This is safe. The fantasy is manageable, his gift a false memory. A few decades later, the political leaders of his country would specialize in airbrushing the downfallen from history, in removing their photographic traces. Now here he is, bent over his album of memories, meticulously inserting the figure of a past companion. Paste it in, that photograph of the timid, appealing Verochka, while the lamplight rejuvenates your white hair into black shadow.
4
AT YASNAYA POLYANA
Shortly after meeting her, he had gone to stay with Tolstoy, who took him out shooting. He was put in the best hide, over which snipe habitually passed. But that day, for him, the sky remained empty. Every so often, a shot would ring out from Tolstoy’s hide; then another; then another. All the snipe were flying to Tolstoy’s gun. It seemed typical. He himself shot a single bird, which the dogs failed to find.
Tolstoy thought him ineffectual, vacillating, unmanly, a frivolous socializer and a despicable Westernizer; embraced him, loathed him, spent a week in Dijon with him, quarrelled with him, forgave him, valued him, visited him, challenged him to a duel, embraced him, scorned him. This is how Tolstoy expressed sympathy when he lay dying in France: “The news of your illness has caused me much sorrow, especially when I was assured it was serious. I realized how much I cared for you. I felt that I should be much grieved if you were to die before me.”
Tolstoy at this time despised the taste for renunciation. Later, he began railing at the lusts of the flesh and idealizing a Christian peasant simplicity. His attempts at chastity failed with comic frequency. Was he a fraud, a fake renunciator; or was it more that he lacked the skills, and his flesh declined renunciation? Three decades later he died on a railway station. His last words were not, “The bell rang, and ciao, as the Italians say.” Does the successful renunciator envy his unsuccessful counterpart? There are ex-smokers who decline the offered cigarette but say, “Blow the smoke in my direction.”
She was travelling; she was working; she was married. He asked her to send him a plaster cast of her hand. He had kissed the real thing so many times, kissed an imagined version of the real thing in almost every letter he wrote her. Now he could lay his lips on a plaster version. Is plaster nearer to flesh than air? Or did the plaster turn his love and her flesh into a memorial? There is an irony to his request: normally it is the writer whose creative hand is cast in plaster; and normally by the time this is done he is dead.
So he proceeded deeper into old age, knowing that she was—had already been—his last love. And since form was his business, did he at this time remember his first love? He was a specialist in the matter. Did he reflect that first love fixes a life for ever? Either it impels you to repeat the same kind of love and fetishizes its components; or else it is there as warning, trap, counter-example.
His own first love had taken place fifty years before. She had been a certain Princess Shakhovskaya. He was fourteen, she was in her twenties; he adored her, she treated him like a child. This puzzled him until the day he found out why. She was already his father’s mistress.
The year after he shot snipe with Tolstoy, he visited Yasnaya Polyana again. It was Sonya Tolstoy’s birthday, and the house was full of guests. He proposed that each of them should recount the happiest moment of their lives. When his own turn in his own game arrived, he announced, with an exalted air and a familiar melancholy smile: “The happiest moment of my life is, of course, the moment of love. It is the moment when you meet the eyes of the woman you love and sense that she loves you too. This has happened to me once, perhaps twice.” Tolstoy found this answer irritating.
Later, when the young people insisted upon dancing, he demonstrated what was new in Paris. He took off his jacket, stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and capered about, legs kicking, head waggling, white hair flopping, as the household clapped and cheered; he panted, capered, panted, capered, then fell over and collapsed into an armchair. It was a great success. Tolstoy wrote in his journal: “Turgenev—can-can. Sad.”
“Once, perhaps twice.” Was she the “perhaps twice”? Perhaps. In his penultimate letter, he kisses her hands. In his last letter, written in failing pencil, he does not offer kisses. He writes instead: “I do not change in my affections—and I shall keep exactly the same feeling for you until the end.”
This end came six months later. The plaster cast of her hand is now in the Theatre Museum of Saint Petersburg, the city where he had first kissed the original.
Vigilance
It all started when I poked the German. Well, he might have been Austrian—it was Mozart after all—and it didn’t really start then, but years before. Still, it’s best to give a specific date, don’t you think?
So: a Thursday in November, the Royal Festival Hall, 7:30 p.m., Mozart K595 with Andras Schiff, followed by Shostakovich 4. I remember thinking as I set off that the Shostakovich had some of the loudest passages in the history of music, and you certainly wouldn’t be able to hear anything over the top of them. But this is jumping ahead. 7:29 p.m.: the hall was full, the audience normal. The last people to arrive were strolling in from a sponsor’s pre-concert drinks downstairs. You know the sort—oh, it seems to be about half-past, but let’s just finish this glass, have a pee, then saunter upstairs and barge past half a dozen people on the way to our seats. Take your time, pal: the boss is putting up some moolah, so Maestro Haitink can always hang on a bit longer in the green room.
The Austro-German—to give him his due—had at least arrived by 7:23 p.m. He was smallish, baldish, with glasses, a sticky-up collar and red bow-tie. Not exactly evening dress; perhaps some going-out gear typical of where he came from. And he was pretty bumptious, I thought, not least because he had two women in tow, one on either side. They were all in their mid-thirties, I’d say: old enough to know better. “These are good seats,” he announced, as they found their places in front of me. J 37, 38 and 39. I was in K 37. I instantly took against him. Praising himself to his escorts for the tickets he’d bought. I suppose he could have got them from an agency, and was just relieved; but he didn’t say it like that. And why give him the benefit of the doubt?
As I say, it was a normal audience. Eighty per cent on day release from the city’s hospitals, with pulmonary wards and ear-nose-and-throat departments getting ticket priority. Book now for a better seat if you have a cough which comes in at more than ninety-five decibels. At least people don’t fart in concerts. I’ve never heard anyone fart, anyway. Have you? I expect they do. Which is partly my point: if you can suppress at one end, why not at the other? You get roughly the same amount of warning in my experience. But people don’t on the whole fart raucously in Mozart. So I suppose a few vestiges of the thin crust of civilization which prevents our descent into utter barbarism are just about holding.
The opening allegro went pretty well: a couple of sneezes, a bad case of compacted phlegm in the middle of the terrace which nearly required surgical intervention, one digital watch and a fair amount of programme turning. I sometimes think they ought to put directions for use on the cover of programmes. Like: “This is a programme. It tells you about tonight’s music. You might like to glance at it before the concert begins. Then you will know what is being played. If you leave it too late, you will cause visual distraction and a certain amount of low-level noise, you will miss some of the music, and risk annoying your neighbours, especially the man in seat K 37.” Occasionally a programme will contain a small piece of information, vaguely bordering on advice, about mobile phones, or the use of a handkerchief to cough into. But does anyone pay any heed? It’s like smokers reading the health warning on a packet of cigarettes. They take it in and they don’t take it in; at some level, they don’t believe it applies to them. It must be the same with coughers. Not that I want to sound too understanding: that way lies forgiveness. And on a point of information, how often do you actually see a muffling handkerchief come out? I was at the back of the stalls once, T 21. The Bach double concerto. My neighbour, T 20,
suddenly began rearing up as if athwart a bronco. With pelvis thrust forward, he delved frantically for his handkerchief, and managed to hook out at the same time a large bunch of keys. Distracted by their fall, he let handkerchief and sneeze go off in separate directions. Thank you very much, T 20. Then he spent half the slow movement eyeing his keys anxiously. Eventually he solved the problem by putting his foot over them and contentedly returning his gaze to the soloists. From time to time a faint metallic stir from beneath his shifting shoe added some useful grace-notes to Bach’s score.
The allegro ended, and Maestro Haitink slowly lowered his head, as if giving everyone permission to use the spitoon and talk about their Christmas shopping. J 39—the Viennese blonde, a routine programme-shuffler and hair-adjuster —found a lot to say to Mr. Sticky-Up Collar in J 38. He was nodding away in agreement about the price of pullovers or something. Maybe they were discussing Schiff’s delicacy of touch, though I would choose to doubt it. Haitink raised his head to indicate that it was time for the chat-line to go off air, lifted his stick to demand an end to coughing, then threw in that subtle, cocked-ear half-turn to indicate that he, personally, for one, was now intending to listen very carefully indeed to the pianist’s entry. The larghetto, as you probably know, begins with the unsupported piano announcing what those who had bothered to read the programme would have known to expect as a “simple, tranquil melody.” This is also the concerto in which Mozart decided to do without trumpets, clarinets and drums: in other words, we are being invited to attend to the piano even more closely. And so, with Haitink’s head staying cocked, and Schiff offering us the first few tranquil bars, J 39 remembered what she hadn’t finished saying about pullovers.
I leaned across and poked the German. Or the Austrian. I’ve nothing against foreigners, by the way. Admittedly, if he’d been a vast, burger-fed Brit in a World Cup T-shirt, I might have thought twice. And in the case of the Austro-German, I did think twice. Like this. One: you’re coming to hear music in my country, so don’t behave as if still in yours. Then two: given where you probably come from, it’s even worse to behave like this in Mozart. So I poked J 38 with a joined tripod of thumb and first two fingers. Hard. He turned instinctively, and I glared at him with finger tapping my lips. J 39 stopped chattering, J 38 looked gratifyingly guilty, and J 37 looked a bit scared. K 37—me—went back to the music. Not that I could entirely concentrate on it. I felt jubilation rising in me like a sneeze. At last I’d done it, after all these years.
When I got home, Andrew applied his usual logic in an attempt to deflate me. Perhaps my victim thought it OK to behave as he did because everyone around him was doing the same; it wasn’t unmannerly but an attempt to be mannerly—wenn in London . . . Additionally and alternatively, Andrew wanted to know, wasn’t it the case that much music of that time was composed for royal or ducal courts, and wouldn’t such patrons and their retinue have been strolling around, having a buffet supper, throwing chicken bones at the harpist, and flirting with their neighbours’ wives while half-listening to their lowly employee bash away at the spinet? But the music wasn’t composed with bad behaviour in mind, I protested. How do you know, Andrew replied: surely those composers were aware of how their music was going to be listened to, and either wrote music loud enough to cover the noise of chicken-bone-throwing and general eructation, or, more likely, tried to write tunes of such commanding beauty that even a lustful upcountry baronet would for a moment stop tampering with the exposed flesh of the apothecary’s wife? Was this not the challenge— indeed, perhaps the reason why the resultant music had lasted so long and so well? Furthermore and finally, this harmless neighbour of mine in the wing-collar was quite possibly a linear descendant of that upcountry baronet, simply behaving in the same way: he’d paid his money and was entitled to listen to as much or as little as he chose.
“In Vienna,” I said, “twenty or thirty years ago, when you went to the opera, if you uttered the slightest cough, a flunky in knee-breeches and a powdered wig would come over and give you a cough-sweet.”
“That must have distracted people even more.”
“It stopped them doing it the next time.”
“Anyway, I don’t understand why you still go to concerts.”
“For the good of my health, doctor.”
“It seems to be having the opposite effect.”
“No one’s going to stop me going to concerts,” I said. “No one.”
“We don’t talk about that,” he replied, looking away.
“I wasn’t talking about it.”
“Good.”
Andrew thinks I should stay at home with my sound system, my collection of CDs, and our tolerant neighbours who are very rarely heard clearing their throats on the other side of the party wall. Why bother going to concerts, he asks, when it only enrages you? I bother, I tell him, because when you are in a concert hall, having paid money and taken the trouble to go there, you listen more carefully. Not from what you tell me, he answers: you seem to be distracted most of the time. Well, I would pay more attention if I wasn’t being distracted. And what would you pay more attention to, as a purely theoretical question (you see how provoking Andrew can be)? I thought about this for a while, then said: the loud bits and the soft bits, actually. The loud bits, because however state-of-the-art your system, nothing can compare to the reality of a hundred or more musicians going full tilt in front of you, cramming the air with noise. And the soft bits, which is more paradoxical, because you’d think any hi-fi could reproduce them well enough. But it can’t. For instance, those opening bars of the larghetto, floating across twenty, thirty, fifty yards of space; though floating isn’t the right word, because it implies time spent travelling, and when the music is on its way towards you, all sense of time is abolished, as is space, and place, for that matter.
“So how was the Shostakovich? Loud enough to drown the bastards out?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s an interesting point. You know how it starts off with those huge climaxes? It made me realize what I meant about the loud bits. Everyone was making as much noise as possible—brass, timps, big bad drum— and you know what cut through it all? The xylophone. There was this woman bashing away and coming across clear as a bell. Now, if you’d heard that on a record you’d think it was the result of some fancy bit of engineering— spot-lighting, or whatever they call it. In the hall you knew that this was just exactly what Shostakovich intended.”
“So you had a good time?”
“But it also made me realize that it’s the pitch that counts. The piccolo cuts through in the same way. So it’s not just the cough or the sneeze and its volume, but the musical texture it’s competing with. Which means of course you can’t relax even in the loudest bits.”
“Cough-sweets and a powdered wig for you,” said Andrew. “Otherwise, you know, I think you’ll go seriously, woofingly mad.”
“Coming from you,” I replied.
He knew what I meant. Let me tell you about Andrew. We’ve lived together for twenty or more years now; we met in our late thirties. He works in the furniture department of the V & A. Cycles there every day, rain or shine; one side of London to the other. On his way he does two things: listens to books on tape with his Walkman, and keeps an eye out for firewood. I know, it doesn’t sound likely, but most days he manages to fill his basket, enough for an evening fire. So he pedals along from this one civilized place to another, listening to cassette 325 of Daniel Deronda, while constantly on the lookout for skips and fallen branches.
But that’s not all. Even though Andrew knows a lot of cut-throughs where the firewood hangs out, he spends more than enough of the journey in rush-hour traffic. And you know what motorists are like: they only look out for other motorists. Buses and lorries as well, of course; motor-cyclists occasionally; pedal-cyclists, never. And this makes Andrew hopping mad. There they are, sitting on their arses, pouring out fumes, one person to a car, a traffic-jam of environmentally abusive egoists constantly trying to swerve
into an eighteen-inch gap without first checking for the presence of cyclists. Andrew shouts at them. Andrew, my civilized friend, companion and ex-lover, Andrew, who has spent half the day bent over some exquisite piece of marquetry with a restorer, Andrew, his ears full of high-Victorian sentences, breaks off to shout,
“You fucking cunt!”
He also shouts, “I hope you get cancer!”
Or, “Drive under a fucking lorry, arse-face!”
I ask what he says to women drivers.
“Oh, I don’t call them cunts,” he replies. “ ‘You fucking bitch!’ usually seems to cover it.”
Then off he pedals, scouting for firewood and worrying about Gwendolen Harleth. He used to bang on car roofs when a driver cut him up. Bang bang bang with a sheepskin-lined glove. It must have sounded like a thunder-machine from Strauss or Henze. He also used to snap their wing-mirrors back, folding them in against the car; that used to irritate the bastards. But he’s stopped doing this; about a year ago he had a scare from a blue Mondeo which caught up with him and tipped him off the bike while the driver made various threatening suggestions. Now he just calls them fucking cunts at the top of his voice. They can’t object, because that’s what they are, and they know it.
I started taking cough-sweets to concerts. I handed them out like spot fines to offenders within my immediate reach, and to distant hackers at the interval. It wasn’t a great success, as I might have foreseen. If you give someone a wrapped sweet in the middle of a concert, you then have to listen to the sound of them taking the paper off. And if you give them one unwrapped, they’re hardly likely to just pop it into their mouths, are they?