The Conductor Read online

  ‘Of course Stalin doesn’t want to hear,’ agreed Sollertinsky. ‘Nor to see. The possibility that he’s been taken for a ride by Hitler doesn’t sit easily with his view of the world.’

  ‘So he shuts his damn eyes.’ Shostakovich closed his own. The water, the early drinking, the apparition: he was beginning to feel queasy. ‘And the German rats run from the sinking ship, and we — well, what are we to do?’

  Sollertinsky shook his head. ‘There’s nothing we can do but wait. I came to your home this morning simply to tell you what I’d found out, not to rouse you to action.’ He sighed. ‘As it turned out, I couldn’t rouse you at all. When Dmitri Shostakovich finally sleeps, he might as well be dead. I knocked so hard the door nearly crumbled. I thought your wife would be out chasing me away with a broom.’

  ‘Nina!’ Shostakovich started. ‘When I woke up, Nina was gone.’ It was all starting to come back to him. ‘She threatened last night that she’d take the children, go to her parents’ for a few days. She was very angry.’

  ‘No wonder she was angry!’ Sollertinsky turned off the water. ‘How would you like to be married to yourself, day in and day out?’ He led the way back into the now half-full drinking house. ‘No offence, my friend, but even I, with my nerves of steel, would not take on the task of being your spouse.’

  Shostakovich signalled to the barkeeper for more vodka. ‘Nina isn’t easy herself,’ he said mutinously. ‘She seems incapable of understanding that sometimes I must be left alone to work.’

  ‘Sometimes?’ quoted Sollertinsky. ‘Be honest. Have you been working twenty-four-hour or forty-eight-hour stints this week?’

  ‘The latter.’ Shostakovich flushed. ‘But I can’t stop now, not possibly. Not until I get down the outline.’ He stared into his empty glass and saw the whole of the previous evening there: raised voices, slammed doors, little Galina crying, and the uncertain, insistent melody in his head.

  ‘The English Poets project? My God, Dmitri! Most men would give their eye-teeth to be married to the beautiful Nina, and you shut her out for Romances of a musical kind — for Raleigh, Burns and Shakespeare?’ Nonetheless, Sollertinsky gave him a reassuring slap on the shoulder. ‘Nina never stays away long. She’ll be back in a couple of days. You know she finds you irresistible.’

  ‘Like a moth to a flame,’ said Shostakovich gloomily. ‘Only problem is, she’s as fiery as I am. But I must keep working. You know how it is when you get up speed. It’s dangerous, almost fatal, to stop.’

  Sollertinsky raised first his eyebrows and then his brimming glass. ‘To music and marital harmony. May they one day co-exist.’

  ‘To thinking slowly and writing fast,’ countered Shostakovich, gulping his vodka. ‘Well, there’s no one waiting for me at home. If I’m to live like a bachelor for the next day or two, I guess I can have another.’

  Three vodkas later, and the room was loud with voices and laughter. Even Druskin, who was rarely happy, had the satisfied look of a critic who’d honed a hatchet job to perfection. As they left, Sollertinsky boomed out a greeting to him, while Shostakovich sneaked a quick glance at the open notebook. ‘Pretentious,’ he read. ‘Angular. More farce than comedy. Melodies limper than a wet handkerchief.’

  Druskin, noticing his interest, slammed the book shut.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ said Shostakovich. ‘Whatever sins Prokofiev may be accused of, you can’t deny he has a rare gift for melody.’

  Druskin shrugged. ‘Unfortunately for Sergey Prokofiev, you’re not the one writing the review.’

  Shostakovich stared into his dry grey face. ‘“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”’

  Druskin looked nonplussed.

  ‘Philo of Alexandria,’ said Sollertinsky briskly as he pushed through the door into the chilly bright light. ‘God, it’s cold as a witch’s tit.’

  ‘Spring’s certainly late this year,’ agreed Shostakovich, hunching into his coat.

  Sollertinsky turned up the collar of his suit jacket, bought six months earlier but already looking ten years old, its pockets bulging with keys, threads trailing from its lapels. ‘Are you feeling quite well?’ He pulled on his overcoat. ‘I could have sworn I heard you defending one Mr Prokofiev.’

  ‘Prokofiev has the soul of a goose and the talent of a turkey,’ shrugged Shostakovich. ‘Nonetheless, he’s one of us, and we composers must unite against the enemy.’

  ‘Now you’re using the language of war. Go home now.’ Sollertinsky clasped his hand, kissed him on both cheeks, and warned him to take great care, not only of his marriage but of himself, because he was the best drinking companion in the city, not to mention a reasonably talented composer.

  Shostakovich turned to go, and then turned back. ‘Do you know the worst thing about all this German fraternising we’ve had to put up with?’

  ‘No, what?’ Sollertinsky’s query floated on a vodka breeze.

  ‘That we’ve had to endure so many years of strategic Wagner,’ said Shostakovich, and he marched away.

  Anticipation

  Karl Illyicli Eliasberg, commonly known as Elias, sat counting the times his mother chewed before swallowing. Ten. Swallow. Twelve. Swallow. A commendable practice, recommended by doctors to aid the digestion. Nevertheless, they were eating only a kind of purée that he’d cooked out of turnips and swede, boiled for hours, reduced to a tasteless grey gruel in deference to his mother’s gapped teeth.

  He concentrated on eating his own meal extremely quietly, hoping his mother would follow his example. Even when alone, he ate, drank and moved with as little noise as possible, as if not wanting to disturb the inanimate objects around him. The world ran on one track, he on another. This was the way it had always been.

  Fifteen. Swallow! How could so few teeth mulching through liquefied root vegetables make so much noise?

  ‘Mother!’ he said sharply, involuntarily.

  His mother looked up. She hadn’t yet done her hair; greyish wisps trailed like lichen over her shoulders. The sight annoyed Elias still further. Whatever the state of the wider world, however quickly Europe might be sliding into chaos, there was no excuse for personal slovenliness, even at eight in the morning.

  ‘Karl?’ Her eyes were as faded as the envelopes she carried about day and night.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Soundlessly, he spooned up the last of his sludge.

  ‘I’d hoped we might have fresh rolls this morning.’ His mother prodded at what was left on her plate. ‘Didn’t we have this stuff yesterday for lunch?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ he said expressionlessly.

  ‘Not that it isn’t nice,’ mused Mrs Eliasberg. ‘But I did feel like a little bread today.’

  Elias placed his spoon beside his plate at a precise right angle to the edge of the table. ‘I didn’t have time to queue for bread this morning. Nor did I have time last evening to set dough. Please try to remember this is a busy time for me.’

  His mother ducked away from the reproach, bending once more to her food. ‘How light —’ she muttered. ‘And how —’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mother?’

  Mrs Eliasberg raised her head. Small shreds of turnip swayed in her hair. ‘I didn’t mean to offend you, Karl. It was merely that I felt for a little bread today.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ His eyes strayed towards the work desk by the wall, but he forced his gaze back to his mother.

  ‘I was simply saying How light it is here, and how unfriendly!’ Deliberately, vaguely, his mother looked towards the open window.

  Silence fell. Down in the street someone who hadn’t been eating liquid vegetables with an aged relative was whistling cheerfully. Elias fiddled with his spoon and, out of habit, sprinkled salt on his empty plate.

  ‘Think of your health, Karl!’ His mother clicked her tongue. ‘You don’t want to die before you’re forty like your poor father.’

  ‘Chances are,’ said Elias, ‘that I’ll be killed by something other than an excessive intake of salt.’
Death by nagging, for instance. He’d be found slumped at his desk, his head on a pillow of scores, driven to an early grave by a semi-paralysed matriarch whose tongue was the only part of her body in full working order.

  ‘“My tired body has given way … And passersby think vaguely: She probably was widowed yesterday.”’ His mother breathed heavily as she quoted Anna Akhmatova: lines she’d used most days for the past thirty years. ‘A wonderful poem. It captures my own situation perfectly. If only you had such a gift yourself.’

  ‘Words have never been my forte.’

  ‘True enough,’ agreed his mother. ‘You were very slow to speak. Of all the autumn babies born within two miles of Pishev Station, you were the last to utter a sound. But perhaps I’ve told you that before.’

  ‘Once or twice,’ said Elias.

  With a great squeaking and scraping, Mrs Eliasberg gathered together the last fibres of her vegetables, sucked the spoon and smacked her lips.

  ‘Not that you haven’t done well for yourself. If only your poor father had lived to see his son become the best conductor in Leningrad!’

  ‘Please, Mother.’ Elias gave a small tight smile. ‘I’m not the best, and the whole of Leningrad knows it.’

  ‘Bah! Best and second-best are simply matters of opinion, and opinions are as many as leaves on a tree.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Elias took the plates to the sink, wiped them with a cloth, and rinsed the cloth with boiling water from the large blackened kettle. ‘Now, Mother, I really must get to work.’ It was imperative to be casual, to slip in his requests sideways. The trout that opens its mouth widest is most securely hooked ran through his head.

  From years of practice, first with his father and then with himself, his mother had developed selective deafness into an art. ‘Terrible thing, this German war, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elias, looking down into the empty street.

  ‘Suffering like you wouldn’t believe, they say,’ she said chattily.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated, raising the sash window, leaning out and feeling the wind on his face. High above the rooftops, the pale sky was streaked with clouds.

  ‘Poles, Jews, anyone they can lay their hands on. If your father were alive, I dread to think what they would —’

  ‘Mother, don’t upset yourself so soon after eating. You’ll give yourself indigestion.’

  ‘Indigestion, from that dull muck? Now, if I’d had some meat, even a tiny piece of sausage, I’d gladly suffer indigestion for it.’ Mrs Eliasberg’s famous tongue-click had a multitude of meanings, and this particular click was that of a person hard done by.

  ‘What if I move your chair over here by the window?’ suggested Elias. ‘Then you can get some sun on your face.’ If she clicked at him once more, he’d take her chair and throw it out the window. With her in it.

  Immediately, he was ashamed of himself. Why couldn’t he be kinder?

  He leaned his head on the window frame and focused as hard as he could on the solid stack of scores behind him. Mahler’s Fifth; think of Mahler’s Fifth! In his mind, he opened the stiff green cover and looked at the first page.

  Instantly, there it was, catching him, stopping his fall. The low repeated notes of the trumpet — full of hope, or foretelling tragedy? The possibility of both was there in that urgent, repeated brass voice. Then the lift to the minor third and the rise to the octave — and then the descending notes, the repeated fall, the rising up again. And the crash! That beautiful, all-encompassing, full and worldly sound, shutting out critical faces and marching feet, ominous news, guilt and fear. All of it gone, gone —

  ‘What?’ Distantly he heard something behind him. He turned, but the breeze from the window was full in his hair and Mahler was still crashing in his head like the sea. He saw that his mother’s mouth was moving, yet he could hear nothing except the trumpet, falling in brassy rain onto the embroidered tablecloth. His hands had floated up off the windowsill, were moving in the air, giving shape to what he was hearing.

  ‘What did you say?’ he said, dazed.

  ‘I was saying —’ His mother’s voice came from a great distance away. But just as the string melody emerged, sweeter than a nightingale, he returned to his real life: caged in the front room of his apartment, listening to his invalid mother. He shut the window, closing out the wind and the possibility of what lay beyond the city — sights he’d never seen, music he’d never heard — and he turned, with customary self-imposed politeness, to his mother.

  ‘I was asking,’ said his mother, ‘whether you might begin thinking about children? You’re not a young man any more; thirty-five has been and gone. And before the Germans or the English blow this world to smithereens, I’d like to see a grandchild with your dear father’s face.’

  ‘Mother,’ he pointed out, ‘I don’t have a wife yet. Not even a suspicion of a wife.’

  She waved a dismissive hand. ‘Surely in the orchestra? There must be plenty of girls in search of a handsome husband. A nice viola player, a pretty flautist?’ She stopped in sudden concern. ‘But perhaps a musician is not the best choice for a wife. They can be temperamental, so I’m told.’

  Elias saw his chance. ‘Yes, they can certainly be temperamental — all the more so if I’m late to rehearsal. What woman could love a man who’s unable to be punctual?’

  ‘You’re right!’ Mrs Eliasberg rolled her chair over the uneven floor and seized his gloves off the music cabinet. ‘Put on your outdoor clothes! Don’t waste your time here with me.’

  Elias accepted his gloves. ‘Let me put your chair here by the window. Is the sun in your eyes?’

  ‘No, no!’ His mother waved him away. ‘I’ll be perfectly comfortable. If you will pass me my sewing basket on your way out, I can begin darning your socks. It’s not a good start to a courtship if the man has holes in his toes.’

  All the way down four dark flights of stairs and out the front door, Elias kept a steady pace, walking as a soldier would, head erect, feet straight. At the intersection where the trams swung around with a clanging of bells, he turned, shielding his eyes against the sun. His mother’s white handkerchief waved from the window, and he lifted his heavy briefcase in a kind of salute.

  Once around the corner, he broke into a much faster walk: almost a run. Dignity, he reminded himself, sweating a little between his shoulder blades. Dignity must be maintained at all costs. There was the newsstand, directly across the street. Elias was blind to anything but the stack of newspapers displayed at the front.

  ‘Morning.’ The man in the kiosk was casual, almost insolent. The stub of a cheap cigarette stuck out the side of his mouth like an errant tooth. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Elias stepped away from the kiosk and shook open the newspaper — and there it was.

  ‘Angular … More farce than comedy …’ The sun was so bright the words were almost impossible to read. ‘A light-hearted romp in which style is sacrificed for the sake of vigour.’ He felt almost sorry for Prokofiev. Always, when it came to the critics, the inevitable fall from grace.

  But this was not what he’d been looking for. His eyes raced on down the column. ‘But of course,’ he murmured slowly. ‘What did you expect.’ He folded up the pages, once, twice, three times, until the paper sat in a hard wad under his arm. He crossed back over into the shade and leaned against the wall of an apartment block, pressing against the cold stone as if its strength might seep into him.

  ‘Aha!’ Someone emerged from the doorway on his left. ‘If it isn’t Karl Eliasberg!’

  Blinking, Elias turned to see Sollertinsky beside him. ‘Good morning to you, Ivan,’ he said, as evenly as he could manage.

  ‘And a good morning to you, too!’ Sollertinsky was still bundling his tie into a clumsy knot. For such an eminent lecturer, not to mention Artistic Director of the Leningrad Philharmonica, he looked rather a mess. ‘At least I hope it’s a good morning. I’m off to buy a newspaper to see what damaging words that dung-beetle Druskin has written
about my orchestra.’

  Elias swallowed so loudly he thought it must be audible over the clatter of the trolley cars. ‘In fact, I’ve just read that very review.’

  ‘Oh! How scathing was it?’ Sollertinsky pulled his collar down over his untidy tie and squinted at Elias.

  ‘Not at all scathing, Sir.’ Elias bit his lip; not even Sollertinsky’s sartorial flaws could save him from undue deference. ‘That is, Prokofiev didn’t come off so well, but Mravinsky — well, yet again Mravinsky has saved the day.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Sollertinsky spied the newspaper clenched tightly under Elias’s elbow. ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course.’ Elias shoved the paper at him as if it were red-hot.

  Sollertinsky smoothed out the paper. ‘“Only Yevgeny Mravinsky and his skilled musicians could rescue the music from charges of flimsiness”,’ he murmured, scanning the review at top speed. ‘“His stick technique is as modest as it is commanding.” Nice! “Barrow-loads of self-confidence, which translates to complete authority.” Very good! “Leningrad is fortunate to call a conductor of this calibre our own.” Well!’ He straightened up, although the newspaper stayed bent like an old pin in his hands. ‘Who would have thought such warmth of feeling could be hidden in Druskin’s heart, eh?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Elias tried to smile, though he felt as if his face would crack with the effort. ‘Quite a review from such a tough nut.’

  With a gallant flourish, Sollertinsky offered the ridiculous-looking newspaper back to him, but he waved it away. ‘Please, keep it. I’ve read enough already.’

  The birthday

  Happiness or the lack of it always stopped her sleeping. Tonight, it was happiness. She lay in bed, looking at the way the moon painted tiger-stripes on the wall, and she made herself stay that way while she counted her breaths.