Solo (18 page)

On her birthday, Ulrich proposed a surprise expedition. He prepared some food early in the morning, and helped her brush her hair. He borrowed a car from a man he knew and drove out of Sofia along the E81.

‘It’s a new place, Mother. I think you’ll like it.’

She was very weak by then, but she was enlivened by the plan, and told stories from the old days.

‘Do you remember that Yezidi priest we met that time, near Mosul? What a beautiful place it was, deep grass, rice fields, and everywhere oleander. Storks wading in the rice.’

She was tiny in her seat, her head wobbling with the motion of the car. She looked out of the window, away from Ulrich, out across the flat fields. Her sunglasses looked too big for her now.

‘They had this idea that human beings would become smaller and smaller. Each generation smaller than the last, until they turned into tiny, insignificant creatures. Do you remember? What a fantastic mythology they had! Then a giant would come at the end of time and drink all the seas and rivers until he was full of water, and unable to move. And a mighty worm would come and eat him. Then the whole universe would be flooded and cleansed, and it would be time for judgement.’

‘That’s what he said?’

‘Yes. I remember it like yesterday.’

Her voice was almost gone, and she rasped through her words. It was Sunday, and the road was abandoned. Black factories went by, and
orange housing blocks, and flocks of goats. Thistles sparked purple by the side of the road. Up the distant hills was a padding of clumpy forest.

‘We are so lucky in Bulgaria,’ she said. ‘We have the best yogurt and the best countryside.’

He had heard her say this so many times before.

‘Do you remember the picnics we used to have around here? When you were a child? I think about them so often. What beautiful times they were! We drank from pure rivers, and you could cry at the wealth in the trees. Do you remember?’

Ulrich inclined his head in a way that said neither
yes
nor
no
. It was a gesture he used often with her. But she was dying, and they had these two hours in the car. It gave her an autobiographical zeal.

‘Before I die,’ she said, ‘I want to confess something. I have no one else to tell it to.’

Ulrich’s forearms throbbed on the wheel. She said,

‘Long ago, in Baghdad, I had an affair with a man. You were a child, always needing attention, and he was so perfect with you. He was a Kurd. His name was Karim. It’s wonderful to say it out loud. Even now.’

She was looking away from him, out of the window. She said,

‘I loved him. It’s the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. We went on a journey together – you were with us, but you were very small – and everything we saw was magical. In the camp I kept myself alive with that feeling from so long ago. What did your father give me to draw on? When we came home I was pregnant with Karim’s child, and I never told anyone, not even him. I didn’t know how to contact him. I managed to get rid of it. I had to do that, for your sake.’

She wept silently. She said,

‘I’m sorry, Ulrich. You were a beautiful thing too. I don’t want you to think …’

But Ulrich was cynical.

‘I always wondered why you talked so endlessly about that part of our lives. All along, it was only because of a man.’

‘No, I loved those places,’ she said. ‘With all my heart. We’ve been trapped so long in this accursed country.’

She gave way to a fit of coughing.

‘I always hoped,’ she said, wiping the saliva from around her mouth, ‘you would find more love in your life.’

The seal around the car windows was broken, and the air was loud. Ulrich saw a formation of military jets flying overhead. He caught something in the distance.

‘We’ve arrived,’ he said.

Steel chimneys slashed the horizon, and white reactors clambered over it like domed pastries. In the distance, the ground gave way to a sea of mercurial piping. Vast clouds drifted from the coolers, white like dough stretched across the sky.

‘What is it?’ said Ulrich’s mother.

‘We’re near Kozloduy. Nearly at the border – the Danube is just ahead, and then Romania. And this is a miracle of our times, Mother. The first nuclear power plant in our country.’

‘
That’s
what you’ve brought me to see?’

He parked the car, and lifted her out into her wheelchair. The land was very flat, and monumentally empty. While he walked round the car shutting the doors, the wheelchair stood in the road. She had a blanket on her knees, battling the rushing air.

He wheeled her as close as possible, but he was unable to push her up the verge. The fence was topped with barbed wire, and plastic bags were caught there, thundering in the wind. They were a long way from the installation, but the basic structures were visible, and Ulrich explained how the system worked. His mother listened with her tortoiseshell sunglasses on. Her white hair, so thin by then, was all blown to one side.

Ulrich took out their lunch, because she had to eat regularly. He knelt on the grass, feeding her with a spoon. The skies were grey, but beams of intense sunlight occasionally broke through, shining in their eyes. Elizaveta’s face was expressionless as she ate. Ulrich said,

‘Happy birthday, Mother.’

She began to weep.

‘How could you ever think I would want to come here?’ It took a long
time for her to chew with her gums. ‘I am a nineteenth-century woman, with cancer. And this is where you bring me?’

‘I thought you’d appreciate a day out of Sofia,’ he said simply.

When she had finished eating, he wiped her mouth, and tried again to push the wheelchair up the incline, but it was too much for him. He left her sitting in a clearing by the side of the road, as occasional cars shook the ground, and climbed up to the fence to examine the power plant, shielding his eyes, and shouting descriptions and explanations to her down below.

She was put into hospital.

She was too old to withstand chemotherapy, so it was only a matter of time. She was allergic to morphine, and in her last days she could not sleep with the pain. After she died he found in her hospital bed some pages she had scribbled during the nights, while he slept in a chair. She had made plans for her funeral: she wanted roses to be given to all the mourners.

Once, she opened her eyes and said to him,

‘Have you heard the latest joke?’

‘No.’

‘A woman goes into a store and asks for six eggs. The shopkeeper says,
You’re in the wrong store. Here we have no meat. You have to go next
door if you want no eggs
.’

He tried to smile.

‘The doctor told me that,’ she said.

She was no bigger than a child under the bedclothes.

‘You’re allowed to laugh,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing tragic about disease, or age, or empty shops. It’s time for me to die. The tragedy is when people don’t feel around you, and never laugh. I hope you laugh some more when I’m gone. Look into the eyes of others, Ulrich, and you’ll see there’s still a field of life there.’

Her hair was thin and greasy, and her plait kept falling open. She asked him to tie it up again.

He propped her up and sat behind her.

‘Mother,’ he said.

He was nearly seventy years old, plaiting his mother’s wispy hair. He broke down weeping.

‘I can’t live without you. I won’t survive.’

He curled himself around her, sobbing. She put her hand on his head.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Just remember everything we did.’

When her body gave out, he went back home. The house was cold.

It was as if all her possessions had died with her, for they were noticeably less animated than before. He touched her glasses, her knitting, her lifeless books. He overturned her shoes to contemplate the soles’ wear. He found the enormous pile of papers she had typed over the years, and, for the first time, he allowed his curiosity out. He flicked slowly through this thing she had made, seeing the curlicue script down the left-hand margin, inked in by hand.

It was a dictionary. All those years she had been writing a dictionary. A Bulgarian–Arabic dictionary, which she had left piled up in neat bundles secured with rubber bands.

S
OON AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH
, Ulrich converted her bedroom into a chemistry laboratory.

He moved her bed out into the corridor, where it stood on its side for years before he finally chopped it up for firewood.

He set up a workbench and laid out all the equipment he had stolen from the factory. He installed an extractor fan that propelled effluent gases through a length of corrugated piping hanging out of the window. He brought barrels of petroleum and canisters of chlorine. He erected a small oven.

There were echoes of the garden laboratory of his childhood, for
though he had seen many real laboratories since then, he still had in mind the same dramatic descriptions from the same old adventure novels.

Ulrich set out to discover plastic.

The 1970s were already well advanced. In the shops downstairs from Ulrich’s apartment, there were plastic cups and trays. There was polystyrene packaging and polythene bags. His own house was full of plastic pens and vinyl flooring, and even the clothes he wore were polyester. His sofa was stuffed with plastic foam. The casing of his television was plastic, and there was a plastic clock on the wall.

But Ulrich’s knowledge of polymers dated from his time in Berlin, half a century before, when all of these materials lurked in the void of the future. The intervening time had added little to his theoretical understanding, for he had become cut away from the world of research. He had only vague ideas as to how nylon might be made, or even vinyl. In his scientific world, the entire empire of plastics still had to be invented – and he set out as a late-coming pioneer.

He devoted several years to fundamental experiments, and taught himself many of the principles of polymer science. He developed a range of materials with different properties, and he began to test how they responded under various conditions. He learned how to adjust hardness, plasticity and heat resistance.

He drew his plastic curtains on the world outside. There was a plastic lamp on the bench, in whose bright circle he lived, day and night.

There were occasional accidents and his neighbours sometimes came to complain about the smells and the explosions. They were suspicious of his perpetual confinement.

There were days of euphoria, the ethylene gas coming off in a hot polymer slurry, and drying solid. He gazed at glistening blobs of virgin plastic, and he felt the satisfaction of having planted himself in something outside himself.

His inner thoughts from those days are mostly sealed off to him now. When he remembers what he did, he is reminded of a monkey he once saw in the Sofia zoo, beating its head rhythmically in its cage. Or the
parrots he read about in a magazine, who pulled their feathers out when explorers caged them and took them away.

The police came to the apartment. It was after his remaining hair had turned grey, because they remarked on it. They complained of the smells and the dirt. They seemed alarmed at the conditions he was living in. They took him to a small room for questioning.

Ulrich had lost the habit of conversation, and was intimidated by the interrogation room. His eyes were wide with confusion, and the interrogator had to steady him.

‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘We’re not trying to scare you. We just want to understand what you’re doing. Your neighbours are concerned.’

There was a lamp in Ulrich’s eyes, which released glowing spores in front of the interrogator’s face. They turned it off to calm him.

‘When did you last take a bath, comrade?’ the interrogator asked.

The question seemed easy, but Ulrich’s mind had become a vacuum. There were three men gathered around him who seemed to think there was a truth inside him that they would persuade him to part with. But inside him was nothing. He could not even remember when he last had a bath.

‘What is the purpose of the experiments you are conducting in your apartment?’

This, too, was impossible. Ulrich foundered on
purpose
. The interrogator tried to simplify his approach.

‘Are you making something?’

‘Yes,’ replied Ulrich.

‘Well, what are you making?’

‘Plastics. Various kinds of plastics.’

‘Plastic. Like this, you mean?’

He knocked his knuckle against the plastic clock that stood on the table between them. Ulrich picked up the clock and examined it.

‘No, not like this,’ he said at length. ‘This is made of polycarbonate. I don’t know how to make that.’

‘So what do you make?’ asked the interrogator patiently.

‘My experiments are still at an early stage, and I don’t know where they will lead. At present I am trying to develop some transparent materials using acetone and hydrogen cyanide. I may succeed, I may fail.’

‘Hydrogen cyanide. That sounds dangerous.’

‘I wear a gas mask,’ said Ulrich reassuringly. His nerves had calmed down.

The interrogator asked,

‘What do you intend to do with these transparent materials? Supposing you succeed?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ulrich.

‘Let me ask you this. Are you running an illegal business? Are you trying to undermine our socialist economy?’

‘No,’ said Ulrich.

‘You don’t intend to sell what you make?’

‘No.’

‘How can you afford to buy your supplies?’

‘From my pension. I have no other expenses. And I have some savings.’

The interrogator was silent. Ulrich said,

‘If someone wanted me to make plastic things for them I might be able to do so. I think I could make buttons for a suit.’

‘But it is easy to get buttons for a suit!’

Ulrich picked up the clock and looked at it again. The interrogator continued,

‘Why do you do this, comrade? You are behaving like an eccentric and making people nervous. If it continues we will have to confiscate your equipment. And who would suffer from that? You are using dangerous chemicals in a residential building. There are several chemistry clubs you could belong to, where everything would be above board.’