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

Rossel opened the score and leafed through the sheets of white paper. Six solo parts, all jumbled up, nothing sticking the disparate pages and parts together, and in a separate box folder, the full orchestral parts. On the back of the last page was Vronsky’s flourish of a signature.

This was the composition Vronsky had submitted to the All-Soviet Contest to find the greatest patriotic music for the Great Patriotic War – a work for an orchestra and six soloists. Where Shostakovich had gone for scale, grandiosity and sheer volume, Vronsky had tried intensity, intimacy, a foray into the Russian soul, darkness laced with light. Shostakovich had scored his work for a vast ensemble, an orchestra you could hear in Berlin. In total, close to a hundred musicians. The advantage was size and noise – the kind of fist-waving defiance the authorities would love. The disadvantage was that it had been almost impossible to find enough musicians of the right calibre who were alive and had the energy to blow, scrape or bash their instruments. That had been Eliasberg’s task. Every able-bodied adult was either at the front, in armaments factories, fighting fires from incendiaries or digging ditches. But he had found enough to form a ragged orchestra – and turned them into something worth listening to.

The soloists for Raskolnikov’s Feast were a soprano, two violins, cello, clarinet and trumpet. The accompanying orchestra was of roughly the size needed for a classical symphony. To be sure, compositions for smaller forces could have extraordinary power – but as a piece to rouse the masses in the name of war? It was a gamble. And it hadn’t paid off.

‘Did you ever receive a complete copy of Raskolnikov’s Feast, Madame Shishani?’

‘A copy? No – these are the only parts ever printed,’ she said. ‘These are the originals.’

Rossel reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the list of everyone who had played in both pieces on the day of the contest. He thought back to that day. Most of the time he had been gazing at Sofia when not struggling to play his violin or thinking about food. The rest of the day was wrapped in fog.

He showed the list to Madame Shishani. ‘Forgive me, I know you are the librarian, not the administration. But do you remember this name? Gusts Landau – it is an unusual one.’

She took the paper from him and held it right up to her face, her lips moving as she read.

‘Oh!’ She jabbed a finger at the paper. ‘Oh yes – that was a bad business. I could never forget that one.’ She beckoned him to look with her.

‘Gusts,’ said Madame Shishani. ‘The poor man . . .’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Rossel, his heart racing.

Madame Shishani looked around for hidden Chekists and spoke in a whisper.

‘Not one of ours,’ she said. ‘A Latvian. They said he was a big band trumpeter really. And a Jew . . . we thought someone had murdered him because he was a Jew.’

The memory hit Rossel between the eyes. The trumpeter in the rehearsal – ‘Normally I play for dinner dances so forgive me all the wrong notes.’ A refugee from Riga after the Latvian capital had fallen to the Wehrmacht in the earliest days of the war. But Gusts Landau had ended up surrounded by the Germans anyway a few months later in Leningrad. A rotund, cheerful soul, bemused at finding himself preparing Leningrad’s anti-tank defences one minute and having to sight-read Shostakovich and Vronsky the next.

Madame Shishani nodded with vigour. ‘He had played in some sort of rehearsal of Raskolnikov’s Feast but forgotten to hand back his part. I should have reported it at the time, I know, but there was so much death, so much suffering, it hardly seemed worth it.’

‘Reported what?’

‘Isn’t that why you’re here, asking about this piece? What the girl saw in that flat on the Griboyedova Canal? It’s a very long time ago now, but I thought that must be why you were interested in this particular composition.’

Rossel raised an eyebrow.

‘A girl?’

‘Alla, she was an assistant here during the war. She, well, it was all very strange, really. Or, in those terrible times, perhaps, not so.’

‘Describe it to me.’

‘It was in the second summer of the blockade, so 1943, maybe July – the last days of the White Nights. I missed the last evacuation train out and in any case I refused to go. I would fight and die with my home city, I told them. Alla was only fourteen. Her parents had died so she had gone to live with her aunt and uncle, out near the St Peter and Paul Fortress. Then the aunt and uncle went, too, in the winter of that year. I let her stay with me, shared what little food I could find with her. We came to work here each day, just to try and do something, anything to take our minds off the monsters our bellies had become. Not very much was happening. By then the only time anyone ever picked up an instrument was to burn it or turn the strings into soup. Then one day a messenger came from the Deputy Kommissar for Culture, Nikolai Shevchuk himself, with a special executive order.’

‘An order to do what?’

‘It seemed crazy. I could hardly walk, neither could Alla,’ continued Madame Shishani. ‘But we were told to go to the homes of everyone who had any music by Vronsky in their possession and return them all to the library. This Landau character had played in his rehearsal and wandered off with his part instead of returning it, do you see? He was a stranger. His Russian was only so-so. He didn’t know the way things were done. And there were all sorts of other bits of music missing, as you can imagine. Library candy, do you remember that? People boiling the glue out of books and manuscripts to make soup. And also, we