The Conductor (17 page)

‘You’re not talking about Shostakovich, are you?’

‘Oh, he’s one example,’ said Elias diffidently.

Nikolai frowned. ‘I’m extremely fond of Dmitri, and his music is ground-breaking — but I don’t know if he’s the best person to emulate. He operates entirely within his own moral system, and effects his own self-imposed duties with little thought of the consequences.’

Elias looked up at the high windows, at the swaying cobwebs and the pigeon droppings spattered on the dusty glass. He half-closed his eyes against the sun (he couldn’t see, he didn’t want to see). ‘But Shostakovich has such purpose! He’s someone I ad-ad-admire. Someone I t-t-try to —’

But before his stutter could grow worse, and before Nikolai could voice any other unwelcome opinions, a clerk with a pencil-thin moustache approached them. Mr Eliasberg, he announced, had emphysema of the left lung and had been given a Grade 4 rating, meaning he would not be required for military service in the immediate future.

Elias stammered out thanks to the clerk, and a farewell to Nikolai, and he reeled from the building. The warmth of the late afternoon washed over him; the air felt like silk. He leaned on the stone balustrade until his legs felt strong enough to carry him. Once in the street he proceeded in his usual composed manner, but his bearing was that of a liberated man, and his relief was so profound that he began whistling under his breath. He stopped only when he remembered that, although he felt as if the war was over, the worst was still to come.

The march

A
ll day the sky had looked like the ground. In the morning, the clouds lined up in neat undulating rows, like a freshly ploughed field. Later they dispersed, merging into each other so that by mid-afternoon they resembled an endless grey stretch of sand. The world, it seemed, had inverted.

Shostakovich — looking up, wiping his hands on his trousers — remembered his first trip to the sea. He’d been five, sickly, wrapped up in rugs. It must have been summer then, as it was now. Through a crack in the cart, he’d seen fields bristling with flax, heard the seed-pods popping, and smelt their honeyed sweetness. When the horse had stopped suddenly — at a gate or a ford — he hadn’t been able to stop his stomach heaving, and a mess of chunky bile dribbled out over the blanket.
He’s a bad traveller
, someone had said, mopping him up with paper that scratched his chin.
Dmitri’s always been the delicate one
. The next thing he remembered was being lifted out of the cart, salt air sweeping through his lungs, clearing away the smell of horse-shit and the heavy yellow scent of hay. ‘The sea!’ he’d cried, and he left his rugs lying on the sand and headed towards the vast expanse of ocean. Glittering, unpeopled, it was infinitely more inviting than the cosy dacha behind the dunes, with its rounded rose bushes, a jug of cornflowers on the windowsill and a bubbling pot on the fire.

Recently, he felt as if he’d lost sight of the sea. He’d allowed himself once more to be wrapped in rugs (institutional, familial) so he could no longer reach that enormous, necessary loneliness. Loneliness was
undoubtedly a vital part of it all, though not always easy to achieve. He winced as he remembered the previous night (the pain was far sharper than that of the reddening welts on his hands). ‘I’m working, goddamn it!’ he’d shouted. ‘Get out of my room!’

Nina’s mouth had become smaller and tighter, as if trying to suppress the drama that always surrounded her husband. ‘
Your
room!
Your
home,
your
children. Everything is yours until it demands something of you, at which point you disappear like a snowflake in a fire.’

She was right. He’d recognised this even in the midst of his desperation to be left alone. How deftly she exposed his character! As neatly as gutting a fish: no squeamishness or mercy, in with the blade, and there were his innards, spilled out for the world to see. Yes, he admired her astuteness — but he wished she’d get the hell out of his working space.

Slowly, ostentatiously, she gathered up her books, walked from the room and closed the door.

Shostakovich watched the door handle; when the latch reached its resting position, there was a click. The noise both sealed him off and liberated him.

‘Alone at last,’ he said loudly enough for Nina to hear. ‘Finally, alone!’ She understood the reasons for his fierce demands —why, then, did he always have to fight for his rights?

And so, with the added pressure of having to prove himself right, he’d written all night, and had turned up for work with the Home Guard with heavy eyes and a body that was already intolerably weary.

‘You look tired.’ It was Boris Trauberg, the oafish pianist whose appointment at the Conservatoire had been opposed by both Sollertinsky and Shostakovich. He’d spent the last twenty minutes poking ineffectually at the sides of the trench, sweating profusely, making no progress at all. ‘Little wonder you’re exhausted. Ditch-digging is no occupation for men like us.’

Shostakovich spat on a callus on his hand and looked at Boris’s shiny face. He resented being placed in the same category as a toad, even by the toad himself. ‘I was working last night. If I look tired, it’s because I only had a couple of hours’ sleep.’

‘Working?’ Boris looked annoyed, as if he’d hoped war would level all creative differences. ‘Can we expect another hit for the people — a new national anthem, even?’ He closed his eyes and hummed a few bars of the Internationale rather badly.

‘I believe our leader remains happy with the current version,’ replied
Shostakovich. ‘Until he commissions a new one, I’ll continue working on my own compositions. Of which —’ he bowed over his shovel, as if Boris the Toad were worthy of respect — ‘of which I can’t speak for superstitious reasons. I’m sure you understand, from whatever it is you’re working on.’ Knowing that Boris had as much artistic ability as one of Sollertinsky’s pug dogs, he waited with interest for a response.

Boris stared suspiciously at him. ‘I’m keeping in practice, if that’s what you’re implying. It would be foolhardy not to. We’ll only be doing this donkey’s work until planes are organised to lift us out of here.’

‘I’m surprised you’re in such a hurry to leave the city that’s offered you such great opportunities. After all, your professional career took root in Leningrad’s Conservatoire and your future is flourishing on its soil.’
Greatly helped
, he felt like adding,
by the fact that you’re a distant cousin of the cultural minister
.

‘But I won’t be leaving the Conservatoire.’ Boris pursed his rubbery lips. ‘At present I am digging
for
it, and soon I will be evacuated
with
it.’

‘The Conservatoire will remain,’ said Shostakovich. ‘Musicians and composers will come and go. But the Conservatoire will live on in its permanence and greatness — exactly, one hopes, as Mother Russia will.’ He spoke as sarcastically as he dared. Opposing the Toad’s appointment had been risky enough, considering the status of his third cousin. Implying that the Red Army might be at a disadvantage — poorly armed and undertrained, lacking in supplies, and especially in expertise after the purge of Tukhachevsky and other experienced generals — well, such an implication might be enough to send Boris bleating to the Kremlin.

‘You speak the truth.’ The Toad chose to interpret his words as complimentary. ‘We’re nothing but bricks and mortar in the great wall of national culture.’

Shostakovich winced. There was no reason in the world to voice such sentiments unless facing a jail sentence or worse. ‘A shabby assortment of bricks,’ he said, glancing at their companions. A few were digging in a desultory way, but most had thrown aside their tools and were sitting in the shade, engaged in earnest discussion. They might as well have been in a lunch restaurant, he thought, or the staffroom of the Conservatoire. The sight of Horowitz waving his puny white arms as if delivering a lecture on nineteenth-century orchestration, and of Possokhov’s skinny ankles protruding from his suit trousers, made his heart sink. Boris was right. These men belonged in concert halls and lecture theatres. As defence workers, they were as useless as babies.

A young officer strode up beside them. ‘What’s going on here? Why are you wasting time gossiping?’ His voice had only a thin veneer of authority. With his smooth chin and round blue eyes, he looked young enough to be one of their sons. ‘Well?’ he snapped.

Boris gave an ingratiating smile. ‘We were discussing Comrade Shostakovich’s musical contribution to this confounded war. He was about to elaborate on his work in progress.’ He glanced sideways at Shostakovich.
Now you have to tell me!
said his treacherous smirk.

The officer gave a start at Shostakovich’s name and his right arm jerked, as if suppressing a salute. But he’d been trained to overlook individual attributes in favour of the wider causes of Party and Country. ‘We’re not here to talk music. We’re here to dig! The ditch has to reach the hospital walls by evening, and we’ll stay here until it does.’

Boris ducked his head deferentially, but once the officer’s back was turned, he winked. ‘We may be hollowing out the ground,’ he whispered. ‘But we’re filling in time, if you get my meaning.’ Slithering into the shallow trench, he jabbed at the rock-hard earth with his shovel. A tiny rivulet of soil, not even enough to fill a thimble, ran over his borrowed boot.

The officer turned back to Shostakovich. He opened his mouth, but any awkward apology was drowned out by a blast of martial music. Around the corner of the Forelli Hospital appeared a long line of men marching in an unsteady way, three abreast. Some were in threadbare uniforms, but most wore their own thick trousers and jackets.

‘Volunteers from the Kuibyshev District. Just look at them.’ Again, the officer’s voice was a tangle of emotions: contempt mixed with what sounded like pity.

Shostakovich stared at the ragged men. ‘They’re scarcely armed! There’s barely one rifle between five of them.’

The young officer remained silent. Perhaps it was more than his life was worth to comment on the decision to send men to the front line armed with home-made hammers and swords made from melted-down printing presses.

The volunteers laboured on, their eyes trained straight ahead. As the final rank approached, Shostakovich dropped his shovel and started forward.

‘Fleishman? Is that you?’

The man at the end of the row turned, and a fleeting smile appeared on his face. He raised his arm in greeting but continued to march.

‘Fleishman! Stop!’ Shostakovich took a useless step forward. The ditch between them was narrow, but the space was uncrossable: one was a civilian, the other had become a soldier.

‘I know him!’ he cried, turning to the officer. ‘He was my student.’ Already Fleishman’s thin back was disappearing into the distance, his shoulders squared inside an overly large jacket. ‘One of my more promising students,’ he added. ‘He was writing an opera.’

‘Operas won’t win the war.’

‘Neither will sending untrained, unarmed boys to the Front.’ Shostakovich was hot with anger. ‘They’ll never come back alive. They’re doomed, every one of them.’

The officer stiffened. ‘Just dig the bloody ditch. Finished by nightfall, I said!’ He strode over to the men sitting beside the bushes in their incongruous suits and neat leather shoes. Picking up Possokhov’s books, he threw them in the air. The blue covers spread like wings, releasing a few loose pages which the officer stamped into the dust.

Miserably, Shostakovich bent to his work. His blistered palms felt as if they would bleed.

Suddenly there was a rush of air beside him. ‘Mr Shostakovich!’ It was Fleishman, his normally pale cheeks blotched with red. ‘I can’t stay — I’ll be court-martialled, or worse.’ His hands were trembling as he shoved a crushed mess of pages at Shostakovich. ‘Could you look after this? It’s not finished, which is why I was taking it with me. I thought I might have time, in the evenings —’ He stopped. ‘But when I saw you here, it seemed as if it was meant to be. Could you take care of it until I get back? Perhaps have a quick look at it?’

Shostakovich grasped Fleishman’s thin wrists. ‘Of course I will. In the names of Chekhov and Fleishman!’

Despair swept over Fleishman’s face. ‘I’m sorry the score’s in such a mess. And there’s a dreadful aria in the second act that you’ll probably pull to pieces. Remember it’s in its early stages, and I have a lot of work to do when I … If I —’He pulled away. ‘I must catch up with the guard.’

He was gone as quickly as he’d arrived, a gangly figure with patched boots. Shostakovich sank down in the trench, staring at the notes: hundreds of them running over crooked staves, accompanied by scribbled stage directions and crossings-out and over-scorings. It was like looking into someone else’s brain: a mass of information gathered over years of listening and learning, half-followed threads, half-exposed themes.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ Boris sidled up.
‘Rothschild
’
s Violin
. What’s that?’

‘None of your business.’ Shostakovich spoke curtly, but he felt like crying. ‘Nor should it be mine. Unfortunately, one result of this war is that we’re all forced to do things for which we’re not even remotely qualified.’

Although the comment wasn’t directed at him, Boris looked offended. ‘We all know you’re a genius, Dmitri, while the rest of us are merely artisans. But how will your precious talent save us when the Germans come marching in, raping our women and smashing the skulls of our children? Will your symphonies stop the bullets that are already flying in the streets of Moscow?’

Shostakovich removed his glasses, so that Boris’s face became a round pink blur. He wiped the grit out of his eyes. He was about to tell Boris to get back to the only work for which he was fit, grubbing around in the dirt. But as Boris’s voice hammered on, a tinny tune emerged from the insults. Just as he grasped it (a mindlessly repetitive tune, but there was something there) and was trying to memorise it, annoyingly Boris stopped.