Solo (10 page)

One night he went to the big house on Krakra Street where his wife and son were now shut up. It was late, and he was incoherent with drink. There were no people in the street, though a dog pestered him, trying obstinately to lick his hand. A light was burning in an upstairs window. There was a route up to the window by the roof of the outhouse.

In his stupor, he was intent on clear thought, and he climbed with excruciating slowness, monitoring the movements of each limb so it did not escape and set off the cymbals of the night. Silence returned his
favours, and finally he crouched undetected beneath the lit window, and could lift his head to the view.

Ulrich had heard that Protestants kept their windows uncurtained in order to prove that nothing furtive ever happened inside; and somewhere he believed that they were truly unacquainted with secrecy and urge. Even at this hour, he imagined he might fall upon some scene of decorous domesticity: novel-reading, perhaps, or symmetrical bedtime prayer.

But when he looked inside, the man was fully inside her with his shirt still on, her crying
More!
, which Ulrich could hear through the glass. The room was scattered with objects he dimly recognised, though his attention was not there: for her mobile breasts shone under the electric lamp, her legs were open, and her face was transported no differently than once for him. The body pushing into her was thin and had a repulsive smoothness to it, as if it were without hair. As he squatted on the roof, his chin just clear of the windowsill, the sweat gushed from Ulrich’s armpits, and his clothes stuck to his back. While the preacher’s fishy foot soles flapped with his exertions, Ulrich became extravagantly aroused by the sight of Magdalena displayed luxuriant, so that he could not tear himself away even as the evangelist flurried his backside to a clench, and let himself collapse upon her, spent.

So it was that Ulrich’s wide-eyed, jerking face, lit up by the room’s blaze like a glossy mask in the night, still bobbed at the window when Magdalena’s gaze came to rest there, and they locked eyes for a strange duration.

No longer fearing discovery, he gave up climbing down and fell most of the way. He lay in the street for a while, his limbs gliding like the after-movements of a dead insect. When he pulled himself up, he saw Magdalena silhouetted in the front door, newly wrapped in a dressing gown. She beckoned to him.

She put her arms around him and clasped him to her, still ripe from the other man, and he let himself be held until she pulled herself away and shut the front door against him.

It was not long afterwards that Magdalena departed for America. Ulrich went to the railway station to watch the family board the train. Her husband extended his hand to cut the ceremony short, and Ulrich stared at its long thin fingers, which reminded him unpleasantly of those kicking feet. He felt vaguely nauseous at the thickness of the man’s new wedding band and the neatness with which he clipped his fingernails, but he took the hand and shook it. Magdalena looked him in the eye, and he mumbled some empty words of good fortune, to which she nodded.

Ulrich wanted to embrace his son, asleep in her arms, but he felt unable to approach Magdalena, and the opportunity passed. The young family boarded the train, and Ulrich thought with bitterness about the prehistoric bombast of his father, who pretended that the railways would unite what was split apart.

As far as he can remember now, he put his palms together in some perplexing gesture of prayerfulness, and turned to leave.

The Bible scholar took Magdalena and her son to Detroit, where he studied at the seminary for some years before going to serve as pastor to a Lutheran church somewhere in Texas. At that point, Magdalena broke off contact with Ulrich and his mother, and Ulrich never knew more about them.

For years afterwards, Ulrich remained convinced that the world was too systematic for a child to become lost to a father, and he continued to expect that his son would reappear at some point – if not in real life, then at least in the lists of names he sometimes read to this end. Lists of sports teams and prize winners, lists of committee members, lists of students sent on exchange visits, lists of convicts, lists of important poets, lists of patriots and botanists, lists of marriages, lists of academic appointments, lists of the approved, lists of the disgraced, and lists of the dead.

W
HENEVER
U
LRICH’S NEIGHBOUR
knocks at the door, he reaches for his pair of dark glasses. A residue of vanity.

She has seen them a thousand times before, but she chooses today to make a comment.

‘They make you look funny, those sunglasses,’ she says. ‘They’re small for you, and a bit lopsided.’

Ulrich explains that he fabricated them himself, and it was difficult to get them as good as this.

‘I never heard of a person making sunglasses before,’ she says. She sounds as if she does not believe him.

Ulrich says he copied them from a pair his mother had. She became extravagant towards the end of her life, and asked her friends to make unnecessary purchases for her in town. She bought this pair for a lot of money: they were made to look like tortoiseshell, and she thought they were glamorous. Ulrich told her he could make a pair just like it himself, without the expense. And he did it, too, but only after she died.

His neighbour is not interested in Ulrich’s story, true or not, and concentrates on what she has come to do.

The shape of the world changed when Ulrich lost his sight. When he had relied on his eyes, everything was shaped in two great shining cone rays. Without them, he sank into the black continuum of hearing, which passed through doors and walls, and to which even the interior of his own body was not closed.

His hearing is still perfect – which is why he wakes up so often at night, cursing the bus station, or the eternal wailing of cats.

If cats were to make an atlas, he sometimes thinks as he lies awake in his sagging bed, Sofia would be a great metropolis of the world. It would be the legendary city of pleasure, he muses, so loud and ubiquitous is the nightly feline copulation.

The blackness of his obliterated vision has made a fertile screen for his daydreams, and they have intensified during the last years. There he finds treasured smells, and tunes he has whistled, and other remnants that are lustred, now, with the mauve of nostalgia. He pictures the strange offspring that might have grown out of a man like him, whose blurred faces float among rows of lamps strung like greenish pearls in the darkness. He forgets that his own son, if he is still alive, would now be over seventy, and he dreams of strong young people filled with the courage he never had. He pleasures himself with implausible tableaux of revenge, and sometimes he can see himself in the streets of New York, as clear as day.

His daydreams seem to come from without, like respiration, and they have the power to surprise him. They provide relief from the rest of his thought, which rarely brings up anything new.

Whenever he recalls any event involving a horse, for instance, he always asks himself the same question.
What happened to all the horses
?

He remembers the smell of them filling the streets, the lines by the river chewing in their nosebags, the constant sound of hoofs and shouting drivers. He thinks of the horses thronging in Berlin, heaving every kind of merchandise.

He does the same calculation every time he thinks of it: one horse for every twenty people, he estimates, making twenty million across Europe at that time, and still their numbers exploding with the population. Then, after the centuries of coexistence, humans turned away from horses, and embraced machines. But he does not remember seeing how the surplus of horses was carried off.

He tries to visualise the volume of twenty million horses.
Did we eat
them, without knowing
? he asks himself. The question irritates him
because he has gone countless times through this sequence of thoughts, and he knows it does not produce any answers.

U
LRICH MOVED BACK
into his parents’ house, where he watched his father die of chagrin.

The days were already running out when people could die of such things. Ulrich knows his own will be a modern death, and his death certificate will require a mechanical justification for it: for even at his excessive age, bureaucrats will see his demise as a suspicious error. It is no longer possible to say on a death certificate that a person died of old age.

But Ulrich’s father died of chagrin. He sat in a chair for the better part of a decade, looking out of the window and growing deaf, and squawking, sometimes, with snatches of birdsong. The gap between his breaths became longer and longer, until finally, almost indiscernibly, they ceased.

While he was still alive, Elizaveta would say, ‘All he ever does is sit in that chair and look out of the window.’ It infuriated her to see him so inactive. But after he died she never said anything but, ‘That was the chair he loved.’ Or, ‘How he loved sitting in that chair.’ Or, ‘They are spoiling the view your father loved so much.’

Ulrich had never played music again after his childhood violin was thrown into the fire. But his separation from chemistry was not so perfect. It continued to seep back in, diverting him from his proper life, and prodding him, sometimes, to do puzzling things.

Though life had uprooted him from the pursuit of science, he continued to surround himself with chemical accoutrements, which acted like substitutes for the real thing. He fell into the routine of spending an
hour or two after work in a scientific bookshop, which stocked some of the most recent international publications about chemistry. He liked to look through the contents of the German journals – the
Zeitschrift
für Angewandte Chemie,
the
Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen
Gesellschaft,
the
Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie
, and
Liebigs
Annalen
– and to pose questions to the shopowner, who knew something about recent developments in the field. Ulrich usually came away with some small purchase or other: manuals for practical experimentation, mostly, and biographies of scientists. These books and papers began to accumulate in every room of the house, filling corners and covering chairs.

‘Are you trying to close up all the gaps?’ his mother asked bitterly, staring at the piles. ‘Make sure I never let down my hair?’

Elizaveta viewed Ulrich’s return home as an admission of failure, and she was no longer indulgent to his whims. In the past, she had supported him whenever her husband had stood in his way, but now she turned on him in just the same way – as if she were trying to preserve the dead man’s memory by taking over his attitudes. She treated Ulrich’s chemistry as if it were a form of onanism that had to be rooted out of him, and she forbade experiments in the house. She quizzed him about how he planned to get on in life, and cursed him for losing the daughter-in-law and grandson she loved so much. For years, she continued to write letters to the last address they had, which always found their way back to her, unopened.

Ulrich developed a routine. Every month, he delivered his salary to her, placing a pile of notes on the dresser, weighed down with a lead battleship that survived from his childhood. On Saturday mornings he set off with a shopping bag to the Ladies’ Market, where he bought groceries for the week. Afterwards, he went to the library, where he read for a few hours. He purchased a gramophone player that he listened to some evenings, with the volume down. After dinner on Sundays, he polished his shoes.

Ulrich had good features and bright, even teeth, and he could look distinguished in the glasses he now used for reading. But since the
failure of his marriage he had lost his desire for communication, and even his old acquaintances seemed uneasy around him. He sat in his father’s armchair, and made his displeasure felt when his mother invited guests to the house. On weekdays, he arrived home late in the evening and sat down to read at the kitchen table, and though Elizaveta offered a nightly monologue of thoughts and anecdotes, it did nothing to draw him out.

She exploded, sometimes, with the emptiness.

‘I am full of thoughts, you know, full of feelings. Do you realise how lonely I am, living like this?’

She found things to occupy her. She stripped everything out of the house, and had the walls repainted. She organised old photographs, and resumed her dressmaking. She read every newspaper with close attention, and she began to write a series of memoirs about the travels she had made with her husband before the wars.

She bought a dog to keep her company. She called it Karim, and she took it for walks in the evenings, which gave her some release.

In the hour before they retired, the silence claimed his mother too, and Ulrich relaxed into contentment. While the ball of wool twitched with her knitting, his attention drifted from his books and spiralled into his own recesses, where old faces coasted past like comforting submarine monsters, and fine filaments lit up a route to the future. He came to find comfort in these daydreams, and on the days when he did not have an opportunity to cultivate them, he went to bed quite unsatisfied.

After the fascist coup of 1934, democratic freedoms were cancelled, political parties abolished, and espionage and surveillance reigned in every sector of society. Elizaveta became the centre of a group of men and women who met regularly to discuss political affairs. The values of democracy, commerce and freedom that she stood for were being squeezed between the Bolsheviks and the fascists, who were both sweeping the country with their murderous recruitment drives. She clung to the hope that earnest discussions between learned, reasonable people would somehow help to restore sanity and moderation.

Every Thursday, priests, lawyers, doctors and professors came to her house to debate the burden of war reparations and the rise of Macedonian terrorism, the oppression of Bulgarians in Yugoslavia, and the problem of the refugees. They discussed the awakening in the East, and the rise of China. They argued about Spain and Abyssinia.

At one meeting Elizaveta gave an edifying lecture about the prospects of the new nation of Iraq, a land for which she still entertained an extravagant affection.

Above all, they discussed German politics, and the increasing hold of that country over their own. German industrialists now filled the hotels of Sofia, planning new mining ventures and chemical plants, and taking over the Bulgarian tobacco industry. When the king allied himself with Chancellor Hitler, and German industry began to supply the Bulgarian army with gleaming modern armaments, Elizaveta and her associates wrote a plea for political prudence that they circulated to the newspapers and to several thinking people in the city. It began thus:

When Germany invaded Poland, and the Great Powers went to war, the king tried valiantly to keep Bulgaria out of the conflict, but there
was no way to hold off the inevitable. The Wehrmacht pushed through into the Balkans and overran the country, taking command of its army and industry – and humble Bulgaria found itself at war, against its will, with America, Britain and the Soviet Union.

Ulrich was sent to man an observation tower, scanning the night skies with binoculars for British and American bombers, but the bombardment, when it arrived, was mighty and irresistible. He remembers looking up into the night at the lines of planes, their bellies lit up theatrically with the explosions, the deep noise out of phase with the flashes because of the distance. He wondered how the city would look from so high, and thought it must seem unreal, like a toy, and incapable of pain.

One night, sheltering in the basement with his mother, though he had a blanket pressed to his ears to protect his hearing, he heard a terrible screeching outside, inhuman and uncouth, as if a savage and relentless giant were sawing steel. It went on and on, undaunted by the explosions, tearing at Ulrich’s nerves, and all at once he went out to see what it was.

A house was hit near by, and flames sprang from the upper-storey windows, lighting up the street. In the gaps in the smoke he could see the domes of the Alexander Nevski church glinting in the flashes, and the red air shook with an overwhelming roar. Others were running to discover what the noise was. Someone brought a lantern, and soon they came upon a horse pinned down in the rubble, its raw flesh glistening in the lamplight, screaming as if it would wake the dead. In this pitch of war they could find no gun, and they had to dispatch it with an axe.

In the mornings, Ulrich wandered through the stench of quenched fire watching people digging corpses out from the rubble, and he saw women writing the names of missing people on trees. He looked up through Doric windows that now housed nothing, and were only frames for the implacable sky.

With the military leadership absorbed by the war, the long-suppressed partisan communists, in concert with Moscow, saw their chance for a full-blown uprising, and the government’s punishments saw whole villages destroyed. The country was ripped apart. Elizaveta
honoured every side with obscenities that Ulrich had never before heard from her mouth.

‘Bulgarian soldiers are cutting off the breasts of our young women,’ she wailed. ‘They are throwing young Bulgarian men into ovens! And who is benefiting? Only our enemies, who will come in afterwards and build cities over our dead.’

She was consumed by the horror of what was happening, and she became grim and dogged. When Hitler ordered the king to round up the Bulgarian Jews and send them to the labour camps, Elizaveta became an organiser for the protests. Her house became a war office for the outraged teachers and lawyers who marched during the day and debated through the night. When the king finally announced he would not give up Bulgaria’s Jews, Elizaveta was exultant, for it seemed it was possible for decent people to make themselves heard. But after the war, all the Jews who had been saved departed for Israel and America, and the society she had fought to preserve was anyway broken up.