East Berlin remained much damaged, thanks to the senseless resistance of the Hitlerite remnants. Laughing, somebody remarked that Dresden looked worse. Comrade Alexandrov wanted to know why the Bach Festival was in Leipzig when Leipzig was the city of the proto-Fascist Richard Wagner. Shostakovich kept silent, feeling worms crawling in his heart. He decided to avoid Dresden forever. He didn’t want to see any more, you know. About Berlin, which was, after all, merely our transit point, he didn’t care. Years ago, his teacher Glazunov had praised the city’s stone gates, but their grandiosity had long since tarnished into something like earth. Was the western sector any less ruined? Well, why shouldn’t it be? How close was it?—Right over there!—And had they…? Better not to ask. He felt as if he were suffocating and bleeding at the same time. What was that sound? He wanted a piano to compose on. What was that sound? On the windowsill of the car, his fingers began to tap out the allegro molto of Opus 110.
He didn’t care about Bach, either, not then; over the decades he’d tried to learn what he could from Bach the craftsman, who put one note after the other, then fitted the third note perfectly into place; but this innocuously banal observation proved to be the spearhead of something inimical which now breached his mind’s defenses, namely, the axion of that Nazi mediocrity Paulus, who if you don’t keep up with such things was the Field-Marshal we’d captured at Stalingrad; apparently he used to aphorize: It’s merely a question of time and manpower. That was how Bach must have built his compositions; it’s what we all do, and when I myself, when I…
The next time he saw Glikman, he asked whether we’d shot Paulus; Glikman wasn’t sure; he might have missed the announcement in Pravda. It’s just a question of… and for the rest of that day, Bach was spoiled for him. What if there were no difference between people who created bit by bit and people who murdered piece by piece? Nobody would agree, of course; anyhow it was better to think of something else, Elena Konstantinovskaya for instance. Her hair was fire and her skin was milk. What if she’d been in Dresden when the Anglo-Americans came? Why had she divorced Roman Lazarevich? Glikman said… Actually, he probably shouldn’t think about Elena.
Intermission! Time to write a postcard to Glikman: Everything is so fine, so perfectly excellent, that I can find almost nothing to write about.
After they gave him a tour of Stalin-Allee he asked for permission to return to the hotel to rest, because thanks to his Leningrad education he already possessed an intimate comprehension of the way that the corners of bombarded buildings, being stronger than the rest, survive to form grisly spires whose churchlike effect is accentuated at night when the stars delineate the nave of an immense cathedral of niches, crypts, galleries, freestanding stone doorways in which one half expects to see a Russian icon, a marble likeness of a German Catholic saint, a Kaiser’s sarcophagus; but there is nothing to make an offering to, no reason to lay down even a withered flower in memory of Europe Central’s dead. Now a whitish-yellow light comes glaring: a military patrol. This is closest we can come to gilded grillework, comrades! Save your gold for Opus 110.
Please, Comrade Schostakowitsch, a German woman begged in secret, my little brother’s being denazified because everybody in his school had to join the Hitler Youth. It wasn’t his fault; what was he supposed to do? This letter, I received it last month, it says that his apartment got taken away and since then I haven’t…
To be sure, to be sure. Dear lady, I’m very sorry. That is the reality…
And a train bore him away across the flat green of the German heartland.
In Leipzig he stood beside the pianist T. P. Nikolayeva, who was fresh from Moscow.
Would you like to tour Dresden, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? inquired an individual in raspberry-colored boots. We’re quite close. It’s good for the Russian soul, actually, to see it so smashed up. I hate all these Germans. You do, too, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten Leningrad, have you?
Comrade Alexandrov, you’re completely on the mark, so to speak, and if I have time after the competition—well, well, who’s to say how long it’ll last?
And then they all went into the Thomaskirche, where Bach’s remains had just been reinterred.
Nikolayeva waited rigidly; she must have been nervous. Although since ’45 he’d passed her many times in the half-real darkness of the Conservatory, his own weariness, which breeds narrowness, and the various persecutions raining down on him like sizzling steel fragments, had isolated him; this young woman might as well have been a stranger; after all, she’d studied with Goldenweiser, not with him. His eyes were dull, round-cornered triangles of light splayed out upon his spectacles. He’d better not flirt; he was getting too old! A long, long time ago, once upon a time, in fact, Akhmatova had licked her lips, and he’d laughingly cried: Very good, Anna Andreyevna, yes, very good. The embouchure must be kept wet, since you’re about to play my French horn…—No, those days are buried. This fine young Nikolayeva, far too lively to be homely, maybe it actually wasn’t too late to, never mind, smiled beside him, showing her upper teeth. What sort of person was she? Another devotee of white keys and black keys who knew her in childhood remembers her as this typical Russian girl, with her two braids, always serious, friendly and neat. Nationals of the capitalist powers make each other’s acquaintances (at least, so I’m told) by asking how they prefer to spend money: Do you collect stamps? I like to watch war movies. But to know somebody in our Soviet land, which now includes half of Germany and will in the measurable future include all of it, one need only learn what form her suffering happened to take during the Great Patriotic War (husband hanged in Minsk, sister starved to death in Leningrad, all four sons killed in battle at Stalingrad); however, since such communications are painful both to transmit and to receive, it’s better that we all share a tacit commonality of horror, speaking only with our eyes or by means of music. So again, what sort of person was she? When she began to play, she did not fill the Thomaskirche with soulful gloom; instead, something light, distinct, aloof constructed itself: a castle, not a fountain, an artifact whose tessellated surface possessed a precise and nearly perfect geometry of notes; her rendition contained no chiaroscuro, only skill. Without haste or melodrama, with the seemingly simple harmony of a Roman inscription, she built her castles in the air, nakedly showing herself, unashamed and unafraid as he could never be; even in his youth, when he’d been the future’s darling from whom all misfortune would forever withhold itself, his nature had tended to express itself extravagantly—hence the mischievous grotesqueries of “The Nose,” the rapid fire of “Bolt,” the complex dissonances of “Lady Macbeth,” none of which were strained or “wrong,” simply hyperactive, a trifle anxious, maybe; this was D. D. Shostakovich, to be sure; this was “honest,” but, but, how should I say? Nikolayeva made music as a Tsarina must have carried herself, with calmly unhurried grace. It was as if she were saying to him: All that’s happened is inconsequential; it cannot hurt us anymore; there’s only music, which lives within us and beyond us, needing us to express it but capable of surviving forever between expressions. Castle succeeded castle.
The jury had instructed her to play whichever one of Bach’s forty-eight preludes and fugues she’d best prepared; she played them all. Shostakovich lost himself. He no longer saw the grey heads like eggs in the wooden pews. He felt, how should I say, quite heartened, because… Actually (I hope it’s appropriate to reveal his secret), he felt as if he’d found a new companion to dwell with him in the secret world beneath the piano keys! Not that he and she could ever… Besides, he’d never let himself be caught again. Because after Elena, with all that, you know, it was better not to even… She’s Elena Vigodsky now, imagine! And how could I hope for anything? At least I can… And so Tatyana won the competition. Flowers for her! More flowers for Bach’s grave… His spectacles kept slipping down his nose. He felt very… Then and there he resolved to compose a cycle of preludes and fugues (Opus 87), dedicated to her and arranged in ascending fifths. The brief, happy flame of the Fugue in A Minor, which he’d write the following year, became his special homage to her soul.