3 Great Historical Novels

by Fay Weldon

  ‘Dmitri’s grown up,’ she had written. ‘He’s got a tan, and is happily in love.’ Yes, this was true enough. But then he read: ‘Tatyana Glivenko is a strange girl, verging on coquettish.’ And, in the next letter: ‘T. is a flirt. I don’t like her.’ It took a large effort of will for him to reseal this envelope and send it on — but even at the age of seventeen he had a fear of altering destiny, and the censorship of letters fell into this category.

  By the time summer frayed into autumn, he’d written several letters to assure his mother that he’d remained pure (which he had, in spirit). ‘I won’t throw myself into the whirlpool,’ he promised, as his mother warned him of the many ways family life could threaten artistic talent. After a month, however, it was clear that he was head over heels in love. Everyone could see it — Mariya, Dr Elena Nikolaevna and the nurses, not to mention his mother and Tatyana herself.

  By the following summer, when they were invited to the dacha in Repino, Shostakovich believed himself to be truly in love. The invitation had come from Tatyana’s aunt, who’d heard the confident predictions of the Leningrad music professors. Her niece’s beau was destined for greatness, perhaps as a concert pianist! ‘There’s a grand piano in the dacha,’ she wrote reassuringly to Shostakovich’s mother. ‘His daily practice can continue.’ She’d welcomed them when they arrived, dusty from the train ride and a walk down a lane musty with elderflowers, and she’d shown them a battered upright that had survived years of her father’s folk tunes.

  ‘It’s there,’ she said knowingly, ‘in case you have nothing better to do.’ Then she showed them to their room, a large bare space in the southern turret, with a tin bath in the corner and a huge bed in the middle of the floor. ‘Everything you need!’ she said, pressing a key into Shostakovich’s hand — after which she disappeared down the creaking stairs and stayed out of their way for the next four weeks.

  ‘Our own place at last!’ Tatyana kicked off her shoes and bounced on the mattress, so that her braids stood up with every downwards fall.

  Although no more than an hour from the city, the place had felt like an island, cut off from the burdens of duty and ambition that usually lay so heavily on Shostakovich. The nights at Repino were open and seductive, Tatyana’s cries of pleasure flying like birds into the ceiling. Every morning, exhausted from lovemaking, they would lean naked on the windowsill, looking over hazy fields and sighing birch trees, and the dark bulk of a ramshackle farmhouse by the river. They ate fruit and vegetables from the garden, feeding each other with a generosity bordering on greed. Tatyana would split open a pod with her thumbnail and rake lime-green peas into Shostakovich’s mouth. Shostakovich forced soft strawberries through her pursed lips, then the smaller, tarter klubnika, and finally a pulpy mush of raspberries, until Tatyana’s chin ran red and sweet with juice. There were huge radishes, drawn from the soft ground and taken to the kitchen, trailing soil; their white biting taste was softened with salt or butter. There were cucumbers as thick as a labourer’s wrist, coated thickly with honey — ‘Peasant’s food,’ said Tatyana, biting into one hungrily.

  So much food back then! Shostakovich, writing in full score and hearing the orchestra behind the piano notes, marvelled at the memory. Those same dachas now stood deserted and empty, their gardens torn up, their crops burnt and their owners trapped in the stone city.

  ‘You love me most.’ This was Tatyana at her most aggressive and insecure; her voice challenged him down the years. ‘If not, why did you dedicate the Piano Trio to me?’ In Leningrad, she’d sat night after night in the Bright Reel movie theatre, her eyes fixed on him as he proceeded with his undercover practice. He’d discovered that he could use his accompanist’s job as a way to rehearse his own compositions; once, he’d even persuaded the manager to let in two of his classmates, a violinist and a cellist, thus providing him with a test run for his trio.

  That work had failed to satisfy, its single-movement form seeming unsophisticated, its opening too obviously signalling the themes. Now, staring at the sketches for the symphony’s scherzo, he realised the trio had been a forerunner to this. The resolute opening was his approach to new situations — resistant, tense, observant — and its melodic second theme was the succumbing: to the sun, his returning health, to Tatyana and love.

  Trying to ignore the distant gunfire, he felt the same old magic leap inside him, an ache of possibility that was almost sexual. It was a synthesis of sound and feeling, captured in the memory of the key: that large, theatrical-looking key pressed into his palm by Tatyana’s big-bosomed aunt. It could both lock them in and keep the world out — just as it had that first evening, when he’d turned it in the door and there had been a clap of thunder, the beginning of a great summer storm.

  The wooden dacha had groaned in the fierce warm wind. Tatyana lay on her front on the bed, her eyes vivid. Her white cotton blouse had slipped off her shoulder and Shostakovich could see one small bare breast, peaked with a dark nipple. He’d shut the window and then pulled her blouse over her head, cupping her breasts in his hands. He liked their combined weight and weightlessness, heavy and light, like round ripe apricots.

  They lay with their naked torsos pressed together, listening to the storm passing over the house. Outside, the trees were wild black shapes, bending their heads and whipping up again in a dervish dance. At one point, Shostakovich saw an apple box flying through the air, belly-up like a fish.

  The few hours before this had been calm: heady, drowsy, bee-filled. ‘Who would have guessed?’ Tatyana’s narrow ribs rose in astonishment. But of course the storm had been building all afternoon, unseen behind the hills. ‘The wildness came from nowhere,’ said Tatyana, whose moods did exactly this, tears springing from the mildest reproach and smiles restored by a caress.

  The turn of the key, the anticipation, the banging windowpane, the rocking dacha: twenty years later these fused in Shostakovich’s head. The air-raid sirens were cranking up into a wail, and he went to the door. ‘Nina!’ he called sharply. ‘Take the children to the cellar.’

  He returned to his desk. Even before the drone of the planes began, he stuffed cotton wool in his ears and picked up his pen. He willed himself back to the sweet-smelling Repino day, the warm grass, the dozing and the waking. Remember Repino. Remember peace.

  Then, at last, he found a path into the scherzo. The lilting melody of the strings was like stepping out into a fresh country morning. This was underpinned by some stealthy, stagy, staccato cello notes — a little like the footsteps of an aunt not wanting to intrude. Next, the oboe. Lilting and soaring, it was Tatyana’s voice as it used to be, before she became quarrelsome and possessive. (Dimly, he heard the roar of planes; glancing up, he saw a portrait of his grandparents falling from the wall.)

  The storm? This would be easier. The first movement had pointed the way, with its uneasy C sharp minor key and its repetitive chaos. He would use brass and woodwind for the buffeting wind, crashing against barns and flattening hedgerows. And a hammering xylophone would return, slowly and inevitably, to the original key of B minor. (The light above him flickered and dimmed; the room was shaking, books tumbled off the shelves.)

  Then, for a single brief moment, he could see clear to the symphony’s end. As the building rumbled around him and a huge crack split the wall, he dived under the piano. But he felt no fear — only relief. That glimpse had been enough.

  ‘Everything is resolved.’ He gripped the shaking legs of the piano. ‘Everything, eventually, comes to an end.’ His ears were still blocked by the cotton wool; his words sounded muffled even inside his head. Just as he pulled the stoppers from his ears — BANG! He was deafened. Had he been obliterated by a Luftwaffe bomb? But it was the lid of the piano, crashing down with massive impact, setting the strings screeching like sea-witches and making him wince.

  Nina and the children had emerged from the cellar and were inspecting the damage. Mirrors and plates lay shattered on the floor, and the windows had cracked across in spite of the ta
pe. Shostakovich sat in the middle of the debris, explaining why he’d stayed behind. ‘It was the breakthrough for the scherzo. I would have lost it.’

  Nina began sweeping up the mess. ‘And we would have lost you.’ Her reactions to danger were unvarying: humour as a defence against fear, practicality a barrier against emotion.

  He watched her as she bent over a smashed geranium pot, and was filled with a sudden desire. Work often did this to him, making him as lustful as hell, yet sating him of the energy to initiate sex. And his mind was still full of Tatyana: her slanting eyes, her sudden tempers and equally sudden capitulations; her small gasps when she cried, the way she bit him when aroused.

  ‘I love you, Nina,’ he said. ‘I do love you.’

  Later that evening, he trudged around the Conservatoire building with Nikolai, checking the ground-floor windows for breakages. ‘What a day!’ He felt elated and exhausted. ‘As unexpected as … as the second movement of a symphony.’

  ‘So you’re onto the second movement already?’ Nikolai bent to retrieve a bucket of sand, half-hidden behind a barbed-wire barricade. ‘Impressive, in a week during which two hundred shells a day have rained upon us.’ As he picked up the bucket, he stumbled and nearly fell.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Shostakovich steadied him.

  ‘Just tired,’ said Nikolai, trying to smile. But his eyes looked like black holes in his face.

  Shostakovich felt a stab of guilt. Over the past two months, his friend had changed beyond recognition. He was as intelligent as ever, capable of discussing anything from bread queues to Brahms, but somewhere in the middle of him was an unfillable void.

  ‘I’m an idiot. Here I am babbling about my work, remaining in my room when everyone else is running for their life.’ He looked around at the skyline bristling with guns and the squat concrete shelters for snipers. ‘This is reality.’

  ‘Your work is also real. You were talking about unexpectedness. About your scherzo?’

  ‘No more of that for now.’ Shostakovich stepped around the barricade across the Conservatoire entrance and sat down on the top step. ‘I’ve avoided talking about the one topic that needs to be discussed. Have you had any news?’

  Nikolai remained standing. ‘No, nothing. Nothing at all.’ Despair seeped out of him like ink, spreading in a dark pool around him — and, at that moment, Shostakovich realised how it was to be Nikolai. Day by day, as his hopelessness grew, Nikolai was drowning.

  What is the worst

  It was mid-afternoon, and Elias was making his way home after an unsatisfactory rehearsal during which Alexander had called him a bastard and old Petrov had collapsed from exhaustion. Nikolai, more vague than ever, had fumbled his entry and dropped his bow. And they’d heard the news that several of the musicians who’d volunteered for front-line duty had officially been declared dead.

  The Tchaikovsky was due for broadcast in less than ten days, and the orchestra — depleted, fatigued — needed ten times that amount of time to pull it off. Gloomily, Elias imagined how they would be heard by the world. As dismal failures rather than Soviet ambassadors, the laughing stock of Leningrad rather than the last bastion of culture. My orchestra is like a decaying mouth, he thought, trudging on down Nevsky Prospect. Full of rotten teeth and gaping holes.

  When the sirens began, he was nowhere near a shelter. Along with those around him he ran as fast as he could, dodging into doorways, making for the shelter in Gostiny Dvor. But there was too little time; the sirens had sounded too late. Already the planes were visible in the sky, sweeping in from the south, wave upon wave, and he began to sweat from terror.

  Just as he stumbled into the marketplace, the world erupted around him. He threw himself under a cart at the side of the square. Those who hadn’t made it to shelter didn’t stand a chance. Glass cascaded down in lethal showers. Chunks of concrete crashed from buildings, breaking bones and smashing skulls. It seemed as if the very air had been made of solid matter, and it was now shattering.

  The noise was deafening: the crashing of masonry, the roar of the planes and the eerie whistle of falling bombs. But worst of all was the screaming. He’d never heard anything like it, and he knew he would never stop hearing it; that he would lie awake in his bed, months later, hearing the screams and seeing the cobblestones running with blood. He shoved his fingers in his ears and pressed his face against the uneven stones. A strange hot wind blew in under the wheels of the cart. He was in hell.

  It was hard to tell how long he lay there, blocking out the chaos, waiting for death. As suddenly as it had begun, the raid was over. The plane engines faded to a drone, and the clatter of anti-aircraft fire stuttered into silence. Slowly, he turned his head and looked out through the bent spokes of the wheel.

  It was a nightmare vision — though only the most fevered imagination could have created such terrible detail. Blocks of concrete and twisted steel strewn over the ground, canvas awnings shredded like the sails of wrecked boats. And lying amid the wreckage were dozens of mutilated bodies. Legs ripped off torsos, hands ripped off arms, some still clutching their bread rations in their bloodied fingers. The worst, though, were the severed heads, staring at the sky with open eyes.

  He lay still in his small shelter which smelt of mud and mouldy cabbage. He didn’t want to crawl out and confront what was waiting beyond. He prayed to someone or something he’d never believed in. Give me strength. Help me. Give me strength. Finally, with tears streaming down his face, he edged his way out from under the cart and stumbled to his feet.

  It was easy enough to spot those who needed help; the bodies that were moving stood out from the dead. He began following the orders of a doctor, a moustached man whose right leg was drenched in blood. Along with the other shocked survivors, they ripped up coats to staunch blood, and lifted the wounded onto makeshift stretchers, covering the corpses with sacks, torn rugs and whatever else they could find. Elias worked as automatically as he could, forcing back nausea, pretending that these were not real people who had been cut down in seconds. No, this was not a mother who had been queuing for bread for her children; this had not been a boy running to snatch his baby brother out of the path of a vegetable cart.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ he said repeatedly to those still breathing. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  Suddenly his heart began hammering so hard he thought he’d choke. ‘Is it you?’ His voice was clogged with fear. ‘Nina Bronnikova?’

  It was certainly Nina, though she was far thinner than she’d been when he last saw her. Her face was white, and her lips so pale they looked as if they’d been drained of blood. She was half-lying against a tram filled with sandbags that had barricaded the entrance to the marketplace; its metal frame had been torn in two.

  ‘Mr Eliasberg?’ She reached out for him, with hands that were covered in blood.

  He knelt beside her. ‘How badly are you hurt?’

  ‘I don’t know. I tried to get up, but I can’t stand.’ Her left calf was a mess of ruined flesh, shrapnel and blood-soaked stockings.

  His stomach heaved. Quickly, he looked back at her face. ‘You’re still conscious. It’s a miracle.’

  ‘A miracle that anyone has been left alive,’ she murmured.

  ‘We need to —’ began Elias.

  But her eyes had closed, and her head fell with a thud against the side of the tram.

  Frantically he felt her wrist for a pulse. Nothing. But on her neck he felt a faint fluttering. He cradled her head in both hands. Slowly, her eyes opened and she looked at him in a dazed way.

  ‘We have to get you to hospital. Do you think you can make it over to that van?’ Carefully, as if she were the most fragile of instruments, he placed her arm around his neck. ‘Hold on if you can.’

  She was lighter than he imagined, but he staggered as he stood up; his legs were shamefully weak. A gangly teenager stood nearby, staring blankly at them, blood trickling out from under his cap. ‘Could you help me?’ gasped Elias. Wordlessly, the boy steppe
d forward, and together they carried Nina to the nearest van. Already it was crammed with the injured, but no one objected as they laid her in the last empty space at the back.

  ‘Nina?’ Elias stroked her forehead — but she had lost consciousness again, and he was forced to step away as the engine started.

  The teenager went off without a word and Elias was left watching the ambulance weave away through the broken market. He remained there long after the vehicle had disappeared, standing in the shadow of the cracked fountain: without company, without conversation, and intensely aware of the lack of both. Almost angrily, he wiped the tears from his eyes. Being alone was what he was accustomed to, after all. There was no need to cry about it.

  Relatives

  Aunt Tanya was installed in Nikolai’s apartment for the indeterminate future, and she was as bossy and auntish as ever, though there was no longer anyone around to call her ‘Aunt’. Once or twice, the title slipped out of Nikolai’s mouth. His sister-in-law had always made him feel as if he were a member of the younger generation — as if he should be watching his language and hiding his cigarettes in his pocket. If he’d thought that the likelihood of being starved or bombed into oblivion might have encouraged Tanya to lower her standards, it quickly became clear he was wrong.