Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  He imagined Khatuna returning to this place after the horror of LA. He imagined how she would have staggered, walking in, when she saw everything so unchanged. He saw her fingering Irakli’s imprint upon the rooms: his food half eaten in the fridge, his pocket coins spilled upon the sofa. He saw the devastation of a book half read, and an unwashed shirt. He saw her following the source of her brother’s radiation, looking at the parrot and the hollows in his half-made bed, and coming, eventually, to the pile of papers on his desk, where she stopped and placed her hand.

  He could see all this vividly – as if it had been left behind in the room, too barbed for time to swallow away.

  She had put Irakli’s manuscript in the middle of the dining table, and Boris could read the title. Androgyne.

  He saw that the shelter he had built out on the balcony had been removed, and there was no sign of the pig. Everything had been fixed and cleaned.

  The parrot was perched on the table. It had lost most of its feathers, and was covered in patches of scaly skin.

  ‘What happened to the parrot?’

  ‘Nothing happened. It decided to pull out its feathers,’ said Khatuna.

  She lit a cigarette. Boris stroked the parrot’s bald head.

  ‘I came to read Irakli’s poems,’ he said. He gestured to the manuscript on the table.

  ‘Don’t say his name,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to say a word about him.’

  But she didn’t stop him when he picked up the manuscript.

  He took it out on to the balcony and slid the door closed behind him. He read the book from beginning to end. When he had finished he stood with his hand on the rail of the balcony.

  His eyes were red when he came in. He said,

  ‘It’s a wonderful book. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.’

  He waited for Khatuna to say something, but she was intent on her packing. He said,

  ‘What will you do with it?’

  ‘I’ll publish it. Even if I have to sew the fucking pages together myself. The whole world is going to know my brother was a poet.’

  Boris put the manuscript back on the table. He picked up a button from the floor. He said,

  ‘I know you don’t like me. But I loved Irakli too, and I want to talk about what happened. I still don’t understand.’

  Khatuna looked at him for the first time. There were hollows around her eyes. She said,

  ‘I’m not talking to you about anything, Boris.’

  She was angry. She said,

  ‘Don’t think just because Irakli is gone that you and I are friends. I hate you and I wish he’d never met you. I wish I’d followed my instincts and made sure he didn’t get involved with you. I knew it would end badly, I knew it. I’m not going to talk about anything with you. Fuck you.’

  Boris said,

  ‘I’ve never—’

  ‘You have no idea,’ shouted Khatuna, ‘what I’ve been through in the last few weeks. You have no idea what an effort it was just to pull myself out of LA, when I only wanted to stay with him and die. You have no idea. He was the one thing I couldn’t lose, he was the one thing that was absolutely necessary to me. You know nothing about me. I’ve lost everything many times and I can get through that, but I cannot lose my brother.’

  Khatuna’s grief suddenly took her over. She fell to her knees, crying. Her face was terrible, and between her sobs she sucked loudly for breath. Boris went to her and took her in his arms, absorbing the spasms of her body.

  She calmed down. She pushed him away and lit another cigarette.

  ‘I’m not ashamed of crying,’ she said, sitting on the floor.

  He took one of her cigarettes too, though he never smoked. For a time there was only the sound of the two of them inhaling and exhaling.

  Boris said,

  ‘Are you going back to Tbilisi?’

  ‘I’m going to Baghdad,’ she said. ‘I’m going to help design the new security city. Renovate the old palaces of Saddam Hussein.’

  She took a drag of her cigarette.

  ‘I have to go on living,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead. I have to put myself somewhere and do something. I want to see a city at war. I’m fed up with this boring place. I want a place with real men, where real things happen.’

  Boris did not know what to say. He stubbed out his cigarette, which tasted disgusting. He tried to conjure Irakli back into the room, picturing him on the sofa, where he had seen him many times. It was strangely hard, and he felt his memories, too, were being slowly taken from him.

  Khatuna said,

  ‘Let me tell you something, because it doesn’t matter any more. I made reports about you to the FBI. I implicated you in all sorts of crimes. You’ve done some questionable things and it wasn’t difficult to exaggerate them a bit. I know a lot about crime. Those guys aren’t very complex, I know how to get inside their heads. It’s only a matter of time before they come down on you.’

  She stood up and dusted cigarette ash off her knee.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now. I wanted you to go to jail and suffer. But now I don’t give a shit. All I want to do is smoke cigarettes in this apartment until I’ve inhaled everything he’s left behind.’

  Boris walked over to the door.

  ‘Bye-bye, Khatuna,’ he said.

  ‘Wait!’ she said, and ran with sudden urgency out of the room.

  He heard her opening doors in the kitchen, and the icy scrape of the freezer. She came back weighed down, her arms laden with a ruddy frozen mass.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take this away.’

  She put it into Boris’s arms and he realised in horror that it was Irakli’s pig. Its throat had been slit.

  ‘How could you do this?’ he cried.

  The pig was solid against Boris’s chest, and turned it numb. He began to cry like a baby.

  ‘How could you do it?’ he said. ‘This pig was part of Irakli. It’s like killing him again.’

  ‘No,’ said Khatuna. She had ice crystals on her T-shirt, and she was rubbing her hands to warm them up. ‘It was like killing you.’

  22

  THE CEO CALLED PLASTIC into his office. Plastic was in his gym suit. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The CEO massaged a pile of business cards, aligning the edges. He said,

  ‘I’m sorry to have to do this, Plastic, but you’re fired.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I’m not happy about it, but you haven’t left me any choice.’

  ‘What?’

  The CEO put his neat pile of business cards into a golden box. He straightened the keyboard of his computer. He was in a mood for tidying up.

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you’re mixed up in. But it’s got to a stage where this company’s looking questionable, and I can’t have that.’

  ‘You can’t really believe all this! I thought you were on my side!’

  ‘I’ve just been interviewed by the FBI,’ said the CEO. ‘I didn’t appreciate it.’

  ‘Take a look at me. Look at the state I’m in. They’ve taken over my apartment: I can’t go home. I slept in the office – I haven’t had a shower for two days. They’ve taken my paintings, my papers, my laptop, they’ve had me in a room for two days, asking questions. They want to know where Boris is – how the hell do I know where he is? They’re asking me what are my links to organised crime. They arrived with piles of my bank statements and asked me to explain cheques I wrote ten years ago.’

  The CEO did not feel obliged to comment. Plastic raised his voice.

  ‘That guy who committed suicide – I hardly knew him! I didn’t exchange ten words with the guy. He was my girlfriend’s brother, that’s true, but I hardly knew him. Now she’s my ex-girlfriend because she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened. Look: he was a depressed poet, and he committed suicide. End of story. They are manufacturing a crime around it because he was a friend of Boris, who has disappeared off the face of the planet. Because he was from Georgia and his sister was involved with
a gangster – and they think the only thing that comes out of that part of the world is crime. Well, I have nothing to do with any of it!’

  He seemed short of breath.

  ‘You’re an idiot if you fire me!’ he said. ‘If you believe there is any truth to this!’

  The CEO exhaled into the mask of his hands.

  ‘Someone is setting me up!’ yelled Plastic. ‘I don’t know who. But the FBI knows things about me they couldn’t know. There are these Bulgarian bureaucrats who took a dislike to me when I stole Boris from under their noses. Maybe it’s them. I don’t know! All I’m saying is someone is cooking this up and you’re swallowing it without asking a single question.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Plastic. It’s not what it is, but what it seems that matters. Suicides? Artists disappearing? It’s all gone too far. All the newspapers can talk about is America’s new criminal underworld. And Boris is the poster boy. Boris is the Pied Piper, leading us all into the shit.’

  ‘He’s more famous than he ever was,’ said Plastic. ‘Universal has a legend on its hands.’

  ‘Do I have to remind you that we don’t own his music? It floats free, remember, in some very cool, post-industrial sort of way, and all the lawsuits in the world are not going to bring it back. That’s how my differences with you began, remember?’

  ‘Do you remember who you’re talking to? I’m not one of your managers, sitting on my suited ass. I’m Plastic Munari, for Christ’s sake! You can’t do this to me!’

  ‘You were great,’ said the CEO. ‘I’m not denying it.’

  After this conversation, Plastic was not allowed to go back to his office. He was escorted down to the lobby. Security men put their hands on him and he lost his cool.

  ‘I need to get my stuff from my office, I’m not letting anyone else do that. I’ve worked fifteen years in this company: at least let me pick up my fucking things!’

  Above the lobby, people had come out on to the landings to see Plastic evicted. The whole company was there, murmuring.

  ‘We’ll get everything sent to your home,’ said a security guard.

  ‘I can’t get into my home!’ shouted Plastic. ‘The FBI has taken over my home. Does no one understand anything I say? Just give me half an hour in my office to pick up my personal things. I have antique paintings. I have two eighteenth-century globes in there – do you think I trust you people to pack them up?’

  Eventually, the security team forced Plastic out on to the sidewalk, where all New York was around him and there was no point shouting any more.

  He got a taxi and checked into a hotel. He had a shower and changed back into the same clothes. He went out for a walk. He had to buy some deodorant. He had to calm down.

  There were offices and lively restaurants around him, and he tried to get out of their way. The cacophony of clothes boutiques and hairdressers grated on him, and he looked for emptier streets. He turned a few corners and found his way out of the crowds.

  He passed the red-light district, peaceful at this time of day. He saw a naked arm stretched out of a window, and a woman reaching on tiptoe, trying to put a sandwich into the hand.

  He walked for a long time, not really knowing where he was going. He passed liquor stores and warehouses, and the roads became cracked. He saw two men labouring under the bonnet of a car, a crushed can of oil on the road beside them. He saw a cat sleeping in a doorway, and a young girl crying in an alley – and then no one at all. He reached a part of town where entire skyscrapers stood vacant. He walked aimlessly, and ran his hands along a wall.

  Evidently, few people ever came here, and the thistles that grew between the paving slabs came up to his thigh. The cars parked here were old models, and they had merged with the tarmac and the trees. There were clocks on buildings, stopped at different times. The area was abandoned.

  Plastic was surprised, therefore, to see an open music shop. The lights were on, and the windows had sparkling displays. Above the entrance was a wooden sign carved with lyres, and decorated with gold script. Plastic pushed at the door, and a bell tinkled inside.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ said the owner. He was busy polishing the keys of a clarinet, and spoke to him in the mirror.

  ‘Hello,’ said Plastic, looking around the shop. What a beautiful place it was. How amazing he had never seen it before.

  ‘May I have a look around?’

  ‘Be my guest!’ said the man, engrossed in his work.

  They had old gramophone players on sale here, and hundreds of records. They had shelves and shelves of music scores. An entire case was devoted to metronomes. Plastic looked at the rows of flutes and oboes in the glass cases; he looked at the harps and organs laid out.

  Finally he sat down at a piano and, hesitantly, he began to play.

  23

  ULRICH IS WAITING ON THE CORNER of Hudson and Canal. Boris pulls up in a brand-new car, and opens the passenger door. He leaves the engine running.

  ‘Don’t you want to stop for a moment?’ suggests Ulrich. ‘I’d like to buy you a drink.’

  ‘I have to go,’ says Boris. ‘I have to meet someone soon.’

  Ulrich lowers himself into the car and settles in the seat. He shuts the door, and Boris sets off. The car turns a corner and heads down a slope, and now they are driving underground. There’s hardly anyone else in sight, and driving through the Holland Tunnel is like swimming in a yellow dream.

  Boris is accustomed, now, to American roads.

  When they come out on the New Jersey side, Ulrich takes a last look back at the Manhattan skyline. He doesn’t think he will see it again.

  Boris finds that Ulrich has introduced a new smell into the car: a smell of old candles and much-worn wool. It’s a familial smell, and Boris is drawn to this strange old man. He feels bad that he shut the door in his face the first time he saw him.

  The evening is pure sapphire light, and the empty road is broad and peaceful. There are green banks of grass along both sides of the highway, blocking out the view, but when they reach the crest of a hill they get a panorama over the rolling green of New Jersey. There is a sheepdog bringing in the flock at the end of the day, the sheep running in waves among the factories.

  ‘I look at the beauty of an evening like this,’ says Boris, ‘and the fact Irakli is in the ground and cannot see it is the most terrible thing in the world.’

  Ulrich turns so he is facing Boris, and the new leather creaks. The car moves so smoothly there is hardly any noise from the engine.

  ‘I found that old note again,’ Boris continues, ‘the one you slipped under my door with your phone number – and I wanted to see you one more time. I keep thinking back to what you said about Irakli when I met you in the street. As if you already knew.’

  Ulrich says,

  ‘I didn’t think it would go so far.’

  They pass a fairground in the distance, the big wheel glinting in the sun.

  ‘He was like the other half of myself,’ says Boris, ‘and I thought he would always be around.’

  He looks desolate and strung out. Ulrich says to him,

  ‘You haven’t lost Irakli, you know. I don’t know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.

  ‘He’ll find his way inside you, and you’ll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you’ll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.

  ‘There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You’ll see visions of him wherever you go. You’ll see his eyes so moist, his intention so blinding, you’ll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.

  ‘Gradually you’ll grow older than him, and love him as your son.

  ‘In the future, you’ll live astride the line separating life from death. You’ll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won’t wait until people die to grieve for them. You’ll give them their grief whi
le they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.’

  Boris drives on. Ulrich watches the play of thoughts on his face, and the swallow in his throat. His exterior is as thin as a meniscus, and Ulrich can see through to the grinding inside. This son of his daydreams has already done things that Ulrich could not do in a hundred years. But he is still so young, and he is tossed around by feelings he cannot understand. It will be difficult to leave him, knowing he will be alone.

  Ulrich tells himself, reassuringly,

  ‘Millions of people manage to lead their lives, and there’s no reason he should be any different. He’s not a bad child. Considering what happened to me, I could have made something much worse. I could have made a monster.’

  He worries about Khatuna. He doesn’t know where she will end up or what she will become. She has grown beyond him. She has become volatile, and he cannot even approach her.

  ‘They are not the children I thought I would have,’ he thinks. ‘I always imagined I would produce people more civilised. But a confounded man like me, living through such mess – it’s not surprising if my offspring carry a few scars. They’ll have a better life than I did, and things will smooth themselves out. Their children will be better than they. In a couple of generations they’ll give birth to angels, and there’ll be nothing left to show what bad times we sprang from.’

  By now the highway is delivering prophecies of sea. There are seabirds overhead, and there’s a maritime smell in the air. When the gaps line up in the landscape, it is possible to spy the continent’s end.

  Ulrich tells Boris that he’s been holding on to a story for him and now he wants to let it out.

  ‘Back in my day,’ he says, ‘there was a scientist named Albert Einstein. I had a thing for science when I was young and I thought Albert Einstein was the greatest man alive. I even studied at his university in Berlin, where I used to see him in the flesh.

  ‘One day I was walking behind him in a corridor and he dropped a sheaf of papers. He didn’t notice he’d lost them, so I picked them up and raced after him. I handed them over and he looked at me, smiled and said, I would be nothing without you.’