The Noise of Time (14 page)

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s put all those official questions to one side. Instead, I’ll ask you this: what is Revisionism?’

It was a question even he could have answered. Revisionism was so loathsome and heretical a concept that the word itself practically had horns growing out of its head.

The girl reflected for a while, and then answered confidently, ‘Revisionism is the highest stage in the development of Marxism–Leninism.’

Whereupon he had smiled, and given her the best mark possible.

When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach’s preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically.

In 1949, when the attacks on him were still continuing, he had written his fourth string quartet. The Borodins had learnt it, and played it for the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Musical Institutions, which needed to approve any new work before it could be performed – and before the composer could be paid. Given his precarious status, he was not sanguine; but to everyone’s surprise the audition was a success, the piece authorised and money forthcoming. Soon afterwards, the story began to circulate that the Borodins had learnt to play the quartet in two different ways: authentically and strategically. The first was the way the composer had intended; whereas in the second, designed to get past musical officialdom, the players emphasised the ‘optimistic’ aspects of the piece, and its accordance with the norms of socialist art. This was held to be a perfect example of the use of irony as a defence against Power.

It had never happened, of course, but the story was repeated often enough for its veracity to be accepted. This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true – it couldn’t be true – because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the fourth quartet in the way the composer intended. Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

This was what he held to.

His civil, tedious and fraudulent conversations with Comrade Troshin continued. One afternoon, the tutor’s mood was uncharacteristically animated.

‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘is it true – I’ve just recently been told – that a few years ago Iosif Vissarionovich rang you up in person?’

‘Yes, it is true.’

The composer pointed at the telephone on the wall, even though it was not the one he had used. Troshin gazed at the instrument as if it ought already to be in a museum.

‘What a truly great man Stalin is! With all the cares of state, with all that he has to deal with, he knows even about some Shostakovich. He rules half the world and yet he has time for you!’

‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed with feigned zeal. ‘It is truly amazing.’

‘I am aware that you are a well-known composer,’ the tutor continued, ‘but who are you in comparison with our Great Leader?’

Guessing that Troshin would not be familiar with the text of the Dargomyzhsky romance, he replied gravely, ‘I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’

‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed. And it’s a good thing that you now appear to possess a healthy sense of self-criticism.’

As if eager for more such praise, he had repeated, as soberly as he could manage, ‘Yes, I’m a worm, a mere worm.’

Troshin went away well pleased with the progress that had been made.

But the composer’s study never did display the finest portrait of Stalin that Moscow could sell. Only a few months into Dmitri Dmitrievich’s re-education, the objective circumstances of Soviet reality changed. In other words, Stalin died. And the tutor’s visits came to an end.

As the chauffeur braked, the car pulled to the left. It was a Volga, comfortable enough. He had always wanted to own a foreign car. He had always wanted, very specifically, a Mercedes. He had foreign currency sitting in the copyright bureau, but was never allowed to spend it on a foreign car. What is wrong with our Soviet cars, Dmitri Dmitrievich? Do they not take you from place to place, are they not reliable, and built with Soviet roads in mind? How would it look if our most distinguished composer was seen to insult the Soviet motor industry by buying a Mercedes? Do members of the Politburo drive around in capitalist vehicles? Surely you can see that it is quite impossible.

Prokofiev had been allowed to import a new Ford from the West. Sergei Sergeyevich was very pleased with it, until the day it proved too difficult for him to manage, and in the middle of Moscow he ran over a young woman. Somehow, that was typical of Prokofiev. He always came at the world from the wrong direction.

Of course, no one dies at exactly the correct moment: some too early, some too late. A few get the year more or less right, but then choose completely the wrong date. Poor Prokofiev – to die on exactly the same day as Stalin! Sergei Sergeyevich suffered a stroke at eight in the evening and died at nine. Stalin died fifty minutes later. To die not even knowing that the Great Tyrant had expired! Well, that was Sergei Sergeyevich for you. Despite being a punctilious timekeeper, he was always half out of step with Russia. So his dying had shown a foolish synchronicity.

The names of Prokofiev and Shostakovich would always be linked. But though manacled together, they were never friends. They – mostly – admired one another’s music, but the West had penetrated too deeply into Sergei Sergeyevich. He had left Russia in 1918, and, apart from brief returns – as with a pair of puzzling pyjamas – had stayed away until 1936. By then he had lost touch with Soviet reality. He imagined that he would be applauded for his patriotic homecoming, that tyranny would be grateful – how naive was that? And when they were arraigned together before tribunals of musical bureaucrats, Sergei Sergeyevich thought only of musical solutions. They had asked him what was wrong with his colleague Dmitri Dmitrievich’s Eighth Symphony. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, he replied, ever the pragmatist: it just needs a clearer melodic line, and the second and fourth movements should be cut. And when faced with criticism of his own work, his response was: look, I have a multiplicity of styles, just tell me which you would prefer me to use. He was proud of his facility – but that was not what was being asked of him. They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them. They wanted your complicity, your compliance, your corruption. And Sergei Sergeyevich had never really understood this. He said – and it was brave of him to do so – that when a piece was killingly denounced for ‘formalism’, it was ‘a simple matter of not understanding something on first hearing’. He had a strange kind of sophisticated innocence. But really, the man had the soul of a goose.

He often thought of Sergei Sergeyevich in wartime exile, selling off his finely-cut European suits in the market at Alma-Ata. They said he was a skilful trader and always got the best price. Whose shoulders would those suits be on now? But it wasn’t just his clothes: Prokofiev enjoyed all the trappings of success. And he understood fame in a Western way. He liked to say things were ‘amusing’. Despite his public praise of
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
, when he leafed through the score in its composer’s presence, he had pronounced the work ‘amusing’. It was a word which should have been banned until the day after Stalin’s death. Which Sergei Sergeyevich had not lived to see.

He himself had never been tempted by a life abroad. He was a Russian composer who lived in Russia. He declined to imagine any alternative. Though he had experienced his own brief moment of Western fame. In New York, he had gone to a pharmacy for some aspirin. Ten minutes after he left, an assistant was seen fixing a sign in the window. It read:
DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SHOPS HERE
.

He no longer expected to be killed – that fear was long in the past. But being killed had never been the worst. In January 1948 his old friend Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The day the news came out, he had spent five hours being hectored by Zhdanov for distorting Soviet reality, failing to celebrate the nation’s glorious victories, and eating out of the hands of its enemies. Afterwards, he went straight to Mikhoels’s apartment. He had embraced his friend’s daughter and her husband. Then, standing with his back to the crowd of silent, fearful mourners, with his face almost pushing into the bookcase, he said to them, in a quiet, clear voice, ‘I envy him.’ He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror.

But endless terror continued for another five years. Until Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev emerged. There was the promise of a thaw, cautious hope, incautious elation. And yes, things did get easier, and some filthy secrets emerged; but there was no sudden idealistic attachment to the truth, merely an awareness that it could now be used to political advantage. And Power itself did not diminish; it just mutated. The terrified wait by the lift and the bullet to the back of the head became things of the past. But Power did not lose interest in him; hands still reached out – and since childhood he had always held a fear of grabbing hands.

Nikita the Corncob. Who would go into tirades about ‘abstractionists and pederasts’ – they being obviously the same thing. Just as Zhdanov had once denounced Akhmatova as ‘both a slut and a nun’. Nikita the Corncob, at a meeting of writers and artists, had said of Dmitri Dmitrievich, ‘Oh, his music’s nothing but jazz – it gives you the bellyache. And I’m to clap my hands? But with jazz – you get colic.’ However, this was better than being told you ate out of the hands of the nation’s enemies. And in these more liberal times, some of those gathered to meet the First Secretary were allowed, if with proper deference, to offer a contrary opinion. There had even been a poet bold – or crazy – enough to maintain that there were great artists among the abstractionists. He had mentioned the name of Picasso. To which the Corncob had replied brusquely,

‘Death cures the hunchback.’

In the old days, such an exchange might have led to the insolent poet being reminded that he was playing a dangerous game which might end very badly. But this was Khrushchev. His rantings made the lackeys with brass faces sway in one direction, then another; but you did not immediately fear for your future. One day the Corncob might announce that your music gave him the bellyache, and the next, after a fancy banquet at the Union of Composers’ Congress, he might actually praise you. That evening he had been holding forth about how, if music were half decent, he could just about listen to it on the radio – except when they transmitted stuff which sounded, well, like the cawing of rooks … And as the lackeys with brass faces were laughing away, his eye fell on the well-known composer of bellyaching jazz. But the First Secretary was in a benign, indeed forgiving, mood.

‘Now, there’s Dmitri Dmitrievich – he saw the light at the very beginning of the war with his … what d’you call it, ah, his symphony.’

Suddenly, he was not in disfavour, and Lyudmila Lyadova, concocter of popular songs, came over and kissed him, then witlessly announced how everyone loved him. Well, it really did not matter either way, because things were no longer as they had once been.

But this was where he made his mistake. Before, there was death; now, there was life. Before, men shat in their pants; now, they were allowed to disagree. Before, there were orders; now, there were suggestions. So his Conversations with Power became, without him at first recognising it, more dangerous to the soul. Before, they had tested the extent of his courage; now, they tested the extent of his cowardice. And they worked with diligence and know-how, with an intense but essentially disinterested professionalism, like priests working for the soul of a dying man.

He himself knew little about visual art, and could hardly argue with that poet about abstractionism; but he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso. He was free to speak the truth – why didn’t he do so on behalf of those who couldn’t? Instead, he sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France painting his revolting dove of peace time and time again. He loathed the sight of that bloody dove. And he loathed the slavery of ideas as much as he loathed physical slavery.

Or Jean-Paul Sartre. He’d once taken Maxim to the copyright bureau next to the Tretyakov Gallery, and there, standing at the cashier’s desk, was the great philosopher, counting out his fat wad of roubles with great care. In those days royalties were paid out to foreign writers only in exceptional cases. In a whisper, he had explained those circumstances to Maxim: ‘We don’t deny material incentives if a person leaves the camp of reaction for the camp of progress.’

Stravinsky was a different matter. His love and reverence for Stravinsky’s music had never wavered. And as proof, he kept a large photograph of his fellow composer beneath the glass of his desktop. He looked at it every day and remembered that gilded salon at the Waldorf Astoria; remembered the betrayal, and his moral shame.

When the Thaw came, Stravinsky’s music was played again, and Khrushchev, who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges, was persuaded to invite the famous exile to return for a visit. It would be a great propaganda coup, apart from anything else. Perhaps they hoped in some way to turn Stravinsky back from a cosmopolitan into a purely Russian composer. And perhaps Stravinsky for his part hoped to rediscover some remnants of the old Russia he had long ago left behind. If so, both dreams were disappointed. But Stravinsky had some fun. For decades he had been denounced by the Soviet authorities as a lackey of capitalism. So when some musical bureaucrat came towards him with a fake smile and an extended hand, Stravinsky, instead of offering his own hand, gave the official the head of his walking stick to shake. The gesture was clear: who’s the lackey now?