Great Historical Novels (58 page)

‘Ready when you are,’ said Mr Shostakovich from the piano.

Sonya straightened her back and pressed her feet against the floor. The cello leaned into her.
I’m ready too
, it said in a woody whisper. Sonya placed her left hand in position and laid the bow carefully across the strings — no squeak, no twang.

Before this she’d seen the Elégie as a silvery kind of piece, clear-cut, almost icy. But today, in the hushed moments before beginning, she saw it differently. Fauré’s familiar notes were transformed: they hung in the air, round, opaque, like ripe golden fruit. How odd! Already, the cello had changed her way of seeing. She took a deep breath, nodded to Mr Shostakovich, and the first note dropped into the silence, perfectly pitched and as sweet as honey.

And soon it seemed to Sonya that the cello was singing by itself. All she had to do was place her fingers on the strings, and the song sprang open, phrase after phrase floating out as if she’d unlocked a secret world with a magic key. Then, with a sigh — was it from her or the cello? — the bow drew a last husky stroke across the string, and there was silence. She let her arms fall by her side; they were aching from the effort of embracing a cello slightly too large for her. She gave the cello a quick stroke on its smooth back.
Thank you
, she said.
You were wonderful
.

Mr Shostakovich sprang up from his stool and clapped wildly. The room dissolved into applause, and Sonya’s father held her so hard she heard a button on his shirt cracking. ‘You were wonderful!’ he said, just as she’d said to the Storioni. ‘You were marvellous.’

The light faded, and people began gathering up their things, and Sonya went to stand by the front door. ‘Goodbye,’ she said, shaking hands with her guests. ‘Thank you for coming.’ To Galina, she said, ‘You’re lucky. I’d like a little brother just like yours.’

‘Yes, he’s all right.’ Galina took Maxim casually by the hand. ‘We might come and see you again one day.’

‘Please do,’ urged Sonya, and to Mr Shostakovich she said, ‘Thank you so much for accompanying me.’

‘I should be thanking you. A fine performance.’ He bowed low so that his lock of hair bounced forward. ‘You have a very talented daughter,’ he said to Sonya’s father. ‘Don’t, for God’s sake, allow her to become a teacher. Let her play, whatever happens!’

‘Humph!’ Papa pretended to be offended. ‘Just because you consider yourself a poor teacher doesn’t mean the entire profession is useless! Some consider it a noble way of making a living.’ He put a hand on Sonya’s shoulder. ‘But I agree that she’s brilliant.’

‘It was one of the nicest parties I’ve been to,’ said Mrs Shostakovich. ‘If one wants good company, one should always go to nine-year-olds’ birthday parties — never to official functions.’

Much later, in her bedroom, Sonya lay back and watched her father who was, most unusually, tidying things away. ‘Is Mr Shostakovich famous?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her father bent down to slot books into the shelves. ‘Very famous.’

‘Those books go on the top shelf,’ Sonya told him. ‘And are you?’

‘Am I famous?’ Her father looked over his shoulder. ‘No, not really. And we should be glad about that.’

‘Why? Is it difficult to be related to a famous person? Galina said her father doesn’t always pay attention. Sometimes he sits at the piano for a long time and then he gets up and slams the door, or shouts. After that, Galina’s mother takes her and Maxim and they all go to stay with their grandparents, for something called a respite.’

For some reason, her father laughed at this. ‘Well, that’s one reason to avoid fame. And there are plenty of others. Life isn’t easy for people with a high public profile.’ He paused and then cleared his throat. ‘You should try to sleep now. Concerts are quite tiring, if I remember rightly from my performing days.’

‘Could you put my cello over there?’ said Sonya. ‘I want to see it when I’m lying down.’

Her father propped it up against the wall, where it seemed to lean in a tired but graceful way. ‘Is that all, your Excellency? May I help Aunt Tanya with the rest of the washing up now?’

After the door was closed, Sonya waited for sleep. She tried to close her eyes, but they kept flying open, as if her happiness was too great to box away. So she simply lay there, looking over to where the light-blue sky gleamed on the wooden scroll of her cello. She wished the world could stop right here, because at this very moment everything was perfect. 

Nikolai, grieving

There had been a time when Nikolai thought he would go mad with grief. Crossing at street corners, he didn’t bother to look; he simply stepped out into the blaring, weaving traffic and trusted to fate. If he was taken away, so be it.

Since that terrible night in January, he hadn’t been able to see properly, anyway. Far from the expected darkness, a glaring light had appeared in the centre of his vision. The only way he could see was by glancing out of the corner of one eye, barely turning his head, as if not really wishing to look at all. Thus the world was presented to him in slivers: distorted trees, bent lamp-posts, the thin corners of buildings.

He walked through those months like a blind man, feeling the streets through the soles of his feet. His boots wore thin, and finally wore out. ‘Why don’t you get some new shoes?’ Tanya’s tone was halfway between anxiety and a scold. ‘You look like one of the men down at Finland Station.’ To get her off his back, Nikolai pretended he was saving the money for something he couldn’t yet talk about. The truth was, it was easier to walk now that his boots had become a second skin: just as a mountaineer traverses the lips of a cold windy crevasse on a rope, hand over hand, so Nikolai felt his way with his feet. But with every uneven cobblestone, every dip of a gutter, he thought he might fall, plummeting thousands of feet into a blue icy silence.

‘Are you ready yet?’ Sonya stood in front of him, her hair tied back in a red ribbon and her cardigan buttoned. Her feet were in a dancer’s first position, together at the heels, turned out at the toes.

‘Your shoes are very shiny! Positively gleaming!’ Nikolai returned from the past with a double-edged shock: pleasure at the sight of Sonya undermined by a sharp regret. The passing of time was not altogether a blessing. He closed his eyes, trying to recapture the pale oval face, but it had gone. There were days now when he couldn’t remember the colour of her hair and, desperately, he would search the world outside the window for the exact shade to bring her back to him. On other days he realised that he’d never looked carefully enough at the curve of her neck or the shape of her feet, so that these, too, were slipping from his memory.

Sonya was looking at her shoes. ‘I spat on them,’ she confided, ‘because I couldn’t find where Aunt Tanya had put the polish.’

‘Aunt Tanya is an exceedingly tidy woman,’ agreed Nikolai. ‘Sometimes I think she’d like to tidy away the grass and the trees, and probably the Neva River. Nature is a little too unruly for Aunt Tanya.’

Sonya glanced at Nikolai’s desk. Every drawer was bulging open and scores were piled high, teetering like stacks of pancakes. ‘I suppose there’s a place in this world for every type,’ she said diplomatically.

‘You’d make an excellent politician,’ said Nikolai. ‘Perhaps we should send you to America — you’d be President in no time.’

‘No!’ Sonya ran to him. ‘I can’t leave you. I belong here in Leningrad. This is where I belong.’

Her arms tightened, noose-like, around Nikolai’s neck, and the familiar panic rose in him, as strong as it had ever been.

‘Don’t make me go away!’ Sonya was breathing fast and her forehead was slimy with sweat.

‘I was only joking, Mouse,’ said Nikolai quickly. ‘It’s not a good time to go anywhere with the spreading of this wretched war.’

His words appeared to calm Sonya. At the mention of separation, it was as if her heart had flown apart, fragments hammering in her wrists and temples. Now, almost instantly, her pulse slowed to normal. ‘The war,’ she said, with unmistakable relief. ‘As long as this war goes on, we all have to stay put. No one will go away — not you, not Aunty, not the Gessen kids or Maxim Shostakovich. Am I right?’

‘You are.’ Nikolai kicked off his slippers. ‘I’ll go and comb my hair, and then it’s time for some fun!’

In the bathroom, he leaned on the washstand and breathed deeply. ‘Eight years and five months,’ he said, staring into the cracked basin. ‘Eight years, five months and three days.’ His whisper slipped into the
slimy web of hair and soap at the bottom of the bowl, and was gone. When he looked in the mirror, his eyes were watery, and he wiped them with a greyish towel.

Shostakovich had been the only one to whom Nikolai had been able to tell the shameful truth, partly because of the way the composer sat in on rehearsals: implacable, impassive, seemingly emotionless. Even when hearing his music mangled, his face betrayed nothing. There he sat for twenty or thirty minutes, listening to Mravinsky wrestle with the Philharmonic: starting, stopping, reprimanding the bassoonist or chastising the flutes. And still he would sit in the fourth or fifth row, as silent and immobile as a wax cast, as if the torrent pouring from wide-open brass mouths, from bows and wrists, had nothing to do with him.

Occasionally, on days when his favourite football team had lost a match or he hadn’t slept, he would break his customary silence. ‘That solo must be pianissimo!’ he would shout. ‘Pianissimo, I said!’ The contrast between the delivery of his request and what he actually wanted might have provoked a joke or two, if the combination of Mravinsky and Shostakovich hadn’t been so formidable — and if the Great Hall of the Philharmonia hadn’t had acoustics (it was said) that enabled a fart from the percussionist’s backside to be heard by an eighty-year-old in the back stalls.

‘It’s not marked in the score.’ Mravinsky, defending his orchestra, regarded Shostakovich steadily. ‘See? No dynamic markings at all.’ The greater Shostakovich’s rage, the calmer Mravinsky remained. He was generally considered to be the only person in the world, with the exception of Shostakovich’s wife, who was not afraid of the composer’s sharp, though short-lived, tempers.

Shostakovich would stride to the podium and scribble on the score. ‘It must have been omitted. To be true to the music, I should write
pppppp
. To be kind to your musicians, I will settle for
pp
. I’m sorry if it’s difficult to play, but there’s nothing I can do about it. High G, pianissimo, end of argument.’

Such detachment, combined with such certainty! It was as if the man was able to separate completely: from his own work, from his family, from life itself. His students, piqued and fascinated by this, had nicknamed him ‘the man from Mars’ — and it was this same quality that made Nikolai believe he could unburden himself to no other person but Shostakovich. For months he’d remained silent, not wanting to risk condemnation.

But one evening in May, thin, weak, with shaking hands, he’d met Shostakovich in the Summer Garden and they’d taken a walk. The long promenade was crowded, mostly with couples strolling quietly under the full canopy of the lime trees. Nikolai looked down as he talked, scuffing the toes of his blistered boots.

Shostakovich listened all the way to the end of his story before speaking. ‘You’re afraid of loving
too much
?’

Above them swallows darted and turned in mid-air. Nikolai ducked his head away from the shadows and sank down on the nearest bench. ‘I was the one who wanted her to have the child. She was uncertain — she was always uncertain — but I begged her!’ His words came out in a loud embarrassing cry, and he closed his eyes, remembering that evening. Sitting by the window, she appeared to him in silhouette. Her profile was etched against the bright light: the small rounded chin, the tilted nose, and eyelashes so indecently long they were the envy of every woman in Leningrad. ‘Your career will always be waiting for you,’ he’d reassured her. The truth was, at that moment he scarcely cared about her brilliant career. Her career wasn’t going to provide him with a replica of that profile, that straight back, that soft but intense voice.

‘That was all I wanted.’ He wiped his eyes. ‘I loved her so much, you see. I wanted to be sure that a part of her went on, even after we’d both departed. I didn’t think of the danger.’

‘She died of influenza,’ said Shostakovich.

‘Yes, but weakened by childbirth!’ Nikolai could hardly breathe. ‘Because of illness caused by childbirth, and depression after childbirth —’

‘And now you’re trying not to love the baby? I have to tell you, my friend, it seems slightly illogical to me.’

‘Not illogical. Ironic, perhaps. If my love destroyed my wife, it’s going to do the same to my daughter. I can’t allow myself.’ Nikolai put his head down on his knees. ‘To tell the truth, I can’t bring myself to look at her. I can’t go near her.’

It was the worst admission he’d ever made, and it was true. When Tanya called to him to come quickly (Baby was smiling! Baby was pointing!), he pretended not to hear. He would bend stubbornly over the papers he was correcting, or turn up the radio to cover the murmuring in the next room. At night he paused beside the closed door, but the handle felt resistant to his touch.
Keep out
, it warned.
You are the carrier of danger and death
. Then he turned away from the quiet
breathing within the dim room, calling to Tanya that he had to go back to work, he’d forgotten something; and then he would stride for hours along the canal, crossing every bridge he came to, back and forwards in a meaningless trickery of a route that seemed to offer escape but led nowhere, especially not away from himself. When he arrived once more at the apartment door, he was slick with guilt, as if he’d visited a whorehouse and sunk, finally, into depravity.

‘I don’t want to love her,’ he said, looking at Shostakovich who was sitting upright beside him. His profile was as sharp and bold as if it had been hacked from the side of a mountain, and Nikolai waited numbly to hear himself condemned.

A few small boys ran across the avenue, kicking a ball, sand flying up behind their feet. Nikolai leaned back on the bench and felt the slats dig into his back. He was skin and bone, as Tanya was always telling him when she removed his untouched soup and bread.