But, Mitya, wailed his wife, they’re reaching out their hands to you! Please join them! I’ve never begged anything of you before—
Oh, me, oh, my! But a hand can also, you know, grab you!
There he was, almost rigid in the chair, anchored by his pear-shaped flesh, his white fingers outspread on the piano while G. A. Ilizarova stared worshipfully at him, her dark hair tucked back around her pale face like a helmet of chastity.—Dmitri Dmitriyevich, don’t ever join the Party! she whispered. We’re so proud of you! Keep fighting!
What if someone were listening? Quickly (but winking at Ilizarova) he began praising the ever brilliant victories of our Soviet people.
12
At this very same moment, his “Song of the Forests” (Opus 81), which celebrated Soviet labor (and incidentally praised Comrade Stalin), resounded in almost every factory of the USSR. Ninusha loved it, she actually loved it! That was the worst. He could hardly . . . Whereas “Lady Macbeth,” which he’d dedicated to her, well, the point is that Ninusha now got her hair waved and smiled like a chiseled image above her starched white collar, seated compactly in the velvet padded box beside her husband, who might be arrested this very instant and who’d just won the Stalin Prize: ten thousand rubles! Poor woman, didn’t she deserve her moment of fame?
Opus 81 was, from an artistic point of view, the opposite of conspicuous. Don’t you remember how Saint Isaac’s Cathedral used to be visible all the way from Finland, thanks to its golden dome? That was why we’d had to grey it down during the Nine Hundred Days—a very dark grey, as he remembered, which made the victory garden of cabbages all the greener. Opus 81 was good music greyed down for the sake of survival—greyed down to gaudy gold. And Nina didn’t even care. But what was he saying? Nina loved him; she wanted him to succeed and thrive; as for the ten thousand rubles, she knew how to get through those; it’s only a question of time and manpower. Now he could go out, get drunk and, you know. He’d also like to send some money to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who Glikman said had been impoverished ever since she divorced Roman Lazarevich. This Professor Vigodsky didn’t earn much, and they had a daughter now. Elena had a child! Imagine that! How time, you know, flies. He only hoped that she never heard “Song of the Forests.” Oh, me! How could she not hear? And I used to tell her that I’d never . . . Well, we were young. But it’s really, I mean I’m not too thrilled about this.
After the premiere in Leningrad, he rushed to his hotel room, accompanied by his pupil-mistress Galina Ustvolskaya, and hid his head beneath a pillow. Then he began weeping wretchedly with shame and self-disgust.
13
Ustvolskaya stood at the side of the bed. She knew him so well. Trying to suppress the loathing which rose up between her ribs like nausea, she said: You’re being unfair to yourself. So what if you have to throw them a bone once in awhile? Don’t forget your genius. You’ve accomplished so very very many of your dreams . . .
Thank you; thank you. But how can you love me now?
She hesitated.
Don’t say it, he said, fearing the answer. Now let’s talk about you. I fear you haven’t been composing enough—
Dmitryosha, I’d rather keep worrying about you—
His lips vibrated like a brass player’s. He finally said: Don’t throw away your efforts.
14
He went home, and instantly got into an argument with his wife. (Someday she too would be a skeleton.) She said that she was sick and tired of his moping about the success of “The Song of the Forest.” He didn’t see what she was driving at. He said so. She said:
Did you really not think, or do you enjoy being self-destructive? When you make a mess, you ought to sweep up after yourself.
Ninotchka, don’t be harsh, no, no, no, no, not now—
No! Stay there and listen. You look just like a cheap bourgeois in the movies; it’s almost comical. You can’t hide your secrets from me, Mitya. When you were sleeping with that slut Elena I could literally smell her on you. That cheap, catty smell of her—ugh! You’re a man who has to have affairs. Maybe I would have preferred to love somebody different, but that’s how it is, right? Well, are you going to answer me or not?
I, I don’t see what this has to do with—
Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he’s got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That’s just how it goes. Sometimes I think you’re not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, and you can’t help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker—
Nina, you’re killing me, that’s what you’re doing. Not that you even—
I’m not complaining. I knew what I was getting into. As soon as you married me you had to step out. That bastard tells you to zig; he even warns you in Pravda, and so you zag. All that trouble we got into over “Lady Macbeth,” you knew you were bringing it on us! Oh, I’m not saying it was anything personal—
Nina!
Nina, what? You’re a genius and all that, but you don’t know the first thing about yourself. You’re always looking for a Muse to follow, and she’s got to be a dark-eyed Muse from someplace else. Any other Soviet composer would be thrilled by the success of “The Song of the Forest,” but you—
I can see it’s no use continuing with this talk, no, no, no. I’m going round to see Lebedinsky . . .
Mitya, stop acting childish. You know that I love you. Hopefully you’re aware that I even respect certain things about you. I’m only the slightest bit angry with you; I’m not asking you to change your ways. After all, you’re going to sleep with whomever you sleep with.
Excuse me, but what’s the purpose of this conversation?
I don’t know. As you always say, why waste one’s efforts? And yet, when you come back all rapturous from your little Galisha, who by the way is never going to marry you, and you think that you’re hiding it from me even though she studied with you for ten bloody years, and your other little Galisha, the one you and I are raising together, knows perfectly well what’s going on, as does Maxim, and meanwhile you feel angry that I’m me and not her, so you get all strict and silent with me, why, then I guess I want to tell you what you are.
Very well then, he cried, so pale and agonized that she couldn’t decide whether to slap his face or burst out crying, what am I?
You’re a—well, well, you don’t follow the Party line, that’s for sure! My God, but you’re a free spirit, Mitya! You’re a formalist.
15
Dmitryosha, would you like some tea? I could make it for you very quickly. A nice, hot cup of tea—there’s comfort in it, especially on a cold dark night . . .
She had served in a military hospital during the war. She knew how to tend the sick even when she felt very angry.
He said to her: Can music attack evil or not?
Certainly not. All it can do is scream.
He laughed gruesomely.—You formalist, you! But still, I wonder what it all means, if there’s no, so to speak, no purpose in—
Ustvolskaya’s face wore an expression of pity, irritation and perhaps repulsion; he couldn’t make it out. She said to him: Please don’t cry anymore, Dmitryosha. You’ll suffer much less when you stop hoping for the impossible. There’s no hope for any of us, whether they shoot us or not.
But illusions don’t die all at once—
I never had any.
It’s a long process, like a toothache. And then the illusions rot and stink inside us, like—
You’ve told me all that before. Drink your tea now.
I’ve seen you hold your teacup when you compose, and I’ve seen you wrap your long white fingers around the warmth.
Whenever she had an orgasm, her mouth reminded him of a certain little round window in the Kirov Theater about which he used to have friendly feelings.
16
In January 1949, Comrade Stalin finally began his campaign against Jewish influences. Maybe it was only now, with the dis
tractions of the war years more or less mastered, that he’d found the time to read Mein Kampf. In February, Galina Ustvolskaya completed her Sonata No. 2, whose dreary fetters of quarter-notes left her lover almost beside himself with gloom. In March, at that bastard’s express wish, Shostakovich was sent to New York as a member of the Soviet peace delegation. All his works had been un-banned four days before. (We’ll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich.—This was exactly what Stalin had said on the telephone. Oh, me, oh, my, he’d, so to speak, authorized the operation!) And the composer, who’d forgotten nearly everything except how to be most vigilantly afraid, suddenly began to hope that if he only acted sufficiently obedient and broken, maybe his music might be performed again.
Meanwhile, what was he supposed to play? Probably not the incidental music to “Lady Macbeth”—that would be a joke! And Opus 40 would only make me sad and get Elena in trouble. What about my crowd-pleaser? But you-know-who is taking measures, so Pravda informs me, to transform the Soviet sector of shattered Nazidom into an All-German Republic subservient to the needs of, how shall I put this, history. Therefore, my Seventh Symphony might have, er, outlived its usefulness, you see. Because we need Germans again! Time to renew the, how shall I say, the Nazi-Soviet Pact! Ha, ha! Ninusha, don’t glare at me with your mouth open like that, because it makes you, um, but seriously, in these happy, happy times, wouldn’t it be better to forget about the siege of Leningrad? And Vlasov never existed, either. If only I’d composed a fluffy little trio or something in honor of Operation Citadel! Because that would be really, really . . . Please don’t look at me like that, Galina!
To be sure, our Great Soviet Encyclopedia continues to state that the Seventh played an important role in rallying the world against fascism. But encyclopedias are subject to revision. Thus we find Shostakovich playing the second movement of his less famous Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden, his dark-suited shoulders squared as he sat at the piano, his face hunching forward, his mouth stiffly downcurved: First a chord as warm as the streak of white foam in a café au lait, and then, you know. He couldn’t understand the simplest things Americans said, even though he’d once taken English lessons with Elena Konstantinovskaya. It gives me the creeps. That was all he remembered. How many years ago was that?—I don’t feel much enthusiasm, he said to himself as his widespread fingers began to hurtle down on the piano’s white-and-black terrain. Somebody in the front muttered: That guy looks like a weirdo.
Afterward, there’d be more reporters, insinuations and petty-bourgeois stupidity, when all he cared about was keeping his family out of, why say it? America being a capitalist country, the various civic choirs sing a cappella there, meaning without instrumental accompaniment. In a well-ordered zone, such license would never be tolerated. High time to harden our line against the Americans! They’re very . . . Oh, me! Anyhow, why the Fifth? Because we’re on Fifth Avenue, stupid! That symphony got me in trouble, too, because the audiences applauded too loudly when I was officially a, a, what was it, oh, yes, a cultural alien. Elena had already been taken to the, you know.—Second movement. An hour more; then I can sit in a corner and drink champagne. Maybe some American woman will consent to, you know, pop out the cork! The shot heard round the world . . . Pizzicato.
The Fifth was hardly his, so to speak, favorite—I mean, to hell with it. It was subtitled a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism—precisely the motif he sought to sound today.
He played adequately. We all did, or else. Even Akhmatova wrote her chirpy odes in praise of that bastard. Well, not everyone: Brave Tsevtaeva had actually, I don’t need to say it. He’d heard that it didn’t hurt, unless they were doing it to you and they used piano wire. Vlasov must have . . . But we don’t talk about that. In one of her last poems, written when the sleepwalker’s army marched into Prague, Tsevtaeva had written, “in anger and in love,” I refuse to be. That sentiment would be mortared into the grey chamber of Opus 110.
Decrescendo. The Americans applauded—hypocritically, he thought. His foot kept jerking sideways when he bowed. They say that you keep twitching for a long time, even after you, well. Then he read out denunciations upon command, all the while twisting an unlit “Kazbek” cigarette. He attacked among others a certain D. D. Shostakovich, who’d committed various errors. His mouth grew dry, and he could not finish the speech. A pleasant male voice completed it for him.
17
Yes, he grew pale when he drank vodka. He grew paler when he drank the future. To be sure, it wasn’t as bad as those Moscow nights at the beginning of ’45 when there was no electricity from six in the morning to six at night, so that by three in the afternoon, when the winter sun failed, he’d had to sit in cold darkness, unable to compose by that pale kerosene-light; later on he’d be tense, unable to sleep before midnight, awaking in the dark with his heart stuttering like a machine-gun. Now he . . . In fine, his major task nowadays consisted in preparing responses to various foreseeable criticisms. Once in awhile he got the odd job: Now, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, there’s going to be a twenty-four-gun salute in Moscow for the liberation of each capital, so the world will know that it wasn’t just Leningrad, that it was Minsk, Kiev, Stalingrad and all the rest! We’ve decided, and no doubt you’ll agree, that your fanfare ought to consist of twenty-four-note chords, which will undoubtedly create an impressive tonal effect, much wider than the bass theme which you’ll be called upon to write to symbolize the Fascist German command. Then it was time for another dream of leaving home on a rainy night, Nina screaming and shaking her fist at him through the glass of the front door, Maxim and Galya silently mouthing Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! as he went through the darkness to Elena’s house where she let him kiss her through the window but didn’t allow him in.
How long could he remain in step? A hundred times a night he’d torture himself with his fears. Glikman dragged him off to see Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Kazakhstan,” which was reliably spectacular. Naturally he dreaded to find Elena at the Kino Palace; he felt crushed not to find her.
In 1950, shortly after the reactionary powers defeated our blockade of Berlin, he wrote a soundtrack for the film “Belinsky,” scoring the orchestration with the same confident rapidity in which the former German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus once drew up his orders of battle: a row for each subunit, motorized or not, each division assigned its own measure, then those measures clustered together into corps which he indrew to make his armies; the armies coalesced into Heeresgruppen; and the apparatchiks loved it. Much the same happened with Hamlet. The black telephone rang; Roman Karmen wished him to know that his scoring was perfect, superb.
But Karmen sounded sad! His voice was very . . . He was still, perhaps, getting over Elena, just like the rest of us—oh, me! But it wouldn’t do to, well, especially given that he and I, er, and besides, I need him to call Arnshtam for me; I need work; I need a favor, dear Leo Oskarovich! Because all that “Zoya” money’s gone. The children are so . . . By the way, whatever became of your actress Vodyanischkaya? An excellent Zoya! She reminded me a little of Elena. But what does this apparatchik want from me? Why won’t he get off the line? Especially when I’m starting to feel a bit, you know, panicked? My dear Roman Lazarevich, if I’m permitted to, to—ahem!—to use a musical metaphor, not that I, well, one gets, so to speak, tuned to the person one loves. And then even though one clings to any stranger, or even takes her to bed and then, you know, all to, just to block that artillery barrage of, how should I say, loneliness, one feels bored and, and—a proxy just can’t carry the tune! That’s why I do not like too friendly or too antagonistic relationships between people. Or even if a proxy manages to carry the tune after all, a different key has a different, I don’t know. So one says goodbye. But the instant one’s alone again, the craving for the person one’s tuned to comes back and then, don’t think I don’t know! How can I say any of this to you, my dear, dear Roman Lazarevich? By the way, next time you happen to see Leo Oskarovich, please do greet him for me and ask h
im if he has any, er, you know. And that child-actress who played Zoya when she was a little girl, what was her name? It’ll come to me. Was it Katya Skvortsova or was it Elena Skvortsova? Elena is such a common name; it keeps coming up.
He composed the music to that cinema spectacular, “The Fall of Berlin,” whose protagonist was Comrade Stalin. Roman Karmen wasn’t involved, he claimed, because he was too hard at work on “Soviet Turkmenistan,” but it might have been because he’d fallen out with the bastards at Mosfilm, because I’ve heard that what you say is not what we want to hear, so he said, and Karmen replied, after which they both fell silent; well, so kind of you to trouble yourself, my dear, dear Roman Lazarevich! Thank you for speaking with Leo Oskarovich on my behalf, even though, well. Does he still play the piano? And how is—never mind, I just wanted to, to, and please accept my very best wishes.
He agreed with the wise decision to withhold his new Fourth String Quartet from publication, due to its Jewish intonations.
18
They sent him to East Germany as the principal Soviet delegate to the Bach Festival. He didn’t want to go, but he was on the jury. (He thought he heard somebody calling.) A Russian would win. He’d already promised to take the appropriate “class approach.”
His escort of German Communists clicked their heels and saluted him. They asked if he needed anything.—Thank you, thank you, but please don’t trouble yourselves, he replied. The other jurors called him esteemed comrade. He remembered Nazis tall and grinning. He remembered white blurred faces in the winter twilights of Leningrad, dark eye-sockets of starvation. He remembered all the newsreels he’d seen of milk-pale children getting hanged, the German Fascists fussily adjusting each noose beforehand to get it perfect. Luckily, Comrade Stalin had liquidated their state apparatus.
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