3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  The road to professionalism wasn’t easy. He attended classes on days when the air inside the Conservatoire felt too cold to breathe, or when Professor Steinberg turned up an hour late and all the other students had left, grumbling. Stubbornly, he sat on, playing two hands of a four-handed transcription to keep himself warm. Occasionally he was joined by Dmitri Shostakovich, who took the melodic part as a matter of course, playing fast, loudly and with flair. Rather than looking at the sheet music, he seemed to look past it, into a cavernous place behind the written notes that Elias could only guess at.

  ‘A professional?’ repeated Shostakovich, on one of the rare occasions when they exchanged more than a basic greeting. ‘Of course! I’ve been a professional since I began playing. Since the age of nine.’ He buttoned his thin coat around his thin torso and marched away to the library. Elias watched him go with an odd feeling in his stomach: an envy so strong it almost amounted to anger.

  When Elias was knocked from his bicycle, cracking three vertebrae and suffering nerve damage to the third and fourth fingers of his left hand, his mother wept for days. His brilliant career as an instrumentalist was over! He was washed up before he had begun! Elias had no time to lament; he was too preoccupied with recovering, and then he was too busy reassessing his career. After lying on his back for three and a half weeks, he limped into Professor Ferkelman’s office, and emerged an hour later with a new major.

  Some would consider it making the best of a bad situation but, looking back, Elias saw it as a turning point. Standing on the podium was like facing the world alone, which was, after all, what he was used to. Years later, stepping in front of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra for his first rehearsal, he wished with equal measures of scorn and regret that his father could see him. The grinding years of hardship, apprenticeship and the utmost loneliness had paid off. He was a real conductor, with his own musicians. The orchestra stretched before him, a sea of restless movements and indistinct noise. When he tapped the side of his music stand with his brand new baton, he felt as if the small noise might shatter his body.

  Night watch

  Unsettled by the news of the German evacuation, exhausted from teaching, Shostakovich was unable to sleep. He twisted over and over in his bed until he was wound tightly in the sheet like an Egyptian mummy.

  The treachery of the body! On nights like these he wanted Nina, her long toes twined in his and her cool rounded stomach against his back. He bitterly resented her — for not being there, and for making him need her.

  The clock on the mantelpiece struck two. Two and a half minutes later came the tinny chime from the church on Kovenskiy Pereulok, and one minute later a more commanding clang from Kazan Cathedral. He threw the pillow off his head and onto the floor. Why in God’s name was it impossible for Russians to fix anything? For three years, since the night of Maxim’s birth when he’d first noticed it, these clocks had been predictably out of time.

  ‘I’m bored.’ He spoke to the whispering dust on the floorboards, to the creaking springs of the wedding bed given to him by his mother (an attempt to prove she didn’t mind her son marrying a most unsuitable girl). ‘Bored, so bored, at our petty and predictable human ways.’

  Somewhere in the house a door slammed. He stiffened and watched the branches tap at the window. Who could be up and about at this time, except composers and drunkards? He knew he was watched — for all he knew, Stalin’s men were watching right now, crouched in one of the buildings opposite. For some years he’d kept a bag in a cupboard on the landing: two clean undershirts, a toothbrush and razor, pencils and score paper. ‘I won’t let them have the satisfaction of a public removal,’ he vowed to Nina. ‘I won’t have my children remembering their father being forcibly taken from his home.’

  The knife-edge danger of being public property, the possibility of falling from grace at any time — these were constant fears. The stifling irritation of daily existence was another problem altogether.

  ‘There’s nothing new under the sun,’ he’d complained recently to Nina.

  ‘You’re always saying you need a monotonous existence to work properly.’ Annoyingly, Nina had the abilities of a court lawyer, reproducing his most sweeping pronouncements as evidence against him.

  He shrugged away his own words. ‘It’s not healthy, being able to predict what will happen.’

  ‘What will happen?’ she asked, mocking him slightly.

  ‘I will crank out another movement of a piano quartet, my students will surprise me with their stupidity. Maxim will learn a few more words, Galina will learn another way of tricking her grandmother at cards. Hitler will continue his march. Churchill will continue to be exasperated by Roosevelt. Stalin will stick his head more deeply in the sand.’

  But in the past few days the heaviness had become altogether more than this. On the surface, life proceeded at its usual pace, but Shostakovich felt as if some menace lay clenched under the city, ready to uncoil and spring.

  Was that a rat scrabbling in the wall beside the bed? He thought he felt something run across his face — rasping claws, a dragging leathery slither, a foul breath mixing with his — and he shivered. His insomnia was like a plague; already the fever was starting in his joints. He dipped his finger in a glass of water and smoothed the moisture over his hot eyelids. ‘Sleep now,’ he said, as if he were talking to Maxim.

  But his mind was stretched as tightly as rope. Out of nowhere came Herr Lehmann, the German diplomat who had fled the city, marching with his family along a wide road. Legs bent in perfect unison, swinging out and back, joined by a single note — was it a repeated C? — which moved their limbs like strings on puppets. Their feet pointed straight ahead, never deviating from the black-ink markings on the road. (Five parallel markings: now it was recognisable as a musical stave.) The Lehmanns moved unerringly forward, turning only their heads as they peered from side to side, searching for their home country.

  A pattern started up in his head, rising and falling in regular peaks. ‘C to G,’ he muttered. ‘C to G.’ Trapped in an endlessly repeated progression, he could neither struggle awake nor escape, and he was filled with dread. ‘Steady,’ he mumbled. ‘Focus on what you know.’ But the white moulded ceiling, the mantelpiece clock, the glass of water: all had vanished. Thudding boots shook the bed, and he saw the machine-like movement of a hundred bodies, flashing teeth, the sun glancing off the curve of an eagle’s beak. Through the din emerged Sollertinsky’s mocking voice. ‘Don’t you understand? The Germans are evacuating.’

  Helplessly, Shostakovich watched the lines of people marching away. When one of the women turned, he thought he knew her. ‘Nina?’ But as she began striding back towards him, her face blurred and coarsened. ‘You remember me,’ she hissed. ‘They call me Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.’ And she leapt at him, and her hands were around his throat, and he choked and screamed — and woke.

  Sweat lay thickly on his body, the sheet was wet through. He pulled on his trousers and coat, and shuffled towards the piano. At last the room was silent, and the strange low light of the night sun showed nothing but empty corners. He bent over the piano, resting his forehead on the wood, then laid his hands on the keys.

  The repeated nightmare pattern was still there, absorbed in his fingers. He picked it out with his left hand and grasped a pencil with his right. Seizing a new sheet of paper, he licked the tip of the pencil and began to write. Halting yet unerring — it was like following a sunken road, covered for centuries by soil and grass, that was slowly revealing itself.

  God, he was tired. Damn Sollertinsky and his unsettling news. Damn Nina for being neither goddess nor whore nor mother figure, but some mixture of the three, making him worship her, lust for her and need her. Damn the tyrannical, homely, grounding ties of family. And above all damn himself and all his neurotic, unavoidable tricks that had to be fought through before he could begin composing. More than anything he wanted to sleep, but the marching notes were clustering in his veins.

  Only when a
dog barked — three, four, five times — did he look up. The light filtering through the trees was bright gold. The bed was a tangled mess of sheets and pillows washed up against the wall. Morning was here. Throwing off his coat, he crashed across the mattress and fell into sleep.

  In Sollertinsky’s office

  Late afternoon, and the dust motes were swirling in the sunlight. Sollertinsky’s meeting with an attractive student was about to end — though not as pleasantly as he would have liked.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ he said reluctantly, ‘that I really cannot alter your grade.’ He watched as Lydia’s huge eyes began to brim with tears. ‘Of course, had I the power to make such a decision single-handedly, I would be delighted to do so.’ This was true: Lydia’s presence in class was a joy. She sat in the front row, looking at him as if his lectures were enthralling; her sweaters were so tight it was difficult to imagine how she wrestled them on each morning. ‘Delighted,’ he repeated, tearing his gaze away from her breasts, which were rising and falling in delectable distress.

  ‘So,’ gulped Lydia, ‘I am stuck with a — with a —’ She seemed unable to voice the grade scribbled on her paper, and she bowed her head so that Sollertinsky could see the nape of her neck tapering into the depths of her astounding jumper.

  ‘Remember, there’s always next term! If you spend the summer studying, that might make all the difference.’ Although he tried to sound encouraging, he doubted whether she would be allowed back to the Conservatoire. For someone so pretty, she was remarkably untalented.

  ‘Forgive me.’ She raised a streaky, doe-like face. ‘I shouldn’t cry in front of a lecturer, especially such an important one as you.’

  ‘Oh come,’ said Sollertinsky. ‘I’ve seen plenty of students cry in my time. There’s nothing wrong with tears.’

  ‘You’re very kind.’ Lydia’s voice was as trembling and luminous as the dust dancing in the air behind her. ‘I’m afraid I must look a mess.’

  ‘Not at all. Many women are at their most beautiful after crying. Their faces have a newly washed look, a kind of purity.’

  For the past ten minutes, he had been thinking longingly of the brandy stowed behind his leather-bound copies of Beethoven’s orchestral works. Now, as Lydia gave a small but radiant smile, he was no longer sure if he wanted her to leave. There was a short, anticipatory silence, during which he became uncomfortably aware of his second wife’s scrutiny from the photo frame on his desk.

  He cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘Will that be all?’ He sounded like a grocer wrapping up spring greens for a favoured customer. ‘Anything else I can help you with?’ Not, of course, that he had helped her at all — nor, on this fine Monday afternoon, had his concentration been aided by her tearful face and delicious body. He walked to the window, casually turning his wife’s photograph away so her steely gaze was trained on the Dictionary of Musicology rather than himself.

  ‘Nothing else,’ said Lydia, showing little sign of vacating her chair.

  Sollertinsky kept his back turned. Below him students were spilling out onto the Conservatoire steps. In the street, mothers and children walked hand in hand; a tram clattered past, swaying on its domino-tracks. The light was so bright that, when he turned back to Lydia, for a second he could see nothing at all.

  ‘I hear that you’re good friends with Mr Shostakovich.’ Lydia’s voice filtered into his dazzled vision. ‘And that there will be a performance of his Sixth Symphony in a fortnight?’ She stopped, her desire for a ticket — and perhaps something more — hanging in the air.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ But he spoke automatically. He’d just noticed a line of smoke creeping under his door, rising in a spiral against the panelled walls like a snake lured by a charmer’s flute. ‘I meant to say,’ he corrected himself, ‘although I’d like to offer you one of my tickets, it isn’t de rigueur, considering my position at the school, and your —’ Just in time, he stopped himself from saying considerable allure.

  The strong tar-smoke was familiar. Reluctantly, he held out a hand to Lydia. ‘Allow me to see you out.’

  As she paused beside him, she pushed her shiny hair behind one ear, and he caught the tempting scent of rosewater and skin. Nonetheless, he opened the door, and Lydia stepped out onto the landing, keeping her eyes fixed on his face so that she failed to see the figure sitting at the top of the stairs. ‘Oh!’ she cried, almost falling.

  ‘Careful now!’ The man grabbed her shapely ankle with one hand, while plumes of smoke poured from his loosely rolled cigarette. Lydia coughed. ‘Excuse me!’ she said, sounding genuinely flustered. ‘I didn’t know it was you. That is, I didn’t see you!’ With a flurry of hair and heels, she departed rapidly, less femme fatale than embarrassed teenager.

  Sollertinsky watched her disappear down the curved stairwell before he spoke. ‘Dmitri Shostakovich,’ he said, holding out both hands. ‘You may not be as comely as my last visitor but you’re welcome all the same.’

  Grasping the stair rail, Shostakovich pulled himself to his feet and picked up his books. ‘It’s about time you finished your tête à tête. Did you want your old friend to die of chain smoking?’ A pile of grainy butts lay in a bottle top on the floor.

  ‘You smell like a bonfire,’ said Sollertinsky. ‘Care to come in for a spot of Beethoven?’

  ‘Absolutely!’ Shostakovich followed him back into the office. ‘Did you fail that girl?’

  ‘I had no choice. Fortunately for her, her looks will compensate for her astounding lack of brains. Once she gives up this musical nonsense, she’ll find a husband who — the lucky sod — will keep her in clover for the rest of her life. But now, on to more important matters.’ He reached behind Beethoven’s Second Symphony and extracted the brandy bottle. ‘To whom shall we toast? Pretty girls with large — ahem — I mean, pretty girls with little brain?’

  Shostakovich swirled the brown liquid in his glass.

  ‘You prefer to drink to something worthier?’ queried Sollertinsky.

  ‘Yes. To sleep!’ Shostakovich swallowed the brandy in one gulp and held out his glass for more.

  Sollertinsky tilted the bottle with careless finesse. ‘What have you been doing to yourself, my friend? I thought the Romances on Verses were wed and put to bed?’

  ‘Nowhere near.’ Shostakovich’s eyes were red-rimmed. ‘They went cold on me. Now I’m onto something else altogether.’ He lay back in his chair. ‘A kind of march, I think.’

  Sollertinsky groaned. ‘Not a march. Well, I have to support you, whatever nonsense you’re up to. But whatever will Mravinsky say?’

  ‘I don’t care what Mravinsky says.’ Shostakovich looked mutinous. ‘Let him stick his baton where the sun doesn’t shine. Anyway, I might not let him near it — whatever it is, whenever it is finished.’

  His words held no truth: everyone knew that Yevgeny Mravinsky, at the helm of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, was the only conductor Shostakovich trusted, and it had been this way for the past three years, ever since their roaring battles over the Fifth Symphony, when Shostakovich had sat stony-faced in the fourth row, refusing to offer suggestions, and Mravinsky sat at the piano, thumping out every melody at the wrong speed until he’d finally provoked Shostakovich into action. By the fifth rehearsal, metronome markings had been written into the score and a firm friendship had developed, cemented by Mravinsky’s being awarded the All-Union Competition for Conductors with Shostakovich’s symphony.

  ‘Anyway,’ added Shostakovich, in a kind of protestation, ‘there was a march in the Fifth! At least, the hint of a march. And I haven’t done one since.’

  ‘So you’re entitled to a march. Whatever lights your fire. But I fear for your domestic harmony. I don’t expect your mood will be improved by working on a march.’

  Shostakovich swigged another mouthful of brandy. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Some kind of foreboding.’ He looked sombrely into his glass. ‘What will we do if the rumours are true and the Germans are planning to
double-cross us?’

  Sollertinsky walked back to the window. ‘I don’t know. At any rate, we’ll be told what to do — or it will be “suggested” to us. Since when did we have what’s commonly called a choice?’

  Shostakovich joined him at the windowsill, gazing out at the crowded pavements, the bustling women with their baskets, the buildings throwing long shadows across the streets. ‘What will be, will be. But I promise you, I won’t leave Leningrad willingly.’ Sighing, he suddenly became practical. ‘I promised Nina I’d be home before Maxim’s bedtime. What’s the time?’

  ‘Twenty-five past six,’ said Sollertinsky, without looking at his watch.

  ‘Damn! Are you sure?’

  ‘I’d bet my monthly salary on it.’ Sollertinsky pointed to a figure rushing across the square. ‘Karl Eliasberg. He always hurries but he’s never late. As regular as a Swiss metronome and twice as reliable. Do you know, I bumped into him last week and he dropped a score of Mahler! Rather incongruous for an old stick insect like Elias — but apparently he has a passion for the music.’

  ‘What?’ Shostakovich was picking up his books, and dropping them again, and knocking papers off Sollertinsky’s desk, and finishing his third brandy.

  ‘Mahler,’ repeated Sollertinsky. ‘Elias must know there’s no hope of performing that German music — not now, possibly never again. Still, he seems almost as obsessed with it as you are.’

  ‘I can’t think about Mahler right now, nor Karl What’s-his-name-Berg. I absolutely must get home.’

  ‘Calm down! I’ll see you out!’ Sollertinsky placed the nearly empty brandy bottle back in its hiding place. ‘Cheers, Ludwig. Don’t drink it all in our absence.’

  As they were leaving the office, they heard a door slam and quick footsteps on the landing above. Shostakovich peered up the stairwell. ‘Hello there! Many thanks for the other night!’