JAMES CHAPMAN

James Chapman, lives in NYC, born in California 1955, 5 novels published, magazine publications Central Park, Cambridge Book Review, Appearances, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Real Fiction, DDT, Transmog, Global City Review, Northwest Review, No Roses Review, Jacob’s Ladder, Journal of Experimental Fiction, others. He also operates a small press for experimental and “advanced” fiction, Fugue State Press, which has published 13 titles to date.

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STEEL TAPESTRIES
(Excerpted from Stet)

Josef Stalin has died, and in response a young filmmaker is about to make a pencil-mark on a piece of cardboard. It used to be, when Stalin was alive, that merely to make a certain kind of mark with a pencil could lead one into terrible difficulties. But now-who knows-is it safe? The point of the pencil is on the storyboard. Should it move?
      Stet, the filmmaker, sees fingers that aren't his fingers.
      Stalin's fingers, in his coffin, holding a little icon. Stalin, dead, dead, his fingers curled around a gold-leaf picture of filmmaker Stet as an old man of 50. The flesh of Stalin's dead index fingers actually touching the depicted cheeks of the gaunt thorn-crowned Stet.
      Stalin is really dead? Definitely?
      Thousands of citizens are filing through the Great Hall of Columns. They arrive as if scorched by a black enemy. They have come here to compare their charred flesh with the flesh of a man who was never hurt. They are the people of an heroic land, but the land is not called Russia, it is without a name, because it was abandoned by its father at conception. And yet these people still love their father. A woman falls to the floor screaming "My judge! They didn't spare even you!" Her husband doesn't try to lift her, but continues to stare at the dead face of the great Leader and Teacher.
      Owing to the condition of film in this unnamable land (think of film as a living man with every bone, including the skullbone, removed by the skill of state surgeons, and now film is a mammalian blob lying on a bright-lit public stage, squeaking every time it tries to inhale, because even air is too ambiguous, too subject to misinterpretation), life itself must now submit to the most egregious of cinematic conventions. The men who prepared the lying-in-state of the great Virgin Father Josef Stalin, these men were unable to think in any terms but the film epic. They saw the lines of mourners as a fine dramatic crowd of extras, and were content to filigree this crowd scene with silent visuals (the dark blue drapes and massive black-hung columns, the silenced Leader's corpse and the stricken faces of young guards of that same Red Army from which he used to carve limbs for his breakfast). Then they panicked, these funeral art directors, when they recognized that the extras were also the audience. An unusual situation! Who can direct an audience to perform? Suppose some of those milling faces, looking upon the dead man, revealed ambiguous thoughts?
      So a musical soundtrack was provided, to constantly channel the emotions of this performing audience into the correct path of somber tragedy. A piano was wheeled into a corner, and red ropes put up to symbolize the invisibility and subconscious effectiveness of any good soundtrack, and then it was necessary to call upon the greatest performers to run through these funeral marches, since it would not do to have some Ivan Ivanovich picking out the notes. And then again they had to invite all the great performers (those who were in good political health) or risk offending many important people-so the red rope moved much farther into the room to permit even a full orchestra, the greatest soundtrack ever dubbed onto any funeral.
      At this moment there is only one living creature performing, anonymously reinforcing the somber mood, and that is the scrawny fellow at the grand piano, pale, looking down at the keys as if this little piece he's playing were extremely difficult for him, his fingers trembling, mouth not quite daring to grimace-it's enough that he was officially invited here! It is enough that he is still alive in 1953, a worm like that, having dared to outlast the Leader and Teacher! Twice Josef Stalin reached out his hand to personally crush this man, the composer Shostakovich: once in 1934 when there had appeared upon the earth an opera so personally offensive to the Leader that it was necessary for all the newspapers to attack the composer, and for his music to be banned across a vast empire-you can imagine the composer had his bags packed, ready for his trip to Lubyanka Prison-and he would have gone there, too, had not the official whose job it was to arrest him been, himself, arrested just a few days earlier. The composer finally wormed out of it all by calling his next symphony A SOVIET ARTIST'S RESPONSE TO JUSTIFIED CRITICISM. That's the ticket. Still, in 1948 it all happened over again, denunciations again signed by all loyal Soviet composers, Shostakovich fired from his teaching jobs, his music banned everywhere whether it'd won the Stalin Prize or not, the composer having to read aloud in a vast hall full of musicologists a humble self-criticism and repentance for having written "music against the people," symphonies "that in no way can be called musical compositions," music "with absolutely no connection to the art of music"-he read his self-accusation from a piece of paper that was handed to him on his way up to the podium-and yet this man was never arrested, never once! And here he is at the honored post of playing at Stalin's wake, composer Shostakovich, or let us call him the piano-player Shostakovich, yes, he's certainly not here to play Shostakovich compositions, that would be too much, Tchaikovsky is good enough for such a lucky worm to play.
      Nobody can know where the music's coming from anyway, the corpse of the great one is too distracting. And this leads to an odd circumstance. The fact is, this Shostakovich used to work in the cinema at night when he was young, playing piano to accompany the silent pictures, improvising (this was the 1920s), freely (the 1920s, understand), to the general irritation and rage of the cinemagoing public, which was the same dim beast then as now. And here, in 1953, working again as an accompanist, he is so overcome by the presence of the corpse of the Beloved Critic that he begins to lose track of the action on-screen, so to say-at this moment he is supposed to be playing the "Dialogue" in B-major of Tchaikovsky, which is a musical depiction of two pre-revolutionary people making tragic remarks to each other, and he is nearly playing it-to Stalin's ears it sounds all right-nobody among the perspiring, crazed spectators seems to notice the music at all-and of course the important Party members present have opinions, but with absolutely no basis, Soviet officials actually outstripping the officials of every other nation on earth in the matter of unmusicality.
      In fact, there is really nothing wrong with what Shostakovich is playing-it's only that his ears have gotten confused, and they seem to be hearing an entirely different melody, up in the top three octaves of the piano. This hallucination is so distracting that he turns his eyes to the right end of the keyboard to see if some fool is perhaps playing four-hand piano with him.
      What he sees is not so simple to describe. On the storyboard of filmmaker Stet (since this is Stet's unfilmable film we are watching) the composer's vision is depicted as a bald man sitting next to Shostakovich on the piano bench, and this bald man, who looks so cheerful, who is playing a brittle work of his called "Sarcasms" that quite improbably fits in academically impeccable counterpoint with the glum movement Shostakovich is trying to play, is the translucent image of dishonored composer Prokofiev. He consists entirely of dots.
      Now, anybody will tell you that Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day, and had their funerals on the same day. And this is supposed to be an interesting coincidence. But what does it mean, to "die on the same day"? If a young metalworker kills his wife with a hammer, and then commits suicide by taking prussic acid, is it permissible to speak of their having died on the same day, the interesting coincidence of that? Did you marry your wife on a different day than she married you? Prokofiev grew up around Stalin, as all of us did (on the tapestry on the wall, there are trees depicted in the act of trying to grow through an iron grating). Our limbs jammed and stunted for decades, we all felt so strange when the barrier was suddenly removed, that some of us froze in place, waiting for new barriers to rest our twisted parts against. And new barriers were soon supplied. Let us not laugh too hard at each other, in fact let us stop talking now, and look instead into the peaceful peasant faces on these tapestries, and have a moratorium on knowing laughter and the mockery that feels so much like the first cigarette before breakfast, such a joy and relief to destroy something small right after dreaming. In the crowd filing past the coffin, a pair of deformed brothers, joined forever at the foreheads, are crab-walking past, looking sidelong at the body of the Great Physician. There you are, imagine it is you who have had a Siamese brother attached to your brow since birth, a face that has been the largest object to your eyes, the face you see instead of a mirror, he you have hated with the intimacy of self-hatred, and wished out of existence, and struggled against, and screamed at, with no sense of his right to scream at you-imagine that he dies one afternoon. (Shostakovich's head dips lower as he plays, occluding an electric light behind him, all is dark forever.) It is not as if your brother's face now, in death, disappears, revealing the soft sunshine you could never see full-on. No, you are confronted with the same face, blocking you in the same way, not more lovely for being a dead face, its mouth and eyes hanging open in mockery. The doctors will kindly conceal from you the fact that, now that your brother is dead, an inexorable coincidence requires that you too shall die on this very same evening. All you know is that now you can never walk again, because to walk you have always needed the help of the nameless one, the scourge, the delimiter, the trauma, the soulless all-flesh all-opaque all-burdening brother, whose voice and breath were acid to your flesh, who defined how you moved, thought, ate, spoke, who even in your dreams never vanished, though he sometimes became gray and light as a balloon-those were happy dreams with, however, the intensity of nightmares.
      Composer Prokofiev, who lived in Paris as the kind of expat who wears a checked jacket, orange bow tie and yellow shoes all at the same time, this pampered cosmopolitan ended up returning to Moscow just at the time the purges and arrests were worst-imagine, he was looking for an understanding audience. To force a sophisticate to write sincerely, that will cause him such suffering that he might, like O. Wilde, become in his suffering an authentic man. "I know what will restore their love for me-I'll write a work to their exact specifications, a work in their image!" Some might even say he became a better composer by acquaintance with tragedy. That's a good thing, right? And what was this tragedy? The easy and instant mutability of his critics. "Why wouldn't they approve this piece of music," he whispers to Shostakovich, "of all things, this outright propaganda in their favor? It is impossible that they would attack such a work-I myself despise it, but it's a perfect ode to the Leader-" (and Prokofiev is playing the theme of his cantata setting of Stalin's speech at Lenin's bier, which by no means blends well with poor Shostakovich's nervous playing-furthermore, Prokofiev is singing a new text to his ode, it's the speech of the prosecutor at the show trials before the war: "Shoot these rabid dogs!" sings the composer nobly. "Death to this gang that hide their ferocious teeth, their eagle claws, from the people! Down with that vulture Trotsky, from whose mouth a bloody venom drips, putrefying the great ideals of Marxism! Let's put an end once and for all to these miserable hybrids of foxes and pigs, these stinking corpses! Let their horrible squeals finally come to an end!" He then continues to sing wordless animal noises, growls and bleats, while Shostakovich beside him turns dead white, his fingers somehow still repeating the brief "Dialogue" over and over, whispering "No, it's all a mistake, so to speak, all a mistake-" But Prokofiev is encroaching on the middle of the keyboard now, singing with the full voice that an invisible dead man might as well adopt-he plays a section of Ivan the Terrible, and the great tapestry against the wall at the head of the bier flickers alive with scenes from the Eisenstein film-unfamiliar scenes, because these are the parts of the film that were suppressed, and Prokofiev is singing

Many years, many years,
Many years, many years!
Many years, many years!
Many years!

Ivan at the tomb of Anastasia, and it is the gift of the dead composer to sing as a whole boy's choir if he chooses.

Here we are at the mercy of lawless masters
The most terrible renegades of an illegitimate tsar,
the most terrible in the world.

Prokofiev is playing unfamiliar themes, more dissonant, more formalist, more an outright insult to the workers, and scenes flash past on the screen of workers destroying a church, from the never-permitted Bezhin Meadow by that same Eisenstein, a bacchanal of highly organized flames, and a slight arrogance returns to Prokofiev's face as he returns to himself. A thousand images follow, films that were never made, films that were destroyed, films the filmmakers only wished for, films they did not dare wish. Tchaikovsky has been evicted, and the full brittleness of the free Prokofiev requires the entire keyboard, leaving Shostakovich perched on the left edge of the bench, playing only the chord changes of the "Dialogue" in the lowest octave. The light from the filmic tapestry shines mildly down on Stalin's body, and his face actually softens, because for him to hold still and permit such films to exist, there must have been a change for the better in the world. And he has not lifted his fingers from the little icon of Stet, has not written one of his famous notes, has not even tried to sing along with Ivan on the screen when he screams "No more! I will be your judge! I will be tsar!"
      But all this is rankest fantasia, serving no purpose, in reality we have only composer Shostakovich, suffering from nerves, finishing up the "Dialogue" and playing now for the body of the Great Gardener some piece by Khrennikov. That is correct, the worm Shostakovich is playing a piano composition by Khrennikov himself, First Secretary of the Union of Composers, that fine talent. How better to honor the deceased Great Judge than to play to his corpse a piece of note-spinning by honored academician Khrennikov? Lest the viewer believe this film namedrops only the most dishonored geniuses, here is a man beside whom Bach was a puppy and Beethoven a bug. Khrennikov, who used his position at the Union of Composers to correct the paths of Shostakovich, Miaskovsky, Prokofiev, Shebalin, and conductor Mravinsky. After weeks of this public path-correction, speeches of self-criticism were given in public by the victims. Shebalin died of a stroke, and Prokofiev was finally broken. Music, you see, must be melodic and graceful, melodic and graceful. Nikolai Yakovlevich Miaskovsky died too, weeping on his deathbed-perhaps our lives really have been "on the wrong path"-perhaps everything I did really was "against the people"-Shostakovich, suddenly without income, withdrew into the writing of preludes and fugues, but, just think of it, even these turned out to be politically atrocious, and to require severe public correction. A judge, in a responsible position, aware of his powers, suffers, yes he does, he must wield his axe with the care of an artist, it's very like being an artist, upholding standards is deeply creative. Khrennikov, a weak-legged spider himself, nevertheless was willing to take upon himself the burden of setting the tone.
      In the Great Hall of Columns, hundreds of weeping women. A sixteen-year-old girl, choking, her cheeks splotted red: because Marshall Stalin has decided not to breathe anymore, the air is now her enemy.
      Khrennikov stands in a corner of the Great Hall, listening deadpan to his composition being played, leaning against a small Georgian tapestry of red and gold. His fingers fidget rhythmically behind him, and find the threads, and pick at them. Tapestry threads should be made of steel if they don't expect to be ripped out.
      Steel tapestries, now there's the thing. Steel tapestries wouldn't take dyes, would carry no picture at all, no opportunity for misunderstanding or ambiguity, just enormous twenty-meter-square woven steel monoliths.
      A peasant with an oud, playing for an audience of one listening rabbit, is portrayed on the ancient tapestry right where Khrennikov's buttocks lean.
      Where his fingernails snatch at threads, a mockingbird was shown trying to grow golden wings.
      Steel would have lasted longer. Art and artists that can't stand a little criticism, what are they worth? Art is no place for the weak, the shy, the easily-damaged flowers.
      Shostakovich, who unlike Prokofiev is not yet beyond the reach of useful self-correction, performs the work of Tikhan Khrennikov subtitled "Unhealthy Pessimism Refuted by Comrade Zdanov." (The main title is Arabesque.) As Dimitri Dimitrivich plays it (plays with frightening sincerity and conviction), it sounds like a polka in the right hand and a funeral march in the left. And which hand should dominate a melody, according to Tikhan Khrennikov? And, to Tikhan Khrennikov's way of thinking, does piano music have the power to return life to a dead man?
      But where did all these hanging tapestries come from? The frightening and beautiful faces of Soviet citizens having passed in single file for hours, nobody notices that the draperies hanging around the Hall of Columns, which were this morning mere velvet-curtains, sashes, window-scarves, all in royal blue-are now a profusion of tapestries depicting monks, saints, itinerant singers, holy fools, and jesters at the feet of tyrants. These fabrics alter themselves because they feel the absence of any edict not to do so, they are the first draped fabrics to witness the Great Leader and Teacher in death, his hand not not not lifting the bludgeon of a telephone. Notice that Stalin now wears a lilac dressing-gown, and the bier is stuffed with cherry branches blossoming in pink.
      (As if the Hall of Columns were a puppet theatre! And the body of Stalin just a toy dead doll! And this all the private game of some individual.)
      The high sashes now hung with thousands of small pasteboard dangling golden Jewish-nosed Stalins, each wearing a beret and pretending to play an invisible violin. Stalin is dead.
      (Charlemagne, thought to be buried under the dome of the cathedral at Aachen, is not dead, but has only fallen asleep. He waits, still wearing his crown, still holding his broad sword, until the advent of Antichrist, when he will awaken and destroy his enemies.)
      The surface of the great columns themselves, no longer whitewashed but laminated with royal playing-cards, kings, queens, jacks each revealing both of their two faces (a readable face and a face which, inverted, is submerged). Stalin is dead.
      (Knez Lazar of Serbia, supposed to have been killed by the Turks in 1389, is not dead but only asleep. In the fullness of time he will awaken in his full strength and destroy his enemies.)
      The pale guards have slackened their attention, thus their uniforms have gotten transmogrified into tight-fitting costumes of silk that give the appearance of flesh tattooed with the words of the poet Mayakovsky's suicide note "Past One o'Clock" in an extravagant, sloppy red handwriting that extends from the chest into the crotch and down to the toes, with certain phrases blurring and vanishing, unreadable but making a beautiful stain across the worn silk. Men die, their words and deeds live, sometimes unluckily.
      (Endymion, with his lover asleep by his side, sleeps. He will never wake.)
      A naked Armenian boy brings a mirrored tray of plums to Joseph Stalin, and holds it in place above the Teacher's chest. But Joseph Stalin sees it not.
      Stalin's dressing gown a shroud of pomegranate seeds, held together only by love. What if we cannot forgive a man? Then we will never free ourselves, we will have to carry him within us.
      A woman named Marina taunts the dignity of the Great Cowherd and Supplier of Milk by creeping forward and whispering a poem straight into his ear, but Joseph Stalin is resting and will not stir today.
      This poem only goes, Where is my husband? My husband has gone. Where is his judge? His judge has not remained.
      To be like him, whom nobody does judge. The poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva pushes through the crowds looking for her husband, looking for her sister, looking for her daughter.
      She is another of these dotted-line creatures. We will not say this is her spirit, it's her presence, dressed very poorly. She returned from Paris to Russia because "I'm indifferent as to where I'm alone." Her grave does not exist. She wrote the words "I refuse to be" and died by ceasing to live, in a hut alongside the Kama River, thus following her husband in totalist emigration. She destroyed the universe.

     "My love,

     Some people live all their lives without paying attention to music. They die, and by their deaths something's removed from music anyway. Excuse me, you never explained, or perhaps we weren't listening, why it was Prokofiev died at the same instant as Stalin?
      He didn't. He died five seconds later. Barometric pressure. Authentic performance was suddenly possible. The removal of one pressure, and the application of another.
      Stet, his pencil drawing pictures on the only storyboard in Russia that expresses and does not communicate, suddenly imagines the effect of a microphone inside a coffin as it's being buried; we would hear the dirt surround us, hold us down and all around. We'd have ears of a dead man.
      Stet is free because nobody knows yet what he thinks.
      He is the black thread that sews shut the mouth of Stalin. He is the microphone in the gut of the glorious Leader. He is the noise in the night of a hammer.
      Hammer noise whink whink like digging through a glass mountain. Where is a glass mountain in the Kremlin? The steel hammer a doctor is using, some Latin name for it but it's a hammer all right-hitting a silver chisel striking bone, breaking open the skull of Stalin. The battles are all won by doctors and undertakers. Even with Stalin's greatest invention, the "Doctor's Plot," he could not exterminate enough doctors to eliminate death.
      At eleven at night, Stalin's body alone in the Great Hall, Oistrakh plays at the back of the foyer, for an audience of nobody, a heavy brass mute on the bridge of his violin, the strings barely sounding. Nothing unapproved, nothing improper, just his part from a Haydn trio. Bars of non-Russian adagio, from another century altogether, his violin almost silent, cancelled-out, secret. He manages to send these inaudible sounds to the ears of-let's not speak of who he's playing to. It is not to the dead ears in the box. A private audience.
      So is a column in a hall of columns the same as a tree in a forest of trees? A column, when it is born, already has its burden set.
      Columns are the same thing as trees, if for instance you consider it of no importance whether your own father is alive or dead. And a tapestry on a wall is identical with the planetary sky over a forest, assuming that life in a prison camp is the same as drinking wine at an outdoor café in Paris. If a poet named Marina who liquidated herself on a certain date can nevertheless hear and be comforted by sounds made ten years later by a balding, heartfelt violinist, then it may as well turn out to be true that the past can return.