Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

‘Hey, Shosti, look this way! Wave your hat at us!’

That had been later, at LaGuardia airport. Dutifully, he had raised his hat and waved it, as had his fellow delegates.

‘Hey, Shosti, give us a smile!’

‘Hey, Shosti, how do you like America?’

‘Hey, Shosti, do you prefer blondes or brunettes?’

Yes, they had even asked him that. If at home you were spied on by the men who smoked Belomory, here in America you were spied on by the press. After their plane had landed, a journalist had got hold of a stewardess and quizzed her about the behaviour of the Soviet delegation during the flight. She reported that they had chatted to their fellow passengers, and enjoyed drinking dry martinis and Scotch and soda. And such information was duly printed in the New York Times as if it were of interest!

Good things first. His suitcase was full of gramophone records and American cigarettes. He had heard the Julliards perform three Bartok quartets and had met them backstage afterwards. He had heard the New York Philharmonic under Stokowski in a programme of Panufnik, Virgil Thomson, Sibelius, Khachaturian and Brahms. He had himself played — with his small, ‘non-pianistic’ hands — the second movement of his Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden in front of 15,000 people. Their applause was thunderous, unstoppable, competitive. Well, America was the land of competition, so perhaps they wanted to prove they could clap longer and louder than Russian audiences. It had embarrassed him and — who knew? — perhaps the State Department as well. He had met some American artists who had received him most cordially: Aaron Copland, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, a young writer called Mailer. He had received a large scroll thanking him for his visit, signed by forty-two musicians from Artie Shaw to Bruno Walter. And there the good things ended. These had been his spoonfuls of honey in a barrel of tar.

He had hoped for some obscurity among the hundreds of other participants, but found to his dismay that he was the star name of the Soviet delegation. He had given a short speech on the Friday night and an immense one on the Saturday night. He had answered questions and posed for photographs. He was treated well; it was a public success — and also the greatest humiliation of his life. He felt nothing but self-disgust and self-contempt. It had been the perfect trap, the more so because the two parts of it were not connected. Communists at one end, capitalists at the other, himself in the middle. And nothing to do except scuttle through the brightly lit corridors of some experiment, as a series of doors opened in front of him and closed immediately behind him.

And it had all started again because of another trip Stalin had made to the opera. How ironic was that? The fact that it was not even his opera, but Muradeli’s, made absolutely no difference, neither at the end, nor indeed from the beginning. Naturally enough, it had been a leap year: 1948.

It was a commonplace to say that tyranny turned the world upside down; and yet it was true. In the twelve years between 1936 and 1948, he had never felt safer than during the Great Patriotic War. A disaster to the rescue, as they say. Millions upon millions died, but at least suffering became more general, and in that lay his temporary salvation. Because, though tyranny might be paranoid, it was not necessarily stupid. If it were stupid, it would not survive; just as if it had principles, it would not survive. Tyranny understood how some parts — the weak parts — of most people worked. It had spent years killing priests and closing churches, but if soldiers fought more stubbornly under the blessing of priests, then priests would be brought back for their short-term usefulness. And if in wartime people needed music to keep their spirits up, then composers would be put to work as well.

If the state made concessions, so did its citizens. He made political speeches written for him by others, but — so upside down had the world become — they were speeches whose sentiments, if not whose language, he could actually endorse. He spoke at an anti-Fascist meeting of artists about ‘our gigantic battle with German vandalism’, and ‘the mission to liberate mankind from the brown plague’. ‘Everything for the Front,’ he had urged, sounding like Power itself. He was confident, fluent, convincing. ‘Soon, happier times will come,’ he promised his fellow-artists, parroting Stalin.

The brown plague included Wagner — a composer who had always been put to work by Power. In and out of fashion all century, according to the politics of the day. When the Molotov — Ribbentrop Pact was signed, Mother Russia had embraced its new Fascist ally as a middle-aged widow embraces a husky young neighbour, the more enthusiastically for the passion coming late, and against all reason. Wagner became a great composer again, and Eisenstein was ordered to direct The Valkyrie at the Bolshoi. Less than two years later, Hitler invaded Russia, and Wagner reverted to being a vile Fascist, a piece of brown scum.

All of which had been a dark comedy; though one which obscured the more important question. Pushkin had put the words into Mozart’s mouth:

Genius and evil

Are two things incompatible. You agree?

For himself, he agreed. Wagner had a mean soul, and it showed. He was evil in his anti-Semitism and his other racial attitudes. Therefore he could not be a genius, for all the burnish and glitter of his music.

He had spent much of the war in Kuibyshev with his family. They were safe there, and once his mother was out of Leningrad and able to join them, he became less anxious. Also, there were fewer cats sharpening their claws on his soul. Of course, as a patriotic member of the Union of Composers, he was often required in Moscow. He would pack enough garlic sausage and vodka to last the journey. ‘The best bird is the sausage,’ as they said in the Ukraine. The trains would stop for hours, sometimes days; you never knew when sudden troop movements or a lack of coal would interrupt your journey.

He travelled soft class, which was just as well, as the carriages of hard class were like wards of potential typhus cases. To prevent infection, he wore an amulet of garlic around his neck, and another around each wrist. ‘The smell will put off girls,’ he would explain, ‘but such sacrifices have to be made in wartime.’

Once, he had been travelling back from Moscow with … no, he couldn’t recall. A couple of days out, the train had stopped on some long, dusty platform. They had opened the window and poked their heads out. The early-morning sun was in their eyes and the filthy song of some raucous beggar in their ears. Had they given him some sausage? Vodka? A few kopecks? Why did he half-remember this station, this beggar among thousands of others? Was it to do with a joke? Had one of them made a joke? But which one? No, it was no good.

He couldn’t bring to mind the beggar’s barrack-room obscenities. What came back to him instead was a soldiers’ song from the previous century. He didn’t know the tune, just the words he’d once found, glancing through Turgenev’s letters:

Russia, my cherished mother,

She doesn’t take anything by force;

She only takes things willingly surrendered

While holding a knife to your throat.

Turgenev was not to his literary taste: too civilised, not fantastical enough. He preferred Pushkin and Chekhov, and Gogol best of all. But even Turgenev, for all his faults, had a true Russian pessimism. Indeed, he understood that to be Russian was to be pessimistic. He had also written that, however much you scrubbed a Russian, he would always remain a Russian. That was what Karlo-Marlo and their descendants had never understood. They wanted to be engineers of human souls; but Russians, for all their faults, were not machines. So it was not really engineering they were up to, but scrubbing. Scrub, scrub, scrub, let’s wash away all this old Russianness and paint a shiny new Sovietness on top. But it never worked — the paint began to flake off almost as soon as it was applied.