Still and all, one feature must be conceded to the grey old days: coherence. Just as a poem achieves its effect by a narrow application of choice within a wide application of exclusion (the word I need cannot be any of the thousands which fail to rhyme with grey), so wartime Europe was perfect in its ghastly fashion, inhabited by beings with coarse-pored silver complexions. What were my parents like when they were young? Their hair is silver now. Of course it always was; they got married before brown was invented. Relatively speaking, they had luck; my father grew up in the ultra-whiteness of Chicago winters; my mother had her grey Nebraska wheat fields. In Europe, the tonal scale remained measurably harsher. What inmate of that continent could hope to be more than a fleeing, slender civilian in an inky-black suit, or one of many snowy-camouflaged men on a tank, pointing black guns across the snow? A few million souls did get to be decorated dull-grey Russian soldier-girls in mid-grey fur hats; we see them marching westward in that propaganda spectacular “The Fall of Berlin,” to which Shostakovich wrote the soundtrack. When Khruschev, outflanking Operation Polaroid, introduced the color red into Soviet society in early 1961, it caught on so well that every subsequent decoration had to be either crimson or bloody, but during the war all medals stayed grey, of course, which I actually consider befitting because it was a dreary grey war of frozen corpses; frozen blood goes black; red would have been out of place. The pale skinny boys assembling the round magazines of machine-guns, what color should they have been but dead white? Between the reflections of long white military columns writhing in the Neva and the black trickles of people dwindling day by day on the frozen streets of Leningrad, only two zones were needed: ultra-field-grey, as exemplified by the squat darkness above the treads of the Panzerkampfwagen (specifically, a Pzkpfw-IIIF), and ice-grey, the color of those Stalinist banners which the Panzers overpassed, the banners which said: LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.
He rose from the bed and stood lankily naked, watching his breath freeze in the greyish room. He went to the window. Yawning, he scratched a little circle in the window-frost. Through this peephole he saw what he had known he would see: dull grey battleships frozen in the ice.
He saw men in murky greatcoats, with grey wool caps on their heads, hands in their pockets, and rifles wedged under their arms, the barrels aiming straight upwards, every man standing shoulder to shoulder for warmth as the military band played. Then they began to march. White snakes of snow-light flittered across them as they twitched rhythmically out of focus.
He saw the pavements shimmering and shining with ice.
He smiled. (White streaks—scratches in the war film—writhed across his face.) He was as happy as he would ever be, because the woman in the bed was his mistress, Elena Konstantinovskaya, and because after everything she still loved him.
The master composer (which is what he was) does not bemoan the absence of greyness between the piano’s white and black keys. Anyhow, he had his greys, three strong, crude Russian shades which sufficed for everything. —Two zones, I’ve just written, but she brought the third to us. Between black and white lie the following three greys, from dark to light: the charcoal grey of Konstantinovskaya’s pubic curls, which corresponds to the shadow which our T-34 tanks cast upon the frozen pavement of Kirovsky Prospekt (let us hereby repudiate the enemy’s Pzkpfw-IIIF); the healthy mid-grey of her fingernails, lips and nipples; and the creamy pale grey, not ice-grey at all, of her face, hands and shoulders, which have been tanned by the Russian sun. Underneath her white, white breasts live twin crescent-shadows which crave to express themselves in their own intermediate shade between lip-grey and shoulder-grey, but they cannot, because all greys have been used up. Once the poem has narrowed and thereby deepened itself (for instance, limiting itself to white, black and three greys), it becomes more fully what it is; Konstantinovskaya is perfectly what she is; she is perfect; she saves him who loves her because the white sun of an explosion is a face, Death’s face, and Death’s long black tresses are smoke; without Konstantinovskaya, white and black would be only Death; she blessed them into a marriage. Here come more Germans in field-grey; here come NCOs with silver lace on their shoulder straps. Thanks to her, field-grey isn’t just an enemy shade; it’s lip-grey, too; he kisses it whenever he kisses her mouth…
He drinks from her mouth. Her white breath-fog flutters across the blackish-grey swellings of the Neva. That breath will be frozen tomorrow, maning the snow-clods and dirty ice-clods and corpses in new white. Yes, the mud will be frozen silver by her breath, and then it will be dusted white, and the small bomb-smashed houses of Pulkovo will seem cleaner. All will be white on white, even the shy rare smoke which freezes as soon as it’s born from chimneys.
He said: Well, Elena, how unlucky it is that I didn’t marry you—
Don’t cry. Stay with me today.
But then I—
And stay the night.
If they’re watching—
Of course they’re watching, Mitya.
He took heart at that and laughed: Well, to be sure, they’re all waiting for my bad end. Here, Elena, do you see what I have with me? I forgot to show you before because I was so excited to be, well, I, I was thinking of you, Elena, oh, yes, I was… Sollertinsky gave me this smoked fish. I wish I knew where he got it—
Come to bed now, she said quietly.
And it went on, it continued, greyly curving like the triple-railed tramcar tracks of Leningrad which now led directly from Comrade Zhukov’s pale, pouchy face to the round bald head and wide round eyes of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb; their pearl-grey hours flickered and stuttered past, her white breasts sanctifying by sharing the same unholy light as German munitions coming to kiss the streets newly paved by the corpses they’d made; her eyebrows were a wall of smoke. But it was only a war movie that he dreamed. He was long gone to Kuibyshev by then; he’d been evacuated with his wife and children, because he was valuable. Konstantinovskaya was in Spain; she married and divorced a certain Roman Karmen. And when the last reel flopped and chittered loose, when the projectionist returned them all to ghastly light, then the movie star awoke, rolled away from his wife’s snores, rose, fiddled with his Seventh Symphony and later stood with his face sadly and anxiously crumpled as he rested his hands on his two children’s shoulders. His glasses kept sliding down his nose. He wanted to take them off. His daughter Galya scratched a circle in the frosty windowpane. Peering through it, he saw the stopped buses, the black, flat-topped Russian automobiles whose fronts sloped doubly down over the wheels like the clasped mandibles of praying mantises, and after he had counted only two shades of grey, his white, white fingers, which in those days were exactly the same shade as piano keys, began to clench like the feelers of an insect drawing up and dying.
All right, so he’d known it was a movie all along; he’d rushed to leave her because Nina was pregnant; he’d joined the dark crowds on the far side of the street, the safe side, where building-fronts remained multiwindowed and white. (The stenciled Cyrillic letters, white on grey, said: .) In the movie he’d finally returned to the side where he was meant to be. The soundtrack was his own. She was on top of him, and he was inside her, and their mouths both opened and then those two pale, open-mouthed Russian corpses formed their own exclusive society on a street corner which shone brilliant silver with rain. ■