Europe Central (122 page)

What he wanted was to get drunk. He wanted to pass out. He dreamed that a skeleton was beckoning to him. LIFE HAS BECOME BITTER, COMRADES. How long can a soul struggle and strain?

He sat there with his expressionless look, which was often, thank God, taken for dazed, and folded in his arms as tightly as he could, sitting motionless on the dais as the musicians played his “Song of the Forests.”

31

Fat and pale, in a heavy dark suit, he smiled over his wine with the other grinning functionaries. Soon, with his discreetest sarcasm, he’d send all his friends congratulatory postcards on the anniversary of the glorious October Revolution. To Glikman he wrote:
Life is far from easy. How I long to summon the aid of the Old Woman so inspiringly invoked
(how Glikman would laugh! how Nina would have snorted! he himself was laughing and sobbing as he deepened the joke; listening to himself, he heard a three-toned keening like an air raid siren)
by the poet in his
Horizon Beyond the Horizon,
published in
(Glikman would split his sides at this next pomposity)
the Party’s Central Organ
Pravda
on 29 April 1960.
Forty-one years later, when Glikman finally published the correspondence of Shostakovich, he added a special footnote to explain, for the benefit of those of us who don’t possess the “Enigma” decoding device, that the Old Woman personified death.
I kiss you warmly,
the letter went on.
Be well and happy.

Upon receipt of this greeting, Glikman, overcome by eeriness, actually made efforts, so I’m told, to visit Elena Konstantinovskaya, who was now the chairwoman of foreign languages at the Leningrad Conservatory, but she repulsed his approaches, remarking: Look, I’m already forty-six years old, and Mitya is what? Fifty-four? It’s too late for both of us. And I’m married. And my daughter would never understand; she hates Mitya! More to the point, since you’ve come to me behind Mitya’s back, he’s obviously not interested. You may think he needs me, but what am I? and her cigarette mysteriously went out. She threw it on the floor, lit another, and went on: I’m not just someone to be
needed;
I, I—now you’ve got me talking like him! So please give Isaak Davidovich my best respects, and there’s no message for Mitya since he sent none to me, and now would you please please, please get out?

Mitya imprisoned his cigarette in a sybaritic clutch. Although his Seventh String Quartet proved as nervously beautiful as his memories of Galina Ustvolskaya gnawing her snow-white knuckles back in 1951, he himself was reverting to earth. Still he sat straight at the piano, his hands flat enough for a parade of toy soldiers to march over, but the use of his limbs grew increasingly painful, the doctors couldn’t say why. He hid from the world in his shabby dacha in Komarovo, out of sight of Moscow, where the reflections of white-limed trees resembled bones on the wet brown streets. When visitors came, he took them on long walks and talked about the weather. Sometimes he sat down on a bench, folded his arms, and glared until they went away. He wanted to, well, I don’t know. Maybe I should ring up Roman Lazarevich for advice. Because he . . . Far away, some little peasant child was droning in a voice as highpitched as a German bomber over Leningrad. It was all very, how should I say, pleasant. But then money worries would draw him out, or he’d get a craving to hear his latest music performed. Addicted to the voices of young sopranos, he could no longer hold himself back from writing textual parts for them to sing. He was now flirting with a quiet married woman named I. A. Supinskaya. Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me. His passion resembled the healthy blonde upleaping of flames in a stoveful of taiga logs, but Irina was so much younger that he had no heart to, you know. As a general rule he loathed the sight of his own round, pale, weary face. How could he inflict himself on anyone? As Lebedinsky kept telling him, You don’t have much luck with women, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that you’ve racked up your share of failures.—Thank you, thank you! he bitterly replied. Fundamentally he was as solitary as a mollusk. But whenever he got summoned to perform, he couldn’t get out of it. That is why we see him nervously sitting in a factory, his arms tightly indrawn as all the babushkas and peasant girls who worked there applauded on command. He needed a woman to, never mind. He was an asset to his country now—no matter that his music had failed to rid itself entirely of undesirable elements. In the Central Committee they put him forward as proof that we could hold our own against the Americans, at least on the cultural front.

When he held her hand for the first time, Irina told him how much his Leningrad Symphony had always inspired her.—He pulled his hand away. He said: Actually, I’m not against your calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under siege. It’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and Hitler only, so to speak, finished off.

Please be careful what you say, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!

Oh, please, oh, please, call me Mitya—

Somebody might be—

That’s exactly what I, so to speak, mean, he replied, with a smile of self-satisfied grief. He knew that he was being very hateful then. At the same time, something was hanging on this moment. Now she understood why they used to call him
the enemy of the people Shostakovich.
If she refrained from snubbing him now, why then . . .

She wore her hair pulled tight back from her forehead into a prudish little bun which he found erotic. She was as earnest as any choir girl—oh, how sweetly they open up their black scores, gazing into the conductor’s eyes just as a certain D. D. Shostakovich’s children used to do when he read them stories! Between her legs his fat old fingers would soon come to life, expressing the most crystalline
glissandos
. She had very intelligent eyebrows which could rise at any untoward word. Sometimes when she looked at him she rested her face upon her delicate fingers. Looking away, he felt the same despairing craving for salvation which had driven him to appeal to Tukhachevsky back in ’36. But this time it was not life, but only order that he longed for. If Irina accepted him, she’d be kind to him. She’d lower him gently into his grave.

He summoned Lebedinsky over to his flat to drink vodka. Frowning down at the piano, tickling the black keys most silently, he invited the guest to speak about women. Lebedinsky laughed and called him a hard case. Time for the caviar! One more little bitty, you know, cucumber, and then a gulp of, of, because, you see, it was very cold today. Lebedinsky didn’t mind; he liked vodka quite well. They say it’s good for you, because . . . Oh, my head! I need more vodka. When he’d swallowed down enough to make his face go pallid, he began to whisper that it was fortunate that Stalin had squashed “Lady Macbeth” so that his perhaps unknowingly ambiguous indictment of repression had never been soiled by a pro-Soviet counterpart.

But you’re so cynical, Mitya! How can you twist yourself around so masochistically like that? It almost makes me sick to hear you—

Don’t worry; don’t worry. It’s, so to speak,
irrelevant
when the earthworm twists on the hook. And you know what? I don’t care about myself anymore.

What do you mean, you don’t care?

I’d sign anything even if they shoved it at me upside down. All I want is to be left alone . . .

He switched on the radio, and Comrade Khruschev was demanding to know: Plainly speaking, why do the United States of America, France and the United Kingdom need West Berlin? They need it as a dog needs a fifth leg. By the way, no one encroaches on West Berlin.

Just then the telephone rang. He began to shake; he didn’t want to answer it, but Lebedinsky was looking at him, so he pretended to be brave; and it turned out to be nobody worse than our esteemed Comrade Karmen, who had just won a Lenin Prize for his two gripping films about Caspian oil workers, and was now, I don’t
believe
this, ringing him up to advise: Perhaps you should join the Party, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. Let us help you! You know, I’ve been a member ever since ’36, and it’s definitely smoothed my way. It makes me very sorry to see all your needless struggles . . .

Thank you so much for your suggestion, my dear,
dear
Roman Lazarevich! Perhaps after my next, you know, symphony . . .

Buttering another slice of thick black bread, Lebedinsky chuckled, not so loudly that the big black telephone could hear: That’s the way, Mitya! Keep stalling the sonsofbitches until you’re dead!

My
various needless struggles,
he says. And when I think of him, you know, running his hands over Elena . . . Congratulations on your, so to speak, your fine work, Roman Lazarevich! A Lenin Prize, just imagine! I’m extremely . . .

You can count on me to put in a good word for you with the Party.

Roman Lazarevich, that’s very . . . I’ll never forget your kind wishes.

Thank God I got ride of that sonofabitch, not that I believe in God, nor should I completely shut Roman Lazarevich out (Lebedinsky refuses to understand this), because
he was there,
and for once I don’t mean with her, not at all; I mean Leningrad, oh, yes, my friends, when we . . . ha, ha! That snow and still more snow and corpses frozen to the sidewalk and Maxim begging me for food, but
we
didn’t have to go through
anything,
thanks to the wonders of my, of my so-called “symphony.” The ones we left behind covered up their faces and then they . . . fortunately,
dear
Roman Lazarevich recorded that winter for me, so I can feel guilty forever! Galisha’s still not the way she, I mean, a sustained scream, perhaps in the key of B-flat, is what I should, you know. In Opus 110. Those ice-white windows, and then the, the, but those sleds were the worst. With the little dead children on them. And Maxim, I’ve got to do something for Maxim. I wonder how he’s, anyhow, it’s a mercy he gets on better with Irina than he did with Margarita. She’s so good to me! As for Galisha, now that she’s married I can’t, why complete that thought? I need to . . . What’s that sound? Something under the piano. It must be a (Lebedinsky will like this!), a rat from my Rat Theme.

Lebedinsky had to go soon after that because, well, you know. But Shostakovich didn’t want to be alone! Irina was with her husband, so Nikolayeva was with
him,
sitting beneath Akhmatova’s portrait. They no longer held hands. Well, it was for the best, because she had a somewhat, how should I say,
cowlike
appearance; this thought made him crumple up his grey face in a crackle of laughter, not that he could tell Glikman, who . . . He adored her; she was very . . . I have my own ideas about Russian women.

Comrade Khruschev was on the radio again. He said to her: Listen to that bully. He denies it now, but of course he was cutting throats right next to Comrade Stalin . . .

Hush, Mitenka! Are you out of your mind? Why, somebody could be—

You’re right, of course. I mean, you and I are both very well taken care of. But his voice, you know, Shostakovich droned on, well, it’s gone
flat,
just like mine. Even Comrade Khruschev needs a rest! Tatiana, my little angel, do you remember much about the brass instruments? You see, at the Leningrad Conservatory I learned from Glazunov himself that there are two kinds—

Live bells and dead bells, put in Nikolayeva, who could not bear to have anyone think her stupid.

Exactly. And a live bell—correct me if I’m mistaken, dear girl—well, the heaviness and the temper of its metal give it a, well, which is to say, a
ringing
tone. I still have a great deal of music to write, but I’m the merest dead bell now, like Nikita Sergeevich there on the radio. Everything I used to compose—

You’re drinking too much, Mitya.

No, no, no, it’s just to warm me up. Dear girl, please why don’t you . . . ? Well, dead bells, you know, they’re made of
soft
metal. The dark tones they’re capable of, like, like, well, as if somebody were playing a trombone in a catacomb—

The preludes and fugues you wrote for me weren’t at all like that, said Nikolayeva earnestly. They make me
happy.
I intend to perform them all my life . . .

There may be a few good notes in those, yes, yes, yes, my dear, said the old man with some satisfaction. And I’m not saying there won’t be more. The
allegro molto
in the, you know, the D-flat major fugue is rather—well, you know it, and I’m sorry it didn’t quite . . .

So even that doesn’t make you happy? What about your Seventh Symphony? At least it rallied people. Once you told me how alive you felt then; you said you gave it your all—

Didn’t you learn in school, he demanded in a hateful voice, that Ivan the Terrible, having coaxed his architect into, so to speak, putting the very best of himself into building Polrovsky Cathedral, afterwards
put out his eyes
? Anyway, things are so much easier in our century. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL! Although Meyerhold’s wife, you see, they cut her eyes out, too, as I recall. With a—ha,
ha
! That was extremely . . . She must have been a real anti-Soviet element, don’t you think? Nowadays we’re more enlightened. An extremely beautiful woman, by the way, although she might have been slightly, so to speak, plump, in our Russian fashion. Not that I mean any . . . Well, once I’m blinded and gelded and all the rest, then I . . . Do have a little more vodka, Tatianochka. It keeps, you know, it keeps out the
chill.

In June he somehow found himself in company with some unknown persons who wore tall shiny boots. They were very friendly and came right into his home so he had to give them vodka. One of them, whom he seemed to have met before, was named Comrade Alexandrov, and he persisted in hoping that on account of this prior acquaintanceship, which he couldn’t quite recollect, they’d go easy on him, that the finale would end on a, so to speak, major key, since by the law of averages he ought to succeed in avoiding further misfortunes, although that notion might simply prove to be (how should I put this?) stupidity on his part. Now the vodka was all gone, but they must have brought vodka of their own, as it seemed, because they kept filling his glass.