Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  When he finishes they call for more, but Irakli is spent. He bows elegantly, heaving with breath, and he goes back to the table. He is happy and sweating. Boris puts an arm round him.

  ‘I love to see you dance,’ he says.

  A stranger is sitting in Irakli’s place, who has come to ask for autographs from Boris. Irakli stands by, waiting for the man to leave. He has another drink to cool down. He suddenly feels tired and rests his head on the table. He has drunk too much.

  He does not feel well.

  He looks out of the window, trying to steady his stomach. The street is quiet, but he can see a figure he recognises. He goes to the door and calls out to his sister, who is walking with Plastic. They turn back when they hear him; they come into the bar and stand by the table.

  ‘Hello, Boris,’ Plastic says emphatically.

  ‘This is my brother, Irakli,’ says Khatuna to Plastic.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ says Plastic, reaching out for Irakli’s hand. Irakli fails to register it.

  ‘Are you drunk?’ Khatuna asks him.

  Irakli denies it, but he cannot focus properly on her face.

  Khatuna sees Boris chatting to a scruffy stranger, while Irakli does not even have a seat at the table and is drinking himself stupid in the corner. She is seized with hatred for Boris, in whose company her brother is so pathetically diminished. She would like to erase this musician from their lives.

  Plastic says,

  ‘I must have called you a hundred times, Boris. Everyone in the company has been trying to get hold of you. You’ve been back a long time and no one has heard from you. Why can’t you answer your damn phone?’

  ‘I don’t like the phone,’ says Boris breezily. ‘You should have come to my house.’

  ‘Do you think we didn’t try that?’ Plastic is beside himself. ‘Your house was full of people, but you were never there. Who the fuck are those people, Boris?’

  ‘Friends.’

  ‘That’s a company apartment. You can’t use it for just anything you like.’

  His lips are tight as he speaks. He is trying to keep himself seemly.

  ‘You’re going too far, Boris. I’ve stood by you, but you’re making me look like an idiot.’

  Boris says,

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  Plastic says,

  ‘No, I don’t want a drink. I want to know what’s going on. What have you been doing since you got back?’

  ‘I was resting. I was tired after the tour. Now I’m writing more music.’

  ‘I’ve been hearing all kinds of stories. You’ve made recordings with our competitors. It seems every last lousy music company is recording your music. Now I hear you’ve done a whole movie soundtrack.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Boris. He seems pleased.

  ‘You signed an exclusive contract with us, Boris: that means you record with us and us alone. I know you understand things perfectly well. Do you realise I have hundreds of thousands of your personal money which I can’t give you because you are in serious breach of contract? There are articles all over the press about it, asking if we’re going to send you to jail. And there’s everything else I don’t even want to go into, rumours I don’t even understand.’

  Boris is not enjoying this conversation.

  ‘I can’t play the way you want me to play,’ he says.

  Plastic calms a little. He has let the head off his anger. He says,

  ‘You’re a great musician. But there are ways of doing things. There are rules.’

  Khatuna is frustrated with Plastic’s approach. She wants to see him take Boris into the street and beat him into oblivion. She says to Boris,

  ‘Isn’t it time you paid him back for your violin?’ She places her hand dynastically over Plastic’s. Her voice is caustic. ‘You’re making so much money and you can’t even pay your debts. Everything you have, you owe it to us.’

  Boris finds the gesture absurd, and laughs in her face.

  ‘Everything I have,’ he says, ‘I had long before you knew me.’

  A young woman approaches, and asks Boris to sign a napkin. Khatuna tells her to fuck off. There is silence around the table.

  Irakli is suffering with all this. He says,

  ‘Boris bought me a pig.’

  ‘What?’ says Khatuna.

  ‘He bought me a pig.’

  ‘What are you going to do with a pig?’

  ‘Boris built a hut for it on the balcony.’

  ‘He’s been building on our balcony?’

  Khatuna’s instinct tells her Boris is trying to sabotage her life at its very core.

  ‘You better get rid of it right away,’ she says. ‘And whatever Boris has built. I don’t want to see it when I get home.’

  Boris has had enough. He gets up to leave, and Irakli joins him.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ Khatuna says to her brother. ‘I want you to come home with me.’

  ‘I’ll be OK,’ Irakli says.

  Plastic says to Boris,

  ‘Come to the office tomorrow morning. We have a lot of things to discuss. Do you understand?’

  Boris’s grunt is ambiguous. He and Irakli walk outside and disappear from sight. Khatuna stares after them.

  She and Plastic wander in the streets. It’s a Sunday night, and the city is empty. The helicopters droning overhead are the only sign of life. They come to a corner that Khatuna knows well.

  ‘This is one of the blocks we’re developing,’ she says. ‘We’re going to pull down the whole thing and convert it into high-security housing for high-end individuals.’

  They walk the length of the block, Khatuna pointing out its features.

  ‘Businessmen need a secure environment, which you can’t get in Manhattan. Manhattan buildings open directly on to the street. So we’re pulling this whole area down, we’re making a private road with barricades. It will be a totally secure block, as good as you can find in any modern city.’

  High above, advertisements flash on and off, signalling to each other. Khatuna’s heels echo in the street. They pass an empty square where a three-storey-high inflatable puppet is cavorting with the night, flapping and flailing with the air blowing inside, and no one there to see. Suddenly Khatuna says,

  ‘I want to kill Boris.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ says Plastic.

  Khatuna goes silent, and Plastic can feel her harden towards him. They are walking under old bridges where the bricks are black and the rivets are mighty. There is scrawled graffiti, and people are sleeping here and there.

  Passing under a bridge, they see a young man standing by a fire that he feeds every now and then with a squirt of kerosene. She and Plastic stop and watch for a moment. She calls out,

  ‘Why don’t you pour the whole bottle?’

  The young man looks at her, wide eyed.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to see it.’

  She is suddenly flirtatious. The man unscrews the lid from his bottle and upends it over the fire. The blaze roars – at their distance Khatuna and Plastic feel a sudden heat on their faces – and the man is engulfed in flames. He backs away, yelping, and beating his head. The fire dies down quickly.

  He is dazed, and his hair is singed.

  ‘You idiot!’ shouts Khatuna.

  ‘You told me to do it!’ he wails.

  ‘Next time I’ll tell you to jump out of a window.’

  Plastic feels estranged by everything he has just witnessed, and he and Khatuna continue on in silence. There are no cars in the streets. They turn on to Fifth Avenue, where the mannequins are vibrant in the windows, but there are no people. They wander down the empty road and find a man who has fallen asleep while walking his dog.

  ‘I wish I was in Shanghai,’ remarks Khatuna bleakly, ‘where everything is new.’

  They walk all the way to her building. She goes up the steps to the front door and Plastic stays below. She shuts the door behind her without looking back.

  Upstairs, t
he apartment is in darkness. She puts the light on in Irakli’s room and contemplates his empty bed. Then she opens the balcony doors and goes out to see what has happened there.

  Boris has built a giant, dirty thing that he has nailed into the side of her house. She can see his footprints in the sawdust, and everything smells of pig shit. She picks up a hammer and gives a few angry blows to the construction, but it is not as flimsy as it looks. She peers inside and sees the pig huddled in a corner, trying to keep warm.

  ‘Disgusting creature,’ she thinks.

  She goes back into the apartment and sits down. She thinks about Boris, who has dared to take hammer and nails to her house. She smokes several cigarettes. She taunts herself with unhappy thoughts. She thinks of her mother, living alone, her poor mother who was beautiful once. She thinks of all the things she bought Irakli, and how he scorned all of them, only to be delighted by Boris’s pig.

  She knows Irakli will not come home tonight, and she goes to bed.

  She has been lying there only a few minutes when her phone rings. The call is from a hospital, where Irakli is recovering after being hit by a car.

  The hospital is near by, and she runs there. Irakli has broken an arm. He is lying in bed with his arm in plaster, and he is still drunk. She says,

  ‘How could you get hit by a car tonight? There were hardly any cars on the streets.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened,’ he says.

  She looks him over with concern.

  ‘Where’s Boris?’ she says. ‘Didn’t he stay with you?’

  ‘He was here. He just left.’

  Khatuna sighs with contempt.

  ‘He’s a fucking coward.’

  She touches the tips of her brother’s fingers poking out from the plaster.

  ‘I was clearly lit up in the headlights,’ says Irakli, ‘and still it drove into me.’

  His eyes are closed, and his forehead wrinkles.

  ‘I think I’m becoming transparent,’ he says.

  19

  Item

  Perhaps Boris would not have achieved such extraordinary fame if he had cropped up in another age. But these were unusual times. It was noticeable, for instance, that children knew less than their parents, who themselves preserved a mere fraction of what they had been taught. People no longer felt they could rely upon the future, and they fell upon Boris’s musical prophecies as if they were sparkling ponds in the desert.

  Item

  Khatuna employed a private detective to collect information about Boris.

  ‘Anything suspicious, I want to know it. Anything at all. Anything that can be made to look suspicious. There are a lot of stories circulating about him, so it shouldn’t be hard.’

  The detective blew air both ways through his lips.

  ‘He’s a public figure, he’s a famous musician. It’ll cost a lot to keep tabs on him.’

  ‘I’m in security: I know what I’m talking about. He has no protection; he goes everywhere normal people go. He’s an easy target. Just do what I’m telling you.’

  Item

  Irakli went to gather food for himself and his pig. At the back of a local supermarket were bins into which mountains of good food were thrown out for regulatory reasons. He picked out cheese, meat, vegetables and a couple of loaves of olive bread. He found a packet of macaroons, which he thought Khatuna would like. Then he went for a walk in the Midtown orchards, where the last apples were still on the trees. His arm was mended now, and he felt light without his plaster.

  In recent weeks, Irakli’s poetry had returned without warning. Now the obscure feelings of his heart broke out of him in words, and poems arrived, fully formed, without any urging. His book was nearly finished.

  The season was ending, and the ground was covered in rotting apples. Irakli found a few good ones on the branches and put them in his bag. He returned home, and let the pig in from the balcony. It had already grown since Boris first brought it. It had developed the habit of staring longingly into Irakli’s eyes.

  Item

  Plastic flipped back through the article in consternation. He did not know what to believe any more.

  The CEO had called him at 7.15 on a Sunday morning.

  ‘You get the Times?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Read the magazine cover story and then call me back.’

  The photo on the cover showed a simple stone room, with a wood stove in the middle where two men stood to keep warm. They had guns slung over their shoulders, and they watched two other men at a game of chess. One of these chess players sat amply, like their leader.

  The journalist had managed to secure an interview with a fugitive Serbian general wanted for war crimes committed during the conflict in Yugoslavia. He had been blindfolded during his journeys to and from the hideout, which he surmised was in Montenegro. He had spent two days with the voluble Serb, who lived in a house in the mountains with only four bodyguards for company. A priest from the Serbian Orthodox Church stayed in the evenings to lead them in chanting and prayer.

  The journalist was informed that a world-famous musician was coming to play a concert in the house. Do not think we are sad people, said the guard. Do not think we are poor. That evening, to the journalist’s astonishment, Boris arrived in a helicopter. This was during his European tour, and he came with a Hungarian accordion player he had met on his travels. The two of them played the whole night. The general wept for hours, drinking to Boris and his genius, and kissing his hands. In the morning, Boris got back in the helicopter to resume his tour.

  ‘The beauty of music,’ said the war criminal, shaking his head as the helicopter receded above the fir trees. ‘Whatever happens, no one can take that away from you.’

  Item

  Khatuna put her business card on the table. The man had heard of her company. He nodded at her title: Vice-President Security Systems.

  ‘You’ve been referred to me,’ he said, ‘because of the nature of your information. But so far I don’t have a real detailed … I only have a basic outline of what it concerns.’

  Khatuna had a folder of papers and photographs. She placed it in front of him.

  ‘This is a file about an organised crime network operating between New York and a number of eastern European countries. Boris is a key player in these operations. His musical activities provide a front.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said the agent. He flicked through the folder, dwelling on the photographs. ‘These things happen all the time, of course, but you don’t expect it to happen with … When it happens with someone so well known it’s a bit of a surprise.’

  He took out a sheet of paper and began to read.

  Khatuna looked at the FBI crest on the wall behind him. It showed a pair of scales surrounded by a wreath. She was disappointed by it. What harm could you do to someone with a pair of scales? She had thought it would show a gun, at least, or maybe a missile.

  In America, the strength lay with the government, and if you wanted to destroy someone you had to get the government to do it. But there was little gratification in that. People in the government looked like bus drivers and chewed their nails. Considering this man’s ugly suit and tie, Khatuna mentally jabbed her fingers twice down her throat.

  Item

  A song was released on the internet: a duet between Boris and a singer. There was no documentation of the performance, and it was never clear who had written it.

  Everything that was difficult or obscure in Boris’s other music fell away for that song, and what was left was the simplest, most heartrending beauty. The song became a worldwide sensation of the purest sort. For a time, people played it everywhere, and it was the greatest moment of Boris’s fame.

  Item

  Boris never went back to his apartment, and Plastic did not know how to find him any more.

  People called him every five minutes to get hold of Boris. They wanted him on TV. They wanted to hear him speak. They wanted to know what he thought about every possible subject. />
  Plastic read about him in the newspapers, like everyone else. He read about him getting kicked out of restaurants, and beaten up by angry film stars. He read about the drugs he took, and his excessive sexual tastes.

  Boris appeared on the covers of all the big music magazines. He was the future of jazz and the future of folk. He had raw, beat-up good looks. He said crazy things that looked great in print.

  Boris had ceased to be a single person. There were too many stories about him for them all to be true.

  Plastic read that Boris was a sadist and a fake. He read he hated the American government and gave his money to terror. He read he played in Baghdad and Kabul. He read he was a laundry machine for eastern European crime money. He read he liked prostitutes and sometimes conducted rehearsals without clothes on.

  Boris’s music began to torment Plastic. He stopped his ears in the streets, trying to shut out the radio play, the endless replays of bars and restaurants. They had turned his music into a public neurosis. As if they could absorb it only by beating it to death.

  Item

  The newspapers reported that two eastern European men who had entered the United States as part of Boris’s road crew had been arrested for drug trafficking. Pavel Alexandru, twenty-eight, from Constanta in Romania, and Vladislav Penkov, twenty-four, from Plovdiv in Bulgaria, were accused of bringing substantial quantities of MDMA into the country from the Netherlands. One journalist wrote:

  Organised crime is the fastest growing sector of our economy. Hyper-violent criminal gangs from the Caribbean, eastern Europe and Latin America are taking over our cities, while international criminal organisations, as wealthy as the very largest corporations, are buying off our politicians and judges. We should not doubt the power of these organisations to infiltrate the glitz and glamour of our entertainment industry. Major celebrities move easily around the world without attracting the attention of security men, and they are a natural vehicle for international crime.