Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  9

  The Central Committee of the Communist Party singled out him and others as aliens. Now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. He instantly lost his position in the Composers’ Union. When the director called him into his office to inform him of this new promotion, Shostakovich thanked the man, looking far away. He had to clean out his desk right away and go, to avoid contaminating the others. And the way my heart beats, that lurch, almost baroque, if I represented it as a, a, a, bass element then I could put it in my next opus. No, they didn’t exactly call him music’s Kandinsky anymore! Did Elena feel unclean when they called her in to expel her from the Komsomol? I never asked her about that, because . . . And when they took her off in a Black Maria, how vile did she feel then? I . . . There had once been a poster of D. D. Shostakovich in a copper helmet, leading the fire-watch on the Conservatory roof. That poster had been everywhere in Leningrad! Nina kept a copy to save for the children when they were older. If he ever found it, he’d, you know, wipe his asshole with it. Back in ’41, Glikman’s brother Gavriil had opined that the helmet suited him excellently. It went well with his classic face. (This individual, by the way, was another acolyte. When he received his call-up notice, he spent his last free moments at the Academy of Sculpture, carving a bust of Shostakovich out of white alabaster. Then off he went to artillery school.) Evidently our Great Composer, you know, a certain S_____-, had once again decided to make life a battuta: LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL. Why be surprised? Elena had taught him the motto she’d learned in the Pioneers: Always ready. He used to whisper that into her ear, right before they, you know. She’d always giggled. My underwear’s packed. Come and take me away, you bastards. Or worse yet, march me off to watch Roman Karmen’s latest horror. What is it now? It’ll come to me. Oh, I know: “Song of the Kolkhoz Fields!” What a . . . Should I compose a “Song of the Forests” or a “Song of the Factories”? Then they can all . . .

  In February, much of his work, including that invidious Eighth Symphony, was banned by the organ Glavretkom—a necessary policy, with which no true Communist can argue. E. A. Mravinsky, who’d conducted the premiere of the Fifth a decade ago, under equally foreboding circumstances, had raised the score above his head then, at considerable risk to himself. Now the Fifth was to be outlawed altogether. Mravinsky conducted the final performance, kissed the score, then raised it high . . .

  After all, what should this Shostakovich have expected? Refusing to participate in our collective struggle during the war years, he’d removed himself from the Leningrad front.

  There was a broad, low snowy mound in the middle of Theater Square. Naked earth glistened darkly in the middle. The mound resembled the areola of a barely pubescent girl. He paced and paced around it, in that intersection of paths bordered by fences and benches. Beyond the fences lay snowy grass. He stopped. He gazed between the pillars of the Bolshoi Theater, remembering that evening a quarter-century ago now when he’d come rushing from the train station, rightly trusting to the curving, glowing tram to preserve his legendary punctuality. He’d had the score of “Lady Macbeth” in his briefcase, in case he might be expected to present it to Comrade Stalin. And then the crowds had come in, the curtain had gone up, and . . .

  He trudged round and round the dirt.

  In April, summoned to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers to receive further instruction regarding his errors, Shostakovich, unable to further imperil Nina and the children, why did I ever, you know, rose to approach the lectern. His face was more squarish than it used to be. He no longer gazed shyly down at his adorers’ feet; instead, he stared levelly through his condemners. He’d cropped his hair a trifle. His mouth was tighter and firmer. Even during the “Lady Macbeth” affair he’d managed to entrench himself out of reach of this special humiliation. But back then there were still Old Bolsheviks to vivisect. Now that Comrade Stalin had won the game, even white pawns such as Shostakovich had to paint themselves black, because the year after “Lady Macbeth,” yes, in ’37 it certainly was, the composer N. S. Zhelayev had been arrested for, for, what’s the difference. He never came back, did he? And Elena had already had her little, how should I put it, experience. Thanks to what she’d whispered in his ear, he knew the pitch of a hammer striking a rail on an Arctic winter morning—prison camp reveille. That would be preserved in Opus 110. And what can I glean for my opus now? What’s the meaning of, of my so-called, you know; oh, it’s funny, really; it’s crazy; I want to laugh because it feels just the same as receiving a Stalin Prize! Stagefright, you know, and all that. Should I have worn my Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, or would they have called that a provocation? Everything’s a provocation. And the worst of it is . . . Galina must be praying for me; that’s something she would do. If they take me away I could see her jumping out the window, and then I’d . . . And Elena must know about this from the newspaper. Elena, you’re lucky that you didn’t marry me. Ninusha agreed about that! He had to do this, for, for her and for the children, after which they’d never talk about it again. When he remembered how Meyerhold had disappeared—my God! The man was never anything but a theater manager! —and how his wife Zinaida had been found with her eyes cut out, why can’t I stop thinking about that year after year?

  For Mravinksy’s grand gesture, as for the other one back in ’38, he felt no gratitude, no, no, even gratitude he must dissimulate! Impossible to say what tune the “organs” might play now! And that impossibility haunted him. Every night his terror broke through his sleep.

  Yesterday Nina had begged him to apply for membership in the Party. He’d replied (it was night time, and of course their quarrel took place in hideous whispers): I, I, I’ll go there and shit all over myself, but I’ll never do that, never, not even if they take us all away! I won’t join the Nazi Party, either!

  Gripping the podium with both hands, he stared into the first face he saw, a face as smug as some Stakhanovite cement works wristwatch-winner, exemplar of overweening productivity. The face bared its teeth at him quite suddenly, in scherzo-like aggression.

  Shostakovich cleared his throat. He said: Comrades, it’s all true. I’m—I’m a formalist alien . . .—Frowning uneasily, he scratched at his mop of fading hair, his face’s ageing skin unable to avoid wrinkling itself up in a thousand new grimaces. All around him he seemed to see the double grins of Nazi caps above Nazi faces. He thought to himself: the whipping rack at Buchenwald. But how could he have gone off the track? Why not just imagine himself as being one with those pallid figures of acrobats glaringly illuminated in the darkness of the Moscow Circus? Why be gratuitous? People were going to call him gratuitous anyway, because he, well. They were waiting, and not very nicely, either.

  He said, straining not to explode in laughter or tears: Every time I turn on the radio and hear Klavdia Sulzhenko sing “The Blue Kerchief,” I realize the depths of my, you see, well, I mean to say, I, I, certain negative characteristics in my musical style prevented me from reconstructing myself . . .

  Beneath the gigantic likenesses of Lenin and Stalin he confessed all his crimes, his anti-democratic, neurotic erotic tendencies. This way Nina wouldn’t have to, you know. It’s not real. Not even music is real. That’s why I reject program music, because it pretends to be real. And Galisha, darling little Galisha who had just yesterday tossed her head at him so pertly with her braids dancing across the shoulders of her flower-striped sweater; he’d been helping her with her homework when she, she, anyway, how could he have ever thought of harming his own daughter?—Why can’t I get wacky?—That’s what he’d actually used to say; he’d compared himself to Rodchenko, back in the years when, hell. And Meyerhold had said . . . Meyerhold never came back either. And what they did to his wife, it makes me want to . . . What’s that sound? That’s what the neighbors heard when they started in on her left eye. Remember it, please, for Opus 110. Then he expressed his total faith in the wisdom of the Party.

  Darling Mita, you�
�ve united the left and right! For at the same time your equally endangered colleagues spurn you—some of them are as endangered as you, but they haven’t recanted yet—spontaneous representatives of the Soviet people threaten Nina and shatter your windows.

  10

  August was when they hanged the Fascist collaborator A. A. Vlasov. That’s how we light the way ahead with a searchlight. The way the rope creaked, can I put that in Opus 110? In September, while Comrade Stalin’s cadres began rounding up Zionist conspirators, Shostakovich was stripped of his teaching jobs at the Leningrad Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory alike.—Give him eight grams! somebody screamed out. (That was a bullet’s weight.)—Thank you, thank you, he replied, rising from his seat. I was never here, so how can I feel humiliated? They think they’ve won a so-called “victory,” but I’m not here; I’m under the piano keys, in my, my . . . That’s where I want to rest. Are my lips still moving? I feel extremely . . . And if only she could have . . . In which case, it would need to be sixteen grams!—Then he walked out, blinking steadily through his glasses. Call it a down cadence; it wasn’t despair. No one dared say a word of comfort to him, certainly not his students, who that very day had been standing respectfully behind him as he played another theme for them at the piano; well, could he blame them? I’m only a, a, whatchamacallit. Of course they wanted to be progressive; they didn’t want to be eradicated. It was very . . .

  Poor Maxim, now ten years old, found himself required to denounce his father during an examination at music school.—Smiling when he heard, Shostakovich stroked the boy’s hair.

  I’m sorry, Papa. Don’t be angry. They made me do it, but I love you—

  Of course, of course, laughed Shostakovich. I know you’re loyal to me. After all, dear boy, we cannot help but put ourselves at the service of our own, um, class. Now why are your socks so dirty? Come here a minute. Oh, dear, oh, my—

  What were his sensations at that moment? Within Maxim’s eyes, something screamed and screamed; that was the thing that agonized him, or, to be specific, the sound (what’s that sound?); his soul knew what it ought to sound like, and it became another note of Opus 110! Well, well, and Lebedinsky informs me Akhmatova’s also had her moment of fame, in Leningradskaya Pravda. “Poetry Harmful and Alien to the People.” That’s really very . . . To think she carried my Seventh Symphony out of Leningrad on her lap. Poor lady, poor lady! I’d better keep my distance. Someday I’ll have to set one of her poems to music, just to kind of, you know. Glikman assures me that in “Poem Without a Hero,” the words my seventh are a reference to, to . . . What’s that sound? Oh, it hurts; it hurts; it hurts!—What was it like for Shostakovich, and was it the same right then, when it first exploded within his skull like a cerebral hemorrhage, as it would be twelve years later when he locked himself up in the spa town above Dresden and flicked down the notes of that very chord onto the music-paper? How can I tell you? Well, during the war years, the inborn secrecy behind his shyness, which our Revolution’s communal character and his own ideals had besieged, had actually been temporarily breached, such was the emergency. Instead of hearing only his own music, he sometimes had to listen to people, whose various sorrows and aspirations could not but affect him. In particular, he could not get away from soldiers, because nearly every man was one. There’d been a certain Red Army man in Leningrad, whom he’d met only once, and only for an instant, yet whom he could never forget, whose entire family died an instant death that first August, courtesy of a shell dispatched to their apartment under authority of Field-Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb; this soldier had been wounded shortly thereafter, and he adored his wound as if it were his child; he was proud of it; it was his, and it was all he had. A German Fascist had bayoneted him in the forearm, but he’d killed the bastard; he’d cut his soft white throat! Drunk, perhaps absent without leave, with nowhere to go, the Red Army man literally grabbed Shostakovich in the street, increasing the latter’s natural anxiety to a level approximating fortissimo because he was supposed to take his fire-warden station on the Conservatory roof in seventeen minutes; but the Red Army man, who was very tall and whose sour-sad breath and red-rimmed eyes haunted him forever, didn’t understand that at all. First he told Shostakovich how in his opinion each member of his family must have died; of course he hadn’t been there or he would have been dead, too; he’d been on the front line, which was not many blocks from here; and the activity of his imagination (Mama, you see, she likes to sit right at the window when she sews, ’cause her eyes ain’t so good for detail work now; she’s farsighted, so I figure she must’ve seen it coming; that’s what gets to me) was his organism’s way of resisting the shock; after he’d told the story over and over—and Shostakovich felt nothing toward him but a compassion which was itself an agony; perhaps he never experienced such closeness with any other soul in his life, except when he and Elena were, you know—the Red Army man rolled up his sleeve to thrust the wound, the hideous wound, which he’d refused to allow any nurse to bandage and which was accordingly infected, into Shostakovich’s face, lovingly recounting how he got it, how honored he was to carry its half healing, half putrefying scar with him forever; and he said that sometimes he kissed it and pretended that it was his dead wife’s lips; sometimes he pretended that it was a very young girl named Natalka, a girl with long black hair whom he’d loved even more than his wife but whose father, unfortunately, had been an enemy of the people (and Shostakovich was thinking: my God, oh, dear, what are you saying?); sometimes he pretended that our Motherland was this young Natalka, and that when he was kissing his wound he was kissing her; then he got nasty and started asking Shostakovich what he, an obvious stinking intellectual, had done for our Motherland; at which point Glikman helped him get away. Each note of Opus 110 would be a wound like this, a wound which the composer cherished and prepared to spitefully thrust up everybody’s ear—

  But at the same time he detected this feeling and expertly reduced it to its component metals, in order to trim it into artful strips and weld it onto the most strategic chord-walls of Opus 110, he couldn’t feel it. It possessed no reality.

  Good Communists wrote him letters saying that he ought to be exterminated. Well, weren’t they correct? Wasn’t he a formalist, an American lapdog, a Vlasovite? They mentioned his thick black glasses; they categorized him as a bourgeois decadent aesthete, a Zionist apologist.—He winked at Nina like a sad old crow when he heard this last, and then he whispered in her ear: That makes me, so to speak, proud. Because, you see, do you know what Comrade Hitler said? Conscience is a Jewish creation.—And Nina jerked away from him as if she’d been burned. His suicidal cynicism appalled her.

  Comrade Khrennikov had long since labeled him “alien to the Soviet people.” They destroyed his recordings and scores wherever they could . . .

  11

  In that same year, just when Comrade Stalin began sealing off Berlin against the capitalists,41 Shostakovich finished his cycle From Jewish Poetry, which, of course, given that second word, could never be publicly performed so long as Comrade Stalin was alive, and maybe not afterward, either. When his friends expressed determination to find a venue, he said: Why waste our efforts? This is our life . . .

  His besieged hopes, like semi-skeletonized buildings glimpsed through the smoke of burning tanks, secreted themselves deeper and deeper behind his tics and his meaningless murmured assents to everything.

  Activists said to him: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, we thought you’d learned your lesson in 1936, when we exposed the errors of “Ledi Makbet.”

  Yes, yes, exactly.

  But we’d hoped you’d taken your punishment to heart! Certainly in your Seventh Symphony you placed your art in the service of the people.

  Thank you, thank you—

  It wasn’t meant as a compliment. Frankly, you’re not living up to your own former ideals.

  I appreciate your valuable critical observations, he said to them humbly, comforted only by the thought of Nina’s pillow-choked laug
hter tonight when he whispered all this mummery to her. Oh, he was a clown, wasn’t he? They could never breach his defenses!

  Do you understand the sanctions you face?

  Naturally, comrades, and I’m sure those sanctions will, mmm, to speak, inspire me to, to (Ninusha will love this!) future creative work and provide, er, insights—

  Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re in grave danger of becoming an enemy of the people again!

  I appreciate the warning, comrades. But don’t worry about me; please don’t worry. Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak (Ninotchka will die laughing; actually Ninotchka will be terrified) forward—

  Actually he didn’t care anymore; he almost wanted them to shoot him, as long as Nina and the children wouldn’t be harmed. Galina Ustvolskaya, well, she wasn’t as close to him as Elena had been, and . . . Although her compositions were very . . . Do you remember Dziga Vertov’s heart of machines sequence in “Stride, Soviet”? That must have been in 1926, because it was right before my Second, you know, Symphony. A fine filmmaker, really, although he was also very, well, like Roman Lazarevich, he was too much the true believer. I wonder if Vertov’s still alive. I suppose he’s disappeared. Roman Lazarevich would know, but I don’t dare ask him. I want a heart of machines for Opus 110. It’ll be a machine for, I don’t know, let’s say for pulverizing human bones; Roman Lazarevich filmed that; I remember that for some reason I was in the Kino Palace with Ninusha, who cried—very unlike her, if I may say so. Give me eight grams! Or is it nine? Then they can pulverize my . . . He’d never felt that way before! When would he need that underwear in the suitcase? Back in ’37 they liked to leave a disgraced man at liberty for weeks or months, to wear him out with worrying until the Black Maria came. Now life was more confusing, comrades, LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.