Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  And so the time came when Shostakovich had to meet him, at the congratulatory dinner. Come to think of it, he’d already met him twice, first at the opening ceremonies and then when the prize was presented, for, as I may have neglected to tell you, Shostakovich was the Chairman of the Organizing Committee for this First International Tchaikovsky Competition (an appointed position, whose bestowal underlined the Party’s confident expectation that his rehabilitation would never be a source of regret), and so it was actually he who’d been required to stand at the podium, praising Van Cliburn, and he who’d transmitted the medal and the envelope of cash into the boy’s sweaty hand while newsmen’s flashbulbs exploded like antiaircraft rounds. Truth to tell, he was less interested in Cliburn than in the pretty violinist from Volgograd who sat across the table. Something about her lips—well, she wasn’t really that young, but Shostakovich had begun to find that every woman now appeared in his eyes a virgin, plus or minus. He couldn’t believe how girlish the forty-year-olds had started to look. Yesterday he’d been chatting with E. V. Denisov about what made up a real Russian girl’s face: a pleasing prominence of the cheekbones, in youth anyway (or was that just because until just recently Russian children had never gotten enough to eat?); Denisov, less enthralled by this subject, because more concerned about the Central Committee’s new Decree on the Correction of Errors, yawned, opened and closed both pianos, ate a herring and directed their mutual consideration to the poor complexions of many Russian females, but Shostakovich counterattacked by praising those wheat fields of hair blonde or auburn or black, not to mention the dark eyebrows which went so well with pale hands (not very proletarian! laughed Denisov).

  They’d given Van Cliburn an interpreter of almost intimidating beauty. But Shostakovich noticed that those two scarcely gazed at each other. She kept tapping her hands on the banquet table. (It actually seemed to Cliburn that she was indifferent to him, which gave him a strange feeling, but after all, this was another country, a dangerous country, a Slavic enemy country.)

  Mr. Shostakovich, I’d be right honored if you’d call me Van.

  But you’re too kind! cried the old man anxiously. Dear me! Well, Van, thank you, thank you, thank you; and feel free to call me Mitya . . .

  He felt almost sorry for Cliburn. The boy was too guileless.

  From the next table, the sad young composer S. Gubaidulina was making eyes at him. He knew that as soon as the banquet broke up she’d back him into a corner and begin all over again: Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’re the person our generation depends on to give us answers. Please, I beg of you, don’t let them talk you into joining the Party. You can’t imagine how many people are counting on you to hold firm . . .

  The American boy’s blond curls enraged him, he hardly knew why.

  Do you know, Van, I myself was once the soloist for this very same Tchaikovsky concerto! It was in Kharkov, in the summer of 1926. Long before all the, the, you know. Hitler took it three times and we took it back twice, after which they . . . three and two, now, how does that work out? But I don’t suppose there’s much left of the old city. Field-Marshal Paulus had a lot of tanks at first, before we . . . Tree-lined streets. Anyway, nothing lasts. Perhaps a few bricks, or . . . For instance, I was actually young once! You can hardly imagine . . .

  He was trying to be kind. As a matter of fact, the nineteenth-century predictability of the composition pained him now. Oborin was correct; Tchaikovsky’s music deserved to be parodied.

  The boy smiled and started to say something, but Shostakovich, embarrassed and anxious, rushed on with the story, longing to put them both at ease, trying to make it funny: Perhaps you haven’t heard of him, Van, but the conductor was, was, he was Nikolai Malko, who’s with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra now. He did his best to look after me. Ha! We used to play billiards together when we should have been practicing! In 1926 I would have been, excuse me, about the age you are now. Do you play billiards, Van?

  Gosh, Mitya, I’ve never had the time. If you want to teach me, maybe we could try a game . . .

  Oborin was already claiming that the only reason the audience had wept at Van Cliburn’s performance was mass hysteria

  Another Russian girl came with flowers for Vanyitchka. He thanked her shyly, sitting tall and slightly bowed. He didn’t seem to know whether or not to rise when he accepted the bouquet. She invited him to escort her to the premiere of “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.” Definitely he was blushing now. Everybody looked away, feeling sorry for him. For what reason did his appearance stain Shostakovich with a feeling of peculiarity, almost of horror? He felt as if he’d half forgotten some secret. Then it came to him: the front page of Izvestiya, with that portrait gallery of the heroic generals who’d saved Moscow, and among them the favorite of Comrade Stalin (so it was said), tall, thin, anxious Vlasov, who’d peered down at fame through harsh black-rimmed spectacles. Why had Vlasov made such an impression on Shostakovich? No, the impression must have been made later, at the war’s end, when the man got hanged for treason and cowardice. There had been no Izvestiya photograph then. They’d never met. Nor was Vlasov’s fate unusual. But that one image of him, his face already bent as if in anxiety and misery, although the true case must simply have been that he was taller than the photographer, well, there Shostakovich could see himself. As for the American Vanyitchka, he looked nothing like General Vlasov. He was tall, to be sure, and he hunched nervously but . . .

  Mitya, I’ll tell you something, Oborin had said. Once when I was preparing a concert at the front we drove over a German mine. Everybody except me got killed. In my case it was really just luck, and I . . . Well, anyway, what I remember from that instant is two sharp reports—not particularly loud, you understand, but sharp. And sometimes, even now, the sound of a backfiring engine . . .

  But Vlasov and this kid, I, there’s, there’s no—

  Look, said Oborin. There’s no logical connection between the sputtering of a truck and two land mine explosions. But when you’re in danger, you don’t have time for logic. Your heart pounds, and you try to save yourself, that’s all.

  So you’re saying that because I might have identified with Vlasov—

  Mitya, are you crazy? Don’t keep mentioning that name. Who knows if somebody’s in the hallway right now . . . ?

  Well, Van, it was a remarkable performance, I must say. You ought to feel, how should I say, very proud. I understand that your mother—

  My mother was my best teacher. And I played clarinet at Kilgore High, said the boy in a confiding tone.

  My mother also taught me well.

  I’d be proud to meet her, Mitya.

  Unfortunately, she’s dead, laughed Shostakovich, fiddling with his glasses. And your mother, is she, I mean, is she in good health?

  Oh, pretty good, thanks. Mitya, I want to ask you something. Do you think I played the Rachmaninoff too fast? I felt a little nervous—

  No, no, no, in my opinion your choice of tempo was entirely correct. (Please tell your mother to look after her health.) It was a splendid performance, really, very very talented, and that moderato in the first movement, well, the way you played it, it had a steady, you know, tenderness—

  Thanks for saying that, Mitya, because I’ve always been crazy about your Seventh Symphony. When I was playing the moderato, as soon as I got through the fast part I tried to slow down into something that would sound like your third movement—

  Yes, yes, I think I’m, you might say, familiar with that music, said Shostakovich with a wink. How does it go now, Van? The third movement, I mean. Can you carry a tune? Maybe you could—

  It always inspired me, continued the boy a little desperately. The part that’s called the “Open Spaces of the Heartland”—

  Oh, dear, well, perhaps you overrate me. But you certainly put on a fine performance.

  Blushing, Van Cliburn listened in his head to the crucial bars of the second movement, the adagio sostenuto, just as he had played it. To him this was the most romanti
c music of all, the piano upholding the sweetness of the strings, then growing as reflective as a Chopin nocturne. Whenever he played it, he felt as though he were walking through a summer pavilion. And the great Shostakovich approved of his performance! He could hardly breathe for joy.

  But how’s the life for you over there? Oborin wanted to know. Do you serve in your country’s armed forces, Van?

  They inducted me last year, but I had a blood condition . . .

  An East German pianist approached to present his congratulations, and as soon as he was out of earshot, Shostakovich, clutching his vodka-glass, chuckled to Van Cliburn: You know what Comrade Stalin said at the twenty-sixth anniversary parade? I think it was the twenty-sixth. Or was it the twenty-fifth? Never mind. How did he put it? Wait a moment. No, no, now it comes to me! He said, Comrades, long live the, so to speak, victorious Anglo-Soviet-American fighting alliance. Death to the, if you get my drift, German invaders.

  Cliburn blinked and said: Well, thanks for saying that, Mitya. I sure appreciate it.

  Shostakovich choked on his vodka.

  And now a journalist from TASS leaned across the translator and said with malicious zest: Mr. Cliburn, the Soviet people unanimously demand to know the status of the Negro question in your country.

  Gosh, Mitya, said Cliburn, not looking at the journalist at all, I never met a Negro I didn’t like. After all, they’re Americans, too.

  Shostakovich bit his lip to keep from laughing. He could hardly wait to tell Lebedinsky about this! (With Lebedinsky, as with Poe’s protagonist, it was the teeth. In ’44 he’d seen a Ukrainian village which had just been liberated from the Fascists. All the corpses hung grinning. To him the most menacing thing was their rotting smiles. And now, whenever somebody smiled too widely or too whitely, he longed to scream.)

  Hastily, Oborin put in: Van, I imagine that everybody in Kilgore, Texas, must be proud of you today.

  A little self-consciously, like his dark bowtie clinging to the tapering slit of whiteness (for I’ve heard that as a rule they dress casually in America), the boy said: Actually I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. I don’t suppose you know where that is—

  No, said Oborin, but I’ve heard that it’s very hot in your southern provinces. Almost like Africa.

  Raising his voice, the journalist said: Many Negroes there, laboring in atrocious conditions . . .

  Yes, hot, said Van Cliburn in an exhausted voice.

  And now Shostakovich began to perceive some haunted and guarded quality about the American’s soul. And indeed, the man in raspberry-colored boots who dropped by the next day to drink vodka said with a wink: You see, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, he’s a homosexual. We know this irrefutably. It’s in his file.

  You don’t say, returned the composer with a pretense of deep astonishment. Well, well, well, I’m most interested.

  What would you expect from such a decadent country? If I had my way (and I’m sure you agree with me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich), I’d smash his smiling American face! I hate ’em all. Remember how they wouldn’t open the second front year after year? They wanted the Fascists to bleed us dry—

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, said Shostakovich, whose temples had begun to ache from too much liquor. You’re absolutely correct, Comrade Alexandrov—

  Every time I see an American, it sets me off. I start thinking about that second front, and I . . . Well, at least you’re one of us, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. You were in Leningrad . . .

  Indeed I was, Comrade Alexandrov, and I, I, I’ll never forget what—

  My first wife fell into their hands. She was a hostage. In Kiev.

  Well, well. She was there on business? If I may say so, my dear friend, sometimes it’s better not to—

  We’d always believed that the only thing they did was hang her, but do you know what I learned just last year? You know what they did to her first? While those fucking Americans were laughing all the way to the bank! Don’t get me started. Who taught him our music?

  A Russian. Rozina Levina—

  An émigré. Scum.

  His mother also taught him, I believe.

  That’s rich. A mama’s boy. No wonder he’s a fairy.

  She was formerly a concert pianist, he told me—

  That just makes it worse.

  And it’s even worse than that, Comrade Alexandrov. You see, I venture to say that he’s—

  He’s what? We need all the details. Tell me everything you can remember about that bastard—

  Do you know, he’s—well, I share your feelings of, of, so to speak, betrayal, and yet in this case, well, I truly think he’s not all there.

  How could he say what he truly felt? Perhaps Cliburn knew more than he pretended. But Shostakovich remained convinced that this American was part of the natural process of forgetting. Call him a bacterium on the moldering corpse of our war-memories. Soon there’d be nothing left, not even bones. (Of course he was only a little boy, with his hands in his pockets.) When Shostakovich was in Leipzig for the Bach festival, a German Communist, smirking, had quoted him the words of a certain General von Hartmann, commander of the Seventy-first Division of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. A few days before the final surrender, Hartmann had remarked: As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust a thousand years from now, and Sixth Army an indecipherable name, incomprehensible to all.—Then he strode to the top of a railroad embankment, and fired blindly at the Russians until they shot him down. The German Communist continued: I can’t deny that these words made an impression on me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. To get right down to it, his bourgeois-dramatic heroic posture in the service of absolute nihilism—well, that shithead was absolutely correct about Sixth Army. Who cares about it now?—And the German Communist went on laughingly reviling General von Hartmann (of whom Shostakovich had never heard), until it became apparent that the German Communist couldn’t stop thinking about Sixth Army and maybe didn’t want Sixth Army to become an indecipherable name, because the sufferings which everybody in Germany and Russia had endured had become valuable as the simple result of their own intensity; he dreaded to condemn them to the crematorium of history. What Shostakovich felt (beyond revulsion, which he did his jittering best to mask, that any German should now presume to be his comrade) was something midway between sadness and peace. For didn’t he likewise cherish his own hopelessness? And this blond bacterium from America was here on a mission to transform the death which presently characterized all Europeans, and perhaps even vivified them, back into dirt. The bacterium would win.46 It would overwhelm him. He did not want to die—which is to say, he was death; he could not bear for his death to die . . . ‣

  LOST VICTORIES

  And then, as I smoked a cigarette with a tank crew or chatted with a rifle company about the overall situation, I never failed to encounter that irrepressible urge to press onward, that readiness to put forward the very last ounce of energy, which are the hallmarks of the German soldier.

  —Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein (1958)

  1

  In the sleepwalker’s time, we took back our honor and issued Panzergruppen in all directions. But when I finally got home, the advance guard of the future had already come marching through the Brandenburg Gate, with their greatcoats triple-buttoned right up to their throats, their hands in their pockets and their eyes as expressionless as shell craters! According to my wife, whose memory isn’t bad when she confines herself to verifiable natural events, some of our lindens were in bloom that May, as why wouldn’t they be, and the rest were scorched sticks, so she refers to that time as the “Russian spring,” which proves that she can be witty, unless of course she heard that phrase on the radio. Anyhow, we got thoroughly denazified. Our own son, so I hear, threw away his Hitlerjugend uniform and sat on the fountain’s rim, listening to the United States Army Band day after day. Next the Wall went up, so half of Germany got lost to us, possibly forever, being magically changed into one of the new grey countries of Europe Central, and all our fearfulness of death came back.
An old drunk stood up in the beerhall and tried to talk about destiny, but somebody bruised his skull with a two-liter stein, and down he went. When I reached home that night my wife was standing at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the doorjamb, peering at me through the place where the diamond-shaped glass window used to be, and I must have looked sad, because she said to me in a strange soft voice like summer: Never mind those lost years; we still have almost half the century left to make everything right, to which I said: Never mind those eight years I spent in Vorkuta, when they knocked my teeth out and damaged my kidneys, to which she replied: Listen, we all suffered in the war, even me whom you left alone while you were off raping Polish girls and shooting Ukrainians in the ditches; it’s common knowledge what you were up to; besides, you’re a middle-aged man and, and look at all the beer you swill; your kidneys would have given out on you anyway.—Having reconnoitered her disposition (as my old commanding officer would have said; he died of influenza in some coal mine near Tiflis), I fell back, so to speak; I withdrew from the position in hopes of saving something; I retreated into myself. Let her talk about destiny all she wants, I said to myself. At least I’m not tainted by illusions!

  As it happened, I’d been saving up a little treat for myself; I’d hoarded it beneath the cushions of my armchair. Right before I went to the hospital, Athenäum-Verlag released the memoirs of my hero, Field-Marshal von Manstein. Although I don’t consider myself a bookish person, it seemed befitting to show my support, so to speak, especially since the poor old man had recently gotten out of jail, fourteen years early if memory serves—the only favor I’ll ever thank those “Allies” for. For four years I couldn’t get to it, on account of the shell splinter in my head, but finally the thing stopped moving, so I got some peace, and there he was, right there on the dust jacket in all his grey dignity, wearing his Iron Cross and his oak leaves. The title of the book was Lost Victories.