Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  19

  THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED to Ulrich after his mother’s return from the camp are recorded in his memory differently from everything that went before.

  He feels, in fact, that the environment turned hostile to the laying down of memories. Such slow sediment required a soft and stable bed, and he was too shaken up in those days by statistics, the roar of crowds, and bomb tests on the Kazakh steppe.

  Ulrich remembers how he produced barium chloride in greater and greater quantities. That part is preserved. For everything around him had turned to chemistry, and his own production was part of something bigger than he. Bulgaria had become a chemical state: in the streets, there were posters of the nation’s chemical factories smoking in formation, like synchronised swimmers. The government issued chemical challenges to the workers, and the newspapers gloated over the achievements of famous Bulgarian chemists.

  This development might have been Ulrich’s vindication, but it served instead to devalue the secrets he carried inside. Everything he had cherished as his own was taken away and turned into slogans.

  It was the era of launching spacecraft, and when he thinks back, Ulrich sees himself as if from orbit. He can remember government statistics and the opening of new monuments, but he has trouble picking out what happened to him. His own figure is dwarfed amid the vaster wreckage: power plants and Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum. The might of Olympic wrestlers and Todor Zhivkov’s smile.

  Sections of his life went missing, and there are decades he can hardly account for.

  He remembers how a Soviet dyeing company wanted to obtain enormous quantities of barium chloride. Ulrich’s factory did not have spare capacity, and the Soviet company sent a delegation to discuss the plant’s expansion.

  Ulrich went with Comrade Denov to the airport, and they waited on the tarmac. They saw the Aeroflot Tupolev touch down in the distance, and taxi slowly to its place. Steps were pushed against it, and the hatch popped open. The band began to play, and the Soviet visitors waited on the top steps to appreciate the coordinated kicking of the folk dancers.

  Ulrich studied the distant faces of the Russians to see how it felt coming out of a plane, for he had never flown.

  They descended with political smiles, and groups of dancers approached them with gifts of bread and salt while they shook hands with Comrade Denov and then with Ulrich. A young soprano from the conservatory sang a song of gratitude to Russian liberators.

  The next day was a Sunday, and Ulrich had the responsibility of taking the Russians on an outing to Vitosha Mountain. Give them whatever they ask for, Comrade Denov had said. Don’t let them say a word against us. Ulrich arrived at the Pliska Hotel with a chauffeured car, and found them lively after their breakfast. The car drove them out of the city, up the wooded roads towards Kopitoto. The Russians were bureaucrats, not scientists, and, to Ulrich’s disappointment, they could not bring news of chemistry. They seemed distracted, and Ulrich had the sense they were mocking him.

  They stood in a line looking down on Sofia from the mountain. In the foreground were rows of birch trees, leafless at this time of year. Down below, the city was like a brittle ivory star, with points spreading along the highways, and Ulrich had to suppress the desire to reach out and smash it.

  He asked the Russians why they were laughing.

  ‘Everything is so small here,’ they said. ‘Your city is like a village. And your mountain is just a hill.’

  Over lunch, they asked what Bulgarians thought about Nikita Khrushchev and Dinamo Moscow, the football team, and Ulrich said he did not know what Bulgarians thought. The Russians ordered a succession of vodkas, and Ulrich grew worried about the bill he would present the next day to Comrade Denov. They went on asking him what Bulgarians thought about many other Russian things, and Ulrich realised that all questions had begun to sound to him like interrogation.

  In the car on the way back, they listened to a monologue by the leader of the Russian delegation. He had Tatar features and thick limbs, and alcohol made him joyful.

  ‘Your country is such a simple problem,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union: twelve time zones. How can you ever solve such a thing? Bulgaria is so small, and your weather is gentle. That’s why your socialism has much better alcohol than ours, and your women look so modern.’

  Ulrich was silent, looking forward to the moment when he would drop them at their hotel, and his responsibilities would be over. But when they arrived, the Russians were adamant that he should not leave.

  ‘Will you make us drink alone? We have no new jokes to tell each other!’

  Reluctantly, Ulrich let the chauffeur go, anxious about what the rest of the night would hold. In the hotel room, the Russians pulled off their shoes and called for expensive vodka. They poured for him too, though he protested.

  ‘I don’t drink,’ he said. ‘I don’t like alcohol.’

  They roared with laughter, as if it were a joke.

  Ulrich began to drink out of conformity, while the leader told stories of his childhood in Minsk. The corners of his tales were jabbed out with cigarettes that he held between his fingers for a long time before he lit them. The others clapped around him and kept the glasses full. Ulrich felt the blood rise in his ears and allowed himself to sink into the cushions. He watched the indefatigable storyteller, who drummed his fingers on his belly, shook his head insanely into his enormous handkerchief, and sighed Ah! when others spoke.

  He talked about old films, and how he had kept bees when he was young. He told stories about his first job in a factory, above the Arctic Circle, where he lived in a tunnel underground whose entrance he could never find for snow and the darkness that came for months at a time. At length he broke into verse:

  My uncle, in the best tradition

  By falling dangerously sick

  Won universal recognition

  And could devise no better trick.

  The wingtips of his cheeks were raised in transport like the roped peaks of a tent, and his cigarette left an aerobatic trail in the air.

  How base to pamper grossly

  And entertain the nearly dead

  Fluffing pillows for his head

  And passing medicines morosely –

  While thinking under every sigh

  The devil take you, Uncle. Die!

  They laughed and clapped, and the leader got up from his recline, backslapping and hugging round the room, seizing Ulrich with his powerful arms and holding him for a long while. He sat down and stared open mouthed into his vodka as if it were a miracle.

  ‘When we got permission to come to your factory, we knew we would drink a lot,’ he said happily.

  ‘But enough Pushkin,’ said one of the others, his socked feet resting on the wall. ‘We should have Bulgarian poetry!’

  ‘Geo Milev! The great one-eyed Bulgarian. Give us one of his!’

  ‘I don’t know any poetry,’ said Ulrich weakly.

  They did not believe him, and took him for shy.

  ‘Drink more!’ they said. ‘You are far behind.’

  Ulrich was already drunk, and in the clarity of vodka he felt his usual judgements collapsing. He looked at these men, men he would normally despise for their drink and their uncouth dissipation, and this evening he felt ashamed before their joy. He wondered what he carried inside him that could compare to such exuberance. He became despondent, wishing he were other than what he was.

  He made a forced attempt at abandon.

  ‘Shall I call some girls?’

  The three men roared in unison. The Tatar raconteur screwed his face into love-agony at the ceiling, and froze for a second as if he might topple backwards with joy.

  The old tinnitus struck up in Ulrich’s ears, and he wondered how he would deliver what he offered. But his companions had already moved on to an exchange of jokes, the girls forgotten, as if all possible pleasure had been won from the mere suggestion.

  ‘They wanted to open a striptease club in the Kremlin Palace. The applications were ma
de, permission was granted, billboards were put up around Moscow. But no one showed up.’

  Ulrich ordered more vodka, looking for approval.

  ‘Central Committee called up in the morning. Why had the project failed? Telephones rang across Moscow. The report came back: the organisers were bewildered. The striptease club was well organised and all the striptease artists had a solid party record. In fact most of them were Bolsheviks from 1905 and some were even personal friends of Lenin!’

  They seemed to have an endless supply of jokes, and the banter went back and forth. The hotel ran out of vodka, and they ordered rakia instead.

  ‘ … so Stalin opens the door and catches the couple in flagrante and he says to the man, I am very attached to my pipe. But sometimes I take it out of its hole!’

  As the night wore on, Ulrich became so awash with drink that his gloom dissolved, and he grew happy on his companions’ cheer. He felt confident, and proposed an anecdote of his own. He told a story about a young man who had to slaughter a pig in a small Bulgarian town. It had an uncanny ending. He talked with some power, and they all listened.

  ‘Did that happen to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘It’s something I dreamed up.’

  ‘He is a poet!’ they said. ‘No wonder he is so quiet!’

  ‘The quiet ones are the most dangerous!’

  The night expired somewhere there, and when Ulrich woke up he was still lying in his place on the cushions. He slipped out, unnoticed by the snoring Russians, and went home to clean himself up. He met the men at the factory later, and looked at them remorsefully, as if he were a guilty lover.

  In their official conversations, the Russians showed themselves in a very different light, and as the week drew on Ulrich found it difficult to believe he had shared such a time with them. They were hard nosed and inflexible, and they rarely smiled.

  Their approach to technical problems was crude. To increase the factory’s productivity they wanted simply to build more of the same, introducing three more gigantic kilns alongside the existing one, lined up together like the microphones under Todor Zhivkov’s chin. They did not give scientific justifications for their ideas, and when they were challenged they only repeated them more gruffly, with added ideological weight:

  ‘Worldwide capitalist enterprise will be run into the ground!’

  On the first day, Ulrich listened silently to what they had to say, but then he became more bold. He said this factory was built in the 1930s, and many new production methods had come in since then. He said they could achieve a substantial increase in production simply by replacing the coal-fired kiln with a new fluidised bed reactor that would run on gas. Natural gas had become very cheap, and the new technique gave a more efficient reaction.

  The Soviet experts were uncertain about Ulrich’s proposal, but Comrade Denov praised it in such a way that it soon seemed as if it had originated with them, and not with Ulrich.

  The Russians condescended, happy to have been of service. They seemed never to take off their thick coats, though it was spring, and hot enough for ceiling fans.

  A deal was struck, and Comrade Denov was delighted. He said to Ulrich, You have worked a revolution in our factory, and he forgave him the tremendous cost of his entertainment. A Bulgarian–Russian Friendship Party was held on the last night. But Ulrich did not try again to find his way back into the Russians’ conviviality.

  The ancient kiln was lifted out with cranes on to a long truck. The new, modern reactor was much smaller, and the factory looked strangely vacant.

  Somewhere, Ulrich still has a photograph from the day when the new reactor was installed. An official from the ministry came to inaugurate the new machinery, and a photograph was taken to commemorate the occasion. Ulrich is in a row with four other men, all in slightly irregular suits, standing awkwardly because of the strong wind. Five shadows with ballooning trousers stretch behind them on the concrete.

  When the economic impact of the new process became apparent, Ulrich was singled out for considerable felicitation. Comrade Denov presented him with a gold watch in front of all the workers, and a medal embossed with the heads of Lenin and Zhivkov. He said,

  ‘If ever a man has given his love to a factory, it must be him.’

  Ulrich was asked to go to the studios of Radio Sofia to record an interview with a smiling official from the Internal Information Department. The man asked him how he came to think of installing this new reactor, how he felt about the astonishing improvements in productivity, what these would mean for the Bulgarian people, and why he was inspired to work so tirelessly and selflessly for the nation.

  The interview was broadcast in the evening, and several of Ulrich’s colleagues, including Comrade Denov, came to his house to listen. They broke into applause when his name was mentioned, and gazed at each other in awe as the details of their small universe were broadcast to the nation. The programme called Ulrich an ‘ordinary hero’.

  Comrade Denov congratulated Ulrich’s mother, and said she must be very proud. She held her vodka close, and smiled.

  The photograph of the inauguration of the new reactors was displayed on Ulrich’s wall for many years, next to the photograph of Einstein with his violin. In the background of the photograph was the concrete water tower that once supplied the small town.

  Shortly after the photograph was taken, this tower collapsed, without any warning. Ulrich remembers arriving at work the next morning, and seeing the entire town flooded. The savagery of the debacle rendered everyone speechless, and all they could do was stare. It took days to pump the water out of the mine.

  Ulrich recalls that as he stood with the crowds at the edge of the water, he was intensely moved by this mysterious eruption of latent forces. To this day, he wishes it could be given to him again to set eyes on that spectacle.

  20

  ELIZAVETA ASKED HIM to get her a typewriter, and he brought home a cast-off from the factory that she banged on night and day. For years he woke up to that sound, but he did not ask her what she was writing.

  She opened and closed her mouth in those years, and sound came out, but Ulrich paid little attention. She wept in the house, and complained about her life, and Ulrich withdrew into his thoughts.

  He became subject to obsessions.

  Todor Zhivkov announced that he would build the biggest steel combine anywhere in the Balkans, and Ulrich was preoccupied with it for years.

  ‘The Germans wanted to make steel here, during the war,’ he ranted to anyone who would listen. ‘But they couldn’t make it from Bulgarian ore. Our ore is of the lowest grade. Has the government not done any research? Do they not realise?’

  He wrote letters to the newspapers and the ministry, laying out his arguments in a numbered list. As soon as these arguments were seen and acknowledged, he felt, this vast and foolish project would be abandoned immediately.

  But no one took any notice. The Gypsy labour gangs still laboured on the site, and, after three years of construction, the vast Kremikovtsi Steel Works were opened near Sofia. Songs and poems were composed to the factory, and special coins were issued with a heroic engraving of it, but it was never able to squeeze any steel out of Bulgarian ore. They had to import the ore from Russia to keep the works going.

  ‘They built one of the most expensive factories in the entire Soviet bloc,’ Ulrich said to Comrade Denov, ‘on the basis of an ore they could not use. Where is the logic?’

  ‘Perhaps the logic was simply to build one of the most expensive factories in the Soviet bloc. Here in Bulgaria.’

  Ulrich looked at him, appalled.

  ‘But no one could do such a thing. It’s completely unscientific. It’s impossible to believe.’

  And he never stopped going back over the story, telling people how he had warned the government about it before the factory even opened, and they had taken no notice.

  He used to dream, in those days, of his mother’s death, which also seemed to happen in a factory.


  The machines churn, and he sees her suspended in the glowing tunnel: the burning sparks coming off her, and her limp head thrown side to side in the force field, some last animal reserves keeping her righted, head-on to the slipstream, before the vibrations become too violent to withstand, and suddenly the turbulence catches her, the roar lets up, and he sees her whole for the last time, jackknifing, white hot, flipping like a rag doll, and then there is a giant shower as she explodes, slow motion, among the stars, and bright lights disperse into the endless silence, from whose remoteness the thunder will take years to arrive.

  When Ulrich awoke from this dream he would come down and find his mother already banging at the typewriter, and feel relieved that nothing had happened to her. But he still did not ask her what she was writing. He had a suspicion it was her memoir of the camp, because he knew she carried heavy things inside her that she had not told, and he had made it clear that he would never hear them.

  When Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet pianist, came to play a week of recitals in Sofia, Elizaveta begged Ulrich to take her to hear him. Richter was a wild-looking man, even in his suit, and he tamed the piano monster with the mere application of his fingertips. Ulrich was terrified to see the speed at which he played Chopin, for no one could sustain such a fury. When he finished it with such a contemptuous flourish, the tears ran down Ulrich’s face.

  It was the period when he had strong physical reactions if he witnessed some form of surpassing human achievement. He wept at athletes breaking records. He trembled when he saw a standing ovation in the theatre. When Albert Einstein died, he read his words in the newspaper, which made him weep too:

  The years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, and the final emergence into light – only those who have experienced it can appreciate it.