Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

Perhaps courage was like beauty. A beautiful woman grows old: she sees only what has gone; others see only what remains. Some congratulated him on his endurance, his refusal to submit, the solid core beneath the hysterical surface. He saw only what was gone.

Stalin himself was long gone. The Great Gardener had gone to tend the grass in the Elysian Fields, and strengthen the morale of the apple trees there.

The red roses on Nita’s grave, strewn all over. Every time he visited. And not sent by him.

Glikman had told him a story about Louis XIV. The Sun King had been as absolute a ruler as Stalin ever was. Yet he was always willing to give artists their proper due; to acknowledge their secret magic. One such was the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. And Louis XIV, in front of the entire court at Versailles, had announced, as if it were an everyday truth, ‘Monsieur Despréaux has a better understanding of poetry than I do.’ No doubt there was sycophantically disbelieving laughter from those who, in private and public, assured the great king that his understanding of poetry — and music, and painting, and architecture — was unmatched across the globe and down the centuries. And perhaps there was a tactical, diplomatic modesty about the remark in the first place. But still, it had been made.

Stalin, however, had so many advantages over that old king. His profound grasp of Marxist — Leninist theory, his intuitive understanding of the People, his love of folk music, his ability to sniff out formalist plots … Oh, enough, enough. He would make his own ears bleed.

But even the Great Gardener in his guise as the Great Musicologist had been unable to sniff out the location of the Red Beethoven. Davidenko had disappointed — not least by dying in his mid-thirties. And the Red Beethoven never did turn up.

He liked to tell the story of Tinyakov. A handsome man, a good poet. He lived in Petersburg and wrote about love and flowers and other lofty subjects. Then the Revolution came, and soon he was Tinyakov the poet of Leningrad, who wrote not about love and flowers, but about how hungry he was. And after a while things got so bad that he would stand on a street corner with a placard round his neck reading POET. And since Russians valued their poets, passers-by used to give him money. Tinyakov liked to claim that he had earned far more money from begging than he ever did from his verses, and so was able each evening to wind up in a fancy restaurant.

Was that last detail true? He wondered. But poets were allowed exaggeration. As for himself, he did not need a placard — he had three Orders of Lenin and six Stalin Prizes round his neck and ate in the restaurant of the Union of Composers.

One man, sly and swarthy, with a dangling ruby earring, grips a coin between thumb and forefinger. He shows it to a second, paler man, who does not touch it, but instead looks the first man straight in the eye.

There had been that strange time when Power, having decided that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was a salvageable case, had tried a new tactic with him. Instead of waiting for the end result — a finished composition which would then have to be examined by politico-musicological experts before being approved or condemned — the Party, in its wisdom, decided instead to begin at the beginning: with the state of his ideological soul. Thoughtfully, generously, the Union of Composers appointed a tutor, Comrade Troshin, a grave and elderly sociologist, to help him understand the principles of Marxism — Leninism — to help him reforge himself. He was sent a reading list, which consisted entirely of works by Comrade Stalin, such as Marxism and Questions of Linguistics , and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR . Troshin then came to the apartment and explained his function. He was there because, alas, even distinguished composers were capable of serious error, as had been publicly aired in recent years. To avoid repetition of such errors, Dmitri Dmitrievich’s level of political, economic and ideological understanding must be raised. The composer received his uninvited guest’s statement of intent with due seriousness, while expressing his regret that work on a new symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin had so far prevented him from reading all of the library which had been so kindly delivered.

Comrade Troshin looked round the composer’s study. He was neither a devious nor a threatening man, just one of those diligent, unquestioning functionaries that every regime throws up.

‘And this is where you work.’

‘Indeed.’

The tutor stood up, made a step or two in each direction, and praised the room’s general arrangement. Then, with an apologetic smile, he observed:

‘But there is one thing missing in the study of a distinguished Soviet composer.’

The distinguished Soviet composer in turn stood up, looked around the walls and bookcases he knew so well, and shook his head with equal apology, as if embarrassed to be failing at his tutor’s first question.

‘There is no portrait on your walls of Comrade Stalin.’

A daunting silence ensued. The composer lit a cigarette and paced the room, as if searching for the cause of this hideous solecism, or as if he might find the necessary icon beneath this cushion, that rug. Finally, he assured Troshin that he would take immediate steps to procure the best available picture of the Great Leader.

‘Well, that’s fine, then,’ replied Troshin. ‘Now let’s get down to business.’

He was required, from time to time, to make a précis of Stalin’s turgid wisdom. Happily, Glikman offered to do the job for him, and the composer’s patriotic insights into the Great Gardener’s oeuvre were posted to him on a regular basis from Leningrad. After a while, other key texts were added to the curriculum: for instance, G. M. Malenkov’s ‘The Characteristics of Creativity in Art’, a reprint of his speech to the 19th Party Congress.

Troshin’s presence in his life, earnest and persistent, was received on his part with polite evasiveness and secret mockery. They played their roles as instructor and pupil with straight faces; no doubt, Troshin did not have another face to offer. He believed all too evidently in the virtuous purpose of his task, and the composer treated him civilly, recognising that these unwanted visits amounted to a kind of protection. And yet each of them was aware that their charade might have serious consequences.

In that time, there were two phrases — one a question and one a statement — which would cause the sweat to pour and strong men to shit their pants. The question was: ‘Does Stalin know?’ The statement, even more alarming, was: ‘Stalin knows.’ And since Stalin was accorded supernatural powers — he never made a mistake, he commanded everything and was everywhere — the mere terrestrial beings under his power felt, or imagined, his eye being constantly on them. So what if Comrade Troshin failed to teach the precepts of Karlo-Marlo and their descendants in a satisfactory way? What if his pupil, outwardly solemn but inwardly whimsical, failed to learn? What then for the Troshins of this world? They both knew the answer. If the tutor offered protection to his pupil, the pupil had a certain responsibility towards his tutor.

But there was a third phrase, whispered about him as it had been whispered about others — Pasternak, for example: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’ Sometimes this statement was a fact, sometimes a wild theory or envious supposition. Why had he survived being a protégé of the traitor Tukhachevsky? Why had he survived those words, ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly’? Why had he survived being named an enemy of the people by the newspapers? Why had Zakrevsky disappeared between a Saturday and a Monday? Why had he been spared when so many around him had been arrested, exiled, murdered, or had disappeared into a fate which might become clear only decades later? One answer would fit all those questions: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’