Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Shostakovich swore that he no longer committed that error.

  Dmitri Dmitriyevich, can you put in a little more self-sacrifice? And maybe—

  Don’t worry, don’t worry, I’ll do what I can, the composer murmured wearily.

  And heroism? Listen up! We want to get the message across that anyone can be a hero.

  I really love, so to speak, heroism. I’m going to squeeze some in this very instant.

  (Far away, our Black Sea fleet was firing. Glikman’s brother Salomon had just been killed. Nearer at hand, Field-Marshal Ritter von Leeb sounded the timpani. Across the street, a stinking, shadow-cheeked man clutched his handful of bread. He was there every day. If only he could write him into his symphony. He’d find a way.)

  I was saying, maybe more optimism.

  Well, it would seem that—

  We don’t believe you’ve taken note of how optimistic Leningraders are. After all, thousands starved here during the Civil War, but that didn’t keep Leningrad down!

  You don’t remember that, do you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? You were too protected by your privileged background.

  Please excuse me, but in fact I, well, my grandfather—

  We know all about that grandfather of yours. You’re lucky he’s dead.

  For example, if you rewrote a few measures in a major key . . .

  I understand, said Shostakovich with a coiled smile. That would certainly improve it immeasurably, although perhaps in this case—

  And then that so-called Rat Theme or Fascism Theme or whatever it is, well, frankly, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, there’s been some concern. How long is it?

  How long? Let’s see, let’s see; I believe it’s two hundred and eighty bars. What does the length have to do with anything?

  No wonder Konstantinovskaya left him! Shostakovich, have you ever once satisfied a woman? I know why they call you a masturbator!

  No, that’s all fine, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. That’s irrelevant. Our concern is that it begins too melodiously, which might mislead the masses into believing—

  That I like rats?

  Always the joker!

  That I’m a, a, so to speak, a Hitlerite?

  Out of your own mouth! You ought to be extremely careful. So if you could . . .

  I appreciate your criticism. He who has ears will hear. I can see I’ll have to think deeply about this, Comrade Petrov . . .

  But, please, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, none of this is meant to detract from the majesty of your symphony. (What crap! put in Comrade Alexandrov.) It’s truly very striking, especially the loud parts.

  I’m very grateful—

  But you need to work faster. Can you finish it in a week?

  A week, perhaps, is, so to speak, somewhat—

  It’s quite good, really. There’s hardly a drop of your old individualism in it—

  Thank you, thank you, my dear friend. Well, our life is so full of brilliant themes just now . . .

  They recommended that he follow the example of his colleague Khrennikov, who’d always persecuted him, who would persecute him to the very end, and who for that reason among other reasons of a similar kind got to be present at the capitulation of Berlin. Shostakovich accordingly promised to let himself be guided by this genius. (As I used to tell Elena, I am a person with a, how shall I describe myself? With a very weak character. I am not certain that I can achieve happiness.) The third man spat on the floor. Thanks again for that, dear friend. In every way that he possibly could, he acted as though they had triumphed over him, that he’d actually swallowed all their filth. Could any of them even name the dominant of any scale? Well, well; technical knowledge is surely, how should I say, overrated, especially when all you need to know is—ha, ha!—how to break bones.

  They reminded him, as if he could possibly forget with the loudspeakers screaming it every day, of Comrade Stalin’s decree that any soldier who surrendered deserved the supreme punishment. He didn’t want to surrender to defeatism, did he? Then they appointed him chairman of the Home Guard Theater, and in an instant he’d composed twenty-seven popular songs.

  By the end of the week, nearly everybody in Leningrad was humming his “Oath to the People’s Commissar,” which was actually very, how should I say, complicated, because the scoring, well, it only pretends to be idiotic. The “organs” were happy with him for that; his song ended by praising the generalship of Comrade Stalin. As he peered down from the Conservatory roof, he saw a troop of Komsomol boys marching off to mine more factories and bridges. Someday his son would be doing that, if he lived. They were singing “Oath to the People’s Commissar” in two-part harmony.

  In the era of total war, coddling musicians might appear to be a weakness. But our apparatchiks knew better. Music inspired harder work and distracted the toilers from dangerous thoughts. Besides, music was all we could offer just now. The Seventh and Seventy-third Armies of the Northern Front, the Eighth, Eleventh and Twenty-seventh Armies of the Northwestern Front—thirty-nine divisions and two brigades in all—they held the line against the Fascists, but they were dwindling by the thousands. (Many had been liquidated by theDeath’s-Head Division.) And those squat, propeller-driven MIG-3s in formation over Leningrad, they weren’t ready just yet; first we had to relocate our airplane factories out of Hitler’s reach, and then we’d need to, so to speak, you know. Where were the T-34 tanks? Wait two years; we had no tank armies yet. That was why loudspeakers chanted from every street corner (Akhmatova was on the radio); that was why even along the White Sea Canal, on whose construction a hundred thousand people died, there’d occasionally been convict orchestras huddled on concrete slabs, their horns drooping down like the beaks of perishing ravens as they played inspirational melodies.

  But you have to appeal to a larger audience this time, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. That goes without saying, comrades! I, I, I’ll follow your fraternal guidance . . .

  (Late that night, when he saw Nina, he whispered that phrase into her ear, and she laughingly pretended to slap him. Then she leaped up to see if anybody might have been listening at the door.)

  So that was how it was. Thirty years later, he told his treacherous disciple Volkov: I wrote my Seventh Symphony very quickly. I couldn’t not write it. War surrounded us; I had to be with the people . . .

  But by then he scarcely remembered how he had really felt. After thirty years one becomes sentimental.

  27

  On 1 September, we find Shostakovich on the radio, claiming to have finished the second movement of his symphony just an hour ago. He continues: We are all at our battle stations . . .

  At first sight this claim of his appears propagandistically fantastic. What a coincidence! He just happened to finish that movement an hour before going on the official radio! Especially since our dear little Galisha was playing with his glasses and hid them for twenty minutes. Still, it’s not entirely out of the question, even though he’ll later write Glikman that he completed the first movement on the third of September, the second movement on the seventeenth. Even if he did stretch the truth a little, in order to make the Party happy, I’m sure that he was almost finished. The conductor G. V. Yudin remembers a certain examination day at the Conservatory, twenty years before the siege. With tension and anticipation seething together in his stomach, Yudin joined his fellow students by the closed door after Shostakovich had been summoned. After a short pause while he was being told what to play, the silence from behind the closed doors was suddenly broken by a cascade of chords played at prestissimo speed. This tempo was so fantastic that we were left suspended in disbelief and awe. From 1921 to 1941, Shostakovich could only have improved his craft. Why not then suppose that he could compose a symphony at the same prestissimo pace? We have, moreover, the example of the infamous Twelfth Symphony. According to Lebedinsky, this supposed ode to Lenin was actually an angry satire against the founder of our Soviet Union. Realizing three or four days before the premiere that this music was practically a death sentence for his entire family, he sat d
own and wrote a complete new score—no matter that, in Lebedinsky’s words, the music was frightening in its helplessness. In short, our Shostakovich was a rapid worker, his Seventh was coming along just fine, and its second movement, “Recollection,” might well prove the most pleasing of all, thanks to its summery lightness.

  28

  On 2 September the bread ration was reduced for the first time (to a fourth of its previous level). On 4 September the first German shells exploded in Leningrad. On 6 September came the first bomber attack. He had never before seen any, let’s call it a, you know, exercise involving aerial explosives. Did you know that under ideal conditions bombs can express all eight degrees of the diatonic scale as they whistle down? Sometimes even the full chromatic scale can, well, anyhow it distracts me from the fear. Nina was still preparing earth walls, antitank ditches, barbed wire emplacements, pillboxes. Every morning he said goodbye to her forever. His mother was too old and sick for anything. The bones in her face, my God, and the way she coughs . . . On 8 September the Badyaev warehouses were destroyed by incendiary bombs. The German tanks were now within ten miles of the city center.

  On 9 September, during one of the worst raids, Shostakovich invited his friends and a few of their friends to his fifth floor flat on Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street so that they could hear (no matter that our composition dates still don’t agree) the first two movements of his symphony, played on the piano. Nina was away digging trenches; his mother had the children; anyway there couldn’t have been any tea. A kilo of horsemeat for a bottle of red wine, that’s how it was. Well, Glikman had brought wine. He was very . . . They sat choking on brick-dust while loudspeakers shouted outside.

  A bomb fell, and instantly afterward they all heard piccolo-notes screeching from the victims, but no one mentioned the air raid shelter. One scream lasted for a quarter-hour.—Poor tone, thought Shostakovich, lack of breath support; or perhaps the, well, the embouchure’s too large now. I, I do hope it’s not Elena.

  Sighing, he rose, peered through the blackout curtain and sat down again. He still couldn’t tell where that scream was coming from. It went on and on. He was sure that it was Elena now. He got up again. The piano had gotten filthy with brick-dust. He went to the bathroom to find a damp cloth, well, actually, you see, to compose himself, because . . .—Excuse me, everybody, he said. I apologize for this, this, you know.

  Sitting down again, he polished each key clean. In the streets of Leningrad, Elena Konstantinovskaya was screaming and screaming.

  Well, well, he cheerfully announced. One just can’t get away from death. These keys, for instance, they’re, how should I say, black and white, like a clothed corpse half covered in snow. I don’t know if we should even . . . Anyway they’re clean now.

  Never mind all that! We’re ready, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!

  Oh, well, oh, well, let’s get on with it. That’s the spirit. Now, what do you really think of this? he asked his guests. Because we have to go on as if our suffering isn’t meaningless! Do you see my point? Because otherwise . . . This is the first movement, and I, well, here it is.

  And he played a theme like a field of tall flowering grass in which consciousness and premonition browsed together like wild deer. Then his hands rushed up from the piano, the fingers twitching out the beat of silence as he played a rest as black and square as the silhouette of a pillbox, and then came what in the orchestral version would be faint snare drums, and the Rat Theme commenced.

  At this juncture it could have been the motif of a lover or a muse—a light, flirtatious knocking, as if a certain someone whose initials were E. E. K. had come to awake him for an hour of erotic delight in the Astoria Hotel; but what if it were the NKVD, who knocked in that same coaxing fashion out of sadistic fun, so that he smilingly opened the door, dressed in his very best underpants, when he should have leapt out the window? When he stroked that first go-round out of the white keys and black keys and spaces in between, he employed all the artifices of his trademark sarcasm, which, after all, is their sadism once removed, so that it beautifully expressed ugliness, in much the same way that “Lady Macbeth”’s most gruesome and sinister passages always occurred in a major key, or, for that matter, exactly the same way that for the rest of his life he’d refer to informers and police spies as his dear, dear friends, precisely the same way that when he eulogized the perfect military genius of Comrade Stalin, he meant exactly the opposite. How gently he plucked it! And the Rat Theme’s second iteration was still more open, sweet and beautiful. But when it came around again, a woodwind lurked dissonantly beneath the high sweetness. The Rat Theme now assumed a brassy life, shrugging off its former tentativeness, with celli, horns, piccolos, clarinets, brasses and xylophone creeping in en route to the ostinato. And you must believe me when I tell you that even though he had no orchestra on that day, only an out-of-tune piano whose cover had been nicked by shell fragments, he played in such a way that it was all there; this was the true premiere even though hardly anybody was there to hear it. And now the snare drum stiffened the Rat Theme into martialness. The fifth repetition was like the second but much louder, more confident. The Pied Piper had entered his stride (and for the sake of our lives, to say nothing of our musical careers, we’ll call him Adolf Hitler, because otherwise we’d, you know). Now in came the orchestra’s processional drums, the Rat Theme going national-patriotic, and in the seventh go-round it was positively stern with the snare drum sounding like a rattlesnake. Next it was childishly inane with loud xylophones, then cunningly impressionistic, aping Debussy with vague wavish loudness; but in its tenth incarnation it grew creepy and horrid, with the moaning dissonance of air raid sirens and U-boat alarms; and in the eleventh it marched and bayed in a full-throated major key which might have seemed no worse than pompous in another context (Shostakovich said to Glikman: I suppose that critics with nothing better to do will, so to speak, damn me copying Ravel’s “Bolero.” Well, let them. You see, my dear friend, that’s how I hear war!); the twelfth round changed key, because the Rat Theme, more determined and unstoppable than ever, was already beginning to break up into its own chaos. Fragments of it thrashed in frenetic confusion, wallowed crazily, came back to major-keyed life again, but only for a moment, then flaked, flakked, shredded, collapsed and died. From the “Lady Macbeth” affair he’d learned that we never know when death will come; from those corpses on Nevsky Prospect, with their outflung arms and clenched fists, or their indrawn arms, or missing arms, he’d learned that how death comes is equally secret. Now a slow Sibelius-like dirge returned, mirroring the opening theme of the movement, until once vigilance had slipped the Rat Theme cunningly resurrected itself in an innocuous sort of mountain climber’s accompaniment, brave and sporty. Cymbals clashed and gnashed like monster-teeth; the Rat Theme, already very far from what it had been before, scuttled back into anti-programmatic formalism. Sad, slow, near silent contemplation drew wisps of music-consciousness through ruins, mournful woodwinds drifting smoke-like across the creeping blows of the bass. Then a reprise of the opening theme, sweet, melancholy yet unafraid, seemed to securely close the movement. At the very end, however, amidst more creeping thumps and the rattlesnaking of the snare drum, the Rat Theme came back, as it always has and always will, on this occasion disguised as “Taps.”

  He played utterly by memory, committing no errors. And his friends sat listening and silently weeping. So many tears! And at the end, a man he scarcely knew said to him: Thanks to the war, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, and thanks also to you, for the first time we can cry openly. Not one of us here hasn’t lost somebody, somebody killed by the Fascists or else before—

  My God! cried Glikman in terror. Please watch what you’re saying, Ivan Borisovich!

  No, I’m sorry, everybody. Of course I didn’t mean it like that. Forgive me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich . . .

  29

  There was a lot of shelling later on that day, and the shells seemed to go right past his ears. Around the corner was a so-called “factory” wher
e pale skinny boys stood shaking and assembling the round magazines of machine-guns; all right, so the Fascists knew about that and were shelling it. It’s a shame that those boys were probably, so to speak, well. He’d advanced the thesis to Glikman that a person owns many different sorts of courage stored up within himself like fats; most of them can be exhausted, at which point a man becomes a coward; one must feed one’s bravery; it’s all a matter of chemicals. His friend gazed at him with huge sad eyes and said: For your own sake, I beg you, try not to get cynical, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!