Thank you, thank you, dear lady, he said, and now I need to go, for I’m really not well, you see…—And he really wasn’t well. In fact, I’m so feeble that if Elena were mine I’d drop dead for happiness.
Irina had proposed a visit to Leningrad so that he could see it one last time. And probably he should have gone; Leningrad defined him as much as did Opus 110; Glikman’s brother Gavriil, already famous for sculpting the “Apollo Shostakovich,” would soon propose setting little stones from Leningrad on his grave, surrounded by metal bars (Irina Antonova considered my idea to be better than all the others); we’re all sure a tour of that metropolis’s socialist reconstruction would have invigorated him. Irina thought it might be nice to promenade on Nevsky Prospect and peer into the shops; somebody had told her (I think it was the singer G. P. Vishnevskaya) that some of the dressmakers there were nearly as clever as the ones in Paris; and there was such a little-girl look in her face when she proposed it, such a smile of anticipated delight, that he realized that she had not been very happy for a long time and so was craving some sort of pleasure, even the most trivial kind; it was that longing for merriment which her eyes so intensely expressed; that was precisely what he found so, how should I say, upsetting, because he was impotent in that department, too. So she wanted to, um, I mean, really, the Nevsky of all places! Not long before the October Revolution, the Symbolist writer Bely proclaimed: All of Petersburg is an infinity of the Prospect raised to the nth degree. Beyond Petersburg lies nothing. Nothing but tanks, that is, the T-26s, T- 34s, and sixty-ton TVs… Oh, my, he remembered quite well, so very, you know, thank you, all the corpses with back-flung faces which used to blow across Nevsky Prospect like leaves, and the living faces the color of dirt, and that severed arm which hung from the garden gate; I would have thought that my Galisha was too young to remember, but even now she has nightmares; I suppose she’ll be tortured until she dies. And this child he’d married had no idea! She was simply too young. He remembered especially well the great bundle of guns aiming at the sky in R. L. Karmen’s “Leningrad Fights,” the Smolny Institute obscured by smoke. Of course he and the family were in Kuibyshev by that time. One had to admire Karmen for, you know. And now that he had wheezed his way to his feet so that he could stand sternly over her like that statue of Lenin which remained before the raised portico of the Smolny throughout the Nine Hundred Days, Irina began to realize that once again she’d offended him, and her face turned red as he ranted: I, I used to gaze at Nevsky Prospect through a jagged hole! And that sound of those Stukas coming, pure vibrato, I, I—
And let me guess, interrupted his wife, likewise rising. She was standing beside you.
No! he cried, shocked out of his rage. Don’t worry, don’t worry; that’s all garbage. I wasn’t even—
Naked, I’m sure. Well, you certainly had your romantic moments, back when you could still—
In a hurried rasp he begged: Don’t be cruel, Irina!
I’m sorry! Forgive me, Mitya. I felt jealous for a moment, that was all.
I—
Never mind. Now it’s over. Please do forgive me. We won’t go to Leningrad.
He lived on to 1973, when he signed an open letter in Pravda denouncing the human rights activist A. Sakharov. This servile act cost him several of his remaining friends.45 The avant-gardist Y. P. Lyubimov, toward whom he’d always been generous, no longer consented to greet him. So what? Tell it to the the grinning boys of the Condor Legion! His fame was distinct without warmth, like Arctic sunlight on a pavement of soldiers’ helmets.
He lived until 1974, when he wrote the spectacular “Suite on Verses of Michelangelo,” whose songs are as beautiful as a flock of multicolored fighter planes. Now it had been exactly forty years since that international musical festival in Leningrad when he’d played his piano concerto and then a certain twenty-year-old student had slipped him a note signed with her initials, E. E. K. It was actually Nina who’d wanted the divorce. And Irina had certainly also, you know, but Irina was practically the age of his own daughter; she didn’t know what she, anyhow, there were times when she slipped an arm around him and he just laughed to himself: She thinks she’s embracing me but she’s only embracing my coat! Irina laid her hand on his fingers, which were as soft, fat and white as graveyard-berries. And everywhere he turned he was, you know. For example, and this is just one example, every time Irina turned on the television there was another Roman Karmen program about the fraternal struggle in Latin America, and you know how I feel about dear, dear Roman Lazarevich! I wonder how often he gets kissed. He’s still in good health, I hear. One’s supposed to get kissed farewell three times by our Russian women when one goes off to the front. He’s in another of his suits, filming the White House in Washington, D.C.; can you imagine? And now here’s Fidel Castro sitting casually in the back seat of a car, chatting with children through the open window (that’s a scene in “Flaming Island”), slim, whitehaired Roman Karmen stands dreamily beside Castro, who looks very revolutionary and dynamic; pan to children, crowds, old women, militants, parades. And Irina’s so gullible; she even thinks these people have now been, you know, liberated! Because she saw it on television! She says that just because I’m older doesn’t mean I have the right to tell her what to think; she’s just as intelligent as I am. What can I say to that? I can’t say that Elena would have, well, what do I know? He smiled at Irina; don’t think he wasn’t, to get right down to it, grateful. Nina saw all too clearly that he would have been better off with Elena, but he couldn’t go through with it, perhaps exactly because he would have been better off, which he couldn’t bear; he trailed after Nina and got her to take him back. He should have believed his heart. And then Elena had said—what had she said?—Bury me in Leningrad, he told Irina.
45
“I can testify that nobody I knew fought,” writes Nadezhda Mandelstam. “All they did was lie low. That was the most that people with a conscience could do—and even that required real courage.”