Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, our planet’s most pronounced topographical features comprise an approximate mirror image of the crust’s underside. The steppes of the Ukraine thus roof the cratonic platform which replicates them, while the Ural Mountains not only project into the sky, but in equal measure stab down like gunbarrels trained upon the magma on which our continents uneasily slither. To me, the thought that this world is doubled within its own red, liquid hell is a profoundly unnerving one. Chaos seethes beneath my feet. The chaos feels stifled; it wants to breathe. But chaos is by its very nature formalist deviation. I still believe in myself, but only in my own ugliness. Damp it down, comrades! Even in the depths of Soviet coal mines we now insist on the flameless explosion of a Hydrox cartridge, for that reduces danger. Our foreman gives the signal. A muffled crash stifles the stifling darkness, unrelieved by any light. On the official side, a certain D. D. Shostakovich excretes new program music for the masses. And on the mirror-side, where all’s presumably flameless (otherwise we’d glimpse red writhings when we gazed down into those bottomless black slits of the piano keys), a counterpart D. D. Shostakovich composes Opus 110.

  Roundfaced, staring straight at the piano like an old coachman out of nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg, he watched the sad and angry music ooze out of his fingers. His spectacle-frames had lightened to translucency over the years. Now he was not so much a stern man as a gaping, goggling old fish. His enemies laughed that he’d come to resemble Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, who’d been likewise known for ineffectuality and a bulging gaze. (Ineffectuality! Isn’t that all that music is? Lebedinsky had told him about that petty Nazi, K. Gerstein, who’d joined thein order to reveal its secrets and halt its crimes; the tribunal condemned him for not getting results.)—Operation Reinhard, that’s written in now; Operation Blau will be present in the second movement. Can we refer to T-4 in the overture? But it’s all got to be airless. Akhmatova insists, correctly in my opinion, that whoever doesn’t make continual reference to the torture chambers all around us is a criminal. Under the earth, and then they shoot them! Nina and I used to hear the executions every night. Now Nina’s also under the earth, which must be very . . . And then Elena, no. I couldn’t expect Nina’s sympathy at that time. What’s that sound? What a nasty little allegro, like a . . . My Rat Theme at least had humor for those who cared to be amused. And I was going to . . . When the Nine Hundred Days began and Maxim was weeping in the night from hunger, I promised I’d write him into the Seventh. And I did; I wrote that for him. Now’s my final chance to make sure I didn’t waste any of his tears, because . . . It was in A-flat minor, I’ll never forget that. And my mother said . . . What about Rodchenko? He was an influence, at least a youthful influence. Now that I’m . . . Rodchenko’s hollow wooden squares within squares, each figure twisted into a different plane from its neighbor, why, those must be prison cells! More abstract sculpture for my, for my so-called “opus.”—Oh, me, oh, dear, I almost forgot Operation Magic Fire! Because that’s where Elena met the gallant knight Roman Lazarevich. (Dmitri Dmitriyevich, the knight had condescended to advise, in my opinion the point is to use those screams to keep our antifascist hatred in condition, to reject those awful things in the name of peace. It’s not good to dwell on the dark side.) And Spain, of course. Where she and Roman Lazarevich . . . We prefer our personal tragedies, because we’re all cowards and bastards.

  His friends assumed that he was drinking too much. As long as he stayed in East Germany he kept tossing back schnapps, with and without his interpreter. (She smiled at him once, and he remembered the childlike grin of a young woman sniper he’d seen somewhere, maybe in Kuibyshev. Then she stopped smiling. She lowered her softly immaculate face.) Sometimes he drank until he fell asleep. When he awoke, he reached for the tumbler, muttering into the mirror: Generally speaking, I, I’m a degenerate.

  It was a cool, humid German summer. He wanted to sit on the grassy bank of the Elbe just to watch the steamboats and to, so to speak, catch his breath, but there wasn’t time because they showed him atrocity films all day. Case White couldn’t be omitted, but he didn’t yet know how to, well, maybe in largo form, and if he could squeeze bitterness out of a few more grace notes . . . Then they escorted him back to his hotel. The darkhaired interpreter was ill today. He didn’t know whether or not to refer to Operation Citadel. Since her brother had fallen at Kursk, why not? She was a pretty woman, although not quite plump enough for his taste. Let’s see, what was I doing during Operation Citadel? I remember seeing Roman Lazarevich’s newsreel about it, seventeen years ago it’s already been now, in that Kino Palace where Elena and I used to, to, what had it been called? “The Battle of Orel.” No, it couldn’t have been that Kino Palace, because . . . A Tiger tank snarls through the mud and down into a river; the water sizzles around the treads; it swims like a stately crocodile, grips the mud of the far bank, up-raises its gun, and grinds on, with German Fascists standing calmly astride like whale-riders; then Roman Lazarevich, who no doubt was wearing that oil-stained fur-lined jacket of his, pans to show the crew of one of our hundred-and-twenty-twos: Ready, aim, fire! I don’t mind admitting he was brave. In fact, I’d rather be him. So what? The bastard, you know, although it was actually I who . . . The Tiger tank explodes, accompanied by music which could have been written by a certain D. D. Shostakovich! How, so to speak, heroic! Pan to a wheat field with its hidden strongpoint of antitank guns; pan to mine traps; pan to Red Army generals with their leather greatcoats and binoculars. Later on we’ll blow up the evil FREYA network! Had she left him yet? All our planes flying over their tanks, it reminded me even then of a score, but more for orchestra than for a string quartet. So what? I’m going to make sure that Opus 110 contains everything, since it’s the last time I’ll still be, so to speak, me. From a strictly musical point of view, Citadel should be the merest interlude. (On likely nightmare axes he positioned his own thought-traps.) Allegro would be too easy. That would resemble letting those ass-lickers in raspberry-colored boots tell me to make everything happy and in a major key! There are times when doing the right thing might destroy me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing. If Elena were here, or at least Nina . . .

  Picking up the newspaper, he read that a traitor named M. Smolka had just been executed for terrorist activities committed at the behest of the American Secret Service. The traitor’s last words: There is no doubt that desertion and treachery to the interests of peace and socialism are the severest of crimes and can only be expiated by the severest of punishments. It had been an early morning guillotining, no doubt. That was how they did things in Dresden.

  Blood raged flamelessly in his windowless heart! He completed Opus 110.

  36

  About this quartet the most fundamental thing which can be said is that it is too sad even to rise from a moan into a wail at death’s uncompassed crescendo. To be sure, the danse macabre of the second movement glows sickeningly vivid as a sodium flare at night (so much for flamelessness!); it’s as bright as the electric light which illuminates the gas chamber when it’s time to ascertain whether all the Jews are dead; while the menace of the third remains more chilling than those screams of terror in Leningrad when the German bombs come down; they’ll never stop coming down. Yet on the whole the effect is of somebody drowning, his most desperate convulsions already behind him; he’s begun to inhale water; the green water he sees is going black; and he’s settling down into the muck. Some listeners who close their eyes during the second movement claim to perceive a whirling red eyeball or domino, and the more rapidly it speeds, the more balefully it glows. This eidetic image seems to symbolize the approach of something evil. I myself have never seen any red spot, perhaps because Opus 110 already threatens me so perfectly that no kinesthesia is needed to extend or refine the threat. While Shostakovich’s music wriggles like the worming of black-gloved fingers clasped behind a policeman’s back, the Bronze Horseman sinks down under sandbags and planks. Leningrad strangles
in a loop of barbed wire. Meaning dissolves into pure music. (And to think he once wanted to surpass the “Fate motif” of Beethoven’s Fifth! When fate and all that are, you know, meaningless!) Hence the opening notes of the first movement as carefully hopeless as men in a snow-trench before Leningrad, resting their machine-guns on blocks of ice.

  Western critics claim to find some peculiarly Slavic sorrow which is at least as ancient as the relics of the Volsovo Culture below Riazan. Glikman for his part insists that Opus 110 contains here and there a chord harvested from older ages (for instance, the screams of Peter III after drinking the poisoned wine). This is why it’s reductionist to claim that this quartet is merely the corrective to the Seventh Symphony, the distillation of Leningrad’s agony with the propaganda decanted off. Anyhow, what is Leningrad? Forget the Germans for once. Forget external causes. (Every definition of God leads to heresy, write the Kabbalists.) The foggy, tan-hued tranquility of old Petersburg endures. It’s the dead color of a pickled embryo; it’s crowned by church-gold and underlined by aquatic mazes of commerce and refuse. Here one finds little Mitya holding his mother’s hand; he pulls away to catch a whirling leaf. Here one spies Akhmatova and her first husband Gumilyev (he’s the one we’ll shoot for counterrevolutionary treason); they’re prowling the mists in search of poems!—This part of Opus 110 is not frightening at all, hardly even melancholy, merely Slavic. Well, well, dear friends; you know how things, er, turn out. The second movement will be all knives and cadavers, but the measures in which we now find ourselves remain quite silver-on-black, like anbadge.—One must understand his character, Akhmatova is murmuring defensively, when Mitya’s mother comes running after them: Anna Andreyevna ! Excuse me, Anna Andreyevna; I believe you forgot your scarf.—Extending her hand to receive the trifle (strangers give her flowers all the time), Akhmatova thanks her with that cold politeness for which she’s so famous. Then she notices Mitya and says to her husband: There he is! That’s my little grey-eyed prince!—The boy doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He doesn’t have grey eyes. He jitters and blushes, crossing his mittened fingers. He understands only this: This lady loves him; she doesn’t love his mother or, so it seems, her own husband, who now angrily snatches the scarf: Come on; we’ll be late for the masque! Madame, we’re much obliged to you . . . They whirl away into a Petersburg the color of catacombs: tan, yellow, brown, all blending, as dead things eventually must, into wet earth. Opus 110 explodes out of it, like metal splinters protruding from broken ferro-concrete.

  And the equally broken composer—let’s call him a pechatnik, the centuries-gone Russian official who keeps the state seal—he remembers, or imagines, the time when Akhmatova was still a goddess, not yet a maimed queen of tears, when we still could go to masques in Russia, before the red domino exploded at the center of Petersburg and turned it into Leningrad. Excuse me, Anna Andreyevna . . . At this point the music, which in this respect oddly resembles some of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, expands and expands, breaking out of Leningrad’s concentric rings of death; it rises like the preludes and fugues which he’d composed for his well-loved T. P. Nikolayeva back in Opus 87, but there is neither joy in it nor even escape; it expands like an ascending aerial view of Dresden’s roofless windowlessness and immense fishbones, half-untoothed combs, upon blinding white rubble-gravel, window-holed brickfronts shattered into runes and swastikas, Strassen and Plätze now utterly sunny and open, sheared-off spicules. As the Führer once said: One can’t fight a war with Salvation Army methods! Opus 110 repeats this dictum in the speech of instruments.

  What’s that sound? The very first moment that Shostakovich arrived in Dresden, music flooded his skull in a hideous scream; he clutched at his chest and the world whirled, but nothing else did: An eighteenth-century maiden outstretched her stone hand, serenely gazing across the brokenness which could be Stalingrad or Leningrad. His interpreter had confided to him that for an instant this cityscape she used to love had resembled a log on the fire-grate, its flesh tortured into cheery cherry-colored facets, and then the crystal shattered, tumbling down between the iron teeth to become grey ash. While it burned, Hitler the Liberator drank in the last warmth he’d ever get from his storehouse of German summers. Then the Grail landscape turned cold, and no da capo al segno, no exit. Shostakovich believes this all too well. He didn’t escape; he won’t get away this time, either; so in Opus 110 he self-loathingly quotes himself: the opening motif of the First Cello Concerto, the “Jewish theme” from the Second Piano Trio: Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.—Where’s Elena now? Not with me, not with me. (As he scribbled out the chords of the second movement with his quavering, liver-spotted hands, he saw her as a brooding, smiling skeleton in burnt rags, with dust in her long silver hair; her skull was canted almost elegantly, as if in thought, and she gazed sweetly into his eyes; only gradually from her burned eye-sockets did the poison come, that inevitable poison which infects the relations between the living and the dead; there was still something sweet about her and in life she surely wouldn’t have meant him any harm, but now the eternal blackness within her smile couldn’t help but trap him, weigh him down so that he fell between the teeth and stayed there, wasting away until he died and forever after; he had to get away.) And whenever there’s any beauty at all in Opus 110, it’s dismembered; it drips with death like shitty guts hanging out of a woman’s marble-white torso (thus perish all enemies of Hitler and Stalin’s power). And death oozes out of the silences between notes, too, the silences of secret Nazi documents (Geheim), the eight-beat rest which hung between himself and Maxim when the boy confessed to having denounced him at school; the suffocating air of a Black Maria with its windowless cages—did I ever tell you that in the Lubyanka prisoners get led in silence, obeying the hand signals of their guards, ready at the appropriate gesture to turn their faces to the wall? He’s known that for so much of his life now. LIFE HAS BECOME MORE, more, you know . . . Some notes of Opus 110 get coffined up in chords, while others, solo, coffinless, become Leningraders falling one by one into the snow to die.

  As for the rhythm, if you’ve ever been present when our Blackshirts in Berlin or their NKVD cadres in Leningrad are beating enemies of the people, you’ll know how it is, the screams alternating with gasps. What’s that sound? That’s the allegro molto.

  Of course I’ve failed to describe Opus 110 just as I’ve failed to describe death; music remains ultimately indescribable unless Khrennikov and the other artillerymen of Soviet culture compose it for us in pre-measured clips of glittering copper-jacketed mediocrity. And Shostakovich, entering the negative spaces beneath the piano’s black keys at last, extends his front line beyond music into a perfect hell where his life, dekulakization and Operation Barbarossa become one.

  Never mind the second movement, when he really opens up with his eighty-eights! I hear batteries on Pulkovo Heights; the Smolny’s now green-blotched, brown-blotched, grey-blotched under camouflage nets; my God, the Fascists have already established a strongpoint in the Leningrad Typewriter Factory! Time to strip the Aurora’s old guns . . . Never mind the third movement, even though I myself am all ears. A fireplace like a mouth, and red flames inside it; that’s very . . . The brief but tenacious resistance of a sylvan theme in the final movement recalls the patches of green-and-gold melodic ground revealed through the clouds of those high-flying, spectacularly chromatic fugues he’d once made for Tatyana Nikolayeva. But once again the fog has less in common with the obscurity of innovation than with blind melancholy. We fly high, fine, but we don’t know to shut off the X-ray beams which shine right through the earth to illuminate the mangled, tortured skeletons; we close our eyes, but can’t stop seeing right through our eyelids. According to Lebedinsky, when Shostakovich composed these measures he was remembering the old, verdigrised horses on the bridges of Leningrad, and suchlike frivolities which the Revolution hadn’t gotten around to smashing yet. They called him a formalist but he was really a classicist. Let’s call
that mistake pure comedy. Anyhow, Shostakovich’s music always flitters from one mood to another with incredible rapidity, which is to say that he’s unstable. That’s his, his, so to speak, trademark (isn’t that what the capitalists say?). Turn and turn about with the NKVD Ensemble! What’s that sound? A quotation from the traditional Russian song “Languishing in Prison” illuminates the airless chamber of the quartet with history’s glare, but not brightly enough to show us whose prison or cyanide bath it might be, other than his. In Opus 110, nothing completes itself before perishing. For instance, that flash of prettiness near the end, perfumed by Elena Konstantinovskaya, affords the listener scant relief; rather, it reminds us that D. D. Shostakovich is dying with his eyes open. He knows what happiness is. He knows that he’ll never possess it. Hence the sylvan theme is, above all, cruel. Katerina Izmailova, who’s the heroine of his ill-starred “Lady Macbeth,” sings that same melody to her lover in the final act. The syllables of the tune comprise his nickname, Seryosha—oh, how she adores him! And the other convicts all listen, but . . . What’s that sound? Have you ever seen the expressionless faces of people in a queue to send parcels to their spouses in prison camps? They mask themselves out of knowledge that the “organs” are watching. Or perhaps they’ve developed this habit simply because our Soviet Union is a cold country; one learns to hide oneself simply to, so to speak, stay warm, to, to, to, well. In this opera, however, we’re in the ancient times of Russian bear-hunters: Swamps and forests of Russian misery press all around, besieging the walls which jail Katerina. In our time life will be more, so to speak, JOYFUL: The walls will grow higher; the Fifth Symphony will end with hordes of perfidiously bristling bug-legged notes and chords strung on the music paper’s barbed wire; Opus 110 will scream like invalids in a burning hospital (by the way, screaming is also the task of an intellectual in crisis); unfortunately, “Lady Macbeth” remains trapped in the prerevolutionary era; poor Katerina’s on her way to Siberia! But she’s happy, she sings Seryosha’s name. What is it that those idiots always say about Zoya? Not long but beautifully did she live! Ha, and then those Fascists hanged her! Beautifully, all right! Sometimes I want to spew. And Katerina’s just another, you know. They’ll want me to compose her in a major key: Not long but JOYFUL. What a . . . It might have been well for her had she troubled to consider the studied blankness of her fellow prisoners’ faces, because then she might have found the mockery interred so shallowly beneath the twitching earth of their grey lips—buried alive! Well, that’s par for the course in Opus 110. On the other hand, why not allow Katerina her little, her, her, you know . . . ? She sings Seryosha, each repetition of the name she loves soaring from her throat right up to the heaven of tenderness beyond the prison wall! All this happens in the merest handful of measures. We couldn’t allow there to be too much happiness. Seryosha’s tired of Katerina. He’s found himself a newer convict-slut named Sonetka. With a cruelty which sickened me almost literally when I saw the opera in Leningrad, Seryosha struts around with her at stage right, mocking Katerina to her face. That is why when Katerina sings the sylvan theme, his name defiles it, and his contempt for her, which is visible to us on that stage but not to Comrade Stalin because he withdrew himself two acts ago and not to Katerina because love is truly blind, the murders she’s committed for adoration of him, and that selfsame adoration, which empowered her until now to suffer and to endure and even in some measure to remain happy, wavers and beautifully flutters only because a certain extremely cruel God, fate or dialectic, who is not D. D. Shostakovich at all but the unknown suzerain of this known stage we sing our hopes on, wants to exalt her up into sunlight for this instant only so that the shock and depth of her downfall into the uttermost darkness will have been magnified, on exactly the same principle that when Comrade Stalin condemned General Vlasov to be hanged, it was necessary to raise Vlasov somewhat above the dangling noose, in order that the rope be slack enough for convenient manipulation, after which he could be dispossessed from that height either by the operation of a trapdoor in the gallows or else by removing a stool or some other such expedient method; so Shostakovich, seeking even then in that long lost era of his innocent success to give utterance to what must have been his own fundamental, irrevocable despair, wrote that flash of evening sunlight into Katerina’s score in order to give her approaching darkness still greater definition, its hideousness being correspondingly enhanced into superior strike depth; and Glikman has personally assured me (not that he’s a one percent reliable element) that when Shostakovich composed those measures, hypnotized by the infinite divide between the white and black piano keys, he couldn’t help remembering that the German Fascist troops whom we’d cut off at Stalingrad stuck frozen horse-legs in the snow for road markers; those skinny dark posts of flesh must have resembled the black keys, but who played them? Victory did! LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES. Life’s a transfer prison. Sunlight between two darknesses isn’t sunlight at all; it’s central Europe herself, which is to say that it’s the fourth movement’s largo, which manages to convey the atmosphere of sickening expectation which overhung Shostakovich at this period; and that feeling is abstracted and generalized to include the naked women standing on a dirt-ledge, facing into the hill so that they won’t have to see the pit of white corpses and black blood in which they’ll soon lie, for across that pit, two soldiers are feeding a new clip into the machine-gun, waiting for the field telephone to ring. Once we learn that story (Estonian Jews), life alters—doesn’t it? Violin, viola, cello, violin! What’s that sound? Shostakovich becomes every victim; trembling silently, staring at Nina’s black round telephone-face with its perfectly round holes, he writes music which holds its breath, striving not to scream and scream.—In other words, it’s all sunlight, white and bright on the cheekbones of the execution squad. A Stuka from the Condor Legion strains up to swallow the sun; the bomber itself resembles a condor, but with whiskers; there it goes! Soon it will dive down and release its seeds, two by two; but in this instant it’s still ascending, harmlessly, gloriously. Katerina sings sunlight, then gets immediately assaulted by the fiendish torture of Seryosha mocking her and this new young Sonetka from nowhere also mocking her, and in practically the next instant, she who’s poisoned her father-in-law and strangled her husband for love now for the sake of utter and unblinkingly despairing hatred grapples Sonetka into her arms, then leaps into the river (Leskov writes in the nineteenth-century original that she threw herself on Sonetka like a strong pike on a soft little perch) so that they both drown. Over their perfect death-embrace the misty sun’s out, imparting to the river the warm whiteness of a musical score; it’s a summer day over the Elbe, with the skeletons of Dresden’s domes still clinging to their bits of brokenness wherever they can; East German schoolboys swim happily by the ruins of the Carolabrücke; the streets are clean and empty around the ruined bookend of the Frauenkirche (there goes the former Field-Marshal Paulus; they’re driving him to the office in his official car); the linden trees are in full police-green piping, like the caps of noncomissioned-officers; little East German boys are beating on drums and blowing trumpets to celebrate the impending victory of socialism; that sunlight, the sylvan theme, hangs like a fading rainbow for a duration of several beats (this reminds me of the forest theme’s illusory return at the end of the Seventh Symphony’s first movement), then loses out forever to the grim seven-note motif42 which haunts the prison corridors of the third movement, and then, far past any skeletal rage-clacking or enemy pincer-thrust, which the perceptual filters of hopelessness have already translated from the menacing into the merely ludicrous (so what if that towering yellow skeleton reached down to snatch me into its talons and haul me up into its hard insectoid face as round and yellow and ruthless as the sun, then gnawed me to bloody pieces? So what if that treacherous little white skeleton came scuttling like a crocodile out of the darkness to kill me? I’m already long and uselessly past my own death), recapitulates the opening of the first movement because Opus 110 is no pro
gression, only a prison, and the prisoner (one D. D. Shostakovich) has now paced the walls right back to his starting point. He’s at the center of the world, you see. (The center of the world is Leningrad, which is Stalingrad, which is Auschwitz.) Every place leads here. Hence Opus 110’s horror as intimate as the throat-slime of music, the strings dripping with bitterness and hate.