Julian Barnes: The Noise of Time

After the performance, he had collected his briefcase and gone straight to the Northern Station to catch the train for Arkhangelsk. He remembered thinking that the government box had been specially reinforced with steel plates, to protect its occupants against assassination. But that there was no such cladding to the director’s box. He was not yet thirty, and his wife was five months pregnant at the time.

1936: he had always been superstitious about leap years. Like many people, he believed that they brought bad luck.

The lift’s machinery sounded once more. When he realized that it had passed the fourth floor, he picked up his case and held it by his side. He waited for the doors to open, for the sight of a uniform, a nod of recognition, and then those outstretched hands reaching towards him, and the clamp of fist on wrist. Which would be quite unnecessary, given his eagerness to accompany them, to get them away from the premises, away from his wife and child.

Then the lift doors opened, and it was a neighbour, with a different nod of recognition, designed to give nothing away — not even surprise at seeing him go out at such a late hour. He inclined his head in reply, walked into the lift, pressed a button at random, rode down a couple of floors, waited for a few minutes, then back up to the fifth floor where he got out and resumed his vigil. This had happened before, and in the same way. Words were never exchanged, because words were dangerous. It was just possible that he looked like a man humiliatingly thrown out by his wife, night after night; or a man who indecisively kept walking out on his wife, night after night, and then returning. But it was probable that he looked exactly what he was: a man, like hundreds of others across the city, waiting, night after night, for arrest.

Years ago, lifetimes away, back in the last century, when his mother had been at the Irkutsk Institute for Noblewomen, she and two other girls had danced the mazurka from A Life for the Tsar in front of Nicolas II, then crown prince. Glinka’s opera was of course unperformable in the Soviet Union, even if its theme — the morally instructive one of a poor peasant who lays down his life for a great leader — might have appealed to Stalin. ‘A Dance for the Tsar’: he wondered if Zakrevsky knew about that. In the old days, a child might pay for the sins of its father, or indeed mother. Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

His mother had been the strength in her marriage, just as Nina Vasilievna was the strength in theirs. His father, Dmitri Boleslavovich, had been a gentle, unworldly man who worked hard and handed his salary to his wife, keeping back just a small amount of tobacco money. He had a fine tenor voice and played four-handed piano. He sang gypsy romances, songs like ‘Ah, It Is Not You I Love So Passionately’, and ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’. He adored toys and games and detective stories. A new-fangled cigarette lighter or a wire puzzle would keep him amused for hours. He did not come at life directly. He had a special rubber stamp made, so that every item in his library was inscribed with the purple words: ‘This book has been stolen from D. B. Shostakovich.’

A psychiatrist researching the creative process had once asked him about Dmitri Boleslavovich. He had replied that his father ‘was an entirely normal human being’. This was not a patronising phrase: it was an enviable skill to be a normal human being, and to wake up every morning with a smile on your face. Also, his father had died young — in his late forties. A disaster for the family, and for those who loved him; but not, perhaps, a disaster for Dmitri Boleslavovich himself. Had he lived any longer, he would have watched the Revolution turn sour, paranoid and carnivorous. Not that he was much interested in the Revolution. This had been another of his strengths.

On his death his widow had been left with no income, two daughters, and a musically precocious son of fifteen. Sofya Vasilyevna had taken menial jobs to support them. She worked as a typist in the Chamber of Weights and Measures, and gave piano lessons in exchange for bread. Sometimes he wondered if all his anxieties had not begun with his father’s death. But he preferred not to believe this, because it came close to blaming Dmitri Boleslavovich. So perhaps it was truer to say that all his anxieties were redoubled at that moment. How many times had he nodded agreement to those gravely encouraging words: ‘You must be the man in the family now.’ They had freighted him with an expectation and a sense of duty he was ill equipped to bear. And his health had always been delicate: he was all too familiar with the doctor’s palpating hands, the tapping and listening, the probe, the knife, the sanatorium. He kept waiting for this promised manliness to develop in him. But he was, he knew, easily distracted; also, wilful rather than continuingly assertive. Hence his failure to set up house with Jurgensen.

His mother was an inflexible woman, both by temperament and necessity. She had protected him, worked for him, loaded all her hopes onto him. Of course he loved her — how could he not? — but there were … difficulties. The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading. His father had always avoided difficulties, had cultivated humour and indirection in the face of both his life and his wife. And so the son, though he knew himself more resolute than Dmitri Boleslavovich, rarely challenged his mother’s authority.

But he knew that she used to read his diary. So he would deliberately write into it, for a date a few weeks ahead, ‘Suicide’. Or, sometimes, ‘Marriage’.

She had her own threats too. Whenever he tried to leave home, Sofya Vasilyevna would say to others, but in his presence, ‘My son will first have to step over my corpse.’

They were neither of them sure how much the other meant it.

He had been backstage at the Small Hall of the Conservatoire, feeling chastened and sorry for himself. He was still a student, and the first public performance of his music in Moscow had not gone well: the audience had clearly preferred Shebalin’s work. Then a man in military uniform appeared at his side with consoling words: and so his friendship with Marshal Tukhachevsky had begun. The Marshal acted as his patron, organising financial support for him from the military commander of the Leningrad District. He had been helpful and true. Most recently, he had told everyone he knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was in his opinion the first classic Soviet opera.

Only once so far had he failed. Tukhachevsky was convinced that a move to Moscow was the best way to speed his protégé’s career, and promised to arrange the transfer. Sofya Vasilyevna had naturally been against it: her son was too fragile, too delicate. Who would ensure he drank his milk and ate his porridge if his mother was not seeing to it? Tukhachevsky had the power, the influence, the financial resources; but Sofya Vasilyevna still held the key to his soul. And so he had remained in Leningrad.

Like his sisters, he had first been put in front of a keyboard at the age of nine. And that was when the world became clear to him. Or a part of the world, anyway — enough to sustain him for life. Understanding the piano, and music, had come easily — at least, compared to understanding other things. And he had worked hard because it felt easy to work hard. And so, there was no escaping this destiny either. And as the years passed, it seemed all the more miraculous because it gave him a way of supporting his mother and sisters. He was not a conventional man, and theirs had not been a conventional household, but still. Sometimes, after a successful concert, when he had received applause and money, he felt almost capable of becoming that elusive thing, the man in the family. Though at other times, even after he had left home, married and fathered a child, he could still feel like a lost boy.