He said to her: Thank you for all the happiness you’ve given me.
She kissed him passionately. His music became as heavy-lidded as the eyes of Käthe Kollwitz.
He could sight-read her, so to speak; he knew how to make her feel as though an orchestra were playing. (Well, wasn’t it?) This facility he lost later in life, around the time that the Berlin Wall went up; women began complaining that this Shostakovich had no erotic empathy—one of the two reasons why G. Ustvolskaya would refuse to marry him in 1954. By then he was talking to himself; after Nina died he used to say, I think to the piano: Oh, me, oh, my, Elena; well, if it’s not working as it is, then maybe we should leave it and, you know, avoid our mistakes next time we’re each with a, a, I’m sorry. That’s just my, how should I say, my personal point of view.—But he hadn’t lost anything in 1934, neither courage nor confidence, let alone integrity; in 1935 he still sparkled with jokes; Elena never stopped laughing! She counted on him to keep her always highspirited; that was one of the myriad ways he cherished her; he remained untouched by what I’ll call history, which is why I assert that foreseeing the future is as worthless as observing that the third theme of Opus 40’s fourth movement appears more uneven on the page than does the second theme of the first movement. But imagining the future, then mistaking imagination for foresight, is one of life’s luxuries; certainly it seemed to him and her (and how could it have been otherwise?) that whenever they kissed they were drinking the future.
Kissing her again and again, he got drunk. All around them both, the dull grey and pinkish-grey building-fronts of Leningrad angled and articulated in accordance with canal-curves. One more kiss, Lyalochka! When he slowly slid his finger in and out of her, she uttered soft clucking sounds from deep within her throat, her eyes closed in ecstasy.
The extent of his infatuation with this young woman (who was still, by the way, a member in good standing of the Komsomol—no matter that she smoked cigarettes) may best be conveyed by noting that three weeks into their affair, in June, he had to leave on a concert tour; in July he met Nina in Yalta, then vacationed with her in Polenevo, where the cellist V. Kubatsky, pitying his desperation, implored him to distract himself by composing a new sonata, and the very next month, within a few days of their return to Leningrad, Nina had already moved out, at which her husband burst into tears and said: It’s entirely superfluous to, to, how can I make my point, Ninusha, to take the line of least resistance and… Then he rushed off to take Elena Konstantinovskaya to another concert.
That was on the the thirteenth of August. He walked down the great avenue of trees in Alexander Park, just so he could, you know, think about Elena. On the nineteeth of September, the fourth movement of Opus 40 was already finished, because he couldn’t help, how should I say, bustling about; as a small child he’d never been able to sit still in his chair, so his mother had to, never mind. Elena wept when he played her score on his piano: In affairs of the heart, my friends, considerable weeping tends to go on as part of the, you know, background music. On 10 March 1935, he informed his closest confidant, Sollertinsky, that he might never come back to Leningrad; he could now envision himself in Moscow with Elena, where we’ll have a little, you know, with two sets of four rooms. His mother had never liked Nina anyway—not that she liked Elena much better, but his sister Maryusa adored her. In Moscow the two of us can get away from everything; we’ll start over and I’ll never see Nina again. And indeed it was in Moscow that he showed L. T. Atovmyan his divorce certificate.
What about Nina? Well, what about her? The late S. Khentova, in whose Udivitelyenui Shostakovich (1993) forty-two of Shostakovich’s letters to Elena are published, although not without the excisions of certain intimacies (I have all that right here, but it’s going to stay in my secret collection), bequeathed us the following summation of the two rivals: In contrast to Nina Vasilievna, who was not interested in fashion, she dressed elegantly, cultivating grace, femininity and sensuality.
All the same, he did come back to Nina—twice.
Khentova, whom Shostakovich avoided like death, cannot always be trusted. I’m not saying she was in the hire of any foreign powers; I do maintain that her intelligence service was less reliable than mine. For example, she claims that our composer did not become Elena Konstantinovskaya’s lover until the summer of 1934, when one of the private English classes in his apartment ended with kisses. But Opus 40 itself proves that their love was consummated in the very first movement, the allegro non troppo. No doubt they took precautions on those white nights. He hadn’t yet volunteered to leave Nina; nor had Elena become unshakably certain of her love for him. So they hid within their eight-chambered house where even sharp-eyed Khentova couldn’t see. They fooled Mravinsky, Glikman, Sollertinsky, Nina unquestionably (come to think of it, perhaps they didn’t fool Nina), and most impressively, Shostakovich’s mother, who still read his diary whenever she could. Deep down they went, down to the red core that he’d revisit alone twenty-six years later, when he composed Opus 110.
A pianist can sometimes resemble a slow underwater swimmer, and a lover likewise swims within the sea of the other, far down where no waves can reach; overhead, the piano’s lid, heavier than a coffin’s, shuts out extraneous vibrations, while simultaneously demarcating the boundary between water and air. It’s too perfect underwater; that’s what kills us, the perfection! (This is not my theory, of course; I don’t believe in perfection.) And the addictive poisonousness of this perfection was what flooded Shostakovich with the joy of something illicit, first when he was a boy playing weirdness on the piano when others expected a foxtrot; and now when he was Nina’s husband and playing out his passion for Elena. Another English lesson, pretty please, Lyalotchka! Elena is to poor Nina as Opus 110, the Eighth String Quartet, will be to the First, which its composer dismisses as a particular exercise in the form of a quartet. Forgive me, Ninusha!
After the divorce went through, he went to his previous muse, T. Glivenko, and said to her with a sad laugh: I have a very clever wife, oh, yes—very clever…
Because he couldn’t stop kissing her, her delightfully puffy lips were the next parts of her to get translated. In the course of translation, he necessarily sucked on them. Private English lessons, oh, me, oh, my! He couldn’t stop! And so Elena’s lips kiss us all forever in the second movement. Elenka dearest, I’m going to write a, let’s see, a Moscow Concerto, so that you and I can go to Moscow! And there we’ll do it again, oh, yes, Lyalka, we’ll orchestrate something else all over again! Because you’re my…
Then her hair—oh, her, how should I say, her, well, her long, dark hair…