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

Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky. ‘Second only to Shostakovich in the great pantheon of twentieth-century Soviet composers,’ as Izvestia’s music critic had once called him. Vronsky had, it seemed, at last returned to the brilliant form of his precocious youth. Right now, however, he looked far from happy.

Vronsky stood, glaring down into the orchestra pit – a lord surveying his domain. He tapped the backs of two gold-ringed fingers on the brass rail of the box; drumming out a steady beat as he did so. Scratched, momentarily, at his thick black beard. Then he picked up a score from the music stand in front of him and began – very slowly – to rip it to pieces.

‘You cockroaches.’

Vronsky threw the torn paper up into the air. The ninety mute faces in the pit stared up as it fluttered down towards them.

‘I will have you all shot, do you hear me? No, not shot, hung, no, not hung, too quick, decapitated! No, not decapitated, too merciful. Drowned, yes, drowned but slowly, one at a time. I will call the people I need to call and have them stand you all on your heads on the shores of Lake Ladoga. And then I will kneel down on the banks of that godforsaken pond and pray, yes pray, for the Lake Gods to turn its waters into ten million gallons of beery German piss and then, do you know what I will do? I will wait; wait with a big fat smile on my bearded face, for the tide to come in.’

Vronsky pointed directly at a small grey-haired man in the orchestra pit.

‘That’s what I will do to you, Karlof, the next time you give me a false, farting note on that trombone of yours so abysmally poor that even a deaf mute who has gouged out their own eardrums with a hatpin can tell it is an abomination.’

Karlof’s face went a deep crimson. He started to stutter out a reply.

‘I’m sorry . . . Maestro . . . I . . . don’t . . . I . . . I’m . . .’

‘Don’t try and tell me what you are, Karlof. I decide what you are. And that is an epic reactionary bourgeois fool who wants to destroy my music. And when a man tries to do that, Karlof, do you know what he is trying to do?’

Karlof looked as though he wanted the sticky red carpet of the orchestra pit to rise up and swallow him. He shook his head.

‘He is trying to destroy my reputation.’

A woman sat down in the seat next to Rossel. Her perfume was expensive, unfamiliar, heavy with musk. Nothing like that available in the shops of Leningrad. The scent drew him in. He turned away from the confrontation. She smiled.

‘The maestro is nervous today, I think. Somewhat at odds with himself. He can be the sweetest of men, I assure you.’

She held out a perfectly manicured hand.

‘Marina Morozova. The deputy manager said an officer of the militia had come . . . ’

She stopped in mid-sentence.

‘Hello, Marina,’ Rossel said.

‘Revol.’

Rossel nodded.

There was a commotion above them and an anxious murmur from the pit. Rossel and the singer both looked up. In a surprisingly graceful movement for such a big man, Vronsky had stepped onto a stool and then leapt onto the edge of the balcony. He began to slow handclap his musicians, moving sarcastically from one foot to the other. Then suddenly his mood changed. His entire body began to shake with laughter. His voice became softer. Mischievous. Self-mocking. As if, at that precise moment, there was nothing in the world Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky found so ridiculous as his own grandiose pomposity.

‘Useless,’ he cried out. ‘Tone-deaf, talentless cretins. I, Vronsky, poet of the Russian soul, heir to Rimsky-Korsakov, to Mussorgsky, to Balakirev, salute you.’

*

The once gleaming crystal chandeliers were covered in dust and the Kirov’s café now exuded a decidedly prolet-arian demeanour. No such thing could be said of Marina Morozova, Honoured Artist of the Soviet Union and leading lady of the Kirov Opera.

They drank tea either side of a small glass table which had a folded beer mat underneath one leg to keep it balanced correctly.

She was still a great beauty. Her beauty was the first thing everybody, man or woman, noticed about Marina Morozova. When she had stood in front of him and Sorokin on their first day at the conservatory, neither of them could take their eyes off her. She had, of course, become one of Felix’s many conquests. ‘Don’t let that sweet, porcelain face fool you,’ his friend had said of her. ‘She screws like a navy whore.’

Sat opposite her, Rossel noticed something else. The exquisite, glittering diamond studs in each ear. They reminded him of the earrings on the blue-hat’s corpse.

‘The conservatory – oh, how I miss it,’ Marina said. ‘It’s where I learned who I was. Who I am! A good Bolshevik, of course, but also myself, too. I’m allowed that, am I not? Certainly, I must be allowed that. Waiter?’

The singer waved an elegant arm at a middle-aged man wearing an ill-fitting black suit, who came straight over to their table. She held up her chipped cup.

‘More tea.’

She turned towards Rossel.

‘And you, Revol? Can I call you that? I mean Lieutenant Rossel just feels too cold, too impersonal for old friends like us.’

Rossel handed his cup to the waiter and nodded. Then smiled at the soprano.

‘I thought it was Felix who was your particular friend, Marina?’

She ran a finger across the top of her brow, just beneath the hairline. Her skin was a dramatic, translucent white and, although, like him, she was now in her mid-thirties, unblemished. It was set off by lustrous dark locks, cut in a page-boy style. Her eyes were sea-blue and guarded.

‘Felix, my God. Do you still see him?’

Rossel shook his head.

‘Not for years now. At the conservatory, we were very close. But we drifted apart after we left. Like student friends often do. He moved, to Moscow, I think. A teaching job for some high-up member of the Politburo. Or