The Noise of Time

by Julian Barnes

Like sexual desire, for instance. That came out of the blue, and yet it was perfectly logical.

Pravda. He had looked at the front page briefly, then turned to the next two. It was, as he would later put it, the most memorable day of his life. And a date he chose to mark each year until his death.

perhaps even written it himself: there were enough grammatical errors to suggest the pen of one whose mistakes could never be corrected.

But it was probable that he looked exactly what he was: a man, like hundreds of others across the city, waiting, night after night, for arrest.

Nowadays, in the most advanced society on earth, the parents might pay for the sins of the child, along with uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, colleagues, friends, and even the man who unthinkingly smiled at you as he came out of the lift at three in the morning. The system of retribution had been greatly improved, and was so much more inclusive than it used to be.

He did not come at life directly. He had a special rubber stamp made, so that every item in his library was inscribed with the purple words: ‘This book has been stolen from D. B. Shostakovich.’

it was an enviable skill to be a normal human being, and to wake up every morning with a smile on your face. Also, his father had died young – in his late forties.

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

Who would ensure he drank his milk and ate his porridge if his mother was not seeing to it? Tukhachevsky had the power, the influence, the financial resources; but Sofya Vasilyevna still held the key to his soul. And so he had remained in Leningrad.

And such people, perhaps aware that fame often leads to vanity and self-importance, might open their Pravda and agree that composers could easily stray from writing the kind of music people wanted to hear. And further, since all composers were employed by the state, that it was the state’s duty, if they offended, to intervene and draw them back into greater harmony with their audience. This sounded entirely reasonable, didn’t it?

Except that as early as 1929 he had been officially denounced, told that his music was ‘straying from the main road of Soviet art’, and sacked from his post at the Choreographic Technical College. Except that in the same year Misha Kvadri, the dedicatee of his First Symphony, became the first of his friends and associates to be arrested and shot. Except that in 1932, when the Party

A composer was expected to increase his output just as a coal miner was, and his music was expected to warm hearts just as a miner’s coal warmed bodies. Bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms.

it was ‘non-political and confusing’, and because it ‘tickled the perverted taste of the bourgeois with its fidgety, neurotic music’.

‘The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.’ That was enough to take away his membership of

the Union of Composers. ‘The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.’ That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.’ That was enough to take away his life.

This was a Pravda editorial: not some fleeting judgement which might be appealed against, but a policy statement from the highest level. Holy writ, in other words.

The offence, the full confession of the offence, the priest’s judgement on the matter, the act of contrition, the forgiveness. Though there were occasions when the sin was too great and not even a priest could forgive it. Yes, he knew the formulae and the protocols, whatever name the church might go by.

Such unsoldierly apprehension was not encouraging.

Not even paradise was free of insects.

Their bites were ingeniously made in places inaccessible to him; the lotion was based on an extract of carnation flowers. If a mosquito was the cause of her fingers touching his skin and making him smell of carnations, how could he possibly hold anything against the insect?

They were nineteen and they believed in Free Love: keener tourists of each other’s bodies than ...

If the Red Napoleon had been outmanoeuvred by Sofya Vasilyevna, what chance did he ever have?

Their time at Anapa had been an idyll. But an idyll, by definition, only becomes an idyll once it has ended.

And then

she had got married herself. Which only made him love her the more.

Well, there was no escaping one’s temperament. That too was part of one’s destiny.

This was how you should love – without fear, without barriers, without thought for the morrow. And then, afterwards, without regret.

After a good dinner, he had come back to the bar of the London Hotel and picked up two girls. Or perhaps they had picked him up. At any rate, they had joined his table. They were both very pretty, and he was immediately attracted to the one called Rozaliya. They had talked of art and literature while he fondled her buttocks. He drove them home in a horse-drawn carriage and the friend looked away while he touched Rozaliya all over. He was in love, that much was clear to him.

Meanwhile, old man Gauk sat in the restaurant of the London Hotel, trying to decide whether to have one cutlet or two.

Kazbeki were smoked by artists, and the packet’s very design suggested freedom: a galloping horse and rider against the background of Mount Kazbek. Stalin himself was said to have personally approved the artwork; though the Great Leader smoked his own brand, Herzegovina Flor.

Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.

And so he and Nina met, and they became lovers, but he was still trying to win Tanya back from her husband, and then Tanya fell pregnant, and then he and Nina fixed a day for their wedding, but at the last minute he couldn’t face it so failed to turn up and ran away and hid, but still they persevered and a few months later they married, and then Nina took a lover, and they decided their problems were such that they should separate and divorce, and then he took a lover, and they separated and put in the papers for a divorce, but by the time the divorce came through they realised they had made a mistake and

so six weeks after the divorce they remarried, but still they had not resolved their troubles. And in the middle of it all he wrote to his lover Yelena, ‘I am very weak-willed and do...

And then Nita fell pregnant, and everything of necessity stabilised. Except that, with Nita into her fourth month, the leap year of 1936 began, and on its twenty...

The first was that many people did not want their souls to be engineered, thank you very much.

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

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.

Still, he used to remind himself that Brahms had played the piano at a sailors’ brothel in Hamburg. Which might have been more fun, admittedly.

‘The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,’ as they say.

These had been his spoonfuls of honey in a barrel

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. That

was why the words Soviet Russia were a contradiction in terms. Power had never understood this. It thought that if you killed off enough of the population, and fed the rest a diet of propaganda and terror, then optimism would result. But where was the logic in that? Just as they had kept on telling him, in various ways and words, through musical bureaucrats and newspaper editorials, that what they wanted was ‘an optimistic Shostakovich’. Another contradiction in terms.

Soviet Russia, the most socially advanced nation in history, where it was natural that things were discovered first. So

Who said the age of miracles was past?

And art made tongue-tied by authority

and Petrov had written: ‘It is not enough to love Soviet power. It has to love you.’

But it was an artist’s nature to be pessimistic and neurotic. So, they wanted you not to be an artist. But they already had so many artists who were not artists! As Chekhov

put it, ‘When they serve coffee, don’t try to find beer in it.’

But the clerk was always more important than the customers: there were many of them and only one of him. Similarly,

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.