Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

The search for the Red Beethoven might have been a comedy; except that nothing around Stalin was ever a comedy. The Great Leader and Helmsman could easily have decided that the Red Beethoven’s failure to emerge had nothing to do with the organisation of musical life in the Soviet Union, and everything to do with the activities of wreckers and saboteurs. And who might want to sabotage the quest for the Red Beethoven? Why, formalist musicologists, of course! Give the NKVD enough time, and they would surely unearth the musicologists’ plot. And that would be no joke either.

Ilf and Petrov had reported that there were no political offences in America, only criminal ones; and that Al Capone, while in his Alcatraz cell, had written anti-Soviet articles for the Hearst press. They also noted that Americans had ‘primitive culinary skill and primitive rote voluptuousness’. He could not judge the latter characteristic, though there had been a strange incident with a woman during a concert interval. He had been in a roped-off area when he heard a female voice persistently calling his name. Assuming that she wanted to talk about his music, he had indicated that she should be let through. She stood in front of him, and said, with a bright, open friendliness,

‘Hello. You resemble my cousin very much.’

It sounded like a line with which spies make contact, and so put him on the defensive. He asked if this cousin was Russian, by any chance.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘he is one hundred per cent American. No, one hundred and ten per cent.’

He waited for her to mention his music — or that of the concert they were both attending — but she had delivered her message, and with another bright, open smile she left. He was puzzled. So he looked like someone else. Or someone else looked like him. Did this mean something, or did it mean nothing?

He knew, when he had agreed to attend the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace, that he had no choice. He also suspected that he might be displayed as a figurehead, a representative of Soviet values. He had expected some Americans to be welcoming, others to be hostile. He had been instructed that after the congress he would travel outside New York, to peace rallies in Newark and Baltimore; he would also speak and play at Yale and Harvard. He was not surprised that some of these invitations had already been rescinded by the time they landed at LaGuardia; nor was he disappointed when the State Department sent them home early. All this was foreseeable. What he had not prepared himself for was that New York would turn out to be a place of the purest humiliation, and of moral shame.

The previous year, a young woman working at the Soviet consulate had jumped from a window and sought political asylum. So, during the congress, every day, a man paraded up and down outside the Waldorf Astoria with a placard reading SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP THRU THE WINDOW! There had even been a proposal to construct nets around the building the Russian delegates were staying in, so that they could, if they wished, hurl themselves to freedom. By the end of the congress, he knew that the temptation was there — but that if he jumped, he would make sure that he missed any net.

No, that was not true; that was not being honest. He wouldn’t aim for the pavement, for the simple reason that he wouldn’t jump. How many times over the years had he made threats of suicide? Countless. And how many times had he actually tried? None. It wasn’t that he didn’t mean it. He felt, in the moment, genuinely suicidal, if it were possible to feel genuinely suicidal without passing to the act itself. Once or twice, he had even bought pills to do the job with, but never managed to keep this fact to himself — whereupon, after hours of tearful argument, the pills were confiscated. He had threatened his mother with suicide, and Tanya, and then Nita. It was all perfectly genuine, just as it was all perfectly juvenile.

Tanya had laughed at his threats; his mother and Nita had taken them seriously. When he returned from the humiliation of the composers’ congress, it was Nita who had dealt with him. But it was not just her moral strength that saved him; it was also the realisation on his part of exactly what he was doing. This time, he wasn’t threatening Tanya or Nita or his mother with suicide; he was threatening Power. He was saying to the Union of Composers, to the cats who sharpened their claws on his soul, to Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov, and to Stalin himself: Look what you have reduced me to, soon you will have my death on your hands and on your conscience. But he realised it was an empty threat, and Power’s response hardly needed articulation. It would be this: Fine, go ahead, then we shall tell the world your story. The story of how you were up to your neck in the Tukhachevsky assassination plot, how for decades you schemed to undermine Soviet music, how you corrupted younger composers, sought to restore capitalism in the USSR, and were a leading element in the musicologists’ plot which will soon be disclosed to the world. All of which is made plain in your suicide note. And that was why he could not kill himself: because then they would steal his story and rewrite it. He needed, if only in his own hopeless, hysterical way, to have some charge of his life, of his story.

The provoker of his moral shame was a man called Nabokov. Nicolas Nabokov. A composer himself in a small way. Who had left Russia in the Thirties and found a home in America. Machiavelli said that you should never trust an exile. This one was probably working for the CIA. As if any of that made it better.

At the first public meeting at the Waldorf Astoria, Nabokov sat in the front row, immediately opposite him, so close that their knees almost touched. With an insolent friendliness, this Russian with a well-cut American tweed jacket and brilliantined hair pointed out that the conference hall they were in was called the Perroquet Room. He explained that Perroquet meant Parrot . He translated the word into Russian. He smirked as if the irony would be apparent to all. The ease with which he had installed himself in the front row suggested that he was indeed in the pay of the American authorities. This had made Dmitri Dmitrievich even more nervous than he was already. When he tried to light a cigarette he would snap the match; or else, distracted, he would let his cigarette go out. Always, the tweed-clad exile was there with a lighter, clicking it smoothly under his nose, as if to say, Jump Thru The Window and you can have a nice shiny lighter like mine.

Anyone with an ounce of political undertsanding would know that he hadn’t written the speeches he gave: the short one on the Friday and the very long one on the Saturday. He was handed them in advance and instructed to prepare his delivery. Naturally, he didn’t. If they chose to rebuke him, he would point out that he was a composer, not a speech-maker. He read the Friday speech in a fast, uninflected gabble, reinforcing the fact that he was quite unfamiliar with the text. He carried straight on over punctuation marks as if they did not exist, pausing neither for effect nor reaction. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, his manner insisted. And while a translator read the English version, he ignored the gaze of Mister Nicolas Nabokov, and did not light a cigarette for fear it would go out.

The next day’s speech was different. He felt its length and weight in his hand, and so, without forewarning those concerned for his welfare, he merely read the first page and sat down, leaving the full text to the translator. As the English version was being read out, he followed the Russian original, curious to discover his own trite views on music and peace and the dangers to each of them. He began by attacking the enemies of peaceful coexistence and the aggressive activities of a group of militarists and hate-mongers who were intent on a third world war. He specifically accused the American government of building military bases thousands of miles from home, of provocatively trampling on its international obligations and treaties, and of perfecting new kinds of weapons of mass destruction. This act of wild discourtesy received a solid round of applause.