Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  Is Ulrich deceiving himself when he imagines that he has stood with her in an ancient monastery carved entirely out of rock, somewhere on the way to Mosul, where the aged bishop has taken vows of silence and lives in solitude on the top of an inaccessible mountain? Surely not: for he remembers looking up to the astonishing incline where every day the man lowers a basket for his food – the basket in which, when his last mortal sickness comes upon him, he will send down a message so they may climb up to collect his body. Ulrich remembers eating mulberries and pomegranates plucked from trees by the Tigris, and all the flowers, and his mother laughing with her Kurdish guide, saying, This is paradise. Another snatch of the past: Ulrich has been dressed in a red shirt (for the wearing of blue is offensive to these people, and how marvellous that there can be prohibition on a colour!) and he sits in a dim room in a low-built house whose threshold is decorated with a painted snake. There is a woman seated on a mat who wears a flowing headdress (whose unfamiliar folds are disquieting to the young boy) and who cuts up into squares, with great delectation, a pulpy substance that is shiny on her fingers. She eyes him all the time with heavy curiosity, and without warning she is possessed with the desire to stroke his cheeks with her sticky hands. He runs to take shelter behind his mother, who appals him still further by eating these syrupy squares and declaring her delight. On the journey home, she tells him that these people have experienced violent raids and live in terror of a great massacre: their religion is an offence to the Musulmans who live in these parts and, now the empire is breaking up, they are in perpetual peril. And with the narcissism of childhood he is filled with regret at having denied the woman his cheek when she was about to die.

  Ulrich remembers his father’s late-night fury at Elizaveta when she returned from one of those rural expeditions – and perhaps they were less numerous than he now imagines. For he also recalls the heavy tedium of big city hotels where the family stayed for weeks together, and restaurants where his mother sat in unending debates over politics. Elizaveta had a consuming passion for the affairs of that region – she wrote about them regularly for the Bulgarian newspapers – and she was never so content as when exchanging political analyses with other informed observers. But these conversations drove her young son to distraction. He hated the diplomats and businessmen whose arguments absorbed her so, and he tried to disrupt their speeches with tears and full-blown choking tantrums. He developed an array of ruses for prising Elizaveta’s attentions away from them and, though she held out for a while, his complaints of sickness, headaches and ringing in his ears would eventually force her to board a train with him back to Sofia.

  He sang on the journey, happy to have her to himself again. He was joyful when they arrived back at home (the house cold and dim save for the small corner kept alive by his grandmother’s movement) and he ran off to play with the children he knew in the houses round about. But each time he discovered that they had grown out of the games he had shared with them before he went away, and turned to others he did not know – ones that seemed calculated to exclude casual visitors such as he.

  Perhaps this was why Ulrich became such a solitary child. The stuccoed cube of his bedroom, perched up in that big house, became the most dependable thing in his world, and he filled it with the ample emission of his daydreams.

  His father was exasperated by his early signs of introversion.

  ‘You are privileged enough, at a young age, to enjoy the society of talented and influential men – and all you can do is stammer and scratch, and hold your foot in your hand like a fool. You will not be a failure, my son. Whatever it takes, I will not allow it.’

  3

  BY WHAT ALCHEMY is an obsession kindled in a boy?

  Another child who passed through Ulrich’s early experiences might have emerged with a passion for machines. His father encouraged him in that direction, with his tender demonstrations of engines, and the delightful way he simulated moving parts with his long white fingers. Or he might have conceived a fascination with exploration, or the study of peoples. But there was something Ulrich’s early attentions found more marvellous.

  One day, when Elizaveta was alone with him in the house, she heard him singing. Following the sound, she came upon him, not yet six years old, giving a solo performance in the middle of the lavish drawing room, where there hung a series of prints of the Ringstrasse that her husband had once purchased in Vienna. Ulrich produced from his boyish throat a passable imitation of a violin’s whine, and he improvised a tune with such zeal that Elizaveta wondered where this spirit had come from to enter her son. He moved while he sang, a jerky infant’s version of a grown man’s dance, and he clapped a drum here and there. His music became faster and more breathless, and, as he rolled into the last variation on his theme, his eyes widened and his head shook with what he felt inside – until the performance exploded in one final stamping flourish. Ulrich stood entirely still for a moment, the hiss of the fire the only sound in the room. Then he burst into his own applause and bowed low to an unseen audience, and his mother took her opportunity to withdraw.

  Whenever news reached Ulrich that the Gypsies had come to Sofia, he would run through the streets to their encampment and beg the weary fiddlers to play for him, jumping on the spot with impatience until they gave in. As long as they were in the city, he would follow them wherever they went, capering on the street corners where they played, and imitating, with an imaginary violin under his chin, their sway, their foot-tap, and their bow.

  The Gypsies always left without warning, so there would come a morning when he went out to find only a forlorn patch of ground, flattened and smoking, where dogs and pigs sniffed the leftovers. He would take out his handkerchief and wave it at the empty road – a gesture he had observed at railway stations and presumed grandiose.

  Ulrich heard about gramophone records, in which men captured music and sealed it up, and he developed a fascination for them. The family did not possess a gramophone player, but this did not prevent him from wanting them, for it made him happy to arrange the records around his room like talismans. In those days there were few gramophone records available in Sofia, and Elizaveta therefore discovered a means of appeasing her son when they set off for journeys abroad. His favourite place on earth became Herr Stern’s Odeon record shop on the Grande Rue de Pera in Constantinople, where it was possible to listen to records in an enchanted room festooned with rugs and paintings.

  It was Herr Stern who introduced Ulrich to the music of Cemil Bey, the great Turkish tanbur player, and who expanded his tastes to include the Armenian and Greek musicians, and singers from Egypt. Together they discussed music, and innovations in recording equipment, and news from the big companies who manufactured Ulrich’s delights – Odeon from Germany, Gramco from England, Baidaphon from Lebanon and Victor from America.

  ‘Is Odeon the very best company, Herr Stern?’ he liked to ask.

  ‘Odeon certainly has a very great range,’ replied Herr Stern, without condescension. ‘In our part of the world, they have recorded many more musicians than the others. Many excellent masters who were only known in their own small towns until a few years ago – now Odeon has made them into celebrities that you and I can listen to in our homes.’

  ‘But Odeon invented the double-sided record, and now all the others have copied them. So they must be the best!’

  Herr Stern laughed.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right!’

  ‘Will someone invent a triple-sided record some day, Herr Stern?’

  Ulrich was full of questions, but he chose not to ask why his own family did not possess a gramophone player, when modern brass horns had begun to bloom proudly in all the other houses they visited in Sofia. There was an evening when his father, increasingly irritated by the piano exercises of the girl in the adjoining house, suddenly banged down his spoon and appealed furiously: ‘Can that child not be made to stop?’ Other things added up along the way: the absence of musical instruments and Sunday afternoon concerts
. Ulrich noticed that his mother’s singing voice fell silent when his father was around, and he began to sense in her a philharmonic sadness, looming like the outsized shadows in the modern paintings they saw on their visits to Vienna.

  He was therefore surprised when his mother announced, during one of his father’s absences, that she wished to buy him a violin. He knew it was an assault on the household’s unspoken rules.

  He went with her to the violin maker’s shop, and of course it was the climax of all his hopes: the gloomy room where rows of ruddy instruments were hung, redolent of wood and varnish. The violin maker played on them so Ulrich could judge the tone, the children’s half-size instruments tucked like toys under his enormous beard. Ulrich chose the one that was the most beautiful of all. Elizaveta was delighted, and she said to the violin maker, ‘Please just show him how to put his hands. He doesn’t have a teacher yet.’ So the man crouched behind Ulrich and operated his hands like a puppeteer, supporting the instrument and moving the bow, and Ulrich felt it was all much more difficult than he had imagined.

  He threw himself into his violin practice. Mealtimes and lessons became inconveniences, and all his other pursuits were forgotten. Lacking a teacher, he studied photographs of violinists to see how they positioned their fingers, and he invented exercises to make his movements more assured. When the Gypsies next came into town, Ulrich ran with his violin, and pestered them for advice and demonstrations. He studied their performance with the attentiveness of a fellow musician. By the time they left, he was confident that the mysteries of music would not resist him, and he would play his violin as well as any human being. He told himself, ‘I am one of them.’

  ‘Do you think that Father will allow me to take lessons?’ he asked his mother doubtfully.

  ‘I think when he sees how much progress you have already made on your own, it will be impossible for him to refuse.’

  ‘Really?’ Ulrich asked, unconvinced.

  ‘Why not?’ she said, with a hint of evasion. ‘Why don’t you give a concert for him when he returns? He will be amazed at what you have achieved.’

  Given his father’s love of all things Viennese, Ulrich decided to prepare a waltz that was often performed by the orchestra in the Shumenska restaurant opposite their house. He listened at the restaurant window until he had memorised it, and then began to reproduce it on his own instrument. He practised it until every note was perfectly sculpted for his father’s return.

  On that evening, he set up the drawing room as a concert hall, with two armchairs for his parents, and an upturned chest as a podium. He put on a little black suit, and took a bow tie from his father’s dressing room. When his preparations were complete, he summoned his audience and sat them down. After a few vigorous swipes of his bow in the empty air, he began.

  Ulrich’s eyes were set on his father, who sat folded in one half of his armchair. He saw the lines gathering on his father’s forehead, and he watched the tips of his moustache rise to meet them. He thought of a stormy tangle of telegraph wires, and a flock of birds above the bars of lowered railway barriers. He thought of a set of photographs he had once seen in a bookshop, which showed the expressions induced in mental patients by the application of electric currents to the various muscles of the face. He thought of a day when he had posed with his parents in the sunlight for a photograph in front of the opera house in Vienna, the folds of his mother’s parasol ticklish against his bare legs, and his father said, ‘If only we had been conquered by the Austrians, and not by the Turks, we would have had some of this Enlightenment for ourselves,’ and Ulrich had wondered if he was talking about a kind of cake. He thought of anything but the music, and, in the middle of the waltz, a great buzzing filled his ears, and his playing simply tailed off.

  His bow caught a violin string awkwardly as he lowered it, and there was a catastrophic plink. And the family sat once again in a silence punctuated only by the funereal bark of the crows outside.

  His father seized the violin from Ulrich’s hand, and brandished it at his wife like a meat cleaver.

  ‘You bought this for him? Haven’t we talked about this before?’

  His anger raised him up, and he circled the room.

  ‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it!’

  As he threw the violin into the fire, Ulrich’s mother was already sobbing, and, when the sparks flew up with the impact, she howled with grief and ran from the room.

  Ulrich, still holding his listless violin bow, joined his father in contemplating the incendiary demise of his instrument. He noticed that the varnish burned differently from the wood underneath – more furious, and almost white – while the copper from the bass string sent a streak of green through the conflagration. The mahogany did not burn fully, and a charred rack was left behind when the fire died down later.

  The next day, Ulrich had occasion to note that the shellac from which gramophone records were made burned differently again. A broad orange, with a diffuse, sooty, pungent flame.

  Ulrich was too young to imagine that his father’s opinions could be simply brushed aside. For a long time he bore a grudge against both father and music. But since the former would not be altered, he pushed the latter far down inside him where it could not cause more damage. Only in the concealed realm of his daydreams did it emerge again, inviolate.

  In the rest of his life, Ulrich resolved to be more circumspect in his attachments, and to surrender them when necessary. Later on, when he saw what happened to people who refused to give up their convictions, he wondered if this is why he survived so long.

  A curious fact: Ulrich’s father made an exception, in his strenuous censorship of music, for the song of birds. In fact he had an unusually passionate love of birdsong, and could recognise a hundred different species by their calls. He taught Ulrich how to imitate birdsong with whistles and throaty warbles. On such tender ground, Ulrich and his father found common cause; and his memories of the walks they took together to hear the dawn chorus remain some of the happiest of all his childhood.

  4

  ONE DAY, ULRICH’S FATHER came into his bedroom. He said, ‘Remember everything.’

  He was dressed as a soldier.

  All at once, Ulrich’s father stopped taking him for Sunday walks. His exercises. His excitement at new scientific discoveries. Buying pork at the market. He abandoned all this and became a soldier in a war.

  He came into Ulrich’s bedroom and sat on the bed in his improbable uniform. He looked at his son and said, ‘Remember everything.’ When Ulrich thinks back now, he feels that he was staring into the gas lamp to examine its glare. Was there also another boy with him, crouching by his side? It seems to him there was. It was so long ago: and as he pictures it now his father is but a military silhouette to his dazzled eyes.

  He has forgotten.

  Those were the days of his father’s wealth, when he was admired in the city, and would strike out into the world with projects and opinions. He had travelled widely, and dressed in a way that made him seem idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan. He liked dogs and cameras. He was proud of his Russian samovar, and had many discussions with his servant about its use. He took Ulrich to the fair, and roared with delight as he soared on the swings. He attended lectures by famous scientists, and tried to reconstruct their arguments over the dinner table. He had a system of exercises to which he ascribed his vigour. He loved to travel by tram, even on the most crowded days. He saw signs in every morning’s newspaper that the world was getting better. He stood rigid in church, and irritated Elizaveta with his devotions. He requested daily letters from Ulrich, even when they were in the same house, and insisted that he learn German and French. He took him to the opening of the first cinema in Sofia. He became a soldier in a war.

  ‘I chose your name, Ulrich. I have always thought it sounded noble.’ He said that, too; and then he left the room in a manner
that indicated he had not got what he came for. He was gone for years.

  Ulrich does not know which war his father was going to on that day, since there were several at that time. But he knows he fell sick with typhus while his father was away. It was the year of the epidemic, and the disease was all around. He had seen a dead woman lying by the side of the road, and while his mother had yanked his hand and said, Don’t look, don’t look! he had turned back obstinately to look at the unhappy corpse, and wondered whose job it was to clear such things away.

  But typhus was not supposed to enter clean, well-aired houses such as theirs, and Elizaveta was terrified. She burned all his clothes and filled the closets with mothballs.

  Ulrich cannot recall the feeling of typhus, only the effect it had on adult faces. His eyes are burning with formalin, and the doctor sits heavily by his bed. The stethoscope is great and cold on his chest, and the medical gaze is intent behind the pince-nez, in whose steady glass the reflection of the window is two bright dancing rectangles; and, as Ulrich lies motionless, searching in the doctor’s eyes for the intuition of whether he will live or die, twin white feathers fall there, scything side to side in the miniature double sky.

  When he recovered, his mother clasped him to her and said,

  ‘My baby. Don’t ever leave me!’

  Some time after, on an evening when she had filled the Dondukov Boulevard mansion with guests, he remembers descending the broad staircase quite naked, and weaving unselfconsciously through the adult crush to find her. Seeing him so exposed, she hurried over, furious with shame, and sent him running back up the stairs.