‘Enough for now.’ Just that morning, Shostakovich had had to fasten his belt several notches tighter. ‘But it doesn’t look good. Bread rations are going to be cut again — to five hundred grams, I think.’ The truth was, he was barely aware of what he’d eaten in the last weeks: a bit of sausage chopped into red cabbage, dried mushrooms in watery broth, bread with sunflower oil rather than butter. The main thing was that mealtimes were now less of a palaver, meaning he could eat quickly without losing track of the work. While he was wasting time shovelling food into his mouth, the violins were hovering in his workroom, marking time above a pizzicato bass.
The phoneline was worsening. Soon all he could hear was an odd exclamation or the fragment of a word, yet he couldn’t bear to say goodbye. When the line suddenly went dead, he swore. Goddamn it! He’d wasted an opportunity to talk about real things, had babbled on about food rations and an air raid the previous evening which had trapped them in the cellar for two hours, when he should have been asking about Mravinsky, and whether the Philharmonic might start rehearsing his symphony, and how one might transport a score to Siberia, and how many copies could be made of what would amount to thousands of pages. ‘Ivan Ivanovich!’ He kicked the wall in frustration; the sound of his friend’s name filled him with foreboding. Suppose he never again felt that solid arm around his shoulders, nor saw the crumpled collar and badly knotted tie, nor benefited from Sollertinsky’s informed conversations on topics ranging from Sanskrit to Sophocles?
He knew he should start working again, but he felt a reluctance so strong it surprised him. Keep going, he commanded himself. This is the reason you’re still in Leningrad!
Before he could begin, he heard a small knock on the door. It was Nina, who’d been gone for hours, queuing for bread. She looked closely at him. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I just talked to Sollertinsky.’ He noticed, for the first time, how her cheekbones stood out in her thin face. She’d stopped suggesting they leave Leningrad; in fact, she’d stopped saying much at all. But it was obvious that, every day, she was hoping someone else would help her fight this particular battle.
‘Is he all right?’ Nina rarely entered his workroom; this was his territory and he kept it as free as possible from the clutter of family life. But now she came over to him and laid her head against his chest.
He could feel her shoulder blades jutting through her coat, and the sharp steps of her ribs. Shamed, unprotected by work, he saw that this was also his fault. Maxim had started wetting the bed, Galina had become afraid of the dark. Single-handedly, he was destroying his family.
‘You miss Sollertinsky,’ said Nina. It was a statement, not a question.
‘I do.’ Shostakovich gave a huge sigh. ‘I miss his certainty. I miss the life we had.’
Heroes
Elias was woken by the most intense pain he’d ever felt. The entire right side of his face was burning. It was as if a wire was threaded from his jaw to his ear, and it was being ratcheted tighter and tighter.
‘Hell!’ he said, opening his eyes to darkness. ‘Bloody, shitting hell.’
As if on cue, the early-morning silence was ripped apart. Church bells tolled, sirens blared. Two months earlier, a loudspeaker had been mounted on a pole immediately below the apartment windows. (‘How considerate,’ his mother had exclaimed. ‘Someone must be aware that I’m hard of hearing.’) Now, out of that very speaker, came the repeated warning ‘AIR RAID! AIR RAID!’, blasting through Elias’s already splitting head.
Clutching his cheek, he pulled his coat on over his pyjamas. The noise and the pain merged in a red-hot blur. If we’re not dead by the time this infernal war is over, he thought angrily, we shall certainly be deaf.
Getting his mother down to the cellar was becoming increasingly difficult, for her indignation grew with each air raid. ‘The Germans signed a pact,’ she’d say. ‘They were supposed to be our friends.’ Recently, she seemed to have found a way of making herself heavier, so that Elias had to grit his teeth and call on Mr Shapran for help. ‘You’re not even trying, Mother,’ he’d exclaim. ‘Yes, it’s all most trying,’ she’d answer, sitting solidly in her chair.
Now, he could barely open his aching jaw to call out for assistance. Instead he ran out onto the landing just as the Bobrovskys’ young son emerged from the door opposite.
‘My … mother,’ Elias grated out. ‘Can’t … lift … alone.’
‘I’ll help you. But we have to hurry!’ Valery’s blue eyes were round with fear.
By tilting the chair at a dangerous angle, it was just possible for them to jolt Mrs Eliasberg around the corners of each landing. After two flights of stairs she began to shout, flailing her arms about so that Elias narrowly missed a punch on his already smarting jaw.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ Valery’s chubby face was flushed.
‘I forgot my shawl!’ Mrs Eliasberg caught at the stair-rail.
‘Can’t … go back.’ Elias’s shoulders were burning, but he was almost glad of the new pain, distracting him from the one in his head.
‘There are blankets in the cellar, Mrs Eliasberg. We can’t go back.’ Valery stumbled and nearly dropped his side of the chair. ‘Whoops.’
Olga Shapran’s face loomed below them, lit by the feeble glow of a lamp. ‘Hurry! We want to close the door! Hurry up!’
‘All right, we’re coming. You try hurrying when you’re lugging an old dragon in a bath-chair.’ Valery looked as if he might cry.
‘I must go back,’ cried Mrs Eliasberg. ‘I’ve left my lucky shawl behind, and the portrait of my husband isn’t in its proper place. If he isn’t in the shrine we’re doomed!’
Just in time, Elias caught her, pushing her back in the chair and wrapping her coat tightly around her legs. ‘Would you shut up, Mother,’ he hissed, ‘and let us get you to the cellar, or we’ll all be as dead as Father.’
They sat crammed together in the dark, the door firmly bolted and their backs to the wall. The attack seemed very close. Elias felt the anti-aircraft fire vibrate through his body; the shriek of the falling bombs sounded almost human. The whole building shuddered, making even Mrs Eliasberg stop moaning and fall silent.
Elias clenched his hands. His pain blended with the noise outside, and soon it all became so intolerable that he felt as if he were not in his body at all. Think about the symphony, he told himself. Remember that day in Shostakovich’s study. He concentrated on the memory of the composer’s face: his flickering mouth when he reached a difficult passage, the rise of his eyebrows mimicking the upward lilt of a melody. Unclenching his left hand, Elias played out the opening theme on his knee. Had the first shift to the dominant key happened so early? Gradually, the sounds around him receded; he tilted his head back against the shaking wall, his eyes shut and his mind on the music.
Mining the past
It was the memory of the dacha that saved him, taking him back to a place where he could hear notes again — though he had, quite literally, to block his ears, stuffing them with the cotton wool reserved for medical emergencies. These days the raids began at dawn and continued late into the night. The distant thudding of artillery was constant, muttering like thunder. Even standing in the bread queues was dangerous, with the frequent shelling forcing people to run for cover. Leningrad had become scarred: pockmarked squares, pitted stone walls and shattered houses. When munitions factories were hit, there were flaming explosions. Regardless of the chaos, Shostakovich continued to go to his study.
The dacha? It had been close enough to the city but it seemed like another world. It was the year after he’d first met Tatyana Glivenko, in the sanatorium in Crimea. She was what the French called jolie laide. Her face held a potential for excitement close to hysteria; it lit her peaky chin and high cheekbones to an approximation of beauty. As he watched her, Shostakovich had felt the bandages on his neck become constricting. Running his finger beneath them he felt not the familiar swellings of his tuberculosis but the girl’s cool white ne
ck — bent, at that moment, over a plate of tasteless cabbage soup. He knew he had to touch her skin, soon.
In the late afternoon, they’d climbed the tower in Gaspra, gazing at the purple smoke drifting above Ai-Petri. For three weeks fires had raged between Alupka and Simeiz; and as his arm lightly brushed sixteen-year-old Tatyana’s, he felt his boredom falling away, tumbling down the tower to merge with the haze. He no longer pined for Petrograd, for its sharp winds and the drizzle on cobblestones. The connection was instant and reciprocal. As she looked sideways at him, there was a knowingness in her eyes that coloured them the same smudged violet as the smoke.
As much as Shostakovich was attracted to Tatyana, his sister disliked her. While he and Tatyana lay together, one secret night after another, he could hear Mariya turning and coughing in the next room, perhaps sensing that, on the other side of the wall, her brother (whom she’d come to look after) was getting himself into trouble. When he carried letters to the post each morning, he felt them weighing heavily in his hand. He stopped behind a stand of oak trees and carefully unsealed all envelopes addressed to their mother, reading such things about his first love that made his cheeks flare. While he’d been taking care not to worry his mother — the injections of arsenic ‘didn’t hurt at all’, he was now allowed to expose his body to sunlight, he was recovering quickly — Mariya was writing in a deliberately anxiety-provoking manner.
‘Dmitri’s grown up,’ she had written. ‘He’s got a tan, and is happily in love.’ Yes, this was true enough. But then he read: ‘Tatyana Glivenko is a strange girl, verging on coquettish.’ And, in the next letter: ‘T. is a flirt. I don’t like her.’ It took a large effort of will for him to reseal this envelope and send it on — but even at the age of seventeen he had a fear of altering destiny, and the censorship of letters fell into this category.
By the time summer frayed into autumn, he’d written several letters to assure his mother that he’d remained pure (which he had, in spirit). ‘I won’t throw myself into the whirlpool,’ he promised, as his mother warned him of the many ways family life could threaten artistic talent. After a month, however, it was clear that he was head over heels in love. Everyone could see it — Mariya, Dr Elena Nikolaevna and the nurses, not to mention his mother and Tatyana herself.
By the following summer, when they were invited to the dacha in Repino, Shostakovich believed himself to be truly in love. The invitation had come from Tatyana’s aunt, who’d heard the confident predictions of the Leningrad music professors. Her niece’s beau was destined for greatness, perhaps as a concert pianist! ‘There’s a grand piano in the dacha,’ she wrote reassuringly to Shostakovich’s mother. ‘His daily practice can continue.’ She’d welcomed them when they arrived, dusty from the train ride and a walk down a lane musty with elderflowers, and she’d shown them a battered upright that had survived years of her father’s folk tunes.
‘It’s there,’ she said knowingly, ‘in case you have nothing better to do.’ Then she showed them to their room, a large bare space in the southern turret, with a tin bath in the corner and a huge bed in the middle of the floor. ‘Everything you need!’ she said, pressing a key into Shostakovich’s hand — after which she disappeared down the creaking stairs and stayed out of their way for the next four weeks.
‘Our own place at last!’ Tatyana kicked off her shoes and bounced on the mattress, so that her braids stood up with every downwards fall.
Although no more than an hour from the city, the place had felt like an island, cut off from the burdens of duty and ambition that usually lay so heavily on Shostakovich. The nights at Repino were open and seductive, Tatyana’s cries of pleasure flying like birds into the ceiling. Every morning, exhausted from lovemaking, they would lean naked on the windowsill, looking over hazy fields and sighing birch trees, and the dark bulk of a ramshackle farmhouse by the river. They ate fruit and vegetables from the garden, feeding each other with a generosity bordering on greed. Tatyana would split open a pod with her thumbnail and rake lime-green peas into Shostakovich’s mouth. Shostakovich forced soft strawberries through her pursed lips, then the smaller, tarter klubnika, and finally a pulpy mush of raspberries, until Tatyana’s chin ran red and sweet with juice. There were huge radishes, drawn from the soft ground and taken to the kitchen, trailing soil; their white biting taste was softened with salt or butter. There were cucumbers as thick as a labourer’s wrist, coated thickly with honey — ‘Peasant’s food,’ said Tatyana, biting into one hungrily.
So much food back then! Shostakovich, writing in full score and hearing the orchestra behind the piano notes, marvelled at the memory. Those same dachas now stood deserted and empty, their gardens torn up, their crops burnt and their owners trapped in the stone city.
‘You love me most.’ This was Tatyana at her most aggressive and insecure; her voice challenged him down the years. ‘If not, why did you dedicate the Piano Trio to me?’ In Leningrad, she’d sat night after night in the Bright Reel movie theatre, her eyes fixed on him as he proceeded with his undercover practice. He’d discovered that he could use his accompanist’s job as a way to rehearse his own compositions; once, he’d even persuaded the manager to let in two of his classmates, a violinist and a cellist, thus providing him with a test run for his trio.
That work had failed to satisfy, its single-movement form seeming unsophisticated, its opening too obviously signalling the themes. Now, staring at the sketches for the symphony’s scherzo, he realised the trio had been a forerunner to this. The resolute opening was his approach to new situations — resistant, tense, observant — and its melodic second theme was the succumbing: to the sun, his returning health, to Tatyana and love.
Trying to ignore the distant gunfire, he felt the same old magic leap inside him, an ache of possibility that was almost sexual. It was a synthesis of sound and feeling, captured in the memory of the key: that large, theatrical-looking key pressed into his palm by Tatyana’s big-bosomed aunt. It could both lock them in and keep the world out — just as it had that first evening, when he’d turned it in the door and there had been a clap of thunder, the beginning of a great summer storm.
The wooden dacha had groaned in the fierce warm wind. Tatyana lay on her front on the bed, her eyes vivid. Her white cotton blouse had slipped off her shoulder and Shostakovich could see one small bare breast, peaked with a dark nipple. He’d shut the window and then pulled her blouse over her head, cupping her breasts in his hands. He liked their combined weight and weightlessness, heavy and light, like round ripe apricots.
They lay with their naked torsos pressed together, listening to the storm passing over the house. Outside, the trees were wild black shapes, bending their heads and whipping up again in a dervish dance. At one point, Shostakovich saw an apple box flying through the air, belly-up like a fish.
The few hours before this had been calm: heady, drowsy, bee-filled. ‘Who would have guessed?’ Tatyana’s narrow ribs rose in astonishment. But of course the storm had been building all afternoon, unseen behind the hills. ‘The wildness came from nowhere,’ said Tatyana, whose moods did exactly this, tears springing from the mildest reproach and smiles restored by a caress.
The turn of the key, the anticipation, the banging windowpane, the rocking dacha: twenty years later these fused in Shostakovich’s head. The air-raid sirens were cranking up into a wail, and he went to the door. ‘Nina!’ he called sharply. ‘Take the children to the cellar.’
He returned to his desk. Even before the drone of the planes began, he stuffed cotton wool in his ears and picked up his pen. He willed himself back to the sweet-smelling Repino day, the warm grass, the dozing and the waking. Remember Repino. Remember peace.
Then, at last, he found a path into the scherzo. The lilting melody of the strings was like stepping out into a fresh country morning. This was underpinned by some stealthy, stagy, staccato cello notes — a little like the footsteps of an aunt not wanting to intrude. Next, the oboe. Lilting and soaring, it was Tatyana’s voice a
s it used to be, before she became quarrelsome and possessive. (Dimly, he heard the roar of planes; glancing up, he saw a portrait of his grandparents falling from the wall.)
The storm? This would be easier. The first movement had pointed the way, with its uneasy C sharp minor key and its repetitive chaos. He would use brass and woodwind for the buffeting wind, crashing against barns and flattening hedgerows. And a hammering xylophone would return, slowly and inevitably, to the original key of B minor. (The light above him flickered and dimmed; the room was shaking, books tumbled off the shelves.)
Then, for a single brief moment, he could see clear to the symphony’s end. As the building rumbled around him and a huge crack split the wall, he dived under the piano. But he felt no fear — only relief. That glimpse had been enough.
‘Everything is resolved.’ He gripped the shaking legs of the piano. ‘Everything, eventually, comes to an end.’ His ears were still blocked by the cotton wool; his words sounded muffled even inside his head. Just as he pulled the stoppers from his ears — BANG! He was deafened. Had he been obliterated by a Luftwaffe bomb? But it was the lid of the piano, crashing down with massive impact, setting the strings screeching like sea-witches and making him wince.
Nina and the children had emerged from the cellar and were inspecting the damage. Mirrors and plates lay shattered on the floor, and the windows had cracked across in spite of the tape. Shostakovich sat in the middle of the debris, explaining why he’d stayed behind. ‘It was the breakthrough for the scherzo. I would have lost it.’
Nina began sweeping up the mess. ‘And we would have lost you.’ Her reactions to danger were unvarying: humour as a defence against fear, practicality a barrier against emotion.
The Conductor Page 21