Julian Barnes - The Noise of Time

In later years, his tics and mannerisms increased. He could be calm and sit quietly with Irina; but put him on a platform, at an official function, even among a gathering of those entirely sympathetic to him, and he could barely keep still. He would scratch his head, cup his chin, force his index and little fingers into the flesh of his cheek; twitch and fidget like a man waiting to be arrested and taken away. When listening to his own music, he would sometimes cover his mouth with his hands, as if to say: Do not trust what comes out of my mouth, trust only what goes into your ears. Or he would catch himself plucking at his torso with his fingertips: as if pinching himself to see if he was dreaming; or as if scratching sudden mosquito bites.

His father, after whom he had been obediently named, was often in his mind. That gentle, humorous man who woke each morning with a smile on his face: he had been ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’ if ever there was one. Dmitri Boleslavovich would always feature in his son’s memory with a game in his hand and a song in his throat; peering through his pince-nez at a pack of cards or a wire puzzle; smoking his pipe; watching his children grow. A man who never lived long enough to disappoint others, or for life to disappoint him.

‘The chrysanthemums in the garden have long since faded …’ and then — how did it go on? — yes, ‘But love still lingers in my ailing heart.’ The son smiled, but not as the father used to. He had a different sort of ailing heart, and had already suffered two attacks. A third was on its way, because he could now recognise the warning sign: when drinking vodka brought him no pleasure.

His father had died the year before he met Tanya: that was right, wasn’t it? Tatyana Glivenko, his first love, who told him she loved him because he was pure. They had kept in touch, and in later years she used to say that if only they had met a few weeks earlier at the sanatorium, the whole course of their lives would have been different. Their love would have been so firmly established by the time they came to part that nothing could have eradicated it. This had been their destiny, and they had missed it, been cheated out of it by the calendar’s chance. Perhaps. He knew how people liked to melodramatise their early lives, and to obsess retrospectively about choices and decisions which at the time they had made unthinkingly. He also knew that Destiny was only the words And so .

Still, they had been one another’s first loves, and he continued to think of those weeks at Anapa as an idyll. Even if an idyll only becomes an idyll once it has ended. At the dacha in Zhukhova, a lift had been installed to take him from the hallway directly to his room. However, this being the Soviet Union, laws and regulations insisted that a lift, even one in a private residence, could only be worked by a properly qualified lift attendant. And what did Irina Antonovna, who cared for him so wonderfully well, do about this? She enrolled at the appropriate school and studied until she received her final certificate. Who would have thought that it would be his destiny to be married to a qualified lift operator?

He was not making a comparison between Tanya and Irina, between first and last; that was not the point. He was devoted to Irina. She made everything as bearable and enjoyable for him as she could. It was just that his possibilities of life were now much reduced. Whereas in the Caucasus his possibilities of life had been unbounded. But this was just what time did to you.

Before he joined up with Tanya at Anapa, there had been that performance of his First Symphony in the public gardens at Kharkov. It was, by any objective standards, a disaster. The strings sounded thin; the piano couldn’t be heard; the timpani drowned everything; the principal bassoon was embarrassingly bad, and the conductor complacent; early on, the entire city’s dog population had joined in, and the audience was beside itself with laughter. And yet it was pronounced a great success. The ignorant audience applauded long and loud; the complacent conductor took the praise; the orchestra kept up the illusion of competence; while the composer was required to mount the stage and bow his thanks many times to one and all. True, he was very annoyed; equally true, he was young enough to enjoy the irony.

‘A Bulgarian policeman ties his bootlaces!’ Maxim would announce to his father’s friends. The boy had always loved pranks and jokes, catapults and air rifles; and over the years he had worked up this comic sketch to perfection. He would come on, his laces hanging loose, carrying a chair which he would frowningly arrange in the middle of the room, slowly moving it to the best position. Then, putting on a pompous face, and using both hands, he would lift and lever his right foot up on to the chair. He would look around, very pleased by this simple triumph. Then, with an awkward manoeuvre which the spectators might not at first understand, he would bend over, ignoring the foot on the chair, and tie the laces of the other shoe, the one flat on the floor. Immensely pleased with the result, he would swap legs, lifting his left foot up on to the chair before bending down to tie the laces of his right shoe. When he had finished, and the audience was squealing with pleasure, he would stand upright, almost to attention, scrutinise his two successfully laced boots, nod to himself, and ponderously carry the chair back to its place.

People found it so funny, he suspected, not just because Maxim was a natural comedian, not just because they enjoyed Bulgarian jokes, but for another, deeper reason: because the little sketch was so perfectly suggestive. Over-complicated manoeuvres to achieve the simplest of ends; stupidity; self-congratulation; imperviousness to outside opinion; repetition of the same mistakes. Did not all this, magnified across millions and millions of lives, mirror how things had been under the sun of Stalin’s constitution: a vast catalogue of little farces adding up to an immense tragedy?

Or, to take a different image, one from his own childhood: that summer house of theirs at Irinovka, on that estate rich from the swathes of peat beneath it. The house from some dream or nightmare, with vast rooms and tiny windows, which made adults laugh and children shiver with fright. And now he realised that the country in which he had lived for so long was like that too. It was as if, when drawing up their plans for Soviet Russia, the architects had been thoughtful, meticulous and well-intentioned, but had failed at a very basic level: they had mistaken metres for centimetres, and sometimes the other way round. With the result that the House of Communism was built all disproportionate, and lacking in human scale. It gave you dreams, it gave you nightmares, and it made everyone — adults and children alike — fearful.

That phrase, so painstakingly applied by the bureaucrats and musicologists who had examined his Fifth Symphony, would be better attached to the Revolution itself, and the Russia that had come out of it: an optimistic tragedy.

Just as he could not control his mind’s rememberings, he could not prevent its constant, vain interrogations. The last questions of a man’s life do not come with any answers; that is their nature. They merely wail in the head, factory sirens in F sharp.

So: your talent lies beneath you like a swathe of peat. How much have you cut? How much remains uncut? Few artists cut only the best sections; or even, sometimes, recognise them as such. And in his own case, thirty years and more ago, they had erected a barbed-wire fence with a warning sign: DO NOT CROSS THIS POINT. Who knew what lay — what might have lain — beyond the wire?

A related question: how much bad music is a good composer allowed? Once, he thought he knew the answer; now, he had no idea. He had written a lot of bad music for a lot of very bad films. Though you could say that his music’s badness made those films even worse, and thus rendered a service to truth and art. Or was that just sophistry?