Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  I must have been in love with, I mean, an illusion, he thought, which sounded so trite that he wondered in which bad novel he’d read it. But it was true. And he still was. He loved her to the point of agony. And it was worse than hopeless; he could never . . .

  Remember, said Glikman, trying to console him, it wasn’t as if she left you. Be logical, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Why feel abandoned? She offered to marry you, but you went back to Nina. Doesn’t that make it better? Elena never left you.

  Grinning malignantly at his dear friend, Shostakovich replied: That makes it worse, you, you, you sonofabitch—no, forgive me, Isaak Davidovich, I . . . My word, what a rude thing I’ve just said! Put it out of your mind, I beg you; it was just a . . . You see, I prefer to think she left me, because in that case I had no choice. I didn’t have a, a choice which I—

  The telephone rang. It was not Elena Konstantinovskaya.

  2

  Our so-called “Allies” had finally launched Operation Overlord against the Fascists; they’d established a beachhead on the French coast, in the locale of Normandy. Can you believe it? We bled ourselves almost to death at Stalingrad, while they, you know. It’s like a parody. Their casualty statistics must be exaggerated; I don’t believe that France could be all that dangerous. Of course we all try hard; we all do what we can. Who am I to, to, say that Americans shouldn’t play second violin? Nina says I don’t know anything. He was trying to read about this development in Pravda, but Maxim, who hadn’t yet left behind that boyhood age of mischief and tricks, kept teasing him by dragging a toothbrush across the wires of the second-best piano; that sound made him melancholy but he didn’t know why. Lebedinsky, who’d been raised strictly, was appalled that he didn’t beat the child, but he just couldn’t.—He’s performing the classics! cried Shostakovich with a hideous attempt at a smile; he was afraid that Lebedinsky looked down on him for his leniency. Truth to tell, when he heard that ghostly, almost erotic sound, which resembled a woman’s moan, it, so to speak, gave him ideas; he wouldn’t mind weaving that chord into his Ninth Symphony, which was almost completed, or perhaps into the Tenth. (Actually, it materialized in the terrifying Fourteenth.)

  The telephone failed to ring. Lebedinsky watched him stare at it. Misconstruing vigilance for hatred, Lebedinsky, whose brother-in-law had been taken away after a telephone call summoning him to an important meeting, said: Oh, yes, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, what a pleasure! To wait on the pleasure of that thing, so that—

  I know, I know, interrupted the host in alarm. Lebedinsky grew embarrassed, discomfited. A quarter-hour later he’d taken his leave. Shostakovich sat alone, drinking vodka and staring at the telephone.

  Galya was at the kitchen table doing her homework. The assignment: Write an essay on the subject “Immortal Heroes of the Great Patriotic War.” Her chosen immortal hero was liaison officer Putilov, who had been stationed at Stalingrad. The tale goes that under heavy enemy fire he crawled out to repair a communication line. The Fascists machine-gunned him. Clenching the two broken strands of wire in his teeth, he completed the circuit and died. Communications were restored.

  Papa, do you think it happened just like that?

  I think it’s quite interesting, Galisha, and, you know, quite, quite educational. Could it actually have happened? I mean, whether or not the electrons . . . Ask your mama; she’s a physicist. You’re lucky she . . . By the way, your hair looks extremely, you know, pretty pulled back like that. How I love you, dear child! Is that a new style? And that red ribbon is very . . . But it’s not fastened properly. Oh, me! Come here, please, you pretty child, and I’ll . . .

  The days went by. The telephone never rang.

  There was a scene from a certain Roman Karmen newsreel: A dead street-lamp bulb hangs like a translucent olive from its metal stem; unshoveled snow reaches almost all the way up to heaven. Which one was that? Maybe “The Men of the Sedov.” Curious how that snow made him feel! Because snow, you see, signifies waiting—not that I believe in program music. If only the telephone would, you know, ring! Well, well, and now our busy little German Fascists were launching V-weapons against England. Sometimes he had to laugh—

  That night he dreamed about a monstrous idol whose face was a black telephone, then woke up gasping. It was not much after four. Hours to go before dawn, but not enough hours to give him any hope of falling asleep again. Tomorrow he was going to be worthless. Fortunately, the dance music they’d demanded wasn’t complicated; he could score it awake, asleep, or in between. Send me out, and I’ll take the wires in my teeth; who cares what happens after that, as long as their signal goes through? This is my life; this is my life. It’s a very, how should I say, typical situation. And the longer Galya believes it’s wonderful, the better for her.

  He was composing his Second String Quartet when the telephone rang. It shrieked with the same brassy shrillness that it had had when it rang last year to announce that Comrade Stalin had rejected the national anthem he’d composed with A. Khatchaturian. This time it was merely the storeman of the NKVD Ensemble, informing him that if he brought a can around it would be filled with jam; Nina had been begging for that, less for Maxim’s sake than for Galya’s. The girl seemed to have stopped growing, although she no longer complained of hunger. He understood that this condition was now prevalent, unfortunately. And Nina had told him (somewhat sharply, in fact) that the least he could do was beg a few grams of something for his children, given all the favors he did for strangers. She refused to believe that he loved Galya as much as Maxim. In fact, every time he laid eyes on that girl he remembered holding her when she was a baby; he remembered the first time she’d said his name; he’d gladly chop himself into pieces if that would in any way, you know. He said to Nina: Maybe they ought to add a trumpet or two, so that—

  What on earth are you talking about?

  The telephone, you imbecile. So that we really can’t escape it. And then accent the—

  I don’t have time for this, Nina said, as she always did. Well, he shouldn’t have called her an imbecile, but on the other hand he frequently felt that he could hardly—

  The telephone rang. His heart exploded sickeningly. He lifted the receiver and heard nothing but an evil silence. This was what they sometimes did to make sure you were home, when they, you know. What he really wanted was to find a nice rabbit-fur coat for Galisha while he was still here, because . . . Very quietly he reinterred the receiver, took up his briefcase, which contained a toothbrush, clean underwear, and a few scraps of music paper, and then he went out to the landing by the elevator, waiting very quietly for an hour, so that the children would not have to see him being arrested.

  3

  The day after he’d persuaded the jury to award Rostropovich the first prize in the All-Union Competition, the telephone rang. It was, well, you know. This was the worst, even worse than being arrested. She wanted to know how he was. She was very gentle. He couldn’t speak with her, unfortunately; he actually could barely even, well, I’m sure you get the point. Some things are infinite. Fortunately, Nina and the children weren’t home. Elena would have known that; that was why she’d . . . He doubled over and burst into tears. ‣

  ECSTASY

  Another quality of the Poem: a magic potion being poured into a vessel suddenly thickens and turns into my biography, as if seen by someone in a dream or in a row of mirrors . . . Sometimes it looks transparent and gives off an incomprehensible light (similar to light during the White Nights, when everything shines from within) . . .

  —Anna Akhmatova (1961)

  She once told that him he was lucky and he said yes, thinking: I am lucky because I sometimes get to see you, which was not what she had meant.

  He once wanted to tell her that she was lucky, too, because two men loved her very very much, but he caught himself: His loving her wasn’t lucky for her at all, because she and the other man were so much better than he.

  It was understood that he could never touch her.

  Once in a lett
er he asked whether there was really no hope, and she wrote back promising him that there was absolutely none. So he asked again. She told him firmly, sadly and not without affection that there would never, ever, ever be any hope. She felt sorry for him. As for him, he continued right on hoping, firstly because she kept seeing him, sometimes without the other man’s knowledge, secondly because even though she used to murmur don’t say that when, unable to control himself, he repeated that he loved her, by the second month she no longer objected, merely looked at the restaurant table or into his face with an indecipherable expression which made him want to lay his life down at her feet since like a divinity she heard, even though she did not grant, his prayer; thirdly because when he glancingly mentioned that he’d written and destroyed a diary of the imaginary years they’d dwelled together in one of those houses like narrow white islands in the rectangular oceans of pear trees—a very particular house, the one with the windowed tower which gazed over the levee—she’d remarked that she wished she could have read that diary; fourthly because she told him of her own volition that had she not met the other man first they could have been very happy (although she subsequently began to wonder aloud whether she would in fact have been the right woman for him); and fifthly because it would have been too unbearable for him not to hope. Needless to say, he couldn’t divorce Nina.

  She was always good to him. She smiled silently upon his worship. When he asked what she was feeling, she replied: I feel that you already understand everything.

  His hope made him happy, and their meetings mostly made him very happy, although sometimes the fact that he could never marry her nor even take her in his arms stiffened his chest with such agony that he fell silent and only with the greatest effort could avoid tears. At those times he always remembered to smile at her, who truly wanted the best for him and whose goodness vastly overtowered the pain which he kept ridiculously inflicting on himself.

  She said: There’s no point in waiting for me.

  He said: Do you know, Elena, I, I think I’ll wait.

  She said: Don’t wait.

  He asked whether he would see her that afternoon.

  About this matter of taking her in his arms I should explain that a few times they had embraced hello and that once she had embraced him goodbye for a long time, tightly and tremblingly, which had convinced him that she didn’t want to see him anymore, but that wasn’t the case, although it was true, or appeared to be, that from that day on, whenever he tried to embrace her she folded her arms and walked past him, so he, sickened at the thought of forcing himself on her in any way, stopped trying, not knowing for how long he could control himself in this respect and at the same time knowing proudly and ecstatically that he could in fact refrain from this for the rest of his life if that was what she desired or expected. Three or four days later, he got the courage to ask why he couldn’t embrace her anymore, and she, smoothing her dark hair, assured him that he could; it had all been a misunderstanding; she’d thought that he hadn’t wanted to. I can hardly describe to you how happy he became then. Moreover, that day he received the great fortune of meeting her twice; and on the second meeting he embraced her very tightly; for the rest of the day he was in ecstasy.

  Once when he told her how much he loved her, she answered: I’m sorry.

  (Usually she just half-smiled and said nothing. She listened to him as patiently and silently as God. But this time he had written to her, and so she replied in writing.)

  His idea was that there was a one percent chance that she would leave the other man in ten or twenty years. As long as he could believe in that, he could frequently be happy.

  The other man was by definition more loving, honest and decent than he. Had she ever exceeded the limits and given herself to him, how could he have lived up to the standard which the other man had set? Even if he devoted himself only to her, that wouldn’t have been sufficient, for the other man was already devoted to her, and the pain which he, the worshiper, would have caused the woman in making her cause pain to the other man would have been unforgivable. So all that remained was to devote himself to her as much as the circumstances allowed. And since those circumstances prescribed that his devotion be carried out more or less in her absence, what he prayed for was to go crazy so that he could live in a world where she would always be with him. Every day his love for her seared deeper into his chest and throat.

  It was in writing, as I have said, that they truly communicated during this period, although that communication could not be anything but painful. After she and he were quits, he communicated only through music. In fact he was going to write her a symphony, but she explained that the difficulty was that he had already given her too much of everything except for the one thing that he really should have given her. He wrote her many, many letters, and she wrote him three in return, the last of which she requested that he destroy, and then she accepted but no longer replied to his letters, which after all said only the one thing. Their meetings, infused with her occasional stories and compassionate, half-acquiescent silences, gave him an opportunity to be simultaneously unrealistic and selfish. Sometimes he even forgot the war. When he wasn’t too sad or shy, he talked, too much, of course, but only so that he could say I love you, since she never would. He gazed into her face in ecstasy. Every time he saw her, the ecstasy increased. Then she looked at her watch and had to go away. He was in agony even though he was exalted to have been with her, and he wondered when he could see her again; oh, he was crazy about her.

  He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.

  But, again, this was not to say that she was not present, gazing steadily at him from across the table, speaking or listening. She cared for him (and once more I must emphasize that she was not at all remote; it was more than pity which she felt for him). He hoped and imagined that she loved him; if he only could be sure that she did, he could go on easily down the long path of dreams, despair and useless hopes.

  Everything she’d ever given him he’d kept, of course. They’d given one another books. At some point he’d begun to lend her some of his own books; needless to say, he would gladly have given them to her to keep, but feared making her uncomfortable by doing that, for she might well have felt awkward about accepting the things he treasured, since that would have deprived him of them (he wouldn’t have cared) or perhaps unduly encouraged him (about which he would have cared only too much). Sometimes he could in fact in a politely quiet sort of way give her things he treasured, but this bordered on dishonesty and he didn’t want to tell her any untruths. Why then didn’t he buy her mint-new copies of those books and be done? Some were out of print, but the main reason was once again that he didn’t want to overwhelm her by always giving and giving. She knew how much he loved her. At first she’d disbelieved, but now she believed (so he thought; she said that she didn’t believe him but he supposed she had to say this in order to avoid encouraging him). Wasn’t that enough? So he lent her books. After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is reread
ing that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I’ve drunk.

  Amidst the other grey, red, greenish, black and orange volumes of various heights, this white book with the black lettering was perfectly proportioned in every way, neither showy nor insignificant. It was one of his favorite books (we can’t say his favorite since his life wasn’t over yet). He mentioned it, and she was willing to accept it; she was that kind, to read the book which he loved.