The Noise of Time

  But Dmitri Dmitrievich, you are being pessimistic. Music is immortal, music will always last and always be needed, music can say anything, music … and so on. He stopped his ears while they explained to him the nature of his own art. He applauded their idealism. And yes, music might be immortal, but composers alas are not. They are easily silenced, and even more easily killed. As for the accusation of pessimism – this was hardly the first time it had been voiced. And they would protest: No, no, you do not understand, we are just trying to help. So the next time they came, from their safe, rich lands, they would bring him vast batches of ready-printed manuscript paper.

  In the war, on those slow, typhus-ridden trains between Kuibyshev and Moscow, he had worn amulets of garlic round his wrists and neck; they had helped him survive. But now he needed to wear them permanently: not against typhus, but against Power, against enemies, against hypocrites, and even against well-meaning friends.

  He admired those who stood up and spoke truth to Power. He admired their bravery and their moral integrity. And sometimes he envied them; but it was complicated, because part of what he envied them was their death, their being put out of the agony of living. As he had stood waiting for the lift doors to open on the fifth floor of Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street, terror was mixed with the pulsing desire to be taken away. He too had felt the vanity of transitory courage.

  But these heroes, these martyrs, whose death often gave a double satisfaction – to the tyrant who ordered it, and to watching nations who wished to sympathise and yet feel superior – they did not die alone. Many around them would be destroyed as a result of their heroism. And therefore it was not simple, even when it was clear.

  And of course, the intransigent logic ran in the opposite direction as well. If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption.

  It had been a betrayal. He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life.

  When they reached Iceland, the plane had broken down, and they waited two days for a replacement. Then bad weather prevented them flying on to Frankfurt, so they diverted to Stockholm instead. Swedish musicians were delighted by the unscheduled descent of their distinguished colleague. Though when he was invited to name his favourite Swedish composers, he felt like a boy in short trousers – or like that girl student ignorant of whom art belonged to. He was about to cite Svendsen when he remembered that Svendsen was Norwegian. Still, the Swedes were too civilised to take offence, and the next morning he found in his hotel room a large parcel of records by local composers.

  Not long after his return to Moscow, an article appeared under his name in the magazine New World. Interested to find out what he was supposed to think, he read of the congress’s huge success, and of the State Department’s furious decision to cut short the Soviet delegation’s stay. ‘On the way home I thought much about this,’ he read of himself. ‘Yes, the rulers of Washington fear our literature, our music, our speeches on peace – fear them because truth in any form hinders them from organising diversions against peace.’

  ‘Life is not a walk across a field’: it was also the last line of Pasternak’s poem about Hamlet. And the previous line: ‘I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood.’

  Three: In the Car

  ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time of all.

  The worst time was not the same as the most dangerous time.

  Because the most dangerous time was not the time when you were most in danger.

  This was something he hadn’t understood before.

  He sat in his chauffeured car while the landscape bumped and drifted past. He asked himself a question. It went like this:

  Lenin found music depressing.

  Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music.

  Khrushchev despised music.

  Which is the worst for a composer?

  To some questions, there were no answers. Or at least, the questions stop when you die. Death cures the hunchback, as Khrushchev liked to say. He was not born one, but perhaps he had become one, morally, spiritually. A questioning hunchback. And perhaps death cures the questions as well as the questioner. And tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

  When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Dmitri Dmitrievich and a group of schoolfellows had rushed there to greet the returning hero. It was a story he had told many times. However, since he had been a delicate, protected child, he might not have been allowed to go off just like that. It was more plausible that his Old Bolshevik uncle, Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, would have accompanied him to the station. He had told this version as well, many times. Both accounts helped burnish his revolutionary credentials. Ten-year-old Mitya at the Finland Station, inspired by the Great Leader! That image had not been a hindrance to his early career. But there was a third possibility: that he had not seen Lenin at all, and been nowhere near the station. He might just have adopted a schoolfellow’s report of the event as his own. These days, he no longer knew which version to trust. Had he really, truly, been at the Finland Station? Well, he lies like an eyewitness, as the saying goes.

  He lit another forbidden cigarette and stared at the chauffeur’s ear. That, at least, was something solid and true: the chauffeur had an ear. And, no doubt, one on the other side, even though he couldn’t see it. So it was an ear which existed only in his memory – or, more exactly, his imagination – until such time as he saw it again. Deliberately, he leant across until the wing and lobe of the other ear came into view. Another question solved, for the moment.

  When he was little, his hero had been Nansen of the North. When he was grown up, the mere feel of snow beneath a pair of skis made him frightened, and his greatest act of exploration was to set off at Nita’s request for the next village in search of cucumbers. Now that he was an old man, he was chauffeured around Moscow, usually by Irina, but sometimes by an official driver. He had become a Nansen of the Suburbs.

  On his bedside table, always: a postcard of Titian’s The Tribute Money.

  Chekhov said that you should write everything – except denunciations.

  Poor Anatoli Bashashkin. Denounced as Tito’s stooge.

  Akhmatova said that under Khrushchev, Power had become vegetarian. Maybe so; though you could just as easily kill someone by stuffing vegetables down their throat as by the traditional methods of the old meat-eating days.

  He had returned from New York and composed The Song of the Forests, to an enormous, windy text by Dolmatovsky. Its theme was the regeneration of the steppes, and how Stalin, the Leader and Teacher, the Friend of Children, the Great Helmsman, the Great Father of the Nation, and the Great Railway Engineer, was now also the Great Gardener. ‘Let us clothe the Motherland in forests!’ – an injunction Dolmatovsky repeated ten or a dozen times. Under Stalin, the oratorio insisted, even apple trees grew more courageously, fighting off the frosts just as the Red Army had fought off the Nazis. The work’s thunderous banality had ensured its immediate success. It helped him win his fourth Stalin Prize: 100,000 roubles, and a dacha. He had paid Caesar, and Caesar had not been ungrateful in return. In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times. He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals: in 1946, 1956 and 1966. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.

  Perhaps courage was like beauty. A beautiful woman grows old: she sees only what has gone; others see only what remains. Some congratulated him on his endurance, his refusal to submit, the solid core beneath the hysterical surface. He saw only what was gone.

  Stalin himself was long gone. The Great Gardener had gone to tend the grass in the Elysian Fields, and strengthen the morale of the apple trees there.

  The red roses on
Nita’s grave, strewn all over. Every time he visited. And not sent by him.

  Glikman had told him a story about Louis XIV. The Sun King had been as absolute a ruler as Stalin ever was. Yet he was always willing to give artists their proper due; to acknowledge their secret magic. One such was the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. And Louis XIV, in front of the entire court at Versailles, had announced, as if it were an everyday truth, ‘Monsieur Despréaux has a better understanding of poetry than I do.’ No doubt there was sycophantically disbelieving laughter from those who, in private and public, assured the great king that his understanding of poetry – and music, and painting, and architecture – was unmatched across the globe and down the centuries. And perhaps there was a tactical, diplomatic modesty about the remark in the first place. But still, it had been made.

  Stalin, however, had so many advantages over that old king. His profound grasp of Marxist–Leninist theory, his intuitive understanding of the People, his love of folk music, his ability to sniff out formalist plots … Oh, enough, enough. He would make his own ears bleed.

  But even the Great Gardener in his guise as the Great Musicologist had been unable to sniff out the location of the Red Beethoven. Davidenko had disappointed – not least by dying in his mid-thirties. And the Red Beethoven never did turn up.

  He liked to tell the story of Tinyakov. A handsome man, a good poet. He lived in Petersburg and wrote about love and flowers and other lofty subjects. Then the Revolution came, and soon he was Tinyakov the poet of Leningrad, who wrote not about love and flowers, but about how hungry he was. And after a while things got so bad that he would stand on a street corner with a placard round his neck reading POET. And since Russians valued their poets, passers-by used to give him money. Tinyakov liked to claim that he had earned far more money from begging than he ever did from his verses, and so was able each evening to wind up in a fancy restaurant.

  Was that last detail true? He wondered. But poets were allowed exaggeration. As for himself, he did not need a placard – he had three Orders of Lenin and six Stalin Prizes round his neck and ate in the restaurant of the Union of Composers.

  One man, sly and swarthy, with a dangling ruby earring, grips a coin between thumb and forefinger. He shows it to a second, paler man, who does not touch it, but instead looks the first man straight in the eye.

  There had been that strange time when Power, having decided that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was a salvageable case, had tried a new tactic with him. Instead of waiting for the end result – a finished composition which would then have to be examined by politico-musicological experts before being approved or condemned – the Party, in its wisdom, decided instead to begin at the beginning: with the state of his ideological soul. Thoughtfully, generously, the Union of Composers appointed a tutor, Comrade Troshin, a grave and elderly sociologist, to help him understand the principles of Marxism–Leninism – to help him reforge himself. He was sent a reading list, which consisted entirely of works by Comrade Stalin, such as Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Troshin then came to the apartment and explained his function. He was there because, alas, even distinguished composers were capable of serious error, as had been publicly aired in recent years. To avoid repetition of such errors, Dmitri Dmitrievich’s level of political, economic and ideological understanding must be raised. The composer received his uninvited guest’s statement of intent with due seriousness, while expressing his regret that work on a new symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin had so far prevented him from reading all of the library which had been so kindly delivered.

  Comrade Troshin looked round the composer’s study. He was neither a devious nor a threatening man, just one of those diligent, unquestioning functionaries that every regime throws up.

  ‘And this is where you work.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  The tutor stood up, made a step or two in each direction, and praised the room’s general arrangement. Then, with an apologetic smile, he observed:

  ‘But there is one thing missing in the study of a distinguished Soviet composer.’

  The distinguished Soviet composer in turn stood up, looked around the walls and bookcases he knew so well, and shook his head with equal apology, as if embarrassed to be failing at his tutor’s first question.

  ‘There is no portrait on your walls of Comrade Stalin.’

  A daunting silence ensued. The composer lit a cigarette and paced the room, as if searching for the cause of this hideous solecism, or as if he might find the necessary icon beneath this cushion, that rug. Finally, he assured Troshin that he would take immediate steps to procure the best available picture of the Great Leader.

  ‘Well, that’s fine, then,’ replied Troshin. ‘Now let’s get down to business.’

  He was required, from time to time, to make a précis of Stalin’s turgid wisdom. Happily, Glikman offered to do the job for him, and the composer’s patriotic insights into the Great Gardener’s oeuvre were posted to him on a regular basis from Leningrad. After a while, other key texts were added to the curriculum: for instance, G. M. Malenkov’s ‘The Characteristics of Creativity in Art’, a reprint of his speech to the 19th Party Congress.

  Troshin’s presence in his life, earnest and persistent, was received on his part with polite evasiveness and secret mockery. They played their roles as instructor and pupil with straight faces; no doubt, Troshin did not have another face to offer. He believed all too evidently in the virtuous purpose of his task, and the composer treated him civilly, recognising that these unwanted visits amounted to a kind of protection. And yet each of them was aware that their charade might have serious consequences.

  In that time, there were two phrases – one a question and one a statement – which would cause the sweat to pour and strong men to shit their pants. The question was: ‘Does Stalin know?’ The statement, even more alarming, was: ‘Stalin knows.’ And since Stalin was accorded supernatural powers – he never made a mistake, he commanded everything and was everywhere – the mere terrestrial beings under his power felt, or imagined, his eye being constantly on them. So what if Comrade Troshin failed to teach the precepts of Karlo-Marlo and their descendants in a satisfactory way? What if his pupil, outwardly solemn but inwardly whimsical, failed to learn? What then for the Troshins of this world? They both knew the answer. If the tutor offered protection to his pupil, the pupil had a certain responsibility towards his tutor.

  But there was a third phrase, whispered about him as it had been whispered about others – Pasternak, for example: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’ Sometimes this statement was a fact, sometimes a wild theory or envious supposition. Why had he survived being a protégé of the traitor Tukhachevsky? Why had he survived those words, ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly’? Why had he survived being named an enemy of the people by the newspapers? Why had Zakrevsky disappeared between a Saturday and a Monday? Why had he been spared when so many around him had been arrested, exiled, murdered, or had disappeared into a fate which might become clear only decades later? One answer would fit all those questions: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’

  If so – and he had no way of knowing, any more than those who uttered the phrase – he would be a fool to imagine that it afforded him permanent protection. Just to be noticed by Stalin was much more dangerous than an existence of anonymous obscurity. Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell. How many important cogs in the machinery of Soviet life had subsequently turned out, after some imperceptible shift of the light, to have been hindering the other cogs all along?

  The car slowed at an intersection, and then he heard the clatter of a ratchet as the chauffeur pulled on the handbrake. He remembered buying their first Pobeda. At the time, regulations insisted that the purchaser be present when the car was handed over. He still held a licence from before the war, so went to the garage by himself and took delivery of the car. Driving hom
e, he wasn’t very impressed by the Pobeda’s performance, and wondered if he’d been sold a dud. He parked, and was fiddling with the lock when a passer-by called out, ‘Hey, you with the specs, what’s wrong with your car?’ The wheels were disgorging smoke: he had driven all the way from the garage with the handbrake on. Cars didn’t seem to like him – that was the truth.

  He remembered another girl he had examined in his guise as Professor of Bolshevik Ideology at the Conservatoire. The chief examiner had left the room for a while, and he found himself in sole charge. The student was so nervous, twisting in her hand the page of questions she was expected to answer, that he had taken pity on her.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s put all those official questions to one side. Instead, I’ll ask you this: what is Revisionism?’

  It was a question even he could have answered. Revisionism was so loathsome and heretical a concept that the word itself practically had horns growing out of its head.

  The girl reflected for a while, and then answered confidently, ‘Revisionism is the highest stage in the development of Marxism–Leninism.’

  Whereupon he had smiled, and given her the best mark possible.

  When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach’s preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically.

  In 1949, when the attacks on him were still continuing, he had written his fourth string quartet. The Borodins had learnt it, and played it for the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Musical Institutions, which needed to approve any new work before it could be performed – and before the composer could be paid. Given his precarious status, he was not sanguine; but to everyone’s surprise the audition was a success, the piece authorised and money forthcoming. Soon afterwards, the story began to circulate that the Borodins had learnt to play the quartet in two different ways: authentically and strategically. The first was the way the composer had intended; whereas in the second, designed to get past musical officialdom, the players emphasised the ‘optimistic’ aspects of the piece, and its accordance with the norms of socialist art. This was held to be a perfect example of the use of irony as a defence against Power.