Afterward, there’d be more reporters, insinuations and petty-bourgeois stupidity, when all he cared about was keeping his family out of, why say it? America being a capitalist country, the various civic choirs sing a cappella there, meaning without instrumental accompaniment. In a well-ordered zone, such license would never be tolerated. High time to harden our line against the Americans! They’re very… Oh, me! Anyhow, why the Fifth? Because we’re on Fifth Avenue, stupid! That symphony got me in trouble, too, because the audiences applauded too loudly when I was officially a, a, what was it, oh, yes, a cultural alien. Elena had already been taken to the, you know.—Second movement. An hour more; then I can sit in a corner and drink champagne. Maybe some American woman will consent to, you know, pop out the cork! The shot heard round the world… Pizzicato.
The Fifth was hardly his, so to speak, favorite—I mean, to hell with it. It was subtitled a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism—precisely the motif he sought to sound today.
He played adequately. We all did, or else. Even Akhmatova wrote her chirpy odes in praise of that bastard. Well, not everyone: Brave Tsevtaeva had actually, I don’t need to say it. He’d heard that it didn’t hurt, unless they were doing it to you and they used piano wire. Vlasov must have… But we don’t talk about that. In one of her last poems, written when the sleepwalker’s army marched into Prague, Tsevtaeva had written, “in anger and in love,” I refuse to be. That sentiment would be mortared into the grey chamber of Opus 110.
Decrescendo. The Americans applauded—hypocritically, he thought. His foot kept jerking sideways when he bowed. They say that you keep twitching for a long time, even after you, well. Then he read out denunciations upon command, all the while twisting an unlit “Kazbek” cigarette. He attacked among others a certain D. D. Shostakovich, who’d committed various errors. His mouth grew dry, and he could not finish the speech. A pleasant male voice completed it for him.
Yes, he grew pale when he drank vodka. He grew paler when he drank the future. To be sure, it wasn’t as bad as those Moscow nights at the beginning of ’45 when there was no electricity from six in the morning to six at night, so that by three in the afternoon, when the winter sun failed, he’d had to sit in cold darkness, unable to compose by that pale kerosene-light; later on he’d be tense, unable to sleep before midnight, awaking in the dark with his heart stuttering like a machine-gun. Now he… In fine, his major task nowadays consisted in preparing responses to various foreseeable criticisms. Once in awhile he got the odd job: Now, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, there’s going to be a twenty-four-gun salute in Moscow for the liberation of each capital, so the world will know that it wasn’t just Leningrad, that it was Minsk, Kiev, Stalingrad and all the rest! We’ve decided, and no doubt you’ll agree, that your fanfare ought to consist of twenty-four-note chords, which will undoubtedly create an impressive tonal effect, much wider than the bass theme which you’ll be called upon to write to symbolize the Fascist German command. Then it was time for another dream of leaving home on a rainy night, Nina screaming and shaking her fist at him through the glass of the front door, Maxim and Galya silently mouthing Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! as he went through the darkness to Elena’s house where she let him kiss her through the window but didn’t allow him in.
How long could he remain in step? A hundred times a night he’d torture himself with his fears. Glikman dragged him off to see Roman Karmen’s “Soviet Kazakhstan,” which was reliably spectacular. Naturally he dreaded to find Elena at the Kino Palace; he felt crushed not to find her.
In 1950, shortly after the reactionary powers defeated our blockade of Berlin, he wrote a soundtrack for the film “Belinsky,” scoring the orchestration with the same confident rapidity in which the former German Fascist Field-Marshal Paulus once drew up his orders of battle: a row for each subunit, motorized or not, each division assigned its own measure, then those measures clustered together into corps which he indrew to make his armies; the armies coalesced into Heeresgruppen; and the apparatchiks loved it. Much the same happened with Hamlet. The black telephone rang; Roman Karmen wished him to know that his scoring was perfect, superb.
But Karmen sounded sad! His voice was very… He was still, perhaps, getting over Elena, just like the rest of us—oh, me! But it wouldn’t do to, well, especially given that he and I, er, and besides, I need him to call Arnshtam for me; I need work; I need a favor, dear Leo Oskarovich! Because all that “Zoya” money’s gone. The children are so… By the way, whatever became of your actress Vodyanischkaya? An excellent Zoya! She reminded me a little of Elena. But what does this apparatchik want from me? Why won’t he get off the line? Especially when I’m starting to feel a bit, you know, panicked? My dear Roman Lazarevich, if I’m permitted to, to—ahem!—to use a musical metaphor, not that I, well, one gets, so to speak, tuned to the person one loves. And then even though one clings to any stranger, or even takes her to bed and then, you know, all to, just to block that artillery barrage of, how should I say, loneliness, one feels bored and, and—a proxy just can’t carry the tune! That’s why I do not like too friendly or too antagonistic relationships between people. Or even if a proxy manages to carry the tune after all, a different key has a different, I don’t know. So one says goodbye. But the instant one’s alone again, the craving for the person one’s tuned to comes back and then, don’t think I don’t know! How can I say any of this to you, my dear, dear Roman Lazarevich? By the way, next time you happen to see Leo Oskarovich, please do greet him for me and ask him if he has any, er, you know. And that child-actress who played Zoya when she was a little girl, what was her name? It’ll come to me. Was it Katya Skvortsova or was it Elena Skvortsova? Elena is such a common name; it keeps coming up.
He composed the music to that cinema spectacular, “The Fall of Berlin,” whose protagonist was Comrade Stalin. Roman Karmen wasn’t involved, he claimed, because he was too hard at work on “Soviet Turkmenistan,” but it might have been because he’d fallen out with the bastards at Mosfilm, because I’ve heard that what you say is not what we want to hear, so he said, and Karmen replied, after which they both fell silent; well, so kind of you to trouble yourself, my dear, dear Roman Lazarevich! Thank you for speaking with Leo Oskarovich on my behalf, even though, well. Does he still play the piano? And how is—never mind, I just wanted to, to, and please accept my very best wishes.
He agreed with the wise decision to withhold his new Fourth String Quartet from publication, due to its Jewish intonations.
They sent him to East Germany as the principal Soviet delegate to the Bach Festival. He didn’t want to go, but he was on the jury. (He thought he heard somebody calling.) A Russian would win. He’d already promised to take the appropriate “class approach.”
His escort of German Communists clicked their heels and saluted him. They asked if he needed anything.—Thank you, thank you, but please don’t trouble yourselves, he replied. The other jurors called him esteemed comrade. He remembered Nazis tall and grinning. He remembered white blurred faces in the winter twilights of Leningrad, dark eye-sockets of starvation. He remembered all the newsreels he’d seen of milk-pale children getting hanged, the German Fascists fussily adjusting each noose beforehand to get it perfect. Luckily, Comrade Stalin had liquidated their state apparatus.