Don’t say it, he said, fearing the answer. Now let’s talk about you. I fear you haven’t been composing enough—
Dmitryosha, I’d rather keep worrying about you—
His lips vibrated like a brass player’s. He finally said: Don’t throw away your efforts.
He went home, and instantly got into an argument with his wife. (Someday she too would be a skeleton.) She said that she was sick and tired of his moping about the success of “The Song of the Forest.” He didn’t see what she was driving at. He said so. She said:
Did you really not think, or do you enjoy being self-destructive? When you make a mess, you ought to sweep up after yourself.
Ninotchka, don’t be harsh, no, no, no, no, not now—
No! Stay there and listen. You look just like a cheap bourgeois in the movies; it’s almost comical. You can’t hide your secrets from me, Mitya. When you were sleeping with that slut Elena I could literally smell her on you. That cheap, catty smell of her—ugh! You’re a man who has to have affairs. Maybe I would have preferred to love somebody different, but that’s how it is, right? Well, are you going to answer me or not?
I, I don’t see what this has to do with—
Maybe the only person that an artist can be faithful to is himself. Maybe he’s got to betray everybody else. Will you kindly get that martyred look off your face? That’s just how it goes. Sometimes I think you’re not even conscious of it. A pair of dark eyes comes floating toward you, and you can’t help yourself; you follow them like a sleepwalker—
Nina, you’re killing me, that’s what you’re doing. Not that you even—
I’m not complaining. I knew what I was getting into. As soon as you married me you had to step out. That bastard tells you to zig; he even warns you in Pravda, and so you zag. All that trouble we got into over “Lady Macbeth,” you knew you were bringing it on us! Oh, I’m not saying it was anything personal—
Nina!
Nina, what? You’re a genius and all that, but you don’t know the first thing about yourself. You’re always looking for a Muse to follow, and she’s got to be a dark-eyed Muse from someplace else. Any other Soviet composer would be thrilled by the success of “The Song of the Forest,” but you—
I can see it’s no use continuing with this talk, no, no, no. I’m going round to see Lebedinsky…
Mitya, stop acting childish. You know that I love you. Hopefully you’re aware that I even respect certain things about you. I’m only the slightest bit angry with you; I’m not asking you to change your ways. After all, you’re going to sleep with whomever you sleep with.
Excuse me, but what’s the purpose of this conversation?
I don’t know. As you always say, why waste one’s efforts? And yet, when you come back all rapturous from your little Galisha, who by the way is never going to marry you, and you think that you’re hiding it from me even though she studied with you for ten bloody years, and your other little Galisha, the one you and I are raising together, knows perfectly well what’s going on, as does Maxim, and meanwhile you feel angry that I’m me and not her, so you get all strict and silent with me, why, then I guess I want to tell you what you are.
Very well then, he cried, so pale and agonized that she couldn’t decide whether to slap his face or burst out crying, what am I?
You’re a—well, well, you don’t follow the Party line, that’s for sure! My God, but you’re a free spirit, Mitya! You’re a formalist.
Dmitryosha, would you like some tea? I could make it for you very quickly. A nice, hot cup of tea—there’s comfort in it, especially on a cold dark night…
She had served in a military hospital during the war. She knew how to tend the sick even when she felt very angry.
He said to her: Can music attack evil or not?
Certainly not. All it can do is scream.
He laughed gruesomely.—You formalist, you! But still, I wonder what it all means, if there’s no, so to speak, no purpose in—
Ustvolskaya’s face wore an expression of pity, irritation and perhaps repulsion; he couldn’t make it out. She said to him: Please don’t cry anymore, Dmitryosha. You’ll suffer much less when you stop hoping for the impossible. There’s no hope for any of us, whether they shoot us or not.
But illusions don’t die all at once—
I never had any.
It’s a long process, like a toothache. And then the illusions rot and stink inside us, like—
You’ve told me all that before. Drink your tea now.
I’ve seen you hold your teacup when you compose, and I’ve seen you wrap your long white fingers around the warmth.
Whenever she had an orgasm, her mouth reminded him of a certain little round window in the Kirov Theater about which he used to have friendly feelings.
In January 1949, Comrade Stalin finally began his campaign against Jewish influences. Maybe it was only now, with the distractions of the war years more or less mastered, that he’d found the time to read Mein Kampf. In February, Galina Ustvolskaya completed her Sonata No. 2, whose dreary fetters of quarter-notes left her lover almost beside himself with gloom. In March, at that bastard’s express wish, Shostakovich was sent to New York as a member of the Soviet peace delegation. All his works had been un-banned four days before. (We’ll take care of that problem, Comrade Shostakovich.—This was exactly what Stalin had said on the telephone. Oh, me, oh, my, he’d, so to speak, authorized the operation!) And the composer, who’d forgotten nearly everything except how to be most vigilantly afraid, suddenly began to hope that if he only acted sufficiently obedient and broken, maybe his music might be performed again.
Meanwhile, what was he supposed to play? Probably not the incidental music to “Lady Macbeth”—that would be a joke! And Opus 40 would only make me sad and get Elena in trouble. What about my crowd-pleaser? But you-know-who is taking measures, so Pravda informs me, to transform the Soviet sector of shattered Nazidom into an All-German Republic subservient to the needs of, how shall I put this, history. Therefore, my Seventh Symphony might have, er, outlived its usefulness, you see. Because we need Germans again! Time to renew the, how shall I say, the Nazi-Soviet Pact! Ha, ha! Ninusha, don’t glare at me with your mouth open like that, because it makes you, um, but seriously, in these happy, happy times, wouldn’t it be better to forget about the siege of Leningrad? And Vlasov never existed, either. If only I’d composed a fluffy little trio or something in honor of Operation Citadel! Because that would be really, really… Please don’t look at me like that, Galina!
To be sure, our Great Soviet Encyclopedia continues to state that the Seventh played an important role in rallying the world against fascism. But encyclopedias are subject to revision. Thus we find Shostakovich playing the second movement of his less famous Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden, his dark-suited shoulders squared as he sat at the piano, his face hunching forward, his mouth stiffly downcurved: First a chord as warm as the streak of white foam in a café au lait, and then, you know. He couldn’t understand the simplest things Americans said, even though he’d once taken English lessons with Elena Konstantinovskaya. It gives me the creeps. That was all he remembered. How many years ago was that?—I don’t feel much enthusiasm, he said to himself as his widespread fingers began to hurtle down on the piano’s white-and-black terrain. Somebody in the front muttered: That guy looks like a weirdo.