The Noise of Time (16 page)

He pondered the story, and thought back over some of the things that had happened in his life. Nita’s joy in another’s admiration; her joke about the Nobel Prize. And now he wondered if perhaps he should see himself differently: as Monsieur Parisse, that businessman husband, locked out of the town, obliged at bayonet point to spend a night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station.

He switched his attention back to the chauffeur’s ear. In the West, a chauffeur was a servant. In the Soviet Union, a chauffeur was a member of a well-paid and dignified profession. After the war, many chauffeurs were engineers with military experience. You knew to treat your chauffeur with respect. You never criticised his driving, or the state of the car, because the slightest such comment often resulted in the car being laid up for a fortnight with some mysterious illness. You also ignored the fact that when you did not require your chauffeur, he was probably off working on his own account, making extra money. So you deferred to him, and this was right: in certain respects, he was more important than you. There were chauffeurs so successful that they had their own chauffeurs. Were there composers so successful that they had others to compose for them? Probably; such rumours were common. It was said that Khrennikov was so busy being loved by Power that he only had time to sketch out his music, which others orchestrated for him. Perhaps this was the case, but if so, it did not matter very much: the music would be no better and no worse if Khrennikov had orchestrated it himself.

Khrennikov was still there. Zhdanov’s stooge, who had so eagerly threatened and bullied; who had persecuted even his own former teacher Shebalin; who acted as if he personally signed every chit allowing composers to buy manuscript paper. Khrennikov, picked out by Stalin as one fisherman picks out another from afar.

Those obliged to play the customer to Khrennikov’s shop clerk liked to tell a certain story about him. One day, the First Secretary of the Union of Composers was summoned to the Kremlin to discuss candidates for the Stalin Prize. The list had been drawn up as usual by the Union, but it was Stalin who made the final choice. On this occasion, and for whatever reason, Stalin decided not to play the avuncular Helmsman, but to remind the clerk of his own humble standing. Khrennikov was shown in; Stalin ignored him, pretending to work. Khrennikov became more and more anxious. Stalin looked up. Khrennikov mumbled something about the list of candidates. In return, Stalin ‘gave him the eye’, as they say. And immediately, Khrennikov shat himself. Panicked, and babbling some excuse, he fled from the presence of Power. Outside, he found a couple of burly male nurses, well used to such a response, who grabbed him, took him to a special room, hosed him down, cleaned him up, let him recover himself, and gave him back his trousers.

Such behaviour was not, of course, abnormal. And you certainly did not despise a man for the weakness of his bowels when in the presence of a tyrant who could obliterate anybody on a whim. No, what you despised Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov for was this: that he recounted his shame with rapture.

Now Stalin was gone, and Zhdanov was gone, and tyranny was repudiated – but Khrennikov was still there, unbudgeable, sucking up to the new bosses as he had sucked up to the old ones; admitting that, yes, some mistakes might have been made, but if so, all had happily been corrected. Khrennikov would outlast them all, of course, but some day even he would die. Unless this was one law of nature which didn’t apply: perhaps Tikhon Khrennikov would live for ever, a permanent and necessary symbol of the man who loved Power and knew how to make it love him back. And if not Khrennikov himself, then his doubles and his descendants: they would live on for ever, regardless of how society changed.

He liked to think that he wasn’t afraid of death. It was life he was afraid of, not death. He believed that people should think about death more often, and accustom themselves to the notion of it. Just letting it creep up on you unnoticed was not the best way to live. You should make yourself familiar with it. You should write about it: either in words or, in his case, music. It was his belief that if we thought about death earlier in our lives, we would make fewer mistakes.

Not that he hadn’t made a lot of mistakes himself.

And sometimes he thought that he would have made the same number of mistakes even if he hadn’t been so frequently concerned with death.

And sometimes he thought that death was indeed the thing that terrified him the most.

His second marriage: that had been one of his mistakes. Nita had died, and then, barely a year later, his mother had died. The two strongest female presences in his life: his guides, instructors, protectresses. He had been very lonely. His opera had just been murdered a second time. He knew that he was incapable of frivolous relationships with women; he needed a wife by his side. And so, while serving as chairman of the jury for Best Massed Choir at the World Festival of Youth, his eye had fallen on Margarita. Some said she resembled Nina Vasilievna, but he couldn’t see it himself. She worked for the Communist Youth Organisation, and had perhaps been deliberately placed in his way, though that was no excuse. She had no knowledge of, and little interest in, music. She had tried to please, but failed. None of his friends liked her, or approved of the marriage, which of course had taken place suddenly and secretly. Galya and Maxim did not take to her – what could he expect, when she had so quickly replaced their mother? – and therefore she did not take to them. One day, when she was complaining about them, he said, with a completely straight face,

‘Why don’t we kill the children, then we can live happily ever after?’

She neither understood the remark, nor seemed to realise that it was humorous.

They separated, then divorced. It was not her fault: it was entirely his. He had put Margarita in an impossible position. In his loneliness, he had panicked. Well, that was nothing new.

As well as running volleyball competitions, he had also served as a tennis umpire. Once, at a sanatorium in the Crimea reserved for government officials, he had found himself in charge of a match involving General Serov, then head of the KGB. Whenever the general disputed a let or a line-call, he would take pleasure in his temporary authority. ‘No arguing with the umpire,’ he would command. This had been one of the few conversations with Power that he had enjoyed.

Had he been naive? Of course. But then, he had become so used to threats and intimidations and vile abuse that he was not as suspicious of praise and welcoming words as he should have been. Nor was he the only dupe. When Nikita the Corncob denounced the Cult of Personality, when Stalin’s errors were acknowledged and some of his victims posthumously rehabilitated, when people started returning from the camps, and when
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
was published, how could men and women fail to hope? No matter that the toppling of Stalin meant the restoration of Lenin, that changes of political line were often merely intended to outflank rivals, and that Solzhenitsyn’s novel was in his opinion reality varnished over, and the truth ten times worse: even so, how could men and women fail to hope, or believe that the new rulers were better than the old ones?

And that, of course, was the point at which the grabbing hands reached out towards him. See how things have changed, Dmitri Dmitrievich, how you are garlanded with honours, an ornament of the nation, how we let you travel abroad to receive prizes and degrees as an ambassador of the Soviet Union – see how we value you! We trust the dacha and the chauffeur are to your satisfaction, is there anything else you require, Dmitri Dmitrievich, have another glass of vodka, your car will be waiting however many times we clink glasses. Life under the First Secretary is so much better, would you not agree?

And by any scale of measurement, he had to agree. It
was
better, in the way that the life of a prisoner in solitary confinement is improved if he is given a cellmate, allowed to climb up to the bars and sniff the autumn air, and if the warder no longer spits in his soup – at least, not in the prisoner’s presence. Yes, in that sense it was better. Which is why, Dmitri Dmitrievich, the Party wants to hug you to its bosom. We all remember how you were victimised during the Cult of Personality, but the Party has indulged in fruitful self-criticism. Happier times have come. So all we would like from you is an acknowledgement that the Party has changed. Which is not much to ask, is it, Dmitri Dmitrievich?

Dmitri Dmitrievich. All those years ago, he was intended to be Yaroslav Dmitrievich. Until his father and mother had allowed themselves to be talked out of the name by a bullying priest. You could say that his parents were merely displaying good manners, and proper piety, under their own roof. Or you could say that he had been born – or at least christened – beneath the star of cowardice.

The man they chose for his Third and Final Conversation with Power was Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov. Member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Federation, chief ideologist of the Party throughout the Forties, former editor of
Pravda
, author of one of those books he had failed to read when tutored by Comrade Troshin. A plausible face with one of his six Orders of Lenin in his buttonhole. Pospelov had been a great supporter of Stalin until he became a great supporter of Khrushchev. He could explain fluently how Stalin’s defeat of Trotsky had preserved the purity of Leninism in the Soviet Union. Nowadays Stalin was out of favour but Lenin was back in favour. A few more turns of the wheel and Nikita the Corncob would be out of favour; a few more after that and perhaps Stalin and Stalinism would be back. And the Pospelovs of this world – like the Khrennikovs – would sense each shift before it came, would have their ear to the ground and their eye to the main chance and their wetted finger in the air to apprehend any change of wind.

But that was no matter. What mattered was that Pospelov was his interlocutor in his final, and most ruinous Conversation with Power.

‘I have excellent news,’ Pospelov announced, drawing him to one side at some reception he had only attended because they had never stopped inviting him. ‘Nikita Sergeyevich has personally announced an initiative to have you appointed Chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers.’

‘That is far too great an honour,’ he had instinctively replied.

‘But not one, coming from the First Secretary, that you could possibly refuse.’

‘I am not worthy of such an honour.’

‘Perhaps it is not for you to judge your worthiness. Nikita Sergeyevich is better placed than you in this regard.’

‘I could not possibly accept.’

‘Come, come, Dmitri Dmitrievich, you have accepted high honours from across the world, which we have been gratified to see you accept. So I cannot possibly see how you can reject one offered by your own homeland.’

‘I regret I have such little time. I am a composer, not a chairman.’

‘It would take very little of your time. We would see to that.’

‘I am a composer not a chairman.’

‘You are our greatest living composer. Everyone acknowledges you as such. Your difficult years are behind you. That is why it is so important.’

‘I do not follow you.’

‘Dmitri Dmitrievich, we all know how you did not escape certain consequences during the Cult of Personality. Even though, if I may say so, you were more protected than most.’

‘I can assure you that it didn’t feel that way.’

‘And this is why it is so important that you accept the chairmanship. To demonstrate that the Cult of Personality is over. To put it straightforwardly, Dmitri Dmitrievich, the changes wrought under the First Secretary, if they are to be made secure, need to be supported by public declarations and appointments such as the one proposed.’

‘I am always happy to sign a letter.’

‘You know that is not what I am asking.’

‘I am unworthy,’ he had repeated, adding, ‘I am nothing but a worm beside the First Secretary.’

He doubted the allusion would be picked up by Pospelov, who indeed chuckled disbelievingly.

‘I am sure we shall be able to overcome your natural modesty, Dmitri Dmitrievich. But we shall talk more at another time.’

Each morning, instead of prayer, he would recite to himself two poems by Evtushenko. One was ‘Career’, which described how lives are led beneath the shadow of Power:

In Galileo’s day, a fellow scientist

Was no more stupid than Galileo.

He was well aware that the Earth revolved,

But he also had a large family to feed.

It was a poem about conscience and endurance:

But time has a way of demonstrating

The most stubborn are the most intelligent.

Was that true? He could never quite decide. The poem ended by marking the difference between ambition and artistic truthfulness:

I shall therefore pursue my career

By trying not to pursue one.

These verses both comforted and questioned him. He was, for all his anxieties and fearfulness and Leningrad civility, at base a stubborn man who had tried to pursue the truth in music as he had seen it.

But ‘Career’ was essentially about conscience; and his own accused him. What use, after all, is a conscience unless, like a tongue probing teeth for cavities, it seeks out areas of weakness, duplicity, cowardice, self-deception? If he went to the dentist every two months, always suspecting that something was wrong in his mouth, then he examined his conscience on a daily basis, always suspecting that something was wrong in his soul. There were many things to accuse himself of: acts of omission, fallings-short, compromises made, the coin paid to Caesar. At times he saw himself as both Galileo and that fellow scientist, the one with mouths to feed. He had been as courageous as his nature allowed; but conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown.

He hoped, and tried, in the subsequent weeks, to avoid Pospelov, but there he was again one evening, coming towards him among the chat and the hypocrisy and the brimming glasses.