Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  WHILST IT IS TRUE that, since the independence of our nation, we have, by war and enforced treaty, lost great expanses of our territory to neighbouring countries, AND thousands of our fellow countrymen live under the daily oppression of foreign governments, AND our politics have descended frequently into violence and chaos which have resulted in terrible deprivations for our people, NEVERTHELESS, the decades have revealed that the Great Powers are not swayed by these sufferings, and every alliance with them has rebounded even more disastrously upon us. WE OPPOSE the alliance with Germany, whose might will never be employed to right the wrongs of our Bulgarian history, and whose use of us in the past has been responsible for many of our present ills.

  When Germany invaded Poland, and the Great Powers went to war, the king tried valiantly to keep Bulgaria out of the conflict, but there was no way to hold off the inevitable. The Wehrmacht pushed through into the Balkans and overran the country, taking command of its army and industry – and humble Bulgaria found itself at war, against its will, with America, Britain and the Soviet Union.

  Ulrich was sent to man an observation tower, scanning the night skies with binoculars for British and American bombers, but the bombardment, when it arrived, was mighty and irresistible. He remembers looking up into the night at the lines of planes, their bellies lit up theatrically with the explosions, the deep noise out of phase with the flashes because of the distance. He wondered how the city would look from so high, and thought it must seem unreal, like a toy, and incapable of pain.

  One night, sheltering in the basement with his mother, though he had a blanket pressed to his ears to protect his hearing, he heard a terrible screeching outside, inhuman and uncouth, as if a savage and relentless giant were sawing steel. It went on and on, undaunted by the explosions, tearing at Ulrich’s nerves, and all at once he went out to see what it was.

  A house was hit near by, and flames sprang from the upper-storey windows, lighting up the street. In the gaps in the smoke he could see the domes of the Alexander Nevski church glinting in the flashes, and the red air shook with an overwhelming roar. Others were running to discover what the noise was. Someone brought a lantern, and soon they came upon a horse pinned down in the rubble, its raw flesh glistening in the lamplight, screaming as if it would wake the dead. In this pitch of war they could find no gun, and they had to dispatch it with an axe.

  In the mornings, Ulrich wandered through the stench of quenched fire watching people digging corpses out from the rubble, and he saw women writing the names of missing people on trees. He looked up through Doric windows that now housed nothing, and were only frames for the implacable sky.

  With the military leadership absorbed by the war, the long-suppressed partisan communists, in concert with Moscow, saw their chance for a full-blown uprising, and the government’s punishments saw whole villages destroyed. The country was ripped apart. Elizaveta honoured every side with obscenities that Ulrich had never before heard from her mouth.

  ‘Bulgarian soldiers are cutting off the breasts of our young women,’ she wailed. ‘They are throwing young Bulgarian men into ovens! And who is benefiting? Only our enemies, who will come in afterwards and build cities over our dead.’

  She was consumed by the horror of what was happening, and she became grim and dogged. When Hitler ordered the king to round up the Bulgarian Jews and send them to the labour camps, Elizaveta became an organiser for the protests. Her house became a war office for the outraged teachers and lawyers who marched during the day and debated through the night. When the king finally announced he would not give up Bulgaria’s Jews, Elizaveta was exultant, for it seemed it was possible for decent people to make themselves heard. But after the war, all the Jews who had been saved departed for Israel and America, and the society she had fought to preserve was anyway broken up.

  Ulrich saw her weeping every day, and he wished he could reach out and help her. But he felt inhibited around her suffering, and he could not bring himself to ask how she felt. It was an irrationality that he recognised about his character, but could do nothing about. For all their life together, his mother’s troubles made him panic, and he kept his distance from them – as if they contained a poison to which he was peculiarly vulnerable.

  It was around that time that Ulrich glimpsed an aged vagrant in the street, and realised it was Misha the fool. Misha was filthy and carried a sack. He marched up and down Tsar Osvobiditel Place, where the bureaucrats parked their limousines. When cars drew up there, he guided them in, flapping his arms and grimacing with his missing teeth. Then he wrote out parking tickets that he pressed upon the uniformed chauffeurs, who threw them away and took no notice.

  Ulrich watched for some time, but he did not approach. It was the last time he ever saw Misha. During the communist years, they cleaned out people like him.

  The Red Army marched into Sofia on 9 September 1944, and was met by frenzied crowds. Ulrich and his mother watched the tanks arrive, and they cheered with the rest of them, for now Hitler’s hold was released. Bulgaria changed sides in the war, and fought with its Soviet liberators against Germany.

  During those last months of the war, Ulrich’s thoughts were set upon distant Berlin. He read of the thousand American bombers flying over the city every night, and the million Russian soldiers encircling the city with their tanks. He saw pictures of wilderness where once he had sat in cafés, and he knew that the Berlin he remembered had already ceased to exist.

  Albert Einstein had left for Princeton even before Hitler came to power, and, during the Nazi years, Berlin was emptied by a full-blown exodus.

  His old teachers had gone. Walther Nernst had resigned over the anti-Jewish policies which had emptied his department. Fritz Haber, an ardent German nationalist, who had been decorated by the Kaiser for his invention of chemical weapons and who wore Prussian military uniform on official occasions, was thrown out of the university because he was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism. He fled to Switzerland and died of chagrin.

  Max Planck had visited Hitler personally to ask him to spare the scientific community from persecution. He remained in Berlin during the war to tend to its ruins. His house was destroyed in the Allied bombings, along with decades of his notes, and his son tortured to death by the Gestapo for his role in a failed plot to assassinate the Führer. When the war came to an end, the eighty-seven-year-old Planck was discovered living with his wife in the forest.

  Ulrich lay awake thinking about Clara Blum, who was not mentioned in the newspapers. He did not know whether she had escaped. He wondered what the canals looked like now, where he and she used to walk.

  14

  THE RUSSIANS PARKED their tanks on the courts of Sofia’s tennis club, and there was no doubt which way things were heading. So many were executed from the previous regime that the judge took days to read out the list of names. In the name of the People: death. Others were taken away and shot without any such performance, including those of Elizaveta’s friends who had been most outspoken in their criticism of the communists. The fresh government was filled up with party activists from the villages and communist stalwarts fresh out of jail – and after what they had been through, they were in a vengeful mood.

  The new society had already been formulated in Moscow, and it was unrolled here even as the war still raged. The Stefanovs’ leather company was confiscated, and the scientific bookshop where Ulrich used to stop each day was closed. The newspapers he had grown up with disappeared. His family home was divided in half, and a party man from the countryside was installed upstairs with his wife and six children.

  One afternoon, Ulrich opened the door to a delegation that had come to confiscate the remaining relics of his family’s one-time prosperity: his mother’s jewellery, an ancient crucifix with a gold figure of Christ that hung on the wall, and the framed prints of the Ringstrasse in Vienna.

  Elizaveta turned apoplectic with these indignities, and never lost an opportunity to rant about them. She abused the policemen in the
street who presumed to interfere with her, and she complained about the Russian tanks. Most of all, she seethed about the family who had taken over half her house, whose party membership earned them many privileges she did not enjoy.

  ‘We don’t even have flour or oil, and they have everything. People without a grain of civilisation who leave spit every day in the stairwell. Your father bought this house with his last money, and look at us now, crouching here like vagrants!’

  She shouted such diatribes at the ceiling, hoping they would hear, and she hissed when she saw them on the stairs. The man said to her,

  ‘You should be more restrained in your expression, comrade. Your opinions don’t matter any more. They may land you in trouble.’

  The war ended with one dictatorship crushing another. The exultant newspapers showed the Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag in Berlin.

  A few months later, when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the front pages were strangely mute, and Ulrich searched in vain for details of how it had happened. It seemed Einstein had started off the bomb with a letter to Roosevelt, and other scientists from Berlin had been involved in building it. But already the books from England and Germany had disappeared, and it was difficult to get reports from the West. He was left troubled and bewildered. What happened to those beautiful scientists when they got to America?

  Now, in his blindness, his imagination of it has become more vivid. Two infernal flashes, immense shadows clutching for an instant at the earth, and survivors stumbling in the dust, their retinas burned.

  The bombing of Sofia, just a year and a half old, already seemed quaint and remote. The bombs that dropped on Dondukov Boulevard were mechanical and comprehensible. You could imagine how they might look the moment they came through the ceiling. With these two bombs, everyone knew that humans had become entirely without substance, and henceforth there was only abject obedience.

  Ulrich received a letter summoning him to the offices of the Council for Industry and Construction at 3.15 on a Thursday afternoon.

  He was led through modern corridors, glimpsing men poring over tiny columns of numbers. Every closed door bore a name. He was brought to one inscribed I. Popov.

  Popov sat at his desk looking at photographs. He glanced at Ulrich as he entered, not bothering with greetings. He placed one of the images in front of him.

  ‘Can you tell me what this is?’

  Ulrich looked at the photograph.

  ‘It seems to be a factory,’ he said.

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘A chemical factory. This is a kiln, and there’s the reactor vessel. It would be used for making some kind of heavy metal salt.’

  ‘Good. Good,’ said Popov.

  He turned his attention to the typewritten pages in front of him. He smoked curious yellow cigarettes, and left long gaps between his sentences.

  ‘You studied chemistry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘University of Berlin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Popov looked at him quizzically, as if wanting more.

  ‘My teachers were Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst,’ Ulrich offered.

  Popov nodded impatiently.

  ‘You’ve been supervising a leather factory for some years.’

  ‘No,’ replied Ulrich. ‘I was in the accounting department. I was not connected to the factory.’

  ‘And yet it says here—’

  Popov stared for a moment. ‘No damage done,’ he said lightly. ‘None at all.’

  He stubbed out his cigarette and took up a pencil. He crossed out a line from his notes, and wrote in an amendment.

  ‘I am an admirer of bourgeois science,’ he said magnanimously, making abstract diagrams on his paper. ‘In their day, the bourgeois scientists achieved some useful things.’

  His diagrams followed the rise and fall of his speech, as if they were musical notation.

  ‘We have been a rural economy for many centuries, and it is difficult to put that behind us. But our leadership is strong, and the people are invigorated. Next year, our industrial sector will grow by sixteen per cent.’

  The sharp tip of Popov’s pencil hovered.

  ‘Chemistry. Nothing will be more important than chemistry.’

  He smiled at Ulrich.

  ‘It has been decided at the highest levels: Bulgaria will be the chemical engine of the socialist countries. We have ore, we have rivers, we have land and good climate. We have workers who will soon forget cattle and crude village dances and fill their minds with modern things. What we lack is chemists. We are training them: soon we will have world-class chemists in the thousands. But for now, everyone with even basic chemical knowledge has to do their part.’

  The telephone rang.

  ‘Three million seven hundred thousand last year,’ Popov said immediately into the receiver. He wrote that number down absent-mindedly, as he listened to the commentary on the other end. Ulrich studied the sheet of paper to see whether he could decode Popov’s thoughts from his outlines.

  Popov put the phone down. He looked into Ulrich’s face.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  There was a long silence. Ulrich said slowly,

  ‘Perhaps I could have some position at the university? I would like that very much. I could get back to my experimentation.’

  Popov was unimpressed.

  ‘It’s many years since you studied chemistry, and science has moved a very long way since then. Moreover, your ideological credentials are unclear. No one knows where your loyalties lie. What kind of name is Ulrich?’

  ‘It’s a German name, comrade. My father chose it.’

  Popov took a long time to consider.

  ‘I don’t even know how to say it properly,’ he said. ‘It does you no favours, holding on to a name like that. If I were a suspicious man I would see a reactionary statement there. You could easily have changed it to something more patriotic and revolutionary. Ilyich, for instance, after our beloved Lenin. You should consider it.’

  He looked over his papers.

  ‘Your mother’s opinions are particularly disheartening.’

  ‘My mother?’ echoed Ulrich.

  Popov skimmed through his notes.

  ‘She continues to dwell under the influence of bourgeois-fascist propaganda. She praises bourgeois society. She said she would kill herself if the Russians did not leave. Blah blah blah. It leaves a nasty taste.’

  He returned to his photograph.

  ‘This factory was built by Germans. Now they have gone, we are looking for someone to get it running again. I thought such a task would fall within your capabilities.’

  Ulrich nodded, not able to look Popov in the eye. He kept his eyes on the notepad, where Popov had made a sketch of a bird perched on a lamp-post.

  A week later, Ulrich took a bus to the factory, which was thirty kilometres outside Sofia. He was the only passenger, and he sat on the back seat. The sun was just rising, and the land was dewy, unlit and desolate. Old bomb craters in the fields had filled with water, and the wind whipped through the naked window frames of the bus. They made slow progress: the road became muddy, and the gears whinnied. The driver honked the horn to the rhythm of some tune in his head.

  Ulrich saw pylons rising above the green bar of the horizon, and then the factory appeared, its smokestack frigid, its steel reactor rosy in the dawn sky. The bus dropped Ulrich off and drove away, and he stood by the roadside, turning around to take in the scene.

  On the other side of the valley were barite mines, where the ore came from. Cables ran overhead from the mines to the factory, but everything was dead for now, and the lines of buckets hung empty, squeaking in the breeze. The town was quiet, and shaggy pigs ran in the streets.

  Ulrich climbed through a hole in the wire fence, and walked on to the factory forecourt. Bracken had taken there, and the pipes were damaged in places. From high up, the chimneys whistled with the wind on their lips. The ladders went to the very top, one missin
g a rung, and Ulrich thought of what he would find when he climbed up there and looked down into the shafts.

  He walked around the installation, studying how it was set out. The kiln was mighty, a ribbed steel tower laid out on its side. Spindly conveyor belts fed it at one end, where sparrows lined up chattering. He looked over the leaching tanks and the reactor vessel, where moss had started to grow. The mills looked run down and exhausted.

  The former owners had taken everyone out in a hurry, and the debris of departure lay all around: discarded overalls and tin lunch boxes, a pair of broken spectacles and, in the office, a dusty scattering of old invoices and cigarette ends. People had written on the wall in childish German. On a bench, a plant had shrivelled in its pot.

  The logic of the plant was gratifyingly simple. It was built for the production of barium chloride, and its design was an architectural expression of the chemical process:

  1. BaSO4 + 4C → BaS + 4CO

  2. BaS + CaCl2→ BaCl2 + CaS

  Ulrich checked the state of the pipework, following the lines on his knees, tapping a steady chink-chink against the wind’s commotion outside, and noting the dimensions of sections that needed to be replaced. He opened every valve wheel, checking the seals. Corrosion had worn the reactor walls too thin for continued use, and he made recommendations for a new vessel.

  In the office he found volumes of the old logs, and he set to calculating the factory’s capacity, and the volumes of raw materials it could consume. He worked out what labour would be required. He inspected the town, and described the provisions for worker housing.