-men that in 1941 he could have rolled into Leningrad with ease, had it not been for Hitler’s dilettantish meddling. That might have been true. Anyhow, he’d been replaced first by Field-Marshal Busch, then by Colonel-General von Küchler, neither of whom was in von Manstein’s class, although the latter seemed to be a fair enough conductor, beating out many a military tattoo upon the half-broken city, which nonetheless stood firm. As our new slogan went: Leningrad is not afraid of death; death is afraid of Leningrad! All the more reason for us to shake Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony in their faces!
Artillery pieces on loan from Moscow (oriented at forty-five-degree angles like bassoons) would hold the Fascists in check for the duration, so that they couldn’t destroy the Great Philharmonic Hall. This proved to be a useful precaution, because General Friedrich Ferch, Chief of Staff of Eighteenth German Army, actually ordered a cannonade when he found his men listening on the radio; the cannonade failed, thanks to us. I’ve read that General Ferch also listened to the radio, sitting quite still as if he were awaiting some announcement. Von Küchler for his part grew very melancholy on that day, and the remainder of his war, not to mention his life, would not be happy, either. And so the Fascists hunched down in their trenches beneath the golden grass, with tiny sun-glitters adorning their dark helmets as they watched the sky blacken with smoke from the Soviet tanks they’d killed. Their mortars fell silent; they were low on ammunition.
And it came out of Leningrad, spiraling out and out, our transmitters artificially increasing its inductance to decrease the attenuation, transforming it into pure electricity so that it might as well have been a single human voice (for instance, Comrade Stalin’s) whose harmonic components had been entirely converted to analogue signals, dominating over all enemy cross-talk by thirty-five decibels or more! The Great Hall Philharmonic, that dull yellow, not particularly ornate building, with its white-on-yellow rococo decorations sparse and faded, this was now the brain of our national telephone; and Shostakovich had braided the sub-waves of his immense signal so as to most beautifully and loudly carry the commands of the automatic central office in a rhythm as reassuringly steady as Red Army men with up-pointed rifles filing past our trapezoidal shelter for the Bronze Horseman. The first movement, which is rather idyllic and slight until the Rat Theme, with here and there a reverie which recalls for me Novgorod’s ancient towers silhouetted against the evening sky, reminded the German Fascists of their own landscapes, since after all it was meant to speak to them, its softness being akin to the silence on the telephone after it has rung late at night—Elena, is it you?—No, that pealing shrillness within the telephone’s black face means that the secret police are verifying one’s presence preparatory to making an arrest. It’s already too late.
Shostakovich sat in Kuibyshev listening to the broadcast. Nina was holding his hand. His silent tears were heavier than bullets. On the floor, their children played very, very quietly. In his heart he felt a crushing dissonance, or as I should say an acciaccatura.
The announcer crooned: Listen, comrades…
Many wept. Leningrad was transformed into gold.
The grim, stern fanfares of the fourth movement (which is called “Victory”) gave way first to a requiem, then bits of sunshine flickered through the clouds, like earth beginning to appear beneath melting snow. It faded back into the Easter theme of loss and resurrection, returning full-fledged in strings; then, as so often happens with Shostakovich, it greyed and dulled back to the beginning major theme, again brightened and dulled until the attacca into the finale.
On 23.8.42, Hitler the Liberator sent out new orders from Headquarters Werewolf: STAGE 1, MAKE A JUNCTION WITH THE FINNS. STAGE 2, OCCUPY LENINGRAD AND RAZE IT TO THE GROUND. But on the morning of 2 January 1943, our Red Army launched Operation Iskra. Six days later the Nazi blockade had been penetrated five miles to the southeast of Petrokrepost. On 27 January the siege was lifted, the Nine Hundred Days ended. Now that city which Dostoyevsky likens to a consumptive girl blushing into beauty briefly and inexplicably was free again, free to devour herself in secret claustrophobic maelstroms of fear.
As for the secret German military maps, they found themselves compelled to sing: Dislokation Heeresgruppe Nord nach Lage Ost Gen St d H OpAbt/IIIb. Those crisp black pen-lines superimposed on the map of the Russian landscape which in its faint grey rivers, place-names and junctions over whiteness most resembled traceries of dirt on snow on a dreary winter’s dawn, these lines could not be made to lie outright to the Führer, but the Heeresgruppe flags andpennants which once had massed together in baying chords of hunting-horn themes were now bleeding pale, black notes fading self-evidently into weary white quarter-rests which clung in frozen weariness to the music-staves within their trenches until Soviet scouts came creeping with wirecutters and Operation Iskra blared.
On 31 January, the Fascists surrendered at Stalingrad. Even von Manstein couldn’t turn our magic back. Hitler the Liberator kept chanting: The Russians are dead! but all that summer and much of the next, his soldiers kept running away through sunflower-fields, hunched low. And then they had run entirely out of our Soviet land—those who lived. By the middle of ’44, we’d established a solid national-democratic bloc in Romania…
So who dares disbelieve in happy endings? In 1945 the productive capacity of Kuibyshev was five times greater than it had been in 1940.
Along with ninety-three thousand others, Akhmatova got her Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, although we’ve already mentioned that she had been compelled to pass most of the Nine Hundred Days elsewhere. It goes without saying that she’d written a poem in praise of Operation Iskra, and many other martial odes besides; but no one ever said that her talent was as powerful as the gun of a Josef Stalin tank. Now that we didn’t need the Anglo-Americans anymore, it was high time to bring up her past. In August 1946, we expelled her from the Leningrad Union of Writers. Comrade Zhdanov had a hand in this. Digging up her old epitaph, half nun, half whore, he spread the word that she was a real chéstnaya daválka, a woman who likes to fuck. He himself died under mysterious circumstances in August 1948. We should probably blame the Fascist-Trotskyite bloc. Thousands would be executed or imprisoned for their part in this so-called “Leningrad Affair.” For in Stalin’s symphony, we’d now reached the passage marked a battuta, which means a return to strict tempo.
As for Shostakovich, as I said, he did quite well. His hair had begun to go white a year or so before the siege was broken. Liver spots burst out on his cheeks, as if he were a very old man. These marks or stains or images, whatever one wants to call them, what are they but reminders of how the flesh must someday corrupt within the coffin? (And Shostakovich, now he too is gone, like the German-killed lime trees of the Peterhof.)