Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

But surely, Dmitri Dmitrievich, you could write in the secrecy of your apartment; you could circulate your music; it could be played among friends; it could be smuggled out to the West like the manuscripts of poets and novelists? Yes, thank you, an excellent idea: new music of his, banned in Russia, played in the West. Could they imagine what a target that would make of him? It would be perfect proof that he was seeking to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. But you could still write music? Yes, he could still write unperformed and unperformable music. But music is intended to be heard in the period when it is written. Music is not like Chinese eggs: it does not improve by being kept underground for years and years.

But Dmitri Dmitrievich, you are being pessimistic. Music is immortal, music will always last and always be needed, music can say anything, music … and so on. He stopped his ears while they explained to him the nature of his own art. He applauded their idealism. And yes, music might be immortal, but composers alas are not. They are easily silenced, and even more easily killed. As for the accusation of pessimism — this was hardly the first time it had been voiced. And they would protest: No, no, you do not understand, we are just trying to help. So the next time they came, from their safe, rich lands, they would bring him vast batches of ready-printed manuscript paper.

In the war, on those slow, typhus-ridden trains between Kuibyshev and Moscow, he had worn amulets of garlic round his wrists and neck; they had helped him survive. But now he needed to wear them permanently: not against typhus, but against Power, against enemies, against hypocrites, and even against well-meaning friends.

He admired those who stood up and spoke truth to Power. He admired their bravery and their moral integrity. And sometimes he envied them; but it was complicated, because part of what he envied them was their death, their being put out of the agony of living. As he had stood waiting for the lift doors to open on the fifth floor of Bolshaya Pushkarskaya Street, terror was mixed with the pulsing desire to be taken away. He too had felt the vanity of transitory courage.

But these heroes, these martyrs, whose death often gave a double satisfaction — to the tyrant who ordered it, and to watching nations who wished to sympathise and yet feel superior — they did not die alone. Many around them would be destroyed as a result of their heroism. And therefore it was not simple, even when it was clear.

And of course, the intransigent logic ran in the opposite direction as well. If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption.

It had been a betrayal. He had betrayed Stravinsky, and in doing so, he had betrayed music. Later, he told Mravinsky that it had been the worst moment of his life.

When they reached Iceland, the plane had broken down, and they waited two days for a replacement. Then bad weather prevented them flying on to Frankfurt, so they diverted to Stockholm instead. Swedish musicians were delighted by the unscheduled descent of their distinguished colleague. Though when he was invited to name his favourite Swedish composers, he felt like a boy in short trousers — or like that girl student ignorant of whom art belonged to. He was about to cite Svendsen when he remembered that Svendsen was Norwegian. Still, the Swedes were too civilised to take offence, and the next morning he found in his hotel room a large parcel of records by local composers.

Not long after his return to Moscow, an article appeared under his name in the magazine New World . Interested to find out what he was supposed to think, he read of the congress’s huge success, and of the State Department’s furious decision to cut short the Soviet delegation’s stay. ‘On the way home I thought much about this,’ he read of himself. ‘Yes, the rulers of Washington fear our literature, our music, our speeches on peace — fear them because truth in any form hinders them from organising diversions against peace.’

‘Life is not a walk across a field’: it was also the last line of Pasternak’s poem about Hamlet. And the previous line: ‘I am alone; all round me drowns in falsehood.’

ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time of all.

The worst time was not the same as the most dangerous time.

Because the most dangerous time was not the time when you were most in danger.

This was something he hadn’t understood before.

He sat in his chauffeured car while the landscape bumped and drifted past. He asked himself a question. It went like this:

Lenin found music depressing.

Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music.

Khrushchev despised music.

Which is the worst for a composer?

To some questions, there were no answers. Or at least, the questions stop when you die. Death cures the hunchback, as Khrushchev liked to say. He was not born one, but perhaps he had become one, morally, spiritually. A questioning hunchback. And perhaps death cures the questions as well as the questioner. And tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Dmitri Dmitrievich and a group of schoolfellows had rushed there to greet the returning hero. It was a story he had told many times. However, since he had been a delicate, protected child, he might not have been allowed to go off just like that. It was more plausible that his Old Bolshevik uncle, Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, would have accompanied him to the station. He had told this version as well, many times. Both accounts helped burnish his revolutionary credentials. Ten-year-old Mitya at the Finland Station, inspired by the Great Leader! That image had not been a hindrance to his early career. But there was a third possibility: that he had not seen Lenin at all, and been nowhere near the station. He might just have adopted a schoolfellow’s report of the event as his own. These days, he no longer knew which version to trust. Had he really, truly, been at the Finland Station? Well, he lies like an eyewitness, as the saying goes.

He lit another forbidden cigarette and stared at the chauffeur’s ear. That, at least, was something solid and true: the chauffeur had an ear. And, no doubt, one on the other side, even though he couldn’t see it. So it was an ear which existed only in his memory — or, more exactly, his imagination — until such time as he saw it again. Deliberately, he leant across until the wing and lobe of the other ear came into view. Another question solved, for the moment.

When he was little, his hero had been Nansen of the North. When he was grown up, the mere feel of snow beneath a pair of skis made him frightened, and his greatest act of exploration was to set off at Nita’s request for the next village in search of cucumbers. Now that he was an old man, he was chauffeured around Moscow, usually by Irina, but sometimes by an official driver. He had become a Nansen of the Suburbs.

On his bedside table, always: a postcard of Titian’s The Tribute Money .

Chekhov said that you should write everything — except denunciations.

Poor Anatoli Bashashkin. Denounced as Tito’s stooge.

Akhmatova said that under Khrushchev, Power had become vegetarian. Maybe so; though you could just as easily kill someone by stuffing vegetables down their throat as by the traditional methods of the old meat-eating days.

He had returned from New York and composed The Song of the Forests , to an enormous, windy text by Dolmatovsky. Its theme was the regeneration of the steppes, and how Stalin, the Leader and Teacher, the Friend of Children, the Great Helmsman, the Great Father of the Nation, and the Great Railway Engineer, was now also the Great Gardener. ‘Let us clothe the Motherland in forests!’ — an injunction Dolmatovsky repeated ten or a dozen times. Under Stalin, the oratorio insisted, even apple trees grew more courageously, fighting off the frosts just as the Red Army had fought off the Nazis. The work’s thunderous banality had ensured its immediate success. It helped him win his fourth Stalin Prize: 100,000 roubles, and a dacha. He had paid Caesar, and Caesar had not been ungrateful in return. In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times. He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals: in 1946, 1956 and 1966. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.