The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

  Still, he wrote the letter, and the Ministry of Culture appointed a committee to examine this new version. As a gesture of respect to the nation’s most distinguished composer, the committee would come to his apartment on the Mozhaiskoye Highway. Glikman was there, as were the director of the Maly Theatre and its orchestra’s conductor. The committee itself consisted of the composers Kabalevsky and Chulaki, the musicologist Khubov and the conductor Tselikovsky. He had been very nervous before their arrival. He handed them typed copies of the libretto. Then he played through the entire opera, singing all the parts, while Maxim sat at his elbow and turned the score.

  There had been a pause, which extended into an awkward silence, and then the committee began its work. Twenty years had passed, and they were not four men of power sitting in a bulletproof box; instead, they were four men of music – sophisticated men with no blood on their hands – sitting in the apartment of a fellow musician. And yet it was as if nothing had changed. They compared what they had heard with what had been written two decades previously, and found it just as wanting. They argued that since ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had never been officially withdrawn, its tenets were still applicable. One of them being that his music hooted and quacked and grunted and gasped for breath. Glikman had tried to argue but was shouted down by Khubov. Kabalevsky praised certain sections of the work while asserting that as a whole it was morally reprehensible because it justified the actions of a murderess and whore. The two from the Maly Theatre were silent; he himself sat on the sofa with his eyes closed, listening to the committee members seek to outdo one another in abuse.

  They voted unanimously not to recommend the opera’s revival because of its glaring artistic and ideological faults. Kabalevsky, seeking to ingratiate, had said to him,

  ‘Mitya, why the hurry? The time for your opera has not yet come.’

  Nor, it seemed to him, would it ever now come. He had thanked the committee for their ‘critique’, and then gone with Glikman to the private room of the Aragvi restaurant, where they had got very drunk. That was one of the few advantages he found in age: he no longer collapsed after a couple of glasses. He could go on getting drunk all night if he so wished.

  Diaghilev was always trying to persuade Rimsky-Korsakov to come to Paris. The composer kept on refusing. Eventually, the lordly impresario came up with a stratagem which effectively compelled the composer’s presence. A resigned Korsakov sent a postcard which read: ‘If we’re going, then let’s go, as the parrot said to the cat which was dragging it downstairs by the tail.’

  Yes, that was what his life had often felt like. And his head had been bumped on far too many steps.

  He had always been a meticulous man. He visited the barber every two months and the dentist just as often – being as anxious as he was meticulous. He was always washing his hands; he emptied ashtrays as soon as he saw two stubs in them. He liked to know that things were working properly: water, electricity, plumbing. His calendar was marked with the birthdays of family, friends and colleagues, and there would always be a card or a telegram for those on the list. When visiting his dacha outside Moscow, his first action was always to send himself a postcard to check the reliability of the mail. If this at times became a slight mania, it was a necessary one. If the wider world becomes uncontrollable, you must make sure to control what areas you can. However tiny they might be.

  His body was just as nervous as it always had been; perhaps more so. But his mind no longer skittered; nowadays, it limped carefully from one anxiety to the next.

  He wondered what the young man with the skittering mind would have made of the old man staring out from the back seat of his chauffeured car.

  He wondered what happened at the end of that Maupassant story which had so struck him as a young man: the story about passionate, reckless love. Was the reader told the aftermath of the lovers’ dramatic tryst? He must check, if he could find the book.

  Did he still believe in Free Love? Perhaps so; theoretically; for the young, the adventurous, the carefree. But when children came along, you could not have both parents pursuing their own pleasure – not without causing unconscionable damage. He had known couples who were so set on their own sexual freedom that their children had ended up in orphanages.

  That cost was far too high. So there had to be some accommodation. This was what life consisted of, once you got past the part where everything smelt of carnation oil. For instance, one partner might practise Free Love while the other looked after the children. More often it was the man who took such freedom; but in some cases it was the woman. That was how his own case might look to someone from a distance, not knowing all the details. Such a spectator would see Nina Vasilievna away a lot, for work or pleasure, or both at the same time. She was not fitted for domesticity, Nita, neither by temperament nor habit.

  One person could truly believe in the rights of another person – in their right to Free Love. But yes, between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish. And so he had buried himself in his music, which took his entire attention and therefore consoled him. Though when he was present in his music he was inevitably absent from his children. And sometimes, it was true, he had had his own flirtations. More than flirtations. He had tried to do his best, which was all a man could do.

  Nina Vasilievna had been so full of joy and life, so outgoing, so comfortable in her own skin, that it was hardly surprising others loved her too. This was what he told himself; and it was true, and quite understandable, if, at times, painful. But he also knew that she loved him, and had protected him from many things he was unable or unwilling to deal with himself; also, that she was proud of him. All this was important. Because that person looking in from the outside, who did not understand, would understand even less what happened when she died. She was away in Armenia with A. at the time and suddenly fell ill. He had flown out with Galya, but Nita had died almost as soon as they arrived.

  To state just the facts: he had returned to Moscow by train with Galya. Nina Vasilievna’s body was flown back, escorted by A. At the funeral all was black and white and scarlet: earth, snow, and red roses provided by A. At the graveside he held A. close to him. And stayed near to him – or rather, kept A. near to him – for the next month or so. And thereafter, when he went to visit Nita, there were often red roses from A. strewn all over the grave. He found the sight of them comforting. Some people would not understand this.

  He had once asked Nita if she was planning to leave him. She had laughed and replied, ‘Not unless A. discovers a new particle and wins the Nobel Prize.’ And he had laughed too, not being able to calculate the likelihood of either event. Some would not understand that he had laughed. Well, this was no surprise.

  There was one thing he did resent. When all of them were staying on the Black Sea, usually at different sanatoriums, A. would arrive in his Buick to take Nita for a drive. Such drives were not a problem. And he always had his music – he had the knack of finding a piano, wherever he was. A. did not drive, so he had a chauffeur. No, the chauffeur was not the problem either. The problem was the Buick. A. had bought the Buick from a repatriated Armenian. And he had been allowed to do so. That was the problem. Prokofiev was allowed his Ford; A. was allowed his Buick; Slava Rostropovich had been allowed an Opel, another Opel, a Land Rover and then a Mercedes. He, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, was not permitted to have a foreign car. Over the years, he could choose between a KIM-10-50 and a GAZ-MI and a Pobeda and a Moskvich and a Volga … So yes, he envied A. the Buick with its chrome and leather and fancy lights and fins, and the different noise it made, and the stir it created wherever it went. It was almost like a physical being, that Buick. And his wife Nina Vasilievna, with golden eyes, was in it. And for all his principles, that too was sometimes a problem.

  He found the Maupassant story, the one about love without boundaries, love without thought for the morrow. What he had forgotten was that on the morrow, the young garrison commandant was severely reprimanded for the fake
emergency, and his entire battalion punished by being transferred to the other end of France. And then Maupassant had allowed himself to speculate on his own narrative. Perhaps this was not, as the writer had first presumed, a heroic tale of love worthy of Homer and the Ancients, but instead some cheap, modern story out of Paul de Kock; and perhaps the commandant was even now boasting to a messful of fellow officers about his melodramatic gesture and its sexual reward. Such contamination of romance was all too likely in the modern world, Maupassant concluded; even if the initial gesture, and the night of love, remained, and had their own purity.

  He pondered the story, and thought back over some of the things that had happened in his life. Nita’s joy in another’s admiration; her joke about the Nobel Prize. And now he wondered if perhaps he should see himself differently: as Monsieur Parisse, that businessman husband, locked out of the town, obliged at bayonet point to spend a night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station.

  He switched his attention back to the chauffeur’s ear. In the West, a chauffeur was a servant. In the Soviet Union, a chauffeur was a member of a well-paid and dignified profession. After the war, many chauffeurs were engineers with military experience. You knew to treat your chauffeur with respect. You never criticised his driving, or the state of the car, because the slightest such comment often resulted in the car being laid up for a fortnight with some mysterious illness. You also ignored the fact that when you did not require your chauffeur, he was probably off working on his own account, making extra money. So you deferred to him, and this was right: in certain respects, he was more important than you. There were chauffeurs so successful that they had their own chauffeurs. Were there composers so successful that they had others to compose for them? Probably; such rumours were common. It was said that Khrennikov was so busy being loved by Power that he only had time to sketch out his music, which others orchestrated for him. Perhaps this was the case, but if so, it did not matter very much: the music would be no better and no worse if Khrennikov had orchestrated it himself.

  Khrennikov was still there. Zhdanov’s stooge, who had so eagerly threatened and bullied; who had persecuted even his own former teacher Shebalin; who acted as if he personally signed every chit allowing composers to buy manuscript paper. Khrennikov, picked out by Stalin as one fisherman picks out another from afar.

  Those obliged to play the customer to Khrennikov’s shop clerk liked to tell a certain story about him. One day, the First Secretary of the Union of Composers was summoned to the Kremlin to discuss candidates for the Stalin Prize. The list had been drawn up as usual by the Union, but it was Stalin who made the final choice. On this occasion, and for whatever reason, Stalin decided not to play the avuncular Helmsman, but to remind the clerk of his own humble standing. Khrennikov was shown in; Stalin ignored him, pretending to work. Khrennikov became more and more anxious. Stalin looked up. Khrennikov mumbled something about the list of candidates. In return, Stalin ‘gave him the eye’, as they say. And immediately, Khrennikov shat himself. Panicked, and babbling some excuse, he fled from the presence of Power. Outside, he found a couple of burly male nurses, well used to such a response, who grabbed him, took him to a special room, hosed him down, cleaned him up, let him recover himself, and gave him back his trousers.

  Such behaviour was not, of course, abnormal. And you certainly did not despise a man for the weakness of his bowels when in the presence of a tyrant who could obliterate anybody on a whim. No, what you despised Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov for was this: that he recounted his shame with rapture.

  Now Stalin was gone, and Zhdanov was gone, and tyranny was repudiated – but Khrennikov was still there, unbudgeable, sucking up to the new bosses as he had sucked up to the old ones; admitting that, yes, some mistakes might have been made, but if so, all had happily been corrected. Khrennikov would outlast them all, of course, but some day even he would die. Unless this was one law of nature which didn’t apply: perhaps Tikhon Khrennikov would live for ever, a permanent and necessary symbol of the man who loved Power and knew how to make it love him back. And if not Khrennikov himself, then his doubles and his descendants: they would live on for ever, regardless of how society changed.

  He liked to think that he wasn’t afraid of death. It was life he was afraid of, not death. He believed that people should think about death more often, and accustom themselves to the notion of it. Just letting it creep up on you unnoticed was not the best way to live. You should make yourself familiar with it. You should write about it: either in words or, in his case, music. It was his belief that if we thought about death earlier in our lives, we would make fewer mistakes.

  Not that he hadn’t made a lot of mistakes himself.

  And sometimes he thought that he would have made the same number of mistakes even if he hadn’t been so frequently concerned with death.

  And sometimes he thought that death was indeed the thing that terrified him the most.

  His second marriage: that had been one of his mistakes. Nita had died, and then, barely a year later, his mother had died. The two strongest female presences in his life: his guides, instructors, protectresses. He had been very lonely. His opera had just been murdered a second time. He knew that he was incapable of frivolous relationships with women; he needed a wife by his side. And so, while serving as chairman of the jury for Best Massed Choir at the World Festival of Youth, his eye had fallen on Margarita. Some said she resembled Nina Vasilievna, but he couldn’t see it himself. She worked for the Communist Youth Organisation, and had perhaps been deliberately placed in his way, though that was no excuse. She had no knowledge of, and little interest in, music. She had tried to please, but failed. None of his friends liked her, or approved of the marriage, which of course had taken place suddenly and secretly. Galya and Maxim did not take to her – what could he expect, when she had so quickly replaced their mother? – and therefore she did not take to them. One day, when she was complaining about them, he said, with a completely straight face,

  ‘Why don’t we kill the children, then we can live happily ever after?’

  She neither understood the remark, nor seemed to realise that it was humorous.

  They separated, then divorced. It was not her fault: it was entirely his. He had put Margarita in an impossible position. In his loneliness, he had panicked. Well, that was nothing new.

  As well as running volleyball competitions, he had also served as a tennis umpire. Once, at a sanatorium in the Crimea reserved for government officials, he had found himself in charge of a match involving General Serov, then head of the KGB. Whenever the general disputed a let or a line-call, he would take pleasure in his temporary authority. ‘No arguing with the umpire,’ he would command. This had been one of the few conversations with Power that he had enjoyed.

  Had he been naive? Of course. But then, he had become so used to threats and intimidations and vile abuse that he was not as suspicious of praise and welcoming words as he should have been. Nor was he the only dupe. When Nikita the Corncob denounced the Cult of Personality, when Stalin’s errors were acknowledged and some of his victims posthumously rehabilitated, when people started returning from the camps, and when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, how could men and women fail to hope? No matter that the toppling of Stalin meant the restoration of Lenin, that changes of political line were often merely intended to outflank rivals, and that Solzhenitsyn’s novel was in his opinion reality varnished over, and the truth ten times worse: even so, how could men and women fail to hope, or believe that the new rulers were better than the old ones?

  And that, of course, was the point at which the grabbing hands reached out towards him. See how things have changed, Dmitri Dmitrievich, how you are garlanded with honours, an ornament of the nation, how we let you travel abroad to receive prizes and degrees as an ambassador of the Soviet Union – see how we value you! We trust the dacha and the chauffeur are to your satisfaction, is there anything else you require, Dmitri Dmitrievich, have another g
lass of vodka, your car will be waiting however many times we clink glasses. Life under the First Secretary is so much better, would you not agree?

  And by any scale of measurement, he had to agree. It was better, in the way that the life of a prisoner in solitary confinement is improved if he is given a cellmate, allowed to climb up to the bars and sniff the autumn air, and if the warder no longer spits in his soup – at least, not in the prisoner’s presence. Yes, in that sense it was better. Which is why, Dmitri Dmitrievich, the Party wants to hug you to its bosom. We all remember how you were victimised during the Cult of Personality, but the Party has indulged in fruitful self-criticism. Happier times have come. So all we would like from you is an acknowledgement that the Party has changed. Which is not much to ask, is it, Dmitri Dmitrievich?

  Dmitri Dmitrievich. All those years ago, he was intended to be Yaroslav Dmitrievich. Until his father and mother had allowed themselves to be talked out of the name by a bullying priest. You could say that his parents were merely displaying good manners, and proper piety, under their own roof. Or you could say that he had been born – or at least christened – beneath the star of cowardice.

  The man they chose for his Third and Final Conversation with Power was Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov. Member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Federation, chief ideologist of the Party throughout the Forties, former editor of Pravda, author of one of those books he had failed to read when tutored by Comrade Troshin. A plausible face with one of his six Orders of Lenin in his buttonhole. Pospelov had been a great supporter of Stalin until he became a great supporter of Khrushchev. He could explain fluently how Stalin’s defeat of Trotsky had preserved the purity of Leninism in the Soviet Union. Nowadays Stalin was out of favour but Lenin was back in favour. A few more turns of the wheel and Nikita the Corncob would be out of favour; a few more after that and perhaps Stalin and Stalinism would be back. And the Pospelovs of this world – like the Khrennikovs – would sense each shift before it came, would have their ear to the ground and their eye to the main chance and their wetted finger in the air to apprehend any change of wind.