Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

Football was pure, that was why he had first loved it. A world constructed from honest striving and moments of beauty, with matters of right and wrong decided in an instant by a referee’s whistle. It had always felt far away from Power and ideology and vacuous language and the despoiling of a man’s soul. Except that — gradually, year by year — he became aware that this was just his fantasy, his sentimental idealisation of the game. Power made use of football just as it made use of everything else. So: if Soviet society was the best and most advanced in the history of the world, then Soviet football was expected to reflect this. And if it could not always be the very best, then it must at least be better than the football of those nations which had vilely abandoned the true path of Marxism — Leninism.

He remembered the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, when the USSR had played Yugoslavia, fiefdom of the revisionist Gestapo thug Tito. To general surprise and dismay, the Yugoslavs had won 3–1. Everyone expected him to be downcast by the result, which he heard on the early morning radio in Komarova. Instead, he had rushed to Glikman’s dacha and together they had demolished a bottle of finchampagne brandy.

But there had been more to the match than the result; it contained an example of the filth that pervaded everything under tyranny. Bashashkin and Bobrov: both in their late twenties, both stalwarts of the team. Anatoli Bashashkin, captain and centre half; Vsevolod Bobrov, the dashing scorer of five goals in the team’s first three matches. In the defeat to Yugoslavia, one of the opposition’s goals had come as the result of a blunder by Bashashkin — that was true. And Bobrov had screamed at him, both on the pitch and afterwards,

‘Tito’s stooge!’

Everyone had applauded the remark, which might have been stupidly funny had not the consequences of denunciation been well known. And had Bobrov not been the best friend of Stalin’s son Vasily. Tito’s stooge versus Bobrov the great patriot. The charade had disgusted him. The decent Bashashkin was removed as captain, while Bobrov went on to become a national sporting hero.

The point was this: to some of those out there, to young composers and pianists, to optimists, idealists and the untarnished, what had Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich looked like when he had applied to join the Party and was accepted? Khrushchev’s stooge?

The chauffeur blew the horn at a car which seemed to be swerving towards them. The other car blew its horn back. There was nothing to be made from those two sounds, just a pair of mechanical noises. But out of most conjunctions and collaborations of sound he could make something. His Second Symphony had contained four blasts from a factory siren in F sharp.

He loved chiming clocks. He had a number of them, and liked to imagine a household in which all the clocks chimed together. Then, on the hour, there would be a golden blend of sound, a domestic, interior version of what it must have been like in old Russian towns and cities when all the church bells rang together. Assuming they ever did. Perhaps, this being Russia, half rang tardily, half in advance.

In his Moscow apartment, there were two clocks which struck at exactly the same moment. This was not chance. He would turn on the wireless a minute or two before the hour. Galya would be in the dining room, with the clock’s door open, holding back the pendulum with one finger. He would be in his study, doing the same to the clock on his desk. When the time signal sounded, they each released their pendulum, and the clocks were united. He found such orderliness a regular pleasure.

He had once visited Cambridge, in England, as the guest of a former British ambassador to Moscow. The family also owned two chiming clocks, which announced their presence a minute or two apart. This had troubled him. He offered to adjust them, using the system he had devised with Galya, to make them synchronous. The ambassador had thanked him politely, but said that he rather preferred the clocks to strike separately: if you didn’t quite hear the first one, you knew the other would be along soon enough to confirm whether it was three rather than four o’clock. Yes, of course he understood, but still it irked him. He wanted things to chime together. That was his fundamental nature.

He also loved candelabra. Chandeliers, fitted with real candles, not electric bulbs; and candlesticks bearing their single flickering flame. He enjoyed preparing them: making sure each candle stood at a true vertical, setting a match to the wicks in advance and then blowing them out, so they would be easier to relight when the big moment came. On his birthday there would be one flame for each year of his life. And friends knew the best present to bring. Khachaturian had once given him a splendid pair of branched candlesticks: bronze, with crystal pendants.

So, he was a man who loved chiming clocks and chandeliers. He had owned a private car since before the Great Patriotic War. He had a chauffeur and a dacha. He had lived with servants all his life. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Hero of Socialist Labour. He lived on the seventh floor of the Union of Composers building on Nezhdanova Street. Ever since he had been a Deputy of the Russian Federation, he had only to write a note to the manager of the local cinema for Maxim to be instantly granted two free tickets. He had access to the closed shops used by the nomenklatura. He had been part of the organising committee for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Endorsements of the Party’s policy on cultural matters often appeared over his name. He was shown in photographs hobnobbing with the political elite. He was still the most famous composer in Russia.

Those who knew him, knew him. Those who had ears could hear his music. But how did he seem to those who didn’t know him, to the young who sought to understand the way the world worked? How could they not judge him? And how would he now appear to his younger self, standing by the roadside as a haunted face in an official car swept past? Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.

He attended Party meetings as instructed. He let his mind wander during the endless speeches, merely applauding whenever others applauded. On one occasion, a friend asked why he had clapped a speech in the course of which Khrennikov had violently criticised him. The friend thought he was being ironic or, possibly, self-abasing. But the truth was, he hadn’t been listening.

Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, might well have observed that Power had kept the deal offered by Pospelov on its behalf. Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich had been received into the holy church of the Party, and little more than two years later, his opera — now retitled Katerina Izmailova — was approved and premiered in Moscow. Pravda piously commented that the work had been unfairly discredited during the Cult of Personality.

Other productions followed, at home and abroad. Each time, he imagined the operas he might have written had that part of his career not been killed. He might have set not just ‘The Nose’, but the whole of Gogol. Or at least ‘The Portrait’, which had long fascinated and haunted him. It was the tale of a talented young painter called Chartkov, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a bag of gold roubles: a Faustian pact which brings success and fashionability. His career is contrasted with that of a fellow art student who long ago disappeared to work and learn in Italy, and whose integrity is matched by his obscurity. When he finally returns from abroad, he exhibits a single picture; yet it puts the whole of Chartkov’s oeuvre to shame — and Chartkov knows it. The story’s almost biblical moral is this: ‘He who has talent in him must be purer in soul than anyone else.’