Europe Central (93 page)

I was never in Army Group South, of course. That must be why the achievement which consoled von Manstein leaves me cold. I was with Dancwart, whom I often saw clothed in Russian blood; Volker, who always insisted on taking his turn in the most dangerous spot; Gernot, who always enjoyed fighting in the open; Rüdiger, who was generous even to enemies. We were all excellent Panzer grenadiers with straps around our helmets. Well, after all, what’s the difference?

The engagement at Prokhorovka (12.7.43) is usually considered the precise locus of our defeat in the Kursk Salient. I’m told that this was the greatest tank battle in history, but I can’t confirm it; I was sitting on a park bench at that time, kissing Lisca Malbran on the mouth. Somewhere north of Bjelgorod, in a place where the fields had been deeply cut by our dark tank-tracks whose shadows were darker than blood, our Tiger tanks crushed the grass and wheat, the black crosses on them as dark as their ruts in that glaring summer light. But T-34s sucked the life out of them. Stalin gloated
: If the Battle of Stalingrad signalled the twilight of the German-Fascist Army, then the Battle of Kursk confronted it with catastrophe.
—In short, he agreed with von Manstein. Well, who says that Citadel wasn’t worthwhile? Our withdrawal enabled those Slavs to execute many of our collaborators.

After Operation Citadel came Operations Kutuzov and Rumiantsev, each of which ended badly for us. It was all as rapid as the westward recession of summer greenness; winter was coming from the east again, but in the west the moist emerald fields still insisted that it was July; the green shadows of the oaks and lindens were as warmly humid as the sweat from my Golden Princess’s armpits. We’d already withdrawn to the Hagen Line. I think I must have been there; I almost remember screaming:
Run for your life! It’s T-34s!

They took Orel away from us, but not before we’d blown it up and killed more Slavs. There they discovered the mass graves and began making propaganda against us. By the end of August, Kharkov was lost. Then they launched Operation Suvorov . . .

So we retreated, laying down land mines like metal suitcases, and next to me a shellshocked colonel with sunken eyes kept saying over and over again: My name is Hagen. My job is to take the blame. ‣

THE TELEPHONE RINGS

As a general rule, writing for two voices is only successful . . . when discords are prepared by a common note.

—Rimsky-Korsakoff, Principles of Orchestration (draft, 1891)

1

He dreamed that the big black telephone rang and the voice in his ear was hers; that was when he thought that he was going to incur a heart attack. She wanted him to visit her, but he didn’t think he could bear it. In that agonizingly beautiful voice of hers, she said that she needed him to come. So he went to her, at which point she said that what she actually needed was for them to be friends. That, he answered, he definitely couldn’t bear; so long as he didn’t see her, ever, then what they had been to each other could stay frozen just the way it was, but as soon as they began to be “friends,” the thing he refused to let go of would really be
over, over.
He was weeping when he stood up to leave her and she, refraining of course from approaching him, was gazing at him with implacable gentleness. So he faced away from her and began to go out; he did in fact go out of his dream, awaking with tears on his cheeks and the old longing poisoning him to the very bones; it was all he could do not to go to her right then, or at least telephone her; but, after all, everyone should do his own work all the way to the end. All the while, the familiarity of his anguish was such a comfortable old trick; it did, so to speak, comfort him in a way. The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that was the sort of fellow he was now; he’d never get rid of it now, but after all it was better than the other feeling, the fear which also lived in his bones, year by year eating away his skeleton from the inside out. As for Elena Konstantinovskaya, he remembered for a fact how jealous she had been—why, she’d never trusted him even with his male colleagues, Glikman especially. What was it about that man? Their friendship wasn’t as close as Glikman thought; for that matter, anyone who presumed on a, a, well, an
intimacy,
let’s say, with Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was welcome to dream whatever liked; he himself didn’t mind armoring himself in irony if that would, well, the point is that every instant he’d spent away from Elena embittered her to a more fantastic degree; because the way she quite reasonably looked at it, he was still living with Nina, wasn’t he? And he was never going to leave Nina, never. Therefore, he had no right to further subdivide his heart even for innocuous friendships, did he? Did he? He’d been so often afraid of Elena! Oh, the times when she threw a plate against the wall simply because Sollertinsky had telephoned, or snatched up one of his scores, threatening to tear it up for absolutely no reason that he’d ever comprehended—how he’d hated her, really! Or at least, how he’d feared her . . . ! Why then had she so deeply wounded him by walking out? Well, it had certainly been a shock. He needed to analyze this shock without delay.

I must have been in love with, I mean, an
illusion,
he thought, which sounded so trite that he wondered in which bad novel he’d read it. But it was true. And he still was. He loved her to the point of agony. And it was worse than hopeless; he could never . . .

Remember, said Glikman, trying to console him, it wasn’t as if she left you. Be logical, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Why feel abandoned? She offered to marry you, but you went back to Nina. Doesn’t that make it better?
Elena never left you.

Grinning malignantly at his
dear friend,
Shostakovich replied: That makes it worse, you, you, you sonofabitch—no, forgive me, Isaak Davidovich, I . . . My word, what a rude thing I’ve just said! Put it out of your mind, I beg you; it was just a . . . You see, I prefer to think she left me, because in that case I had no choice. I didn’t have a, a
choice
which I—

The telephone rang. It was not Elena Konstantinovskaya.

2

Our so-called “Allies” had finally launched Operation Overlord against the Fascists; they’d established a beachhead on the French coast, in the locale of Normandy. Can you believe it? We bled ourselves almost to death at Stalingrad, while they, you know. It’s like a parody. Their casualty statistics must be exaggerated; I don’t believe that France could be all that dangerous. Of course we all try hard; we all do what we can. Who am I to, to, say that Americans shouldn’t play second violin? Nina says I don’t know anything. He was trying to read about this development in
Pravda,
but Maxim, who hadn’t yet left behind that boyhood age of mischief and tricks, kept teasing him by dragging a toothbrush across the wires of the second-best piano; that sound made him melancholy but he didn’t know why. Lebedinsky, who’d been raised strictly, was appalled that he didn’t beat the child, but he just couldn’t.—He’s performing the classics! cried Shostakovich with a hideous attempt at a smile; he was afraid that Lebedinsky looked down on him for his leniency. Truth to tell, when he heard that ghostly, almost erotic sound, which resembled a woman’s moan, it, so to speak, gave him ideas; he wouldn’t mind weaving that chord into his Ninth Symphony, which was almost completed, or perhaps into the Tenth. (Actually, it materialized in the terrifying Fourteenth.)

The telephone failed to ring. Lebedinsky watched him stare at it. Misconstruing vigilance for hatred, Lebedinsky, whose brother-in-law had been taken away after a telephone call summoning him to an important meeting, said: Oh, yes, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, what a pleasure! To wait on the
pleasure
of that thing, so that—

I know, I know, interrupted the host in alarm. Lebedinsky grew embarrassed, discomfited. A quarter-hour later he’d taken his leave. Shostakovich sat alone, drinking vodka and staring at the telephone.

Galya was at the kitchen table doing her homework. The assignment: Write an essay on the subject “Immortal Heroes of the Great Patriotic War.” Her chosen immortal hero was liaison officer Putilov, who had been stationed at Stalingrad. The tale goes that under heavy enemy fire he crawled out to repair a communication line. The Fascists machine-gunned him. Clenching the two broken strands of wire in his teeth, he completed the circuit and died. Communications were restored.

Papa, do you think it happened just like that?

I think it’s quite interesting, Galisha, and, you know, quite, quite educational. Could it actually have happened? I mean, whether or not the electrons . . . Ask your mama; she’s a physicist. You’re lucky she . . . By the way, your hair looks extremely, you know,
pretty
pulled back like that. How I love you, dear child! Is that a new style? And that red ribbon is very . . . But it’s not fastened properly. Oh, me! Come here, please, you pretty child, and I’ll . . .

The days went by. The telephone never rang.

There was a scene from a certain Roman Karmen newsreel: A dead street-lamp bulb hangs like a translucent olive from its metal stem; unshoveled snow reaches almost all the way up to heaven. Which one was that? Maybe “The Men of the
Sedov.
” Curious how that snow made him feel! Because snow, you see, signifies waiting—not that I believe in program music. If only the telephone would, you know,
ring
! Well, well, and now our busy little German Fascists were launching V-weapons against England. Sometimes he had to laugh—

That night he dreamed about a monstrous idol whose face was a black telephone, then woke up gasping. It was not much after four. Hours to go before dawn, but not enough hours to give him any hope of falling asleep again. Tomorrow he was going to be worthless. Fortunately, the dance music they’d demanded wasn’t complicated; he could score it awake, asleep, or in between. Send me out, and I’ll take the wires in my teeth; who cares what happens after that, as long as their signal goes through? This is my life; this is my life. It’s a very, how should I say, typical situation. And the longer Galya believes it’s wonderful, the better for her.

He was composing his Second String Quartet when the telephone rang. It shrieked with the same brassy shrillness that it had had when it rang last year to announce that Comrade Stalin had rejected the national anthem he’d composed with A. Khatchaturian. This time it was merely the storeman of the NKVD Ensemble, informing him that if he brought a can around it would be filled with jam; Nina had been begging for that, less for Maxim’s sake than for Galya’s. The girl seemed to have stopped growing, although she no longer complained of hunger. He understood that this condition was now prevalent, unfortunately. And Nina had told him (somewhat sharply, in fact) that the least he could do was beg a few grams of something for his children, given all the favors he did for strangers. She refused to believe that he loved Galya as much as Maxim. In fact, every time he laid eyes on that girl he remembered holding her when she was a baby; he remembered the first time she’d said his name; he’d gladly chop himself into pieces if that would in any way, you know. He said to Nina: Maybe they ought to add a trumpet or two, so that—

What on earth are you talking about?

The
telephone,
you imbecile. So that we really can’t escape it. And then accent the—

I don’t have time for this, Nina said, as she always did. Well, he shouldn’t have called her an imbecile, but on the other hand he frequently felt that he could hardly—

The telephone rang. His heart exploded sickeningly. He lifted the receiver and heard nothing but an evil silence. This was what they sometimes did to make sure you were home, when they, you know. What he really wanted was to find a nice rabbit-fur coat for Galisha while he was still
here,
because . . . Very quietly he reinterred the receiver, took up his briefcase, which contained a toothbrush, clean underwear, and a few scraps of music paper, and then he went out to the landing by the elevator, waiting very quietly for an hour, so that the children would not have to see him being arrested.

3

The day after he’d persuaded the jury to award Rostropovich the first prize in the All-Union Competition, the telephone rang. It was, well, you know. This was the worst, even worse than being arrested. She wanted to know how he was. She was very gentle. He couldn’t speak with her, unfortunately; he actually could barely even, well, I’m sure you get the point. Some things are infinite. Fortunately, Nina and the children weren’t home. Elena would have known that; that was why she’d . . . He doubled over and burst into tears. ‣

ECSTASY