Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

His body was just as nervous as it always had been; perhaps more so. But his mind no longer skittered; nowadays, it limped carefully from one anxiety to the next.

He wondered what the young man with the skittering mind would have made of the old man staring out from the back seat of his chauffeured car.

He wondered what happened at the end of that Maupassant story which had so struck him as a young man: the story about passionate, reckless love. Was the reader told the aftermath of the lovers’ dramatic tryst? He must check, if he could find the book.

Did he still believe in Free Love? Perhaps so; theoretically; for the young, the adventurous, the carefree. But when children came along, you could not have both parents pursuing their own pleasure — not without causing unconscionable damage. He had known couples who were so set on their own sexual freedom that their children had ended up in orphanages.

That cost was far too high. So there had to be some accommodation. This was what life consisted of, once you got past the part where everything smelt of carnation oil. For instance, one partner might practise Free Love while the other looked after the children. More often it was the man who took such freedom; but in some cases it was the woman. That was how his own case might look to someone from a distance, not knowing all the details. Such a spectator would see Nina Vasilievna away a lot, for work or pleasure, or both at the same time. She was not fitted for domesticity, Nita, neither by temperament nor habit.

One person could truly believe in the rights of another person — in their right to Free Love. But yes, between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish. And so he had buried himself in his music, which took his entire attention and therefore consoled him. Though when he was present in his music he was inevitably absent from his children. And sometimes, it was true, he had had his own flirtations. More than flirtations. He had tried to do his best, which was all a man could do.

Nina Vasilievna had been so full of joy and life, so outgoing, so comfortable in her own skin, that it was hardly surprising others loved her too. This was what he told himself; and it was true, and quite understandable, if, at times, painful. But he also knew that she loved him, and had protected him from many things he was unable or unwilling to deal with himself; also, that she was proud of him. All this was important. Because that person looking in from the outside, who did not understand, would understand even less what happened when she died. She was away in Armenia with A. at the time and suddenly fell ill. He had flown out with Galya, but Nita had died almost as soon as they arrived.

To state just the facts: he had returned to Moscow by train with Galya. Nina Vasilievna’s body was flown back, escorted by A. At the funeral all was black and white and scarlet: earth, snow, and red roses provided by A. At the graveside he held A. close to him. And stayed near to him — or rather, kept A. near to him — for the next month or so. And thereafter, when he went to visit Nita, there were often red roses from A. strewn all over the grave. He found the sight of them comforting. Some people would not understand this.

He had once asked Nita if she was planning to leave him. She had laughed and replied, ‘Not unless A. discovers a new particle and wins the Nobel Prize.’ And he had laughed too, not being able to calculate the likelihood of either event. Some would not understand that he had laughed. Well, this was no surprise.

There was one thing he did resent. When all of them were staying on the Black Sea, usually at different sanatoriums, A. would arrive in his Buick to take Nita for a drive. Such drives were not a problem. And he always had his music — he had the knack of finding a piano, wherever he was. A. did not drive, so he had a chauffeur. No, the chauffeur was not the problem either. The problem was the Buick. A. had bought the Buick from a repatriated Armenian. And he had been allowed to do so. That was the problem. Prokofiev was allowed his Ford; A. was allowed his Buick; Slava Rostropovich had been allowed an Opel, another Opel, a Land Rover and then a Mercedes. He, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, was not permitted to have a foreign car. Over the years, he could choose between a KIM-10-50 and a GAZ-MI and a Pobeda and a Moskvich and a Volga … So yes, he envied A. the Buick with its chrome and leather and fancy lights and fins, and the different noise it made, and the stir it created wherever it went. It was almost like a physical being, that Buick. And his wife Nina Vasilievna, with golden eyes, was in it. And for all his principles, that too was sometimes a problem.

He found the Maupassant story, the one about love without boundaries, love without thought for the morrow. What he had forgotten was that on the morrow, the young garrison commandant was severely reprimanded for the fake emergency, and his entire battalion punished by being transferred to the other end of France. And then Maupassant had allowed himself to speculate on his own narrative. Perhaps this was not, as the writer had first presumed, a heroic tale of love worthy of Homer and the Ancients, but instead some cheap, modern story out of Paul de Kock; and perhaps the commandant was even now boasting to a messful of fellow officers about his melodramatic gesture and its sexual reward. Such contamination of romance was all too likely in the modern world, Maupassant concluded; even if the initial gesture, and the night of love, remained, and had their own purity.

He pondered the story, and thought back over some of the things that had happened in his life. Nita’s joy in another’s admiration; her joke about the Nobel Prize. And now he wondered if perhaps he should see himself differently: as Monsieur Parisse, that businessman husband, locked out of the town, obliged at bayonet point to spend a night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station.

He switched his attention back to the chauffeur’s ear. In the West, a chauffeur was a servant. In the Soviet Union, a chauffeur was a member of a well-paid and dignified profession. After the war, many chauffeurs were engineers with military experience. You knew to treat your chauffeur with respect. You never criticised his driving, or the state of the car, because the slightest such comment often resulted in the car being laid up for a fortnight with some mysterious illness. You also ignored the fact that when you did not require your chauffeur, he was probably off working on his own account, making extra money. So you deferred to him, and this was right: in certain respects, he was more important than you. There were chauffeurs so successful that they had their own chauffeurs. Were there composers so successful that they had others to compose for them? Probably; such rumours were common. It was said that Khrennikov was so busy being loved by Power that he only had time to sketch out his music, which others orchestrated for him. Perhaps this was the case, but if so, it did not matter very much: the music would be no better and no worse if Khrennikov had orchestrated it himself.

Khrennikov was still there. Zhdanov’s stooge, who had so eagerly threatened and bullied; who had persecuted even his own former teacher Shebalin; who acted as if he personally signed every chit allowing composers to buy manuscript paper. Khrennikov, picked out by Stalin as one fisherman picks out another from afar.

Those obliged to play the customer to Khrennikov’s shop clerk liked to tell a certain story about him. One day, the First Secretary of the Union of Composers was summoned to the Kremlin to discuss candidates for the Stalin Prize. The list had been drawn up as usual by the Union, but it was Stalin who made the final choice. On this occasion, and for whatever reason, Stalin decided not to play the avuncular Helmsman, but to remind the clerk of his own humble standing. Khrennikov was shown in; Stalin ignored him, pretending to work. Khrennikov became more and more anxious. Stalin looked up. Khrennikov mumbled something about the list of candidates. In return, Stalin ‘gave him the eye’, as they say. And immediately, Khrennikov shat himself. Panicked, and babbling some excuse, he fled from the presence of Power. Outside, he found a couple of burly male nurses, well used to such a response, who grabbed him, took him to a special room, hosed him down, cleaned him up, let him recover himself, and gave him back his trousers.