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

As if you didn’t expect some Mingrelian shitkicker, like me, to ever have heard of the Greek myths.’

Another nod to Sarkisov.

Another swing of the club.

A sickening sound: wood playing the simplest of scales on bone.

Vronsky’s huge frame toppled forward into the snow and lay prone. Beria leaned over him and spat onto the side of his face.

‘Thanatos, Death, yes, back then, I never used to like it, Nikolai Nikolayevich,’ he said. ‘But, tonight, I find, I do.’

Vronsky began to wail. ‘Please, comrade, I told no one, I don’t know . . .’

Beria clamped a gloved hand over the maestro’s mouth.

‘Girls, Nikolai. Mere musical extravagances. I can make the Party look the other way at even the most depraved escapades. But the jewels. The jewels. To festoon your slut in our smuggled baubles and then allow them to be traced to the ledgers of Djilas the jeweller – and from there to me. That I do not forgive.’

Beria let Vronsky go. ‘Take the maestro to the lake,’ he said to Sarkisov, ‘make a hole in the ice, and drop him in it.’

Then, with a stiff bow, he turned and began to walk back towards the house. Sarkisov raised his club. All around Rossel, MGB men cocked their weapons and aimed them at him.

Just as he reached the foot of the stone steps, alerted by the sound of approaching vehicles, Beria stopped and turned.

A sleek Packard limousine, followed by two snub-nosed military trucks, rolled into view and came to a halt on the drive. A dozen Red Army special forces clambered out of the trucks and, almost nonchalantly, trained their weapons on Beria’s MGB.

The driver of the limousine opened his door and slid out. He adjusted his cap and sauntered round to the passenger door, which he opened as if its occupants were arriving at a state function. Out stepped a tall middle-aged man, dressed head to toe in black, who wore the concerned air of a punctilious funeral director. This was Georgy Malenkov, Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, member of the Politburo. And presumptive heir to Stalin.

Another man got out from the opposite side of the limousine and stood next to him. Major Nikitin.

‘Cordial greetings, Lavrentiy,’ said Malenkov to Beria. ‘And here is our maestro too. Why this is a stroke of luck. I was on my way to his hideaway on Krestovsky Island when we noticed your gate security had been compromised. I do hope there’s nothing amiss?’

Beria’s face gave nothing away. But it took him a moment to answer. When he did so, however, his voice sounded calm, gentle – solicitous.

‘What I always ask myself at times like this, Georgy, is the same thing you – with all your practical experience of the world – undoubtedly do too.’

‘Which is?’ said Malenkov.

Beria took a moment to adjust his glasses and then grinned broadly.

‘Why simply this – what would Comrade Stalin do?’

Malenkov considered the question. Finally, after a moment or two, he nodded at Nikitin.

‘Comrade,’ he said to the major. ‘Do your patriotic duty.’

Rossel, his arms still in the air, watched as Nikitin walked forward and took the club from Sarkisov. The MGB major placed a boot on Vronsky’s cheek. Then he began to beat a rhythm on the maestro’s body, singing as he did so.

‘Life has never been better,’ the torturer sang, ‘Life has never been more beautiful. Sing it to me, bourgeois. Sing it to me now!’

The lieutenant turned his eyes away and stared out toward the vast, mute, frozen lake upon which Captain Mikhail Murov had once built a miraculous road.

PRAVDA 12 November 1951

Obituary

Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky

A Hero of Hero City

I weep as I write this – just as every true socialist and member of the People’s Party of the Soviet Union must, surely, shed a patriotic tear as they, in turn, read it.

‘Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky is dead.’ When I first heard those terrible words, and learnt of his accidental death in the fire which burnt down his dacha, I felt almost exactly as I did on 21 January 1924, when news reached me of the death of Lenin himself, at Gorki Leninskiye.

And if Lenin was still with us, I have little doubt he would lead the outpourings of socialist grief that must now surely stretch all across our great Soviet Union; from Minsk and Baku to Donetsk and Rostov, and, of course, in Moscow, and here in the maestro’s home city of Leningrad.

It is a bitter but nevertheless true honour to be, even in such tragic circumstances, chosen to write the official obituary for my esteemed colleague, cherished friend and fellow member of the Union of Composers.

No Russian composer, in modern times, not Stravinsky, nor Scriabin, or Boradin or Korsakov, Rubenstein or Medtner, has come close to matching the breadth of Vronsky’s creative range and vision. No one understood more of what it means to be a citizen and comrade of this great revolution than he did.

The widest masses of the toilers of the whole world will lament his passing. As the farmer puts his shoulder to the plough and the factory worker his heart into his vital production targets, in the exact same way Nikolai Nikolayevich applied his prodigious intellect and profound musical sensibilities to examining and penetrating the suffering of the workers in their unceasing struggle against the bourgeois.

In this way, he became a hero to us all, most certainly to me. For no one has expressed the soul of socialism – captured its joyous cadences, melodies and undertones – with more clarity and precision than he did.

Nikolai Nikolayevich Vronsky 12.04.1904 – 06.11.1951

D. D. Shostakovich

46

Monday November 19

‘Citizens! In case of artillery fire, this side of the street is extremely dangerous.’

It was because the shelling had come in from the south and west. As the German shells arced in, they had made the northern side of Nevsky Prospect more vulnerable, so if caught outside you cowered on the south pavement and got