Lyadova wanted to give him some comradely criticism, to help him write more correct music. She thought his music should be more clear. In one of their final quarrels, Galina Ustvolskaya had told him that he’d betrayed his music because he was willing to pretend for these murderers that it meant whatever they wanted it to mean. And then she’d, I, I mean to say that after that she’d… Whereas this Lyadova was as busy as a stream of eighth-notes! There might be something cheerful about her. Might it be that she actually, you know? After all, was he condemned to live out his years in a, so to speak, cemetery? He couldn’t decide whether her stupidity would be safe or merely unendurable. She’d painted her lips as red as rocket flares. He wondered what it would be like to, to, oh, forget it. Stroking his grey and greasy hair, puffing out her mouth at him in a dazzling crimson spot, she whispered: Don’t you want to foil the designs of the imperialists, Dmitri Dmitriyevich? When will you join the Party? That will send a very—
What he wanted was to get drunk. He wanted to pass out. He dreamed that a skeleton was beckoning to him. LIFE HAS BECOME BITTER, COMRADES. How long can a soul struggle and strain?
He sat there with his expressionless look, which was often, thank God, taken for dazed, and folded in his arms as tightly as he could, sitting motionless on the dais as the musicians played his “Song of the Forests.”
Fat and pale, in a heavy dark suit, he smiled over his wine with the other grinning functionaries. Soon, with his discreetest sarcasm, he’d send all his friends congratulatory postcards on the anniversary of the glorious October Revolution. To Glikman he wrote: Life is far from easy. How I long to summon the aid of the Old Woman so inspiringly invoked (how Glikman would laugh! how Nina would have snorted! he himself was laughing and sobbing as he deepened the joke; listening to himself, he heard a three-toned keening like an air raid siren) by the poet in his Horizon Beyond the Horizon, published in (Glikman would split his sides at this next pomposity) the Party’s Central Organ Pravda on 29 April 1960. Forty-one years later, when Glikman finally published the correspondence of Shostakovich, he added a special footnote to explain, for the benefit of those of us who don’t possess the “Enigma” decoding device, that the Old Woman personified death. I kiss you warmly, the letter went on. Be well and happy.
Upon receipt of this greeting, Glikman, overcome by eeriness, actually made efforts, so I’m told, to visit Elena Konstantinovskaya, who was now the chairwoman of foreign languages at the Leningrad Conservatory, but she repulsed his approaches, remarking: Look, I’m already forty-six years old, and Mitya is what? Fifty-four? It’s too late for both of us. And I’m married. And my daughter would never understand; she hates Mitya! More to the point, since you’ve come to me behind Mitya’s back, he’s obviously not interested. You may think he needs me, but what am I? and her cigarette mysteriously went out. She threw it on the floor, lit another, and went on: I’m not just someone to be needed; I, I—now you’ve got me talking like him! So please give Isaak Davidovich my best respects, and there’s no message for Mitya since he sent none to me, and now would you please please, please get out?
Mitya imprisoned his cigarette in a sybaritic clutch. Although his Seventh String Quartet proved as nervously beautiful as his memories of Galina Ustvolskaya gnawing her snow-white knuckles back in 1951, he himself was reverting to earth. Still he sat straight at the piano, his hands flat enough for a parade of toy soldiers to march over, but the use of his limbs grew increasingly painful, the doctors couldn’t say why. He hid from the world in his shabby dacha in Komarovo, out of sight of Moscow, where the reflections of white-limed trees resembled bones on the wet brown streets. When visitors came, he took them on long walks and talked about the weather. Sometimes he sat down on a bench, folded his arms, and glared until they went away. He wanted to, well, I don’t know. Maybe I should ring up Roman Lazarevich for advice. Because he… Far away, some little peasant child was droning in a voice as highpitched as a German bomber over Leningrad. It was all very, how should I say, pleasant. But then money worries would draw him out, or he’d get a craving to hear his latest music performed. Addicted to the voices of young sopranos, he could no longer hold himself back from writing textual parts for them to sing. He was now flirting with a quiet married woman named I. A. Supinskaya. Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me. His passion resembled the healthy blonde upleaping of flames in a stoveful of taiga logs, but Irina was so much younger that he had no heart to, you know. As a general rule he loathed the sight of his own round, pale, weary face. How could he inflict himself on anyone? As Lebedinsky kept telling him, You don’t have much luck with women, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that you’ve racked up your share of failures.—Thank you, thank you! he bitterly replied. Fundamentally he was as solitary as a mollusk. But whenever he got summoned to perform, he couldn’t get out of it. That is why we see him nervously sitting in a factory, his arms tightly indrawn as all the babushkas and peasant girls who worked there applauded on command. He needed a woman to, never mind. He was an asset to his country now—no matter that his music had failed to rid itself entirely of undesirable elements. In the Central Committee they put him forward as proof that we could hold our own against the Americans, at least on the cultural front.
When he held her hand for the first time, Irina told him how much his Leningrad Symphony had always inspired her.—He pulled his hand away. He said: Actually, I’m not against your calling the Seventh the Leningrad Symphony, but it’s not about Leningrad under siege. It’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed and Hitler only, so to speak, finished off.
Please be careful what you say, Dmitri Dmitriyevich!
Oh, please, oh, please, call me Mitya—
Somebody might be—
That’s exactly what I, so to speak, mean, he replied, with a smile of self-satisfied grief. He knew that he was being very hateful then. At the same time, something was hanging on this moment. Now she understood why they used to call him the enemy of the people Shostakovich. If she refrained from snubbing him now, why then…
She wore her hair pulled tight back from her forehead into a prudish little bun which he found erotic. She was as earnest as any choir girl—oh, how sweetly they open up their black scores, gazing into the conductor’s eyes just as a certain D. D. Shostakovich’s children used to do when he read them stories! Between her legs his fat old fingers would soon come to life, expressing the most crystalline glissandos. She had very intelligent eyebrows which could rise at any untoward word. Sometimes when she looked at him she rested her face upon her delicate fingers. Looking away, he felt the same despairing craving for salvation which had driven him to appeal to Tukhachevsky back in ’36. But this time it was not life, but only order that he longed for. If Irina accepted him, she’d be kind to him. She’d lower him gently into his grave.
He summoned Lebedinsky over to his flat to drink vodka. Frowning down at the piano, tickling the black keys most silently, he invited the guest to speak about women. Lebedinsky laughed and called him a hard case. Time for the caviar! One more little bitty, you know, cucumber, and then a gulp of, of, because, you see, it was very cold today. Lebedinsky didn’t mind; he liked vodka quite well. They say it’s good for you, because… Oh, my head! I need more vodka. When he’d swallowed down enough to make his face go pallid, he began to whisper that it was fortunate that Stalin had squashed “Lady Macbeth” so that his perhaps unknowingly ambiguous indictment of repression had never been soiled by a pro-Soviet counterpart.