Meanwhile, Khruschev was removed from power in favor of Brezhnev, who explained to the Twenty-third Congress: Socialist art is profoundly optimistic and life-affirming.—Shostakovich lived on. It’s said that he watched R. L. Karmen’s new film “The Great Patriotic War” again and again; after awhile not even Glikman would accompany him to the cinema anymore; after all, the man lost his wife in the, so I can see his, his, you know. But Shostakovich couldn’t take his eyes off the Leningrad woman in the snowy overcoat who was towing another sled to the cemetery. I could swear she’s somebody I know! Because she… and her long dark hair. But I can’t say that Elena’s calling me to lie down beside her, because as far as I know she’s still… All the same, he avoided more horrors than he sought out. On a rainy afternoon, at a reception for some artist friend of Glikman’s, he wondered what he should do, how he should live; what was her name now, he should really, anyhow, it was all oils in gilded frames, flowers, landscapes, fruits, not to mention the occasional, you know, nude. I don’t approve of nudes, because then I feel, well. The women were gazing more at each other’s smiles than at the art, which was as it should be, but where had Irina slipped off to? Don’t leave me here, my God, or they’ll all be hounding. All they want is… Suddenly he feared that some sneak assault would get through: so many of the individuals he’d cared for, I hope not the majority, better not to count, Denisov makes five, had gone over to the other side, not just Denisov but, oh, me, and especially these snowy landscapes, I don’t approve of them, either! What do I approve of! Irina, of course. That woman’s so good to me! And my children. Why don’t they paint something cheerful and red? “Let There Always Be Sunshine,” and light up the way with a searchlight; I know we can do it; it’s just a question of, of everything in a major key! Speaking of which, must I congratulate Roman Lazarevich now that he’s been named People’s Artist of USSR? I have his telephone number right here: VI, 93, 80. Leo Oskarovich tells me excellent things about Maya Ovchinnikova. He’s got a sweet wife, just as I have; thank God and Soviet power for sweet wives! If I had my own atomic bomb I’d just… I wonder if my pretty Irinka would mind sending him a card for me, with greetings to her, so that I could simply… I’ll bet he still keeps a bust of Stalin at his writing desk! Oh, my, and I also forgot to telephone him when he won his second Order of Lenin last year. When he’s always been so, whatever. That’s terrible! I have no excuse; it’s only… One bronze of an absolutely heartbreaking nude, female, bald, with an an almost simian face, brought Opus 110 back; she was halfway between weeping and screaming, with her hands on her hair, and he couldn’t bear it, so he turned away and gazed out the window; something dark like rain was cratering the pavement. How can I get out of here? It’s so… But what’s the use? Skyscrapers as blocky and tower-perimetered as castles were going up everywhere, haloed with scaffolding; welders’ torches glared on them like unwinking stars (whenever he saw a flame now, he remembered the blistered dead of Dresden, the children who clung to banisters and railings until the fires inhaled them, the screams of the tropical birds getting roasted at the zoo); new trees grew between the communal flats, and airplanes banked protectively over everything. Some of them looked like fighters. Let’s see; the German fighters had been based at Gatchina, Siverskaya, Tosna. They bombed Leningrad every day. And Pilutov became a Hero of the Soviet Union when he shot down all those Messerschmitts. That was very…
They told R. L. Karmen to film a meeting of the minds between D. D. Shostakovich and A. Akhmatova, with whom he’d never had anything in common anyway, excepting nightmares, so he stood beside her in snowy muck, waiting for the camera to whir, then said: Eighty-eight, eighty-eight, an exercise he’d invented for creating the illusion of animated speech by stretching the corners of the mouth; perhaps opera singers might also find it, you know, convenient. Where was Irinochka? She would have been polite; she was so, thank God for that, because at my age, well. Akhmatova stared at him; she was wearing her green-ribboned Medal of Leningrad but he wasn’t; the poor woman looked rather stout, because our Russian food, you know… All right, so he’d hurt her feelings, but he didn’t give a damn, not that he disliked her; the poor woman was looking old and shabby. The only thing he held against her was that she’d carried the score of his Seventh Symphony out of Leningrad, holding it on that promiscuous lap of hers; she thought that made him her soul mate. If she’d only lost the Seventh, and he’d been shot down, then he wouldn’t have contributed to that shameful, you know. Not that Nina and the children would have deserved such an ending, even though they might have been, never mind. As for Roman Lazarevich, he seemed satisfied; they shook both hands, and for a moment Shostakovich dreaded that he might utter her name; indeed, he feared that more than he’d ever feared anything in this world; he might have screamed.
Karmen’s face had become strangely clayey as he aged; it was palish-tan and nude, its white slicked-back hair resembling lines combed into a lump of clay; it was more featureless than it used to be, as if poor Roman Lazarevich were collapsing back into a primordial ball! His lips were two pale bars of clay half-mashed together. To think that he and Elena… His head had sunk deeper down upon his clayey neck, settling between the slabs of clay which were called his shoulders. His blank eyes had sunken in a trifle. All in all, he was ready to be taken off the shelf at a moment’s notice to have any expression whatsoever painted onto him, and then he could be baked, glazed and finished. But I’m not being very… Shooting him a searching look, the director merely said: Much obliged, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! You haven’t aged a day! And here’s a copy of my new book, just a small gift…
The Heroics of Struggle and Creation. Why, thank you, Roman Lazarevich, thank you! In the unlikely event that I myself ever succeed in doing anything, er, creative, I’ll be sure and send you a copy…
And this Dmitri Dmitriyevich, whoever he was, gave speeches on demand, his own gaze expressing that strange dullness of the slaughter-doomed steer which we remember from the former Marshal Tukhachevsky’s triaclass="underline" The Soviet Union fully supports the just position of, how should I put it, Ho Chi Minh.
Elena had told him that in the Arctic camps they split open a corpse’s skull before burial, just in case. And that night when those three guards raped her, oh, let’s think about something else. So he went everywhere they told him; he trudged the Motherland’s icy streets, with Irina juggling two suitcases while holding his arm in case he fell. As soon as they got back to Moscow, he was going to buy her some more “Stone Flower” perfume! The world she lived in he wanted to live in, too (a prosecutor would have pounced on him); he’d been very unfair to marry and drag her into his, his, you get the drift. What was a little more guilt among friends? He’d never even notice. They’d already expelled him from their consideration, just as Shostakovich himself cut out superannuated notes from his scores with a razorblade; as each blade got dull he’d dispatch Glikman or Glikman’s brother to go buy a new one for fifty kopeks. Denouncing the continuing Anglo-American aggression in, so to speak, Cuba, deliberately slurring and mumbling each page of typescript, he craned away from the corpselike grins of his audience to stare out the window at the snow on the flat roofs of Soviet Asian cities, snow on the flat roofs of neobureaucratic halls, palaces and apartment blocks. Even Irina had gotten tired of traveling by then. Originally she’d thought, well, he didn’t know what she’d thought. Why had she left her husband, anyway? Perhaps neither he nor I can pass for a man. She wants a… But how can I please her when I, uh, to counter the unheard insolence of the imperialist camp. We demand the immediate punishment of these, oh, yes, these dangerous enemies of the working class. Those snowy trees, with snow-mountains all around, well, we mustn’t, so to speak, exaggerate, but what was the point? He felt as if the music paper had swallowed him up. Whenever people asked him to generalize or pronounce on something, he replied: Ha, ha! My dear lady, in this life we only know our own sector of front, so to speak…