Great Historical Novels (92 page)

He didn’t look at the flautist again, nor at Nina or Nikolai; he wasn’t strong enough to see grief or shock, not today. His head was swimming and there was an unfamiliar burning in his lungs. The orchestra dragged on through the adagio, which was no longer beautiful, and into the finale, which lacked all vigour and conviction. He conducted mechanically, feeling as if, at any moment, he might topple to the floor.

At the end of the first hour he sank onto a chair and conducted sitting down — something he’d never have dreamed of doing before this nightmare began. But from his chair he had an unimpeded view of Nina Bronnikova’s face. Was there reproach in her curved neck and lowered eyes? He found the possibility unbearable, and stood up again, leaning heavily on the chair and conducting with his right hand only.

After the musicians had left, some for sentry duty and some for the bread queues, he allowed himself to sit once more. With his head between his knees, coughing and gasping, he began to recite progressions from the symphony: ‘Variation Four, Figure 25, oboe and bassoon. Dynamic:
piano
. B flat against B natural; C major to C sharp minor. Crescendo to
fortissimo
. Back to C major.’

But instead of steadying him, as he’d hoped, the musical equations tumbled into a sea of horrifying images. His father beating a human face with his cobbler’s hammer, Shostakovich throwing manuscript pages from the window of an aeroplane. A row of incendiary bombs scattered down a street, blazing like flowers.
And back to C major
, he repeated in desperation, but his thoughts were drowned out by the blows of the
hammer. The human profile disintegrated into a cloud of white skin, Shostakovich’s face went up in flames, the engines of the aeroplane roared. He was in hell.

Through the chaos a hand touched his forehead, anchoring him. ‘We have to get him to a hospital,’ someone said.

He opened his eyes to a world that, somehow, was still intact.

‘Can you hear me?’ Nikolai’s straggling hair and beard did nothing to hide his concern.

Yes, I can hear you perfectly
, he answered.
Only at present, due to unforeseen illness, I’m unable to speak.

Nina’s face floated behind Nikolai’s like a beautiful pale cloud. ‘I think he can hear but not speak.’

Even as his lungs rasped for breath, Elias felt enormous gratitude. She could understand him. She knew what he was thinking.

‘Try to drink this,’ said Nikolai, putting the rim of a glass to his lips.

The tepid water made him gag but it was laced with sugar, which seeped a grainy strength into his limbs. He lay where he’d fallen, listening to the voices, succumbing to the loss of power. It was like being a child again — although his parents had never cared so much.

‘He’s dreadfully thin.’ Nina seemed to forget that Elias was capable of hearing. ‘And he’s had that cough for weeks. I remember him saying that he’d once had tuberculosis. Do you think —?’

‘I don’t think it’s TB. Perhaps a touch of pneumonia? And certainly nervous exhaustion. He’s been working himself to death.’

‘Poor Elias.’ Nina sounded upset.

‘If we can get him to the Astoria,’ said Nikolai, ‘Tanya will find a bed for him. He has to rest.’

Elias opened his eyes and spoke with a leaden tongue. ‘Rehearsals. Shostakovich —’

‘Less important than your health. Besides, what good will you be to Shostakovich if you’ve worked yourself to death before the performance?’

Closing his eyes again, Elias listened to Nikolai arranging his future with surprising decisiveness. The door banged, and now only Nina was left beside him, holding the water glass, checking his pulse.

It seemed rude to lie there silently. Wetting his lips, he practised a couple of phrases in his head —
two-tone motif, six repeated Gs
— and then he tried speaking out loud. ‘Thank you,’ he managed to croak.

‘For what?’

‘For playing … the piano.’

‘But I’m still hopeless. Nowhere near as good as you’d like.’

‘Not … hopeless.’ He turned his head to look at her. ‘Not yet …excellent. But not … hopeless.’

Nina laughed. ‘Someone once described you as brutal. But I think honest is a better word.’

‘The two are … easily confused.’ He gave a small nod. He was too tired to say any more, although he wanted to tell her a thousand things: things he’d wanted to say for a long time. Out in the street, the army trucks rumbled on, and through the occasional chink in the noise came the sound of a few birds singing.

The door banged again and Nikolai was back. ‘Good news!’ he said. ‘You’ll be taken by car to the hospital. They’ll have a bed ready for you there. You’re a more important person than you think!’

‘One night only,’ said Elias weakly. ‘Tomorrow we must rehearse.’

Nikolai ignored this. ‘Now, what about your mother? Is she able to look after herself for a few days, or is she completely bedridden?’

‘She is … She is completely —’ Elias turned his head away, and mumbled the last words into the floor.

‘
What
did you say?’ asked Nikolai sharply.

‘She’s dead. My mother is dead.’

Nina grasped his hand. ‘When? When did this happen?’

‘Two days ago.’ He bit his lip to stop himself crying and heard again the scraping of Valery’s sled as the runners bumped over the dry mud. He saw Valery’s small hands alongside his on the rope, and the half-fearful look on the boy’s face as they reached the cemetery gates.

‘God, I’m so sorry.’ Nikolai sounded shocked. ‘Why didn’t you say anything? You worked yesterday, and all day today, without telling us?’

‘I … couldn’t. I don’t know why.’ It was no explanation, but it was the truth. He licked the metallic taint of blood off his lip: it tasted of death. He had wrapped his mother’s body in the old crocheted blanket and carried it down the first flight of stairs. As emaciated as she’d been, the weight had almost proved too much for him. Only the fear that Mr Shapran would find him collapsed on the landing, with his dead mother beside him, had forced him on, one stair at a time, his arms burning and his eyes leaking tears.

‘No wonder you’re near collapse,’ said Nikolai. ‘Have you been giving all your rations to her?’

‘I was trying to stop her disappearing.’ How had her life slipped
through his fingers? She was alive when he went to the bathroom to scrape at his face with the blunt blade, yet by the time he’d emerged, raw-chinned, hurrying, she had gone. He knew it instantly. The room was ringing with absence. After checking that her eyes were closed, and pulling the sheet over her face, he’d closed the door and left for rehearsal. All day yesterday, he had said nothing, spoken of nothing but work. Returning to the apartment in the evening had been the hardest and loneliest thing he’d ever done in the whole of his hard, lonely life.

Nina was still holding his hand. ‘You did everything anyone could.’ She had no way of knowing this, but the characteristic ring of truth in her voice was somehow comforting.

After coping so long on his own, being in the hospital was curiously soothing. White-clad staff passed by quietly; the ill and the wounded lay still under their covers. Unlit chandeliers hung over the makeshift wards like the canopies of oak trees. Elias was fed, sometimes he was washed; he was treated with no more and no less respect than anyone else. It was only when he stepped shakily back into the real world a few days later and returned to the Radio Hall that he remembered what he’d been through, and what lay ahead.

Nikolai looked at him in an assessing way. ‘Why don’t you shorten rehearsal time? At least for a couple of days, until you get some strength back.’

Elias shook his head. ‘We need every minute we can get.’

‘You’re a stubborn bastard. You and Shostakovich have a lot in common. In a word, pig-headedness.’

‘Speaking of Shostakovich,’ said Elias, ‘do you know how he is?’

‘He’s worried. Worried about the war, worried about catching typhus, worried how long Leningrad can survive under siege. Essentially, he’s the same Dmitri we’ve always known and loved.’

‘But has he mentioned —’ Elias fiddled with his music stand. ‘The symphony? You told me he was concerned that Toscanini may botch it in America — but what about this performance,
our
performance?’

‘Nothing yet,’ admitted Nikolai. ‘But the last letter from him was some time ago. A good deal of post isn’t getting through.’

‘Of course.’ Elias tried to sound matter-of-fact. It was unlikely that Shostakovich would expend much thought on a makeshift orchestra in
Leningrad, when his symphony was gaining the attention of eminent conductors and critics all over the world. Yet he couldn’t help hoping for — what, a sign? Something to show that Shostakovich believed in what they were doing, and that it mattered. Stifling a sigh, he lowered his music stand. ‘Not very dignified to conduct from a chair, I know, but collapsing mid-rehearsal would be less so.’

There turned out to be one other advantage to his new, lowly position. Viewed from a chair, the orchestra seemed less of a solid mass and more a collection of individuals. He was able to see veins standing out on necks, and nervous twitching in the bars before a solo. He was less audible and less visible — but at last he was on the right level.

After the rehearsal was over, several of the musicians came up to enquire about his health, and to commiserate over the loss of his mother.

‘They seem to like me better,’ he said to Nina, in slight surprise.

‘Of course. Now they see you as a human being, instead of a conductor.’

‘Because my mother died?’ He was confused. ‘Or because I’ve been in hospital?’

‘Because you’re vulnerable.’ Nina closed the lid of the piano. Her knack of summarising things made him see life didn’t need to be as complicated as he’d always found it.

‘Are you ready to go?’ Nikolai was stationed by the door. Over the winter he’d developed a strange stillness about him — a static, waiting quality. With his long beard and eyebrows he reminded Elias of a moss-covered statue. Arrested in time, as they’d all been, by an ill twist of fate and by the siege. When would they be released?

Very slowly, they made their way through the ruined city, Nikolai carrying Elias’s small bag and Elias carrying the huge score. He’d boiled down his leather briefcase many months earlier; it had yielded a peculiar-tasting chunk of protein, which he’d told his mother was pork aspic, and it had lasted them some weeks.

The streets were no longer muddy but were still marked by the deep ruts from army vehicles and tanks. Young people moved in the same way as the elderly, slowly and stiffly. Only the rustling green trees seemed alive. Summer was here again, but it had returned to a suspended city: smashed, ruined, still surrounded by the enemy.

At the thought of a stalemate, of entrapment stretching ahead with no end, Elias felt the familiar stirrings of panic. How could he inspire exhausted Leningraders and their Party leaders if he had no belief in a
future? His fear grew, as it always did, at the prospect of Shostakovich sitting by his radio in Kuibyshev, listening to him conduct the Seventh Symphony. But today the thing that frightened him most of all was the thought of walking back into his empty apartment.

The closer they got, the more nervous he became. Nikolai had stopped trying to make conversation, and they turned the corner in silence. Elias kept his head down and his eyes fixed on the broken cobblestones.

‘Look!’ Nikolai nudged him. ‘You have a welcoming committee.’

There on the front steps sat Valery, tracing patterns in the dust with his stubby fingers. As soon as he caught sight of them, he jumped up. ‘Mr Elias! Hooray, you’re home!’

‘Nice to see you, too.’ Elias coughed — it was the dust, surely, that made his eyes prickle and his voice come out slightly clogged.

Valery looked earnestly at Nikolai. ‘Mr Elias has been giving me some of his rations. He says I need to get plump and strong, the way I used to be.’ He stood back, flexing imaginary muscles on his stick-thin arms.

‘That’s kind of him,’ said Nikolai. ‘Though he might consider looking after himself as well as other people.’

‘I’m fine,’ mumbled Elias. ‘Just doing what anyone else would.’

Valery took the score out of his hands and held it as if it were made of glass. ‘This is Mr Shostakovich’s work,’ he informed Nikolai. ‘He’s very famous. Soon there’ll be a big concert, with Mr Elias in charge.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ said Nikolai. ‘Shall we go inside now?’

And so Elias came home again, flanked by an eager knock-kneed boy and a generous, grief-stricken man. As he pushed open the door of the apartment and caught sight of the empty bed, he’d never been so glad of the company.

The letterbox

It seemed strange that no one had ever touched the trees. When Nikolai looked out his window, peering through the criss-crossed tape and scratched glass, he still saw tree-tops, now a deep dark green, in the park. Throughout the dark icy months of winter, every shelled house had been stripped and every bombed factory picked over for fuel. Anything not chained down or locked up had been removed: pulled apart by bare hands, chopped up with hatchets, tugged away on sleds to feed small smoky stoves, staving off a cold so extreme it slowed the blood to a crawl. Furniture, wallpaper, books; dung scavenged from the city stables before the horses were shot and used for meat. Anything with combustible potential had been scavenged — so why had the trees survived?