Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Shall we map out the sector assigned to D. D. Shostakovich? His defensive system now consisted first and most fundamentally of Irina (who was very gemütlich, I believe), secondly of Glikman, Lebedinsky and his sister Mariya, thirdly of his increasing physical disabilities, which excited compassion and guilt in others, fourthly of his Party membership, which isolated and protected him within what military strategists would refer to as his cutoff and intermediate position; fifthly came the world within the piano keys, the lovely world of pure darkness and white winter icicles, into which he’d once upon a time imagined that he could invite anyone he chose, for instance, the plump girl in the blue dress who sang at the Hotel Sovietskaya; unfortunately, that world’s tunnels had suffered many cave-ins since he’d detonated the various Hydrox cartridges of Opus 110; he longed to retreat there and still sometimes did, but it wasn’t the same; it was stifling, collapsed, flooded and poisoned, but he couldn’t see the point of complaining about it, not even to the, how should I say, people’s responsible representatives; sixthly and lastly was his inner line, namely, his memories of Elena Konstantinovskaya, who had always actually been very, you know.

  40

  The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts granted him honorary membership. The rows of seats down the herringboned floor, the stage dissected by chairs and frames, then curtains above everything, it was all quite . . . Weary old owl that he was, he cocked his head, smiled, and tooted out his thank you, thank you. The following year, as the new purges of Soviet literature began, he was named Hero of Socialist Labor. By then the infamous dissident A. I. Solzhenitsyn was already referring to him as “the shackled genius.” Yet he dared to sign a petition in Solzhenitsyn’s favor. I’m told that he’d often stand in the back of a concert hall, listen to the music of other composers, close his eyes and silently weep with emotion. Sweaty, flabby and feeble, he lived on, producing music with an efficiency comparable to that of the SKNK-6 corn-planting machine, which can inseminate 3.5 hectares per hour of ploughed ground. It’s merely a question of time and manpower. LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER . . . At their best, wrote the bourgeois critic Layton, the symphonies have the epic panoramic sweep of the great Russian novels. To Glikman, to whom everything he wrote was a masterpiece, he wrote: I have been disappointed in much and I expect many terrible things to happen. I am a dull, mediocre composer. Ustvolskaya had cut him off forever. Nikolayeva had become very, very busy. Irinushka, who was so good and who forgave everything, would have understood if he’d needed to refresh himself with one of them (not that he could have done anything except with his half-paralyzed hand); she was such a magnificent wife, so loving and respectful of his pain; he even trusted her with his hidden manuscripts. Once she asked him why he hadn’t married E. E. Konstantinovskaya, I mean Vigodsky, and he gaily replied: Inferior antitank forces!

  She didn’t go away, so he cocked his head and said: Irinochka, I, I prefer not to discuss it much. It humiliates me. Well, we, I mean, we tried hard. And, and . . . First and foremost, you musn’t think that I don’t love you, Irina. Here’s the worst of it. She . . . But, you know, what happened to her and me, well, we can’t just blame the times and that bastard.—Then he lifted the telephone to call Nikolayeva, but the voice on the other end of the wire, a male voice, informed him rather unpleasantly that she was on tour in the Ukraine.—Kindly tell her that I need to talk with her about, you know, about, about Mussorgsky. About the, uh, bass clarinet.—Glikman wrote him again and he began to reply: Slowly and with great difficulty, squeezing out one note after another, I am writing a violin concerto, and then such an eerie echo rang between his ears that he had to lay down the pen, because his own phrase, squeezing out one note after another, merely repeated the sentiment it’s merely a question of time and manpower. Oh, those Fascists, they’d been special individuals, all right!

  Buried under the rubble of his three Orders of Lenin, his Order of the October Revolution, his Order of the Red Banner of Labor, he lived on to 1968, when Akhmatova died. Her funeral cortège was as steady as the one-track railroad line through Wolf’s Lair: Bahnhof Goerlitz, final stop! Now into the hole. He was there, of course. Eighty-eight; eighty-eight. The eighty-eight is the best general-purpose German gun. After all, she’d been in Leningrad when . . . We have a Motherland and they have a Fatherland. Their child is Europe Central. And I have Messerschmitts, Heinkels, Junkers, ammunition transported through the sewers, Germans crouching in their snowy trenches, the dark swirl of greatcoats as Red Army men leapt from the earth to charge forward; these comprised his homeland forever, where pale, open-mouthed corpses lay in each other’s arms on a street corner in the rain. Here came the Messerschmitts again; she was screaming and screaming.

  And his soul was the winter sun of this ghastly dreamland now as bygone as old Petersburg; Elena’s screams, which he’d thought to inter in the grey chapel of Opus 110, continued to torture him to the end; they rose and died so nakedly, illuminated by rays of despair. Opus 110 towered above us all; he’d brought a new evil into the world without solving an old one. Supposedly one can actually, so to speak, make a bulletproof wall out of snow, but in this case their artillery can, well, you know. Or had he even done anything at all? Wasn’t death always with us? Had he lived five hundred years ago, Shostakovich might have found Opus 110 just as luckily in some deep old well with ferns on the walls and sickly concentric circles of darkness. So let’s go down to the Queen of Hell. Then we can come back up and inherit a whole green hill with cemetery ruins embedded in it. Ha, ha! Steep dark stairs burrowing upward through the very stone of the castle walls, chandeliers like spiders, and then if I’m good I’ll get to make love with Elena in an ebony bed with snakes carved in it. Glikman encountered them at the spa at Gagra, the Vigodskys, I mean, not the snakes. He told me they were extremely . . . But what’s that sound? And yet in spite of his terrible fear and all the sadness, he even lived on to 1969, when one of his worst tormentors, the musicologist P. Apostolov, was stricken by a heart attack at the premiere of the grim Fourteenth Symphony, whose proclaimed theme was death, and whose melodies (if they can even be called that) were blacker than the smoke from a burning oil depot. Explaining what he required of the orchestra, he said at the first rehearsal: On the left and right flanks, the battalion regions are echeloned to the depth of the, the, you see, the regimental sectors.—But he was only joking. Oh, that hilarious D. D. Shostakovich! To the symphony audience he said: Death is terrifying; there is nothing beyond it. You see, I don’t believe in life beyond the grave . . .—Refusing to accompany him into the pit, his old friend Lebedinsky wrote him a letter which severed relations between them; so goes one story, but other people have said that Lebedinsky, like Glikman, was jealous of Irina’s influence. The third version, which claims that Lebedinsky dreaded the Party officials and representatives of the “organs” who now frequented the Shostakovich household, may safely be dismissed as an anti-Soviet slander.—Unfortunately, said Shostakovich to his wife, Lebedinsky has grown, how shall I put it, old and stupid.—And he sat down heavily, clutching at his heart. Everybody’s equally disgusting. Where are my cigarettes? For instance, here’s that war criminal von Manstein; Lebedinsky sent his memoirs when we were still friends; I particularly like this, this, where is it? Here: It was essential to ensure that, you know. Consequently it was now necessary for the Germans, too, to resort to the “scorched earth” policy which the Soviets had adopted during their retreats in previous years. The worst of it is, the monster’s correct. He’s such a . . .—Back to the Fourteenth, which I myself don’t mind confessing has given me nightmares; it really does stink of the tomb; nonetheless, it bears the same relation to Opus 110 as does the post-mortem twitching of a dissected frog (a musical twitch, we might as well say, or at least a rhythmic one, for it’s brought about according to the quirks of the experimenter, who opens and closes the circuit between flesh and galvanic battery, prestissimo) to the actual death-convulsions when we’d placed the reptile in the killing-jar.—My Fourteenth,
you know, I’ve sort of, you know, taken a shine to it, because it’s nasty and because it reminds me of my past. For instance, the time that Elena, you know, she was having her, her, and then the time when the German Fascists wrecked the Catherine Palace. I forgot to include that in Opus 110 . . .—About this work (ten percussion instruments, nineteen strings, two solo voices), important musical personalities insisted that its symphonic conflict never showed any dialectical resolution—which means that more passages should have been in a major key.

  Staring down at the piano keys to which his aching ancient claws of hands couldn’t make love anymore, he thanked us for their comradely criticism; oh, yes, he thanked us in words as lucent as the icily sparkling corpses which had once adorned Leningrad.—And in fact, I, well, there’s simply no question about it. In my next symphony I’m going to change everything exactly as you advise! If we’re fainthearted about carrying out those measures, thewill step in. That violin section you dislike, I’ll tell the orchestra to play it quickly so that the audience won’t even hear it! Moreover, I’m going to, er, there’ll be dialectical resolution in every measure, I guarantee it! Like a searchlight!—But, as usual, he was, how should I say, teasing them. After all, isn’t nocturnal antiaircraft fire likewise a song of darkness engraved in pure and delicate lines of light, akin to the rays of twenty-four-carat gold which a bookbinder’s heated stylus, if drawn with sufficiently errorless spontaneity across the measured strip of foil, engraves forever in the black leather covers of the Book of Night?

  In a grand Hallway of the People with a brass chandelier, he got drunk and whispered into Glikman’s face: They talk about this new, this, this cultural exchange! Well, haven’t we always had it? We have Black Marias and they have Green Minnas!

  My dear, dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, what on earth are you saying? Please be careful—

  Or did Green Minnas vanish with the Reich? Maybe they transport them in schoolbuses now—

  Them? Whom are you talking about?

  Why, I’m talking about all of us. Long live the, so to speak, the, the Fatherland!

  Dmitri Dmitriyevich, day and night I worry about your happiness.

  Thank you. Thank you!

  And I have something important to say to you.

  Yes, my friend, said Shostakovich in a panic, his fingers beginning to gallop crazily all over the room. What is it?

  Do you remember that many years ago you asked me to—

  No, no! Please don’t—

  And after I saw you last time, when you burst into tears—

  I did not!

  I swear to you—

  So you betrayed my confidence, is that what you did?

  When you were weeping, you asked me to go to her and—

  Did you tell her? How dare you?

  She kept asking me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. So I told her, because—

  Because what?

  My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich, I advise you to leave your present situation, because you’re not happy. Even now it’s not too late to—

  Please keep your advice to yourself, my dear, dear Isaak Davidovich!

  With a despairing and humiliated smile, Glikman said softly: That’s how I know you’re in love. Because people in love never take the advice of their friends. First they ask for it and don’t take it, and then they become quite offended when their friends, who only want to help them and who—

  Isaak Davidovich, please forgive me! Oh, I’m a bastard, such a, a, a bastard! And that’s why you told her, of course, of course—because I wanted you to! How is she? Her hair must be completely white by now. And then I—oh, I’m such a sonofabitch! Galina was right not to marry me!

  Never mind her, said Glikman, laying his hand on Shostakovich’s shoulder; and Shostakovich suddenly felt that he loved Glikman more than he had ever loved any man or woman on or under this earth, and Glikman tenderly repeated: Never mind her. It’s not Galina Ustvolskaya that you love.

  Shostakovich lived on to 1970, when he published an article entitled “Lenin’s life, an inspiring example to us.” He also composed Opus 139, “March of the Soviet Police.” I mean, why run ahead of progress? It’s better to just, you know. But Irina kept being so kind. The silent tact of the woman who sits on the bench beside the concert pianist, turning pages at just the right moment, and otherwise scarcely existing, that summed up Irinochka, who devoted herself to him so perfectly; how could he possibly deserve her?

  He knew that he was ruining her as he’d ruined Tatyana, Elena, Nina and Galina; he was a poisoned bomb who killed all; poor tired Ninusha had suffered the worst, because she’d lived with him the longest. And then he’d . . . Elena, you’re so lucky that you didn’t marry me. Is the page turner any less important than the concert pianist? First of all, she needs to read music, which is no mean feat in our times. More important still, she keeps me company, knowing me and comforting me. She keeps Opus 110’s swarm of sorrows from . . . I, I, the things growing deep within the mass graves! And then . . . From within the great brick arch, the railroad tracks roll toward a stand of trees. I think that’s the gas chamber. Wooden watchtowers, A-framed ocher-bricked barracks in rows and rows and rows, the remains of chimneys in the grass, that’s my music. Long rows of chords, block after pinewood block of them, long and low with steeper, blacker-roofed chords on the right, it all aims at the same kind of feeling—you know, that feeling of . . . But when she holds me in her arms, Operation Barbarossa never happened! Well, aren’t I vile, though, to want to deny . . . ? Do you remember when the American fighter-bombers returned to Dresden for the third raid and began machine-gunning women and children in the grass? Talk about chopping up the melodic lines! The Americans should have, well . . . Some people survived even then. I wonder who was luckier. We can all hope to, to, so to speak, survive. And I myself, although I’m very afraid, I . . .

  Time ticked, and he lived on to 1972, when his Fifteenth Symphony premiered; for despite his impairments they still expected him to fulfill his quota of symphonies, just as in the old days they’d demanded that the NKVD chief of some city arrest and shoot ten thousand enemies of the people at once and without fail. Unfortunately, the Fifteenth was no more than a feeble rearguard action, a holding-on behind enemy-occupied lines. Many a chord got borrowed from Wagner, Prokofieff, Mussorgsky and a certain D. D. Shostakovich. On the whole, it was as grey as Tukhachevsky’s eyes, as white as Glikman’s intentions, as clean as Nina’s fingernails, as solitary as Irina’s, you know. Elena, you see how lucky it is that, well. I used to be—how should I put it? Conceited. And now, when I hear someone’s silly laugh, especially a man’s, because women are, you know, I, I can hardly . . . They praised its banality, and his ears kept ringing. He kept expecting to see Comrade Stalin in the back row, or Zhukov, Khrennikov, or anybody else who was unshakably determined to light the way ahead with a searchlight. As for our unshakable allies in East Germany, they called it strangely reserved and introverted. His attention wandered; his mouth trembled; his coat fell off his lap and Irina picked it for him. The searchlight’s on me; it gives me the creeps! His spectacles were now as big as clockfaces. White light gleamed on them, so that it was sometimes difficult for others to read his eyes—thank you, thank you! He sat stiff and frowning, with his useless hands at his sides. Why not cut them off? Then I’d take up less space in this world! That way I could hide from Comrade Alexandrov, who won’t leave me alone; he’s always around with his . . . Remembering the chord of screams when a German Fascist oil bomb hit a children’s hospital, he realized that he’d forgotten to put that sound into Opus 110. Well, well! Should I rewrite it? It would field-strip as nicely as a Nazi pistol, every movement black and silver. And then that one sound— what’s that sound? Because . . . Struggling painfully to his feet to thank the musicians as usual, he found that several shuddered away from his compromised hand. They jeeringly called him Comrade Shostakovich. His heart drummed as hellishly as the second movement of Opus 110. The next day, however, an American admirer invited him
to her apartment for an intimate breakfast, not far from where the “Spartak” Children’s Home used to be. What was her name? It was some, so to speak, American name. His memory wasn’t always . . . She told him that his Fifteenth was brilliant, and he thought to himself: If I were only fifteen measures younger I could have, I could have, well. Let me calculate it: Fifteen years ago, Nina had just died and Elena would have been forty-three. When did that Vigodsky marry her? After the war; it must have been after the war. She wouldn’t have been too old then to, to, how shall I say, but it’s better not to think about that because, anyway that’s how most meetings go. Besides, for the sake of my so-called “health” . . . He remembered the cries which Elena used to utter: first appassionato, almost con dolore, then morendo, then after a long rigid silence with her face locked away in pleasure, con brio for the very finish, not explosively as other women so often did, but as calmly unstoppably as a rocket rising upon its own flame, with superhuman brilliance, really; hence that smooth shrill pass of the cello’s bow in the second movement of Opus 40; that was when he’d first known how far above everyone she truly was. Well, that was over. The waffles which this American had made (she seemed to be suffering from a case of leftwing infantile deviation) reminded him of war-skeletonized buildings. It was all a matter of scale. Instead of charred square concrete pits which had once been rooms, square wells of golden starchiness looked up at him, glimmering with melted butter and maple syrup imported all the way from Canada!