The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

  Now, on the flight back, his minder left him alone. It would be thirty hours before they reached Moscow, with stops at Newfoundland, Reykjavik, Frankfurt and Berlin. It would be comfortable at least: the seats were good, the noise level bearable, the stewardesses well groomed. They brought food served on china and linen with heavy cutlery. Enormous shrimps, fat and sleek like politicians, swimming in shrimp-cocktail sauce. A steak, almost as tall as it was wide, with mushrooms and potatoes and green beans. Fruit salad. He ate, but mainly he drank. He no longer had the light head of his younger days. One Scotch and soda followed another, but they failed to put him out. No one stopped him, neither the airline nor his companions, who were audibly merry, and probably drinking just as much. Then, after coffee had been served, the cabin seemed to grow warmer, and everyone dropped off to sleep, himself included.

  What had he hoped of America? He had hoped to meet Stravinsky. Even though he knew it was a dream, indeed a fantasy. He had always revered Stravinsky’s music. He’d barely missed a performance of Petrushka at the Mariinsky. He’d played second piano in the Russian premiere of Les Noces, performed the Serenade in A in public, transcribed the Symphony of Psalms for four hands. If there was a single composer of the twentieth century who might be called great, it was Stravinsky. The Symphony of Psalms was one of the most brilliant works in musical history. All this, without doubt or hesitation, he declared to be the case.

  But Stravinsky would not be there. He had sent a snubbing and well-publicised telegram: ‘Regret not being able to join welcomers of Soviet artists coming this country. But all my ethic and esthetic convictions oppose such gesture.’

  And what had he expected of America? Certainly not cartoon capitalists in stovepipe hats and Stars and Stripes waistcoats marching down Fifth Avenue and trampling underfoot the starving proletariat. Any more than he expected a trumpeted land of freedom – he doubted such a place existed anywhere. Perhaps he had imagined a combination of technological advancement, social conformity, and the sober manners of a pioneering nation come into wealth. Ilf and Petrov, after taking a road-trip across the country, had written that thinking about America made them melancholy, while having the opposite effect on Americans themselves. They also reported that Americans, contrary to their own propaganda, were very passive by nature, since everything was pre-processed for them, from ideas to food. Even the cows standing motionless in the fields looked like advertisements for condensed milk.

  His first surprise had been the behaviour of American journalists. There had been an advance guard of them at Frankfurt airport on the journey out, waiting in ambush. They bawled questions and shoved cameras into his face. There had been a cheerful rudeness about them, an assumption of superior values. The fact that they couldn’t pronounce your name was your name’s fault, not theirs. So they shortened it.

  ‘Hey, Shosti, look this way! Wave your hat at us!’

  That had been later, at LaGuardia airport. Dutifully, he had raised his hat and waved it, as had his fellow delegates.

  ‘Hey, Shosti, give us a smile!’

  ‘Hey, Shosti, how do you like America?’

  ‘Hey, Shosti, do you prefer blondes or brunettes?’

  Yes, they had even asked him that. If at home you were spied on by the men who smoked Belomory, here in America you were spied on by the press. After their plane had landed, a journalist had got hold of a stewardess and quizzed her about the behaviour of the Soviet delegation during the flight. She reported that they had chatted to their fellow passengers, and enjoyed drinking dry martinis and Scotch and soda. And such information was duly printed in the New York Times as if it were of interest!

  Good things first. His suitcase was full of gramophone records and American cigarettes. He had heard the Julliards perform three Bartok quartets and had met them backstage afterwards. He had heard the New York Philharmonic under Stokowski in a programme of Panufnik, Virgil Thomson, Sibelius, Khachaturian and Brahms. He had himself played – with his small, ‘non-pianistic’ hands – the second movement of his Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden in front of 15,000 people. Their applause was thunderous, unstoppable, competitive. Well, America was the land of competition, so perhaps they wanted to prove they could clap longer and louder than Russian audiences. It had embarrassed him and – who knew? – perhaps the State Department as well. He had met some American artists who had received him most cordially: Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, a young writer called Mailer. He had received a large scroll thanking him for his visit, signed by forty-two musicians from Artie Shaw to Bruno Walter. And there the good things ended. These had been his spoonfuls of honey in a barrel of tar.

  He had hoped for some obscurity among the hundreds of other participants, but found to his dismay that he was the star name of the Soviet delegation. He had given a short speech on the Friday night and an immense one on the Saturday night. He had answered questions and posed for photographs. He was treated well; it was a public success – and also the greatest humiliation of his life. He felt nothing but self-disgust and self-contempt. It had been the perfect trap, the more so because the two parts of it were not connected. Communists at one end, capitalists at the other, himself in the middle. And nothing to do except scuttle through the brightly lit corridors of some experiment, as a series of doors opened in front of him and closed immediately behind him.

  And it had all started again because of another trip Stalin had made to the opera. How ironic was that? The fact that it was not even his opera, but Muradeli’s, made absolutely no difference, neither at the end, nor indeed from the beginning. Naturally enough, it had been a leap year: 1948.

  It was a commonplace to say that tyranny turned the world upside down; and yet it was true. In the twelve years between 1936 and 1948, he had never felt safer than during the Great Patriotic War. A disaster to the rescue, as they say. Millions upon millions died, but at least suffering became more general, and in that lay his temporary salvation. Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts – the weak parts – of most people worked. It had spent years killing priests and closing churches, but if soldiers fought more stubbornly under the blessing of priests, then priests would be brought back for their short-term usefulness. And if in wartime people needed music to keep their spirits up, then composers would be put to work as well.

  If the state made concessions, so did its citizens. He made political speeches written for him by others, but – so upside down had the world become – they were speeches whose sentiments, if not whose language, he could actually endorse. He spoke at an anti-Fascist meeting of artists about ‘our gigantic battle with German vandalism’, and ‘the mission to liberate mankind from the brown plague’. ‘Everything for the Front,’ he had urged, sounding like Power itself. He was confident, fluent, convincing. ‘Soon, happier times will come,’ he promised his fellow-artists, parroting Stalin.

  The brown plague included Wagner – a composer who had always been put to work by Power. In and out of fashion all century, according to the politics of the day. When the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed, Mother Russia had embraced its new Fascist ally as a middle-aged widow embraces a husky young neighbour, the more enthusiastically for the passion coming late, and against all reason. Wagner became a great composer again, and Eisenstein was ordered to direct The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. Less than two years later, Hitler invaded Russia, and Wagner reverted to being a vile Fascist, a piece of brown scum.

  All of which had been a dark comedy; though one which obscured the more important question. Pushkin had put the words into Mozart’s mouth:

  Genius and evil

  Are two things incompatible. You agree?

  For himself, he agreed. Wagner had a mean soul, and it showed. He was evil in his anti-Semitism and his other racial attitudes. Therefore he could not be a genius, for all the burnish and glitter of his m
usic.

  He had spent much of the war in Kuibyshev with his family. They were safe there, and once his mother was out of Leningrad and able to join them, he became less anxious. Also, there were fewer cats sharpening their claws on his soul. Of course, as a patriotic member of the Union of Composers, he was often required in Moscow. He would pack enough garlic sausage and vodka to last the journey. ‘The best bird is the sausage,’ as they said in the Ukraine. The trains would stop for hours, sometimes days; you never knew when sudden troop movements or a lack of coal would interrupt your journey.

  He travelled soft class, which was just as well, as the carriages of hard class were like wards of potential typhus cases. To prevent infection, he wore an amulet of garlic around his neck, and another around each wrist. ‘The smell will put off girls,’ he would explain, ‘but such sacrifices have to be made in wartime.’

  Once, he had been travelling back from Moscow with … no, he couldn’t recall. A couple of days out, the train had stopped on some long, dusty platform. They had opened the window and poked their heads out. The early-morning sun was in their eyes and the filthy song of some raucous beggar in their ears. Had they given him some sausage? Vodka? A few kopecks? Why did he half-remember this station, this beggar among thousands of others? Was it to do with a joke? Had one of them made a joke? But which one? No, it was no good.

  He couldn’t bring to mind the beggar’s barrack-room obscenities. What came back to him instead was a soldiers’ song from the previous century. He didn’t know the tune, just the words he’d once found, glancing through Turgenev’s letters:

  Russia, my cherished mother,

  She doesn’t take anything by force;

  She only takes things willingly surrendered

  While holding a knife to your throat.

  Turgenev was not to his literary taste: too civilised, not fantastical enough. He preferred Pushkin and Chekhov, and Gogol best of all. But even Turgenev, for all his faults, had a true Russian pessimism. Indeed, he understood that to be Russian was to be pessimistic. He had also written that, however much you scrubbed a Russian, he would always remain a Russian. That was what Karlo-Marlo and their descendants had never understood. They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked – the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied.

  To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms. Power had never understood this. It thought that if you killed off enough of the population, and fed the rest a diet of propaganda and terror, then optimism would result. But where was the logic in that? Just as they had kept on telling him, in various ways and words, through musical bureaucrats and newspaper editorials, that what they wanted was ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Another contradiction in terms.

  One of the few places where optimism and pessimism could happily coexist – indeed, where the presence of both is necessary for survival – was family life. So, for instance, he loved Nita (optimism), but did not know if he was a good husband (pessimism). He was an anxious man, and aware that anxiety makes people egotistical and bad company. Nita would go off to work; but the moment she arrived at her Institute, he would telephone to ask when she was coming home. He could see that this was annoying; but his anxiety would just get the better of him.

  He loved his children (optimism), but was not sure if he was a good father (pessimism). Sometimes he felt his love for his children was abnormal, even morbid. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes.

  Galya and Maxim were taught never to lie, and always to be polite. He insisted on good manners. He explained to Maxim at an early age that you preceded a woman upstairs but followed her downstairs. When the two of them acquired bicycles, he made them learn the highway code, and practise it even when riding on the emptiest forest path: left arm out to indicate left turn, right arm out to indicate right turn. At Kuibyshev he also supervised their gymnastic exercises each morning. He would turn on the radio, and all three would follow the hearty-voiced instructions of a fellow called Gordeyev. ‘That’s right! Feet shoulder-width apart! First exercise …’ And so on.

  Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown him what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead.

  Nita loved skiing and mountaineering; he was put in a state of mortal fear as soon as he felt the treacherous snow beneath his skis. She enjoyed boxing matches; he could not bear the sight of one man beating another nearly to death. He even failed to master the form of exercise closest to his own art: dancing. He could write a polka, he could play one jauntily on the piano, but put him on the dance floor and his feet would be ineptly disobedient.

  What he enjoyed was playing patience, which calmed him; or card games with friends, as long as they played for money. And though he was neither robust nor coordinated enough for sport, he liked umpiring. Before the war, in Leningrad, he had qualified as a football referee. During their exile in Kuibyshev, he organised and umpired volleyball competitions. He would announce solemnly, in one of the few English phrases he had somehow picked up, ‘It is time to play volleyball.’ And then add, in Russian, a sports commentator’s favourite phrase: ‘The match will take place whatever the weather.’

  Galya and Maxim were rarely punished. If they did anything naughty or dishonest, this immediately reduced their parents to a state of extreme anxiety. Nita would frown and look at the children reproachfully; he would light cigarette after cigarette while pacing up and down. This dumbshow of anguish was often chastisement enough for the children. Besides, the whole country was a punishment cell: why introduce a child so early to what it would see quite enough of in its lifetime?

  Still, there were occasionally cases of extreme naughtiness. Once, Maxim had faked a bicycle accident, pretending to be hurt, perhaps even unconscious, only to jump up and start laughing when he saw how distraught his parents were. In such cases he would say to Maxim (for it usually was Maxim), ‘Please come and see me in my study. I need to have a serious talk with you.’ And even these words brought a kind of pain to the boy. In his study, he would make Maxim write down a description of what he had done, followed by a promise never to behave like that again, then sign and date this affidavit. If Maxim repeated his sin, he would summon the boy to his study, take the written promise from the desk drawer, and make Maxim read it aloud. Though the boy’s shame was often such that it felt as if the punishment were being visited back upon the father.

  His best memories of wartime exile were simple ones: he and Galya playing with a litter of pigs, trying to hold on to the snorting, bristly bundles of flesh; or Maxim doing his famous impression of a Bulgarian policeman tying his bootlaces. They spent summers on a former estate at Ivanovo, where Poultry Collective Farm Number 69 became an ad hoc House of Composers. Here he wrote his Eighth Symphony on a desk consisting of a piece of board nailed to the inside wall of a converted henhouse. He could always work, regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. This was his salvation. Others were distracted by the sounds of normal life. Prokofiev would angrily chase away Maxim and Galya if they were merely being themselves within earshot of his room; but he himself was impervious to noise. All that bothered him was the barking of dogs: that insistent, hysterical sound cut right across the music he heard in his head. That was why he preferred cats to dogs. Cats were always happy to let him compose.

&nb
sp; Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that the trauma of 1936 now lay well in the past. He had committed a great fault in writing Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and Power had properly castigated him. Repentant, he had composed a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism. Then, during the Great Patriotic War, he had written his Seventh Symphony, whose message of anti-Fascism had resounded across the world. And so, he had achieved forgiveness.

  But those who understood how religion – and therefore Power – operated would have known better. The sinner might have been rehabilitated, but this did not mean that the sin itself had been expunged from the face of the earth; far from it. If the country’s most famous composer could fall into error, how pernicious must that error be, and how dangerous to others. So the sin must be named, and reiterated, and its consequences eternally warned against. In other words, ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had become a school text, and formed part of conservatoire courses in the history of music.

  Nor could the chief sinner be allowed to continue on his way unshepherded. Those skilled in theolinguistics, who had studied the wording of that Pravda editorial as closely as it deserved, would have noticed an implicit reference to film music. Stalin had expressed a great appreciation of Dmitri Dmitrievich’s soundtrack for the Maxim trilogy; while Zhdanov was known to play ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ to his wife on the piano every morning. It was the view of those at the highest level that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was not a lost cause, and capable, if properly directed, of writing clear, realistic music. Art belonged to the People, as Lenin had decreed; and the cinema was of much greater use and value to the Soviet people than the opera. And so, Dmitri Dmitrievich now received proper direction, with the result that in 1940 he received the Red Banner of Labour as a specific reward for his film music. If he continued to tread the right path, this would surely prove the first of many such honours.