Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense. He had put the theory of Free Love into practice, first with Tanya, then with Nita. Indeed, with both of them at the same time; they had overlapped in his heart, and sometimes still did. It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition. And on top of this, he himself was weak-willed and indecisive — except on those occasions when he was strong-willed and decisive. But even then he didn’t necessarily make the right decisions. So his emotional life had been … how best to sum it up? He smiled ruefully to himself. Yes indeed: muddle instead of music.

He had wanted Tanya; his mother had disapproved. He had wanted Nina; his mother had disapproved. He had hidden their marriage from her for several weeks, not wanting their first happiness to be clouded with ill feeling. This had not been the most heroic action of his life, he admitted. And when he did confess the news, his mother reacted as if she’d known all along — perhaps she had read the registrar’s diary — and saw no reason to approve. She had a way of talking about Nina which sounded like praise yet was in fact criticism. Perhaps, after his death, which could not be far away, they would form a household together. Mother, daughter-in-law, granddaughter: three generations of women. Such households were increasingly common in Russia these days.

He may have got things wrong; but he was not a fool, nor altogether naive. He had been conscious from the beginning that it was necessary to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s. So why was Caesar angry with him? No one could say he was not productive: he wrote quickly, and rarely missed a deadline. He could turn out efficiently tuneful music which pleased him for a month and the public for a decade. But this was precisely the point. Caesar didn’t just demand that tribute be rendered unto him; he also nominated the currency in which it should be paid. Why, Comrade Shostakovich, does your new symphony not sound like your wonderful ‘Song of the Counterplan’? Why is the weary steel-worker not whistling its first theme on his way home? We know, Comrade Shostakovich, that you are well capable of writing music which pleases the masses. So why do you persist with your formalist quacks and grunts which the smug bourgeoisie who still command the concert halls merely pretend to admire?

Yes, he had been naive about Caesar. Or rather, he had been working from an outdated model. In the old days, Caesar had demanded tribute money, a sum to acknowledge his power, a certain percentage of your calculated worth. But things had moved on, and the new Caesars of the Kremlin had upgraded the system: nowadays your tribute money was calculated at the full 100 % of your worth. Or, if possible, more.

When he was a student — those years of cheerfulness, hope and invulnerability — he had slaved for three years as a cinema pianist. He had accompanied the screen at the Piccadilly on Nevsky Prospekt; also at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace. It was hard, demeaning work; some of the proprietors were skinflints who would sack you rather than pay your wages. Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have beem more fun, admittedly.

He tried to watch the screen above him and play appropriate music. The audience preferred the old romantic tunes which were familiar to them; but often, he would get bored, and then play his own compositions. These did not go down so well. In the cinema, it was the opposite from the concert hall: audiences would applaud when they disapproved of something. One evening, while accompanying a film called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden , he found himself in a more than usually satirical mood. First he began to imitate bird calls on the piano, and then, as the marsh and water birds flew higher and higher, the piano worked itself up into a greater and greater passion. There was loud applause, which in his naivety he took to be aimed at the ridiculous film; and so he played all the harder. Afterwards, the audience had complained to the cinema manager: the pianist must have been drunk, what he played was never music, he had insulted the beautiful film and also its audience. The manager had sacked him.

And that, he now realised, had been his career in miniature: hard work, some success, a failure to respect musical norms, official disapproval, suspension of pay, the sack. Except that now he was in the grown-up world, where the sack meant something much more final.

He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected on to the screen. Tanya — his mother applauds. Nina — his mother applauds. Rozaliya — his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba — his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.

His nocturnal vigils lasted for ten days. Nita argued — not from evidence, more from optimism and determination — that the immediate danger had probably passed. Neither of them believed this, but he was weary of standing, of waiting for the lift’s machinery to grind and whirr. He was weary of his own fear. And so he returned to lying in the dark fully clothed, his wife at his side, his overnight bag next to the bed. A few feet away Galya would be sleeping as an infant does, careless about matters of state.

And then, one morning, he picked up his case and opened it. He put his underclothes back in the drawer, his toothbrush and tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet, and his three packets of Kazbeki on his desk.

And he waited for Power to resume its conversation with him. But he never heard from the Big House again.

Not that Power was idle. Many of those around him began to disappear, some to camps, some to execution. His mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, his Old Bolshevik uncle, associates, a former lover. And what of Zakrevsky, who had not come into work that fatal Monday? No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps Zakrevsky had never really existed.

But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work. There would be no rest. ‘We rest only when we dream,’ as Blok put it; though at this time most people’s dreams were not restful. But life continued; soon Nita was pregnant again, and soon he began adding to the opus numbers he had feared would end with the Fourth Symphony.

His Fifth, which he wrote that summer, was premiered in November 1937 in the Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. An elderly philologist told Glikman that only once before in his lifetime had he witnessed such a vast and insistent ovation: forty-four years previously, when Tchaikovsky had conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. A journalist — foolish? hopeful? sympathetic? — described the Fifth as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism’. He never repudiated the phrase; and many came to believe it was to be found in his own hand at the head of the score. These words turned out to be the most famous he ever wrote — or rather, never wrote. He allowed them to stand because they protected his music. Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

The phrase also permitted those with asses’ ears to hear in his symphony what they wanted to hear. They missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph. They heard only triumph itself, some loyal endorsement of Soviet music, Soviet musicology, of life under the sun of Stalin’s constitution. He had ended the symphony fortissimo and in the major. What if he had ended it pianissimo and in the minor? On such things might a life — might several lives — turn. Well, ‘Nothing but nonsense in the world.’