Well, what did Elena really look like? Akhmatova, who met her briefly, compared her to a church—specifically, to one of the forty times forty churches in Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems about Moscow.13 Remember that in those days it was unwise even to mention churches; they were getting demolished or converted into museums of atheism all over our Soviet land. Church times church, all those forty times forty, Akhmatova couldn’t stop chanting that nursery rhyme, which certainly cost Tsvetaeva dearly and may have helped bring about Akhmatova’s own punishment later on, but at this point in the story the fact of the untrustworthiness of those three people—Shostakovich, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, I mean—feels less important to me than the fact that they couldn’t stop comparing one thing with another. Rodchenko made avant-garde “constructions”—an act which also seems slightly untrustworthy, now that I come to think of it, but all right; let’s suppose that they were correctly conceived—why did Shostakovich have to distort her into one of them? What was wrong with Elena just being Elena? Why did she have to be a church? One theory I have—this is Comrade Alexandrov speaking—is that Akhmatova had so many women in her life that they might as well have been the forty times forty churches of prerevolutionary Moscow! This gets to the root of what makes intellectuals dangerous. We use them to add newness to life, which is what keeps it bearable, but newness shouldn’t mutate into utter alienation; a woman never ought to become a church. And now I beg your pardon and will get out of the story.
Shostakovich, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva were all, insofar as it was possible to be without getting liquidated (Tsvetaeva liquidated herself), rebels. Elena Konstantinovskaya was more the good girl. I see here that her parents applied on her behalf for membership in the Little Octobrists, but she was a few months too old. In the Young Pioneers (“Carpenter” link, N. K. Krupskaya Brigade) she became a leading force among the other children, thanks to her enthusiasm for making floats and banners. Her excuse for not immediately entering the Komsomol, namely dedication to her schoolwork, strikes me as plausible. When she did join, at age fifteen, her marks continued to be excellent. One of her professors, the widow Liadova, seems to have been responsible for the girl’s decision to take up linguistics. In the course of preparing this summary I have reviewed Elena’s translations of German military documents,for in 1941 I myself had unfortunate occasion to learn that other language; in spite of the adverse report of Lieutenant N. K. Danchenko, which I also happen to have here, I can testify to her literalness and neutrality. Such qualities cannot be taken for granted, particularly in translators of the front echelon, whose perfectionistic quest for exactly the right word sometimes gets corrupted into expression of self.
Konstantinovskaya’s work reassures me with its touch of stiltedness: Here is a professional who is more concerned with correctness than with style. Furthermore, she lived the quiet life. I am creditably informed that when Shostakovich uttered rash, irreverent and at times even provocative speeches against Soviet power, she urged him to be more pleasant. She disapproved of his more extremist acquaintances, and in the course of a quarrel informed him: I’m glad that your friends aren’t my friends! which I myself will always count in her favor. Her expressions of support for his formalist-individualist Opus 40 may be excused, since he dedicated it to her. When we sent her north in ’35, it was simply to put pressure on Shostakovich, to remind him. Take it from me: We had nothing against her. We arrested Akhmatova’s son and boyfriend in the same year and for equivalent reasons. It was my pleasure to help her get an early release, not that she ever knew about my help. My work tends to leave me with the worst thoughts about people. I’m left with only good thoughts about Elena Konstantinovskaya.
Nonetheless, and this may have been one of the qualities which attracted Shostakovich, she bore her own not so secret deviation—a harmless one, to be sure. How should I say it? (I’ve said it more bluntly about Akhmatova, but that’s because I never liked that woman.) In 1928, when rocket projectiles were first launched from our Soviet land, Elena was abnormally close to her schoolmate Vera Ivanovna. A report on those two stated that we noticed two black and blue marks on the neck of Elena Konstantinovskaya. First Elena did not want to explain the reason for those marks, but then with embarrassment she said that Vera Ivanova had kissed her in the woods, which resulted in the blue marks on her neck. This incident impels me to reconsider the girl’s relationship with Professor Liadova, who by the way introduced her to the poems of the bisexual Tsvetaeva.
After Vera, a whole year later in fact, the year that Shostakovich married Nina Varzar and Comrade Stalin’s wife shot herself; the year after Hitler’s niece shot herself and the year before Hitler became Chancellor, there would take place a conference in international linguistics, one of whose delegates would be a German comrade named Lina, a woman with brown eyes and brown bangs who that very first time would sit on the soft red armchair of that hotel room in Leningrad, watching Elena and pushing the collar of her sweater up around her throat with both hands; for the previous half hour Lina and Elena would have been engaged in a fervent discussion as to the best Russian rendering of the following thirteenth-century verse: Isolde’s secret song was her marvelous beauty, whose invisible music crept through the windows of the eyes. Aside from the sweater, Lina would be naked with her white knees drawn up almost to her shoulders and her white thighs shining and the long white lips of her vulva as irresistible as candy to Elena, and her anus was a white star. In a moment, Elena was going to kneel down and bury her face in the German girl’s flesh; she knew it and so did Lina. Just before that happened, Lina was going to say: We have almost the same name, don’t we? and Elena, hardly able to bear her desire for the other woman, would nod rapidly while Lina let go of her sweater with her right hand and slowly reached out, rested her fingers in Elena’s hair, twisted it in a knot, and forced her head down; no, no, it wouldn’t be that way at all; Elena, who had won a prize in the Komsomol fencing competition, would be lunging for Lina’s cunt like a pikefish striking at bait; then Lina would be stroking the top of Elena’s head, murmuring: We’re both so white, aren’t we?—And then Lina would wrap her hand in Elena’s hair and pull her head more firmly against her, whispering: Oh, baby, but you’re white like snow and I’m white like a cloud . . .—and before she’d even finished uttering these words, Elena would begin to melt from the heat of Lina, while Lina would turn to rain in Elena’s mouth. There would be a second time and a third (by which point Elena would be ready to die for Lina), then a fourth and a fifth, all in the space of a long white night. At midmorning Lina would set out sleepless to Berlin and Elena would never even know what happened to her.
Do you want to know the difference between Vera Ivanova and Lina? Elena did the same thing, performed the same sexual act, with both of them. But with Lina, because she was now more adult and more experienced, she did it in much the way that von Karajan conducts Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony: more smooth, rounded, polished, elegant (one hears this especially in the brasses), less harsh and desperate than as André Previn does it. The ferocious second movement especially, although Karajan’s tempo is actually faster than Previn’s, sounds richer, more modulated than his. (I myself prefer Previn’s starkness here.) In the third movement all irony is lost, resulting in what I consider to be a serious misinterpretation of Shostakovich; but in exchange Karajan imparts a haunting sweetness to the music quite unlike what Previn achieved. Uncanny how different the same notes can sound!
(By the way, Karajan got his Nazi Party card in April 1933, less than two months after the sleepwalker became Chancellor.)
By the time she’d become Shostakovich’s mistress, which is to say the muse of his Cello Sonata in D Minor, she’d learned to make love even more smoothly and perfectly than she had with Lina. There was something about her—Akhmatova was correct!—something akin to entering an ancient church. It wasn’t just that she knew how to hold and how to tease vibrato, how to manipulate (thus she later summed up sex for her husband Roman Karmen); there was somet
hing about her that made her lovers cry.
But the strangest thing of all about her was that she knew how to disguise herself in plainness (I suppose so that she wouldn’t get hurt). Once she’d put on her round glasses and tied her hair into a bun, hardly anybody looked at her when she walked down the street. And in school she was likewise inconspicuous—a highly adaptive trait in her time and place. I’ve read that those who were lucky enough to see her literally let her hair down could never forget her for the rest of their lives. In 1927, the year of A Ya. Fedorov’s rocket-powered automobile, a girl committed suicide over her.
Shostakovich in a moment of curiosity once asked her whether she might ever stop being attracted to women, and she gravely, proudly replied: I’ll never change.
And why should she? As I said before, why should Elena be compelled to be anything other than Elena? I think that the reason she loved him above all others was that to him, who and what she was was perfect. An E-sharp cannot be improved; nor can it be replaced by a B-flat. It is what it is. She loved women, and he loved her for it.
2
In 1931, when construction of the first Soviet rocket-glider commenced, Elena seriously considered applying to the S. Ordzhonikidze Moscow Aviation Institute. She could have done anything; she was good at becoming part of the collective. That must have been why she kept dreaming that in every room there was a big black telephone which buzzed when she walked by. She’d saved last year’s newspaper about the Seventh All-Union Glider Rally, when S. M. Korolev’s “Red Star” glider proved capable of spectacular acrobatics; Elena imagined falling in love with Korolev. In 1934, when she was having her affair with Shostakovich, Roman Karmen stood young and handsome in a flier’s suit and a warm beret, everything buttoned up around his throat as, holding up a snow-white camera, he filmed the flier W. S. Molokov, Hero of the Soviet Union, who was also young and handsome but covered up, wearing a thick round fur cap so you couldn’t really tell who either of them were; Molokov had goggles pushed up against his hat, and Karmen didn’t; it was when she saw that photograph of Karmen that Elena fell in love with him. By then our first liquid-propellant rocket, a rather small one, had succeeded in leaving the launching rig. It would soon be superseded by a rocket as tall as the spire of the Fortress of Peter and Paul! Elena read all about it in Izvestiya. And just when she had definitively resolved to marry Roman Karmen, she received a card from Vera Ivanova, who would not get expelled from the Komsomol until 1937, a year after Elena, who as she opened it remembered the mud on Vera’s shoes as Vera leaned forward naked in the chair with her long, beloved, slightly greasy hair falling over her eyes, shadow in her cleavage, shadow between her legs.
3
Elena would most certainly have been there, gazing up through the flags and streamers, when the AHT-20 “Maxim Gorki” plane flew overhead in 1935, but that was when we locked her away. I remember when we arrested her; I was there, and she stood before us with her eyes half-closed like the blacked-out headlights of a tramcar in wartime; that was when I knew that this was her “intimate look,” that Shostakovich and Vera and Lina and those other boys and girls alike in love with her, always throwing rockets, they’d all seen this; this made me crazy; it was right then that I fell in love with her; I became another of her victims.
Squares of Red Army men marched along the base of a wall of airplanes whose propellers had all been oriented perfectly parallel to the ground, but Elena wasn’t there; she was with us.
I repeat: What did Elena really look like? Not like a Rodchenko angel at all, not any more than she resembled the KPIR-3 glider of 1925: wings like squared-off banana fronds, a skeletal body of hollow triangles. In her own interest, I freely confess to altering certain details of her appearance throughout this book. For instance, Elena Konstantinovskaya was blonde, and it was as a blonde that Shostakovich, the protagonist of these stories, would certainly have thought of her, but to me, and what I say goes, she will always be the darkhaired woman, or, if you prefer, the woman with the dark, dark hair.
4
In 1930, People’s Commissar Voroshilov was present at the maiden voyage of the TB-5 bomber, but Elena was too young. (Her Komsomol report for that year reports her as being extremely proficient in sharpshooting and first aid—two skills which would serve her well in Spain.) How happy she would have been to watch the takeoff of the TB-5! I’ll write her in if I care to; I’ll give her a front row spot in front of what they still liked to call the cosmodrome. Can’t I be allowed my amusements? After all, the great aviator V. Chkalov was grounded for prankishly flying under a bridge in Leningrad.
In proof of my deservingness, let me remind you that I never touched Elena Konstantinovskaya. I never even introduced myself, not even when I arrested her.—Vera Ivanova was another matter.—So it’s not from personal experience but from personal observation that I can so accurately describe the way that Elena could be so distant and angry with those who loved her, so sweet to win back those who were slipping away. I didn’t lean on Roman Karmen, nor even on that bastard Shostakovich until Elena had definitively moved on. From 1953 on I resisted checking up on her more than once a week, no matter how tempted I felt. (I remember on one winter morning in Leningrad watching her flicker between each of the eight white columns, formerly yellow, of the Smolny Institute.) When she died in 1975, I respectfully refrained from attending her funeral. Establishing that code of behavior for myself didn’t require me to own a degree in rocket science (an endeavor of great importance to our Soviet land, and accordingly always supported by Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky). As a matter of fact, most rocket scientists end up being traitors. I wish it weren’t that way. But since it is, why not imagine that there’s one loyal rocket scientist? And who would that be but Elena Konstantinovskaya, who is pure and perfect and good? Shall I make her an astrophysicist right now? Don’t tell me I don’t have the nerve! Why, if I felt like it, I could anoint her with those crimson rhomboids which we find exclusively on the shoulders of our Red Army commanders!
B. N. Yuriev was the very first to construct a rigid theoretical proof that helicopter flight was possible. What could you do to me if I corrected history so that the name of that theoretician became E. E. Konstantinovskaya? At the very least, can’t I place her within one of those blue and green Soviet biplanes which used to be all the time buzzing in the slipstream above our heads?
I know everything, I really do. I could tell you precisely which two of Akhmatova’s lines it was that Vera Ivanova murmured in Elena’s ear on that last day by the riverbank when she understood that it was truly over between her and Elena. I’ve read Elena’s diary (which is now in our archive) and I’m more aware than she ever was, thanks not only to the gift of distance but also to my own professional training, why she dreamed what she did the night after she first met Shostakovich. These temptations I’m likewise proof against; surely you’re not interested in biochemical accidents of personality. But another of her dreams I’ll report to you, because it was a dream that all of us had in those years, thanks to the deteriorating international situation, which resulted inevitably from the struggle between capitalists to devour the hugest profits. Over and over, Elena Konstantinovskaya woke up sweating from a dream she hated almost as much as her dream of the black telephone; she dreamed of a long finned bomb slowly flying through darkness above a glowing pyramid. ‣
MAIDEN VOYAGE
What child is there that lives, as I did, midway between Reality and Fairy-land, that does not long sometimes to leave altogether the familiar world and set off in search of new and fabulous realms?
—Hanna Reitsch, German pilot, ca. 1947
1
The telephone rang. Then it was agreed: Krakow to us, Lwow to them, Warsaw to us, Brest-Litovsk to them. That was how we established the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line.—Not another inch! the sleepwalker shouted into the heavy black mouthpiece, but that obedient buzz of assent might have concealed something. He longed to smash open the telephone’s bakelite shell and peer within,
but dreaded what he might find. Never mind; he’d win with commands and arguments.
He told the telephone: Get somebody over here with the order of battle.
Trudl, he said to his favorite secretary, would you be so good as to bring me that white Barbarossa folder? Thank you, child.
He instructed the telephone: That makes absolutely no difference. Over there they’ve got nothing but low-quality Slavic formations.
Then it was time to confirm with Göring that our rocket-planes were ready.
As a matter of fact, we weren’t even supposed to have tanks. Even armored scout cars had been forbidden us by the Anglo-American plutocrats. Well, what about rockets? Our enemies had overlooked those. I myself was already a fervent rocket man and had been ever since the Rhön Gliding Contests of 1933. How else were we going to get the Polish Corridor back?
If we could only go to the moon! sighed Herr Doktor von Braun.—I met him once—a certified genuis. He died in America, long after the war. Imagine! He’d sold himself to the victors, just so somebody could get to the moon.
But in the sleepwalker’s time, our moon-wooers were flying inside of bombs powered by intermittent propulsive duct engines.
You probably don’t even remember your first rocket, for the same reason that I forget my first telephone. The first rocket I ever saw was a long grey-green monster with a helmeted, goggled man in the cockpit, black crosses on each wing, screaming engines and fat little bombs, not to mention a pair of machine-guns on the upper deck. You wouldn’t call it a rocket at all; you live in the future, when the Americans stand on the verge of conquering Saturn. That first rocket was actually nothing but a fighter with a rocket engine, its bomblets only for show. Doktor von Braun hadn’t started working on our V-weapons; the Russians hadn’t yet stolen a march on us with Sputnik. Still, why not call it a rocket? By the way, it happened to be equipped with a quintuplicator to record five pieces of aerial data; that I can swear to, because I invented the quintuplicator myself! Oh, yes, I was there; I was there at the very beginning; even before the Heinkel-Hirth turbojet experiments. I’d always wanted to visit the moon myself, you see.
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