At 0210 hours I breached the Curtain through a cellar in the ruined Kaiserhof Hotel. They had cut a diaperlike flap of grey Ur-metal to hang down across the broken stairs, and it proved more challenging than I had imagined to worm myself underneath, for it was so heavy, cold and dead; at least it wasn’t yet poisoned or electrified. Anyhow, up I came. No more dancing with Aryan girls at the Berolina Haus! Smashed tanks around the smashed Reichstag, black marketeers doing business in the moonlit grassy rubble all around (because the People’s Police couldn’t crack down on everything yet), this was not the Berlin that I could have imagined back in the days when our stone eagles flew. If only LEHMANN were here to repeat how proud of me they all were!
All the same, the instant I reached the East I’d begun to feel different, as if I’d escaped from false consciousness. They were marching, or gliding as I should say, beneath a banner which proclaimed their lives better and more joyful; I got caught up in their emotion: Life seemed that way to me. I dreamed about marrying the owner of that long, dark hair, whoever she was, just as soon as the pale man confirmed my presence on the safe citizens’ list. Or arguably I’d go into currency speculation. But first I needed to be vigilant. Suspecting that once again Shostakovich might doublecross me, I resolved to keep calm no matter what; according to any enlightened calculus it didn’t matter if he got to play dead once or twice more. Eventually he’d stay dead. After all, if he didn’t, how would I ever get my name moved from the bad list to the good list?
At a café in a ruined courtyard I stopped for a beer. Didn’t I have the right? I was an operative in good standing of the Gehlen Organization! On the radio, Klavdia Sulzhenko sang “The Blue Kerchief.” The war had died; that song was getting old; then again, so was I. But the beer was good; it actually tasted like something more than dreamwater; night by night I was adopting a more realistic attitude to the East. For instance, the Iron Curtain was better for both sides; I’d realized that now. It used to be that the NKVD drove right into West Berlin to kidnap people they didn’t like, and once they were back in the Russian sector there was nothing anybody could do. Now we were safer from them, and they were safer from us; that was why LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER. I was also thrilled by the degree to which this zone had retained its infinite character, endlessly bearing dark grey European field-rectangles outlined in white or sometimes silver; this unlimited aspect reminded me of the good old days when we’d dreamed of a summer to which no one else could put a final four-beat rest. When did Europe actually come to an end? In the Urals, so I’d been advised, there were places where the map had been crumpled into mountains, that was where the Frost Giants dwelled. But first things first: I’d now perform Opus 110: “The Execution of Dmitri Shostakovich.” Poor man! It was nothing personal. Time to fly over ruins, ruins again, orienting myself (assuming that I actually cared to be oriented) by those parallel railroad tracks as multitudinous as the music-lines for a single measure of Wagner’s Ring; long trains rode them eastward, bearing German prisoners and machine tools.
Someone tried to kiss me, but I’d have none of it; I wasn’t about to let myself be caught in an East German honeypot trap. The waitress brought me another beer.
Now where was I? Was I drunk or merely sleepy? How long ago had Klavdia Sulzhenko finished singing? I wanted a warm voice to drink; Elena Kruglikova’s would do, but better yet would be that sweetly husky cigarette smoker’s voice of Shostakovich’s bisexual Muse. Hiding in the oblivion behind a hill of rubble, I spied on a bright-lit doorway which was all that remained of a building; its broken brick edges ended as distinctly as a starfish’s arms; they were dead white against the darkness; and within the doorway was also darkness; foregrounded against that darkness stood Elena Konstantinovskaya with her hair down and her brown eyes wide with sadness and love.
Knowing that in Dreamland one meets the anima wherever one goes, I left that incarnation of her to grieve in peace; doubtless she’d just separated from Shostakovich. Verification (achieved through Zeiss lenses): Tears nearly as large as grapefruits were rushing down her cheeks. I’ve heard from Comrade Alexandrov, who continues to closely follow this case and who’s codenamed LYALKA, that the last thing she said to him, or rather called out or sobbed out as she went down the stairs, leaving our composer writhing on the bed like a loathsome worm of agony (she’d kissed his mouth, then his forehead, then one last time his mouth; he’d kept his lips closed) was that she was sorry and that she loved him. He called down that he loved her, too. If this intelligence is true, then what? I theorize as follows: She was afraid of being alone with him, isolated, locked into a dark bedroom beneath the piano keys. She screamed an obscenity at him; at least she didn’t break dishes. He expected her to change, in order to accommodate his desire! (Am I thinking of Shostakovich here or of R. L. Karmen?) That was why she’d left him twice already; and that third time, when it was really him forcing the issue, he asked her to write out on music-paper what she wanted of him; he wrote out what he needed of her; he agreed to everything she wanted of him but now she refused to believe that he could live up to that, and she for her part couldn’t do what he wanted, which was to give him ever more of herself; she feared being consumed; and so the last time he’d come to see her they quarreled and hadn’t made love at all; then the time after that, which was the absolutely last time, when she’d come to take care of him after the first time I assassinated him, she’d slept with him, but only slept, and with her clothes on; she’d embraced him, but never closely enough to stop the draft which blew in between them, and when he’d begged her to hold him tight she’d angrily refused, and so they were compelled to part forever; it was she who pronounced the sentence, but only when he asked her; and she could have been willing to go on as they were—poor Elena!—she didn’t want to lose him or hurt him; she was sobbing and sobbing as she went down the stairs forever, with big tears speeding down her face. I can’t say I didn’t long to comfort her.
But maybe it never happened like that; maybe she never left him. I was in Dreamland, so I might have been getting Elena mixed up with Lina, who left me before Operation Citadel; I forget why; sometimes we forget in order to, you know.
Well, now that she’d officially left him, I wouldn’t be hurting her if I shot him. The theme I meant to instill—renunciation, letting Elena go, helping her find her ideal one, her true Shostakovich—could best be played out by liquidating the false one upstairs.
The American bombers had blown off the front wall of this stage set, so I took aim, but every bullet turned into a black music-note that screeched straight into his heart!
I should have known that he wouldn’t mind it; he even liked it. After he had popped his eyeballs back in and cleaned his spectacles he even waved; thanks to me he’d now collected new despairing dissonances for Opus 110. What was I doing wrong? Next time I’d figure it out. It was simply a question of time and manpower. But I didn’t dare look over my shoulder, in case Shostakovich might be imitating my mannerisms, even sticking out his tongue.