Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  She nodded, but made no comment.

  She wished she could have been a cabaret singer. She laughed like a girl when she said it: how she would have liked to have legs like Marlene Dietrich and to sing love songs to an audience every evening. He brought her a gift of a jazz record he still had from Berlin, which she gently refused.

  Occasionally she ran across him and said, I can’t see you this Saturday, and he felt as if his treasure had been snatched away.

  He did not tell his mother about Diana, and never invited her to his home. It was an indefinable thing, only slightly beyond what would bear scrutiny by the world. Sometimes they just wandered along the grassy railway tracks, so they could be together. But they never called each other by their first names.

  One day they went to the St Nedelya cathedral. Ulrich had not been inside it since just after the 1925 bomb, when he had visited it in ruins with his father. Now it was perfectly restored, and their footsteps echoed through the calm interior. They leaned backwards to look up into the dome, and their heads touched. He became talkative as they left. He told her about his father.

  ‘He loved God. I never understood anything about religion, but my father loved churches and God. He was very quiet about it. I think there were a lot of things he did in silence. When he was younger he talked a lot, but it was not necessarily about the things that were most important to him.’

  He told her about Boris, whose death followed on from this building’s destruction.

  She took him to a café and ordered Coca-Cola, which had come into Bulgaria. She offered it to Ulrich and he said,

  ‘I don’t like alcohol.’

  ‘It isn’t alcohol!’ She laughed. ‘All those Bulgarian films we saw, where American soldiers drank Coca-Cola to put themselves in a drunken fury before battle – they were all lies!’

  Ulrich sipped it and told her he liked it. He gave the glass back to her, and watched the way she drank. He said,

  ‘I care very much about these times we spend together.’

  She smiled, and took his arm. They walked outside, where there was a crowd watching a dancing bear. The bear towered over its two minders, lumbering to the drum. There was a chain through its nose.

  ‘You know how they train them?’ she said. ‘They bang a drum and set the cubs on hot coals, so they jump from one foot to the other to relieve the pain. After a while, they don’t need the coals any more. Just banging the drum is enough.’

  The hopping bear looked inexpressively around the audience, its eyes like small buttons in its enormous head. The two men chanted to the crowd, tweaking children’s noses, trying to keep it festive.

  ‘It looks like dancing,’ Diana concluded. ‘But it’s not.’

  She kissed Ulrich lingeringly on the cheek, though there were people all round.

  It was the next weekend that she said,

  ‘I don’t think I can go out with you any more. My husband is jealous.’

  Ulrich said,

  ‘You told your husband?’

  ‘Of course.’

  It stopped at once, and then they saw each other only in passing. Once, Ulrich encountered her with her husband, carrying home a child’s tricycle, and she introduced them, and the man was very affable.

  She was not yet old when she died. A kidney infection killed her. Ulrich found out only a long time later.

  23

  ONCE A YEAR, there was a maintenance shutdown at the factory. The entire system was drained and broken down for repairs.

  Ulrich still remembers the astonishing silence of those intervals, and the echo of human voices in the metallic expanse.

  There was a worker who liked to sing in the factory at those times. She was a small woman with a nimble soprano voice, and she loved the factory acoustics, which made the sound swell around her. She had a place where she used to stand, and she sang in all the breaks, not caring who listened: folk songs, arias, and whatever else she liked.

  One day, during one of these shutdowns, this woman was singing an old drinking song from her part of the country. It was lunchtime, and people were playing cards. The day was mild, and Ulrich stood outside, watching the machines chewing in the open mines below. There were others around him, talking and smoking.

  Comrade Denov came over, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He leaned against the wall, mirroring Ulrich’s own pose.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ he said warmly.

  Ulrich was not sure what he meant. The day? The singing? The factory parts laid out on the concrete? But he did not ask. Whenever he met Denov he was gripped with guilt. He could not overcome that feeling, even though he was in the right.

  They stood for a moment, not speaking. The song was beautiful. Comrade Denov said,

  ‘You were always a faithful colleague.’

  And he gave one of his strange grimaces, which could be humour or gall.

  Ulrich was thrown into confusion. Why did Denov speak in the past tense? Did he know what Ulrich was doing?

  Ulrich could not summon so much as a grunt in response. The song ended in the factory and, humming it over the mining noise, Denov walked away.

  Elizaveta burst into Ulrich’s room one night while her friends were drinking round the table. The door slammed into the wall.

  ‘Come and join us,’ she cried. ‘Come and have a drink!’

  She stood unsteadily in the doorway in a tiger-print dress. He had been trying to sleep.

  ‘You look disgusting.’

  She stared at him for a moment.

  ‘What did you say?’

  She anchored herself with the door handle. He did not repeat himself. She said angrily,

  ‘One day I’ll tell you exactly what happened to me during those years. Exactly what I had to do to survive till I saw your face again. Now you say dirty things to me just because I want to enjoy my last days.’

  To his consternation, she began to weep.

  ‘You won’t talk to me,’ she wailed. ‘You don’t like me talking to other people. You won’t so much as have a drink with your own mother.’

  She sat on his bed and looked at him, her tears still flowing. Her bones protruded, and she smelt of alcohol.

  ‘You’re impossible to live with.’

  She let herself down heavily beside him, forgetting her guests, and drew her feet on to the bed. They lay together in silence while the party continued in the other room.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, vaguely.

  Soon afterwards, she began to snore, and he did not know whether she had heard him.

  He put an arm around her. The noise outside no longer seemed to interfere, and he drifted into sleep himself.

  It was announced in the factory that Comrade Denov’s duties had been curtailed. Ulrich rushed to his office, and found him packing up his things. Denov did not stop what he was doing, but asked him simply,

  ‘What did you tell them, comrade?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Denov shook his head significantly, and Ulrich’s pent-up resentment poured out.

  ‘How can you look me in the eye, after everything you’ve done? All the people you’ve betrayed with your stealing. We worked like animals for all these years to meet our quotas, and you sold our barium chloride to foreign companies! You hoarded raw materials and sold them on the black market. You see: I know everything. How much money you must have piled up!’

  ‘You’ve been to my house many times. Did you see me lining my pockets? Did you see cars or jewellery? No. Do you know where that money went? With all your accounting genius, did you ever ask yourself where the money came from for your new baths, your new reactors? Comrade Denov, we need a heating system so the pipes don’t freeze in the winter. We need new pumps. We need this, we need that. It was you who spent that money, and you did it without a care in the world. What did you think: that I built up all that surplus by obeying the rules?’

  Ulrich sat down.

  ‘You should have come to me,’ continued Denov. ‘You understand a
ccounting ledgers well enough, like you understand chemical reactions. But human behaviour is much more complicated.’

  ‘But it was not right, what you did.’ Ulrich struggled. ‘Even if it wasn’t for yourself.’

  Denov spoke without emotion.

  ‘Do you know how this system works? The numbers they come up with in the Planning Commission are pure fiction. When they say a ton of barium chloride will sell for so many leva, do you think that number has any significance? A bureaucrat comes to work on his mother’s eightieth birthday and he thinks, Eighty is a good number, so he writes it in a column, and for ever afterward we are forced to sell the product of our factory at eighty leva a ton, though it may cost three hundred to produce. This system is fatal. If you don’t have the ingenuity to invent another one, you die. And for this you inform on me to the police. I hope they rewarded you well, Comrade Ulrich.’

  Ulrich was dazzled by the sun on the floor. He imagined himself jumping through the glass of Denov’s study window, out into the light, where the scattered words of this conversation would be no more than distant tremors on a clear day. He imagined falling down into the mine pit and smashing on the rocks, and what a release that would be.

  He imagined himself standing far away, as if the whole world were no more than a small band of horses tossing heads in a far-off field, and he could let the nearby vastness of the wind in the grass take him over, sweeping him this way and that.

  He asked thinly,

  ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘What do you think I will do?’ said Denov, standing on a chair and lifting dusty volumes down from the top shelf. ‘I have been appointed to run a much bigger factory near Varna. I will make coatings for satellites. I will have a big house and a driver, and my wife will be happy that I do not smell when I come home from work.’

  Denov put the last books in a box and sat behind his desk.

  ‘They wanted information about me. They always want information. But they didn’t want to destroy me. They wanted to use me. People like me who supply the energy to our socialism. Do you think they value idiots who follow all the rules? They like people who can take a hopeless project, like this factory, and turn it into a success. Even if it means exporting to France.’

  Ulrich stood up weakly. He wanted to leave. Denov reached out for the hand at the end of his limp arm and shook it.

  ‘Goodbye, comrade.’

  Ulrich remembers that the factory began to make the wrong sounds, and he developed headaches when at work.

  The mills where the ores were ground became deafening, the smell of chlorides suddenly unbearable. The slurry heap was like a mountain after twenty years.

  Denov’s young replacement did not consult Ulrich about technical decisions. When Ulrich complained, he explained that he did not think he was competent to oversee a modern factory of this scale.

  Ulrich came to work every day but did nothing. He was not asked to attend discussions, nor consulted on any issue, and he was prevented from intervening in the factory’s routine. He walked around giving his approvals to what he saw, but it was like a man conducting an orchestra on the radio.

  Idle, he devised a rhapsody of chemicals for the worker who sang in the shutdowns, a scientific spectacle full of mystery and delight. He approached her at her station and invited her to take a walk with him to an abandoned place where he could set it up. Up close, her youth made him conscious of his thinning hair, and his sagging neck. She looked at him with alarm, and refused.

  He began to steal regularly from the factory’s small laboratory. Mostly little things, here and there. Old valves from gas canisters. Rubber tubing. Every kind of safety equipment: goggles, gloves, breathing masks. He stole an old microscope that had lain unused for years. There was no dishonour in such behaviour. His old restraining principles were childish affectations, and these objects, he felt, were owed to him.

  Ulrich was presented with a date for his retirement. When the day came, the director called him into his office and thanked him for all his work. He told him they were increasing security at the factory and that if Ulrich were to present himself there after that day he would not be able to gain entry. Afterwards there was a quick ceremony in the forecourt of the factory, where the director presented him with a bottle of rakia and spoke to him as if he were a sick person. Several people came up to Ulrich and shook his hand. Then they escorted him to the bus.

  24

  THE LAST OF ULRICH’S contemporaries from Berlin, some of whom had long since become world famous, died.

  Bulgaria built its own oil refineries in Pleven and Bourgas.

  The economy began to fail in conspicuous ways, and the shops ran empty.

  In those years, the Sunny Beach resort was opened on the Black Sea coast, and the new foreign tourists came to lie in the Bulgarian sun. The East Germans covered the costs of their vacation by selling jeans and Nivea cream to Bulgarians, proving that years of communism had done little to blot out the secrets of trade.

  It was the era when the Ilyushins and Tupolevs flown by Balkan Bulgaria Airlines never stopped falling out of the sky, and when Bulgaria took the Olympic medals for weightlifting and wrestling.

  Khrushchev, Stravinsky and Louis Armstrong died in a cluster, and Duke Ellington soon after. Shostakovich died too.

  Pasha Hristova, whose pop songs drove Ulrich crazy in the house, came down in an aeroplane.

  Ulrich’s former employer, Ivan Stefanov, died. Boris’s old friend, Georgi, died of a heart attack while leaving a banquet for party officials. He was sixty-eight years old.

  Ulrich’s appearance drew away from all the old photographs, and he began to look more like his elderly father than himself. And Elizaveta was diagnosed with cancer of the lung.

  Suddenly their remaining time together seemed short, though she was anyway approaching ninety years of age.

  On her birthday, Ulrich proposed a surprise expedition. He prepared some food early in the morning, and helped her brush her hair. He borrowed a car from a man he knew and drove out of Sofia along the E81.

  ‘It’s a new place, Mother. I think you’ll like it.’

  She was very weak by then, but she was enlivened by the plan, and told stories from the old days.

  ‘Do you remember that Yezidi priest we met that time, near Mosul? What a beautiful place it was, deep grass, rice fields, and everywhere oleander. Storks wading in the rice.’

  She was tiny in her seat, her head wobbling with the motion of the car. She looked out of the window, away from Ulrich, out across the flat fields. Her sunglasses looked too big for her now.

  ‘They had this idea that human beings would become smaller and smaller. Each generation smaller than the last, until they turned into tiny, insignificant creatures. Do you remember? What a fantastic mythology they had! Then a giant would come at the end of time and drink all the seas and rivers until he was full of water, and unable to move. And a mighty worm would come and eat him. Then the whole universe would be flooded and cleansed, and it would be time for judgement.’

  ‘That’s what he said?’

  ‘Yes. I remember it like yesterday.’

  Her voice was almost gone, and she rasped through her words. It was Sunday, and the road was abandoned. Black factories went by, and orange housing blocks, and flocks of goats. Thistles sparked purple by the side of the road. Up the distant hills was a padding of clumpy forest.

  ‘We are so lucky in Bulgaria,’ she said. ‘We have the best yogurt and the best countryside.’

  He had heard her say this so many times before.

  ‘Do you remember the picnics we used to have around here? When you were a child? I think about them so often. What beautiful times they were! We drank from pure rivers, and you could cry at the wealth in the trees. Do you remember?’

  Ulrich inclined his head in a way that said neither yes nor no. It was a gesture he used often with her. But she was dying, and they had these two hours in the car. It gave her an autobiographical zeal. />
  ‘Before I die,’ she said, ‘I want to confess something. I have no one else to tell it to.’

  Ulrich’s forearms throbbed on the wheel. She said,

  ‘Long ago, in Baghdad, I had an affair with a man. You were a child, always needing attention, and he was so perfect with you. He was a Kurd. His name was Karim. It’s wonderful to say it out loud. Even now.’

  She was looking away from him, out of the window. She said,

  ‘I loved him. It’s the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. We went on a journey together – you were with us, but you were very small – and everything we saw was magical. In the camp I kept myself alive with that feeling from so long ago. What did your father give me to draw on? When we came home I was pregnant with Karim’s child, and I never told anyone, not even him. I didn’t know how to contact him. I managed to get rid of it. I had to do that, for your sake.’

  She wept silently. She said,

  ‘I’m sorry, Ulrich. You were a beautiful thing too. I don’t want you to think …’

  But Ulrich was cynical.

  ‘I always wondered why you talked so endlessly about that part of our lives. All along, it was only because of a man.’

  ‘No, I loved those places,’ she said. ‘With all my heart. We’ve been trapped so long in this accursed country.’

  She gave way to a fit of coughing.

  ‘I always hoped,’ she said, wiping the saliva from around her mouth, ‘you would find more love in your life.’

  The seal around the car windows was broken, and the air was loud. Ulrich saw a formation of military jets flying overhead. He caught something in the distance.

  ‘We’ve arrived,’ he said.

  Steel chimneys slashed the horizon, and white reactors clambered over it like domed pastries. In the distance, the ground gave way to a sea of mercurial piping. Vast clouds drifted from the coolers, white like dough stretched across the sky.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ulrich’s mother.