Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

In ‘The Portrait’ there was a clear, two-way choice: integrity or corruption. Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable. But in the real world, especially the extreme version of it he had lived through, things were not like this. There was a third choice: integrity and corruption. You could be both Chartkov and his morally shaming alter ego. Just as you could be both Galileo and his fellow scientist.

In the time of Tsar Nicolas I a hussar had once abducted a general’s daughter. Worse — or better — he had actually married her. The general had complained to the Tsar. Nicolas resolved the problem by decreeing first, that the marriage was null and void; secondly, that the girl’s virginity was officially restored. Anything was possible in the homeland of elephants. But even so, he did not think there was a ruler, or a miracle, that could restore his virginity.

Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. That was what he had always said, always believed. And his own case was no different. He had, at times, felt that his life, like that of many others, like that of his country, was a tragedy; one whose protagonist could only solve his intolerable dilemma by killing himself. Except that he had not done so. No, he was not Shakespearean. And now that he had lived too long, he was even beginning to see his own life as a farce.

As for Shakespeare: he wondered, looking back, if he hadn’t been unfair. He had judged the Englishman sentimental because his tyrants suffered guilt, bad dreams, remorse. Now that he had seen more of life, and been deafened by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times. In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences. Not any more. The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of the old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found.

Two years after he joined the Party, he married again: Irina Antonovna. Her father had been a victim of the Cult of Personality; she herself was brought up in an orphanage for children of enemies of the state; now she worked in music publishing. There were some slight impediments: she was twenty-seven, only two years older than Galya, and already married to another older man. And of course this third marriage was as impulsive and secretive as his other two. But it was a novelty for him to have a wife who loved both music and domesticity, and who was as practical and efficient as she was adorable. He became shyly, tenderly uxorious.

They had promised to leave him alone. They never left him alone. Power continued speaking to him, but it was no longer a conversation, merely something one-sided and basely quotidian: a wheedling, a cajoling, a nagging. Nowadays, a late-night ring at the door meant not the NKVD or the KGB or the MVD, but a messenger scrupulously bringing him the text of an article he had written for the next morning’s Pravda . An article he hadn’t written, of course, but which required his signature. He would not even glance at it, merely scribble his initials. And the same went for the more scholarly articles which appeared under his name in Sovetskaya Muzyka .

‘But what will this mean, Dmitri Dmitrievich, when they publish your collected writings?’ ‘It will mean that they are not worth reading.’ ‘But ordinary people will be misled.’ ‘Given the scale on which ordinary people have already been misled, I would say that a musicological article purportedly but not actually written by a composer does not matter much either way. In my view, if I were to read it and make a few corrections, that would be more compromising.’

But there was worse than this, much worse. He had signed a filthy public letter against Solzhenitsyn, even though he admired the novelist and reread him constantly. Then, a few years later, another filthy letter denouncing Sakharov. His signature appeared alongside those of Khachaturian, Kabalevsky and, naturally, Khrennikov. Part of him hoped that no one would believe — no one could believe — that he actually agreed with what the letters said. But people did. Friends and fellow musicians refused to shake his hand, turned their backs on him. There were limits to irony: you cannot sign letters while holding your nose or crossing your fingers behind your back, trusting that others will guess you do not mean it. And so he had betrayed Chekhov, and signed denunciations. He had betrayed himself, and he had betrayed the good opinion others still held of him. He had lived too long.

He had also learnt about the destruction of the human soul. Well, life is not a walk across a field, as the saying goes. A soul could be destroyed in one of three ways: by what others did to you; by what others made you do to yourself; and by what you voluntarily chose to do to yourself. Any single method was sufficient; though if all three were present, the outcome was irresistible.

He thought of his life as arranged into twelve-year cycles of bad luck. 1936, 1948, 1960 … Twelve more years led to 1972, inevitably another leap year, and so one in which he had confidently expected to die. He had certainly done his best. His health, always poor, declined to the point where he was unable to walk up stairs. He had been forbidden alcohol and cigarettes, prohibitions which in themselves were surely enough to kill a man. And vegetarian Power tried to help, ordering him from one end of the country to the other, to attend this premiere, receive that honour. He finished the year in hospital with kidney stones, while also enjoying radiotherapy for a cyst on the lung. He was stoic as an invalid; what troubled him was not so much his condition as people’s reactions to it. Pity embarrassed him just as much as praise ever had.

However, he seemed to have misunderstood: the bad luck 1972 intended for him was not his dying, rather his continued living. He had done his best, but life had not yet finished with him. Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.

When these times are over … if they ever will be, at least until 200,000,000,000 years have passed. Karlo-Marlo and their successors were always denouncing the internal contradictions of capitalism, which would assuredly, logically, bring it crumbling down. And yet capitalism was still standing. Anyone with eyes to see would have been aware of the internal contradictions of Communism; but who knew if they would be enough to bring it down. All he could be sure of was that when — if — these times were over, people would want a simplified version of what had happened. Well, that was their right.

One to hear, one to remember, and one to drink — as the saying went. He doubted he could stop drinking, whatever the doctors advised; he could not stop hearing; and worst of all, he could not stop remembering. He so wished that the memory could be disengaged at will, like putting a car into neutral. That was what chauffeurs used to do, either at the top of a hill, or when they had reached maximum speed: they would coast to save petrol. But he could never do that with his memory. His brain was stubborn at giving house-room to his failings, his humiliations, his self-disgust, his bad decisions. He would like to remember only the things he chose: music, Tanya, Nina, his parents, true and reliable friends, Galya playing with the pig, Maxim imitating a Bulgarian policeman, a beautiful goal, laughter, joy, the love of his young wife. He did remember all those things, but they were often overlaid and intertwined with everything he wanted not to remember. And this impurity, this corruption of memory, tormented him.