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Parzival killed the Red Knight and became King, all of us now hoping for good harvest years.

6

When Parzival killed Galogandres, the standard-bearer of King Clamidê, the attackers called the battle off. The long dark pipelike barrels of their antitank rifles couldn’t frighten him: Parzival had saved Queen Condwiramurs! On the next day, it’s true, he had to best King Clamidê in single combat, but, even though at the time it seemed difficult—so difficult, in fact, that the blood gushed from Parzival’s eyes—it ended correctly, with the sleepwalker’s arm rigidly parallel to the ground as he stood at the reviewing stand, Berlin, noon exactly, 7.6.39, and the returned Condor Legion striding past with their guns straight up. ‣

OPUS 40

There is nothing in you which fails to send a wave of joy and fierce passion inside me when I think of you. Lyalya, I love you so, I love you so, as nobody ever loved before. My love, my gold, my dearest, I love you so; I lay down my love before you.

—Shostakovich to E. E. Konstantinovskaya (1934)

1

Each of Shostakovich’s symphonies I consider to be a multiply broken bridge, an archipelago of steel trailing off into the river. Opus 40, however, is a house with four rooms. In front, it’s true, there’s an ornate golden staircase ascending out of a snowy plain, then ending unconsummated in air. But Shostakovich always liked his jokes—oh, me!

In those years he still resembled a boy. Sweetly gazing at the world through his round dark-framed spectacles, he captivated Elena Konstantinovskaya. That sliver of starched white shirt within his dark suit, she couldn’t wait to stroke it with her talented hands. He peered shyly down through half-closed eyes. Then he built Opus 40 for her and him to dwell in, and she led him inside.

They were going to have an apartment with a dark passageway, then steps and halfsteps. They’d live there, deep below the piano keys in Moscow. Nina could stay in Leningrad.

2

It was 1934, the year of Y. Bilioch’s immortal elegy “Kirov,” with camerawork by R. L. Karmen. But Kirov wasn’t yet dead on the white night between May and June when Elena first held Shostakovich’s hand. The music festival had ended, and the pale boy, who was newly married, crossed his soft white wrists, gazing rapturously at her through his glasses. Elena,
you’re the one for me,
he said. Time for private English lessons! Before he’d even kissed her, his bass- and treble-glands had begun composing Opus 40, which prefigures his most beautiful fugues.

3

Her electric clitoris and the phrase
electric clitoris
were the first two aspects of her to be translated musically—a claim which the translator would have rejected, since right up until his Seventh Symphony he proudly disdained program music; but sometimes the critic’s exegesis is wiser than the composer’s, for the same reason that in recordings of Opus 40, Emanuel Ax plays the piano part better than Shostakovich; no one who has read the entire case file can deny that Elena Konstantinovskaya’s clitoris was electric and that its sweet vibrations sing forever in the cello melody which opens the first movement. The phrase or alias which derives from her clitoris gets expressed in the happy, comic, rocking-horse sexuality of the piano in the second movement, when our young Shostakovich looks self-deprecatingly down between his own shoulders (if you’ve ever drunk absinthe, you’ll understand what it’s like to be weighed down by the drug almost to paralysis, and at the same time to exist within an invisible ball of consciousness which hovers precisely halfway between your body and the ceiling); from an eminence which sparkles with dust-motes in the bedroom of that dacha in Luga, the second movement
(allegro)
gazes irreverently down upon its pale and awkwardly ecstatic father, whom I’d rather call a child; groaning for joy, the child is riding his hobbyhorse, Elena. His shoulderblades rise and fall as elaborately as the mechanical arms of a player piano; he’s copulating in a frenzy! This brief theme expresses a typical lover’s sentiment: Look how ridiculous I am compared to you! Joined to you, I make us both ridiculous! All the same, let’s, let’s, so to speak,
do it,
my darling little Elenochka, because you’re the one for me.

Marry me then, said Elena Konstantinovskaya.

And why shouldn’t he marry her? She was the only one he ever found who could have dwelled with him in that four-roomed house within his chest, which they were fully capable of connecting, by means of trumpetlike passageways, with the four chambers of her own heart, so that then they would have had quite the castle together, oh, my, sharing refuges and secrets. And on that very first night he took her inside the world beneath the black keys, whispering: My tonic must have been D minor, when you, you know . . . And she understood him. She always did. She smiled and took him in, just the merest half-step, I actually mean a semitone, which is the space between adjacent notes in this diatonic scale we all live by. She was the only one!

4

Therefore, Opus 40, and in particular the first movement, composed of fire-light and kisses, remains the most romantic thing that Shostakovich ever wrote. In the recording which he made with D. Shafran ten years later, he played the piano part and Shafran the cello, the cello as vivid as Elena herself, the piano steady and glittery like Shostakovich; even though I have already stated that Elena’s song was more perfectly realized in the recording by E. Ax and Y.-Y. Ma, everything was already there: the piano was the skeleton; the cello was the flesh; he was the knowledge and commemoration; she was the life.

5

Elenochka, Lyalya I mean, or better yet my most perfect of all Russian Lyalkas, you possess all the names! You’re my jewel, oh, indeed, and I’m just a, a . . . I want to be a rocket scientist for you; I know you like rockets. Unfortunately, all I can do is, er, you know. This is a very complicated decision for us to make, Elena, with many, many factors, such as, I mean, what if I’m not the one for you? Because if you leave me, I’ll never forgive you. I’d rather be the one to, to—aren’t I contemptible? Lyalochka, I can’t sleep anymore for thinking of you! Please don’t leave me for a rocket scientist! And no heroes, either! You’d better not be attracted to brave individuals who like to go places; I’m only a mollusk; I need to hide forever within your lovely shell . . .

6

The red glow of embers seen through her hair as they lay by the hearth in Luga, then her vehement kisses, and his mouth on her cunt (his tongue seeking as tenderly as a true pianist’s fingers, obeying the timbre of her sighs, to give pleasure as exactly as he could: in short, her sighs were the score; his kisses were the performance; which is also to say that his kisses were the score, and her sighs the performance, the music of Opus 40 itself); and his mouth on her mouth when he penetrated her, and the unearthly beauty of her face in orgasm, and the way she held him tight for a long long time until they drowsed with his penis still inside her; they were still literally one flesh—all this seems to be grammatically the subject (but please confirm this with Comrade Academician Alexandrov); the verb comes only here; because these various acts, occurrences and results have become, as were their bodies, one thing, a coherent self-sufficiency of being which, like a noun, simply is; what they did is what they were; they were love; when she sighed, she sighed
I love you
and then her soft, smooth arms went rigid so that she could brace herself against the warm hearthstones and the sighs became inarticulate expressions of ecstasy, by which I mean again music.

He said to her: Thank you for all the happiness you’ve given me.

She kissed him passionately. His music became as heavy-lidded as the eyes of Käthe Kollwitz.

7

He could sight-read her, so to speak; he knew how to make her feel as though an orchestra were playing. (Well, wasn’t it?) This facility he lost later in life, around the time that the Berlin Wall went up; women began complaining that this Shostakovich had no erotic empathy—one of the two reasons why G. Ustvolskaya would refuse to marry him in 1954. By then he was talking to himself; after Nina died he used to say, I think to the piano: Oh, me, oh, my, Elena; well, if it’s not working as it is, then maybe we should leave it and, you know, avoid our mistakes next time we’re each with a, a, I’m sorry. That’s just my, how should I say, my
personal
point of view.—But he hadn’t lost anything in 1934, neither courage nor confidence, let alone integrity; in 1935 he still sparkled with jokes; Elena never stopped laughing! She counted on him to keep her always highspirited; that was one of the myriad ways he cherished her; he remained untouched by what I’ll call history, which is why I assert that foreseeing the future is as worthless as observing that the third theme of Opus 40’s fourth movement appears more uneven on the page than does the second theme of the first movement. But imagining the future, then mistaking imagination for foresight, is one of life’s luxuries; certainly it seemed to him and her (and how could it have been otherwise?) that whenever they kissed they were drinking the future.

Kissing her again and again, he got drunk. All around them both, the dull grey and pinkish-grey building-fronts of Leningrad angled and articulated in accordance with canal-curves. One more kiss, Lyalochka! When he slowly slid his finger in and out of her, she uttered soft clucking sounds from deep within her throat, her eyes closed in ecstasy.

8

The extent of his infatuation with this young woman (who was still, by the way, a member in good standing of the Komsomol—no matter that she smoked cigarettes) may best be conveyed by noting that three weeks into their affair, in June, he had to leave on a concert tour; in July he met Nina in Yalta, then vacationed with her in Polenevo, where the cellist V. Kubatsky, pitying his desperation, implored him to distract himself by composing a new sonata, and the very next month, within a few days of their return to Leningrad, Nina had already moved out, at which her husband burst into tears and said: It’s entirely superfluous to, to, how can I make my point, Ninusha, to take the line of least resistance and . . . Then he rushed off to take Elena Konstantinovskaya to another concert.

9

That was on the the thirteenth of August. He walked down the great avenue of trees in Alexander Park, just so he could, you know, think about Elena. On the nineteeth of September, the fourth movement of Opus 40 was already finished, because he couldn’t help, how should I say, bustling about; as a small child he’d never been able to sit still in his chair, so his mother had to, never mind. Elena wept when he played her score on his piano: In affairs of the heart, my friends, considerable weeping tends to go on as part of the, you know, background music. On 10 March 1935, he informed his closest confidant, Sollertinsky, that he might never come back to Leningrad; he could now envision himself in Moscow with Elena, where we’ll have a little, you know, with two sets of four rooms. His mother had never liked Nina anyway—not that she liked Elena much better, but his sister Maryusa adored her. In Moscow the two of us can get away from everything; we’ll start over and I’ll never see Nina again. And indeed it was in Moscow that he showed L. T. Atovmyan his divorce certificate.

10

What about Nina? Well, what about her? The late S. Khentova, in whose
Udivitelyenui Shostakovich
(1993) forty-two of Shostakovich’s letters to Elena are published, although not without the excisions of certain intimacies (I have all that right here, but it’s going to stay in my secret collection), bequeathed us the following summation of the two rivals:
In contrast to Nina Vasilievna, who was not interested in fashion, she dressed elegantly, cultivating grace, femininity and sensuality.

All the same, he did come back to Nina—twice.

11

Khentova, whom Shostakovich avoided like death, cannot always be trusted. I’m not saying she was in the hire of any foreign powers; I do maintain that her intelligence service was less reliable than mine. For example, she claims that our composer did not become Elena Konstantinovskaya’s lover until the summer of 1934, when one of the private English classes in his apartment
ended with kisses.
But Opus 40 itself proves that their love was consummated in the very first movement, the
allegro non troppo.
No doubt they took precautions on those white nights. He hadn’t yet volunteered to leave Nina; nor had Elena become unshakably certain of her love for him. So they hid within their eight-chambered house where even sharp-eyed Khentova couldn’t see. They fooled Mravinsky, Glikman, Sollertinsky, Nina unquestionably (come to think of it, perhaps they didn’t fool Nina), and most impressively, Shostakovich’s mother, who still read his diary whenever she could. Deep down they went, down to the red core that he’d revisit alone twenty-six years later, when he composed Opus 110.