The fall of Moscow appeared imminent. Vlasov and those other generals hadn’t yet turned the tide. How should I put it? We were gloriously falling back. Everybody was shivering except for the NKVD men in their jackets trimmed with lambskin. It was a new era, an era of specialists. Certain people specialized in, you know, keeping warm. Those non-specialists the Shostakoviches couldn’t decide whether to continue all the way to Tashkent as Akhmatova had (he’d been informed by Glikman that Elena Konstantinovskaya was there, too), or to stop at the new de facto capital of Kuibyshev. Late at night they arrived at Kazan Station, where women lay sleeping on every bench with their mouths open, breath-steam jetting from their faces like visible snores, Kazakh men pacing, menacingly tall in their cylindrical fur hats, shouting in deep voices, while Russian grandfathers pointed and fussed, scared children coughed, teenaged girls sat on the floor holding each other’s hands. Poor Galochka kept whimpering, red in the face. Every time the Fascists launched a shell, she’d scream. Nina didn’t know what to do with her. As for our composer, he’d kept his sense of humor. A fat woman farted, and he said in Nina’s ear: A bit of, um, artillery preparation, so to speak.—Wide-eyed and silent, Maxim clutched a piece of oilcake.
They embarked at last. And so, comrades: “The Open Spaces of the Heartland!”—Russia is actually as blackly untidy as a page of a Dostoyevsky manuscript, with its excisions, spearpointed insertions, doodled bearded saints.—Shostakovich couldn’t help remembering his optimistic journey six years ago from Leningrad to Moscow within the streamlined metal of the express train, with its blind bulbous nose, adorned with a star; one could have likened it to a certain kind of mole, but naturally that trope wouldn’t be correct in this epoch of perfect vision; better to conceive of it as an immense bullet inset in a jointed steel phallus which ejaculated low V’s of white steam on either side as it clittered down the tracks. “Lady Macbeth” was going to win him the permanent patronage of Comrade Stalin. The way it turned out was actually, how should I say, educational. On another occasion he had boarded this same train to propose to Elena Konstantinovskaya, who’d accepted with sweet hope and joy; that might have been the last time he’d ever seen her smile—probably not, however, for most of us can’t stop smiling meaninglessly. Oh, me, the way she moaned that first time! An ocean of ghostly, uprising moans, each one similar to the sound which children make by racing their fingertips across the taut and slender wires within a piano, going up the octaves in a thin metallic music of echoing ghostliness; that was how Elena had moaned, exactly that way, presto appassionato. His fingers drummed softly against the steel wall for days as he smiled desperately into space, pressing his greying hair against Nina’s greying hair. He was working out the fourth movement of his new symphony.—A symphony! That was nice, but that was nothing; it was only when he was kissing Elena or deep, deep inside her that he’d felt solace, gratitude, fulfillment, absolute peace, which he had never felt before and never would again—no, no, that’s another exaggeration; life isn’t as fancy as that; we have to, you know, eat whatever food gets set before us, even if it’s only oilcake—anyhow, at first he couldn’t accustom himself to that feeling which Elena gave him; he distrusted it because, well, he distrusted everything, but she was real and steady from that very first night when she unsmilingly invited him into her bed; she didn’t merely “give herself” to him as other women did, she gave him a home within her heart, a sweet strong house in which they both could have dwelled until they died, if only the roof hadn’t gotten blown off; and afterward, when she stood naked at the hotel window to smoke a cigarette, he felt even closer to her than he had when she was on top of him; usually when the act was finished he felt, so to speak, alone, especially when the woman gazed away; truth to tell, right now Elena wasn’t looking at him at all, but the curve of her back, which still glittered with sweat, remained aware of him, and loved him. I’ve read that he truly was a superb lover, and for the same reason that he was a musical genius: he gently intuited harmonies and spaces; the ecstatic droop of a woman’s eyelid expressed as much to him as that black piano key he’d half depressed; his body and hers became instruments on which he could play a duet for both of them; in later years, crowds of Muscovites and Leningraders wept at premieres of his “death symphonies,” and Elena likewise wept whenever he made love with her; she sobbed with happy lust, wept for love, then cried out, her cry a peculiar chord dominated by B-sharp, and that became his treasure, which he reverently secreted in his own greying heart, never allowing it to shine forth in any of his music. One December night deep in the postwar decades, when Lebedinsky, a little drunk, dared to ask him what it was that he loved so much about her, he might have been remembering that chord, that secret, magnificent sound, when he answered: He who has ears will hear. Or it might have simply been her that he meant; she remained, as she forever would, within his hiddenmost soul, emblem of his youth, strength and bravery, not to mention the goodness he’d separated himself from, his fading prehistoric consecration. He who has ears will hear. No sense in thinking about that! And precisely because he who has ears will hear, he wanted to ensure that each passage of each movement would be as well wired as a German Fascist entrenchment. They needed his symphony without delay, just as they needed the new Katyusha rockets. Could he still remain unerring? Why not? They’d drafted him in advance to oversee the rehearsals of the NKVD Song and Dance Ensemble. Meanwhile he’d lost his two suitcases; A. I. Khatchaturian had to give him some of his clothes. Then he lost the score of the Seventh itself, which Nina had wrapped up in a quilt, but V. Y. Shebalin found it for him. He forgot to eat; he was worried about his mother. Nina begged a smoked fish from D. B. Kabalevsky, which he in his shyness could never have done; throughout his life he requested favors only for others; and while he was munching at it, absently swallowing the bones, he said: You know, Ninochka, I’m not completely sure, but, since Isaak Davidovich has…—You want to join him in Tashkent, said Nina flatly and loudly in everyone’s hearing. You want to join him in Tashkent because your other woman is waiting for you there with open arms and open legs, which is why I can’t imagine what her husband sees in her; but he’s away a lot, isn’t he? Maybe your plan is simply to moon outside her window, which will have a blackout curtain anyway, so why bother?—On 22 October they arrived in their haven, which was named after the moderate Politboro man Kuibyshev, whose mysterious heart ailiment in 1935 had been so convenient for Comrade Stalin. The train stopped, recapitulating the half-strangled violin of the first movement. A beggar with a baritone voice sang a song about our Red Army.
A lamp’s snow-white incandescence, his own pale, pudgy reflection-silhouette upon the piano lid, his score glowing like a slab of light, the long white jawbone of piano keys which sang to him who caressed it, so ran his world which was guarded to a precarious security by the outward spiralings of squat little bombers with red stars at flank and tail, twelve planes to a squadron, three squadrons to a regiment, four regiments to a division, two divisions to a corps. The children were asleep. Nina came to the piano and laid her hand upon his shoulder. He gazed out the window.
Since the Fascists had come, the coldness between her and him no longer mattered, so perhaps it was not even coldness anymore, this dissonance, chemical incompatibility; they rarely quarreled now for much the same reason that they almost never slept together; necessity discouraged it, and Leningrad’s agony chilled their selfishness and anger.