Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘And you mean to film all this?’

  ‘No point in trying to capture anything on film that isn’t almost impossible to show. You must know it’s the magic art—it goes much further than mere words. I’m taking the sentences Grossman set down on the page. I’ll raise them from their burial in print: I’ll be the one to give them new life. Don’t you see it? I can portray what he only describes: the mother walking barefoot across the dark earth, cradling her son in her arms. She belongs to our world, she lives among us, she’s trudged through the snow, she’s walked the autumn roads, she shares the dark gruel the soldiers drink from their tin cups every day. How long the path is that stretches ahead of her—from Oboyan near Kursk, or from the black earth of Voronezh—all the way to the taiga, to marshy forests beyond the Urals, to exile in the sands of Kazakhstan. He remembers when he saw her during the years of famine, in Konotop in Ukraine, at the station there—her face was dark and drawn from hunger, she came up to the window of the express train, and begged for bread, wordlessly, only moving her lips; he sees her as she was in Leningrad and Moscow, in the time of purges and night arrests, holding her son in her arms for the last time, saying goodbye, then heading down the ill-lit stairs. A black car waits for her in the street below, a wax seal is already placed upon the door of her room—and how silent the tall buildings seem, how strange and solemn the silence of the dawn. All this he imagines, and her journey to her new home, to sentries, watchtowers, barbed wire. All this, and he feels himself filled with wonder at the majesty of life. That’s my project—my dream! To shape these fragments, to make them into a necklace of shining jewels—bring them into life up on the screen.’

  He paused, and turned his anxious eyes on me. ‘So,’ he said: ‘What’s the verdict? What do you think?’

  ‘Just you?’ I asked: ‘You’re going to film it all yourself?’

  ‘Just me. I’ll go with my camera—wherever the road takes me. I’ll make myself a modern Dziga Vertov—I’ll go to Karaganda and see the Kazakh steppe, I’ll go to Voronezh, I’ll take my tripod back to Moscow and set up outside the Lubyanka, right underneath Dzerzhinsky’s eyes, and see who stops me.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ I said.

  ‘You’re trying to hold me back! I thought you’d be in favour. Isn’t that what the West dreams of? A Russia reborn, and in the arms of faith? You’ll see—I’ll make a film so rich and strange you won’t be able to drag your eyes away.’

  ‘I look forward to it,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t believe me. Do you think I’m just a fantasist? You say almost nothing.’

  ‘Do I have to take a position?’

  ‘You hold yourself back. Is that what a free man does? It seems I’m freer than you, and I’ve lived all my life in chains.’

  ‘Everyone’s in chains,’ I said.

  ‘Or perhaps you think I’m some kind of provocateur. Is that it? You think I’m trying to entrap you. Do I look like that kind of person? Is that how I strike you? Really?’

  ‘The thought had occurred to me,’ I said.

  ‘I expected more from you when we began talking, you know,’ he went on, in a low voice: ‘Much more. I thought to myself: here, a conversation partner, what good fortune. Someone to trust who’ll trust me. Someone with western eyes, who’s lived in truth, who’s made the pilgrimage to the Sistine Madonna—who feels compassion for the world, and sees beyond the boundaries of himself.’

  With that he produced his light meter, held it up to my face and, in silence, before leaving me, gave me a long, appraising look—and this little scene and its conclusion might be less vivid in my thoughts, were it not for a chance encounter a few months later in a very different setting that brought it back to me. It was near the end of summer: I was in southern Italy, in the town of Trani, whiling away my days, waiting to meet a schoolfriend of mine who was following a course of lectures at a college nearby. I had a room at an old hotel beside the cathedral and the little harbour and its fishing boats. From my window there I could hear the seagulls calling, and see the sunlight glinting on the waves. All was quiet. Life’s burdens seemed far away. I went downstairs one morning, and began to read in the reception. Slumped on a low chair across from me was a young man in jeans and a thick green work jacket. He seemed about my age; he had tousled hair and pale blue eyes. For some minutes he stared in my direction, then he came over.

  ‘You have my room,’ he said: ‘I need it. We have to change rooms—right away. You take mine; I’ll have yours.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m a novelist.’

  ‘That’s not really enough as an explanation.’

  ‘I’m doing my field research.’

  ‘More like an anthropologist, actually?’

  ‘And you’ve got the room I need for that.’

  ‘Tell me more.’

  He sat down beside me, and gave me a defiant look. ‘Why are you here, anyway?’ he said: ‘Do you need that particular room?’

  ‘What’s so special about it?’ I asked him.

  ‘It’s the room the film-maker Tarkovsky stayed in, when he came here, just a few years before he died. He was hunting for locations for his Italian film. You’ve probably seen it: Nostalghia. It’s a great masterpiece. It won a few prizes. They say it would have won the Palme d’Or in Cannes but the Soviet authorities stepped in behind the scenes. You’re not familiar with it? I know it perfectly. I know every shot in it and every idea that went into its composition. I know every piece of dialogue. I know the whole film as well as if I’d made it myself.’

  ‘And that’s what you’re writing about? A book about a film?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said: ‘All my life’s given over to the task.’

  ‘Art about art?’

  ‘Exactly! Is there any other kind? I’m using the story to retrace the last stages of Tarkovsky’s life: his thoughts, his feelings, the ideas that came to him in the places he visited—the way that exile sharpens everything.’

  ‘But why him? You’re not Russian, are you? You don’t sound as if you are.’

  ‘I’m not, but art’s not an affair of nationalities.’

  ‘It’s universal?’

  ‘No. The opposite! It’s specific. Everyone has their own nature. We’re confined in what we are. How rare it is that an image of a film or book reaches into us. Don’t you find that? If you come across a snatch of music or a dramatic scene that speaks to you, that’s a treasure, that’s something to hold on to. It’s the reason why you have to seek out the artist who speaks to you—seek out the art that’s on your wavelength: pursue it, keep it in your vision. It’s the way to see yourself clearly, amplify yourself—know yourself more—grasp your purpose in the world.’

  ‘And this is yours?’

  ‘Naturally.’ This was said in a voice of complete assurance, with a proud glare.

  ‘And what’s it going to be called, your book?’

  ‘I’m going to call it “Nostalgia for Nostalghia”. The obvious title, don’t you think? Though I had thought of calling it “From the Madonna to Portonuovo”, but that didn’t seem to flow so well.’

  I had the strong sense I knew where this talk was going to lead.

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘He was a believer, of course, Tarkovsky, that’s clear enough. Every film he made was a quest for the divine in life.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘Of course. In Stalker, God is radiation; in Solaris, God’s there when the planet gazes at the cosmonaut; in Mirror, God’s in the mother’s eyes; and in Nostalghia, he’s in the sputtering candle flame. In my story Tarkovsky ends his quest in the little seaside town of Portonuovo, up the coast from here. He finds a Russian icon hanging in an empty church. He realises that his life’s course is run. The gates of heaven are there before him. Suffering is at an end.’

  ‘And where does it begin?’

  ‘In Moscow, of course. It begins with the Sistine Madonna. He saw it when he was a young
film student there. It was shown at a famous exhibition, in the Pushkin Museum. That had an impact on him. What you hear and see when you’re young shapes what you turn into. We think we’re free: we’re not! We go down tracks prepared for us—prepared a long time before. Why do you smile that way? Is this all amusing to you?’

  ‘No. It just reminds me of a talk I had, not so long ago: and it makes me think how life seems to go like that—repetitions, echoes, half-rhymes, as if the world was trying to tell you something, get a point through to you, and it keeps on telling you, and you can’t help seeing the pattern and wondering what it means.’

  ‘But isn’t that what I’ve just been describing to you? Isn’t that the task of art—to trace those hidden links and joins? The task of life, even—to see the resemblances? What we have awareness for?’

  Maybe it is, I thought then as I listened to him—maybe that’s just what it is. He spoke on, I said nothing, and pictured Ady in my mind—Ady as she was that day at Badrutt’s Palace, long years in the past, fixing her stare on me.

  *

  ‘What a look,’ said Josette to her: ‘As if you were condemning him!’

  ‘And perhaps I am: condemning him to complex times.’

  Muscatine drew towards them at that moment, with Eppler and a stranger, a new arrival, tall, middle-aged, elegantly dressed. The stranger stopped, gave a little bow of the head, clicked his heels together and extended his hand towards Ady. ‘Amborn,’ he said.

  ‘Do we know each other?’

  ‘In an adjacent way. I’m just a humble music lover, madame. I have the Amborn Foundation. We support the Tribschen recitals your husband’s going to give this year. I was with the Maestro last week, in fact, in Hamburg. It was a blessed time for me, a dream. How forthcoming he was—full of warmth.’

  ‘Madame,’ said Muscatine: ‘The foundation’s bringing out a book, and holding an exhibition, too. On Wagner and the Maestro.’

  ‘Valhalla Redefined,’ said the new arrival, savouring the syllables as they rolled off his tongue: ‘A Study in Affinities. That’s our title. We made the plan last autumn, together, just the three of us—your husband and I, and our friend Muscatine.’

  ‘How intimate,’ said Ady.

  ‘And we realised as we were talking what an opportunity we had before us. The time for the revolution of ideas has come round—for a breakthrough in our understanding of music’s last hundred years.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ady: ‘So many revolutions in the air.’

  ‘Yes. Novo’s Wagner is the new Wagner, that’s evident: a tumultuous Wagner, unstable, melting, boundless in possibilities. I like to say that in the Maestro’s hands the whole Ring Cycle is open to our eyes once more—open, and full of mystery. His Parsifal’s the pursuit of a godless grail. How perfectly he understands the composer—he sees into his heart.’

  ‘And what’s in there?’ asked Ady, in a smooth voice.

  ‘A galaxy—a whole whirling, exploding galaxy of contradictions: love, desire, hatred of desire, the life instinct, the death instinct—under his baton the music pulls apart our certainties.’

  ‘Clearly for you it’s not just notes on a printed score. I’m sure you’re going to tell me that the music’s the shattered mirror of our times, or something grandiose like that.’

  ‘Absolutely, madame,’ said Amborn. ‘You phrase it well.’

  ‘Shall I tell you the real truth about Novogrodsky’s Wagner,’ said Ady then: ‘What the poor man actually thinks? What his aim is? Why he can’t ever stop himself from performing these works—time after time, the same repertoire, reworked, refashioned, year after year? Would you like me to do that? Do you dare to know?’

  ‘Please—I always have the feeling when we’re talking that the Maestro holds himself back—he veils his words.’

  ‘You know my husband was born in eastern Poland. You know he lost his family. You know what he witnessed, in his years of boyhood there: you know what befell that world: you know of his escape. You can imagine, then, that for him the case of Wagner is a special one.’

  ‘Of course, and for us too—the shadows are always present in our hearts…’

  ‘The music is the enemy,’ said Ady, sweeping on. ‘The enemy for him—the threat, the ever-present danger—the danger to be subjugated: to be neutralised, torn apart and remade—and that can only be done on the podium. When he stares out over the orchestra and its gleaming instruments he’s looking out across the camp of death itself. For him, the music’s something to be destroyed in public, the notes are there to be mastered and reclaimed—he’s colonising the composer from within.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘How wonderful,’ breathed Amborn: ‘Of course: it must be so. And our task must be to help—in any way we can.’

  ‘A noble thought,’ said Muscatine.

  ‘Yes—to plunge into the storm: go headfirst,’ said Amborn: ‘That’s the path ahead: it’s clear. And you, madame? Does our project speak to you? Our exhibition? Does Wagner loom as large in your thoughts as in ours—or your husband’s?’

  ‘Do I seem like a Wagner lover? Listening to him puts me in fear of dissolving—as if I was soaking in a bath too long. You need a fondness for complication over simplicity to be a true Wagnerian. The music closest to my heart is the music composed here in these valleys: the Four Last Songs.’

  ‘Richard Strauss: a pure taste,’ said Amborn.

  ‘Music like light,’ said Ady to him: ‘Like air.’

  ‘No. Music like you!’

  ‘Ah, gallantry,’ said Ady, and she turned to me: ‘Take note, my treasure. Charm’s only charm when glancingly deployed.’

  ‘And now a suggestion for you, madame,’ Amborn went on: ‘A request, even.’

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘How honoured my wife and I would be if you and your husband cared to join us. We have an evening planned, next month—at home, nearby.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘An estate on the Bodensee,’ said Muscatine into Ady’s ear.

  ‘A modest affair,’ said Amborn: ‘By the waterside. And I hear there’s some hope the Maestro will accept.’

  ‘You hear that, do you? And who from?’

  ‘Ludovic’s been very helpful.’

  ‘Has he, indeed—the faithful accompanist.’

  She turned to face him. Muscatine quailed. ‘And what else have you been scheming about behind my back?’

  ‘It’ll be a select gathering, I promise you,’ said Amborn: ‘Only like-minded souls, only the finest flowers of the cultural world. And I believe we have a special friend in common—she’ll be there.’

  ‘Oh—and who might that be, in these revolutionary times? I’m not sure I know myself who I could still count as a special friend.’

  ‘I mean Serghiana Semyonova, of course. We know how close you are.’

  ‘Close! To that fellow traveller? How much longer will she dog my steps! Muscatine, if this is your idea of a refined insult, if you’re behind it, your days in my husband’s service are at an end.’

  ‘Madame, I’m innocent. I’ve said nothing, I know nothing.’

  ‘Those may be the only true words that have passed your lips all day.’

  ‘Forgive me, Madame Novogrodsky,’ said Amborn, with a little pleading gesture. ‘It was Serghiana Ismailovna herself who told us. She came to us with a proposal: for bridge-building between East and West.’

  ‘The bridges at the heart of Europe seem to be working quite well already,’ said Ady: ‘You may not have noticed the Soviet tanks making use of them a year ago to stamp out the Prague Spring.’

  ‘Exactly so. The need to soothe the tensions is as great now as at any point in our lifetime.’

  ‘And she means to do this how?’

  ‘By making a film: Mozart’s journey on the road to Prague. The famous tale, freely adapted, with a cast drawn from both sides of the continent—East and West—and she believes the Maestro should conduct the music. All Mozart compositions, of course.
’

  ‘The great unmade film! I’ve heard the fantasy. If she’s even read the book she hasn’t understood it. Nothing could be less well fitted for the purpose. Surely you know it’s something like a sacred work for us, in the Hapsburg lands, that novella, with all its sweetness and its charm. And now kolkhoz hands reach out to grasp it! What treasure of ours is there they won’t try to take?’

  She looked around the silent room. Everyone was watching. Guests, waiters, the manager, Amborn above all.

  ‘Madame,’ he said again: ‘Forgive me. Such an error! I would kneel at your feet if I thought it would make a difference.’

  ‘I’d like to see that, my dear industrialist!’

  ‘I’m not an industrialist. Our enterprise makes precision instruments.’

  ‘A minor detail. I meant what I said!’

  ‘What, madame?’

  ‘I’d like to see you kneeling. Right here, right now. In the ladies’ salon of Badrutt’s. Make the gesture! Back up your words. Or are you embarrassed, in front of all these staring eyes? Perhaps you don’t want to spoil the press of your Knize suit?’

  ‘If you wish it,’ said Amborn, half under his breath.

  ‘I do. I do wish it. With all my heart!’

  For a few moments no one spoke. Gradually, uneasily, almost in slow motion, Amborn fell to his knees, placed his hands before him on the carpet and bent his head. Ady looked down at him, a cold expression on her face. She gave a soft, mechanical laugh—a laugh directed inward, for herself, not for the watching room to hear.

  Beside me, Daru was whispering to Josette. ‘It’s not every day that one sees one of the continent’s grandees kneeling before a Viennese cocotte.’

  ‘I couldn’t hear you exactly, my dear diplomat,’ Ady called out to him: ‘But I can guess the sentiment!’

  Amborn looked up at her with beseeching eyes.

  ‘Just like Saint Sixtus in the painting on the wall,’ she said: ‘What a pose. What piety. Up, now—enough playacting.’

  She made a sign to Amborn, stepped away from him, paced towards the window and back, and turned. ‘I’ll tell you the true story of the Caucasian and her Mozart fantasy. Why not? It’s almost funny, in an irritating kind of way. She came to Vienna for a visit. Somehow I doubt she filled you in on all the details. Picture the scene. The Ring, beside the Stadtpark. A dull, grey morning, rain in the skies, a cold wind. The doorbell rings at my town palazzo—my modest affair. A housemaid opens. There she is—standing on the steps: the queen of the red screen herself, the all-powerful Serghiana Ismailovna, with an Italian in a leather trench coat at her side. No appointment, no advance notice. They were shown in. I came down. I’d only just returned from a long trip with Novogrodsky. We were both exhausted. Imagine the astonishment I felt. She made her pitch, in a stumbling, nervous way—the same one she made to you: bridges, Europe, a shared space and common culture, all the nonsense from the propaganda mills. She gave me the usual promises: state funding, governmental backing from the East. “And,” she said, “you surely know Luchino, who’s agreed to direct!” She’d brought Visconti with her. Can you believe it? Of all the drawcards she could have chosen, she’d selected him—a count from a line that goes back to the thirteenth century. At least he’d been a communist, and had a fondness for opera. He sat obediently by her side, chain-smoking, smiling unhappily and listening to her, and not following a word of any of the languages we were speaking. “I came to you because we’re almost sisters.” That’s what she said, I promise you. Almost sisters. “We’re strangers,” I replied. “On opposite sides of the barricade.” “But we used to be so close, we belonged to the same milieu. Won’t you consider the idea? For the sake of the past!” What was I to do with that absurd pair of grotesques in my reception rooms, sneaking glances here and there to see if they could catch a glimpse of Novogrodsky ghosting about? I had an army of Salukis and wolfhounds to walk. I handed the two of them over to Muscatine. I felt I could rely on him to bore them half to death.’