by Ben Creed
He turned and stared back across the square at the Kirov Theatre, with its green and white stuccoed walls. The two buildings were separated by only a few hundred feet, but the musical journey between them – that of starting out as a student at the conservatory and ending up on stage or in the pit of the Kirov – was a chasm. Nevertheless, it was one his old violin teachers had expected him to make. Until he had been diverted to make his confession to Major Nikitin.
*
Inside the conservatory, everything was just as he remembered. Branching out from a central staircase were long, airy corridors of rooms for practising, teaching and lectures. As a student, he loved to linger here in the evenings, when lessons were over but the rooms still full. Better to practise here than in the hostel, where other students were always crashing around, shouting and singing.
If you walked slowly enough along these corridors you could wander into a Beethoven sonata and pass through into a Chopin étude, like slipping through an aural curtain – passing from one reality to the next, from C minor to A-flat major, from darkness into light. You could stop and moor yourself in one world for a while or move on to the edge of another; something comforting and familiar yet, at the same time, hard to discern until you took only two more steps and passed into the storms of a Rachmaninov prelude. And all the time, out on the edge of hearing, out on the edge of your very self, was the siren call of a Tchaikovsky violin concerto, or the sarabande from a Bach cello suite, or an aria from The Tsar’s Bride.
It was, Sofia had once said, a little like being in Heaven’s aviary.
The halls were busy with chattering students moving between the classrooms and the rehearsal halls but he spotted Professor Lebedeva immediately. She walked directly towards him. She looked older, of course, he tried to calculate her age – mid-sixties now, at least. Her hair, once garishly red, was now almost completely white. She was still trim and behind some small wire-framed glasses – a new addition – her green eyes flashed the intelligence that he had always found, even as her student, a little beguiling.
‘Revol, it really is you!’
‘Yes, Professor, it really is.’
He took a step forward and kissed her formally on the cheeks, three times.
*
Rossel brought out his notebook and opened it at a place where he had written down all four names and, then, a question mark to signify the still unidentified fifth victim.
Sofia Fedotova
Maxim Avdeyev
Felix Sorokin
Nadya Bazhanova
?
They were sitting before the stage of the conservatory’s concert hall, beneath an ornate ceiling on which were painted clouds, cherubs and a muse in a Grecian robe playing a golden harp. The walls of the room were pure white and crystal chandeliers glittered in the October sunlight that shone through a row of large, arched windows.
Rossel had performed here countless times but all those memories eluded him. Instead, it was Sofia whose presence filled him, just as it filled the concert hall – the pang of jealousy he had felt seeing her laughing with another student after a rehearsal, jealousy he could still taste. The longing as he watched her prepare for a solo in one of the Mahler lieder, eyeing her from his seat in the orchestra.
His sense of Sofia, of everything he had lost, was tangible here, in this grand room, amongst the ghosts of their shared past and, for a moment, he was lost.
He tapped on the notebook with a finger, using this small motion to pull himself back together.
‘Do you remember them, Professor?’
Professor Lebedeva glanced down at the notebook and then back up at him.
‘Felix, yes, naturally, how could I forget Felix? So mischievous. And of course, I taught him, as I did you. I used to wonder why he bothered, frankly, given the amazing amount of practice he didn’t do. I nearly kicked him out of my class but he was entertaining so we would talk instead of playing. He was the only lazy student I have ever tolerated. A real charmer.’
Lebedeva glanced down at the four names again and sighed.
‘Memories. Sofia, so charming and sweet. Beautiful of heart. Her voice had a magical purity about it, though she had yet to learn control. The other two, I have some recollection of the names, but that’s all really. I have been teaching violin here for twenty years now. That’s a lot of students. And not all of them as talented as you, such a shame. What happened?’
‘The war happened, Professor.’
‘Do you miss playing?’
Rossel shook his head.
‘No. Not anymore.’
He put the notebook away.
‘What else connects them?’ asked the professor. ‘Sofia, I knew through you, but those two, Maxim and Nadya, well, so many students pass through this conservatory.’ She tapped her cigarette into a metal ashtray. Beneath her calm demeanour she could be an absolute tyrant. It was considered all but impossible to get into her class, and certainly impossible to please her once you got there. ‘We lost so many students, past and present, during the war and since. From the German bombs, the siege and the starvation. I used to dream of food. One night I dreamt it was New Year’s Eve and instead of making dumplings I had married one.’ Lebedeva smiled but the smile did not last.
‘It is bad to be on a list. They must be in danger,’ she added.
‘Not anymore,’ said Rossel. ‘They are all dead.’
She recoiled and crossed herself, then caught herself doing it and stopped.
‘Why are you here?’ she said, looking him in the eye – no longer reminiscing with a favourite old student but confronting a man in uniform who was talking of the dead.
‘I am asking people who knew the victims.’
‘But why me?’ Professor Lebedeva spread her hands. ‘I told you, I barely knew those two, this Max and this Nadya.’
‘But you knew the others well.’
‘Not well,’ she protested.
‘Felix,’ said Rossel. ‘Him you knew very well.’
‘My student, yes, but how well do a student and teacher ever know each other? Passionate when he played, so I knew there was more to Felix than the prancing peacock he let us all see.’
‘Passionate in other ways, too, Professor?’
She held his gaze for a moment as if to convey she was making a mental note of his impertinence. As if she wasn’t scared.
‘He told you that?’
Rossel nodded.
‘Felix told me about all his conquests. That’s why I came to see you.’
‘Yes, he would mention it to you. The pleasure for boys like Felix is always less in the act itself and more in the telling of the tale. We were lovers, I admit it. I did not know the war had claimed him. Do you know how he died? Was it terrible? I hope not.’
Rossel saw no need to tell her the truth. The professor took a last drag at her cigarette and stubbed it out.
‘I loved him a little, Revol. Foolish I know. He was twenty. I was twice his age – more. But the heart cannot be tamed.’
‘Did Felix talk about any of them, back then? If they were all connected by something other than the murders themselves, my investigation shows it has to be by something that happened when they were here at the conservatory, when they were all students. I’ve checked the files and after that they all go very different ways.’
The professor stared down at the four names for a moment. Then she pointed to one of them.
‘The one called Nadya. Describe her to me.’
‘Short and round. A clarinettist. Chatty.’
She nodded. ‘Well, there is one thing then,’ she said.
‘Go on.’
Professor Lebedeva took off her glasses for a moment and gave them an unnecessary polish.
‘Felix liked to gamble, you remember that?’ she said.
‘He would bet on anything.’
‘One wager sticks in my mind. He told me he might be able to get us some food, horsemeat from a conservatory graduate who was in the army. Th
at he’d put a bet on with this soldier about who would win what Felix – and others by then – were calling The Great Symphonic Contest. And he said a girl, who I think was the clarinettist you describe, would help him win because she had the inside track on what the outcome would be.’
‘The Great Symphonic Contest? Vronsky versus Shostakovich?’
Professor Lebedeva nodded.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘It was the perfect game for someone who was being classically trained. The race between the two leading composers of the day to see which one of them would have their work become the anthem of the war. “Nadya has the inside track.” That’s what he said.’
Rossel closed his notebook. Then slipped it into his pocket.
‘I played at that contest, Professor. The great symphonic battle, the great audition. But so did many others.’
She stood. ‘Revol, may I be allowed to continue with my teaching duties?’
‘Of course, my apologies.’
She walked down the side aisle towards the double doors at the rear of the hall. She stopped halfway and turned, starting to say something. But she thought better of it and scuttled off.
*
On a whim, he called in at the library on the ground floor – a dusty maze guarded, as it always had been, by a couple of fearsome women. But they had no idea how to find a score written during the years of the siege.
‘Madame Shishani would know,’ said one, ‘she knows every piece of music that ever went in and out of this building. But, she’s away today, comrade, nursing her mother. Can you come back tomorrow?’
Rossel shook his head. Then sighed.
‘Not tomorrow. Later this week, yes. I have a prior appointment in Moscow.’
32
Thursday November 1
The round clock in the stone tower of Moscow’s Leningrad Station read 7.15 as Rossel and Nikitin walked down the granite steps that led to the city’s busy streets. A black limousine was parked up on the south side of Komsomolskaya Square. The morning crowds milling past it tried not to stare or get too close. They didn’t want to be noticed taking notice. But everyone knew a car like that must belong to someone important.
As they walked towards the black American Packard limousine, an MGB officer got out from the passenger side and came over to greet them.
Nikitin held out his hand.
‘Colonel Sarkisov.’
The officer shook it.
‘Comrade Nikitin.’
Rossel stood to attention and saluted.
‘This is the lieutenant I told you about,’ said Nikitin. ‘The musician.’
Sarkisov gave Rossel a quick appraisal.
‘We’ve met,’ he said. ‘Comrade Beria has read your file with interest, Lieutenant. I even heard him laugh at one of your many ill-advised student jokes.’ Sarkisov turned away again. ‘The chief used to play something – did you know that?’ he said to Nikitin.
Nikitin shook his head.
‘I didn’t. He’s full of surprises, I have to say. Play what?’
Colonel Sarkisov smiled and opened the door of the limousine. He held out a hand to usher Rossel and Nikitin inside it.
‘When he was in Baku, so I’m told, Minister Beria did, on occasion, like to perform Mingrelian peasant songs on the balalaika.’
He looked at Rossel again.
‘You already have a love of music in common. Perhaps that’s why he so very much wants to see you, Comrade Lieutenant.’
*
The journey through the busy Moscow traffic was considerably quicker for black limousines than for other vehicles. During it Nikitin and Sarkisov exchanged small talk about Vsevolod Bobrov; the CSKA winger also played ice hockey for the same Red Army club. Sarkisov thought he should stick to football. Nikitin thought not.
After about ten minutes they turned off Sadovaya Kudrinskaya Street into Malaya Nikitskaya and, moments later, swept through black metal gates into an impressive courtyard. Rossel’s knowledge of Moscow was poor and he was uncertain what district they were in but they had come from the station around the ring road so this must be on the city’s western side. Two junior officers were piling up snow on either side of the yard with a brush and shovel.
As the three men got out of the limo the junior officers stood to attention and saluted. The house was a large blue and white one with painted alabaster pillars and fresco work; some kind of scene from Greek mythology. Originally a merchant’s or a banker’s, Rossel surmised, before the repercussions of the revolution had led to it becoming the home of Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria.
*
The wall was painted a reptilian shade of jade. The large door was a very dark oak and Rossel was having great difficulty taking his eyes off its faded brass handle. Next to the door was a small table on which stood a white vase filled with pale yellow irises. He checked his watch for the tenth time. They had been waiting for over an hour and a half now. His mouth had dried up completely. His stomach was churning. No one had uttered a word since they had been shown to the leather chairs in the corridor outside the minister’s office by a junior officer. Sarkisov and Nikitin presumably knew the building well but their mood was not one of relaxed familiarity. They had become noticeably less jocular ever since the Packard had pulled into the courtyard.
Now the brass doorknob rattled. In the silence, the noise was as alarming as a shot – all three men jumped to attention. A sharp twist to the left. The junior officer who had shown them to their seats earlier stuck his head around the door.
‘He will see you now.’
*
Music was coming from an old Victrola gramophone that sat on a piano stool in the corner of the room, next to a bay window through which the winter sunlight streamed. Rossel recognised the music immediately – a piece the student orchestra at the conservatory had played, albeit rarely: Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead. It was supposed to evoke Charon’s oars cutting through the water of the Styx as he rowed lost souls towards the island. And there, behind a small desk covered in neatly stacked manila files, sat the great Soviet Charon himself.
The deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union was smaller than Rossel had been expecting. Apart from propaganda posters like the one attached to Smolny Cathedral, he had only ever seen Beria in pictures on the front of Pravda or standing directly behind Stalin reviewing the May Day parade in cinema newsreel footage, his balding and wrink-led head and darting black eyes reacting with a calculated condescension towards the adoring masses. The press portrayed him as a Bolshevik colossus, a towering defender of Marxist-Leninist purity against reactionary capitalism and traitorous fifth columnists. He would actually be, in his stocking feet, Rossel guessed, a little less than 165 centimetres tall.
Beria stood as the two men entered – Sarkisov had not joined them in the inner sanctum. Somewhat unexpectedly, considering his rank, the minister shook hands with both Rossel and Nikitin, holding onto Rossel’s just a little longer than was necessary. His palms were soft, Rossel thought. It was rumoured that Beria had personally strangled Nikolai Yezhov, his predecessor in charge of the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the forerunner of the MGB. If so, thought Rossel, it must at first have felt like a gentle embrace.
Beria gestured towards two scarlet leather armchairs in front of his desk and resumed his own seat. He wore small pince-nez spectacles which he slipped off and, using a tiny piece of red cloth he took from a green leather case, began to clean them. No one spoke. All they could hear was the music playing on the Victrola and the steady rhythmic squeak of the cloth moving back and forth across the lenses. Beria buffed and polished in his quest for perfection, in tempo with the music.
After a minute, he put the cloth back into the case and repositioned his pince-nez. He blinked a couple of times and then stared at Rossel and Nikitin as though he had only just noticed them.
‘You like Rachmaninov?’
It was not clear to which of them the question had been asked. Nikit
in, a forced jauntiness in his tone, got in first with a pre-emptive tactical denial.
‘Rach who, Comrade Deputy Premier?’
Beria used the middle finger of his left hand to set the glasses more firmly upon his head. He fixed his gaze upon Rossel.
‘And you?’
‘His music, yes, Comrade Deputy Premier.’
Beria raised a hand. ‘Comrade will do, Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, comrade – his music, that is. I despised the man. A reactionary bourgeois recidivist and enemy of the people.’
Rossel felt his heart pound as he negotiated the trap. The dead were, he thought, fair game for denunciation.
Beria sat back. He looked pleased with the answer. In the same way a man who has spent the morning laying out a minefield might take pleasure in watching his quarry avoid the first detonation.
‘I share your contempt. His traitorous sojourn in America was discussed many times at the highest levels. Before his death from a fortuitous melanoma, plans had been made to return him from his deckchair in Palm Springs and grind his soul into dust in a corrective labour facility. I had placed myself personally in charge of the operation. It is my experience that creative talent and the greatest treachery often go hand in hand.’
Once in full flow, Beria spoke with machine-gun rapidity. He glanced across at a portrait of Stalin above the fireplace, then back at Rossel.
‘Comrade Stalin also places particular importance on the arts, especially music and literature. There was an incident, you may remember, with Shostakovich. Before the war, when his music became – and I quote the words used by Pravda at the time – “Too formalist, too bourgeois”. To all intents and purposes, Comrade Stalin was the music critic of Pravda that day; the words he used in private, however, were of a more colourful and peasant vernacular. These days the Party has trained musical ears everywhere, Comrade Rossel. It is Comrade Stalin’s view that a traitorous mind reveals itself in every conceivable place, yes, even in the spaces left between one note and the next. Nikitin tells me you think these bodies found out on the line near Lake Ladoga were deliberately arranged to allude to some devilish melody.’