The Conductor (7 page)
‘What about the table? And all four chairs?’ Already Mrs Eliasberg sounded defeated by the potential cost of saving her only son.
‘Where do you propose we eat? In the gutter?’
A pause. On his side of the door, Elias wiped a film of sweat from his forehead and shifted from one weak leg to the other.
‘How about the best china?’ His father sounded a little brighter.
Now it was Karl’s mother who demurred. The tea set was dear to her heart, the only possession in which she could take pride when entertaining. For some minutes Elias listened to his parents tipping the scales back and forth: the value of his health against various household items. His feet burned with cold, and his face burned with an emotion impossible to define. As he dragged his way back to bed, he felt a new strength in his limbs, and he clenched his hands under the chilly sheet.
‘I will live!’ he declared, spitting over the side of the bed into a basin, staring at the bubbling mix of blood and saliva. Then, propped up against his lumpy pillow, he wrote a list headed ‘Karl Illyich Eliasberg’s Ten Commandments’. They included:
Surviving, to prove them all wrong
Not becoming a Shoemaker or any other kind of tradesman
Never valuing Material Possessions over Art or Life
During the following months Elias recovered, thus achieving the first of his commandments. ‘Inexplicable,’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘A miracle.’ He sounded almost annoyed: predicting bad news and then being robbed of the outcome can leave one feeling faintly ridiculous.
Though never strong, Elias proceeded to grow steadily upwards and increasingly inwards. He refused point blank to learn the shoe trade (thereby achieving his second commandment). To kneel in the dust of life, dealing with objects that came in contact with the base earth — this was not for him! He considered becoming a pilot — ‘A pilot?’ queried his mother in alarm — and a general, until he realised he disapproved
of organised killing, whatever the cause.
And then one Sunday, after performing a solo in a youth-choir concert, he was approached by a distinguished grey-haired man. Did Karl Eliasberg play an instrument, asked the man, as well as sing? Yes, Elias did; the neighbour across the landing owned a piano and she’d taught him for many years.
‘Would you mind playing something?’ asked the grey-haired man, with just the right mix of authority and diffidence.
The dilapidated church echoed like a cave as Elias walked, with booming uncertain steps, to the piano. He started with a Bach prelude, which was all he could remember under duress. The notes fell starkly and too loudly into all that empty space. They seemed like stones hurled off a cliff, some flying in arcs, others aimed more deftly — but as they piled up together they achieved their own amassed validity. He started his favourite Beethoven sonata with more confidence.
Boom, boom-be-boom!
The low bass notes spread out impressively, while his right hand lifted the melody higher and higher towards the roof.
When the final repeated chords had dissolved, the grey-haired man applauded. It was a reaction that seemed incongruous in a church, even a disused one, but Elias flushed with pleasure. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had listened to him so attentively, nor the last time he’d been praised. After the grey-haired man had asked several questions — where did Elias live, what was his age, how was his father’s financial situation? — he asked the most significant question of all. Was Karl interested in trying for a scholarship for the Conservatoire?
Elias was taken aback, but as his father had developed pneumonia and was unable to work, and his mother had begun serving pancakes consisting mainly of coffee grounds — ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘I’d be most interested.’ At the very least, a scholarship would entitle him to extra grocery rations. At best, it would set him free.
D
uring his first two terms at the Conservatoire, Elias noticed his father’s cheeks becoming hollow and heard the breath rattling in his lungs. Instead of pity, he felt hatred. His contempt for his dying father grew with every new technique he learned and with every conversation he had with fellow students.
His father had taught him nothing, prepared him for nothing. He hadn’t shown Elias how to act around artists, nor coached him in the art of conversation. He’d sung neither hymns nor gypsy tunes, lullabies nor operas. He’d never even
been
to the opera. He hadn’t owned a decent suit, had never knotted a casual scarf around the throat like Professor Steinberg, nor worn an expensive jacket so carelessly that it ended up a nonchalant second skin.
Even Eliasberg’s highly honed skills of observation were not enough to save him. When he wore a long fur coat to the end-of-term recital — as he’d heard the famous Professor Glazunov had, when performing for Artur Schnabel and other esteemed visitors from the West — laughter started up at the back of the auditorium. It didn’t stop until he’d finished all three of his chosen Etudes, an interminable journey, at the end of which no recognisable vestige of Chopin remained.
Stumbling from the stage, he locked himself in one of the rehearsal rooms on the first floor. When the coast was clear, he crept back down to the empty auditorium and lay down in the wings behind the curtains, which smelt of mothballs, pressing his hot face against the cold floor.
After some time he heard footsteps on the stage.
‘Extraordinary decision to wear that coat.’ It was Professor Steinberg. ‘Shoulders, arms, spine, all restricted. Whatever possessed him?’
‘Pretensions, I suppose.’ Professor Ferkelman pushed in the piano stool with a screech. ‘He’s completely out of his depth.’
‘Socially, you mean?’ Steinberg’s voice grew more distant. ‘His work’s certainly up to scratch.’
‘His own worst enemy.’ Ferkelman’s voice, too, was further away. ‘Tries too hard to fit in … stands apart.’
When Elias finally reached home, he found his father sleeping. He stood over the bed, looking down at the diminished figure that had once — strange to remember! — represented authority. The body jutted through the threadbare sheet: haunches like a withered fox, a sharp march of ribs, one wasted arm lying across a rasping chest.
‘You’ve given me nothing but disadvantage,’ he said in a low voice. ‘You’ve taught me only what I don’t want to become. You have bestowed on me all the disadvantages of a narrow-minded, straight-laced upbringing. A life of endless scales and five-finger exercises, with no higher goal.’
He put his face close to his father’s, staring at the sunken cheeks and the stubble pushing through the yellow skin. The camphor fumes and the stuffy darkness made him as breathless as his dying father. ‘You pretended to be creative, but you were nothing but a craftsman,’ he said, backing away from the bed. ‘You were born and will die a bootmaker.’
That night he lay awake for a long time, hearing tomcats shrieking in the alleys and the monotonous trolley cars rattling by. Where did he belong? Not here in this family with its wafer-thin layer of culture, nor in the corridors of the Conservatoire, among those who referred to Mussorgsky as casually as the latest football scores and somehow knew the right time to discuss each.
Where do I fit in?
He tossed and turned on the mattress. Being neither educated nor ignorant, he had ended up in no-man’s land, where rules couldn’t help him nor background support him. ‘I am an outsider,’ he whispered. ‘I am outside.’
The sharp embarrassment of the afternoon, the guilt at not doing justice to Chopin, the needling pain of the professors’ comments: these seeped out of him like black ink and disappeared into the darkness. Nothing could comfort him, apart from the chilly austere knowledge that he was
other
, and therefore less likely to be tainted or influenced.
Not until he saw the first dirty streaks of dawn over the railway station did he know what to do. ‘The dilettantes were right to fear,’ he
said slowly. What he intended to achieve could not be bought by the wealthy or pulled down by philistines; it existed above social status and scorn. It was the only untouchable thing — and the only way to become untouchable.
When he emerged, bleary-eyed, from his room, his mother was in the hallway, her eyes and nose streaming. His father had died. Karl Elias was the new head of the family.
He stood there impassively, feeling her body shake against his. Should he announce his new-found resolve? It seemed neither the time nor place. But as he stared over his mother’s head, he saw a clear-cut future before him.
The road to professionalism wasn’t easy. He attended classes on days when the air inside the Conservatoire felt too cold to breathe, or when Professor Steinberg turned up an hour late and all the other students had left, grumbling. Stubbornly, he sat on, playing two hands of a four-handed transcription to keep himself warm. Occasionally he was joined by Dmitri Shostakovich, who took the melodic part as a matter of course, playing fast, loudly and with flair. Rather than looking at the sheet music, he seemed to look past it, into a cavernous place behind the written notes that Elias could only guess at.
‘A professional?’ repeated Shostakovich, on one of the rare occasions when they exchanged more than a basic greeting. ‘Of course! I’ve been a professional since I began playing. Since the age of nine.’ He buttoned his thin coat around his thin torso and marched away to the library. Elias watched him go with an odd feeling in his stomach: an envy so strong it almost amounted to anger.
When Elias was knocked from his bicycle, cracking three vertebrae and suffering nerve damage to the third and fourth fingers of his left hand, his mother wept for days. His brilliant career as an instrumentalist was over! He was washed up before he had begun! Elias had no time to lament; he was too preoccupied with recovering, and then he was too busy reassessing his career. After lying on his back for three and a half weeks, he limped into Professor Ferkelman’s office, and emerged an hour later with a new major.
Some would consider it making the best of a bad situation but, looking back, Elias saw it as a turning point. Standing on the podium was like facing the world alone, which was, after all, what he was used to. Years later, stepping in front of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra for his first
rehearsal, he wished with equal measures of scorn and regret that his father could see him. The grinding years of hardship, apprenticeship and the utmost loneliness had paid off. He was a real conductor, with his own musicians. The orchestra stretched before him, a sea of restless movements and indistinct noise. When he tapped the side of his music stand with his brand new baton, he felt as if the small noise might shatter his body.
U
nsettled by the news of the German evacuation, exhausted from teaching, Shostakovich was unable to sleep. He twisted over and over in his bed until he was wound tightly in the sheet like an Egyptian mummy.
The treachery of the body! On nights like these he wanted Nina, her long toes twined in his and her cool rounded stomach against his back. He bitterly resented her — for not being there, and for making him need her.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck two. Two and a half minutes later came the tinny chime from the church on Kovenskiy Pereulok, and one minute later a more commanding clang from Kazan Cathedral. He threw the pillow off his head and onto the floor. Why in God’s name was it impossible for Russians to fix anything? For three years, since the night of Maxim’s birth when he’d first noticed it, these clocks had been predictably out of time.
‘I’m bored.’ He spoke to the whispering dust on the floorboards, to the creaking springs of the wedding bed given to him by his mother (an attempt to prove she didn’t mind her son marrying a most unsuitable girl). ‘Bored, so bored, at our petty and predictable human ways.’
Somewhere in the house a door slammed. He stiffened and watched the branches tap at the window. Who could be up and about at this time, except composers and drunkards? He knew he was watched — for all he knew, Stalin’s men were watching right now, crouched in one of the buildings opposite. For some years he’d kept a bag in a cupboard on the landing: two clean undershirts, a toothbrush and razor, pencils and score paper. ‘I won’t let them have the satisfaction of a public removal,’
he vowed to Nina. ‘I won’t have my children remembering their father being forcibly taken from his home.’
The knife-edge danger of being public property, the possibility of falling from grace at any time — these were constant fears. The stifling irritation of daily existence was another problem altogether.
‘There’s nothing new under the sun,’ he’d complained recently to Nina.
‘You’re always saying you need a monotonous existence to work properly.’ Annoyingly, Nina had the abilities of a court lawyer, reproducing his most sweeping pronouncements as evidence against him.
He shrugged away his own words. ‘It’s not healthy, being able to predict what will happen.’
‘What will happen?’ she asked, mocking him slightly.
‘I will crank out another movement of a piano quartet, my students will surprise me with their stupidity. Maxim will learn a few more words, Galina will learn another way of tricking her grandmother at cards. Hitler will continue his march. Churchill will continue to be exasperated by Roosevelt. Stalin will stick his head more deeply in the sand.’
But in the past few days the heaviness had become altogether more than this. On the surface, life proceeded at its usual pace, but Shostakovich felt as if some menace lay clenched under the city, ready to uncoil and spring.
Was that a rat scrabbling in the wall beside the bed? He thought he felt something run across his face — rasping claws, a dragging leathery slither, a foul breath mixing with his — and he shivered. His insomnia was like a plague; already the fever was starting in his joints. He dipped his finger in a glass of water and smoothed the moisture over his hot eyelids. ‘Sleep now,’ he said, as if he were talking to Maxim.
