Shostakovich cleared his throat. He said: Comrades, it’s all true. I’m—I’m a formalist alien…—Frowning uneasily, he scratched at his mop of fading hair, his face’s ageing skin unable to avoid wrinkling itself up in a thousand new grimaces. All around him he seemed to see the double grins of Nazi caps above Nazi faces. He thought to himself: the whipping rack at Buchenwald. But how could he have gone off the track? Why not just imagine himself as being one with those pallid figures of acrobats glaringly illuminated in the darkness of the Moscow Circus? Why be gratuitous? People were going to call him gratuitous anyway, because he, well. They were waiting, and not very nicely, either.
He said, straining not to explode in laughter or tears: Every time I turn on the radio and hear Klavdia Sulzhenko sing “The Blue Kerchief,” I realize the depths of my, you see, well, I mean to say, I, I, certain negative characteristics in my musical style prevented me from reconstructing myself…
Beneath the gigantic likenesses of Lenin and Stalin he confessed all his crimes, his anti-democratic, neurotic erotic tendencies. This way Nina wouldn’t have to, you know. It’s not real. Not even music is real. That’s why I reject program music, because it pretends to be real. And Galisha, darling little Galisha who had just yesterday tossed her head at him so pertly with her braids dancing across the shoulders of her flower-striped sweater; he’d been helping her with her homework when she, she, anyway, how could he have ever thought of harming his own daughter?—Why can’t I get wacky?—That’s what he’d actually used to say; he’d compared himself to Rodchenko, back in the years when, hell. And Meyerhold had said… Meyerhold never came back either. And what they did to his wife, it makes me want to… What’s that sound? That’s what the neighbors heard when they started in on her left eye. Remember it, please, for Opus 110. Then he expressed his total faith in the wisdom of the Party.
Darling Mita, you’ve united the left and right! For at the same time your equally endangered colleagues spurn you—some of them are as endangered as you, but they haven’t recanted yet—spontaneous representatives of the Soviet people threaten Nina and shatter your windows.
August was when they hanged the Fascist collaborator A. A. Vlasov. That’s how we light the way ahead with a searchlight. The way the rope creaked, can I put that in Opus 110? In September, while Comrade Stalin’s cadres began rounding up Zionist conspirators, Shostakovich was stripped of his teaching jobs at the Leningrad Conservatory and the Moscow Conservatory alike.—Give him eight grams! somebody screamed out. (That was a bullet’s weight.)—Thank you, thank you, he replied, rising from his seat. I was never here, so how can I feel humiliated? They think they’ve won a so-called “victory,” but I’m not here; I’m under the piano keys, in my, my… That’s where I want to rest. Are my lips still moving? I feel extremely… And if only she could have… In which case, it would need to be sixteen grams!—Then he walked out, blinking steadily through his glasses. Call it a down cadence; it wasn’t despair. No one dared say a word of comfort to him, certainly not his students, who that very day had been standing respectfully behind him as he played another theme for them at the piano; well, could he blame them? I’m only a, a, whatchamacallit. Of course they wanted to be progressive; they didn’t want to be eradicated. It was very…
Poor Maxim, now ten years old, found himself required to denounce his father during an examination at music school.—Smiling when he heard, Shostakovich stroked the boy’s hair.
I’m sorry, Papa. Don’t be angry. They made me do it, but I love you—
Of course, of course, laughed Shostakovich. I know you’re loyal to me. After all, dear boy, we cannot help but put ourselves at the service of our own, um, class. Now why are your socks so dirty? Come here a minute. Oh, dear, oh, my—
What were his sensations at that moment? Within Maxim’s eyes, something screamed and screamed; that was the thing that agonized him, or, to be specific, the sound (what’s that sound?); his soul knew what it ought to sound like, and it became another note of Opus 110! Well, well, and Lebedinsky informs me Akhmatova’s also had her moment of fame, in Leningradskaya Pravda. “Poetry Harmful and Alien to the People.” That’s really very… To think she carried my Seventh Symphony out of Leningrad on her lap. Poor lady, poor lady! I’d better keep my distance. Someday I’ll have to set one of her poems to music, just to kind of, you know. Glikman assures me that in “Poem Without a Hero,” the words my seventh are a reference to, to… What’s that sound? Oh, it hurts; it hurts; it hurts!—What was it like for Shostakovich, and was it the same right then, when it first exploded within his skull like a cerebral hemorrhage, as it would be twelve years later when he locked himself up in the spa town above Dresden and flicked down the notes of that very chord onto the music-paper? How can I tell you? Well, during the war years, the inborn secrecy behind his shyness, which our Revolution’s communal character and his own ideals had besieged, had actually been temporarily breached, such was the emergency. Instead of hearing only his own music, he sometimes had to listen to people, whose various sorrows and aspirations could not but affect him. In particular, he could not get away from soldiers, because nearly every man was one. There’d been a certain Red Army man in Leningrad, whom he’d met only once, and only for an instant, yet whom he could never forget, whose entire family died an instant death that first August, courtesy of a shell dispatched to their apartment under authority of Field-Marshal Ritter Wilhelm von Leeb; this soldier had been wounded shortly thereafter, and he adored his wound as if it were his child; he was proud of it; it was his, and it was all he had. A German Fascist had bayoneted him in the forearm, but he’d killed the bastard; he’d cut his soft white throat! Drunk, perhaps absent without leave, with nowhere to go, the Red Army man literally grabbed Shostakovich in the street, increasing the latter’s natural anxiety to a level approximating fortissimo because he was supposed to take his fire-warden station on the Conservatory roof in seventeen minutes; but the Red Army man, who was very tall and whose sour-sad breath and red-rimmed eyes haunted him forever, didn’t understand that at all. First he told Shostakovich how in his opinion each member of his family must have died; of course he hadn’t been there or he would have been dead, too; he’d been on the front line, which was not many blocks from here; and the activity of his imagination (Mama, you see, she likes to sit right at the window when she sews, ’cause her eyes ain’t so good for detail work now; she’s farsighted, so I figure she must’ve seen it coming; that’s what gets to me) was his organism’s way of resisting the shock; after he’d told the story over and over—and Shostakovich felt nothing toward him but a compassion which was itself an agony; perhaps he never experienced such closeness with any other soul in his life, except when he and Elena were, you know—the Red Army man rolled up his sleeve to thrust the wound, the hideous wound, which he’d refused to allow any nurse to bandage and which was accordingly infected, into Shostakovich’s face, lovingly recounting how he got it, how honored he was to carry its half healing, half putrefying scar with him forever; and he said that sometimes he kissed it and pretended that it was his dead wife’s lips; sometimes he pretended that it was a very young girl named Natalka, a girl with long black hair whom he’d loved even more than his wife but whose father, unfortunately, had been an enemy of the people (and Shostakovich was thinking: my God, oh, dear, what are you saying?); sometimes he pretended that our Motherland was this young Natalka, and that when he was kissing his wound he was kissing her; then he got nasty and started asking Shostakovich what he, an obvious stinking intellectual, had done for our Motherland; at which point Glikman helped him get away. Each note of Opus 110 would be a wound like this, a wound which the composer cherished and prepared to spitefully thrust up everybody’s ear—