Great Historical Novels (62 page)

His words held no truth: everyone knew that Yevgeny Mravinsky,
at the helm of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, was the only conductor Shostakovich trusted, and it had been this way for the past three years, ever since their roaring battles over the Fifth Symphony, when Shostakovich had sat stony-faced in the fourth row, refusing to offer suggestions, and Mravinsky sat at the piano, thumping out every melody at the wrong speed until he’d finally provoked Shostakovich into action. By the fifth rehearsal, metronome markings had been written into the score and a firm friendship had developed, cemented by Mravinsky’s being awarded the All-Union Competition for Conductors with Shostakovich’s symphony.

‘Anyway,’ added Shostakovich, in a kind of protestation, ‘there was a march in the Fifth! At least, the hint of a march. And I haven’t done one since.’

‘So you’re entitled to a march. Whatever lights your fire. But I fear for your domestic harmony. I don’t expect your mood will be improved by working on a march.’

Shostakovich swigged another mouthful of brandy. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Some kind of foreboding.’ He looked sombrely into his glass. ‘What will we do if the rumours are true and the Germans are planning to double-cross us?’

Sollertinsky walked back to the window. ‘I don’t know. At any rate, we’ll be told what to do — or it will be “suggested” to us. Since when did we have what’s commonly called a choice?’

Shostakovich joined him at the windowsill, gazing out at the crowded pavements, the bustling women with their baskets, the buildings throwing long shadows across the streets. ‘What will be, will be. But I promise you, I won’t leave Leningrad willingly.’ Sighing, he suddenly became practical. ‘I promised Nina I’d be home before Maxim’s bedtime. What’s the time?’

‘Twenty-five past six,’ said Sollertinsky, without looking at his watch.

‘Damn! Are you sure?’

‘I’d bet my monthly salary on it.’ Sollertinsky pointed to a figure rushing across the square. ‘Karl Eliasberg. He always hurries but he’s never late. As regular as a Swiss metronome and twice as reliable. Do you know, I bumped into him last week and he dropped a score of Mahler! Rather incongruous for an old stick insect like Elias — but apparently he has a passion for the music.’

‘What?’ Shostakovich was picking up his books, and dropping them again, and knocking papers off Sollertinsky’s desk, and finishing his third brandy.

‘
Mahler
,’ repeated Sollertinsky. ‘Elias must know there’s no hope of performing that German music — not now, possibly never again. Still, he seems almost as obsessed with it as you are.’

‘I can’t think about Mahler right now, nor Karl What’s-his-name-Berg. I absolutely must get home.’

‘Calm down! I’ll see you out!’ Sollertinsky placed the nearly empty brandy bottle back in its hiding place. ‘Cheers, Ludwig. Don’t drink it all in our absence.’

As they were leaving the office, they heard a door slam and quick footsteps on the landing above. Shostakovich peered up the stairwell. ‘Hello there! Many thanks for the other night!’

‘You’re welcome! It would have been less of a party without you.’ It was Nikolai.

‘Party? What party?’ queried Sollertinsky. ‘Could there possibly have been a party in Leningrad to which I was not invited?’

‘Sollertinsky missed a delectable performance, did he not?’ Shostakovich started down the stairs beside Nikolai. ‘A beautiful young cellist. Played like an angel.’

‘Who?’ Sollertinsky pricked up his ears like a hunting dog. ‘Does the angel attend the Conservatoire?’

‘She’s a little too young for that,’ said Nikolai.

‘And a little too young for
you
, Sollertinsky,’ said Shostakovich.

‘It’s my daughter.’ Nikolai relented. ‘The occasion for the party was her ninth birthday.’

‘You spoil all the fun, Nikolai,’ said Shostakovich, striding ahead across the marble foyer. ‘Here was Sollertinsky, anticipating a new quarry.’

‘Please.’ Sollertinsky looked injured. ‘I’m a married man with two children.’

‘In that case,’ said Shostakovich, ‘I wonder why
you
are never required at home for bedtime stories? Here I am, about to run for a tram that I’ll miss, forcing me to sprint alongside it as I did for most of my youth, being too weak to push into a crowded car, and in spite of sprinting I’ll be late, Maxim will already be in bed, Nina will be angry, I’ll slam a door, Maxim will cry, and I’ll wonder why, in heaven’s name, does my married friend Ivan Sollertinsky never suffer such a scenario?’

Sollertinsky gave an elaborate shrug. ‘When she met me, my wife sensed that I had excellent genes. In this matter, at least, I didn’t let her down. What more can I say? You, on the other hand, promise too much and you can’t always deliver.’

‘Oh, I can deliver.’ Shostakovich set his jaw determinedly. ‘I always deliver, I promise you that.’

‘You look done in,’ said Nikolai. ‘Go home to that family of yours and have an early night.’

Shostakovich gripped his hand. ‘I meant what I said the other night. About Sonya. She’s got a bright future ahead of her and you must take care of that at all costs.’ He peered across the square. ‘Not a tram in sight. Damn. I won’t get home in time to prevent Maxim conducting.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Sollertinsky. ‘Your son has started conducting?’

‘With anything he can lay his hands on. Pencils, knitting needles — he must be discouraged. I’ll never consent to having a conductor in the family.’

Nikolai watched Shostakovich set off at a jog across the square. He turned to Sollertinsky. ‘Is he serious?’

‘Alas, I fear he is. At least half serious. His dislike for the baton-wielding race is rivalled only by his despising of orchestras. And the profession of teaching, of course.’

Suddenly Shostakovich, already some distance away, stopped and turned. ‘Football!’ he called.

Nikolai shielded his eyes against the sun. ‘What’s that?’

‘Football! Tickets! Get some for next week?’

Nikolai waved. ‘I’ll take care of it!’

‘Plebeian pastime,’ said Sollertinsky pleasantly. ‘Don’t know what you see in it. Fancy a drink?’

‘Maybe one,’ said Nikolai. ‘Then I’ve got to get home.’

‘Don’t tell me. Parental duties.’

‘The very same,’ agreed Nikolai.

The first fight

The orchestra was at its worst when the weather was hot. The rehearsal-room windows were too small and too high up to let in more than a trickle of air. Today, before the musicians had even started playing, sweat was running down their faces and painting large wet patches under their arms. Those who were already warming up were pausing, mid-arpeggio, to scrabble for handkerchiefs or flap sheets of music in front of their faces.

Elias stepped onto the low platform and began straightening his score. It didn’t matter how many hundreds of rehearsals he had taken over the past decade. In the moments between entering the room and the sounding of the first note, he felt like an impostor, about to be sent, red-faced, back to music school.

‘Good morning,’ he called over the messy riffs of violins, and flutes emitting single repeated notes like ships entering a channel, and the low hum of gossip about who was sleeping with whom and which government official had been seen at the opera drinking champagne with the new young star of the Kirov. ‘Only sixteen!’ he heard. ‘Young enough to be his granddaughter.’ There were hoots of laughter, and the shrill rise and fall of a clarinet playing a passage that had nothing to do with what they were currently rehearsing.

‘I trust you’re well?’ he said to nobody in particular. His voice was overly careful, and he despised himself for it. Apparently when Mravinsky walked into a rehearsal room an instant silence fell.

‘Let’s start with the second movement,’ he said, rapping repeatedly on
his stand until he’d gained a mutinous hush. But even once the musicians started playing, his control was flimsy. He’d kept his jacket on to make himself feel more authoritative; this was a mistake. Whenever he raised or lowered his arms, drops of sweat ran like mice inside his shirt-sleeves.

Outside the trams rumbled by, shaking the floor: a reminder that the whole of Leningrad was built on waterways and over unstable marshes. The orchestra felt similarly unstable, lagging a quarter and sometimes half a count behind. Soon Elias’s arms were trembling with the effort.

‘Crisper articulation!’ he ordered. ‘Make it more extrovert.’ Each time he swallowed he could taste the fried egg he’d had for breakfast, mixed with the sour bile of insecurity. ‘Pay attention!’

But the players’ eyes remained fixed on the music. The strings turned the melodies to mush, the brass was coarse, the woodwind as shrill as a wife long out of love with her husband.

Finally Elias stopped them and marched to the piano. ‘At bar one hundred and thirteen, you must pick up the pace. Or have you lost your collective memory, so you no longer know the meaning of
poco più mosso
?’ Setting the metronome going, he picked out the melody with his right hand. ‘Hear that? More like a dance, less like a bloody funeral procession.’ Leaving the metronome on, he returned to the podium. Down in the street a dog began to bark, and it continued barking against the beat. Laughter started up in the strings, and spread through the ranks.

The only thing to be grateful for was that no outsider was witnessing the debacle. ‘We’ll take it from the start of the oboe solo.’ Elias tried to sound assertive. ‘Bar one hundred and sixty, please.’

The strings began obediently enough, hacking out a ragged accompaniment. But from the woodwind section — nothing. Elias glanced down at the score, half-hoping it was he who’d made a mistake. The notes clustered mockingly on the stave, but there was no corresponding sound. The violas and cellos sawed on, minus a soloist.

Now, more than ever, the ground seemed to be shaking under his feet. He grabbed the sides of his stand to steady himself. ‘For God’s sake, stop!’ he shouted, so loudly the orchestra instantly halted. For the first time that day real silence fell, as taut as a soap bubble — and as fragile.

Elias wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and forced himself to look up.

He could hardly believe what he saw. Alexander was lying back in his chair with his eyes closed. He held his oboe loosely across his body, and the way he was reclining meant his pelvis was tilted towards the ceiling
in a half-insolent, half-indifferent gesture.

‘You!’ Elias had never spoken with such rage. The other musicians straightened in their chairs.

Slowly, ostentatiously, Alexander opened his eyes.

‘You deliberately missed your entrance.’ Elias tried to ignore the fact that his legs were shaking. ‘Are you going to grace us with your genius, or should I give your solo to someone more dedicated?’

Alexander waved a languid hand. His freckled face was pale, and his eyelashes were almost invisible against his pink lids. ‘I’m hung over. After all, it’s midsummer, and I am a reveller. At midsummer, those who have friends revel and those who don’t —’ He paused in a theatrical way. ‘Suffice to say, this morning I have other things on my mind than dry professional concerns. Last night I had wine in my veins. And in my bed …’ Lasciviously, he licked the reed of his oboe. ‘I don’t mean to make you envious. Truly, I’m sorry that my flesh is weaker than yours and my life is more varied.’

Elias dropped his eyes to the score. The notes blurred into a sickening black mass. ‘I don’t care how much you’ve drunk. Nor how many teenage whores have been in your bed in the name of midsummer revelry. What you do in your free time is your own business, but what you do in rehearsal is not. If Leningrad weren’t so sorely lacking in oboists, I’d remove you at once for not being up to the mark.’

Alexander sat up, flushing pink around his nostrils. ‘I’m the best!’ he hissed. ‘How dare you talk to me in that way?’

With his hands behind his back, Elias drove the point of his baton into his palm. ‘You’re not the best.’ His voice was like a whip; he wanted to hurt as much as he was hurting, and he ground the baton deeper into his hand. ‘None of you is the best,’ he said, staring around with hatred. ‘You’re second-best, the lot of you. If you weren’t, you’d be playing for Mravinsky. This is an orchestra of losers, myself included. We’re nothing but understudies and reserves, sitting on the bench of life, hoping to be called to action. In the meantime we butcher the music that grants us a livelihood! We kill the music we’re supposed to love!’ He stopped, aware of a tiny movement from old Petrov, the concertmaster. Glancing down, he saw bright beads of blood falling onto the scratched floor.

‘You’re all excused from rehearsal. Anyone who is late on Monday will be permanently dismissed.’ He stood stiffly, hands behind his back, and watched the players shuffle out the door. No one looked at him as they passed.

Only Alexander paused, so close that Elias could see the sweat on his heavy eyelids. ‘You can’t sack us.’ Vodka fumes leaked from the pores of his skin. ‘You’re not in charge of appointments; you don’t even have the power to choose the repertoire. Everyone knows you’re nothing but a puppet to the committee.’

Elias wanted nothing more than to punch him, to smash the bridge of his sneering, arrogant nose. For a second Alexander’s face disappeared in a streaming mess of blood, his eyes purple slits, his cheekbones sagging, his teeth splintering. ‘You’re ridiculous.’ Elias looked away dismissively. ‘You’re nothing but a fish.’

‘A what?’ Alexander lurched. ‘A
fish
?’

‘You heard me. You’re a big fish in a small pond. An oboist in a second-rate orchestra in a cold swampy city that’s been forgotten by the rest of the world. No one will remember you or thank you for what you’ve done. Do you think we’re the ones who make history? We’re simply ciphers.
These
men —’ He smacked his hand down on the score, leaving a smear of blood on the page. ‘They’re the ones who’ll be invoked long after their bones lie in the grave. Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Prokofiev, Shostakovich — these men are the ones who will be revered for what they’ve given the world. Your sweat, your aching back, your blistered fingers: do you think anyone cares? You’re not a god, Alexander, however you strut and preen. No one will make pilgrimages to your altar. You will die as you’ve lived — a mediocre musician, and an arsehole of the first degree. In that, at least, you excel.’