Solo (20 page)

He was forced to sell all his mother’s valuables, and his gold watch too. He resented the smugness of the owner of the antique shop, who accepted these things with so little emotion. The shop was piled high with painted wooden icons, china horses, military decorations, sports trophies, stamp collections and old spectacles. There were boxes full of yellowed postcards sent from the Black Sea. The place swelled with the lives that were deposited there.

Till the very end, Ulrich had sustained the hope that there would be someone for him to bequeath his gold watch to.

Ulrich’s life had become minimal. He rarely left his tiny apartment and he had little to do. There was no telephone in his apartment, and the list of his possessions was short. He did not even cook his meals any more. He produced nothing at all. He spent some time every day making lists of the things he threw out. He listed toothpaste tubes, exhausted pens and sachets of coffee, and he found there some signature of his remaining significance.

One day, Ulrich decided to throw out two old canisters of sulphuric acid that were left over from his days of experimentation. He had kept them with the vague idea that they might come in useful for stripping electrical wire or something of the sort, but he had not touched them in many years. He took them down from the shelf, and, out of some inexplicable desire to see what state the contents were in after all this time, he tried to open one of them. It was sealed tightly shut. After several minutes of wrestling, holding the canister between his knees to keep it steady, the seal broke and the acid burst in his face. He ran to the kitchen to plunge his head in the sink, still full of dishwashing water, but
the pain remained intense. When he could finally open his eyes he could see nothing.

His neighbours took him to the hospital, where the skin of his nose and forehead was treated for burns, but there was nothing they could do about his eyes. His corneas were destroyed.

T
HIS MORNING,
U
LRICH
sensed a new, ripe feeling in the air, and now, in the afternoon, the storm is being prepared.

Just a succession of pinpricks at the beginning, but swelling to a single sighing sheet: a sonic layer over everything. The breeze in the window –
thank God!
– and the smell of dust flowing off the roof and dripping from the tree leaves. Ulrich can hear his neighbour’s hurried limp next door as she rushes between windows, throwing them open. It’s an even downpour, and he sees everything in fine grain: the cars are spraying now, the back-hiss of radials, and there is the bus park laid out, the long steel roofs resounding like tin drums. Figures caught unprepared: the street pours its people into the doorways, and somebody runs with a polythene bag held tutting overhead. Plastic takes on more of the roar as the stalls are quickly covered across the street. The windowsill is a delicate pattering bar.

Underneath, directly below, is an umbrella open wide, where the sill’s globules bomb. Silverdrops are swelling on the rib tips till they break and fall, smattering the ground plumply amid the slender rain. They burst on the paving and scatter into spray; and, caught in the flare – is he being fanciful? – is something too large to be one person, a dark doublemass absorbing the sibilance. Two hidden lovers holding each other close under the awning, a huddled shadow in sound.

By now, Ulrich has reconciled himself to the loss of his vision. In the beginning he was terribly shaken, and for months afterwards he
mourned the sense he had lost. But his system gradually regenerated itself, and now he does not feel inconvenienced without his eyes. In fact, his gaze turned inward, he has become rejuvenated. Little disturbed by sensory impressions, his mind generates its own material, which absorbs him completely, and he finds his days are full.

Thinking back, he realises how much has slipped through the fingers of his memory. Everything he still retains could be told in an afternoon, and yet there is so much more. The substance of all those days, which has entirely escaped.

The days of dust drifting in the light shafts. Tea bags put out to dry. Listless newspapers with new dates on them every day. The pipes of grubby gloss that turn from the back of the radiator along the wall. The gradual death of things: plants and machines and animals; furniture and friends. Twisted hairs trapped in a hairbrush. The seasons, and their increasing irrelevance, even if there is still a sense of eternity about the clouds. Cracks in walls, and the refusal of windows to close properly after too many coats of paint. Filling in forms. New buildings whose purpose is unclear. Things that have not been seen for some time: a good pen, a souvenir key ring. Lying in bed, and ceilings. Surprises, such as window glass blown in by the wind. Small changes that appear in routes walked often: a new fence post, or a sawn-off tree. The shocking breathlessness of climbing just a few stairs, and shaving in the morning. Thoughts in the background: concerns about money, and whether he can still be considered good looking. The cleaning of things just cleaned: cups, and plates, and bathtubs, and cookers, and hands, and all the other parts of the body. Old-style banknotes discovered in jacket pockets, and the recollection of facts when the need for them has passed. The relief of television, and its futility. The persistence of shit, and its undue hold on the mind. The stuff that passes through the days: empty food cans, old batteries, rotten fruit, and notepaper.

It has all slipped away.

Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said, Yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its
life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter.

Ulrich’s spirit has expanded in these last days, and he is no longer bereft. Though the memories are no longer his, he feels they persist nonetheless. Einstein said, considering his death,
I feel such solidarity
with all things, that it does not matter where the individual begins and
ends
. When his mind is particularly aware, Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and, ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it. Everything he has known has drained, over time, from the actual world into this ocean, and he is blissful in the endless oblivion. Only when his surroundings insist – when the electric drill whirs downstairs, and the walls start with that powdery vibration, so unique to this place – does he alight again, reluctantly, in the narrow confines of his room.

In his childhood, Ulrich’s parents were often invited to evening parties. His father would come down first, his velvet coat resplendent and his moustaches waxed to dagger tips, and he admired himself in the fireplace mirror, saying,
Look at your handsome old man!
Then his mother, whose heart-shaped diamond necklace shone in the firelight, who lent over the flurries of her sapphire dress while he begged her not to go, and kissed him
goodnight
in a gust of perfume. Ulrich watched their departure from the window, the coachman’s whips and cries as the horses strained against the carriage’s inertia, and he sat back down, barefooted, with toys and books.

His grandmother enjoyed these moments when she had him to herself. She sat with him, and told him stories. Over the hours, the oil lamps burned out, until they were left only with the glow of the fire, which Ulrich prodded now and then.

It is a feeling that Ulrich has sought again and again through his life.

Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been
poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavour of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.

I
N
A SMALL INDUSTRIAL TOWN
some two hundred kilometres from the
Bulgarian city of Rousse lived a youth named Petar, who was looking to prove his
manhood.

Petar was small and spindly, and could not attract the
girls, while his father was a bull of a man whose feats of strength were talked
about even in the next town.

Old Petar never stopped remarking on it.

‘Don’t know what games your old mother must
have played to bring out a gimp like you.’

Petar felt it was time to show everyone what he could do.
He was twenty-one: he worked as hard as anyone else in the factory, and, if you
did not take his size into account, he could look quite handsome.

His opportunity came when the mayor announced a party for
his wedding anniversary. Old Petar was the mayor’s brother, and naturally
it would fall to him to slaughter the pig. He was famous for it: he could slice
a jugular in an instant, and with his bulk he pinned down the largest animals
and held them as they died.

‘Pigs are sensitive beasts,’ he would say as he
got up from his exertions and acknowledged the crowd’s approval.
‘You can’t let them suffer.’

On the morning of the mayor’s party, Petar approached
his father and said,

‘Today
I
am going to slaughter the
pig.’

Old Petar burst out laughing.

‘You? You wouldn’t have
the first idea. It takes skill to kill a pig. Can you imagine what kind of beast
my brother will have stored up for a day like this? – it will weigh twice
as much as me! How could you keep it down?’

‘I’ve watched you all my life, and I know how
it’s done. As for my size – I’ll make up for it with
ingenuity.’

The argument went on until his father gave in.

‘But you’re on your own. I’ll have
nothing to do with it.’

Around midday, people began to gather at the hall where the
mayor was having his party. A steel bath was already heating on the fire to dunk
the pig in afterwards, to remove the hair.

Old Petar arrived, his son in tow. Everyone knew what his
arrival portended; they greeted him excitedly and walked with him in a jubilant
crowd to where the pig was penned. Old Petar opened the gate to the enclosure
while everyone else climbed on to the fence and sat there to watch. The pig was
sleeping inside a wooden hut with its head resting in the mud outside. The
sudden commotion roused it, and it blinked drowsily.

Old Petar stood in the middle of the enclosure and took his
knife out of his belt. He raised it above his head, and everyone cheered. He
spoke:

‘I’m not slaughtering the pig today. My son
here thinks he can do it better. So see him try.’

There was general surprise. Old Petar walked out of the pen
and handed the knife to his son. Then he turned his back on the crowd and set
off down the street towards home.

Petar jumped down from the fence into the enclosure.
Everyone was watching. The mayor and all his friends. The young men who had
mocked Petar when they were at school. All the prettiest girls in the town were
there. They were all sitting on the fence watching how Petar would fare with the
pig.

The mayor was a little nervous.

‘Are you sure about this, young Petar? I have a lot
of guests to feed today and I don’t want anything to go wrong. That
pig’s been waiting a
long time for this day. Ideally
he would want someone with a bit more experience.’

Petar had brought three long pieces of rope. He tied them
to sturdy posts on different sides of the pen, and laid the three loose ends
together in the middle. Everyone watched curiously.

The mayor said,

‘Do you want some men to hold him down? You’re
just a snip of a thing yourself.’

Petar approached the pig, which eyed him lazily. He took
its ear and tried to pull it to its feet. The pig did not move. He seized both
ears and leant backwards, pulling as hard as he could. The pig was oblivious,
and the girls began to snigger. Petar took a sharp stick and began to poke the
pig in the neck. It still did not react: its skin was as tough as bark. Finally,
he threw himself into the ripe darkness of the sty, wriggled along the length of
the pig’s warm flank, and prodded it vigorously in the backside. The pig
snorted and flicked its tail in his face, and, as Petar dug in harder, it whined
irritably and struggled to its feet. Finally, it stumbled out of the sty and
into the open. Petar crawled after it, covered in filth.

The pig stood under the hot sun, drowsy and bewildered. It
was the mayor’s prize boar, and the largest Petar had ever seen. Its head
was larger than his torso. Its body was a long pink mountain of muscle and fat,
and its legs were as thick as pillars. Its eyes were moist and human, with a
thatch of stiff gold lashes.

Petar coaxed the pig into the middle of the enclosure. He
stroked it to keep it calm, and pushed it gently ahead of him. The pig was in no
mood for an argument. When Petar had it where he wanted it, he began to stroke
its snout and to speak soothingly in its ear, until the pig folded its forelegs
and lay down on the ground. Petar pulled the ropes taut and tied them firmly
around the pig’s ankles.

Everyone was still. The mayor said quietly,

‘You’re sure you’re all right,
boy?’

Petar nodded.

He took the knife his father had given him and held it
ready. He lay
down gently on the broad surface of its
back, speaking softly in the pig’s ear, his arms around either side of its
head. Suddenly, and so violently that even his expectant audience was taken by
surprise, Petar thrust the knife into the pig’s throat.

The pig let out a scream that split their heads like the
screech of an electric drill; it staggered to its feet, eyes flung wide. Petar
gripped its head and tried to push his knife in farther, but the pig started to
run. The two posts at the far end of the enclosure were pulled clean out of the
ground, and spectators fell into the mud as the fence collapsed. The pig lowered
its head and broke through the barrier at the other end; the crowd scattered in
all directions as Petar gripped the pig’s back with his knees as best he
could and sawed at its windpipe, opening a hole that gushed blood in the wind.
The third rope tautened, and once again the post was ripped out – and now
there were three fence posts bouncing on the end of ropes as the pig ran
screaming down the hill, its eyes rolling in its sockets and Petar hanging on
for dear life.

Behind them ran the party guests, calling and screaming and
grabbing at the flying ropes, but none of them could stall the careering
pig.

Ahead of them, Petar could see the main road coming close,
where cars flashed by on their way to Rousse or the Black Sea, and still the pig
charged pell-mell, hoofs a-clatter on tarmac and piston legs accelerating with
the incline; and just as the road broadened out into a junction, still bucking
and lurching, Petar managed to cut through the pig’s windpipe. Its shriek
dried up in its throat and he felt it flag. Its giant lungs were heaving,
sucking impotently at the air.

The pig came to a halt. The running crowd caught up and
watched as the big eyes turned white, saliva coursed from pig lips, the legs
buckled – and the huge animal rolled over, its nostrils still whistling.
Petar did not loose his grip but clung on as if in his own rigor mortis. People
formed a circle around the dying pig. It was covered in sweat, and blood was
still pumping out on to the street. Its eyes opened wide and its back legs
kicked, once, twice, three times. It took a long time to die. No one spoke.

The mayor marched after them. He was red with rage.

‘A fine mess, young Petar. What
a way to kill a pig. The whole meal will taste of this. And now we have to carry
a quarter-ton beast back up the hill. A big fucking mess. I should have just put
a bullet in its head.’

Petar got off the pig. He was covered in blood from head to
toe. Someone brought a tractor, and everyone heaved the dead pig on to the
trailer. They walked behind it up the hill.

Petar went home. His father was sawing wood.

‘Did you kill it?’

‘Yes.’

His father smirked.

‘Looks like it put up quite a fight. You’d
better get washed.’

Petar took a shower. His hair was matted with blood and pig
shit. He felt depressed. He watched the brown water go down the plughole and
vomited suddenly, holding in the noise.

In the evening, he put on a new shirt and set out with his
father for the party.

The men came gathered round as they arrived.

‘Never seen a pig killed like that, Old Petar! Your
son did it bareback! Did well to keep his focus, he did.’

Old Petar gave a half-smile. The men pressed rakia into
their hands.

‘You’ll need a drink after that,
boy.’

The pig had been roasting for hours on the spit, and the
aroma displaced everything else. Women were still peeling vegetables and
chopping onions and herbs. It was a beautiful autumn night, and the men gathered
in lazy groups, smoking and drinking.

The mayor came over with more rakia.

‘Your son told you how he ruined my pig? Big mess.
Big fucking mess. I saved that boar a long time.’

Old Petar did not look up. There was music coming from
inside the hall, too loud for him to think straight, and he said,

‘My brother has rented a Japanese stereo from the
Gypsies, with speakers as tall as me. He thinks it will make the young people
like him. Meanwhile we can’t even hear what we’re saying.’

The stars grew bright, and the mayor announced dinner. They
went
inside to take their places. A life-sized photograph
of the mayor and his wife on their wedding day had been pasted on one wall. The
stereo was blaring pop music, and the worldlier girls were singing along. The
tables were piled with food, and people began to eat hungrily. The mayor sat at
the head table with his family, glaring all the time at his brother. He shouted
through the music,

‘Can you taste it, Petko? Can you taste the upset
your son made? The meat is ruined.’

Old Petar laid an arm across his son’s shoulders and
said,

‘It tastes fine to me. At least he had the courage to
try. You should have taken the pig on yourself. Then we could have laughed good
and proper.’

The girls got up to dance in the middle of the tables. It
was raucous music that Petar did not know. Several babies started crying at the
same time. The mayor continued to complain about the pig.

Somebody came and hovered over Petar.

Petar had always loved Irina, but only from afar. In his
private thoughts, she was an insouciant flock of laughter, a tumbling-sycamore
girl, a bliss of damask roses. He had watched her grow up without her ever
sending a glance in his direction. He sometimes went to the bakery where she
worked, and she dealt with him swiftly and silently. He had seen her at
weddings, singing songs until the old men cried, and she was perfect and
fearless, and destined for extraordinary things.

‘Why don’t you ever dance?’ said she.

‘I’m not very good. I prefer to
watch.’

‘Why don’t you try?’

She held out her hand and he took it. Standing next to her,
he was half a head shorter. She led him into the middle of the room and
succumbed to an energetic dance which was a perfect translation of the wild
sounds into flesh. He tried to follow, awkwardly. She smiled at him.

‘That was the worst slaughter I ever saw!’

She laughed loudly.

‘It was a big pig,’ he said, not sure what she
meant.

The dance was not working. She
said,

‘Let’s go.’

They went outside and walked idly.

‘Don’t you like music?’

‘I don’t know much about it.’

‘You’re missing out. Music is the reason to be
young!’

And then she said,

‘The Gypsies bring in music from England and Germany.
I can teach you everything. In England there’s a style called punk, and
there’s another kind called heavy metal. Motörhead, Iron Maiden
– have you heard of them? I have headphones at home: you put those pads on
your ears and hear the guitars groaning behind your eyelids, your brain melts
and it’s crazy and fantastic.’

Petar looked at the ground while they walked, thinking,
She is amazing
.

‘Let’s face it,’ she said, ‘the
world is shit, and full of lies. You need music. Then you understand that none
of this matters – this punishment, this stupid Bulgaria.’

The factory had stayed closed that day, and the air was
clear. She said,

‘I’m going to join a band some day. Get out of
this town.’

‘You’ll be a great singer,’ said Petar
assuredly.

‘What do you know? What have you heard, except for
the stuff they play on Radio Sofia? The songs I write would scare
you.’

Petar smiled. He said,

‘I know
you
well enough. I know we’ll
switch on the television one day and see you on the big shows from Moscow. And
we’ll still be here, living like we do. We’ll say,
Once we knew
her: she grew up here!
’

He was wistful. He said,

‘It will make me happy. To know you did what you
dreamed of.’

She thought about it.

‘They’ll never play my music on those stuffy
shows.’

They had arrived at her house.

‘Come in. Everyone’s at the party. We can drink
on our own.’

They went into the house. He sat down
at the kitchen table. She took some vodka down from a shelf and poured it into
two glasses. 

Nine months later, Irina gave birth to a baby
boy. She and her new husband, Petar, named him Boris.

They had moved into a small apartment in an old tower
block, but Petar was making plans for them to move to Sofia so that Irina could
pursue her musical dreams.