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‘My goodness,’ said Elizaveta coolly. ‘What things you carry in your head.’

‘Soon after,’ said Ulrich, ‘Carlsbad and the mines were occupied by Nazi Germany. The Germans wanted the uranium for an atomic bomb, and they set up a labour camp in Joachimsthal, where non-Aryans were sent into the ground to pull out the pitchblende. Then the territory passed to the Soviet Union in the war, who did exactly the same thing. Enemies of the state were forced to dig uranium for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Every day we have new stories about the Soviet Union’s glorious nuclear might. Well, this is how it happens. Can you imagine those people? Can you imagine the cancer?’

After a while, Elizaveta said,

‘I don’t know why you would tell me something like that.’

She began to cry, and Ulrich stiffened, as he always did.

‘You just have no sense of things,’ she said behind her hands.

He did not look at her. He said,

‘A long time ago, Boris and I had a debate about chemistry. I said it was the science of life, and he said it brought only death. Now I see that our views were simply two halves of the same thing.’

But Elizaveta did not reply.

U
LRICH’S NEIGHBOUR IS IRRITATED
, and her limp sounds worse than usual.

‘Water is still pouring through our ceiling,’ she says bitterly. The man who lives above her has not been seen for months, and no one has the key to his apartment.

‘I don’t know what’s going on up there. If he left a tap on or if his pipes have burst. It must be like a swimming pool, because our ceiling is completely sodden. We need an umbrella to go into the toilet.’

She has come to give him his pills. She smells musty.

‘That man, he’s better off than a politician. He’s made so much money in a few years that he doesn’t even bother to sell his old apartment. He’s just locked it and gone: no one knows where he is. My husband’s looking for a crowbar to break it open. Who knows what he’ll find inside?’

Ulrich sometimes thinks that his neighbour talks too much.

‘This building is slowly falling down,’ she continues. ‘I’m scared to walk in the stairwell! It’s dark as hell and so filthy you could catch a disease. When I open the front door at night there are cockroaches in the hallway, running from the light outside.’

She sighs as she speaks, to make the point.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘At least in the old days we didn’t have all this. Now everything is shit. Excuse me, but it is. Did you hear about the rabies? The streets are full of dogs now, biting people, and we’ve just
had another case. Who ever heard of rabies in Sofia? That’s capitalism, I suppose. You must have heard that Ilia Pavlov has been shot?’

Ulrich has heard the news reports, but he is not sure who Ilia Pavlov is.

‘You don’t know? Don’t you use that television? Every month I go to deliver the money. It’s no use if you don’t ever watch it.’

Ulrich thinks,
Yes, I turn it on every evening
, but he does not say it to her. He does not see why he should justify himself. He hopes she will live to a hundred so she can see how difficult it is to adapt to the new names.

She has gone to fetch today’s newspaper, which has a big article about Ilia Pavlov’s life. She reads to Ulrich.

This triggers something in Ulrich. He says he thinks he remembers, but he cannot be sure.

‘You must remember,’ she says. ‘He had a big shaggy mane in those days. When he competed in the Olympics his picture was plastered everywhere.’

 She sits back on a chair and lights a cigarette. Ulrich doesn’t like her smoking in his apartment, but he finds it difficult to say so. He’ll ask her to open the window on her way out.

 ‘If you turn on your TV you’ll hear his whole life story again and again,’ she says. ‘The journalists are all tearful. They say the next Miss
Bulgaria contest will be devoted to his memory. People really loved Ilia Pavlov.’

Ulrich says he cannot understand this.

‘People need saints,’ she responds.

‘But he was an appalling man!’

‘Our saints have always been thieves and murderers. That’s the proof of the loftiness of their hearts.’

He can hear her stubbing out her cigarette. He asks her to open the window, hoping she will take it as a hint. But she carries on talking gaily.

‘When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they’ve brought in capitalism it is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.’

She asks if he needs anything else. He says
No
, wanting to be alone to reflect.

He has become completely absorbed in thinking back over his life. Remembering, Ulrich realises, has its own pleasure, like spreading wings. The mind unfurls and proclaims its own sensuality – and sometimes it does not matter if the memory is bleak.

‘I’ll go and check upstairs,’ she says. ‘See if they’ve managed to break into the swimming pool. It’s so ironic, you see. Outside it hasn’t rained for weeks. But in our bathroom it’s raining day and night.’

T
HE THINGS THAT HAPPENED
to Ulrich after his mother’s return from the camp are recorded in his memory differently from everything that went before.

He feels, in fact, that the environment turned hostile to the laying down of memories. Such slow sediment required a soft and stable bed, and he was too shaken up in those days by statistics, the roar of crowds, and bomb tests on the Kazakh steppe.

Ulrich remembers how he produced barium chloride in greater and greater quantities. That part is preserved. For everything around him had turned to chemistry, and his own production was part of something bigger than he. Bulgaria had become a chemical state: in the streets, there were posters of the nation’s chemical factories smoking in formation, like synchronised swimmers. The government issued chemical challenges to the workers, and the newspapers gloated over the achievements of famous Bulgarian chemists.

This development might have been Ulrich’s vindication, but it served instead to devalue the secrets he carried inside. Everything he had cherished as his own was taken away and turned into slogans.

It was the era of launching spacecraft, and when he thinks back, Ulrich sees himself as if from orbit. He can remember government statistics and the opening of new monuments, but he has trouble picking out what happened to him. His own figure is dwarfed amid the vaster wreckage: power plants and Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum. The might of Olympic wrestlers and Todor Zhivkov’s smile.

Sections of his life went missing, and there are decades he can hardly account for.

He remembers how a Soviet dyeing company wanted to obtain enormous quantities of barium chloride. Ulrich’s factory did not have spare capacity, and the Soviet company sent a delegation to discuss the plant’s expansion.

Ulrich went with Comrade Denov to the airport, and they waited on the tarmac. They saw the Aeroflot Tupolev touch down in the distance, and taxi slowly to its place. Steps were pushed against it, and the hatch popped open. The band began to play, and the Soviet visitors waited on the top steps to appreciate the coordinated kicking of the folk dancers.

Ulrich studied the distant faces of the Russians to see how it felt coming out of a plane, for he had never flown.

They descended with political smiles, and groups of dancers approached them with gifts of bread and salt while they shook hands with Comrade Denov and then with Ulrich. A young soprano from
the conservatory sang a song of gratitude to Russian liberators.

The next day was a Sunday, and Ulrich had the responsibility of taking the Russians on an outing to Vitosha Mountain.
Give them whatever
they ask for
, Comrade Denov had said.
Don’t let them say a word
against us
. Ulrich arrived at the Pliska Hotel with a chauffeured car, and found them lively after their breakfast. The car drove them out of the city, up the wooded roads towards Kopitoto. The Russians were bureaucrats, not scientists, and, to Ulrich’s disappointment, they could not bring news of chemistry. They seemed distracted, and Ulrich had the sense they were mocking him.

They stood in a line looking down on Sofia from the mountain. In the foreground were rows of birch trees, leafless at this time of year. Down below, the city was like a brittle ivory star, with points spreading along the highways, and Ulrich had to suppress the desire to reach out and smash it.

He asked the Russians why they were laughing.

‘Everything is so small here,’ they said. ‘Your city is like a village. And your mountain is just a hill.’

Over lunch, they asked what Bulgarians thought about Nikita Khrushchev and Dinamo Moscow, the football team, and Ulrich said he did not know what Bulgarians thought. The Russians ordered a succession of vodkas, and Ulrich grew worried about the bill he would present the next day to Comrade Denov. They went on asking him what Bulgarians thought about many other Russian things, and Ulrich realised that all questions had begun to sound to him like interrogation.

In the car on the way back, they listened to a monologue by the leader of the Russian delegation. He had Tatar features and thick limbs, and alcohol made him joyful.

‘Your country is such a simple problem,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union: twelve time zones. How can you ever solve such a thing? Bulgaria is so small, and your weather is gentle. That’s why your socialism has much better alcohol than ours, and your women look so modern.’

Ulrich was silent, looking forward to the moment when he would drop them at their hotel, and his responsibilities would be over. But
when they arrived, the Russians were adamant that he should not leave.

‘Will you make us drink alone? We have no new jokes to tell each other!’

Reluctantly, Ulrich let the chauffeur go, anxious about what the rest of the night would hold. In the hotel room, the Russians pulled off their shoes and called for expensive vodka. They poured for him too, though he protested.

‘I don’t drink,’ he said. ‘I don’t like alcohol.’

They roared with laughter, as if it were a joke.

Ulrich began to drink out of conformity, while the leader told stories of his childhood in Minsk. The corners of his tales were jabbed out with cigarettes that he held between his fingers for a long time before he lit them. The others clapped around him and kept the glasses full. Ulrich felt the blood rise in his ears and allowed himself to sink into the cushions. He watched the indefatigable storyteller, who drummed his fingers on his belly, shook his head insanely into his enormous handkerchief, and sighed
Ah!
when others spoke.

He talked about old films, and how he had kept bees when he was young. He told stories about his first job in a factory, above the Arctic Circle, where he lived in a tunnel underground whose entrance he could never find for snow and the darkness that came for months at a time. At length he broke into verse:

The wingtips of his cheeks were raised in transport like the roped peaks of a tent, and his cigarette left an aerobatic trail in the air.

They laughed and clapped, and the leader got up from his recline, backslapping and hugging round the room, seizing Ulrich with his powerful arms and holding him for a long while. He sat down and stared open mouthed into his vodka as if it were a miracle.

‘When we got permission to come to your factory, we knew we would drink a lot,’ he said happily.

‘But enough Pushkin,’ said one of the others, his socked feet resting on the wall. ‘We should have Bulgarian poetry!’

‘Geo Milev! The great one-eyed Bulgarian. Give us one of his!’

‘I don’t know any poetry,’ said Ulrich weakly.

They did not believe him, and took him for shy.

‘Drink more!’ they said. ‘You are far behind.’

Ulrich was already drunk, and in the clarity of vodka he felt his usual judgements collapsing. He looked at these men, men he would normally despise for their drink and their uncouth dissipation, and this evening he felt ashamed before their joy. He wondered what he carried inside him that could compare to such exuberance. He became despondent, wishing he were other than what he was.

He made a forced attempt at abandon.

‘Shall I call some girls?’

The three men roared in unison. The Tatar raconteur screwed his face into love-agony at the ceiling, and froze for a second as if he might topple backwards with joy.