tribute money, a sum to acknowledge his power, a certain percentage of your calculated worth. But things had moved on, and the new Caesars of the Kremlin had upgraded the system: nowadays your tribute money was calculated at the full 100% of your worth. Or, if possible, more.
When he was a student – those years of cheerfulness, hope and invulnerability – he had slaved for three years as a cinema pianist. He had accompanied the screen at the Piccadilly on Nevsky Prospekt; also at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace. It was hard, demeaning work; some of the proprietors were skinflints who would sack you rather than pay your wages. Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have beem more fun, admittedly.
He tried to watch the screen above him and play appropriate music. The audience preferred the old romantic tunes which were familiar to them; but often, he would get bored, and then play his own compositions. These did not go down so well. In the cinema, it was the opposite from the concert hall: audiences would applaud when they disapproved of something. One evening, while accompanying a film called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden , he found himself in a more than usually satirical mood. First he began to imitate bird calls on the piano, and then, as the marsh and water birds flew higher and higher, the piano worked itself up into a greater and greater passion. There was loud applause, which in his naivety he took to be aimed at the ridiculous film; and so he played all the harder. Afterwards, the audience had complained to the cinema manager: the pianist must have been drunk, what he played was never music, he had insulted the beautiful film and also its audience. The manager had sacked him.
And that, he now realised, had been his career in miniature: hard work, some success, a failure to respect musical norms, official disapproval, suspension of pay, the sack. Except that now he was in the grown-up world, where the sack meant something much more final.
He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected on to the screen. Tanya – his mother applauds. Nina – his mother applauds. Rozaliya – his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba – his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.
His nocturnal vigils lasted for ten days. Nita argued – not from evidence, more from optimism and determination – that the immediate danger had probably passed. Neither of them believed this, but he was weary of standing, of waiting for the lift’s machinery to grind and whirr. He was weary of his own fear. And so he returned to lying in the dark fully clothed, his wife at his side, his overnight bag next to the bed. A few feet away Galya would be sleeping as an infant does, careless about matters of state.
And then, one morning, he picked up his case and opened it. He put his underclothes back in the drawer, his toothbrush and tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet, and his three packets of Kazbeki on his desk.
And he waited for Power to resume its conversation with him. But he never heard from the Big House again.
Not that Power was idle. Many of those around him began to disappear, some to camps, some to execution. His mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, his Old Bolshevik uncle, associates, a former lover. And what of Zakrevsky, who had not come into work that fatal Monday? No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps Zakrevsky had never really existed.
But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work. There would be no rest. ‘We rest only when we dream,’ as Blok put it; though at this time most people’s dreams were not restful. But life continued; soon Nita was pregnant again, and soon he began adding to the opus numbers he had feared would end with the Fourth Symphony.
His Fifth, which he
When he was a student – those years of cheerfulness, hope and invulnerability – he had slaved for three years as a cinema pianist. He had accompanied the screen at the Piccadilly on Nevsky Prospekt; also at the Bright Reel and the Splendid Palace. It was hard, demeaning work; some of the proprietors were skinflints who would sack you rather than pay your wages. Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have beem more fun, admittedly.
He tried to watch the screen above him and play appropriate music. The audience preferred the old romantic tunes which were familiar to them; but often, he would get bored, and then play his own compositions. These did not go down so well. In the cinema, it was the opposite from the concert hall: audiences would applaud when they disapproved of something. One evening, while accompanying a film called Marsh and Water Birds of Sweden , he found himself in a more than usually satirical mood. First he began to imitate bird calls on the piano, and then, as the marsh and water birds flew higher and higher, the piano worked itself up into a greater and greater passion. There was loud applause, which in his naivety he took to be aimed at the ridiculous film; and so he played all the harder. Afterwards, the audience had complained to the cinema manager: the pianist must have been drunk, what he played was never music, he had insulted the beautiful film and also its audience. The manager had sacked him.
And that, he now realised, had been his career in miniature: hard work, some success, a failure to respect musical norms, official disapproval, suspension of pay, the sack. Except that now he was in the grown-up world, where the sack meant something much more final.
He imagined his mother sitting in a cinema while pictures of his girlfriends were projected on to the screen. Tanya – his mother applauds. Nina – his mother applauds. Rozaliya – his mother applauds even harder. Cleopatra, the Venus de Milo, the Queen of Sheba – his mother, ever unimpressed, continues to applaud unsmilingly.
His nocturnal vigils lasted for ten days. Nita argued – not from evidence, more from optimism and determination – that the immediate danger had probably passed. Neither of them believed this, but he was weary of standing, of waiting for the lift’s machinery to grind and whirr. He was weary of his own fear. And so he returned to lying in the dark fully clothed, his wife at his side, his overnight bag next to the bed. A few feet away Galya would be sleeping as an infant does, careless about matters of state.
And then, one morning, he picked up his case and opened it. He put his underclothes back in the drawer, his toothbrush and tooth powder in the bathroom cabinet, and his three packets of Kazbeki on his desk.
And he waited for Power to resume its conversation with him. But he never heard from the Big House again.
Not that Power was idle. Many of those around him began to disappear, some to camps, some to execution. His mother-in-law, his brother-in-law, his Old Bolshevik uncle, associates, a former lover. And what of Zakrevsky, who had not come into work that fatal Monday? No one ever heard from him again. Perhaps Zakrevsky had never really existed.
But there is no escaping one’s destiny; and his, for the moment, was apparently to live. To live and to work. There would be no rest. ‘We rest only when we dream,’ as Blok put it; though at this time most people’s dreams were not restful. But life continued; soon Nita was pregnant again, and soon he began adding to the opus numbers he had feared would end with the Fourth Symphony.
His Fifth, which he
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