Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  After the first few days he took to spending his nights in the factory. He brought the gramophone player with him on the lurching bus, and he spent obscure hours lying by the kiln, wrapped in blankets, with the valves and pressure gauges just above his head, and the brassy sounds of Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson echoing in the expanse. He woke up stiff every morning, and lit a fire for tea, and he looked beyond the enclosure fence, where crested larks dipped over the straining grass, and he was absolutely, completely happy.

  His report was later typed up and ran to sixty pages. The report was given to I. Popov for him to add his comments. He in turn handed it upwards, and it arrived, ultimately, in the lofty corridors of the Supreme Economic Council, where invisible experts of almost unimaginable intelligence performed the devilish calculations required to coordinate the production of barium chloride with the million other items necessary for the well-being of the Bulgarian People.

  For months, iron balls swung against Sofia’s empty façades, watched by the murmuring crowds, who could still remember dimly what had once been inside. No matter how many times he saw the buildings come down, it was never enough for Ulrich to believe it.

  He watched the cranes demolish the house he had lived in as a child. The neighbouring building had been directly hit, and his father’s Viennese fantasy had been blown wide open. The flues connecting the fireplaces to the chimney were now a gaping lattice on the outside of the building, and a wooden door opened into the void. The walls of Ulrich’s childhood bedroom were exposed to the sky, though the wallpaper had been changed since then. As they pummelled the stone, it was like a series of concussions, and the final dusty surrender came as a relief.

  The intense new men who arrived in Sofia at that time to build a replica of Moscow made the men from Ulrich’s childhood, the men in suits who had tried to emulate Vienna, look infantile. Vast, wedge-shaped meteors were chiselled for party offices, with steel windows arrayed back towards the vanishing point. They made perfect restorations of the ancient bombed-out churches, and they put up angular memorials to stirring ideals. They liked neat flowerbeds, grand spaces, clear numbering, railings, scientific design, well-laid pavements, and clearings for flags. They liked culture and conversation to happen in the appointed places, and in the street they liked human figures to be evenly distributed, with ample space between them.

  Outside the cities they built mighty factories and power plants. They had no affection for villages, where it was impossible to know what people believed; they confiscated animals, equipment and land, and sent everyone to live in the cities. The destruction of the farms and villages took less than five years, and everything that was ancient was cleared away to make room for a scientific nation. Fruit and vegetables, for instance, once the best in Europe, now disappeared from Sofia’s markets, leading to struggles and queues.

  Housing projects were built for all the peasants who now arrived in the city, still stupefied from the confiscation of their sheep and cows. Some came with every brick and beam of their old house loaded on a donkey cart, vainly imagining they might recreate it in the capital. But there was no space amid the blossoming offices and schools and hospitals. In the new playgrounds, rocket-shaped climbing frames gave children an early passion for the future.

  The former villains were cast in bronze and put up in the parks, and all the stories changed. The paintings of Geo Milev, who had been executed as a traitor, were now put on the postage stamps, and his poetry was taught in schools, while the old murdered prime minister, Stamboliiski, was given a statue outside the opera house. The newspapers claimed it was the Communist Party which had saved the Jews from the fascists, and everyone was speechless with the audacity of it – when it was still so recent and everyone could remember how it really was – but memories altered to fit the books, and many things passed into silence.

  Prohibitions stamped out the music. Jazz became illegal – and Turkish music, Gypsy music, Arabic music, and most of the other kinds Ulrich had listened to as a child. Only classical music remained – and the folk music of Bulgarian villages, which Paris-trained composers rewrote for the concert hall, removing all the vulgarity and noise. Ulrich hid away his illegal records, and most of his last musical pleasures with them.

  Over the years, an eerie calm descended over the city of Sofia. The trams ran on time, and things were fixed before they were broken. The disdainful glide of the Volga limousines was smooth over the gold cobblestones of the official quarter, the branches of the willow trees fell just so in the parks, and the military-green uniforms of the traffic police were unthinkingly pristine. Beggars, eccentrics and delinquents were deported to the camps, and even on the busiest streets the crowds were somehow well rehearsed.

  Ulrich paid a visit, one evening, to Ivan Stefanov, who had been given work as a driver. The mansion had been confiscated, and the family was allotted a cramped and run-down attic for its nine members. Ivan insisted that Ulrich dine with them, and they sat around a long table with their heads banging on the eaves. The family emerged one by one from behind a curtain, where they had stooped in turn to don evening suits and dresses for dinner – though there was nothing except bread, cheese and tomatoes on the table. Old Stefanov was senile in his wheelchair, and dribbled through the meal. Having noticed how Ivan was surreptitiously chided by his wife when he made to serve himself with cheese, Ulrich also refrained from eating, claiming he was full.

  15

  THEY CAME AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning to arrest Elizaveta, and they gave her five minutes to dress. When Ulrich launched himself at them, they beat him with metal bars. There were four of them, in black leather jackets and helmets, and they used the time they were waiting to smash the bookshelves. They kept repeating Fascist as if it had become a reflex.

  ‘My mother is not a fascist,’ said Ulrich, trying to keep control of his voice. He was lying on the floor with one of the men standing over him. ‘She hated the fascists. She wrote articles against them in the newspapers!’

  ‘Don’t lie to us.’

  ‘I’ve met fascists before,’ said one of the men, so young he still had spots on his face. ‘Their houses always look like this.’

  They called out to Elizaveta and opened the door to her room. She was standing in her dress. They pulled her out and marched her to the door.

  ‘I love you, Ulrich,’ she said. The expression on her face was terrifying.

  He ran to embrace her, but they pushed him back.

  ‘Take me!’ he cried. ‘Take me!’

  They had a jeep outside. They put her in and drove away.

  The communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, executed his former allies, and the one-party state was complete. The purges were felt in families across the country, and the waiting rooms of police stations were packed with distressed folk searching for the disappeared.

  Ulrich does not care to remember the extremes he went through at that time. He did not know where they were holding his mother. He haunted the Ministry of the Interior at 5 Moskovska Street, where the interrogations happened. He circled the central prison. He went to the State Security headquarters, where the colonel in charge of deportations threatened the desperate families with arrest if they did not have authorisation to sit there. He carried a file of his mother’s anti-fascist newspaper articles, which no one was interested in seeing. He grew sick with the uncertainty. He wandered the streets for days, and when he returned home he found Elizaveta’s dog lying dead in her bedroom.

  One evening, he received a telephone call from the police telling him that his mother had been sent to the Bosna concentration camp.

  It was an eleven-hour train ride to Burgas. He arrived in darkness and waited through the night for the local train, cradling the food and clothes he had packed for her.

  The road from the train station to the camp was surmounted by signs saying ‘Hail to the Soviet Communist Party!’ and ‘Long Live the Bulgarian Communist Party!’

  Ulrich reached the gate and waited by a sm
all window. A man inside was trying to thread a needle so he could sew a button on his uniform. He was startled to see Ulrich.

  ‘Who told you to come here?’ he said.

  ‘I have come to see my mother.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am … the son of a prisoner.’

  ‘Have you lost your mind? Get the hell out of here!’

  ‘Is my mother in this camp?’

  The man summoned a guard, who seized Ulrich and led him away.

  ‘I’ve brought food,’ cried Ulrich over his shoulder. ‘Will you give it to her?’ He struggled against the guard. ‘Leave me alone for one minute!’

  An arm was extended through the window, and Ulrich handed over his bag of food and clothes.

  The man rifled through the bag. He took out sweaters and threw them back at Ulrich.

  ‘Comrade, she is old,’ said Ulrich. ‘She will not survive hard labour. Please let her go.’

  The man found the letter that Ulrich had written on the way, ripped it into small pieces, and flung them at him.

  ‘These things don’t go inside,’ he said.

  Ulrich picked up the remnants, and got back on the train to Sofia.

  He clung to his schedule as if it were a raft. Every morning, he cut through to his desk, ignoring the others’ tea and chat. The previous day’s logs were waiting for him, and he scanned the numbers with his ruler, checking they were correctly behaved. Then he retired to the laboratory, where assays of the previous day’s production were waiting, and tested their purity. After this, he poured some tea from his flask and walked the factory floor, always inhaling the acrid odour of chlorides with the same feeling of repellent reassurance, looking over the instrumentation for temperatures and flow rates. By lunchtime he had checked the factory’s stocks of raw materials, dealt with his correspondence, and made a report to Comrade Denov, the factory director.

  Comrade Denov was an amiable man who was fond of hard work and long speeches. The factory was not merely a production unit for him: it was like a mission, and he introduced a great array of activities there. There were picnics and outings to the zoo. He hosted an evening reading group in Marxist theory. There were visits to the opera, for which he entertained a particular love. His wife often sent him to work with a cake.

  One evening, he called Ulrich into the tiny cabin he called his office. Portraits of Marx and Lenin hung on the wall.

  ‘I’ve been watching you, Comrade Ulrich. You’re a curious individual.’

  Comrade Denov had a tragicomic face that was prone to absurd grimaces even in his most serious moments.

  ‘You know the other workers make fun of you? They gossip about the lectures you give about chemical theories. They imitate the way you talk, staring at the sky over their heads. Did you know?’

  ‘No,’ replied Ulrich, simply.

  ‘Well, it’s true.’

  The monthly production figures were lying on the director’s desk. All the graphs were rising. But they still fell short of the official figures, which rose much faster.

  ‘But it’s not malicious. They find you odd, but they can recognise you have a precious bond with this factory. Your affection is a strong thing. It commands respect.’

  ‘Thank you, comrade,’ said Ulrich uncertainly.

  ‘I’m a party man,’ said Denov. ‘I’ve believed in socialism all my life. You don’t know how poor my family was under the king, how desperately poor. I grew up with nothing – and now look at me. I’m running a factory and my sons are studying medicine at university. I owe everything to socialism.’

  Ulrich found himself wondering where all the barium chloride went. It was strange he had not ever thought about this before. The factory was a logical universe whose processes came to an end when the finished barrels were loaded into a truck – and Ulrich’s thought stopped there too. But now he had visions of these barrels dispersing into every country of the Soviet bloc, and tried to imagine how they could all be used up.

  ‘They warned me about you, Comrade Ulrich. They said you’re a dangerous eccentric. But I’ve been watching you, and I like you. I want you to help me build a great factory. I’m not like others. I don’t care what your private opinions are. Is that understood?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Ulrich.

  Comrade Denov gave a jocular grimace again, and Ulrich suddenly felt a great loyalty to him.

  Whenever the economic plans were announced, Comrade Denov summoned all the workers together for a speech.

  ‘These targets seem unattainable. But they have been calculated on the basis of the strength that each of you carries inside him. Strength you may not even know yourself. When it’s all over you will feel grateful that you have been tested like this.

  ‘The tales of your labour will be told far away! In Poland and Yugoslavia the workers will look jealously at the socialist Bulgaria you have created, and wish they had worked as hard as you. In the Soviet Union, they will say, They have out-Moscowed Moscow!’

  But the Five-Year Plans necessitated almost inconceivable leaps in production, and even the director fell prey to the general anxiety and depression. Crippling work schedules were insufficient to lift output to the required levels, and for months the factory was underperforming. There was hardship and misery all round, and no money for anything except essential supplies.

  Ulrich could recall moments when he had fervently wished to be delivered from his mother. Her presence had tired him, and he had imagined that his energies would be released only when she was no longer around. But now she was gone, he found he had nothing left. He was empty, and traversed only by ghosts and shadows.

  His daydreams turned morbid. He invented damning reports against himself, which he would submit to the police in return for his mother’s release.

  Item

  I complained on many occasions about the poor supply of bread in Sofia, and expressed aloud the belief that senior party members did not have to undergo such hardships. I allowed such delusions to lead me into public approbations of imperialist societies.

  Item

  I owned a number of recordings of Western music which I played at licentious gatherings at my house in order to corrupt the aesthetic taste of those around me. These included a large selection of American jazz of the most indecent variety. I liked to encourage women to imitate Western dancing at these gatherings for my own entertainment. I drank heavily, and, in my intoxication, I uttered obscenities against the party and against Our Friend, the Soviet Union.

  Item

  I harboured a dream of escaping across the border and making my way, finally, to New York. I boasted that many of my acquaintances had already made this journey, and they had told me of the tall buildings they had discovered there, and the wonderful life.

  16

  ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Ulrich encountered Boris’s old friend, Georgi, in the street. It was twenty years since he had last seen him, and he had grown stout and bald, but Ulrich recognised him immediately.

  He had spent years in jail for his revolutionary activities, and now he found himself showered with honours. He had become a colonel in the Secret Service, and he walked expansively, as if to allow room for his new aura. He seemed strangely happy to see Ulrich, and led him away to an expensive café with flowers and bow-tied waiters. Sitting down, he displayed his large stomach with a sensuousness that made Ulrich feel muddled. Georgi talked incessantly.

  ‘In the last years I shared a cell with another revolutionary, Atanas. He was married to a woman called Maria. Maria’s father was as rich as Rothschild: he was a big industrialist with several mansions, and factories all over the Balkans. So Maria was from one of Bulgaria’s leading families, she was closely connected to the king and the entire fascist government – and she had staked everything on her love for a scruffy communist revolutionary. Her parents disowned her, so she joined the party and came every day to jail to see Atanas. She brought fruit and biscuits, and told us news from the world outside.’

  He
ordered wine.

  ‘So what happened? She began to bring me gifts, too, and after a while she hid letters in them, full-blown declarations. I cannot think for love of you, I am dead not having you with me.’

  Georgi raised his eyebrows to insinuate more. Man to man.

  ‘Can you imagine? In the beginning I tried to stay aloof, but I’d been stuck in jail for more than ten years, and here was a soft-skinned young woman making offers. What choice did I have?’

  Ulrich could muster no more affection for Georgi than on the first time he had met him. His face was sour, and his teeth as broken as before, and Ulrich tried in vain to picture what this woman had seen in him, lying like a dog in jail.

  ‘Obviously Atanas wasn’t happy. He and I went to war. Sometimes we beat each other through the night, until we had no more strength, and when Maria came in the morning our eyes were swollen like footballs. But after a while he realised he had lost her. He gave up hope in everything, and became like a pathetic animal. He slunk away to his corner when she came, so we could have space for ourselves. In a while he grew sick and died. Maria and I had our wedding in the prison. We have two little boys.’

  He smiled fondly. He wore an impressive suit and the kind of steel glasses that were in fashion then.

  ‘Now her mother, who used to wear fur coats and drive sports cars, is getting a taste of how her workers lived. She comes to our front door to beg for cooking oil. A few years ago she was too good to even talk to her daughter. Now she begs us for soap.’

  He exuded contentment.

  ‘Nineteen years in jail,’ he said, ‘and now I have to make up the time. We’re going to drive this country into socialism in twenty years, so it arrives while you and I have eyes to see it. You can already see the dams and factories we’re building. Todor Zhivkov is more ambitious than Georgi Dimitrov, and there will be no compromises. One day you’ll see the paradise we’ll make, and you’ll understand what all the fervour was for.’