The Noise of Time

  And so he and Nina met, and they became lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her husband, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a day for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so failed to turn up and ran away and hid, but still they persevered and a few months later they married, and then Nina took a lover, and they decided their problems were such that they should separate and divorce, and then he took a lover, and they separated and put in the papers for a divorce, but by the time the divorce came through they realised they had made a mistake and so six weeks after the divorce they remarried, but still they had not resolved their troubles. And in the middle of it all he wrote to his lover Yelena, ‘I am very weak-willed and do not know if I will be able to achieve happiness.’

  And then Nita fell pregnant, and everything of necessity stabilised. Except that, with Nita into her fourth month, the leap year of 1936 began, and on its twenty-sixth day Stalin decided to go to the opera.

  The first thing he had done after reading the Pravda editorial was to telegraph Glikman. He asked his friend to go to the Central Leningrad Post Office and open a subscription to receive all the relevant press cuttings. Glikman would bring them round to his apartment each day, and they would read them through together. He bought a large scrapbook and pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ onto the first page. Glikman thought this unduly masochistic, but he had said, ‘It has to be there, it has to be there.’ Then he pasted in every new article as it appeared. He had never bothered keeping reviews before; but this was different. Now they were not just reviewing his music, but editorialising about his existence.

  He noted how critics who had consistently praised Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk over the past two years suddenly found no merit at all in it. Some candidly admitted their own previous errors, explaining that the Pravda article had made the scales fall from their eyes. How greatly they had been duped by the music and its composer! At last they saw what a danger formalism and cosmopolitanism and Leftism presented to the true nature of Russian music! He also noted which musicians now made public statements against his work, and which friends and acquaintances chose to distance themselves from him. With equal apparent calm he read the letters which came in from ordinary members of the public, most of whom just happened to know his private address. Many of them advised him that his ass’s ears should be chopped off, along with his head. And then the phrase from which there was no recovery began to appear in the newspapers, inserted into the most normal sentence. For instance: ‘Today there is to be held a concert of works by the enemy of the people Shostakovich.’ Such words were never used by accident, or without approval from the highest level.

  Why, he wondered, had Power now turned its attention to music, and to him? Power had always been more interested in the word than the note: writers, not composers, had been proclaimed the engineers of human souls. Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda, composers on page three. Two pages apart. And yet it was not nothing: it could make the difference between death and life.

  The engineers of human souls: a chilly, mechanistic phrase. And yet … what was the artist’s business with, if not the human soul? Unless an artist wanted to be merely decorative, or merely a lapdog of the rich and powerful. He himself had always been anti-aristocratic, in feeling, politics, artistic principle. In that optimistic time – really so very few years ago – when the future of the whole country, if not of humanity itself, was being remade, it had seemed as if all the arts might finally come together in one glorious joint project. Music and literature and theatre and film and architecture and ballet and photography would form a dynamic partnership, not just reflecting society or criticising it or satirising it, but making it. Artists, of their own free will, and without any political direction, would help their fellow human souls develop and flourish.

  Why not? It was the artist’s oldest dream. Or, as he now thought, the artist’s oldest fantasy. Because the political bureaucrats had soon arrived to take control of the project, to leach out of it the freedom and imagination and complication and nuance without which the arts grew stultified. ‘The engineers of human souls.’ There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be engineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn’t show your face …

  And the second problem with engineering human souls was more basic. It was this: who engineers the engineers?

  He remembered an open-air concert at a park in Kharkov. His First Symphony had set all the neighbourhood dogs barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.

  He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes, as his mind skittered in the small hours, he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.

  He forced his mind across to a different composer with a different travelling case. Prokofiev had left Russia for the West shortly after the Revolution; he returned for the first time in 1927. He was a sophisticated man, Sergei Sergeyevich, with expensive tastes. Also a Christian Scientist – not that this was relevant to the story. The customs officers at the Soviet border were not sophisticated; further, their minds were filled with notions of sabotage and spies and counter-revolution. They opened Prokofive’s suitcase and found on the top an item which baffled them: a pair of pyjamas. They unfolded them, held them up, turned them this way and that, looking at one another in astonishment. Perhaps Sergei Sergeyevich was embarrassed. At any rate, he left the explaining to his wife. But Ptashka, after their years in exile, had forgotten the Russian word for night-blouse. The problem was eventually resolved by dumbshow, and the couple were allowed through. But somehow, the incident was entirely typical of Prokofiev.

  His scrapbook. What kind of a man buys a scrapbook and then fills it with insulting articles about himself? A madman? An ironist? A Russian? He thought of Gogol, standing in front of a mirror and from time to time calling out his own name, in a tone of revulsion and alienation. This did not seem to him the act of a madman.

  His official status was that of a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’. Stalin liked to say that the finest quality of the Bolshevik was modesty. Yes, and Russia was the homeland of elephants.

  When Galina was born, he and Nita used to joke about christening her Sumburina. It meant Little Muddle. Muddlikins. It would have been an act of ironic bravado. No, of suicidal folly.

  Tukhachevsky’s letter to Stalin received no answer. Dmitri Dmitrievich himself did not follow the advice of Platon Kerzhentsev. He made no public statement, no apology for the excesses of youth, no recantation; though he withdrew his Fourth Symphony, which to those without ears to hear would assuredly sound like a medley of quacks and grunts and growls. Meanwhile, all his operas and ballets were removed from the repertoire. His career had simply stopped.

  And then, in the spring of 1937, he had his First Conversation with Power. Of course, he had talked to Power before, or Power had talked to him: officials, bureaucrats, politicians, coming with suggestions, proposals, ultimata. Power had talked to him through newspapers, publicly, and had whispered in his ear, privately. Recently, Power had humiliated him, taken away his livelihood, ordered him to repent. Power had told him how it wanted him to work, how it wanted him to live. Now it was hinting that perhaps, on consideration, it might not want him to live any more. Power had decided to have a face-to-face with him. Power’
s name was Zakrevsky, and Power, as it expressed itself to people like him in Leningrad, resided in the Big House. Many who went into the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt never emerged again.

  He had been given an appointment for a Saturday morning. He maintained to family and friends that it was doubtless all a formality, perhaps an automatic consequence of the continuing articles against him in Pravda. He barely believed this himself, and doubted they did. Not many were summoned to the Big House to discuss musical theory. He was, of course, punctual. And Power was at first correct and polite. Zakrevsky asked about his work, how his professional affairs were proceeding, what he intended to compose next. In reply, he mentioned, almost as a reflex, that he was preparing a symphony on the subject of Lenin – which might conceivably have been the case. He then thought it sensible to refer to the press campaign against him, and was encouraged by the interrogator’s almost perfunctory dismissal of such matters. Next he was asked about his friends, and whom he saw on a regular basis. He did not know how to answer such questions. Zakrevsky helped him along.

  ‘You are, I understand, acquainted with Marshal Tukhachevsky?’

  ‘Yes, I know him.’

  ‘Tell me about how you made his acquaintance.’

  He recalled the meeting backstage at the Small Hall in Moscow. He explained that the Marshal was a well-known music lover who had attended many of his concerts, who played the violin, and even made violins as a hobby. The Marshal had invited him to his apartment; they had even played music together. He was a good amateur violinist. Did he mean ‘good’? Capable, certainly. And, yes, capable of improvement.

  But Zakrevsky was uninterested in how far the Marshal’s fingering and bow technique had progressed.

  ‘You went to his home on many occasions?’

  ‘From time to time, yes.’

  ‘From time to time over a period of how many years? Eight, nine, ten?’

  ‘Yes, that is probably the case.’

  ‘So, let us say, four or five visits a year? Forty or fifty in total?’

  ‘Fewer, I would say. I have never counted. But fewer.’

  ‘But you are an intimate friend of Marshal Tukhachevsky?’

  He paused for thought. ‘No, not an intimate friend, but a good friend.’

  He did not mention the Marshal arranging financial support for him; advising him; writing to Stalin on his behalf. Either Zakrevsky would know this, or he wouldn’t.

  ‘And who else was present at these forty or fifty occasions at the home of your good friend?’

  ‘Not so many. Only members of the family.’

  ‘Only members of the family?’ The interrogator’s tone was rightly sceptical.

  ‘And musicians. And musicologists.’

  ‘Any politicians there, by any chance?’

  ‘No, no politicians.’

  ‘You are quite sure about that?’

  ‘Well, you see, they were sometimes rather crowded gatherings. And I did not exactly … In point of fact, I was often playing the piano …’

  ‘And what did you talk about?’

  ‘About music.’

  ‘And politics.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come, come, how could anyone fail to talk about politics with Marshal Tukhachevsky of all people?’

  ‘He was, shall we say, off duty. Among friends and musicians.’

  ‘And were there any other off-duty politicians present?’

  ‘No, never. There was never any talk of politics in my presence.’

  The interrogator looked at him for a long while. Then came a change of voice, as if to prepare him for the seriousness and menace of his position.

  ‘Now, I think you should try to shake your memory. It cannot be that you were at the home of Marshal Tukhachevsky, in your capacity as a “good friend” as you put it, on a regular basis over the last ten years and that you did not talk about politics. For instance, the plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin. What did you hear about that?’

  At which point, he knew that he was a dead man. ‘And yet another’s hour is near at hand’ – and this time it was his. He reiterated, as plainly as he could, that there had never been any talk of politics at Marshal Tukhachevsky’s; they were purely musical evenings; matters of state were left at the door with hats and coats. He was not sure if this was the best phrase. But Zakrevsky was barely listening.

  ‘Then I suggest you think a little harder,’ the interrogator told him. ‘Some of the other guests have verified the plot already.’

  He realised that Tukhachevsky must have been arrested, that the Marshal’s career was over, and his life as well; that the investigation was just beginning, and that all those around the Marshal would soon vanish from the face of the earth. His own innocence was irrelevant. The truth of his answers was irrelevant. What had been decided had been decided. And if they needed to show that the conspiracy which they had either just discovered or just invented was so perniciously widespread that even the country’s most famous – if recently disgraced – composer was involved, then that was what they would show. Which explained the matter-of-factness in Zakrevsky’s tone as he brought the interview to a close.

  ‘Very well. Today is Saturday. It is twelve o’clock now, and you can go. But I will only give you forty-eight hours. On Monday at twelve o’clock you will without fail remember everything. You must recall every detail of all the discussions regarding the plot against Comrade Stalin, of which you were one of the chief witnesses.’

  He was a dead man. He told Nita all that had been said, and he saw beneath her reassurances that she agreed he was a dead man. He knew he must protect those closest around him, and to do so needed to be calm, but could only be frantic. He burnt anything that might be incriminating – except that once you had been labelled an enemy of the people and the associate of a known assassin, everything around you became incriminating. He might as well burn the whole apartment. He feared for Nita, for his mother, for Galya, for anyone who had ever entered or left his apartment.

  ‘There is no escaping one’s destiny.’ And so, he would be dead at thirty. Older than Pergolesi, true, but younger even than Schubert. And Pushkin himself, for that matter. His name and his music would be obliterated. Not only would he not exist, he would never have existed. He had been a mistake, swiftly corrected; a face in a photograph that went missing the next time that photograph was printed. And even if, at some point in the future, he was disinterred, what would they find? Four symphonies, one piano concerto, some orchestral suites, two pieces for string quartet but not a single finished quartet, some piano music, a cello sonata, two operas, some film and ballet music. He would be remembered by what? The opera which had brought him disgrace, the symphony he had wisely withdrawn? Perhaps his First Symphony would make the cheerful prelude to concerts of mature works by composers lucky enough to outlive him.

  But even this was false comfort, he realised. What he himself thought was irrelevant. The future would decide what the future would decide. For instance, that his music was quite unimportant. That he might have come to something as a composer if he had not, through vanity, involved himself in a treasonous plot against the head of state. Who could tell what the future would believe? We expect too much of the future – hoping that it will quarrel with the present. And who could tell what shadow his death would cast on his family. He imagined Galya emerging at sixteen from her Siberian orphanage, believing that her parents had heartlessly abandoned her, unaware that her father had written even a single note of music.

  When the threats against him had first begun, he told friends: ‘Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with a pen in my mouth.’ They had been words of defiance intended to keep up everyone’s spirits, his own included. But they did not want to cut off his hands, his small, ‘non-pianistic’ hands. They might want to torture him, and he would agree to everything they said immediately, as he had no capacity for bearing pain. Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of t
hem. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Yes, I was there at the time in the Marshal’s apartment; Yes I heard him say whatever you suggest he might have said; Yes this general and that politician were involved in the plot, I saw and heard it for myself. But there would be no melodramatic cutting-off of his hands, just a businesslike bullet to the back of the head.

  Those words of his had been at best a foolish boast, at worst a mere figure of speech. And Power had no interest in figures of speech. Power knew only facts, and its language consisted of phrases and euphemisms designed either to publicise or to conceal those facts. There were no composers writing with a pen between their teeth in Stalin’s Russia. From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.

  How recently he had sensed within him youth’s indestructibility. More than that – its incorruptibility. And beyond that, beneath it all, a conviction of the rightness and truth of whatever talent he had, and whatever music he had written. All this was not in any way undermined. It was just, now, completely irrelevant.

  On the Saturday night, and again on the Sunday night, he drank himself to sleep. It was not a complicated matter. He had a light head, and a couple of glasses of vodka would often make him need to lie down. This weakness was also an advantage. Drink, and then rest, while others carried on drinking. This left you fresher the next morning, better able to work.

  Anapa had been famous as a centre of the Grape Cure. He had once joked to Tanya that he preferred the Vodka Cure. And so, now, on perhaps the last two nights of his life, he took the cure.

  On that Monday morning he kissed Nita, held Galya one last time, and caught the bus to the dismal grey building on Liteiny Prospekt. He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual. He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all. At the Big House he presented himself to the guard at reception. The soldier looked through his roster but could not find the name. He was asked to repeat it. He did so. The soldier went down the list again.