Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time

Those words of his had been at best a foolish boast, at worst a mere figure of speech. And Power had no interest in figures of speech. Power knew only facts, and its language consisted of phrases and euphemisms designed either to publicise or to conceal those facts. There were no composers writing with a pen between their teeth in Stalin’s Russia. From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.

How recently he had sensed within him youth’s indestructibility. More than that — its incorruptibility. And beyond that, beneath it all, a conviction of the rightness and truth of whatever talent he had, and whatever music he had written. All this was not in any way undermined. It was just, now, completely irrelevant.

On the Saturday night, and again on the Sunday night, he drank himself to sleep. It was not a complicated matter. He had a light head, and a couple of glasses of vodka would often make him need to lie down. This weakness was also an advantage. Drink, and then rest, while others carried on drinking. This left you fresher the next morning, better able to work.

Anapa had been famous as a centre of the Grape Cure. He had once joked to Tanya that he preferred the Vodka Cure. And so, now, on perhaps the last two nights of his life, he took the cure.

On that Monday morning he kissed Nita, held Galya one last time, and caught the bus to the dismal grey building on Liteiny Prospekt. He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual. He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all. At the Big House he presented himself to the guard at reception. The soldier looked through his roster but could not find the name. He was asked to repeat it. He did so. The soldier went down the list again.

‘What is your business? Who have you come to see?’

‘Interrogator Zakrevsky.’

The soldier nodded slowly. Then, without looking up, said, ‘Well, you can go home. You are not on the list. Zakrevsky isn’t coming in today, so there is nobody to receive you.’

Thus ended his First Conversation with Power.

He went home. He assumed it must be some trick — they were letting him go so they could follow him and then arrest all his friends and associates. But it turned out to have been a sudden piece of luck in his life. Between the Saturday and the Monday, Zakrevsky had himself fallen under suspicion. His interrogator interrogated. His arrester arrested.

Still, if his dismissal from the Big House was not a trick, it could only be a bureaucratic delay. They were hardly likely to give up their pursuit of Tukhachevsky; so Zakrevsky’s departure was only a temporary hitch. Some new Zakrevsky would be appointed and the summons would be renewed.

Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist. Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not? ‘Nothing but madness in the world.’

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them — that is a musicologist.

But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.

And so he began his vigils by the lift. He was not unique in this. Others across the city did the same, wanting to spare those they loved the spectacle of their arrest. Each night he followed the same routine: he evacuated his bowels, kissed his sleeping daughter, kissed his wakeful wife, took the small case from her hands, and closed the front door. Almost as if he was going off for the night shift. Which in a way he was. And then he stood and waited, thinking about the past, fearing for the future, smoking his way through the brief present. The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned. Men dragged from their beds in their night-clothes often did not. Whether or not this was true was unimportant. What mattered was this: it looked as if he was not afraid.

This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither — merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer.

Would Zakrevsky’s successor begin as Zakrevsky had, with courteous preliminaries, then a hardening, a threat, and an invitation to return with a list of names? But what additional evidence could they need against Tukhachevsky, given that he had already been tried, condemned and executed? More likely, it would be part of a wider investigation into the Marshal’s outer circle of friends, the inner circle having been dealt with. He would be asked about his political convictions, his family and his professional connections. Well, he could remember himself as a boy standing in front of the apartment building on Nikolayevskaya Street, proudly wearing a red ribbon on his coat; later, rushing with a group of schoolfellows to the Finland Station to greet Lenin on his return to Russia. His earliest compositions, predating his official Opus One, had been a ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’, and a ‘Hymn to Liberty’.

But proceed any further, and facts were no longer facts, merely statements open to divergent interpretation. So, he had been at school with the children of Kerensky and Trotsky: once a matter of pride, then of interest, now, perhaps, of silent shame. So, his uncle Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, an old Bolshevik exiled to Siberia for his part in the 1905 Revolution, had been the first encourager of his nephew’s revolutionary sympathies. But Old Bolsheviks, once a pride and a blessing, were nowadays more frequently a curse.

He had never joined the Party — and never would. He could not join a party which killed: it was as simple as that. But as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’ he had allowed himself to be portrayed as fully supportive of the Party. He had written music for films and ballets and oratorios which glorified the Revolution and all its works. His Second Symphony had been a cantata celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, in which he had set some quite disgusting verses by Alexander Bezymensky. He had written scores applauding collectivisation and denouncing sabotage in industry. His music for the film Counterplan — about a group of factory workers who spontaneously devise a scheme to boost production — had been a tremendous success. ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ had been whistled and hummed all over the country, and still was. Currently — perhaps always, and certainly for as long as was necessary — he was at work on a symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin.

He doubted any of this would convince Zakrevsky’s replacement. Did any part of him believe in Communism? Certainly, if the alternative was Fascism. But he did not believe in Utopia, in the perfectibility of mankind, in the engineering of the human soul. After five years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, he had written to a friend that ‘Heaven on Earth will come in 200,000,000,000 years.’ But that, he now thought, might have been over-optimistic.