And now it consumes every evening, every weekend, not to mention those working days when no-one at Capitol pays much attention to what you’re doing. The movement’s transitions are like algebra or molecular physics; they may as well be written in hieroglyphs. For all the hours you spend staring at the score, it eludes you.
Ron was a man of contradictions, in his life and in his work. The scion of an old Cornell Republican family; his father a classicist, his grandfather a professor of philosophy. His shift towards radicalism came from nowhere. Even when he’d pinned his colours to that mast, his subject matter remained arcane. Euripides and Dante. In conducting any piece of his, let alone Giudecca, you’ll have to meet those contradictions, and navigate your way through them.
A vacation could be the answer. A few days out of town, away from the city’s distractions. Henderson needs no persuading; he’ll relish a break from you. Angie is a little more hesitant, but after some deliberation she tells you that she understands.
“You do whatever it is you have to.”
She might miss you while you’re away, but the New York concert represents so many things for her, not least of all her husband conducting at Carnegie Hall and a trip to the East Coast. Late one night, in the moments before you both fall asleep, she tells you she’ll feel more at home in New York than she ever has in LA, she’s sure of it. Now, whenever you’re studying the score at home she beams at you with pride, in a way she never did in Room 01B. Like Margaret Bernard and her Uptown set, Angie believes this is what you were meant to do, and as the days and weeks go by you come to believe it yourself.
Studying the oratorio does, at least, allow you to spend time with Ron. The days and weeks before you got married meant removing every trace of him from the house. The pictures, those that looked like photographs of two friends, were taken from their frames and placed in albums. Any in which a deeper intimacy was hinted at were burned, along with his letters, and after burning them you wept for hours.
It wasn’t the first time you’d burned letters.
This is a clean start. This is your life now. You are a husband. You hadn’t even thought of Nick in months, or if you had it was in passing, wondering if he might still be in Los Angeles, if his acting career ever took off. You dread the unexpected knock at the door. Nick asking to stay. Angie’s questions. How do you know this young man? But those moments pass quickly enough. It’s only as preparations for the concert grind to a halt and work at Capitol slows to a trickle and you and Angie settle into married life that you begin thinking of him again.
When Angie is out, running an errand or visiting a friend, you rush to the bathroom and masturbate, thinking only of Nick. With your eyes closed you go through every moment you spent together, embellishing those few encounters with added details, extra scenes. You can’t stop thinking about him. You need time away. The solution was staring at you the whole time.
You have no destination in mind until you come across the black and white image of a mushroom cloud. You’re getting your shoes shined outside Bullock’s, flipping through Life magazine, and there it is. A story about the atomic tests in Nevada, accompanied by that photograph, spread across two pages. You’ve seen such images before. You read John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima in The New Yorker. There’s something strangely beautiful about them, columns of smoke towering impossibly above the landscape, pushing apart all other clouds and cresting at the edge of heaven.
The following night you tell Angie you’re heading down into Beverly Hills to visit Herb Borowitz, a veteran conductor and a passing acquaintance of Ron’s. She believes you, because she has no reason not to.
You drive, instead, to Pershing Square. Nick is there. Leaner than you remember him; not quite gaunt, but sallow, hungry. A kind of seedy, strung out look. He sees you but doesn’t react. Instead he carries on talking to a group of men, laughing at their jokes, only acknowledging you when it might become embarrassing or dangerous not to.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he says.
“I wanted to speak with you.”
“We got nothing to talk about. You made that clear last time.”
You ask if he’d like to get a soda or a milkshake. You’d have suggested a beer, but that seems like the last thing he needs. You’re sorry. You can explain everything. He hesitates, looking across the square to his friends. He says yes, perhaps to avoid a scene as much as anything, and you walk over to a diner at the corner of Hill Street and 6th.
There, you tell him about the night you wouldn’t answer the door, and the days and weeks preceding it. You tell him about Mary, and the Buick, and the men in the snap-brim hats.
“You thought I was mixed up in all that?”
“Yes.”
For a moment he says nothing. He looks out through the window, diagonally across the square towards the lights of the Biltmore. He taps his fingers restlessly against the table. You tell him you’re leaving town for a few days, a road trip to Nevada, and ask him if he’d like to join you.
“Will there be a pool?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Casino?”
“Unlikely.”
“But it’ll just be the two of us?”
“Just the two of us.”
“Then okay,” he says. “I’m in.”
Chapter 19:
LENINGRAD, JUNE 1938
It’s late, the union offices otherwise deserted for the weekend. Its stairwells and corridors are silent and dark. Remizov’s office is the very model of austerity. On the walls, the obligatory portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Kirov. Doesn’t have a telephone. Nothing on his desk except a lamp, a notepad and pen, a box of cigarettes and the message Sergey received almost an hour ago.
Герой тура отменен.
Hero tour cancelled.
Even before Sergey speaks, Remizov’s expression is one of weary impatience, as though they’ve been having this discussion for hours on end, as if he anticipates everything Sergey is about to say and hasn’t the time for it.
“Why is it cancelled?”
“Does it really need spelling out to you?” says Remizov. “The subject matter was deemed inappropriate.”
“What do you mean, ‘inappropriate’?”
“The subject matter. The tone. You took a single chapter from a pre-revolutionary work about the bourgeoisie. What were you thinking?”
“It wasn’t inappropriate when I first proposed it. It wasn’t inappropriate when we performed at the Kirov. Why is it suddenly inappropriate?”
Remizov sighs. “People can get awfully excited about a new work. But when that excitement dies down, well… sometimes we’re forced to see the work for what it is. Now, there isn’t much we can say or do to Comrade Lermontov about the vulgarity of his novel. But this ballet, on the other hand…”
“Vulgarity? How is it vulgar?”
“How is it not, Sergey Andreievich? Look at it from our point of view. Pechorin is a nobleman, an individualist, who gallivants around behaving as he wishes. What sort of a hero is that?”
“The title is ironic.”
“And that’s another problem. Irony. You see, irony plays well among the intelligentsia in, say, Paris or Vienna, but if we’re creating music for the proletariat, that sort of thing can be mistaken for sincerity, can it not?”
“If you say so.”
“You know I’m right.”
Sergey braces himself with both hands against the back of a chair. He can’t bring himself to sit. The room is smaller than when he entered it. Remizov opens the wooden cigarette box and takes one. He turns the box toward Sergey.
“No, thank you.”
“Please. It’ll calm your nerves.”
“I’m not nervous.”
“You should be.”
Hesitantly, Sergey takes a cigarette, and Remizov lights it for him.
“So. Is that it? Is my career over?”
“Stalled, perhaps,” says Remizov. “But not beyond redemption.”
“Then what should I do?”
“Well, first you must renounce the thing itself.”
“Renounce my work?”
“Of course. It has left rather a sour taste on the Soviet palate, which you must cleanse; first by renouncing your more recent work, then by eclipsing all memory of it with something more appropriate. There may be an interregnum, of course, but I’m sure you’ll find work. A few months writing film music, for instance. Lenfilm are always looking for composers, and they’re really not that fussy about former indiscretions.”
“I can’t.”
“It’s really not so different to writing for ballet, or –”
“I mean I can’t renounce my work.”
Remizov leans back and laughs, the cigarette bouncing in the corner of his mouth, raining grey ash down his shirtfront.
“You’re being ridiculous,” he says, brushing the ash away with his knuckles. “You make it sound as if renouncing your work is a physical impossibility, when all you have to do is say the words. ‘I renounce my work wholeheartedly. I am ashamed of what I’ve done, and I promise never to do it again.’ That’s all. What’s so difficult about that?”
“It’s my work,” says Sergey. “And I’m proud of it. Really, I am.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go bragging about that. Listen. Frankly, Seryozha, I don’t care what you think or how you feel about your work. It really doesn’t matter to me. What matters is that publicly you are ashamed, and that you demonstrate your shame. That’s all.”
“I can’t do it.”
“You can. You’ve done it before.”
Sergey draws the chair away from Remizov’s desk, and slumps into it before he can fall.
“I saw your file,” says Remizov. “From when you were at the academy. I read the notes about your visit from the GUGB, or the OGPU, or…” He waives his hand dismissively. “…Whatever they were calling themselves back then.”
Something catches in Sergey’s throat, as if he’s choking on a peach stone. With little effort, he can smell the bleached grey linoleum of the academy’s corridors and see the winter light creeping in through its high windows. The long walk from his classroom to the principal’s office. The agents waiting for him. The paperwork, the denunciation, on the desk, waiting for his signature. He was fifteen years old. They told him to sit. The principal got up and placed his hand briefly, sympathetically on Sergey’s shoulder before leaving the room.
“Unfortunate business, all that,” says Remizov. “What is it they say? You can choose your friends, but not your family?”
“That was ten years ago.”
“Your point being? The files still exist. And they’re worryingly prescient, given the nature of your work. I wouldn’t want people to link the two unnecessarily. You know what I mean. ‘Oh, his family were kulaks, therefore he was bound to produce a work like this sooner or later.’ That sort of thing.”
“You think they would say that?”
“Of course. You know how people are. They’d forget how you washed your hands of them. Or they’d say you were simply saving your own skin. What was your brother’s name? Mikhail, wasn’t it?”
“Misha.”
“Not very old, if I remember rightly. But then, that was the difference between you. He stayed with your father, carried on being influenced by him, you came to the city. Don’t get me wrong, the zealousness of those officials was regrettable. I mean, your brother was practically a child…”
“He was a child.”
“But a child raised as a kulak. A very unfortunate business, all round. You must feel very lucky to have come to the academy, to have missed out on all that.”
Sergey says nothing. His hands are shaking and he hides them beneath the desk. He wants to hurt Remizov, to get up and hit him from his chair, and when he’s on the floor and curled up in a ball, to start kicking him until he hears the sound of breaking bones. Instead, Sergey takes a deep breath and holds it till it feels as if it’s boiling in his lungs.
“Still,” says Remizov. “It was a wise move, distancing yourself. To have done otherwise would have ruined your life, not to mention your career. Instant dismissal from the academy. Exiled to somewhere up north, or out in the east. You’d have been lucky to get a job teaching piano to schoolchildren after that. But now look at you. The world, Seryozha, is yours. If you want it. This whole business with the Lermontov ballet, it could be a minor setback if you do things properly.”
Sergey stubs out his cigarette when he’s smoked only half of it, and brings his hands together, cracking the knuckles.
“I won’t renounce it,” he says. “I don’t care what you say, what anyone says. I won’t renounce it. Not that. It’s the best work I’ve done.”
Remizov laughs. “You say this as if you’re the elder statesman of Soviet music. How old are you? Twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Good grief, we really did spoil you, didn’t we? Putting your first ballet on at the Kirov. Trust me. Everyone thinks they’re a genius at twenty-five, but very few are. Forget about Lermontov and Pechorin and Princess fucking Mary, and all that nonsense. Write something else. Something better.”
“Very well,” says Sergey. “I’ll write something else. But I will not renounce A Hero of Our Time. I can’t.”
Remizov sighs, flinging up his hands in showy despair. “What am I to do with you?” he says. “There is a tried, tested and time-honoured route to rehabilitation in this country, and I’ve spelled it out to you quite clearly. That said, if you’re adamant…”
“I am.”
“Well, if you’re adamant, there is one alternative.”
“Which is?”
“I can have a word with the union. My star is in the ascendency there, I feel. I can speak to them, perhaps persuade them that while A Hero of Our Time isn’t in line with current tastes, it may one day become so. When the work of the revolution is complete and we can better appreciate its irony. That sort of thing. And perhaps, with that in mind, it shouldn’t be denounced altogether. How does that sound?”
Sergey nods. “That’s better.”
“Better?” says Remizov. “I’d say that’s an excellent offer. Should they agree to it, of course. However, I will need some guarantee that I can trust you to work in a more suitable vein from now on.”
“You have my word.”
“That isn’t good enough, I’m afraid. I’m not calling you a liar. Far from it. But you are an artist, and artists are fickle, unpredictable. I want some means by which I can know that we are bonded in our discretion.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, come now.”
Remizov smiles, and draws another cigarette from the open box. He holds it to his lips, and pauses before lighting it, never once breaking eye contact. That single look, dark and mocking, is all the explanation he has to give.
Sergey leaves Remizov’s office without giving him an answer, telling him instead that he would like to sleep on it. If the arrival of the note sobered him up, his walk back to his rooms tips him back into a heavy, sluggish stupor. This is bad. No mistaking it. He’d thought he was immune, invincible, and that the worst days were behind them. The revolution’s work was complete, they said. But now it seems the revolution will never be over, and that no-one, least of all Sergey, will ever be safe again.
Chapter 20:
INDIAN SPRINGS, FEBRUARY 1951
Angie watches you pack. A big, proud smile for her husband the conductor. The man about to be the toast of New York City. The guilt coils in your stomach like a viper. Another secret, another thing to be hidden.
You collect Nick from a rundown-looking bungalow in Edendale. As he leaves the house he yells angrily at someone inside. He gets into the car with dark shadows beneath his eyes and a few days’ worth of stubble, and though it’s early in the day he smells strongly of marijuana, sweat and booze.
Driving through the morning and early afternoon, you stop for lunch on the outskirts o
f Barstow before heading out across the desert. In the diner you ask Nick about the argument he was having when you picked him up.
“Aw, it ain’t nothing,” he says. “Just some people can be assholes, is all.”
You agree and don’t ask any more questions. When you leave the diner Nick climbs onto the back seat of the car and falls asleep. It takes three hours to reach Indian Springs. The sky is vast and many stretches of the Death Valley road seem endless, tapering off towards the distant hills. You could do with someone to talk to, to keep you focused and alert, but Nick just snores away on the back seat, and doesn’t wake up again until you pull up outside the Cheyenne Motel.
“Where are we?”
“We’re there.”
You check in as Sam and Bob Maitland – names taken from two brothers who lived in the apartment above yours on Clinton Street. The most goyish, straight-laced, white bread names you could think of.
“Room 37,” the manager says. “It’s away from the road, so it’s nice and quiet. You here for the bomb?”
Nick is about to ask what he’s talking about when you interject.
“Yes, we’re here for the bomb.”
“Should be a humdinger. Last one lit up the sky like the Fourth of July, and they reckon this one’ll be even bigger.”
He hands you the keys and you and Nick walk across the parking lot to your room. Nick says nothing until you’re through the door.
“What’s he talking about? Which atom bomb?”
“They’re testing a bomb, fifty miles north of here, tomorrow night.”
“Then why the hell did we come here?”
“I thought it would make a nice surprise.”
“Surprise? It’s a bomb.”
“It’ll be something to see, won’t it?”
“It’s a fucking bomb.”
“It’s not like they’re bombing the motel.”
“How far away are they testing it?”
“Fifty miles, like I said.”
“You have any idea how powerful those things are?”
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