The Noise of Time Read online

  Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music ‘quacks and grunts and growls’; how its ‘nervous, convulsive and spasmodic’ nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with ‘shrieking’. The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the ‘effete’, who had lost all ‘wholesome taste’ for music, preferring ‘a confused stream of sound’. As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’.

  But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced ‘Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science’. In case it needed spelling out – and it always did – Leftism was contrasted with ‘real art, real science and real literature’.

  ‘Those that have ears will hear,’ he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. ‘The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.’ That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. ‘The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.’ That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.’ That was enough to take away his life.

  But still, he was young, confident in his talent, and highly successful until three days ago. And if he was no politician, either by temperament or aptitude, there were people he could turn to. So in Moscow he first addressed himself to Platon Kerzhentsev, President of the Committee for Cultural Affairs. He began by explaining the plan of response he had worked out on the train. He would write a defence of the opera, an argued rebuttal of the criticism, and submit the article to Pravda. For instance … But Kerzhentsev, civilised and courteous though he was, would not even hear him out. What they were dealing with here was not a bad review, signed by a critic whose opinion might vary according to the day of the week or the state of his digestion. This was a Pravda editorial: not some fleeting judgement which might be appealed against, but a policy statement from the highest level. Holy writ, in other words. The only possible course of action open to Dmitri Dmitrievich was to make a public apology, recant his errors, and explain that while composing his opera he had been led astray by the foolish excesses of youth. Beyond this, he should announce an intention of immersing himself forthwith in the folk music of the Soviet Union, which would help redirect him towards all that was authentic, popular and melodious. According to Kerzhentsev, this was the only way he might achieve an eventual return to favour.

  He was not a believer. But he had been baptised, and sometimes, when he passed an open church, he would light a candle for his family. And he knew his Bible well. So he was familiar with the notion of sin; also with its public mechanism. The offence, the full confession of the offence, the priest’s judgement on the matter, the act of contrition, the forgiveness. Though there were occasions when the sin was too great and not even a priest could forgive it. Yes, he knew the formulae and the protocols, whatever name the church might go by.

  His second call was on Marshal Tukhachevsky. The Red Napoleon was still in his forties, a stern, handsome man with a pronounced widow’s peak. He listened to all that had happened, cogently analysed his protégé’s position, and came up with a strategic proposal which was simple, bold and generous. He, Marshal Tukhachevsky, would write a personal letter of intercession to Comrade Stalin. Dmitri Dmitrievich’s relief was intense. He felt light-headed and light-hearted as the Marshal sat down at his desk and straightened a sheet of paper in front of him. But as soon as the man in uniform gripped his pen and started writing, a change came over him. Sweat began to pour from his hair, from his widow’s peak down on to his forehead, and from the back of his head down into his collar. One hand made flurrying darts with a handkerchief, the other halting movements with a pen. Such unsoldierly apprehension was not encouraging.

  The sweat had poured off them at Anapa. It was hot in the Caucasus, and he had never liked the heat. They had gazed at Low Bay beach but he felt no inclination to cool off by taking a swim. They walked in the shade of the forest above the town, and he was bitten by mosquitoes. Then they were cornered by a pack of dogs and almost eaten alive. None of this mattered. They inspected the resort’s lighthouse, but while Tanya craned her head upwards, his concentration was on the sweet fold of skin it made at the base of her neck. They visited the old stone gate which was all that remained of the Ottoman fortress, but he was thinking about her calves, and the way their muscles moved as she walked. There was nothing in his life for those weeks except love, music and mosquito bites. The love in his heart, the music in his head, the bites on his skin. Not even paradise was free of insects. But he could hardly resent them. Their bites were ingeniously made in places inaccessible to him; the lotion was based on an extract of carnation flowers. If a mosquito was the cause of her fingers touching his skin and making him smell of carnations, how could he possibly hold anything against the insect?

  They were nineteen and they believed in Free Love: keener tourists of each other’s bodies than of the resort’s attractions. They had thrown off the fossilised dictates of church, of society, of family, and gone away to live as man and wife without being man and wife. This excited them almost as much as the sexual act itself; or was, perhaps, inextricable from it.

  But then came all the time they were not in bed together. Free Love may have solved the primary problem, but had not done away with the others. Of course they loved one another; but being all the time in one another’s company – even with his 300 roubles and his young fame – was not straightforward. When he was composing, he always knew exactly what to do; he made the right decisions about what the music – his music – required. And when conductors or soloists wondered politely if this might be better, or that might be better, he would always reply, ‘I’m sure you’re right. But let’s leave it for now. I’ll make that change next time round.’ And they were satisfied, and he was too, since he never had any intention of implementing their suggestions. Because his decisions, and his instinct, had been correct.

  But away from music … that was so different. He became nervous, things blurred in his mind, and he would sometimes make a decision simply in order to have the matter settled rather than because he knew what he wanted. Perhaps his artistic precocity meant that he had avoided those useful years of ordinary growing up. But whatever the cause, he was bad at the practicalities of life, which included, of course, the practicalities of the heart. And so, at Anapa, alongside the exaltations of love and the heady self-satisfaction of sex, he found himself entering a whole new world, one full of unwanted silences, misunderstood hints and scatter-brained planning.

  They had returned again to their separate cities, he to Leningrad, she to Moscow. But they would visit one another. One day, he was finishing a piece and asked her to sit with him: her presence made him feel secure. After a while, his mother came in. Looking straight at Tanya, she had said,

  ‘Go out and leave Mitya to finish his work.’

  And he had replied, ‘No, I want Tanya to stay here. It helps me.’

  This was one of the rare occasions when he had stood up to his mother. Perhaps if he had done so more, his life would have been different. Or perhaps not – who could tell? If the Red Napoleon had been outmanoeuvred by Sofya Vasilyevna, what chance did he ever have?

  Their time at Anapa had been an idyll. But an idyll, by d
efinition, only becomes an idyll once it has ended. He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn’t respond to. So, for instance, they had gone away to the Caucasus specifically not as man and wife, specifically as free equals. Was the purpose of such an adventure to end up as real man and real wife? That seemed illogical.

  No, this was not being honest. One of their incompatibilites was that – whatever the equality of words spoken on either side – he had loved her more than she had loved him. He tried to stir her into jealousy, describing flirtations with other women – even seductions, real or imaginary – but this seemed to make her cross rather than jealous. He had also threatened suicide, more than once. He even announced that he had married a ballet dancer, which might conceivably have been the case. But Tanya had laughed it all off. And then she had got married herself. Which only made him love her the more. He implored her to divorce her husband and marry him; again, he threatened suicide. None of this had any effect.

  Early on, she had told him, tenderly, that she had been attracted to him because he was pure and open. But if this didn’t make her love him as much as he loved her, then he wished it were otherwise. Not that he felt pure and open. They sounded like words designed to keep him in a box.

  He found himself reflecting on questions of honesty. Personal honesty, artistic honesty. How they were connected, if indeed they were. And how much of this virtue anyone had, and how long that store would last. He had told friends that if ever he repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, they were to conclude that he had run out of honesty.

  He thought of himself as someone with strong emotions who was unskilled at conveying them. But that was letting himself off too easily; that was still not being honest. In truth, he was a neurotic. He thought he knew what he wanted, he got what he wanted, he didn’t want it any more, it went away from him, he wanted it back again. Of course he was indulged, because he was a mother’s boy, and a brother with two sisters; also, an artist, who was expected to have an ‘artistic temperament’; also, a success, which allowed him to behave with the sudden arrogance of fame. Malko had already accused him to his face of ‘growing vanity’. But his underlying condition was one of high anxiety. He was a thorough-going neurotic. No, again it was worse than that: he was a hysteric. Where did such a temperament come from? Not from his father; nor from his mother. Well, there was no escaping one’s temperament. That too was part of one’s destiny.

  He knew, in his mind, what his ideal of love was —

  But the lift had passed the third floor, and then the fourth, and was now stopping in front of him. He picked up his case, the doors opened, and a man he didn’t know came out whistling ‘The Song of the Counterplan’. Faced with its composer, he broke off in mid-phrase.

  He knew, in his mind, what his ideal of love was. It was fully expressed in that Maupassant short story about the young garrison commander of a fortress town on the Mediterranean coast. Antibes, that was it. Anyway, the officer used to go walking in the woods outside the town, where he kept running into the wife of a local businessman, Monsieur Parisse. Naturally enough, he fell in love with her. The woman repeatedly declined his attentions until the day she let him know that her husband would be away on an overnight trip. An assignation was arranged, but at the last minute the wife received a telegram: her husband’s business had concluded early, and he would be home that evening. The garrison commander, mad with passion, feigned a military emergency and ordered the town’s gates to be closed until the next morning. The returning husband was driven away at bayonet point and obliged to spend the night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station. All so that the officer could enjoy his few hours of love.

  True, he could not imagine himself in charge of a fortress, not even a tumbledown Ottoman gateway in a sleepy Black Sea spa town. But the principle applied. This was how you should love – without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then, afterwards, without regret.

  Fine words. Fine sentiments. Yet such behaviour was beyond him. He could imagine a young Lieutenant Tukhachevsky pulling it off, had he ever been a garrison commander. His own case of mad passion … well, it would make a different kind of story. He had been on tour with Gauk – a good enough conductor, but a bourgeois through and through. They were in Odessa. This was a couple of years before he and Nita married. At the time he was still trying to make Tanya jealous. Nita as well, probably. After a good dinner, he had come back to the bar of the London Hotel and picked up two girls. Or perhaps they had picked him up. At any rate, they had joined his table. They were both very pretty, and he was immediately attracted to the one called Rozaliya. They had talked of art and literature while he fondled her buttocks. He drove them home in a horse-drawn carriage and the friend looked away while he touched Rozaliya all over. He was in love, that much was clear to him. The two women had arranged to take a steamer to Batumi the next day, and he went to see them off. But the girls never got beyond the pier, where Rozaliya’s friend was arrested for being a professional prostitute.

  This had come as a surprise to him. At the same time, he felt such a terrible love for Rozochka. He did things like banging his head against the wall, and tearing at his hair; just like a character in a bad novel. Gauk warned him severely against the two women, saying that they were both prostitutes and terrible bitches. But this only increased his excitement – it was all such fun. So much fun that he’d nearly got married to Rozochka. Except that when they got to the registry office in Odessa he realised he’d left his identity documents back at the hotel. And then, somehow – he couldn’t even recall why or how – it had all come to an end with him running away in pouring rain at three o’clock in the morning from a boat which had just docked at Sukhumi. What had all that been about?

  But the point was, he didn’t regret any of it. No barriers, no thought for the morrow. And how come he had nearly married a professional prostitute? Because of the circumstances, he assumed, and some element of folie à deux. Also, because of a spirit of contradictoriness within him. ‘Mother, this is Rozaliya, my wife. Surely it doesn’t come as a surprise? Didn’t you read my diary, where I’d written down “Marriage to a prostitute”? It’s good for a woman to have a profession, don’t you think?’ Also, divorce was easily obtainable, so why not? He had felt such love for her, and a few days later he was nearly marrying her, and a few days after that running away from her in the rain. Meanwhile, old man Gauk sat in the restaurant of the London Hotel, trying to decide whether to have one cutlet or two. And who’s to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

  He was an introverted man who was attracted to extroverted women. Was that part of the trouble?

  He lit another cigarette. Between art and love, between oppressors and oppressed, there were always cigarettes. He imagined Zakrevsky’s successor, behind his desk, holding out a pack of Belomory. He would decline, and offer one of his own Kazbeki. The interrogator would in return refuse, and each would lay his chosen brand on the desk, the dance concluded. Kazbeki were smoked by artists, and the packet’s very design suggested freedom: a galloping horse and rider against the background of Mount Kazbek. Stalin himself was said to have personally approved the artwork; though the Great Leader smoked his own brand, Herzegovina Flor. They were specially made for him, with the terrified precision you could imagine. Not that Stalin did anything as simple as put a Herzegovina Flor between his lips. No, he preferred to break off the cardboard tube and then crumble the tobacco into his pipe. Stalin’s desk, those in the know told those not in the know, was a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash. He knew this – or rather, he had been told this more than once – because nothing abou
t Stalin was deemed too trivial to pass on.

  No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin’s presence – unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic. Those who carried out Stalin’s orders tended to smoke Belomory. The NKVD smoked Belomory. Its packet design showed a map of Russia; marked in red was the White Sea Canal, after which the cigarettes were named. This Great Soviet Achievement of the early Thirties had been built with convict labour. Unusually, much propaganda was made of this fact. It was claimed that while constructing the canal the convicts were not just helping the nation advance but also ‘reforging themselves’. Well, there had been 100,000 labourers, so it was possible that some of them might have been morally improved; but a quarter of them were said to have died, and those clearly had not been reforged. They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped. And the NKVD would light up their Belomory and picture in the rising smoke new dreams of wielding the axe.

  No doubt he had been smoking at the moment Nita came into his life. Nina Varzar, eldest of the three Varzar sisters, straight off the tennis court, exuding cheerfulness, laughter and sweat. Athletic, confident, popular, with such golden hair that it somehow seemed to turn her eyes golden. A qualified physicist, an excellent photographer who had her own darkroom. Not over-interested in domestic matters, it was true; but then neither was he. In a novel, all his life’s anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria – all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life’s many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.