Solo (3 page)

Given his father’s love of all things Viennese, Ulrich decided to prepare a waltz that was often performed by the orchestra in the Shumenska restaurant opposite their house. He listened at the restaurant window
until he had memorised it, and then began to reproduce it on his own instrument. He practised it until every note was perfectly sculpted for his father’s return.

On that evening, he set up the drawing room as a concert hall, with two armchairs for his parents, and an upturned chest as a podium. He put on a little black suit, and took a bow tie from his father’s dressing room. When his preparations were complete, he summoned his audience and sat them down. After a few vigorous swipes of his bow in the empty air, he began.

Ulrich’s eyes were set on his father, who sat folded in one half of his armchair. He saw the lines gathering on his father’s forehead, and he watched the tips of his moustache rise to meet them. He thought of a stormy tangle of telegraph wires, and a flock of birds above the bars of lowered railway barriers. He thought of a set of photographs he had once seen in a bookshop, which showed the expressions induced in mental patients by the application of electric currents to the various muscles of the face. He thought of a day when he had posed with his parents in the sunlight for a photograph in front of the opera house in Vienna, the folds of his mother’s parasol ticklish against his bare legs, and his father said, ‘If only we had been conquered by the Austrians, and not by the Turks, we would have had some of this Enlightenment for ourselves,’ and Ulrich had wondered if he was talking about a kind of cake. He thought of anything but the music, and, in the middle of the waltz, a great buzzing filled his ears, and his playing simply tailed off.

His bow caught a violin string awkwardly as he lowered it, and there was a catastrophic
plink
. And the family sat once again in a silence punctuated only by the funereal bark of the crows outside.

His father seized the violin from Ulrich’s hand, and brandished it at his wife like a meat cleaver.

‘You bought this for him? Haven’t we talked about this before?’

His anger raised him up, and he circled the room.

‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it!’

As he threw the violin into the fire, Ulrich’s mother was already sobbing, and, when the sparks flew up with the impact, she howled with grief and ran from the room.

Ulrich, still holding his listless violin bow, joined his father in contemplating the incendiary demise of his instrument. He noticed that the varnish burned differently from the wood underneath – more furious, and almost white – while the copper from the bass string sent a streak of green through the conflagration. The mahogany did not burn fully, and a charred rack was left behind when the fire died down later.

The next day, Ulrich had occasion to note that the shellac from which gramophone records were made burned differently again. A broad orange, with a diffuse, sooty, pungent flame.

Ulrich was too young to imagine that his father’s opinions could be simply brushed aside. For a long time he bore a grudge against both father and music. But since the former would not be altered, he pushed the latter far down inside him where it could not cause more damage. Only in the concealed realm of his daydreams did it emerge again, inviolate.

In the rest of his life, Ulrich resolved to be more circumspect in his attachments, and to surrender them when necessary. Later on, when he saw what happened to people who refused to give up their convictions, he wondered if this is why he survived so long.

A curious fact: Ulrich’s father made an exception, in his strenuous censorship of music, for the song of birds. In fact he had an unusually passionate love of birdsong, and could recognise a hundred different species by their calls. He taught Ulrich how to imitate birdsong with whistles and throaty warbles. On such tender ground, Ulrich and his father found common cause; and his memories of the walks they took together to hear the dawn chorus remain some of the happiest of all his childhood.

O
NE DAY
, U
LRICH’S FATHER
came into his bedroom. He said, ‘Remember everything.’

He was dressed as a soldier.

All at once, Ulrich’s father stopped taking him for Sunday walks. His exercises. His excitement at new scientific discoveries. Buying pork at the market. He abandoned all this and became a soldier in a war.

He came into Ulrich’s bedroom and sat on the bed in his improbable uniform. He looked at his son and said, ‘Remember everything.’ When Ulrich thinks back now, he feels that he was staring into the gas lamp to examine its glare. Was there also another boy with him, crouching by his side? It seems to him there was. It was so long ago: and as he pictures it now his father is but a military silhouette to his dazzled eyes.

He has forgotten.

Those were the days of his father’s wealth, when he was admired in the city, and would strike out into the world with projects and opinions. He had travelled widely, and dressed in a way that made him seem idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan. He liked dogs and cameras. He was proud of his Russian samovar, and had many discussions with his servant about its use. He took Ulrich to the fair, and roared with delight as he soared on the swings. He attended lectures by famous scientists, and tried to reconstruct their arguments over the dinner table. He had a system of exercises to which he ascribed his vigour. He loved to travel by tram, even on the most crowded days. He saw signs in every morning’s newspaper that the world was getting better. He stood rigid in church, and irritated Elizaveta with his devotions. He requested daily letters from Ulrich, even when they were in the same house, and insisted that he learn German and French. He took him to the opening of the first cinema in Sofia. He became a soldier in a war.

‘I chose your name, Ulrich. I have always thought it sounded noble.’
He said that, too; and then he left the room in a manner that indicated he had not got what he came for. He was gone for years.

Ulrich does not know which war his father was going to on that day, since there were several at that time. But he knows he fell sick with typhus while his father was away. It was the year of the epidemic, and the disease was all around. He had seen a dead woman lying by the side of the road, and while his mother had yanked his hand and said,
Don’t
look, don’t look!
he had turned back obstinately to look at the unhappy corpse, and wondered whose job it was to clear such things away.

But typhus was not supposed to enter clean, well-aired houses such as theirs, and Elizaveta was terrified. She burned all his clothes and filled the closets with mothballs.

Ulrich cannot recall the feeling of typhus, only the effect it had on adult faces. His eyes are burning with formalin, and the doctor sits heavily by his bed. The stethoscope is great and cold on his chest, and the medical gaze is intent behind the pince-nez, in whose steady glass the reflection of the window is two bright dancing rectangles; and, as Ulrich lies motionless, searching in the doctor’s eyes for the intuition of whether he will live or die, twin white feathers fall there, scything side to side in the miniature double sky.

When he recovered, his mother clasped him to her and said,

‘My baby. Don’t ever leave me!’

Some time after, on an evening when she had filled the Dondukov Boulevard mansion with guests, he remembers descending the broad staircase quite naked, and weaving unselfconsciously through the adult crush to find her. Seeing him so exposed, she hurried over, furious with shame, and sent him running back up the stairs.

At breakfast the next day, Ulrich had to listen to an indignant speech about how he should behave in public. His mother was too simple minded to understand that his humiliating display was intended to prove that he was innocent of the knowledge that would turn him into an adult, and take him away.

With his father’s absence came the end of their travels, and Ulrich began to attend the local school. He sat next to a boy named Boris, who had been born on the same date as he, a year before. Such a coincidence gave Ulrich a sense of predestination, which was redoubled when he discovered that his classmate played the violin.

Boris lived in a grand house where Ulrich loved to go. It had modern blinds that you raised with a cord, and a Blüthner grand piano, which Boris’s little sister could play delightfully well. There was a tree house in the garden, where you could sit looking down on the breeze in the grass. Boris’s mother was from Tbilisi in Georgia, and Ulrich thought her beautiful, with her blue eyes and black hair; she liked food, and she laughed often, and spoke with a rich accent.

In that house Ulrich discovered conversation. What he had thought to himself in his most obscure and original moments could be expressed there, for Boris was also filled up with thoughts.

One afternoon Boris took him up to the attic. Up the steep wooden stairs hidden behind an upstairs door, all dim in the afternoon, and, at their summit, the highest door of all, which opened into exotic smells and great glass sculptures in the half-light.

‘What is it?’ said Ulrich, and Boris replied that it was chemicals. There were lines of glass bottles with the emboss of skulls, as if good and evil struggled inside, and on the bench was an assemblage of glass flasks and funnels joined with rubber tubing.
Mercury Bichloride
, read Ulrich to himself, and the name felt considerable.

Boris’s father was interested in chemistry experimentation, though Boris could not say well what that meant.

The boys sat on the floor amid all these wonders, and Boris reported the news that his uncle had been killed in the war.

‘He didn’t look like the sort to die. If you saw him. He was always playing football with me, more like a friend.’

‘Only old people are supposed to die,’ said Ulrich. ‘Maybe when they are fifty. Not people who can still play football.’

‘He knew about every kind of animal. And now everything in his head has gone.’

Ulrich let it sink in.

‘Why was he born? Just to die when he wasn’t even married yet?’

Boris said,

‘One day I will die. And you will die as well. All these thoughts in our heads will disappear.’

Such an idea had occurred to Ulrich before, but it had never been corroborated by anyone else. It was still difficult to appreciate fully.

‘We’re just boys. We can’t die.’

‘Those boys from school died of cholera. It could have been us. Many things could happen. We could fall out of a window.’

It took some time for Boris to add,

‘We could be hit by a motor car.’

A big accident had happened the previous week in Sofia, when a speeding motor car had ploughed into a market and killed three people, and for a time no one could talk of anything else. The two boys sat in silence, imagining their tragic death under a gleaming motor car – and the thought was unutterably glamorous.

They talked on so long that they could no longer see each other’s faces. It was secret and wonderful to be in the laboratory at that forbidden time, trying to find words together in the darkness. Ulrich felt as if the blinds had been raised on the world, for when you sat with another human being and launched out into new thoughts, there could be no end to it.

Boris introduced Ulrich to the fool, Misha, who was sometimes found at the tea stall near his house. Misha wore rags and sang them strange rhymes that he made up himself. There were stories about Misha: that he was actually a Turk who had committed a terrible crime, that he had once owned a famous perfumery where princesses and dignitaries went to shop. He had a way of imitating a machine, and asked people to pull his crooked forearm to turn on the motion, which sent his body juddering violently until Ulrich and Boris exploded with laughter. He always seemed to have marbles for them in his pocket which he reached for conspiratorially and pushed into their hands, two for each, saying,

Ulrich’s mother did not like him talking to Misha. She tolerated it until Ulrich told her that they had seen the fool tying the tails of two dogs together. The dogs could go neither forward nor back, and barked in bewilderment, the bigger one dragging the smaller one behind, while Misha warmed his hands on his fire and laughed at the startled animals until the tears cut channels in the dust of his face. Boris protested the cruelty, and cut the animals apart, but it was enough for Elizaveta to forbid Ulrich ever to talk to Misha again.

On their voyages abroad, Ulrich’s mother had always carried magnesium wire for lighting up the interiors of caves and ancient buildings. Her reserves now lay uselessly in a drawer in her study, and Ulrich would sometimes cut off a length with scissors to light up for his own amusement. He loved the white brilliance that left a black hole in his vision when he looked away, and the smoke that ribboned coolly from the ardour.

In the decades since then, Ulrich has tried to see his emerging interest in chemistry as the revisitation of his entombed love for music. It has struck him that the two have this thing in common: that an infinite range of expression can be generated from a finite number of elements. But this was not apparent to the boy who now began to quiz his friend’s father on the nature of molecules and the meaning of alkalinity. Boris’s father often answered these questions with an invitation to his laboratory, where substances were made to do startling things out of their obedience to laws. He decanted some copper sulphate solution into a small bottle for Ulrich to take home and grow blue crystals from, and he showed how you could plate steel with copper by putting electrodes in sulphuric acid. He told Ulrich affecting stories of Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, who had peered into the mists of the atom.

Those years all merge together in Ulrich’s mind, so he cannot remember the sequence of events. But it was certainly while they were
still living in the house on Dondukov Boulevard, and while his father was still away in the army, that he first set up his chemistry laboratory.