3 Great Historical Novels (50 page)

From the end of Donskaya Street, he could see the small dark figure of Shostakovich pacing about in his usual manner, circling his favourite bench.

‘I’m so sorry!’ he called, as soon as he was in earshot.

But, far from looking annoyed, Shostakovich’s eyes were bright with anticipation. ‘I feel like a truant!’ His cowlick fell over his forehead, and his face was tinged with pink. ‘I shouldn’t really be here.’

‘Trouble at home?’

But Shostakovich appeared to have forgotten whatever it was that had made him sound so cowed on the phone. ‘No,’ he said, waving his hand, ‘simply that I have a whole stack of composition papers to grade, and I’ve promised Venyamin Fleishman that I’ll look over his working notes before next week.’

‘Fleishman? Is that the skinny blond boy that every female in the Conservatoire is in love with?’

Shostakovich nodded. ‘Not that he notices the girls falling at his feet. Poor innocent that he is.’ For a second, he looked almost wolfish and his eyes glittered; it was easy to see why many of the wealthiest and most beautiful women in Leningrad had fallen under his spell. ‘He’s enormously
talented but overly modest, and sorely lacking in confidence. So I’ve got him started on an opera, based on a Chekhov story I gave him.’

‘Chekhov! Then I hope you’ll also teach him the writer’s riposte to critics.’

‘When you’re served coffee, don’t try to find beer in it!
Yes, he’ll need to develop a thick skin with the Leningrad vultures descending on him. Nevertheless, “Rothschild’s Violin”! It’s the perfect framework for an opera.’ Shostakovich looked torn, as if he wanted to rush back home and immediately begin lecturing his promising student on his favourite writer.

Nikolai glanced up at the sun, already high above them. He thrust the tickets under Shostakovich’s nose. ‘There are times when it’s imperative not to work. And today is one of them.’

‘You’re right. We mustn’t be late! Come along.’ Shostakovich set a cracking pace as they rounded the corner into Mandelstam Street. ‘The highlight of the football season awaits!’

‘Speaking of seasons,’ said Nikolai slightly breathlessly, ‘I’m curious to see what Eliasberg will make of his orchestra this year. I overheard the beginning of their rehearsal yesterday and it sounded like a dog’s dinner.’

‘Eliasberg?’ Shostakovich’s eyes were fixed on the high green roof of the stadium. ‘Oh, the radio conductor? I don’t really know his work. Mravinsky is quite enough for me to handle.’ He shaded his eyes, peering at the main entrance ahead of them. ‘What’s going on there? It looks like chaos.’

‘Dmitri! Nikolai!’ The shout came from behind. It was Sollertinsky, sprinting towards them, his large jacket flying out like a cape.

‘What the hell —?’ Shostakovich stared. ‘Sollertinsky,
running
?’

Gravel flew from Sollertinsky’s feet. His breath came in great rasps, audible even from some distance away.

‘Changed your mind?’ called Shostakovich. ‘Realised at last that Zenith is worth sprinting for?’

But Nikolai seized his arm, his heart hammering as though he were the one running. ‘I fear — oh, God, I fear the worst.’

Then Sollertinsky had reached them, sweat pouring down his face. He bent double, struggling for his breath. ‘I — followed — you,’ he gasped. ‘Knew — you — were — coming — here.’

Shostakovich stiffened. ‘What is it?’

Sollertinsky’s chest heaved as he straightened up and stood to attention. ‘It’s just been announced. Hitler has attacked. Russia is at war with Germany.’ 

When Dmitri Shostakovich was eleven, back in 1917, he’d seen a boy killed right in front of him. The city had become a mess, a bad and dangerous place, and his mother had tried to keep him home as much as possible. But for the past year attending music classes had become a routine, and he liked routines: they were the only way to make progress. What he didn’t like, however, was the director of the music school.

‘He treats me with a total lack of respect,’ he complained to Mariya, as she sat on her mattress combing her hair.

‘You’re eleven years old.’ Mariya was fourteen, and annoyingly aware of her superior age. ‘Mr Gliasser is a grown-up and an expert. You should listen to him.’

‘He may be fully grown, but I don’t believe he is an expert.’ Dmitri snatched the saucer of warm candle wax from Mariya, who was preparing to rub it through her hair. (Her inherited frizzy hair was only one of a list of teenage grievances against her mother, Sofia Vasiliyevna Shostakovich.)

One by one, Dmitri stuck his fingers into the molten wax and held up their white tips. ‘Gliasser plays Bach like a moron. Like a machine. Even on my worst days, I play Bach better than that old man.’

Mariya grabbed the saucer back. ‘He’s better than my teacher. He has a great reputation.’

‘He
had
a reputation,’ corrected Dmitri, ‘forty or fifty years ago. He relies too much on the past. It’s always Fux this, Bellermann that and
Yavorsky the other. He takes his music from text books. That’s a
dead-end
.’ He marched over to the piano in the corner of the room. ‘I was playing the opening to my Chopin Prelude like this —’ With sticky wax fingertips, he began picking out the B Flat Minor Prelude. ‘And he said if I continued that way I would fail my exam. Then he told me to play like
this
!’ Sitting up straight on the stool, he shut his eyes so as to better remember Gliasser’s pious expression, and felt his body transform into his teacher’s. His arms became stiff, his fingers turned to wood and, on the pedals, his feet shrivelled to those of a seventy-year-old. Because this was a special knack of his, the keys also changed under his touch, as if responding to a different person.

‘You shouldn’t mock your elders.’ But Mariya was laughing, sounding less annoyingly adult and more like herself.

The door crashed open and Dmitri swivelled on his stool, though his hands continued pounding through the Chopin.

‘Dmitri, what on earth are you doing?’ His mother was in the doorway, her arms folded, her eyebrows lowered. ‘That’s no way to treat Chopin.’

‘I’m being Gliasser, Mother.’

‘He’s being precocious,’ said Mariya, turning traitor once more, and kicking the incriminating saucer of wax behind a chair.

‘You’re lucky to have such a teacher,’ scolded Sofia Shostakovich over her son’s mechanical playing. ‘Your father and I don’t make these sacrifices for you to mock your elders and betters.’

‘Exactly what I said.’ Mariya wandered to the window, hoping for a glimpse of Goga Rimsky-Korsakov, who was sixteen and handsome.

Dmitri stopped playing and began peeling the wax coating off his fingers. ‘Gliasser is a dinosaur. He’s the past, and I’m the future. I’ll give him until next June to prove his merit.’ He looked up to see his mother’s mouth fall open, like a frog waiting for flies. ‘What’s wrong? I’m only speaking the truth.’ He pushed the stool back with a loud squeak. ‘Don’t worry. Gliasser has a perfectly wonderful Bechstein, and I won’t give that up in a hurry.’

So he went on attending lessons throughout the long winter, as the streets of Petrograd descended into chaos. By February, his father was lying ill in the small room at the back of the apartment.

‘Just a little throat trouble,’ his mother told Zoya, who wanted to hear one of her father’s gypsy songs. ‘But there isn’t enough air in his lungs for singing.’

Conditions were bad enough inside; outside, the frozen streets were
being set alight, and shop fronts smashed so the pavements glittered with glass and ice.

‘Don’t go to class, Dmitri.’ Sofia Shostakovich was mending Mariya’s tights, which were more holes than wool. ‘Stay home today.’

Dmitri placed his books on the table with a determined thud. His mother was a fine pianist and a good teacher, but she was an amateur. Already it was clear — she didn’t understand what was needed to get to the top. The only way you could improve at something was to do it every single day. And as heartily as he despised dusty old Gliasser, at present there was no better option. ‘It’s cold today!’ he said, bending to put on his overshoes. This was not simply small talk; his fingers could barely work his feet into the stiff rubber.

‘Didn’t you hear me?’ His mother’s voice was more definite, catching at his ankles, hobbling him before he could make it out the door. ‘You’re too young to understand. There are changes afoot. It’s dangerous out there. The city’s no longer safe to walk in.’

‘I won’t walk, I’ll run.’ He avoided her gaze. ‘I’ll run straight to school. How else can I become the b — breadwinner?’ He’d nearly said ‘the best pianist in Petrograd’, but he realised that naked ambition wasn’t the best way to win over his mother. With a gravely ill husband and three hungry children, Sofia Shostakovich’s fear of the financial future seemed his most likely ally.

Zoya ran out of the back room, her creamy cheeks mottled like marble. ‘Da won’t tell me a story, either! No songs, no stories. What’s wrong with him?’ She collapsed on the floor and pushed her face into the folds of her mother’s skirt.

Dmitri felt suffocated. He wanted nothing more than to turn his back on it all, to race out into the chilly stairwell and breathe air uncluttered by family ties. He stood scraping his foot against the shoe rack. ‘Da will get better,’ he said to no one in particular. The metallic scraping was almost the same pitch as a cello’s A string. He felt a brief lifting of his heart, like the waft of air when a heavy winter curtain is raised.
Scrape, scrape
. Yes, definitely an A. If he experimented with tempo, this could be a possible beginning for —

But Zoya had started to cry, and his mother dropped Mariya’s stockings in a jumble of loose threads. ‘It’s just the cold winter we’re having,’ she said soothingly. ‘The cold factory Da’s been working in. Once the spring comes, he’ll improve.’

Dmitri forced himself to step towards his crying sister and his lying
mother; then he stopped, wavering towards the back bedroom. The door was half-open and he peered inside. There was a brown blanket nailed up over the window — his mother’s attempt at keeping in the meagre warmth from the burzhuika, and keeping out the minus-twenty-degree breath of the world outside. The light was muddy and dull. And there, as if at the bottom of a dirty pond, lay his father, his thin shoulder hunched under a thin blanket, his head barely visible. His breath sounded like a saw labouring through wood, producing much noise with little effect.

‘Father?’ But Dmitri’s voice had almost entirely deserted him. He tried again. ‘Father?’

His father didn’t seem to have heard. Dmitri backed away into the main room and seized up his books. ‘See you tonight,’ he said quickly, and with shameful relief he stepped onto the landing.

He banged and jumped his way down the stairs, taking two at a time.
It’s all right
, he reassured himself.
If you’re going to become a professional, nothing must get in your way: not faintheartedness, nor politeness. Not family illness, nor pity.
At the front door he looked out at a familiar desolation. Charred metal girders lay crossed over each other like bones in a charnel house. Along the street a car burned dully, the flames muffled by falling snow. From the direction of the city came shouting, the blowing of whistles and bursts of gunfire.
Neither looting nor rioting must put you off,
he said, pulling his furry hat over his ears,
nor political protests. These things mustn’t sway you.

His mother was right — he didn’t really understand what was happening, but he knew that people were fed up with being hungry, with queuing at bakeries for hours and camping outside butchers’ shops to get scraps of offal fit for dogs. Petrograders had reached the end of their tether, as Mariya would say — reduced to eating mouldy bread, no longer remembering the taste of butter or eggs! His stomach rumbled; all he’d eaten was half a cup of watery porridge. His mother had watched him shovelling it into his mouth, while Mariya frowned into her bowl and Zoya screwed up her face. ‘Your father will soon be back at work,’ she’d said. ‘This unsettled time will soon be over.’

‘Soon we’ll be dead of starvation,’ muttered Mariya, whose kindly teacher at the Conservatoire sometimes gave her extra bread, which she brought home to break into five pieces.

Turning up his collar, hooking his leather book-strap over his shoulder, Dmitri set off. He wasn’t sure how much longer classes would continue; there was a looseness, a nervousness in the air that affected
even the orderly regime at the Conservatoire. As he rounded the corner into Nevsky Prospect, he stopped and gasped. Before him was a wall of backs. The street was filled from one side to the other with people pushing slowly forward, looking more like one heaving body than separate human beings. He hesitated and then darted into the ranks, ducking under elbows. Twice, right beside him, he saw revolvers clasped in large reddened hands.

He straightened up, took a gulp of icy air. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked the woman next to him. ‘Please, tell me what’s happening.’

‘This is the day!’ She barely glanced at him. ‘Today we’re going to break them!’

At the edge of the pushing crowd, a window splintered into a shower of glass. The people roared in response.

Up ahead, three shots rang out. The woman grabbed Dmitri, her rough fingers gripping his neck. Saliva hung from her lips; her mouth was a dark cavern, her teeth broken and blackened. ‘Go home! Children should have no part in this.’

He shrank away, suddenly scared of her frenzied excitement. ‘Let me go!’ He wrenched free of her hands, and ran, twisting through the crowd — but he made his way towards the front, rather than retreating.

When he saw the teenage boy fall, he felt as if he, too, was falling. He was so close! Close enough to see the stubble on the boy’s chin, to smell his sweat and hear him shout in a cracked voice, ‘Bread for the workers!’ But the Cossack was looming before them. The sabre swung high, glinting against the grey rain of snowflakes — then it carved through the air like the downwards stroke of a violin bow, masterful, precise, perfect.

Cleaved through the shoulders and neck, the boy fell without a sound. Blood leapt from his mouth, staining his teeth. Within seconds, the crowd was swarming around him, hiding his body from view. But already Dmitri was racing away through the screaming women and the cursing soldiers, dodging the boys with slingshots and the girls hysterical with fear.

When he stopped, he was in an empty alley. He crouched behind a stack of crates and pressed his head against the rotting planks. Hiding there, he could hear the heavy beat of a drum. Where was it coming from? It was some minutes before he realised it was the thump of his own horror-struck heart. He lay against the wall of wood, and the high
keen of what sounded like a flute came from his own mouth.

He stayed there until the cold struck through his overshoes and socks, driving upwards through his legs. Pulling himself upright, he found that he could barely move. He wiped his cheeks and pulled his hat back down on his head, then peered out from the alley to plot an alternative route. Composition class might still be on, in spite of the chaos that had descended on Petrograd. He glanced back towards Nevsky Prospect, to where smoke was smudging the sky. ‘This year or next year, or in ten years’ time,’ he promised the dead boy, ‘I’ll write down your story in music. You’ll have your Funeral March. I won’t forget.’