Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘Ulrich!’ cried Magdalena when she saw him, and she threw herself at his chest.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m giving away his clothes.’

  She had brought everything out of the house. Jackets, shirts and sweaters flapped in the gale. Ulrich could not bear to see it all disappear.

  ‘So his warmth stays alive,’ she said. ‘Look how many have come.’

  Ulrich saw Misha in the crowd and, for the first time, burst into tears. The fool approached him. He secreted two cold marbles in Ulrich’s hands.

  ‘I did not know that fish could drown. Those marbles were his eyes.’

  It began to rain. The people dispersed, only a scattering of unwanted shirt collars and neckties left on the ground. Magdalena went into the house and emerged with Boris’s umbrella.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she said.

  ‘But it’s late.’

  She ignored him.

  The storm became stupendous. She led him, pulling his arm, and they found a place for sex. There were no lips, no hands, no hair: just genitals. In the tumult, the umbrella blew away and they were entirely exposed under the flashes. Her skirt was at her thighs and she screamed: not with the sex, but with its insufficiency. Over her shoulder, Ulrich saw a man watching them from his shelter in a doorway, and he felt ashamed. He sank to the floor, sobbing in the downpour.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She stared at him in disbelief, untrussing her skirt.

  ‘You know how much I need you,’ she shrieked into the tempest.

  She beat his head with her fists, and ran away, clacking and splashing on the street. He pulled up his trousers and retrieved the umbrella from the iron fence where it had lodged. When he reached the main road she had disappeared.

  Disturbed crows were wheeling overhead, their wet wings slapping ineffectually at the air.

  He did not know where to escape to. The city was suddenly without dimension, like a whipped-up ocean, and the umbrella, in this horizontal torrent, a flailing superfluity. He arrived finally at the bar where they had been two nights earlier. He found Else, the guileless prostitute, and took her upstairs. She was alarmed at his inconsiderate, uncouth pounding, but he did not stop until the barmaid knocked angrily at the door, complaining of the noise and the hour, and he grabbed his clothes and went home.

  For a long time, Ulrich avoided all places where he might run the risk of meeting any member of Boris’s family.

  Many years later, Ulrich heard a story about the great pianist, Leopold Godowsky, whom he had once seen in Berlin playing the music of Franz Liszt.

  Leopold Godowsky was born in Lithuania but spent his life in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and then New York. He had a gift for friendship and hospitality, and, wherever he lived, his home became a centre for artists and thinkers. His friends included Caruso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Chaplin, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Gide, Matisse, Ravel – and Albert Einstein.

  Godowsky was one of those people who are born to do one thing, and when a stroke rendered his right hand useless for piano playing, he fell into a deep depression. He never played in public again.

  During his final unhappy years in New York, Godowsky saw Einstein frequently, as the scientist had moved from Berlin to nearby Princeton.

  Leopold Godowsky had an Italian barber in New York, named Caruso. Caruso was a great follower of Einstein, and when he discovered that his customer, Godowsky, knew him personally, he begged him to bring the famous man to his shop. Each time Godowsky saw Einstein, he told him that Caruso the barber wanted to meet him, and Einstein each time agreed to go and see the man whenever he was next in the city. With one thing and another, however, the visit never took place.

  Eventually, Godowsky died. When the news reached Einstein at Princeton he did not say a word. He immediately picked up his hat and coat, took the first train to New York, and went to visit Caruso at his barbershop.

  Ulrich thinks back, sometimes, to the conversation he had with Boris in that attic laboratory so long ago, when they discussed the news of an uncle who had died. He feels that he did not ever progress far beyond his childhood bewilderment, and is ashamed of the inadequacy he always felt in the face of death. He has always been affected by stories of people who knew precisely how to respond when a person has died.

  Perhaps it is because his behaviour after Boris’s death fell so short of the mark that the terrible finality of it never truly settled.

  Whenever he thinks back to his wedding day, he remembers the smile on Boris’s face, and the way his hand was tucked in the belt of his green army uniform. But such a thing is impossible: for Boris had been dead for years by then – and he would never have worn army clothes. There are many other memories like that, which have all the flesh of terrestrial recollections, but must have slipped in somehow from another world.

  10

  ULRICH THREW HIMSELF into his bookkeeping at the leather company. It was not the kind of work he had imagined for himself, but the sense of finitude he discovered there turned out to be a surprising relief. When he immersed himself in grids of numbers, every ache in his head went away. He developed a knack for spotting the errors in a page of figures with just a casual glance, and he traced several routes to every total to ensure the computation was robust. He became notorious among his subordinates for spotting even the most trivial lapse, and asking them to do the work again. He delivered the completed books at the same time every day to the office of Ivan Stefanov, the son of the owner, and, when his work was finished, he applied himself to the greater task of overhauling the bookkeeping systems to make them more accurate and efficient. Ivan Stefanov, who was bored by procedure, was delighted by Ulrich’s devotion to it, and quickly promoted him to financial controller, a post that carried with it an office with his name on the door, and a fully enclosed desk.

  When his thoughts were not occupied with bookkeeping, Ulrich could not prevent himself wondering how so much had been snatched away from him so fast. He tried to deny it had happened: he played tricks on himself, marking time in Sofia by the timetable in his Berlin diary, full of far-off lectures and exams. He even chose to ask directions around his home town, and feigned gaps in his Bulgarian speech – as if he were an outsider here, who might be called away at any moment. He lay awake at night, completing in his head his thesis on plastic fibres in time for the deadline, which passed unobtrusively by.

  In Sofia there was no one who understood the scientific wonder he had left behind, and it became like a heavy secret he could only dwell on alone. He maintained an archive of Berlin science, full of notes and news clippings about the people he had encountered there. Every year he added to the list he kept of all his Berlin teachers and colleagues who won the Nobel Prize – an award that always held enormous allure for him. But as time passed, his ponderous rehearsals became detached from any reality of Berlin, which had moved on without him. His peers graduated, and moved on to more advanced things. New chemical discoveries were made every day, which Ulrich knew nothing of.

  Clara Blum began to teach chemistry at the University of Berlin, and married one of her colleagues in the department. Ulrich had to hear it from someone else, for she had broken off all contact when she realised he was never coming back.

  Meanwhile, in the cramped space of Ulrich’s Sofia home, his father sat in his chair, showing fewer and fewer signs of life. His leg stump became regularly infected, and every few months a little bit more had to be shaved off the end. And his deafness became more pronounced with the years, until he was finally delivered from the music he disliked so much. When he could no longer hear at all, Elizaveta erupted into a festival of song, chanting arias from Verdi to lah-lah-lah as she worked.

  Ulrich took advantage of his father’s deafness, too. He found perverse satisfaction in whispering insults in his ear:

  ‘You whipped your son so hard into success, and look what he has become. He has come back to this godforsaken place, and now he will never be anything at all. Your son is a
failure! How bitter your disappointment must be!’

  His father looked at him in bewilderment, his eyes narrow under heavy brows, and he peeled off a ribbon from his tattered mind:

  ‘Nothing can sing like the lyrebird. It can imitate the song of every other bird. It can make the sound of branches creaking in the wind.’

  Ulrich was invited to a piano recital in the house of the well-known doctor, Ivan Karamihailov, who had once been a regular associate of his father’s. He arrived directly from his work, and paid little attention to his surroundings. He waited distractedly in the audience, still preoccupied by the concerns of the day, eschewing the sociable gazes of people he knew.

  He was snatched away from the accounting columns in his head when the pianist entered, and he realised that it was Magdalena. He was ashamed: he had not seen her since the night of Boris’s death, and he had convinced himself she must despise him.

  She had tied her black hair back, exaggerating the exoticism of her pale skin and blue eyes. She was now approaching the age that Boris had been when he died, and the resemblance was more striking than ever.

  She wore a long dress of radiant blue.

  In the centre of the room was a music stand, which Magdalena picked up and moved aside so she could deliver some words to her audience. The stand was wooden, and carved in the shape of a lyre.

  Against one wall stood a magnificent long-case clock, whose pendulum had been stilled so the chimes would not disturb the performance. Hanging behind the piano was a painting of a solitary man contemplating an Alpine lake.

  Magdalena said,

  ‘I would like to dedicate my first public recital to the memory of my brother, Boris, who died two years ago on Saturday. I am delighted to see that some of his friends are here this evening.’

  And Ulrich was carried away to see her smile at him, openly, and without restraint. He has kept that smile with him ever since, even as it has become progressively detached from the time and the place, and, finally, from Magdalena herself.

  She sat at the piano. Ulrich watched the tightly laced black shoes that reached below for the pedals, and the narrow band of her legs that was visible beneath the blue of her dress.

  Ulrich was astonished by her performance, which showed how intent she had become since he had seen her. She had become a musician, and he watched her with every kind of yearning. As she played, her toes were on the pedals, and only the point of her shoes’ long heels touched the floor. Ulrich found himself aroused by the click each time her soles made contact with the brass.

  Afterwards, they walked in the garden together, and he told her about jazz, which it was impossible to hear in Sofia. She told him she had fallen in love with him long ago.

  ‘As a little girl I was always tender for you,’ she said. ‘And my brother told me such stories about you when you were away in Berlin. He knew you would do something wonderful: he knew he was less than you, and he put your ambition above his own. Since he’s been gone I’ve not stopped thinking of those stories.’

  11

  THE FRICTION OF ULRICH’S MEMORY, moving back and forth over the surface of his life, wears away all the detail – and the story becomes more bland each time.

  Nowadays, Ulrich finds it difficult to remember any happy moments from his marriage to Magdalena. Whenever he stumbles upon such a memory, he adds it to a list so it will not disappear.

  Item

  Magdalena’s father paid for the newly wed couple to honeymoon in Georgia. She wanted Ulrich to see where her maternal family came from, and where she herself had spent many happy times. He loved Tbilisi, and her joy at showing it. Her cousins were eccentric, attentive hosts, who woke them in the middle of the night to climb into horse carts and travel for hours along mud roads just to see an old church, or a beautiful hill. Ulrich took Magdalena to see Tosca in the arabesque opera house, and their happiness was absolute.

  When they emerged from their room each morning, Magdalena’s uncle made gestures to Ulrich that would have been obscene if it were not for the great generosity with which he delivered them.

  After this journey to Tbilisi, Ulrich never left Bulgaria again.

  Item

  Ivan Stefanov invited Ulrich and Magdalena to dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding. There was a strict dress code in the Stefanov mansion, and Magdalena wore her most sumptuous gown. Gloved waiters carried lobster aloft, and each place had its own cascade of crystal glasses. Ivan was merry, and stood up to make a speech about the deep affection he had always held for Ulrich. His lugubrious aunts blinked behind diamond necklaces, and ate little. After dinner Ivan became drunk, and he kept his guests up with his ideas about the company, his gossip about his workers, and his theories about life’s various dissatisfactions. Magdalena signalled several times to Ulrich that she wished to leave, but he could not find the appropriate break in his employer’s monologue, and they did not make their exit until Ivan Stefanov fell asleep in his chair.

  Item

  Boris and Magdalena had grown up in luxurious surroundings, which Ulrich’s bookkeeper salary did not allow him to match. They moved into a small house on Pop Bogomil Street, near the entrance to the city. But she liked the house very much, which was a relief to Ulrich. Every time he asked her, she said that she liked it.

  Item

  It became a tradition with them that Magdalena came to meet Ulrich after work every Friday, and they went to hold hands over the table in a nearby cake shop. He used to watch for her arrival by the upstairs window where he worked, and every week he had the same stirring of love when he saw her come round the corner, dressed up for him, and so small she fitted inside the eye on the casement handle.

  Item

  Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a chemistry trick. He put a glass vial in a bowl of water, and, calling her to watch, broke it open with pliers. The bowl erupted with boiling, and a pink flame hovered over the water. Magdalena started, while Ulrich looked between the bowl and her face, incandescent himself.

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, as it died down.

  ‘It’s very pretty. But what does it lead to?’

  ‘Oh! Something will come of it, one day.’

  ‘It’s childish, it seems to me.’

  There was a coolness between them for the rest of the day. And yet it was on that night that their son was conceived.

  Item

  They were once invited to a wedding in the Jewish quarter. The guests spoke Ladino and Bulgarian both, mixed together. There was a klezmer brass orchestra, and Magdalena laughed with the music, and danced unrestrainedly with him, though she was exuberantly pregnant. She kissed him and said, I hope our baby will be Jewish.

  Item

  Faithful to her maternal tradition, Magdalena wanted to give their son a Georgian name. Before choosing, she called several names from the front door to see how they would sound when, in years to come, she summoned her boy from his play.

  Item

  Elizaveta loved Magdalena. I never expected such a wonderful daughter-in-law, she said. Her own situation was gloomy, with no money and her husband lost, and the life of the young couple gave her new joy. She came to the house with gifts she could ill afford, yodelling and prancing to delight her grandson. Early one sunny morning, when she was drinking tea with Magdalena, Ulrich came back from a walk with his son, and announced, ‘Birds don’t fly away from a man holding a baby!’ and the two women burst into laughter at the expression of awe upon his face.

  Item

  An upright piano was brought into the house for Magdalena to continue her practice. Nothing gave Ulrich greater happiness than to sit behind her after dinner and request his favourite pieces, one after another.

  As the months drew on, Magdalena ceased to find romance in their meagre situation, and she and Ulrich were led more and more frequently into arguments.

  ‘When are you going to leave Ivan Stefanov and his leather company? It was supposed to be temporary, and now it’s been years. And you’re still earn
ing the same as when you began.’

  ‘Think of Einstein. While he was doing his routine job in the Swiss Patent Office he managed to come up with his greatest theories. Perhaps something like that will come to me!’

  He smiled bashfully, and she tutted with exasperation.

  ‘You’re no Einstein! And you have a wife and a son to take care of.’

  At social gatherings he asked his acquaintances whether they knew of any jobs that would pay well. But his enquiries lacked conviction, and led to nothing. He said to Magdalena,

  ‘Perhaps I could set up a little chemistry laboratory here. Investigate some compounds in the evenings. Your father made some money that way.’

  She said,

  ‘Ulrich! Face up to reality! Sometimes I wonder if you know what the word means.’

  He looked at her strangely, and exclaimed,

  ‘What is reality? Is it this?’ – and he banged the table excessively, then the wall – ‘is it this?’

  She waited, impassive before his transport, and he said,

  ‘Did your brother believe in reality? Didn’t he spend his whole time thinking about how to overthrow it?’

  ‘I am not my brother, Ulrich.’

  One day, Ulrich arrived home with an old desk that had been discarded from the office. A colleague helped him cart it, and they carried it to the back of the house.

  ‘This will be my workbench!’ he announced happily to Magdalena.

  ‘It’s filthy,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll clean it. Don’t worry.’

  ‘There isn’t much room here. How much more junk will you bring?’

  He sighed gravely.

  ‘Please, Magda. I need to do this.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happening to the man I married.’

  Ulrich took her hands and comforted her. She studied him for a long time, until tenderness flowed back into her cheeks. She put her arms round him and inhaled from his hair.