The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

  It had never happened, of course, but the story was repeated often enough for its veracity to be accepted. This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true – it couldn’t be true – because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the fourth quartet in the way the composer intended. Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

  What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

  This was what he held to.

  His civil, tedious and fraudulent conversations with Comrade Troshin continued. One afternoon, the tutor’s mood was uncharacteristically animated.

  ‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘is it true – I’ve just recently been told – that a few years ago Iosif Vissarionovich rang you up in person?’

  ‘Yes, it is true.’

  The composer pointed at the telephone on the wall, even though it was not the one he had used. Troshin gazed at the instrument as if it ought already to be in a museum.

  ‘What a truly great man Stalin is! With all the cares of state, with all that he has to deal with, he knows even about some Shostakovich. He rules half the world and yet he has time for you!’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed with feigned zeal. ‘It is truly amazing.’

  ‘I am aware that you are a well-known composer,’ the tutor continued, ‘but who are you in comparison with our Great Leader?’

  Guessing that Troshin would not be familiar with the text of the Dargomyzhsky romance, he replied gravely, ‘I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’

  ‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed. And it’s a good thing that you now appear to possess a healthy sense of self-criticism.’

  As if eager for more such praise, he had repeated, as soberly as he could manage, ‘Yes, I’m a worm, a mere worm.’

  Troshin went away well pleased with the progress that had been made.

  But the composer’s study never did display the finest portrait of Stalin that Moscow could sell. Only a few months into Dmitri Dmitrievich’s re-education, the objective circumstances of Soviet reality changed. In other words, Stalin died. And the tutor’s visits came to an end.

  As the chauffeur braked, the car pulled to the left. It was a Volga, comfortable enough. He had always wanted to own a foreign car. He had always wanted, very specifically, a Mercedes. He had foreign currency sitting in the copyright bureau, but was never allowed to spend it on a foreign car. What is wrong with our Soviet cars, Dmitri Dmitrievich? Do they not take you from place to place, are they not reliable, and built with Soviet roads in mind? How would it look if our most distinguished composer was seen to insult the Soviet motor industry by buying a Mercedes? Do members of the Politburo drive around in capitalist vehicles? Surely you can see that it is quite impossible.

  Prokofiev had been allowed to import a new Ford from the West. Sergei Sergeyevich was very pleased with it, until the day it proved too difficult for him to manage, and in the middle of Moscow he ran over a young woman. Somehow, that was typical of Prokofiev. He always came at the world from the wrong direction.

  Of course, no one dies at exactly the correct moment: some too early, some too late. A few get the year more or less right, but then choose completely the wrong date. Poor Prokofiev – to die on exactly the same day as Stalin! Sergei Sergeyevich suffered a stroke at eight in the evening and died at nine. Stalin died fifty minutes later. To die not even knowing that the Great Tyrant had expired! Well, that was Sergei Sergeyevich for you. Despite being a punctilious timekeeper, he was always half out of step with Russia. So his dying had shown a foolish synchronicity.

  The names of Prokofiev and Shostakovich would always be linked. But though manacled together, they were never friends. They – mostly – admired one another’s music, but the West had penetrated too deeply into Sergei Sergeyevich. He had left Russia in 1918, and, apart from brief returns – as with a pair of puzzling pyjamas – had stayed away until 1936. By then he had lost touch with Soviet reality. He imagined that he would be applauded for his patriotic homecoming, that tyranny would be grateful – how naive was that? And when they were arraigned together before tribunals of musical bureaucrats, Sergei Sergeyevich thought only of musical solutions. They had asked him what was wrong with his colleague Dmitri Dmitrievich’s Eighth Symphony. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, he replied, ever the pragmatist: it just needs a clearer melodic line, and the second and fourth movements should be cut. And when faced with criticism of his own work, his response was: look, I have a multiplicity of styles, just tell me which you would prefer me to use. He was proud of his facility – but that was not what was being asked of him. They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them. They wanted your complicity, your compliance, your corruption. And Sergei Sergeyevich had never really understood this. He said – and it was brave of him to do so – that when a piece was killingly denounced for ‘formalism’, it was ‘a simple matter of not understanding something on first hearing’. He had a strange kind of sophisticated innocence. But really, the man had the soul of a goose.

  He often thought of Sergei Sergeyevich in wartime exile, selling off his finely-cut European suits in the market at Alma-Ata. They said he was a skilful trader and always got the best price. Whose shoulders would those suits be on now? But it wasn’t just his clothes: Prokofiev enjoyed all the trappings of success. And he understood fame in a Western way. He liked to say things were ‘amusing’. Despite his public praise of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, when he leafed through the score in its composer’s presence, he had pronounced the work ‘amusing’. It was a word which should have been banned until the day after Stalin’s death. Which Sergei Sergeyevich had not lived to see.

  He himself had never been tempted by a life abroad. He was a Russian composer who lived in Russia. He declined to imagine any alternative. Though he had experienced his own brief moment of Western fame. In New York, he had gone to a pharmacy for some aspirin. Ten minutes after he left, an assistant was seen fixing a sign in the window. It read: DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SHOPS HERE.

  He no longer expected to be killed – that fear was long in the past. But being killed had never been the worst. In January 1948 his old friend Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The day the news came out, he had spent five hours being hectored by Zhdanov for distorting Soviet reality, failing to celebrate the nation’s glorious victories, and eating out of the hands of its enemies. Afterwards, he went straight to Mikhoels’s apartment. He had embraced his friend’s daughter and her husband. Then, standing with his back to the crowd of silent, fearful mourners, with his face almost pushing into the bookcase, he said to them, in a quiet, clear voice, ‘I envy him.’ He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror.

  But endless terror continued for another five years. Until Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev emerged. There was the promise of a thaw, cautious hope, incautious elation. And yes, things did get easier, and some filthy secrets emerged; but there was no sudden idealistic attachment to the truth, merely an awareness that it could now be used to political advantage. And Power itself did not diminish; it just mutated. The terrified wait by the lift and the bullet to the back of the head became things of the past. But Power did not lose interest in him; hands still reached out – and since childhood he had always held a fear of grabbing hands.

  Nikita the Corncob. Who would go into tirades about ‘abstractionists and pederasts’ – they being obviously the same thing.
Just as Zhdanov had once denounced Akhmatova as ‘both a slut and a nun’. Nikita the Corncob, at a meeting of writers and artists, had said of Dmitri Dmitrievich, ‘Oh, his music’s nothing but jazz – it gives you the bellyache. And I’m to clap my hands? But with jazz – you get colic.’ However, this was better than being told you ate out of the hands of the nation’s enemies. And in these more liberal times, some of those gathered to meet the First Secretary were allowed, if with proper deference, to offer a contrary opinion. There had even been a poet bold – or crazy – enough to maintain that there were great artists among the abstractionists. He had mentioned the name of Picasso. To which the Corncob had replied brusquely,

  ‘Death cures the hunchback.’

  In the old days, such an exchange might have led to the insolent poet being reminded that he was playing a dangerous game which might end very badly. But this was Khrushchev. His rantings made the lackeys with brass faces sway in one direction, then another; but you did not immediately fear for your future. One day the Corncob might announce that your music gave him the bellyache, and the next, after a fancy banquet at the Union of Composers’ Congress, he might actually praise you. That evening he had been holding forth about how, if music were half decent, he could just about listen to it on the radio – except when they transmitted stuff which sounded, well, like the cawing of rooks … And as the lackeys with brass faces were laughing away, his eye fell on the well-known composer of bellyaching jazz. But the First Secretary was in a benign, indeed forgiving, mood.

  ‘Now, there’s Dmitri Dmitrievich – he saw the light at the very beginning of the war with his … what d’you call it, ah, his symphony.’

  Suddenly, he was not in disfavour, and Lyudmila Lyadova, concocter of popular songs, came over and kissed him, then witlessly announced how everyone loved him. Well, it really did not matter either way, because things were no longer as they had once been.

  But this was where he made his mistake. Before, there was death; now, there was life. Before, men shat in their pants; now, they were allowed to disagree. Before, there were orders; now, there were suggestions. So his Conversations with Power became, without him at first recognising it, more dangerous to the soul. Before, they had tested the extent of his courage; now, they tested the extent of his cowardice. And they worked with diligence and know-how, with an intense but essentially disinterested professionalism, like priests working for the soul of a dying man.

  He himself knew little about visual art, and could hardly argue with that poet about abstractionism; but he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso. He was free to speak the truth – why didn’t he do so on behalf of those who couldn’t? Instead, he sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France painting his revolting dove of peace time and time again. He loathed the sight of that bloody dove. And he loathed the slavery of ideas as much as he loathed physical slavery.

  Or Jean-Paul Sartre. He’d once taken Maxim to the copyright bureau next to the Tretyakov Gallery, and there, standing at the cashier’s desk, was the great philosopher, counting out his fat wad of roubles with great care. In those days royalties were paid out to foreign writers only in exceptional cases. In a whisper, he had explained those circumstances to Maxim: ‘We don’t deny material incentives if a person leaves the camp of reaction for the camp of progress.’

  Stravinsky was a different matter. His love and reverence for Stravinsky’s music had never wavered. And as proof, he kept a large photograph of his fellow composer beneath the glass of his desktop. He looked at it every day and remembered that gilded salon at the Waldorf Astoria; remembered the betrayal, and his moral shame.

  When the Thaw came, Stravinsky’s music was played again, and Khrushchev, who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges, was persuaded to invite the famous exile to return for a visit. It would be a great propaganda coup, apart from anything else. Perhaps they hoped in some way to turn Stravinsky back from a cosmopolitan into a purely Russian composer. And perhaps Stravinsky for his part hoped to rediscover some remnants of the old Russia he had long ago left behind. If so, both dreams were disappointed. But Stravinsky had some fun. For decades he had been denounced by the Soviet authorities as a lackey of capitalism. So when some musical bureaucrat came towards him with a fake smile and an extended hand, Stravinsky, instead of offering his own hand, gave the official the head of his walking stick to shake. The gesture was clear: who’s the lackey now?

  But it was one thing to humiliate a Soviet bureaucrat once Power had grown vegetarian; another to protest when Power was carnivorous. And Stravinsky had spent decades sitting on top of his American Mount Olympus, aloof, egocentric, unconcerned when artists and writers and their families were being hunted down in his native land; were imprisoned, exiled, murdered. Did he utter a single public word of protest while breathing the air of freedom? That silence had been contemptible; and just as he revered Stravinsky the composer, so he despised Stravinsky the thinker. Well, perhaps that answered his question about personal honesty and artistic honesty; lack of the former didn’t necessarily contaminate the latter.

  They had met twice during the course of the exile’s visit. Neither occasion had been a success. He himself was as apprehensive and self-conscious as Stravinsky was bold and self-assured. What could they possibly have to say to one another? So he had asked,

  ‘What do you think of Puccini?’

  ‘I loathe him,’ Stravinsky had replied.

  To which he had answered, ‘So do I.’

  Did either of them mean it – mean it as absolutely as they had spoken? Probably not. One was being instinctively dominant, the other instinctively submissive. That was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’.

  He had also had a ‘historic meeting’ with Akhmatova. He had invited her to visit him at Repino. She came. He sat in silence; so did she; after twenty such minutes, she rose and left. She said afterwards, ‘It was wonderful.’

  There was much to be said for silence, that place where words run out and music begins; also, where music runs out. He sometimes compared his situation with that of Sibelius, who wrote nothing in the last third of his life, instead merely sat there embodying the Glory of the Finnish People. This was not a bad way to exist; but he doubted he had the strength for silence.

  Sibelius had apparently been full of dissatisfaction and self-contempt. It was said that the day he burnt all his surviving manuscripts he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. That made sense. As did the connection between self-contempt and alcohol, the one inciting the other. He knew that connection, that incitement all too well.

  There was a different version of Akhmatova’s visit to Repino going the rounds. In this, her report went: ‘We talked for twenty minutes. It was wonderful.’ If she’d actually said that, she was fantasising. But that was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’. What was posterity to believe? Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.

  When he and Stravinsky had discussed conducting, he had confessed: ‘I do not know how not to be afraid.’ At the time, he thought he was only talking about conducting. Now, he was not so sure.

  He was no longer afraid of being killed – that was true, and should have been an advantage. He knew he would be allowed to live, and receive the best medical attention. But, in a way, that was worse. Because it is always possible to bring the living to a lower point. You cannot say that of the dead.

  He had gone to Helsinki to receive the Sibelius Prize. In the same year, simply between the months of May and October, he had been made a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris, an honorary doctor of Oxford University, and a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cock
tail sauce. In Oxford, he met Poulenc, who was also receiving an honorary degree. They were shown a piano which had apparently once belonged to Fauré. Respectfully, each had played a few chords.

  Such occasions would have given a normal man great pleasure, and be received as the sweet and merited consolations of age. But he was not a normal man; and as they showered him with honours, they also stuffed him with vegetables. How cunningly different their attacks on him now were. They came with a smile, and several glasses of vodka, and sympathetic jokes about giving the First Secretary bellyache, and then the flattery, and the wheedling, and the silences and the expectations … and sometimes he was drunk, and sometimes he hadn’t really known what was happening until he got home, or went to the apartment of a friend, where he might collapse in tears and sobs and cries of self-loathing. It had got to the point where he despised being the person he was, on an almost daily basis. He should have died years ago.

  Also, they had killed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk a second time. It had been banned for twenty years, since the day Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov had chortled and sneered away while Stalin skulked behind a curtain. With Stalin and Zhdanov dead, and the Thaw declared, he had revised the opera with the help of Glikman, his friend and helpmeet since the early Thirties. Glikman, who had sat beside him the day he pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ into his scrapbook. Their new version went to the Leningrad Maly Theatre, who applied for permission to stage it. But the process stalled, and he was advised that the best hope of accelerating it was for the composer himself to write a letter petitioning the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Which was of course humiliating, because the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was none other than Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.