‘We’re near Kozloduy. Nearly at the border – the Danube is just ahead, and then Romania. And this is a miracle of our times, Mother. The first nuclear power plant in our country.’
‘That’s what you’ve brought me to see?’
He parked the car, and lifted her out into her wheelchair. The land was very flat, and monumentally empty. While he walked round the car shutting the doors, the wheelchair stood in the road. She had a blanket on her knees, battling the rushing air.
He wheeled her as close as possible, but he was unable to push her up the verge. The fence was topped with barbed wire, and plastic bags were caught there, thundering in the wind. They were a long way from the installation, but the basic structures were visible, and Ulrich explained how the system worked. His mother listened with her tortoiseshell sunglasses on. Her white hair, so thin by then, was all blown to one side.
Ulrich took out their lunch, because she had to eat regularly. He knelt on the grass, feeding her with a spoon. The skies were grey, but beams of intense sunlight occasionally broke through, shining in their eyes. Elizaveta’s face was expressionless as she ate. Ulrich said,
‘Happy birthday, Mother.’
She began to weep.
‘How could you ever think I would want to come here?’ It took a long time for her to chew with her gums. ‘I am a nineteenth-century woman, with cancer. And this is where you bring me?’
‘I thought you’d appreciate a day out of Sofia,’ he said simply.
When she had finished eating, he wiped her mouth, and tried again to push the wheelchair up the incline, but it was too much for him. He left her sitting in a clearing by the side of the road, as occasional cars shook the ground, and climbed up to the fence to examine the power plant, shielding his eyes, and shouting descriptions and explanations to her down below.
She was put into hospital.
She was too old to withstand chemotherapy, so it was only a matter of time. She was allergic to morphine, and in her last days she could not sleep with the pain. After she died he found in her hospital bed some pages she had scribbled during the nights, while he slept in a chair. She had made plans for her funeral: she wanted roses to be given to all the mourners.
Once, she opened her eyes and said to him,
‘Have you heard the latest joke?’
‘No.’
‘A woman goes into a store and asks for six eggs. The shopkeeper says, You’re in the wrong store. Here we have no meat. You have to go next door if you want no eggs.’
He tried to smile.
‘The doctor told me that,’ she said.
She was no bigger than a child under the bedclothes.
‘You’re allowed to laugh,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing tragic about disease, or age, or empty shops. It’s time for me to die. The tragedy is when people don’t feel around you, and never laugh. I hope you laugh some more when I’m gone. Look into the eyes of others, Ulrich, and you’ll see there’s still a field of life there.’
Her hair was thin and greasy, and her plait kept falling open. She asked him to tie it up again.
He propped her up and sat behind her.
‘Mother,’ he said.
He was nearly seventy years old, plaiting his mother’s wispy hair. He broke down weeping.
‘I can’t live without you. I won’t survive.’
He curled himself around her, sobbing. She put her hand on his head.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Just remember everything we did.’
When her body gave out, he went back home. The house was cold.
It was as if all her possessions had died with her, for they were noticeably less animated than before. He touched her glasses, her knitting, her lifeless books. He overturned her shoes to contemplate the soles’ wear. He found the enormous pile of papers she had typed over the years, and, for the first time, he allowed his curiosity out. He flicked slowly through this thing she had made, seeing the curlicue script down the left-hand margin, inked in by hand.
It was a dictionary. All those years she had been writing a dictionary. A Bulgarian–Arabic dictionary, which she had left piled up in neat bundles secured with rubber bands.
25
SOON AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH, Ulrich converted her bedroom into a chemistry laboratory.
He moved her bed out into the corridor, where it stood on its side for years before he finally chopped it up for firewood.
He set up a workbench and laid out all the equipment he had stolen from the factory. He installed an extractor fan that propelled effluent gases through a length of corrugated piping hanging out of the window. He brought barrels of petroleum and canisters of chlorine. He erected a small oven.
There were echoes of the garden laboratory of his childhood, for though he had seen many real laboratories since then, he still had in mind the same dramatic descriptions from the same old adventure novels.
Ulrich set out to discover plastic.
The 1970s were already well advanced. In the shops downstairs from Ulrich’s apartment, there were plastic cups and trays. There was polystyrene packaging and polythene bags. His own house was full of plastic pens and vinyl flooring, and even the clothes he wore were polyester. His sofa was stuffed with plastic foam. The casing of his television was plastic, and there was a plastic clock on the wall.
But Ulrich’s knowledge of polymers dated from his time in Berlin, half a century before, when all of these materials lurked in the void of the future. The intervening time had added little to his theoretical understanding, for he had become cut away from the world of research. He had only vague ideas as to how nylon might be made, or even vinyl. In his scientific world, the entire empire of plastics still had to be invented – and he set out as a late-coming pioneer.
He devoted several years to fundamental experiments, and taught himself many of the principles of polymer science. He developed a range of materials with different properties, and he began to test how they responded under various conditions. He learned how to adjust hardness, plasticity and heat resistance.
He drew his plastic curtains on the world outside. There was a plastic lamp on the bench, in whose bright circle he lived, day and night.
There were occasional accidents and his neighbours sometimes came to complain about the smells and the explosions. They were suspicious of his perpetual confinement.
There were days of euphoria, the ethylene gas coming off in a hot polymer slurry, and drying solid. He gazed at glistening blobs of virgin plastic, and he felt the satisfaction of having planted himself in something outside himself.
His inner thoughts from those days are mostly sealed off to him now. When he remembers what he did, he is reminded of a monkey he once saw in the Sofia zoo, beating its head rhythmically in its cage. Or the parrots he read about in a magazine, who pulled their feathers out when explorers caged them and took them away.
The police came to the apartment. It was after his remaining hair had turned grey, because they remarked on it. They complained of the smells and the dirt. They seemed alarmed at the conditions he was living in. They took him to a small room for questioning.
Ulrich had lost the habit of conversation, and was intimidated by the interrogation room. His eyes were wide with confusion, and the interrogator had to steady him.
‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘We’re not trying to scare you. We just want to understand what you’re doing. Your neighbours are concerned.’
There was a lamp in Ulrich’s eyes, which released glowing spores in front of the interrogator’s face. They turned it off to calm him.
‘When did you last take a bath, comrade?’ the interrogator asked.
The question seemed easy, but Ulrich’s mind had become a vacuum. There were three men gathered around him who seemed to think there was a truth inside him that they would persuade him to part with. But inside him was nothing. He could not even remember when he last had a bath.
‘What is the purpose of the exper
iments you are conducting in your apartment?’
This, too, was impossible. Ulrich foundered on purpose. The interrogator tried to simplify his approach.
‘Are you making something?’
‘Yes,’ replied Ulrich.
‘Well, what are you making?’
‘Plastics. Various kinds of plastics.’
‘Plastic. Like this, you mean?’
He knocked his knuckle against the plastic clock that stood on the table between them. Ulrich picked up the clock and examined it.
‘No, not like this,’ he said at length. ‘This is made of polycarbonate. I don’t know how to make that.’
‘So what do you make?’ asked the interrogator patiently.
‘My experiments are still at an early stage, and I don’t know where they will lead. At present I am trying to develop some transparent materials using acetone and hydrogen cyanide. I may succeed, I may fail.’
‘Hydrogen cyanide. That sounds dangerous.’
‘I wear a gas mask,’ said Ulrich reassuringly. His nerves had calmed down.
The interrogator asked,
‘What do you intend to do with these transparent materials? Supposing you succeed?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ulrich.
‘Let me ask you this. Are you running an illegal business? Are you trying to undermine our socialist economy?’
‘No,’ said Ulrich.
‘You don’t intend to sell what you make?’
‘No.’
‘How can you afford to buy your supplies?’
‘From my pension. I have no other expenses. And I have some savings.’
The interrogator was silent. Ulrich said,
‘If someone wanted me to make plastic things for them I might be able to do so. I think I could make buttons for a suit.’
‘But it is easy to get buttons for a suit!’
Ulrich picked up the clock and looked at it again. The interrogator continued,
‘Why do you do this, comrade? You are behaving like an eccentric and making people nervous. If it continues we will have to confiscate your equipment. And who would suffer from that? You are using dangerous chemicals in a residential building. There are several chemistry clubs you could belong to, where everything would be above board.’
‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘I want to do it in the proper way.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The proper way. The authentic way.’
Ulrich remembers that his door wore padlocks like so many earrings, and it was reinforced with steel. He plugged his keyhole and kept his curtains drawn.
He began to manufacture plastic objects. He made plastic dolls and animals. He sculpted a plastic comb, painstakingly, tooth by tooth. He did not have moulds, and everything he made looked like craftwork: irregular and roughly shaped.
He conducted some experiments with colouring, and set himself the task of producing a replica of his mother’s imitation tortoiseshell sunglasses, which had sat on a sideboard in the main room all this time.
He had to construct his own equipment: a reactor loop made of two new car exhausts he found, and a pump he had stolen from the factory. He used a chromium catalyst that he powdered himself. He needed high temperatures, and the apartment sweated. He used phthalic anhydride to make the frames more flexible, which he produced on his own, from naphthalene.
How many years of work did it take him to produce the material for the lenses? He remembers producing the first successful sheet, pressed between sheets of aluminium foil under a pile of heavy books. When he drew it out it was unintentionally embossed with the words Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language, and the device of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
He made moulds out of concrete, lined with aluminium foil. He used his own weight to hold the moulds closed while he injected the plastic with a hand pump, and he crouched there, on the mould, until it had cooled. He lifted off the top, pulled out the foil, and peeled it away carefully from the plastic. Glistening, and still warm.
He was unable to make hinges for the glasses, and he could not find out where to buy them. He was therefore obliged to go to the market and buy another pair of sunglasses to take the hinges from. That pair cost four leva. Over the years he had invested hundreds, if not thousands, of leva in his own production.
The police took years to return, but when they did they asked no questions. They simply dismantled his laboratory so that he could not continue his work any more.
Uranium
26
TODAY, ULRICH’S NEIGHBOUR is preoccupied by the recent arrival of two more Gypsy families in the building.
‘They’re taking over,’ she says as she unloads Ulrich’s laundry. ‘These days I’m scared to come home after dark. Their young men stare at me while I walk to the lift.’
She has brought hot sausages, which Ulrich can smell. She puts a new packet of tea bags in the cupboard, and disappears into the bathroom with toilet paper.
In this weather, everything is storing heat. When there is absolute quiet, Ulrich can hear the wood of the window frame creaking with desiccation.
He hears his neighbour tidying up in the bathroom. She flushes the toilet.
‘You know they steal the electricity?’ she says, emerging again. ‘Their children are electrical wizards: they disconnect their meters and connect their supply to the meters of hard-working Bulgarians. That’s why our bills have been rising so much. The Gypsies don’t pay one stotinka. They spend it all on dancing and weddings. And if you try and confront them …’
She leaves Ulrich to picture the consequences. He feels he should show more concern, since she also pays his own electricity bill, but he can think of nothing to say.
‘You’d think they’d become more civilised, living among Bulgarians. But it’s quite the opposite! They have marble floors and satellite dishes, they mint money like the National Bank – and still they steal from us!’
And with a sigh she said,
‘God save Bulgaria!’
Ulrich has his own pet hatred. There is a man on the ground floor who collects bits of old wood and iron, covers them in gold spray paint, and sells them. He picks up a rusty plaque with a lion on it, or a wreath, he sands the rust off and sprays it gold, and sells it to someone for their house. This building has a small garden, which at present is full of the man’s junk, though Ulrich is certain that no one gave him the liberty to store it there. On windy days he applies his spray paint inside, in the hallway, and the entire building smells of acetone.
These proceedings incite inexplicable fury in Ulrich. His mind dwells on this man for much longer than it should, and whenever his neighbour is counting out his pills, he asks whether she has news of him, to feed his irritation.
In the extreme of his life, Ulrich’s emotions have begun to pitch and toss on their own, with no proportion to what caused them. He no longer laughs at jokes, or weeps at things that are sad, but he finds himself weeping and laughing at other times, for no obvious reason. Nothing flows when expected, and then an entirely simple thing – the sun on his face in the morning, or the feel of a spoon in the hand – punctures an escape route, and a torrent bubbles out, erotic and sickly, of grief, or anger, or mirth.
Earlier today, the excited voice of a football commentator activated in Ulrich a sharp happiness that seemed to have been laid down decades ago, and never felt.
Ulrich has come to enjoy this unpredictability of his emotions. He feels as if something new is happening to him, even at his age.
‘You know what we found in the flooded apartment upstairs?’ his neighbour says as she opens the door. ‘Beetles.’
Ulrich nods, imagining the scene. But that is not what she meant.
‘He had them on the wall, in wooden cases. Must have been at least twenty wooden frames full of different beetles. Beautiful things, they were: iridescent green, some of them as big as your fist. There was nothing else in the house: the place was emptied out. A radiator pipe had burst, that’s wh
y we had all that water, and the floor was completely rotten. Don’t know who’s going to pay for the repairs. My husband’s going to see if he can get some money for those beetles, but that won’t begin to cover it.’
Ulrich asks if the owner of the flat was an entomologist.
‘I don’t know,’ she says hurriedly. ‘I never met him. But I have to get home and take the weight off these legs. They’re killing me.’
Ulrich takes the opportunity to ask what exactly is wrong with her legs.
She blows out her air.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs, as such. I don’t have any. Didn’t you ever notice? I lost them years back.’
Ulrich does not feel he can ask how it happened, since she has not volunteered it. She shuts the door, and he hears her limping hurriedly along the corridor. He feels a little guilty that he takes her so for granted.
It is the most beautiful moment in the day, and though Ulrich can no longer see it, he has lived in this room for long enough to sense when it is beginning. In the middle of the morning, the sun shines through his window on to the mirror, and the room glows joyfully for a few minutes with the travelling rectangle of light on the opposite wall. Even without his eyes, he feels the momentary transfiguration.
27
RELEASED FROM HIS OWN CHEMISTRY, Ulrich realised Bulgaria had become a chemical disaster. The rivers ran with mercury and lead, and hummed with radioactivity. Fishing had dried up on the Black Sea coast, and, every year, more fields and forests were lost.
The Kremikovtsi steelworks and the Bukhovo uranium mine flooded Sofia with lead, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, ethanol and mercury. Radioactive sludge from Bukhovo was dumped in an open forest, contaminating the river and the surrounding land.
The copper mines in Pirdop devastated everything around them. Arsenic flowed straight into the Pirdopska river, and dead fish piled up downstream in enormous stinking banks. Nylon stockings melted on contact with the air.
Bulgarian sheep had miscarriages and died, and the cows went mad. Children were born with cancers and deformities. Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.
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