Europe Central (113 page)

One night, not long after the ruling circles of the reactionary powers set up a separate “West German” state, he had a very strange dream filled with both ominousness and promise. He dreamed that he was once again a pale young student who haunted the halls of the Leningrad Conservatory like his own rapturous ghost. This domain had now become the fabled world within every piano’s black keys, the reverberating refuge into which since childhood his soul had always been able to withdraw. Outside, dark boy-figures in wool caps bowed their faces against the blinding snow they stood on; the dreamer understood that this whiteness was the
ostensible world,
where his body, his honors and his persecutors dwelled. Within, he was safe. The piquant vibrations of chromaticism which infused those corridors nourished him as if he were still a baby with his head on his mother’s breast, listening to the beating of her heart. Or imagine, if you wish, that these hovering chords resembled dust-motes gilded by a divine tracer-bullet of sunlight, unearthly and untouchable forever. But suddenly it was as if the dust began to whirl about in menacing spirals; the harmonies suffered interruption and distortion, as if someone had clapped a hand upon an ululating mouth for an interval, then released the pent-up sound in a rising while, stopped it again, then freed it, the mufflings of the sound devouring ever longer beats until at last that selfsame choking silence which exists within each note of Opus 110 had conquered the obscurity forever. And in the tunnel, approaching him with a dragging sort of cadence symptomatic of his life’s diminished intervals, he now spied a kindred wraith, a tall, bearlike apparition with the beard and sidelocks of a Hasidic Jew. Somehow he knew that this individual’s name was Comrade Luria, and that Comrade Luria was angry with him.

Because you betrayed all of us with that facile Seventh Symphony of yours, which wears its own
meaning
on its chest like an idiotic medal . . .

Well, well, well, then I must beg you to forgive me, replied Shostakovich, almost asphyxiated by dreamy dread. You see, I wanted to inspire people, and—well, I mean to say I thought I could make myself useful—

Useful?
said Comrade Luria in a rage. You know all too well that utility’s the merest pimp for whom true art gets prostituted! Moreover . . .

He took a step closer. Shostakovich trembled.

Moreover, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, it’s high time we talk about form.

Another step. Now Shostakovich was touched by the odor of burned hair.

I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form. But in music, perfect form and content together can remain as stillborn as a law without the seal of Heaven on it. There has to be
emotion
. . .

Excuse me, excuse me; but isn’t emotion the same as, er,
content
in this case? Naturally I understand that it’s not equivalent to
form,
no matter what our socialist realists preach. For instance, in the right hands an
allegro
in a major key can convey anything, not just happiness—

Exactly, said Comrade Luria, taking another step. You’ve proved that yourself in “Lady Macbeth.”

Oh, well, thank you for that, yes, thank you. But, if I may ask, what
is
musical content if not the feeling of the music?

Comrade Luria smiled, took three more rapid steps, outstretched an arm as if in benediction, and
touched
him.

That touch! It was like entering a darkened room and suddenly getting assaulted by soft, silent, hideous moths whose scales flaked off as they brushed in their dozens across nose, forehead, cheek and eyes, dryly flapping and dying, blindly disintegrating, polluting, attacking, asphyxiating. He reeled. He choked on dust which might have been smoke from all the millions and millions of burned Jews.

Comrade Luria was a charred skeleton. Comrade Luria knowingly said: After somebody’s been cremated (no matter whether he was living or dead), his form’s his image in your memory. His feeling, his emotional value if you will, is nothing more or less than the feeling
you
have when you remember him. So what’s his content?

I don’t know.

Is it a handful of ash? demanded Comrade Luria, breathing in Shostakovich’s face that terrible breath which stank of roasted flesh.

No, no—

What’s your content?

I . . . I have no content; I’m empty.

Then say so in your music.

5

Later, in the course of his Jewish researches, he learned that Isaac Luria had been an eminent Kabbalist.

6

I’m
empty
! he crowed to Glikman and Lebedinsky. I have no, how should I say, no content. If I hummed a few bars of “Suleiko” I’d achieve my dream, because—

Please, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!

No more communitarian exhortations!

We beg of you, please be silent! Who knows who might be—

Their terror that he might say something both forbidden and overheard was hideously apparent in their faces. He studied what he saw, and expertly converted it into a single musical chord, which in due course he’d retrieve from his skull’s storehouse and weld into the chassis of Opus 110.

7

The Shostakoviches now lived in Moscow. Too many of their friends had perished in Leningrad; they couldn’t bear to go back. (Comrade Alexandrov notes here:
Shostakovich exaggerates. Only eight percent of Leningrad’s housing was destroyed.
) Those tan- and earth-hued houses remained windowpaneless, their multiple rectilinear darknesses as strangely inhuman as Roman ruins, with the life within them long gone and carried to the cemetery by Komsomol boys and girls during spring cleanups. In comparison, Moscow remained untouched. The children were less likely to be, I mean,
reminded.
Moreover, Lebedinsky, Glikman and his other friends whispered that the Party had resumed its attacks upon Leningrad intellectuals, not that Nina, who seemed to be getting more fearful with each birthday, believed that Moscow was any safer; but it was preferable to think that one could be safer
somewhere.
Then Comrade Zhdanov had made that speech about his—ha, ha!—
searchlight
! Moreover, E. E. Konstantinovskaya was teaching at the Conservatory, and he didn’t want to accidentally, you know. (Her face would have gone cotton-white, like a puff of antiaircraft smoke.) His sister Mariya said that Elena had married a Professor Vigodsky. Better to stay away! Lastly, I mean firstly, the Dynamo Stadium was right here in Moscow, and he’d never grown tired of football.

The composer had two grand pianos in the double flat. He kept them swathed in black cloths whenever he didn’t need them. The flat, the pianos, the dacha and everything were a gift from Comrade Stalin. (Keep your eye on that queer, Stalin told Beria. Sooner or later he’ll fuck up. Then I want you to hit him hard.)

Shostakovich was ageing fast. Oh, oh, he felt sick! Meaning was departing from him. His best pupil of that period, a reclusive beauty named G. I. Ustvolskaya, sat in an unheated room, literally taking her fists to the piano in an angry struggle to give birth to her Sonata No. 1, which she insisted (to his horror) expressed his influence; well, I, to be sure, perhaps the piccolo did, a trifle, I mean, but this young woman’s rage was not bridled as his had eternally been; it discomfited him; why did she jerk her head away like that, gazing at the wall, clenching her teeth? She said that it was the times, which he, well, he certainly couldn’t call her foolish, although she wasn’t healthy; in spite of her manifest unfitness for life, something about her reminded him of Nina; his dear friend Sollertinsky, now deceased for ever so many years, had once opined that he was attracted to strong women.

The moldy gloomy chords which she wrested from the piano were most appropriate, so she said, for a church. There was that expression of Elena Konstantinovskaya’s, oh, yes; once they’d even studied English together:
It gives me the creeps.
Actually, he hadn’t thought about that for years. Ustvolskaya’s sonata gave him the creeps. So did his nightmares of Comrade Luria, not to mention, er, well, the times, which is to say, you know,
that bastard.
As for Shostakovich himself, struggling to seek beauty in his way, to be true only to the melodies he heard (this being the only loyalty he could not betray), he descended like a spinning bomb toward the tomb of Opus 110. There he could explode all he liked. That would be harmless, there being no air to support combustion . . . Faster and faster, deeper and deeper! By now he’d grown greyer than the walls of the Leningrad Conservatory. The harsh, dry cold of the Russian winter (which meteorologists blame on the Asiatic anticyclone) bit him more deeply than ever nowadays. The only way he could get warm was to drink vodka. But Nina said . . .

He made his students write their scores in ink without exception now, for the sake of his eyes.

8

I. Schwartz, who already showed a certain lyrical talent, could no longer afford to continue his studies. Shostakovich told him: What I’ve heard is better than anything by Shostakovich! (And he told the same to the other students.) He paid all Schwartz’s fees for the next two years, in secret, so that the young man wouldn’t feel beholden. But Comrade Stalin probably knew. Comrade Stalin probably smiled triumphantly to see that Shostakovich was bank-rolling characters with German names . . .

People were finally getting tired of whistling Khrennikov’s “Song of the Artillerymen.” Shostakovich’s old “Song of the Counterplan” was coming back. Nina told him that just last week she’d heard a legless veteran singing it near the train station.

He spoke sharply to Nina, and she drew the blinds. In Petersburg, in the room where Paul was murdered in 1801 by an army clique, an edict kept the blinds drawn for more than half a century. Meanwhile, prayers hid themselves away likewise within the star-riddled cupolas of the Ismaelovski, and pretty young noblewomen learned to be ladies behind the high walls of the Smolny. Oh, me, that was back in the opening bars of the overture! And Nina went out; from the way she slammed the door he knew that she was going to come back late.

The next day, two men in tall, shiny boots dropped by to advise him: You’re denying yourself true happiness, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. What could make a real Communist happier than expressing himself on the subject of Lenin?

Or for that matter the subject of Comrade Stalin! put in the shorter man.

Yes, yes, to be sure; what an oversight I’ve committed—

There was an infinite supply of these characters, but the way they spoke never changed. He knew them so well that he could almost laugh! If he were still twenty he could have scored a ballet about them; the dancers would have been cardboard beetles. Because it was all so . . . And yet, strange or not so strange to say, each new assault further abraded his defenses. Nina would have approved of his realism; on the other hand, if Galina Ustvolskaya could have seen how ingratiatingly he was smiling at them, she would have punched her fist through the piano.

You promised us Lenin in your Sixth Symphony. Then you promised him in the Seventh. Not that we have anything against the Seventh, of course, but
when will you get around to Lenin
?

Comrades, you know I try to write sincerely! I don’t want to throw away my second-best music on, uh, Lenin. Certainly the Seventh wasn’t worthy of him. That was only a . . . To be frank, I’m waiting for—

Yeah, what
are
you waiting for?

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, what comes into your head when you think of Lenin? Answer immediately.

Well, I, I’d have to say a
largo
in
passacaglia
form . . .

Come off it! What are you waiting for, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? You’re not against Lenin, are you?

Although his Ninth Symphony had disappointed many critics, his Second Piano Trio won a Stalin Prize! I can almost see him rocking crazily with joy when they told him, like a small boy riding his hobbyhorse, or baby-young Mitya riding Tatyana Glivenko or Elena Konstantinovskaya into the red sunset of, of, whatever; not to mention D. D. Shostakovich on the verge of being summoned by Comrade Stalin to the State Box! The curtain rises; “Lady Macbeth” begins.—No matter about “Lady Macbeth”; at last he was in step! But he wasn’t going to unpack his underwear, oh, me! Because it was precisely when they, how should I say, and you thought they loved you and forgave you, that the knock came on the door! And then Nina would be staring in dry-eyed horror when they started dumping his scores and manuscripts on the carpet, looking for that
largo
in
passacaglia
form, and the children, you see, yes, exactly, my children. Which reminds me: I keep meaning to buy some white “Moscow” face powder for Galisha, because . . . And a blue crepe dress; she really wants a new dress. Poor child—with a father like me to, to, am I making myself clear? That’s why a Stalin Prize is the highest honor in our great Soviet land, and I’m very, you know. It’s said that his expression on that occasion resembled that of a child in a trench gazing up between his fingers at oncoming German bombers. (At that time we didn’t have enough one fifty-twos to stop them.) And no wonder! He was chronically afflicted with stagefright! He went home to Nina and muttered: I’m most upset, I don’t know exactly why . . .

Why indeed? For in those days, thanks to Comrade Stalin, Soviet music had become as wide and stable as the treads of a T-34 tank! We felt ourselves to be impelled by the noble Soviet goal of rising above all prior cultural stages, of
planning
culture. There were only a few deviationists left. Well, actually, far too many of the leading composers were deviationists. And so now our new propaganda organ
Culture and Life
began to attack a certain D. D. Shostakovich. By 1948 he was being accused once more of formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies.