Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Oh, I’m not cynical. I merely, I, well, I wonder how all this will affect us in later life. If we’re allowed to have a later life . . .

  He peered over the edge of the Conservatory roof. We were trying to regain command of Pulkovo Heights, and the loudspeakers were shouting. To the left, women with suspicious eyes stood around a lake of blood. To the right, a pretty, baby-faced girl in a woolen cap was wrapping up the head of bleeding boy who kept scratching at his chest, his rifle flung down on the broken bricks beside him. Suddenly he stopped moving. Sighing, the nurse rose and turned away.—Now do you see? Shostakovich muttered to himself, not even really knowing what he was saying.

  30

  On 10 September General Voroshilov was removed for “passivity” and General Zhukov arrived in Leningrad with an express directive from Stalin to hold the front line no matter what the cost.—Well, and why not? said the fire warden when he heard. Nina was too tired to reply. He said to her: Come on into the bathroom so I can tell you a joke. Don’t worry; we’ll turn the water up loud . . .

  Go to hell, Mitya.

  Our history books will show Zhukov’s solid, close-shaven head sternly tilted as he listens to his strategic Muse: Stalin will be the savior of Europe. That was the day that a shell landed on Liteiny Boulevard, and Shostakovich could hope that the NKVD headquarters had been hit. He was full of optimism, actually, or maybe it wasn’t exactly optimism but some manifestation of concentrated anger such as one frequently hears in the second movement of his Eighth Symphony; it definitely wasn’t optimism, which might well have been impossible under these conditions. On 12 September the bread ration was reduced again. Hunger came as slowly as an adagissimo. Shostakovich had nothing to say about that. But soon people would be wearing gas masks against the cold and eating library paste. And the children, you see, Maxim was already crying in the night because his stomach was empty, well, can I somehow put that into the Rat Theme, so that they’ll . . . ? Nina doesn’t believe in this, but I have to believe, to, to, do you understand? When his son wept, he most frequently uttered a highly specific sound in A-flat minor. Can one do anything with this? It hurts me, of course, not that I have anything to say about it, because, because, but the real point is that if it didn’t hurt me it would be unconscionable to build it into my music, but since I, my God, how can I not weep when my children suffer? And therefore, it would be unconscionable not to use that A-flat minor, when it might somehow, well, it’s important to remember that each one of us has his work.

  Glikman had already sampled cottonseed cake. He said that it tasted pretty foul, but with a little vodka, you know, some in the glass and just a splash on the cake itself, anyhow, that was how Glikman’s wife liked it. (She was already getting weak.) Oh, our fine Russian proverb: to make a cake out of shit. That’s what I’m doing with this symphony. And Glikman said . . . (Nina whispered that she’d heard the Fascists had just taken Kiev; even General Vlasov had barely escaped.) Then someone knocked on the door, two light taps; first he thought it was the NKVD and he vomited, but it was only that maddening Akhmatova coming around again, with her hands melodramatically bleeding from sewing sandbags, as if other people didn’t also, you get the picture; she’d always thought she was really something, and now she was on the radio all the time. I personally prefer to, how should I put, to listen to the metronome. He granted that she was graceful, a genius, and all that. She certainly knew it, too. Anyhow, she promised that she’d use her pull to try to get him out of here, and he replied: My dear Anna Andreyevna, there’s no need. I’m where I should be, so to speak. I draw strength from, I—who was that Greek protagonist who, you know—wait! it’s coming to me; I mean Antaeus! Or do I mean Lenin? The one who, so to speak, got stronger whenever they threw him down to the ground. There’s something about this Russian earth, and when they throw me in it, I’m going to take a big bite . . . By the way, Anna Andreyevna, you and I had an encounter when I was very small. You probably don’t remember it but . . .

  Akhmatova closed her eyes and very slowly shook her head. She looked so engaging at that moment, so, how should I say, erotic, that he couldn’t help but wonder how it would be to, well. She was only seventeen years older; that was nothing. But he pressed on: There’s someone who, well, this is in a sense a, a delicate matter, but, you know, someone who, someone who, I’d have to say someone far more worthy of being evacuated than I—

  Than your own family, Dmitri Dmitriyevich?—Akhmatova smiled and said: This must be love!

  Oh, please, he whispered in an agony, peeking around his shoulder to make sure that Ninochka hadn’t come in.

  Shall I guess who it is? giggled Akhmatova.

  There’s no need, dear Anna Andreyevna, no need and no reason to be overly, how shall I say, specific—

  I understand, said Akhmatova. In Pushkin’s day one did not expose everything about oneself.

  Thank you for that; thank you, thank you! Because—

  I believe she’s already on the list, so don’t worry. But what do you see in her, you grey-eyed prince? She’s nothing to me.

  Has she . . . is she—

  She’s surviving. Roman Lazarevich is taking good care of her, from what I hear. Why didn’t you marry her? You were very foolish.

  My dear Anna Andreyevna—

  And now I must go.

  On 25 September, when shrapnel killed many citizens who were queueing by number for graves, he celebrated his birthday by candlelight, with black bread and potatoes instead of cake. (Nina was angrily, proudly announcing to the guests: He refused to be evacuated!) Four days later, he completed the third movement of his symphony.

  For those of you who may still wonder how the so-called “creations” of this formalist intellectual could possibly be as useful as, say, the circus acrobatics of the Kokh Sisters, who in 1943 distracted the masses from wartime cares with their famous Great Semaphore Act, I want to discuss this sweet and brilliant third movement, the adagio, which contains traces of that last spring before the invasion, when Shostakovich was in the Crimea picking juniper berries with Shebalin’s wife Alisa, a woman who personified Leningrad for him now that Elena Konstantinovskaya was gone; with Alisa he lived, at least for a day or two, in a world as long gone as the hand-kissings of counts and countesses. How she laughed at his owlish little eyes! And he . . . Well, but it was also difficult in a way, since in the nighttime he woke up thinking about Elena. Never mind; we all have our, so to speak, sorrows. Not that there’s any call to be sentimental, especially about Elena, who wasn’t exactly; never mind; I’m thinking for instance of, of Nina. In fact, if the forest were music, we’d hear a tranquil major key theme—say, this third movement, which he had originally entitled “The Open Spaces of the Heartland,” and whose cathedralesque quality is reminiscent of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s ode to Easter. Nina had said to him: Don’t fuck her so much that you forget to bring me any berries.—It was Nina’s fate to always give, but hurriedly and quick-temperedly, so her gifts were not received with gratitude. He for his part was a generous man without anything to give. Well, he filled up Alisa’s apron with berries (I mean, my dear, dear lady, which is to say . . . ) They marinated the berries in vodka, but found the result too strong; they got so drunk and their tongues burned so much that they were laughing and almost missed the train home because Alisa lost an earring and then the taxi kept getting flat tires on the boggy, stony road, so that Shostakovich became nervous unto sickness, especially because he’d confided to her: We all have somebody to, to, you know, cry over . . .—and that night after playing a round of cards with him the violinist P. returned to his first class compartment and died in his sleep, as a result of which Shostakovich was interrogated and almost arrested, which definitely took his mind off Elena. And here the “Pacques” theme of that third movement gave way to a minor-keyed Slavic dance, a wild one which suddenly took on the tramp of avengers’ boots. Then the dreamy melody alit again, as beautifully as the four-stranded bundles of tracer bullet light arising from the Maxim
guns of Leningrad.

  31

  I fear that I have not really described this third movement very well. Let me try again. It opens, as I’ve said, with a stately joy equivalent to that of Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Grand Pacques,” then dims down to a frame of sternness to introduce one of the most purely beautiful themes Shostakovich ever wrote, which will be reiterated with an Asian tinge. Then comes a sort of rising, spiraling music as if we were in a plane circling up over the mountains. Shostakovich had not flown very often in those days; nor is the area between Moscow and Leningrad mountainous; but when the plane which was bearing Nina, Galya, Maxim and himself out of the besieged city (naturally Nina won that argument in the end) had bored through the black cloud-edges and the white fog, they all cried out, because before them lay a perfectly flat rainbow over cloud-edges the length of the horizon, muted by the clouds; this rainbow formed one of the most beautiful lines any of them had ever seen, the sky lavender above it, the sky below diffusely luminous with all colors from electric blue to yellow to peach. And when Shostakovich saw this sight, he heard again within himself those “spiraling” measures of that already completed third movement, which quickly grows more stern and gloomy, suddenly forceful and mechanical in a positive, martial sense, like truckloads of soldiers rolling west out of Kazakhstan, approaching the Stalingrad front—and we might note that on the Conservatory roof in Leningrad he’d listened carefully to the defenders’ medium and heavy mortars, trying to decide how they could best be represented. For Leningrad’s sake he was willing to make it simple, comprehensible, even vulgar. When I listen to the later Shostakovich, the real Shostakovich, whose melodies are almost completely lightless, I don’t know what to believe about this Seventh Symphony.

  32

  When he clambered down from the Conservatory roof, so faint with fatigue and hunger that he was almost blind, a child grabbed him by the hand, whimpering that it didn’t have enough strength to go home.—Don’t worry, don’t worry, replied Shostakovich. From his pocket he pulled out a scrap of bread. Later he felt guilty, because he should have saved it for his own children.

  33

  In October, the month of wet winds which thicken a sick man’s cough, the Fascists were bombing promptly at seven each evening. Like Shostakovich, they adored punctuality. October was when the potatoes ran out. It wasn’t until November that people started feeding on a jelly made from leather straps. October was the merest overture to the time of wide white streets slippery with packed ice, when men wrapped in scarves and hats, women in shawls and hoods, bulky bear-people all of them, and Leningrad began to be mounded here and there with the dead. In September the organs of our civic body still functioned well enough for corpses to get hauled away, but now our task required other measures. Those thirteen-year-old boys assembling artillery shells in each factory’s frozen darkness, they couldn’t be spared to clean the streets, not in October. October was pianissimo at first. Somewhere in the freezing darkness came the downbeat of the conductor’s baton: Skizze B: Heeresgruppe Nord, as performed by Field-Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb. The first measure commenced. Here came their whistling woodwinds, and then the first cymbal-clash struck Leningrad’s stage. Pale, drooping-headed women shivering inside an unheated bakeshop, waiting to take their bread rations into a purse or a coat pocket, got illuminated into nonexistence by a million mirrors of breaking glass. Some screamed soprano, but there was one bass bray which went on and on—a husband, he conjectured. If only he would please, please, you know . . . Then the loudspeaker was screaming encouragements, first screaming and then really screaming; for an instant it sounded almost like, er, you know who, but he had to stop believing that. Late in life he told S. Volkov: Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all.—But in those days it wasn’t true; or at least he didn’t most intensely fear his own death; he was terrified that harm might come to the woman he loved, not that he actually loved her anymore, because all that would have been, so to speak, well . . . The next shell killed a family on the second storey of the apartment building across the street. He saw it happen. And what was there to say? Perhaps music could say it. Falling walls applauded. Siege guns are nothing more than, so to speak, brass instruments—specifically, “Wagner tubas,” which are what we hear in the Ring Cycle . . . I refuse to fear them. I may be a preposterous, useless person; no doubt I should have, you know; but I won’t fear them; and if I do fear them, I’ll pretend to be brave even if I have to hide the fear inside me where it can poison my life—what life? For an encore, the German cymbals dropped death upon a furcapped man who was shivering and blowing on his hands as he toiled at the roofless munitions plant, and Shostakovich saw that, too; he was longing for a Ju-88 to come and strafe him as he stood in furious anguish there upon the roof! Had he succeeded? Did the Rat Theme say everything yet? (What about the sound of planks getting wrenched out of buildings in Okhta so that somebody would have firewood? He left that out; someday he’d squeeze that into Opus 110.) Oh, my, those screams! And then when I come home, Nina will, she’ll, and my children’s eyes are already dead; I predict that Maxim will die first. As for me, art, if there’s even such a thing, won’t suffer if I . . . But Nina wants me to . . .—Snare drums rattled across the trenches, and more people fell dead, gushing from scarlet holes.

  Now let’s repeat the measure, da capo. It’s all program music. Entering the scratched oak doors of the Conservatory, Shostakovich ascended the half-dozen steps, passed through the turnstile, and then came inner doors and inner doors until he felt safe. The rooms were cold and dark again, just as they’d been in his Civil War boyhood. He didn’t care about that. He was home beneath the piano keys. Hunching down, he gnawed on a scrap of oilcake until his mind cleared. Glikman said that sometimes soldiers gave him sauerkraut or other food; their rations were better. Shostakovich was rarely that lucky. How could he possibly, possibly end the Seventh hopefully while remaining true to it? Actually, he knew that he could; there was no fear of his betraying the music he loved so much, although life was certainly different from what he had expected. Music not only could save him; it (or she, as I should say) already had. He knew that he could die for her and was living for her; therefore everything had become strangely simple and good. She could speak to him through his own skinny nervous fingers, which alone expressed her. A brilliant clean burst of shell fragments, now, if I were a visual artist I might express them kaleidoscopically, because they’re so, how should I put it; anyhow a glockenspiel might convey that sparkling tinkling scattering, a steel rainbow coming apart and, and, especially since a glockenspiel is such a, you know, German instrument. And if I specified that the orchestra use metal mallets . . . Smiling in utter happiness, he ascended to the roof, wondering whether he would die today.

  The German Fascists had been dropping incendiaries all month; the optics factory (which now made grenades and bayonets) caught fire three hundred times on a single night. If anything landed on the Conservatory, he was supposed to, to, never mind; it was preposterous. Not far away he heard machine-gun fire and then the scream of sirens. No, no; Leningrad’s mist and stone would hide him. And all the while his brain was organizing the opening of the fourth movement. When a bluish tint came into Maxim’s face, he went out by night and bought a kilogram of some unknown illegal meat from a Tartar horse-butcher who crouched amidst many dead below a brick wall. How did buyer and seller find one another? Well, let’s just call it a, a, a typical incident. Later he was appalled at the risk that he had taken—thank God Nina never found out; she thought that once again Glikman had played the patron. He could have been shot! And that meat, well, he just hoped it didn’t come from the graveyard; in the market there was said to be a sausage made from human flesh. Never mind. It’s always easier to believe what we want to believe, much easier. The mentality of a chicken, his mother always used to say, and now she kept prating about our imminent victory over the Fascists. Correct, Mama, one hundred percent, so to speak, correct! We’ll be in Berlin tomorrow, and the
n that bastard in the Kremlin’s going to retire! Ha, ha! Why be serious? Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.

  On the thirteenth of October, his colleague A. D. Kamensky performed Tchaikovsky on the radio. He wanted to hear it, but he had his duty on the roof. Peering over the edge, he watched nine-year-old girls dragging firewood on sledges. Are they too young to be afraid? he wondered. Or are they heroic as the radio says? They look hungry and that’s all. My own children are afraid. It must simply be that I’m too far away from these girls to, to, well, after all, I have binoculars.—So he tracked them with those miraculous military-quality lenses which they’d lent him for the Sovfoto portrait, and he saw that they were indeed afraid, which both saddened and comforted him. But he was not afraid. Closing his eyes, he imagined Elena walking safe and radiant along the long shining walkway to the Smolny Institute; his fondest hope was that she could become Zhukov’s mistress, or, since he was dreaming, Comrade Stalin’s, but on second thought, Comrade Stalin might be more perilous to her than any German tank.

  On the fourteenth, which happened to be the eight hundredth anniversary of the Azerbaijani poet Nizami, the first snow fell. People were already eating dogs, cats, laboratory guinea pigs. A crazy woman spread the rumor that the Germans’ delayed action bombs were full of sugar, and dozens died hoping to prove it. In the morning he caught Nina in the bathroom eating hair oil. That day it was sunnier and when the shelling began he could see quite readily those dark crowds on the far side of the street, the safe side, whose building-fronts were multiwindowed and white. Everything was black and white, black and white, like piano keys, like a clothed corpse half covered in snow.