Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  East Berlin remained much damaged, thanks to the senseless resistance of the Hitlerite remnants. Laughing, somebody remarked that Dresden looked worse. Comrade Alexandrov wanted to know why the Bach Festival was in Leipzig when Leipzig was the city of the proto-Fascist Richard Wagner. Shostakovich kept silent, feeling worms crawling in his heart. He decided to avoid Dresden forever. He didn’t want to see any more, you know. About Berlin, which was, after all, merely our transit point, he didn’t care. Years ago, his teacher Glazunov had praised the city’s stone gates, but their grandiosity had long since tarnished into something like earth. Was the western sector any less ruined? Well, why shouldn’t it be? How close was it?—Right over there!—And had they . . . ? Better not to ask. He felt as if he were suffocating and bleeding at the same time. What was that sound? He wanted a piano to compose on. What was that sound? On the windowsill of the car, his fingers began to tap out the allegro molto of Opus 110.

  He didn’t care about Bach, either, not then; over the decades he’d tried to learn what he could from Bach the craftsman, who put one note after the other, then fitted the third note perfectly into place; but this innocuously banal observation proved to be the spearhead of something inimical which now breached his mind’s defenses, namely, the axion of that Nazi mediocrity Paulus, who if you don’t keep up with such things was the Field-Marshal we’d captured at Stalingrad; apparently he used to aphorize: It’s merely a question of time and manpower. That was how Bach must have built his compositions; it’s what we all do, and when I myself, when I . . .

  The next time he saw Glikman, he asked whether we’d shot Paulus; Glikman wasn’t sure; he might have missed the announcement in Pravda. It’s just a question of . . . and for the rest of that day, Bach was spoiled for him. What if there were no difference between people who created bit by bit and people who murdered piece by piece? Nobody would agree, of course; anyhow it was better to think of something else, Elena Konstantinovskaya for instance. Her hair was fire and her skin was milk. What if she’d been in Dresden when the Anglo-Americans came? Why had she divorced Roman Lazarevich? Glikman said . . . Actually, he probably shouldn’t think about Elena.

  Intermission! Time to write a postcard to Glikman: Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to write about.

  After they gave him a tour of Stalin-Allee he asked for permission to return to the hotel to rest, because thanks to his Leningrad education he already possessed an intimate comprehension of the way that the corners of bombarded buildings, being stronger than the rest, survive to form grisly spires whose churchlike effect is accentuated at night when the stars delineate the nave of an immense cathedral of niches, crypts, galleries, freestanding stone doorways in which one half expects to see a Russian icon, a marble likeness of a German Catholic saint, a Kaiser’s sarcophagus; but there is nothing to make an offering to, no reason to lay down even a withered flower in memory of Europe Central’s dead. Now a whitish-yellow light comes glaring: a military patrol. This is closest we can come to gilded grillework, comrades! Save your gold for Opus 110.

  Please, Comrade Schostakowitsch, a German woman begged in secret, my little brother’s being denazified because everybody in his school had to join the Hitler Youth. It wasn’t his fault; what was he supposed to do? This letter, I received it last month, it says that his apartment got taken away and since then I haven’t . . .

  To be sure, to be sure. Dear lady, I’m very sorry. That is the reality . . .

  And a train bore him away across the flat green of the German heartland.

  19

  In Leipzig he stood beside the pianist T. P. Nikolayeva, who was fresh from Moscow.

  Would you like to tour Dresden, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? inquired an individual in raspberry-colored boots. We’re quite close. It’s good for the Russian soul, actually, to see it so smashed up. I hate all these Germans. You do, too, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten Leningrad, have you?

  Comrade Alexandrov, you’re completely on the mark, so to speak, and if I have time after the competition—well, well, who’s to say how long it’ll last?

  And then they all went into the Thomaskirche, where Bach’s remains had just been reinterred.

  Nikolayeva waited rigidly; she must have been nervous. Although since ’45 he’d passed her many times in the half-real darkness of the Conservatory, his own weariness, which breeds narrowness, and the various persecutions raining down on him like sizzling steel fragments, had isolated him; this young woman might as well have been a stranger; after all, she’d studied with Goldenweiser, not with him. His eyes were dull, round-cornered triangles of light splayed out upon his spectacles. He’d better not flirt; he was getting too old! A long, long time ago, once upon a time, in fact, Akhmatova had licked her lips, and he’d laughingly cried: Very good, Anna Andreyevna, yes, very good. The embouchure must be kept wet, since you’re about to play my French horn . . .—No, those days are buried. This fine young Nikolayeva, far too lively to be homely, maybe it actually wasn’t too late to, never mind, smiled beside him, showing her upper teeth. What sort of person was she? Another devotee of white keys and black keys who knew her in childhood remembers her as this typical Russian girl, with her two braids, always serious, friendly and neat. Nationals of the capitalist powers make each other’s acquaintances (at least, so I’m told) by asking how they prefer to spend money: Do you collect stamps? I like to watch war movies. But to know somebody in our Soviet land, which now includes half of Germany and will in the measurable future include all of it, one need only learn what form her suffering happened to take during the Great Patriotic War (husband hanged in Minsk, sister starved to death in Leningrad, all four sons killed in battle at Stalingrad); however, since such communications are painful both to transmit and to receive, it’s better that we all share a tacit commonality of horror, speaking only with our eyes or by means of music. So again, what sort of person was she? When she began to play, she did not fill the Thomaskirche with soulful gloom; instead, something light, distinct, aloof constructed itself: a castle, not a fountain, an artifact whose tessellated surface possessed a precise and nearly perfect geometry of notes; her rendition contained no chiaroscuro, only skill. Without haste or melodrama, with the seemingly simple harmony of a Roman inscription, she built her castles in the air, nakedly showing herself, unashamed and unafraid as he could never be; even in his youth, when he’d been the future’s darling from whom all misfortune would forever withhold itself, his nature had tended to express itself extravagantly—hence the mischievous grotesqueries of “The Nose,” the rapid fire of “Bolt,” the complex dissonances of “Lady Macbeth,” none of which were strained or “wrong,” simply hyperactive, a trifle anxious, maybe; this was D. D. Shostakovich, to be sure; this was “honest,” but, but, how should I say? Nikolayeva made music as a Tsarina must have carried herself, with calmly unhurried grace. It was as if she were saying to him: All that’s happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there’s only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions. Castle succeeded castle.

  The jury had instructed her to play whichever one of Bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues she’d best prepared; she played them all. Shostakovich lost himself. He no longer saw the grey heads like eggs in the wooden pews. He felt, how should I say, quite heartened, because . . . Actually (I hope it’s appropriate to reveal his secret), he felt as if he’d found a new companion to dwell with him in the secret world beneath the piano keys! Not that he and she could ever . . . Besides, he’d never let himself be caught again. Because after Elena, with all that, you know, it was better not to even . . . She’s Elena Vigodsky now, imagine! And how could I hope for anything? At least I can . . . And so Tatyana won the competition. Flowers for her! More flowers for Bach’s grave . . . His spectacles kept slipping down his nose. He felt very . . . Then and there he resolved to compose a cycle of preludes and fugues (Opus 87), dedicated t
o her and arranged in ascending fifths. The brief, happy flame of the Fugue in A Minor, which he’d write the following year, became his special homage to her soul.

  Esteemed comrade . . . said a German, but already Shostakovich’s inner life was winging away with careful subtlety, in just the same way that the first prelude, the moderato in C major, begins with the very notes of Bach himself, sweet and melodious, classical, like a good Communist composer following the correct harmonic line; and then comes a dissonance. The melody returns, but muted and misted by chromatism. The prelude begins to soar farther and farther into the sky of absolute music, until that ordered landscape has been interred beneath clouds, and we rise beyond atonality into a sacredness beyond comprehension. Flashes of green and golden orderedness reveal themselves far below, then vanish because we are in the sky. We have escaped. We are beyond them. We have died.

  20

  In 1951 he was elected deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federated Soviet Republic. Taking his bench, he felt the gaze of the pale, titanic Lenin behind him. Lenin was stone. He was stone. They asked him when he would consecrate his symphony to Lenin, and he muttered something. His thoughts were as dull and brittle as war-metal. On the way home he took a detour toward Lebedinsky’s to pay him back for the bottle of vodka he’d borrowed last week, and a few old women, members of the former possessing classes who’d somehow escaped prison camps, were huddled against an icy wall, begging. With a shy grimace, Shostakovich approached them. He gave the nearest crone a few rubles, his face flushed with embarrassment, and rushed away, trying not to hear the others’ imploring cries. And then on the other side of the street, in a nice coat with a silver fox-fur collar, there she was, Elena Konstantinovskaya I mean, her hair now grey but only the more, what can I say, I’m afraid to say beautiful, because, well, she was as perfect, and as unlikely for being so, as a gold-framed prerevolutionary icon; and she saw him but both of them had been educated by those niches in corridors in which passing prisoners can be placed, faces to the wall, so that they won’t recognize each other. He hoped that she was better off with this, this, whatshis-name, this Vigodsky; their daughter must be very, well, he could ask his sister Mariya. Anyhow, hadn’t he possibly glimpsed her at the premiere of Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Georgia”? Because nowadays one’s eyes, you know, were not so very . . . He rushed home and collapsed. Thank God Ninusha was out! He sobbed for his life and for himself. He tried to keep silent at all times, but every now and then they gave him a speech to read, and he had to stand up and mumble it. In musical language, the phrase da capo al segno means repeat these measures until you reach the sign S. The sign S was Stalin. It was for D. D. Shostakovich to repeat and repeat what he’d been told.

  He sat down. He reassured himself: There is no form. There is no content. No words mean anything.—His foot twitched, and his face erupted in grimaces.

  He could not forget that time when the NKVD had interrogated him about his connection with Marshal Tukhachevsky. Down the hall he’d heard somebody screaming—very pure screams mostly in B-flat; in due time he’d wring them into Opus 110. Now he was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Tomorrow he’d be lying next to Tukhachevsky if that was what they wanted. How did that jingle go? It’s not enough to love Soviet power. Soviet power also has to love you.

  He drummed his fingers on his knee, working out the cadences of his preludes and fugues, for which the Union of Composers would denounce him again as a “formalist.” At his summons, Nikolayeva came rushing to his flat to hear each composition as he completed it: Do have some more pancakes, darling. Ninusha really knows how to, that’s right, with sour cream. Sometimes she sat at the other piano and watched his flickering fingers; sometimes she sat on the sofa beneath Akhmatova’s portrait. When it was just him and her he was always able to play con fuoco, with fire.

  The very first time she came, he’d finished the C major pair, which he played quite boldly, she thought; and then without a pause, gazing into her eyes, he commenced the Prelude in A Minor. When he played the accompanying fugue for her, richly allegretto, a deep flush began to ascend from the base of her neck. She understood that this music signified her. Even now, after Stalin and Zhdanov, no deficit barred him from the perfect world within the black keys, the chromatic world of sharps and flats and skittering celestial evasions, the place between yes and no. Needless to say, this piece got singled out for special criticism at that recital in the Union of Composers, whose flowerbeds are planted so that the blossoms form likenesses of Lenin and Stalin.

  I absolutely reject such music, began our Union Secretary, a certain malignant S. Skrebov. And in my view, the A minor fugue sounds distorted and false, erroneous in its modulations and chords. As for the G major prelude . . .—

  Nikolayeva turned the pages for him as he played.—Thank you, Tatyana, he whispered, his new spectacles sitting more heavily than ever on his flesh which was now of grandfatherly coarseness. In consequence of his anxiety he played extremely badly.

  Dmitri Dmitriyevich needed to remember (his colleagues explained, as he sat at the piano with his head between his knees) that the intelligentsia no longer existed for itself; it was only an advance detachment of the working class. He was making the same errors he’d made with “Lady Macbeth” back in 1936. He was running a serious risk of being considered a deserter from the cultural front.

  Dmitri Dmitriyevich, not only did you play atrociously, but the works are so gloomy that they’re going to impede your creative rehabilitation.

  You’re absolutely correct, of course, replied the composer, while Nikolayeva stood comfortingly beside him, as if she were about to turn another page. You need, how should I put it, loyal lyrics and sanitary symphonies, people’s preludes and, and—let’s see now—

  At least he understands that much.

  If you don’t mind my saying so, you ought to listen to your own Seventh Symphony, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! There you succeeded in drawing your music from the life of the masses. I’m told that you based the third movement entirely on indigenous folksongs of our fraternal peoples. Isn’t that so?

  Yes, yes, I assure you, whispered Shostakovich. He smiled faintly, and his spectacles flashed. He tried to light a cigarette, but his trembling fingers kept breaking the matches.

  Now, this formalist trash you’ve just subjected us to, this is, well—why can’t you be guided by Party spirit?

  I much appreciate your guidance, comrades. You certainly know how to, um, to light the way ahead with a searchlight. And what luminescence! It’s very . . . Could you recommend—

  If you keep it simple you’ll never go wrong, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. For instance, do you know that song “Chapaev the Hero Roamed the Urals”? That’s a real Soviet classic.

  Oh, yes, oh, oh, yes, I’ve heard that on the radio. There seems to be quite a demand for it.

  Or Pokrass’s ditty—you know, “The Red Army Is Most Powerful of All.”

  Perhaps Dmitri Dmitriyevich should also pay more attention to the heroic epics of oppressed Slavic peoples.

  We already told him that, comrade. And, to give him his due, that Seventh Symphony does, after all—

  Thank you, thank you!

  We’re all in favor of internationalism, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but there’s a difference between internationalism and cosmopolitanism, if you see what I’m saying. You’re playing into the hands of the Zionists!

  The Zionists! But I never—I mean, in that case what a terrible, er, error I’ve committed!

  He sat there at the piano bench, smiling at them over his shoulder, and his fidgety hands trembled over the keys with the fingers dangling down, each hand like the burned half-skeleton of a warstruck bridge, until Nikolayeva finally laid her hand on him and whispered in his ear. He leapt gratefully up and found a chair in the corner of the stage.

  And he keeps himself aloof from us. He won’t apply to the Party—

  Succeeding at last in lighting a cigarette, Shostakovich admitted the absolute justice of all thei
r criticisms. Then he went home with Nikolayeva.

  She said to him: How are you feeling, Dmitri Dmitriyevich?

  Agitato, he laughed, writhing his fingers.

  When no one could see, she took his face in her hands and kissed him, affettuoso. But it wasn’t, you know.

  21

  Nearly despairing of his unteachability, they nonetheless assigned him an old tutor to come to his home and quiz him on his knowledge of the works of Comrade Stalin. The tutor was horrified to find no portrait of Comrade Stalin in his study. Shostakovich stammered and apologized, behind his back all ten fingers lashing like the tentacles of a fresh-caught cuttlefish; beneath the flurry, with a cool cruel humorousness, his defensive apparatus was already preparing sentences of insidiously mocking abnegation: To be sure, Comrade Ivanov, I must have been asleep all these years, but it’s only because I, well, you see, I knew that Comrade Stalin had worked everything out, so I thought that he, I mean, I suppose I’ve been lazy (if I could simply make it up to him and be his, his—ha, ha, ha! percussion instrument!), so now it’s time for this old fool to learn; and since everything has been analyzed for all time by Comrade Stalin’s genius, perhaps if you taught me the high points, I could, so to speak, take three steps forward instead of two steps back, because it’s all a question of time and manpower, and then once I understand the subtleties my music will doubtless attain, um, perfect melodiousness.

  Glikman prepared cribs of the odious volumes, so he didn’t have to read them. The tutor was astounded at his progress. He promised to hang a portrait of Comrade Stalin just as soon as he found the right one, to hang him, I said, he whispered that night to Ninusha, chuckling so helplessly that she feared he might choke. Oh, that, that murdering bastard.

  He wanted the whole cycle to be played together—everything from scherzo to sarabande—but didn’t dare to do it himself. The devoted Nikolayeva did. He dreamed that she was summoning him to her side.