That was when I discovered that I’d somehow forgotten to load my pistol; I hadn’t slept enough lately.
Shostakovich said: You know, my dear friend, there’s something you have that I don’t. You display, how should I say, resolution. To be sure, I stick to my own guns in my music; no one can dictate that, but otherwise I, well.
I told him, and I was being sincere: Actually, Herr Schostakowitsch, I admire you.
That’s too kind; that’s too kind. Oh, how you’ve dirtied yourself! You deserve to, well, well, why upset you? I’m willing to agree that something in me has to die. How can we both end this torture? Perhaps poison will…
That’s just what I proposed to GREINER, Herr Schostakowitsch, but he—
(Where was Elena? She’d dissolved into the air. What if she’d never been here? I was getting very sleepy.)
Do you hate me? he demanded.
Of course not, Herr Schostakowitsch! I just told you how much I admire you.
But I hate you. I consider you a wicked, terrible man. The nightmares you’ve caused my friends, especially, how should I say, Elena…
But this is harmless; it’s not real!
What can you hope to get out of my death? Money? An Adenauer Prize? It must be money. You love money over there.
Begging your pardon, Herr Schostakowitsch, but I’m on a list.
Oh, he said. So that’s how it is. And to save yourself you’re willing to, to—
I begged him to forgive me then. I realized that he was correct. In an instant, he’d completely turned me against the Gehlen Organization.
I refuse to forgive you, he said. I feel no pity, oh, not! Because you’ve been nasty, you see. Let me tell you something: Like all murderers, you’re too, how shall I put this, optimistic.
In my now habitual state of disgrace and despair (I’ll never forget how Elena Konstantinovskaya looked at me before she faded away), I turned away from him, wandering west between various rubble-hills which were stuck through with steel spears. So he hated me! I lost myself in a tumble of bricks, a mass of plinths, iron collars, steel strings, rocky guts all crammed under ruined arches. He hated me! I felt as sunless as Dresden in winter. And I dug my way back under the Iron Curtain and into a blindingly bright afternoon in West Berlin, the long white boulevard stretching from the Arch of Triumph to the Hall of the People with its knife-winged dark eagle, the only entity which wasn’t white; the boulevard was perfect and it was empty; beyond the Hall of the People it articulated leftward into the clouds; white parks and guardhouses surrounded me, and then everything faded into a glare so excruciating that I finally comprehended that I would always be in the dark as to the real strategic purpose of this operation.
That meant that I must be awake at last: I knew that I didn’t know.
As soon as I’d rested, I penetrated beneath the Curtain through a disused S-Bahn tunnel which led to the center of the earth, which I can now assure you is a hemispherical room whose pattern of blue and white tiles have been chessboarded, staired and umbrella’d for centuries. Here I discovered rows of listening devices like pictures in a gallery, each machine affixed to reality by its two wires, each one labeled: ZOYA, VLASOV, GEHLEN… They went on and on, infinitely. Where was SHOSTAKOVICH? But after all, I had to see him; I had to face him! In a crypt in Berlin I’ve spied the effigy of an infant whose hand reaches innocently out at the world which he has been denied, while a stone eagle guards him. I was the child within the tomb! I had nothing, not even an eagle, because he hated me.
But I found resurrection in the delicious moonlight of Berlin-East. And like a champagne cork I popped up into the air, speeding into Europe Central! It was quite gusty; I would have enjoyed carrying my Variometer, to check variations in barometric pressure. But my Variometer was another item I’ve lost over the years. Prague’s hills crowded with trees and towers were all dark; Riga was buried under autumn leaves; and in an empty snowy park in Moscow I found Shostakovich walking round and round.
Smeared with iron-colored grime I interrupted his circles; I blocked his way; I snivelled and insisted: Herr Schostakowitsch, I’m sorry—
Indignantly he interrupted: I must tell you this, my dear German friend: I feel it’s the worst cynicism to, to, to besmirch yourself with ugly behavior and then speak beautiful words. I, do you know, I think it’s preferable to say ugly words and not commit illegal acts…
But nothing could take me away from him now! He was everything to me. He—and Elena, of course. (Where was Elena?)
Oh, how cold it was! I had to get down and grovel in the snow. But it paid off; I fulfilled my objective. People rarely choose to accept my apologies. But in the end, Shostakovich did. He’s a very nice man.
What I dreamed of by then was inventing a method to bring about a reconciliation between him and Elena (who was codenamed LINA); was I supposed to shoot him before or after that? How about not at all? You see, I’d come to adore the man, and I valued his happiness more than my own. Many’s the time I’ve peeped in on him as he’s composing. When he closed his eyes, I saw how happy he truly was; with my Zeiss lenses I was able to obtain a magnified view of the veins in his eyelids, which pulsed in time with what must have been his Fifth Symphony, described by R. Taruskin as a series of components, gestures or events that are immediately recognizable as signs or symbols whose referents are not specified by any universally recognized and stable code. Now he was smiling! His fingers spread out on the table and he seemed to be playing a complex chord on the piano, or perhaps milking Elena’s left breast—how I loved him for his happiness!
On one of those assassination visits, which now numbered more than the total number of Allied bombing raids on Berlin, he’d confided to me that there was a certain other world he sometimes lived in, a world beneath the piano keys; not caring to hurt his feelings by revealing that I already knew that, I calculated the sum instead: Let me keep this all straight; first there’s Berlin itself, divided into East and West just as Europe is; second of all, there are the four sectors of Germany; meanwhile, within the Soviet zone, there’s this other zone, this place where everything is beautiful and pure (this is why I loved him; this is in fact an extremely Germanic conception); but who can go there? Only Shostakovich himself? Can Elena go there, too? She left him because she didn’t want to go there; but what if she’d actually left him because he believed her capable of entering that world and she knew that she couldn’t? Whenever I listen to Opus 40 I believe that she can, but if that’s the case, where did the operation break down? He’d told me that toward the end she was really trying; she framed the first page of the score to Opus 40, a composition which was truly her as he knew her; and she hung it up on the wall of her little flat on Kirovsky Prospekt in Leningrad, to show him that she, that she, you know (these last six words come verbatim from Shostakovich). All right, but could he ever bring her there? Please God, why not?
He’d also told me of a nightmare which had attacked him for years: He tries to make love with Elena but every time he takes her into his arms the telephone rings.
I begged him for the password. I wanted admission to that world east of East, the world beneath the piano keys. If I only had that, I’d be free; I wouldn’t need to worry about which list the Gehlen Organization kept me on.