Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  He entered the vestibule in company with several anxious music apparatchiks. (What a great chance for you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! said the director.—Shostakovich grinned inappropriately and stared away.) Chandeliers glared sickeningly down on the black and white tiles, which glittered with that harsh light, glittering doubly with the melting snow which had slid off people’s boots like dirty tears. They led him past the piano in the main lobby, his footsteps pianissimo, then backstage so that he could inspire the orchestra. His mouth was dry; he could scarcely swallow. He peered up at the State Box, which for all the world resembled a gilded four-poster bed; the seats of course were still empty beneath the red canopy. The crowd had begun coming in. The tiers of seats around him, which comprised a curving scarlet cliff, darkened with humanity. Music-loving seagulls, feathered in wool and furs, were settling into their nests. Shostakovich took his own red seat, surrounded by obsequious dignitaries, and awaited the rising of the red curtain.

  All went well from the very first. Around him, the audience gazed with titillated horror upon the squalors of pre-Soviet Russia: a rotting house, with the onion domes of reactionary superstition bursting up behind it like toad-stools. He’d refused to compose any overture; in the midst of revolution, who had no time for that? Moreover, revolutionary musicologists kept telling him that overtures, being free of content, were but formalism, which the people would not understand. He didn’t want to be a formalist, did he? And so the soprano began to sing, and Shostakovich’s music fell down upon everyone’s shoulders like a snowstorm of gloom.

  All his life, he retained an empathy for the situation of women. This Russian Lady Macbeth of his—really, I should say, of the nineteenth-century fabulist N. Leskov’s—had been an adulteress, thrice a murderess and finally, spurned by the villain she’d done it all for, a suicide. To Leskov she was a predator. To Shostakovich she was beautiful, intelligent and doomed. In Tsarist times, when girls could be sold to be the toys of brutal old merchants, how could such a person as Katerina Izmailova hope for happiness? This was why the libretto contained scarcely a word that wasn’t vulgar, nasty or bullying. The choruses of the workers had to be melodious and ugly at the same time—for example, in their farewell song to Katerina’s husband, whose cadences he’d composed to convey that their sorrow was the merest pretense, derived from intimidation; how could any of them really miss their dull, cruel master? It was, in short, the opera’s ideological content, not the composer’s soul, which required that “melody” be permitted to shine only briefly, and then only in epiphanies of eroticism dragged down immediately afterward by the piglike gruntings of the brasses. (What a cultural soldier our Shostakovich! Throughout his life, his music would remain admirably unrelieved.)

  Burning with enthusiastic pity, he’d already planned a cycle of operas about women. (And just what do you know about us? drawled Nina with a kiss and a laugh.) He’d brought his Katerina Izmailova to life and to death. His next heroine would be a brave terrorist of the “People’s Will” movement. (She also must die, he feared.) Then he’d tell the story of a woman in the 1905 Revolution. Would her tale be tragic or not? It all depended. The final opera must of course be set in our Soviet Russia of today, when, as Comrade Stalin so aptly coined it, LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL. The heroine of that work would no longer be an individual at all, but a stylized collective female comrade—woman cement worker, woman teacher, woman engineer all rolled into one. (Do those shockworker girls really dance when they jump off their tractors at night? That’s what it says right here in Izvestiya. It sounds, so to speak, idiotic. They’d better not make me try to write that into my . . . ) He could almost see a stern young Russian girl in red at the wheel of a combine, with yellow wheat all around her. (Better yet, proposed Sollertinsky, how about a parade of female fencers on Red Square, showing lots of leg?) To the press he announced: I want to write a Soviet Ring of the Nibelung !

  He loved Katerina, perhaps because she didn’t exist. Far more patient with this heroine than with anyone, even Elena Konstantinovskaya, he’d explained to Nina, who was disgusted by Katerina: All of her music has as its purpose the justification of her crimes.

  So you’re writing program music after all, she drily said, and he tumbled back into confusion.

  Listening carefully to the bitter fartings of the trumpets, the defiant clashings of the brasses in Act I, he knew that he had truly conveyed the benightedness of prerevolutionary, vegetative Russia; and, moreover, that he’d carried the audience with him. The mezzo-soprano Nadezhda Welter, who sang Sonetka the Whore’s part in that “Lady Macbeth,” later recalled that sometimes one was overcome with a feeling of cold fear and horror at Shostakovich’s brilliant manner of offsetting the eternal themes, good and evil, the striving for freedom and the struggle with brutality. Now the workmen had trapped the cook in a barrel and were running their hands over her, singing out: Give us a suck! as she transchromatically wept: Ay! ay! ay! ay! Twisting anxiously in his seat, he read on all the listeners’ faces what he had hoped to find: not amusement, nor even disgust, but outraged pity. In that shocking third scene, as Katerina Izmailova slowly stripped, letting down her long hair and crooning out her yearning for a man who’d caress her pale breasts or at least smile at her, he saw tenderness in his neighbors’ gazes—yes, he’d shown them all!

  There is a term called portamento, which refers to the sliding or changing of the musical voice. That was coming, but Mitya didn’t hear it yet, for the strings grew sweet and heavy just as they should, gorgeously perfumed with amorous “exoticism.” Came the seduction, half a rape—cold, angry and brassy, with jeeringly lascivious oohs and ahs from the brasses, until Sergei had finished, and Katerina’s desperate boredom returned with an ugly wilting glissando.

  Meanwhile, the music was beautiful—as smooth as the hollows of Elena Konstantinovskaya’s neck—

  At the end, he supposed, there’d have to be an encore, and then he’d be led up to the State Box. He could not for the life of him figure out what to say. Nina had told him to smile, bow his head and murmur soft thanks.—Do you have everything you need? Stalin would ask. Shostakovich needed any number of things, but Sollertinsky, Glikman, his mother and Nina had all advised him to reply that he possessed absolutely everything. That would please Comrade Stalin . . .

  Shostakovich waited patiently through the pseudo-Wagnerian farewell of the illicit lovers in Act II, and still there was no summons, which he found odd. In the very first words of the third act, Sergei seemed to be directly addressing his creator when he sang to Katerina Izmailova: Why do you stand there? What are you gaping at?—She for her part kept staring at the cellar where her husband’s corpse hid. And Shostakovich kept twisting in his seat, trying not to gaze at the State Box.

  At the end of the third act, Stalin, Molotov and the other luminaries arose from the State Box, then withdrew in an ominous silence. Sickened, Shostakovich waited out the final act, composed his face into the deathmask serenity required by the times, and even took his bow when called upon to do so by the rapturous audience—for public opinion, reader, has its own inertia; and the opera’s successes in Sweden, America, Czechoslovakia could not be instantaneously undone. He went backstage to thank the musicians—who recoiled as if he were a leper. His mouth twitched crazily. He took up his briefcase in silence. No one saw him out. He descended the portico into the blue pallor of another snowy night, then stopped. He gazed up at the rearing horses of Apollo above the colonnade—frozen horses. During the Civil War the lucky souls had eaten horseflesh. Oh, yes; that’s why our sailors had eaten Beethoven. Yielding himself to the streets, he passed a policeman whose greenish shoulders were obscured by snow. A few hours before, he would have smiled at the man. Now he dared not look into his face. He boarded the Archangel-bound train, his fingertips tapping out the rousing, crazy, drunkenly leering march which seizes hold when the ragged peasant, having discovered the husband’s stinking corpse, rushes off to the police station to denounc
e Katerina and Sergei. And Shostakovich’s compartment clitteryclattered allegro as he rode away into the oddly tender lavender of a Russian winter dawn.

  Two days later, Pravda unmasked the opera’s bourgeois obscurantism. Expressing a quiet, well-mannered defiance, he continued the tour. Everyone was beginning to recoil from his guilt.

  8

  The Leningrad Union of Composers summoned him to a discussion of the charges against him, but he refused to attend. This, too, was remembered against him as evidence of unyielding individualism.

  Within the week, Pravda exposed his collective farm comedy “The Bright Stream” as “Ballet Falsity.” His coauthor Piotrovsky was ostracized and eventually liquidated. Shostakovich never wrote another ballet.

  As for all who’d ever praised “Lady Macbeth,” they found themselves in much the same position as those two female parachutists, Tamara Ivanovna and Liubov’ Berlin, who’d been so desperate to best each other in the recent All-Soviet competition that neither one pulled her rip cord in time. What would the praisers do in this turnaround race? Pravda had denounced their “fawning music criticism.” To save themselves, they must leap as far and fast as possible, leaving Shostakovich alone in the stormy skies of formalism. (And he knew that; he knew the rules. He’d done it to Malko. From Archangel he sent Glikman a telegram: Please send all the press clippings immediately, dear Isaak Davidovich! He wanted to hear each individual note in the symphony of denunciation.) They must rush to earth. They must exclude him from friendship, charity, memory. Ruthless seclusion in private, ruthless conformity in public—those were the two wires they must pull, to steer themselves safely down to obscurity. Now and again one of them got taken, and the rest turned pale; but because it was dangerous to comment ever again on those who had been devoured, let alone wonder whether they themselves might be arrested at the next tick of the metronome, they struggled to prove their faith in the dictum LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL, because who wouldn’t want that to be so? Some comforted themselves that Comrade Stalin did not realize what was being done in his name; for if that were only true, then they might not be utterly lost. Those afflicted with more knowledge than that still hoped that in regard to his growing collection of victims, Comrade Stalin resembled some bygone Russian boyar who, living luxuriously removed from the operation of his own vast power, needed to ask his stewards should he ever for some unlikely reason wish to find out how many villages, serfs and greyhounds he possessed. The truth, of course, was that night after night, Stalin sat up in the Kremlin with Molotov, tallying everything, commanding everything, initialing long lists of names to which they mutually added the prescription: All to be shot.

  Shostakovich secluded himself. He kept saying to Nina: I don’t understand.

  On the tenth of February, P. Kerzhentsev, who directed the All Union Committee for Artistic Affairs, publicly urged and exhorted this Shostakovich to redeem himself by studying tuneful folk music from each Soviet zone. Because only the first few bars of this comradely criticism had been orchestrated, there remained at this juncture, like a canal-reflection of the BETTER-JOYFUL slogan itself, a trembling image of hope for the composer, who might yet be proved to be no worse than an egotist who’d committed careless errors. Sing an oratorio of contrition; perform the penance demanded; carry out any subsequent expiations, and his greying life might yet again become candy-striped like the tallest dome of the Church of the Savior of the Blood (one of Leningrad’s more picturesque edifices, which our Party has now transformed into a Museum of Atheism). Several individuals, who so far forgot the common decency and their own security as to wish him well, remarked that the energy which he must now spend to clear himself would distract him from his apprehensions. If he only did as he’d been told, they said, the next few measures might be sunnier.

  Shostakovich was silent, then humbly ambiguous. He requested a meeting with Comrade Stalin. Unfortunately, Comrade Stalin did not seem to be so disposed.

  9

  Whispering every night with Nina, he tried to determine what had offended that bastard. Then he got out of bed; he could hardly get to sleep anymore even if he got drunk. What was that sound? He sat on the piano bench shivering, his shirt buttoned up to the neck, staring downward through his thick glasses as if a score-sheet lay virgin-ready in his lap. Loneliness had penetrated through his egotism first. Next he began to feel the fear.

  I’m trying, you see, he whispered, to, to maintain a philosophical attitude, but at the same time it would help if I knew why. I was wondering if you’d heard anything new . . .

  Just take it as a joke! rejoined his wife with a stinging laugh. What does it matter? Anyhow, the joke’s on both of us, I can tell you.

  I . . . What do you mean?

  Are you really such a child? Asking if I’ve heard anything new! Who’s even going to talk to me? I don’t have the nerve to borrow a cup of sugar anymore . . .

  He tried to be funny. He said: This is only the first movement, Ninochka. In the finale they’ll have to shoot me, so I keep saying, come on, let’s, let’s at least get to the recapitulation, but it’s still only the development . . .

  Keep laughing. I wonder if a person can laugh when they blow his head off? You are really beyond everything.

  Well, well, well, well. Perhaps we both . . . But I really . . . Anyway, their speeches make my ears vomit.

  Lower your voice, Mitya!

  Tell me one thing, please. “Otello” is still my favorite opera of all time, and don’t you still enjoy Verdi also?

  What are you getting at?

  Because “Lady Macbeth” happens to be dedicated to you, I thought, well . . . do you like it?

  Slowly she came to stand beside him, resting one arm upon the upturned piano lid. Her belt was level with his face. Her pregnant belly touched his cheek, and he, he, you know. She said: Mitya, darling, you know I was very flattered.

  That’s not what I was asking. I wanted to do something important. If it’s only art, in which case I didn’t get it right then, maybe I, I, . . . you see, Lady Macbeth’s crimes are a protest against the life she’s trapped in, the suffocating existence of the merchant class of the last century—

  You haven’t said a thing. What’s your question, exactly?

  Can music attack evil? If I were to try, really sincerely, and perhaps to suffer, and to seek out the sufferings of others, or—

  How could it do that?

  The Baltic Fleet—

  Go take a hike, said Nina. You don’t think they would rather have had bread?

  So you’re saying that what I wanted to do was really, you know, impossible.

  Who cares about whether it’s impossible or not? You love to torture yourself with these abstract questions. In fact, you’re so busy torturing yourself that you’ll never—

  Then they won’t need to—ha, ha!—do it for me . . .

  Please be careful, Mitya, oh, my God! What are you saying?

  I do for some reason, you know, pity Katerina. As if she were actually . . . And if I could have made other people pity her also—

  Enough with the past tense!

  Then maybe somebody would even, you know, come to the rescue of some woman somewhere who happens to be as trapped as she is—

  Stupidity!

  And Sergei, you see, my music strips him, so to speak, naked. (I’m out of cigarettes.) Through his air of slick haberdasher oozes the future kulak who, if he hadn’t been sentenced to hard labor, would have become a merchant exploiter—

  Where do you get all this from? You’re talking as if we’re in public!

  No, no! And stop interrupting me! I sincerely—

  They keep telling you to apologize and apply for membership in the Party. Maybe you should just do it. Hold your nose and do it, Mitya! Never mind about me, but you’ll soon be a father, remember.

  I’m going to, I, well, I’m going to make a stand. When we’re all dead they’ll see. My music will—

  Mitya, listen.
I allow you your mistresses and your antisocial games, which might even be crimes. Haven’t I done enough? Do I have to let you commit suicide, too?

  Anyway, said he, feebly cleaning his glasses, they can threaten me as much as they like. Perhaps they won’t actually—but regardless of their threats I’m going to keep on writing the music I please.

  Very noble, she said, gazing down at his twitching hands. And what about your family?

  Ninusha, you know I didn’t mean it like that.

  What’s that book you keep hiding under the cushion?

  Oh, it’s—you see? Just an album of press clippings. Glikman was obliging enough to, well, I, I started keeping it last month, to see where my fault lies, so to speak. But, you know, I can’t find it.

  And he stutteringly commenced yet again to run through everything in the opera which might have been considered incorrect. (Nina’s double shadow terrified him upon the ceiling.) Was it the police extortion in Act III, which could have been construed as a dig against our security organs? Then again, Comrade Stalin, being a busy man, might have overlooked the irony of the Amen sung by the workers when Katerina’s father-in-law, poisoned by her, gives up his nasty ghost. (It might well be, given the earnestness of our anti-religious campaign nowadays, that one should never say Amen even in jest. This thought just now occurred to him. Mitya had grown up at last.) Turning to the music itself, he worried about the sadistic-sardonic music of the lashes striking Sergei’s back while Katerina, watching helplessly from her window, shrieks in perfect time with each stroke. Someone might misconstrue that. Perhaps the abstract chromatism of the first entr’acte should have been toned down—