Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  The shelling stopped. The Conservatory hadn’t caught fire this time, either. Now here came our tommy-gunners who in the white winter uniforms resembled desert Arabs, especially since so many grew beards now, for warmth. And a white-wrapped corpse swam by, dragged down the white streets. Maybe it was one of those old women in shawls who’d been set to digging antitank trenches; it was too big to be a child. Amidst the cemetery drifts, the coffined and the coffinless awaited this new arrival, but then right across the street two women with snow on their shoulders stopped to gaze listlessly upon a third who’d just fallen dead. He heard the roar of a T-34 engine, and farther away he heard the MG-34s being fired by the German Fascist batteries, and then shells began to fall upon Leningrad again. Dark-clad human bundles scuttled into doorways.—Shostakovich, he said to himself, I will die today.—He tried to be, let’s say progressive, philosophical, realistic, even—why not try again to use this word?—optimistic (for instance, the streetcars fortunately still moved; they weren’t yet frozen to the streets); and what must have been in all probability an essentially, you know, unfounded feeling armored him against the fear, at least for now; while flame-walls as jagged as broken windowpanes sprang up around him and he activated the alarm. Years later he remembered flames reflected in puddles of melted sugar, but that must have happened during the previous month, when the Badayevskiy warehouses won the lottery.

  On the seventeenth he was on the Conservatory roof when a black bundle fell in the street. For a long time he avoided looking, and later he thought to himself, if only I could have thought more clearly, I never, I, I, but hunger lowered my guard, so I, well. I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have . . . It was my task right then, for the sake of the symphony, to seek out grief. I know that.

  After several hours, he peered down through the field glasses at that Leningrader’s closed eyes, the lips pursed almost coquettishly, the ice on the chin. Those details pressed him to alter a chord in the second movement.

  On the nineteenth, Moscow was officially declared to be in a state of siege. Nina asked what would happen. He cleaned his glasses and said: I’m sure they’ll, which is to say that bastard, you know the one I mean, he’ll save us all—tomorrow! He’ll lead the, so to speak, cavalry charge. He’ll choke with his, his . . .—and he looked right and left, then whispered hideously in her ear: His Constitution.—Well, what do you know? As soon as he’d croaked that out, the radio announced a victorious counteroffensive! Then, as ever, it fell silent except for the feeble ticking of a metronome. Nina felt dizzy; she had to lie down. As for him, he, well, can’t you guess?

  From the window he watched a mother dragging her son to the cemetery on his little sled. Some shivering schoolgirls were trying to drag an antitank hedgehog across the ice; one girl fell down and lay there quite awhile before she got up again. The others stood blankly round, not trying to help her. Finally they’d pulled their hedgehog all the way to the corner, passing the corpse with dried blood-bubbles on its lips which had lain there for two weeks; thank God the snow hid it now. It made the children afraid. And Galya said: Papa, I’m hungry.

  Now it was night. In that chilly darkness behind the blackout curtain, Maxim was lying on the sofa, his face more pallid than before, his arms and legs as limp as the down-swinging golden arcs and crescents on the stage curtain of the Kirov Theater where those failed ballets “Dynamiada” and “Bolt” had both premiered so long ago. Why was I thinking about “Bolt” just now? My ballets nauseate me. I’ll never write another one, I promise. I’ll certainly never write another opera, because I’ll be (why not joke about it?) dead. But Maxim’s going to feel better tomorrow. The news from Glikman was that people had started eating cooked glue. Soon our Red Army engineers would begin dynamiting the frozen ground at Volkovo Cemetery to make mass graves.—Maxim, shall I read you a story?—The boy opened his eyes, but did not answer. Well, but after all, the terrified father tried to reassure himself, children, especially small children, get more quickly debilitated (not that this situation doesn’t bear watching), but they also recover more quickly than we do, which isn’t to say that I shouldn’t somehow prepare, or, or, or, but for instance, and here’s just one of, oh, a hundred examples: When I get a chest cold I’m miserable for ten days, whereas Galya and Maxim are as good as new after three. Therefore . . .—And he cleaned his glasses on his sweater, wiping away the tears, but all he did was smudge them. From the Conservatory roof that day he’d seen them take another cart of corpses to Volkovo, reflections of the cartwheels shining in a pool of melting ice, and he remembered the Tartar horse-butcher. Well, well. No doubt that’s commonplace in our times. But I, I, to me I, well, I’d simply not pursued such considerations.

  Gazing on his wife and children, he saw as if for the first time long starving necks rising out of sweater-collars, and winter was just beginning. The Rat Theme rose up in him like vomit. This situation needs watching, he said to himself. Ha, ha! Hitler the Liberator means to, to, slim us down. Last month Akhmatova had confided that the city’s art treasures were being shipped out by train. But that news must now be, so to speak, superseded, because the Fascists had cut all our railroad lines. Perhaps to Elena this wasn’t new. The Black Maria had taken her to that place, where the wash-water was always frozen, and flat-chested, wrinkled girls prostituted themselves for half a kilo of bread. Why had they let her go? It must have been a random decision; perhaps her prosecutor got arrested. And now she’s . . . Anyhow, history can’t be undone. The clock winds down and you wind it up, but when the spring, you see, gives way . . . I’m not talking about myself now; I’m talking about something else. You’re so lucky I didn’t . . . If Maxim died, why then, he’d . . . Galisha would probably . . . What could he do now? He could tell them uplifting lies as the radio did; perhaps he could smuggle home a little more food; but . . . Our snowy-camouflaged men on each tank, pointing black guns across the snow, they might save Leningrad but they couldn’t save his children. No one could save anyone, which is why this will someday be, how should I say, the best page of my memoirs: sincerity, self-sacrifice, a common enemy whose name we don’t have to whisper, so when Galya dies I can borrow Litvinova’s sled and . . . No one can do anything. That motif, like letters from a soldier which keep arriving for weeks after his death, would infect his music for the rest of his life.

  But that very month, despite his murmurous protests, Shostakovich and his family got flown out by special plane! The activists said: No more objections, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Not unless it’s true that you’re waiting for the Germans. We’ve heard that you admire the fugues of J. S. Bach . . .

  The “Muse of Leningrad,” which is to say Akhmatova, had already been evacuated. It’s said that she carried the original piano score of the Seventh on her lap, as precaution in case his plane were to be shot down. As for Shostakovich, he had the orchestral score, as well as his much-loved child, “Lady Macbeth.” Romain Rolland had liked that opera. Save us from these humanists! Glikman’s wife was already dying by then. And where were Sollertinsky, Lebedinsky, and, and, you know? Get over it! His mother, his sister and his brother-in-law had to stay behind.—In short, the authorities agreed with his mother, who’d written that if the roof fell in and she had to choose whom to save, the answer would be of course Mitya—for this would be the duty of everyone to society, for the sake of art—disregarding all personal feeling. He said to himself: If I ever forget that I was spared, I’ll be as evil as, you know, that bastard. The last thing he saw in the city of his birth was a half-melted machine-gun barrel in the snow, snake-twisted like the mouthpiece of a bass clarinet.

  34

  The fall of Moscow appeared imminent. Vlasov and those other generals hadn’t yet turned the tide. How should I put it? We were gloriously falling back. Everybody was shivering except for the NKVD men in their jackets trimmed with lambskin. It was a new era, an era of specialists. Certain people specialized in, you know, keeping warm. Those non-specialists the Shostakoviches couldn’t decide whether to conti
nue all the way to Tashkent as Akhmatova had (he’d been informed by Glikman that Elena Konstantinovskaya was there, too), or to stop at the new de facto capital of Kuibyshev. Late at night they arrived at Kazan Station, where women lay sleeping on every bench with their mouths open, breath-steam jetting from their faces like visible snores, Kazakh men pacing, menacingly tall in their cylindrical fur hats, shouting in deep voices, while Russian grandfathers pointed and fussed, scared children coughed, teenaged girls sat on the floor holding each other’s hands. Poor Galochka kept whimpering, red in the face. Every time the Fascists launched a shell, she’d scream. Nina didn’t know what to do with her. As for our composer, he’d kept his sense of humor. A fat woman farted, and he said in Nina’s ear: A bit of, um, artillery preparation, so to speak.—Wide-eyed and silent, Maxim clutched a piece of oilcake.

  They embarked at last. And so, comrades: “The Open Spaces of the Heartland!”—Russia is actually as blackly untidy as a page of a Dostoyevsky manuscript, with its excisions, spearpointed insertions, doodled bearded saints.—Shostakovich couldn’t help remembering his optimistic journey six years ago from Leningrad to Moscow within the streamlined metal of the express train, with its blind bulbous nose, adorned with a star; one could have likened it to a certain kind of mole, but naturally that trope wouldn’t be correct in this epoch of perfect vision; better to conceive of it as an immense bullet inset in a jointed steel phallus which ejaculated low V’s of white steam on either side as it clittered down the tracks. “Lady Macbeth” was going to win him the permanent patronage of Comrade Stalin. The way it turned out was actually, how should I say, educational. On another occasion he had boarded this same train to propose to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who’d accepted with sweet hope and joy; that might have been the last time he’d ever seen her smile—probably not, however, for most of us can’t stop smiling meaninglessly. Oh, me, the way she moaned that first time! An ocean of ghostly, uprising moans, each one similar to the sound which children make by racing their fingertips across the taut and slender wires within a piano, going up the octaves in a thin metallic music of echoing ghostliness; that was how Elena had moaned, exactly that way, presto appassionato. His fingers drummed softly against the steel wall for days as he smiled desperately into space, pressing his greying hair against Nina’s greying hair. He was working out the fourth movement of his new symphony.—A symphony! That was nice, but that was nothing; it was only when he was kissing Elena or deep, deep inside her that he’d felt solace, gratitude, fulfillment, absolute peace, which he had never felt before and never would again—no, no, that’s another exaggeration; life isn’t as fancy as that; we have to, you know, eat whatever food gets set before us, even if it’s only oilcake—anyhow, at first he couldn’t accustom himself to that feeling which Elena gave him; he distrusted it because, well, he distrusted everything, but she was real and steady from that very first night when she unsmilingly invited him into her bed; she didn’t merely “give herself” to him as other women did, she gave him a home within her heart, a sweet strong house in which they both could have dwelled until they died, if only the roof hadn’t gotten blown off; and afterward, when she stood naked at the hotel window to smoke a cigarette, he felt even closer to her than he had when she was on top of him; usually when the act was finished he felt, so to speak, alone, especially when the woman gazed away; truth to tell, right now Elena wasn’t looking at him at all, but the curve of her back, which still glittered with sweat, remained aware of him, and loved him. I’ve read that he truly was a superb lover, and for the same reason that he was a musical genius: he gently intuited harmonies and spaces; the ecstatic droop of a woman’s eyelid expressed as much to him as that black piano key he’d half depressed; his body and hers became instruments on which he could play a duet for both of them; in later years, crowds of Muscovites and Leningraders wept at premieres of his “death symphonies,” and Elena likewise wept whenever he made love with her; she sobbed with happy lust, wept for love, then cried out, her cry a peculiar chord dominated by B-sharp, and that became his treasure, which he reverently secreted in his own greying heart, never allowing it to shine forth in any of his music. One December night deep in the postwar decades, when Lebedinsky, a little drunk, dared to ask him what it was that he loved so much about her, he might have been remembering that chord, that secret, magnificent sound, when he answered: He who has ears will hear. Or it might have simply been her that he meant; she remained, as she forever would, within his hiddenmost soul, emblem of his youth, strength and bravery, not to mention the goodness he’d separated himself from, his fading prehistoric consecration. He who has ears will hear. No sense in thinking about that! And precisely because he who has ears will hear, he wanted to ensure that each passage of each movement would be as well wired as a German Fascist entrenchment. They needed his symphony without delay, just as they needed the new Katyusha rockets. Could he still remain unerring? Why not? They’d drafted him in advance to oversee the rehearsals of the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble. Meanwhile he’d lost his two suitcases; A. I. Khatchaturian had to give him some of his clothes. Then he lost the score of the Seventh itself, which Nina had wrapped up in a quilt, but V. Y. Shebalin found it for him. He forgot to eat; he was worried about his mother. Nina begged a smoked fish from D. B. Kabalevsky, which he in his shyness could never have done; throughout his life he requested favors only for others; and while he was munching at it, absently swallowing the bones, he said: You know, Ninochka, I’m not completely sure, but, since Isaak Davidovich has . . .—You want to join him in Tashkent, said Nina flatly and loudly in everyone’s hearing. You want to join him in Tashkent because your other woman is waiting for you there with open arms and open legs, which is why I can’t imagine what her husband sees in her; but he’s away a lot, isn’t he? Maybe your plan is simply to moon outside her window, which will have a blackout curtain anyway, so why bother?—On 22 October they arrived in their haven, which was named after the moderate Politboro man Kuibyshev, whose mysterious heart ailiment in 1935 had been so convenient for Comrade Stalin. The train stopped, recapitulating the half-strangled violin of the first movement. A beggar with a baritone voice sang a song about our Red Army.

  35

  A lamp’s snow-white incandescence, his own pale, pudgy reflection-silhouette upon the piano lid, his score glowing like a slab of light, the long white jawbone of piano keys which sang to him who caressed it, so ran his world which was guarded to a precarious security by the outward spiralings of squat little bombers with red stars at flank and tail, twelve planes to a squadron, three squadrons to a regiment, four regiments to a division, two divisions to a corps. The children were asleep. Nina came to the piano and laid her hand upon his shoulder. He gazed out the window.

  Since the Fascists had come, the coldness between her and him no longer mattered, so perhaps it was not even coldness anymore, this dissonance, chemical incompatibility; they rarely quarreled now for much the same reason that they almost never slept together; necessity discouraged it, and Leningrad’s agony chilled their selfishness and anger.

  In November, three thousand inhabitants of that city starved to death from sunrise to sunrise. They’d cut the rations for the fifth time by then. Moscow was badly off too, of course . . . Haunted by thoughts of his mother cutting a hole in the frozen street to find water, of puffy-eyed children, crazed old ladies shivering, he gorged himself with semi-secret statistics which were meaningless and already obsolete: three hundred barrage balloons, nine hundred tons of burnt sugar. He had thought that music was the most important thing in the world, but now he realized that he would do almost anything, even compromise his talent, to help Leningrad, formerly known as Petrograd, and before that Saint Petersburg, which is to say City of the Periodic Table—city of Glinka, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Prokofieff, Shostakovich! So what if he wrote bad music? No, he’d never . . . It could still be his, given sincerely and unstintingly, and also something they could use. In short, if they wanted program music they�
��d get program music. He’d make it good in spite of itself. Convenient and effective was what they wanted; all right, but he actually, excuse me for saying so, loved Leningrad, so what they were also going to get in that symphony was, you know, Leningrad.

  Lev Oborin, who seemed very tired, came by unannounced for an hour of four-handed piano. He was smiling; not only had he tracked down five hundred grams of horsemeat sausage, but we’d just liberated Kalinin! Galya jumped up and down, screaming: Kalinin, Kalinin! It was past her bedtime, actually. And she couldn’t get over that cough, the “Leningrad cough” they called it. Kalinin, so now I’ll have to compose a . . . What’s that sound? Oh, it’s only . . . Moreover, said Oborin, at Leningrad we’d now gained an ice-bridge across Lake Ladoga; refugees went out and food came in, a little, not enough, and sometimes the Fascists strafed our trucks, but Shostakovich couldn’t help wondering at the pride and hope he felt, when he read the confirmation in Pravda. Years later, when he returned to Leningrad, just to visit (he never lived there again), his friends told him that on some occasions people had torn bread from each other outside the bakeries, but usually they starved in silence. They didn’t want to compromise either, you see. And when he heard that he, well, he grew emotional.

  There were many new common graves now in Piskarevskoye Cemetery. In December it got worse. Some calculated that six thousand perished every day of that month; others said four, or ten. No one had the strength to count. Like ripe pears falling off trees, frozen bodies dropped out of windows into the snowy streets. Cannibals were said to be killing stray children every day; steak-meat was cut from the shoulders, thighs and buttocks of corpses abandoned at the cemetery. On 17 December the radio announced that the Volkhov Front had been formed under General Meretskov, but even the announcer failed to express much hope. Now back to the ticking of a metronome; that was all Leningrad had the strength to broadcast. Children’s sleds kept getting dragged to the cemetery, with dead children on them. Poets collapsed and died from the exertion of standing upright to read their verses on Radio Leningrad. Then came the metronome again. That was why he wanted to build his symphony not out of music, but out of snow and explosions.