Europe Central (127 page)

Laboring with the ruthlessly exemplary dedication of a shock worker, he lived on to 1963, when his friend Marshal Tukhachevsky got posthumously rehabilitated. Let’s drink Crimean champagne with R. L. Karmen! Shostakovich wrote the memorial music, feeling (how should I say this?) anxious. No matter that Stalin was dead; it was only habit to, to, you know, well, to expect a hand on one’s shoulder. How would the “organs” perceive this? Still, he craved to be a decent person, especially now, since . . .

His silent young Irina stood behind him, with her hair in a double bun. In the raised bell of the stage he could see something flittering behind the tarnished iron leaves of the railing. Elena’s skirt had trembled like that, that red skirt she used to wear with the black jacket, and she used to trace patterns with her fingernail upon the glass goblet on the table. As they played on, the bell glowed more and more beautifully against the blue sky which was becoming night, and Elena’s skirt, well, actually, it wasn’t her skirt at all. Would it hurt me more to know that it was or to know that it wasn’t? Oh, me! The lady violinists in white blouses and black shirts, the men in the black and white suits, the cobblestones yellow under the inverted truncated pyramids of the lamps, and the shadows between cobblestones very black, they all added up to something, another composition by another composer, perhaps Haydn, certainly not Shostakovich. These windowpanes curtained or simply black, that’s what my music is about.
This
music was very, I mean, he never should have composed it, because first of all it wouldn’t bring Tukhachevsky back and second of all, it wasn’t, how should I say, healthy to remind the “organs” of their past deeds. Better not to remember the Marshal!
I get everything I ask for!
he used to crow. And then . . . But I’m certainly proud of Irina, who to get right down to it possesses, how should I describe it, an almost serpentine elegance: I
do
adore those pale, slim women! When she puts her hair up in a bun like that I want to sink my teeth into it, it’s so delicious! How good she is to me! And how
understanding.
And all the other old men are jealous of me; they don’t know I can’t even, well, but I wish she’d stop gnawing on her knuckles like that. The poor dear must be nervous. Why bother? It’s too late to be nervous! She’s already married a former enemy of the people. That was very . . .

When they got home, she wanted to know the wife’s fate. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t know. Of course it was all in Opus 110, but I admit that that’s elliptical; all the same, you’d think that, well. Sitting down at the piano bench, resting his aching wrists on the lid which mercifully hid the extended grin of those black and white keys, he told her, watching her reflection in the shiny wood between his hands: The first one, er,
shot herself.
During the Civil War. That must have been very . . . Although I myself—don’t look at me like that, Irinochka! They say she was caught stealing bread, and didn’t want to disgrace her husband. I never asked him anything, of course. And the second one
disappeared.

But—

In a poisonous whisper he breathed into her ear: All right, then,
she got liquidated by the “organs.”
After they liquidated him, obviously; I mean, you wouldn’t want to put a finale before a—

Her eyes became as big as bomb craters.—Mitya, are you sure she wasn’t implicated? I don’t remember those times, of course, but—

Yes you do! he shouted. We all remember them!

His voice diminished into something as unnerving as a gap in the front line, and he said: But we, we
pretend,
you see . . .

Anyway, said Irina steadily, the performance was very beautiful.

And he shot, I repeat, he shot your own father, yet you’re so naive as to maintain—

Be careful, Mitya! Anyhow, my mother said—

To
protect
you, you little fool! Don’t you even know that much? And from a Polish father, a Jewish mother, how could you not know
what goes on in this world
? And then what happened to your mother, you, well, that’s how it is for all of us. Irinochka, please, please forgive me for my, for, for speaking to you in this monstrous fashion; I know I’m a . . . Poor child! What a lot of pain I’ve caused you! And you knew it anyway, didn’t you?

Breathing heavily, she said: You say all this, and meanwhile you joined the Party.

At this he punched himself in the face again and again with his half-crippled old fist.

39

Well? she said.

It was blackmail, Irinochka . . . If you love me, you won’t dig that up . . . Khatchaturian’s been a member for years . . .

He lived on to 1964, the thirtieth anniversary of his first meeting with Elena Konstantinovskaya, when the decay of his limbs and joints compelled him to forgo all public performances. (After all, in the Soviet Union aren’t old relics an offense against history?) My
dear
friends, are you familiar with that statue who lost his hands in Dresden, from the Allied, you know? That’s how it is now, with D. D., how should I say, Shostakovich! Retaining his civic capacities at least, he rose in the assembly hall, panting and trembling a little, splaying his aching fingers like tree-roots, gazing into the socialist horizon beyond the microphone, and expressed his confidence in the future. He was one of our reliable leading cadres. Every time he spied anybody in authority, a policeman or even a janitor, he felt sick with terror. Glaring at the yellow drapes, pretending that he didn’t know that this slogan had been discredited, he declaimed to his fellow Party members: LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL. People begged him to be more careful.

Anyway, he muttered to his friends, it’s over. The second movement was the worst.

Mitya, you’re drunk and you really don’t look so good. Whatever do you mean?

Opus 110, naturally. That’s when we all died. I wrote the second movement like a Katyusha: eight rocket launchers in a go! It was supposed to be horrible. But now they’ve killed us off, so we don’t have to be careful.

This was the year when he publicly denounced the
Soleil des Incas
of E. V. Denisov. The golden sheen of his Medal for the Defense of Leningrad was alive on his breast with armed figurines oriented left, making a wall of guns and bayonets against the enemy; above them, a central tower climaxed in a Soviet star.

Staring as though his features were as terrifying as the bomb-crushed face of some stranger who’d introduced himself a quarter-hour before, Denisov asked why he’d done it. He replied: Well, well, Edik, you know, because I was frightened, of course . . .—(A Party functionary had been there.)—It’s, it’s, just the same as at movie theaters when we all rise to, to the Horst Wessel Song! Or, or, or
Deutschland über Alles!
I mean, you can . . . In fact, I consider
Le Soleil des Incas
to be a, well, a masterpiece, a real masterpiece. Acoustically speaking, the barbed wire of the second movement is as distinct and cleanly patterned as the concentric polyhedrons of a spiderweb. This is not a work for idiots. I sincerely hope you won’t alter a single note . . .

Mitya, didn’t you realize that I can’t be your friend after this?

Forgive me, I beg of you. I admit that I’m a bastard. But it’s our, our,
our life.
Back in ’48, or maybe it was ’46, when, you know, even Maxim had to . . .

Goodbye, Mitya.

Do you know, do you know, the—the French horn ought to be played, as a general rule, between its fourth and twelfth partials. Well, if somebody who’s up to his ears in blood commands that you play it at the seventeenth partial, then a certain degree of distortion—

Denisov was already turning away, now and forever.

Have pity, Edik! Remember the vulnerability of my children!

(To his wife, whose gentleness he valued more and more, he muttered: You see, I’m such an insensitive criminal type! A, a, an enemy of the people, actually. But he’ll never . . . Guess what a great comrade said?
Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated by his adversaries does not seem to me to be worth much as a friend.
Guess who? He’s, so to speak, a German. An Austrian, actually. A late Austrian. My sexy little Irinka, thanks for your . . . But I’ll survive. I’ll get through this.)

He lived on to 1965, when they made him Doctor of the Arts.
That
honor was truly indispensable!

They urged him to write more popular songs, with civic content. Oh, what patrons of the arts! Now that he was a Party member, which meant that he was truly one of us, he really needed to toe the line a little more exactly. The best reputations require maintenance; even fresh white bricks will slowly tarnish in, for instance, Dresden. They suggested that he use as his templates A. I. Ostrovskii’s “Let There Always Be Sunshine,” and A. G. Novikov’s “March of the Communist Brigades.” My, oh, my! They said to him: There’s so much filth around us, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Be careful that you don’t get smeared with any of it.—He assented with diplomatic grimaces. Later that day, when his daughter looked in on him, he sat down at the piano and accompanied himself, singing in a crazed cracked voice:

Merry singing makes the heart glow;
merry singing stops the tear-flow!
In the country villages, singing is their meat;
from Moscow straight to Leningrad, singing is their treat!

Do you remember that, Galisha? It was on the radio when you were still a, a little . . . What nice perfume you have on! Is it “Red Dawn,” or . . . ? That’s what I’m supposed to emulate. The effect is, you know,
enormous.

She shook her head and said: You’re doing this to yourself.

How’s married life? Is it true what they say? I’ve heard that women sometimes . . . never mind. “Let There Always Be Sunshine.” By the way, did you hear that your brother’s won another award? Will you be attending the ceremony? I’m very . . . Your hair looks extremely, how should I say, effective. Oh, me! Is that a new style?

Meanwhile, Khruschev was removed from power in favor of Brezhnev, who explained to the Twenty-third Congress: Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and life-affirming.—Shostakovich lived on. It’s said that he watched R. L. Karmen’s new film “The Great Patriotic War” again and again; after awhile not even Glikman would accompany him to the cinema anymore; after all, the man lost his wife in the, so I can see his, his, you know. But Shostakovich couldn’t take his eyes off the Leningrad woman in the snowy overcoat who was towing another sled to the cemetery. I could swear she’s somebody I know! Because she . . . and her long dark hair. But I can’t say that Elena’s calling me to lie down beside her, because as far as I know she’s still . . . All the same, he avoided more horrors than he sought out. On a rainy afternoon, at a reception for some artist friend of Glikman’s, he wondered what he should do, how he should live; what was her name now, he should really, anyhow, it was all oils in gilded frames, flowers, landscapes, fruits, not to mention the occasional, you know, nude. I don’t approve of nudes, because then I feel, well. The women were gazing more at each other’s smiles than at the art, which was as it should be, but where had Irina slipped off to? Don’t leave me here, my God, or they’ll all be hounding. All they want is . . . Suddenly he feared that some sneak assault would get through: so many of the individuals he’d cared for, I hope not the majority, better not to count, Denisov makes five, had gone over to the other side, not just Denisov but, oh, me, and especially these snowy landscapes, I don’t approve of them, either! What
do
I approve of! Irina, of course. That woman’s so good to me! And my children. Why don’t they paint something cheerful and
red
? “Let There Always Be Sunshine,” and light up the way with a
searchlight
; I know we can do it; it’s just a question of, of everything in a major key! Speaking of which, must I congratulate Roman Lazarevich now that he’s been named People’s Artist of USSR? I have his telephone number right here:
VI, 93, 80.
Leo Oskarovich tells me excellent things about Maya Ovchinnikova. He’s got a sweet wife, just as I have; thank God and Soviet power for sweet wives! If I had my own atomic bomb I’d just . . . I wonder if my pretty Irinka would mind sending him a card for me, with greetings to her, so that I could simply . . . I’ll bet he still keeps a bust of Stalin at his writing desk! Oh, my, and I also forgot to telephone him when he won his second Order of Lenin last year. When he’s always been so, whatever. That’s terrible! I have no excuse; it’s only . . . One bronze of an absolutely heartbreaking nude, female, bald, with an an almost simian face, brought Opus 110 back; she was halfway between weeping and screaming, with her hands on her hair, and he couldn’t bear it, so he turned away and gazed out the window; something dark like rain was cratering the pavement. How can I get out of here? It’s so . . . But what’s the use? Skyscrapers as blocky and tower-perimetered as castles were going up everywhere, haloed with scaffolding; welders’ torches glared on them like unwinking stars (whenever he saw a flame now, he remembered the blistered dead of Dresden, the children who clung to banisters and railings until the fires inhaled them, the screams of the tropical birds getting roasted at the zoo); new trees grew between the communal flats, and airplanes banked protectively over everything. Some of them looked like fighters. Let’s see; the German fighters had been based at Gatchina, Siverskaya, Tosna. They bombed Leningrad every day. And Pilutov became a Hero of the Soviet Union when he shot down all those Messerschmitts. That was very . . .

They told R. L. Karmen to film a meeting of the minds between D. D. Shostakovich and A. Akhmatova, with whom he’d never had anything in common anyway, excepting nightmares, so he stood beside her in snowy muck, waiting for the camera to whir, then said:
Eighty-eight, eighty-eight,
an exercise he’d invented for creating the illusion of animated speech by stretching the corners of the mouth; perhaps opera singers might also find it, you know, convenient. Where was Irinochka? She would have been polite; she was so, thank God for that, because at my age, well. Akhmatova stared at him; she was wearing her green-ribboned Medal of Leningrad but he wasn’t; the poor woman looked rather stout, because our Russian food, you know . . . All right, so he’d hurt her feelings, but he didn’t give a damn, not that he disliked her; the poor woman was looking old and shabby. The only thing he held against her was that she’d carried the score of his Seventh Symphony out of Leningrad, holding it on that promiscuous lap of hers; she thought that made him her soul mate. If she’d only lost the Seventh, and he’d been shot down, then he wouldn’t have contributed to that shameful, you know. Not that Nina and the children would have deserved such an ending, even though they might have been, never mind. As for Roman Lazarevich, he seemed satisfied; they shook both hands, and for a moment Shostakovich dreaded that he might utter
her
name; indeed, he feared that more than he’d ever feared anything in this world; he might have screamed.