by David Szalay
Outside, night has fallen on Sverdlovsk. Some people leave immediately, as if the loss existed only there, in Ivan’s flat. The others, understanding that it is not so easily escaped, turn to drink. It is past midnight when Ivan drives Aleksandr home. Drunk, he steers slowly through the quiet streets. Aleksandr is untalkative. ‘You okay?’ Ivan says.
‘I’m just thinking about something.’
‘The football?’
Aleksandr shakes his head. Then, a moment later, he murmurs, ‘Metelyev Log.’
‘What?’
‘Metelyev Log.’
‘What’s that?’ Ivan takes a hand off the plasticated wheel to fish his cigarettes from his pocket and the Lada wanders in the road. ‘There was a strike or something,’ he says. ‘A railway strike. Was that it?’
‘No, that wasn’t it.’
They have left the tarmacked streets and are probing the mothy darkness of suburban tracks.
‘There was a man called Lozovsky,’ Aleksandr says. ‘He was a sort of doctor.’
‘Was he?’
‘Yes. You wrote a piece on him.’
‘Did I?’
‘Two, in fact.’
Leaning forward with a cigarette in his mouth, peering through the windscreen, the speckle of impacted insects, Ivan says, ‘Do you know how many thousands of pieces I’ve written?’
‘You’ve forgotten?’
There is a long silence. Then Ivan says, ‘Sasha, what’s the point of talking about these things? Nobody wants to hear about them now …’
‘You don’t …’
‘No, I don’t. I’m surprised you do …’
‘Surprised? Why are you surprised?’
Ivan sighs. ‘I don’t know. Forget it. We’re here.’
4
IVAN, YOU SOMETIMES seem to have no memory at all. So let me tell you: You were not always like you are now. Once you were known for writing things that got you into trouble. The story of the ‘strike’, for instance. You mentioned it last night. The story of the ‘strike’. I took you out to lunch – in those days I took you to lunch – and you told me about it.
It was just after my first visit to Metelyev Log. I was stranded there for more than a week. A mudslide somewhere in the hills had stopped the trains. When I finally got home, Irishka said you were looking for me. I went to see you on Sunday. You weren’t in. Katya opened the door. She was heavily pregnant with Shurik. Whenever I saw her, she talked and talked about you – how she was worried about you, how you were not eating enough, how you worked too hard, smoked too much, didn’t sleep properly. She spent her life worrying about you, Ivan. I asked her where you were, and she said you were working – on Sunday, she said, you had to write the paper for Monday. This wasn’t true, and she must have known it. You wrote Monday’s paper on Friday.
I took you out to lunch the next day. You were late, of course. You were wearing a jacket that was too big for you and an open-necked shirt with long collars. Your hair, parted in the middle, was plastered shinily to your head. You were smoking a Belomor. That was how you looked in those days. We ordered our lunch, and then I said, ‘So there’s something you want to tell me about?’
‘Yes,’ you said, ‘something I’m working on.’ That was what I had expected. In those days you often told me what you were working on. You took a piece of paper out of your pocket. ‘This,’ you said.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s a letter,’ you said, unhurriedly, salting your bread, ‘from the management committee of the Molotov railway to the oblispolkom, here in Sverdlovsk.’ It will probably surprise you to know that I still have it. The very letter. It says:
At present we are unable to pay any wages, as has been the case for several weeks. Workers cannot buy even a single kilogram of bread, and are coming to work hungry and declaring that they do not have the strength to work. Having been deprived of bread and food products, the dependants and children of workers are forced to starve, and the workers themselves are dividing up what little we can give them with their children and thereby driving themselves to emaciation. This failure to pay wages is now acquiring a political character. Non-appearance for work is becoming more widespread, and there have been instances of engine drivers refusing to take their locomotives out. For all these reasons, and in view of the vital strategic importance of the railway, we urge the immediate release of the emergency funds necessary to resolve this exceptionally difficult situation.
In the Ural restaurant, tucking into the zakouski – some smoked trout, some pickled garlic, some cucumber and sour cream – you said, ‘Do you think the necessary funds were released?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
With a flourish, you produced a second letter, obviously an answer to the first, written several days later, from the office of the oblispolkom secretary for transport.
The government’s decree (15 February 1948) forbids the covering of losses of economic organisations. Thus the railway and its economic units are obliged to take all measures not only to make good the circulating capital which they allowed to be exhausted in 1947, but to find additional sources of accumulation, and to achieve the stable financial position of their subdivisions.
‘Where did you get these letters?’ I said.
‘They were sent to me anonymously at the paper.’
‘It’s probably embezzlement.’
‘Possibly.’
I made a little speech. I said, ‘The state can’t keep pouring money into the pockets of managers who steal from their enterprises. Something has to be done about it. It amounts to sabotage. And the ordinary workers are the ones who suffer. It’s good that you’re writing about it. We need to increase people’s awareness of this. These people need to be exposed and dealt with. It’s the only long-term solution –’
‘It may be a case of embezzlement,’ you said, interrupting me, ‘or it may not. That isn’t the point.’
‘Oh, isn’t it? What is the point?’
‘The point is what happened next.’
‘Which was?’
‘There was a strike.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you think?’ You were almost whispering, leaning towards me over your now empty plate with a newly lit papirosa in your hand. ‘There was an organised, coordinated strike, which lasted for several days.’
Suddenly you sat back and smiled. The waitress – the pretty one you liked so much – put our lunch on the table.
‘A strike?’ I said, when she had moved away. You nodded, holding your spoon. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘I have several sources,’ you said. ‘And there have been massive disruptions on the railway.’
‘Not necessarily caused by a strike. The disruptions could have been caused by something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. A mudslide, for instance.’
Stirring your soup, you smiled knowingly. ‘A mudslide?’
‘For instance,’ I said.
‘Well, as it happens, that’s exactly what they’re saying.’
‘Who?’
‘The management of the railway, and the oblispolkom. They’re saying there was a mudslide, but they’re very vague about where. Very vague indeed.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I don’t think there was a mudslide.’ You started to eat.
‘Why?’
‘Sasha,’ you said with your mouth full, ‘one mudslide wouldn’t shut the whole railway!’
‘It depends where it was.’
‘The strike started with the engine drivers,’ you said, ‘and spread very quickly. The whole workforce was refusing to work until they were paid –’
‘You’re not planning to write about this?’ I said suddenly.
‘Why not? You said it would be good to write about it.’
‘Don’t be stupid! You know what I meant. It would be good for you to write about the embezzlement that led to the situation described in those letters. Th
e strike, if there was one, isn’t the point. It’s nothing to do with the underlying problems. You mustn’t write about it.’ In those days I worried about you, Ivan. Your name was mentioned in the wrong places. It was starting to appear on the wrong lists. I know you wanted to be successful. You wanted to be editor of ‘Pravda’. What you did not seem to understand was that nothing could be worse for your prospects of success than the sort of name you were making for yourself. I don’t know why you didn’t understand that. Perhaps because you had started your journalistic career with such a shocking, sensational exposé – the fact that the sons and daughters of obkom members were being awarded degrees from the Urals State Technical University, including medical degrees, without having passed the exams. Publicly you were feted for that. Unfortunately, it also made you enemies. I know it frustrated you to see your more politically skilful peers move into positions of editorial power, or to Moscow to work on the nationals, while you were still sent out to Uralmash to interview Stakhanovites. I know you were desperate to make some sort of mark, something that would be reprinted – as the Urals State exposé was – in the national press. You may have thought the strike story would do that. It wouldn’t. And there was no shortage of people willing to stab you in the back if you made such a stupid mistake. I don’t know if you ever understood quite what a precarious position you were in. I understood, and I was worried about you. I knew you saw me as a sort of protection. There was, though, a limit to what I would be able to do, which was why I said, ‘You must not write about it.’
Later, we walked along Lenin Prospekt. You were sullen. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I understand the suffering of those workers, but a strike – if there was one – would be seen as a hostile political act. To publicise it wouldn’t help them. Not that it would be published, if you wrote about it. And writing about it wouldn’t help you either. Quite the opposite. So what would be the point? You’ve got to forget about it, the whole thing.’
Sulkily, smoking, you watched a tram pass. It was early spring, everything was wet. I see the exact moment, the sodden wooden pavement, the expression on your face. I thought I understood you then. I thought we were essentially the same. We were both saved from village life by Yevdokimov, who made it possible for us – first me, then you – to go to school in Sverdlovsk. He understood the urgent need to establish a working-class intelligentsia, which unlike the old tsarist specialists on whom we were still dependent in those years, would be progressive in its instincts. When we arrived in Sverdlovsk, we were not aware – were we? – that our education was part of an effort to do this. What is undeniably true is that it would have been impossible for us to have had such an education before 1917. Our lives would have been like those of our parents – illiterate, ignorant, impoverished, without hope. That they were not, the opportunities that we have had, we owe entirely to the party.
‘Who were your sources for this?’ I said. ‘How can you trust them? You pay them, I suppose? Slip them a bottle of vodka?’
‘I trust them.’
‘Perhaps you should let me have those letters.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll look into it. There may be something …’ I shrugged. Without enthusiasm you handed me the letters – I did not want them to be found in your possession, that was why I took them from you. ‘Have you mentioned this to anyone else?’ I said.
‘Of course not.’
‘Not to Katya?’
‘No.’
‘And not to … You know who I mean.’
You paused, perhaps stung by this – were you stung by it? – and then shook your head.
That spring was the time of the Zhdanovshchina. Another word you will have forgotten, Ivan. You knew it once. The Zhdanovshchina. People’s minds are formed by what they see and hear – a lifetime in journalism has surely taught you that – and if, for instance, Leningrad’s literary journals were obsessed with the most nihilistic modern writing from the West, it undermined our efforts to move towards Communism, to move towards it in people’s minds. That was the most important thing. People’s minds. I therefore spent much of my time interviewing members of the intelligentsia about their work. Unfortunately, some of the others took a very negative approach to this, laughing at poems in front of the people who had written them, and saying, ‘Who would want to read this? What does this have to do with the everyday lives of ordinary people?’ Or looking exaggeratedly pained as someone’s music was played, and then shouting, ‘Why would anyone want to listen to that? The average person wants music they can hum!’ Such philistinism succeeded only in turning people against us.
My experience of this sort of work was probably why I was sent to interview Yudin in the first place. To prepare myself, I made a summary of his security file. There were a number of photographs in the file, mostly of Yudin himself. He was shortish, stocky and muscular, with dark brown hair and blue eyes. One photograph, taken from the end-of-year album of the Moscow Conservatory, 1939, shows a thoughtful-looking young man, turning his face slightly from the camera, the hint of a half-ironic smile on his lips. A sensitive face, though not a delicate one – the eyebrows emphatic, the nose prominent. Unfortunately, the evidence against this thoughtful-looking young man was strong.
His professor at the Conservatory was Heinrich Haussman, a German married to a Russian woman. He seems to have been a father-figure to Yudin. Often, outside school hours, Yudin would spend time with Haussman and his family. He would spend weekends at their dacha. His enthusiasm for bourgeois German culture, however, seems to have pre-dated his friendship with Haussman. He learnt German at school and spoke it well by the time he arrived in Moscow in 1936. He read German books, and specialised as a performer in the works of J.S. Bach. The file said that ‘he often compares Russian composers unfavourably with German ones, especially Bach’. (And next to the name ‘Bach’ some oaf had written ‘Fascist? Nazi? FIND OUT’.) He wrote an essay called ‘The Meaning of Form and the Form of Meaning in the Music of J.S. Bach‘, which was published in the leading Soviet musical journal in December 1938.
In February 1939 he won first prize in the Tchaikovsky International piano competition. In March he moved into a new flat on Kutuzov Prospekt. In June he went to the Crimea, where he had use of a villa overlooking the sea. He was in the Crimea for most of the summer. Photos from his time there: horsing around by the pool, posing, eating dinner at a long table in the open air, everyone looking tanned and healthy, even the Azerbaijani housemaids. His mother and sisters came to visit. Haussman spent a week there. There was a photo – sad in view of what was to happen – of Yudin, smiling hugely (he had very straight white teeth), with one arm around Haussman and the other around his mother.
In September, he started his recording of the forty-eight preludes and fugues of Bach’s ‘Well-tempered Clavier’. This piece had been recorded only once before, by the Swiss Edwin Fischer in 1936. It was considered desirable that the Soviet Union equal this feat. There was also the prospect of an international market for recordings by Yudin. The final session was on April 6 1940. The following spring, however, the recording was withdrawn. This was done for political reasons – by then the leadership was preparing the country psychologically for a war with Germany, and German music was no longer politically correct. Yudin protested, of course. He appealed to Haussman for help, but Haussman was himself German – and was deported that spring, accused of Fascism and spying, and died during the war in unknown circumstances. This deprived Yudin of his mentor and father-figure – his own father had died years earlier – at a time when his world seemed suddenly to be falling apart. In particular, newspaper articles were appearing denouncing his devotion to German music. German, Germany, Germans, words that in the winter of 1940–41 start to appear more and more frequently in the file.
He entered the army in the late summer of 1941. However, in June, just after the invasion, he had attempted to contact Haussman, sending the letter via a Swiss musician, Albert Zugzwang in Luzern. In this letter he spoke of hi
s desire to leave the USSR, and go to Germany ‘where I have so many friends’. It was intercepted. In any case, Haussman may already have been dead. Then, in April 1942 Yudin wrote, again via Zugzwang, to Rudolf Steglich, a friend of his, a German musicologist and a member of the Nazi party. Like the first letter, this one, which was also intercepted, inquired whether it would be possible for him to go to Germany. He even seems to imply that he would welcome a German victory in the war. In view of this, it was decided to take action, and on May 17 a warrant was issued for his arrest, something not mentioned in the obituaries published several weeks later. Such were the known facts when I went to see him at Metelyev Log in April 1948.
Then, one evening in May, I was summoned to Mikhalkov’s office on the fourth floor of the old MGB building.
Mikhalkov was in with someone so I had to wait for a few minutes, making small talk with his secretary, old Yegorova, who had worked there for a succession of colonels since the twenties. Some civilians in suits emerged from the inner office and left hurriedly. ‘You can go in now,’ Yegorova said. Mikhalkov was sitting at his desk. Sherepin was there too. ‘They want to have a look at Yudin,’ Mikhalkov said, without preamble. ‘I know you don’t think that’s necessary.’
‘No.’
‘You think it’s unnecessary to move him from where he is?’
I said nothing.
‘They just want to have a look at him,’ Mikhalkov said. ‘They want a second medical opinion. That’s what I think. They don’t entirely trust this Lozovsky. One of our long-nosed friends, I presume?’
‘One of our …?’
‘A Jew.’
‘Oh. Yes, I think so.’
Sherepin nodded slowly several times, staring at the floor as though his mind was on something else.
‘What do you make of him?’ Mikhalkov said to me.
