The Noise of Time Read online

  But there had been more to the match than the result; it contained an example of the filth that pervaded everything under tyranny. Bashashkin and Bobrov: both in their late twenties, both stalwarts of the team. Anatoli Bashashkin, captain and centre half; Vsevolod Bobrov, the dashing scorer of five goals in the team’s first three matches. In the defeat to Yugoslavia, one of the opposition’s goals had come as the result of a blunder by Bashashkin – that was true. And Bobrov had screamed at him, both on the pitch and afterwards,

  ‘Tito’s stooge!’

  Everyone had applauded the remark, which might have been stupidly funny had not the consequences of denunciation been well known. And had Bobrov not been the best friend of Stalin’s son Vasily. Tito’s stooge versus Bobrov the great patriot. The charade had disgusted him. The decent Bashashkin was removed as captain, while Bobrov went on to become a national sporting hero.

  The point was this: to some of those out there, to young composers and pianists, to optimists, idealists and the untarnished, what had Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich looked like when he had applied to join the Party and was accepted? Khrushchev’s stooge?

  The chauffeur blew the horn at a car which seemed to be swerving towards them. The other car blew its horn back. There was nothing to be made from those two sounds, just a pair of mechanical noises. But out of most conjunctions and collaborations of sound he could make something. His Second Symphony had contained four blasts from a factory siren in F sharp.

  He loved chiming clocks. He had a number of them, and liked to imagine a household in which all the clocks chimed together. Then, on the hour, there would be a golden blend of sound, a domestic, interior version of what it must have been like in old Russian towns and cities when all the church bells rang together. Assuming they ever did. Perhaps, this being Russia, half rang tardily, half in advance.

  In his Moscow apartment, there were two clocks which struck at exactly the same moment. This was not chance. He would turn on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be in the dining room, with the clock’s door open, holding back the pendulum with one finger. He would be in his study, doing the same to the clock on his desk. When the time signal sounded, they each released their pendulum, and the clocks were united. He found such orderliness a regular pleasure.

  He had once visited Cambridge, in England, as the guest of a former British ambassador to Moscow. The family also owned two chiming clocks, which announced their presence a minute or two apart. This had troubled him. He offered to adjust them, using the system he had devised with Galya, to make them synchronous. The ambassador had thanked him politely, but said that he rather preferred the clocks to strike separately: if you didn’t quite hear the first one, you knew the other would be along soon enough to confirm whether it was three rather than four o’clock. Yes, of course he understood, but still it irked him. He wanted things to chime together. That was his fundamental nature.

  He also loved candelabra. Chandeliers, fitted with real candles, not electric bulbs; and candlesticks bearing their single flickering flame. He enjoyed preparing them: making sure each candle stood at a true vertical, setting a match to the wicks in advance and then blowing them out, so they would be easier to relight when the big moment came. On his birthday there would be one flame for each year of his life. And friends knew the best present to bring. Khachaturian had once given him a splendid pair of branched candlesticks: bronze, with crystal pendants.

  So, he was a man who loved chiming clocks and chandeliers. He had owned a private car since before the Great Patriotic War. He had a chauffeur and a dacha. He had lived with servants all his life. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Hero of Socialist Labour. He lived on the seventh floor of the Union of Composers building on Nezhdanova Street. Ever since he had been a Deputy of the Russian Federation, he had only to write a note to the manager of the local cinema for Maxim to be instantly granted two free tickets. He had access to the closed shops used by the nomenklatura. He had been part of the organising committee for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Endorsements of the Party’s policy on cultural matters often appeared over his name. He was shown in photographs hobnobbing with the political elite. He was still the most famous composer in Russia.

  Those who knew him, knew him. Those who had ears could hear his music. But how did he seem to those who didn’t know him, to the young who sought to understand the way the world worked? How could they not judge him? And how would he now appear to his younger self, standing by the roadside as a haunted face in an official car swept past? Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

  He attended Party meetings as instructed. He let his mind wander during the endless speeches, merely applauding whenever others applauded. On one occasion, a friend asked why he had clapped a speech in the course of which Khrennikov had violently criticised him. The friend thought he was being ironic or, possibly, self-abasing. But the truth was, he hadn’t been listening.

  Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, might well have observed that Power had kept the deal offered by Pospelov on its behalf. Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich had been received into the holy church of the Party, and little more than two years later, his opera – now retitled Katerina Izmailova – was approved and premiered in Moscow. Pravda piously commented that the work had been unfairly discredited during the Cult of Personality.

  Other productions followed, at home and abroad. Each time, he imagined the operas he might have written had that part of his career not been killed. He might have set not just ‘The Nose’, but the whole of Gogol. Or at least ‘The Portrait’, which had long fascinated and haunted him. It was the tale of a talented young painter called Chartkov, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a bag of gold roubles: a Faustian pact which brings success and fashionability. His career is contrasted with that of a fellow art student who long ago disappeared to work and learn in Italy, and whose integrity is matched by his obscurity. When he finally returns from abroad, he exhibits a single picture; yet it puts the whole of Chartkov’s oeuvre to shame – and Chartkov knows it. The story’s almost biblical moral is this: ‘He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else.’

  In ‘The Portrait’ there was a clear, two-way choice: integrity or corruption. Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable. But in the real world, especially the extreme version of it he had lived through, things were not like this. There was a third choice: integrity and corruption. You could be both Chartkov and his morally shaming alter ego. Just as you could be both Galileo and his fellow scientist.

  In the time of Tsar Nicolas I a hussar had once abducted a general’s daughter. Worse – or better – he had actually married her. The general had complained to the Tsar. Nicolas resolved the problem by decreeing first, that the marriage was null and void; secondly, that the girl’s virginity was officially restored. Anything was possible in the homeland of elephants. But even so, he did not think there was a ruler, or a miracle, that could restore his virginity.

  Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. That was what he had always said, always believed. And his own case was no different. He had, at times, felt that his life, like that of many others, like that of his country, was a tragedy; one whose protagonist could only solve his intolerable dilemma by killing himself. Except that he had not done so. No, he was not Shakespearean. And now that he had lived too long, he was even beginning to see his own life as a farce.

  As for Shakespeare: he wondered, looking back, if he hadn’t been unfair. He had judged the Englishman sentimental because his tyrants suffered guilt, bad dreams, remorse. Now that he had seen more of life, and been deafened by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times. In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences. Not any more.
The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of the old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found.

  Two years after he joined the Party, he married again: Irina Antonovna. Her father had been a victim of the Cult of Personality; she herself was brought up in an orphanage for children of enemies of the state; now she worked in music publishing. There were some slight impediments: she was twenty-seven, only two years older than Galya, and already married to another older man. And of course this third marriage was as impulsive and secretive as his other two. But it was a novelty for him to have a wife who loved both music and domesticity, and who was as practical and efficient as she was adorable. He became shyly, tenderly uxorious.

  They had promised to leave him alone. They never left him alone. Power continued speaking to him, but it was no longer a conversation, merely something one-sided and basely quotidian: a wheedling, a cajoling, a nagging. Nowadays, a late-night ring at the door meant not the NKVD or the KGB or the MVD, but a messenger scrupulously bringing him the text of an article he had written for the next morning’s Pravda. An article he hadn’t written, of course, but which required his signature. He would not even glance at it, merely scribble his initials. And the same went for the more scholarly articles which appeared under his name in Sovetskaya Muzyka.

  ‘But what will this mean, Dmitri Dmitrievich, when they publish your collected writings?’ ‘It will mean that they are not worth reading.’ ‘But ordinary people will be misled.’ ‘Given the scale on which ordinary people have already been misled, I would say that a musicological article purportedly but not actually written by a composer does not matter much either way. In my view, if I were to read it and make a few corrections, that would be more compromising.’

  But there was worse than this, much worse. He had signed a filthy public letter against Solzhenitsyn, even though he admired the novelist and reread him constantly. Then, a few years later, another filthy letter denouncing Sakharov. His signature appeared alongside those of Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and, naturally, Khrennikov. Part of him hoped that no one would believe – no one could believe – that he actually agreed with what the letters said. But people did. Friends and fellow musicians refused to shake his hand, turned their backs on him. There were limits to irony: you cannot sign letters while holding your nose or crossing your fingers behind your back, trusting that others will guess you do not mean it. And so he had betrayed Chekhov, and signed denunciations. He had betrayed himself, and he had betrayed the good opinion others still held of him. He had lived too long.

  He had also learnt about the destruction of the human soul. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes. A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself. Any single method was sufficient; though if all three were present, the outcome was irresistible.

  He thought of his life as arranged into twelve-year cycles of bad luck. 1936, 1948, 1960 … Twelve more years led to 1972, inevitably another leap year, and so one in which he had confidently expected to die. He had certainly done his best. His health, always poor, declined to the point where he was unable to walk up stairs. He had been forbidden alcohol and cigarettes, prohibitions which in themselves were surely enough to kill a man. And vegetarian Power tried to help, ordering him from one end of the country to the other, to attend this premiere, receive that honour. He finished the year in hospital with kidney stones, while also enjoying radiotherapy for a cyst on the lung. He was stoic as an invalid; what troubled him was not so much his condition as people’s reactions to it. Pity embarrassed him just as much as praise ever had.

  However, he seemed to have misunderstood: the bad luck 1972 intended for him was not his dying, rather his continued living. He had done his best, but life had not yet finished with him. Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.

  When these times are over … if they ever will be, at least until 200,000,000,000 years have passed. Karlo-Marlo and their successors were always denouncing the internal contradictions of capitalism, which would assuredly, logically, bring it crumbling down. And yet capitalism was still standing. Anyone with eyes to see would have been aware of the internal contradictions of Communism; but who knew if they would be enough to bring it down. All he could be sure of was that when – if – these times were over, people would want a simplified version of what had happened. Well, that was their right.

  One to hear, one to remember, and one to drink – as the saying went. He doubted he could stop drinking, whatever the doctors advised; he could not stop hearing; and worst of all, he could not stop remembering. He so wished that the memory could be disengaged at will, like putting a car into neutral. That was what chauffeurs used to do, either at the top of a hill, or when they had reached maximum speed: they would coast to save petrol. But he could never do that with his memory. His brain was stubborn at giving house-room to his failings, his humiliations, his self-disgust, his bad decisions. He would like to remember only the things he chose: music, Tanya, Nina, his parents, true and reliable friends, Galya playing with the pig, Maxim imitating a Bulgarian policeman, a beautiful goal, laughter, joy, the love of his young wife. He did remember all those things, but they were often overlaid and intertwined with everything he wanted not to remember. And this impurity, this corruption of memory, tormented him.

  In later years, his tics and mannerisms increased. He could be calm and sit quietly with Irina; but put him on a platform, at an official function, even among a gathering of those entirely sympathetic to him, and he could barely keep still. He would scratch his head, cup his chin, force his index and little fingers into the flesh of his cheek; twitch and fidget like a man waiting to be arrested and taken away. When listening to his own music, he would sometimes cover his mouth with his hands, as if to say: Do not trust what comes out of my mouth, trust only what goes into your ears. Or he would catch himself plucking at his torso with his fingertips: as if pinching himself to see if he was dreaming; or as if scratching sudden mosquito bites.

  His father, after whom he had been obediently named, was often in his mind. That gentle, humorous man who woke each morning with a smile on his face: he had been ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’ if ever there was one. Dmitri Boleslavovich would always feature in his son’s memory with a game in his hand and a song in his throat; peering through his pince-nez at a pack of cards or a wire puzzle; smoking his pipe; watching his children grow. A man who never lived long enough to disappoint others, or for life to disappoint him.

  ‘The chrysanthemums in the garden have long since faded …’ and then – how did it go on? – yes, ‘But love still lingers in my ailing heart.’ The son smiled, but not as the father used to. He had a different sort of ailing heart, and had already suffered two attacks. A third was on its way, because he could now recognise the warning sign: when drinking vodka brought him no pleasure.

  His father had died the year before he met Tanya: that was right, wasn’t it? Tatyana Glivenko, his first love, who told him she loved him because he was pure. They had kept in touch, and in later years she used to say that if only they had met a few weeks earlier at the sanatorium, the whole course of their lives would have been different. Their love would have been so firmly established by the time they came to part that nothing could have eradicated it. This had been their destiny, and they had missed it, been cheated out of it by the calendar’s chance. Perhaps. He knew how people liked to melodramatise their early lives, and to obsess retrospectively about choices and decisions which at the time they had made unthinkingly. He also knew that Destiny was only the words And so.


  Still, they had been one another’s first loves, and he continued to think of those weeks at Anapa as an idyll. Even if an idyll only becomes an idyll once it has ended. At the dacha in Zhukhova, a lift had been installed to take him from the hallway directly to his room. However, this being the Soviet Union, laws and regulations insisted that a lift, even one in a private residence, could only be worked by a properly qualified lift attendant. And what did Irina Antonovna, who cared for him so wonderfully well, do about this? She enrolled at the appropriate school and studied until she received her final certificate. Who would have thought that it would be his destiny to be married to a qualified lift operator?

  He was not making a comparison between Tanya and Irina, between first and last; that was not the point. He was devoted to Irina. She made everything as bearable and enjoyable for him as she could. It was just that his possibilities of life were now much reduced. Whereas in the Caucasus his possibilities of life had been unbounded. But this was just what time did to you.

  Before he joined up with Tanya at Anapa, there had been that performance of his First Symphony in the public gardens at Kharkov. It was, by any objective standards, a disaster. The strings sounded thin; the piano couldn’t be heard; the timpani drowned everything; the principal bassoon was embarrassingly bad, and the conductor complacent; early on, the entire city’s dog population had joined in, and the audience was beside itself with laughter. And yet it was pronounced a great success. The ignorant audience applauded long and loud; the complacent conductor took the praise; the orchestra kept up the illusion of competence; while the composer was required to mount the stage and bow his thanks many times to one and all. True, he was very annoyed; equally true, he was young enough to enjoy the irony.

  ‘A Bulgarian policeman ties his bootlaces!’ Maxim would announce to his father’s friends. The boy had always loved pranks and jokes, catapults and air rifles; and over the years he had worked up this comic sketch to perfection. He would come on, his laces hanging loose, carrying a chair which he would frowningly arrange in the middle of the room, slowly moving it to the best position. Then, putting on a pompous face, and using both hands, he would lift and lever his right foot up on to the chair. He would look around, very pleased by this simple triumph. Then, with an awkward manoeuvre which the spectators might not at first understand, he would bend over, ignoring the foot on the chair, and tie the laces of the other shoe, the one flat on the floor. Immensely pleased with the result, he would swap legs, lifting his left foot up on to the chair before bending down to tie the laces of his right shoe. When he had finished, and the audience was squealing with pleasure, he would stand upright, almost to attention, scrutinise his two successfully laced boots, nod to himself, and ponderously carry the chair back to its place.