The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

would believe? We expect too much of the future – hoping that it will quarrel with the present. And who could tell what shadow his death would cast on his family. He imagined Galya emerging at sixteen from her Siberian orphanage, believing that her parents had heartlessly abandoned her, unaware that her father had written even a single note of music.
    When the threats against him had first begun, he told friends: ‘Even if they cut off both my hands, I shall continue to write music with a pen in my mouth.’ They had been words of defiance intended to keep up everyone’s spirits, his own included. But they did not want to cut off his hands, his small, ‘non-pianistic’ hands. They might want to torture him, and he would agree to everything they said immediately, as he had no capacity for bearing pain. Names would be put in front of him, and he would implicate all of them. No, he would say briefly, which would quickly change to Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes. Yes, I was there at the time in the Marshal’s apartment; Yes I heard him say whatever you suggest he might have said; Yes this general and that politician were involved in the plot, I saw and heard it for myself. But there would be no melodramatic cutting-off of his hands, just a businesslike bullet to the back of the head.
    Those words of his had been at best a foolish boast, at worst a mere figure of speech. And Power had no interest in figures of speech. Power knew only facts, and its language consisted of phrases and euphemisms designed either to publicise or to conceal those facts. There were no composers writing with a pen between their teeth in Stalin’s Russia. From now on there would be only two types of composer: those who were alive and frightened; and those who were dead.
    How recently he had sensed within him youth’s indestructibility. More than that – its incorruptibility. And beyond that, beneath it all, a conviction of the rightness and truth of whatever talent he had, and whatever music he had written. All this was not in any way undermined. It was just, now, completely irrelevant.
    On the Saturday night, and again on the Sunday night, he drank himself to sleep. It was not a complicated matter. He had a light head, and a couple of glasses of vodka would often make him need to lie down. This weakness was also an advantage. Drink, and then rest, while others carried on drinking. This left you fresher the next morning, better able to work.
    Anapa had been famous as a centre of the Grape Cure. He had once joked to Tanya that he preferred the Vodka Cure. And so, now, on perhaps the last two nights of his life, he took the cure.
    On that Monday morning he kissed Nita, held Galya one last time, and caught the bus to the dismal grey building on Liteiny Prospekt. He was always punctual, and would go to his death being punctual. He gazed briefly at the River Neva, which would outlast them all. At the Big House he presented himself to the guard at reception. The soldier looked through his roster but could not find the name. He was asked to repeat it. He did so. The soldier went down the list again.
    ‘What is your business? Who have you come to see?’
    ‘Interrogator Zakrevsky.’
    The soldier nodded slowly. Then, without looking up, said, ‘Well, you can go home. You are not on the list. Zakrevsky isn’t coming in today, so there is nobody to receive you.’
    Thus ended his First Conversation with Power.
    He went home. He assumed it must be some trick – they were letting him go so they could follow him and then arrest all his friends and associates. But it turned out to have been a sudden piece of luck in his life. Between the Saturday and the Monday, Zakrevsky had himself fallen under suspicion. His interrogator interrogated. His arrester arrested.
    Still, if his dismissal from the Big House was not a trick, it could only be a bureaucratic delay. They were hardly likely to give up their pursuit of Tukhachevsky; so Zakrevsky’s departure was only a