A Simple Scale Read online

  What would they think of the apartment? Her father might look on it with a kind of rough admiration. Maybe he would be happier for a son to live in a building with rodent problems and damp, its staircases tilting with subsidence, but at least his daughter wasn’t blowing all her income on a place she couldn’t afford. Her mother, on the other hand, would have staged an intervention. The credit cards would soon be splayed across the chrome dining table. In the phonebook she would circle the names of nearby cleaners and interior decorators, and she would phone them, getting quotes. By the time Gino got back from Europe he wouldn’t recognise the place. But in its present condition, even Natalie had to admit it wasn’t what she’d ever imagined for herself.

  She finished the schnapps and went to bed, hoping the booze might help her sleep. No chance. She lay there, in the dark, going over the same thoughts in a loop. Pavel Grekov was a scam artist, out to blackmail ageing writers and composers, accusing them of plagiarism. Pavel Grekov was a psychopath, obsessed with obscure figures from TV history. Pavel Grekov was delusional; his grandfather’s music and the Battle Station Alpha theme sounded nothing alike.

  She had never really met anyone like him. There were one or two Russians on the musicology course at NYU, and she’d met others since, but none like Pavel Grekov. He was rougher than the men she had known. In the village where she grew up the men – no, boys – wore rugby shirts, chinos and tan Oxfords. They went snowboarding in winter and slummed it around the nicer parts of India in their gap years. When she chose NYU, rather than the Guildhall or the Royal College, it was partly because of them, partly because everywhere in England – even London – felt so bloody parochial.

  In New York the men she knew were pleasant, bookish types. They read Frank O’Hara poems and played guitar and knew the name of every vegetarian restaurant within a mile of Washington Square. They could speak intensely about Schoenberg or Ginsberg or Leonard Cohen for hours on end. On the surface, they may have seemed entirely unlike the boys in rugby shirts and chinos, but they spent just as much time enjoying the sound of their own voices.

  Pavel was like none of these men. If he was, she might have guessed what he was after. Money, prestige, honour. A combination of the three. But she couldn’t place him, she didn’t “know his sort”. If he wasn’t dishonest or insane, what could he possibly want?

  She moved onto her side and closed her eyes. All she could hear, over and over, was that music. Not even the whole piece, just the first few bars; the part everybody knows. The part any child could hum along to, even now.

  Did it sound Russian? Or rather, did it sound uniquely Russian? Could it have come from some other time and place than Sol Conrad’s imagination in 1978? Shades of Stravinsky, maybe a dash or two of Holst. Was there something else?

  If Grekov had the score, she’d know a fake the second she saw it. And by reading it, she would know if the two pieces were the same. Not just similar, but identical.

  The sleepless night wore on, long enough for her to sober up. The nearest bars and bodegas were now closed, and besides, once that first drunken buzz had worn off, there was no point in chasing after a second.

  She got up, went to the lounge, and for the first time in months took her cello out of its case. All this time, during everything that happened, it was there, hidden away in the dark. She sat near the window and placed a practice mute over the strings. She adjusted the tuning and began playing the prelude from the second of Bach’s cello suites. Not immediately, of course. There were missteps and bum notes before muscle memory took over. Then it came back to her, and the room was filled with music.

  When she’d tired of Bach, she opened the window and the city’s noise burst in like the howl of a jet engine. She waited as it settled into separate sounds and then she played along with the chugging bass of helicopters, and the swooping glissandos of police sirens, and she improvised around the short, sharp blast of hip-hop as an open-topped car went past. The music vibrated through the edgework and into her thighs and through her fingertips as they pressed each string against the neck. That sound, like a feather or a dust mote suspended in the air. The purest expression of all the things she would never say. This was the closest she had come to creating music in years, and she played instinctively, without concentrating, till her fingers were sore and her eyes were tired, and the theme from Battle Station Alpha had faded into silence.

  Chapter 5:

  VORKUTA, AUGUST 1942

  Dusk and dawn feel like the same thing. The sun sets around 9pm, rising again before 2am, and it never truly gets dark. It won’t feel like night, true night again until September. As such, August is a month he associates with an approaching darkness. This month marks the fourth anniversary of his arrest.

  At 8pm the sun still hovers over the low hills on the river’s western banks. No snow on the ground. There hasn’t been snow since April. In the few places not yet built upon the earth is covered in the dense black scrub that passes for vegetation in this part of the world.

  Not that it’s ever felt like a part of the world. Vorkuta is another planet, the kind of place you might read about in Technology for Youth magazine. A barren, alien world explored by brave, Soviet pioneers. Though in those stories the pioneers are always proud to be there.

  Sergey spent over a year in a logging team before arriving in Vorkuta. It was followed by a short spell in the mines until the Camp Boss, Maltsev, learned that he was – or at least had been – a musician. The general is a young man, late thirties at most. There aren’t many old men these days, at least not in the lower positions of authority. It’s rare to see anyone older than forty in charge of anything.

  “We have a band here,” Maltsev said. “Did you know that?”

  Sergey nodded. He’d heard them playing as they filed out each day; a ragged band of players standing at the gates, playing a march or something similarly rousing. Something to raise their spirits as they set off for another twelve hours beneath the ground.

  “We lost a few of our players in the winter,” said Maltsev. “And they don’t have a band leader. Do you conduct?”

  Sergey nodded.

  “Good. Well. That’s decided. I’ve spoken with the troika and your brigadier and they agree that you can be excused from working in the mine for now. In the mornings you and the band will play at the gates. Then, when everyone has left, you can return to the barrack and do whatever needs to be done there. You can discuss all that with your brigadier. How are you with your fists?”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sergey.

  Maltsev let out a short, bleak laugh. “You’re a young man,” he said. “The others in your brigade may resent you staying home all day but getting the same rations. Can you take care of yourself? You look as if you’ve boxed.”

  Sergey shook his head. His flattened nose he acquired not in a boxing ring but an interrogation room.

  Since that day in Maltsev’s office, Sergey’s routine has been more or less the same, with little variation. The alarm sounds at 5am. Thirty minutes later, once everyone has woken and washed, they congregate and are counted outside the cookhouse before breakfast.

  Sergey’s fellow band mates are from other barracks: A Jewish trumpeter from Minsk, here for stealing wood from a warehouse; a young lad who plays snare drum, booted out of an army marching band for stealing bread. There are others, most of them thieves or petty criminals. None of them are fellow Fifty-Eighters, enemies of the state. For a Fifty-Eighter to play in the band is practically unheard of.

  “Maltsev must like you,” said the Jew. “Or else you’d have been kept in the mine or fed to the Urkas by now.”

  It was Maltsev who, on hearing it one morning, took a fancy to the Pechorin March. Sergey had only had the band play it out of restlessness. Each morning they played the same repertoire of standards, dreary old songs and marches. Perhaps if they played something he had written himself, he could forget where he was, if only for a moment.

  “I like this one,” said Malt
sev. “What is it?”

  “One of mine, comrade,” Sergey replied, his voice raised as the band continued playing. “I wrote it.”

  “It’s very good,” said Maltsev. “You should play it every morning.”

  Once the last workers have left, the gates are closed. Sergey returns to his barrack and with some of the older inmates he sweeps the floor, lights the stove and empties the latrine tank. This will usually take up much of the day. The tank itself holds twenty gallons, and it takes several of them working in a team to carry it. The stench is unbearable, even in the coldest depths of winter. He’d thought he might get used to it eventually, in the way a farmer must grow accustomed to the smell of pigshit, but he never has.

  If he finds himself with time to spare, spare minutes unnoticed by the brigadier or the guards, he writes. Often the briefest passages of melody; never a whole piece. Paper and pencils are hard to come by. He’ll write on anything. Maybe one day these fragments will coalesce into a single work – maybe even a symphony – but one that will never be performed.

  Even if he gets through this alive, there will be no moment of absolution or redemption. The ones who enjoy that privilege are never those who were sent away. Look at Shostakovich. Sergey was there at the Philharmonic, the night they premiered Dmitri’s Symphony No.5. The theatre was full, and at its end the audience cheered for a good hour, their applause lasting so much longer than the symphony. It was a powerful piece, alright. During the third movement, the largo, Sergey noticed people, men and women, weeping, and later that evening he heard men from the composers’ union – Remizov, Dzerzhinsky and the others – talking about it so warmly.

  Comrade Dmitri had more than atoned for his dreadful Formalism, they said, and for that disgusting opera at MALIGOT. (None of them even dared mention it by name.) It was a pleasure, hearing him abandon all that nonsense and stick to true, Soviet virtues.

  But Sergey heard something else in the music, something that troubled him immensely. How could the others not have noticed? It was there, in the largo that made people weep; a despair so absolute, nothing that followed could contradict or overturn it. Now, in the piece – or rather, pieces – he’s written, Sergey hears a similar desolation, and it’s not a mea culpa. It’s a scream.

  The days pass easier if he can forget where he is, or at least why he’s here, and what brought him here. He wants to remember life before this, but each time he remembers it’s unbearable.

  At 8pm the brigades return. Sergey hides his paper and pencil beneath a floorboard near the bunk he shares with three others, and along with the old timers he sets about looking busy. It wouldn’t do to have men come back from the mines and see them lying around on their bunks.

  First to enter are the two Poles, Lubinski and Bajek. They hurry in, closing the door behind them, and glance furtively at Sergey and the old men before speaking to one another in German. Perhaps they think that nobody will understand them, but Sergey hears mention of a time – 10:30 – and a place; the eastern edge of the compound, far from the nearest guard dog and watchtower.

  “Wird es dunkel genug sein?”

  “Nicht sehr dunkel, aber dunkler als jetzt.”

  The old men watch them for a moment. When it becomes clear they won’t understand a word, they carry on cleaning the room. Sergey feigns ignorance.

  The Poles arrived in Vorkuta a few months after him, prisoners of war after the invasion of Poland. Both younger than Sergey – neither any older than twenty-five – but working in the mines is ageing them, the way it ages everyone. All of the men here look like corpses.

  Lubinski is the older of the two, and stronger. Bajek is attractive, almost boyish, and more timid than his friend. Sergey senses that Lubinski is the protector, but whether the relationship is sexual, he couldn’t say. There could be a physical convenience to it, when the lights are out, but the same could be said of many others.

  He can’t remember the last time he thought of sex. For the first eighteen months he thought of little else, as a drowning man must think of nothing but drawing breath. In the barrack he masturbated almost constantly, often regardless of whether or not he had privacy, but it was no longer a pleasurable act. Rather, it was an effort, a physical need to expel something. Thoughts of sex, of tenderness and intimacy, are unhelpful in a place where neither tenderness nor intimacy exist. Remembering them would only make him ill. Better to work away at himself until he had let those thoughts go.

  Dinner: A second ration of balanda. Oats, watery broth and fish bones. The same as every night. On a good day, there might be enough bread left over to mop it up. One of his bunkmates, Smirnov, tells him he may have got his hands on a chessboard and asks Sergey if he can play. Sergey replies with a noncommittal nod. Hasn’t played in years, but anything to pass the time. Dinner over, they leave the canteen and return to the barracks.

  Sergey’s is home to a small, but growing, number of Old Believers; their leader an aged priest who arrived during the winter. In the towns and cities these men would be jeered at and beaten for their antique superstitions, but here they’re tolerated, more or less. Most of the men ignore them, but they fill the barrack’s brigadier, Charkov, with an almost comical unease. He’s an old party man, convicted of fraud. Not old in years, but a party member since he was old enough to join, and despite everything he still balks at anything of which the party wouldn’t approve.

  Sergey listens to the Old Believers’ prayers, but they may as well be praying in some obscure Siberian dialect. The individual words he understands, but the meaning of it all is lost to him. How, in a place like this, can they believe some benign, supernatural being is listening to their prayers? Is it hope, simple-mindedness, or desperation?

  Lights out, and Sergey and three others – Smirnov, Koslov and Lebvedev – crawl into their bunk, beneath separate blankets. Limbs jostling for space. Short, frustrated sighs. Koslov’s foot is too close to Sergey’s face. Lebvedev sleeps shirtless and has his arm behind his head, so that if Sergey were to lie on his side he would have his face in Lebvedev’s armpit. It’s a nuisance, of course, but they’re glad of it in winter. He can’t imagine how it would be to sleep alone out here when it’s at its coldest. The barrack becomes a chorus of snuffles, coughs and farts. Somebody mutters something from the far side of the room, and a handful of men laugh.

  “Keep it down,” says Charkov.

  Sergey is the only one who notices that the Poles have already made their escape. They were crafty. They must have known exactly what time Charkov carries out his nightly headcount, and then crept out via the shallow alcove housing the latrine. Maybe they snuck out while the Old Believers were praying and everyone else was playing cards or reading. Crafty Polaks.

  They chose the best time of year for it. Usually, when someone tries to escape, they do so in the dead of winter, thinking the darkness will help cover them. But if the searchlights don’t pick them out against the snow, the cold kills them before they’re a mile beyond the fence.

  In spring, however, the twilight of the small hours renders searchlights all but useless, and it’s no longer murderously cold.

  They stand a chance, the two young Poles; a chance, at least, to get more than a mile away from the camp. But then what? A thousand miles of unforgiving waste in all directions. That is the secret, the incredible genius behind a place like this, and he admires it, in a way. Not only is Russia blessed with vastness, it contains within that vastness places so remote they may as well be other worlds, separated from the cities of the West by stretches of country no man, however strong, could survive.

  And if the cold and hunger don’t get to them, the Zyrians will. Every few months they come by, the local tribesmen, with a fresh cache of severed heads and hands, and they collect their reward from Maltsev, who never asks what happened to the rest of the bodies.

  The Old Believers see these things – the darkness of the mines, the bitter cold of winter, the violence of the Zyrians, the Urkas, the secret service, of everyone �
�� as proof that what they call the “End Times” are upon us. Unlikely. An end would be a relief, and time is meaningless here. One day, repeating itself, and in high summer or low winter even the hours just rolling around in circles, like the final moments of a spinning coin. Sergey doubts he will see Leningrad again, if Leningrad even exists as something more than a memory or an idea.

  The trains no longer bring in people from the cities. Just other prisoners from other camps. Perhaps the camps are all that’s left. Perhaps the rest of Russia is gone, burned to the ground.

  Asleep in his shared bunk, Sergey stumbles through half-remembered rooms and along impossible streets, before finding himself clinging to the outer edge of an immense railway bridge. He believes it represents a bridge he once knew, but couldn’t name, across the Neva, but in this dream the river is impossibly wide, more like a roiling sea. There are few places for him to hold on, too many trains clattering back and forth for him to walk along the tracks, and so he edges his way slowly along a reddish brown girder with cautious sidesteps.

  Dogs are barking. Perhaps the railway men are after him. He’s trespassing on their bridge. Then Koslov mutters something, and Lebedev replies with a whisper, and the dream unthreads itself, and Sergey stirs and asks them, “What’s going on?”

  “An escape,” says Koslov. “Must be.”

  The camp’s guard dogs are tethered to metal wires, strung up between the watchtowers, and as they run back and forth their leashes howl and screech against the cables. The barking he could stand, if only just, but the cold mechanical shriek of metal against metal makes him nauseous.

  There’s movement, something from the alcove. Breathing, short breaths, anxious. Someone crawling on his hands and knees across the room. One of the Poles, Lubinski or Bajek; he can’t see which.

  “Get into bed, you fool,” someone hisses. “Before they turn on the lights.”

  A commotion, the crack of shin against bedframe, and the Pole, whichever one it is, swears loudly in Polish. Then the lights come on.