ALL HE KNEW was that this was the worst time of all.

The worst time was not the same as the most dangerous time.

Because the most dangerous time was not the time when you were most in danger.

This was something he hadn’t understood before.

He sat in his chauffeured car while the landscape bumped and drifted past. He asked himself a question. It went like this:

Lenin found music depressing.

Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music.

Khrushchev despised music.

Which is the worst for a composer?

To some questions, there were no answers. Or at least, the questions stop when you die. Death cures the hunchback, as Khrushchev liked to say. He was not born one, but perhaps he had become one, morally, spiritually. A questioning hunchback. And perhaps death cures the questions as well as the questioner. And tragedies in hindsight look like farces.

When Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Dmitri Dmitrievich and a group of schoolfellows had rushed there to greet the returning hero. It was a story he had told many times. However, since he had been a delicate, protected child, he might not have been allowed to go off just like that. It was more plausible that his Old Bolshevik uncle, Maxim Lavrentyevich Kostrikin, would have accompanied him to the station. He had told this version as well, many times. Both accounts helped burnish his revolutionary credentials. Ten-year-old Mitya at the Finland Station, inspired by the Great Leader! That image had not been a hindrance to his early career. But there was a third possibility: that he had not seen Lenin at all, and been nowhere near the station. He might just have adopted a schoolfellow’s report of the event as his own. These days, he no longer knew which version to trust. Had he really, truly, been at the Finland Station? Well, he lies like an eyewitness, as the saying goes.

He lit another forbidden cigarette and stared at the chauffeur’s ear. That, at least, was something solid and true: the chauffeur had an ear. And, no doubt, one on the other side, even though he couldn’t see it. So it was an ear which existed only in his memory – or, more exactly, his imagination – until such time as he saw it again. Deliberately, he leant across until the wing and lobe of the other ear came into view. Another question solved, for the moment.

When he was little, his hero had been Nansen of the North. When he was grown up, the mere feel of snow beneath a pair of skis made him frightened, and his greatest act of exploration was to set off at Nita’s request for the next village in search of cucumbers. Now that he was an old man, he was chauffeured around Moscow, usually by Irina, but sometimes by an official driver. He had become a Nansen of the Suburbs.

On his bedside table, always: a postcard of Titian’s The Tribute Money.

Chekhov said that you should write everything – except denunciations.

Poor Anatoli Bashashkin. Denounced as Tito’s stooge.

Akhmatova said that under Khrushchev, Power had become vegetarian. Maybe so; though you could just as easily kill someone by stuffing vegetables down their throat as by the traditional methods of the old meat-eating days.

He had returned from New York and composed The Song of the Forests, to an enormous, windy text by Dolmatovsky. Its theme was the regeneration of the steppes, and how Stalin, the Leader and Teacher, the Friend of Children, the Great Helmsman, the Great Father of the Nation, and the Great Railway Engineer, was now also the Great Gardener. ‘Let us clothe the Motherland in forests!’ – an injunction Dolmatovsky repeated ten or a dozen times. Under Stalin, the oratorio insisted, even apple trees grew more courageously, fighting off the frosts just as the Red Army had fought off the Nazis. The work’s thunderous banality had ensured its immediate success. It helped him win his fourth Stalin Prize: 100,000 roubles, and a dacha. He had paid Caesar, and Caesar had not been ungrateful in return. In all, he had won the Stalin Prize six times. He also received the Order of Lenin at regular ten-year intervals: in 1946, 1956 and 1966. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. And he hoped to be dead by the time 1976 came around.

Perhaps courage was like beauty. A beautiful woman grows old: she sees only what has gone; others see only what remains. Some congratulated him on his endurance, his refusal to submit, the solid core beneath the hysterical surface. He saw only what was gone.

Stalin himself was long gone. The Great Gardener had gone to tend the grass in the Elysian Fields, and strengthen the morale of the apple trees there.

The red roses on Nita’s grave, strewn all over. Every time he visited. And not sent by him.

Glikman had told him a story about Louis XIV. The Sun King had been as absolute a ruler as Stalin ever was. Yet he was always willing to give artists their proper due; to acknowledge their secret magic. One such was the poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux. And Louis XIV, in front of the entire court at Versailles, had announced, as if it were an everyday truth, ‘Monsieur Despréaux has a better understanding of poetry than I do.’ No doubt there was sycophantically disbelieving laughter from those who, in private and public, assured the great king that his understanding of poetry – and music, and painting, and architecture – was unmatched across the globe and down the centuries. And perhaps there was a tactical, diplomatic modesty about the remark in the first place. But still, it had been made.

Stalin, however, had so many advantages over that old king. His profound grasp of Marxist–Leninist theory, his intuitive understanding of the People, his love of folk music, his ability to sniff out formalist plots … Oh, enough, enough. He would make his own ears bleed.

But even the Great Gardener in his guise as the Great Musicologist had been unable to sniff out the location of the Red Beethoven. Davidenko had disappointed – not least by dying in his mid-thirties. And the Red Beethoven never did turn up.

He liked to tell the story of Tinyakov. A handsome man, a good poet. He lived in Petersburg and wrote about love and flowers and other lofty subjects. Then the Revolution came, and soon he was Tinyakov the poet of Leningrad, who wrote not about love and flowers, but about how hungry he was. And after a while things got so bad that he would stand on a street corner with a placard round his neck reading POET. And since Russians valued their poets, passers-by used to give him money. Tinyakov liked to claim that he had earned far more money from begging than he ever did from his verses, and so was able each evening to wind up in a fancy restaurant.

Was that last detail true? He wondered. But poets were allowed exaggeration. As for himself, he did not need a placard – he had three Orders of Lenin and six Stalin Prizes round his neck and ate in the restaurant of the Union of Composers.

One man, sly and swarthy, with a dangling ruby earring, grips a coin between thumb and forefinger. He shows it to a second, paler man, who does not touch it, but instead looks the first man straight in the eye.

There had been that strange time when Power, having decided that Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich was a salvageable case, had tried a new tactic with him. Instead of waiting for the end result – a finished composition which would then have to be examined by politico-musicological experts before being approved or condemned – the Party, in its wisdom, decided instead to begin at the beginning: with the state of his ideological soul. Thoughtfully, generously, the Union of Composers appointed a tutor, Comrade Troshin, a grave and elderly sociologist, to help him understand the principles of Marxism–Leninism – to help him reforge himself. He was sent a reading list, which consisted entirely of works by Comrade Stalin, such as Marxism and Questions of Linguistics, and Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. Troshin then came to the apartment and explained his function. He was there because, alas, even distinguished composers were capable of serious error, as had been publicly aired in recent years. To avoid repetition of such errors, Dmitri Dmitrievich’s level of political, economic and ideological understanding must be raised. The composer received his uninvited guest’s statement of intent with due seriousness, while expressing his regret that work on a new symphony dedicated to the memory of Lenin had so far prevented him from reading all of the library which had been so kindly delivered.

Comrade Troshin looked round the composer’s study. He was neither a devious nor a threatening man, just one of those diligent, unquestioning functionaries that every regime throws up.

‘And this is where you work.’

‘Indeed.’

The tutor stood up, made a step or two in each direction, and praised the room’s general arrangement. Then, with an apologetic smile, he observed:

‘But there is one thing missing in the study of a distinguished Soviet composer.’

The distinguished Soviet composer in turn stood up, looked around the walls and bookcases he knew so well, and shook his head with equal apology, as if embarrassed to be failing at his tutor’s first question.

‘There is no portrait on your walls of Comrade Stalin.’

A daunting silence ensued. The composer lit a cigarette and paced the room, as if searching for the cause of this hideous solecism, or as if he might find the necessary icon beneath this cushion, that rug. Finally, he assured Troshin that he would take immediate steps to procure the best available picture of the Great Leader.

‘Well, that’s fine, then,’ replied Troshin. ‘Now let’s get down to business.’

He was required, from time to time, to make a précis of Stalin’s turgid wisdom. Happily, Glikman offered to do the job for him, and the composer’s patriotic insights into the Great Gardener’s oeuvre were posted to him on a regular basis from Leningrad. After a while, other key texts were added to the curriculum: for instance, G. M. Malenkov’s ‘The Characteristics of Creativity in Art’, a reprint of his speech to the 19th Party Congress.

Troshin’s presence in his life, earnest and persistent, was received on his part with polite evasiveness and secret mockery. They played their roles as instructor and pupil with straight faces; no doubt, Troshin did not have another face to offer. He believed all too evidently in the virtuous purpose of his task, and the composer treated him civilly, recognising that these unwanted visits amounted to a kind of protection. And yet each of them was aware that their charade might have serious consequences.

In that time, there were two phrases – one a question and one a statement – which would cause the sweat to pour and strong men to shit their pants. The question was: ‘Does Stalin know?’ The statement, even more alarming, was: ‘Stalin knows.’ And since Stalin was accorded supernatural powers – he never made a mistake, he commanded everything and was everywhere – the mere terrestrial beings under his power felt, or imagined, his eye being constantly on them. So what if Comrade Troshin failed to teach the precepts of Karlo-Marlo and their descendants in a satisfactory way? What if his pupil, outwardly solemn but inwardly whimsical, failed to learn? What then for the Troshins of this world? They both knew the answer. If the tutor offered protection to his pupil, the pupil had a certain responsibility towards his tutor.

But there was a third phrase, whispered about him as it had been whispered about others – Pasternak, for example: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’ Sometimes this statement was a fact, sometimes a wild theory or envious supposition. Why had he survived being a protégé of the traitor Tukhachevsky? Why had he survived those words, ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly’? Why had he survived being named an enemy of the people by the newspapers? Why had Zakrevsky disappeared between a Saturday and a Monday? Why had he been spared when so many around him had been arrested, exiled, murdered, or had disappeared into a fate which might become clear only decades later? One answer would fit all those questions: ‘Stalin says he is not to be touched.’

If so – and he had no way of knowing, any more than those who uttered the phrase – he would be a fool to imagine that it afforded him permanent protection. Just to be noticed by Stalin was much more dangerous than an existence of anonymous obscurity. Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell. How many important cogs in the machinery of Soviet life had subsequently turned out, after some imperceptible shift of the light, to have been hindering the other cogs all along?

The car slowed at an intersection, and then he heard the clatter of a ratchet as the chauffeur pulled on the handbrake. He remembered buying their first Pobeda. At the time, regulations insisted that the purchaser be present when the car was handed over. He still held a licence from before the war, so went to the garage by himself and took delivery of the car. Driving home, he wasn’t very impressed by the Pobeda’s performance, and wondered if he’d been sold a dud. He parked, and was fiddling with the lock when a passer-by called out, ‘Hey, you with the specs, what’s wrong with your car?’ The wheels were disgorging smoke: he had driven all the way from the garage with the handbrake on. Cars didn’t seem to like him – that was the truth.

He remembered another girl he had examined in his guise as Professor of Bolshevik Ideology at the Conservatoire. The chief examiner had left the room for a while, and he found himself in sole charge. The student was so nervous, twisting in her hand the page of questions she was expected to answer, that he had taken pity on her.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s put all those official questions to one side. Instead, I’ll ask you this: what is Revisionism?’

It was a question even he could have answered. Revisionism was so loathsome and heretical a concept that the word itself practically had horns growing out of its head.

The girl reflected for a while, and then answered confidently, ‘Revisionism is the highest stage in the development of Marxism–Leninism.’

Whereupon he had smiled, and given her the best mark possible.

When all else failed, when there seemed to be nothing but nonsense in the world, he held to this: that good music would always be good music, and great music was impregnable. You could play Bach’s preludes and fugues at any tempo, with any dynamics, and they would still be great music, proof even against the wretch who brought ten thumbs to the keyboard. And in the same way, you could not play such music cynically.

In 1949, when the attacks on him were still continuing, he had written his fourth string quartet. The Borodins had learnt it, and played it for the Ministry of Culture’s Directorate of Musical Institutions, which needed to approve any new work before it could be performed – and before the composer could be paid. Given his precarious status, he was not sanguine; but to everyone’s surprise the audition was a success, the piece authorised and money forthcoming. Soon afterwards, the story began to circulate that the Borodins had learnt to play the quartet in two different ways: authentically and strategically. The first was the way the composer had intended; whereas in the second, designed to get past musical officialdom, the players emphasised the ‘optimistic’ aspects of the piece, and its accordance with the norms of socialist art. This was held to be a perfect example of the use of irony as a defence against Power.

It had never happened, of course, but the story was repeated often enough for its veracity to be accepted. This was a nonsense: it wasn’t true – it couldn’t be true – because you cannot lie in music. The Borodins could only play the fourth quartet in the way the composer intended. Music – good music, great music – had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

This was what he held to.

His civil, tedious and fraudulent conversations with Comrade Troshin continued. One afternoon, the tutor’s mood was uncharacteristically animated.

‘Is it true,’ he asked, ‘is it true – I’ve just recently been told – that a few years ago Iosif Vissarionovich rang you up in person?’

‘Yes, it is true.’

The composer pointed at the telephone on the wall, even though it was not the one he had used. Troshin gazed at the instrument as if it ought already to be in a museum.

‘What a truly great man Stalin is! With all the cares of state, with all that he has to deal with, he knows even about some Shostakovich. He rules half the world and yet he has time for you!’

‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed with feigned zeal. ‘It is truly amazing.’

‘I am aware that you are a well-known composer,’ the tutor continued, ‘but who are you in comparison with our Great Leader?’

Guessing that Troshin would not be familiar with the text of the Dargomyzhsky romance, he replied gravely, ‘I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.’

‘Yes, that’s just it, you are a worm indeed. And it’s a good thing that you now appear to possess a healthy sense of self-criticism.’

As if eager for more such praise, he had repeated, as soberly as he could manage, ‘Yes, I’m a worm, a mere worm.’

Troshin went away well pleased with the progress that had been made.

But the composer’s study never did display the finest portrait of Stalin that Moscow could sell. Only a few months into Dmitri Dmitrievich’s re-education, the objective circumstances of Soviet reality changed. In other words, Stalin died. And the tutor’s visits came to an end.

As the chauffeur braked, the car pulled to the left. It was a Volga, comfortable enough. He had always wanted to own a foreign car. He had always wanted, very specifically, a Mercedes. He had foreign currency sitting in the copyright bureau, but was never allowed to spend it on a foreign car. What is wrong with our Soviet cars, Dmitri Dmitrievich? Do they not take you from place to place, are they not reliable, and built with Soviet roads in mind? How would it look if our most distinguished composer was seen to insult the Soviet motor industry by buying a Mercedes? Do members of the Politburo drive around in capitalist vehicles? Surely you can see that it is quite impossible.

Prokofiev had been allowed to import a new Ford from the West. Sergei Sergeyevich was very pleased with it, until the day it proved too difficult for him to manage, and in the middle of Moscow he ran over a young woman. Somehow, that was typical of Prokofiev. He always came at the world from the wrong direction.

Of course, no one dies at exactly the correct moment: some too early, some too late. A few get the year more or less right, but then choose completely the wrong date. Poor Prokofiev – to die on exactly the same day as Stalin! Sergei Sergeyevich suffered a stroke at eight in the evening and died at nine. Stalin died fifty minutes later. To die not even knowing that the Great Tyrant had expired! Well, that was Sergei Sergeyevich for you. Despite being a punctilious timekeeper, he was always half out of step with Russia. So his dying had shown a foolish synchronicity.

The names of Prokofiev and Shostakovich would always be linked. But though manacled together, they were never friends. They – mostly – admired one another’s music, but the West had penetrated too deeply into Sergei Sergeyevich. He had left Russia in 1918, and, apart from brief returns – as with a pair of puzzling pyjamas – had stayed away until 1936. By then he had lost touch with Soviet reality. He imagined that he would be applauded for his patriotic homecoming, that tyranny would be grateful – how naive was that? And when they were arraigned together before tribunals of musical bureaucrats, Sergei Sergeyevich thought only of musical solutions. They had asked him what was wrong with his colleague Dmitri Dmitrievich’s Eighth Symphony. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, he replied, ever the pragmatist: it just needs a clearer melodic line, and the second and fourth movements should be cut. And when faced with criticism of his own work, his response was: look, I have a multiplicity of styles, just tell me which you would prefer me to use. He was proud of his facility – but that was not what was being asked of him. They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them. They wanted your complicity, your compliance, your corruption. And Sergei Sergeyevich had never really understood this. He said – and it was brave of him to do so – that when a piece was killingly denounced for ‘formalism’, it was ‘a simple matter of not understanding something on first hearing’. He had a strange kind of sophisticated innocence. But really, the man had the soul of a goose.

He often thought of Sergei Sergeyevich in wartime exile, selling off his finely-cut European suits in the market at Alma-Ata. They said he was a skilful trader and always got the best price. Whose shoulders would those suits be on now? But it wasn’t just his clothes: Prokofiev enjoyed all the trappings of success. And he understood fame in a Western way. He liked to say things were ‘amusing’. Despite his public praise of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, when he leafed through the score in its composer’s presence, he had pronounced the work ‘amusing’. It was a word which should have been banned until the day after Stalin’s death. Which Sergei Sergeyevich had not lived to see.

He himself had never been tempted by a life abroad. He was a Russian composer who lived in Russia. He declined to imagine any alternative. Though he had experienced his own brief moment of Western fame. In New York, he had gone to a pharmacy for some aspirin. Ten minutes after he left, an assistant was seen fixing a sign in the window. It read: DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH SHOPS HERE.

He no longer expected to be killed – that fear was long in the past. But being killed had never been the worst. In January 1948 his old friend Solomon Mikhoels, director of the Moscow Jewish Theatre, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The day the news came out, he had spent five hours being hectored by Zhdanov for distorting Soviet reality, failing to celebrate the nation’s glorious victories, and eating out of the hands of its enemies. Afterwards, he went straight to Mikhoels’s apartment. He had embraced his friend’s daughter and her husband. Then, standing with his back to the crowd of silent, fearful mourners, with his face almost pushing into the bookcase, he said to them, in a quiet, clear voice, ‘I envy him.’ He meant it: death was preferable to endless terror.

But endless terror continued for another five years. Until Stalin died, and Nikita Khrushchev emerged. There was the promise of a thaw, cautious hope, incautious elation. And yes, things did get easier, and some filthy secrets emerged; but there was no sudden idealistic attachment to the truth, merely an awareness that it could now be used to political advantage. And Power itself did not diminish; it just mutated. The terrified wait by the lift and the bullet to the back of the head became things of the past. But Power did not lose interest in him; hands still reached out – and since childhood he had always held a fear of grabbing hands.

Nikita the Corncob. Who would go into tirades about ‘abstractionists and pederasts’ – they being obviously the same thing. Just as Zhdanov had once denounced Akhmatova as ‘both a slut and a nun’. Nikita the Corncob, at a meeting of writers and artists, had said of Dmitri Dmitrievich, ‘Oh, his music’s nothing but jazz – it gives you the bellyache. And I’m to clap my hands? But with jazz – you get colic.’ However, this was better than being told you ate out of the hands of the nation’s enemies. And in these more liberal times, some of those gathered to meet the First Secretary were allowed, if with proper deference, to offer a contrary opinion. There had even been a poet bold – or crazy – enough to maintain that there were great artists among the abstractionists. He had mentioned the name of Picasso. To which the Corncob had replied brusquely,

‘Death cures the hunchback.’

In the old days, such an exchange might have led to the insolent poet being reminded that he was playing a dangerous game which might end very badly. But this was Khrushchev. His rantings made the lackeys with brass faces sway in one direction, then another; but you did not immediately fear for your future. One day the Corncob might announce that your music gave him the bellyache, and the next, after a fancy banquet at the Union of Composers’ Congress, he might actually praise you. That evening he had been holding forth about how, if music were half decent, he could just about listen to it on the radio – except when they transmitted stuff which sounded, well, like the cawing of rooks … And as the lackeys with brass faces were laughing away, his eye fell on the well-known composer of bellyaching jazz. But the First Secretary was in a benign, indeed forgiving, mood.

‘Now, there’s Dmitri Dmitrievich – he saw the light at the very beginning of the war with his … what d’you call it, ah, his symphony.’

Suddenly, he was not in disfavour, and Lyudmila Lyadova, concocter of popular songs, came over and kissed him, then witlessly announced how everyone loved him. Well, it really did not matter either way, because things were no longer as they had once been.

But this was where he made his mistake. Before, there was death; now, there was life. Before, men shat in their pants; now, they were allowed to disagree. Before, there were orders; now, there were suggestions. So his Conversations with Power became, without him at first recognising it, more dangerous to the soul. Before, they had tested the extent of his courage; now, they tested the extent of his cowardice. And they worked with diligence and know-how, with an intense but essentially disinterested professionalism, like priests working for the soul of a dying man.

He himself knew little about visual art, and could hardly argue with that poet about abstractionism; but he knew Picasso for a bastard and a coward. How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism! Picasso had spent a lifetime painting his shit and hailing Soviet power. Yet God forbid that any poor little artist suffering under Soviet power should try to paint like Picasso. He was free to speak the truth – why didn’t he do so on behalf of those who couldn’t? Instead, he sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France painting his revolting dove of peace time and time again. He loathed the sight of that bloody dove. And he loathed the slavery of ideas as much as he loathed physical slavery.

Or Jean-Paul Sartre. He’d once taken Maxim to the copyright bureau next to the Tretyakov Gallery, and there, standing at the cashier’s desk, was the great philosopher, counting out his fat wad of roubles with great care. In those days royalties were paid out to foreign writers only in exceptional cases. In a whisper, he had explained those circumstances to Maxim: ‘We don’t deny material incentives if a person leaves the camp of reaction for the camp of progress.’

Stravinsky was a different matter. His love and reverence for Stravinsky’s music had never wavered. And as proof, he kept a large photograph of his fellow composer beneath the glass of his desktop. He looked at it every day and remembered that gilded salon at the Waldorf Astoria; remembered the betrayal, and his moral shame.

When the Thaw came, Stravinsky’s music was played again, and Khrushchev, who knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges, was persuaded to invite the famous exile to return for a visit. It would be a great propaganda coup, apart from anything else. Perhaps they hoped in some way to turn Stravinsky back from a cosmopolitan into a purely Russian composer. And perhaps Stravinsky for his part hoped to rediscover some remnants of the old Russia he had long ago left behind. If so, both dreams were disappointed. But Stravinsky had some fun. For decades he had been denounced by the Soviet authorities as a lackey of capitalism. So when some musical bureaucrat came towards him with a fake smile and an extended hand, Stravinsky, instead of offering his own hand, gave the official the head of his walking stick to shake. The gesture was clear: who’s the lackey now?

But it was one thing to humiliate a Soviet bureaucrat once Power had grown vegetarian; another to protest when Power was carnivorous. And Stravinsky had spent decades sitting on top of his American Mount Olympus, aloof, egocentric, unconcerned when artists and writers and their families were being hunted down in his native land; were imprisoned, exiled, murdered. Did he utter a single public word of protest while breathing the air of freedom? That silence had been contemptible; and just as he revered Stravinsky the composer, so he despised Stravinsky the thinker. Well, perhaps that answered his question about personal honesty and artistic honesty; lack of the former didn’t necessarily contaminate the latter.

They had met twice during the course of the exile’s visit. Neither occasion had been a success. He himself was as apprehensive and self-conscious as Stravinsky was bold and self-assured. What could they possibly have to say to one another? So he had asked,

‘What do you think of Puccini?’

‘I loathe him,’ Stravinsky had replied.

To which he had answered, ‘So do I.’

Did either of them mean it – mean it as absolutely as they had spoken? Probably not. One was being instinctively dominant, the other instinctively submissive. That was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’.

He had also had a ‘historic meeting’ with Akhmatova. He had invited her to visit him at Repino. She came. He sat in silence; so did she; after twenty such minutes, she rose and left. She said afterwards, ‘It was wonderful.’

There was much to be said for silence, that place where words run out and music begins; also, where music runs out. He sometimes compared his situation with that of Sibelius, who wrote nothing in the last third of his life, instead merely sat there embodying the Glory of the Finnish People. This was not a bad way to exist; but he doubted he had the strength for silence.

Sibelius had apparently been full of dissatisfaction and self-contempt. It was said that the day he burnt all his surviving manuscripts he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. That made sense. As did the connection between self-contempt and alcohol, the one inciting the other. He knew that connection, that incitement all too well.

There was a different version of Akhmatova’s visit to Repino going the rounds. In this, her report went: ‘We talked for twenty minutes. It was wonderful.’ If she’d actually said that, she was fantasising. But that was the trouble with ‘historic meetings’. What was posterity to believe? Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.

When he and Stravinsky had discussed conducting, he had confessed: ‘I do not know how not to be afraid.’ At the time, he thought he was only talking about conducting. Now, he was not so sure.

He was no longer afraid of being killed – that was true, and should have been an advantage. He knew he would be allowed to live, and receive the best medical attention. But, in a way, that was worse. Because it is always possible to bring the living to a lower point. You cannot say that of the dead.

He had gone to Helsinki to receive the Sibelius Prize. In the same year, simply between the months of May and October, he had been made a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris, an honorary doctor of Oxford University, and a member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce. In Oxford, he met Poulenc, who was also receiving an honorary degree. They were shown a piano which had apparently once belonged to Fauré. Respectfully, each had played a few chords.

Such occasions would have given a normal man great pleasure, and be received as the sweet and merited consolations of age. But he was not a normal man; and as they showered him with honours, they also stuffed him with vegetables. How cunningly different their attacks on him now were. They came with a smile, and several glasses of vodka, and sympathetic jokes about giving the First Secretary bellyache, and then the flattery, and the wheedling, and the silences and the expectations … and sometimes he was drunk, and sometimes he hadn’t really known what was happening until he got home, or went to the apartment of a friend, where he might collapse in tears and sobs and cries of self-loathing. It had got to the point where he despised being the person he was, on an almost daily basis. He should have died years ago.

Also, they had killed Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk a second time. It had been banned for twenty years, since the day Molotov, Mikoyan and Zhdanov had chortled and sneered away while Stalin skulked behind a curtain. With Stalin and Zhdanov dead, and the Thaw declared, he had revised the opera with the help of Glikman, his friend and helpmeet since the early Thirties. Glikman, who had sat beside him the day he pasted ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ into his scrapbook. Their new version went to the Leningrad Maly Theatre, who applied for permission to stage it. But the process stalled, and he was advised that the best hope of accelerating it was for the composer himself to write a letter petitioning the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Which was of course humiliating, because the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR was none other than Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov.

Still, he wrote the letter, and the Ministry of Culture appointed a committee to examine this new version. As a gesture of respect to the nation’s most distinguished composer, the committee would come to his apartment on the Mozhaiskoye Highway. Glikman was there, as were the director of the Maly Theatre and its orchestra’s conductor. The committee itself consisted of the composers Kabalevsky and Chulaki, the musicologist Khubov and the conductor Tselikovsky. He had been very nervous before their arrival. He handed them typed copies of the libretto. Then he played through the entire opera, singing all the parts, while Maxim sat at his elbow and turned the score.

There had been a pause, which extended into an awkward silence, and then the committee began its work. Twenty years had passed, and they were not four men of power sitting in a bulletproof box; instead, they were four men of music – sophisticated men with no blood on their hands – sitting in the apartment of a fellow musician. And yet it was as if nothing had changed. They compared what they had heard with what had been written two decades previously, and found it just as wanting. They argued that since ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ had never been officially withdrawn, its tenets were still applicable. One of them being that his music hooted and quacked and grunted and gasped for breath. Glikman had tried to argue but was shouted down by Khubov. Kabalevsky praised certain sections of the work while asserting that as a whole it was morally reprehensible because it justified the actions of a murderess and whore. The two from the Maly Theatre were silent; he himself sat on the sofa with his eyes closed, listening to the committee members seek to outdo one another in abuse.

They voted unanimously not to recommend the opera’s revival because of its glaring artistic and ideological faults. Kabalevsky, seeking to ingratiate, had said to him,

‘Mitya, why the hurry? The time for your opera has not yet come.’

Nor, it seemed to him, would it ever now come. He had thanked the committee for their ‘critique’, and then gone with Glikman to the private room of the Aragvi restaurant, where they had got very drunk. That was one of the few advantages he found in age: he no longer collapsed after a couple of glasses. He could go on getting drunk all night if he so wished.

Diaghilev was always trying to persuade Rimsky-Korsakov to come to Paris. The composer kept on refusing. Eventually, the lordly impresario came up with a stratagem which effectively compelled the composer’s presence. A resigned Korsakov sent a postcard which read: ‘If we’re going, then let’s go, as the parrot said to the cat which was dragging it downstairs by the tail.’

Yes, that was what his life had often felt like. And his head had been bumped on far too many steps.

He had always been a meticulous man. He visited the barber every two months and the dentist just as often – being as anxious as he was meticulous. He was always washing his hands; he emptied ashtrays as soon as he saw two stubs in them. He liked to know that things were working properly: water, electricity, plumbing. His calendar was marked with the birthdays of family, friends and colleagues, and there would always be a card or a telegram for those on the list. When visiting his dacha outside Moscow, his first action was always to send himself a postcard to check the reliability of the mail. If this at times became a slight mania, it was a necessary one. If the wider world becomes uncontrollable, you must make sure to control what areas you can. However tiny they might be.

His body was just as nervous as it always had been; perhaps more so. But his mind no longer skittered; nowadays, it limped carefully from one anxiety to the next.

He wondered what the young man with the skittering mind would have made of the old man staring out from the back seat of his chauffeured car.

He wondered what happened at the end of that Maupassant story which had so struck him as a young man: the story about passionate, reckless love. Was the reader told the aftermath of the lovers’ dramatic tryst? He must check, if he could find the book.

Did he still believe in Free Love? Perhaps so; theoretically; for the young, the adventurous, the carefree. But when children came along, you could not have both parents pursuing their own pleasure – not without causing unconscionable damage. He had known couples who were so set on their own sexual freedom that their children had ended up in orphanages.

That cost was far too high. So there had to be some accommodation. This was what life consisted of, once you got past the part where everything smelt of carnation oil. For instance, one partner might practise Free Love while the other looked after the children. More often it was the man who took such freedom; but in some cases it was the woman. That was how his own case might look to someone from a distance, not knowing all the details. Such a spectator would see Nina Vasilievna away a lot, for work or pleasure, or both at the same time. She was not fitted for domesticity, Nita, neither by temperament nor habit.

One person could truly believe in the rights of another person – in their right to Free Love. But yes, between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish. And so he had buried himself in his music, which took his entire attention and therefore consoled him. Though when he was present in his music he was inevitably absent from his children. And sometimes, it was true, he had had his own flirtations. More than flirtations. He had tried to do his best, which was all a man could do.

Nina Vasilievna had been so full of joy and life, so outgoing, so comfortable in her own skin, that it was hardly surprising others loved her too. This was what he told himself; and it was true, and quite understandable, if, at times, painful. But he also knew that she loved him, and had protected him from many things he was unable or unwilling to deal with himself; also, that she was proud of him. All this was important. Because that person looking in from the outside, who did not understand, would understand even less what happened when she died. She was away in Armenia with A. at the time and suddenly fell ill. He had flown out with Galya, but Nita had died almost as soon as they arrived.

To state just the facts: he had returned to Moscow by train with Galya. Nina Vasilievna’s body was flown back, escorted by A. At the funeral all was black and white and scarlet: earth, snow, and red roses provided by A. At the graveside he held A. close to him. And stayed near to him – or rather, kept A. near to him – for the next month or so. And thereafter, when he went to visit Nita, there were often red roses from A. strewn all over the grave. He found the sight of them comforting. Some people would not understand this.

He had once asked Nita if she was planning to leave him. She had laughed and replied, ‘Not unless A. discovers a new particle and wins the Nobel Prize.’ And he had laughed too, not being able to calculate the likelihood of either event. Some would not understand that he had laughed. Well, this was no surprise.

There was one thing he did resent. When all of them were staying on the Black Sea, usually at different sanatoriums, A. would arrive in his Buick to take Nita for a drive. Such drives were not a problem. And he always had his music – he had the knack of finding a piano, wherever he was. A. did not drive, so he had a chauffeur. No, the chauffeur was not the problem either. The problem was the Buick. A. had bought the Buick from a repatriated Armenian. And he had been allowed to do so. That was the problem. Prokofiev was allowed his Ford; A. was allowed his Buick; Slava Rostropovich had been allowed an Opel, another Opel, a Land Rover and then a Mercedes. He, Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich, was not permitted to have a foreign car. Over the years, he could choose between a KIM-10-50 and a GAZ-MI and a Pobeda and a Moskvich and a Volga … So yes, he envied A. the Buick with its chrome and leather and fancy lights and fins, and the different noise it made, and the stir it created wherever it went. It was almost like a physical being, that Buick. And his wife Nina Vasilievna, with golden eyes, was in it. And for all his principles, that too was sometimes a problem.

He found the Maupassant story, the one about love without boundaries, love without thought for the morrow. What he had forgotten was that on the morrow, the young garrison commandant was severely reprimanded for the fake emergency, and his entire battalion punished by being transferred to the other end of France. And then Maupassant had allowed himself to speculate on his own narrative. Perhaps this was not, as the writer had first presumed, a heroic tale of love worthy of Homer and the Ancients, but instead some cheap, modern story out of Paul de Kock; and perhaps the commandant was even now boasting to a messful of fellow officers about his melodramatic gesture and its sexual reward. Such contamination of romance was all too likely in the modern world, Maupassant concluded; even if the initial gesture, and the night of love, remained, and had their own purity.

He pondered the story, and thought back over some of the things that had happened in his life. Nita’s joy in another’s admiration; her joke about the Nobel Prize. And now he wondered if perhaps he should see himself differently: as Monsieur Parisse, that businessman husband, locked out of the town, obliged at bayonet point to spend a night in the waiting room of Antibes railway station.

He switched his attention back to the chauffeur’s ear. In the West, a chauffeur was a servant. In the Soviet Union, a chauffeur was a member of a well-paid and dignified profession. After the war, many chauffeurs were engineers with military experience. You knew to treat your chauffeur with respect. You never criticised his driving, or the state of the car, because the slightest such comment often resulted in the car being laid up for a fortnight with some mysterious illness. You also ignored the fact that when you did not require your chauffeur, he was probably off working on his own account, making extra money. So you deferred to him, and this was right: in certain respects, he was more important than you. There were chauffeurs so successful that they had their own chauffeurs. Were there composers so successful that they had others to compose for them? Probably; such rumours were common. It was said that Khrennikov was so busy being loved by Power that he only had time to sketch out his music, which others orchestrated for him. Perhaps this was the case, but if so, it did not matter very much: the music would be no better and no worse if Khrennikov had orchestrated it himself.

Khrennikov was still there. Zhdanov’s stooge, who had so eagerly threatened and bullied; who had persecuted even his own former teacher Shebalin; who acted as if he personally signed every chit allowing composers to buy manuscript paper. Khrennikov, picked out by Stalin as one fisherman picks out another from afar.

Those obliged to play the customer to Khrennikov’s shop clerk liked to tell a certain story about him. One day, the First Secretary of the Union of Composers was summoned to the Kremlin to discuss candidates for the Stalin Prize. The list had been drawn up as usual by the Union, but it was Stalin who made the final choice. On this occasion, and for whatever reason, Stalin decided not to play the avuncular Helmsman, but to remind the clerk of his own humble standing. Khrennikov was shown in; Stalin ignored him, pretending to work. Khrennikov became more and more anxious. Stalin looked up. Khrennikov mumbled something about the list of candidates. In return, Stalin ‘gave him the eye’, as they say. And immediately, Khrennikov shat himself. Panicked, and babbling some excuse, he fled from the presence of Power. Outside, he found a couple of burly male nurses, well used to such a response, who grabbed him, took him to a special room, hosed him down, cleaned him up, let him recover himself, and gave him back his trousers.

Such behaviour was not, of course, abnormal. And you certainly did not despise a man for the weakness of his bowels when in the presence of a tyrant who could obliterate anybody on a whim. No, what you despised Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov for was this: that he recounted his shame with rapture.

Now Stalin was gone, and Zhdanov was gone, and tyranny was repudiated – but Khrennikov was still there, unbudgeable, sucking up to the new bosses as he had sucked up to the old ones; admitting that, yes, some mistakes might have been made, but if so, all had happily been corrected. Khrennikov would outlast them all, of course, but some day even he would die. Unless this was one law of nature which didn’t apply: perhaps Tikhon Khrennikov would live for ever, a permanent and necessary symbol of the man who loved Power and knew how to make it love him back. And if not Khrennikov himself, then his doubles and his descendants: they would live on for ever, regardless of how society changed.

He liked to think that he wasn’t afraid of death. It was life he was afraid of, not death. He believed that people should think about death more often, and accustom themselves to the notion of it. Just letting it creep up on you unnoticed was not the best way to live. You should make yourself familiar with it. You should write about it: either in words or, in his case, music. It was his belief that if we thought about death earlier in our lives, we would make fewer mistakes.

Not that he hadn’t made a lot of mistakes himself.

And sometimes he thought that he would have made the same number of mistakes even if he hadn’t been so frequently concerned with death.

And sometimes he thought that death was indeed the thing that terrified him the most.

His second marriage: that had been one of his mistakes. Nita had died, and then, barely a year later, his mother had died. The two strongest female presences in his life: his guides, instructors, protectresses. He had been very lonely. His opera had just been murdered a second time. He knew that he was incapable of frivolous relationships with women; he needed a wife by his side. And so, while serving as chairman of the jury for Best Massed Choir at the World Festival of Youth, his eye had fallen on Margarita. Some said she resembled Nina Vasilievna, but he couldn’t see it himself. She worked for the Communist Youth Organisation, and had perhaps been deliberately placed in his way, though that was no excuse. She had no knowledge of, and little interest in, music. She had tried to please, but failed. None of his friends liked her, or approved of the marriage, which of course had taken place suddenly and secretly. Galya and Maxim did not take to her – what could he expect, when she had so quickly replaced their mother? – and therefore she did not take to them. One day, when she was complaining about them, he said, with a completely straight face,

‘Why don’t we kill the children, then we can live happily ever after?’

She neither understood the remark, nor seemed to realise that it was humorous.

They separated, then divorced. It was not her fault: it was entirely his. He had put Margarita in an impossible position. In his loneliness, he had panicked. Well, that was nothing new.

As well as running volleyball competitions, he had also served as a tennis umpire. Once, at a sanatorium in the Crimea reserved for government officials, he had found himself in charge of a match involving General Serov, then head of the KGB. Whenever the general disputed a let or a line-call, he would take pleasure in his temporary authority. ‘No arguing with the umpire,’ he would command. This had been one of the few conversations with Power that he had enjoyed.

Had he been naive? Of course. But then, he had become so used to threats and intimidations and vile abuse that he was not as suspicious of praise and welcoming words as he should have been. Nor was he the only dupe. When Nikita the Corncob denounced the Cult of Personality, when Stalin’s errors were acknowledged and some of his victims posthumously rehabilitated, when people started returning from the camps, and when One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published, how could men and women fail to hope? No matter that the toppling of Stalin meant the restoration of Lenin, that changes of political line were often merely intended to outflank rivals, and that Solzhenitsyn’s novel was in his opinion reality varnished over, and the truth ten times worse: even so, how could men and women fail to hope, or believe that the new rulers were better than the old ones?

And that, of course, was the point at which the grabbing hands reached out towards him. See how things have changed, Dmitri Dmitrievich, how you are garlanded with honours, an ornament of the nation, how we let you travel abroad to receive prizes and degrees as an ambassador of the Soviet Union – see how we value you! We trust the dacha and the chauffeur are to your satisfaction, is there anything else you require, Dmitri Dmitrievich, have another glass of vodka, your car will be waiting however many times we clink glasses. Life under the First Secretary is so much better, would you not agree?

And by any scale of measurement, he had to agree. It was better, in the way that the life of a prisoner in solitary confinement is improved if he is given a cellmate, allowed to climb up to the bars and sniff the autumn air, and if the warder no longer spits in his soup – at least, not in the prisoner’s presence. Yes, in that sense it was better. Which is why, Dmitri Dmitrievich, the Party wants to hug you to its bosom. We all remember how you were victimised during the Cult of Personality, but the Party has indulged in fruitful self-criticism. Happier times have come. So all we would like from you is an acknowledgement that the Party has changed. Which is not much to ask, is it, Dmitri Dmitrievich?

Dmitri Dmitrievich. All those years ago, he was intended to be Yaroslav Dmitrievich. Until his father and mother had allowed themselves to be talked out of the name by a bullying priest. You could say that his parents were merely displaying good manners, and proper piety, under their own roof. Or you could say that he had been born – or at least christened – beneath the star of cowardice.

The man they chose for his Third and Final Conversation with Power was Pyotr Nikolayevich Pospelov. Member of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Federation, chief ideologist of the Party throughout the Forties, former editor of Pravda, author of one of those books he had failed to read when tutored by Comrade Troshin. A plausible face with one of his six Orders of Lenin in his buttonhole. Pospelov had been a great supporter of Stalin until he became a great supporter of Khrushchev. He could explain fluently how Stalin’s defeat of Trotsky had preserved the purity of Leninism in the Soviet Union. Nowadays Stalin was out of favour but Lenin was back in favour. A few more turns of the wheel and Nikita the Corncob would be out of favour; a few more after that and perhaps Stalin and Stalinism would be back. And the Pospelovs of this world – like the Khrennikovs – would sense each shift before it came, would have their ear to the ground and their eye to the main chance and their wetted finger in the air to apprehend any change of wind.

But that was no matter. What mattered was that Pospelov was his interlocutor in his final, and most ruinous Conversation with Power.

‘I have excellent news,’ Pospelov announced, drawing him to one side at some reception he had only attended because they had never stopped inviting him. ‘Nikita Sergeyevich has personally announced an initiative to have you appointed Chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers.’

‘That is far too great an honour,’ he had instinctively replied.

‘But not one, coming from the First Secretary, that you could possibly refuse.’

‘I am not worthy of such an honour.’

‘Perhaps it is not for you to judge your worthiness. Nikita Sergeyevich is better placed than you in this regard.’

‘I could not possibly accept.’

‘Come, come, Dmitri Dmitrievich, you have accepted high honours from across the world, which we have been gratified to see you accept. So I cannot possibly see how you can reject one offered by your own homeland.’

‘I regret I have such little time. I am a composer, not a chairman.’

‘It would take very little of your time. We would see to that.’

‘I am a composer not a chairman.’

‘You are our greatest living composer. Everyone acknowledges you as such. Your difficult years are behind you. That is why it is so important.’

‘I do not follow you.’

‘Dmitri Dmitrievich, we all know how you did not escape certain consequences during the Cult of Personality. Even though, if I may say so, you were more protected than most.’

‘I can assure you that it didn’t feel that way.’

‘And this is why it is so important that you accept the chairmanship. To demonstrate that the Cult of Personality is over. To put it straightforwardly, Dmitri Dmitrievich, the changes wrought under the First Secretary, if they are to be made secure, need to be supported by public declarations and appointments such as the one proposed.’

‘I am always happy to sign a letter.’

‘You know that is not what I am asking.’

‘I am unworthy,’ he had repeated, adding, ‘I am nothing but a worm beside the First Secretary.’

He doubted the allusion would be picked up by Pospelov, who indeed chuckled disbelievingly.

‘I am sure we shall be able to overcome your natural modesty, Dmitri Dmitrievich. But we shall talk more at another time.’

Each morning, instead of prayer, he would recite to himself two poems by Evtushenko. One was ‘Career’, which described how lives are led beneath the shadow of Power:

In Galileo’s day, a fellow scientist

Was no more stupid than Galileo.

He was well aware that the Earth revolved,

But he also had a large family to feed.

It was a poem about conscience and endurance:

But time has a way of demonstrating

The most stubborn are the most intelligent.

Was that true? He could never quite decide. The poem ended by marking the difference between ambition and artistic truthfulness:

I shall therefore pursue my career

By trying not to pursue one.

These verses both comforted and questioned him. He was, for all his anxieties and fearfulness and Leningrad civility, at base a stubborn man who had tried to pursue the truth in music as he had seen it.

But ‘Career’ was essentially about conscience; and his own accused him. What use, after all, is a conscience unless, like a tongue probing teeth for cavities, it seeks out areas of weakness, duplicity, cowardice, self-deception? If he went to the dentist every two months, always suspecting that something was wrong in his mouth, then he examined his conscience on a daily basis, always suspecting that something was wrong in his soul. There were many things to accuse himself of: acts of omission, fallings-short, compromises made, the coin paid to Caesar. At times he saw himself as both Galileo and that fellow scientist, the one with mouths to feed. He had been as courageous as his nature allowed; but conscience was always there to insist that more courage could have been shown.

He hoped, and tried, in the subsequent weeks, to avoid Pospelov, but there he was again one evening, coming towards him among the chat and the hypocrisy and the brimming glasses.

‘So, Dmitri Dmitrievich, have you thought the matter over?’

‘Oh, I am quite unworthy, as I told you.’

‘I have passed on your agreement to seriously consider the chairmanship, and told Nikita Sergeyevich that only your modesty is holding you back.’

He paused to consider this distortion of their previous conversation, but Pospelov was hurrying on.

‘Come, come, Dmitri Dmitrievich, there is a point at which modesty becomes a kind of vanity. We are counting on you to accept, and you will accept. Of course, as we both know, the chairmanship of the Russian Federation Union of Composers is not what this is about. And that is why I completely understand your hesitation. But we are all agreed that now the time has come.’

‘What time has come?’

‘Well, you cannot become chairman of the Union without joining the Party. It would be against all constitutional rules. Of course you knew that. It was why you hesitated. But I can assure you, there will be no obstacles put before you. It is really no more that a question of signing the application form. We shall take care of the rest.’

He felt, suddenly, as if all the breath had been taken out of his body. How, why had he not seen this coming? All through the years of terror, he had been able to say that at least he had never tried to make things easier for himself by becoming a Party member. And now, finally, after the great fear was over, they had come for his soul.

He tried to collect himself before replying, but even so, what he said came out in a rush.

‘Pyotr Nikolayevich, I am quite unworthy, quite unsuitable. I do not have a political nature. I have to admit that I have never truly grasped the basic tenets of Marxism–Leninism. Indeed, they once appointed a tutor for me, Comrade Troshin, and I dutifully read all the books they provided, including, as I remember, one of yours, but I made such poor progress that I fear I must wait until I am better equipped.’

‘Dmitri Dmitrievich, we all know about that unfortunate and – if I may say so – unnecessary appointment of a political tutor. So demeaning for you, and such a characteristic of life under the Cult of Personality. All the more reason to show how times have changed, and that members of the Party are not expected to have a deep grasp of political theory. Nowadays, under Nikita Sergeyevich, we all breathe more freely. The First Secretary is still a young man, and his plans extend over many years. It is important to us that you are seen to approve these new paths, this new freedom to breathe.’

He certainly felt little freedom to breathe at the moment, and reached for another defence.

‘The truth is, Pyotr Nikolayevich, that I have certain religious beliefs which, as I understand it, are quite incompatible with Party membership.’

‘Beliefs which you have wisely kept to yourself for many years, of course you have. And since they are not publicly known, this is not a problem we need to overcome. We shall not be sending you a tutor to help you with this … how shall I put it, this old-fashioned eccentricity.’

‘Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Christian Scientist,’ he replied musingly. Aware that this was not strictly apropos, he then asked, ‘You do not mean that you are going to reopen the churches?’

‘No, I am not saying that, Dmitri Dmitrievich. But of course, now that sweeter air surrounds us, who knows what we shall soon be free to discuss. Free to discuss with our new and distinguished Party member.’

‘And yet,’ he replied, swerving from the numinous to the particular, ‘and yet – you will correct me if I am wrong, but there is no overriding reason why a Union chairman has to be a Party member.’

‘It would be inconceivable for this not to be the case.’

‘And yet Konstantin Fedin and Leonid Sobolev were high up in the Union of Writers, and they were not Party members.’

‘Indeed. But who has heard of Fedin and Sobelev compared to those who know the name of Shostakovich? This is not an argument. You are the most famous, the most celebrated of our composers. It would be inconceivable for you to be Union chairman without being a Party member. All the more so as Nikita Sergeyevich has such plans for the future development of music in the Soviet Union.’

Scenting a way out, he asked, ‘What plans? I have read nothing about his plans for music.’

‘Of course not. Because you will be invited to help the appropriate committee formulate them.’

‘I cannot join a party which has banned my music.’

‘What music of yours is banned, Dmitri Dmitrievich? Forgive me for not …’

‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. It was banned first under the Cult of Personality, and banned again after the Cult of Personality was overthrown.’

‘Yes,’ replied Pospelov soothingly, ‘I can see how that might appear to be a difficulty. But let me speak to you as one practical man to another. The best way, the likeliest way, for you to get your opera performed is for you to join the Party. You have to give something to get something in this world.’

The man’s slipperiness enraged him. And so he reached for his final argument.

‘Then let me reply to you as one practical man to another. I have always said, and it has been one of the fundamental principles of my life, that I would never join a party which kills.’

Pospelov did not miss a beat. ‘But that is precisely my point, Dmitri Dmitrievich. We – the Party – have changed. No one is being killed nowadays. Can you name me one person you know who has been killed under Nikita Sergeyevich? One single person? On the contrary, victims of the Cult of Personality are returning to normal life. The names of those who were purged are being rehabilitated. We need such work to continue. The forces of the camp of reaction are ever-present, and should not be underestimated. That is why we ask for your help – by joining the camp of progress.’

He left the encounter exhausted. Then, there was another meeting. And another. It seemed that, wherever he turned, he saw Pospelov, glass in hand, coming towards him. The man even began to inhabit his dreams, always speaking in a calm, rational voice, and yet one driving him to madness. What had he ever wanted except to be left alone? He confided in Glikman, but not in his family. He drank, he was unable to work, his nerves were shredded. There was only so much a man could bear in his life.

1936; 1948; 1960. They had come for him every twelve years. And each of them, of course, a leap year.

‘He could not live with himself.’ It was just a phrase, but an exact one. Under the pressure of Power, the self cracks and splits. The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they – he – had once fitted together.

His friend Slava Rostropovich maintained that the greater the artistic talent, the better able it was to withstand persecution. Maybe that was true of others – certainly it was of Slava, who had in any case such an optimistic disposition. And who was younger, and did not know how it had been in earlier decades. Or what it was like to have your spirit, your nerve, broken. Once that nerve was gone, you couldn’t replace it like a violin string. Something deep in your soul was missing, and all you had left was – what? – a certain tactical cunning, an ability to play the unworldly artist, and a determination to protect your music and your family at any price. Well, he finally thought – in a mood so drained of colour and resolution that it could scarcely be called a mood – perhaps this is today’s price.

And so, he submitted to Pospelov, as a dying man submits to a priest. Or as a traitor, his mind numb with vodka, submits to a firing squad. He thought of suicide, of course, when he signed the paper put in front of him; but since he was already committing moral suicide, what would be the point of physical suicide? It wasn’t even a question of lacking the courage to buy and hide and swallow the pills. It was rather that now, at this juncture, he lacked even the self-respect that suicide required.

But he was enough of a coward to run away, like the little boy slipping from his mother’s grasp as they neared Jurgensen’s hut. He signed the application form to join the Party, then fled to Leningrad and holed up with his sister. They could have his soul but not his body. They could announce that the distinguished composer had proved himself a true worm and joined the Party in order to help Nikita the Corncob develop his wonderful, if as yet perfectly unformed, ideas about the future of Soviet music. But they could announce his moral death without him. He would stay with his sister until it was all over.

Then the telegrams began to arrive. The official announcement would take place in Moscow on such-and-such a date. His presence was not just requested but required. No matter, he thought, I shall stay in Leningrad and if they want me in Moscow they will have to tie me up and drag me there. Let the world see how they recruit new Party members, by trussing them up and transporting them like sacks of onions.

Naive, as naive as any terrified rabbit. He sent a telegram saying he was unwell and regrettably unable to attend his own execution. They replied that the announcement would therefore wait until he was better. And in the meantime, of course, the news had slipped out and was all over Moscow. Friends telephoned, journalists telephoned: of which was he the more scared? And so, there is no escaping one’s fate. And so, he returned to Moscow and read out yet another prepared statement, to the effect that he had applied to join the Party and that his petition had been granted. It seemed that Soviet power had finally decided to love him; and he had never felt a clammier embrace.

When he had married Nina Vasilievna, he had been too scared to tell his mother beforehand. When he had joined the Party, he had been too scared to tell his children beforehand. The line of cowardice in his life was the one thing that ran straight and true.

Maxim only ever saw his father weep twice: when Nina died, and when he joined the Party.

And so, he was a coward. And so, one spins around like a squirrel on a wheel. And so, he would put all his remaining courage into his music, and his cowardice into his life. No, that was all too … comforting. To say: Oh, excuse me, but you see I am a coward, there’s really nothing I can do about it, Your Excellency, comrade, Great Leader, old friend, wife, daughter, son. That would make it uncomplicated, and life always refused simplicity. For instance, he had been afraid of Stalin’s power, but not of Stalin himself: neither on the telephone, nor in person. For instance, he was capable of interceding for others where he would never dare intercede for himself. He surprised himself at times. So perhaps he was not entirely hopeless.

But it was not easy being a coward. Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment – when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change – which made it, in a way, a kind of courage. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette. The pleasures of irony had not yet deserted him.

Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich has joined the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. 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.

He had always loved football, all through his life. He had long dreamt of composing an anthem for the game. He was a qualified referee. He kept a special notebook in which he recorded the season’s results. In his younger days he had supported Dinamo, and once flew thousands of miles to Tbilisi just to watch a game. That was the point: you had to be there when it happened, surrounded by crowds of people all going mad and screaming. Nowadays, people watched football on television. To him, this was like drinking mineral water instead of Stolichnaya vodka, export strength.

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

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

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

‘Tito’s stooge!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The final wail in his head was about his life as well as his art. It was this: at what point does pessimism become desolation? His last chamber works articulated that question. He told the violist Fyodor Druzhinin that the first movement of his Fifteenth Quartet should be played ‘so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom’.

All his life he had relied on irony. He imagined that the trait had been born in the usual place: in the gap between how we imagine, or suppose, or hope life will turn out, and the way it actually does. So irony becomes a defence of the self and the soul; it lets you breathe on a day-to-day basis. You write in a letter that someone is ‘a marvellous person’ and the recipient knows to conclude the opposite. Irony allows you to parrot the jargon of Power, to read out meaningless speeches written in your name, to gravely lament the absence of Stalin’s portrait in your study while behind a half-open door your wife is holding herself in against forbidden laughter. You welcome the appointment of a new Minister of Culture by commenting that there will be especial rejoicing in progressive musical circles, which have always placed their greatest hopes in him. You write a final movement to your Fifth Symphony which is the equivalent of painting a clown’s grin on a corpse, then listen with a straight face to Power’s response: ‘Look, you can see he died happy, certain of the righteous and inevitable triumph of the Revolution.’ And part of you believed that as long as you could rely on irony, you would be able to survive.

For instance, in the year in which he joined the Party, he wrote his Eighth Quartet. He told his friends that in his mind the work was dedicated ‘to the memory of the composer’. Which would clearly have been regarded by the musical authorities as unacceptably egotistical and pessimistic. And so the dedication on the published score eventually read: ‘To the Victims of Fascism and War’. This would no doubt have been viewed as a great improvement. But all he had really done was turn a singular into a plural.

However, he was no longer so sure. There could be a smugness to irony, as there could be a complacency to protest. A farm boy throws an apple core at a passing, chauffeur-driven car. A drunken beggar pulls down his trousers and bares his bottom to respectable folk. A distinguished Soviet composer inserts subtle mockery into a symphony or a string quartet. Was there a difference, either in motive, or in effect?

Irony, he had come to realise, was as vulnerable to the accidents of life and time as any other sense. You woke up one morning and no longer knew if your tongue was in your cheek; and even if it was, whether that mattered any more, whether anyone noticed. You imagined you were issuing a beam of ultraviolet light, but what if it failed to register because it was off the spectrum known to everyone else? He had inserted into his first cello concerto a reference to ‘Suliko’, Stalin’s favourite song. But Rostropovich had played straight over it without noticing. If the allusion had to be pointed out to Slava, who else in the world would ever spot it?

And irony had its limits. For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture. Equally, you couldn’t join the Party ironically. You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically: those were the only two possibilities. And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible. His younger self, by the side of the road, would see in the back of that car some wizened old sunflower, no longer turning towards the sun of Stalin’s constitution, but still heliotropic, still drawn to the light-source of Power.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

Beneath the glass of his desktop at the dacha in Zhukhova was an enormous photograph of Mussorgsky looking ursine and disapproving: it urged him to throw away inferior work. Beneath the glass of his desktop at his Moscow apartment was an enormous photograph of Stravinsky, the greatest composer of the century: it urged him to write the best music he could. And always, on his bedside table, was that postcard he had brought back from Dresden: of Titian’s The Tribute Money.

The Pharisees had tried to trick Jesus by asking him if the Jews ought to pay taxes to Caesar. As Power, throughout history, always tried to dupe and subvert those it felt threatened by. He himself had tried not to fall for Power’s tricks, but he was not Jesus Christ, only Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. And while Jesus’s reply to the Pharisee who showed him Caesar’s golden image was in fact usefully ambiguous – he did not specify what exactly belonged to God and what to Caesar – this was not a line he could repeat himself. ‘Render unto art that which is art’s?’ Such was the creed of art for art’s sake, of formalism, egocentric pessimism, revisionism, and all the other -isms thrown at him down the years. And Power’s reply would always be the same: ‘Repeat after me,’ it would say, ‘ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE – V. I. LENIN. ART BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE – V. I. LENIN.’

And so, he would die soon, probably during the next leap year. Then, one by one, they would all die: his friends and enemies; those who understood the complexities of life under tyranny, and those who would have preferred him to be a martyr; those who knew and loved his music, and a few old men who still whistled ‘The Song of the Counterplan’ without even knowing who had written it. All would die – except, perhaps, Khrennikov.

During his last years, he increasingly used the marking morendo in his string quartets: ‘dying away’, ‘as if dying’. It was how he marked his own life too. Well, few lives ended fortissimo and in the major. And no one died at the right time. Mussorgsky, Pushkin, Lermontov – they had all died too soon. Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Gogol – they all should have died earlier; perhaps Beethoven as well. It was, of course, not just a problem for famous writers and composers, but for ordinary people too: the problem of living beyond your best span, beyond that point where life can no longer bring joy, instead only disappointment and dreadful happenings.

So, he had lived long enough to be dismayed by himself. This was often the way with artists: either they succumbed to vanity, thinking themselves greater than they were, or else to disappointment. Nowadays, he was often inclined to think of himself as a dull, mediocre composer. The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

And beyond death? He felt like raising a silent glass with the toast, ‘Here’s hoping it doesn’t get any better than this!’ If death would come as a relief from life, with its fur-lined humiliations, he did not expect things would become less complicated. Look what had happened to poor Prokofiev. Five years after his death, just as the memorial plaques were being installed across Moscow, his first wife was instructing lawyers to get the composer’s second marriage annulled. And on what grounds! The grounds being that ever since his return to Russia in 1936, Sergei Sergeyevich had been impotent. Therefore his second marriage couldn’t have been consummated; therefore she, the first wife, was his only legal wife, and his only legal heir. She was even demanding an affidavit from the doctor who had examined Sergei Sergeyevich two decades previously that his incapacity had been established as an irrefutable fact.

But this was what happened. They came and delved between your sheets. Hey, Shosti, do your prefer blondes or brunettes? They looked for any weakness, any filth they could find. And they would always find something. The gossips and myth-mongers had their own version of formalism, as defined by Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev: anything we cannot understand on first hearing is probably immoral and disgusting – that was their attitude. And they would do with his life what they wished.

As for his music: he didn’t suffer from the illusion that time would separate the good from the bad. He did not see why posterity should be able to calibrate quality better than those for whom the music was written. He was too disillusioned for that. Posterity would approve what it would approve. He knew all too well how composers’ reputations rose and fell; how some were wrongly forgotten, and others mysteriously immortal. His modest wish for the future was that ‘The Chrysanthemums in the Garden Have Long Since Faded’ would continue to make men weep, however badly it was sung through some cracked amplifier in a cheap cafe; while, further along the road, an audience might be silently moved by one of his string quartets; and that, perhaps, one day not long ahead, both audiences might overlap and mingle.

He had instructed his family not to concern themselves with his ‘immortality’. His music should be played on its merit, not because of some posthumous campaign. Among the many petitioners who besieged him nowadays was the widow of a well-known composer. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody’ – such was her constant refrain. She was always telling him that he only had to ‘lift the receiver’ and instruct this or that person to play her late husband’s music. He had done so many times, at first out of pity and politeness, later just to get rid of the woman. But it was never enough. ‘My husband is dead and I have nobody.’ And so he would lift the receiver yet again.

But one day the familiar words had provoked more than the familiar exasperation in him. So he had replied solemnly, ‘Yes … yes … And Johann Sebastian Bach had twenty children and they all promoted his music.’

‘Exactly,’ agreed the widow. ‘And that is why his music is still being played today!’

What he hoped was that death would liberate his music: liberate it from his life. Time would pass, and though musicologists would continue their debates, his work would begin to stand for itself. History, as well as biography, would fade: perhaps one day Fascism and Communism would be merely words in textbooks. And then, if it still had value – if there were still ears to hear – his music would be … just music. That was all a composer could hope for. Whom does music belong to, he had asked that trembling student, and though the reply was written in capital letters on a banner behind her interrogator’s head, the girl could not answer. Not being able to answer was the correct answer. Because music, in the end, belonged to music. That was all you could say, or wish for.

The beggar would be long dead by now, and Dmitri Dmitrievich had almost immediately forgotten what he had said. But the one whose name is lost to history remembered. He was the one who made sense of it, who understood. They were in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a war, in the middle of all kinds of suffering within that war. There was a long station platform, on which the sun had just come up. There was a man, half a man really, wheeling himself along on a trolley, attached to it by a rope threaded through the top of his trousers. The two passengers had a bottle of vodka. They descended from the train. The beggar stopped singing his filthy song. Dmitri Dmitrievich held the bottle, he the glasses. Dmitri Dmitrievich poured vodka into each glass; as he did so, a wristlet of garlic slipped into view. He was no barman, and the level of vodka in each glass was slightly different. The beggar saw only what came out of the bottle; while he was thinking how Mitya was always anxious to help others, though temperamentally incapable of helping himself. But Dmitri Dmitrievich was listening, and hearing, as he always did. So when the three glasses with their different levels came together in a single chink, he had smiled, and put his head on one side so that the sunlight flashed briefly off his spectacles, and murmured,

‘A triad.’

And that was what the one who remembered had remembered. War, fear, poverty, typhus and filth, yet in the middle of it, above it and beneath it and through it all, Dmitri Dmitrievich had heard a perfect triad. The war would end, no doubt – unless it never did. Fear would continue, and unwarranted death, and poverty and filth – perhaps they too would continue for ever, who could tell. And yet a triad put together by three not very clean vodka glasses and their contents was a sound that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.