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

me. And Felix knew it. She also told me Felix had said “Nadya had the inside track.” Which makes sense. Nadya was just the sort of woman to try and get close to Deputy Kommissar Shevchuk.’

‘But how could it be?’ said Vassya, dragging a chair closer and sinking into it. ‘Shostakovich wrote his Leningrad Symphony and that is the music the whole world heard.’

‘That was because the performance of Vronsky’s composition was a disaster. The clarinettist could hardly produce a sound, the trumpeter had barely learned to read music – he was a big-band man used to improvising his way through tea dances, not sight-reading a score as complex as this one. The singer could manage little more than a thin squeak. And so on. It was ridiculous. The Shostakovich was hardly a triumph of musical performance but you could sense the scale of it, the power, the ambition, even with only half the right number of players.

‘Vronsky was furious, screaming at Shevchuk, at the musicians, threatening to send everyone to penal battalions. But he still thought the contest was a done deal. It was the Magnetophon that made him storm out. The very moment he set eyes on that, he really lost control.’

‘The Magnetophon?’ Vassya looked puzzled.

‘The tape recorder. They recorded the whole thing. Shevchuk saw to that. It baffled people at the time but now I know why.’

Rossel took another drag on his cigarette, exhaled and then shrugged.

‘When he heard the Vronsky cacophony, Shevchuk got cold feet. He couldn’t be the man in charge of a catastrophe – that was the way to the firing squad. So he did what any Soviet underling does: passed the judgement up the chain of command. Vronsky understood Shevchuk had double-crossed them as soon as he saw the tapes being spooled off the Magnetophon and packed into boxes – the decision was being left to the Kremlin. So he blew his top and stormed out.’

Vassya thought for a moment but then shook her head.

‘For a maniac like Vronsky, I can see why that might be a reason to kill Shevchuk. But why the others?’

‘There is something I haven’t told you,’ said Rossel. ‘Of the six soloists who fouled up Vronsky’s composition, four of them were conservatory students and friends of mine: Felix, Nadya, Max and Sofia. Gusts Landau was the fifth. And the last musician you know well, because he is standing in front of you.’

Vassya shot to her feet.

‘You played?’

Rossel nodded. He stood upright, raising his arms as if about to play his violin. ‘Despite the cold and the hunger, I think I played well. I hadn’t practised for months but as soon as I picked up my instrument it just felt right. As though the music was nourishing me, almost as much as a proper meal. It made me realise that the hope of getting back to playing was a big part of what had got me through the first months of siege. That after the war, there might still be a place for me in a world I felt I belonged in.’

Rossel stubbed out his cigarette.

‘But things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped.’

*

As for Sofia, the shock of seeing her after six long months, after the worst of the siege, had almost broken him.

Her face was gaunt, the cheekbones switchblade thin.

When she took off her fur hat, her lustrous black hair was now tinged with grey. She looked no worse, he had realised, than he did – than anyone else there in the RadioKom rehearsal rooms. They were all dystrophic. All starving. But it was the image of her he carried in his mind – Sofia as she had been, small, perfect and, to him, impossibly beautiful, his Sofia – which had carried him, this far, through the war. A fragile, internalised, personal icon that he had worshipped every night and believed kept him safe. He had made himself live only for this moment. Everything he already had suffered during the siege was only possible because he felt he might see her face once again. And now it had arrived in the dusty rehearsal rooms of the RadioKom building on Gogol Street and he could hardly bring himself to look at her.

She walked towards him and, with a faux air of jollity, kissed him three times, lightly, on the cheeks. Then she stared into his eyes. Hers were wide and watery, the lids stretched back making the eyeballs protrude a little. She saw him see her exactly as she was and understood his ridiculously quixotic romantic dissatisfaction. Then she had squeezed his hand.

‘I’m still here, Revol. All our friends are, for the most part. Now’s let’s make music. I need to sing. My voice, at least, will always remain for you, just as it was, just as it always will be.’

*

It was late. They had almost run out of cigarettes.

Rossel stood up and walked towards the mantelpiece above the grate. He stared at the etching of the ship and the seabirds.

‘Shostakovich is declared the winner soon after and sets to work completing his symphony. It is performed in Kuibyshev, then Moscow, then New York and London and – when the army and the NKVD and Eliasberg himself had rounded up every musician they can find – in Leningrad. August 9, 1942. An unforgettable day. Vronsky goes away, licks his wounds and plots his revenge. He gets hold of the names of the sextet, the musicians who spoiled everything for him through their rendition of his piece, and devises a new composition. It’s a very exclusive one. He allots parts to Maxim, Nadya, Felix and Sofia, and adds Shevchuk to the list for his betrayal. Only this time the thing the great maestro orchestrates is their death, and the score on which he writes is a pair of railway tracks in a forest clearing.’

‘Did you play in the actual orchestra for the Leningrad premier of the seventh?’

Rossel closed his eyes.

‘No.’

‘But they wanted every musician they could find?’

‘By then