The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

  ‘What is your business? Who have you come to see?’

  ‘Interrogator Zakrevsky.’

  The soldier nodded slowly. Then, without looking up, said, ‘Well, you can go home. You are not on the list. Zakrevsky isn’t coming in today, so there is nobody to receive you.’

  Thus ended his First Conversation with Power.

  He went home. He assumed it must be some trick – they were letting him go so they could follow him and then arrest all his friends and associates. But it turned out to have been a sudden piece of luck in his life. Between the Saturday and the Monday, Zakrevsky had himself fallen under suspicion. His interrogator interrogated. His arrester arrested.

  Still, if his dismissal from the Big House was not a trick, it could only be a bureaucratic delay. They were hardly likely to give up their pursuit of Tukhachevsky; so Zakrevsky’s departure was only a temporary hitch. Some new Zakrevsky would be appointed and the summons would be renewed.

  Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist. Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not? ‘Nothing but madness in the world.’

  It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them – that is a musicologist.

  But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.

  And so he began his vigils by the lift. He was not unique in this. Others across the city did the same, wanting to spare those they loved the spectacle of their arrest. Each night he followed the same routine: he evacuated his bowels, kissed his sleeping daughter, kissed his wakeful wife, took the small case from her hands, and closed the front door. Almost as if he was going off for the night shift. Which in a way he was. And then he stood and waited, thinking about the past, fearing for the future, smoking his way through the brief present. The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned. Men dragged from their beds in their night-clothes often did not. Whether or not this was true was unimportant. What mattered was this: it looked as if he was not afraid.

  This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither – merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer.

  Would Zakrevsky’s successor begin as Zakrevsky had, with courteous preliminaries, then a hardening, a threat, and an invitation to return with a list of names? But what additional evidence could they need against Tukhachevsky, given that he had already been tried, condemned and executed? More likely, it would be part of a wider investigation into the Marshal’s outer circle of friends, the inner circle having been dealt with. He would be asked about his political convictions, his family and his professional connections. Well, he could remember himself as a boy standing in front of the apartment building on Nikolayevskaya Street, proudly wearing a red ribbon on his coat; later, rushing with a group of schoolfellows to the Finland Station to greet Lenin on his return to Russia. His earliest compositions, predating his official Opus One, had been a ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’, and a ‘Hymn to Liberty’.

  But proceed any further, and facts were no longer facts, merely statements open to divergent interpretation. So, he had been at school with the children of Kerensky and Trotsky: once a matter of pride, then of interest, now, perhaps, of silent shame. So, his uncle Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, an old Bolshevik exiled to Siberia for his part in the 1905 Revolution, had been the first encourager of his nephew’s revolutionary sympathies. But Old Bolsheviks, once a pride and a blessing, were nowadays more frequently a curse.

  He had never joined the Party – and never would. He could not join a party which killed: it was as simple as that. But as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’ he had allowed himself to be portrayed as fully supportive of the Party. He had written music for films and ballets and oratorios which glorified the Revolution and all its works. His Second Symphony had been a cantata celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, in which he had set some quite disgusting verses by Alexander Bezymensky. He had written scores applauding collectivisation and denouncing sabotage in industry. His music for the film Counterplan – about a group of factory workers who spontaneously devise a scheme to boost production – had been a tremendous success. ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ had been whistled and hummed all over the country, and still was. Currently – perhaps always, and certainly for as long as was necessary – he was at work on a symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin.

  He doubted any of this would convince Zakrevsky’s replacement. Did any part of him believe in Communism? Certainly, if the alternative was Fascism. But he did not believe in Utopia, in the perfectibility of mankind, in the engineering of the human soul. After five years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, he had written to a friend that ‘Heaven on Earth will come in 200,000,000,000 years.’ But that, he now thought, might have been over-optimistic.

  Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense. He had put the theory of Free Love into practice, first with Tanya, then with Nita. Indeed, with both of them at the same time; they had overlapped in his heart, and sometimes still did. It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition. And on top of this, he himself was weak-willed and indecisive – except on those occasions when he was strong-willed and decisive. But even then he didn’t necessarily make the right decisions. So his emotional life had been … how best to sum it up? He smiled ruefully to himself. Yes indeed: muddle instead of music.

  He had wanted Tanya; his mother had disapproved. He had wanted Nina; his mother had disapproved. He had hidden their marriage from her for several weeks, not wanting their first happiness to be clouded with ill feeling. This had not been the most heroic action of his life, he admitted. And when he did confess the news, his mother reacted as if she’d known all along – perhaps she had read the registrar’s diary – and saw no reason to approve. She had a way of talking about Nina which sounded like praise yet was in fact criticism. Perhaps, after his death, which could not be far away, they would form a household together. Mother, daughter-in-law, granddaughter: three generations of women. Such households were increasingly common in Russia these days.

  He may have got things wrong; but he was not a fool, nor altogether naive. He had been conscious from the beginning that it was necessary to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s. So why was Caesar angry with him? No one could say he was not productive: he wrote quickly, and rarely missed a deadline. He could turn out efficiently tuneful music which pleased him for a month and the public for a decade. But this was precisely the point. Caesar didn’t just demand that tribute be rendered unto him; he also nominated the currency in which it should be paid. Why, Comrade Shostakovich, does your new symphony not sound like your wonderful ‘Song of the Counterplan’? Why is the weary steel-worker not whistling its first theme on his way home? We know, Comrade Shostakovich, that you are well capable of writing music which pleases the masses. So why do you persist with your formalist quacks and grunts which the smug bou
rgeoisie who still command the concert halls merely pretend to admire?

  Yes, he had been naive about Caesar. Or rather, he had been working from an outdated model. In the old days, Caesar had demanded tribute money, a sum to acknowledge his power, a certain percentage of your calculated worth. But things had moved on, and the new Caesars of the Kremlin had upgraded the system: nowadays your tribute money was calculated at the full 100% of your worth. Or, if possible, more.

  When he was a student – those years of cheerfulness, hope and invulnerability – he had slaved for three years as a cinema pianist. He had accompanied the screen at the Piccadilly on Nevsky Prospekt; also at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace. It was hard, demeaning work; some of the proprietors were skinflints who would sack you rather than pay your wages. Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have beem more fun, admittedly.

  He tried to watch the screen above him and play appropriate music. The audience preferred the old romantic tunes which were familiar to them; but often, he would get bored, and then play his own compositions. These did not go down so well. In the cinema, it was the opposite from the concert hall: audiences would applaud when they disapproved of something. One evening, while accompanying a film called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden, he found himself in a more than usually satirical mood. First he began to imitate bird calls on the piano, and then, as the marsh and water birds flew higher and higher, the piano worked itself up into a greater and greater passion. There was loud applause, which in his naivety he took to be aimed at the ridiculous film; and so he played all the harder. Afterwards, the audience had complained to the cinema manager: the pianist must have been drunk, what he played was never music, he had insulted the beautiful film and also its audience. The manager had sacked him.

  And that, he now realised, had been his career in miniature: hard work, some success, a failure to respect musical norms, official disapproval, suspension of pay, the sack. Except that now he was in the grown-up world, where the sack meant something much more final.

  He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected on to the screen. Tanya – his mother applauds. Nina – his mother applauds. Rozaliya – his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba – his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.

  His nocturnal vigils lasted for ten days. Nita argued – not from evidence, more from optimism and determination – that the immediate danger had probably passed. Neither of them believed this, but he was weary of standing, of waiting for the lift’s machinery to grind and whirr. He was weary of his own fear. And so he returned to lying in the dark fully clothed, his wife at his side, his overnight bag next to the bed. A few feet away Galya would be sleeping as an infant does, careless about matters of state.

  And then, one morning, he picked up his case and opened it. He put his underclothes back in the drawer, his toothbrush and tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet, and his three packets of Kazbeki on his desk.

  And he waited for Power to resume its conversation with him. But he never heard from the Big House again.

  Not that Power was idle. Many of those around him began to disappear, some to camps, some to execution. His mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, his Old Bolshevik uncle, associates, a former lover. And what of Zakrevsky, who had not come into work that fatal Monday? No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps Zakrevsky had never really existed.

  But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work. There would be no rest. ‘We rest only when we dream,’ as Blok put it; though at this time most people’s dreams were not restful. But life continued; soon Nita was pregnant again, and soon he began adding to the opus numbers he had feared would end with the Fourth Symphony.

  His Fifth, which he wrote that summer, was premiered in November 1937 in the Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. An elderly philologist told Glikman that only once before in his lifetime had he witnessed such a vast and insistent ovation: forty-four years previously, when Tchaikovsky had conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. A journalist – foolish? hopeful? sympathetic? – described the Fifth as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism’. He never repudiated the phrase; and many came to believe it was to be found in his own hand at the head of the score. These words turned out to be the most famous he ever wrote – or rather, never wrote. He allowed them to stand because they protected his music. Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

  The phrase also permitted those with asses’ ears to hear in his symphony what they wanted to hear. They missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph. They heard only triumph itself, some loyal endorsement of Soviet music, Soviet musicology, of life under the sun of Stalin’s constitution. He had ended the symphony fortissimo and in the major. What if he had ended it pianissimo and in the minor? On such things might a life – might several lives – turn. Well, ‘Nothing but nonsense in the world.’

  The Fifth Symphony’s success was instant and universal. Such a sudden phenomenon was accordingly analysed by Party bureaucrats and tame musicologists, who came up with an official description of the work, to assist the Soviet public’s understanding. They called his Fifth ‘an optimistic tragedy’.

  Two: On the Plane

  ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time.

  One fear drives out another, as one nail drives out another. So, as the climbing plane seemed to hit solid ledges of air, he concentrated on the local, immediate fear: of immolation, disintegration, instant oblivion. Fear normally drives out all other emotions as well; but not shame. Fear and shame swilled happily together in his stomach.

  He could see the wing and a churning propeller of the American Overseas Airlines plane; that, and the clouds they were heading into. Other members of the delegation, with better seats and greater curiosity, were pressing against the little windows for a last glimpse of the New York skyline. The six of them were in celebratory mood, he could hear, and eager for the stewardess to come round with the first offer of drinks. They would toast the great success of the congress, and assure one another that it was precisely because they had advanced the cause of Peace so much that the warmongering State Department had revoked their visas and packed them home early. He was just as keen on the stewardess and the drinks, if for different reasons. He wanted to forget everything that had happened. He drew the patterned curtains across the window, as if to blot out the memory. Small chance of that, however much he drank.

  ‘There is only good vodka and very good vodka – there is no such thing as bad vodka.’ This was the wisdom from Moscow to Leningrad, from Arkhangelsk to Kuibyshev. But there was also American vodka, which, he had now learnt, was ritually improved with fruit flavours, with lemon and ice and tonic water, its taste covered up in cocktails. So perhaps there might be such a thing as bad vodka.

  During the war, anxious before a long journey, he would sometimes go for a session of hypnotherapy. He wished he’d had a treatment before the outbound flight, then one each day of their week in New York, and another before the return journey. Or better still, they could have just put him in a wooden crate with a week’s supply of sausage and vodka, dumped it at LaGuardia airport and loaded it back on the plane for their return. So, Dmitri Dmitrievich, how was your trip? Wonderful, thank you, I saw all I wished to see and the company was most agreeable.

  On the flight out, the seat beside him had been occupied by his official protector, warder, translator and new best friend as of twenty-four hours previously. Who naturally smoked Belomory. When they were handed menus in English and French, he had asked his companion for a translation. On the right were cocktails and alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. On the left, he had assumed, was food. No, came the reply, these were other things you could order. A bureaucratic
forefinger ran down the list. Dominoes, checkers, dice, backgammon. Newspapers, stationery, magazines, postcards. Electric razor, ice bag, sewing kit, medical kit, chewing gum, tooth-brushes, Kleenex.

  ‘And that?’ he had asked, pointing at the only untranslated item.

  A stewardess was called, and a long explanation followed. Eventually, he was told,

  ‘Benzedrine inhaler.’

  ‘Benzedrine inhaler?’

  ‘For drug-addict capitalists who shit themselves on take-off and landing,’ said his new best friend, with a certain ideological smugness.

  He himself suffered from non-capitalist fear on take-off and landing. Had he not known it would go immediately into his official file, he might have tried this decadent Western invention.

  Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,’ as they say. While he had been awaiting orders from the Big House in St Leninsburg, Oistrakh had been expecting arrest in Moscow. The violinist had described to him how, night after night, they came for someone in his apartment block. Never a mass arrest; just one victim, and then the next night another – a system which ramped up the fear for those who remained, who had temporarily survived. Eventually, all the tenants had been taken except for those in his apartment and the one opposite. The next night the police van arrived again, they heard the downstairs door slam, footsteps coming along the corridor … and going to the other apartment. From this exact point, Oistrakh said, he was always afraid; and would be, he knew, for the rest of his life.