The Conductor (22 page)
‘Better a pimp than a man who puts his foot in his mouth.’ Shostakovich sniffed the caviar but the metallic aroma was no longer the smell of luxury. It merely reminded him of the bent shovel he’d wielded that day, as he’d hacked at the dry ground. ‘Besides, I told the truth. I really am working on military music, as well as my own private march, and the combination’s driving me mad.’
‘It’s not the official composing that’s getting you down.’ Sollertinsky put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ve always had to do that, thanks to the … how shall I put it? … the
philanthropic
regime under which we’ve flourished. If you ask me, you’re more worried about the fact that this time next week you may be watching for incendiaries from the Conservatoire roof.’
‘It’ll be preferable to ditch-digging.’ Shostakovich spread his palms to reveal open sores. ‘I’m tired of scrabbling in the dirt.’
‘At least you’ll be back at the Conservatoire. But on top of the building, rather than inside it!’
Shostakovich looked at Sollertinsky’s blunt features: the big nose, the light blue eyes, the vast planes of his cheeks, all of which somehow made up an attractive whole. ‘Yes, I’ll be back there, but you won’t.’ The fiery vodka and the sustaining strength of the beer vanished like a sun falling into cloud. He was left with nothing but foreboding.
‘I won’t be around for a while,’ agreed Sollertinsky. ‘But no war lasts forever, you know. Perhaps we’ll meet again before either of us expects it — if not in Siberia, then back at the club in better days, when you can make amends for your curtness by buying the conductor a drink.’ He glanced down at Shostakovich’s plate. ‘May I? You’re not touching that excellent caviar and tomorrow morning it will be wasted on the pigs.’
Shostakovich passed his plate. ‘I’m fearful. Fearful that I’ll never see you again.’ He looked at his friend long and steadily.
‘Just get on with that secret work of yours,’ said Sollertinsky. ‘Put out a few fires to satisfy your nationalistic conscience, and then meet me in Siberia. It may not be the most attractive of holiday destinations, but I hear the girls are pretty.’
E
lias woke to an unfamiliar feeling. His stomach was rumbling like a heavy cart on cobblestones, and his eyelids rasped. There was thick sweat all over his body: forehead, chest, even the backs of his legs. He rolled over and reached out for Nina Bronnikova. She wasn’t there.
The light falling through the thin curtain was too bright, and the hammering and crashing from the street compounded his nausea.
Nina!
Groaning, he closed his eyes again to block out recent reality and his even more recent dream. Taking Nina Bronnikova’s arm and escorting her to the dance floor (reality). Her cool hand in his sticky one, her legs moving close to his (reality). His fingers stroking her face, their lips meeting, his hands running over her bare shoulders and down to her arched lower back, her body shuddering with pleasure.
Dream. Dream. Dream
. Despising himself, he rammed his head into his pillow.
When his erection had subsided, he turned on his back and stared at the ceiling, at the large boot-shaped stain caused three winters earlier by a burst water pipe. Of course it looked like a boot; he would never escape his upbringing. Perhaps one was allowed only a glimpse into a better possible life, before falling back into the pit where one belonged? God, this nausea, the frustration and guilt — and the new resentment that throbbed like a cut. Sollertinsky had put out the bait; Elias — stupidly confident — had risen to it. And Shostakovich had thrown him back like an unsatisfactory sprat.
Nina Bronnikova
. He repeated it like a mantra.
Nina Bronnikova
. The intimacy he’d felt on waking was caused by nothing more than
lust and a ridiculous sense of romance. ‘Do you care to dance?’ That was all she’d said. He knew even then she was partnering him out of pity, but his tongue had been loosened by alcohol, as well as relief at escaping Shostakovich’s unexpected attack, Mravinsky’s cool stare and Sollertinsky’s jokes. So they’d chatted — about what? About the dacha she owned south of the city, left to her by her grandparents after her parents were killed in a train crash. It was deserted now: dacha owners had been ordered to destroy all crops and food stores, lest they provide sustenance for the enemy. What had Nina done when she left for the last time? She’d locked the door and the garden gate, then cycled back into the city with jam jars and pickles in her basket, and a sack of potatoes on her back. At the checkpoint, the soldiers had searched her belongings and told her she wouldn’t be allowed to pass this way again. ‘A series of lock-ups,’ she said. ‘A series of retreats.’ She’d clamped her mouth shut and her eyes looked sad. Quickly, Elias had told her of a recent rehearsal when Fomenko had struck the kettle drums so hard that the end flew off his drumstick, bouncing smartly off Marchyk’s bald head and into the open mouth of his tuba. Nina had laughed at this, and he’d noticed that her teeth were slightly crooked, and he’d almost kissed her for her beautiful imperfections.
God, he felt ill. He tried to sit up, but the room whirled. He had to get to work. Cautiously, he reached for his watch — and a piercing scream came from the outer room.
‘I won’t go!’ It was his mother, shouting in what sounded like genuine distress.
Just swinging his legs over the edge of the bed made fresh sweat break out on his back. Automatically, he checked the time: barely an hour before he was due at rehearsal.
‘Karl! Karl!’ His mother sounded panicky. ‘For God’s sake, help me!’
He pulled on his coat and blundered out. ‘What is it, Mother? What on earth is happening?’
Olga Shapran stood in the middle of the room. She was bending over Elias’s shrieking mother, pulling at her, half-lifting her out of the chair.
‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ Elias’s head felt as if it would explode.
Olga looked at him disapprovingly, taking in his bare feet and his dishevelled hair. ‘I tried to wake you. You were snoring like a pig. You’ve got to help me — your mother’s due at the station in less than two hours.’
‘Today?’ He glanced at the calendar above the stove. ‘You’ve got it
wrong. The train leaves next week, not today.’
‘The timetable has been changed. Clearly, you’ve been too busy carousing to listen to the news.’ Olga began pulling at his mother’s shoulders again. ‘Stand up. Get dressed. Do you want to be sent out of Leningrad in your nightclothes?’
‘Leave her alone!’ Elias’s nausea was made worse by his intense dislike of the interfering Olga. ‘I’ll get her dressed. She doesn’t need to be bullied by you.’
‘Just trying to help.’ Olga’s mouth turned down further until she looked like a large and wily trout. ‘Just looking out for my neighbours. If it weren’t for me, you’d both have slept through your mother’s chance at evacuation. One of you snoring from old age, and the other—’ she eyed Elias suspiciously, as if sensing his lustful dreams — ‘through
over-indulgence
.’
Mrs Eliasberg whimpered and shifted in her chair. ‘This is my home. I won’t be evacuated like a refugee. I wish to stay here, in my neighbourhood where I belong.’
‘Mother.’ Elias straightened her woollen shawl. ‘We’ve been through this already. The situation’s becoming more dangerous by the day. Have you looked outside recently? Your street is unrecognisable. There’s a tram filled with sandbags at your intersection. Your park has become a trench. Your trees are shelters for snipers.’ He went to the window and raised the blind, though vomit rose in his throat at the sharpness of the light.
His mother rolled her eyes. ‘I’m too ill to travel.’ She held out a wavering hand. ‘See how it shakes?’
Triumphantly, Olga turned to Elias. ‘You see? She’s becoming infirm. Which is why we have to get her out of the house and onto that train. You weren’t here for the last air-raid practice, so you have no idea what we went through with your mother.’
‘No, I wasn’t here. In that, at least, you’re correct. I was at work, carrying out my duties as a citizen of Leningrad.’ He spoke as coldly as he could, trying to ignore his churning bowels.
‘Had you been here, you’d have witnessed the near-impossibility of carrying an old woman in a chair down four flights of stairs. Fortunately,
some
men were around to help — my husband, for one.’
‘Yes, I understand Mr Shapran has been out of a job for some time now.’ Elias gripped the windowsill. ‘I’m surprised he hasn’t volunteered for a labour battalion by now.’
‘He’s duty bound to stay with us as long as possible. He’s been voted warden of this building.’
‘Oh.’ Already Elias was tiring of the fight. ‘I hadn’t realised. I —’
‘You artistic types with your heads in the clouds.’ Olga seemed slightly mollified. ‘Lucky for you you’ve got practical neighbours. When the real air raids start, you’ll be even more grateful we’re looking out for you. Now, where’s your mother’s suitcase?’
‘No!’ Mrs Eliasberg began banging her head against the back of her chair. ‘I won’t go. I — will — not — go.’ There was fear in her eyes, and she clutched her chair so tightly that her knuckles shone white through her skin.
‘You will go!’ Olga’s temper returned. ‘You’re another mouth to feed! Another useless body to carry to the air-raid shelter!’ She rushed across the room and grabbed Mrs Eliasberg by the ankles. ‘See, you can’t even move by yourself. You’re a liability!’
‘That’s enough!’ Elias launched himself away from the windowsill. ‘How dare you touch my mother in such a way!’ Grabbing Olga by the hair, he flung her sideways so she staggered against the table. His jar of batons crashed to the floor. ‘She’s not going. She’ll stay here with me. I’ll be responsible for her. If we have to endure frequent air raids —
if
, for we still don’t know what the Germans are planning — then I’ll carry her to the cellar. If I’m not here, Mr Shapran will do it. Is that clear?’
Olga’s ruddy face was pale; her freckles stood out like crumbs on a white cloth. She nodded but said nothing.
‘What a scene.’ Elias glanced down at his bare bony ankles and then, guiltily, at the sparse handful of hair pulled from Olga’s head. ‘Being at war with barbarians turns us into barbarians ourselves. I apologise.’
Olga shuffled her feet amid the batons and broken glass. She spoke gruffly. ‘Can you still conduct with those?’
‘The orchestra will neither notice nor care. They rarely do what I ask, even when commanded by batons of a full length.’
A smile twitched at the corner of Olga’s trout mouth.
‘We’re still neighbours, eh?’ said Elias. ‘Regardless of what the next few months may bring. We’re still human beings, rather than liabilities or statistics. Now you must excuse me. I have to go to work.’
Protectively, he stood beside his mother until Olga had disappeared, then he, too, stepped out onto the landing. He made his way up the three small stairs to the blue-painted door and rapped on the wooden panels. Mercifully, there was no one in there. Bolting the door behind him, he knelt on the floor and, with his head in the lavatory bowl, was instantly, copiously sick.
S
hostakovich’s paper supply was running low. Three mornings in a row, straggling back to Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street in the early morning, he’d detoured to the Composers’ Union. Three mornings in a row, he was met with blank expressions and empty hands. Everything was running out. Even the farcical old plaster replicas had reappeared in the windows of grocery stores, and bread rations had been cut once again.
‘But why has score paper run out?’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘Now, of all times? Especially as Prokofiev’s no longer in Leningrad to hog it all.’
The clerk gave an uncertain laugh.
‘I wasn’t joking.’ Shostakovich spoke morosely. He had an increasing and not irrational fear of being stopped in his tracks. Stopped by military developments, as the crucial battle at Mga was still raging and the German lines were coiling closer around Leningrad. Stopped by Nina, demanding they leave the city. Stopped by lapsed concentration, exhaustion or illness. The music he’d written over the past weeks was like a steam train at his back, bearing down, forcing him on. It was bad enough thinking about what he still had to write, without fretting about what he was supposed to write
on
. ‘Can’t you give me something?’
The clerk shuffled through logbooks as if to postpone the bad news. Finally he looked up. ‘It appears our deliveries have been temporarily halted.’
Shostakovich sighed. ‘Please try to get me some, by whatever means you can. It’s extremely important.’
In recent days the clerk, having witnessed the departure of almost all regular Union visitors, had become increasingly gloomy. The building was a ghost-ship with his puny reluctant self at the helm, and outside a fearsome storm was brewing. But now his chin lifted. ‘You mean to say you’re still
composing?
And it’s something
important?
I suppose it’d be impertinent to enquire what it … might be.’ His sentence ended in a nervous squeak.
Shostakovich dropped his fire helmet with a clang. ‘I’m not sure. That is, I can’t speak about it.’ By the time he’d stooped, banged his head on the desk and retrieved his helmet, his dislike of the clerk was complete. His wife and his best friend: these were the only two who’d possibly earned the right to enquire about his work in progress. In fact, due to past experience, neither Sollertinsky nor Nina had asked very much at all. How would a spindly idiot behind a desk have any insight into Shostakovich’s rough black notation?
‘Just move heaven and earth to get me some paper,’ he said curtly.
‘I’ll try, sir. I hear that you’re fire-watching now?’
‘Yes, I’m keeping watch on the roof of the Conservatoire.’
‘How ironic!’ The clerk peered at him deferentially. ‘For so long you’ve nurtured our city from inside that building, and now you’re protecting us from its heights.’
More than ever, Shostakovich wished someone else would enter the room and save him. But the Union, once full of people he wished to avoid, was dismayingly empty. ‘I suppose it’s ironic,’ he muttered.