Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  The road was empty, and they cut quickly through the hills. The driver peered through the arcs carved by the wipers from the windscreen’s mud.

  ‘All these smugglers and terrorists in the Georgian mountains, running from the war in Afghanistan – the Americans are going to come in and get them. The Americans will come in, the Russians will come in, and between one and the other, Shevardnadze will go down. Then all hell will break loose. Every vulture in the Caucasus will come to tear up his corpse, and the country with it. Shevardnadze’s a bastard but at least he’s held things together.’

  They climbed up high, and the valleys were hazy below. There was snow on the ground and patches of ice in the shadows. In the back of the car, Kakha’s dog sat watching the flashing landscape, front paws spread against the bumps.

  ‘The big countries need Georgia to be weak,’ said Kakha. ‘Do you think the Americans could just march armies in here to guard their pipelines if we were a normal, stable country? They keep us on the brink of crisis, so there’s always an excuse to come in. That’s why people in our country are so insane: they know they’re only raw material.’

  ‘But that’s why we’re stronger than everyone else. We know how the world is. We know the fairy tales aren’t real.’

  Kakha said,

  ‘There are many who are resentful that we own the borders, and they’ll use the chaos to try and take that away. That’s when we need an army. Our oil, our mines, our drugs – they all need proper military protection.’

  The rolling hills were becoming more icy and rugged, and the pylons more precarious in their perch. There was an occasional corrugated-iron village.

  ‘The site is up there,’ said Kakha, pointing as the car turned off the road. ‘It used to be a Soviet training base. It’s a natural fortress. Look at the visibility it has.’

  They drove up the slope to a barbed-wire entrance. Armed guards opened the gates, and the Landcruisers drove through. In the distance were two helicopters, their blades collapsed, graceful in a dusting of snow. There was a generator building and soaring military radar. There were half-buried armoured vehicles and a series of pitted walls.

  They got out of the car. Kakha opened the back and the dog bounded into the distance. The men in the other cars spread out to guard the site. The peaks were vast and silent, and the place was utterly alone.

  ‘Watch the dog run,’ Kakha said.

  Khatuna sighed. ‘Nothing else is real when you see a mountain.’

  ‘If you carry on up the road you get to Mount Kazbek,’ said Kakha. ‘Chechnya and Dagestan are right over there. You are standing in a secure site in the middle of a massive zone of war. That’s why I grabbed this place, as soon as the USSR moved out.’

  He inhaled deeply, and kicked an old mortar shell sunk in the grass.

  ‘It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,’ said Khatuna.

  ‘Those are the firing ranges,’ Kakha said, pointing. ‘They’re derelict. We need to take them down. Probably the whole thing will come down.’

  They wandered slowly across the site, enjoying the feeling of clean, cold air in their lungs. Kakha made for the entrance of the main building, a huge box-like concrete structure. Inside, a light bulb was smashed by the door, and sections of the ceiling had collapsed, leaving spewing wires. Fires had left sooty stains up the walls. A torso from an anatomical model was propped up against a pillar, its ruddy tendons dulled with dust. On the blackboards there were diagrams from ancient seminars, and vast crinkled maps showed the world as it had been thirty years earlier.

  They went up the stairs, which opened out into a concrete expanse, walled on one side with glass. Rows of welded seats with numbers painted on the back were scattered haphazardly, and a giant hammer and sickle, cut crudely from steel, hung askew on the wall.

  They stood at the window looking over the plateau below them, flecked with thistles and rusting metal, and surrounded by a high wall. Beyond, the mountains shone through the mist.

  ‘No government will interfere with us here,’ said Kakha. ‘It’s easy to guard. I’ve got rocket launchers stored here, and surface-to-air missiles. I’ve got small arms and chemical weapons. There’s no problem with men: this region is crawling with soldiers who want to make money. I’ve hired top-class instructors from South Africa and England. They’ve been in Angola and Congo. They trained both sides in the Yugoslav war. You see? All the pieces are in place. We’re talking about the most advanced private army on the continent.’

  ‘You’ve been planning this for a while,’ said Khatuna.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you before. Now you know everything.’

  The dog appeared at the top of the stairs and ran over to Kakha, panting and dribbling on the floor.

  ‘If it’s all as you say,’ she said, ‘we can hire this army out. It will pay for itself.’

  ‘It will do more than that! Just think about it for a moment. We have America, Russia and China building pipelines and nuclear installations with totally inadequate military back-up. We have – what? – forty conflicts in the region, many of them already armed. We have bankrupt national armies, twenty years out of date – the men don’t even have uniforms. You see what I mean? If you can’t make money from a situation like that you’re a fool. Our army will be equipped and trained for next-generation warfare, and governments and corporations will be queuing up to use it. This is business.’

  Khatuna leaned her head on his shoulder. They looked out together at the mountains, and the haphazard gathering of Landcruisers parked below. The peaks had begun to run orange in the late afternoon light. Khatuna said,

  ‘I feel better, coming here.’

  Kakha put his arm around her.

  ‘I’ve been so worried,’ she said. ‘With this baby on the way, I think all the time about security. I never cared so much before.’

  ‘Look around you,’ said Kakha. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of anymore.’

  For a while they stood there, close together, looking out at the Caucasus mountains. The Rottweiler sat alert by their side, staring at the lines of birds flying towards the golden horizon.

  11

  SITTING IN THE BACK SEAT of her Mercedes, Khatuna saw a flock of pigeons take off from the roof of a building and wheel dizzyingly in the sky above.

  The car swept past a big poster of Nata Sabadze, an advertisement for her upcoming concert. It showed her walking in the rain over a bridge in Moscow, intense against the romance of the old Stalinist buildings.

  Khatuna was coming from a meeting with an arms dealer. She was working full-time on the military side of the business. In her pregnancy, she had become more preoccupied with security.

  People were strolling in the streets as normal: groups of young men in leather jackets whiling away their unemployment, old women selling sweets and soft drinks by the side of the road, people queuing conversationally for the baker, whose shop was marked by an old loaf hung on a string. But it all seemed different today. She felt she was seeing her city like a surveillance satellite, with eyes that had no feeling. The clouds above had shaggy claws.

  ‘Drive quickly,’ she said to the driver.

  The powerful Mercedes screamed past the other traffic, and on to the hill road that led up to the house. Something was indeed unusual, for there were cars parked haphazardly outside the gates, and here too the pigeons were flying in great, agitated circles. The car raced into the compound and Khatuna jumped out while it was still moving, her papers left unconsidered on the back seat. She ran into the house and the first thing she saw was Vakhtang.

  ‘They shot Kakha! Kakha is dead!’

  Vakhtang buried his head in her neck, howling.

  ‘Kakha is dead!’

  There was a great commotion outside, cars braking and everyone shouting directions, and four puffing men carried Kakha in and laid him on the floor. His head was bundled in his raincoat, which they unwrapped to show his face, and the cooped-up blood ran out over the floor. The shot had hit h
im in the forehead and most of the back of his head was missing. Vakhtang threw himself on the body, screaming. Every mobile phone was ringing, and Khatuna thought to herself,

  ‘Who are all these people?’

  She knelt beside Kakha, and wiped his face with her sleeve. She whispered in his harrowed ear,

  ‘Couldn’t you even wait to see your baby?’

  Kakha’s Rottweiler galloped into the house, skidding on the marble. The circle of people parted to let him in. His nose bobbed against Kakha’s motionless hand. He whined, and paced around the body. He sniffed Kakha’s face and began to lick at the brains on the floor.

  Vakhtang bellowed,

  ‘Fucking dog!’

  He kicked the animal in the jaw. The dog turned on him, but Vakhtang flailed at the animal until it ran away.

  Khatuna wondered where Kakha’s daughter was. She was aware there were people in the house she did not know, come to ransack secrets. She felt an urgent need to escape.

  She was in a daze as she ran upstairs to gather her things. She did not even know what documents she was flinging into her bag, and she hurried downstairs, passing men coming up. She heard a man on his mobile phone whispering, Wineface has been shot. She took a final look at Kakha laid out, put her hand on his stagnant chest.

  She made for the front door, and Vakhtang flung his arms around her, sobbing.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I have to leave,’ she said.

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘I’ll call you soon.’

  Her driver was standing by the door.

  ‘Take me to town,’ she said to him.

  He stared at her with a new defiance. He was a big man, and he did not move. He simply leaned against his pillar, took a slow drag of his cigarette, and drew his finger like a knife across his throat.

  Khatuna ran out of the house alone, carrying her bag; she walked out of the gates and down the hill until she found a church. She called her brother and asked him to meet her there. He arrived twenty minutes later and found her inside, rocking on a stone step, her arms clasped round her knees.

  When she saw him she collapsed into his arms, baying like a terrified animal. Her convulsions did not cease, and there was nothing he could offer to staunch her grief. She screamed in the empty church, she was impossibly heavy in his arms, she was like a paralysed woman who could not support her limbs. He tried to soothe her, reciting her secret name. She made bestial sounds and he shouted at her to bring her back.

  She said she would die here. She wanted only to die. He said,

  ‘You will survive this.’

  The church was silent, and no one came in. The saints shone in the afternoon sun.

  She stroked his face. She said,

  ‘I have to leave the country. I promised him I would.’

  She struggled with herself. He is here. I cannot leave him. Then she took the other side. They will kill me if I stay. I won’t let them put me on TV crying at his funeral.

  She said she was not strong enough.

  ‘You have to come with me,’ she said.

  ‘What about Mother?’

  She began crying again. Will she die without you? I will die. I will die if you don’t come.

  He nodded. He said,

  ‘I don’t have a passport.’

  ‘I have it all. I’ve got papers for you. Passport, visa, everything. I’ve had them for months, for just this situation. You’ll have to travel under a different name.’

  They took a taxi to the airline office. Khatuna looked out at the city, trying to comprehend that Kakha was not part of it. They drove past the street where he had been gunned down, and she fancied there was something festive in the way the people walked there. A young man stuck his head out of a speeding car and yelled into the wind.

  There was only one flight that evening, going to Vienna. The man made a couple of phone calls and printed their tickets. Khatuna looked blankly at the bright tourist posters of Amsterdam and Jerusalem. She had the sense that the objects in the room were not fixed, as they appeared, but floated an imperceptible distance above the floor.

  They took a taxi to the airport. Khatuna said, You haven’t even met him, and this thought made her weep again. You don’t know anything, she said, thinking of the secret unborn baby. She buried herself in her brother’s shoulder. She said,

  ‘You would like him, I know you would.’

  He laid his head on the back of the seat. He thought of his mother, and all the things he would leave behind. He watched the sky through the back window, where pigeons had settled on the lamp-posts. He counted four on the first, three on the second, then two, then one, then zero. A countdown of pigeons, he thought to himself.

  They arrived at the ramshackle airport, apartment towers falling on every side and UN jets bristling on the runways. Inside, the posters warned women not to sell themselves into prostitution.

  Irakli called his mother. He wandered away for the conversation, and Khatuna could not hear.

  They arrived in Vienna late at night. Irakli fell asleep in the hotel. Khatuna left him and walked around the city in her fur coat, the one Kakha had bought her.

  She walked round the Ringstrasse, where cars droned indifferently past the mournful opera house and the Bürgtheater, filling the night with the vinegar smell of burnt diesel. The place seemed to be astonishingly full of antique shops. The streets were desolate. She saw a man standing alone in the middle of the night, watching silent football replays on a television in a shop window.

  She reached the hotel after sunrise and slept all the next day: a leaden, frozen sleep from which Irakli could not wake her. He sat by the bed and began a poem. The title was, The strange laughter when, looking for a place to lie down in secret, we crawled beneath a table and discovered, on its underside, the scrawls we had made together as children.

  Khatuna awoke in the evening and discovered her mobile phone had been cut off and all her credit cards stopped. She called Vakhtang from the hotel phone.

  ‘Has anyone said what happened?’

  ‘Some people say he stopped to buy milk, and they opened fire. It doesn’t sound right. Kakha didn’t do that kind of thing. He didn’t go and buy milk.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘I’m in the house. Nata has moved in here.’

  ‘I’m sure she has.’

  ‘They gave her Kakha’s job. They made her head of the national airline. She’s inherited his football club.’

  ‘They must have made a bargain with her. We have to kill your father but in return we’ll take care of you.’

  ‘There were speeches in Parliament. They want to name a road after Kakha.’

  ‘All right. Take care, Vakhtang.’

  The tears were running down her face, and she did not want him to know.

  He said,

  ‘Can I come and visit you? It’s terrible here.’

  ‘You should think about getting a job. Taking care of yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know what I should do.’

  ‘Bye, Vakhtang.’

  She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for so many hours that Irakli got worried. He sat next to her and held her gingerly.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She whined in the darkness,

  ‘I already lost my father, and now he is gone too.’

  He moaned with her, and held her tight, and she said,

  ‘I am bad luck for men.’

  She lay awake as he fell asleep, and her body began to tremble with a crisis. She leapt up and miscarried in the bathroom. She was nearly three months pregnant, and there was a lot of blood. Weak and dizzy, she cleaned every last trace off the surfaces, not wanting Irakli to know. She went back to bed, and held herself under the sheets, sobbing.

  When she awoke the next day she was coldly focused. She went to the phone and called Charles Hahn, the CEO of the construction company she had met at Kakha’s millennium party. She said,

  ‘Do yo
u remember me?’

  ‘Of course I remember. But it’s three o’clock in the morning!’

  ‘You told me to call you if I was ever coming to New York.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’m coming and I need a job.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And I need you to wire me five thousand dollars today.’

  ‘You want me to wire you five thousand dollars!’

  ‘Yes. I’m in Vienna at the Holiday Inn.’

  ‘I see.’ He paused. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Irakli was watching her gravely. As she put down the phone, he said,

  ‘I don’t think I know who you really are.’

  The money arrived that afternoon, and Khatuna bought tickets to New York.

  Charles met them at the airport, and was dismayed to discover he was taking charge not only of Khatuna but also of her dishevelled younger brother.

  From the taxi, Irakli looked up at the skyscrapers, which were old and scaled like a prehistoric fish. Ichthyosaur, he thought.

  The three of them went out to dinner. Irakli said nothing to Charles all evening, and Khatuna drank two bottles of wine. Charles thought, All along, she was just a Third World girl. Give them an inch, they take a mile.

  Afterwards he took her home and fucked her while Irakli, on the couch outside, piled the pillows round his head.

  Khatuna had only just stopped bleeding from her miscarriage. But her screams came less from Charles’ fucking, than from its insufficiency.

  Dugong

  12

  THERE IS AN INCANDESCENT GAP between the buildings, and Ulrich realises he is close to Times Square. He wears a maroon tie and a blazer beneath his overcoat, which give him a distinguished air, even if they hang a little loose on his elderly frame. He wanders towards the light.

  In his daydreams, Ulrich is somewhat altered from real life. The gold watch he was forced to sell glints once more on his wrist, and his blind eyes are seeing and undimmed. He stands more upright, and that pleading air, which he has always detested in himself, is gone – as if he had not spent his time dwelling on what was taken away. He walks naturally, like the other people on the street, as if there were no reason he should not be here. He resembles one of those men, perhaps, who has just emerged from a theatre – for it is night – or from a jazz club, and who wanders, satisfied with what he has seen.