The Conductor (3 page)

‘I was simply saying
How light it is here, and how unfriendly
!’ Deliberately, vaguely, his mother looked towards the open window.

Silence fell. Down in the street someone who hadn’t been eating liquid vegetables with an aged relative was whistling cheerfully. Elias fiddled with his spoon and, out of habit, sprinkled salt on his empty plate.

‘Think of your health, Karl!’ His mother clicked her tongue. ‘You don’t want to die before you’re forty like your poor father.’

‘Chances are,’ said Elias, ‘that I’ll be killed by something other than an excessive intake of salt.’ Death by nagging, for instance. He’d be found slumped at his desk, his head on a pillow of scores, driven to an early grave by a semi-paralysed matriarch whose tongue was the only part of her body in full working order.

‘“My tired body has given way … And passersby think vaguely: She probably was widowed yesterday.”’
His mother breathed heavily as she quoted Anna Akhmatova: lines she’d used most days for the past thirty years. ‘A wonderful poem. It captures my own situation perfectly. If only you had such a gift yourself.’

‘Words have never been my forte.’

‘True enough,’ agreed his mother. ‘You were very slow to speak. Of all the autumn babies born within two miles of Pishev Station, you were the last to utter a sound. But perhaps I’ve told you that before.’

‘Once or twice,’ said Elias.

With a great squeaking and scraping, Mrs Eliasberg gathered together the last fibres of her vegetables, sucked the spoon and smacked her lips.

‘Not that you haven’t done well for yourself. If only your poor father had lived to see his son become the best conductor in Leningrad!’

‘Please, Mother.’ Elias gave a small tight smile. ‘I’m not the best, and the whole of Leningrad knows it.’

‘Bah! Best and second-best are simply matters of opinion, and opinions are as many as leaves on a tree.’

‘Perhaps.’ Elias took the plates to the sink, wiped them with a cloth, and rinsed the cloth with boiling water from the large blackened kettle. ‘Now, Mother, I really must get to work.’ It was imperative to be casual, to slip in his requests sideways.
The trout that opens its mouth widest is most securely hooked
ran through his head.

From years of practice, first with his father and then with himself, his mother had developed selective deafness into an art. ‘Terrible thing, this German war, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Elias, looking down into the empty street.

‘Suffering like you wouldn’t believe, they say,’ she said chattily.

‘Yes,’ he repeated, raising the sash window, leaning out and feeling the wind on his face. High above the rooftops, the pale sky was streaked with clouds.

‘Poles, Jews, anyone they can lay their hands on. If your father were alive, I dread to think what they would —’

‘Mother, don’t upset yourself so soon after eating. You’ll give yourself indigestion.’

‘Indigestion, from that dull muck? Now, if I’d had some meat, even a tiny piece of sausage, I’d gladly suffer indigestion for it.’ Mrs Eliasberg’s famous tongue-click had a multitude of meanings, and this particular click was that of a person hard done by.

‘What if I move your chair over here by the window?’ suggested Elias. ‘Then you can get some sun on your face.’ If she clicked at him once more, he’d take her chair and throw it out the window. With her in it.

Immediately, he was ashamed of himself. Why couldn’t he be kinder?

He leaned his head on the window frame and focused as hard as he could on the solid stack of scores behind him. Mahler’s Fifth; think of Mahler’s Fifth! In his mind, he opened the stiff green cover and looked at the first page.

Instantly, there it was, catching him, stopping his fall. The low repeated notes of the trumpet — full of hope, or foretelling tragedy? The possibility of both was there in that urgent, repeated brass voice. Then the lift to the minor third and the rise to the octave — and then the descending
notes, the repeated fall, the rising up again. And the crash! That beautiful, all-encompassing, full and worldly
sound
, shutting out critical faces and marching feet, ominous news, guilt and fear. All of it gone, gone —

‘What?’ Distantly he heard something behind him. He turned, but the breeze from the window was full in his hair and Mahler was still crashing in his head like the sea. He saw that his mother’s mouth was moving, yet he could hear nothing except the trumpet, falling in brassy rain onto the embroidered tablecloth. His hands had floated up off the windowsill, were moving in the air, giving shape to what he was hearing.

‘What did you say?’ he said, dazed.

‘I was saying —’ His mother’s voice came from a great distance away. But just as the string melody emerged, sweeter than a nightingale, he returned to his real life: caged in the front room of his apartment, listening to his invalid mother. He shut the window, closing out the wind and the possibility of what lay beyond the city — sights he’d never seen, music he’d never heard — and he turned, with customary self-imposed politeness, to his mother.

‘I was asking,’ said his mother, ‘whether you might begin thinking about children? You’re not a young man any more; thirty-five has been and gone. And before the Germans or the English blow this world to smithereens, I’d like to see a grandchild with your dear father’s face.’

‘Mother,’ he pointed out, ‘I don’t have a wife yet. Not even a suspicion of a wife.’

She waved a dismissive hand. ‘Surely in the orchestra? There must be plenty of girls in search of a handsome husband. A nice viola player, a pretty flautist?’ She stopped in sudden concern. ‘But perhaps a musician is not the best choice for a wife. They can be temperamental, so I’m told.’

Elias saw his chance. ‘Yes, they can certainly be temperamental — all the more so if I’m late to rehearsal. What woman could love a man who’s unable to be punctual?’

‘You’re right!’ Mrs Eliasberg rolled her chair over the uneven floor and seized his gloves off the music cabinet. ‘Put on your outdoor clothes! Don’t waste your time here with me.’

Elias accepted his gloves. ‘Let me put your chair here by the window. Is the sun in your eyes?’

‘No, no!’ His mother waved him away. ‘I’ll be perfectly comfortable. If you will pass me my sewing basket on your way out, I can begin darning your socks. It’s not a good start to a courtship if the man has holes in his toes.’

All the way down four dark flights of stairs and out the front door, Elias kept a steady pace, walking as a soldier would, head erect, feet straight. At the intersection where the trams swung around with a clanging of bells, he turned, shielding his eyes against the sun. His mother’s white handkerchief waved from the window, and he lifted his heavy briefcase in a kind of salute.

Once around the corner, he broke into a much faster walk: almost a run.
Dignity
, he reminded himself, sweating a little between his shoulder blades.
Dignity must be maintained at all costs
. There was the newsstand, directly across the street. Elias was blind to anything but the stack of newspapers displayed at the front.

‘Morning.’ The man in the kiosk was casual, almost insolent. The stub of a cheap cigarette stuck out the side of his mouth like an errant tooth. ‘Anything else?’

‘Nothing.’ Elias stepped away from the kiosk and shook open the newspaper — and there it was.

‘Angular … More farce than comedy …’ The sun was so bright the words were almost impossible to read. ‘A light-hearted romp in which style is sacrificed for the sake of vigour.’ He felt almost sorry for Prokofiev. Always, when it came to the critics, the inevitable fall from grace.

But this was not what he’d been looking for. His eyes raced on down the column. ‘But of course,’ he murmured slowly. ‘What did you expect.’ He folded up the pages, once, twice, three times, until the paper sat in a hard wad under his arm. He crossed back over into the shade and leaned against the wall of an apartment block, pressing against the cold stone as if its strength might seep into him.

‘Aha!’ Someone emerged from the doorway on his left. ‘If it isn’t Karl Eliasberg!’

Blinking, Elias turned to see Sollertinsky beside him. ‘Good morning to you, Ivan,’ he said, as evenly as he could manage.

‘And a good morning to you, too!’ Sollertinsky was still bundling his tie into a clumsy knot. For such an eminent lecturer, not to mention Artistic Director of the Leningrad Philharmonica, he looked rather a mess. ‘At least I hope it’s a good morning. I’m off to buy a newspaper to see what damaging words that dung-beetle Druskin has written about my orchestra.’

Elias swallowed so loudly he thought it must be audible over the clatter of the trolley cars. ‘In fact, I’ve just read that very review.’

‘Oh! How scathing was it?’ Sollertinsky pulled his collar down over
his untidy tie and squinted at Elias.

‘Not at all scathing, Sir.’ Elias bit his lip; not even Sollertinsky’s sartorial flaws could save him from undue deference. ‘That is, Prokofiev didn’t come off so well, but Mravinsky — well, yet again Mravinsky has saved the day.’

‘Is that so?’ Sollertinsky spied the newspaper clenched tightly under Elias’s elbow. ‘May I?’

‘Of course.’ Elias shoved the paper at him as if it were red-hot.

Sollertinsky smoothed out the paper. ‘“Only Yevgeny Mravinsky and his skilled musicians could rescue the music from charges of flimsiness”,’ he murmured, scanning the review at top speed. ‘“His stick technique is as modest as it is commanding.”
Nice!
“Barrow-loads of self-confidence, which translates to complete authority.”
Very good!
“Leningrad is fortunate to call a conductor of this calibre our own.”
Well!
’ He straightened up, although the newspaper stayed bent like an old pin in his hands. ‘Who would have thought such warmth of feeling could be hidden in Druskin’s heart, eh?’

‘Indeed.’ Elias tried to smile, though he felt as if his face would crack with the effort. ‘Quite a review from such a tough nut.’

With a gallant flourish, Sollertinsky offered the ridiculous-looking newspaper back to him, but he waved it away. ‘Please, keep it. I’ve read enough already.’

The birthday

H
appiness or the lack of it always stopped her sleeping. Tonight, it was happiness. She lay in bed, looking at the way the moon painted tiger-stripes on the wall, and she made herself stay that way while she counted her breaths.

By the time she reached forty —
in
and
out
— she couldn’t help noticing she was breathing faster than usual. The sheet was hardly rustling, so shallowly were her lungs working, so eager was her heart.

‘Kitten breaths,’ she told herself severely. ‘You’re cheating!’ When she reached the allotted fifty breaths, she added ten more as penance, though by now the longing to roll over was almost unbearable. ‘You’re a born teacher!’ Papa always said, when he watched her copying out a lesson all over again because of a small ink blot on the last line. ‘I’ve only ever known one other person with such an insistence on perfection.’ He laughed as he said this, but he sighed too. ‘Perhaps it’s not necessary to be quite so strict with yourself. Life is a hard enough taskmaster, you know.’

Sonya had started to notice that Papa often sighed. Also, that the end of his beard was fraying away in wisps because he pulled it when he was writing. And another thing — their apartment was not like other people’s. It was strewn around with piles of paper, and dust-balls skittered under the sofa like mice. Secretly she thought that if Papa were a little more orderly, there would be fewer grey streaks in his brown beard and fewer lines on his forehead.

Now, breathing deeply, she’d reached sixty, so now — now! — she sat up and looked. There it was, leaning against the window: only one day
known, but two centuries perfect. Its neck was graceful in the moonlight, the scroll bending towards her like the head of a swan.

From what she’d heard, Aunt Tanya hadn’t wanted her to have it. ‘Are you sure you’ve thought this through, Nikolai?’ Her aunt had pulled Papa into a corner and they stood there, too close, wedged between the piano and the tall fringed lamp. ‘She’ll drop it,’ hissed Aunt Tanya. ‘She’ll smash it. She’s too small for it.’

‘She’ll treasure it,’ contradicted Papa. ‘She’ll master it. She’ll grow into it.’

It was true, Sonya was still a little short for the cello, but if she placed a cushion on her chair and stretched her neck (imagining herself as one of the tall buildings on Nevsky Prospect), and if she made her arms as long as possible (thinking of orang-utans in the zoo) — well, then she became bigger than her years, and her birthday present was a perfect match.

‘It’s foolish,’ said Aunt Tanya, her cheeks even redder than usual. ‘A genuine Storioni! To think of giving such a valuable instrument to a mere child!’

‘There is nothing
mere
about Sonya.’ Papa had sounded quite angry. ‘At any rate, I can’t help thinking that you’re objecting for entirely the wrong reasons.’

‘Such as?’ Aunt Tanya’s neck was slightly mottled.

Sonya had stopped cutting up small blocks of sausage and placing them on squares of bread; she moved into the doorway to get a proper look.

‘You’re scared that I’m forgetting —’ Papa cleared his throat. ‘That I’m trying to replace —’ He stopped and slammed his hand down on the piano, making the metronome ting and start to tick prestissimo. ‘As if!’ he said, silencing the metronome and Aunt Tanya with one angry hand. ‘As if I could ever forget her!’

‘Look!’ Sonya nudged Konstantin, who’d come early to help with the party food. ‘Look at Aunt Tanya’s neck!’ She stared, fascinated, at the blotches above her aunt’s collar, merging like the pools of blood under the pigs hanging in the market. ‘Oh, would you just look at that!’

But Konstantin was too busy unwrapping candies, cramming several into his mouth at a time.

‘Talk about pigs,’ she said, though in fact no one had been talking about them, it was only in her mind that she’d taken a quick trip over the bristle-covered cobblestones to see the bloated bodies hung in rows. ‘You’re no better than a pig!’ she repeated severely, looking at Konstantin, who stood with drifts of coloured
fantiki
wrappers at his feet like a
sturdy oak that had lost its leaves. ‘What about the Shostakoviches? You’d better leave some sweets for them.’ She snatched the brass bowl away from Konstantin and took it into the living room, where she placed it on the sofa and covered it with a cushion.