Solo (21 page)

The new baby was tiny and frail. Boris breathed with
difficulty and seemed to be in continual discomfort. The doctor warned he might
not live. He advised that the baby sleep with an oxygen mask, since his lungs
were not yet fully developed.

The anxious parents laid their baby between them each night
and stayed awake for hours, watching every breath going into his lungs and every
exhalation misting the mask. Finally, exhausted by the anxiety, they fell
asleep. Long after they had drifted away, the cylinder of oxygen stood like a
sentinel by the bed, its rubber tube looping over one parent and blowing gently
into baby Boris’s mouth and nose.

And so it was, on a cold night in November, when a spiteful
gust of wind caused the flame to go out on the young family’s gas heater,
when gas started to fill the bedroom (whose windows had been closed against
draughts), when all the oxygen was expelled from the air and a deathly heaviness
began to descend – that only little Boris, out of all his family,
survived.

A
FTER THE DEATHS OF
P
ETAR AND
I
RINA
, Old Petar collapsed into incapacity and fell away
from the life of the town. Orphan Boris was taken in by Irina’s mother,
Stoyana, who was the accountant in the local post office.

Stoyana considered her
grandson’s preservation to be nothing short of a miracle. She loved him to
distraction, and his infant antics were her cardinal joy.

When Boris was two years old she heard him singing a tune
to himself. She recognised the melody, but could not recall where she had heard
it. Boris continued to sing the same tune every evening, until Stoyana
remembered it was a lullaby that Irina had written for her unborn son, and sung
to him in the womb. 

The town had seen better times. Money did not
do what it once had done, and people began to suffer. The old housing blocks
were damp and crumbling, and light bulbs had become so scarce they were pilfered
from every corridor and elevator. Half the factory buses had stopped working.
Broken windows and balconies were mended with corrugated iron, and there was
nothing in the shops. Outside the factory, the mountain of slurry had collapsed
into the river, and people blamed it for their cancers. Every morning there was
a repulsive scattering of syringes around the bus shelter.

The Gypsies made money, which only increased the plight. No
one had ever liked Gypsies, but things were easy while they were poor, and their
children safely stowed in a school for the mad. Now they were lording it around
with second-hand ZIL sedans, and illegal satellite dishes, and sparkling
frontages on their shabby houses – and it seemed as though their years of
exile were bringing rewards. The socialist economy, which gave jobs to all the
Bulgarians, had seized up, and now the only money was in contraband.

Another person who seemed to do well was the mayor. He was
an exuberant character who was appreciated as much for his dancing and his
erotic novels as for his political opinions, and he had been a well-loved
fixture for many years. But behind his jovial façade he evidently had
operations that no one surmised, for even in this dark era he had managed to buy
himself a new villa by the Black Sea. So when it was time for his daughter to
marry, everyone looked forward to an extravagant feast at which to drink away
their privations.

Boris was seven years old. On the
morning of the wedding, Stoyana took him to the mayor’s house to wait with
the bridal party, where he sat uncomfortably in his new suit and observed the
goings-on. Two girls, hardly older than he, ran around with some unaccountable
glee. The mayor, dressed up like a battleship coming into port, banged
repeatedly on his daughter’s door,
Fifteen minutes! Ten minutes!
,
while his wife packed bottles of rakia into a box for the party later, weeping
all the time and mopping her nose.

The bride’s door opened a crack, the
bridesmaid’s head peeking through it, mouthing some secret need to another
woman outside; behind them was a glimpse of the bride in the mirror, not fully
dressed.

A rooster scrabbled in a crate in the corner. Boris knelt
by it, his only ally. Its wings were tied and it seemed enraged. Boris put his
head close. Its eyes were stupid, with only a dot of presence. He took the
bird’s beak in his teeth and held it stiffly closed, eye to twitching
orange eye, until its stifled struggling pulled it free.

An old lady said,

‘I will bring roses for all the guests!’

She grinned at the ceiling.

‘The flowers are arranged, Mother. We’ve
already talked about this.’

Boris wondered what you might carry so many roses in. A
wheelbarrow? Perhaps you would need a whole truck? But if there were that many,
the ones at the bottom—

‘They are coming! They are here!’

The girls ran to open the window and the music came in from
down the road. Boris heard it and ran too.
What sounds!
Somebody played
clarinet like a painted spinning-top tripping and skipping on the uneven ground
of the beating tapan, with kaval and violin leaping overhead.
They have
brought Petko Spassov to play at the wedding!
He began to dance like a
seven-year-old at the window as the musicians turned the corner and the sounds
became louder: he could see the party approaching down below, the bridegroom
looking even glummer than usual because of his shaved head, and Petko Spassov
himself with black flowing hair holding high his clarinet as he walked.

The mayor banged again at the
door.

‘They’re already here! What’s going
on?’

Slowly, the door opened. Out came his daughter, stooped,
her face behind a veil. The room went limp.

‘Oh, my darling girl!’

The mayor looked at her tearfully, his urgency forgotten.
He kissed her on the head through the gauze.

‘What a day, what a day!’ he said.

His wife rushed out of the kitchen, shaking dry her hands,
and her tears flowed again at the sight of her daughter in white. The two girls
smashed a glass thing with their running round the house.

The bridegroom’s party arrived at the foot of the
apartment block. There was already a crowd outside, listening and laughing, and
the music continued, loud and muffled, up the staircase, the tapan still banging
though there was little room for it around the corners. The mayor and his family
could hear people opening their doors and clapping on the floors below, while
they had fallen silent and stood transfixed by their own front door, shut solid
in its frame. The music ascended slowly: there was a long way to climb, and
those who played wind instruments blew less vigorously. Then they could hear the
crowd on the landing outside, and the music finished, and there were three loud
knocks on the door. The mayor began an argument with the party outside, winking
at his family with each witticism,
Begone with you!
Unless you’re a millionaire! She won’t go for less!
, with so
much laughter, and Boris wishing he were not shut up in this crush.

‘He’s not only rich, he’s handsome. Open
the door and see for yourself!’

The mayor opened the door a crack and Boris forced his face
and shoulders through the legs, through the door and out into the crowded
stairwell.

The musicians waited a few steps down, big Petko Spassov
sweating and panting from his climb and the man on the tapan smoking a
cigarette.

The violin was held easily like a giant would hold a woman,
looking
like music already, and deeply wood. Boris stared
at it with longing.

‘Can I hold it?’ he asked.

The man frowned.

‘I don’t think so, boy. If anyone’s going
to break it, it should be me.’

Boris clasped his hands behind his back and stared avidly.
The strings were like silver electricity lines arching between pylons, and the
sky behind.

‘It looks old.’

‘A hundred years. Look here.
Mihály
Reményi, Budapest, 1909
. The best violins were made
there.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Slavo.’ He laughed. ‘This is
Petko Spassov, the famous clarinettist.’

‘I know! I knew who you were as soon as I heard you
from the window!’

Boris sang the rushing clarinet line from a cassette
someone had made of a Petko Spassov concert. His grandmother loved music, and
played these things all the time in the house. The musicians laughed, and Slavo
joined in lightly on the violin, his bow bouncing on the strings, Petko clapping
and bear-dancing on the spot – but quietly so as not to disturb the
merriment of the wedding crowd above: their mock, their hoots, their
disputation. The rooster crowed through the middle of it all. Boris finished.
Slavo said,

‘You sing well. What’s your name,
boy?’

‘Boris.’

The tapan player threw his cigarette butt on to the
concrete.

‘Come on. Let’s go down.’

They set off down the stairs with their instruments, and
Boris followed, saying,

‘I can sing the whole concert if you like!’

It was a sunny morning. The mayor’s Lada was polished
and decorated with roses. A few people were waiting for the wedding party to
come down. Boris sang more tunes to impress the big musicians.

‘Shouldn’t you be upstairs with the
wedding?’

‘I want to stay with
you.’

‘He is one of us,’ said Slavo the
violinist.

A cart came up the hill, piled high with hay, and Boris
read
Yamaha
from the barrel of Petko’s clarinet. Birds soared high.
The yellow cloud rose from the chemical plant like a ponderous genie.

The wedding party started to emerge from the building. The
tapan player banged out a rhythm which fired Petko’s instrument into the
air, followed behind by the soaring kaval. Slavo joined in.

The guests gathered downstairs, with whistles and mirth.
Boris hid while they all got into cars. The mayor directed things, six or eight
to a vehicle; doors slammed, neighbours threw flowers, there was a great cheer
as the bridal Lada started up, and one by one the cars drove away to the town
hall. The remaining neighbours returned to their apartments.

Petko stopped playing, mid-phrase, and wiped his mouth, and
once again there was just the sound of the street and the birds. Slavo put his
instrument in its case. They had sandwiches and beer. Boris sat down with them,
meekly.

‘Still here, I see,’ said Slavo to him.
‘Do you want a sandwich?’

Boris shook his head. He watched them eat. He watched how
they were: their beards and the way they talked.

‘Does anyone know you’re with us?’ asked
Petko.

‘No.’

Boris hummed his own improvisation on an old song, as if he
were not aware of it.

They finished eating and packed everything into the
van.

‘Come on.’

Boris climbed in, and they drove to the hall where the
evening party was happening. In the back of the van were their speakers which
they carried inside, and Boris followed behind with Slavo’s violin, which
he held as if it were a fledgling bird fallen from a nest. Some men were laying
food out on the tables, and there were decorations on the ceiling. The musicians
set up amplifiers and stands and plugged cables into sockets that set off
electronic screams. Petko warmed up on his clarinet.
Boris
sat on the stage kicking his feet. They had offered him a sandwich. He had
driven in their car.

The kaval player stood at the back semaphoring while they
adjusted volumes. There was a lot of time before everyone arrived from the
wedding.

A woman put out flowers on the tables. Petko tossed his
song with a honey tone, and the fluorescent lights went on. The tapan was like
the pounding of the earth through the speakers, it was a beating and a life! and
there were trestles all along one wall that made a great corridor underneath
where a boy could hide away from everything, under the tablecloths, under the
dishes and cakes that the guests would eat; then the kaval player took up his
flute and began to play and all of them joined in the tune, the whole band
playing in this empty hall, the arabesque jaunt, the newcomer’s flaunt
– and he, Boris, in the offbeat, in the heartbeat. The clarinet sang
nar-whal nar-whal
with its elbow-vowels like treasured smells, and
over it the silvery lattice of the violin. And Boris thought,
He
is
one of us
. 

Boris’s grandmother was at first
indulgent towards his sudden involvement with the Gypsy musicians.
He is
young, and it will pass
, she thought; and she did not prevent him from
going every day to that part of town. She did not object to the old violin the
Gypsy gave to her grandson, and she listened patiently to his tales of music and
learning. She even spoke to others of the remarkable aptitude he showed for his
instrument.

But Boris’s enthusiasm for the Gypsies began to
extend too far. He started to use slang and mannerisms that appalled her. He
played nothing but Gypsy music. She said,

‘You should spend less time with Slavo. The music you
play is all illegal – where will it get you?’

But Boris loved his new teacher, and nothing could keep him
away.

Slavo said,

‘Now we’ll play an hour of our
lives.’

He raised his violin and played the things of sixty
minutes. The
colours, the thought. The unclipped nails,
the oval pool of vision. The time, the need, and the sounds that break through
from beyond. The book on the fence post. The other person drawing close. The
normal emotions, the thing-at-hand, the body’s suck and pump.

He did it in a couple of moments, which was another part of
the feat.

Boris tried too. To play an hour of his life on his own
violin. But he did not know how, and his sound spoke of nothing at all.