On the seventeenth he was on the Conservatory roof when a black bundle fell in the street. For a long time he avoided looking, and later he thought to himself, if only I could have thought more clearly, I never, I, I, but hunger lowered my guard, so I, well. I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have… It was my task right then, for the sake of the symphony, to seek out grief. I know that.
After several hours, he peered down through the field glasses at that Leningrader’s closed eyes, the lips pursed almost coquettishly, the ice on the chin. Those details pressed him to alter a chord in the second movement.
On the nineteenth, Moscow was officially declared to be in a state of siege. Nina asked what would happen. He cleaned his glasses and said: I’m sure they’ll, which is to say that bastard, you know the one I mean, he’ll save us all—tomorrow! He’ll lead the, so to speak, cavalry charge. He’ll choke with his, his…—and he looked right and left, then whispered hideously in her ear: His Constitution.—Well, what do you know? As soon as he’d croaked that out, the radio announced a victorious counteroffensive! Then, as ever, it fell silent except for the feeble ticking of a metronome. Nina felt dizzy; she had to lie down. As for him, he, well, can’t you guess?
From the window he watched a mother dragging her son to the cemetery on his little sled. Some shivering schoolgirls were trying to drag an antitank hedgehog across the ice; one girl fell down and lay there quite awhile before she got up again. The others stood blankly round, not trying to help her. Finally they’d pulled their hedgehog all the way to the corner, passing the corpse with dried blood-bubbles on its lips which had lain there for two weeks; thank God the snow hid it now. It made the children afraid. And Galya said: Papa, I’m hungry.
Now it was night. In that chilly darkness behind the blackout curtain, Maxim was lying on the sofa, his face more pallid than before, his arms and legs as limp as the down-swinging golden arcs and crescents on the stage curtain of the Kirov Theater where those failed ballets “Dynamiada” and “Bolt” had both premiered so long ago. Why was I thinking about “Bolt” just now? My ballets nauseate me. I’ll never write another one, I promise. I’ll certainly never write another opera, because I’ll be (why not joke about it?) dead. But Maxim’s going to feel better tomorrow. The news from Glikman was that people had started eating cooked glue. Soon our Red Army engineers would begin dynamiting the frozen ground at Volkovo Cemetery to make mass graves.—Maxim, shall I read you a story?—The boy opened his eyes, but did not answer. Well, but after all, the terrified father tried to reassure himself, children, especially small children, get more quickly debilitated (not that this situation doesn’t bear watching), but they also recover more quickly than we do, which isn’t to say that I shouldn’t somehow prepare, or, or, or, but for instance, and here’s just one of, oh, a hundred examples: When I get a chest cold I’m miserable for ten days, whereas Galya and Maxim are as good as new after three. Therefore…—And he cleaned his glasses on his sweater, wiping away the tears, but all he did was smudge them. From the Conservatory roof that day he’d seen them take another cart of corpses to Volkovo, reflections of the cartwheels shining in a pool of melting ice, and he remembered the Tartar horse-butcher. Well, well. No doubt that’s commonplace in our times. But I, I, to me I, well, I’d simply not pursued such considerations.
Gazing on his wife and children, he saw as if for the first time long starving necks rising out of sweater-collars, and winter was just beginning. The Rat Theme rose up in him like vomit. This situation needs watching, he said to himself. Ha, ha! Hitler the Liberator means to, to, slim us down. Last month Akhmatova had confided that the city’s art treasures were being shipped out by train. But that news must now be, so to speak, superseded, because the Fascists had cut all our railroad lines. Perhaps to Elena this wasn’t new. The Black Maria had taken her to that place, where the wash-water was always frozen, and flat-chested, wrinkled girls prostituted themselves for half a kilo of bread. Why had they let her go? It must have been a random decision; perhaps her prosecutor got arrested. And now she’s… Anyhow, history can’t be undone. The clock winds down and you wind it up, but when the spring, you see, gives way… I’m not talking about myself now; I’m talking about something else. You’re so lucky I didn’t… If Maxim died, why then, he’d… Galisha would probably… What could he do now? He could tell them uplifting lies as the radio did; perhaps he could smuggle home a little more food; but… Our snowy-camouflaged men on each tank, pointing black guns across the snow, they might save Leningrad but they couldn’t save his children. No one could save anyone, which is why this will someday be, how should I say, the best page of my memoirs: sincerity, self-sacrifice, a common enemy whose name we don’t have to whisper, so when Galya dies I can borrow Litvinova’s sled and… No one can do anything. That motif, like letters from a soldier which keep arriving for weeks after his death, would infect his music for the rest of his life.
But that very month, despite his murmurous protests, Shostakovich and his family got flown out by special plane! The activists said: No more objections, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! Not unless it’s true that you’re waiting for the Germans. We’ve heard that you admire the fugues of J. S. Bach…
The “Muse of Leningrad,” which is to say Akhmatova, had already been evacuated. It’s said that she carried the original piano score of the Seventh on her lap, as precaution in case his plane were to be shot down. As for Shostakovich, he had the orchestral score, as well as his much-loved child, “Lady Macbeth.” Romain Rolland had liked that opera. Save us from these humanists! Glikman’s wife was already dying by then. And where were Sollertinsky, Lebedinsky, and, and, you know? Get over it! His mother, his sister and his brother-in-law had to stay behind.—In short, the authorities agreed with his mother, who’d written that if the roof fell in and she had to choose whom to save, the answer would be of course Mitya—for this would be the duty of everyone to society, for the sake of art—disregarding all personal feeling. He said to himself: If I ever forget that I was spared, I’ll be as evil as, you know, that bastard. The last thing he saw in the city of his birth was a half-melted machine-gun barrel in the snow, snake-twisted like the mouthpiece of a bass clarinet.