Tanya was getting ready to go to work. ‘I’m leaving now. There’s some rice on the bench for later.’ Her coat hung loosely off her shoulders and her scalp glinted through her thin hair, but she seemed more concerned about Nikolai’s health than her own. She’d developed a remarkable talent for acquiring black-market supplies (fifty grams of lard here, a small pack of lentils there) for the sole purpose of feeding him.
‘Rice.’ He nodded vaguely.
‘Don’t forget to eat it.’ She folded her arms. ‘You’ve got to keep your strength up.’
‘Keep my strength up? For what?’ He was at a loss, in these drifting, monotonous days, to grasp the point of anything.
‘For the concert, of course!’
‘Ah, the concert,’ said Nikolai. ‘Yes, it’s most important for me to eat cold rice for the sole purpose of playing the violin well enough to distract Leningraders from the truth — that their Party has failed to prevent them from starvation and death.’
Tanya looked reproving, though only a year ago she’d considered concerts a waste of time and money. ‘The posters are already up. People are buying tickets. The whole city’s looking forward to it.’
‘The city would be better off saving its money and going to church to pray that this bloody stand-off will end. What good is seventy minutes of music if we’re to be shelled and starved for the next ten years?’
‘Don’t talk like that. One of the doctors said that, according to Mr Eliasberg, this will be the most important concert ever played in Leningrad! The most important since time immemorial.’
There was no trace of Elias in the phrase; Tanya had always embellished stories, particularly when they concerned things she knew nothing about. But the fervour and the belief were recognisable as Elias’s own. Nikolai had seen the glitter in his eyes as he drove the orchestra onwards, disregarding the musicians’ fatigue and despair. At those times it was hard to believe the rumours that had circulated before the war — the lack of discipline in the Radio Orchestra, the public mutinies and practical jokes, and one musician in particular (was his name Alexander?) who regularly ridiculed not only his colleagues but also his conductor.
Tanya was almost misty-eyed. ‘After the concert, morale in the city will soar. That’s what the doctor and Mr Eliasberg say. Through the strength of the music, our army will gain strength — and then I expect we’ll win the war.’
‘Mr Eliasberg has his own axe to grind. The Astoria Hospital may be convinced by his mission, but it’s unlikely he’s risking his life for this concert for purely altruistic reasons.’ Nikolai had become disconcertingly aware of an anger growing inside him. Anger with Tanya for unexpectedly championing a musical cause, and with Elias for growing so bold he made others look cowardly in comparison. With Shostakovich for writing a symphony that had already become symbolic, and with the people of Leningrad who were so desperate they would throng to the concert house to listen to an orchestra of walking cadavers. He was angry with the politicians for setting in motion such a musical farce, and with the pilot who’d risked his life flying the score in over enemy lines, and with the Red Army for not having the strength to push back the Germans. There was only one person in the world with whom he didn’t feel angry, and she had become the stuff of fairy tales and fables: the needle in the haystack, the pea under the mattress, irritating his memory, preventing sleep, never forgotten yet never appearing. Day by day, he was drained. He’d survived the winter, only to be fatally weakened by the sight of green trees and the scent of emptiness. Sonya, you are killing me. Your absence will be my death.
He watched Tanya tie a scarf over her patchy scalp and bustle out the door. Filled with relief, he ran his fingers through his long beard; at least she’d forgotten to nag him about his hair.
‘One more thing.’ Her head reappeared around the door. ‘You should trim your beard. You look like a sailor, without the legitimate excuse of weeks at sea. When Mr Eliasberg was in hospital, he shaved every day.’
There was nothing to throw at her; most of their possessions had been sold, exchanged, or chopped up for firewood. He waved his hand in a peremptory gesture that might have meant ‘All right’ or might have meant ‘Go away’. It seemed to satisfy her; she retreated again and her footsteps faded down the stairwell.
At last he was alone.
Over the past few months, he’d been trying to exist in the moment. But his desperation for escape was growing. He felt suffocated in this city where resignation coated the streets like the sticky juice from the lime leaves. Officially it had been suggested that the siege would be over by the end of summer — but he could hear the hollowness behind the assurances. Nothing but propaganda, and a large measure of hope.
In the quietness that descended after Tanya’s departure, he came to a decision. It wasn’t as hard as he’d anticipated, for with the closing of the door he’d finally realised that Sonya was never coming back. He hadn’t talked about her for weeks. Tanya no longer spoke her name; their few surviving neighbours passed him quickly in the crumbling stairwell.
With every lost opportunity, every time she might have been mentioned and wasn’t, Sonya disappeared a little further. Daily, the images in Nikolai’s head were fading — her eyes, her smile, the tilt of her nose. Soon there would be nothing left of her.
He would wait until the night of the concert — this much he owed to Shostakovich, and to Eliasberg. Then he would make his escape. He would invite Tanya to the victory party, which would happen whether or not the performance was a triumph: commissars glowing with unearned pride, musicians seated at a table laden with rich food that might, earlier, have saved other lives. He would slip away and come back here where he belonged, and, finally, he would do it.
He felt for the small tin taped under the windowsill, a strange but not entirely unwelcome gift from a pathologist who’d lived in the apartment below with his wheelchair-bound, music-loving wife. ‘She’s listened to you practise for years,’ he’d said to Nikolai. ‘Your playing has been her escape. The least I can do is offer you an escape in return.’
Dr Ostrovsky had died on the coldest day in January, two days after his wife. The ostensible cause of his death was pleurisy, but Nikolai believed otherwise, knowing how much the doctor had loved his wife. After hearing the news, he’d opened the tin and stared at the capsule — cyanide, mixed with acetic acid for what Ostrovsky had called ‘more certain results’. How odd that such a small object could smash open a claustrophobic world and let the air in!
He’d believed, for a time, that Nina Bronnikova might be his saviour. In the long vicious grip of winter (searching, always, for Sonya’s small figure), he’d glimpsed Nina and his heart had lifted. The occasional sightings had kept him going — as, later, had the certain prospect of seeing her at rehearsals. Her frailty, her rare smile, her battle to accept her ruined career: these had amazed and impressed him. But before long it became clear to him. He’d already loved not once but twice, such fierce and loyal loves they could never be surpassed. What he’d received from his lost wife and his lost daughter was more than anyone could expect in a lifetime. And so he’d retreated from the flame that was Nina, abandoning the possibility of warmth, and he neither missed nor regretted it.
Although the room was full of sunshine, his fingers were numb. The effects of malnutrition had proved far worse than he’d believed possible; he felt cold all the time. He opened his violin case with difficulty, blew on his hands, tried some exercises. But even simple arpeggios were beyond him.
He swore, and threw down his violin with a discordant clash of strings. It was intolerable! To make it so far, and now be unable to play! He looked around for something, anything at all, to burn in the stove. ‘But not that,’ he said aloud. ‘But not you.’
Above his head, behind the ceiling panels, lay the cello, wrapped in threadbare blankets like a sleeping child. He thought back to the first rehearsal, when musicians had unpacked violins with smashed scrolls, and cracked double basses. ‘Does anyon
e know of any spare instruments?’ Elias had asked despairingly. Nikolai had shaken his head. The cello would stay hidden, perhaps forever.
The sight of the apartment — the cracks caused by the bomb-blast next door, the dark squares where pictures had once hung — filled him with such rage he could barely contain it. A year ago, this had been his home. A year ago, he could play melodies to make the eyes of his audience glitter with tears. ‘And now?’ He spat on the bare floor. ‘Now I live in an empty shell and play no better than a child.’
Pulling on his gloves, he seized up the hatchet from behind the stove. He slammed the front door behind him and clattered down the stairs two at a time, swinging the axe over the stair rail so recklessly that steel clanged on steel.
By the time he reached the entrance hall, Mrs Gessen had emerged from her door in alarm. ‘I thought I heard something. Mercifully, it’s only you.’ Since the night of the near-miss she’d become uncontrollably nervous; her eyes flickered like a lizard’s and her head jerked.
‘Yes, it’s only me,’ repeated Nikolai, but his voice echoed through the damaged hallway, sounding nothing like his.
‘What’s that you’re carrying?’ Mrs Gessen’s relief visibly faded at the sight of the hatchet. ‘Where are you going with that?’
‘I need firewood. My hands are numb and I can’t practise.’
‘But where are you … what are you —? Surely not the trees?’ Mrs Gessen seemed to have absorbed his earlier thoughts; it was as if his anger had run through his cracked floorboards, through ceilings and floors, and finally seeped into her living room.
‘Well, there are plenty out there for the taking.’ He shrugged. ‘If the city wishes to hear the musical evocation of angels, then it must make sacrifices. Don’t you agree?’
‘Angels?’ stammered Mrs Gessen.
‘Shostakovich’s Seventh.’ He spoke impatiently. ‘I’ve been starved for eleven months, my circulation is so wrecked from malnourishment that I can neither get warm nor play a note, yet in five days I’m expected to perform a symphony for the city. Do you think that’s fair?’
‘But the trees! If every Leningrader cut down a tree, where would we be?’
‘Leningraders do not cut down trees.’ He thrust his face close to hers. ‘Most, it seems, would rather sit and look at the trees while waiting to die. I refuse to be one of them.’ He was so angry that the hallway began spinning around him and he clutched at the stair-rail. As he leaned there, breathing hard, surveying the familiar surroundings—the chipped plaster flowers above the door, the scratched floor, the far wall with its rows of letterboxes — reason reasserted itself. Perhaps he should consider an alternative plan? After all, the trees were in full view of a police patrol, and a madman wielding a hatchet would certainly be arrested. (Reasonable to the last! said Shostakovich, in his usual half-admiring, half-mocking way. How sensible to avoid trouble, so you can go on quietly planning your death!)
‘All right, you win.’ Nikolai, wiping his forehead, addressed both Mrs Gessen and the distant Shostakovich. ‘The trees can stay.’
Mrs Gessen let out her breath. ‘They are the property of the city. I would have had to report you if I’d caught you in the act — or even en route to the act. And no one wants to report a neighbour, not after all we’ve been through together. A whole new collective spirit, that’s what these dark times have given us. A brave new —’
‘Yes, yes. Excuse me, please.’ Nikolai pushed past her new-found idealism and headed towards the letterboxes.
‘You won’t find any mail today.’ She shook her head. ‘Not today, and probably not for a long while.’ All the same, she moved a little closer; she’d always kept an avid eye on other people’s post. ‘My cousin works in the postal depot, you know, and she tells me there’s been no mail over Lake Ladoga for a week. It’s not clear why, but her hunch is —’
‘I’m afraid I have no interest in your cousin’s job,’ interrupted Nikolai. ‘Only in mine.’ He eyed up the letterboxes in a professional kind of way; his own box sat in the middle of a row, which made his task much trickier. He raised the hatchet high over his shoulder. ‘Stand back, please!’
Mrs Gessen let out a shriek. ‘Are you crazy? That’s public property!’
Ignoring her, Nikolai took a swing and the blade crashed deep into the wood. He wrenched the hatchet free and raised it once more. The second, equally accurate blow splintered the box into dozens of pieces. ‘What use is a mailbox if mail is never delivered into it?’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I’ll put it to better use.’
‘You’re going to burn our mailboxes?’ Mrs Gessen sounded aghast.
‘No, only mine.’ Nikolai began gathering up the shards of wood. ‘For today, at least. One box ought to provide sufficient fuel for one hour’s practice. Entirely for the benefit of our city, I might add.’
‘Enough fuel for today!’ gasped Mrs Gessen. ‘Do you live only in the present?’
‘Not at all.’ He clutched the wood to his chest. ‘I’ve already made a plan for tomorrow, and that does involve the trees.’
In his mild-mannered days he’d never have managed to reduce Mrs Gessen to splutters; now, watching her back away and slam the door, he was almost impressed by his achievement. He turned to inspect his handiwork. ‘Not bad,’ he commended himself. There was a gaping rectangular hole where his mailbox had once been, but the surrounding boxes remained intact. ‘Not bad!’ he said again.
It was while he was dusting the splinters from the remaining boxes with his sleeve (Always the considerate neighbour! commented Shostakovich) that he saw a corner of paper wedged between the back of the lower mailbox and the damp wall behind it. He could just make out a typed last name (his) and the first letters of a street name (also his). He put down his armful of wood, eased the sodden envelope out of the crack and opened it gingerly. A bill for repairs on his violin, dated a whole ten months earlier. He did some rapid calculations. Two weeks after Isaak Erkenov had written this out in his careful handwriting, he’d marched away with a division of the People’s Volunteers — and had never come back from the Front.
He folded the note and put it in his pocket. Was Erkenov’s widow still alive? He’d have to find out, though how he’d pay the debt was beyond him. How extraordinary that he should find the account after all this time — and only now because of his reckless actions. He looked again at the grimy crevice into which the envelope had fallen. How much more of his mail was lying down there, lost? He fished down the back of the boxes with fingers that, thanks to the wood-chopping, were no longer numb — and felt another corner of paper. As he tried to grasp it, it slipped further down the crack. He cursed and kept trying.
Behind him he heard Mrs Gessen’s door creaking open once more. ‘You can tell your postal-depot cousin,’ he said without turning around, ‘that I prefer my mail less than a year old.’ Very slowly, very carefully, he slid the envelope up the wall. ‘Got you, you bastard!’ The Gessens’ door slammed shut, sending dust showering off the long-disused light bulb.
For a third time, Nikolai peered down into the crack. Nothing more. He gathered up his wood and set off up the stairs; he’d had enough of Gessen interrogations for one day.
Back in the apartment, the chill was waiting. It seeped into him, a familiar and strangely seductive adversary. How easy it would be to lie down and give in. He went to the stove, threw the wood on the floor, and ripped open the second envelope. It had a Sverdlovsk postmark and had been posted — he peered closely at it — last October. Dull news, then, from his distant relatives in Sverdlovsk who, even in wartime, managed to find the weather the most interesting of topics.
There were two sheets of paper inside but, surprisingly, the top one was typed — unevenly inked and badly aligned. Crouching by the stove, he scanned the page.
Our first letter seems not to have reached you … We understand the situation in Leningrad is worsening … We have attempted several times to contact you by telephone … It appears your line is no
longer working … We wish to reassure you, once again, that your daughter is safe.
At the bottom of the page was a small smudged stamp: Miusskaya St. Orphanage, Sverdlovsk.
Nikolai sank to his knees. He was trembling all over, but not from cold. With fumbling fingers, he pulled the second piece of paper out of the envelope. This was not typed but handwritten, and behind its wobbly lines he heard a small, certain voice:
Dearest Papa,
I’ve had what Aunt T calls a chapter of accidents. The lady in charge is worried you haven’t answered her first letter but I told her you’re always busy. Please come soon. I miss you so much that I cry every day. Your loving Sonya.
P.S. Could you bring the cello with you? I am very out of practice.
He tried to stand up, but his legs were shaking so badly he half-fell against the wall. He leaned there, his heart pounding. Sonya was alive. She hadn’t been blown into a thousand pieces, had not lain bleeding by a derailed train until her heart gave out, nor mouldered away in a muddy unknown grave.
‘My darling Sonya.’ His throat was full of tears and he could hardly speak. ‘Sonya, hold on, just a bit longer.’
Suddenly he could see her face again, clearly and whole: her velvet-black eyes full of love, her hopeful smile, the dimple at one side of her mouth. She was saying something, though her voice had become so unfamiliar he strained to hear it. ‘I knew you would come for me! I knew you would.’
The loneliness that had encased him like a coffin all winter split and fell away from his body. The release felt almost like pain. He crumpled the letter in his hand and held it as hard as he could. Sonya. The light in the room seemed to grow in intensity. As he watched, the stripes of sunlight on the floor wavered and ran together, so that he seemed to be standing ankle-deep in bright shimmering water. And still he repeated her name over and over, Sonya, Sonya, until it rang in his ears like a bell announcing armistice to a relieved and exhausted world.
The Conductor Page 29