Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  19

  When the captive Gunnar told the Huns that he’d only reveal to them the hoard of the Niflungs (whose gold shone even brighter than the vertical gleams of sunlight upon marchingboots) on condition that they cut out Hogni’s heart, they tried to trick his rich-wrought mind by carrying to him a mere thrall’s heart upon a board; but he knew his brother’s heart would never quiver in terror as that one did even in death. Helpless before his cleverness, they killed Hogni then, who laughed as he died. Then Gunnar said that since only he remained to tell the secret, he had no more fear, for tell he never would.

  When they lowered Gunnar into the slimy dungeon of adders, he played upon his harp so beautifully that all the serpents slept. Yet finally he wearied, and from that ball of reptiles he perforce lay upon rose up one to bite his liver, and so he perished there in the darkness of snakes.

  Knowing her duty, valiant Guthrún served up her own sons’ hearts to the husband who’d slain her brothers. After that she razed the castle by fire.

  The sleepwalker in his pale grey coat (our memories of him have become so grey and grainy) craves to be another Gunnar. Isn’t he a harpist, too? Hasn’t he always been able to lull all snakes to sleep until now? And his Germany, she shall be Guthrún. Germany must die ferocious, burning down everything . . .

  20

  On 12.04.45, the Berlin Philharmonic presents Brünnhilde’s last aria and the finale from “Götterdämmerung.” He’s seen “Götterdämmerung” more than a hundred times. Each time, his brain burns anew in flames of salmon-colored gold. Silhouettes of hanged corpses comprise the perimeter of his now minuscule empire. A civilian hostage raises both arms. Where now his cruelly smiling pale young faces under steel helmets? Where now his myriad marchers on a hill, following the swastika flag?—In Siberia, or dead under mud or pale cobblestones!—The radio which once spread his words like epidemics now pulses meaninglessly: Complete obliteration . . . shameful . . . solemn promise . . . The Russians have already reached Myrkvith Forest; waves of American Jews hem them in on all other fronts. Verena Wagner decides to plan a Ring without swastikas for 1946. Shadowy night-crowds burn what they’ve worn for a dozen years, their livery sewn and ornamented in his image. Other crowds in striped uniforms begin emerging from the lane of barbed wire. Mountains of shoes which from a distance resemble herrings in a tin memorialize those who will nevermore come forth. And the sleepwalker dreams. He gives orders to execute all the new traitors. Germany will be safe. Smiling at last in his address to the schoolboys who’ve hopelessly fought for him against the parades of Russian tanks now entering Berlin, he speaks of their common lineage, then hands out tokens like unto the ancient rings of red gold. The boys shout: Heil Hitler! Closing his eyes, he remembers how five years ago his long lines of victorious warriors passed through the Arc de Triomphe while he paid homage to Napoleon. But the world of the old gods was corrupt; it had to be smashed. He does not tell the boys this. It is too late for any explanations. A few days later, weird-ringed by Russian flames, the sleepwalker and his secret bride kill themselves.

  21

  In his very first speech as Chancellor he’d cried: I have steadfastly refused to come to the people with cheap promises!—Then he’d pointed to his heart. But now what promises has Gunnar to harp on for all these ungrateful snakes? He tires now; his music stops. Shyly he confesses: On the day following the end of the Bayreuth Festival, I’m gripped by a great sadness—as when one strips the Christmas tree of its ornaments . . .

  His music stops, his Berliners running behind mounds of rubble, flames winging out of windows, for he’s lost this game of draughts which the gods once played with golden figurines, but even yet he guards hope, for Roosevelt is dead; Stalin and Churchill are falling out; and that most ancient of all Norse prophecies sighs upon the lips of the moldy, grassy Mother who periodically arises from this grave-infested earth: Someday, perhaps even in the meadows of Poland where his herds of tanks recently gamboled, the golden figures, the far-famed ones, will be found again, which they possessed in olden days. And then, beneath an even, searing light, he’ll win back his city all of gold, whose monuments and plazas remain unmarred by humanity. ‣

  THE PALM TREE OF DEBORAH

  You know, to a certain extent I think the formula “the end justifies the means” is valid in music.

  —D. D. Shostakovich (1968)

  1

  Barbed wire like music-lines taut in bunches of five, claimed either by the bass cause or the treble—for there never was nor can be a neutral instrumental zone—now embraced Leningrad, that so-called “cradle of the Proletarian Revolution.” The bass command’s kettledrum melodies of artillery would be performed by Army Group North: thirty-two divisions, seven hundred thousand German Fascists, Field-Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb conducting. From within the city (treble, tremolo) arose the countervailing piccolo music of screams. (How could I somehow possibly, wondered the nearsighted fire-warden on the Conservatory roof, let alone passably represent us pianissimo, before the snare drum creeps in? Because we’re not pianissimo at all. We’re, um, you know. That’s what they’ll expect, even though we also have to be the loudest. They want me to, to, you know, to signify this into something they can feed people instead of sausage! Without formalism while I’m at it! To hell with them. I can hold my own.) In the opening bars of those Nine Hundred Days, the chorus comprised three million Leningraders, but a third of them perished. Too weak to push her way through the bread queue, a widow fell in the snow. A sexless child was chewing on coffee grounds. A family was eating oilcake with celluloid in it. Comrade Zhdanov called Stalin on the VC phone, but Stalin would not answer.

  As for the fire-warden, whose name was D. D. Shostakovich, I can hear him drumming out the Rat Theme on the rim of his helmet. Although he wouldn’t have confessed it, this war arrived none too soon! The explosion of rapture at his First Symphony so long ago should have warned him, for in our Soviet Union as in any besieged zone it’s unwise to stand out despicably or dashingly. But—freakish child molting into feminine-mouthed prodigy, then cigarette-twiddling hero, I mean grain-beetle of subversion—he’d never succeeded in camouflage. (His cue: cymbal-clash—gnash, gnash.) Oh, how many times other children had hurt him! Gawky, pale, wary-eyed behind the round spectacles, he watched encirclers with a melancholy consciousness of his own vulnerability, which they frequently took for submission. Indeed, surrender should have been his policy, for he exuded softness, being the larvum of a grain-beetle, which is to say the proverbially pallid intellectual grub. Girls wanted to pinch his cheeks, while most boys despised him before the second beat of the overture. If one believes, as does any true Bolshevik, that the working class, destined to be the victorious class, can send advance detachments to break through the perimeter of the bourgeoisie, why not grant that doomed systems may in the course of their retreat leave behind counterpoised stragglers whose smooth hands and inward aspirations betray them? They’ll survive for a few measures yet; the composer need not write them out of his score so long as they keep time, but they’re outmoded nonetheless; they’re as prehistoric as the Tauride Palace’s fabled owl of gold, into which some extinct Imperial craftsman by means of clocksprings and prayers once built sentience sufficient for its eyes to roll on state occasions. (They never move anymore. After the Revolution, their mechanism ran down.) As for the boy, he stared owl-eyed at the world. Why did I ever liken him to an insect? He was a bird, now that I come to think of it; or maybe he was a—call him a formalist. He blinked. Then he sat down at the piano. His fingers, which appeared far more fragile than dragonflies or faraway antique biplanes, commenced their beautiful convulsions. Oh, he got attention, all right . . .—But the music itself? No less a figure than A. K. Glazunov, director of the Leningrad Conservatory, admitted that he couldn’t understand such harmonies, although he offered to stand aside for them. Our Mitya, he opined, was undoubtedly the future’s darling.

  (Shostakovich ducked his head.)

  Perhaps it’
s mere jealousy on my part, Glazunov continued (and the other professors laughed, to imagine that somebody as important as Glazunov could feel jealous of a student), but all the same, I don’t like your latest opus! Ha, ha, what am I saying? I know he’s sincere—you’re not just playing with us, are you, Mitya?—and what he’s attempting is so, let’s say, revolutionary, that it can’t be appreciated in the very first instant . . .

  The pupil smiled, fiddling with his mittens. In his view, which he would have readily defended in less intimidating surroundings, music ought to remain freely undifferentiated from any but emotional content, and perhaps even from that. This notion might not have been as new as it seemed; nor, perhaps, was Glazunov quite as shocked as he pretended to be. (How natural to patronize youth in the guise of meeting it halfway!—Let the boy overvalue his conceptions a trifle, thought Glazunov. Maybe once he matures he’ll come up with something important.) When his teachers cited the program music of Mussorgsky, Wagner, Berlioz and Rimsky-Korsakoff, our tousleheaded young genius argued that these compositions could be peeled away from their supposed subjects without detriment; if they couldn’t, they failed as music. Such being the case, why not construct sequences of notes without thematic pretense? Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich stood ready to improvise using shock units, shock methods!—Still and all, sighed Glazunov, discreetly sucking alcohol through a long rubber tube, you need not be so irreverent, Mitya.—The boy twitched apologetically. Although it made him nervous, he needed to be noticed. One of Glazunov’s agreeable qualities was an easy tolerance of almost anything. On a white summer’s night when the assistant director attacked the boy, Glazunov interposed: Then this is no place for you. Shostakovich is one of the brightest hopes for our art.—Who then dares allege that Mitya’s mentors didn’t want to help him? In the USSR we practice two kinds of criticism: the merciless denunciation of bourgeois ideology, and the coaxing, comradely criticism of our peers. So long as he continued to follow the well-delineated path which Glazunov had named sincerity, he need anticipate only the second variety, which never stings.

  Born in the antediluvian time when Leningrad was still the claustrophobic “Petersburg” of the Symbolists, in whose nightmares fallen leaves whirled in ever-narrowing spirals, and the same red dominoes or red-eyed terrorists hounded aristocrats wherever they turned, he dwelled, like all children, at the heart of the world. I prefer not to brand him a narcissist, but people do take on the characteristics of the places where they live, and Petersburg is as labyrinthine, enigmatic and literally self-centered as her own best poet, A. A. Akhmatova. Would you like more adjectives? Simultaneously ornate and impoverished, like the golden-braided droshky-driver who cannot feed his own family (and, come to think of it, like Akhmatova, too), Petersburg infects her most sensitive children with a desperation as noble as it is impractical. In a city whose rich aesthetes can admire the greenish tint of thawing river-snow, while ignoring the same hue in the faces of the starving, we must expect the red dominoes to triumph sooner or later. For Petersburg remains above all the city of Raskolnikov, who exists only in Dostoyevsky’s nightmares but whose crime, murder for the sake of an idea, proves its reality again and again. Faint snare drums sound at the beginning of Mitya’s as yet unwritten Rat Theme. Something is coming closer. Mitya reaches for the whirling leaves, and his mittens fall off. Scoldingly, his mother bends down. Time ticks, and the ticking of revolution’s murder-bomb can scarcely be heard because it hides so cleverly in the minister’s study. Measure by measure, death’s overture pulses like the black arch-mouths of Saint Nicholas’s bell-tower reflected in the Kryukov Canal, formalism’s golden spire swimming like a fishtail, black orifices contracting rapidly and sexually, more alive in their distorted untouchability than the “real” arches which overlook them. The future’s darling gazes down at that trembling goldfish, then reaches. His mother smiles, pulling him away.

  He was a year old when Bloody Sunday destroyed the Russian people’s faith in their Tsar. When he was nine, his mother began to teach him piano. I’ve read that she herself had been a credible pianist before her marriage; her shy, skinny son sat down beside her on the mahogany bench reluctantly, if family tradition can be trusted, but—proof that parents always know what’s best for their children—at the end of the third lesson, the mother announced to the family that he had “talent.” The little owl’s eyes rolled.

  The actress N. L. Komarovskaya remembers how even when he was “a small pale youth with a disobedient lick of hair on his forehead,” his prankishness went against the grain. They would tell him to play a foxtrot, for example, and although he’d try (unlike generations of Party activists, Komarovskaya herself remained sure that he honestly intended to be agreeable), his fingers would soon begin to gallop into an incessance completely removed from zeal; then alien improvisations kidnapped the melody, leaving harsh crazed chittering behind. Didn’t he understand his errors? Since he remained too young to be guilty of cynicism, nobody knew whether to call him shy, incompetent or merely bewildered.—His compositions are very good, said Cousin Tania. Of course, some of them one cannot understand from the first hearing.—He looked up, as if he heard somebody calling. In truth, whenever his fingertips settled upon a piano, the white keys took on a brilliance as lovely as icicles on a roof when the late-afternoon sun touches them, while the black keys became slits in the whiteness of the world, holes which gaped from meaning all the way down to pure music. What was he to do? Lost, deliciously dazzled, he played the ineffable.

  A month after his eleventh birthday, revolution struck. The minds of the losers learned to duck down behind frozen eyes. In the fourth movement of his life, when the Hitlerites arrived, Leningrad would get indrawn still further, within the barrier of the Circle Railroad. Cigarette-smoking, helmeted Fascists would burn villages all around, kicking Russian corpses in disgust. German shells would scream proudly in, and people were more than willing to stand aside for them, but . . . Boom! An explosion of rapture set the minister’s house ablaze! Boom! The conductor’s baton came sizzling down . . .—Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’ve really won a victory on the cultural front!—Thank you, thank you, the young composer whispered. He crossed his legs and uncrossed them. Uneasy grimaces flittered across his cheeks.

  Even in the Conservatory, as I’ve implied, he’d excited jealousy. Certain other students (epoch-tuned, let’s call them) sought to strip him of the stipend which armored him against outright hunger. All the same, they didn’t win. His mother tried to fight them when they took away his borrowed piano, but he told her not to worry; he could hear each chord in his head as soon as he wrote it on paper. Beethoven hadn’t let deafness stop him, so Mitya himself could still, well, you know. Ever since his thirteenth birthday he’d consecrated himself in our Revolution’s unheated classrooms. His mother almost starved to feed him; older girl students in threes and fours protected him, fluttering their fingers around long white cigarettes. The worst taunts of his peers (which is to say, their comradely criticisms) hardly ruffled him. It’s easy enough to say that he “believed in himself,” but that means nothing; don’t we each seek our own interest, and dread being crossed? Or, as Mitya would put it, each one composes his own score, and then we all compare versions. Can’t I say that he believed in the power of music? The Civil War meant this to him: Sailors from our Baltic Fleet got serenaded by Beethoven’s Ninth, then sailed directly to the front to fight the Whites! He was there on the quay, aged fifteen; he thought that the orchestra handled its task reasonably well, although the chorus was, well, one must make allowances for hungry people. And the sailors, you see, they were more than interested, because some of them even, how can I begin to tell you? For example, he wouldn’t forget the grizzled pirate who’d clapped his hands like a child. Some of them were so happy that they cried. Their deputies said it was the first time that anyone had ever, you understand. And we had no bread to give them, not even that! All the same, they, they, how can I put this; they thanked us! Then they went off and, I think you
can imagine. Many didn’t come back.—In short, Shostakovich scorned practicality. The whole Revolution did, or claimed to; but in this life we find people who, no matter how zestfully they imitate Raskolnikov by murdering the old pawnbroker, only pretend to be, as the Rascal convinced himself he was, one of the gods, the arbiters, the “extraordinary men”; their real motive for murder, as we know quite well, is greedy gain. Shostakovich would never be one of them. Nourished by the melodies he composed, he kept up his fighting strength, such as it was (to look at him, you’d think him far from formidable), his expectations guarded and comforted by the knowledge that should the pressure ever become more than he could bear, the world within the black keys would shelter him.—You’re just a masturbator, sneered one of his rivals. The way your music sounds, I’d bet anything you don’t come from the working class!—Mitya felt hurt by their malice, to be sure, especially since his grandfather had been a revolutionist in Siberia! Regardless, nobody broke through his defenses. Rapidly wiping his glasses, he faced the other boys down in calm awareness of his own worth.

  It began to be said of him that he was an individualist. His allegiance to collective life was only a pretense. He could not overcome his addiction to the transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale.

  At about the time that we won the war, shot Kolchak and those scum, and established Soviet power forever, Shostakovich was playing piano for money at the Bright Reel cinema palace, his fingers rushing ahead of the so-called “action” in those silent movies whose mediocrity oppressed him into a fury; when the hero died he’d tinkle out some merrily banal improvisation; when the heroine got kissed he’d pound out a motif or two from Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung,” meanwhile trying to stifle his tubercular cough. Oh, he had his fill of playing to order, thank you! It was all the same and it always would be the same, so he’d show them! Sometimes the patrons complained; more often they were so busy groping each other, or so, how should I say, ignorant, that they didn’t notice. At times they even complimented him. One legless ex-colonel who came to each film half a dozen times always shook a finger at him and said: With more feeling, my boy! Make us laugh; make us cry!—But I, yes, yes, yes! replied our high-pitched owl. Next time I’ll get it right! More feeling; let me just write that down, so that I can, um, you know.—Then he’d regurgitate the tale into the projectionist’s ear, laughing and coughing. Every afternoon on the way to work he said to himself: If I’m doing this five years from now, I deserve to be, if you see what I mean, scorned. The tiny bare bulb over the piano almost warmed his hands. Here came Lenin to the rescue! He’d played this part forty-two times. At this point he’d really better pay attention, because if you mock Lenin you might be in for it. All right, all right; now Lenin’s gone I can cut more capers; Dmitri and Elena are parting forever, so let’s play a wedding march! When the management finally let him go, after a whole month, it was a relief.