The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Page B

elephants, why should it not also be the homeland of the Red Beethoven?
    Stalin assured them that they were all screws in the mechanism of the State. But the Red Beethoven would be a mighty cog, hard to keep hidden. Self-evidently, he must be a pure proletarian and a member of the Party. Conditions which happily ruled out Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich. They pointed instead, for a while, to Alexander Davidenko, who had been one of the leaders of the RAPM. His song ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’, written to celebrate the glorious victory of the Red Army over the Chinese in 1929, had been even more popular than ‘The Song of the Counterplan’. Performed by soloists and massed choirs, by pianists, violinists and string quartets, it had stirred and cheered the land for a full decade. At one point, it seemed likely to replace all other available music.
    Davidenko’s credentials were impeccable. He had taught in a Moscow orphanage; he had supervised the lyrical activities of the Shoemakers’ Union, the Union of Textile Workers, and even of the Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. He had written a genuine proletarian opera about the 1905 revolution. And yet, and yet … for all these qualifications, he remained stubbornly the composer of ‘They Wanted to Beat Us, to Beat Us’. A properly melodic work, of course, and one utterly devoid of formalist tendencies. But somehow Davidenko had failed to build on that one great success and earn the title Stalin longed to bestow. Which could have been his good luck. The Red Beethoven, once crowned, might have ended up sharing the fate of the Red Napoleon. Or that of Boris Kornilov, lyricist of the Counterplan . All those much-loved words he put into ‘The Song’, and all those throats which had poured them out, couldn’t save him from being arrested in 1937, and purged, as they liked to say, in 1938.
    The search for the Red Beethoven might have been a comedy; except that nothing around Stalin was ever a comedy. The Great Leader and Helmsman could easily have decided that the Red Beethoven’s failure to emerge had nothing to do with the organisation of musical life in the Soviet Union, and everything to do with the activities of wreckers and saboteurs. And who might want to sabotage the quest for the Red Beethoven? Why, formalist musicologists, of course! Give the NKVD enough time, and they would surely unearth the musicologists’ plot. And that would be no joke either.
    Ilf and Petrov had reported that there were no political offences in America, only criminal ones; and that Al Capone, while in his Alcatraz cell, had written anti-Soviet articles for the Hearst press. They also noted that Americans had ‘primitive culinary skill and primitive rote voluptuousness’. He could not judge the latter characteristic, though there had been a strange incident with a woman during a concert interval. He had been in a roped-off area when he heard a female voice persistently calling his name. Assuming that she wanted to talk about his music, he had indicated that she should be let through. She stood in front of him, and said, with a bright, open friendliness,
    ‘Hello. You resemble my cousin very much.’
    It sounded like a line with which spies make contact, and so put him on the defensive. He asked if this cousin was Russian, by any chance.
    ‘No,’ she replied, ‘he is one hundred per cent American. No, one hundred and ten per cent.’
    He waited for her to mention his music – or that of the concert they were both attending – but she had delivered her message, and with another bright, open smile she left. He was puzzled. So he looked like someone else. Or someone else looked like him. Did this mean something, or did it mean nothing?
    He knew, when he had agreed to attend the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace, that he had no choice. He also suspected that he might be displayed as a figurehead, a representative of Soviet values. He had expected some Americans to be