The Noise of Time (20 page)

But this was what happened. They came and delved between your sheets. Hey, Shosti, do your prefer blondes or brunettes? They looked for any weakness, any filth they could find. And they would always find something. The gossips and myth-mongers had their own version of formalism, as defined by Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev: anything we cannot understand on first hearing is probably immoral and disgusting – that was their attitude. And they would do with his life what they wished.

As for his music: he didn’t suffer from the illusion that time would separate the good from the bad. He did not see why posterity should be able to calibrate quality better than those for whom the music was written. He was too disillusioned for that. Posterity would approve what it would approve. He knew all too well how composers’ reputations rose and fell; how some were wrongly forgotten, and others mysteriously immortal. His modest wish for the future was that ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’ would continue to make men weep, however badly it was sung through some cracked amplifier in a cheap cafe; while, further along the road, an audience might be silently moved by one of his string quartets; and that, perhaps, one day not long ahead, both audiences might overlap and mingle.

He had instructed his family not to concern themselves with his ‘immortality’. His music should be played on its merit, not because of some posthumous campaign. Among the many petitioners who besieged him nowadays was the widow of a well-known composer. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody’ – such was her constant refrain. She was always telling him that he only had to ‘lift the receiver’ and instruct this or that person to play her late husband’s music. He had done so many times, at first out of pity and politeness, later just to get rid of the woman. But it was never enough. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody.’ And so he would lift the receiver yet again.

But one day the familiar words had provoked more than the familiar exasperation in him. So he had replied solemnly, ‘Yes … yes … And Johann Sebastian Bach had twenty children and they
all
promoted his music.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed the widow. ‘And that is why his music is still being played today!’

What he hoped was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life. Time would pass, and though musicologists would continue their debates, his work would begin to stand for itself. History, as well as biography, would fade: perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in textbooks. And then, if it still had value – if there were still ears to hear – his music would be … just music. That was all a composer could hope for. Whom does music belong to, he had asked that trembling student, and though the reply was written in capital letters on a banner behind her interrogator’s head, the girl could not answer. Not being able to answer was the correct answer. Because music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for.

The beggar would be long dead by now, and Dmitri Dmitrievich had almost immediately forgotten what he had said. But the one whose name is lost to history remembered. He was the one who made sense of it, who understood. They were in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a war, in the middle of all kinds of suffering within that war. There was a long station platform, on which the sun had just come up. There was a man, half a man really, wheeling himself along on a trolley, attached to it by a rope threaded through the top of his trousers. The two passengers had a bottle of vodka. They descended from the train. The beggar stopped singing his filthy song. Dmitri Dmitrievich held the bottle, he the glasses. Dmitri Dmitrievich poured vodka into each glass; as he did so, a wristlet of garlic slipped into view. He was no barman, and the level of vodka in each glass was slightly different. The beggar saw only what came out of the bottle; while he was thinking how Mitya was always anxious to help others, though temperamentally incapable of helping himself. But Dmitri Dmitrievich was listening, and hearing, as he always did. So when the three glasses with their different levels came together in a single chink, he had smiled, and put his head on one side so that the sunlight flashed briefly off his spectacles, and murmured,

‘A triad.’

And that was what the one who remembered had remembered. War, fear, poverty, typhus and filth, yet in the middle of it, above it and beneath it and through it all, Dmitri Dmitrievich had heard a perfect triad. The war would end, no doubt – unless it never did. Fear would continue, and unwarranted death, and poverty and filth – perhaps they too would continue for ever, who could tell. And yet a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.

Author’s note

Shostakovich died on 9 August 1975, five months before the start of the next leap year.

Nicolas Nabokov, his tormentor at the New York Peace Congress, was indeed funded by the CIA. Stravinsky’s aloofness from the congress was not just ‘ethic and esthetic’, as his telegram maintained, but also political. As his biographer Stephen Walsh puts it, ‘Like all White Russians in postwar America, Stravinsky … was certainly not going to jeopardise his hard-won status as a loyal American by the slightest appearance of supporting a pro-Communist propaganda exercise.’

Tikhon Khrennikov did not, as in Shostakovich’s (fictional) apprehension, prove immortal; but he did the next best thing, running the Union of Soviet Composers from its refounding in 1948 to its eventual collapse, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Forty-eight years on from 1948, he was still giving slickly bland interviews, claiming that Shostakovich was a cheerful man who had nothing to be frightened of. (The composer Vladimir Rubin commented: ‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep.’) Khrennikov never disappeared from view, nor lost his love of Power: in 2003, he was decorated by Vladimir Putin. He finally died in 2007, at the age of ninety-four.

Shostakovich was a multiple narrator of his own life. Some stories come in many versions, worked up and ‘improved’ over the years. Others – for instance, what happened at the Big House in Leningrad – exist only in a single version, told many years after the composer’s death, by a single source. More broadly, truth was a hard thing to find, let alone maintain, in Stalin’s Russia. Even the names mutate uncertainly: so, Shostakovich’s interrogator at the Big House is variously given as Zanchevsky, Zakrevsky and Zakovsky. All this is highly frustrating to any biographer, but most welcome to any novelist.

The Shostakovich bibliography is considerable, and musicologists will recognise my two main sources: Elizabeth Wilson’s exemplary, multi-faceted
Shostakovich: A Life Remembered
(1994; revised edition 2006), and
Testimony: The Memoirs of Shostakovich
as related to Solomon Volkov (1979). When published, Volkov’s book caused a commotion in both East and West, and the so-called ‘Shostakovich Wars’ rumbled on for decades. I have treated it as I would a private diary: as appearing to give the full truth, yet usually written at the same time of day, in the same prevailing mood, with the same prejudices and forgettings. Other useful sources include Isaak Glikman’s
Story of a Friendship
(2001) and Michael Ardov’s interviews with the composer’s children, published as
Memories of Shostakovich
(2004).

Elizabeth Wilson is paramount among those who have helped me with this novel. She supplied me with material I would never otherwise have come across, corrected many misapprehensions, and read the typescript. But this is my book not hers; and if you haven’t liked mine, then read hers.

J. B.

May 2015

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