Everybody knows, isn’t that so? Nina knew, Tukhachevsky knew; my children know all too well; whenever that sonofabitch Comrade Alexandrov drops by he likes to twit me about it. Well, well, let all their actions speak for themselves! It hurts to remember. And I, maybe she’s not, I, I, please tell me what I should do, Isaak Davidovich! Please—
Marry her.
She’s married. To Vigodsky.
Marry her.
Even Galina Ustvolskaya, do you know what she said? I wanted her for a, so to speak, a substitute. I calculated that if I couldn’t have Elena, at least she might . . . And needless to say I tried to be smart about it. In these times one gets experienced at hiding things! Because I admire her, her, her mind. What a formalist! I mean, a revisionist; that’s how they come after us now. Well, I still know beautiful music when I hear it, thank God. And she . . . And I also . . . Well, she laughed in my face! You don’t know what a spiteful one she is! It was quite a situation. We were in bed when I proposed, at which point she—
Are you sure you want to tell me this, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? Perhaps tomorrow you’ll feel embarrassed.
Don’t interrupt me; I can’t bear it! She got out of bed, stark naked as she was, turned her back to me and started dressing. When she’d buttoned up her coat, she faced me again and said: You had your chance on 26 May 1934! You see, even she had the date memorized, that first time that Elena and I . . . But I swear I never told her! (By the way, have you met this Vigodsky?) That date will never stop being, you know, although naturally it sometimes makes me unhappy, which also speaks for itself. What you said, Isaak Davidovich, it’s one hundred percent correct. And then Galina said, and the way she said it, oh, she’s cold! She said: I’m not her and I don’t want to be her. I’d committed a major error! Although it’s not my concern to . . . And then she . . .
Don’t say it, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!
And then she spat on me.
Mitya, pull yourself together . . .
And I—
Please, please, for your own sake—
I can’t help myself. Do you know what I ask women to do?
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I—
Do me a favor, my dear Isaak Davidovich. The next time you see me, and the time after that, and every other time until we die, please be so good as to, you know, to, to—
I understand. We’ll never mention this again.
Thank you, thank you!
Not unless you wish it. But shall I—
Not another word, Isaak Davidovich, I’m begging you!
But you won’t join the Party? Please promise me.
When Margarita gets to insisting on that, I, well, I can’t help what she says. Those Party texts of Dolmatovsky’s were, um, actually, when Margarita rang up Dolmatovsky himself and told him I’d agreed to, to, at that point I couldn’t say no, so that was Opus 98. But join the Party? Not if they pull my teeth out! I promise I’ll never cave in on that.
That means so much to me, said Glikman, and here came his tram.
Misunderstanding him, hating him at times, Nina had cared for him to the end, tolerating his poses, sharing his perilous disgrace. Margarita for her part seemed to be always with him in a rather different way, dragging him to official functions, reminding him of his duty to the masses. Long buried now those days of Shostakovich sitting alone in a wilderness of dark chairs, his mouth pressed against his hand as he listened to the rehearsal of his Seventh! He’d believed then that music could be good. Now he . . . Was he to listen to nothing, then?—You made us late again! Margarita was snarling through her little white teeth.—He and she were soon divorced, and he lurked at Lebedinsky’s flat, waiting for her to finish disappearing. Here was a film magazine; he paged through it over and over. In a photograph, old Roman Karmen was holding his camera as casually and expertly as a soldier does a gun, smiling flirtatiously down at a Viet Cong girl with a submachine-gun; she was in a line of fighters; they were always in a line; and Shostakovich waited and waited until the telephone rang; Maxim had done the deed; Margarita was gone; she had subsumed herself forever within the auto-beams and sign-reflections upon the cold wetness of Moscow’s streets. I’m told that she allied herself with a better man. Why not say that this, this, you know, this Vigodsky now has two wives? He takes in my cast-offs. Oh, I’m such a bastard, such a . . . Life is nothing but trouble. I wonder if Elena still has that saffroned handbag I bought her in Turkey? It was very good quality. Hopefully Nina never found out, because . . . Meanwhile the apparatchiks proclaimed him a People’s Artist of the USSR; Sweden awarded him honorary membership in the Royal Academy of Music. Everybody advised him to take out that opera of his, that “Lady Macbeth” or whatever it was, and polish it up, to bring it up to date with the times. For instance, with all due respect, how would it sound transposed into a major key? Then there was the matter of his bits of melody borrowed from the reactionary Mussorgsky. To this accusation he readily confessed: All those musical quotations, well, they’re just a way for me not to be myself.—Oh, those bastards! If they’d only . . .—On the other hand, his interest in the situation of women was certainly appreciated, they said. “Lady Macbeth” might serve to show how greatly the lives of our female citizens and comrades had been advanced by the Revolution. Perhaps if he made the heroine into more of a victim, so that she wouldn’t be misconstrued . . .—“Interest,” oh, me! He could coax their clothes off as gently as he’d charmed M. Meyerovich into rewriting his Gypsy Rhapsody—although that had happened ten years ago already. All right, that was over. Time, how should I say, passes.
Falling snow dimming the white streets, trees transformed by snow into thickened negative images of themselves, soft beige slush, white snow falling on women’s fur-clad shoulders, white outlines of once-black railings, Russian caps and Kazakh fur hats wide as tree-crowns, all was as all-or-nothing as the notes he inked onto his score-sheets; and peering timidly between the curtains of his flat he spied before the speckled, soft-stained building-fronts a living note of music; she was dressed in a white fur jacket, and her long hair spilled blackly from beneath her hat like a downward-stemmed A-sharp— only a dream, but, oh my God, that long dark hair! She didn’t dare to approach more closely, it seemed. Well, no wonder; twenty paces away from her stood a man with snow on his dark moustache, snow on his dark fur cap and coat; he was wearing tall shiny boots and he kept staring up into Shostakovich’s window. Isn’t he the one who’s always following Akhmatova? Now I’m glad it’s only a dream, because . . . At least everything remained white and black; it was nearly the same as his true home beneath the piano keys. When will this dream end? I want to wake up now. There’s something about it I don’t like, and I don’t know why. Two longhaired girls came walking under a red umbrella. The redness interrupted and assaulted him. Now it was ubiquitous in troops of little girls with red balloons, troops of Pioneers with red flags. But I’m not anti-Communist. It’s just that red spot which I . . . What’s that sound? And how can I preserve it musically? There’s a high B-sharp in it that chills me, but it also contains dry bass elements. Akhmatova has a good ear. I wonder how she’s . . . The sounds of shelling she characterized in her poem “First Long-Range Firing on Leningrad” as a kind of dry thunder. But that’s not precisely what this is. I’m going to wake up now and . . . There it is again. What’s that sound? Oh, my, how I hate that sound. And it’s closer; they must have have gotten the range. I think that sound lives inside the red spot. Do you know, I think I must have seen something when I was young, which . . . Maybe a drop of blood on my father’s lips when he, no. Or something which, which, what’s that sound? It’s not dry thunder at all, because that B-sharp . . .
Poor Glikman, who always meant well, drew his attention to a film about the female workers who’d reconstructed Stalingrad, sleeping in wrecked German planes because there were no other quarters; he thought that their heroism might be a fitting subject for Shostakovich’s next symphony.—To be sure, Isaak Davidovich; I’ll have to consider that topic extremely, how should I
say, carefully. Anything female, of course, has its so-called “advantages.” For example, that factory worker who flirts with you, Vera Ivanovna, you know, when I walk you to the tram stop at night, I’ve seen her put on purple lipstick first, and then her hard hat. Now, that’s actually rather . . .—And he wrenched his head away, so that Glikman wouldn’t see his angry smile.
And yet why be so, so, you know? Glikman had once taken him to the Kino Palace in about ’32 it must have been, before he’d even kissed Elena for the very first time; he had just begun composing “Lady Macbeth” and cared about the situation of women, or thought he did; Nina already complained that he’d never cared about her, but that was, how should I say; the point was that the Kino Palace was showing a Roman Karmen documentary about the collective farm shock worker Yevdokia Yermoshkina; when she’d begun teaching illiterate women, pointing to the blackboard and making them all chant the lesson: We are not slaves, no slaves are we, a thrill had passed over Shostakovich. He’d been, um, young, you see. Oh, and Karmen, too! Was our dear Roman Lazarevich still a true believer? Eighteen years a Party member; eighteen years of kissing assholes; no wonder Elena couldn’t face him; I hear she’s very, very . . . I suppose he’s proud. When will he make a sequel about Yevdokia Yermoshkina? She probably got drunk and wrecked her tractor, because that’s how we . . .
Oh, Shostakovich smiled! He slobbered poison. Anything female, of course—in my very next symphony! Even the stern middle-aged dragon-ladies in our Soviet hotels who keep everything in order, he charmed even them. (Gazing out the window late on those “white nights,” he sometimes saw Black Marias carrying away enemies of the people as usual, but now they pretended to be bread trucks. The pitch of their tire-squeals he’d glean for Opus 110.) His music was becoming a vast orbit around the planet of the twelve-tone scale, the orbit slowly decaying.
27
In 1955, when the ruling circles of the USA had just begun to suppress the national liberation movement of Vietnam, his song-cycle From Jewish Poetry premiered at last (in cosmopolitan Leningrad, of course.) We forgave him this Zionist provocation, in spite of the fact that he still held back from joining the Party. Even when he used his growing prestige to help effect the posthumous rehabilitation of V. Meyerhold, we continued to forbear. Oh, he was a real internationalist, a neutral element! Unfortunately, our Soviet Union still has need of such people. So we sat in the back row, yawning and rubbing our raspberry-colored boots together. Then we told the critics what to say about those Jewish songs (which after their long suppression, nearly a decade now, seemed as dismal and ancient to him as Kirov’s obsequies in the Tauride Palace), and they said it. But the audience applauded him. Wearied by another nightmare’s flank attack, he bowed and bowed, clutching at his throat as if his necktie were too tight for him. Afterward he sat down on the edge of the bed in the room she’d taken in her name at the Sovietskaya Hotel; we see him peering timidly down through the curtains at those few blocky, dark cars in the slush-shining streets; here came a bright red tramcar; there was a red pennant on a Ministry’s facade; here came another Moscow sunset, adagio. Soon she’d arrive, if the floor lady didn’t, so to speak, well, in point of fact he worried about the floor lady. (Oh, my dear friend, those floor ladies oversee every room and elevator! With quasi-comradely vigilance, you understand. Noiseless and watchful; they’re old or young, but always on the job; turn your key in the lock as quietly as you please, open the door, and step out into the hall, and you’ll find one of them watching, to make sure that you’re you. Nonetheless, they’re Slavs like us; moreover, they’re women, so they can at times be, how should I put it, extremely understanding.) Now she was late. When he closed his eyes, he could literally see her in her dark coat and dark shoes, ascending the worn steps of the Leningrad Conservatory. Had she changed her mind? The night was as black as an-man’s uniform.
You know, Galisha, I’d never say this if I hadn’t—this vodka’s quite—but your face, you resemble—
I wish I could send her to hell, she said flatly.
How did you know?
You once said her name in your sleep. That’s why I’ll never marry you.
You’re always angry! And I, I—
But Ustvolskaya had already run away, slamming the door behind her.
He telephoned T. P. Nikolayeva and summoned her to the hotel room to drink the remainder of the vodka.—Yes, Mitya, I’ll come, but I can’t—
Don’t worry; don’t worry. I’m not asking for that.
Two hours later she arrived in a rush, bearing a packet of deliciously greasy sausages, and he realized that she’d been alarmed on his behalf, not that he . . . He lit up a cigarette and said: Tatiana, sometimes I feel that, well, I’m not a poet, as is, for instance, Blok, but do you ever feel that there’s a woman somewhere at the center of things, a goddess, let’s say, or does a woman perceive the same thing as a male principle?
You’re talking about your music.
Yes, in a way, although I—
I suppose that when one dedicates oneself sincerely enough to anything, one personalizes it.
I knew you’d understand me! Being faithful to an idea is like being faithful to a woman. I’ve never betrayed my own music, not yet. I’ve written money-makers, oh, yes, for films and what not. Even Akhmatova for all her regal pride had to kiss that bastard’s ass in the end because she—
Mitya, please be careful!
Don’t worry; they can’t hear us with that radio blaring out Khrennikov’s latest monstrosity. Music certainly reveals its composer’s soul, don’t you think? When I encounter this, uh, this musical turd, I, I don’t even pity Khrennikov. Did I tell you that he’s still trying to suppress me on the cinematic front? What a trooper, what a bulldog!
Sometimes you’re like a child . . .
Forgive me, forgive me! But to get back to Akhmatova, the essential point is that she chose to save her son’s life instead of keeping pure, and to me she, she . . . Do you remember when they shot her first husband?
I wasn’t born.
Excuse me, my sweetest little Tatianochka, sometimes I forget how time ticks! Well, they shot him and not her. In your opinion, which of them was luckier?
What a question!
At least tell me this much, and as honestly as you can. Elena told me—she heard for herself!—that they recite her poems even in the Gulag. So she’s a . . . But did she damage her life’s work when she wrote that other trash?
Not at all. If anything, she safeguarded it. Otherwise they would have—
To be sure! Oh, you angel! But that’s not my only point. You do that so they don’t shoot you, and then you . . . Well, to grieve is also a right, but it’s not granted to everyone! So I haven’t, I repeat, I haven’t done anything to . . . And music is like a, well, at any rate, no one’s solved the woman question yet, have they, Tatiana? Not even Lenin himself! You strange creatures! I—
Everyone knows whom you love, Mitya. Why don’t you marry her?
Oh, I’m not good enough for . . . You see, I mainly write quartets instead of symphonies now. I’m getting impotent.
He sat up all night getting drunk with her. They never touched each other. The next morning he felt pretty awful. Maxim, who was mooning around the flat these days, waiting for the Composers’ Union to call on him, wanted to go see the film “Vietnam,” by a certain R. L. Karmen, but his father didn’t have time, because he was very, you know. It was really terrible that he didn’t have a secretary. It used to be that Nina always picked up the telephone and said that he was away for two months. Well, well, time to be philosophical!
Next his mother died. At the side of her deathbed he found a volume of Chekhov’s tales turned open to Isn’t our living in town, airless and crowded—isn’t that a sort of case for us? This gave him a horror; he didn’t know why. He’d write that airless crowdedness into Opus 110.
28
In 1956, the year of Khruschev’s “secret speech” denouncing the Stalin cult, the Eighth Symphony
was rehabilitated; and an editorial in the journal Voprosy Filosofii decried the repression of “Lady Macbeth” twenty years ago. Colleagues, musicians and conductors leaned self-satisfiedly against his two pianos. As for him, he smiled as angrily as if he could already see the way everything would be for the rest of his life. (Who says we can’t foretell the future? If that German shell whistles, it’ll miss us. If it sizzles, then watch out!) Actually the anger was the easiest part; what he couldn’t stand was the fear. Under the piano he still kept his suitcase packed, with two changes of underwear. He’d heard that no matter what, one got lice-infested. Elena had had to shave her head after her release; she really resembled a convict then! And she had always had such long, beautiful hair. He wondered what she looked like now. His sister said that Elena’s daughter was very quick with languages. Once or twice he’d dreamed, well, fine, it might have been half a dozen times, that from the Conservatory roof he powerlessly watched a shaveheaded Russian sniper being frisked by two Germans, his face black with dirt, despair staining him; he’d be liquidated; and then when the Fascists stood him up against the wall he suddenly realized that they were about to shoot Elena, whose Red Army uniform had disguised her; he tried to cry out but then the nightmare rolled over his chest, and it was as heavy, broad and metallic as tank-treads. Fortunately, such disturbances had now been almost entirely eradicated. Why couldn’t all the toadies and screws watch her, not him, and give him a daily report? Perhaps she . . .
The Ministry of Culture had organized this audition. Oh, he’d slaved; he’d prepared; he’d eliminated many a measure which might be construed as erotic, let alone anti-Soviet; here was the revised libretto, definitive now, tamed and trimmed like a bathing beauty’s bikini line, perfect indeed, which is to say, one note forward and ten notes back, everything better and more joyous; so his persecutors grinned like crocodiles right there in his apartment (number 87, 37-45 Mozhaiskoye Shosse), when he seated himself at what he called the other piano and played the opera through by memory, thinking to himself: He who has ears will hear.
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