City of Ghosts by Ben Creed (most important books of all time txt) 📕

cut your friend’s face off and left her out on the railway lines at Lagoda. Genius or not, she won’t be playing at the Maly Hall again.’

Rossel shrugged and closed the file.

‘She wasn’t a friend. She was a hanger-on. Someone on the periphery of people I once knew. That was Nadya, always out on the edge of things, calculating how she could propel herself towards the middle. According to her file she never did play the Maly Hall. She was, as Comrade Taneyev says, a dresser with the Kirov, attached to one of the star sopranos. Back then she always tried to hide it but, as I say, Nadya was ambitious. I can’t imagine that being a dresser was something she’d have enjoyed settling for. She had grand plans for herself. I had a friend at the conservatory, Felix Sorokin, who absolutely despised her. Felix used to say she was like Uriah Heep in high heels.’

Taneyev took out his notebook and prepared to make a note.

‘Yuri who, sir?’

Lipukhin sighed.

‘Uriah Heep, Comrade Taneyev.’ He gave the name a great guttural rasp. ‘A character in a novel by the English author Dickens.’ Dickens, a great chronicler of capitalist injustice, was still safe to read, even if he was a foreigner.

Rossel looked up at Taneyev.

‘Nearly six months, you said? That’s a long time to be missing. Did they report it straightaway?’

‘When they got back, yes, they did.’ Taneyev flipped to the last page of the notebook. ‘They had been on a tour of Spain and France. Six weeks in all. A big success, that’s what the deputy manager of the Kirov told me. They had played Paris for ten nights, the Palais Garnier in the 9th Arrondissement. Everything was going really well but then there was an argument, apparently.’

‘An argument?’

‘Yes, between this Nadya and Marina Morozova, the opera singer she was assisting as dresser. Immediately on returning to Leningrad, Bazhanova went missing. And they haven’t seen her since.’

Rossel got up and pushed his chair back under Lipukhin’s desk. Lipukhin got up, too. Tosca serenaded all of them.

Diedi gioielli della Madonna al manto,

E diedi il canto agli astri, al ciel . . .

‘What was it about? Did he say?’ asked the captain.

The sergeant put his notebook back in his pocket and straightened his shoulders.

‘Jewellery, sir. This prima donna, Marina Morozova, reckoned Comrade Lieutenant Rossel’s old friend Nadya had stolen some of her jewellery.’

13

Rossel opened his eyes just as the last bars of the music faded away.

He knew the Kirov Theatre intimately – it was directly opposite the conservatory and he and his fellow students had been there countless times to watch rehearsals and performances. Yevgeny Mravinsky had been the maestro there. Now Mravinsky had moved on to the Leningrad Philharmonic and the Kirov’s chief conductor was Karl Eliasberg, whose task it was to grapple with The Blockade, a new opera commissioned by Stalin himself to honour the tenth anniversary celebrations of the Road of Life. A poster in the foyer proclaimed the premiere was due on November 19. It was to be the culmination of two whole weeks of Party-sponsored trade shows, meetings and events.

Exactly ten years earlier, Captain Mikhail Murov and his transport regiment had carried the first supplies over the ice of Lake Lagoda using a horse-drawn sleigh. The road had initially borne only small amounts of flour into the besieged city, but this was not important. It had given the citizens of Leningrad a different kind of nourishment – hope. A heady moment of optimism that allowed those starving in the bombed cellars, or the wretched souls feverishly twisting and turning in the few remaining hospital beds, to believe that something other than death was to be their fate.

Felix had always been rude about the Kirov – ‘The inside is like a Venetian brothel and the outside is like a provincial train station, the kind of thing they built in Kazan or Sverdlovsk to make themselves feel as big and clever as Leningrad.’ But then Felix was rude about everything. The theatre itself was, indeed, a riot of velvet and gold leaf. But from the very first moment Rossel had stepped inside it as a student, he had fallen in love with it, and he felt that love rekindling as the music curled around him. It had been too long since he had attended the opera.

The orchestra was having difficulty with the piece, particularly the brass, who bore the brunt of the composer’s efforts to depict the frozen lake, the groaning and cracking of the ice beneath the feet of Murov’s team, the wind’s howling as it swept over the ice, and then, in its last few moments, the distant wail of a lone fighter. It was by turns violent and melancholic, and by the sound of it, technically almost impossible. Yet in the fragments the musicians were conquering, Rossel could hear how the composer had captured the primal essence of the siege, a rhythmic beast hidden deep in the Ladoga pine forests roaring defiance back across the rooftops of the distant city, out towards German Army Group North. Even though the auditorium was almost completely empty, Rossel could sense how tens of thousands of Soviet patriots would soon rise to their feet to applaud it.

The abrupt stilling of the timpani ushered in an unnerving silence. Then a colossal figure, chin on hands, leaned forward from the shadows of an unlit grand balcony just to the left of the main stage.

The giant clambered to his feet. He was almost two metres tall, Rossel reckoned, with a barrel-like chest and shoulders like haunches of venison. His face looked like a bronze bust, at once animated and monumental, as if the cast had only moments earlier been stripped from the sparks of a furnace. His physical presence alone was intimidating; a bear buttoned into a suit from which, at any second, it might tear itself free. Even before he spoke a word, the sheer force of the man’s personality filled the