Reactor 4 of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl blew up, and the atmosphere altered. The undead leaders clung to office and alcohol, but they had lost the power to stop talk. Intellectuals began to denounce the chlorine pollution from the chemical plant across the river in Romania, which poisoned the Rousse air. They criticised industry and the socialist ideal. They made films against chemical contamination, and demonstrated in the streets. They spoke with impunity, and it was clear that Zhivkov had lost his mastery.
The Turks protested the treatment they had received: their ghettos, their labour, the forced change of their names. The old factories churned but the shops were empty, and even a child could see that the eternal system was propped up now only by rust and contraband. The lording Gypsies worked in trucks and trains, and made money moving things from here to there. People said it rained banknotes at their weddings.
The forbidden music returned.
Ulrich watched his television, not really understanding what was going on. People said, Communism is no more! and, after forty years, Zhivkov stepped down from his height, and became subject to human things. His arrest and trial were shown to the world. He sweated in the courtroom, he was nervous and made mistakes, and it was impossible any more to believe in his divinity. Secrets were laid bare, and everything collapsed like a public demolition.
It was amazing how fast the old order was swept away. People told stories openly about their previous crimes and punishments, as if they were rumours from another place. The Secret Service archives were opened, and people could see the transcripts of their old phone calls and the reports their friends had filed against them. Ulrich watched a documentary on television about the labour camps, and howled for what his dead mother had kept inside her.
He never had an instinct for politics, and now he could not even tell what kind of world he was in. They said, Now we are capitalist! – but all Ulrich could see was criminality raised up into a principle. Murderers and thieves took over and called themselves businessmen, and kept the people happy with pornography. The United Nations cut off supplies to Milosevic’s Serbia, and gleeful thick-necked Bulgarian toughs stepped in to supply the food and oil, becoming billionaires overnight. They bought TV stations, hotels and football clubs, and they adorned those necks with gold crosses the size of dinner plates.
They were former sportsmen and Secret Service men, and they had manoeuvred well through the debacle, but even they could not believe how many millions they had managed to steal. For a time they lived out in the open, and everyone could see their incredulous carnival; but then they began to die in daylight assassinations, and they retreated behind walls.
Bulgaria became Asiatic again, as it had been when Ulrich was born. Big-breasted Bulgarian singers embraced the long-suppressed Turkish and Arabic music and turned it into anthems for the new gangster society. Heroin poured in from Afghanistan. Criminal companies selected the best-looking Bulgarian girls to work in brothels in Dubai.
The world returned to war. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought. Yugoslavia fell apart. Russia razed Chechnya, trying to hold on to it. There was civil war in Georgia – with tanks firing in front of the opera house in Tbilisi, where Ulrich had gone to see Tosca with Magdalena on their honeymoon so long ago. The Americans bombed Baghdad, which his father had tried so long ago to link harmoniously to Europe with his Berlin–Baghdad railway line. People said, Now our country is open! but even if it had been possible for Ulrich to journey to the places of his life, they all seemed to be in flames. America bombed Yugoslavia, and chemicals flowed down the river into Bulgaria from the destroyed factories, and bloated corpses too.
Ulrich was reduced to absolute poverty. He could not afford the electricity in Zapaden Park, and nearly froze in the winter. He moved into a run-down building near the bus station whose hollow partitions were built against the grain, so that the windows stood half in one apartment, half in another.
He left behind many of his possessions. He could not transport the great volume of his chemistry books.
He brought some paving slabs into the new place, and built a fireplace under the chimney. In the winter, he collected bits of packing crate from the street to make a fire with, which blazed up in an instant, searing the room, and burned out without leaving any warmth.
He began to forage for food, but he moved slowly, and the competitive hordes were energetic and desperate. Even the young could not make it, and many of them left the city in the hope of sustaining themselves on a bit of chemical land. Ulrich sat in doorways, trying to preserve his energy, and he watched the drunk children and the women praying for miracles. There were stains on the pavements from where the people slept, and sometimes there were corpses in the morning.
One afternoon, Ulrich collapsed while trying to open his front door, and was taken in by his neighbours. That was when they began to give him money.
For weeks afterwards, he lay curled up on his bed, unable to think or move. He spent all night trying in vain to sleep, and groaned when he heard the first clatter of morning water in the pipes.
He leaned his head against the wall, which was like a great membrane capturing the sounds of the building. Conversations in other apartments came through as indistinct reverberation. Music, sometimes, and telephone rings. It was rainy, and at night the wall groaned with damp distension. Wet patches spread with clicks as molecules found new space, and the plaster ballooned.
In the afternoons, the air warmed up. The damp paint, hanging off in curled butterfly wings, dried out with the sun; crackled, and fell, finally, to the floor.
Ulrich’s heartbeat slowed, and his pressure dropped inside. He was tired, and his daydreams were not enough to keep out the news stories.
The national airline, Balkan Airlines, sent its air hostesses to pose nude for Playboy in order to save itself from bankruptcy. The Kremikovtsi steelworks were sold to an American company for one dollar.
The new leaders incinerated the communist mummy of Georgi Dimitrov, and decided to demolish his tomb, which had already become a glowering affront to the nobility of their new capitalism. Great crowds came to watch the mausoleum come down, while the prime minister surveyed the solemn proceedings from behind his office curtains. The country’s leading explosives experts came in clean uniforms to lay down their dynamite. With a magnificent lack of humour, they signalled their readiness, and everyone prepared themselves for the house of spirits to evaporate.
The explosion was so massive that the speakers crackled on Ulrich’s rickety television. People ducked and covered their eyes; the surrounding windows were blown out, and great cracks streaked across the stone square. But as the smoke cleared, the crowds burst into laughter – and even Ulrich laughed in his solitude. For the mausoleum stood indifferent, entirely unharmed. The experienced experts set more explosives, and still nothing happened. They claimed a technical hitch, and tried a third time. But still it would not fall. They packed up and went home, and returned after dark, with pickaxes. That was what it was to live in flimsier times, with the past simply too well made.
There was a knock at Ulrich’s door one day, and government agents asked for Elizaveta, who was twenty years dead. They carried a parcel containing her jewellery, a gold crucifix, an oil painting of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, and a series of framed prints of the Ringstrasse in Vienna. These objects had been held in a vault for close on half a century, and now they were fastidiously returned.
This miraculous event contradicted everything Ulrich thought he knew, and he felt he had lived too long. He had seen the statues pulled down too many times – this time they were putting up shrines to Ronald Reagan – and everyone around him had passed away. He was living in the aftertimes, whose rules he did not understand. Forty or fifty years, he thought, were enough for a modern life, for the human frame could not hold up if the world was destroyed too many times and made again.
He was forced to sell all his mother’s valuables, and his gold watch too. He resented the smugness of the owner of the
antique shop, who accepted these things with so little emotion. The shop was piled high with painted wooden icons, china horses, military decorations, sports trophies, stamp collections and old spectacles. There were boxes full of yellowed postcards sent from the Black Sea. The place swelled with the lives that were deposited there.
Till the very end, Ulrich had sustained the hope that there would be someone for him to bequeath his gold watch to.
Ulrich’s life had become minimal. He rarely left his tiny apartment and he had little to do. There was no telephone in his apartment, and the list of his possessions was short. He did not even cook his meals any more. He produced nothing at all. He spent some time every day making lists of the things he threw out. He listed toothpaste tubes, exhausted pens and sachets of coffee, and he found there some signature of his remaining significance.
One day, Ulrich decided to throw out two old canisters of sulphuric acid that were left over from his days of experimentation. He had kept them with the vague idea that they might come in useful for stripping electrical wire or something of the sort, but he had not touched them in many years. He took them down from the shelf, and, out of some inexplicable desire to see what state the contents were in after all this time, he tried to open one of them. It was sealed tightly shut. After several minutes of wrestling, holding the canister between his knees to keep it steady, the seal broke and the acid burst in his face. He ran to the kitchen to plunge his head in the sink, still full of dishwashing water, but the pain remained intense. When he could finally open his eyes he could see nothing.
His neighbours took him to the hospital, where the skin of his nose and forehead was treated for burns, but there was nothing they could do about his eyes. His corneas were destroyed.
28
THIS MORNING, ULRICH sensed a new, ripe feeling in the air, and now, in the afternoon, the storm is being prepared.
Just a succession of pinpricks at the beginning, but swelling to a single sighing sheet: a sonic layer over everything. The breeze in the window – thank God! – and the smell of dust flowing off the roof and dripping from the tree leaves. Ulrich can hear his neighbour’s hurried limp next door as she rushes between windows, throwing them open. It’s an even downpour, and he sees everything in fine grain: the cars are spraying now, the back-hiss of radials, and there is the bus park laid out, the long steel roofs resounding like tin drums. Figures caught unprepared: the street pours its people into the doorways, and somebody runs with a polythene bag held tutting overhead. Plastic takes on more of the roar as the stalls are quickly covered across the street. The windowsill is a delicate pattering bar.
Underneath, directly below, is an umbrella open wide, where the sill’s globules bomb. Silverdrops are swelling on the rib tips till they break and fall, smattering the ground plumply amid the slender rain. They burst on the paving and scatter into spray; and, caught in the flare – is he being fanciful? – is something too large to be one person, a dark doublemass absorbing the sibilance. Two hidden lovers holding each other close under the awning, a huddled shadow in sound.
By now, Ulrich has reconciled himself to the loss of his vision. In the beginning he was terribly shaken, and for months afterwards he mourned the sense he had lost. But his system gradually regenerated itself, and now he does not feel inconvenienced without his eyes. In fact, his gaze turned inward, he has become rejuvenated. Little disturbed by sensory impressions, his mind generates its own material, which absorbs him completely, and he finds his days are full.
Thinking back, he realises how much has slipped through the fingers of his memory. Everything he still retains could be told in an afternoon, and yet there is so much more. The substance of all those days, which has entirely escaped.
The days of dust drifting in the light shafts. Tea bags put out to dry. Listless newspapers with new dates on them every day. The pipes of grubby gloss that turn from the back of the radiator along the wall. The gradual death of things: plants and machines and animals; furniture and friends. Twisted hairs trapped in a hairbrush. The seasons, and their increasing irrelevance, even if there is still a sense of eternity about the clouds. Cracks in walls, and the refusal of windows to close properly after too many coats of paint. Filling in forms. New buildings whose purpose is unclear. Things that have not been seen for some time: a good pen, a souvenir key ring. Lying in bed, and ceilings. Surprises, such as window glass blown in by the wind. Small changes that appear in routes walked often: a new fence post, or a sawn-off tree. The shocking breathlessness of climbing just a few stairs, and shaving in the morning. Thoughts in the background: concerns about money, and whether he can still be considered good looking. The cleaning of things just cleaned: cups, and plates, and bathtubs, and cookers, and hands, and all the other parts of the body. Old-style banknotes discovered in jacket pockets, and the recollection of facts when the need for them has passed. The relief of television, and its futility. The persistence of shit, and its undue hold on the mind. The stuff that passes through the days: empty food cans, old batteries, rotten fruit, and notepaper.
It has all slipped away.
Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said, Yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter.
Ulrich’s spirit has expanded in these last days, and he is no longer bereft. Though the memories are no longer his, he feels they persist nonetheless. Einstein said, considering his death, I feel such solidarity with all things, that it does not matter where the individual begins and ends. When his mind is particularly aware, Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and, ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it. Everything he has known has drained, over time, from the actual world into this ocean, and he is blissful in the endless oblivion. Only when his surroundings insist – when the electric drill whirs downstairs, and the walls start with that powdery vibration, so unique to this place – does he alight again, reluctantly, in the narrow confines of his room.
In his childhood, Ulrich’s parents were often invited to evening parties. His father would come down first, his velvet coat resplendent and his moustaches waxed to dagger tips, and he admired himself in the fireplace mirror, saying, Look at your handsome old man! Then his mother, whose heart-shaped diamond necklace shone in the firelight, who lent over the flurries of her sapphire dress while he begged her not to go, and kissed him goodnight in a gust of perfume. Ulrich watched their departure from the window, the coachman’s whips and cries as the horses strained against the carriage’s inertia, and he sat back down, barefooted, with toys and books.
His grandmother enjoyed these moments when she had him to herself. She sat with him, and told him stories. Over the hours, the oil lamps burned out, until they were left only with the glow of the fire, which Ulrich prodded now and then.
It is a feeling that Ulrich has sought again and again through his life.
Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavour of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.
SECOND MOVEMENT ‘Daydreams’
Narwhal
1
IN A SMALL INDUSTRIAL TOWN some two hundred kilometres from the Bulgarian city of Rousse lived a youth named Petar, who was looking to prove his manhood.
Petar was small and spindly, and could not attract the girls, while his father was a bull of a man whose feats of strength were talked about even in the next town.
Old Petar
never stopped remarking on it.
‘Don’t know what games your old mother must have played to bring out a gimp like you.’
Petar felt it was time to show everyone what he could do. He was twenty-one: he worked as hard as anyone else in the factory, and, if you did not take his size into account, he could look quite handsome.
His opportunity came when the mayor announced a party for his wedding anniversary. Old Petar was the mayor’s brother, and naturally it would fall to him to slaughter the pig. He was famous for it: he could slice a jugular in an instant, and with his bulk he pinned down the largest animals and held them as they died.
‘Pigs are sensitive beasts,’ he would say as he got up from his exertions and acknowledged the crowd’s approval. ‘You can’t let them suffer.’
On the morning of the mayor’s party, Petar approached his father and said,
‘Today I am going to slaughter the pig.’
Old Petar burst out laughing.
‘You? You wouldn’t have the first idea. It takes skill to kill a pig. Can you imagine what kind of beast my brother will have stored up for a day like this? – it will weigh twice as much as me! How could you keep it down?’
‘I’ve watched you all my life, and I know how it’s done. As for my size – I’ll make up for it with ingenuity.’
The argument went on until his father gave in.
‘But you’re on your own. I’ll have nothing to do with it.’
Around midday, people began to gather at the hall where the mayor was having his party. A steel bath was already heating on the fire to dunk the pig in afterwards, to remove the hair.
Old Petar arrived, his son in tow. Everyone knew what his arrival portended; they greeted him excitedly and walked with him in a jubilant crowd to where the pig was penned. Old Petar opened the gate to the enclosure while everyone else climbed on to the fence and sat there to watch. The pig was sleeping inside a wooden hut with its head resting in the mud outside. The sudden commotion roused it, and it blinked drowsily.
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