A Simple Scale

by David Llewellyn

  You take a final drag on your cigarette and crush it beneath your heel. From somewhere nearby, the crunch of gravel and the soft murmur of a car’s engine. Little point in feigning surprise. You know why you came here. The car parks up a short distance from the Griffith Observatory. The engine cuts out. Its lights go dark.

  The sudden flame of a match, the tip of a cigarette flaring orange. The car fills with smoke and the driver opens the window an inch or two. He takes another drag.

  This is why you came here. Not for the drive, or the view, but for this; the suspense and the thrill of anonymity. It’s always in places like this, near yet far. Hidden from the public, yet exposed to the heavens.

  You play through every possible scenario: A walk down into the park and a search for somewhere more shaded, or a car ride out across Glendale to somewhere shamefully remote. These men are shadows. All you remember of them are their voices – if they speak – or the way they smell and taste; almost always of drink. Dutch courage. Occasionally you’ll catch one of them taking off his wedding ring.

  He’s waiting in the car, perhaps expecting you to make the approach. He’ll open the passenger side door, ask you to get in. Maybe it’ll happen there on the front seat. He’ll open his flies, hold you by the hair and force you down. He’ll be aggressive, maybe unkind. He will hurt you. You want him to do all of these things. You only wish you could see his face a little clearer. If you could only see his eyes.

  The car is a Buick. Same colour, same model, as the one that was parked outside Mary’s house. There were two men that time, but you couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t see their eyes.

  What would have happened, that foggy night on the Lower East Side, if you’d stopped walking? If you’d stood near a tree and just waited there? Would someone have stopped and talked to you? Would you have gone somewhere with him, back to an apartment, or maybe a restroom? Would that moment have cancelled out others yet to happen? This was a choice, a fork in the road. You carried on walking. Maybe even quickened your step. When you got home your mother still asked what had kept you out so late.

  Now here we are again. Another fork. And he’s still waiting there, the Buick’s driver; still smoking his cigarette. You start walking towards the car and he pauses; one hand on the steering wheel, the cigarette tilting between his knuckles. You get nearer and he takes another drag, but you keep walking, past the Buick and across the otherwise empty lot, away from everything that might have happened.

  **

  Margaret Bernard is at the same table in the same garden of the Chateau Marmont where you saw her last. If she wasn’t wearing a different dress and a different hat you could be forgiven for thinking she’d been waiting here the whole time.

  “Mr Conrad. Please, sit.”

  You arranged this. Called the hotel and passed on the message that you would like to meet with her again.

  “I’ve ordered iced tea,” she says. “Perhaps this time you’ll stay long enough to try it.”

  On cue, the waiter returns with a jug and two glasses, filling each in turn. Margaret tells him that’ll be all and he walks away, called to another table by the click of someone’s fingers.

  “I hadn’t expected to hear from you again,” Margaret says. “Not after our last meeting. Have you reconsidered?”

  “I have.”

  “But you seemed so adamant. You made it sound as if conducting a concert of Ronald’s music would harm your career.”

  “It still could.”

  “Then what brought about this change of mind?”

  “I no longer care if it does.”

  “That sounds rather rash.”

  “Do you want me to conduct the damn concert or not?”

  “Mr Conrad. I’d thank you kindly not to adopt that tone of voice with me. Yes, I would still like you to conduct the ‘damn’ concert. But you’re a young man with his career ahead of him. I understand your reluctance. And now, now it seems you’ve changed your mind out of wilful self-destruction. Is that it?”

  “Not at all.”

  “I should hope not. Did Ronald ever tell you I studied psychology at Brown? Not as my major, you understand. But psychology was all the rage back then. Not many young women wanted to study it, but I was fascinated. Still am. So when a young man declares himself unafraid to risk his career, I have to ask myself why.”

  “Call it a matter of principle.”

  “You’ll excuse me, Mr Conrad, but I never had you down as a man of principle. Given the circumstances of how we are… acquainted…”

  She pauses, taking a sip of her tea.

  “That was unkind,” she says. “I apologise. If you say it is a matter of principle, we shall leave it at that. And I am grateful, really I am. I want you to know that. I didn’t ask you out of spite.”

  “Why would anyone ask it out of spite?”

  “You underestimate human nature. There is an emotional sadism in most women and homosexuals. The men, I mean, not the lesbians.”

  Nearby, a mature woman in red cat-eye glasses and a pancake hat hears the word “lesbians” and glances over in horror. Margaret pauses only to sip her iced tea and continues.

  “We dress revenge up as a favour, take pleasure in seeing others heartbroken. We play games with those we should care about, and claw at them when they are weak. Oh, I’d no more trust another woman or a man of your inclinations with my wellbeing than I’d leave a cat to look after the canary. But you… perhaps you’re different. Perhaps you are a man of principle. How does a man of principle survive in a town like this?”

  “With great difficulty.”

  “I can imagine. It’s a city of philistines. Present company excepted, of course. I often told Ronald this is where you’d all end up.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Composers. The moment Copland came out here and began writing scores, I knew what would happen. You see, there is a gulf opening up in music, Mr Conrad. A great abyss between the sort of music listened to by the social elite and that listened to by the masses. Music – the decent sort, I mean – is migrating away from the concert hall and into the motion pictures, where no-one really notices it. No-one listens to it for its own sake. Oh, I suppose there is the other sort of music, written by those Europeans who fancy themselves as scientists and mathematicians. An awful racket. But I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about classical music. It still exists, but only in the motion pictures.”

  “Well. It’s a living.”

  “But not a very dignified one, I’ll wager. Ronald was born into the luckiest generation of all, that brief moment when we recognised the true value of art. We saw it as something more than just a commodity to be bought and sold. It isn’t fashionable to say so, I’m sure, but the Soviet system is far better than our own. Oh, I know they have their excesses, and their behaviour before the war was simply inexcusable, but there, at least, the state supports its artists, gives them prestige, honour.

  “Here, in the so-called free world, we subject a thing of beauty to market forces, ask that it stands up to commercial scrutiny, and if not we toss it aside as if it were worthless. What’s worse, we take young artists, who fifty years ago would have composed symphonies, operas, and we funnel them into an industry like the motion pictures.”

  “Ron didn’t hate movies so much.”

  “I know he didn’t. Except when it came to music, I was always so much more of a snob than him. But on this, I agree with Toscanini. ‘In life, one should be a democrat; in art, an aristocrat.’ And which would you rather, Mr Conrad? That we divide society, like the British, along lines of birth-right, or lines of taste?”

  Chapter 11:

  LENINGRAD, AUGUST 1938

  The curtains have gone unopened for three days. He prefers to sit in the dark, only occasionally lighting his lamp. There is a small suitcase beside the door, containing a pair of shoes, two pairs of socks, two pairs of underpants, two clean shirts and a pair of trousers. Though it’s August, his heavy winter coat hang
s on a nearby hook. Just in case.

  He’s tried reading, but finds his concentration drifts when he’s barely halfway through a sentence. His thoughts are like a dull, obtrusive noise from a neighbouring room.

  On the third day of darkness, late in the afternoon, he gives in and opens a curtain. He sits in the window and looks down into the square. No sign of the men who have been following him these last few weeks.

  It’s a gloriously sunny day. There are children playing “Reds and Whites”. He cracks the window open a few inches so that he can hear their mock battles more clearly.

  It was a day much like this when he left Otmichi, the village where he was raised. Late summer and sweltering. His brother, Misha, was playing salochki in the village square. Their father called him in, so that they could sit together a moment before Sergey set off for the city; an old custom still observed in their house. Andrei Grekov sat with his hands on his knees, looking stoically through the window. Knowing that if he met his father’s gaze one or both of them might cry, Sergey stared down at his own feet. Misha, meanwhile, kicked his legs back and forth, his shoes scuffing against the wooden floor. Then it was time for Sergey to go. His brother went running back out into the square. Andrei Grekov carried his son’s trunk out onto the front step. The carriage was waiting, the driver idly picking his nose and taking a moment to study whatever he found. The horses nickered impatiently and pawed the muddy ground with their hooves.

  Sergey and his father embraced, his father’s beard rough against his cheek. Andrei Grekov handed his son the brown leather trunk containing his belongings, Sergey climbed into the carriage, and with two loud cracks of the whip they pulled away.

  As they neared the edge of the square, Sergey leaned out and called his brother’s name, and Misha turned and nodded but he didn’t wave. Did he understand the moment’s gravity? Perhaps he was putting on a brave face, feigning indifference in front of his friends. Neither brother knew that it was the last time they would see one another.

  He remembers the day clearly enough, could probably find his way around the old village blindfolded, but their faces – Misha’s and his father’s – have grown vague with time. He no longer has any photographs of them. He burned them all when it seemed the only sensible thing to do.

  Dusk falls over the city. The children in the square are called in one by one – some by their mothers, many more by their grandmothers – and the place falls empty and silent. It is that moment when the city becomes a stage cleared between acts; the painted backdrop hoisted up, the dancers in their dressing rooms. The boards are bare, the stage is lifeless and dark.

  The lamps light up in sequence when the sky is a shade somewhere between red and gold. A moment later, men enter the square. Not uniformed, but everything about them – the way they walk, the way they’re dressed – seems official. An unmarked black Ford comes puttering from the far corner of the square, drawing to a halt directly outside Sergey’s building.

  It won’t happen yet, it’s still too early. But it will happen.

  Sergey closes the curtain again and crosses the room to his gramophone. He takes a record, Mahler’s second symphony, and lowers it carefully onto the turntable. He cranks the handle several times and lowers the stylus. He sits in the nearest chair and closes his eyes. When the fourth movement, the Urlicht, is done he moves the stylus back to the beginning and listens to it again, and he repeats this three more times. There are places they could take him where there’ll be no more music. If he can memorise just one piece, it should be this.

  He recalls the purges of a year ago, though even remembering them feels forbidden. Entire floors emptied of their inhabitants. Vans lined up, dozens of them, in the street outside. Gunshots echoing in the night. He felt safe then, perhaps one of the few men in Leningrad who did. He was the toast of the Kirov. Their rising star. No-one had a bad word to say about him. So what had changed? It couldn’t just be his music. This felt like something else, something random, as if his name had appeared in some morbid lottery. He felt sick.

  He will apologise. He will do everything Secretary Remizov asked him to. The anonymous reviewer in Pravda was right. “Vulgar individualism”. “Pretentious Formalism”. His music is “a self-centred racket”, an “egregious rejection of Socialist Realism”. He will admit to all of these things and perhaps then they will let him go.

  But when have they ever let anyone go? That isn’t how things happen anymore. If he’s lucky, they’ll send him away. If he isn’t, he’ll receive a bullet in the back of his neck as they frogmarch him along some corridor. There won’t even be a proper grave. He’s heard the stories. Everyone has.

  He rolls and lights another cigarette. The first puff makes him gag. He takes another draw and listens to the paper and tobacco crackle and burn. The room around him seems to take on a greenish hue.

  He won’t sleep. He wants to be awake and alert when they knock. There’ll be questions, and he needs to give the right answers. Why haven’t they knocked already? How long are they willing to wait? Aren’t there other doors for them to knock at? He contemplates putting on the Mahler one last time, but no. He has it now. If he listened to it again, it might dull the effect.

  Despite his efforts, he drifts asleep. He doesn’t even feel it happen. He sinks into sleep as an unconscious man might drown. He wakes to a heavy, insistent knocking at the door. This is it.

  “Open up, Grekov. We know you’re in there.”

  He answers the door, still drowsy. Two men, the building’s commandant and a younger man, almost a boy, dressed in the uniform of a GUGB agent.

  “Sergey Andreievich Grekov,” the boy agent says, his voice flat, emotionless. “I am Sergeant Merkulov of the Main Directorate of State Security. I am arresting you under Article 58 of the penal code. Do not try and make a run for it. There are more agents downstairs. Is that understood?”

  Sergey nods, and Merkulov pushes past him. The commandant is more sheepish, offering a shrug.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers. “I have to be here. It’s the rules.”

  “I know,” says Sergey. “It’s okay.”

  In the sitting room, Merkulov has begun rifling through his books, taking them from the shelves, flicking through the pages and dropping them to the floor. He walks over to the gramophone, lifts the needle and takes the record from its turntable. He holds it up to the light, squinting at its label.

  “Ma…”

  “Mahler,” Sergey explains.

  “Mahler… Auf… Aufer…”

  “Auferstehungssinfonie. It means Resurrection Symphony.”

  “Resurrection? A religious work?”

  “It was written before the Revolution, comrade, and besides, Mahler was Austrian.”

  “Hmm. We may need to look into that.”

  Sergey has the strangest urge to laugh, but if he began there’s a chance he wouldn’t stop. We may need to look into that, the boy said. As if they might have to investigate whether or not Mahler was Austrian. The absurdity is intense, dreamlike. A complete stranger going through his belongings, eyeing him with disdain, turning over books and records and now making his way around the edges of the room, rapping the wall with his knuckles. Merkulov walks back and forth in straight lines, stopping occasionally to stamp his heels. The search continues in the bedroom, where he takes a brace of letters from Sergey’s bedside table and pockets them.

  “Some of these look like English,” he says. “We’ll get them translated at the station.”

  Sergey has no idea what hour it is, but by the time they leave the building and drive across the city it’s beginning to get light. It’s a short drive, only a few minutes, and the streets are empty. Four of them inside the black Ford, the same car he saw parked outside his building. Sergey, Merkulov and two plainclothes men, whose names he isn’t told. Sergey’s wrists are bound with handcuffs. Merkulov offers him a cigarette, which he takes, and helps him to light it. Soon the car fills with a pale grey smoke, and Merkulov winds the window do
wn to clear the air.

  “My wife would kill me if she knows I’m still smoking,” he says. “She hates the smell of it on me.”

  At the DPZ headquarters Sergey is signed in by a tired-looking desk sergeant at the end of his nightshift. In a side room, away from the desk, the agents make Sergey strip, and they search him, ruffling his hair and making him touch his toes. They trim the metal buttons from his jacket, unthread the laces from his boots, and confiscate his belt. Then they take him through into the prison.

  The corridors here reek heavily of disinfectant, with a suggestion of ammonia. The building is cleaner than he had expected. The corridors look, smell and feel sterilised.

  He’s heard about the prisons. Thirty, forty men to a cell, they say. Hardly any room to lie down. Bugs everywhere. But this place is clean, and he’s the sole occupant of his cell. A narrow bed, hard mattress. A small toilet without a proper seat. A roll of toilet paper with visible bits of wood pulp. They tell him to get some sleep. Early start. They lock the door, but leave on the light.

  How long since they were in his flat, with Merkulov going through his music and his books? Twenty minutes? Thirty? Certainly no more than half an hour. How long since he was asleep in his armchair? An hour, maybe less.

  This is how the world works. A life changed in minutes, seconds.

  He can’t sleep. The room is too bright and there doesn’t seem any point, now that it must be daytime. Not that he can see any daylight. Every window is boarded up. It could be any time of day or night, and those in custody would be none the wiser.

  He waits for an unknown length of time; it could be minutes or hours. He tries counting the seconds but gives up when he reaches two thousand. The cell door opens and the NKVD men enter, accompanied by another, older agent. Intelligent, aquiline face. A small, pouting mouth and sad eyes that droop in their corners.