Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Thank you, thank you, dear lady, he said, and now I need to go, for I’m really not well, you see . . .—And he really wasn’t well. In fact, I’m so feeble that if Elena were mine I’d drop dead for happiness.

  Irina had proposed a visit to Leningrad so that he could see it one last time. And probably he should have gone; Leningrad defined him as much as did Opus 110; Glikman’s brother Gavriil, already famous for sculpting the “Apollo Shostakovich,” would soon propose setting little stones from Leningrad on his grave, surrounded by metal bars (Irina Antonova considered my idea to be better than all the others); we’re all sure a tour of that metropolis’s socialist reconstruction would have invigorated him. Irina thought it might be nice to promenade on Nevsky Prospect and peer into the shops; somebody had told her (I think it was the singer G. P. Vishnevskaya) that some of the dressmakers there were nearly as clever as the ones in Paris; and there was such a little-girl look in her face when she proposed it, such a smile of anticipated delight, that he realized that she had not been very happy for a long time and so was craving some sort of pleasure, even the most trivial kind; it was that longing for merriment which her eyes so intensely expressed; that was precisely what he found so, how should I say, upsetting, because he was impotent in that department, too. So she wanted to, um, I mean, really, the Nevsky of all places! Not long before the October Revolution, the Symbolist writer Bely proclaimed: All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect raised to the nth degree. Beyond Petersburg lies nothing. Nothing but tanks, that is, the T-26s, T- 34s, and sixty-ton TVs . . . Oh, my, he remembered quite well, so very, you know, thank you, all the corpses with back-flung faces which used to blow across Nevsky Prospect like leaves, and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate; I would have thought that my Galisha was too young to remember, but even now she has nightmares; I suppose she’ll be tortured until she dies. And this child he’d married had no idea! She was simply too young. He remembered especially well the great bundle of guns aiming at the sky in R. L. Karmen’s “Leningrad Fights,” the Smolny Institute obscured by smoke. Of course he and the family were in Kuibyshev by that time. One had to admire Karmen for, you know. And now that he had wheezed his way to his feet so that he could stand sternly over her like that statue of Lenin which remained before the raised portico of the Smolny throughout the Nine Hundred Days, Irina began to realize that once again she’d offended him, and her face turned red as he ranted: I, I used to gaze at Nevsky Prospect through a jagged hole! And that sound of those Stukas coming, pure vibrato, I, I—

  And let me guess, interrupted his wife, likewise rising. She was standing beside you.

  No! he cried, shocked out of his rage. Don’t worry, don’t worry; that’s all garbage. I wasn’t even—

  Naked, I’m sure. Well, you certainly had your romantic moments, back when you could still—

  In a hurried rasp he begged: Don’t be cruel, Irina!

  I’m sorry! Forgive me, Mitya. I felt jealous for a moment, that was all.

  I—

  Never mind. Now it’s over. Please do forgive me. We won’t go to Leningrad.

  He lived on to 1973, when he signed an open letter in Pravda denouncing the human rights activist A. Sakharov. This servile act cost him several of his remaining friends.45 The avant-gardist Y. P. Lyubimov, toward whom he’d always been generous, no longer consented to greet him. So what? Tell it to the the grinning boys of the Condor Legion! His fame was distinct without warmth, like Arctic sunlight on a pavement of soldiers’ helmets.

  He lived until 1974, when he wrote the spectacular “Suite on Verses of Michelangelo,” whose songs are as beautiful as a flock of multicolored fighter planes. Now it had been exactly forty years since that international musical festival in Leningrad when he’d played his piano concerto and then a certain twenty-year-old student had slipped him a note signed with her initials, E. E. K. It was actually Nina who’d wanted the divorce. And Irina had certainly also, you know, but Irina was practically the age of his own daughter; she didn’t know what she, anyhow, there were times when she slipped an arm around him and he just laughed to himself: She thinks she’s embracing me but she’s only embracing my coat! Irina laid her hand on his fingers, which were as soft, fat and white as graveyard-berries. And everywhere he turned he was, you know. For example, and this is just one example, every time Irina turned on the television there was another Roman Karmen program about the fraternal struggle in Latin America, and you know how I feel about dear, dear Roman Lazarevich! I wonder how often he gets kissed. He’s still in good health, I hear. One’s supposed to get kissed farewell three times by our Russian women when one goes off to the front. He’s in another of his suits, filming the White House in Washington, D.C.; can you imagine? And now here’s Fidel Castro sitting casually in the back seat of a car, chatting with children through the open window (that’s a scene in “Flaming Island”), slim, whitehaired Roman Karmen stands dreamily beside Castro, who looks very revolutionary and dynamic; pan to children, crowds, old women, militants, parades. And Irina’s so gullible; she even thinks these people have now been, you know, liberated! Because she saw it on television! She says that just because I’m older doesn’t mean I have the right to tell her what to think; she’s just as intelligent as I am. What can I say to that? I can’t say that Elena would have, well, what do I know? He smiled at Irina; don’t think he wasn’t, to get right down to it, grateful. Nina saw all too clearly that he would have been better off with Elena, but he couldn’t go through with it, perhaps exactly because he would have been better off, which he couldn’t bear; he trailed after Nina and got her to take him back. He should have believed his heart. And then Elena had said—what had she said?—Bury me in Leningrad, he told Irina.

  As a matter of fact, he lived until 1975, when, three-quarters paralyzed and in terrible pain, his masklike face now trembling more than ever, emitting ripples around the blurry reflection of itself, he still managed to create his Viola Sonata (Opus 147), which he himself accurately described as “bright—bright and clear.” A month later, lung cancer asphyxiated him.

  When his death began, it was as if successive shrouds, each one so gauzy as to be nearly transparent, kept settling over his face, strangling away the breath almost tenderly, with Irina bending over him in the hospital ward, screaming his name like a shrilling telephone. He could hear her longer than he could see her, for the shrouds kept swirling down so that her image steadily greyed into a blackness deeper than meaning, and although for a little while longer he could almost perceive the reflection of her presence swimming on the nightstruck waters, she was fading very rapidly now; indeed, before he had time to mistake her for a certain other woman, she’d vanished with an almost playful suddenness, so that he sank irremediably alone into his velvet agony which drowned and tickled him while a blood-red spot rushed before him in ever-narrowing spirals.

  By coincidence, E. E. Konstantinovskaya died that same year.

  They buried him in Moscow, of course. Roman Karmen was there, and so were the Glikman brothers, of course; so was the white-uniformed girl in Produce Store Number Thirty-one. Although he was granted a funeral in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, and extolled not only as the composer of the Seventh Symphony and the “Counterplan,” but also as a good Communist, the “organs” who played all tunes might not have grieved overmuch. A detachment of men in raspberry-colored boots is said to have entered his flat within two hours of his death; they emerged with an armload of private papers, which have never been seen again. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia accords him a respectful entry, in keeping with his various honors, medals and decorations (each Stalin Prize tactfully altered to a State Prize of the USSR. Was he ever called upon to return the old trophies to have them re-engraved?) His works, we’re told, affirm the ideals of Soviet humanism. In the long article on Soviet music, he receives a number of dutiful acknowledgments. The Seventh Symphony, needless to say, is labeled an immortal monument of th
e period. Even his most egregious formalist error, the opera “Lady Macbeth,” now gets called “a Soviet classic.” No doubt the castrated revision is being referred to. Now that he was safely dead, there was no need to disgrace him; for that matter, he’d been dead ever since he composed Opus 110.

  One might think that his reputation was embalmed as safely as was Lenin in the mausoleum (Stalin, I’m afraid, had been secretly taken out once his fame decayed). And yet the regime might have felt some bitterness about his formalist infidelities. I may be imagining things. However, The Soviet Way of Life, published the year before his demise, mentions the interesting results obtained from a poll conducted in industrial enterprises in the Urals. The workers were asked to name their favorite artists. Of the composers, Tchaikovsky gets mentioned first, and Mussorgsky last, with a couple of foreigners in between. Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich does not appear. After all, no one individual can be indispensable in our Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, greatest and most perfect country in the world, whose borders touch a dozen seas. ‣

  A PIANIST FROM KILGORE

  It can’t hurt you, so what are you getting excited about? You’re a skeleton; nothing hurts a skeleton.

  —Jakov Lind, “Soul of Wood” (1962)

  In 1958, one year after the launch of the atomic ice-breaker Lenin, there was a musical competition in the USSR. Among the gamblers came a young American from Kilgore, Texas, named Van Cliburn.

  His playing was as perfect as the stainless steel from the Krasni Oktiabr’ Stalingrad Metallurgical Works (now, of course, known as the Krasni Oktiabr’ Volgograd Metallurgical Works). And if you wish to know precisely how perfect that would be, I need only tell you that the factory received the Order of Lenin in 1939 and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor in 1948. Shouldn’t he have won first prize, then? Well, thanks to the great power chauvinism of the Anglo-Americans, a so-called “Cold War” had developed. (What’s cold war, really? We Russians know. It’s a soldier’s corpse frozen head-first into the snow. Can a piano express this? Yes, under Van Cliburn’s hands the piano keys seemed to be made sometimes of ice, sometimes of steel, and sometimes of fragrant toffee. And the notes passed by like summer clouds.) Those who with spurious “objectivism” dare to argue that laurels should get bestowed upon a provincial bourgeois lackey, merely because Moscow audiences shout: First prize, first prize! and Vanyusha, Vanyusha! miss the point: for the purpose of competitions is not to reward individual “merit,” but to educate the masses. Our Soviet Union must be seen as a winner on the cultural front! Nor could some judges and spectators fail to react disdainfully to the way the young fellow craned over the piano, his white-collared neck bent almost horizontal, for he was a full hundred and ninety-three centimeters tall; he had to push back the piano bench; to D. D. Shostakovich, for instance, he resembled an old engraving of a racehorse straining at the gate—which is not to imply that Cliburn’s interpretation of the concerto ever sounded strained. The opening’s almost military strictness and grandeur were realized with as much control as Operation “Little Saturn” had been at Stalingrad. The andantino simpico of the second movement “flowed” in patterns as unpredictable as they were perfectly right, the flow first glittering in a frozen way, like a massive shower of crystal, then lightly fluttering toward something as sweetly unattainable to every listener as a little child’s happiness. Wouldn’t it be sad if we could actually feel so happy? Van Cliburn kept smiling as if he did. Softspoken but never moody, dressed in the respectful orthodoxy of darkness intensified by narrow slivers of whiteness at neck and sleeves, he must be an innocent. After all, he was American, and moreover had been born too late to get called up for the war. (Good, really very good, said the juror Oborin, but, you know, he’s shaking his head a lot, rather sentimentally . . .—Three days later, this very same Oborin appeared in a photograph in the New York Times, smilingly gripping the hand of the tall, weary American.)—No question about it: Cliburn was a callow creature, an ignoramus, a pianist from Kilgore, Texas . . . For these and other reasons, several selfless functionaries conspired to give that gold medal, which happened to be accompanied by twenty-five thousand rubles cash, to one of the three Soviet contestants, or, failing that, to the pianist from the People’s Republic of China (with whom our differences had not yet become acute); but the distinguished juror S. Richter demanded that this faction be overruled, I think on account of the way Cliburn performed the third movement, the allegro con fuoco: Commencing with perfect neutrality (cold in execution, warm in conception), the piano suddenly took on a passion alternating with glissandos of a different sort of neutrality like ripples on a sunny Arctic lake; then came the breathless erotic haste of the finale, which never stopped being clear and careful at the same time, like a lover’s deliberate touch.

  So much for the Tchaikovsky. Cliburn paused. His hands hovered over the black-striped pianoscape with the same solitary tension which afflicts the pilots of reconnaissance planes when they drone over enemy territory, gathering in the coordinates of railway yards, cathedrals and apartment blocks for the convenience of master bombardiers. A slow, rapturous smile trembled across his face. His hands descended. He began to play the Rachmaninoff. The judges closed their dreamy eyes. The audience wept. An apparatchik rushed to the telephone. Within twenty minutes, militiamen had surrounded the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, holding back the yearning, adoring crowds. What a debacle! In the end, somebody had to call Comrade Khruschev himself. The matter got decided in the American’s favor then, I believe because a calculated magnanimity appeared to be the least embarrassing stance. After all, even the jurors were applauding! The bravos lasted eight minutes. Cliburn was embraced by E. Gilels and K. P. Kondrashin . . .—It was the eleventh of April—the selfsame day when, in contradistinction to the American warmongers, we withdrew our last forty-one thousand troops from East Germany. Not long after midnight the sixteen jurors reached agreement (which is to say, they were informed of the decision of Comrade Khruschev). On the thirteenth, a loudspeaker said: Harvey Lavan Cliburn, Junior. The crowd screamed: Vanyitchka, Vanyitchka!

  Oh, dear, oh, dear, said Shostakovich. He was quite surprised, because the paragraph they’d prepared for publication over his signature rhapsodized about “this latest Soviet victory.” Already it had come out that Cliburn’s father was the hireling of an oil company, and that the son’s travel allowance had been provided by a front organization of the international capitalist Rockefeller.

  Mitya, please relax, said Oborin. That’s not your problem. They’ll get you to sign something else. At least he played Russian music . . .

  You’re correct! the composer replied, much relieved. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear . . .

  He trusted Oborin because he knew him. They’d been evacuated together from the siege of Leningrad, on that long, long train ride which they could never forget, having been accompanied every now and then by the vibrato of the Fascist bombers.

  Moreover, continued Oborin, it wasn’t just the Cliburn kid who played well. The Radio Symphony members truly surpassed themselves . . .

  Lev, what did you really think? To be honest, I wasn’t exactly, how should I say, listening to the Rachmaninoff, because my son—

  Well, I’d have to say the Tchaikovsky concerto was superb to the extent that that’s possible with Tchaikovsky, although most of the judges preferred the Rachmaninoff, which I found really cloying. Maybe he laid on the rubato a bit thick . . . no, I’m just jealous. The kid’s a master.

  You don’t say! murmured Shostakovich, twiddling his fingers. Who would have thought it? Well, well, well. An American boy from Kilgore, Texas. Can you imagine?

  On the eighteenth Van Cliburn gave his first public recital as a winner. (Meanwhile, the United States Navy fired a dummy Polaris warhead from underwater.) Raising his hands and gazing dreamily down at his outstretched fingers as if he’d never seen them before, he repeated the Tchaikovsky concerto, which the New York Times, still using the language of war, described as a big, percuss
ive attack that dominated the orchestra. While it’s true that he peppered the first movement with powerfully booming chords whose metronome-like steadiness overwhelmed the romantic warmth of the strings, he was no war machine. His loudest hammer-blows remained somehow bell-like, controlled. Moreover, that opening thunder soon gave way to crystalline arpeggios, each note of which glittered as distinctly as an ice-crystal. Whenever the score permitted, Cliburn showed a still gentler touch, lingering a little, deviating from the first stern sweetness, confident enough to give the orchestra a place in the sun, sometimes following, sometimes leading, like a dancer showing good manners to his partner. Oh, he was always clear; his every note was glass. They applauded in a frenzy. Then he repeated the Rachmaninoff.—Another ovation! For an encore he played his own composition, “Nostalgia.”