Europe Central (32 page)

24

In August, the leaflets raining out of enemy airplanes advised women to wear white so that they’d be recognized as noncombatants. In spite of our loudspeakers, some of them believed. Their white dresses as they shoveled in the brown antitank trenches made them perfect targets. But then, so did the any-colored dresses of the housewives, who got blown to bits while they waited in bread queues. Fortunately, his wife had paid attention when he’d warned her: Ninotchka, their promises may be new, but their tricks are old. They’re Fascists!—And Nina, wearing earth-brown, got passed over, although she came creeping home that night with her face spattered with other women’s blood. History repeats itself. For instance, Comrade Stalin promised me the moon, but right after that he kicked me, metaphorically, you know, on my ass! Wasn’t that a joke? And just when Elena finally felt ready to marry me, Nina announced she was pregnant, when actually . . . That was
her
joke. So that’s how it is. Life calls for the highest order of deafness; then we can be, so to speak, happy. It’s actually almost more than I can take. Why wasn’t I, you know, born deaf? From his rooftop post, Shostakovich could hear the strafing and the screaming, with our loudspeakers trying to shout it out. Crash and crash! The linden trees on Nevsky Prospect were falling. The screaming was new to his experience. Back in peacetime, when he and Nina had sat at home in terror, waiting for the knock on the door, they’d heard the shots across the city, but the screaming had been muffled under stone. It was now that he began to entertain the thought that a ringing shriek was at least more free than murder overmastered by silence. His music, how should I say, developed accordingly.

The Seventh’s opening movement, which some believe shows indebtedness to Sibelius, does not scream at first. Major-keyed, yet “dramatic,” it resembles a sunny forest dappled with bass motifs. It doesn’t develop a theme as much as gambol in one. All in all, it’s a pleasant, vegetative sort of melody, eminently forgettable. As he explained in a cabled dispatch to
New Masses
: The first part of the symphony tells of the happy, joyful life of a people confident in themselves and in their future. Elena, you’re so lucky that you didn’t marry me. It is a simple life, such as was enjoyed by thousands of Leningrad’s Popular Guards . . .—Glikman wrote this for him, and he signed it.
LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.
(Glikman was extremely useful.) It broke his heart to remember the Leningrad days when Sollertinsky used to ask him what he wanted to be, how he wanted his music to turn out. Because at that time he had, you see, aspirations. Well, well. (Sollertinsky had just been evacuated to Novosibirsk.) Even Stalin likes art; he enjoys choral singing. And I, I . . . He contemplated what it meant to be walled in. Elena once whispered in his ear how it had been to be forced into a suffocating little compartment in the back of a Black Maria, with nothing for company but the groans of unseen fellow sufferers, each crouching in a dark and airless room. And then someone would vomit, she said, and it had already been so difficult to breathe. No one knew where the Black Maria was going, whether to another transit prison or to a pit in the forest. He clasped her in his arms and his mouth trembled; he longed to scream. Now he intended to make his symphony scream, because it may be true, even though Nina wouldn’t believe it (let it be true!), that through music one can denounce evil and thereby, so to speak, accomplish something; naturally many people will disagree with me on this point, but the Party’s with me. And so he’d compel brass to howl defiance, woodwinds to sob in despair. Why not? Nothing couldn’t be turned into music! For instance, the sirens of the Stuka divebombers illustrated the concept of
portamento,
which, as we know, is the glide from one note to another on a woodwind . . . Late at night came the high-pitched insect-songs of approaching bombers, then antiaircraft guns roaring until the apartment trembled, and finally the bombs themselves whistling and exploding, the sounds of breaking glass, the screams, oh, God, Galya and Maxim screaming in Nina’s arms.

But now Nina was on civil defense duty. His mother was taking care of the children. He wrote seven or eight arrangements for frontline concerts . . .

25

He volunteered for the People’s Militia. When Nina heard, she screamed.

26

Gazing in bemusement upon those round spectacles, that pale, schoolboy face encircled by dark hair, the tiny, slightly effeminate mouth, our Party activists understood quite well that if they sent him to the front, he’d be dead in a week. Had he been anybody else, any other corpse, they wouldn’t have cared. But even then there was talk of his Seventh Symphony. Capitalist intellectuals liked him. We needed the capitalists now. We needed them to open up the second front.

Don’t waste time, they said to him. What is it that you want?

I, I, well, only by fighting can we save humanity from destruction . . .

Look at him! He even believed it!

Just as so many “politicals” sentenced under Article 58 were now being let out of Arctic prison camps in order to fight German Fascism, so Shostakovich found his previous artistic mistakes glossed over. They politely told him: You will be called to the front when you’re required.

Naturally he had to utter a speech expressing gratitude for the forgiveness of his myriad errors. Indeed he did, cocking his head with a curiously mechanical motion. (An unholy light over the Gostinyy Dvor resolved into new corpses and a wall of smoke.) No formalism ever again, he promised. He assured everyone: There can be no music without ideology, comrades! Music is no longer an end in itself, but, how should I say, a vital weapon in the struggle. And I myself, having overcome my, you know, anti-people tendencies . . .

Having convinced himself that these words were but the tongue-tip’s articulation of lung-pressure in a wind instrument (
fluttertongue,
they call it), he gave his performance,
allegro,
and afterward tried to forget about it. Nina was kind or tired enough not to ask him anything. They weren’t at all hard on him. They had far more important things to do than crush a certain D. D. Shostakovich—

They called him. At first he dug antitank ditches, just as Heidegger would soon be doing in Germany. He was in the Conservatory shovel-brigade. Sometimes he worked in the same trench as the director of the Hermitage. Strung on wires like decapitated heads, the loudspeakers shouted out every clause of the Stalin Constitution. If Gogol were only alive to satirize
that
! Then the experience would certainly be more, you know. I’m not very heartened. In fact, all this is really, oh, well. Watching his fellow musicians roll up the sleeves and trousers of their suits (the only working clothes they had), then commence with great sweat and impracticality to move dirt, he thought to himself: If they hadn’t shot Tukhachevsky, this would have been done earlier, not to mention more, so to speak, professionally. We ourselves are not professionals. This is absurd.—Trying sincerely (he really did want to do something), he dug as frantically as the others, his wide grey face locked up in smiles. Finally the Party assigned him to a rooftop fire brigade . . .

A portrait by Sovfoto displays him on the Conservatory roof, dressed in the pale slicker of a fire fighter, his hands mittened in the same shiny material, a double-belted sash around his waist, a shoulder-strap emerging from beneath his collar. Beneath the pale and shiny hat his delicate face half-gazes at us through the round spectacles. The roof has a strangely confused appearance, like the set of a surrealistic ballet. From the roof of the Conservatory he surveys the domes of Saint Nicholas, which were once pale and rare in their gildedness, and are now grey like every muddy day. By then our Alpinists had also ascended the Admiralty Tower and camouflaged it with grey paint. He’d asked Nina where she thought they’d stop. Would they grey down our piano keys next? It certainly seems as if they’re getting, you know, carried away. And here comes another German shell; oh, me, oh, my, they’re playing their
études
. . .

Between air raids he sat working on his score. On other roofs he could see the antiaircraft guns vertical like contrebassoons. Leningrad’s streets were now mostly as empty as the music paper on which his notes, conjoining into chords or beats, resembled insects scuttering over the wire. Sometimes these dying bugs possessed but one leg to which a head, a thorax and an abdomen yet clung; sometimes blank stretches of wire emblematized perfect lethality; often he made evil, manyheaded bugs with bristling legs
(poco animato).
His few friends not yet rendered hostile or absent congratulated him on the important work with which he’d been entrusted. Lowering his head, he replied with his parody of a smile: I, I, I want to write about our time.—Their praise only agitated him all the more, because he’d kept finding out that he was mistaken about people; he’d thought that this friend or that mistress could be trusted, only to learn that nobody was good; he couldn’t rely on anyone except perhaps for Glikman, Sollertinsky, who was far away and who’d soon die in an accident), Lebedinsky, Elena Konstantinovskaya, who liked to be called Lyalya and whom it was best not to see anymore, because . . .

One day, three well-fed NKVD men in tall shiny boots came to his rooftop to visit. That was fine; he had nothing to do right then but gaze through borrowed field glasses at the approaching bombers. In the streets below he could see people preparing pillboxes in the manholes and corner buildings. It was time for the daily scherzo; the loudspeakers, which were our final defense within the walls of concrete and steel, began to shout out orders to take cover. But the men in raspberry-colored boots didn’t seem at all anxious, for which he admired them. They questioned him about this prospective symphony of his. Where did he keep the score? He told them that it remained in his head, if one didn’t count these scribblings in his pocket, and they threatened him with punishment, at which he almost laughed; they were so, so, well. To be sure, he could increase the tempo of his . . . And now below them the round-faced factory girls with handkerchiefs tied around their heads were running past Lenin’s statue, which they really should have done ninety seconds ago, and the antiaircraft guns began to fire, and one of our boxy-angled tanks, which had been proudly lettered
DEATH TO THE GERMAN INVADERS,
attempted to upraise its guns in a Hitler salute, but just then the planes were overhead, bombs whistled down, and that tank exploded. Brown smoke! How should I represent
that
musically? That’s what these bastards want. I’ll just write them a happy, you know, crossword puzzle.—They didn’t act afraid, so neither did he. The planes flew away; from the direction they turned he couldn’t tell if they were going back to Siverskaya or Gatchina, which now were properties of Hitler the Liberator; he would have made small talk about that to the NKVD men, but it never did one any good to make conversation with them and anyhow they started threatening him again, or at least two of them did, and probably they weren’t even threatening, just trying to milk more music out of him in their professional way; meanwhile the third leaned over the roof-edge and spat. People were coming out of their holes now. How many dead? Usually he tried to count, but right now he was, well, distracted. Even when they reminded him that he was a former enemy of the people, he didn’t care, at least not then; every night he faced the same nightmare—a long line of helmeted Germans crawled toward him through a slit they’d made in the earth—so how could he fear
these
idiots? (But that night he told Nina that he’d been visited, and she trembled.) They “invited” him to play for them downstairs on one of the Conservatory pianos, the implication being that if he hadn’t composed his quota of chords, he could expect the front line, prison or the nearest wall. Well, well; even in his student days he’d never failed an impromptu examination, so to hell with them. They went downstairs, past the broken window which looked out on a half-destroyed wall where a poster said:
DEATH TO THE CHILD-KILLERS!
They made him go first. Why not? He knew these stairs better than they. Now which piano should he . . . ? Not that one; that was the one on which he’d played Opus 40 for Elena. He’d rather . . . They lit their cigarettes and sat there yawning while he played the first five hundred measures of his Seventh Symphony. Interrupting him, they demanded to know: Was there any residual formalism in it?

Shostakovich swore that he no longer committed that error.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, can you put in a little more self-sacrifice? And maybe—

Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll do what I can, the composer murmured wearily.

And heroism? Listen up! We want to get the message across that anyone can be a hero.

I really love, so to speak, heroism. I’m going to squeeze some in this very instant.

(Far away, our Black Sea fleet was firing. Glikman’s brother Salomon had just been killed. Nearer at hand, Field-Marshal Ritter von Leeb sounded the timpani. Across the street, a stinking, shadow-cheeked man clutched his handful of bread. He was there every day. If only he could write
him
into his symphony. He’d find a way.)

I was saying, maybe more optimism.

Well, it would seem that—

We don’t believe you’ve taken note of how optimistic Leningraders are. After all, thousands starved here during the Civil War, but that didn’t keep Leningrad down!

You don’t remember that, do you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? You were too protected by your
privileged
background.

Please excuse me, but in fact I, well, my grandfather—

We know all about that grandfather of yours. You’re lucky he’s dead.

For example, if you rewrote a few measures in a major key . . .

I understand, said Shostakovich with a coiled smile. That would certainly improve it immeasurably, although perhaps in this case—