His friends assumed that he was drinking too much. As long as he stayed in East Germany he kept tossing back schnapps, with and without his interpreter. (She smiled at him once, and he remembered the childlike grin of a young woman sniper he’d seen somewhere, maybe in Kuibyshev. Then she stopped smiling. She lowered her softly immaculate face.) Sometimes he drank until he fell asleep. When he awoke, he reached for the tumbler, muttering into the mirror: Generally speaking, I, I’m a degenerate.
It was a cool, humid German summer. He wanted to sit on the grassy bank of the Elbe just to watch the steamboats and to, so to speak, catch his breath, but there wasn’t time because they showed him atrocity films all day. Case White couldn’t be omitted, but he didn’t yet know how to, well, maybe in largo form, and if he could squeeze bitterness out of a few more grace notes… Then they escorted him back to his hotel. The darkhaired interpreter was ill today. He didn’t know whether or not to refer to Operation Citadel. Since her brother had fallen at Kursk, why not? She was a pretty woman, although not quite plump enough for his taste. Let’s see, what was I doing during Operation Citadel? I remember seeing Roman Lazarevich’s newsreel about it, seventeen years ago it’s already been now, in that Kino Palace where Elena and I used to, to, what had it been called? “The Battle of Orel.” No, it couldn’t have been that Kino Palace, because… A Tiger tank snarls through the mud and down into a river; the water sizzles around the treads; it swims like a stately crocodile, grips the mud of the far bank, up-raises its gun, and grinds on, with German Fascists standing calmly astride like whale-riders; then Roman Lazarevich, who no doubt was wearing that oil-stained fur-lined jacket of his, pans to show the crew of one of our hundred-and-twenty-twos: Ready, aim, fire! I don’t mind admitting he was brave. In fact, I’d rather be him. So what? The bastard, you know, although it was actually I who… The Tiger tank explodes, accompanied by music which could have been written by a certain D. D. Shostakovich! How, so to speak, heroic! Pan to a wheat field with its hidden strongpoint of antitank guns; pan to mine traps; pan to Red Army generals with their leather greatcoats and binoculars. Later on we’ll blow up the evil FREYA network! Had she left him yet? All our planes flying over their tanks, it reminded me even then of a score, but more for orchestra than for a string quartet. So what? I’m going to make sure that Opus 110 contains everything, since it’s the last time I’ll still be, so to speak, me. From a strictly musical point of view, Citadel should be the merest interlude. (On likely nightmare axes he positioned his own thought-traps.) Allegro would be too easy. That would resemble letting those ass-lickers in raspberry-colored boots tell me to make everything happy and in a major key! There are times when doing the right thing might destroy me, but that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing. If Elena were here, or at least Nina…
Picking up the newspaper, he read that a traitor named M. Smolka had just been executed for terrorist activities committed at the behest of the American Secret Service. The traitor’s last words: There is no doubt that desertion and treachery to the interests of peace and socialism are the severest of crimes and can only be expiated by the severest of punishments. It had been an early morning guillotining, no doubt. That was how they did things in Dresden.
Blood raged flamelessly in his windowless heart! He completed Opus 110.
About this quartet the most fundamental thing which can be said is that it is too sad even to rise from a moan into a wail at death’s uncompassed crescendo. To be sure, the danse macabre of the second movement glows sickeningly vivid as a sodium flare at night (so much for flamelessness!); it’s as bright as the electric light which illuminates the gas chamber when it’s time to ascertain whether all the Jews are dead; while the menace of the third remains more chilling than those screams of terror in Leningrad when the German bombs come down; they’ll never stop coming down. Yet on the whole the effect is of somebody drowning, his most desperate convulsions already behind him; he’s begun to inhale water; the green water he sees is going black; and he’s settling down into the muck. Some listeners who close their eyes during the second movement claim to perceive a whirling red eyeball or domino, and the more rapidly it speeds, the more balefully it glows. This eidetic image seems to symbolize the approach of something evil. I myself have never seen any red spot, perhaps because Opus 110 already threatens me so perfectly that no kinesthesia is needed to extend or refine the threat. While Shostakovich’s music wriggles like the worming of black-gloved fingers clasped behind a policeman’s back, the Bronze Horseman sinks down under sandbags and planks. Leningrad strangles in a loop of barbed wire. Meaning dissolves into pure music. (And to think he once wanted to surpass the “Fate motif” of Beethoven’s Fifth! When fate and all that are, you know, meaningless!) Hence the opening notes of the first movement as carefully hopeless as men in a snow-trench before Leningrad, resting their machine-guns on blocks of ice.
Western critics claim to find some peculiarly Slavic sorrow which is at least as ancient as the relics of the Volsovo Culture below Riazan. Glikman for his part insists that Opus 110 contains here and there a chord harvested from older ages (for instance, the screams of Peter III after drinking the poisoned wine). This is why it’s reductionist to claim that this quartet is merely the corrective to the Seventh Symphony, the distillation of Leningrad’s agony with the propaganda decanted off. Anyhow, what is Leningrad? Forget the Germans for once. Forget external causes. (Every definition of God leads to heresy, write the Kabbalists.) The foggy, tan-hued tranquility of old Petersburg endures. It’s the dead color of a pickled embryo; it’s crowned by church-gold and underlined by aquatic mazes of commerce and refuse. Here one finds little Mitya holding his mother’s hand; he pulls away to catch a whirling leaf. Here one spies Akhmatova and her first husband Gumilyev (he’s the one we’ll shoot for counterrevolutionary treason); they’re prowling the mists in search of poems!—This part of Opus 110 is not frightening at all, hardly even melancholy, merely Slavic. Well, well, dear friends; you know how things, er, turn out. The second movement will be all knives and cadavers, but the measures in which we now find ourselves remain quite silver-on-black, like an 
badge.—One must understand his character, Akhmatova is murmuring defensively, when Mitya’s mother comes running after them: Anna Andreyevna ! Excuse me, Anna Andreyevna; I believe you forgot your scarf.—Extending her hand to receive the trifle (strangers give her flowers all the time), Akhmatova thanks her with that cold politeness for which she’s so famous. Then she notices Mitya and says to her husband: There he is! That’s my little grey-eyed prince!—The boy doesn’t know what she’s talking about. He doesn’t have grey eyes. He jitters and blushes, crossing his mittened fingers. He understands only this: This lady loves him; she doesn’t love his mother or, so it seems, her own husband, who now angrily snatches the scarf: Come on; we’ll be late for the masque! Madame, we’re much obliged to you… They whirl away into a Petersburg the color of catacombs: tan, yellow, brown, all blending, as dead things eventually must, into wet earth. Opus 110 explodes out of it, like metal splinters protruding from broken ferro-concrete.
And the equally broken composer—let’s call him a pechatnik, the centuries-gone Russian official who keeps the state seal—he remembers, or imagines, the time when Akhmatova was still a goddess, not yet a maimed queen of tears, when we still could go to masques in Russia, before the red domino exploded at the center of Petersburg and turned it into Leningrad. Excuse me, Anna Andreyevna… At this point the music, which in this respect oddly resembles some of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, expands and expands, breaking out of Leningrad’s concentric rings of death; it rises like the preludes and fugues which he’d composed for his well-loved T. P. Nikolayeva back in Opus 87, but there is neither joy in it nor even escape; it expands like an ascending aerial view of Dresden’s roofless windowlessness and immense fishbones, half-untoothed combs, upon blinding white rubble-gravel, window-holed brickfronts shattered into runes and swastikas, Strassen and Plätze now utterly sunny and open, sheared-off spicules. As the Führer once said: One can’t fight a war with Salvation Army methods! Opus 110 repeats this dictum in the speech of instruments.