You must not think that Glazunov and I used to sit around and drink and eat. After all, he was over fifty and I was thirteen when our paths crossed. We could hardly have become drinking partners. And I must add that Glazunov didn't simply enjoy drinking. He suffered from incessant thirst. Some people have such unfortunate constitutions.
Of course, under normal circumstances, it wouldn't have been a problem. Why not drink to slake thirst? You just stop at the store and buy a few bottles, particularly since I think that Glazunov couldn't have managed more than two bottles at a time, his health wouldn't have permitted it.
But here enter those extreme, abnormal circumstances, also known as that "unforgettable year 1 9 1 9," or "military communism."
Those two words say little to the young generation now, but they meant a great deal, including the complete absence of an opportunity to drink and eat. No, no, not even on the day of your former saint, because there was a complete and total disappearance of food, and .of wine and liquor products because of a strict ban on alcohol.
Now when I think back I just don't want to believe that year ever existed. It's unpleasant to remember. And it must be because so many don't like to think about it that I haven't seen any references to the sorry circumstances of our lives back then. All the memoirists must have amnesia caused by malnutrition.
All right, let's put the food problem aside and concentrate on the vodka. For many its disappearance was a tragedy, and for Glazunov the sad fact constituted a catastrophe.
How did other people react to this? Life dictates its laws and you 47
must obey. Let's bear up, comrades, and so on. Probably Glazunov tried to march in step with the times. He probably thought, Well, I can't drink, so I won't. And he went an hour without a drink, two hours. He probably went outside to breathe some fresh air. The air in Petrograd was wonderful then-pine- and fir-scented, since most of the factories were shut down, thus reducing the air pollution considerably. And he saw that life couldn't go on like this, because he was suffering too much.
You know that you have to find the cause for any disease and then beat the hell out of it with a log. That's the advice all the healers in Russia gave from time immemorial. And now we hear the same valuable advice from our physicians.
Glazunov realized that the cause of his distress was the absence of the precious liquid. And therefore he had to get hold of some. Even without a log, since logs in those unforgettable and highly romantic days were also in short supply. (Firewood was invaluable then, people even gave logs as birthday presents. You could certainly bring a bundle as a present, in fact such a valuable gift was quite welcome.) A joke's a joke, but this was serious, they didn't have what could be called the last solace in life. And without it, as Zoshchenko used to say, speech grew difficult, breathing irregular, and nerves frazzled.
Since there was no vodka, you had to get raw alcohol, that was obvious even to a child. But there was no alcohol. It was given out in only two cases: as medical aid for the wounded and for scientific defense experiments. And the last of the cologne had been consumed long ago.
I'm coming to the gist of the story. Glazunov met my parents and they talked about this and that, when . it came out that my father had access to state alcohol.*
Glazunov had lost a lot of weight by then and looked peaked. His face was yellow and unhealthy, with a myriad of tiny lines under the eyes. It was obvious that the man was suffering. And so they came to an agreement: Father would help Glazunov out with alcohol. He would get it for him, from state reserves.
While I studied at the Conservatory I often ran errands for Gla-
•Shostakovich's father worked at the Institute of Standards, which was concerned, among other matters, with establishing a universal metric system iii Russia. He was assistant to the manager and had broad powers, and therefore he had access to "scarce" materiel and products.
48
zunov, delivering letters to various places-offices, the Philharmonic.
But I particularly remember his other letters, the ones he asked me to deliver to my father, because I knew that they contained the usual request for alcohol. "Dear Dmitri Boleslavovich, could you please spare
. . . " and so on.
Why did I take note of these occasions? Because I wasn't a child any more and I understood everything. And first and foremost, I knew that this was serious.
In those days every person had some sort of shady business going.
You had to survive somehow, and everyone was walking close to the edge. But in this case Father could have got into a real mess. Alcohol was worth its weight in gold, even more. Because what was gold?
Only metal. They were planning to build toilets out of it, as Lenin promised, and no one had really planned to abolish alcohol. It was like life itself, and people caught in business involving alcohol were deprived of their lives.
Back then it was called being sentenced to the "highest measure of punishment," which, translated," meant "to be shot." And people used to joke then, "Anything but the highest measure. I'm allergic to the highest measure." In those heroic times there were a lot of synonyms for the simple word "shoot," including "expend," "send to the left,"
"send to Dukhonin's staff," "liquidate," and "lay down." There were many more. It's amazing that there were so many expressions for a single ugly, unnatural act. Why were people afraid to call it by its name?
For no matter what you call it, it's still shooting. And Father was risking his life then. It must run in the family-taking risks.
I worried about Father, I really did. It was a good thing that I wasn't asked to take the alcohol to Glazunov, for I could have dropped the bottle or done so many other stupid things. And what if I had been caught?
Glazunov used to come to our house for it. It was done with the greatest conspiratorial air possible. When I think about it now my heart rate goes up, it's like watching a frightening movie. Sometimes I dream about Glazunov's visits.
Later, much later, when my father was no longer alive and Glazunov lived abroad, rumors started around Leningrad about this whole 49
business. I must have carelessly told someone and I never did lack well-wishers. People began saying things like, "Well, naturally he's got no talent. He bought Glazunov with alcohol. And all his excellent grades at the Conservatory were lubricated with alcohol. What a fraud, and a composer to boot!"
They suggested taking away my diploma, but nothing came of it.
All right, go ahead, kick me, I won't say a word, I thought then. But now I'd like to say the following in my defense: I studied honestly and worked honestly. I was lazier at first and less so later. And there were no stories about me like the ones about the legendary Anatol Liadov.
As a youth, Liadov played the violin and gave it up, then he played piano and dropped that too. He paid little attention to his composition studies. For instance, he would be assigned to write a fugue and he knew ahead of time that he wouldn't do it. And he would tell his sister, with whom he lived, "Don't give me dinner until I've written the fugue." Dinnertime would roll around and the fugue would be unwritten. "I won't feed you because you haven't completed the assignment. You asked me to do that yourself," Liadov's sister, a kind woman, would say. "As you like," our marvelous young man would reply.