Why indeed? For in those days, thanks to Comrade Stalin, Soviet music had become as wide and stable as the treads of a T-34 tank! We felt ourselves to be impelled by the noble Soviet goal of rising above all prior cultural stages, of planning culture. There were only a few deviationists left. Well, actually, far too many of the leading composers were deviationists. And so now our new propaganda organ Culture and Life began to attack a certain D. D. Shostakovich. By 1948 he was being accused once more of formalistic and anti-democratic tendencies.
The Central Committee of the Communist Party singled out him and others as aliens. Now they will start sawing up boxes for firewood again. He instantly lost his position in the Composers’ Union. When the director called him into his office to inform him of this new promotion, Shostakovich thanked the man, looking far away. He had to clean out his desk right away and go, to avoid contaminating the others. And the way my heart beats, that lurch, almost baroque, if I represented it as a, a, a, bass element then I could put it in my next opus. No, they didn’t exactly call him music’s Kandinsky anymore! Did Elena feel unclean when they called her in to expel her from the Komsomol? I never asked her about that, because… And when they took her off in a Black Maria, how vile did she feel then? I… There had once been a poster of D. D. Shostakovich in a copper helmet, leading the fire-watch on the Conservatory roof. That poster had been everywhere in Leningrad! Nina kept a copy to save for the children when they were older. If he ever found it, he’d, you know, wipe his asshole with it. Back in ’41, Glikman’s brother Gavriil had opined that the helmet suited him excellently. It went well with his classic face. (This individual, by the way, was another acolyte. When he received his call-up notice, he spent his last free moments at the Academy of Sculpture, carving a bust of Shostakovich out of white alabaster. Then off he went to artillery school.) Evidently our Great Composer, you know, a certain S_____-, had once again decided to make life a battuta: LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES; LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL. Why be surprised? Elena had taught him the motto she’d learned in the Pioneers: Always ready. He used to whisper that into her ear, right before they, you know. She’d always giggled. My underwear’s packed. Come and take me away, you bastards. Or worse yet, march me off to watch Roman Karmen’s latest horror. What is it now? It’ll come to me. Oh, I know: “Song of the Kolkhoz Fields!” What a… Should I compose a “Song of the Forests” or a “Song of the Factories”? Then they can all…
In February, much of his work, including that invidious Eighth Symphony, was banned by the organ Glavretkom—a necessary policy, with which no true Communist can argue. E. A. Mravinsky, who’d conducted the premiere of the Fifth a decade ago, under equally foreboding circumstances, had raised the score above his head then, at considerable risk to himself. Now the Fifth was to be outlawed altogether. Mravinsky conducted the final performance, kissed the score, then raised it high…
After all, what should this Shostakovich have expected? Refusing to participate in our collective struggle during the war years, he’d removed himself from the Leningrad front.
There was a broad, low snowy mound in the middle of Theater Square. Naked earth glistened darkly in the middle. The mound resembled the areola of a barely pubescent girl. He paced and paced around it, in that intersection of paths bordered by fences and benches. Beyond the fences lay snowy grass. He stopped. He gazed between the pillars of the Bolshoi Theater, remembering that evening a quarter-century ago now when he’d come rushing from the train station, rightly trusting to the curving, glowing tram to preserve his legendary punctuality. He’d had the score of “Lady Macbeth” in his briefcase, in case he might be expected to present it to Comrade Stalin. And then the crowds had come in, the curtain had gone up, and…
He trudged round and round the dirt.
In April, summoned to the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers to receive further instruction regarding his errors, Shostakovich, unable to further imperil Nina and the children, why did I ever, you know, rose to approach the lectern. His face was more squarish than it used to be. He no longer gazed shyly down at his adorers’ feet; instead, he stared levelly through his condemners. He’d cropped his hair a trifle. His mouth was tighter and firmer. Even during the “Lady Macbeth” affair he’d managed to entrench himself out of reach of this special humiliation. But back then there were still Old Bolsheviks to vivisect. Now that Comrade Stalin had won the game, even white pawns such as Shostakovich had to paint themselves black, because the year after “Lady Macbeth,” yes, in ’37 it certainly was, the composer N. S. Zhelayev had been arrested for, for, what’s the difference. He never came back, did he? And Elena had already had her little, how should I put it, experience. Thanks to what she’d whispered in his ear, he knew the pitch of a hammer striking a rail on an Arctic winter morning—prison camp reveille. That would be preserved in Opus 110. And what can I glean for my opus now? What’s the meaning of, of my so-called, you know; oh, it’s funny, really; it’s crazy; I want to laugh because it feels just the same as receiving a Stalin Prize! Stagefright, you know, and all that. Should I have worn my Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, or would they have called that a provocation? Everything’s a provocation. And the worst of it is… Galina must be praying for me; that’s something she would do. If they take me away I could see her jumping out the window, and then I’d… And Elena must know about this from the newspaper. Elena, you’re lucky that you didn’t marry me. Ninusha agreed about that! He had to do this, for, for her and for the children, after which they’d never talk about it again. When he remembered how Meyerhold had disappeared—my God! The man was never anything but a theater manager! —and how his wife Zinaida had been found with her eyes cut out, why can’t I stop thinking about that year after year?
For Mravinksy’s grand gesture, as for the other one back in ’38, he felt no gratitude, no, no, even gratitude he must dissimulate! Impossible to say what tune the “organs” might play now! And that impossibility haunted him. Every night his terror broke through his sleep.
Yesterday Nina had begged him to apply for membership in the Party. He’d replied (it was night time, and of course their quarrel took place in hideous whispers): I, I, I’ll go there and shit all over myself, but I’ll never do that, never, not even if they take us all away! I won’t join the Nazi Party, either!
Gripping the podium with both hands, he stared into the first face he saw, a face as smug as some Stakhanovite cement works wristwatch-winner, exemplar of overweening productivity. The face bared its teeth at him quite suddenly, in scherzo-like aggression.