The Conductor

by Sarah Quigley

  Shostakovich stiffened. ‘What is it?’

  Sollertinsky’s chest heaved as he straightened up and stood to attention. ‘It’s just been announced. Hitler has attacked. Russia is at war with Germany.’

  PART II

  Summer 1941

  The Cossack and the dead boy

  When Dmitri Shostakovich was eleven, back in 1917, he’d seen a boy killed right in front of him. The city had become a mess, a bad and dangerous place, and his mother had tried to keep him home as much as possible. But for the past year attending music classes had become a routine, and he liked routines: they were the only way to make progress. What he didn’t like, however, was the director of the music school.

  ‘He treats me with a total lack of respect,’ he complained to Mariya, as she sat on her mattress combing her hair.

  ‘You’re eleven years old.’ Mariya was fourteen, and annoyingly aware of her superior age. ‘Mr Gliasser is a grown-up and an expert. You should listen to him.’

  ‘He may be fully grown, but I don’t believe he is an expert.’ Dmitri snatched the saucer of warm candle wax from Mariya, who was preparing to rub it through her hair. (Her inherited frizzy hair was only one of a list of teenage grievances against her mother, Sofia Vasiliyevna Shostakovich.)

  One by one, Dmitri stuck his fingers into the molten wax and held up their white tips. ‘Gliasser plays Bach like a moron. Like a machine. Even on my worst days, I play Bach better than that old man.’

  Mariya grabbed the saucer back. ‘He’s better than my teacher. He has a great reputation.’

  ‘He had a reputation,’ corrected Dmitri, ‘forty or fifty years ago. He relies too much on the past. It’s always Fux this, Bellermann that and Yavorsky the other. He takes his music from text books. That’s a deadend.’ He marched over to the piano in the corner of the room. ‘I was playing the opening to my Chopin Prelude like this —’ With sticky wax fingertips, he began picking out the B Flat Minor Prelude. ‘And he said if I continued that way I would fail my exam. Then he told me to play like this!’ Sitting up straight on the stool, he shut his eyes so as to better remember Gliasser’s pious expression, and felt his body transform into his teacher’s. His arms became stiff, his fingers turned to wood and, on the pedals, his feet shrivelled to those of a seventy-year-old. Because this was a special knack of his, the keys also changed under his touch, as if responding to a different person.

  ‘You shouldn’t mock your elders.’ But Mariya was laughing, sounding less annoyingly adult and more like herself.

  The door crashed open and Dmitri swivelled on his stool, though his hands continued pounding through the Chopin.

  ‘Dmitri, what on earth are you doing?’ His mother was in the doorway, her arms folded, her eyebrows lowered. ‘That’s no way to treat Chopin.’

  ‘I’m being Gliasser, Mother.’

  ‘He’s being precocious,’ said Mariya, turning traitor once more, and kicking the incriminating saucer of wax behind a chair.

  ‘You’re lucky to have such a teacher,’ scolded Sofia Shostakovich over her son’s mechanical playing. ‘Your father and I don’t make these sacrifices for you to mock your elders and betters.’

  ‘Exactly what I said.’ Mariya wandered to the window, hoping for a glimpse of Goga Rimsky-Korsakov, who was sixteen and handsome.

  Dmitri stopped playing and began peeling the wax coating off his fingers. ‘Gliasser is a dinosaur. He’s the past, and I’m the future. I’ll give him until next June to prove his merit.’ He looked up to see his mother’s mouth fall open, like a frog waiting for flies. ‘What’s wrong? I’m only speaking the truth.’ He pushed the stool back with a loud squeak. ‘Don’t worry. Gliasser has a perfectly wonderful Bechstein, and I won’t give that up in a hurry.’

  So he went on attending lessons throughout the long winter, as the streets of Petrograd descended into chaos. By February, his father was lying ill in the small room at the back of the apartment.

  ‘Just a little throat trouble,’ his mother told Zoya, who wanted to hear one of her father’s gypsy songs. ‘But there isn’t enough air in his lungs for singing.’

  Conditions were bad enough inside; outside, the frozen streets were being set alight, and shop fronts smashed so the pavements glittered with glass and ice.

  ‘Don’t go to class, Dmitri.’ Sofia Shostakovich was mending Mariya’s tights, which were more holes than wool. ‘Stay home today.’

  Dmitri placed his books on the table with a determined thud. His mother was a fine pianist and a good teacher, but she was an amateur. Already it was clear — she didn’t understand what was needed to get to the top. The only way you could improve at something was to do it every single day. And as heartily as he despised dusty old Gliasser, at present there was no better option. ‘It’s cold today!’ he said, bending to put on his overshoes. This was not simply small talk; his fingers could barely work his feet into the stiff rubber.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ His mother’s voice was more definite, catching at his ankles, hobbling him before he could make it out the door. ‘You’re too young to understand. There are changes afoot. It’s dangerous out there. The city’s no longer safe to walk in.’

  ‘I won’t walk, I’ll run.’ He avoided her gaze. ‘I’ll run straight to school. How else can I become the b — breadwinner?’ He’d nearly said ‘the best pianist in Petrograd’, but he realised that naked ambition wasn’t the best way to win over his mother. With a gravely ill husband and three hungry children, Sofia Shostakovich’s fear of the financial future seemed his most likely ally.

  Zoya ran out of the back room, her creamy cheeks mottled like marble. ‘Da won’t tell me a story, either! No songs, no stories. What’s wrong with him?’ She collapsed on the floor and pushed her face into the folds of her mother’s skirt.

  Dmitri felt suffocated. He wanted nothing more than to turn his back on it all, to race out into the chilly stairwell and breathe air uncluttered by family ties. He stood scraping his foot against the shoe rack. ‘Da will get better,’ he said to no one in particular. The metallic scraping was almost the same pitch as a cello’s A string. He felt a brief lifting of his heart, like the waft of air when a heavy winter curtain is raised. Scrape, scrape. Yes, definitely an A. If he experimented with tempo, this could be a possible beginning for —

  But Zoya had started to cry, and his mother dropped Mariya’s stockings in a jumble of loose threads. ‘It’s just the cold winter we’re having,’ she said soothingly. ‘The cold factory Da’s been working in. Once the spring comes, he’ll improve.’

  Dmitri forced himself to step towards his crying sister and his lying mother; then he stopped, wavering towards the back bedroom. The door was half-open and he peered inside. There was a brown blanket nailed up over the window — his mother’s attempt at keeping in the meagre warmth from the burzhuika, and keeping out the minus-twenty-degree breath of the world outside. The light was muddy and dull. And there, as if at the bottom of a dirty pond, lay his father, his thin shoulder hunched under a thin blanket, his head barely visible. His breath sounded like a saw labouring through wood, producing much noise with little effect.

  ‘Father?’ But Dmitri’s voice had almost entirely deserted him. He tried again. ‘Father?’

  His father didn’t seem to have heard. Dmitri backed away into the main room and seized up his books. ‘See you tonight,’ he said quickly, and with shameful relief he stepped onto the landing.

  He banged and jumped his way down the stairs, taking two at a time. It’s all right, he reassured himself. If you’re going to become a professional, nothing must get in your way: not faintheartedness, nor politeness. Not family illness, nor pity. At the front door he looked out at a familiar desolation. Charred metal girders lay crossed over each other like bones in a charnel house. Along the street a car burned dully, the flames muffled by falling snow. From the direction of the city came shouting, the blowing of whistles and bursts of gunfire. Neither looting nor rioting must put you off, he sai
d, pulling his furry hat over his ears, nor political protests. These things mustn’t sway you.

  His mother was right — he didn’t really understand what was happening, but he knew that people were fed up with being hungry, with queuing at bakeries for hours and camping outside butchers’ shops to get scraps of offal fit for dogs. Petrograders had reached the end of their tether, as Mariya would say — reduced to eating mouldy bread, no longer remembering the taste of butter or eggs! His stomach rumbled; all he’d eaten was half a cup of watery porridge. His mother had watched him shovelling it into his mouth, while Mariya frowned into her bowl and Zoya screwed up her face. ‘Your father will soon be back at work,’ she’d said. ‘This unsettled time will soon be over.’

  ‘Soon we’ll be dead of starvation,’ muttered Mariya, whose kindly teacher at the Conservatoire sometimes gave her extra bread, which she brought home to break into five pieces.

  Turning up his collar, hooking his leather book-strap over his shoulder, Dmitri set off. He wasn’t sure how much longer classes would continue; there was a looseness, a nervousness in the air that affected even the orderly regime at the Conservatoire. As he rounded the corner into Nevsky Prospect, he stopped and gasped. Before him was a wall of backs. The street was filled from one side to the other with people pushing slowly forward, looking more like one heaving body than separate human beings. He hesitated and then darted into the ranks, ducking under elbows. Twice, right beside him, he saw revolvers clasped in large reddened hands.

  He straightened up, took a gulp of icy air. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked the woman next to him. ‘Please, tell me what’s happening.’

  ‘This is the day!’ She barely glanced at him. ‘Today we’re going to break them!’

  At the edge of the pushing crowd, a window splintered into a shower of glass. The people roared in response.

  Up ahead, three shots rang out. The woman grabbed Dmitri, her rough fingers gripping his neck. Saliva hung from her lips; her mouth was a dark cavern, her teeth broken and blackened. ‘Go home! Children should have no part in this.’

  He shrank away, suddenly scared of her frenzied excitement. ‘Let me go!’ He wrenched free of her hands, and ran, twisting through the crowd — but he made his way towards the front, rather than retreating.

  When he saw the teenage boy fall, he felt as if he, too, was falling. He was so close! Close enough to see the stubble on the boy’s chin, to smell his sweat and hear him shout in a cracked voice, ‘Bread for the workers!’ But the Cossack was looming before them. The sabre swung high, glinting against the grey rain of snowflakes — then it carved through the air like the downwards stroke of a violin bow, masterful, precise, perfect.

  Cleaved through the shoulders and neck, the boy fell without a sound. Blood leapt from his mouth, staining his teeth. Within seconds, the crowd was swarming around him, hiding his body from view. But already Dmitri was racing away through the screaming women and the cursing soldiers, dodging the boys with slingshots and the girls hysterical with fear.

  When he stopped, he was in an empty alley. He crouched behind a stack of crates and pressed his head against the rotting planks. Hiding there, he could hear the heavy beat of a drum. Where was it coming from? It was some minutes before he realised it was the thump of his own horror-struck heart. He lay against the wall of wood, and the high keen of what sounded like a flute came from his own mouth.

  He stayed there until the cold struck through his overshoes and socks, driving upwards through his legs. Pulling himself upright, he found that he could barely move. He wiped his cheeks and pulled his hat back down on his head, then peered out from the alley to plot an alternative route. Composition class might still be on, in spite of the chaos that had descended on Petrograd. He glanced back towards Nevsky Prospect, to where smoke was smudging the sky. ‘This year or next year, or in ten years’ time,’ he promised the dead boy, ‘I’ll write down your story in music. You’ll have your Funeral March. I won’t forget.’

  Trying to lie

  Elias was bored. Part of him marvelled at this: how could he be in a city so galvanised into action, yet feel so stultified? On the outskirts of Leningrad, ditches had been dug; in the city, bunkers were being built and guns mounted on rooftops. That morning he’d passed a dozen men digging around the base of a large statue, while others laboured along, ant-like, carrying planks of wood. Were they building a protective wooden shelter for the statue? Did they expect looting — or bombs? Elias, too intimidated to ask, had simply skirted around them and rushed on his way. Already, he felt like a shirker and a fool.

  Here he sat, in the familiar low-ceilinged room, listening to his mother’s droning voice, while fear was seeping from the open drains, swamping the marketplaces and the drinking halls. All the same, he felt his face would split from yawning, that his eyes would grow bloodshot from the pressure of his boredom.

  ‘I’ve always been afraid of June. Everything bad happens in June.’ His mother rocked in her chair, which wasn’t intended for this purpose; its legs thumped unevenly on the floor. ‘Your Uncle Peter died in June, and your Aunt Ester also. Your dear father avoided a June death by a mere twenty-four hours. And now — now we have a June war on our hands!’ She rocked so vigorously at this latest grievance, she nearly toppled backwards.

  ‘Mother,’ said Elias, ‘I don’t know if it has escaped your notice, but your chair has no rockers.’ And you, he felt like adding, are completely off yours. Did she really believe that Hitler and his Luftwaffe were acting in accordance with her calendar of superstition?

  His mother ignored him. ‘I’ve always felt nervous on entering June. I hold my breath until it is over. The trouble started, of course, when they adopted the Gregorian calendar. All that to-ing and fro-ing, mucking about with dates and names. It wasn’t good for stability.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, let’s blame Lenin. He’s a convenient scapegoat for so many things — why not this mess into the bargain?’

  ‘Karl! No Russian person can be blamed for this war! How can you say such a thing.’ She looked as if she’d like to scrub out his mouth with soap, just as she had done when he was eight and he’d called his aunt a greedy pig for scoffing the weekly cake ration in one sitting.

  ‘We have to stop this bickering.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’s no knowing what the future holds. But, naturally, I’m concerned about you. On my way home from work, I made some enquiries about the new evacuation policy. They say —’ He forced himself to go on. ‘Apparently there may be trains to transport the elderly out of Leningrad as early as next week.’

  It was suddenly quiet, so quiet he could hear the cartilage creak in his tired neck. ‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘Surely you can see that.’

  His mother looked both stricken and mutinous. He got up and tried to put his arms around her. It was a long time since he’d been so close to her; her body felt like an unevenly stuffed mattress, her shoulders slumped, her torso heavy. The smell of her damp wrinkled skin made him weak with remorse and fear.

  ‘I refuse to leave you.’ She clutched him tightly. ‘We should stay together at all costs. We’re family.’

  ‘We’re part of a wider family now.’ Even to his own ears, Elias sounded like a propaganda poster. ‘We’re all citizens of Leningrad, and we must draw on that united strength.’

  His mother looked at him as if he were mad. ‘We have nobody but each other, you stupid boy! Nothing but this!’ She gestured at the faded blind, the shelves bending under piles of scores, the motley collection of china. ‘This is our home, and I don’t want to leave it. I won’t.’

  Elias had never been able to stop himself from voicing unwelcome facts. (‘How will you snare a wife if you can’t pay compliments?’ his mother had asked more than once.) ‘It may not look like home for much longer,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Our city’s in a vulnerable position. If the Germans attack from the west and the Finns from the north-east, we’ll not only be cut off but
also locked in. In effect, we’ll be trapped in our own homes. What comfort will china plates be to you then?’

  ‘But our army’s so strong,’ quavered his mother. ‘Surely our men will stop the Germans and keep our possessions safe?’ She glanced nervously at the door as if, at any moment, Nazi soldiers might burst in and carry off the cabinet Elias’s father had made to display his finest samples of boots.

  Elias walked to the shelves and pretended to search for a book. He couldn’t bear to look at his mother’s expression any longer. He sensed that, whatever happened in the months ahead, the time would come when he would be haunted by her face.

  ‘Maybe they will keep us safe,’ he said, clearing his throat. This was as close to a lie as he could come.

  Brandy, talk and the twelfth of July

  The air was layered with cigarette smoke and subdued conversation. Shostakovich sat staring at a long scratch on the tabletop. ‘I can’t believe they turned me down. How could they?’

  ‘Because,’ suggested Sollertinsky, ‘they don’t want one of Russia’s most talented sons shot to pieces?’

  ‘Simply because of my eyesight!’ muttered Shostakovich. Removing his glasses, he peered at the headline of Sollertinsky’s Pravda. The characters were unruly, sliding to the edge of his vision. ‘Ev — ’ he muttered. ‘Ac —’ But it was like trying to catch smoke rings. As soon as he shoved his spectacles back on his nose, the letters sprang into neat legible rows. Evacuation Planned for Leningrad’s Children and Elderly.

  He tossed the paper aside. ‘With half the city gone, the other half will be needed to fight. I’m going to reapply. They can’t be idiotic enough to refuse me twice.’

  ‘It’s you who’s being idiotic,’ contradicted Sollertinsky. ‘What good will it do letting you run about with a gun? You couldn’t hit an omnibus from ten feet, let alone a German. Let those citizens fit for the army do their job, and we’ll do ours. There’s plenty for cultural men to do in times of strife.’ He took a large swig of brandy, and Shostakovich knew what was coming: the tale of how Sollertinsky had once watched a grand piano — ‘a first-rate Koch’ — dragged from a bourgeois household and hoisted onto a lorry. ‘Whereupon I, not a day over fourteen, was also hoisted aboard,’ reminisced Sollertinsky, ‘to be joined by an eighteen-year-old songstress called Ludmila. Then all three of us — the singing beauty, the piano and myself— were driven to military headquarters where we performed our hearts out, thus donating our cultural knowledge to raise the morale of Mother Russia.’