Now let’s repeat the measure, da capo. It’s all program music. Entering the scratched oak doors of the Conservatory, Shostakovich ascended the half-dozen steps, passed through the turnstile, and then came inner doors and inner doors until he felt safe. The rooms were cold and dark again, just as they’d been in his Civil War boyhood. He didn’t care about that. He was home beneath the piano keys. Hunching down, he gnawed on a scrap of oilcake until his mind cleared. Glikman said that sometimes soldiers gave him sauerkraut or other food; their rations were better. Shostakovich was rarely that lucky. How could he possibly, possibly end the Seventh hopefully while remaining true to it? Actually, he knew that he could; there was no fear of his betraying the music he loved so much, although life was certainly different from what he had expected. Music not only could save him; it (or she, as I should say) already had. He knew that he could die for her and was living for her; therefore everything had become strangely simple and good. She could speak to him through his own skinny nervous fingers, which alone expressed her. A brilliant clean burst of shell fragments, now, if I were a visual artist I might express them kaleidoscopically, because they’re so, how should I put it; anyhow a glockenspiel might convey that sparkling tinkling scattering, a steel rainbow coming apart and, and, especially since a glockenspiel is such a, you know, German instrument. And if I specified that the orchestra use metal mallets… Smiling in utter happiness, he ascended to the roof, wondering whether he would die today.
The German Fascists had been dropping incendiaries all month; the optics factory (which now made grenades and bayonets) caught fire three hundred times on a single night. If anything landed on the Conservatory, he was supposed to, to, never mind; it was preposterous. Not far away he heard machine-gun fire and then the scream of sirens. No, no; Leningrad’s mist and stone would hide him. And all the while his brain was organizing the opening of the fourth movement. When a bluish tint came into Maxim’s face, he went out by night and bought a kilogram of some unknown illegal meat from a Tartar horse-butcher who crouched amidst many dead below a brick wall. How did buyer and seller find one another? Well, let’s just call it a, a, a typical incident. Later he was appalled at the risk that he had taken—thank God Nina never found out; she thought that once again Glikman had played the patron. He could have been shot! And that meat, well, he just hoped it didn’t come from the graveyard; in the market there was said to be a sausage made from human flesh. Never mind. It’s always easier to believe what we want to believe, much easier. The mentality of a chicken, his mother always used to say, and now she kept prating about our imminent victory over the Fascists. Correct, Mama, one hundred percent, so to speak, correct! We’ll be in Berlin tomorrow, and then that bastard in the Kremlin’s going to retire! Ha, ha! Why be serious? Elena, you see how lucky it is that you didn’t marry me.
On the thirteenth of October, his colleague A. D. Kamensky performed Tchaikovsky on the radio. He wanted to hear it, but he had his duty on the roof. Peering over the edge, he watched nine-year-old girls dragging firewood on sledges. Are they too young to be afraid? he wondered. Or are they heroic as the radio says? They look hungry and that’s all. My own children are afraid. It must simply be that I’m too far away from these girls to, to, well, after all, I have binoculars.—So he tracked them with those miraculous military-quality lenses which they’d lent him for the Sovfoto portrait, and he saw that they were indeed afraid, which both saddened and comforted him. But he was not afraid. Closing his eyes, he imagined Elena walking safe and radiant along the long shining walkway to the Smolny Institute; his fondest hope was that she could become Zhukov’s mistress, or, since he was dreaming, Comrade Stalin’s, but on second thought, Comrade Stalin might be more perilous to her than any German tank.
On the fourteenth, which happened to be the eight hundredth anniversary of the Azerbaijani poet Nizami, the first snow fell. People were already eating dogs, cats, laboratory guinea pigs. A crazy woman spread the rumor that the Germans’ delayed action bombs were full of sugar, and dozens died hoping to prove it. In the morning he caught Nina in the bathroom eating hair oil. That day it was sunnier and when the shelling began he could see quite readily those dark crowds on the far side of the street, the safe side, whose building-fronts were multiwindowed and white. Everything was black and white, black and white, like piano keys, like a clothed corpse half covered in snow.
The shelling stopped. The Conservatory hadn’t caught fire this time, either. Now here came our tommy-gunners who in the white winter uniforms resembled desert Arabs, especially since so many grew beards now, for warmth. And a white-wrapped corpse swam by, dragged down the white streets. Maybe it was one of those old women in shawls who’d been set to digging antitank trenches; it was too big to be a child. Amidst the cemetery drifts, the coffined and the coffinless awaited this new arrival, but then right across the street two women with snow on their shoulders stopped to gaze listlessly upon a third who’d just fallen dead. He heard the roar of a T-34 engine, and farther away he heard the MG-34s being fired by the German Fascist batteries, and then shells began to fall upon Leningrad again. Dark-clad human bundles scuttled into doorways.—Shostakovich, he said to himself, I will die today.—He tried to be, let’s say progressive, philosophical, realistic, even—why not try again to use this word?—optimistic (for instance, the streetcars fortunately still moved; they weren’t yet frozen to the streets); and what must have been in all probability an essentially, you know, unfounded feeling armored him against the fear, at least for now; while flame-walls as jagged as broken windowpanes sprang up around him and he activated the alarm. Years later he remembered flames reflected in puddles of melted sugar, but that must have happened during the previous month, when the Badayevskiy warehouses won the lottery.