Great Historical Novels (63 page)

Alexander dropped his mute with a clang, and Elias watched him scrabbling on the floor with a loathing so strong he felt it would rot his guts.
Would that I could mute you
, he thought, wrapping his handkerchief tightly around his bleeding hand.
Would that, in the middle of your tirades, I could shove that mute so far down your throat that you gag.

He said nothing more, simply watched, as if from a great distance, the figure of the oboist weaving away from him. At the door Alexander stumbled, spat, then disappeared.

Elias looked at the globule of spit lying on the floor. Elongated, fizzing with bubbles, it looked like some malevolent living organism. He wiped it up with his blood-stained handkerchief and threw the ruined cloth into the bin by the door.

In the dressing room, only old Petrov remained, sitting straight-backed in a chair, combing his fingers through his wispy beard. Elias nodded to him and began packing up. His hands were trembling so
badly he couldn’t even bundle the shuffled edges of the unbound score inside his briefcase.

‘I heard what you said to the Principal Oboe,’ said Petrov finally. He always spoke of the other musicians like this — Third Cellist, Fifth Bass — as if by doing so he could exert control, if not over the individuals, at least over his own emotional responses to them.

‘Did you?’ Elias went on straightening the score.

‘I was listening at the door,’ admitted Petrov. ‘There are times when the concertmaster needs to know what’s going on. For professional reasons.’

‘I suppose so. But this problem is more personal than professional, I fear.’

‘You’re right. Your pedantry annoys the Oboist. Intensely.’

Elias gave a short bark of laughter.

‘Let’s say exactitude,’ modified Petrov. ‘The Oboist doesn’t like being pulled up on detail. Regardless of that, whether he likes you or not, you’re the one in control. I approve of what you said to him.’

‘It’s so ludicrous!’ Elias sank into a chair. ‘He insists on fighting these battles, day after day, while half of the world is engaged in real war. Mothers sending their sons to face the bayonets, tanks crushing bodies into the mud — who knows where it will end? But as long as Alexander’s precious Leningrad is safe, as long as he can strut the streets, and ride half-price on the trams, and jump the queue in the movie theatre because everyone knows his foxish face, then Alexander is happy!’

‘But not, perhaps, for much longer.’ A small tear squeezed out of the corner of Petrov’s rheumy eye. ‘Better to be prepared for the worst than be tripped and thrown down a mine-shaft when you least expect it. I’ll say this for you, you strike me as someone who’s never avoided walking on the dark side of the street.’ His hand strayed to his jacket pocket. ‘Care for a drink?’

‘No, thank you. I never drink during the day.’

‘Very wise.’ Petrov swilled from the flask and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Everyone should have rules of personal conduct. That way, when one breaks them, it feels like a special occasion.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘If it’s any consolation, it’s common knowledge why the Principal Oboe is being such a bastard at the moment — although it’s no excuse.’

‘It’s plain and simple.’ Elias shrugged. ‘Alexander hates me. He’s always hated me, and he will hate me to the grave.’

Petrov looked surprised, and his thin arms floated out slightly from his sides. ‘I thought you knew! The Oboe is in love with the Second Flute, hence he’s strutting like a wild cock. Once she snares him, he’ll become a regular chanticleer. You’ll see.’

Left alone at last, Elias laid his head on the cracked table and cried. His tears, unlike Petrov’s, were no involuntary leaking from eyes weakened by poor nutrition and reading badly copied scores in half-light. They were tears of exhaustion, and of loneliness deeper than a well.
I’m nearly forty years old
, he cried inside his head,
and I’ve never known what it is to be happy. I’m nearly forty, and I have never loved
.

When he raised his head, the buttery light had slid across the wall: how much time had he lost in self-pity? He reached for his handkerchief before remembering it was in the bin, covered in his own blood and another man’s spit. He dragged his sleeve across his wet face. ‘Idiot. Fool. Blubbering like a woman.’

His father had never cried — at least, not in front of Elias. Perhaps that explained the guilt that lay so heavily inside him? He stared at his reflection in his highly polished briefcase. The small dents in the leather made his face look battered; his cheekbone was caved in on one side and his left eye disappeared into his hair. And suddenly he was back in the hallway of the old Dimitrovsky Pereulok apartment, hearing his mother screaming so hysterically that the hair rose on the back of his neck. His grandfather was being carried in from the street by strangers, his head lolling, his neck bent at a strange angle. The men passed so close to Elias that he could have touched his grandfather’s bleeding face. There was a gaping hole where his nose should have been, bones gleamed through the flesh, and his eyes were two black swollen welts. ‘He was attacked near the station,’ said one of the men.

Mr Eliasberg appeared, to stare impassively at the wrecked body of his father. ‘We found him in a pool of blood,’ explained the unknown man, and Elias’s shrieking mother was led away to the kitchen by a neighbour while his father ordered that the body be carried into the back room. (The ‘body’! As if it were no one he knew!). And then the door of the back room slammed, leaving Elias alone in the hallway. Kneeling, he put his fingers in the pools of blood, and he was still crouched there when his dry-eyed father reappeared. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he barked. Elias looked up at him with bloodied lips, for he’d heard that if you tasted the blood of someone you admired you absorbed their attributes.

He remembered the taste as if it were only yesterday. His grandfather’s
blood had tasted of metal, like the railings of the Pantelimonov Bridge that he walked over every day to the market — there was no trace of courage and bravado in it. Instead, it had sent terror into him. He imagined its darkness spreading through his guts, poisoning his stomach, seeping into his brain and eventually driving him mad.

‘Is Grandfather dead?’ he’d quavered. Death had never been explained to him, but he knew that it had entered their house. ‘Go outside and play,’ ordered Mr Eliasberg, roughly wiping his son’s hands with an old workshop cloth. And Elias had gone to sit on the front steps with fingers that smelt of boot polish and were stained brown instead of red.

No, his father hadn’t cried, not even on seeing the broken body of his own father, a victim of random violence. When Elias asked him timidly why he hadn’t shed tears, his father had shrugged. ‘Tears?’ He sounded as if he didn’t fully understand the word. ‘You can’t bring back the past, nor change the present, with tears. What use are tears?’

What use indeed?
thought Elias. Why cry over a row with an oboist, when all it had done was make him late?

Outside the light was as bright as snow. He stood at the top of the steps for a moment, dazzled, before setting off blindly.
Wham!
He collided with a dark shape racing up the steps towards him. His briefcase flew out of his hand and hit the ground, the clasp burst open, and pages of Tchaikovsky soared through the air.

‘Oh, hell!’ He looked despairingly at his score, pages scattering like butterflies. ‘Bloody, bloody hell!’

‘Hell, indeed.’ The newcomer was none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. ‘Please forgive me! I was in such a hurry, I failed to see you.’ He ran back down onto the pavement and began gathering up great handfuls of paper, oblivious to the fact that he was blocking passers-by.

‘No matter.’ Elias tried to sound light-hearted. ‘The music is in no more of a mess than it was in the hands of my orchestra.’

Shostakovich gave a crack of laughter. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ he said, as if he hadn’t been aware of Elias’s identity until now. ‘It’s the conductor, Karl —’ He paused, pulled out a large handkerchief and sneezed heartily.

Please
, thought Elias, with a disproportionate desperation.
Please don’t forget my name, not today.

‘Karl Eliasberg!’ Shostakovich removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes. ‘Eliasberg, the radio-master!’ He bent down to tug at a page pinned under the boot of a stout woman at the tram-stop. ‘If you please!
Kindly release the music of one of the world’s greatest composers. His work does
not
belong under your heel.’ Wiping the dusty sole-mark off the page, he handed a messy sheaf of paper to Elias. ‘Here. I hope that constitutes an entire symphony.’

Elias took the tattered bundle and tried to speak, but his tongue refused to work.

Shostakovich coughed. ‘I’m in rather a hurry, as you may have noticed from my hasty arrival. I’m simply dashing in to pick up some tickets left for me by Nikolai Nikolayev.’

‘Nikolai —’ stuttered Elias, glancing over his shoulder. ‘He is no longer — that is, I was the last —’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Shostakovich, slightly impatiently. ‘But he was recording here earlier today. I’m hoping — though not expecting, as Nikolai’s mind is as cloudy as a March morning — that he’s remembered to leave my tickets with the doorman. Tomorrow is a most important match. And if I miss it I will be most annoyed.’

‘M-m-match?’ Elias could have bitten his tongue out.

‘Football, of course.’ Shostakovich stared up at the glinting windows. ‘Not just one game, but two.’ With alarming rapidity, his attention switched back to Elias. ‘I don’t suppose you want to come, do you? Zenith is playing the Moscow Locomotives. Dementiyev has been drafted in from the Dynamos and he’s in top form!’

‘It’s d-d-difficult,’ said Elias.

‘Difficult? The game’s right here in Leningrad! Half an hour’s journey at most.’

‘It’s my mother. She’s a semi-invalid. It can be a bore, but as her only son —’

‘You
are
a Zenith supporter, I hope?’

‘Certainly,’ said Elias in an uncertain voice. ‘That is, I don’t know much about the sport but, were I to support anybody, it would be Zenith. If I ever made it to a match, I would be Dement … Dementi … that man’s biggest fan.’

Shostakovich nodded. ‘Zenith is the absolute best. One night when my wife was away, I invited the whole team to my home for supper. We had a tremendous time. One of them even knew how to play guitar.’

‘Is that so?’ Elias managed a small laugh. ‘Remarkable!’ He was trembling slightly. This might be his only chance to speak to Shostakovich on such intimate terms; he must do it now, yet it felt as risky as sticking his hand into a fire. ‘Will you permit me to say something I’ve long
wanted to say? I wish to t-t-t—’ But at this point his tongue seized up altogether, and he was eleven years old again, standing before his father who was shouting at him for stuttering like a ninny.

Shostakovich blew his nose, as if allowing Elias time to recover. Seconds dragged by. ‘You wished to tell me —?’

‘S-s-imply to s-s-say —’ He bit the inside of his cheek; blood welled inside his mouth. ‘Your Quintet! The power of your Quintet. The beauty! To capture such passion in such a restrained form. It is quite miraculous.’

‘Oh! Thank you! Thank you, indeed, for such praise.’ Shostakovich bent his head — perhaps in gratitude? — yet he sounded as if he wished he were somewhere else.

Now that his tongue was working, Elias couldn’t stop. ‘Your performance in the Moscow concert was miraculous. I travelled there overnight simply to hear you play. What a performance! So long since you’d played the piano, let alone one of your own works, but no one could rival you. Not Lev Oborin, not Sviatoslav Richter! Even if they’d rehearsed for a month of Sundays, if they’d slept with the score under their pillows — not even then could they know the notes as intimately as you. From where I sat, it seemed that the notes were pouring out, impromptu, from somewhere inside you.’ He stopped for breath, feeling immense relief.

What had he expected to see on Shostakovich’s face? Recognition? An acknowledgement that the second-rate radio-master, Mr Eliasberg, was worthy of sharing the secrets of a great composer?
What
, he asked himself bitterly,
did you expect?
For somewhere in the middle of his outpouring, it seemed, Shostakovich had stopped listening. He was glancing into the street, then up at the blank windows of the Radio Hall; he was shading his eyes, shuffling his feet, rummaging in his pocket.
He hadn’t listened
. And when he looked at Elias the sun glinted off his glasses and Elias was shut out. Blinded, winded, wounded. Alone again.

‘You really must excuse me.’ Shostakovich spoke from behind his shield of glass. ‘I’ll be in terrible trouble if I’m not home soon. Once again, I apologise for —’ he stared at the dirty score in Elias’s arms — ‘for that.’

Abruptly he turned on his heel and was gone.

At the fish market

Elias made his way down Nevsky Prospect, trying not to think of anything at all. ‘I hate him,’ he muttered over and over again. ‘I hate him.’ His sweaty palm slipped on the handle of the briefcase, now filled with a crumpled mess of pages that he’d have to smooth out and press under heavy books once he’d put his mother to bed.

He’d reached the crowded marketplace of Gostiny Dvor before his breathing returned to normal. Entering the Clock Line, he pushed through a mass of people, not looking at faces. ‘An arrogant human cannonball,’ he mumbled, experiencing again the moment of collision, the wind knocked out of him, the briefcase flying from his hand. ‘I hate him. An arrogant son of a bitch who happened to have been born with a gift.
I hate him.’

‘You want to buy?’ Someone was pressing closely to his side: wrinkled face, glazed eyes, toothless open mouth.

‘I hate him,’ he said again to the old woman pushing a handle of candles at him.

‘What’s to hate?’ queried the crone. ‘These are quality candles, damn your eyes.’

Elias shied away. ‘No candles. I’m not here for candles.’ He hurried on, straightening his jacket, attempting to remember that he was a professional working man. But there was a lament inside him: something had been lost. How could he ever listen to the soaring lines of the Quintet with the old appreciation? Even now, though the day was cooling, his cheekbones burned.