Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time

No, not like a bluebottle. More like one of those mosquitoes in Anapa. Landing anywhere, drawing blood.

He had thought, standing here, that he would be in charge of his mind. But at night, alone, it seemed that his mind was in charge of him. Well, there is no escaping one’s destiny, as the poet assured us. And no escaping one’s mind.

He remembered the pain that night before they took his appendix out. Throwing up twenty-two times, swearing all the swear-words he knew at a nurse, then begging a friend to fetch the militiaman to shoot him and end the pain. Get him to come in and shoot me to end the pain, he had pleaded. But the friend had refused to help.

He didn’t need a friend and a militiaman now. There were enough volunteers already.

It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others.

And afterwards, whatever might happen next, it would all continue in the same way, in other places, and in the minds of others.

He thought of cigarettes: packs of Kazbek, Belomor, Herzegovina Flor. Of a man crumbling the tobacco from half a dozen papirosy into his pipe, leaving on the desk a debris of cardboard tubes and paper.

Could it, even at this late stage, be mended, put back, reversed? He knew the answer: what the doctor said about the restoration of The Nose. ‘Of course it can be put back, but I assure you, you will be the worse for it.’

He thought about Zakrevsky, and the Big House, and who might have replaced Zakrevsky there. Someone would have done. There was never a shortage of Zakrevskys, not in this world, constituted as it was. Perhaps when Paradise was achieved, in almost exactly 200,000,000,000 years’ time, the Zakrevskys would no longer need to exist.

At moments his mind refused to believe what was happening. It can’t be, because it couldn’t ever be, as the Major said when he saw the giraffe. But it could be, and it was.

Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about. When life said to you, ‘And so,’ you nodded, and called it destiny. And so, it had been his destiny to be called Dmitri Dmitrievich. There was nothing to be done about that. Naturally, he didn’t remember his own christening, but had no reason to doubt the truth of the story. The family had all assembled in his father’s study around a portable font. The priest arrived, and asked his parents what name they intended for the newborn. Yaroslav, they had replied. Yaroslav? The priest was not happy with this. He said that it was a most unusual name. He said that children with unusual names were teased and mocked at school: no, no, they couldn’t call the boy Yaroslav. His father and mother were perplexed by such forthright opposition, but didn’t wish to give offence. What name do you suggest then? they asked. Call him something ordinary, said the priest: Dmitri, for instance. His father pointed out that he himself was already called Dmitri, and that Yaroslav Dmitrievich sounded much better than Dmitri Dmitrievich. But the priest did not agree. And so he became Dmitri Dmitrievich.

What did a name matter? He had been born in St Petersburg, started growing up in Petrograd, finished growing up in Leningrad. Or St Leninsburg, as he sometimes liked to call it. What did a name matter?

He was thirty-one. His wife Nita lay a few yards away with their daughter, Galina, at her side. Galya was a year old. Recently, his life had appeared to acquire stability. He had never found that side of things straightforward. He felt powerful emotions but had never become skilled at expressing them. Even at a football match he rarely yelled and lost control of himself like everyone else; he was content with the quiet annotation of a player’s skill, or lack of it. Some thought this the typical buttoned-up formality of a Leningrader; but on top of that — or underneath it — he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair. It was as if he was always on the wrong metronome setting.

Still, even so, his life had finally acquired some regularity, and with it the correct beat. Except that now it had all become unstable again. Unstable: that was more than a euphemism.

The overnight case resting against his calf reminded him of the time he had tried to run away from home. How old had he been? Seven or eight, perhaps. And did he have a little suitcase with him? Probably not — his mother’s exasperation would have been too immediate. It was one summer at Irinovka, where his father worked as general manager. Jurgensen was the estate’s handyman. Who made things and mended things, who solved problems in the way a child could understand. Who never instructed him to do anything, just let him watch as a piece of wood turned into a dagger or a whistle. Who handed him a piece of fresh-cut peat and allowed him to sniff it.

He had become very attached to Jurgensen. So when things displeased him, as they frequently did, he would say, ‘Very well then, I’ll go and live with Jurgensen.’ One morning, still in bed, he had made this threat, or promise, for the first time that day. But once was already enough for his mother. Get dressed and I’ll take you there, she had replied. He took up her challenge — no, there had been no time to pack — Sofya Vasilyevna had taken him firmly by the wrist, and they had started walking across the field to where Jurgensen lived. At first he had been bold in his threat, swaggering along beside his mother. But gradually his heels dragged, and his wrist, then hand, began to slip from his mother’s grasp. He thought at the time it was he who was pulling away, but now acknowledged that his mother had been letting him go, finger by finger, until he was free. Not free to live with Jurgensen, but free to turn tail, burst into tears, and run home.

Hands, slipping hands, grabbing hands. As a child, he had feared the dead — feared that they would rise from their graves and seize hold of him, dragging him back into the cold, black earth, his mouth and eyes filling with soil. This fear had slowly disappeared, because the hands of the living had turned out to be more frightening. The prostitutes of Petrograd had been no respecters of his youth and innocence. The harder the times, the grabbier the hands. Stretching out to seize your cock, your bread, your friends, your family, your livelihood, your existence. As well as prostitutes, he had been afraid of janitors. Also of policemen, whatever names they chose to call themselves by.

But then there was the opposite fear: of slipping from hands that kept you safe.

Marshal Tukhachevsky had kept him safe. For many years. Until the day he had watched the sweat march down from the Marshal’s hairline. A large white handkerchief had fluttered and dabbed, and he knew he wasn’t safe any more.

The Marshal was the most sophisticated man he had ever encountered. He was Russia’s most famous military strategist: newspapers called him ‘The Red Napoleon’. Also a music lover and amateur violin maker; a man of open, questioning mind, who enjoyed discussing novels. In the decade he had known Tukhachevsky, he had often seen him sweeping through Moscow and Leningrad after dark in his Marshal’s uniform, half at work, half at play, mixing politics with pleasure; talking and arguing, eating and drinking, keen to show that he had an eye for a ballerina. He liked to explain how the French had once taught him the secret of drinking champagne without ever getting a hangover.

He himself would never be as worldly. He lacked the self-confidence; also, perhaps, the interest. He didn’t like complicated food, and had a light head for drink. Back when he was a student, when everything was being rethought and remade, before the Party took full control, he had, like most students, claimed a sophistication beyond what he knew. For instance, the question of sex had to be rethought, now that the old ways were gone for ever; and someone had come up with the ‘glass of water’ theory. The act of sex, young know-alls maintained, was just like drinking a glass of water: when you were thirsty, you drank, and when you felt desire, you had sex. He had not been against this system, though it did depend on women being as freely desirous as they were desired. Some were, some weren’t. But the analogy only took you so far. A glass of water did not engage the heart.