Europe Central (121 page)

In 1958, when he won the Sibelius Prize, the Central Committee passed a resolution partly denouncing the Zhdanov Decree of 1948, but only partly. They called it the Decree on the Correction of Errors. Shostakovich smiled venomously when he heard. Well, what’s the difference? Not even Nina believed in me, even when I thought that my Seventh Symphony could, you know. Maxim was crying for hunger and I actually thought I could make art out of it! I . . .

That was the year when Pasternak was forced to decline his Nobel Prize, the year when a Soviet selection of Akhmatova’s verses appeared in print, inscribed
to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, in whose epoch I dwelled on earth.
Oh, I know precisely what you mean, my dear,
dear
Anna Andreyevna! In my epoch. My stinking epoch of . . .

We see him pale and weary in a dress shirt and necktie, his arm around A. Mravinsky, who will soon betray him out of fear, and who folds his own arms, as gaunt and indifferent as a wounded soldier. We hear him whispering to his young friend E. Denisov: When I look back on my life, I realize that I’ve been a coward, a coward. But if you’d seen everything I have, Edik, perhaps you too would have become a coward. Can you imagine? To, to, you know, to accept the invitation of a friend, and when you arrive at his flat to discover that he’s
disappeared,
with all his books and clothes thrown into the street, and some new
comrade
already living there! I . . .

The telephone rang. His
dear
friend Leo Oskarovich, who’d tried to console him after he divorced Margarita, was inviting him to a party at Leningradskoe 44-2, you know, the Kino House; he could bring anyone he liked; Roman Lazarevich was going to be there, and there might be work if our trustworthy Dmitri Dmitriyevich could whip off something anti-formalist in a major key—nothing like your Eleventh Symphony, please forgive me for saying that, but we only want to help you—for the soundtrack of the world’s first Kinopanorama film, “Far and Wide My Country Stretches.” Roman Lazarevich wants you to know, Dmitri Dmitreyevich, that he’s very . . .

That was the year that they appointed him Chairman of the Organizing Committee for the First International Tchaikovsky Competition (the prize went to a tall young American named Van Cliburn); that was the year that the arthritis or whatever it was began to settle in his wrists, the year that the municipality of Moscow held a special unveiling of memorial plaques to Prokofieff. Plaques and prizes, it’s all so . . . Take for instance that Order of the Red Star over her right breast; my sister says that she wears it whenever Vigodsky wants to go out in public, and, and you know . . . Prokofieff’s first wife used the occasion to create a scandal against the second. And why should I even care? It wasn’t as if Prokofieff and I were even, you know; but since I’ve dispensed with feeling certain other feelings, why not gratify my, my
ugliness
? Because that makes me all the more ready for Opus 110! Will it actually be Opus 110 or Opus 111? I’m shooting for 110, which will be a quartet, something intimate, so that everybody can hear the, the, whatchamacallit. As if Prokofieff’s wife were even a, a . . . Trembling with rage, Shostakovich inhaled vodka, railing against the foulness of women. When the musicologist M. Sabinina objected in a tentative voice that after all, she herself was a woman, he backed water a trifle, then confessed that, like Prokofieff with the second wife, he himself was now entirely impotent.

Between himself and Galina Ustvolskaya there was no longer a consonance. Mutual friends warned that she tirelessly denounced both his music and his person. (I’ve read that she’d fallen in love with Y. A. Balkashin.) Trying not to think about her, he sat dreaming about the young girls at the Conservatory, with their violin-cases over their shoulders. He muttered to Lebedinsky: Pushkin said it!
There’s no escaping one’s destiny!

He had to go to Leningrad for a concert. He dreaded to go. At every street, he was afraid he’d see Ustvolskaya. He dreaded her more than anything, because she had left him and she . . .

He had a sudden irrational idea (he knew that it was irrational) that if he only killed himself before tomorrow it wouldn’t be too late, and then she’d know he loved her and take him back.

All the while he knew very well that it was Elena Konstantinovskaya whom he loved. Elena, you’re the one for me. Oh, why didn’t I say it? Just as in winter we frontline men dread abandoning our dugouts, because it’s so difficult to dig new ones in the frozen ground, so he did not want to give up Ustvolskaya, especially now that his penis could no longer perform its world-historic task; there was nothing more to it than that. She was his outer perimeter and Elena was the inner. He missed her music, of course.

In 1959, when Lunik landed on the moon (another Soviet victory on the scientific front), his daughter married. Blindly, like a doomed soldier throwing grenades from his foxhole, Shostakovich composed myriad smiles, wishing that he were alone and away; but he pretended that Nina was holding his hand. They’d asked him to play something but his wrists hurt. Galya looked so joyous as she stood beside that new husband of hers, in whose presence he felt awkward, that all he wanted to do was sit in the corner, for fear that he might cast his stinking shadow on her happiness. Solicitously, Glikman filled his vodka glass to the very top and whispered that it was all going well.

As for this music she wants, whispered Shostakovich, instead of me, it should have been the master composer sitting here, the great man himself, you know whom I mean, the, the, that bastard.

My God, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! I implore you, please be careful! That fellow over there, what’s his name?

Why, that’s our fine, so to speak,
friend
Comrade Alexandrov. Don’t you admire the sheen of his boots? He always puts the welfare of the proletariat at the very—

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, he’s trying to listen! Shall I take you home?

By no means, my dear Isaak Davidovich. I only wanted to remark that Comrade Stalin was a brilliant composer of orchestral fugues. And you know which instruments he played them on? Why, the, the, the
organs,
of course! Isaak Davidovich, I’m sorry; I shouldn’t be saying such things; I’m just a sonofabitch—

Elena Konstantinovskaya had told him that during her time “away” her sleep had been continually troubled by the clicking, scraping and shrieking of steel loops along the perimeter-wire as chained watchdogs ran back and forth, lunging at prisoners. He had never been able to forget this detail. It was this which had suddenly invaded his mind as he sat there at Galina’s wedding. Right then he started working out how to transmute it into music, because . . . Well, how could he say why? That clicking, scraping and shrieking, he’d find a way to include them in Opus 110.

Afterwards, half-drunk or perhaps merely quarter-drunk, he approached the elegantly squarish shaft of the Leningradskaya Hotel (built 1948-53), with its belfry on top, and on the steeple no cross, of course, but a star. He paced slowly round and round.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich, so happy you got our invitation! said the men in raspberry-colored boots. Have you met Comrade Alexandrov? We wanted to talk to you about joining the Party.

Ah, to be sure, yes, yes, Shostakovich replied in a voice as waxen as a corpse’s toes, I
promise
to apply just as soon as I finish my symphony about Lenin. That way I’ll, so to speak, have something to offer. And maybe I ought to compose a few bars about the German-Polish question. Right now I’m only a worm, you know, only a—so to speak—a worm. But . . .

Wasn’t your Seventh Symphony supposed to be about Lenin?

Oh, dear, the Seventh, I mean, but at the time I wasn’t
ready.
Lenin is, well, I myself intend the fullest preparation, in order to do full justice to this topic. For example, the liquidation of classes ought to be expressed
pizzicato
—

Let’s quit clowning around. We’re more aware than you might imagine of your real attitude toward Soviet power. All things considered, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, you’ve been lucky. We continue looking into your case. Back in ’36, for instance, the only reason you weren’t dragged down with Tukhachevsky was that your interrogator got arrested. Well, guess what? He’s been rehabilitated!

Posthumously, right? Or have you been, so to speak—

The jokes you allow yourself, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Really, sometimes it almost makes one believe that somebody’s holding his hand over you! Well, think about what we’ve said. We expect your full collaboration. And remember: The “organs” aren’t going to forget you—

This was the time that his First Cello Concerto in E-flat Major premiered. In the last movement was a parody of Stalin’s favorite tune “Suleiko”—so deeply buried, to be sure, that not even Rostropovich, to whom the concerto had been dedicated, could have ever sniffed it out—no matter what the fellows in raspberry-colored boots said, Shostakovich valued his head, oh,
yes,
good friends!—but when they were all alone, with vodka in their glasses, the composer hummed it out like a furious hornet, and how could they
not
all hear it then?
Su-lei-ko!
Rostropovich burst out laughing, but Shostakovich already felt faint and was biting his nails and peering all around him. Rostropovich poured out vodka. Then Shostakovich set out with the Soviet cultural delegation to tour American cities.

30

In April 1960, when in token of his impending elevation he found himself elected First Secretary to the RSFSR Congress of Composers, Khruschev was there, booming away with his inimitable vulgarity about the good music that any proletarian could hum along with, as opposed to the bad music, the intellectual kind that sounded like “the croaking of crows.” Everyone within reach was compelled to play the sycophant, of course. The luckier ones lurked in darker corners of the reception hall. Shostakovich, of course, clung to that darkness, hiding amongst his colleagues, gazing blankly through his spectacles while a thousand tortured or malignant smiles successively devoured one another upon his lips.

A man in a dark suit was taking photographs. His flash resembled the blinding night-lights of Butyrki Prison. Why not imagine that he resembles this Professor Vigodsky of Elena’s? I must send Glikman over there so that he can tell me what the man, you know. I want to kill him! And they have a daughter now, so it’s . . . Meanwhile, the blackest vacuum must be conquered; the mission of the cosmonauts was to prevent American astronauts from overcoming our leading position. (At that very moment, the Americans were threatening us in Cuba.) While all the opinions on this matter were enthusiastically the same, the cacophony of untuned voices represented the intonation discrepancies of valve instruments. Now they had spied him out and were spiraling in upon him. When they inquired whether he supported the total Sovietization of space, he nodded obediently. Truth to tell, the planets unnerved him. For some reason he was frightened by the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. No doubt we’d get to Jupiter eventually; our cosmonauts would, so to speak, force the Vistula . . . The sad, subtle music of “Lady Macbeth” was sounding between his ears—doubtless the only performance in all Russia. That bully Khruschev, he could see him right now singing the part of those workmen who’d thrown the fat cook in a barrel and were feeling her up, pinching her tits and shouting:
Give me a suck . . . !
He’d find a way to concentrate the venom of those measures and inject it into Opus 110. And now Comrade Alexandrov was saying . . .

He hated them. He hated them all.

Suddenly Khruschev’s forefinger came lunging at him. Shostakovich smiled in alarm.

Now, Dmitri Dmitriyevich here, Khruschev was shouting out, he . . . well, he saw the light right at the beginning of the war with his whatchamacallit, his symphony.

Shostakovich thought to himself: He speaks with a mixed cadence—no, a deceptive cadence . . .

That’s right, comrades! cried an apparatchik. Nikita Sergeevich has hit it right on the head! Our Dmitri Dmitriyevich might have brought some unpleasant times on himself, but he’s seen the light!

Khruschev strode up to him and extended his hand. Bitterly, Shostakovich permitted him to shake it. (His arm was troubling him especially today. After 1964 he would be compelled to forgo public performances.)—Why, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, they told me you were as skinny as a rail, and here you are, a regular barrage balloon! You must have been eating your share and more of our fine Russian bread!

Excuse me for that, esteemed Nikita Sergeevich, please forgive me—

Just a joke! Let’s get down to business. When are you going to come around and join the Party?

Khruschev smelled of sweat. His own belly was as big as the rotunda of the Kirov Theater.

Oh, dear, oh, me, sighed Shostakovich. The difficulty is, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, Nikita Sergeevich, I never could understand the, the, you know, when they talk about surplus value—

Leave that crap to the intellectuals! shouted Khruschev. Just tell me you’re a Party man. Are you a Party man?

I, I support the Party with all my—

Now the epigones all applauded, and the people’s composer L. Lyadova, a woman not exactly his type, rushed over and kissed him. . . .

Lyadova wanted to give him some comradely criticism, to help him write more correct music. She thought his music should be more clear. In one of their final quarrels, Galina Ustvolskaya had told him that he’d betrayed his music because he was willing to
pretend
for these murderers that it meant whatever they wanted it to mean. And then she’d, I, I mean to say that after that she’d . . . Whereas this Lyadova was as busy as a stream of eighth-notes! There might be something cheerful about her. Might it be that she actually, you know? After all, was he condemned to live out his years in a, so to speak, cemetery? He couldn’t decide whether her stupidity would be safe or merely unendurable. She’d painted her lips as red as rocket flares. He wondered what it would be like to, to, oh, forget it. Stroking his grey and greasy hair, puffing out her mouth at him in a dazzling crimson spot, she whispered: Don’t you want to foil the designs of the imperialists, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? When will you join the Party? That will send a very—