Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  In 1952, the year of Roman Karmen’s classic “Aerial Parade,” he won another Stalin Prize, category two, for his choral work “Ten Poems on Texts by Revolutionary Poets” (Opus 88). Meanwhile he finished his Fifth Quartet, wearing his heart on his musical sleeve by quoting from the Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano of his beloved Galina Ustvolskaya.

  22

  What are you dreaming about now? asked his wife.

  You might better ask me what I’m hearing. I can’t get the third movement of my Seventh out of my head. Well, well, excuse me, my dear, take no notice . . .

  It’s those pastoral passages that you’re ashamed of listening to on the sly—

  How on earth did you know?

  Because you have to compose them to keep the apparatchiks off your back and so you write ugly music all the time just to protest, but deep down you’d rather—

  Untrue, untrue, he sighed, lighting up a “Kazbek” cigarette. I always preferred ugly music! Even “Lady Macbeth” wasn’t diatonic at all, and that was before I felt compelled to be anything in particular—

  Then why do you hear that third movement now? You told me at the time that you wrote it just so the masses would—

  And that’s why I can’t bear to listen to it now, don’t you see? I’m getting tired of—

  Oh, I think you rather like it.

  23

  In 1953, the Jewish composer Weinberg was arrested. With almost suicidal courage, Shostakovich opened his desk, withdrew a single sheet of music-paper as thin as that with which we blacked out windows back in Leningrad, turned it over and wrote a letter directly to Comrade Beria on his colleague’s behalf. Something sealed off the tunnel between face and soul—something did, surely, like an impermeable steel cofferdam on a petroleum freighter. Because the spouse of an enemy of the people automatically became an enemy, too, Weinberg’s wife Natalya would be arrested next—at dawn, no doubt; Lebedinsky whispered to him that that was the fashion now.—I’m sure that he’ll take a “camp wife,” sobbed poor Natalya; he’d gotten her drunk, not knowing what else to do for her.—Of course not, my dear lady. You’re far too beautiful for him ever to, you know. Don’t worry, don’t worry . . .—And probably all this time he was on a slave ship bound for, say, Kolyma. Or had they shut down Kolyma?—Shostakovich made quiet arrangements to adopt the couple’s seven-year-old daughter Vitosha. A man in raspberry-colored boots advised him to let the matter go, and he said: Oh, me! What a, a preposterous error I’ve just committed!—at which the apparatchik understood all too well that this unmanageable Shostakovich would never alter, would never stop doing whatever he could to save Vitosha.

  No wonder it was so cold in here! The paper around the windows had started to crack. I’ll have to be sure and remind dear Ninusha to glue down some new strips of Isvestiya; that hot air should keep us warm! And if not, let’s send for Rostropovich and his cello. Now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. What a joke—oh, me! Have I already told Mstislav Leopoldovich? Nina thought it was stupid. Nina’s ready, thank God; she’s always been brave. Let them open up with their eighty-eights!

  Then, trembling with terror (he wouldn’t have felt alive without that), he began to make, so to speak, inquiries, very tactfully, of course, so that they wouldn’t, I think you understand, and Comrade Alexandrov dropped by to inform him with an evil smile that that shit he’d interested himself in was still in transfer prison, Nizhnegorodsky Prison it turned out to be, not Lefortovo, thank God, Who according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia is an imaginary figure of a powerful supernatural being; Nizhnegorodsky is not as bad as, say, Kresti in Leningrad; and Comrade Alexandrov even explained how Natalya could send parcels.—If I had my way, he added, I’d give him nine grams of lead, right in the kisser! As for you, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, guess what color your file is now? Want a hint? Try shit-brown. As for that Zionist scum, he’ll never, ever get out. If you really want to help that kike family, tell Natalya to divorce him and change her name. She’ll pull through; she’s not bad looking, for an old bitch. In your opinion, are women sufficiently intelligent to play chess? Because if she isn’t, she’s going to be checkmated! I don’t mind telling you that you’ve made a serious mistake this time. The only reason I’m sticking my neck out for you is that you were in Leningrad when it mattered . . .

  Fortunately, Stalin now shook his fist at the sky, fell back into bed and died; and a month afterward Weinberg found himself released.

  Shostakovich sat at home. He’d grown as fat as one of the pillars of Saint Isaac’s church. His flesh was bluish-grey like the Neva in the dank days of November, when the gilded dome of Kazan Cathedral pales into irresolution. Many white hands like milk-puddings spilled on his piano. A cluster of souls clung around the score of his symphony, far below V. I. Lenin’s portrait. His good friend Denisov had somehow obtained five hundred grams of pure Caspian caviar, the black variety, whose globules burst between the teeth like ripe grapelets. (Give him nine grams!) Glikman was absent. He’d had to do something with his wife. Shostakovich had always tried to help Glikman. Upon learning of his second marriage, he advised him: If you ignore the feminine, then you’ll, how should I say, well, you yourself will suffer.—Weinberg and Natalya were hovering over Nina, whispering something in her ear as the radio said: a fearless officer and a Communist. Nikolayeva was on the sofa humming sadly to herself. Ustvolskaya had declined to come, but the downstairs neighbors were there. At their request he played one of his preludes, moderato no troppo, his hands sure today, his skill perfect because the music was perfect with that selfsame liquidlike streaming of metal particles from an explosive charge, no melting involved, only controlled superstress which empowers the shockwave to penetrate anything from a ribcage to a steel tank. When he finished, all was silent; two of the women were crying, but Nikolayeva was smiling like a cat who’d just caught a mouse.

  Clasping his hands to his knees, looking sportif as he leaned against pretty I. Makharova, he tossed down another vodka while A. Khatchaturian looked on with a gaze whose jealousy was only emphasized by noble renunciation. Was Makharova willing to have her buttock squeezed? The left one, of course, only the left one! Our composer withdrew his hands, both corners of his mouth twitching allegro when the conversation turned political. The guests all seemed hopeful, now that the Stalin chord was at last dissolved back into its arpeggio.

  But, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, surely there will be improvements now!

  Edik, said Shostakovich, the times are new, but the informers are old.

  This new Tenth Symphony of his, which capitalists had the impudence to call his “masterpiece,” was of course attacked in the home country for dissonance and pessimism. Moreover, it contained an offensively erotic element. The second movement teemed with his musical signature intertwined with the musical initials of his latest unrequited love, the young pianist E. M. Nazirova. He hastened to apologize for all this in Sovietskaya Muzyka.

  In August we find him writing the loyal Glikman, begging him to find out the whereabouts of a certain G. I. Ustvolskaya, with whom he had many matters to discuss; the next day he wrote: Dear Isaak Davidovich: Please forget my request. I have received a telegram and no longer have any cause for concern.

  We see his pale, bespectacled face shining wearily over Prokofieff’s bier. He made many good-faith efforts to get the widow released from the concentration camp where she’d been since 1948. He also intervened for the Leningrad conductor Kurt Sanderling. When Nina, distraught with fear, warned him of the possible consequences, he said: Don’t worry, dear, don’t worry; they won’t do anything to me.

  He was willing to denounce Beria in private, but apathetically. He’d been half poisoned by the humiliation of being given all those public librettos to sing. In Pravda, denunciations of class enemies appeared regularly over his signature. At official functions he pretended to write down the insightfully correct remarks of other comrades, so that he could at least refrain from applauding.

  24


  It’s said that shortly after Stalin’s death a guest discovered Shostakovich reading the monster’s official biography, but in secret, as if it were shameful. Why, millions had read that book (or at least bought it)! Just as Mein Kampf had been on practically every German family’s bookshelf during a certain period, so in the days of the “cult of personality” Stalin’s life had sold rather well—even better, perhaps, than Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. No Soviet citizen could get away from it. And now, only now, Shostakovich was reading it—and now he was hiding it! It was all so strange . . .

  Soon afterward he was honored by the Italians.

  25

  The brief winter’s day was nearly done. Peering between the curtains of his hotel room, he gazed into the sky, which had turned the dark, warm reddish-black of tea infused with raspberry jam. He remembered the delicious somberness of Tatyana Glivenko’s menstrual blood one morning on the white sheets—well, that had been forty years ago now, which must have been why his recollections were tainted by less erotic crimsonness, like the image he could not forget of that woman right outside the Conservatory who’d lost her face to a German shell. Letting the curtains close, he drummed out a cadence from Opus 40 on the writing-desk. (Never mind; these others would never recognize it.) A subsequent hour found him sitting very silent in his chair with his head bowed, listening to the rhythm of faint footsteps far down the hall. The ringing metronome-like clicking of high heels reassured him, for it was feminine and it hid nothing. It was the muddier sounds of soft squishy boots, or muffled steps, or the steady yet under-obvious drumbeats of men’s heels which pierced him like pins. He could hear speech in the next room. He could hear water running. He heard the weary cadence of a toilet-flush.

  Trembling, he opened the door of his hotel room and found the floor lady watching him. He tried to smile at her. Then he rushed to the elevator.

  Two men in dark ankle-length coats and shiny boots stood in the lobby, gazing at themselves in the mirror. After awhile one yawned, unfolded his hands from behind his back, and leaned over the counter. Something about those hands reminded Shostakovich of the alabaster inkstand in his room upstairs. The terrified reception girl offered up the register. Meanwhile the other man turned and said: Why, if it isn’t Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Congratulations on your rehabilitation.

  Thank you, thank you . . .

  The man with the alabaster hands yawned, let the register fall out of his hands, strolled up to Shostakovich and said: Almost a decade between symphonies, isn’t that so? You’re not exactly a shock worker!

  Because my hand gets tired, comrades, even when I . . . It, so to speak, subverts me. But I’m only a worm, and my symphonies are mere, uh, so it’s no loss to, to . . . I do apologize.

  Take a vodka with us. We’ve been meaning to have a talk with you.

  Oh, how very, but my friend, unfortunately, is—

  Comrade Ustvolskaya has been delayed. Come over here, you.

  They sat at the bar, and Shostakovich clutched the little glass of vodka in his trembling hands.

  They asked him if he knew that M. Weinberg had been approached by an agent of British intelligence. They wanted to know when his Lenin Symphony would be finished. They demanded that he join the Communist Party, which is the only true party of the working class. He preferred to be associated with the working class, didn’t he? They kept referring to your obligation to the people.

  Yes, yes, yes, he replied with a smile as otherworldly as the gleaming of golden church-domes across a canal.

  26

  In the winter of 1954, not long after reactionary circles in the USA formed the SEATO aggressive bloc, Nina died suddenly. After that, he dreamed that she was calling him. His other nightmares resembled groups of Red Army men and women in uniform, posing in fading photographs. And so he proposed to Galina Ustvolskaya. But she had long since been imprisoned by her awareness that just as in winter the cobalt blue of the Russian atmosphere so quickly greys into darkness, so within him and all his projects any instant of brightness inevitably faded into dreary obscurity. He knew many jokes, to be sure, but in truth it was not very much fun to be around D. D. Shostakovich! That was why she refused him, he supposed. Not that she herself was exactly, how should I put it, fun-loving. All the more reason for her to seek a man who could, well, you know. I’m not saying he wasn’t hurt. But whatever he might have felt or experienced in this regard, let’s just say that it happened in another cadence, a down cadence, naturally, but I, I, anyhow, what’s the point?

  He married M. A. Kainova, Komsomol functionary. Well, didn’t Elena used to belong to the Komsomol? (They’d expelled her before they’d arrested her.) Although the main purpose of this union was to gain a mother for his two half-wild children now being brought up after a fashion by the maid Mariya (you see, I endanger everybody, their father used to say, I attaint everybody, and so, so, so, therefore . . . ), his friends suspected that he’d rushed into this wedding because solitude frightened him almost as much as his own compositions which were now invariably as thick, wide and grey as battleships. But talk about brightness! Everybody he knew was gloomy, or else accused him of being so (Elena, you’re lucky you didn’t marry me); hence why not commit a different error? Now we’ll find out if brightness actually suits D. D. Shostakovich, or whether he’s better off, you know. Margarita, inspired, so she said, by the boats and shining water of Roman Karmen’s “Our Friend India,” which they saw together at the Kino Palace, wanted to go someplace warm for the honeymoon—a beach on the Black Sea, for instance. He almost panicked, and they hadn’t even . . . I’ve read that when Glikman came to pay a formal visit to the new couple, everybody was silent except for the bride, who proudly announced that she understood nothing about music.—And that’s all to the good, Isaak Davidovich, because I’m going to make Mitya concentrate on important things. Do you know what he’s promised me? He’s agreed to join the Party as soon as the time is right!—Shostakovich hung his head miserably. He sat down at the piano and played a chord which resembled a cold blue September Sunday morning in Prague. When they’d drunk up all the vodka, he walked Glikman out.—Keep him in hand, Isaak Davidovich!—Goodnight, and all my respects to you, Margarita Andreyevna!

  Out of pity, the guest had decided to say nothing to his friend, but Shostakovich, trembling and stuttering as they stood in the snowy brightness of the tram stop, cried out to him: Oh, I’m such a bastard, and now I’ve, I’ve, so to speak, disgraced myself before you because I, she drove you away, I realize that, and when I’m with her all I want to do is sit in the corner and not even write music anymore, because she, you see, taunts me; I think she does it on purpose! Don’t you agree? Why didn’t I listen to you, dear Isaak Davidovich? I know you didn’t approve. You probably think I married her just to get a young, so to say, a youngish piece of ass, but it’s the nights, you see, not that Nina and I ever slept in the same bed after Maxim was born, well, hardly ever; there were, if you understand me, moments when we, when, you know, but she mostly left me alone, which was what I wanted; you saw how it was when you stayed with us in Kuibyshev back in, when was it now, in ’42 it must have been, because you’d come for the score of my, my, Seventh Symphony, which was nothing but an, I, I, an intermezzo. Those nights when . . . I could give you any number of sad examples. Do you remember those years, Isaak Davidovich? If only a German shell had—but at least I got to dream out my music, and she never treated me with indifference.

  Of course she didn’t, said Glikman, laying a hand on his arm. Nina loved you.

  Yes, oh, yes, she did, my dear Isaak Davidovich, while all the time I . . .

  Glikman, who knew him so well, murmured thoughtfully: That’s right. Last year, when Nina died, that made twenty years exactly, didn’t it?

  Shostakovich flushed. (The sickening compassion in his friend’s eyes, he’d write that into Opus 110, too, oh, yes he would!) Then, slowly drawing a line in the snow with his foot, he said: Nina was still alive when it, I mean to say, the anniv
ersary fell, technically speaking, in May. Twenty years! And she herself was twenty. That’s the magic number. Isaak Davidovich, you’re absolutely correct. I don’t suppose you ever hear from, from her. If you did, would you tell me? On second thought, please don’t, because that would be, you know.

  As you wish.

  I’ve heard it said, hissed Shostakovich in very low voice, that he courted her in a suit. He had a suit even on the front line in Spain. He looked quite dashing then. I think it was the same suit he wore when he photographed Dmitrov—

  You own plenty of suits, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.

  On the other hand, Lebedinsky says she looks a bit, how should I say, in need, and if I could do anything to . . . I even know the day in May, and if I ever forget it I still have (I took it with me when we got evacuated from Leningrad) the program from that music festival, when we, it was when I played my piano concerto that I met her; she, she remarked that my music reminded her of the white nights . . .

  With all due respect, you could have married her, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.

  Yes, but unfortunately—

  Excuse me, but I disagree. She was the one for you. Even after Nina told you she was pregnant you still could have gone through with it. Please forgive me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I’m speaking only as your friend—

  You’re right, of course. I’ve always been such a coward—

  Don’t say that, I beg you! cried Glikman in agony.

  You were there, weren’t you? I seem to remember you dancing with her . . .

  I’m sorry, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but I wasn’t there.

  Are you quite sure? Denisov tells me that she wears her hair in a knot now. And that very first night I felt—oh, my God!

  Perhaps it’s not too late even now. I could make inquiries—