3 Great Historical Novels (47 page)

The orchestra was at its worst when the weather was hot. The rehearsal-room windows were too small and too high up to let in more than a trickle of air. Today, before the musicians had even started playing, sweat was running down their faces and painting large wet patches under their arms. Those who were already warming up were pausing, mid-arpeggio, to scrabble for handkerchiefs or flap sheets of music in front of their faces.

Elias stepped onto the low platform and began straightening his score. It didn’t matter how many hundreds of rehearsals he had taken over the past decade. In the moments between entering the room and the sounding of the first note, he felt like an impostor, about to be sent,
red-faced
, back to music school.

‘Good morning,’ he called over the messy riffs of violins, and flutes emitting single repeated notes like ships entering a channel, and the low hum of gossip about who was sleeping with whom and which government official had been seen at the opera drinking champagne with the new young star of the Kirov. ‘Only sixteen!’ he heard. ‘Young enough to be his granddaughter.’ There were hoots of laughter, and the shrill rise and fall of a clarinet playing a passage that had nothing to do with what they were currently rehearsing.

‘I trust you’re well?’ he said to nobody in particular. His voice was overly careful, and he despised himself for it. Apparently when Mravinsky walked into a rehearsal room an instant silence fell.

‘Let’s start with the second movement,’ he said, rapping repeatedly on
his stand until he’d gained a mutinous hush. But even once the musicians started playing, his control was flimsy. He’d kept his jacket on to make himself feel more authoritative; this was a mistake. Whenever he raised or lowered his arms, drops of sweat ran like mice inside his shirt-sleeves.

Outside the trams rumbled by, shaking the floor: a reminder that the whole of Leningrad was built on waterways and over unstable marshes. The orchestra felt similarly unstable, lagging a quarter and sometimes half a count behind. Soon Elias’s arms were trembling with the effort.

‘Crisper articulation!’ he ordered. ‘Make it more extrovert.’ Each time he swallowed he could taste the fried egg he’d had for breakfast, mixed with the sour bile of insecurity. ‘Pay attention!’

But the players’ eyes remained fixed on the music. The strings turned the melodies to mush, the brass was coarse, the woodwind as shrill as a wife long out of love with her husband.

Finally Elias stopped them and marched to the piano. ‘At bar one hundred and thirteen, you must pick up the pace. Or have you lost your collective memory, so you no longer know the meaning of
poco più mosso
?’ Setting the metronome going, he picked out the melody with his right hand. ‘Hear that? More like a dance, less like a bloody funeral procession.’ Leaving the metronome on, he returned to the podium. Down in the street a dog began to bark, and it continued barking against the beat. Laughter started up in the strings, and spread through the ranks.

The only thing to be grateful for was that no outsider was witnessing the debacle. ‘We’ll take it from the start of the oboe solo.’ Elias tried to sound assertive. ‘Bar one hundred and sixty, please.’

The strings began obediently enough, hacking out a ragged accompaniment. But from the woodwind section — nothing. Elias glanced down at the score, half-hoping it was he who’d made a mistake. The notes clustered mockingly on the stave, but there was no corresponding sound. The violas and cellos sawed on, minus a soloist.

Now, more than ever, the ground seemed to be shaking under his feet. He grabbed the sides of his stand to steady himself. ‘For God’s sake, stop!’ he shouted, so loudly the orchestra instantly halted. For the first time that day real silence fell, as taut as a soap bubble — and as fragile.

Elias wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and forced himself to look up.

He could hardly believe what he saw. Alexander was lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. He held his oboe loosely across his body, and the way he was reclining meant his pelvis was tilted towards the ceiling
in a half-insolent, half-indifferent gesture.

‘You!’ Elias had never spoken with such rage. The other musicians straightened in their chairs.

Slowly, ostentatiously, Alexander opened his eyes.

‘You deliberately missed your entrance.’ Elias tried to ignore the fact that his legs were shaking. ‘Are you going to grace us with your genius, or should I give your solo to someone more dedicated?’

Alexander waved a languid hand. His freckled face was pale, and his eyelashes were almost invisible against his pink lids. ‘I’m hung over. After all, it’s midsummer, and I am a reveller. At midsummer, those who have friends revel and those who don’t —’ He paused in a theatrical way. ‘Suffice to say, this morning I have other things on my mind than dry professional concerns. Last night I had wine in my veins. And in my bed …’ Lasciviously, he licked the reed of his oboe. ‘I don’t mean to make you envious. Truly, I’m sorry that my flesh is weaker than yours and my life is more varied.’

Elias dropped his eyes to the score. The notes blurred into a sickening black mass. ‘I don’t care how much you’ve drunk. Nor how many teenage whores have been in your bed in the name of midsummer revelry. What you do in your free time is your own business, but what you do in rehearsal is not. If Leningrad weren’t so sorely lacking in oboists, I’d remove you at once for not being up to the mark.’

Alexander sat up, flushing pink around his nostrils. ‘I’m the best!’ he hissed. ‘How dare you talk to me in that way?’

With his hands behind his back, Elias drove the point of his baton into his palm. ‘You’re not the best.’ His voice was like a whip; he wanted to hurt as much as he was hurting, and he ground the baton deeper into his hand. ‘None of you is the best,’ he said, staring around with hatred. ‘You’re second-best, the lot of you. If you weren’t, you’d be playing for Mravinsky. This is an orchestra of losers, myself included. We’re nothing but understudies and reserves, sitting on the bench of life, hoping to be called to action. In the meantime we butcher the music that grants us a livelihood! We kill the music we’re supposed to love!’ He stopped, aware of a tiny movement from old Petrov, the concertmaster. Glancing down, he saw bright beads of blood falling onto the scratched floor.

‘You’re all excused from rehearsal. Anyone who is late on Monday will be permanently dismissed.’ He stood stiffly, hands behind his back, and watched the players shuffle out the door. No one looked at him as they passed.

Only Alexander paused, so close that Elias could see the sweat on his heavy eyelids. ‘You can’t sack us.’ Vodka fumes leaked from the pores of his skin. ‘You’re not in charge of appointments; you don’t even have the power to choose the repertoire. Everyone knows you’re nothing but a puppet to the committee.’

Elias wanted nothing more than to punch him, to smash the bridge of his sneering, arrogant nose. For a second Alexander’s face disappeared in a streaming mess of blood, his eyes purple slits, his cheekbones sagging, his teeth splintering. ‘You’re ridiculous.’ Elias looked away dismissively. ‘You’re nothing but a fish.’

‘A what?’ Alexander lurched. ‘A
fish
?’

‘You heard me. You’re a big fish in a small pond. An oboist in a
second-rate
orchestra in a cold swampy city that’s been forgotten by the rest of the world. No one will remember you or thank you for what you’ve done. Do you think we’re the ones who make history? We’re simply ciphers.
These
men —’ He smacked his hand down on the score, leaving a smear of blood on the page. ‘They’re the ones who’ll be invoked long after their bones lie in the grave. Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich — these men are the ones who will be revered for what they’ve given the world. Your sweat, your aching back, your blistered fingers: do you think anyone cares? You’re not a god, Alexander, however you strut and preen. No one will make pilgrimages to your altar. You will die as you’ve lived — a mediocre musician, and an arsehole of the first degree. In that, at least, you excel.’

Alexander dropped his mute with a clang, and Elias watched him scrabbling on the floor with a loathing so strong he felt it would rot his guts.
Would that I could mute you
, he thought, wrapping his handkerchief tightly around his bleeding hand.
Would that, in the middle of your tirades, I could shove that mute so far down your throat that you gag.

He said nothing more, simply watched, as if from a great distance, the figure of the oboist weaving away from him. At the door Alexander stumbled, spat, then disappeared.

Elias looked at the globule of spit lying on the floor. Elongated, fizzing with bubbles, it looked like some malevolent living organism. He wiped it up with his blood-stained handkerchief and threw the ruined cloth into the bin by the door.

In the dressing room, only old Petrov remained, sitting
straight-backed
in a chair, combing his fingers through his wispy beard. Elias nodded to him and began packing up. His hands were trembling so
badly he couldn’t even bundle the shuffled edges of the unbound score inside his briefcase.

‘I heard what you said to the Principal Oboe,’ said Petrov finally. He always spoke of the other musicians like this — Third Cellist, Fifth Bass — as if by doing so he could exert control, if not over the individuals, at least over his own emotional responses to them.

‘Did you?’ Elias went on straightening the score.

‘I was listening at the door,’ admitted Petrov. ‘There are times when the concertmaster needs to know what’s going on. For professional reasons.’

‘I suppose so. But this problem is more personal than professional, I fear.’

‘You’re right. Your pedantry annoys the Oboist. Intensely.’

Elias gave a short bark of laughter.

‘Let’s say exactitude,’ modified Petrov. ‘The Oboist doesn’t like being pulled up on detail. Regardless of that, whether he likes you or not, you’re the one in control. I approve of what you said to him.’

‘It’s so ludicrous!’ Elias sank into a chair. ‘He insists on fighting these battles, day after day, while half of the world is engaged in real war. Mothers sending their sons to face the bayonets, tanks crushing bodies into the mud — who knows where it will end? But as long as Alexander’s precious Leningrad is safe, as long as he can strut the streets, and ride half-price on the trams, and jump the queue in the movie theatre because everyone knows his foxish face, then Alexander is happy!’

‘But not, perhaps, for much longer.’ A small tear squeezed out of the corner of Petrov’s rheumy eye. ‘Better to be prepared for the worst than be tripped and thrown down a mine-shaft when you least expect it. I’ll say this for you, you strike me as someone who’s never avoided walking on the dark side of the street.’ His hand strayed to his jacket pocket. ‘Care for a drink?’

‘No, thank you. I never drink during the day.’

‘Very wise.’ Petrov swilled from the flask and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘Everyone should have rules of personal conduct. That way, when one breaks them, it feels like a special occasion.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘If it’s any consolation, it’s common knowledge why the Principal Oboe is being such a bastard at the moment — although it’s no excuse.’

‘It’s plain and simple.’ Elias shrugged. ‘Alexander hates me. He’s always hated me, and he will hate me to the grave.’

Petrov looked surprised, and his thin arms floated out slightly from his sides. ‘I thought you knew! The Oboe is in love with the Second Flute, hence he’s strutting like a wild cock. Once she snares him, he’ll become a regular chanticleer. You’ll see.’

Left alone at last, Elias laid his head on the cracked table and cried. His tears, unlike Petrov’s, were no involuntary leaking from eyes weakened by poor nutrition and reading badly copied scores in
half-light
. They were tears of exhaustion, and of loneliness deeper than a well.
I’m nearly forty years old
, he cried inside his head,
and I’ve never known what it is to be happy. I’m nearly forty, and I have never loved
.

When he raised his head, the buttery light had slid across the wall: how much time had he lost in self-pity? He reached for his handkerchief before remembering it was in the bin, covered in his own blood and another man’s spit. He dragged his sleeve across his wet face. ‘Idiot. Fool. Blubbering like a woman.’

His father had never cried — at least, not in front of Elias. Perhaps that explained the guilt that lay so heavily inside him? He stared at his reflection in his highly polished briefcase. The small dents in the leather made his face look battered; his cheekbone was caved in on one side and his left eye disappeared into his hair. And suddenly he was back in the hallway of the old Dimitrovsky Pereulok apartment, hearing his mother screaming so hysterically that the hair rose on the back of his neck. His grandfather was being carried in from the street by strangers, his head lolling, his neck bent at a strange angle. The men passed so close to Elias that he could have touched his grandfather’s bleeding face. There was a gaping hole where his nose should have been, bones gleamed through the flesh, and his eyes were two black swollen welts. ‘He was attacked near the station,’ said one of the men.

Mr Eliasberg appeared, to stare impassively at the wrecked body of his father. ‘We found him in a pool of blood,’ explained the unknown man, and Elias’s shrieking mother was led away to the kitchen by a neighbour while his father ordered that the body be carried into the back room. (The ‘body’! As if it were no one he knew!). And then the door of the back room slammed, leaving Elias alone in the hallway. Kneeling, he put his fingers in the pools of blood, and he was still crouched there when his dry-eyed father reappeared. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he barked. Elias looked up at him with bloodied lips, for he’d heard that if you tasted the blood of someone you admired you absorbed their attributes.

He remembered the taste as if it were only yesterday. His
grandfather’s
blood had tasted of metal, like the railings of the Pantelimonov Bridge that he walked over every day to the market — there was no trace of courage and bravado in it. Instead, it had sent terror into him. He imagined its darkness spreading through his guts, poisoning his stomach, seeping into his brain and eventually driving him mad.