He invited Glikman to accompany him to a concert by Galina Ustvolskaya, but at the last moment he didn’t have the nerve to, well. Glikman suggested that they attend the premiere of Roman Karmen’s new film about the new order in Cuba; it was called “The Blue Lamp,” and was supposed to be very, you know, but every time I meet dear Roman Lazarevich I can’t help but think of a certain, anyhow, I’m not saying that Shostakovich wasn’t busy. Composer and decomposer, he had to go on al fine, to the end.
He lived on to 1962, when word got out that his Thirteenth Symphony was explicitly linked to Yevtushenko’s subversive poem “Babi Yar,”44 and so the district Party secretary cried out: This is outrageous! We let Shostakovich join the Party and then he goes and presents us with a symphony about Jews!—After Yevtushenko caved in and made the changes which the Party required, to deemphasize the Jewish nature of that massacre, Shostakovich got drunk with Lebedinsky, whom he saw less and less these days, and he whispered: I am a Jew! Oh, how I want to be a Jew…
Excuse my directness, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, but there’s a solution to your troubles.
Well, naturally we’ll speak privately about the possibility of a solution, a, a, so to speak, political solution. No, please, please don’t smile like that! When I screwed up my courage to divorce Nina, I couldn’t face her; I wrote her a letter, but she didn’t reply, so Ashkenazi delivered another copy to her. He actually went all the way to Detskoe Selo, where Nina and her mother had already, you know. Sometimes I…
Dmitri Dmitriyevich, she’s a widow now. I’ve made inquiries.
Opus 40 was almost finished then; poor Elena was waiting by the telephone. Can you believe it? But then, you know…
This was the year we find him autographing scores for Young Pioneers who didn’t give a shit, the year he married his third wife, Irina, whose smooth round face, round spectacles and glossy hair-knot he loved so well. He secretly apologized to all his friends for her youthful awkwardness. Glikman in particular felt jealous of her. But that’s normal. He informs me—can you believe it?—that Roman Lazarevich has also tied the knot this year! I sincerely wish him happiness. This Maya Ovchinnikova, I don’t know her circumstances. I hope she likes hunting and fast cars, because otherwise… The man’s my Doppelgänger! Whatever I do, he copies in his golem-like way. But I only imagine that because of, you know. What would it be like to ring him up and…? Strange to say, although I almost never telephone him, I know his number by heart: VI, 93, 80. And if I just said, my dear Roman Lazarevich, come drink vodka with me and we’ll talk about the old days, I’m sure he… He’s a much sweeter person than I—not spiteful. And if I said, Roman Lazarevich, please tell me how it was for you and her in Spain and don’t omit anything! I want to know what she said when she first heard that she’d been awarded the Order of the Red Star! I was, you know, proud. Whereas I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of my own decorations. How many people must I invite to my wedding? How I dread such affairs! It would almost be better to, you know.
I meant to write everything into Opus 110, except for Elena; but of course I had to write Elena in, on account of those… She, you see, kept screaming and screaming. But what I’d rather do is compose something in the style of Opus 40, just a, you know, a simple little something which adores her, but even more achromatically, blurring and revealing her the way her hair does, oh, my God, her long hair, it must be grey now, or maybe it’s fallen out. What was it she used to, no, I won’t admit that I’ve forgotten her. Just a little something like Opus 40, something which, how should I say, respects her right to seclude herself just as the lovely pale pavilion of the Concert Hall veils itself behind the maple leaves of Catherine Park. Should I visit Catherine Park with Irina? She’d surely find that quite, er, romantic. Once when I met Elena at the All-Russian Agricultural Museum, we…
Laboring with the ruthlessly exemplary dedication of a shock worker, he lived on to 1963, when his friend Marshal Tukhachevsky got posthumously rehabilitated. Let’s drink Crimean champagne with R. L. Karmen! Shostakovich wrote the memorial music, feeling (how should I say this?) anxious. No matter that Stalin was dead; it was only habit to, to, you know, well, to expect a hand on one’s shoulder. How would the “organs” perceive this? Still, he craved to be a decent person, especially now, since…
His silent young Irina stood behind him, with her hair in a double bun. In the raised bell of the stage he could see something flittering behind the tarnished iron leaves of the railing. Elena’s skirt had trembled like that, that red skirt she used to wear with the black jacket, and she used to trace patterns with her fingernail upon the glass goblet on the table. As they played on, the bell glowed more and more beautifully against the blue sky which was becoming night, and Elena’s skirt, well, actually, it wasn’t her skirt at all. Would it hurt me more to know that it was or to know that it wasn’t? Oh, me! The lady violinists in white blouses and black shirts, the men in the black and white suits, the cobblestones yellow under the inverted truncated pyramids of the lamps, and the shadows between cobblestones very black, they all added up to something, another composition by another composer, perhaps Haydn, certainly not Shostakovich. These windowpanes curtained or simply black, that’s what my music is about. This music was very, I mean, he never should have composed it, because first of all it wouldn’t bring Tukhachevsky back and second of all, it wasn’t, how should I say, healthy to remind the “organs” of their past deeds. Better not to remember the Marshal! I get everything I ask for! he used to crow. And then… But I’m certainly proud of Irina, who to get right down to it possesses, how should I describe it, an almost serpentine elegance: I do adore those pale, slim women! When she puts her hair up in a bun like that I want to sink my teeth into it, it’s so delicious! How good she is to me! And how understanding. And all the other old men are jealous of me; they don’t know I can’t even, well, but I wish she’d stop gnawing on her knuckles like that. The poor dear must be nervous. Why bother? It’s too late to be nervous! She’s already married a former enemy of the people. That was very…
44
Here we must footnote the dark elegance of “Babi Yar”’s poet, Yevtushenko, who often posed for photographs with his hand on his heart, while Shostakovich smiled beside him anxiously.