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

seemed to be barely registering the conversation. She resumed her address to Rossel.

‘Sanity is a question of perspective, Lieutenant. Should a man of prodigious talent squander his destiny simply because our society does not allow him to express it? Is it not, after all, Nikolai’s duty, as a great artist of the Soviet Union, to break down such petty ideological barriers? Did Lenin himself not say, “You cannot make a revolution wearing white gloves?” The same is true of a great symphony.’

Rossel looked again around the room. The cages hanging in the air, the soundproofing that covered the old brickwork of the stable and, in one corner, a long length of green metal shelving that was almost entirely covered with neat stacks of annotated tape spools. In the half-light, the cages looked like giant versions of the incense burners the monks used at Pskov.

Madame Vronsky leaned in and took Rossel’s broken left hand. Her perfume was rich, exotic. She squeezed his fingers.

‘Thanks to Dr Volkova, we have watched your progress with interest.’

She drifted to the other side of the table and kissed her son on the top of his head before removing the lid from the platter in front of him. She placed it between Rossel and the plate so he could not see its contents. Then, holding the lieutenant’s gaze, she took a knife from her red satin clutch bag and began to cut up what was on it. This took a full minute, perhaps more. Then she left the room, the door clanking shut behind her.

Feeling nauseous, Rossel leaned forward as far as his restraints would allow and stared at the thing on Vronsky’s plate. A bloody chunk of something. The composer’s mocking eyes held Rossel’s. His huge hands wrapped themselves around the dark slab. He waited another moment before devouring it. Stomach knotting, Rossel turned his head towards the empty cages.

The composer sat back, patted at his wet beard with a pale blue napkin and swallowed.

He nodded to the nearest cage to Rossel’s right.

‘When he was here, Maxim, our crazed priest, recounted – after a gentle prompting – a macabre tale. He had a little niece, Anfisa. A charming child by all accounts, liked to play the balalaika and, as they all do, worshipped Grandpa Lenin. But this was in the middle of the siege and so, like everyone else, Anfisa had hardly eaten for weeks. Her tiny ten-year-old stomach was round and swollen, her legs thin and bony. They gave her most of their own rations, Maxim and his sister. Their mother was already dead from malnutrition, their father, too. They tried everything, he and his sister, but eventually, clutching a picture of Lenin, their niece closed her eyes for the last time.

‘Why, they were distraught. But then one of them glanced over at an empty plate lying on the kitchen table, and, a little after that, perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten, at an old pot on the stove. They sat there looking, only looking, for hours. In the end, it was Maxim who was the first to pick up the knife. He did it, he said, so his sister would not have to.’

As Vronsky leaned forward in his chair, Rossel could feel his heart pounding.

‘You think that milksop Shostakovich ever had the heart to score the real story of the siege? How some human beings lasted for nine hundred days – nine hundred days! – on a few grams of sawdust and chaff. How that sounded? The rumbling of empty bellies, parched mouths and loose teeth gnawing down on innocent bones, the whispering, babbled self-exhortations behind the dulled eyes of a creature who was once a man but has now become something utterly other, as he scurries down the street waiting for the spring to give up its harvest of blackened limbs so he might boil them up and partake of a little soup?’

Vronsky’s right arm began to stretch out, as if he were preparing to conduct.

‘Or the sound of steam,’ he continued, ‘hissing and bubbling from a pot on a stove that none dare look into?’

Rossel spat onto the cobbled floor of the stable.

‘“Something utterly other” is what you have become, maestro.’

Vronsky picked up the largest of the five glass tubes on the table and took a step closer.

‘Everything Maxim did after that was in some way an attempt to forget what he had done when he sat down with his sister and partook of that simple plateful of familial salvation. He and Shostakovich are one and the same, Rossel. For what else is the Leningrad Symphony – in all its po-faced pomp, its empty brittle cacophony – but the crudest propaganda? Every time we Soviets celebrate it, what we are really celebrating is our own collective amnesia. I do not forget, Lieutenant, cannot. Great art demands of its creators only one thing: to look truth squarely between the eyes and have enough steel in your soul to never once turn away again. I have that unflinching gaze; an unflinching ear, too. So, I have composed a work like none that has ever been written before, one that will force all who hear it to remember.’

Rossel flexed his wrists but the rope only bit deeper. Buying time by keeping Vronsky talking was the only option open to him.

‘I always thought you were better than him, Vronsky. Better than Shostakovich,’ he said. ‘Better than them all, in fact – Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, Mussorgsky. Or, at least, I used to.’

Vronsky ran his fingers over the shaft of the piece of glass in his hand and smiled.

‘I am what I was born to be, Lieutenant. A great composer. Even when I went to school here, I understood I was supposed to be that. You went straight for the notes carved into the stone so I imagine that fool Eliasberg has been talking. Andrei Suvorin and I were the best of friends. But I came to realise that my talent was destined to outgrow his.’

‘I imagine this was