Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

If so — and he had no way of knowing, any more than those who uttered the phrase — he would be a fool to imagine that it afforded him permanent protection. Just to be noticed by Stalin was much more dangerous than an existence of anonymous obscurity. Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell. How many important cogs in the machinery of Soviet life had subsequently turned out, after some imperceptible shift of the light, to have been hindering the other cogs all along?

The car slowed at an intersection, and then he heard the clatter of a ratchet as the chauffeur pulled on the handbrake. He remembered buying their first Pobeda. At the time, regulations insisted that the purchaser be present when the car was handed over. He still held a licence from before the war, so went to the garage by himself and took delivery of the car. Driving home, he wasn’t very impressed by the Pobeda’s performance, and wondered if he’d been sold a dud. He parked, and was fiddling with the lock when a passer-by called out, ‘Hey, you with the specs, what’s wrong with your car?’ The wheels were disgorging smoke: he had driven all the way from the garage with the handbrake on. Cars didn’t seem to like him — that was the truth.

He remembered another girl he had examined in his guise as Professor of Bolshevik Ideology at the Conservatoire. The chief examiner had left the room for a while, and he found himself in sole charge. The student was so nervous, twisting in her hand the page of questions she was expected to answer, that he had taken pity on her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s put all those official questions to one side. Instead, I’ll ask you this: what is Revisionism?’

It was a question even he could have answered. Revisionism was so loathsome and heretical a concept that the word itself practically had horns growing out of its head.

The girl reflected for a while, and then answered confidently, ‘Revisionism is the highest stage in the development of Marxism — Leninism.’

Whereupon he had smiled, and given her the best mark possible.

When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach’s preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically.

In 1949, when the attacks on him were still continuing, he had written his fourth string quartet. The Borodins had learnt it, and played it for the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Musical Institutions, which needed to approve any new work before it could be performed — and before the composer could be paid. Given his precarious status, he was not sanguine; but to everyone’s surprise the audition was a success, the piece authorised and money forthcoming. Soon afterwards, the story began to circulate that the Borodins had learnt to play the quartet in two different ways: authentically and strategically. The first was the way the composer had intended; whereas in the second, designed to get past musical officialdom, the players emphasised the ‘optimistic’ aspects of the piece, and its accordance with the norms of socialist art. This was held to be a perfect example of the use of irony as a defence against Power.

It had never happened, of course, but the story was repeated often enough for its veracity to be accepted. This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true — it couldn’t be true — because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the fourth quartet in the way the composer intended. Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves — the music of our being — which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

This was what he held to.

His civil, tedious and fraudulent conversations with Comrade Troshin continued. One afternoon, the tutor’s mood was uncharacteristically animated.

‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘is it true — I’ve just recently been told — that a few years ago Iosif Vissarionovich rang you up in person?’

‘Yes, it is true.’

The composer pointed at the telephone on the wall, even though it was not the one he had used. Troshin gazed at the instrument as if it ought already to be in a museum.

‘What a truly great man Stalin is! With all the cares of state, with all that he has to deal with, he knows even about some Shostakovich. He rules half the world and yet he has time for you!’

‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed with feigned zeal. ‘It is truly amazing.’

‘I am aware that you are a well-known composer,’ the tutor continued, ‘but who are you in comparison with our Great Leader?’

Guessing that Troshin would not be familiar with the text of the Dargomyzhsky romance, he replied gravely, ‘I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’

‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed. And it’s a good thing that you now appear to possess a healthy sense of self-criticism.’

As if eager for more such praise, he had repeated, as soberly as he could manage, ‘Yes, I’m a worm, a mere worm.’

Troshin went away well pleased with the progress that had been made.

But the composer’s study never did display the finest portrait of Stalin that Moscow could sell. Only a few months into Dmitri Dmitrievich’s re-education, the objective circumstances of Soviet reality changed. In other words, Stalin died. And the tutor’s visits came to an end.

As the chauffeur braked, the car pulled to the left. It was a Volga, comfortable enough. He had always wanted to own a foreign car. He had always wanted, very specifically, a Mercedes. He had foreign currency sitting in the copyright bureau, but was never allowed to spend it on a foreign car. What is wrong with our Soviet cars, Dmitri Dmitrievich? Do they not take you from place to place, are they not reliable, and built with Soviet roads in mind? How would it look if our most distinguished composer was seen to insult the Soviet motor industry by buying a Mercedes? Do members of the Politburo drive around in capitalist vehicles? Surely you can see that it is quite impossible.

Prokofiev had been allowed to import a new Ford from the West. Sergei Sergeyevich was very pleased with it, until the day it proved too difficult for him to manage, and in the middle of Moscow he ran over a young woman. Somehow, that was typical of Prokofiev. He always came at the world from the wrong direction.

Of course, no one dies at exactly the correct moment: some too early, some too late. A few get the year more or less right, but then choose completely the wrong date. Poor Prokofiev — to die on exactly the same day as Stalin! Sergei Sergeyevich suffered a stroke at eight in the evening and died at nine. Stalin died fifty minutes later. To die not even knowing that the Great Tyrant had expired! Well, that was Sergei Sergeyevich for you. Despite being a punctilious timekeeper, he was always half out of step with Russia. So his dying had shown a foolish synchronicity.

The names of Prokofiev and Shostakovich would always be linked. But though manacled together, they were never friends. They — mostly — admired one another’s music, but the West had penetrated too deeply into Sergei Sergeyevich. He had left Russia in 1918, and, apart from brief returns — as with a pair of puzzling pyjamas — had stayed away until 1936. By then he had lost touch with Soviet reality. He imagined that he would be applauded for his patriotic homecoming, that tyranny would be grateful — how naive was that? And when they were arraigned together before tribunals of musical bureaucrats, Sergei Sergeyevich thought only of musical solutions. They had asked him what was wrong with his colleague Dmitri Dmitrievich’s Eighth Symphony. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, he replied, ever the pragmatist: it just needs a clearer melodic line, and the second and fourth movements should be cut. And when faced with criticism of his own work, his response was: look, I have a multiplicity of styles, just tell me which you would prefer me to use. He was proud of his facility — but that was not what was being asked of him. They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans — they wanted you actually to believe in them. They wanted your complicity, your compliance, your corruption. And Sergei Sergeyevich had never really understood this. He said — and it was brave of him to do so — that when a piece was killingly denounced for ‘formalism’, it was ‘a simple matter of not understanding something on first hearing’. He had a strange kind of sophisticated innocence. But really, the man had the soul of a goose.