The Noise of Time (2 page)

What did a name matter? He had been born in St Petersburg, started growing up in Petrograd, finished growing up in Leningrad. Or St Leninsburg, as he sometimes liked to call it. What did a name matter?

He was thirty-one. His wife Nita lay a few yards away with their daughter, Galina, at her side. Galya was a year old. Recently, his life had appeared to acquire stability. He had never found that side of things straightforward. He felt powerful emotions but had never become skilled at expressing them. Even at a football match he rarely yelled and lost control of himself like everyone else; he was content with the quiet annotation of a player’s skill, or lack of it. Some thought this the typical buttoned-up formality of a Leningrader; but on top of that – or underneath it – he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair. It was as if he was always on the wrong metronome setting.

Still, even so, his life had finally acquired some regularity, and with it the correct beat. Except that now it had all become unstable again. Unstable: that was more than a euphemism.

The overnight case resting against his calf reminded him of the time he had tried to run away from home. How old had he been? Seven or eight, perhaps. And did he have a little suitcase with him? Probably not – his mother’s exasperation would have been too immediate. It was one summer at Irinovka, where his father worked as general manager. Jurgensen was the estate’s handyman. Who made things and mended things, who solved problems in the way a child could understand. Who never instructed him to do anything, just let him watch as a piece of wood turned into a dagger or a whistle. Who handed him a piece of fresh-cut peat and allowed him to sniff it.

He had become very attached to Jurgensen. So when things displeased him, as they frequently did, he would say, ‘Very well then, I’ll go and live with Jurgensen.’ One morning, still in bed, he had made this threat, or promise, for the first time that day. But once was already enough for his mother. Get dressed and I’ll take you there, she had replied. He took up her challenge – no, there had been no time to pack – Sofya Vasilyevna had taken him firmly by the wrist, and they had started walking across the field to where Jurgensen lived. At first he had been bold in his threat, swaggering along beside his mother. But gradually his heels dragged, and his wrist, then hand, began to slip from his mother’s grasp. He thought at the time it was he who was pulling away, but now acknowledged that his mother had been letting him go, finger by finger, until he was free. Not free to live with Jurgensen, but free to turn tail, burst into tears, and run home.

Hands, slipping hands, grabbing hands. As a child, he had feared the dead – feared that they would rise from their graves and seize hold of him, dragging him back into the cold, black earth, his mouth and eyes filling with soil. This fear had slowly disappeared, because the hands of the living had turned out to be more frightening. The prostitutes of Petrograd had been no respecters of his youth and innocence. The harder the times, the grabbier the hands. Stretching out to seize your cock, your bread, your friends, your family, your livelihood, your existence. As well as prostitutes, he had been afraid of janitors. Also of policemen, whatever names they chose to call themselves by.

But then there was the opposite fear: of slipping from hands that kept you safe.

Marshal Tukhachevsky had kept him safe. For many years. Until the day he had watched the sweat march down from the Marshal’s hairline. A large white handkerchief had fluttered and dabbed, and he knew he wasn’t safe any more.

The Marshal was the most sophisticated man he had ever encountered. He was Russia’s most famous military strategist: newspapers called him ‘The Red Napoleon’. Also a music lover and amateur violin maker; a man of open, questioning mind, who enjoyed discussing novels. In the decade he had known Tukhachevsky, he had often seen him sweeping through Moscow and Leningrad after dark in his Marshal’s uniform, half at work, half at play, mixing politics with pleasure; talking and arguing, eating and drinking, keen to show that he had an eye for a ballerina. He liked to explain how the French had once taught him the secret of drinking champagne without ever getting a hangover.

He himself would never be as worldly. He lacked the self-confidence; also, perhaps, the interest. He didn’t like complicated food, and had a light head for drink. Back when he was a student, when everything was being rethought and remade, before the Party took full control, he had, like most students, claimed a sophistication beyond what he knew. For instance, the question of sex had to be rethought, now that the old ways were gone for ever; and someone had come up with the ‘glass of water’ theory. The act of sex, young know-alls maintained, was just like drinking a glass of water: when you were thirsty, you drank, and when you felt desire, you had sex. He had not been against this system, though it did depend on women being as freely desirous as they were desired. Some were, some weren’t. But the analogy only took you so far. A glass of water did not engage the heart.

And besides, Tanya had already come into his life by then.

When he used to announce his regular intention of going to live with Jurgensen, his parents probably assumed he was chafing at the restrictions of family – even of childhood itself. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t so sure. There had been something odd – something deeply wrong – about that summer house of theirs on the estate at Irinovka. Like any child, he assumed things were normal until told otherwise. So it was only when he heard the grown-ups discussing it, and laughing, that he realised how everything about the house was out of proportion. The rooms were enormous, but the windows very small. So a room of fifty square metres might have just one tiny window. The grown-ups thought the builders must have muddled their measurements, substituting metres for centimetres, and vice versa. But the effect, once you noticed it, was alarming to a boy. It was like a house prepared for the darkest of dreams. Maybe that was what he’d been running away from.

They always came for you in the middle of the night. And so, rather than be dragged from the apartment in his pyjamas, or forced to dress in front of some contemptuously impassive NKVD man, he would go to bed fully clothed, lying on top of the blankets, a small case already packed on the floor beside him. He barely slept, and lay there imagining the worst things a man could imagine. His restlessness in turn prevented Nita from sleeping. Each would lie there, pretending; also, pretending not to hear and smell the other’s terror. One of his persistent waking nightmares was that the NKVD would seize Galya and pack her off – if she was lucky – to a special orphanage for children of enemies of the state. Where she would be given a new name and a new character; where she would be turned into a model Soviet citizen, a little sunflower lifting her face towards the great sun that called itself Stalin. He had therefore proposed that he spend those inevitably sleepless hours out on the landing by the lift. Nita was adamant that she wanted them to spend what might prove their last night together side by side. But this was a rare argument he won.

On his first night by the lift, he had decided not to smoke. There were three packs of Kazbeki in his case, and he would need them when it came to his interrogation. And, if it followed, his detention. He held to this resolve through the first two nights. And then it struck him: what if they confiscated his cigarettes as soon as he reached the Big House? Or what if there was no interrogation, or only the briefest of ones? Perhaps they would merely put a sheet of paper in front of him and order him to sign. What if … His mind went no further. But in any of these cases, his cigarettes would have been wasted.

And so he couldn’t think of a reason not to smoke.

And so he smoked.

He looked at the Kazbek between his fingers. Malko had once commented in a sympathetic, indeed admiring, way that his hands were small and ‘non-pianistic’. Malko had also told him, less admiringly, that he didn’t practise enough. It depended what you meant by ‘enough’. He practised as much as he needed to. Malko should stick to his score and his baton.

He had been sixteen, at a sanatorium in the Crimea, recovering from tuberculosis. Tanya and he were the same age, and shared exactly the same birth date, with one small difference: he was born on the 25th of September New Style, she on the 25th of September Old Style. Such virtual synchronicity endorsed their relationship; or, to put it another way, they were made for one another. Tatyana Glivenko, with her short-cropped hair, as eager for life as he was. It was first love, in all its apparent simplicity, and in all its destiny. His sister Marusya, who was chaperoning him, had blabbed to their mother. By return of post Sofya Vasilyevna warned her son against this unknown girl, against this relationship – indeed, any relationship. In reply, with all the pomposity of a sixteen-year-old, he had explained to his mother the principles of Free Love. How all must be free to love as they wished; how carnal love lasted but a short time; how the sexes were entirely equal; how marriage ought to be abolished as an institution, but that if it continued in practice, the woman had the full right to an affair if she so desired, and if she then wanted a divorce, the man must accept it and take the blame; but how, in all of this, and despite everything, the children were sacred.

His mother had not replied to his condescending and sanctimonious explanation of life. And in any case, he and Tanya were to part almost as soon as they had met. She returned to Moscow; he and Marusya to Petrograd. But he wrote to her constantly; they visited one another; and he dedicated his first piano trio to her. His mother continued not to approve. And then, three years later, they finally spent those weeks together in the Caucasus. They were each nineteen and unaccompanied; and he had just made three hundred roubles playing concerts in Kharkov. Those weeks in Anapa together … how long ago they felt. Well, how long ago they were – more than a third of his life away.

And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of
Pravda
. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.

Except that – as his mind obstinately argued back – nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra.

If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written
Macbeth
. Or Leskov for Russifying it into
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera’s fault for being such a success – at home and abroad – it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin’s fault because he would have inspired and approved the
Pravda
editorial – perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin’s fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of
Boris Godunov
at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on
Prince Igor
and Rimsky-Korsakov’s
Sadko
. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera,
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
?

And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion.

He remembered looking across from the director’s box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr’acte before Katerina’s wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them – loud enough to knock out window-panes – Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated.

After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director’s box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time.

1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck.