by Ben Creed
She turned and looked at her son. Vronsky was staring into one of the empty cages and seemed to be barely registering the conversation. She resumed her address to Rossel.
‘Sanity is a question of perspective, Lieutenant. Should a man of prodigious talent squander his destiny simply because our society does not allow him to express it? Is it not, after all, Nikolai’s duty, as a great artist of the Soviet Union, to break down such petty ideological barriers? Did Lenin himself not say, “You cannot make a revolution wearing white gloves?” The same is true of a great symphony.’
Rossel looked again around the room. The cages hanging in the air, the soundproofing that covered the old brickwork of the stable and, in one corner, a long length of green metal shelving that was almost entirely covered with neat stacks of annotated tape spools. In the half-light, the cages looked like giant versions of the incense burners the monks used at Pskov.
Madame Vronsky leaned in and took Rossel’s broken left hand. Her perfume was rich, exotic. She squeezed his fingers.
‘Thanks to Dr Volkova, we have watched your progress with interest.’
She drifted to the other side of the table and kissed her son on the top of his head before removing the lid from the platter in front of him. She placed it between Rossel and the plate so he could not see its contents. Then, holding the lieutenant’s gaze, she took a knife from her red satin clutch bag and began to cut up what was on it. This took a full minute, perhaps more. Then she left the room, the door clanking shut behind her.
Feeling nauseous, Rossel leaned forward as far as his restraints would allow and stared at the thing on Vronsky’s plate. A bloody chunk of something. The composer’s mocking eyes held Rossel’s. His huge hands wrapped themselves around the dark slab. He waited another moment before devouring it. Stomach knotting, Rossel turned his head towards the empty cages.
The composer sat back, patted at his wet beard with a pale blue napkin and swallowed.
He nodded to the nearest cage to Rossel’s right.
‘When he was here, Maxim, our crazed priest, recounted – after a gentle prompting – a macabre tale. He had a little niece, Anfisa. A charming child by all accounts, liked to play the balalaika and, as they all do, worshipped Grandpa Lenin. But this was in the middle of the siege and so, like everyone else, Anfisa had hardly eaten for weeks. Her tiny ten-year-old stomach was round and swollen, her legs thin and bony. They gave her most of their own rations, Maxim and his sister. Their mother was already dead from malnutrition, their father, too. They tried everything, he and his sister, but eventually, clutching a picture of Lenin, their niece closed her eyes for the last time.
‘Why, they were distraught. But then one of them glanced over at an empty plate lying on the kitchen table, and, a little after that, perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten, at an old pot on the stove. They sat there looking, only looking, for hours. In the end, it was Maxim who was the first to pick up the knife. He did it, he said, so his sister would not have to.’
As Vronsky leaned forward in his chair, Rossel could feel his heart pounding.
‘You think that milksop Shostakovich ever had the heart to score the real story of the siege? How some human beings lasted for nine hundred days – nine hundred days! – on a few grams of sawdust and chaff. How that sounded? The rumbling of empty bellies, parched mouths and loose teeth gnawing down on innocent bones, the whispering, babbled self-exhortations behind the dulled eyes of a creature who was once a man but has now become something utterly other, as he scurries down the street waiting for the spring to give up its harvest of blackened limbs so he might boil them up and partake of a little soup?’
Vronsky’s right arm began to stretch out, as if he were preparing to conduct.
‘Or the sound of steam,’ he continued, ‘hissing and bubbling from a pot on a stove that none dare look into?’
Rossel spat onto the cobbled floor of the stable.
‘“Something utterly other” is what you have become, maestro.’
Vronsky picked up the largest of the five glass tubes on the table and took a step closer.
‘Everything Maxim did after that was in some way an attempt to forget what he had done when he sat down with his sister and partook of that simple plateful of familial salvation. He and Shostakovich are one and the same, Rossel. For what else is the Leningrad Symphony – in all its po-faced pomp, its empty brittle cacophony – but the crudest propaganda? Every time we Soviets celebrate it, what we are really celebrating is our own collective amnesia. I do not forget, Lieutenant, cannot. Great art demands of its creators only one thing: to look truth squarely between the eyes and have enough steel in your soul to never once turn away again. I have that unflinching gaze; an unflinching ear, too. So, I have composed a work like none that has ever been written before, one that will force all who hear it to remember.’
Rossel flexed his wrists but the rope only bit deeper. Buying time by keeping Vronsky talking was the only option open to him.
‘I always thought you were better than him, Vronsky. Better than Shostakovich,’ he said. ‘Better than them all, in fact – Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky. Or, at least, I used to.’
Vronsky ran his fingers over the shaft of the piece of glass in his hand and smiled.
‘I am what I was born to be, Lieutenant. A great composer. Even when I went to school here, I understood I was supposed to be that. You went straight for the notes carved into the stone so I imagine that fool Eliasberg has been talking. Andrei Suvorin and I were the best of friends. But I came to realise that my talent was destined to outgrow his.’
‘I imagine this was what you told yourself just after you realised that he, not you, was most likely to win the tsarina’s prize,’ said Rossel. ‘And probably every other prize, too.’
Vronsky placed the glass tube onto the floor. Rossel couldn’t take his eyes off it. The composer put the heel of his black boot over the end and crushed the tip.
‘They were lovers, Stolypin and my mother,’ Vronsky said. ‘After he died, Mama befriended his widow. Then she persuaded her to set up the competition and invite the tsarina. But, one evening, Madame Stolypin told her that our professor considered Andrei the greater prospect. And that he intended to recommend the boy should make the principal recital when the tsarina came to visit. Nonsense, of course. Had Suvorin lived, I would have, in any case, proved the old fool wrong.’
‘But your dear mother decided not to take that chance?’
Vronsky nodded.
‘At first, she simply tried to persuade them to have the boy excluded from the competition, but they would have none of it.’
‘And so, your mother killed Suvorin?’
The composer smiled again.
‘Matricide is the word used for someone who kills their mother but, as far as I know, there has been no lexicographer yet farsighted enough to invent a word for someone who kills with them. We both did for the boy.’
‘You left him in the ice house. Left him in there to freeze to death and while he was dying, he carved the notes I saw into the stone.’
Rossel was trying to mask the anger and loathing in his voice. But failing.
Vronsky put a finger to his lips and began to speak in hushed tones.
‘I told Andrei I had forgotten to bring matches for the tobacco we already smoked. Then, as soon as I left, my mother, who was hidden nearby, shut the door and bolted it.’
With his cuff, Vronsky dabbed at a bead of sweat on his brow.
‘At first,’ he continued, ‘Andrei thought I was joking. We could hear him shouting out. Then his cries changed to ones of petulance and frustration. Finally, tears and sobs. After twenty minutes, we walked away just as the evening sun began to fall. My mother had arranged a recital so that everyone was busy and no one could hear.’
Vronsky ambled over to the nearest cage and pushed at it. It swung back and forth like an outsize thurible.
‘Andrei was a religious boy. At night, before bed, he would
recite the hymn to the Virgin Mary, what the Greeks call the axion. The refrain he carved into the rock was an unfinished final prayer of some sort, I imagine.’
Vronsky pushed the cage again and it began to rock faster, the chains groaning as it moved to and fro. Then the composer took three quick steps forward so he was standing directly in front of the detective. He struck Rossel once in the face with the outstretched palm of his right hand. Then a second time using his left fist – there was an echoing crack as the cartilage in Rossel’s nose broke. Vronsky’s arm swung back as if to strike another blow. But then he stopped. The composer glanced at the glass tube on the floor. He bent down and picked it up. He stepped to the side of Rossel and placed its jagged end against the bare flesh of the detective’s neck. The lieutenant could feel the scratch of the glass prickle against his carotid artery and hear his own breathing punctuating the silence with sharp staccato bursts.
‘This one is exactly the same size as the one I had designed for your friend Felix. When pushed into the windpipe it turns a last breath into something beautiful, Comrade Rossel. Not a perfect E-flat, I grant you that, but at that late stage of his life, I truly believed it helped young Felix express the inexpressible, everything he had failed to get across in his mediocre violin playing. He confessed to everything when I had him inside his cage and began to slowly starve him to death. He was desperate to live. By the end he would tell me everything I asked. All about how much in love you were with sweet little Saint Sofia.’
Rossel felt the tube nick his throat. A sudden wetness there he knew must be blood. He braced himself for the end.
‘Initially, he gasped as I pushed the pipe in, greedy for air. Just like they all did. But then, at the very end, he clamped his mouth tight shut; tried to put a stopper in the bottle. That was when the sound was at its most haunting – as his last essence slipped away.’
Rossel grimaced in fear as the glass pierced his skin again. Then, suddenly, the composer took a step backward.
‘No,’ Vronsky muttered to himself, looking around as if he had forgotten something. ‘Not like this. You, after all, are my listener. I must prepare my performance.’
He lumbered out of the room, shouting for Razin, leaving Rossel to eye the shard of glass – the broken tip of the crystal tube – he had left on the floor. Just out of reach.
42
For the fifth time, Rossel managed to move the seat an inch or so forward. The bindings on his ankles were not quite as tight as those on his wrists and so, now he was this close, he managed to move his left foot towards the sliver of glass, about two centimetres long, which lay half a metre away along the cobbles. He stretched out his bare foot again. This time, he made contact with the glass. Used his toes to scrabble it a little closer. He repeated the action: once, twice. Then a third time. Now the shard was close enough.
Adrenalin coursed through Rossel’s body and sat him back – bolt upright – as he heard the doorknob rattle.
Vronsky swept back into the room, bloated and grandi-ose. Behind him walked his brutal retinue of one: Razin. Rossel got the sole of his left foot over the shard just as the Cossack heaved a Magnetophon tape recorder onto the lacquered table. Vronsky waved his servant away and took two reels out of a box.
‘Sofia Fedotova . . . Maxim Avdeyev . . . Nadya Bazhanova . . . Felix Sorokin . . . They played like automatons, like instruments playing instruments, with no heart, no feeling, and no understanding,’ the composer said. ‘The horrible caterwauling they produced made it even easier for the authorities to deny me. But you were different, Rossel. Your playing stood out.’
Rossel shifted in the chair, his legs numb.
‘We were under siege, being bombed every day, half starved,’ he said. ‘Nobody could feel anything except the emptiness of their bellies.’
‘I am Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky, Hero of Socialist Labour and People’s Artist of the USSR. Where music is concerned, I do not make mistakes. You played well.’
The composer began to connect cables from the Magnetophon to one of the microphones.
‘I needed to score my opera in the first person,’ he added. ‘I needed to live it. Because of what had happened to Suvorin and the trumpeter Landau, to a degree I already had. But now, I knew that before I shaped a chord, I needed to again commit the act. For the truly great man is the one who steps across the line others dare not cross. Lenin knew that, Stalin knows it. To write The Blockade, I could not put pen to paper without – once again – pressing a blade to the nape of someone’s neck.’ He tutted as he fumbled with one of the tape reels.
‘It took me years to track down the philistines who ruined my work – such is the chaos war leaves behind,’ the composer said.
Rossel scraped the glass an inch closer. It grated against the rough ground and he froze, but his captor was too absorbed in the dials on the tape machine to notice.
‘I have no expectations of mercy, maestro,’ said Rossel. ‘Not least since if you released me, I would ensure you spent the rest of your days in the salt mines of Kolyma. But I must ask you nonetheless. You said I played well. Your revenge upon me is not because I ruined your fledgling score?’
Vronsky extended himself to his full height. He reached into the left-hand pocket of his jacket and took out a folded piece of paper. He opened it out with a flourish and held it in front of the lieutenant. Rossel took in the embossed red CCCP header and typed script. It was a single sheet torn from an MGB report.
Fifth Directorate MGB, Report by informant Sofia Fedotova.
There was a small section in the middle of the text underlined in red ink. Vronsky tapped a finger on it. Rossel focused on the page. Tried to understand it. At first, the words doubled up, ran each into the other, but after a few seconds he could read it:
. . . The informant, describing an encounter in the conservatory canteen, said she had asked Rossel what he had thought of Vronsky’s latest work, a Revolutionary Cantata to mark Stalin’s birthday. R told her: ‘Normally I am a great admirer of his work but here I heard nothing other than banality, a mixture of Shostakovich and Strauss, a dash of Rachmaninov, a bit of Stravinsky when he had run out of ideas. It put me in mind of our masters, Sofia. Full of pompous arrogance and precious little to be inspired by.’
The revelation hit him harder than any blow.
Rossel looked at Vronsky. ‘I thought it was Nadya who had informed on me,’ he mumbled.
The composer was exultant. He folded the page again and slipped it back into his pocket.
‘My dear boy, Nadya informed on you and a great many others. But Sofia’s betrayal was the one that counted. That makes it all the sweeter, does it not? Her mother was a Menshevik. This leverage was used to recruit the daughter to inform on dissenters at the conservatory. In looking into your background, I skimmed a few of her reports. She always gave just enough information to show she was trying but not enough to condemn anyone. Hoping, I presume, that her dispatches would simply be checked, stamped and filed away. Yours was. Until, in May ’42, increased political pressure for more arrests caused some bureaucrat to open a filing cabinet somewhere in the Bolshoi Dom – most likely at random – and retrieve it. All those youthful clever remarks. Just one joke about our Bolshevik masters might be overlooked. But page after page . . . Which led to your original arrest and interrogation. If I were you, I would put it down to bad luck. It might be easier on your mind.’
Vronsky walked to the far corner of the room. He picked up the metal railroad rod and began to trail it over the sides of the cages. Steel struck steel. Vronsky swung to his left again and sent one of the cages spinning on the chains. Then one more. Now another. Five whirling metal dervishes. The jarring noise echoed around the room, cannoned off the walls, found a way inside Rossel. Brought up acid from his stomach into the back of his throat.
More than anything, he wanted to put his hands over his ears to block out the sound.
‘Six weeks with only water, not even a smear of Vo
logda butter or a bacon rind,’ Vronsky was shouting as he swung. ‘I would have Razin set the table, once a day, only the very best china, the best dishes from the Party shops I had laid for them. After a few weeks, they would wail and gibber as soon as they heard the clinking of china in the hall outside the room. It took most only a few days to exhibit all the classic symptoms of hunger: impulsivity, irritability, hyperactivity.’
Vronsky’s breath was coming in bursts now. His face and body dripped with sweat; patches appeared like newly forming continents on the loose white shirt that covered the round globe of his belly.
Rossel’s head jerked to the left as he felt the rod swish by.
‘Felix, a lecherous soldier, Max, a depraved priest, Nadya, an inept spy, and Shevchuk, a hapless politician. It was only once I got them here that I realised I had assembled a cast filled with the moronic archetypes of cheap comic opera. It amused me greatly. So, I had Sofia dressed as the Snow Queen. My little joke, Rossel. And we know you’re a connoisseur of them.’
Vronsky struck right. One of the cages began to spin even faster.
‘At night, I would thrash the bars. Record their pleas and screaming. Little evidence of any baritone on the Magnetophon. Fear, it seems, makes sopranos of us all. They screamed out the dregs of their beings into the abyss they knew I would soon consign them to. I cut them differently, mutilated them differently, so my imagination might feast upon the differing sounds. Slice, slash, gouge, gash, each extracts its own particular melody. Cut off a hand and in that, I discovered, is little enough inspiration for a cheap tavern tune. But chop off a man’s prick and you have the beginnings of an epic symphony. And, even before that, they would growl and scurry and beg and plead, roll over on their backs and abase themselves in any way possible – anything for the smallest morsel.’