He lived with his children in the house of Gertrud’s parents, who were still alive. Lina went to visit, and found them sitting around the table with drapes drawn, the older people smiling cautiously, ready for something bad to happen, the boys grinning at the prospect of cake. Stalin’s portrait hung overhead, with a wreath of flowers at his throat, because he’d already died and become a god. They seemed relieved when she said goodbye.
I’ll walk you back, said Hans.
Across the street, in scaffolding resembling the ghost-rungs attached to whichever music-notes protrude above the staff in Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, a dozen laborers roosted, passing a bottle of schnapps. One of them shouted an obscenity at Lina.
Say nothing, Hans told her.
When have I ever said anything?
Everyone has bad manners now, even my children. Please forgive them.
The dirty grey snow had been ground down to slime on the cobblestones of the empty streets, and silhouettes passed sparsely through the cold shade, moving as slowly and silently as mourners.
Do you remember Vice-Landrat Beda? he said in her ear.
Of course. Once when we were small he gave us each a chocolate . . .
They indicted him for sabotage, because they didn’t like his report on the sowing. He was jailed for ten months; but they didn’t like that, either, so they increased the sentence to three years. That was in ’46, so he should have gotten out in ’49, but he’s never come back.
The rubble-piles were heaped neatly around the broken bookends of the Frauenkirche as if in offering; the round window still standing, framing nothing but grey sky.
You’re probably wondering why we don’t talk about Freya, he said then. You see, the Russians took her away. I don’t know how to tell you this; it’s so shameful.
Ivan will never go away, Lina recited, but in a voice as low as her brother’s, because a policeman was blowing his nose on the far side of the street. Three stout women leaned on their shovels, pretending to work.
No, it’s worse than that, said Hans. You lived in Berlin; perhaps you’ve heard of such things, but we . . . You see, Freya—I don’t know how to say this—went away with a woman. That’s why we don’t talk about her anymore.
Lina burst out laughing. ‣
OPERATION WOLUND
Was their ill fate sealed when in they looked.
—Voçlundarkviîa (9th century?)
1
I was the last one, except for Raoul Hillenberg, Raoul Wallenberg and a hundred thousand others. I was the last one I knew about. They’d kept me because of my prior relationship with Colonel Hagen, whom of all the war criminals they loathed most. And while they never feared me (though feared me they should), I’m sure they read the hate in me.
They kept me on an island without a name; at least if the island had a name I never knew it. The last place with a name I ever knew was Shpalnery Prison.
I wrought work for them which only a German could do. Do you want to know what it was? It was rocket work.
They’d shackled and hamstrung me; furthermore, I had to sleep within a web of barbed wire woven by a metal spider whose arms were as long and narrow as that cold-steel Russian sword called the shpaga; to get right down to it, I didn’t sleep much, on account of the injections. What they longed for was a missile which could fly all the way across Myrkvith Forest and exterminate the West Germans; they also hoped to kill the Amis in Washington. I wished to live, so I told them that I could do whatever they wanted; besides, I actually could do it.
They peered into my toolchest. They photographed my workbench. They knocked on the side of my rocket and it sounded hollow. They didn’t understand a thing.
Lieutenant Danchenko always treated me nicely. I’ll never forget the red flashes on her blue NKVD uniform. Once when her partner was in the latrine I told her that I could make her something special if that would please her, something beautiful and poisonous which would let her kill anyone she wanted. She got suspicious then. She wondered what favor I wished in return. I whispered that what I wished was her.
She liked that. Soon I was calling her Natalya Kovalova. Then it was Natalka. She came to me within my spiderweb.
One night when we were making love I strangled her. Then I took her keys and found the long sawtoothed one which went inside the spider’s belly. I unlocked the spider and came out of the web. Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.
Then I cut Natalka’s eyes out—beautiful brown eyes!—and bored wires into them, which I hooked up to transistors and diodes. I squeezed the bulb and they opened. Now they were sensors. After all, it’s the worker who creates all material values. I installed Natalka’s eyes high in the nose of the rocket which was supposed to kill the Amis, and the rocket came alive. It was already a fine rocket, whose shell was magnalium alloy.
I sharpened Natalka’s fine white little teeth, which had proved so good at making lovebites, and packed them into grenades which I mounted under my rocket’s wings. (I saved her canine teeth for an antipersonnel mine which I wired up against the door.) I cleaned out her skull and filled it full of wires and switches so that the rocket had a guidance system. I filled the fuel tanks with her hot Russian blood! As for the rest of her, oh, she was as soft-skinned as an Ami truck; her flesh was as smoothly sloping as a T-34’s breast, which repels our shells as a duck’s breast does rain. So the rest of her I reduced to metal-tinned cubes in order to have something to eat on my journey. Then I was ready to fly as high as heaven.
Under other circumstances I would have made jewels for that woman. Poor Natalka! But I was a prisoner and I was in a rage, knowing that there’d never again be children coming to see us off at the train station in Berlin.
Now here they came, shooting through the door. I was in the cockpit of my rocket by then. As they came bursting in, my antipersonnel mine exploded and Natalka’s teeth killed half a dozen of them! Laughing, I pulled the switch and blasted right through the ceiling.
Shall I tell you how and why I’d won out? Under my tongue (the one place they didn’t search) I kept a splinter of the old Reichscrown, in other words a piece of the True Cross. ‣
OPUS 110
The problem of the “black bread” of culture has now been completely solved, and now is the time to provide society with the “sweet biscuits” of culture.
—The Soviet Way of Life (1974)
1
Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room. When the war’s over, when Stalin’s dead and for cemetery obelisks Europe sports the orphaned chimneys of firebombed Murmansk, the scorched churches of Dresden, politics spares us for a blink or two, nervously gnawing its own claws. The soldier comes home, pulls off his muddy, bloody uniform and becomes a citizen again. So too Shostakovich. Visitors remark on his success: white and black bread both, cheese, butter, even sausage on the table! Nylon stockings for Ninusha! His children love him, Lebedinsky respects him, Glikman reveres him; Ninusha (Nina Vasilyevna to you!) keeps unwanted visitors away; the Party woos him; Galina Ustvolskaya kisses him. Oh, yes, he’s very, how should I say? If I could only . . . Don’t answer the telephone! Because it’s time to, well, you know. But what’s that sound? It certainly wasn’t in Opus 40. What key most effectively expresses bereavement? In the darkness, a cello saws out a tune as dry as the buzzing of wasps within a skull. He claps his hands to his ears, but what good will that do? It comes from within! What’s that sound? Until now, all that he and we could hear was the patriotic clanking of tanks under Leningrad’s arches, as translated into my Seventh Symphony. And I even believed! I’m not saying that the others weren’t idealists, even fat-chinned Khrennikov, who earned his . . . not that I’d speak ill of a colleague, oh, no, dear friends! Did
you know that Comrade Stalin praises Khrennikov? Count on it! They’re two of a kind. No, it’s not I who should be considered the man of our epoch. I get angry when they kick somebody in the teeth and expect me to set it to music. How strange that Roman Lazarevich wants me to write scores for his so-called “masterpieces,” when Khrennikov would be more, you know. Of course she never slept with Khrennikov, at least not that I . . . Thank heavens that’s all over. Isaak Davidovich tells me that she divorced him, so he must be very . . . Not that it’s my business. She’ll probably find another older man. And, yes, the war’s over, too; I wish that Maxim would stop having nightmares about Auschwitz! I mean, in this world we have to . . . And Galisha tells me that the boy won’t even . . . Not that she’s so lucky herself, to have me for a father. Oh, my! Now Europe is silent—but what’s that sound?
It’s himself, starved, choking and weeping in an airless room. In the wise judgment of Sovetskaya Musika: It is impossible to forget that Shostakovich’s work has a certain tendency to close in upon itself, that the popular roots of his music are not deep enough. His pale and shining face sinks down toward the music-paper, which he’s anchored to the desk by his suitsleeves, elbows outward; he doesn’t resemble a boy anymore; his hairline’s receding; he needs another cigarette. What ought to cause him agony he no longer feels; he’s but the catalyst of a biochemical reaction which turns pain into music.—What’s that sound? A D-note, probably.—To his right, from the long black jawbone of the best piano, music-teeth grin at him; when the time comes, when Opus 110 is ready for execution, they’ll know what to do! Fuzzy fibrous tree-roots will eat his flesh. Right now they’re neither popular nor deep enough. No fear; they’ll bite deeper. What’s that sound? The mournful, sinister groanings of the strings comprise a largo of suffocation. Less grisly than the allegretto of skeletons when the soul is pursued and caught by death, that sound is sadder: Death having done its work, we must now suffer through the dying. Thus Opus 110.
We might note that this quartet opens with the four-note signature D, E-flat, C, B, which is to say in inappropriately German notation DSCH, and which therefore is also to say Dmitri Shostakovich. Assertion of self-characterized Soviet artists who were persecuted for following their private Muses. In the case of Akhmatova, who was proscribed from publishing for many years and who lost both son and lover to prison camps, not to mention that ex-husband whom we’d shot long before, the shrill I am approaches megalomania. Had she been, say, an Englishwoman, her egocentricity might have proved insufferable. She versifies about the strophes, streets and monuments which posterity will name after her. But she was Russian. She was not free. What could she assert but herself? In the world of we, the failing I repeated her name, defiant. She became a heroine; her poems were memorized secretly in Black Marias and Arctic camps. She wrote I, and Shostakovich wrote DSCH.
Not long before Opus 110, she composed a poem to him. She wrote that his music kept her company in the grave as if every flower burst into words. Then, slowly, she sank into decrepitude, weeping and drinking tea for years in an airless room.
2
When they heard the hideous news that the Americans had detonated two “atom-bombs” over Japan, killing thousands or hundreds of thousands (as usual, the numbers of the dead varied with the teller), Shostakovich said with a horridly gloomy smile: It’s our task to rejoice.
Younger musicians had begun to draw away, on account of that diabolical cynicism of his, which seemed almost to ape Stalin’s, swelling until it overshadowed Moscow’s new heroic columns; while his own generation, who knew him better, simply worried about his will to live. No need: He’d already survived. To him they were all blue morning shadows on new snow, silhouettehued people gliding cautiously along the icy sidewalks, an occasional camel-brown or blonde-furred coat like a surprise, a bareheaded woman steaming breath ahead of her; he watched them from his redoubt beneath the piano keys. Peering out and up, ready to duck back behind his glasses, he exchanged courtesies even with the ones in raspberry-colored boots—dear Shostakovich! He was as moderate as Comrade Stalin. Those caustic, hideous things that wailed out of his twitching smile with the suddenness of violin-shrieks (it’s our task to rejoice)—well, well . . .
As early as 1944, the cellist V. Berlinsky, while praising his astounding musical memory, had felt forced to describe him as a lump of nerves. And now, with the Germans crushed under their own rubble, Shostakovich, half-smoothfaced, smoothhanded and perfectly pallid as he sat at the piano with his wrists in corpse-white parallels, listened again and again within his skull-bunker to the Eighth Symphony (soon to be denounced as repulsive, ultra-individualist ); when he’d arrived at that resolute call to arms of the fourth movement, that tense, sweet thrumming of all-sacrificing sincerity, he bit his lips for self-disgust, to think that he could have believed in anything! He’d stood up to be counted. He’d even hoped. Now he composed fugues (and here we might note that the Latin source-word fuga means quite simply flight).
We know that Hitler had actually considered sealing off Leningrad with an electric fence. Now the whole country was sealed off, even better than before. Specters whirled through the Summer Garden in ever-narrowing spirals, but it wasn’t summer. And Shostakovich, taking his first breaths of peacetime air, found himself in the situation of the shaggy peasant in his banned opera “Lady Macbeth” who breaks into the cellar in search of wine to steal, and staggers out overcome by the stench of a murdered corpse.
In 1945 we find him writing the popular song “Burn, Burn, Burn” especially for the NKVD Ensemble. Even then he still kept a change of underwear and an extra toothbrush in his briefcase, against the eventuality of arrest. Just for, you know, fun, he liked to imagine that they’d knock on the door in a 5/4 theme, which would be very . . . Nina likewise had prepared herself. When the children were sleeping he sometimes entered her bed, pressed his lips against her ear and began to whisper curses against Comrade Stalin. Her eyes opened. In a low voice she entreated: My God, what are you saying? Think of what could happen to us!
Could it have always been like this? A nineteenth-century French traveler whose prose was as purple as an NKVD agent’s identification card once declared: The Russians are not ghosts, but specters, walking solemnly beside or behind one another, neither sad nor glad, never letting a word escape their lips. Those words were written when all the six hundred and twenty-six church-bells of Petersburg still rang. Could they have been tuned? He wished he could have, you know. And now, when Petersburg was Leningrad and the noble-born girls of the Smolny Convent were dead, even silence was unsafe. Everybody had to sing hosannas. D-flat-C-D-flat was how he’d sung, ever so nastily, in the allegretto of the Eighth Symphony. At the premiere they’d seemed nervous. He’d wanted to blow them all up! He was a loyal citizen of our great Soviet land; he hummed along. Then he went to sleep in the other room.
3
In 1946, Stalin’s enthusiastically ruthless shadow Comrade Zhdanov (who was soon to die under peculiar circumstances) announced to the Leningrad Union of Soviet Writers: Leninism proceeds from the fact that our literature cannot be politically indifferent, cannot be “art for art’s sake.” They got quiet then; they knew what was coming. In truth, the only wonder was that it hadn’t come sooner. When the motif has already sounded, how can the opus go on without it? Folding his arms across his massive breast so that he resembled one of our KV tanks, Comrade Zhdanov forthwith demanded that there be no further deviation from the task at hand on the literary front—namely, to create art to light the way ahead with a searchlight.
Reading this directive in the pages of Pravda, Shostakovich understood that it was only a matter of time before they turned their attention back to music. It would be “Lady Macbeth” all over again.
Nina tried to lay her hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged her off in a terrified rage. What a ridiculous man he was! With a searchlight. And in the dark, when everything’s frozen, it’s not so easy to dig down under the snow and hide before the searchlight co
mes; I’d probably represent it by a B-flat between two C-notes, in a humming, thrumming base, since that would be very, as Elena used to say in her favorite English phrase, creepy.—Oh, dear, oh, me, what brilliant arguments they’ll muster against all of us! he muttered, cocking his head like a wind-up owl, drinking vodka until he turned pale.
Slamming the door, Nina went out to her “special friend,” the physicist A. Alikhanyan.
He lit another “Kazbek” cigarette, his hair rushing carelessly down his face as he played with his children. Galisha was getting spoiled, but he couldn’t bring himself to be firm with the girl; she’d soon enough find out how the world, you know, operated. He remembered her as a baby in Leningrad, hungrily sucking on a piece of oilcake. She used to cry and hide her head in his lap when the Fascists let off their eighty-eights. And Akhmatova had said . . .—How would they develop the offensive this time? They’d probably use Khrennikov to denounce him on the radio. The man loved that sort of work. He was perfectly adapted to our time, like one of those blowflies which specialize in, no need to spell it out. Why even . . . ? But I saved Galisha from that—Maxim, too, who by the way needs to write something for the wall newspaper of his Pioneer brigade. He’s extremely . . . And even though Nina won’t forgive me; she says I didn’t do enough for my own family, I never stopped, well, I should have just . . . And all for nothing! The sincerity of that Seventh Symphony, whenever I hear it I can hardly bear it! I’m so ashamed of it now. With a, a, a searchlight, so to speak; that’s how they’ll . . . Even though Lebedinsky will say . . . Leo Oskarovich informs me that wherever Stalin’s daughter goes, she has a bodyguard, of course, and this man especially hates concerts! When she goes to the Conservatory to listen to, for instance, compositions by the former and future enemy of the people Shostakovich, this Mikhail Nikiforovich complains: Begging your pardon, my dear Svetlana Alliluyeva, now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. It must be the string instruments that he’s referring to, don’t you think? And then Svetlana Alliluyeva replies—what does she reply? It’s hilarious! I suppose that’s what they all think. Then Khrennikov! He knows how to do it—right in the nape of the neck, they say, so that there’s no . . . And here come the blowflies. Next they’ll shut me out of the cinema, where I make my money. “Zoya” just won a Stalin Prize, so they’ll regret that I wrote the music for that monstrosity. I’d better compose one more film score while I still can. Roman Lazarevich might help me, out of pity. He gets invitations to drink with Stalin’s children, so I hear. He’s quite the . . . If not, I could hope that Leo Oskarovich, or perhaps Simonov, to hell with Simonov.
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