ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time.

He had been standing by the lift for three hours. He was on his fifth cigarette, and his mind was skittering.

Faces, names, memories. Cut peat weighing down his hand. Swedish water birds flickering above his head. Fields of sunflowers. The smell of carnation oil. The warm, sweet smell of Nita coming off the tennis court. Sweat oozing from a widow’s peak. Faces, names.

The faces and names of the dead, too.

He could have brought a chair from the apartment. But his nerves would in any case have kept him upright. And it would look decidedly eccentric, sitting down to wait for the lift.

His situation had come out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical. Like the rest of life. Like sexual desire, for instance. That came out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical.

He tried to keep his mind on Nita, but his mind disobeyed. It was like a bluebottle, noisy and promiscuous. It landed on Tanya, of course. But then off it buzzed to that girl, that Rozaliya. Did he blush to remember her, or was he secretly proud of that perverse incident?

The Marshal’s patronage – that had also come out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical. Could the same be said of the Marshal’s fate?

Jurgensen’s affable, bearded face; and with it, the memory of his mother’s fierce, angry fingers around his wrist. And his father, his sweet-natured, lovable, impractical father, standing by the piano and singing ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’.

The cacophony of sounds in his head. His father’s voice, the waltzes and polkas he had played while courting Nita, four blasts of a factory siren in F sharp, dogs outbarking an insecure bassoonist, a riot of percussion and brass beneath a steel-lined government box.

These noises were interrupted by one from the real world: the sudden whirr and growl of the lift’s machinery. Now it was his foot that skittered, knocking over the little case that rested against his calf. He waited, suddenly empty of memory, filled only with fear. Then the lift stopped at a lower floor, and his faculties re-engaged. He picked up his case and felt the contents softly shift. Which made his mind jump to the story of Prokofiev’s pyjamas.

No, not like a bluebottle. More like one of those mosquitoes in Anapa. Landing anywhere, drawing blood.

He had thought, standing here, that he would be in charge of his mind. But at night, alone, it seemed that his mind was in charge of him. Well, there is no escaping one’s destiny, as the poet assured us. And no escaping one’s mind.

He remembered the pain that night before they took his appendix out. Throwing up twenty-two times, swearing all the swear-words he knew at a nurse, then begging a friend to fetch the militiaman to shoot him and end the pain. Get him to come in and shoot me to end the pain, he had pleaded. But the friend had refused to help.

He didn’t need a friend and a militiaman now. There were enough volunteers already.

It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others.

And afterwards, whatever might happen next, it would all continue in the same way, in other places, and in the minds of others.

He thought of cigarettes: packs of Kazbek, Belomor, Herzegovina Flor. Of a man crumbling the tobacco from half a dozen papirosy into his pipe, leaving on the desk a debris of cardboard tubes and paper.

Could it, even at this late stage, be mended, put back, reversed? He knew the answer: what the doctor said about the restoration of The Nose. ‘Of course it can be put back, but I assure you, you will be the worse for it.’

He thought about Zakrevsky, and the Big House, and who might have replaced Zakrevsky there. Someone would have done. There was never a shortage of Zakrevskys, not in this world, constituted as it was. Perhaps when Paradise was achieved, in almost exactly 200,000,000,000 years’ time, the Zakrevskys would no longer need to exist.

At moments his mind refused to believe what was happening. It can’t be, because it couldn’t ever be, as the Major said when he saw the giraffe. But it could be, and it was.

Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about. When life said to you, ‘And so,’ you nodded, and called it destiny. And so, it had been his destiny to be called Dmitri Dmitrievich. There was nothing to be done about that. Naturally, he didn’t remember his own christening, but had no reason to doubt the truth of the story. The family had all assembled in his father’s study around a portable font. The priest arrived, and asked his parents what name they intended for the newborn. Yaroslav, they had replied. Yaroslav? The priest was not happy with this. He said that it was a most unusual name. He said that children with unusual names were teased and mocked at school: no, no, they couldn’t call the boy Yaroslav. His father and mother were perplexed by such forthright opposition, but didn’t wish to give offence. What name do you suggest then? they asked. Call him something ordinary, said the priest: Dmitri, for instance. His father pointed out that he himself was already called Dmitri, and that Yaroslav Dmitrievich sounded much better than Dmitri Dmitrievich. But the priest did not agree. And so he became Dmitri Dmitrievich.

What did a name matter? He had been born in St Petersburg, started growing up in Petrograd, finished growing up in Leningrad. Or St Leninsburg, as he sometimes liked to call it. What did a name matter?

He was thirty-one. His wife Nita lay a few yards away with their daughter, Galina, at her side. Galya was a year old. Recently, his life had appeared to acquire stability. He had never found that side of things straightforward. He felt powerful emotions but had never become skilled at expressing them. Even at a football match he rarely yelled and lost control of himself like everyone else; he was content with the quiet annotation of a player’s skill, or lack of it. Some thought this the typical buttoned-up formality of a Leningrader; but on top of that – or underneath it – he knew he was a shy and anxious person. And with women, when he lost his shyness, he veered between absurd enthusiasm and lurching despair. It was as if he was always on the wrong metronome setting.

Still, even so, his life had finally acquired some regularity, and with it the correct beat. Except that now it had all become unstable again. Unstable: that was more than a euphemism.

The overnight case resting against his calf reminded him of the time he had tried to run away from home. How old had he been? Seven or eight, perhaps. And did he have a little suitcase with him? Probably not – his mother’s exasperation would have been too immediate. It was one summer at Irinovka, where his father worked as general manager. Jurgensen was the estate’s handyman. Who made things and mended things, who solved problems in the way a child could understand. Who never instructed him to do anything, just let him watch as a piece of wood turned into a dagger or a whistle. Who handed him a piece of fresh-cut peat and allowed him to sniff it.

He had become very attached to Jurgensen. So when things displeased him, as they frequently did, he would say, ‘Very well then, I’ll go and live with Jurgensen.’ One morning, still in bed, he had made this threat, or promise, for the first time that day. But once was already enough for his mother. Get dressed and I’ll take you there, she had replied. He took up her challenge – no, there had been no time to pack – Sofya Vasilyevna had taken him firmly by the wrist, and they had started walking across the field to where Jurgensen lived. At first he had been bold in his threat, swaggering along beside his mother. But gradually his heels dragged, and his wrist, then hand, began to slip from his mother’s grasp. He thought at the time it was he who was pulling away, but now acknowledged that his mother had been letting him go, finger by finger, until he was free. Not free to live with Jurgensen, but free to turn tail, burst into tears, and run home.

Hands, slipping hands, grabbing hands. As a child, he had feared the dead – feared that they would rise from their graves and seize hold of him, dragging him back into the cold, black earth, his mouth and eyes filling with soil. This fear had slowly disappeared, because the hands of the living had turned out to be more frightening. The prostitutes of Petrograd had been no respecters of his youth and innocence. The harder the times, the grabbier the hands. Stretching out to seize your cock, your bread, your friends, your family, your livelihood, your existence. As well as prostitutes, he had been afraid of janitors. Also of policemen, whatever names they chose to call themselves by.

But then there was the opposite fear: of slipping from hands that kept you safe.

Marshal Tukhachevsky had kept him safe. For many years. Until the day he had watched the sweat march down from the Marshal’s hairline. A large white handkerchief had fluttered and dabbed, and he knew he wasn’t safe any more.

The Marshal was the most sophisticated man he had ever encountered. He was Russia’s most famous military strategist: newspapers called him ‘The Red Napoleon’. Also a music lover and amateur violin maker; a man of open, questioning mind, who enjoyed discussing novels. In the decade he had known Tukhachevsky, he had often seen him sweeping through Moscow and Leningrad after dark in his Marshal’s uniform, half at work, half at play, mixing politics with pleasure; talking and arguing, eating and drinking, keen to show that he had an eye for a ballerina. He liked to explain how the French had once taught him the secret of drinking champagne without ever getting a hangover.

He himself would never be as worldly. He lacked the self-confidence; also, perhaps, the interest. He didn’t like complicated food, and had a light head for drink. Back when he was a student, when everything was being rethought and remade, before the Party took full control, he had, like most students, claimed a sophistication beyond what he knew. For instance, the question of sex had to be rethought, now that the old ways were gone for ever; and someone had come up with the ‘glass of water’ theory. The act of sex, young know-alls maintained, was just like drinking a glass of water: when you were thirsty, you drank, and when you felt desire, you had sex. He had not been against this system, though it did depend on women being as freely desirous as they were desired. Some were, some weren’t. But the analogy only took you so far. A glass of water did not engage the heart.

And besides, Tanya had already come into his life by then.

When he used to announce his regular intention of going to live with Jurgensen, his parents probably assumed he was chafing at the restrictions of family – even of childhood itself. Now that he thought about it, he wasn’t so sure. There had been something odd – something deeply wrong – about that summer house of theirs on the estate at Irinovka. Like any child, he assumed things were normal until told otherwise. So it was only when he heard the grown-ups discussing it, and laughing, that he realised how everything about the house was out of proportion. The rooms were enormous, but the windows very small. So a room of fifty square metres might have just one tiny window. The grown-ups thought the builders must have muddled their measurements, substituting metres for centimetres, and vice versa. But the effect, once you noticed it, was alarming to a boy. It was like a house prepared for the darkest of dreams. Maybe that was what he’d been running away from.

They always came for you in the middle of the night. And so, rather than be dragged from the apartment in his pyjamas, or forced to dress in front of some contemptuously impassive NKVD man, he would go to bed fully clothed, lying on top of the blankets, a small case already packed on the floor beside him. He barely slept, and lay there imagining the worst things a man could imagine. His restlessness in turn prevented Nita from sleeping. Each would lie there, pretending; also, pretending not to hear and smell the other’s terror. One of his persistent waking nightmares was that the NKVD would seize Galya and pack her off – if she was lucky – to a special orphanage for children of enemies of the state. Where she would be given a new name and a new character; where she would be turned into a model Soviet citizen, a little sunflower lifting her face towards the great sun that called itself Stalin. He had therefore proposed that he spend those inevitably sleepless hours out on the landing by the lift. Nita was adamant that she wanted them to spend what might prove their last night together side by side. But this was a rare argument he won.

On his first night by the lift, he had decided not to smoke. There were three packs of Kazbeki in his case, and he would need them when it came to his interrogation. And, if it followed, his detention. He held to this resolve through the first two nights. And then it struck him: what if they confiscated his cigarettes as soon as he reached the Big House? Or what if there was no interrogation, or only the briefest of ones? Perhaps they would merely put a sheet of paper in front of him and order him to sign. What if … His mind went no further. But in any of these cases, his cigarettes would have been wasted.

And so he couldn’t think of a reason not to smoke.

And so he smoked.

He looked at the Kazbek between his fingers. Malko had once commented in a sympathetic, indeed admiring, way that his hands were small and ‘non-pianistic’. Malko had also told him, less admiringly, that he didn’t practise enough. It depended what you meant by ‘enough’. He practised as much as he needed to. Malko should stick to his score and his baton.

He had been sixteen, at a sanatorium in the Crimea, recovering from tuberculosis. Tanya and he were the same age, and shared exactly the same birth date, with one small difference: he was born on the 25th of September New Style, she on the 25th of September Old Style. Such virtual synchronicity endorsed their relationship; or, to put it another way, they were made for one another. Tatyana Glivenko, with her short-cropped hair, as eager for life as he was. It was first love, in all its apparent simplicity, and in all its destiny. His sister Marusya, who was chaperoning him, had blabbed to their mother. By return of post Sofya Vasilyevna warned her son against this unknown girl, against this relationship – indeed, any relationship. In reply, with all the pomposity of a sixteen-year-old, he had explained to his mother the principles of Free Love. How all must be free to love as they wished; how carnal love lasted but a short time; how the sexes were entirely equal; how marriage ought to be abolished as an institution, but that if it continued in practice, the woman had the full right to an affair if she so desired, and if she then wanted a divorce, the man must accept it and take the blame; but how, in all of this, and despite everything, the children were sacred.

His mother had not replied to his condescending and sanctimonious explanation of life. And in any case, he and Tanya were to part almost as soon as they had met. She returned to Moscow; he and Marusya to Petrograd. But he wrote to her constantly; they visited one another; and he dedicated his first piano trio to her. His mother continued not to approve. And then, three years later, they finally spent those weeks together in the Caucasus. They were each nineteen and unaccompanied; and he had just made three hundred roubles playing concerts in Kharkov. Those weeks in Anapa together … how long ago they felt. Well, how long ago they were – more than a third of his life away.

And so, it had all begun, very precisely, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, in Arkhangelsk. He had been invited to perform his first piano concerto with the local orchestra under Viktor Kubatsky; the two of them had also played his new cello sonata. It had gone well. The next morning he went to the railway station to buy a copy of Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.

Except that – as his mind obstinately argued back – nothing ever begins as precisely as that. It began in different places, and in different minds. The true starting point might have been his own fame. Or his opera. Or it might have been Stalin, who, being infallible, was therefore responsible for everything. Or it could have been caused by something as simple as the layout of an orchestra. Indeed, that might finally be the best way of looking at it: a composer first denounced and humiliated, later arrested and shot, all because of the layout of an orchestra.

If it all began elsewhere, and in the minds of others, then perhaps he could blame Shakespeare, for having written Macbeth. Or Leskov for Russifying it into Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. No, none of that. It was, self-evidently, his own fault for having written the piece that offended. It was his opera’s fault for being such a success – at home and abroad – it had aroused the curiosity of the Kremlin. It was Stalin’s fault because he would have inspired and approved the Pravda editorial – perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected. It was also Stalin’s fault for imagining himself a patron and connoisseur of the arts in the first place. He was known never to miss a performance of Boris Godunov at the Bolshoi. He was almost as keen on Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko. Why should Stalin not want to hear this acclaimed new opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk?

And so, the composer was instructed to attend a performance of his own work on the 26th of January 1936. Comrade Stalin would be there; also Comrades Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov. They took their places in the government box. Which had the misfortune to be situated immediately above the percussion and the brass. Sections which in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk were not scored to behave in a modest and self-effacing fashion.

He remembered looking across from the director’s box, where he was seated, to the government box. Stalin was hidden behind a small curtain, an absent presence to whom the other distinguished comrades would sycophantically turn, knowing that they were themselves observed. Given the occasion, both conductor and orchestra were understandably nervous. In the entr’acte before Katerina’s wedding, the woodwind and brass suddenly took it upon themselves to play more loudly than he had scored. And then it was like a virus spreading through each section. If the conductor noticed, he was powerless. Louder and louder the orchestra became; and every time the percussion and brass roared fortissimo beneath them – loud enough to knock out window-panes – Comrades Mikoyan and Zhdanov would shudder theatrically, turn to the figure behind the curtain and make some mocking remark. When the audience looked up to the government box at the start of the fourth act, they saw that it had been vacated.

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.

Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that this had been his first setback. That the brilliant nineteen-year-old whose First Symphony was quickly taken up by Bruno Walter, then by Toscanini and Klemperer, had known nothing but a clear, clean decade of success since that premiere in 1926. And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?

Except that they had practised sharpening their claws on his soul from the beginning: while he was still at the Conservatoire a group of Leftist fellow students had tried to have him dismissed and his stipend removed. Except that the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians and similar cultural organisations had campaigned from their inception against what he stood for; or rather, what they thought he stood for. They were determined to break the bourgeois stranglehold on the arts. So workers must be trained to become composers, and all music must be instantly comprehensible and pleasing to the masses. Tchaikovsky was decadent, and the slightest experimentation condemned as ‘formalism’.

Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was ‘straying from the main road of Soviet art’, and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot.

Except that in 1932, when the Party dissolved the independent organisations and took charge of all cultural matters, this had resulted not in a taming of arrogance, bigotry and ignorance, rather in a systematic concentration of them. And if the plan to take a worker from the coal face and turn him into a composer of symphonies did not exactly come to pass, something of the reverse happened. A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.

At Arkhangelsk railway station, opening Pravda with chilled fingers, he had found on page three a headline identifying and condemning deviance: MUDDLE INSTEAD OF MUSIC. He determined at once to return home via Moscow, where he would seek advice. On the train, as the frozen landscape passed, he reread the article for the fifth and sixth times. Initially, he had been shocked as much for his opera as for himself: after such a denunciation, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk could not possibly continue at the Bolshoi. For the last two years, it had been applauded everywhere – from New York to Cleveland, from Sweden to Argentina. In Moscow and Leningrad, it had pleased not just the public and the critics, but also the political commissars. At the time of the 17th Party Congress its performances had been listed as part of the Moscow district’s official output, which aimed to compete with the production quotas of the Donbass coal miners.

All this meant nothing now: his opera was to be put down like a yapping dog which had suddenly displeased its master. He tried to analyse the different elements of the attack as clear-headedly as possible. First, his opera’s very success, especially abroad, was turned against it. Only a few months before, Pravda had patriotically reported the work’s American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Now the same paper knew that Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had only succeeded outside the Soviet Union because it was ‘non-political and confusing’, and because it ‘tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music’.

Next, and linked to this, was what he thought of as government-box criticism, an articulation of those smirks and yawns and sycophantic turnings towards the hidden Stalin. So he read how his music ‘quacks and grunts and growls’; how its ‘nervous, convulsive and spasmodic’ nature derived from jazz; how it replaced singing with ‘shrieking’. The opera had clearly been scribbled down in order to please the ‘effete’, who had lost all ‘wholesome taste’ for music, preferring ‘a confused stream of sound’. As for the libretto, it deliberately concentrated on the most sordid parts of Leskov’s tale: the result was ‘coarse, primitive and vulgar’.

But his sins were political as well. So the anonymous analysis by someone who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges was decorated with those familiar, vinegar-soaked labels. Petit-bourgeois, formalist, Meyerholdist, Leftist. The composer had written not an opera but an anti-opera, with music deliberately turned inside out. He had drunk from the same poisoned source which produced ‘Leftist distortion in painting, poetry, teaching and science’. In case it needed spelling out – and it always did – Leftism was contrasted with ‘real art, real science and real literature’.

‘Those that have ears will hear,’ he always liked to say. But even the stone deaf couldn’t fail to hear what ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. ‘The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.’ That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. ‘The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.’ That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.’ That was enough to take away his life.

But still, he was young, confident in his talent, and highly successful until three days ago. And if he was no politician, either by temperament or aptitude, there were people he could turn to. So in Moscow he first addressed himself to Platon Kerzhentsev, President of the Committee for Cultural Affairs. He began by explaining the plan of response he had worked out on the train. He would write a defence of the opera, an argued rebuttal of the criticism, and submit the article to Pravda. For instance … But Kerzhentsev, civilised and courteous though he was, would not even hear him out. What they were dealing with here was not a bad review, signed by a critic whose opinion might vary according to the day of the week or the state of his digestion. This was a Pravda editorial: not some fleeting judgement which might be appealed against, but a policy statement from the highest level. Holy writ, in other words. The only possible course of action open to Dmitri Dmitrievich was to make a public apology, recant his errors, and explain that while composing his opera he had been led astray by the foolish excesses of youth. Beyond this, he should announce an intention of immersing himself forthwith in the folk music of the Soviet Union, which would help redirect him towards all that was authentic, popular and melodious. According to Kerzhentsev, this was the only way he might achieve an eventual return to favour.

He was not a believer. But he had been baptised, and sometimes, when he passed an open church, he would light a candle for his family. And he knew his Bible well. So he was familiar with the notion of sin; also with its public mechanism. The offence, the full confession of the offence, the priest’s judgement on the matter, the act of contrition, the forgiveness. Though there were occasions when the sin was too great and not even a priest could forgive it. Yes, he knew the formulae and the protocols, whatever name the church might go by.

His second call was on Marshal Tukhachevsky. The Red Napoleon was still in his forties, a stern, handsome man with a pronounced widow’s peak. He listened to all that had happened, cogently analysed his protégé’s position, and came up with a strategic proposal which was simple, bold and generous. He, Marshal Tukhachevsky, would write a personal letter of intercession to Comrade Stalin. Dmitri Dmitrievich’s relief was intense. He felt light-headed and light-hearted as the Marshal sat down at his desk and straightened a sheet of paper in front of him. But as soon as the man in uniform gripped his pen and started writing, a change came over him. Sweat began to pour from his hair, from his widow’s peak down on to his forehead, and from the back of his head down into his collar. One hand made flurrying darts with a handkerchief, the other halting movements with a pen. Such unsoldierly apprehension was not encouraging.

The sweat had poured off them at Anapa. It was hot in the Caucasus, and he had never liked the heat. They had gazed at Low Bay beach but he felt no inclination to cool off by taking a swim. They walked in the shade of the forest above the town, and he was bitten by mosquitoes. Then they were cornered by a pack of dogs and almost eaten alive. None of this mattered. They inspected the resort’s lighthouse, but while Tanya craned her head upwards, his concentration was on the sweet fold of skin it made at the base of her neck. They visited the old stone gate which was all that remained of the Ottoman fortress, but he was thinking about her calves, and the way their muscles moved as she walked. There was nothing in his life for those weeks except love, music and mosquito bites. The love in his heart, the music in his head, the bites on his skin. Not even paradise was free of insects. But he could hardly resent them. Their bites were ingeniously made in places inaccessible to him; the lotion was based on an extract of carnation flowers. If a mosquito was the cause of her fingers touching his skin and making him smell of carnations, how could he possibly hold anything against the insect?

They were nineteen and they believed in Free Love: keener tourists of each other’s bodies than of the resort’s attractions. They had thrown off the fossilised dictates of church, of society, of family, and gone away to live as man and wife without being man and wife. This excited them almost as much as the sexual act itself; or was, perhaps, inextricable from it.

But then came all the time they were not in bed together. Free Love may have solved the primary problem, but had not done away with the others. Of course they loved one another; but being all the time in one another’s company – even with his 300 roubles and his young fame – was not straightforward. When he was composing, he always knew exactly what to do; he made the right decisions about what the music – his music – required. And when conductors or soloists wondered politely if this might be better, or that might be better, he would always reply, ‘I’m sure you’re right. But let’s leave it for now. I’ll make that change next time round.’ And they were satisfied, and he was too, since he never had any intention of implementing their suggestions. Because his decisions, and his instinct, had been correct.

But away from music … that was so different. He became nervous, things blurred in his mind, and he would sometimes make a decision simply in order to have the matter settled rather than because he knew what he wanted. Perhaps his artistic precocity meant that he had avoided those useful years of ordinary growing up. But whatever the cause, he was bad at the practicalities of life, which included, of course, the practicalities of the heart. And so, at Anapa, alongside the exaltations of love and the heady self-satisfaction of sex, he found himself entering a whole new world, one full of unwanted silences, misunderstood hints and scatter-brained planning.

They had returned again to their separate cities, he to Leningrad, she to Moscow. But they would visit one another. One day, he was finishing a piece and asked her to sit with him: her presence made him feel secure. After a while, his mother came in. Looking straight at Tanya, she had said,

‘Go out and leave Mitya to finish his work.’

And he had replied, ‘No, I want Tanya to stay here. It helps me.’

This was one of the rare occasions when he had stood up to his mother. Perhaps if he had done so more, his life would have been different. Or perhaps not – who could tell? If the Red Napoleon had been outmanoeuvred by Sofya Vasilyevna, what chance did he ever have?

Their time at Anapa had been an idyll. But an idyll, by definition, only becomes an idyll once it has ended. He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn’t respond to. So, for instance, they had gone away to the Caucasus specifically not as man and wife, specifically as free equals. Was the purpose of such an adventure to end up as real man and real wife? That seemed illogical.

No, this was not being honest. One of their incompatibilites was that – whatever the equality of words spoken on either side – he had loved her more than she had loved him. He tried to stir her into jealousy, describing flirtations with other women – even seductions, real or imaginary – but this seemed to make her cross rather than jealous. He had also threatened suicide, more than once. He even announced that he had married a ballet dancer, which might conceivably have been the case. But Tanya had laughed it all off. And then she had got married herself. Which only made him love her the more. He implored her to divorce her husband and marry him; again, he threatened suicide. None of this had any effect.

Early on, she had told him, tenderly, that she had been attracted to him because he was pure and open. But if this didn’t make her love him as much as he loved her, then he wished it were otherwise. Not that he felt pure and open. They sounded like words designed to keep him in a box.

He found himself reflecting on questions of honesty. Personal honesty, artistic honesty. How they were connected, if indeed they were. And how much of this virtue anyone had, and how long that store would last. He had told friends that if ever he repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, they were to conclude that he had run out of honesty.

He thought of himself as someone with strong emotions who was unskilled at conveying them. But that was letting himself off too easily; that was still not being honest. In truth, he was a neurotic. He thought he knew what he wanted, he got what he wanted, he didn’t want it any more, it went away from him, he wanted it back again. Of course he was indulged, because he was a mother’s boy, and a brother with two sisters; also, an artist, who was expected to have an ‘artistic temperament’; also, a success, which allowed him to behave with the sudden arrogance of fame. Malko had already accused him to his face of ‘growing vanity’. But his underlying condition was one of high anxiety. He was a thorough-going neurotic. No, again it was worse than that: he was a hysteric. Where did such a temperament come from? Not from his father; nor from his mother. Well, there was no escaping one’s temperament. That too was part of one’s destiny.

He knew, in his mind, what his ideal of love was —

But the lift had passed the third floor, and then the fourth, and was now stopping in front of him. He picked up his case, the doors opened, and a man he didn’t know came out whistling ‘The Song of the Counterplan’. Faced with its composer, he broke off in mid-phrase.

He knew, in his mind, what his ideal of love was. It was fully expressed in that Maupassant short story about the young garrison commander of a fortress town on the Mediterranean coast. Antibes, that was it. Anyway, the officer used to go walking in the woods outside the town, where he kept running into the wife of a local businessman, Monsieur Parisse. Naturally enough, he fell in love with her. The woman repeatedly declined his attentions until the day she let him know that her husband would be away on an overnight trip. An assignation was arranged, but at the last minute the wife received a telegram: her husband’s business had concluded early, and he would be home that evening. The garrison commander, mad with passion, feigned a military emergency and ordered the town’s gates to be closed until the next morning. The returning husband was driven away at bayonet point and obliged to spend the night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station. All so that the officer could enjoy his few hours of love.

True, he could not imagine himself in charge of a fortress, not even a tumbledown Ottoman gateway in a sleepy Black Sea spa town. But the principle applied. This was how you should love – without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then, afterwards, without regret.

Fine words. Fine sentiments. Yet such behaviour was beyond him. He could imagine a young Lieutenant Tukhachevsky pulling it off, had he ever been a garrison commander. His own case of mad passion … well, it would make a different kind of story. He had been on tour with Gauk – a good enough conductor, but a bourgeois through and through. They were in Odessa. This was a couple of years before he and Nita married. At the time he was still trying to make Tanya jealous. Nita as well, probably. After a good dinner, he had come back to the bar of the London Hotel and picked up two girls. Or perhaps they had picked him up. At any rate, they had joined his table. They were both very pretty, and he was immediately attracted to the one called Rozaliya. They had talked of art and literature while he fondled her buttocks. He drove them home in a horse-drawn carriage and the friend looked away while he touched Rozaliya all over. He was in love, that much was clear to him. The two women had arranged to take a steamer to Batumi the next day, and he went to see them off. But the girls never got beyond the pier, where Rozaliya’s friend was arrested for being a professional prostitute.

This had come as a surprise to him. At the same time, he felt such a terrible love for Rozochka. He did things like banging his head against the wall, and tearing at his hair; just like a character in a bad novel. Gauk warned him severely against the two women, saying that they were both prostitutes and terrible bitches. But this only increased his excitement – it was all such fun. So much fun that he’d nearly got married to Rozochka. Except that when they got to the registry office in Odessa he realised he’d left his identity documents back at the hotel. And then, somehow – he couldn’t even recall why or how – it had all come to an end with him running away in pouring rain at three o’clock in the morning from a boat which had just docked at Sukhumi. What had all that been about?

But the point was, he didn’t regret any of it. No barriers, no thought for the morrow. And how come he had nearly married a professional prostitute? Because of the circumstances, he assumed, and some element of folie à deux. Also, because of a spirit of contradictoriness within him. ‘Mother, this is Rozaliya, my wife. Surely it doesn’t come as a surprise? Didn’t you read my diary, where I’d written down “Marriage to a prostitute”? It’s good for a woman to have a profession, don’t you think?’ Also, divorce was easily obtainable, so why not? He had felt such love for her, and a few days later he was nearly marrying her, and a few days after that running away from her in the rain. Meanwhile, old man Gauk sat in the restaurant of the London Hotel, trying to decide whether to have one cutlet or two. And who’s to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.

He was an introverted man who was attracted to extroverted women. Was that part of the trouble?

He lit another cigarette. Between art and love, between oppressors and oppressed, there were always cigarettes. He imagined Zakrevsky’s successor, behind his desk, holding out a pack of Belomory. He would decline, and offer one of his own Kazbeki. The interrogator would in return refuse, and each would lay his chosen brand on the desk, the dance concluded. Kazbeki were smoked by artists, and the packet’s very design suggested freedom: a galloping horse and rider against the background of Mount Kazbek. Stalin himself was said to have personally approved the artwork; though the Great Leader smoked his own brand, Herzegovina Flor. They were specially made for him, with the terrified precision you could imagine. Not that Stalin did anything as simple as put a Herzegovina Flor between his lips. No, he preferred to break off the cardboard tube and then crumble the tobacco into his pipe. Stalin’s desk, those in the know told those not in the know, was a terrible mess of discarded paper and cardboard and ash. He knew this – or rather, he had been told this more than once – because nothing about Stalin was deemed too trivial to pass on.

No one else would smoke a Herzegovina Flor in Stalin’s presence – unless offered one, when they might slyly attempt to keep it unsmoked and afterwards flourish it like a holy relic. Those who carried out Stalin’s orders tended to smoke Belomory. The NKVD smoked Belomory. Its packet design showed a map of Russia; marked in red was the White Sea Canal, after which the cigarettes were named. This Great Soviet Achievement of the early Thirties had been built with convict labour. Unusually, much propaganda was made of this fact. It was claimed that while constructing the canal the convicts were not just helping the nation advance but also ‘reforging themselves’. Well, there had been 100,000 labourers, so it was possible that some of them might have been morally improved; but a quarter of them were said to have died, and those clearly had not been reforged. They were just the chips that had flown while the wood was being chopped. And the NKVD would light up their Belomory and picture in the rising smoke new dreams of wielding the axe.

No doubt he had been smoking at the moment Nita came into his life. Nina Varzar, eldest of the three Varzar sisters, straight off the tennis court, exuding cheerfulness, laughter and sweat. Athletic, confident, popular, with such golden hair that it somehow seemed to turn her eyes golden. A qualified physicist, an excellent photographer who had her own darkroom. Not over-interested in domestic matters, it was true; but then neither was he. In a novel, all his life’s anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria – all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life’s many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.

And so he and Nina met, and they became lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her husband, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a day for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so failed to turn up and ran away and hid, but still they persevered and a few months later they married, and then Nina took a lover, and they decided their problems were such that they should separate and divorce, and then he took a lover, and they separated and put in the papers for a divorce, but by the time the divorce came through they realised they had made a mistake and so six weeks after the divorce they remarried, but still they had not resolved their troubles. And in the middle of it all he wrote to his lover Yelena, ‘I am very weak-willed and do not know if I will be able to achieve happiness.’

And then Nita fell pregnant, and everything of necessity stabilised. Except that, with Nita into her fourth month, the leap year of 1936 began, and on its twenty-sixth day Stalin decided to go to the opera.

The first thing he had done after reading the Pravda editorial was to telegraph Glikman. He asked his friend to go to the Central Leningrad Post Office and open a subscription to receive all the relevant press cuttings. Glikman would bring them round to his apartment each day, and they would read them through together. He bought a large scrapbook and pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ onto the first page. Glikman thought this unduly masochistic, but he had said, ‘It has to be there, it has to be there.’ Then he pasted in every new article as it appeared. He had never bothered keeping reviews before; but this was different. Now they were not just reviewing his music, but editorialising about his existence.

He noted how critics who had consistently praised Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk over the past two years suddenly found no merit at all in it. Some candidly admitted their own previous errors, explaining that the Pravda article had made the scales fall from their eyes. How greatly they had been duped by the music and its composer! At last they saw what a danger formalism and cosmopolitanism and Leftism presented to the true nature of Russian music! He also noted which musicians now made public statements against his work, and which friends and acquaintances chose to distance themselves from him. With equal apparent calm he read the letters which came in from ordinary members of the public, most of whom just happened to know his private address. Many of them advised him that his ass’s ears should be chopped off, along with his head. And then the phrase from which there was no recovery began to appear in the newspapers, inserted into the most normal sentence. For instance: ‘Today there is to be held a concert of works by the enemy of the people Shostakovich.’ Such words were never used by accident, or without approval from the highest level.

Why, he wondered, had Power now turned its attention to music, and to him? Power had always been more interested in the word than the note: writers, not composers, had been proclaimed the engineers of human souls. Writers were condemned on page one of Pravda, composers on page three. Two pages apart. And yet it was not nothing: it could make the difference between death and life.

The engineers of human souls: a chilly, mechanistic phrase. And yet … what was the artist’s business with, if not the human soul? Unless an artist wanted to be merely decorative, or merely a lapdog of the rich and powerful. He himself had always been anti-aristocratic, in feeling, politics, artistic principle. In that optimistic time – really so very few years ago – when the future of the whole country, if not of humanity itself, was being remade, it had seemed as if all the arts might finally come together in one glorious joint project. Music and literature and theatre and film and architecture and ballet and photography would form a dynamic partnership, not just reflecting society or criticising it or satirising it, but making it. Artists, of their own free will, and without any political direction, would help their fellow human souls develop and flourish.

Why not? It was the artist’s oldest dream. Or, as he now thought, the artist’s oldest fantasy. Because the political bureaucrats had soon arrived to take control of the project, to leach out of it the freedom and imagination and complication and nuance without which the arts grew stultified. ‘The engineers of human souls.’ There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be engineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn’t show your face …

And the second problem with engineering human souls was more basic. It was this: who engineers the engineers?

He remembered an open-air concert at a park in Kharkov. His First Symphony had set all the neighbourhood dogs barking. The crowd laughed, the orchestra played louder, the dogs yapped all the more, the audience laughed all the more. Now, his music had set bigger dogs barking. History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.

He did not want to make himself into a dramatic character. But sometimes, as his mind skittered in the small hours, he thought: so this is what history has come to. All that striving and idealism and hope and progress and science and art and conscience, and it all ends like this, with a man standing by a lift, at his feet a small case containing cigarettes, underwear and tooth powder; standing there and waiting to be taken away.

He forced his mind across to a different composer with a different travelling case. Prokofiev had left Russia for the West shortly after the Revolution; he returned for the first time in 1927. He was a sophisticated man, Sergei Sergeyevich, with expensive tastes. Also a Christian Scientist – not that this was relevant to the story. The customs officers at the Soviet border were not sophisticated; further, their minds were filled with notions of sabotage and spies and counter-revolution. They opened Prokofive’s suitcase and found on the top an item which baffled them: a pair of pyjamas. They unfolded them, held them up, turned them this way and that, looking at one another in astonishment. Perhaps Sergei Sergeyevich was embarrassed. At any rate, he left the explaining to his wife. But Ptashka, after their years in exile, had forgotten the Russian word for night-blouse. The problem was eventually resolved by dumbshow, and the couple were allowed through. But somehow, the incident was entirely typical of Prokofiev.

His scrapbook. What kind of a man buys a scrapbook and then fills it with insulting articles about himself? A madman? An ironist? A Russian? He thought of Gogol, standing in front of a mirror and from time to time calling out his own name, in a tone of revulsion and alienation. This did not seem to him the act of a madman.

His official status was that of a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’. Stalin liked to say that the finest quality of the Bolshevik was modesty. Yes, and Russia was the homeland of elephants.

When Galina was born, he and Nita used to joke about christening her Sumburina. It meant Little Muddle. Muddlikins. It would have been an act of ironic bravado. No, of suicidal folly.

Tukhachevsky’s letter to Stalin received no answer. Dmitri Dmitrievich himself did not follow the advice of Platon Kerzhentsev. He made no public statement, no apology for the excesses of youth, no recantation; though he withdrew his Fourth Symphony, which to those without ears to hear would assuredly sound like a medley of quacks and grunts and growls. Meanwhile, all his operas and ballets were removed from the repertoire. His career had simply stopped.

And then, in the spring of 1937, he had his First Conversation with Power. Of course, he had talked to Power before, or Power had talked to him: officials, bureaucrats, politicians, coming with suggestions, proposals, ultimata. Power had talked to him through newspapers, publicly, and had whispered in his ear, privately. Recently, Power had humiliated him, taken away his livelihood, ordered him to repent. Power had told him how it wanted him to work, how it wanted him to live. Now it was hinting that perhaps, on consideration, it might not want him to live any more. Power had decided to have a face-to-face with him. Power’s name was Zakrevsky, and Power, as it expressed itself to people like him in Leningrad, resided in the Big House. Many who went into the Big House on Liteiny Prospekt never emerged again.

He had been given an appointment for a Saturday morning. He maintained to family and friends that it was doubtless all a formality, perhaps an automatic consequence of the continuing articles against him in Pravda. He barely believed this himself, and doubted they did. Not many were summoned to the Big House to discuss musical theory. He was, of course, punctual. And Power was at first correct and polite. Zakrevsky asked about his work, how his professional affairs were proceeding, what he intended to compose next. In reply, he mentioned, almost as a reflex, that he was preparing a symphony on the subject of Lenin – which might conceivably have been the case. He then thought it sensible to refer to the press campaign against him, and was encouraged by the interrogator’s almost perfunctory dismissal of such matters. Next he was asked about his friends, and whom he saw on a regular basis. He did not know how to answer such questions. Zakrevsky helped him along.

‘You are, I understand, acquainted with Marshal Tukhachevsky?’

‘Yes, I know him.’

‘Tell me about how you made his acquaintance.’

He recalled the meeting backstage at the Small Hall in Moscow. He explained that the Marshal was a well-known music lover who had attended many of his concerts, who played the violin, and even made violins as a hobby. The Marshal had invited him to his apartment; they had even played music together. He was a good amateur violinist. Did he mean ‘good’? Capable, certainly. And, yes, capable of improvement.

But Zakrevsky was uninterested in how far the Marshal’s fingering and bow technique had progressed.

‘You went to his home on many occasions?’

‘From time to time, yes.’

‘From time to time over a period of how many years? Eight, nine, ten?’

‘Yes, that is probably the case.’

‘So, let us say, four or five visits a year? Forty or fifty in total?’

‘Fewer, I would say. I have never counted. But fewer.’

‘But you are an intimate friend of Marshal Tukhachevsky?’

He paused for thought. ‘No, not an intimate friend, but a good friend.’

He did not mention the Marshal arranging financial support for him; advising him; writing to Stalin on his behalf. Either Zakrevsky would know this, or he wouldn’t.

‘And who else was present at these forty or fifty occasions at the home of your good friend?’

‘Not so many. Only members of the family.’

‘Only members of the family?’ The interrogator’s tone was rightly sceptical.

‘And musicians. And musicologists.’

‘Any politicians there, by any chance?’

‘No, no politicians.’

‘You are quite sure about that?’

‘Well, you see, they were sometimes rather crowded gatherings. And I did not exactly … In point of fact, I was often playing the piano …’

‘And what did you talk about?’

‘About music.’

‘And politics.’

‘No.’

‘Come, come, how could anyone fail to talk about politics with Marshal Tukhachevsky of all people?’

‘He was, shall we say, off duty. Among friends and musicians.’

‘And were there any other off-duty politicians present?’

‘No, never. There was never any talk of politics in my presence.’

The interrogator looked at him for a long while. Then came a change of voice, as if to prepare him for the seriousness and menace of his position.

‘Now, I think you should try to shake your memory. It cannot be that you were at the home of Marshal Tukhachevsky, in your capacity as a “good friend” as you put it, on a regular basis over the last ten years and that you did not talk about politics. For instance, the plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin. What did you hear about that?’

At which point, he knew that he was a dead man. ‘And yet another’s hour is near at hand’ – and this time it was his. He reiterated, as plainly as he could, that there had never been any talk of politics at Marshal Tukhachevsky’s; they were purely musical evenings; matters of state were left at the door with hats and coats. He was not sure if this was the best phrase. But Zakrevsky was barely listening.

‘Then I suggest you think a little harder,’ the interrogator told him. ‘Some of the other guests have verified the plot already.’

He realised that Tukhachevsky must have been arrested, that the Marshal’s career was over, and his life as well; that the investigation was just beginning, and that all those around the Marshal would soon vanish from the face of the earth. His own innocence was irrelevant. The truth of his answers was irrelevant. What had been decided had been decided. And if they needed to show that the conspiracy which they had either just discovered or just invented was so perniciously widespread that even the country’s most famous – if recently disgraced – composer was involved, then that was what they would show. Which explained the matter-of-factness in Zakrevsky’s tone as he brought the interview to a close.

‘Very well. Today is Saturday. It is twelve o’clock now, and you can go. But I will only give you forty-eight hours. On Monday at twelve o’clock you will without fail remember everything. You must recall every detail of all the discussions regarding the plot against Comrade Stalin, of which you were one of the chief witnesses.’

He was a dead man. He told Nita all that had been said, and he saw beneath her reassurances that she agreed he was a dead man. He knew he must protect those closest around him, and to do so needed to be calm, but could only be frantic. He burnt anything that might be incriminating – except that once you had been labelled an enemy of the people and the associate of a known assassin, everything around you became incriminating. He might as well burn the whole apartment. He feared for Nita, for his mother, for Galya, for anyone who had ever entered or left his apartment.

‘There is no escaping one’s destiny.’ And so, he would be dead at thirty. Older than Pergolesi, true, but younger even than Schubert. And Pushkin himself, for that matter. His name and his music would be obliterated. Not only would he not exist, he would never have existed. He had been a mistake, swiftly corrected; a face in a photograph that went missing the next time that photograph was printed. And even if, at some point in the future, he was disinterred, what would they find? Four symphonies, one piano concerto, some orchestral suites, two pieces for string quartet but not a single finished quartet, some piano music, a cello sonata, two operas, some film and ballet music. He would be remembered by what? The opera which had brought him disgrace, the symphony he had wisely withdrawn? Perhaps his First Symphony would make the cheerful prelude to concerts of mature works by composers lucky enough to outlive him.

But even this was false comfort, he realised. What he himself thought was irrelevant. The future would decide what the future would decide. For instance, that his music was quite unimportant. That he might have come to something as a composer if he had not, through vanity, involved himself in a treasonous plot against the head of state. Who could tell what the future would believe? We expect too much of the future – hoping that it will quarrel with the present. And who could tell what shadow his death would cast on his family. He imagined Galya emerging at sixteen from her Siberian orphanage, believing that her parents had heartlessly abandoned her, unaware that her father had written even a single note of music.

When the threats against him had first begun, he told friends: ‘Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with a pen in my mouth.’ They had been words of defiance intended to keep up everyone’s spirits, his own included. But they did not want to cut off his hands, his small, ‘non-pianistic’ hands. They might want to torture him, and he would agree to everything they said immediately, as he had no capacity for bearing pain. Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of them. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Yes, I was there at the time in the Marshal’s apartment; Yes I heard him say whatever you suggest he might have said; Yes this general and that politician were involved in the plot, I saw and heard it for myself. But there would be no melodramatic cutting-off of his hands, just a businesslike bullet to the back of the head.

Those words of his had been at best a foolish boast, at worst a mere figure of speech. And Power had no interest in figures of speech. Power knew only facts, and its language consisted of phrases and euphemisms designed either to publicise or to conceal those facts. There were no composers writing with a pen between their teeth in Stalin’s Russia. From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.

How recently he had sensed within him youth’s indestructibility. More than that – its incorruptibility. And beyond that, beneath it all, a conviction of the rightness and truth of whatever talent he had, and whatever music he had written. All this was not in any way undermined. It was just, now, completely irrelevant.

On the Saturday night, and again on the Sunday night, he drank himself to sleep. It was not a complicated matter. He had a light head, and a couple of glasses of vodka would often make him need to lie down. This weakness was also an advantage. Drink, and then rest, while others carried on drinking. This left you fresher the next morning, better able to work.

Anapa had been famous as a centre of the Grape Cure. He had once joked to Tanya that he preferred the Vodka Cure. And so, now, on perhaps the last two nights of his life, he took the cure.

On that Monday morning he kissed Nita, held Galya one last time, and caught the bus to the dismal grey building on Liteiny Prospekt. He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual. He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all. At the Big House he presented himself to the guard at reception. The soldier looked through his roster but could not find the name. He was asked to repeat it. He did so. The soldier went down the list again.

‘What is your business? Who have you come to see?’

‘Interrogator Zakrevsky.’

The soldier nodded slowly. Then, without looking up, said, ‘Well, you can go home. You are not on the list. Zakrevsky isn’t coming in today, so there is nobody to receive you.’

Thus ended his First Conversation with Power.

He went home. He assumed it must be some trick – they were letting him go so they could follow him and then arrest all his friends and associates. But it turned out to have been a sudden piece of luck in his life. Between the Saturday and the Monday, Zakrevsky had himself fallen under suspicion. His interrogator interrogated. His arrester arrested.

Still, if his dismissal from the Big House was not a trick, it could only be a bureaucratic delay. They were hardly likely to give up their pursuit of Tukhachevsky; so Zakrevsky’s departure was only a temporary hitch. Some new Zakrevsky would be appointed and the summons would be renewed.

Three weeks after the Marshal’s arrest he was shot, together with the elite of the Red Army. The generals’ plot to assassinate Comrade Stalin had been discovered just in time. Among those in Tukhachevsky’s immediate entourage to be arrested and shot was their mutual friend Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev, the distinguished musicologist. Perhaps there was a musicologists’ plot waiting to be uncovered, followed by a composers’ plot and a trombonists’ plot. Why not? ‘Nothing but madness in the world.’

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev’s definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them – that is a musicologist.

But it did not seem so funny now that they were shooting even musicologists. Nikolai Sergeyevich Zhilyayev’s crimes were given as monarchism, terrorism and spying.

And so he began his vigils by the lift. He was not unique in this. Others across the city did the same, wanting to spare those they loved the spectacle of their arrest. Each night he followed the same routine: he evacuated his bowels, kissed his sleeping daughter, kissed his wakeful wife, took the small case from her hands, and closed the front door. Almost as if he was going off for the night shift. Which in a way he was. And then he stood and waited, thinking about the past, fearing for the future, smoking his way through the brief present. The case resting against his calf was there to reassure him, and to reassure others; a practical measure. It made him look as if he were in charge of events rather than a victim of them. Men who left home with a case in their hands traditionally returned. Men dragged from their beds in their night-clothes often did not. Whether or not this was true was unimportant. What mattered was this: it looked as if he was not afraid.

This was one of the questions in his head: was it brave to be standing there waiting for them, or was it cowardly? Or was it neither – merely sensible? He did not expect to discover the answer.

Would Zakrevsky’s successor begin as Zakrevsky had, with courteous preliminaries, then a hardening, a threat, and an invitation to return with a list of names? But what additional evidence could they need against Tukhachevsky, given that he had already been tried, condemned and executed? More likely, it would be part of a wider investigation into the Marshal’s outer circle of friends, the inner circle having been dealt with. He would be asked about his political convictions, his family and his professional connections. Well, he could remember himself as a boy standing in front of the apartment building on Nikolayevskaya Street, proudly wearing a red ribbon on his coat; later, rushing with a group of schoolfellows to the Finland Station to greet Lenin on his return to Russia. His earliest compositions, predating his official Opus One, had been a ‘Funeral March for the Victims of the Revolution’, and a ‘Hymn to Liberty’.

But proceed any further, and facts were no longer facts, merely statements open to divergent interpretation. So, he had been at school with the children of Kerensky and Trotsky: once a matter of pride, then of interest, now, perhaps, of silent shame. So, his uncle Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, an old Bolshevik exiled to Siberia for his part in the 1905 Revolution, had been the first encourager of his nephew’s revolutionary sympathies. But Old Bolsheviks, once a pride and a blessing, were nowadays more frequently a curse.

He had never joined the Party – and never would. He could not join a party which killed: it was as simple as that. But as a ‘non-Party Bolshevik’ he had allowed himself to be portrayed as fully supportive of the Party. He had written music for films and ballets and oratorios which glorified the Revolution and all its works. His Second Symphony had been a cantata celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Revolution, in which he had set some quite disgusting verses by Alexander Bezymensky. He had written scores applauding collectivisation and denouncing sabotage in industry. His music for the film Counterplan – about a group of factory workers who spontaneously devise a scheme to boost production – had been a tremendous success. ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ had been whistled and hummed all over the country, and still was. Currently – perhaps always, and certainly for as long as was necessary – he was at work on a symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin.

He doubted any of this would convince Zakrevsky’s replacement. Did any part of him believe in Communism? Certainly, if the alternative was Fascism. But he did not believe in Utopia, in the perfectibility of mankind, in the engineering of the human soul. After five years of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, he had written to a friend that ‘Heaven on Earth will come in 200,000,000,000 years.’ But that, he now thought, might have been over-optimistic.

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense. He had put the theory of Free Love into practice, first with Tanya, then with Nita. Indeed, with both of them at the same time; they had overlapped in his heart, and sometimes still did. It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition. And on top of this, he himself was weak-willed and indecisive – except on those occasions when he was strong-willed and decisive. But even then he didn’t necessarily make the right decisions. So his emotional life had been … how best to sum it up? He smiled ruefully to himself. Yes indeed: muddle instead of music.

He had wanted Tanya; his mother had disapproved. He had wanted Nina; his mother had disapproved. He had hidden their marriage from her for several weeks, not wanting their first happiness to be clouded with ill feeling. This had not been the most heroic action of his life, he admitted. And when he did confess the news, his mother reacted as if she’d known all along – perhaps she had read the registrar’s diary – and saw no reason to approve. She had a way of talking about Nina which sounded like praise yet was in fact criticism. Perhaps, after his death, which could not be far away, they would form a household together. Mother, daughter-in-law, granddaughter: three generations of women. Such households were increasingly common in Russia these days.

He may have got things wrong; but he was not a fool, nor altogether naive. He had been conscious from the beginning that it was necessary to render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s. So why was Caesar angry with him? No one could say he was not productive: he wrote quickly, and rarely missed a deadline. He could turn out efficiently tuneful music which pleased him for a month and the public for a decade. But this was precisely the point. Caesar didn’t just demand that tribute be rendered unto him; he also nominated the currency in which it should be paid. Why, Comrade Shostakovich, does your new symphony not sound like your wonderful ‘Song of the Counterplan’? Why is the weary steel-worker not whistling its first theme on his way home? We know, Comrade Shostakovich, that you are well capable of writing music which pleases the masses. So why do you persist with your formalist quacks and grunts which the smug bourgeoisie who still command the concert halls merely pretend to admire?

Yes, he had been naive about Caesar. Or rather, he had been working from an outdated model. In the old days, Caesar had demanded tribute money, a sum to acknowledge his power, a certain percentage of your calculated worth. But things had moved on, and the new Caesars of the Kremlin had upgraded the system: nowadays your tribute money was calculated at the full 100% of your worth. Or, if possible, more.

When he was a student – those years of cheerfulness, hope and invulnerability – he had slaved for three years as a cinema pianist. He had accompanied the screen at the Piccadilly on Nevsky Prospekt; also at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace. It was hard, demeaning work; some of the proprietors were skinflints who would sack you rather than pay your wages. Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have beem more fun, admittedly.

He tried to watch the screen above him and play appropriate music. The audience preferred the old romantic tunes which were familiar to them; but often, he would get bored, and then play his own compositions. These did not go down so well. In the cinema, it was the opposite from the concert hall: audiences would applaud when they disapproved of something. One evening, while accompanying a film called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden, he found himself in a more than usually satirical mood. First he began to imitate bird calls on the piano, and then, as the marsh and water birds flew higher and higher, the piano worked itself up into a greater and greater passion. There was loud applause, which in his naivety he took to be aimed at the ridiculous film; and so he played all the harder. Afterwards, the audience had complained to the cinema manager: the pianist must have been drunk, what he played was never music, he had insulted the beautiful film and also its audience. The manager had sacked him.

And that, he now realised, had been his career in miniature: hard work, some success, a failure to respect musical norms, official disapproval, suspension of pay, the sack. Except that now he was in the grown-up world, where the sack meant something much more final.

He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected on to the screen. Tanya – his mother applauds. Nina – his mother applauds. Rozaliya – his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba – his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.

His nocturnal vigils lasted for ten days. Nita argued – not from evidence, more from optimism and determination – that the immediate danger had probably passed. Neither of them believed this, but he was weary of standing, of waiting for the lift’s machinery to grind and whirr. He was weary of his own fear. And so he returned to lying in the dark fully clothed, his wife at his side, his overnight bag next to the bed. A few feet away Galya would be sleeping as an infant does, careless about matters of state.

And then, one morning, he picked up his case and opened it. He put his underclothes back in the drawer, his toothbrush and tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet, and his three packets of Kazbeki on his desk.

And he waited for Power to resume its conversation with him. But he never heard from the Big House again.

Not that Power was idle. Many of those around him began to disappear, some to camps, some to execution. His mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, his Old Bolshevik uncle, associates, a former lover. And what of Zakrevsky, who had not come into work that fatal Monday? No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps Zakrevsky had never really existed.

But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work. There would be no rest. ‘We rest only when we dream,’ as Blok put it; though at this time most people’s dreams were not restful. But life continued; soon Nita was pregnant again, and soon he began adding to the opus numbers he had feared would end with the Fourth Symphony.

His Fifth, which he wrote that summer, was premiered in November 1937 in the Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. An elderly philologist told Glikman that only once before in his lifetime had he witnessed such a vast and insistent ovation: forty-four years previously, when Tchaikovsky had conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. A journalist – foolish? hopeful? sympathetic? – described the Fifth as ‘A Soviet Artist’s Creative Reply to Just Criticism’. He never repudiated the phrase; and many came to believe it was to be found in his own hand at the head of the score. These words turned out to be the most famous he ever wrote – or rather, never wrote. He allowed them to stand because they protected his music. Let Power have the words, because words cannot stain music. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.

The phrase also permitted those with asses’ ears to hear in his symphony what they wanted to hear. They missed the screeching irony of the final movement, that mockery of triumph. They heard only triumph itself, some loyal endorsement of Soviet music, Soviet musicology, of life under the sun of Stalin’s constitution. He had ended the symphony fortissimo and in the major. What if he had ended it pianissimo and in the minor? On such things might a life – might several lives – turn. Well, ‘Nothing but nonsense in the world.’

The Fifth Symphony’s success was instant and universal. Such a sudden phenomenon was accordingly analysed by Party bureaucrats and tame musicologists, who came up with an official description of the work, to assist the Soviet public’s understanding. They called his Fifth ‘an optimistic tragedy’.