3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  He’d tried to describe this to Nina. Lady Macbeth was, after all, dedicated to her. He’d held her in his arms and explained, in his clumsy way, how it was that the repeated blows of the critics hadn’t killed him.

  ‘I know,’ she said, stroking his forehead and his rough chin. ‘I see the way you do it. You simply … go away.’

  At that time, amidst the passion of their recent reunion, she didn’t seem to mind. Later, she resented his escapes, the way he disappeared into the knotted heart of his work. She called it ‘hiding’, while he called it a retreat.

  And so it was now, as day after day Leningrad burned and the streets erupted under the shells. After the Badayev fire had raged for six hours, the warehouse cellars flowing with several thousand tons of burning liquid sugar and the Junkers returning in successive waves, Shostakovich closed off the world. For the next two weeks, he kept his head down and his ears closed. He wrote fast, sometimes right through the air raids, as plaster poured from the ceiling and books fell off shelves, and the single light bulb above the piano swung. The nights of fire-watching were filled with action — kicking incendiaries off the roof, pouring sand on flaring magnesium fires — but they seemed like relief from the pressure of existing inside his symphony.

  ‘I’m consumed by it,’ he confessed to Sollertinsky down a crackling phoneline. ‘It’s too much to carry alone. If only you were here!’

  ‘You should be here, my friend.’ Sollertinsky, in a post office in Novosibirsk, had waited three hours to get a connection — and a bad one at that. ‘I’m not the only one who thinks you should leave Leningrad. Rumour has it that the authorities are —’ His voice was lost in a maelstrom of hissing, but already Shostakovich knew enough. Any day now a Party official would give him evacuation orders that he had little intention of obeying.

  The sound of Sollertinsky’s voice brought tears to his eyes. ‘I miss you,’ he said. ‘I really miss you.’

  ‘Change your mind,’ urged Sollertinsky. ‘Siberia isn’t as fearsome as depicted by our writers. It’s not filled with convicts. We even have food — that is, if you don’t mind rock-hard pies garnished with Central Asian ants. Are you getting enough to eat?’

  ‘Enough for now.’ Just that morning, Shostakovich had had to fasten his belt several notches tighter. ‘But it doesn’t look good. Bread rations are going to be cut again — to five hundred grams, I think.’ The truth was, he was barely aware of what he’d eaten in the last weeks: a bit of sausage chopped into red cabbage, dried mushrooms in watery broth, bread with sunflower oil rather than butter. The main thing was that mealtimes were now less of a palaver, meaning he could eat quickly without losing track of the work. While he was wasting time shovelling food into his mouth, the violins were hovering in his workroom, marking time above a pizzicato bass.

  The phoneline was worsening. Soon all he could hear was an odd exclamation or the fragment of a word, yet he couldn’t bear to say goodbye. When the line suddenly went dead, he swore. Goddamn it! He’d wasted an opportunity to talk about real things, had babbled on about food rations and an air raid the previous evening which had trapped them in the cellar for two hours, when he should have been asking about Mravinsky, and whether the Philharmonic might start rehearsing his symphony, and how one might transport a score to Siberia, and how many copies could be made of what would amount to thousands of pages. ‘Ivan Ivanovich!’ He kicked the wall in frustration; the sound of his friend’s name filled him with foreboding. Suppose he never again felt that solid arm around his shoulders, nor saw the crumpled collar and badly knotted tie, nor benefited from Sollertinsky’s informed conversations on topics ranging from Sanskrit to Sophocles?

  He knew he should start working again, but he felt a reluctance so strong it surprised him. Keep going, he commanded himself. This is the reason you’re still in Leningrad!

  Before he could begin, he heard a small knock on the door. It was Nina, who’d been gone for hours, queuing for bread. She looked closely at him. ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘I just talked to Sollertinsky.’ He noticed, for the first time, how her cheekbones stood out in her thin face. She’d stopped suggesting they leave Leningrad; in fact, she’d stopped saying much at all. But it was obvious that, every day, she was hoping someone else would help her fight this particular battle.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Nina rarely entered his workroom; this was his territory and he kept it as free as possible from the clutter of family life. But now she came over to him and laid her head against his chest.

  He could feel her shoulder blades jutting through her coat, and the sharp steps of her ribs. Shamed, unprotected by work, he saw that this was also his fault. Maxim had started wetting the bed, Galina had become afraid of the dark. Single-handedly, he was destroying his family.

  ‘You miss Sollertinsky,’ said Nina. It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘I do.’ Shostakovich gave a huge sigh. ‘I miss his certainty. I miss the life we had.’

  Heroes

  Elias was woken by the most intense pain he’d ever felt. The entire right side of his face was burning. It was as if a wire was threaded from his jaw to his ear, and it was being ratcheted tighter and tighter.

  ‘Hell!’ he said, opening his eyes to darkness. ‘Bloody, shitting hell.’

  As if on cue, the early-morning silence was ripped apart. Church bells tolled, sirens blared. Two months earlier, a loudspeaker had been mounted on a pole immediately below the apartment windows. (‘How considerate,’ his mother had exclaimed. ‘Someone must be aware that I’m hard of hearing.’) Now, out of that very speaker, came the repeated warning ‘AIR RAID! AIR RAID!’, blasting through Elias’s already splitting head.

  Clutching his cheek, he pulled his coat on over his pyjamas. The noise and the pain merged in a red-hot blur. If we’re not dead by the time this infernal war is over, he thought angrily, we shall certainly be deaf.

  Getting his mother down to the cellar was becoming increasingly difficult, for her indignation grew with each air raid. ‘The Germans signed a pact,’ she’d say. ‘They were supposed to be our friends.’ Recently, she seemed to have found a way of making herself heavier, so that Elias had to grit his teeth and call on Mr Shapran for help. ‘You’re not even trying, Mother,’ he’d exclaim. ‘Yes, it’s all most trying,’ she’d answer, sitting solidly in her chair.

  Now, he could barely open his aching jaw to call out for assistance. Instead he ran out onto the landing just as the Bobrovskys’ young son emerged from the door opposite.

  ‘My … mother,’ Elias grated out. ‘Can’t … lift … alone.’

  ‘I’ll help you. But we have to hurry!’ Valery’s blue eyes were round with fear.

  By tilting the chair at a dangerous angle, it was just possible for them to jolt Mrs Eliasberg around the corners of each landing. After two flights of stairs she began to shout, flailing her arms about so that Elias narrowly missed a punch on his already smarting jaw.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Valery’s chubby face was flushed.

  ‘I forgot my shawl!’ Mrs Eliasberg caught at the stair-rail.

  ‘Can’t … go back.’ Elias’s shoulders were burning, but he was almost glad of the new pain, distracting him from the one in his head.

  ‘There are blankets in the cellar, Mrs Eliasberg. We can’t go back.’ Valery stumbled and nearly dropped his side of the chair. ‘Whoops.’

  Olga Shapran’s face loomed below them, lit by the feeble glow of a lamp. ‘Hurry! We want to close the door! Hurry up!’

  ‘All right, we’re coming. You try hurrying when you’re lugging an old dragon in a bath-chair.’ Valery looked as if he might cry.

  ‘I must go back,’ cried Mrs Eliasberg. ‘I’ve left my lucky shawl behind, and the portrait of my husband isn’t in its proper place. If he isn’t in the shrine we’re doomed!’

  Just in time, Elias caught her, pushing her back in the chair and wrapping her coat tightly around her legs. ‘Would you shut up, Mother,’
he hissed, ‘and let us get you to the cellar, or we’ll all be as dead as Father.’

  They sat crammed together in the dark, the door firmly bolted and their backs to the wall. The attack seemed very close. Elias felt the anti-aircraft fire vibrate through his body; the shriek of the falling bombs sounded almost human. The whole building shuddered, making even Mrs Eliasberg stop moaning and fall silent.

  Elias clenched his hands. His pain blended with the noise outside, and soon it all became so intolerable that he felt as if he were not in his body at all. Think about the symphony, he told himself. Remember that day in Shostakovich’s study. He concentrated on the memory of the composer’s face: his flickering mouth when he reached a difficult passage, the rise of his eyebrows mimicking the upward lilt of a melody. Unclenching his left hand, Elias played out the opening theme on his knee. Had the first shift to the dominant key happened so early? Gradually, the sounds around him receded; he tilted his head back against the shaking wall, his eyes shut and his mind on the music.

  He was halfway through working out the exposition when there was an enormous crash and Mrs Bobrovsky gave a piercing scream. The cellar shook violently. Elias’s eyes flew open, but it was pitch dark and he could see nothing. Plaster was raining down on his head.

  ‘After all this time,’ said Mr Shapran, ‘we’ve been hit.’ He sounded amazed, as if until now the raids had simply been tiresome exercises.

  ‘Well, somebody do something!’ cried Olga Shapran.

  Elias groped for a box of matches. The terrified faces of his neighbours flared into light and then faded.

  ‘I’m going upstairs,’ he announced.

  ‘No!’ shrieked his mother. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘I need to know what’s happened.’

  Cautiously he unbolted the door, letting in a chink of light, peering up the stairs. Then he took off his scarf and wrapped it around his head.

  ‘To ward off the shrapnel.’ Olga sounded impressed.

  ‘There is no shrapnel from incendiaries,’ said her husband. He got to his feet and pushed past Elias. There was no way he was going to be outdone by a thin conductor in slippers.

  The booming and the whine of the bombs were distant now. Mr Shapran tried the switch in the stairwell but nothing happened. ‘Electricity’s gone,’ he said. In the entrance hall, a faint light crept through the boarded-up windows; it was barely enough to see by, but still too bright for Elias’s pulsing right eye. He felt his way up the stairs. On the second landing he heard a sound behind him and turned in alarm, pushing the scarf back from his face.

  ‘It’s only me,’ piped up Valery. ‘I want to help, too.’

  ‘Go back to the cellar,’ ordered Mr Shapran. ‘If that was an incendiary bomb, there’s going to be fire. This is no place for a twelve-year-old.’

  ‘He can come if he wants to,’ said Elias. ‘Boys not much older than him are fighting for us at the Front.’ To Valery he said, ‘Keep behind me and walk carefully.’

  After this Valery followed so close he stepped on Elias’s heel. ‘Whoops,’ he said, just as he had before, and he pushed the cracked leather slipper back onto Elias’s foot.

  When they reached the third-floor landing and paused at the Eliasbergs’ door, a faint sound could be heard from inside. Now it was Elias’s turn to push to the front. ‘It’s my apartment! Get out of the goddamn way.’

  ‘No need to swear,’ said Mr Shapran in his warden’s tone.

  The main room was undisturbed: orchestral scores on the table, dishes in the rack, enamel pans hung above the sink. But playing over the far wall was a new, ominously flickering light.

  ‘It’s in the old lady’s room!’ Valery rushed forward and stopped at the bedroom door. ‘Holy cow!’

  ‘Stay back!’ Elias grabbed his shoulder. Mrs Eliasberg’s bed was ablaze. A pillar of flames rose from her much-prized quilt, leaping towards the gaping hole in the ceiling. Without stopping to think, Elias seized one end of the mattress and tried to fold it in half. The heat was intense and he ducked his face away. ‘Give me a hand, will you!’ he said through clenched teeth.

  Mr Shapran grabbed the other end, and together they carried the burning mattress to the window, heaved it out, and stood watching as it soared down into the yard that was already flaring with small magnesium bonfires. Falling through the misty morning, with fiery bedclothes trailing behind, it looked like a strange and beautiful bird.

  ‘Like a phoenix,’ breathed Valery.

  Elias wanted to tell him that a phoenix rose from the ashes, rather than creating them, but there were more important things to attend to. He stumbled back through the singed bedroom, stamping on stray sparks as he went, and extracted a bottle from the cupboard under the sink.

  ‘Vodka?’ Mr Shapran sounded eager. ‘But oughtn’t we put out the fires in the yard before we start drinking?’

  ‘Not … going to … drink it. I have toothache.’ Elias drenched the dishcloth in alcohol and crammed it in his mouth. Dazed from pain and anticipating more (his mother treasured her quilt as much as life itself), he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Face covered in soot, scarf wrapped around his head, bared teeth clamped around the cloth, he looked less like a professional conductor than one of the Baltic Fleet sailors who frequented Leningrad’s drinking houses. Thank goodness Nina Bronnikova can’t see me now was his first thought.

  Valery was staring at him with undisguised admiration. ‘That was great! You were great. How’d you know what to do so fast?’

  Elias had no idea what had prompted him even to leave the relative safety of the cellar — unless it had been to get away from the voice of Olga Shapran. The unaccustomed alcohol fumes made him light-headed; his knees were turning to water. ‘Don’t know,’ he mumbled.

  ‘And when you told your mother to shut up — and she did!’ It was definitely hero-worship on Valery’s face. ‘Yesterday I ate the tiniest spoonful of honey,’ he confided, ‘and now Ma’s hidden the jar. Maybe if I shout at her the way you did with your mother, she’ll tell me where it is?’

  Gingerly, Elias pulled the rag from his mouth. ‘It was the toothache that made me shout. I don’t normally.’

  ‘War causes abnormal behaviour in the best of us.’ Mr Shapran spoke with the certainty and weight of a philosopher. ‘How about a quick nip to give us strength?’

  Shrugging, Elias sloshed some vodka into a mug. It was too early to drink, but any man married to Olga Shapran deserved a break. For himself and Valery, he poured two tiny measures into small glasses. His eyes were watering, his mouth burned, but gamely he raised his glass. ‘To Leningrad’s finest —’

  ‘To Leningrad!’ Mr Shapran drained his mug in a single gulp.

  ‘To Leningrad!’ Valery hesitated, glancing at Elias to see how brave men drank their vodka.

  Elias swallowed the last word of his toast, along with liquid tasting more like petrol than pure Siberian grain. He and Valery spluttered like disused engines while Mr Shapran reached for the bottle. ‘Got to light a fire in order to put ’em out,’ he said with a wink. Suddenly he was treating Elias as a comrade and an equal — not something Elias had particularly desired, but it wasn’t unpleasant at seven in the morning, after a minor act of bravery.

  He nodded at Mr Shapran, wiped his streaming eyes, and saw the recent past with the clarity of the sleep-deprived and the slightly drunk. The war symphony! He was the first person in the city to have heard it, and because of this he’d changed. The music had marched into his body and strengthened him, fortifying his resolve.

  ‘I am the symphony.’ He said it out loud, but Valery, having drunk his second vodka too fast, was coughing loudly and being clapped on the back by Mr Shapran. The symphony is me. The words seeped through Elias’s red-hot tooth and into his gums, soothing his jaw. He sank into a chair, weak with gratitude for what Shostakovich had given him.

  Mining the past

  It was the memory of the dacha that saved him, taking him back to a pla
ce where he could hear notes again — though he had, quite literally, to block his ears, stuffing them with the cotton wool reserved for medical emergencies. These days the raids began at dawn and continued late into the night. The distant thudding of artillery was constant, muttering like thunder. Even standing in the bread queues was dangerous, with the frequent shelling forcing people to run for cover. Leningrad had become scarred: pockmarked squares, pitted stone walls and shattered houses. When munitions factories were hit, there were flaming explosions. Regardless of the chaos, Shostakovich continued to go to his study.

  The dacha? It had been close enough to the city but it seemed like another world. It was the year after he’d first met Tatyana Glivenko, in the sanatorium in Crimea. She was what the French called jolie laide. Her face held a potential for excitement close to hysteria; it lit her peaky chin and high cheekbones to an approximation of beauty. As he watched her, Shostakovich had felt the bandages on his neck become constricting. Running his finger beneath them he felt not the familiar swellings of his tuberculosis but the girl’s cool white neck — bent, at that moment, over a plate of tasteless cabbage soup. He knew he had to touch her skin, soon.

  In the late afternoon, they’d climbed the tower in Gaspra, gazing at the purple smoke drifting above Ai-Petri. For three weeks fires had raged between Alupka and Simeiz; and as his arm lightly brushed sixteen-year-old Tatyana’s, he felt his boredom falling away, tumbling down the tower to merge with the haze. He no longer pined for Petrograd, for its sharp winds and the drizzle on cobblestones. The connection was instant and reciprocal. As she looked sideways at him, there was a knowingness in her eyes that coloured them the same smudged violet as the smoke.

  As much as Shostakovich was attracted to Tatyana, his sister disliked her. While he and Tatyana lay together, one secret night after another, he could hear Mariya turning and coughing in the next room, perhaps sensing that, on the other side of the wall, her brother (whom she’d come to look after) was getting himself into trouble. When he carried letters to the post each morning, he felt them weighing heavily in his hand. He stopped behind a stand of oak trees and carefully unsealed all envelopes addressed to their mother, reading such things about his first love that made his cheeks flare. While he’d been taking care not to worry his mother — the injections of arsenic ‘didn’t hurt at all’, he was now allowed to expose his body to sunlight, he was recovering quickly — Mariya was writing in a deliberately anxiety-provoking manner.