Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘I was about to get you up,’ he said, and kissed her.

  He was handsome, which made up for a lot.

  She sat down.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in this room before.’

  ‘No,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘I came here with Boris. I sat on this sofa.’

  She took out her phone and showed Plastic the video she had shot in that very place. There was this room, and Khatuna’s face, stolid and foreign in the image, and the sound of Boris’s music in the background.

  ‘He brought you here?’ he said curiously.

  ‘I assumed it was his apartment,’ Khatuna said.

  She got up and walked around, curious again. There was an ancient French tapestry on the wall, and a large Venetian mirror whose silvering had curdled like diesel oil in the rain. There was a set of old engravings of Vienna. There was a carved wooden statue on a pedestal, a Buddha with an arm missing.

  She said,

  ‘Why is your place like this? You’re a rich man but all your things are falling apart.’

  Plastic said,

  ‘Those antiques cost more money than you’ll see in your whole life.’

  ‘You like old things,’ she replied. ‘That’s not good.’

  He kissed her on the ear.

  ‘I like young things too,’ he said.

  She stood very still as he nibbled her lobe, trying to work out whether she liked it. She said,

  ‘Do you have a gun?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I like that tattoo in the small of your back. I feel I’m being watched.’

  ‘That eye is not watching you.’

  He looked at her curiously, and drained his coffee. He said,

  ‘I have to get to the gym.’

  She looked at him, incredulous.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  ‘I work out every Sunday morning.’

  ‘Do you have a beautiful young woman in your house every Sunday morning?’

  ‘I get grumpy if I don’t work out.’

  Khatuna curled her lip with distaste.

  ‘You don’t love women,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll see each other again, won’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  After he left she wanted only to get out of his house. She collected her clothes and took a taxi home. She was unhappy to find that Irakli was not there. She fretted, and paced between rooms. He refused to carry a mobile, so she could not call him.

  The only life in the house was the parrot in the kitchen. Khatuna had bought it as a present for Irakli so he would have company while she was at work. She took the cover off the cage, and the parrot scratched animatedly at the mesh, reciting all its phrases. Khatuna interrogated the bird, asking where Irakli could be.

  ‘Bye-bye,’ it said. ‘Good morning Baghdad.’

  She shushed in exasperation and kicked off her high heels. She called Plastic to see whether he would know how to contact Boris, but he did not answer his phone.

  ‘His fucking gym,’ she thought.

  She put on her slippers and lit a cigarette. She slid open the balcony door and sat on the chair she kept there. The storm had left a damp, cool morning, but Khatuna felt claustrophobic in sealed-up American homes, and liked to have access to the sky. The balcony was the most satisfying thing about this house, with its arabesque decoration, and ferns hanging down from the terrace above.

  She sat with her eyes fixed on the front door, imagining the catastrophic things that could have happened to her brother while she was away with a strange man. She kicked one leg nervously and watched her slipper bounce on her foot. Suddenly she had the feeling that she looked exactly like her mother, and this made her even more anxious.

  The door opened, eventually, and Irakli walked in with his umbrella.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she shouted resentfully.

  He looked her up and down. He said,

  ‘You’re still wearing the same dress.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘I went home with that producer. He’s very rich.’

  She felt like punishing him now. She said,

  ‘He made that guy Boris out of nothing.’

  Irakli came out on to the balcony and looked out across town. Just a couple of blocks away, the Empire State Building sparkled after its recent restoration. Khatuna said,

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘I slept at Boris’s house.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Why did he want to go home with you?’

  Irakli shrugged wanly.

  ‘What did he want from you?’ she asked.

  ‘We talked all night,’ said Irakli, still high with it. ‘I had an amazing time. It was like running into an unknown brother by mistake.’

  ‘Did he want to have sex with you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  Khatuna inspected her brother suspiciously. She said,

  ‘His smile was like a gay man’s.’

  ‘All you can think of is sex,’ Irakli said. ‘You don’t know anything else that people can do together. You should try and imagine.’

  Khatuna smirked.

  ‘If I want advice about sex, I’ll ask someone with a bit of first-hand knowledge.’

  Irakli leant on the rail and looked at the clouds, hanging like white rocks in the sky. There were sirens in every part of town. The sign on the side of the Empire State Building said in massive letters, For RENT.

  15

  HOW MANY TIMES has Ulrich imagined himself knocking at an American door, and finding behind it a young man with a resemblance to himself?

  All those images accompany him now as he enters Boris’s building and takes the elevator to the forty-fifth floor. Everything has the echo of presentiment.

  He rings the bell at Boris’s door. His heart is throbbing. He has put on good clothes, but he is old and does not resemble a father. The words have gone out of his head.

  Boris answers brusquely.

  He is taller than Ulrich expected. He is not wearing a shirt, and he carries his violin in his hand. Round his neck he wears a pendant on a string: it is made from gnarled pig leather, and looks vaguely obscene. There is a bad scar in his side, which makes Ulrich mourn.

  They stare at each other for a time. Ulrich feels ashamed that he has reached such an age while Boris is still so young, and he is all too aware of how he must appear. This morning, with unsteady hand, he shaved the top off a pimple, which now bleeds periodically over his chin.

  He looks past Boris into the apartment. It is full of cardboard boxes, neatly stacked, and labelled with a skull-and-crossbones hazard sign. On the floor are wood chippings, duct tape and other packing paraphernalia.

  Ulrich would love to go inside, to sit for a while. He begins,

  ‘I am—’

  It is absurd to say it like this. He does not know this boy. It would be an offence to say what he wants to say. He swallows several times to regain control of his larynx.

  ‘Will you play for me?’ he says in Bulgarian. ‘I would like it so much.’

  He studies the stubble on Boris’s face. He sees his badly cut hair, his violin bow twitching in his hand, his youthful eyes shining with suspicion, the impatient muscles in his bare arms.

  Boris relaxes his grip on the door handle, and for a moment Ulrich thinks he is going to let him in. But at the last minute, the young face turns wary, and Boris shuts the door. Ulrich’s tense shoulders slump, and he lets out his breath.

  I was too eager, he says to himself in the corridor. He could see it. He doesn’t want some stranger coming and making claims on him.

  But he smiles to himself, because even this unsuccessful contact has made him happy.

  I have to be patient, he thinks.

  He writes a polite note to Boris, telling him how he can contact him, and slips it under the door.
>
  Boris and Plastic work late nights on the album. They are light headed with it, and need little sleep. Something wonderful is emerging, unlike any music they have ever heard.

  Plastic has unexpected insights, and Boris gains respect for a kind of knowledge he has not encountered before. Plastic knows how to finish things: to push and polish until they slot into perfection.

  Boris has bought himself recording equipment and sometimes turns up with strange sounds he wants to use on the album. He’s written a duet for violin and the rhythmic near-far moan of an industrial vacuum cleaner. Plastic doesn’t think it belongs here.

  ‘In my home town,’ explains Boris, ‘sounds lasted a long time. Here there’s so much other noise, they’re stifled immediately. I want to get that feeling in. The sounds desperate for space, all dying young.’

  Plastic tries to set him right.

  ‘You’re at the beginning of your career,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to say everything in one go.’

  Boris doesn’t look at him while he speaks. Plastic continues,

  ‘I’m not thinking about one album. I’m thinking about how we can make the next five albums. Ten. I’m thinking how we can sustain you as a great artist until you’re seventy years old.’

  Boris grins. Plastic says,

  ‘You can smile now because you don’t know anything, and your talents are screaming to be let out. It won’t be the same for ever. Most people of your generation lose their way when they hit thirty-five. While they sit in their jacuzzis wondering how they ever did what they did, the system spits them out.’

  He adds,

  ‘You should have heard me play piano when I was your age.’

  Irakli opens the door of the parrot cage. The bird steps off the parapet and flutters across the kitchen, alighting on a chair.

  ‘Good morning,’ it says, though the day is quite over. It looks Irakli over with avuncular concern.

  He has sat all day with his pen and notebook, but he has not a single word to show for it.

  Irakli has always lived among visions, which come to him just like memories of the womb return sometimes before sleep. Under their influence, he feels his hands as big as planets in the absolute night, and hears the postponed echo of ancient sea monsters. Khatuna looms there, unseparated from him, and the horrors of the world are turned inside out. Beyond his nose, and impossibly remote, great spheres pass through each other, weightless and incandescent.

  Since he met Boris, these visions have departed, and Irakli has become listless and depressed. He sits in the house day after day doing nothing. He tries to unstop himself with alcohol, but it does nothing to help.

  Khatuna is getting irritated with him.

  ‘It’s like living with a corpse,’ she says. ‘You used to make me laugh. Now you’re always morose. I get depressed just seeing you.’

  She tells him it’s time to give up this writing. Your fucking poetry! she says every day. She tells him how he should improve himself, and buys him presents – a biography of a famous CEO, a gold case for business cards – that are designed to draw him out of his slump. Irakli does not pretend to be grateful. She gives him a designer pen holder to stand upon his desk, and he fills it with vodka and empties it down his throat. He says,

  ‘I was born for one thing. When I’m on my deathbed there is only one thing I will look back on and feel proud of.’

  He does not know how to speak to Khatuna any more. She is cynical, and takes pleasure in the humiliation of everyone around her. She says things like retooling, benchmarking and value-add. She meets many people at parties with Plastic and all she can say about them is how many dollars they are worth.

  Today, it is late, and Khatuna is still not home. Irakli proffers some seeds to the parrot, which it eats messily, dropping husks on the floor. It sings some lines from a Russian pop song that Khatuna likes and rounds off with the beep beep of the microwave. It says, Come to Irakli! and Make a cup of tea! – which is a phrase it learned before it arrived in this house.

  Irakli sits down to write a letter to his mother. The worse he feels, the brighter and more effusive his letters become. He tells her his book is going well. The parrot dribbles on the paper. Irakli writes more often to his mother than she to him. Her letters are brief. She has stopped drinking and is cutting hair in a salon. He has sometimes found bits of her customers’ hair between her pages.

  Irakli addresses the envelope and puts the parrot back in its cage. It says Goodnight!, alternating between Khatuna’s voice and his own. Its imitation of voices is uncanny, and both Irakli and Khatuna are surprised now and then by ventriloquist visitations of the other.

  Irakli picks up his umbrella and leaves the house. As he walks he sees the new zombies let loose in the street: the radio-wave imbeciles with wires in their ears, talking to the beyond. He sees the curving aerial highways, braided in concrete, and smooth-moving at this hour. He sees bars on street corners, and crowds outside packed into the electric glow. He sees helicopters overhead, and night markets. He sees the messages on fluorescent paper on the walls. UNDER THE WEATHER? If you’re fading, call us now. A friendly voice changes everything.

  Irakli has begun to feel despondent in this city. He talks wistfully about Tbilisi, but Khatuna cuts off this line of thought.

  ‘There is still danger for us there,’ she says.

  But he is not sure whether she really believes it.

  He arrives at Universal Studios, and waits outside until Boris comes down. He fills in the time with a can of Coke, and makes notes of things around him. He sees an old man checking the slots in the phone booths to see whether any coins have been left behind. He sees a woman sprinting past him in high heels, holding her breasts against the jolts.

  Boris comes down the steps and puts his arm around his friend.

  ‘We just finished a track,’ he says excitedly as they walk down the street. ‘It sounds really good.’

  He ducks into a store to buy a chocolate bar and proposes they go to a late show at the cinema. It is his favourite place to talk. They walk quickly to get there in time, cutting the corners of the blocks to try to force a diagonal through the right-angle city. Boris has become formidable while recording this album, and people look at him as they walk. Some of them he greets and shakes by the hand: Irakli is always amazed how many people he knows.

  ‘Some Russian sailors I met once,’ explains Boris.

  They buy tickets for the movie and settle down with a tray of nachos. Boris eats loudly and tells stories. He tells Irakli about the book he is reading. He has found gems he never dreamed of in Plastic’s library, and he is reading a new book every day. Today’s title is Robinson Crusoe, and Boris has found incredible revelations in it.

  ‘You have to read this book! He describes thoughts exactly as they are, thoughts you didn’t know there could be words for.’

  He is full of his reading. He quotes entire paragraphs by heart so Irakli can admire them. He asks about Irakli’s poetry. Irakli tells him he is not writing anything right now. When Boris asks what he has done with his day he makes up a story of idleness – though this is belied by the exhaustion in his face.

  The movie begins, a staccato symphony of grunts and gunshots. They are blanched in its glow. Boris says,

  ‘Will you write something for me? The tracks on my CD need titles. You’re the only one who can put my music into words.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can.’

  Boris is irritated.

  ‘Why are you always so dismissive of yourself? I’ve read your poetry. I know how you write. I know what you say about my music, and how much you inspire me. Remember how you danced that night? Write like that.’

  At that moment their conversation is shushed by a woman who is trying to record the movie off the screen with a video camera.

  ‘I’m getting your voices on the audio track,’ she complains.

  They apologise, get up and leave the cinema. They buy some vodka and go back to Boris’s apartment.
>
  These days, Boris’s energy is irrepressible, and he refuses to sleep. He gets out his violin and plays to Irakli every phrase from the day’s recording, asking him what he thinks. His head is coursing with music, and it keeps Irakli up all night, so he is useless the next day.

  Khatuna thinks it’s funny that Plastic’s leather shoes creak as he walks. How can you stand it? she exclaims.

  She crouches by his chair, undoes his laces and takes the shoes off his feet. She finds she can fit into them with her own shoes still on.

  ‘Your feet are so big!’ she says.

  She marches up and down the concrete floor of his loft, his shoes clunking on her feet. He is irritated.

  ‘You’ll spoil them, for God’s sake. Those are fifteen-hundred-dollar shoes.’

  She takes out her phone and starts to video her feet walking noisily in his shoes.

  He says,

  ‘Bring them back! And stop constantly filming yourself.’

  She drags her man-sized feet over to him and sits on his lap. Her camera is still running and she turns it on his face.

  ‘A woman is supposed to love how beautiful and sexy she is,’ she says.

  She turns off the camera.

  ‘In this country you don’t know anything about love,’ she says pityingly. ‘You import Asian women to love the men and Mexican women to love the children. So how could you know?’

  She laughs at his dour expression.

  ‘You’re good looking and rich. That much you have going for you, Plastic.’ She ruffles his hair. ‘What’s your real name, anyway?’

  ‘No one calls me that any more.’

  Khatuna takes his shoes off her feet, kneels on the floor and puts them on his own. She proceeds to tie the most symmetrical of knots.

  Plastic considers the focus she brings to the tying of shoelaces and wonders why he was so annoyed a moment ago.

  Since Boris’s launch he has received email threats from Bozhidar Markov in Bulgaria, who is accusing him of abusing Bulgarian hospitality, and Bulgaria itself. His tone is unpleasantly vulgar, and Plastic finds himself brooding on it unnecessarily, even at times like this. He is frustrated by his own high-strung temperament. He wants spontaneity in his days; he wants a woman who is young enough to still know her own feelings, who will put him skin to skin with life. But when he finds her, his instinct is to stifle her and run away.