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Asking why, when sadness falls to the depths of the heart, like snow, it makes no noise, is a pointless exercise.
Because, in fact, it does make a noise, indeed.
And this noise is Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich's Quartet No. 15, Op. 144.
Moscow, Kuntsevo Hospital – February 1974
Then, the day. It hits you with the metallic light of the Russian morning, seeping through the malicious gap of a shutter. The sound of a nurse’s sandals, and the taste of the previous night’s painkiller invading your throat. And a man, finally. A man, sitting on the edge of a bed, destroyed, both he and the bed, with some sheet music in one hand and his head in the other.
This man, huddled on this bed of this room of this hospital of this city, which is called Moscow.
He is the first to wake up. He turns on his side, his hand barely reaches the nightstand, drinks a glass of water. One of many gestures of his days that he performs with the automatic routine of an ancient, now deflated, ritual. He is not thirsty, but he drinks because that’s how he has always done it. With him, three other men, grappling with the same dawn, with the same hands clinging to the same sheets, struggling to reach the same nightstand and drink the same senseless glass of water. In the same city, in the same hospital, in the same room. Old, miserable and torpid, each in his own corner of the world.
And outside, the Soviet winter of 1974.
There is a moment when you are alone when you have reached the end of everything that can happen to you. It's the end of the world. Your own pain no longer responds to you. And you have to go back then, among people, no matter who. One cannot be picky in those moments because even to cry you have to go back to where it all starts again, you have to return with them.
And this man, therefore, returns with them. Among people. No matter who.
With three identical patients of the cardiology ward of a Moscow hospital, where he stays for a few months, the time to write the last of his fifteen quartets: the final reflection on Death and the senselessness of it all.
We know nothing about these three men, like the thieves crucified with Jesus. What brought them to that hospital, what their occupations were, what made their days happy, what they thought of this man. The only thing that unites them is the perimeter of the room they are in, and an unexpected familiarity with the proximity of Death. One of the three might have insulted him for his complicity with the Bolshevik cause: Aren't you Shostakovich? Save yourself and us; another, mocked for the humiliations he suffered for not yielding to the Bolshevik cause. Yet another defended him, addressing his bedmate with a "Don’t you fear the same penalty?”
Of this man, however, we know everything. Of his being the greatest living composer of the time, of his relationship with Stalin, of his difficulties with the Soviet regime, which considered him a traitor, of his difficulties with the opponents of the Soviet regime, who considered him a traitor. It's said he wandered around St. Petersburg with a suitcase containing only the bare necessities in case of deportation and that he slept on the landing of his apartment so that when the secret police decided to arrest him, they would not burst into his home disturbing his family. It was Woody Allen, in one of his formidable early career booklets, who said: “It’s hard to satirize someone who has their boot on your face.” And yet that’s exactly what this man did all his life.
So this man decided to take refuge in quartets, the only safe place where no one could tell him anything. A quartet is a composition that most resembles talking to oneself. And it is in the quartets where one can hear the truest voice of this man.
And so, reaching the extreme step of the most extreme age, this man decides to free his truest voice, which resembles that of the cello, together with those of his three roommates, whom he appoints as first violin, second violin, and viola. All four, in a face-to-face with Death, each with their fears, their bewilderment, their incapability, their things to say.
To be played so that flies drop dead mid-air and the audience leaves the hall due to sheer boredom, this man left as a recommendation for the execution of the first movement, which fades out imperceptibly in a "morendo," a recurring indication in all other movements. The first to speak of his death is the violin. Alone, in a stasis and solitude that are terrifying: in the room, he seemed like a stranger now, coming from a fearsome country, and one didn’t dare to talk to him.
The others, lost, need their time to join the bewilderment of the first violin and respond to him.
Then, slowly, one by one, they gather around the violin, just as they are, in dressing gown, pajamas, and slippers, with the entrance of the cello closing the circle of this docile procession.
It ends like this, trivially. With the light of the Moscow sunset crossing the scene of this pocket-sized Spoon River, where the dead start speaking even before they are dead, in six movements all having the same timing of things happening without being able to do anything to prevent them. "Adagio."
Moments before the sun disappears behind the roof of a building, identical to many in this suburb, this man finds the strength to get up from the bed, accompanied by the fearful gazes of his companions, and reaches the window. A man in pajamas, a dressing gown, and slippers, with eyes sunken into the thickness of the glasses’ frame. The Moskva, right under those eyes, forms a bend. He squints, this man, and sees life bustling, around the shores of that bend. A distant titter of girls laughing and children playing. And he doesn’t even know why, but he whistles the tune of a popular song. A song without words. But which, if it had them, would resemble these:
Far away, the cello whistled; its call passed the bridge, another arch, another, the lock, another bridge, far away, farther away... It called all the barges of the river, all of them, and the entire city, and the sky and the countryside, and us, it took everything away, even the Moskva, everything, let it not be spoken of again.
PS Thank you to Louis Ferdinand Céline for a few interventions here and there.
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