was a success, scarcely two days later he suffered the first of the cerebral hemorrhages which were to carry him off.

6

Job 3:25.

7

Proverbs 16:33.

8

Literally, SHEKHINAH, the female aspect of Jehovah.

9

R. H. McNeal in his drily reliable
Bride of the Revolution
goes so far as to write that
very likely Krupskaya lived out her life in the consoling belief that Fanya Kaplan was alive in jail.

10

In the last photographs taken before her widowhood one already finds a dourly
absent
expression upon her heavyset features, even when everyone else is smiling.

11

In 1924 our fellow traveler Otto Nagel had opened the first German arts exhibition in the Soviet Union. Käthe Kollwitz was represented. No one came out against her.

12

Surprisingly, as late as 1939 they’ll allow her a tiny entry in
Meyers Lexikon:
She was born; she received a German education; she’s been a wife since 1891.
Her expressive pages are not free from the class-battle standpoint used for Communist propaganda.
That knock on the door, when will it come? When it does, three years after her enforced resignation from the Prussian Academy, the Gestapo command her to disavow certain pro-Russian statements she’s made in an interview with
Isvestiya.
She submits. Afterward, she’ll make halfhearted plans with Karl to have poison ready. Karl, his practice already banned, will die of old age just as the sleepwalker’s tanks glide into Paris. On 23.10.43, the family flat will be destroyed by American bombers. Käthe will die in Saxony, shortly after the firebombing of Dresden. I quote from one of her very last letters:
Oh, Lise, being dead must be good, but I am much too much afraid of dying, of being terribly afraid at the moment of death.

13

In fact, she is said to have resembled Tsvetaeva, especially around the mouth, although her long, dark hair, which she so often wore in bangs reaching nearly to the eyebrow, also reminded some people of that doomed poet.

14

Even Käthe Kollwitz herself copied out in her daybook Nietzsche’s letter to his sister rhapsodizing over Wagner’s “Parsifal.”

15

The so-called “D-S-C-H signature,” which will be discussed later, in my analysis of Opus 110, is by this simple criterion akin to a motif: in other words, it’s not relevant to the people. Accordingly, any references to an “E-E-K signature” must be contemptuously dismissed as anti-Soviet provocation. As we like to say, it’s
no accident
that even in Moser’s
Musik Lexikon,
published in the very first year of the Thousand Year Reich, Shostakovich gets passed over.
Sousa
and
Serbian music
are present; they’ll soon be considered enemies. Under
Russische Musik,
Shostakovich’s teacher Glazunov receives a nod on page 721, and below him a
Gruppe Glasunow
sits reverentially assembled. Glazunov, you see, was a classicist; Shostakovich is a formalist. Even the German Fascists know poison when they see it.

16

Americans.

17

In old days, kings gilded the horns of their favorite cows, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if that gold bracelet she wore was from Uncle Wolf.

18

I quote from his diary:
If I myself don’t understand anything in art, what then do I understand? The “living” person and that’s all. Keep shooting live people; they get in people’s way, in the proletariat’s way. Keep shooting.

19

In the interests of justice I’m compelled to remind you of her dismissive cruelty to Nedobrovo’s wife, whom she despised for her ignorance of poetry—at least she found the husband to her taste. In the end she left the husband—she abandoned everybody!

20

It wasn’t until 1945, on the day after that foreign snake Isaiah Berlin departed, that we screwed a microphone into her ceiling. We made it visible on purpose; that saved us trouble. Next time he came to our country, she wisely refused to meet him.

21

The title of the American film says it all: “Thousands Cheer.”

22

As the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
explains: “The Communist Party and the Soviet government foresaw the possibility of an armed struggle with the forces of imperialism, and, in the years of peaceful socialist development, adopted all the necessary measures to strengthen the country’s defensive abilities.”

23

It is perhaps this part which most influenced Martinov’s characterization of the third movement as a “Toccata of Death.”

24

One critic has even read into this symphony a two-note “Stalin motif” which first appears in bars four and five.

25

Simonov, whose testimony is unreliable since he seems to have also been in love with her, remembers seeing her going into the Palace Hotel in Madrid, now converted to an orphanage, and always bringing something for the children. On 24 October 1936, when the first Soviet tanks went into combat in the vicinity of Aranjuez, Elena was there in the midst of a detachment of Komsomol volunteers. Karmen saw her and was captivated. He believed her to be as attracted as he was to the Spanish carelessness for death. I’m informed that her Komsomol training stood her in good stead; the TASS journalist Mirova, who unfortunately
disappeared
on her return to Moscow in 1937, is said to have been drawn to her and often expressed admiration (although not to Karmen, who instinctively kept his distance from this individual as he did from the equally unlucky Koltzov of
Pravda
)
.
However, what Mirova read in Konstantinovskaya as cool effectiveness, and Koltzov as a secret rage, Ehrenburg of
Izvestiya,
one of the few journalists to survive the purges, considered to be a calculated determination to get back in the Party’s good graces so that her spell of imprisonment in 1935 would not haunt her anymore. In his private letters, Ehrenburg writes about her with a venom akin to a rejected suitor’s. In any event, Konstantinovskaya fought bravely, winning her Order of the Red Star in the useless Brunete counteroffensive of July 1937.