The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

  People found it so funny, he suspected, not just because Maxim was a natural comedian, not just because they enjoyed Bulgarian jokes, but for another, deeper reason: because the little sketch was so perfectly suggestive. Over-complicated manoeuvres to achieve the simplest of ends; stupidity; self-congratulation; imperviousness to outside opinion; repetition of the same mistakes. Did not all this, magnified across millions and millions of lives, mirror how things had been under the sun of Stalin’s constitution: a vast catalogue of little farces adding up to an immense tragedy?

  Or, to take a different image, one from his own childhood: that summer house of theirs at Irinovka, on that estate rich from the swathes of peat beneath it. The house from some dream or nightmare, with vast rooms and tiny windows, which made adults laugh and children shiver with fright. And now he realised that the country in which he had lived for so long was like that too. It was as if, when drawing up their plans for Soviet Russia, the architects had been thoughtful, meticulous and well-intentioned, but had failed at a very basic level: they had mistaken metres for centimetres, and sometimes the other way round. With the result that the House of Communism was built all disproportionate, and lacking in human scale. It gave you dreams, it gave you nightmares, and it made everyone – adults and children alike – fearful.

  That phrase, so painstakingly applied by the bureaucrats and musicologists who had examined his Fifth Symphony, would be better attached to the Revolution itself, and the Russia that had come out of it: an optimistic tragedy.

  Just as he could not control his mind’s rememberings, he could not prevent its constant, vain interrogations. The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.

  So: your talent lies beneath you like a swathe of peat. How much have you cut? How much remains uncut? Few artists cut only the best sections; or even, sometimes, recognise them as such. And in his own case, thirty years and more ago, they had erected a barbed-wire fence with a warning sign: DO NOT CROSS THIS POINT. Who knew what lay – what might have lain – beyond the wire?

  A related question: how much bad music is a good composer allowed? Once, he thought he knew the answer; now, he had no idea. He had written a lot of bad music for a lot of very bad films. Though you could say that his music’s badness made those films even worse, and thus rendered a service to truth and art. Or was that just sophistry?

  The final wail in his head was about his life as well as his art. It was this: at what point does pessimism become desolation? His last chamber works articulated that question. He told the violist Fyodor Druzhinin that the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played ‘so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom’.

  All his life he had relied on irony. He imagined that the trait had been born in the usual place: in the gap between how we imagine, or suppose, or hope life will turn out, and the way it actually does. So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul; it lets you breathe on a day-to-day basis. You write in a letter that someone is ‘a marvellous person’ and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. Irony allows you to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin’s portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter. You welcome the appointment of a new Minister of Culture by commenting that there will be especial rejoicing in progressive musical circles, which have always placed their greatest hopes in him. You write a final movement to your Fifth Symphony which is the equivalent of painting a clown’s grin on a corpse, then listen with a straight face to Power’s response: ‘Look, you can see he died happy, certain of the righteous and inevitable triumph of the Revolution.’ And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony, you would be able to survive.

  For instance, in the year in which he joined the Party, he wrote his Eighth Quartet. He told his friends that in his mind the work was dedicated ‘to the memory of the composer’. Which would clearly have been regarded by the musical authorities as unacceptably egotistical and pessimistic. And so the dedication on the published score eventually read: ‘To the Victims of Fascism and War’. This would no doubt have been viewed as a great improvement. But all he had really done was turn a singular into a plural.

  However, he was no longer so sure. There could be a smugness to irony, as there could be a complacency to protest. A farm boy throws an apple core at a passing, chauffeur-driven car. A drunken beggar pulls down his trousers and bares his bottom to respectable folk. A distinguished Soviet composer inserts subtle mockery into a symphony or a string quartet. Was there a difference, either in motive, or in effect?

  Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered any more, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else? He had inserted into his first cello concerto a reference to ‘Suliko’, Stalin’s favourite song. But Rostropovich had played straight over it without noticing. If the allusion had to be pointed out to Slava, who else in the world would ever spot it?

  And irony had its limits. For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture. Equally, you couldn’t join the Party ironically. You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically: those were the only two possibilities. And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible. His younger self, by the side of the road, would see in the back of that car some wizened old sunflower, no longer turning towards the sun of Stalin’s constitution, but still heliotropic, still drawn to the light-source of Power.

  If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

  Beneath the glass of his desktop at the dacha in Zhukhova was an enormous photograph of Mussorgsky looking ursine and disapproving: it urged him to throw away inferior work. Beneath the glass of his desktop at his Moscow apartment was an enormous photograph of Stravinsky, the greatest composer of the century: it urged him to write the best music he could. And always, on his bedside table, was that postcard he had brought back from Dresden: of Titian’s The Tribute Money.

  The Pharisees had tried to trick Jesus by asking him if the Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar. As Power, throughout history, always tried to dupe and subvert those it felt threatened by. He himself had tried not to fall for Power’s tricks, but he was not Jesus Christ, only Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. And while Jesus’s reply to the Pharisee who showed him Caesar’s golden image was in fact usefully ambiguous – he did not specify what exactly belonged to God and what to Caesar – this was not a line he could repeat himself. ‘Render unto art that which is art’s?’ Such was the creed of art for art’s sake, of formalism, egocentric pessimism, revisionism, and all the other -isms thrown at him down the years. And Power’s reply would always be the same: ‘Repeat after me,’ it would say, ‘ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE – V. I. LENIN. ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE – V. I. LENIN.’

  And so, he would die soon, probably during the next leap year. Then, one by one, they would all die: his friends and enemies; those who understood the complexities of life under tyranny, and those who would have preferred him to be a martyr; those who knew and loved his music, and a few old men who still whistled ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ without even knowing who had written it. All would die – except, perhaps, Khrennikov.

  During his last years, he increasingly used the marking morendo in his string quartets: ‘dying away’, ‘as if dying’. It was how he marked his own life too. Well, few lives ended fortissimo and in the major. And no one died at the right time. Mussorgsky, Pushkin, Lermontov – th
ey had all died too soon. Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gogol – they all should have died earlier; perhaps Beethoven as well. It was, of course, not just a problem for famous writers and composers, but for ordinary people too: the problem of living beyond your best span, beyond that point where life can no longer bring joy, instead only disappointment and dreadful happenings.

  So, he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself. This was often the way with artists: either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment. Nowadays, he was often inclined to think of himself as a dull, mediocre composer. The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

  And beyond death? He felt like raising a silent glass with the toast, ‘Here’s hoping it doesn’t get any better than this!’ If death would come as a relief from life, with its fur-lined humiliations, he did not expect things would become less complicated. Look what had happened to poor Prokofiev. Five years after his death, just as the memorial plaques were being installed across Moscow, his first wife was instructing lawyers to get the composer’s second marriage annulled. And on what grounds! The grounds being that ever since his return to Russia in 1936, Sergei Sergeyevich had been impotent. Therefore his second marriage couldn’t have been consummated; therefore she, the first wife, was his only legal wife, and his only legal heir. She was even demanding an affidavit from the doctor who had examined Sergei Sergeyevich two decades previously that his incapacity had been established as an irrefutable fact.

  But this was what happened. They came and delved between your sheets. Hey, Shosti, do your prefer blondes or brunettes? They looked for any weakness, any filth they could find. And they would always find something. The gossips and myth-mongers had their own version of formalism, as defined by Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev: anything we cannot understand on first hearing is probably immoral and disgusting – that was their attitude. And they would do with his life what they wished.

  As for his music: he didn’t suffer from the illusion that time would separate the good from the bad. He did not see why posterity should be able to calibrate quality better than those for whom the music was written. He was too disillusioned for that. Posterity would approve what it would approve. He knew all too well how composers’ reputations rose and fell; how some were wrongly forgotten, and others mysteriously immortal. His modest wish for the future was that ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’ would continue to make men weep, however badly it was sung through some cracked amplifier in a cheap cafe; while, further along the road, an audience might be silently moved by one of his string quartets; and that, perhaps, one day not long ahead, both audiences might overlap and mingle.

  He had instructed his family not to concern themselves with his ‘immortality’. His music should be played on its merit, not because of some posthumous campaign. Among the many petitioners who besieged him nowadays was the widow of a well-known composer. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody’ – such was her constant refrain. She was always telling him that he only had to ‘lift the receiver’ and instruct this or that person to play her late husband’s music. He had done so many times, at first out of pity and politeness, later just to get rid of the woman. But it was never enough. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody.’ And so he would lift the receiver yet again.

  But one day the familiar words had provoked more than the familiar exasperation in him. So he had replied solemnly, ‘Yes … yes … And Johann Sebastian Bach had twenty children and they all promoted his music.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed the widow. ‘And that is why his music is still being played today!’

  What he hoped was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life. Time would pass, and though musicologists would continue their debates, his work would begin to stand for itself. History, as well as biography, would fade: perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in textbooks. And then, if it still had value – if there were still ears to hear – his music would be … just music. That was all a composer could hope for. Whom does music belong to, he had asked that trembling student, and though the reply was written in capital letters on a banner behind her interrogator’s head, the girl could not answer. Not being able to answer was the correct answer. Because music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for.

  The beggar would be long dead by now, and Dmitri Dmitrievich had almost immediately forgotten what he had said. But the one whose name is lost to history remembered. He was the one who made sense of it, who understood. They were in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a war, in the middle of all kinds of suffering within that war. There was a long station platform, on which the sun had just come up. There was a man, half a man really, wheeling himself along on a trolley, attached to it by a rope threaded through the top of his trousers. The two passengers had a bottle of vodka. They descended from the train. The beggar stopped singing his filthy song. Dmitri Dmitrievich held the bottle, he the glasses. Dmitri Dmitrievich poured vodka into each glass; as he did so, a wristlet of garlic slipped into view. He was no barman, and the level of vodka in each glass was slightly different. The beggar saw only what came out of the bottle; while he was thinking how Mitya was always anxious to help others, though temperamentally incapable of helping himself. But Dmitri Dmitrievich was listening, and hearing, as he always did. So when the three glasses with their different levels came together in a single chink, he had smiled, and put his head on one side so that the sunlight flashed briefly off his spectacles, and murmured,

  ‘A triad.’

  And that was what the one who remembered had remembered. War, fear, poverty, typhus and filth, yet in the middle of it, above it and beneath it and through it all, Dmitri Dmitrievich had heard a perfect triad. The war would end, no doubt – unless it never did. Fear would continue, and unwarranted death, and poverty and filth – perhaps they too would continue for ever, who could tell. And yet a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.

  Author’s note

  Shostakovich died on 9 August 1975, five months before the start of the next leap year.

  Nicolas Nabokov, his tormentor at the New York Peace Congress, was indeed funded by the CIA. Stravinsky’s aloofness from the congress was not just ‘ethic and esthetic’, as his telegram maintained, but also political. As his biographer Stephen Walsh puts it, ‘Like all White Russians in postwar America, Stravinsky … was certainly not going to jeopardise his hard-won status as a loyal American by the slightest appearance of supporting a pro-Communist propaganda exercise.’

  Tikhon Khrennikov did not, as in Shostakovich’s (fictional) apprehension, prove immortal; but he did the next best thing, running the Union of Soviet Composers from its refounding in 1948 to its eventual collapse, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Forty-eight years on from 1948, he was still giving slickly bland interviews, claiming that Shostakovich was a cheerful man who had nothing to be frightened of. (The composer Vladimir Rubin commented: ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep.’) Khrennikov never disappeared from view, nor lost his love of Power: in 2003, he was decorated by Vladimir Putin. He finally died in 2007, at the age of ninety-four.

  Shostakovich was a multiple narrator of his own life. Some stories come in many versions, worked up and ‘improved’ over the years. Others – for instance, what happened at the Big House in Leningrad – exist only in a single version, told many years after the composer’s death, by a single source. More broadly, truth was a hard thing to find, let alone maintain, in Stalin’s Russia. Even the names mutate uncertainly: so,
Shostakovich’s interrogator at the Big House is variously given as Zanchevsky, Zakrevsky and Zakovsky. All this is highly frustrating to any biographer, but most welcome to any novelist.

  The Shostakovich bibliography is considerable, and musicologists will recognise my two main sources: Elizabeth Wilson’s exemplary, multi-faceted Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994; revised edition 2006), and Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich as related to Solomon Volkov (1979). When published, Volkov’s book caused a commotion in both East and West, and the so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’ rumbled on for decades. I have treated it as I would a private diary: as appearing to give the full truth, yet usually written at the same time of day, in the same prevailing mood, with the same prejudices and forgettings. Other useful sources include Isaak Glikman’s Story of a Friendship (2001) and Michael Ardov’s interviews with the composer’s children, published as Memories of Shostakovich (2004).