But—
Oh, Mitya, please, please be careful. What would I do without you?
He dreamed that men in high, shining boots came calling for him in the night time.
His former mistress Konstantinovskaya had just come home from the unmentionable regions. He went to congratulate her. (When he departed, she turned her face to the wall.) He said: Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me…
But she didn’t care to talk about that. She merely said: I’m so very sorry about “Lady Macbeth.”
May I please tell you something, dear? In fact, I—well, of course you didn’t have a chance to attend my opera when you were in that place. So you may not be familiar, if I may say so, with the final act. The adulterous lovers are in prison, and…
She had been gazing so lovingly into his face; he knew that she loved him, which he would always know; she loved him more than anyone, so naturally circumstances prevented him from marrying her, not that he hadn’t, so to speak, considered the possibility of—well, the truth was that every night he’d tried to, so to speak, compose the score of his life, which bifurcated unyieldingly between Elena and Nina, so that he’d frequently dreamed that an upper tooth was loose, and in the dream he kept wiggling it indecisively, until suddenly it came out in his hand, and with it a long strange bone which terrified him—oh! he didn’t dare wiggle that tooth anymore!—and now she rose, naked from the waist down, and stood at the frosty window, lighting another cardboard-mouthpieced “Kazbek” cigarette.
And you see, I thought of us. That’s why I wanted to remind the audience that prisoners are wretches to be pitied, and you shouldn’t kick somebody when he’s down. I was thinking of you, Elenka, oh, yes, I was—
Don’t cry, Mitya. It’s much too late for that. Anyhow, it’s not my own suffering, but your own grief that you’re afraid of—
What do you mean?
Stay the night with me, Mitya. Please. Nina won’t care.
But—
He sat down and fiddled with his briefcase. He couldn’t stop thinking of a certain violin theme.
She knows. You told me she knows!
If they’re watching—
Of course they’re watching. But I’m just back from there, and you’re probably (I hate to say it), on your way there, so don’t you want one more fling together? How can Nina begrudge us that? She’s got everything else! By the way, are you shaking from nerves, or are you angry on account of what I’ve just said?
No, no, he replied, decrescendo, and then: I feel cold… Don’t you think we both need some vodka, and maybe a little smoked fish? In my briefcase I’ve got five hundred grams of—please, not a word; it’s a present! And I also wanted to say… Shall we each have a sample? Well, to be sure, they’re all waiting for my bad end. It’s… Here, Elenochka, do you see what I have with me? Sollertinsky gave me this sturgeon. I don’t know where he got it—
I’ll make up our bed now, Mitya, she said quietly.
But I can’t stay all night. I—
Pitying his dear friend Sollertinsky, who was being hounded for his loyalty (and already lay under suspicion in any event, on account of his fluency in more than two dozen foreign languages), Shostakovich gave him permission to vote appropriately. Sollertinsky thanked him in a trembling voice. Thus the resolution of the Leningrad composers to condemn the opera in accordance with the line laid down by Pravda was carried “unanimously” (for they dared not report the abstention of the modernist V. Shcherbachov).
In Moscow, his colleague V. Y. Shebalin was twice “invited” (in accents of the utmost menace) to speak against him. Rising at last, he said: I consider that Shostakovich is the greatest genius among composers of this epoch.—As a result of this, Shebalin’s music could no longer be performed.
Gorki himself petitioned in favor of Shostakovich, but without success. He would soon die mysteriously—poisoned, so they say, by order of Comrade Stalin.
Disregarding the peril to his famous theater, V. E. Meyerhold, who’d employed him back in unconsolidated days, defended the composer publicly and passionately, insisting: Experimentation must never be mistaken for pathology.—Shostakovich hung his head fearfully then, wiping the sweat from his forehead. Doubtless in consequence of this and other crimes that Meyerhold was arrested two years later. He disappeared forever. His wife was found dead at home, with her eyes sliced out.
From these events, Shostakovich was forced to form certain conclusions, one of which had to do with “Lady Macbeth”: Comrade Stalin, it seemed, preferred the musical “Volga-Volga.”
At the corner table of a certain glamorous bar on Gorki Street where he used to wait for Elena, there’d once sat a man in smoked glasses and raspberry boots who slowly drank beer and stared into his face. Pretending that he didn’t exist, Shostakovich ordered a vodka. As soon as she came running in, her whole face already smiling with love, the man paid, rose and strode out, gazing over his shoulder at them. And she—no, better not to talk about that! What had it meant? Nothing. She’d been taken, but not then, nor with him; so it couldn’t have been guilt by association. He couldn’t be responsible. Or had her arrest been intended simply to frighten him?
He wondered whether he should avoid her completely from now on, for the sake of his wife and the child in her belly. It was, so to speak, a sad situation, really, one might say almost a desperate one but I, you see, I exaggerate. Once he told Glikman, who was one of the few people not to shun him in those days: The things you love too much perish, my dear Isaak Davidovich. That’s why it’s necessary to, well…—Evidently he hadn’t loved this E. E. Konstantinovskya too much, or he would have, you know. Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me. So he didn’t have to worry; she wouldn’t perish if he failed to keep her at arm’s length. He decided to visit her again, just to, you get my drift, but a familiar-looking man boarded the streetcar behind him and got off when he did, so… Actually it was just as well, because…
The cliché runs that there are no atheists in foxholes, but in our Soviet Union, where anyone who refuses to be an atheist is either a counterrevolutionary or an idiot, the inhabitants of pits tend to call upon that living God, Comrade You-Know-Who. Who else could intercede? Summoning his courage, Shostakovich prevailed upon himself to disturb Marshal Tukhachevsky, with whom he’d been acquainted for more than ten years. Scourge of Poland, butcher of Kronstadt and Tambov (his maxim for eradicating anti-Soviet banditry: One should practice large-scale repression and employ incentives), proponent of mechanization, mobility and operational shock, Tukhachevsky had attended four performances of “Lady Macbeth.” His favorite passage is said to have been the bewitching yet snaky string music when Katerina Izmailova promises to live openly with her lover. (Well, Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.) Rapid-spoken, cleanshaven almost like a schoolboy, our Red Army’s strategic genius was himself an amateur violinist and violin-maker. Moreover, he and Shostakovich both admired the ballerina Olga Lepeshinskaya’s legs. What fun they always had together!—The legs, I mean.—Well, Tukhachevsky had fun, anyhow; Shostakovich for his part never got over a certain fear of, well, of Tukhachevsky’s eyes…
He arrived exactly on time, wearing his best suit, in the desperate expectation, which can hardly be named confidence, that if he supplicated punctually and receptively, then this pain which goaded him to rush about as if his very flesh were on fire surely must be put to rights, simply because it felt so terrible that he could continue living only by believing in its imminent cessation. And who hasn’t felt the same way? The punished child, the one whose lover has just kindly, gravely announced that she’s leaving him forever, the Arctic explorer perishing for want of food, how can they not keep faith with the proposition that undeviatingly following a given method will save them? Tukhachevsky, then, was the shaman from whom rain is expected.