The Noise of Time (3 page)

The lift’s machinery sounded once more. When he realized that it had passed the fourth floor, he picked up his case and held it by his side. He waited for the doors to open, for the sight of a uniform, a nod of recognition, and then those outstretched hands reaching towards him, and the clamp of fist on wrist. Which would be quite unnecessary, given his eagerness to accompany them, to get them away from the premises, away from his wife and child.

Then the lift doors opened, and it was a neighbour, with a different nod of recognition, designed to give nothing away – not even surprise at seeing him go out at such a late hour. He inclined his head in reply, walked into the lift, pressed a button at random, rode down a couple of floors, waited for a few minutes, then back up to the fifth floor where he got out and resumed his vigil. This had happened before, and in the same way. Words were never exchanged, because words were dangerous. It was just possible that he looked like a man humiliatingly thrown out by his wife, night after night; or a man who indecisively kept walking out on his wife, night after night, and then returning. But it was probable that he looked exactly what he was: a man, like hundreds of others across the city, waiting, night after night, for arrest.

Years ago, lifetimes away, back in the last century, when his mother had been at the Irkutsk Institute for Noblewomen, she and two other girls had danced the mazurka from
A Life for the Tsar
in front of Nicolas II, then crown prince. Glinka’s opera was of course unperformable in the Soviet Union, even if its theme – the morally instructive one of a poor peasant who lays down his life for a great leader – might have appealed to Stalin. ‘A Dance for the Tsar’: he wondered if Zakrevsky knew about that. In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of its father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

His mother had been the strength in her marriage, just as Nina Vasilievna was the strength in theirs. His father, Dmitri Boleslavovich, had been a gentle, unworldly man who worked hard and handed his salary to his wife, keeping back just a small amount of tobacco money. He had a fine tenor voice and played four-handed piano. He sang gypsy romances, songs like ‘Ah, It Is Not You I Love So Passionately’, and ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’. He adored toys and games and detective stories. A new-fangled cigarette lighter or a wire puzzle would keep him amused for hours. He did not come at life directly. He had a special rubber stamp made, so that every item in his library was inscribed with the purple words: ‘This book has been stolen from D. B. Shostakovich.’

A psychiatrist researching the creative process had once asked him about Dmitri Boleslavovich. He had replied that his father ‘was an entirely normal human being’. This was not a patronising phrase: it was an enviable skill to be a normal human being, and to wake up every morning with a smile on your face. Also, his father had died young – in his late forties. A disaster for the family, and for those who loved him; but not, perhaps, a disaster for Dmitri Boleslavovich himself. Had he lived any longer, he would have watched the Revolution turn sour, paranoid and carnivorous. Not that he was much interested in the Revolution. This had been another of his strengths.

On his death his widow had been left with no income, two daughters, and a musically precocious son of fifteen. Sofya Vasilyevna had taken menial jobs to support them. She worked as a typist in the Chamber of Weights and Measures, and gave piano lessons in exchange for bread. Sometimes he wondered if all his anxieties had not begun with his father’s death. But he preferred not to believe this, because it came close to blaming Dmitri Boleslavovich. So perhaps it was truer to say that all his anxieties were redoubled at that moment. How many times had he nodded agreement to those gravely encouraging words: ‘You must be the man in the family now.’ They had freighted him with an expectation and a sense of duty he was ill equipped to bear. And his health had always been delicate: he was all too familiar with the doctor’s palpating hands, the tapping and listening, the probe, the knife, the sanatorium. He kept waiting for this promised manliness to develop in him. But he was, he knew, easily distracted; also, wilful rather than continuingly assertive. Hence his failure to set up house with Jurgensen.

His mother was an inflexible woman, both by temperament and necessity. She had protected him, worked for him, loaded all her hopes onto him. Of course he loved her – how could he not? – but there were … difficulties. The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading. His father had always avoided difficulties, had cultivated humour and indirection in the face of both his life and his wife. And so the son, though he knew himself more resolute than Dmitri Boleslavovich, rarely challenged his mother’s authority.

But he knew that she used to read his diary. So he would deliberately write into it, for a date a few weeks ahead, ‘Suicide’. Or, sometimes, ‘Marriage’.

She had her own threats too. Whenever he tried to leave home, Sofya Vasilyevna would say to others, but in his presence, ‘My son will first have to step over my corpse.’

They were neither of them sure how much the other meant it.

He had been backstage at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire, feeling chastened and sorry for himself. He was still a student, and the first public performance of his music in Moscow had not gone well: the audience had clearly preferred Shebalin’s work. Then a man in military uniform appeared at his side with consoling words: and so his friendship with Marshal Tukhachevsky had begun. The Marshal acted as his patron, organising financial support for him from the military commander of the Leningrad District. He had been helpful and true. Most recently, he had told everyone he knew that
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
was in his opinion the first classic Soviet opera.

Only once so far had he failed. Tukhachevsky was convinced that a move to Moscow was the best way to speed his protégé’s career, and promised to arrange the transfer. Sofya Vasilyevna had naturally been against it: her son was too fragile, too delicate. Who would ensure he drank his milk and ate his porridge if his mother was not seeing to it? Tukhachevsky had the power, the influence, the financial resources; but Sofya Vasilyevna still held the key to his soul. And so he had remained in Leningrad.

Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him. Or a part of the world, anyway – enough to sustain him for life. Understanding the piano, and music, had come easily – at least, compared to understanding other things. And he had worked hard because it felt easy to work hard. And so, there was no escaping this destiny either. And as the years passed, it seemed all the more miraculous because it gave him a way of supporting his mother and sisters. He was not a conventional man, and theirs had not been a conventional household, but still. Sometimes, after a successful concert, when he had received applause and money, he felt almost capable of becoming that elusive thing, the man in the family. Though at other times, even after he had left home, married and fathered a child, he could still feel like a lost boy.

Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their
Pravda
and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?

Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as ‘formalism’.

Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was ‘straying from the main road of Soviet art’, and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot.

Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.

At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening
Pravda
with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance:
MUDDLE INSTEAD OF MUSIC
. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation,
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere – from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district’s official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners.

All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clear-headedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before,
Pravda
had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was ‘non-political and confusing’, and because it ‘tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music’.

Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music ‘quacks and grunts and growls’; how its ‘nervous, convulsive and spasmodic’ nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with ‘shrieking’. The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the ‘effete’, who had lost all ‘wholesome taste’ for music, preferring ‘a confused stream of sound’. As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’.

But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced ‘Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science’. In case it needed spelling out – and it always did – Leftism was contrasted with ‘real art, real science and real literature’.

‘Those that have ears will hear,’ he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. ‘The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.’ That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. ‘The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.’ That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.’ That was enough to take away his life.

But still, he was young, confident in his talent, and highly successful until three days ago. And if he was no politician, either by temperament or aptitude, there were people he could turn to. So in Moscow he first addressed himself to Platon Kerzhentsev, President of the Committee for Cultural Affairs. He began by explaining the plan of response he had worked out on the train. He would write a defence of the opera, an argued rebuttal of the criticism, and submit the article to
Pravda
. For instance … But Kerzhentsev, civilised and courteous though he was, would not even hear him out. What they were dealing with here was not a bad review, signed by a critic whose opinion might vary according to the day of the week or the state of his digestion. This was a
Pravda
editorial: not some fleeting judgement which might be appealed against, but a policy statement from the highest level. Holy writ, in other words. The only possible course of action open to Dmitri Dmitrievich was to make a public apology, recant his errors, and explain that while composing his opera he had been led astray by the foolish excesses of youth. Beyond this, he should announce an intention of immersing himself forthwith in the folk music of the Soviet Union, which would help redirect him towards all that was authentic, popular and melodious. According to Kerzhentsev, this was the only way he might achieve an eventual return to favour.