Free The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes Page B

mountaineering; he was put in a state of mortal fear as soon as he felt the treacherous snow beneath his skis. She enjoyed boxing matches; he could not bear the sight of one man beating another nearly to death. He even failed to master the form of exercise closest to his own art: dancing. He could write a polka, he could play one jauntily on the piano, but put him on the dance floor and his feet would be ineptly disobedient.
    What he enjoyed was playing patience, which calmed him; or card games with friends, as long as they played for money. And though he was neither robust nor coordinated enough for sport, he liked umpiring. Before the war, in Leningrad, he had qualified as a football referee. During their exile in Kuibyshev, he organised and umpired volleyball competitions. He would announce solemnly, in one of the few English phrases he had somehow picked up, ‘It is time to play volleyball.’ And then add, in Russian, a sports commentator’s favourite phrase: ‘The match will take place whatever the weather.’
    Galya and Maxim were rarely punished. If they did anything naughty or dishonest, this immediately reduced their parents to a state of extreme anxiety. Nita would frown and look at the children reproachfully; he would light cigarette after cigarette while pacing up and down. This dumbshow of anguish was often chastisement enough for the children. Besides, the whole country was a punishment cell: why introduce a child so early to what it would see quite enough of in its lifetime?
    Still, there were occasionally cases of extreme naughtiness. Once, Maxim had faked a bicycle accident, pretending to be hurt, perhaps even unconscious, only to jump up and start laughing when he saw how distraught his parents were. In such cases he would say to Maxim (for it usually was Maxim), ‘Please come and see me in my study. I need to have a serious talk with you.’ And even these words brought a kind of pain to the boy. In his study, he would make Maxim write down a description of what he had done, followed by a promise never to behave like that again, then sign and date this affidavit. If Maxim repeated his sin, he would summon the boy to his study, take the written promise from the desk drawer, and make Maxim read it aloud. Though the boy’s shame was often such that it felt as if the punishment were being visited back upon the father.
    His best memories of wartime exile were simple ones: he and Galya playing with a litter of pigs, trying to hold on to the snorting, bristly bundles of flesh; or Maxim doing his famous impression of a Bulgarian policeman tying his bootlaces. They spent summers on a former estate at Ivanovo, where Poultry Collective Farm Number 69 became an ad hoc House of Composers. Here he wrote his Eighth Symphony on a desk consisting of a piece of board nailed to the inside wall of a converted henhouse. He could always work, regardless of chaos and discomfort around him. This was his salvation. Others were distracted by the sounds of normal life. Prokofiev would angrily chase away Maxim and Galya if they were merely being themselves within earshot of his room; but he himself was impervious to noise. All that bothered him was the barking of dogs: that insistent, hysterical sound cut right across the music he heard in his head. That was why he preferred cats to dogs. Cats were always happy to let him compose.
    Those who did not know him, and who followed music only from a distance, probably imagined that the trauma of 1936 now lay well in the past. He had committed a great fault in writing Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk , and Power had properly castigated him. Repentant, he had composed a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism. Then, during the Great Patriotic War, he had written his Seventh Symphony, whose message of anti-Fascism had resounded across the world. And so, he had achieved forgiveness.
    But those who understood how religion – and therefore Power – operated would have known better. The