The Noise of Time by Barnes Julian

Author:Barnes, Julian [Barnes, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Novel, Dmitri Shostakovich
ISBN: 9781101947241
Google: dRZVCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1910702609
Barnesnoble: 1910702609
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Published: 2016-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

Three: In the Car

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.

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