by David Szalay
The next morning I showed it to her. ‘Whose room is it?’ she said. When I told her, she seemed surprised, though I don’t know how else she thought I would find something. She asked how long she would be able to stay there. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Over the next few weeks, the last weeks of summer, I went to see her sometimes. She knew no-one in Sverdlovsk. No-one who would see her anyway. Sometimes I took her to lunch at the Ural restaurant, which had opened since the war and was nearby. She had very little money, and had left Metelyev Log with only one small suitcase, so I bought her some new clothes at the Ministry of State Security store, and a pair of shoes, as well as soap and some other necessities. Once or twice, I took her to the Turkish baths – there was no hot water in Shtern’s flat – and signed her in to the First Department.
It was in those weeks too, the last weeks of summer, that my final meeting with her husband took place in my office one evening. ‘Some tea and sandwiches, please,’ I said to Voronin, when he ushered him in. ‘Oh, and some cigarettes.’ Then I sat down. Not at my desk, on the straight-backed seat usually used by visitors, and indicated to Lozovsky to take the chaise longue. ‘Please.’ He hesitated for a moment. He looked tired and had lost weight. His shoes had no laces.
‘This isn’t a formal interview,’ I said. ‘As you see there’s no stenographer. No witnesses. There’ll be no record of what we say. I just wanted to talk to you. And if you want to ask me anything, feel free.’
‘Has my wife been arrested?’ he said immediately.
‘No. Why would she be?’
‘I don’t know. But then I don’t know why I was. And I don’t expect you’ll tell me.’
‘I will,’ I said.
Voronin wheeled in the tea and sandwiches. The first thing Lozovsky wanted, however, was a cigarette. Unfortunately I didn’t have any matches, and had to ask Voronin to light it for him. ‘Leave the matches,’ I said. I passed Lozovsky an ashtray and for a minute or two he smoked in silence. Then he had some tea. ‘Am I allowed to know what happened to Yudin?’ he said.
‘I don’t see why not. He was brought to Sverdlovsk. A ministry doctor had a look at him.’
‘And?’
‘And he’s been sent home.’
‘Home?’
‘To live with his mother. She lives in a settlement near here. You shouldn’t have been so stubborn. You should have signed the form.’ He stared at me for what seemed like a long time. I shrugged. ‘Well, it’s made no difference,’ I said. ‘Except for you.’ As soon as I had said this I saw the implication of it, and that he had seen it too. He opened his mouth to speak. Then he saw that I knew what he was going to say, and this seemed to satisfy him. ‘May I?’ He indicated the sandwiches.
‘Of course. They’re for you.’
He wolfed down one or two sandwiches very quickly. He must have been hungry, but in fact he always ate like that. I had noticed it at Metelyev Log.
I leaned over and switched on the light on my desk. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask you,’ I said. ‘Why did you leave the Second Medical Institute and take the job at Metelyev Log? It was a significant step down.’
‘That was years ago,’ he said, with his mouth full.
‘I know.’
He seemed to have nothing more to say on the subject, so while he finished eating, I said, ‘They’re going to close Metelyev Log, you know, and transfer the patients to Kisegach.’
‘Are they?’
‘Yes. Your work was the only thing that justified keeping it open –’
‘You said you’d tell me why I was arrested.’
I did not like the way he interrupted me. I was trying to be friendly, though now my voice probably lost some of its friendliness. ‘There was something you wrote in the thirties,’ I said. ‘A piece for a scientific journal. In 1936. I’m sure you know the piece I’m talking about. In it you speculated that the sense of order we have about the world is essentially subjective, is simply a product of our minds. We talked about these things when I was at Metelyev Log. There was a fuss at the time – it turned political – you had influential friends who protected you. Well, now someone’s found it, and they want to talk to you about it. I presume that’s what’s happened. I don’t know for sure.’ Having finished the sandwiches, he lit a cigarette. ‘Of course, you wrote it twelve years ago. Your ideas might have moved on since then.’ My tone was questioning. ‘Have they? As I said, this is entirely informal. Whatever you say will stay in this room. You have my word on that. I’m just interested.’
‘Your word?’ he said.
I now think that this was probably sarcastic. Then, I took it as a sincere question and said, ‘Yes.’
‘The piece you’re talking about was a scientific paper.’
‘Yes.’
‘Its subject was neuropsychology. Politics had nothing to do with it.’
‘Well …’ I smiled. ‘Politics has to do with everything. Neither of us is in a position to say what is political and what isn’t. No one is. And no one can escape from politics. Not you. Not me. Except perhaps through total solitude. Robinson Crusoe. Until man Friday turns up – then you have politics.’ I was uneasily aware of trying to impress him. ‘You must be able to see how what you wrote in that paper might turn into a political issue?’
‘It was turned into a political issue by other people. It’s got nothing to do with me. My work was pure science.’
‘Even if the things they said followed logically, even inevitably, from your ideas?’
‘What things? What did they say? I don’t know.’
‘Taking your ideas as a starting point, they said, in so many words, that there’s no such thing as truth, that life is inherently meaningless, history just a meaningless struggle of all against all. A sort of nihilism, in other words. Or at least an extreme form of scepticism, which is in effect the same thing. Is that what you think too? I’m just interested. You can speak honestly to me.’ When he did not, I smiled and said, ‘Well, I think it is what you think.’
He laughed. ‘Why?’
I opened one of my desk drawers. ‘Do you know this book?’ I said, taking it out and holding it up for a moment. His face showed nothing, or only the slightest tightening of the jaw. ‘I found it in your office at Metelyev Log. It was the only book there, as far as I could see, that wasn’t a medical text book. It’s a book about music. About Johann Sebastian Bach in particular.’ He stared at me impassively. ‘You like puzzles, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Logic puzzles, word puzzles? This book involves a word puzzle – a hidden one. It’s to do with the name of the author. Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov. The strange thing is, this Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov doesn’t seem to exist. Did you know that? I’ve looked into it.’
‘I don’t know anything about him.’
‘And his book was published only two years ago. Then it occurred to me where, exactly, I found it. Where in your office. On which shelf. It was on the shelf with your books – I mean, with books written by you. Of course, it might have found its way there by mistake. That’s what I thought at first. And then,’ I said, ‘then I noticed – and this is where the word puzzle comes in – I noticed something about the name Nikolay Maksimovich Luzhov. It’s an anagram. An anagram of another name. Your name.’
When he did not deny that he had written the little volume – and I think part of him was pleased, even under the circumstances, that someone had solved his puzzle; the pseudonym, after all, did not have to be an anagram of his own name – I opened it and looked for the first passage that I had marked.
‘You start,’ I said, ‘with a quotation from someone – Schweitzer is his name – writing about Johann Sebastian Bach. “He inscribed the work completed in Cöthen the ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ by way of celebrating a victory that gave the musical world of that day a satisfaction which we can easily comprehend. On the old keyed instruments it had become impossible to play in all the keys, since the fifths and thirds were tuned naturally, according to the absolute interv
als given by the divisions of the string. By this method each separate key was made quite true; the others, however, were more or less out of tune, the thirds and fifths that were right for one key not being right for another. So a method had to be found for tuning fifths and thirds not absolutely but relatively, – to ‘temper’ them in such a way that though not quite true in any one key they would be bearable in all. The question occupied the attention of the Italians Gioseffo Zarlino (1558) and Pietro Aron (1529). At a later date the Halberstadt organ builder Andreas Werckmeister (1645–1706) hit upon the method of tuning that still holds today. He divided the octave into twelve equal semitones, none of which was quite true. His treatise ‘Musical Temperament’ appeared in 1691. The problem was solved; henceforth composers could write in all the keys. A fairly long time elapsed, however, before all the keys hitherto avoided came into practical use. The celebrated theoretician Heinichen, in his treatise on the thorough-bass, published in 1728, – i.e. six years after the origin of Bach’s work – confessed that people seldom wrote in B major and A flat major, and practically never in F sharp minor and C sharp minor; which shows that he did not know Bach’s collection of preludes and fugues.” You then spend the next two hundred pages,’ I said, ‘taking issue with various points in Schweitzer’s text. Your main point is that the phrase “the problem was solved” suggests a problem, and a solution, understood in empirical terms. In fact, you say, in the early eighteenth century many methods of tuning existed, of which equal temperament was only one, and one which was in no way seen as being empiric ally or self-evidently superior to the others. You say that it had existed in various forms since about 1675, and was only taken up universally in the mid eighteenth century. In the intervening period there was a violent difference of opinion as to whether it was an improvement, or in fact an impoverishment, of the pre-existing situation. Even Werckmeister himself, the man who Schweitzer tells us invented the method of equal temperament, did not personally favour it until a theologian persuaded him that its proportions somehow matched those of Solomon’s palace as set out in the Bible – from our point of view, as you say, something entirely nonsensical. Until then, he preferred another method, the so-called “Werckmeister III”, which did not involve equal temperament – and which was quite possibly the method favoured by Bach himself. So the term “well-tempered” in Bach’s title does not even necessarily mean “equally tempered”, and might just as easily refer to “Werckmeister III”, or some other method of tuning. Many people at the time thought equal temperament sounded “wrong”, and Bach may have been one of them. That it does not sound “wrong” to us, you say, just shows how subjective these things are, and how wrong we are to think of the equal-temperament scale as “some sort of fundamental musical material”. That we do think of it in those terms is simply because of the sort of music that has been written for the last two hundred years – music for which it is indeed a fundamental material. You insist that none of this should lessen our esteem for Bach and his work. In fact, you say that its position as the foundation of modern European tonality is even more impressive when we understand that this was not inevitable – that it won that status for itself, through its own qualities. That it made something ex nihilo, and did not simply stumble on something that somehow pre-existed and was just waiting to be found. And you end with a second quotation from Schweitzer, which I liked very much. “Nevertheless, overwhelmed as we are by the intellectual and organisational achievements of this work, we must not lose sight of the fact that they would mean little were it not for the profound and humane beauty of every one of the pieces contained therein. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentation, laughter: to all of these it gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the world of restless imperfection to an ideal world of peace, and see reality in a new way: as it were, sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the placid and fathomless water. Whoever has once felt this perfect serenity has comprehended the mysterious spirit that has here expressed all it knew in the language of tone, and will render Bach the thanks we render only to those great souls to whom it is given to reconcile men with life and bring them peace.” Is that a fair summary?’
‘No,’ Lozovsky said.
‘No?’
‘You make it sound like a polemical tract. It’s not.’
‘You don’t think what I’ve said is a fair summary?’
‘No, I don’t. It’s a technical work. It’s about the tuning of musical instruments. Most of it’s taken up with technical detail, which you haven’t even mentioned.’
I looked at him for a few moments. ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ I said. ‘I see this as an Aesopian work. I see it as a restatement of the ideas expressed in your 1936 paper. Only here the political implications are more obvious – if we take “equal temperament” to stand for “Marxism”.’ I smiled. ‘Well? What do you say? I’ve been honest with you. That’s what I think.’
‘It’s fanciful,’ he said.
‘Is it?’
‘And even if it were true, which it isn’t, the “Well-tempered Clavier” would presumably stand for 1917, and Bach for Lenin, and I have only love and veneration for Bach and his work.’
‘And for Lenin and his, I hope! No, it’s true. What you say is true. The problem is more subtle. You may love and venerate Bach and his work, and you may even love and venerate Lenin and his – however, you see neither the equal-temperament scale nor Marxism as having an intrinsic progressive truth. Something else might do just as well. Neither is historically inevitable. Nothing is, in your view.’
‘I don’t know what makes you say that.’
‘No? What about this. You write, “Looking into the past, we are tempted to see the pre-tonal world of the seventeenth century as missing something essential, as existing in darkness, waiting for the tonal light – or at most as a series of primitive, painful steps towards the future of tonality as we know it, founded on the equal-temperament scale, as if this were somehow an end point towards which everything had been progressing from the start.” Isn’t that a denial of the very idea of progress?’
For the first time he seemed to lose his self-possession slightly. ‘Progress? I’m talking about music there. What would progress mean, in musical terms? Perhaps you’ll tell me. I don’t understand.’
‘That’s my point.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Do you believe that history moves forward in a meaningful way?’ I said.
‘History? Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps?’ There was an uneasy silence while I turned the pages of the book. ‘You take exception to Schweitzer’s use of the word “victory”,’ I said. ‘“He inscribed the work completed in Cöthen the ‘Well-tempered Clavier’ by way of celebrating a victory …” It’s the same point, essentially. Just another instance of the subjectivism which is the keynote of the whole thing.’ I shut the book and smiled. ‘You think I’m being silly, I know. It’s not important. It’s just my little theory. I’m not planning to send this book to Moscow, if that’s what you’re worried about. When you get there you’ll be asked whether you still hold the views you expressed in your 1936 paper, and in the papers influenced by yours. You’ll be invited to disown those views. Which I don’t think you will, since they are your views, and you’re very proud and stubborn. And honest.’ He said nothing. ‘You understand, of course, that it’s impossible for someone who holds such views to occupy a prominent position in our public life. Especially in an educational establishment. And what else would you do? Work on a farm? In a factory? You’ll be sentenced to ten years. In a special prison, if you’re willing to work in one. Life is not unpleasant in those places, especially for someone like you. I mean, someone who lives for their work.’ I stood up and poured him some more tea from the little stainless-steel samovar on the trolley. He had been listening to what I said with a stony, expressionless face. Or perhaps he was not listening. He was not looking at me. ‘On a personal level,’ I said, ‘I’m v
ery sorry that this is the situation we find ourselves in. I’ll never forget the week I spent at Metelyev Log, your kindness to me. I want to thank you for that.’
‘What will happen to my wife?’ he said.
‘Your wife?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’
‘If you feel we were kind to you …’ For the first time in several minutes he looked me in the eye. He was more upset than he seemed. I felt very sorry for him.
‘I’ll try to help her,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘And thank you for talking to me.’ I picked up the phone. He immediately lit another cigarette. ‘Take them with you,’ I said. ‘And the matches.’ He seemed to ignore this. While I was speaking to Voronin, however, he put them in his pocket.
That was the last time I saw him. Leaving the office that night, an hour or two later, I said to Voronin, ‘Turn off his light, and make sure he has a proper pillow. He needs to sleep.’ He was taken to Moscow the next morning.
Somewhere in our talk, I’m not sure where – and of course what I have just written is only from memory and a sort of stylisation of what took place – I said to Lozovsky that there was a sentence in his book that I had particularly liked. ‘Where is it?’ I said, leafing through the pages. ‘It’s when you’re explaining the problems involved in tuning keyed instruments, which you explain very well, very lucidly. I found the whole book very interesting. You say that the problem is similar to that associated with leap years – that the smaller natural units do not fit exactly into the larger natural units – days into years, pure major thirds into octaves. And then you say, “The difference is small, but the imperfection is total.” I liked that. “The difference is small, but the imperfection is total.”’
