Europe Central (128 page)

Karmen’s face had become strangely clayey as he aged; it was palish-tan and nude, its white slicked-back hair resembling lines combed into a lump of clay; it was more featureless than it used to be, as if poor Roman Lazarevich were collapsing back into a primordial ball! His lips were two pale bars of clay half-mashed together. To think that he and Elena . . . His head had sunk deeper down upon his clayey neck, settling between the slabs of clay which were called his shoulders. His blank eyes had sunken in a trifle. All in all, he was ready to be taken off the shelf at a moment’s notice to have any expression whatsoever painted onto him, and then he could be baked, glazed and finished. But I’m not being very . . . Shooting him a searching look, the director merely said: Much obliged, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! You haven’t aged a day! And here’s a copy of my new book, just a small gift . . .

The Heroics of Struggle and Creation.
Why, thank you, Roman Lazarevich, thank you! In the unlikely event that I myself ever succeed in doing anything, er,
creative,
I’ll be sure and send you a copy . . .

And this Dmitri Dmitriyevich, whoever he was, gave speeches on demand, his own gaze expressing that strange dullness of the slaughter-doomed steer which we remember from the former Marshal Tukhachevsky’s trial: The Soviet Union fully supports the just position of, how should I put it, Ho Chi Minh.

Elena had told him that in the Arctic camps they split open a corpse’s skull before burial, just in case. And that night when those three guards raped her, oh, let’s think about something else. So he went everywhere they told him; he trudged the Motherland’s icy streets, with Irina juggling two suitcases while holding his arm in case he fell. As soon as they got back to Moscow, he was going to buy her some more “Stone Flower” perfume! The world she lived in he wanted to live in, too (a prosecutor would have pounced on him); he’d been very unfair to marry and drag her into his, his, you get the drift. What was a little more guilt among friends? He’d never even notice. They’d already expelled him from their consideration, just as Shostakovich himself cut out superannuated notes from his scores with a razorblade; as each blade got dull he’d dispatch Glikman or Glikman’s brother to go buy a new one for fifty kopeks. Denouncing the continuing Anglo-American aggression in, so to speak, Cuba, deliberately slurring and mumbling each page of typescript, he craned away from the corpselike grins of his audience to stare out the window at the snow on the flat roofs of Soviet Asian cities, snow on the flat roofs of neobureaucratic halls, palaces and apartment blocks. Even Irina had gotten tired of traveling by then. Originally she’d thought, well, he didn’t know what she’d thought. Why had she left her husband, anyway? Perhaps neither he nor I can pass for a man. She wants a . . . But how can I please her when I, uh, to counter the unheard insolence of the imperialist camp. We demand the immediate punishment of these, oh, yes, these dangerous enemies of the working class. Those snowy trees, with snow-mountains all around, well, we mustn’t, so to speak, exaggerate, but what was the point? He felt as if the music paper had swallowed him up. Whenever people asked him to generalize or pronounce on something, he replied: Ha, ha! My dear lady, in this life we only know our own sector of front, so to speak . . .

Shall we map out the sector assigned to D. D. Shostakovich? His defensive system now consisted first and most fundamentally of Irina (who was very
gemütlich,
I believe), secondly of Glikman, Lebedinsky and his sister Mariya, thirdly of his increasing physical disabilities, which excited compassion and guilt in others, fourthly of his Party membership, which isolated and protected him within what military strategists would refer to as his cutoff and intermediate position; fifthly came the world within the piano keys, the lovely world of pure darkness and white winter icicles, into which he’d once upon a time imagined that he could invite anyone he chose, for instance, the plump girl in the blue dress who sang at the Hotel Sovietskaya; unfortunately, that world’s tunnels had suffered many cave-ins since he’d detonated the various Hydrox cartridges of Opus 110; he longed to retreat there and still sometimes did, but it wasn’t the same; it was stifling, collapsed, flooded and poisoned, but he couldn’t see the point of complaining about it, not even to the, how should I say, people’s responsible representatives; sixthly and lastly was his inner line, namely, his memories of Elena Konstantinovskaya, who had always actually been very, you know.

40

The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts granted him honorary membership. The rows of seats down the herringboned floor, the stage dissected by chairs and frames, then curtains above everything, it was all quite . . . Weary old owl that he was, he cocked his head, smiled, and tooted out his
thank you, thank you.
The following year, as the new purges of Soviet literature began, he was named Hero of Socialist Labor. By then the infamous dissident A. I. Solzhenitsyn was already referring to him as “the shackled genius.” Yet he dared to sign a petition in Solzhenitsyn’s favor. I’m told that he’d often stand in the back of a concert hall, listen to the music of other composers, close his eyes and silently weep with emotion. Sweaty, flabby and feeble, he lived on, producing music with an efficiency comparable to that of the SKNK-6 corn-planting machine, which can inseminate 3.5 hectares per hour of ploughed ground.
It’s merely a question of time and manpower.
LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER . . .
At their best,
wrote the bourgeois critic Layton,
the symphonies have the epic panoramic sweep of the great Russian novels.
To Glikman, to whom everything he wrote was a masterpiece, he wrote:
I have been disappointed in much and I expect many terrible things to happen. I am a dull, mediocre composer.
Ustvolskaya had cut him off forever. Nikolayeva had become very, very busy. Irinushka, who was so good and who forgave everything, would have understood if he’d needed to refresh himself with one of them (not that he could have done anything except with his half-paralyzed hand); she was such a magnificent wife, so loving and respectful of his pain; he even trusted her with his hidden manuscripts. Once she asked him why he hadn’t married E. E. Konstantinovskaya, I mean Vigodsky, and he gaily replied: Inferior antitank forces!

She didn’t go away, so he cocked his head and said: Irinochka, I, I prefer not to discuss it much. It humiliates me. Well, we, I mean, we tried hard. And, and . . . First and foremost, you musn’t think that I don’t love you, Irina. Here’s the worst of it. She . . . But, you know, what happened to her and me, well, we can’t just blame the times and
that bastard.
—Then he lifted the telephone to call Nikolayeva, but the voice on the other end of the wire, a male voice, informed him rather unpleasantly that she was on tour in the Ukraine.—Kindly tell her that I need to talk with her about, you know, about, about Mussorgsky. About the, uh, bass clarinet.—Glikman wrote him again and he began to reply:
Slowly and with great difficulty, squeezing out one note after another, I am writing a violin concerto,
and then such an eerie echo rang between his ears that he had to lay down the pen, because his own phrase,
squeezing out one note after another,
merely repeated the sentiment
it’s merely a question of time and manpower.
Oh, those Fascists, they’d been special individuals, all right!

Buried under the rubble of his three Orders of Lenin, his Order of the October Revolution, his Order of the Red Banner of Labor, he lived on to 1968, when Akhmatova died. Her funeral cortège was as steady as the one-track railroad line through Wolf’s Lair: Bahnhof Goerlitz, final stop! Now into the hole. He was there, of course. Eighty-eight; eighty-eight. The eighty-eight is the best general-purpose German gun. After all, she’d been in Leningrad when . . . We have a Motherland and they have a Fatherland. Their child is Europe Central. And
I
have Messerschmitts, Heinkels, Junkers, ammunition transported through the sewers, Germans crouching in their snowy trenches, the dark swirl of greatcoats as Red Army men leapt from the earth to charge forward; these comprised his homeland forever, where pale, open-mouthed corpses lay in each other’s arms on a street corner in the rain. Here came the Messerschmitts again; she was screaming and screaming.

And his soul was the winter sun of this ghastly dreamland now as bygone as old Petersburg; Elena’s screams, which he’d thought to inter in the grey chapel of Opus 110, continued to torture him to the end; they rose and died so nakedly, illuminated by rays of despair. Opus 110 towered above us all; he’d brought a new evil into the world without solving an old one. Supposedly one can actually, so to speak, make a bulletproof wall out of snow, but in this case their artillery can, well, you know. Or had he even done anything at all? Wasn’t death always with us? Had he lived five hundred years ago, Shostakovich might have found Opus 110 just as luckily in some deep old well with ferns on the walls and sickly concentric circles of darkness. So let’s go down to the Queen of Hell. Then we can come back up and inherit a whole green hill with cemetery ruins embedded in it. Ha, ha! Steep dark stairs burrowing upward through the very stone of the castle walls, chandeliers like spiders, and then if I’m good I’ll get to make love with Elena in an ebony bed with snakes carved in it. Glikman encountered them at the spa at Gagra, the Vigodskys, I mean, not the snakes. He told me they were extremely . . . But what’s that sound? And yet in spite of his terrible fear and all the sadness, he even lived on to 1969, when one of his worst tormentors, the musicologist P. Apostolov, was stricken by a heart attack at the premiere of the grim Fourteenth Symphony, whose proclaimed theme was death, and whose melodies (if they can even be called that) were blacker than the smoke from a burning oil depot. Explaining what he required of the orchestra, he said at the first rehearsal: On the left and right flanks, the battalion regions are echeloned to the depth of the, the, you see, the regimental sectors.—But he was only joking. Oh, that hilarious D. D. Shostakovich! To the symphony audience he said: Death is terrifying; there is nothing beyond it. You see, I don’t believe in life beyond the grave . . .—Refusing to accompany him into the pit, his old friend Lebedinsky wrote him a letter which severed relations between them; so goes one story, but other people have said that Lebedinsky, like Glikman, was jealous of Irina’s influence. The third version, which claims that Lebedinsky dreaded the Party officials and representatives of the “organs” who now frequented the Shostakovich household, may safely be dismissed as an anti-Soviet slander.—Unfortunately, said Shostakovich to his wife, Lebedinsky has grown, how shall I put it, old and stupid.—And he sat down heavily, clutching at his heart. Everybody’s equally disgusting. Where are my cigarettes? For instance, here’s that war criminal von Manstein; Lebedinsky sent his memoirs when we were still friends; I particularly like this, this, where is it? Here:
It was essential to ensure that,
you know.
Consequently it was now necessary for the Germans, too, to resort to the “scorched earth” policy which the Soviets had adopted during their retreats in previous years.
The worst of it is, the monster’s
correct.
He’s such a . . .—Back to the Fourteenth, which I myself don’t mind confessing has given me nightmares; it really does stink of the tomb; nonetheless, it bears the same relation to Opus 110 as does the post-mortem twitching of a dissected frog (a musical twitch, we might as well say, or at least a rhythmic one, for it’s brought about according to the quirks of the experimenter, who opens and closes the circuit between flesh and galvanic battery,
prestissimo)
to the actual death-convulsions when we’d placed the reptile in the killing-jar.—My Fourteenth, you know, I’ve sort of, you know, taken a shine to it, because it’s
nasty
and because it reminds me of my past. For instance, the time that Elena, you know, she was having her, her, and then the time when the German Fascists wrecked the Catherine Palace. I forgot to include that in Opus 110 . . .—About this work (ten percussion instruments, nineteen strings, two solo voices), important musical personalities insisted that its symphonic conflict never showed any dialectical resolution—which means that more passages should have been in a major key.

Staring down at the piano keys to which his aching ancient claws of hands couldn’t make love anymore, he thanked us for their comradely criticism; oh, yes, he thanked us in words as lucent as the icily sparkling corpses which had once adorned Leningrad.—And in fact, I, well, there’s simply no question about it. In my next symphony I’m going to change everything exactly as you advise! If we’re fainthearted about carrying out those measures, the
will step in. That violin section you dislike, I’ll tell the orchestra to play it quickly so that the audience won’t even hear it! Moreover, I’m going to, er, there’ll be dialectical resolution in every measure, I guarantee it! Like a
searchlight
!—But, as usual, he was, how should I say, teasing them. After all, isn’t nocturnal antiaircraft fire likewise a song of darkness engraved in pure and delicate lines of light, akin to the rays of twenty-four-carat gold which a bookbinder’s heated stylus, if drawn with sufficiently errorless spontaneity across the measured strip of foil, engraves forever in the black leather covers of the Book of Night?