Shostakovich choked on his vodka.
And now a journalist from TASS leaned across the translator and said with malicious zest: Mr. Cliburn, the Soviet people unanimously demand to know the status of the Negro question in your country.
Gosh, Mitya, said Cliburn, not looking at the journalist at all, I never met a Negro I didn’t like. After all, they’re Americans, too.
Shostakovich bit his lip to keep from laughing. He could hardly wait to tell Lebedinsky about this! (With Lebedinsky, as with Poe’s protagonist, it was the teeth. In ’44 he’d seen a Ukrainian village which had just been liberated from the Fascists. All the corpses hung grinning. To him the most menacing thing was their rotting smiles. And now, whenever somebody smiled too widely or too whitely, he longed to scream.)
Hastily, Oborin put in: Van, I imagine that everybody in Kilgore, Texas, must be proud of you today.
A little self-consciously, like his dark bowtie clinging to the tapering slit of whiteness (for I’ve heard that as a rule they dress casually in America), the boy said: Actually I was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. I don’t suppose you know where that is—
No, said Oborin, but I’ve heard that it’s very hot in your southern provinces. Almost like Africa.
Raising his voice, the journalist said: Many Negroes there, laboring in atrocious conditions…
Yes, hot, said Van Cliburn in an exhausted voice.
And now Shostakovich began to perceive some haunted and guarded quality about the American’s soul. And indeed, the man in raspberry-colored boots who dropped by the next day to drink vodka said with a wink: You see, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, he’s a homosexual. We know this irrefutably. It’s in his file.
You don’t say, returned the composer with a pretense of deep astonishment. Well, well, well, I’m most interested.
What would you expect from such a decadent country? If I had my way (and I’m sure you agree with me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich), I’d smash his smiling American face! I hate ’em all. Remember how they wouldn’t open the second front year after year? They wanted the Fascists to bleed us dry—
Yes, yes, yes, yes, said Shostakovich, whose temples had begun to ache from too much liquor. You’re absolutely correct, Comrade Alexandrov—
Every time I see an American, it sets me off. I start thinking about that second front, and I… Well, at least you’re one of us, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. You were in Leningrad…
Indeed I was, Comrade Alexandrov, and I, I, I’ll never forget what—
My first wife fell into their hands. She was a hostage. In Kiev.
Well, well. She was there on business? If I may say so, my dear friend, sometimes it’s better not to—
We’d always believed that the only thing they did was hang her, but do you know what I learned just last year? You know what they did to her first? While those fucking Americans were laughing all the way to the bank! Don’t get me started. Who taught him our music?
A Russian. Rozina Levina—
An émigré. Scum.
His mother also taught him, I believe.
That’s rich. A mama’s boy. No wonder he’s a fairy.
She was formerly a concert pianist, he told me—
That just makes it worse.
And it’s even worse than that, Comrade Alexandrov. You see, I venture to say that he’s—
He’s what? We need all the details. Tell me everything you can remember about that bastard—
Do you know, he’s—well, I share your feelings of, of, so to speak, betrayal, and yet in this case, well, I truly think he’s not all there.
How could he say what he truly felt? Perhaps Cliburn knew more than he pretended. But Shostakovich remained convinced that this American was part of the natural process of forgetting. Call him a bacterium on the moldering corpse of our war-memories. Soon there’d be nothing left, not even bones. (Of course he was only a little boy, with his hands in his pockets.) When Shostakovich was in Leipzig for the Bach festival, a German Communist, smirking, had quoted him the words of a certain General von Hartmann, commander of the Seventy-first Division of Sixth Army at Stalingrad. A few days before the final surrender, Hartmann had remarked: As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust a thousand years from now, and Sixth Army an indecipherable name, incomprehensible to all.—Then he strode to the top of a railroad embankment, and fired blindly at the Russians until they shot him down. The German Communist continued: I can’t deny that these words made an impression on me, Dmitri Dmitriyevich. To get right down to it, his bourgeois-dramatic heroic posture in the service of absolute nihilism—well, that shithead was absolutely correct about Sixth Army. Who cares about it now?—And the German Communist went on laughingly reviling General von Hartmann (of whom Shostakovich had never heard), until it became apparent that the German Communist couldn’t stop thinking about Sixth Army and maybe didn’t want Sixth Army to become an indecipherable name, because the sufferings which everybody in Germany and Russia had endured had become valuable as the simple result of their own intensity; he dreaded to condemn them to the crematorium of history. What Shostakovich felt (beyond revulsion, which he did his jittering best to mask, that any German should now presume to be his comrade) was something midway between sadness and peace. For didn’t he likewise cherish his own hopelessness? And this blond bacterium from America was here on a mission to transform the death which presently characterized all Europeans, and perhaps even vivified them, back into dirt. The bacterium would win.46 It would overwhelm him. He did not want to die—which is to say, he was death; he could not bear for his death to die… ‣
LOST VICTORIES
And then, as I smoked a cigarette with a tank crew or chatted with a rifle company about the overall situation, I never failed to encounter that irrepressible urge to press onward, that readiness to put forward the very last ounce of energy, which are the hallmarks of the German soldier.
In the sleepwalker’s time, we took back our honor and issued Panzergruppen in all directions. But when I finally got home, the advance guard of the future had already come marching through the Brandenburg Gate, with their greatcoats triple-buttoned right up to their throats, their hands in their pockets and their eyes as expressionless as shell craters! According to my wife, whose memory isn’t bad when she confines herself to verifiable natural events, some of our lindens were in bloom that May, as why wouldn’t they be, and the rest were scorched sticks, so she refers to that time as the “Russian spring,” which proves that she can be witty, unless of course she heard that phrase on the radio. Anyhow, we got thoroughly denazified. Our own son, so I hear, threw away his Hitlerjugend uniform and sat on the fountain’s rim, listening to the United States Army Band day after day. Next the Wall went up, so half of Germany got lost to us, possibly forever, being magically changed into one of the new grey countries of Europe Central, and all our fearfulness of death came back. An old drunk stood up in the beerhall and tried to talk about destiny, but somebody bruised his skull with a two-liter stein, and down he went. When I reached home that night my wife was standing at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the doorjamb, peering at me through the place where the diamond-shaped glass window used to be, and I must have looked sad, because she said to me in a strange soft voice like summer: Never mind those lost years; we still have almost half the century left to make everything right, to which I said: Never mind those eight years I spent in Vorkuta, when they knocked my teeth out and damaged my kidneys, to which she replied: Listen, we all suffered in the war, even me whom you left alone while you were off raping Polish girls and shooting Ukrainians in the ditches; it’s common knowledge what you were up to; besides, you’re a middle-aged man and, and look at all the beer you swill; your kidneys would have given out on you anyway.—Having reconnoitered her disposition (as my old commanding officer would have said; he died of influenza in some coal mine near Tiflis), I fell back, so to speak; I withdrew from the position in hopes of saving something; I retreated into myself. Let her talk about destiny all she wants, I said to myself. At least I’m not tainted by illusions!
46
In fact, within a few years of Shostakovich’s death, the New York critics were deriding Cliburn for “superficiality.” His repertoire dwindled. In his tour of 1994 he played nothing but Rachmaninoff’s Third, and that first Tchaikovsky concerto which had brought him his freakish fame. (The