Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  does your deliquesce recur?

  Is your senescence waking up?

  He not fuss the morphosis, his lugubrious style:

  This is radium love, do not litter the arm.

  They don’t count the corpses that sink to the deep.

  Boris shone as he played, and all the people in that room were filled with new kinds of desire. They wanted to follow him through his hole in the sky. They tugged at him with infantile dependence. They coveted the perfection of his body’s sway. They applauded him, reached out their hands, and sucked at him with clammy eyes. They became wet with their own saliva: for he was unattainable, and his absence crept into their mouths. They understood the cannibal’s dream.

  The music ended, the lights went up, and the crowd screamed and clapped. They were sitting under Boris’s feet, for the stage was small, and everywhere was free champagne.

  Irakli said to Khatuna, raising his voice over the outcry,

  ‘He is amazing! Amazing!’

  His face was glowing with excitement.

  Khatuna raised her eyebrow. She said,

  ‘I’d like him to rebuke me.’

  The DJ and the bandoneon player filed offstage, leaving Boris alone with the pianist. Boris said,

  ‘I will play the second violin sonata by Alfred Schnittke, written in 1968.’

  It was a piece he had learned from Plastic’s CD collection, but Plastic was aghast.

  ‘What the hell is he doing?’ he whispered. ‘He’s supposed to play his own music!’

  The sonata was dissonant and excruciating, and the faces in the audience went blank. Irakli heard it like an endless struggle –

  radium cholera bitumen patriot

  albatross desiccate fungicide pyramid

  chemical Africa national accident

  multiply hurricane industry motivate

  – the violin not played but wrestled, the piano pummelled, like the repetition of a gun that has ceased to work.

  terminal citizen management piracy

  digital contribute parasite northerly

  democrat corporate marketing ministry

  generate synchronise quality property

  Pakistan automate cellular weaponry

  bullet hole Heisenberg certify history

  Plastic wanted to stop it. He said,

  ‘This is suicide.’

  alcohol medicine embassy recognise

  dentistry personal hospital circumcise

  It was interminable, and there was no refusal. The piano crashed the same chord a hundred senseless times, a psychopath’s barrage.

  document educate financing bellicose

  structural legalise radical standardise

  borderline distribute rational wintertime

  The audience was racked across silence. The music ended, and there was no relief.

  Boris bowed, and people clapped with dull recognition. The hall was wrung out: they wondered why they had deserved it.

  He said,

  ‘Now I will play music of my own.’

  The violin began alone, the stirring of future love. The other musicians came quietly onstage. Plastic’s heart was grinding. The bandoneon trembled, the chords were poised.

  The ptarmigan ruff, the mastodon mouth, an emerald cotyledon …

  In a blink, embark rebellious!, the band has exploded with a riot-dance and Boris stamps exultant like a seven-foot Gypsy, vaulting in a circle, a Cossack caper, shouting the spirit for all he is worth, Hey! Hey! Hey! he cries like seven giant peasants, and in a slow-motion second the trussed audience unfurls euphoric, it opens like a canyon, proclaim the tsunami klaxon after flesh!, and they all stand like the glorious mountain-bud, they thank the journey, what relief, what exaltation, what—

  Beautiful beautiful beautiful I am speechless before your song

  Liquid is flowing again in the dry conduits

  I cannot tell, I cannot tell, I cannot say the way it fell

  The music has merged with tumult, and Irakli sees a passage open up before him. He is on the stage already, his Georgian dance erupting, his Caucasian footwork a-flicker. He jumps and reels and the crowd watches in delight, the band drawing round. This audience will rip down the building, it will howl and fornicate. Irakli leaps high in the air and lands flat on his back with the end chords, laughing unheard in the impossible roar. There are people standing on tables, weeping openly.

  Boris gives Irakli a hand and pulls him up. The band goes offstage.

  The crowd is on its feet, and Plastic has to shield his way through the corks they are throwing at the stage, which is empty with its piano and silent chairs. They shout for Boris but he is in the black-and-white backstage, the light bulbs burning and shadows under his cheekbones. The other musicians are there too, who have not words for what has happened. The pianist smokes a cigarette, trying to piece it together.

  Plastic beckons to Khatuna and takes her hand in the crush. With her other she reaches for Irakli so as not to lose him. Plastic leads her out of the bellowing mass, he hauls her backstage to Boris’s dressing room – and she likes the strength of his grip. The doorway is thronged, and there’s no space to see what is happening inside. There are men trying to get in with tripods and video cameras. Plastic tells them to clear the entrance and forces his way through with Khatuna and Irakli. In the full light he notices Irakli for the first time.

  ‘Aren’t you the guy who danced onstage?’

  A well-known novelist is drinking champagne from the bottle. The ones who have tricked and lied their way in here stand wide eyed, trying to look as if they belong. Boris is taking hungry bites of a hamburger.

  A cameraman puts a microphone in Plastic’s face and asks him to comment on the show. Plastic serves up some simple but effective phrases over the noise. But the journalist is angling for something profound:

  ‘It’s a very tragic place, isn’t it? The Balkans? Would you say that came through in his music?’

  Plastic wants to get out of here, he calls his people to evict the media. He gives everyone the address of the restaurant for dinner and takes his people through the back door.

  Khatuna and Irakli do not go with him. They have to get their stuff from the coat-check.

  They weave back through the crowd in the club. They are high on alcohol and sensation when they make it to the lobby. The attendant hands over coat and umbrella to Khatuna. Irakli looks in through the little wooden ticket hatch. The old woman has gone home, and the office is dark except for the glowing fishes drifting restfully across the computer screen. Slack faced, he watches them for a while and, such is his altered mind, he has the feeling, when he walks out to the street, that the wet splashes on his face are dripping from those fish. Khatuna puts up his umbrella, and he realises it is rain.

  They walk towards the address Plastic has given them, and at the end of the first block they find Boris standing alone.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asks Khatuna.

  ‘I wanted to walk on my own,’ says Boris. ‘But I don’t know which way from here.’

  Khatuna holds the umbrella over him, and they set off, the three of them huddled close, happy and optimistic, three ordinary kids in the night.

  ‘It’s just down there,’ Khatuna says lightly.

  At that moment, the umbrella flies out of her hand and catches in some railings. She runs after it in her heels, racing her brother, laughing at the rain on her dyed-blonde hair, her fur coat flaring on the wind.

  Plastic had booked a private room in a Vietnamese restaurant. The table was already laid with hors d’oeuvres, and the music critics waited for him to seat them. Two waitresses walked the length of the room, ceremonially releasing disinfectant spray above their heads, like in an aircraft.

  People applauded as Boris entered, and took photographs of him with their phones. There were crystal drops down the back of his jacket and his hair was damp. The Bulgarian princess shook her head with emotion and put her arms reverentially around him. The journalists gathered c
lose.

  ‘What do you call your music? Is it jazz? Is it Gypsy?’

  ‘You’ve been described as a feral child. Do you know what that means?’

  The novelist shook Irakli by the hand.

  ‘Your dancing was spellbinding,’ he said. ‘I would have done the same if I knew how.’

  They sat down in groups. There were orchids on the table, and starters of tofu and soft-shell turtle. Everyone was seized by hunger. The room was full of steam and aroma, and they began to eat greedily. One of the critics said through his noodle soup,

  ‘Let’s not forget it was also the best performance of the Schnittke sonata anyone has ever heard!’

  The movie director sat next to Khatuna and asked her about her work. She told him about advances in architectural security. She said,

  ‘We don’t make our buildings here any more. We bring them on a ship from China. They make everything there. If you want you can buy yourself a jail for next to nothing. It’s precast in concrete. You just tell them how many cells you want and they ship it over.’

  There was roast duck, and beef with lemon grass. If you could have tuned out all the other sounds you would have heard a great cacophony of mastication.

  The movie director was sweating a lot. He had taken it upon himself to explain to Khatuna a word she did not know.

  ‘It means what you’ve just written is wrong, and you know it’s wrong.’

  He had coriander leaves caught in his teeth.

  ‘If you know it’s wrong, why would you write it?’

  ‘Maybe because you’re quoting someone else who wrote it wrong? So you put sic afterwards to show it wasn’t you.’

  Khatuna was bewildered by the man’s approach. She thought he must be the most boring film director in the world. She said,

  ‘You get to sit next to someone like me, and this is all you can find to talk about?’

  She wanted to know Boris. He had unbuttoned his military jacket, but still cradled his violin, even at the dinner table. She got out of her seat and went to him. She whispered in his ear,

  ‘You left me alone the other day! Where did you go?’

  Her cheek had touched his forehead. Boris said,

  ‘I didn’t want to stay there any more.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take me?’

  Boris did not reply. She said,

  ‘Will you come out with me now? We can find somewhere to be alone.’

  Boris looked up into her eyes. He studied her, and then he said,

  ‘No.’

  People began to change places around the table, and the bamboo room became jumbled. Clear-thinking waiters removed empty bowls and laid on full ones: stir-fried eel, shrimps with sugarcane, sautéed frogs, cuttlefish salad, lobster wrapped in rice and banana leaves. The meal was a riot for the tongue, and people slurped their wine loudly for the extra sensation.

  Boris was trying out his chopsticks on the roasted suckling pig. He asked the Bulgarian princess whether they raised pigs in America.

  ‘Of course they do.’

  He contemplated the meat. He said,

  ‘How much milk do you get from an American pig?’

  The princess said,

  ‘I don’t know. I live in Spain.’

  She put the question to the table, provoking lively debate.

  ‘Do pigs give milk? I suppose they must.’

  ‘Pigs give bacon.’

  ‘Suckling pig.’

  ‘We’re educated people, and we don’t know this?’

  ‘Pigs are mammals, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Suckling pig!’

  The waiters brought more steaming plates, and looked for gaps in which to put them. Cooked snakes were coiled up in bowls, and the party examined them with ghoulish delight. There was a discussion about outlandish things people had eaten. Dog and alligator.

  ‘I once ate monkey brain,’ said a soft-spoken actress.

  The group embarked upon a compilation of things eaten in China. There was a list of places where people supposedly ate insects.

  ‘In Papua New Guinea they eat the dugong.’

  Haloed with alcohol, the conversation seemed brilliant. It carried on for a long time, coursing through the gathering, and no one noticed that Boris had slipped away, taking Irakli with him.

  Irakli could not stop talking about Boris’s music.

  The rain was harder than ever, and the wind was extreme. Irakli spoke breathlessly, as they ran through the streets,

  ‘This is what I thought of while you were playing. I saw joyful barbarians dancing through a stormed palace. They were hanging up their flags. They were running through the priceless rooms throwing cigarettes on the carpets and posing for photos in gold bathtubs. Chandeliers were smashed on the ground, and they were stashing paintings in suitcases. They were inventing ministries for themselves, and choosing imperial bedrooms for their offices. It was wonderful and terrifying.’

  ‘You say it so well,’ said Boris. ‘I could never say it like that.’

  They were drenched when they arrived at his apartment. Boris brought Irakli a towel and a fresh shirt.

  The apartment was on the forty-fifth floor, and there was almost nothing in it. There was an enormous window that looked over the Hudson River into New Jersey.

  Irakli was rubbing his head with the towel. He said,

  ‘I want you to read my poetry. When I was listening to your music I was thinking, He has felt the same things! He’s had the same intimations I’ve had all my life. I’m trying to put them into words, like you put them into music.’

  Boris poured brown liquid from a bottle with no label. Irakli continued,

  ‘When I saw how easily your music came I thought maybe the task is just too difficult for me. It’s beyond me.’

  ‘You’re just young,’ said Boris. ‘It will take you another twenty years.’

  ‘You’re the same age as me. But look how you play!’

  Boris grinned.

  ‘Don’t judge me by what you heard tonight. Wait a few years, and you’ll hear what I can do!’

  They drank avidly. They were filled with the rare elation that two people sometimes feel on finding each other. They wanted to know everything about each other. They told the story of their lives until that point. Irakli told Boris about Khatuna, and what had happened to her.

  ‘That was her?’ asked Boris. ‘Who was there tonight?’

  ‘She doesn’t usually look like that: she’s dyed her hair.’

  ‘I didn’t like her,’ said Boris.

  He held his violin in his lap, and his left hand fluttered on the strings. Irakli was taken aback.

  ‘Men usually enjoy meeting her,’ he said.

  The night passed, but the weather did not let up. The wind whistled around the building, and the window was lashed with rain. They talked about coming to America. Boris talked about the startling new sounds of New York: the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes. He talked about the way that strangers passing on the sidewalks looked you boldly in the eye.

  Boris and Irakli were sitting facing the window, and they could see blades of lightning as they talked, and the hypnotic stream of car lights leaking into New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel. And then they saw a concrete water tower collapsing on the other side of the river.

  The tower stood next to the highway, and it was brightly lit. First they saw the pillar sway unnaturally. With the enormous weight of the bulb on top, it could not right itself and, majestically, the entire structure slowly toppled over. Irakli started as it crashed, but from this distance all was silence.

  The tower fell away from the highway into unlit grassland where nothing could be seen. A moment later, a raging wave emerged from the blackness and smashed over the highway, sweeping cars away to make a semicircular lake, blazing in the floodlights, while more collisions spread up and down the lanes in chain reactions.

  ‘Did you see that?’ asked Irakli.


  ‘I know!’ said Boris, incredulous.

  The traffic tails, red and white, hardened in each direction. The water reached its greatest extent over the highway and began to subside. Silent sirens converged on the zone.

  ‘I wonder if anyone died down there,’ Irakli wondered dreamily.

  Boris reached for his violin and began to play. He said,

  ‘I’ve spent nearly all my life on my own. Really alone, with nothing but the land and the animals and my violin. I wasn’t unhappy: I never thought that other people could help me with the essentials. But already I feel I’ve known you all my life. My music will be better now I’ve met you.’

  Irakli smiled. Morning approached. The storm wound down, and the first sun appeared. Boris played slow melodies.

  Irakli had been drinking for hours, and wanted to close his eyes. The sofa felt so warm.

  He let Boris’s music flood over him.

  Nothing can be wrong – the fancy? the corruption, the border?

  Every one a flagrance, a fragrance that he made:

  he made a delicate amethyst out of winter,

  a crystal dodecahedron through a pinhole peephole – he snowflake he malleus he

  cochlea he

  eyelid.

  14

  WHEN KHATUNA AWOKE there was no one next to her. The room was strange, and her dress was snagged on a post at the foot of the bed. She rescued it, slipped it on, and walked out of the room. Plastic was already in his gym clothes. He had muffins and coffee on a tray.