Oh, Shostakovich smiled! He slobbered poison. Anything female, of course—in my very next symphony! Even the stern middle-aged dragon-ladies in our Soviet hotels who keep everything in order, he charmed even them. (Gazing out the window late on those “white nights,” he sometimes saw Black Marias carrying away enemies of the people as usual, but now they pretended to be bread trucks. The pitch of their tire-squeals he’d glean for Opus 110.) His music was becoming a vast orbit around the planet of the twelve-tone scale, the orbit slowly decaying.
In 1955, when the ruling circles of the USA had just begun to suppress the national liberation movement of Vietnam, his song-cycle From Jewish Poetry premiered at last (in cosmopolitan Leningrad, of course.) We forgave him this Zionist provocation, in spite of the fact that he still held back from joining the Party. Even when he used his growing prestige to help effect the posthumous rehabilitation of V. Meyerhold, we continued to forbear. Oh, he was a real internationalist, a neutral element! Unfortunately, our Soviet Union still has need of such people. So we sat in the back row, yawning and rubbing our raspberry-colored boots together. Then we told the critics what to say about those Jewish songs (which after their long suppression, nearly a decade now, seemed as dismal and ancient to him as Kirov’s obsequies in the Tauride Palace), and they said it. But the audience applauded him. Wearied by another nightmare’s flank attack, he bowed and bowed, clutching at his throat as if his necktie were too tight for him. Afterward he sat down on the edge of the bed in the room she’d taken in her name at the Sovietskaya Hotel; we see him peering timidly down through the curtains at those few blocky, dark cars in the slush-shining streets; here came a bright red tramcar; there was a red pennant on a Ministry’s facade; here came another Moscow sunset, adagio. Soon she’d arrive, if the floor lady didn’t, so to speak, well, in point of fact he worried about the floor lady. (Oh, my dear friend, those floor ladies oversee every room and elevator! With quasi-comradely vigilance, you understand. Noiseless and watchful; they’re old or young, but always on the job; turn your key in the lock as quietly as you please, open the door, and step out into the hall, and you’ll find one of them watching, to make sure that you’re you. Nonetheless, they’re Slavs like us; moreover, they’re women, so they can at times be, how should I put it, extremely understanding.) Now she was late. When he closed his eyes, he could literally see her in her dark coat and dark shoes, ascending the worn steps of the Leningrad Conservatory. Had she changed her mind? The night was as black as an 
-man’s uniform.
You know, Galisha, I’d never say this if I hadn’t—this vodka’s quite—but your face, you resemble—
I wish I could send her to hell, she said flatly.
How did you know?
You once said her name in your sleep. That’s why I’ll never marry you.
You’re always angry! And I, I—
But Ustvolskaya had already run away, slamming the door behind her.
He telephoned T. P. Nikolayeva and summoned her to the hotel room to drink the remainder of the vodka.—Yes, Mitya, I’ll come, but I can’t—
Don’t worry; don’t worry. I’m not asking for that.
Two hours later she arrived in a rush, bearing a packet of deliciously greasy sausages, and he realized that she’d been alarmed on his behalf, not that he… He lit up a cigarette and said: Tatiana, sometimes I feel that, well, I’m not a poet, as is, for instance, Blok, but do you ever feel that there’s a woman somewhere at the center of things, a goddess, let’s say, or does a woman perceive the same thing as a male principle?
You’re talking about your music.
Yes, in a way, although I—
I suppose that when one dedicates oneself sincerely enough to anything, one personalizes it.
I knew you’d understand me! Being faithful to an idea is like being faithful to a woman. I’ve never betrayed my own music, not yet. I’ve written money-makers, oh, yes, for films and what not. Even Akhmatova for all her regal pride had to kiss that bastard’s ass in the end because she—
Mitya, please be careful!
Don’t worry; they can’t hear us with that radio blaring out Khrennikov’s latest monstrosity. Music certainly reveals its composer’s soul, don’t you think? When I encounter this, uh, this musical turd, I, I don’t even pity Khrennikov. Did I tell you that he’s still trying to suppress me on the cinematic front? What a trooper, what a bulldog!
Sometimes you’re like a child…
Forgive me, forgive me! But to get back to Akhmatova, the essential point is that she chose to save her son’s life instead of keeping pure, and to me she, she… Do you remember when they shot her first husband?
I wasn’t born.
Excuse me, my sweetest little Tatianochka, sometimes I forget how time ticks! Well, they shot him and not her. In your opinion, which of them was luckier?
What a question!
At least tell me this much, and as honestly as you can. Elena told me—she heard for herself!—that they recite her poems even in the Gulag. So she’s a… But did she damage her life’s work when she wrote that other trash?
Not at all. If anything, she safeguarded it. Otherwise they would have—
To be sure! Oh, you angel! But that’s not my only point. You do that so they don’t shoot you, and then you… Well, to grieve is also a right, but it’s not granted to everyone! So I haven’t, I repeat, I haven’t done anything to… And music is like a, well, at any rate, no one’s solved the woman question yet, have they, Tatiana? Not even Lenin himself! You strange creatures! I—
Everyone knows whom you love, Mitya. Why don’t you marry her?
Oh, I’m not good enough for… You see, I mainly write quartets instead of symphonies now. I’m getting impotent.
He sat up all night getting drunk with her. They never touched each other. The next morning he felt pretty awful. Maxim, who was mooning around the flat these days, waiting for the Composers’ Union to call on him, wanted to go see the film “Vietnam,” by a certain R. L. Karmen, but his father didn’t have time, because he was very, you know. It was really terrible that he didn’t have a secretary. It used to be that Nina always picked up the telephone and said that he was away for two months. Well, well, time to be philosophical!
Next his mother died. At the side of her deathbed he found a volume of Chekhov’s tales turned open to Isn’t our living in town, airless and crowded—isn’t that a sort of case for us? This gave him a horror; he didn’t know why. He’d write that airless crowdedness into Opus 110.
In 1956, the year of Khruschev’s “secret speech” denouncing the Stalin cult, the Eighth Symphony was rehabilitated; and an editorial in the journal Voprosy Filosofii decried the repression of “Lady Macbeth” twenty years ago. Colleagues, musicians and conductors leaned self-satisfiedly against his two pianos. As for him, he smiled as angrily as if he could already see the way everything would be for the rest of his life. (Who says we can’t foretell the future? If that German shell whistles, it’ll miss us. If it sizzles, then watch out!) Actually the anger was the easiest part; what he couldn’t stand was the fear. Under the piano he still kept his suitcase packed, with two changes of underwear. He’d heard that no matter what, one got lice-infested. Elena had had to shave her head after her release; she really resembled a convict then! And she had always had such long, beautiful hair. He wondered what she looked like now. His sister said that Elena’s daughter was very quick with languages. Once or twice he’d dreamed, well, fine, it might have been half a dozen times, that from the Conservatory roof he powerlessly watched a shaveheaded Russian sniper being frisked by two Germans, his face black with dirt, despair staining him; he’d be liquidated; and then when the Fascists stood him up against the wall he suddenly realized that they were about to shoot Elena, whose Red Army uniform had disguised her; he tried to cry out but then the nightmare rolled over his chest, and it was as heavy, broad and metallic as tank-treads. Fortunately, such disturbances had now been almost entirely eradicated. Why couldn’t all the toadies and screws watch her, not him, and give him a daily report? Perhaps she…