Solo (32 page)

‘She added the total on a calculator. Then she wrote out the tickets by hand.’

The singer hit a high note and lifted her bare leg on to the piano, and both performers dissolved into laughter. People clapped, and another act came on to the stage.

‘So what’s her computer for?’ said Irakli. He was full of glee. ‘It’s just for her to play solitaire. It’s just a two-thousand-dollar pack of cards.’

Plastic was backstage with his entourage. The editor of a big magazine was there, and some movie people, and a princess from the deposed Bulgarian royal family.

‘It’s absolutely true,’ he said sotto voce. ‘He grew up in a totally empty
town. There was no one else except his grandmother. He grew crops and raised pigs – he made candles from pig lard to light his house, for God’s sake. When he came here he didn’t know – you know –
anything
. But he’s a genius. He’s just a pure natural fucking genius. When you hear him you’ll understand. I haven’t been this excited about an artist in years.’

The room was small, and the photographer kept flashing. Boris had turned his back and was warming up in the corner. He had on a green military uniform. Plastic introduced his guests to the owner of the club.

‘Isn’t this place great, though?’

They gushed compliments. Someone mentioned the antique chemical bottles so artfully laid out in the men’s bathroom. A conversation began about a fabulous little store in the Village where you could pick up the most eccentric things. They drank champagne and chatted happily.

‘I’m allergic to sulphites, you see.’

‘Once in his life, a man should buy a pair of leather pants.’

‘I saw him play in Carnegie Hall, just two months before he died.’

‘
Africa?
I said. There’s nothing to
do
in Africa!’

Noise was building in the club. The owner said it was getting full out there. The bandoneon player took off his jacket and warmed up with some tango. The magazine editor said,

‘Plastic has probably done more than anyone else.’

A mobile phone rang. The movie director took the call and got into an argument with someone on the other end.

‘He didn’t mean it in a negative way? Can someone please explain to me?’

‘Boris needs some water. Get some water over here. And keep the volume down!’

‘More than anyone else I can think of to dictate cultural taste in the world today. Can anyone think of anyone else who comes close?’

The Bulgarian princess lit a cigar. Her hair was shorn. Boris had a melody he was trying out, again and again. The movie director was indignant on the phone:

‘I’d like to know how someone can say
genocide
in a positive way.’

‘His influence goes beyond music, because it’s not just about music. It’s an aesthetic
attitude
to globalisation.’

The CEO of Universal stopped by with another bottle of champagne and they drank a toast. Boris signed a couple of invitations, and the CEO did a mock benediction.
OK
, said Plastic,
OK, everybody out!

‘If he’d stayed in America he would have been as big as Duke Ellington,’ said the movie director to the princess. ‘But no one’s heard of him because he spent the whole of the thirties in Europe. I went to see him play in Carnegie Hall before he died: there were maybe forty people in the audience.’

‘Let’s have some quiet back here!’

‘He was playing in Berlin and Paris. He was playing in Latin America.’

Everyone filed out, still talking, and Plastic was left alone with the band. He shook hands with each of them.

‘You don’t need any advice from me,’ he said. ‘Go make some music.’

From the moment Boris came on the stage, Irakli was transfixed: he had never heard anything as magnificent as this. The DJ’s samples were sharp, like the brilliant ripples in a murky well. The bandoneon was like leather carving on the tune. Boris played four pieces, back to back, and the music came to Irakli like poetry.

Boris shone as he played, and all the people in that room were filled with new kinds of desire. They wanted to follow him through his hole in the sky. They tugged at him with infantile dependence. They coveted the perfection of his body’s sway. They applauded him, reached out their hands, and sucked at him with clammy eyes. They became wet with their own saliva: for he was unattainable, and his absence crept into their mouths. They understood the cannibal’s dream.

The music ended, the lights went up, and the crowd screamed and clapped. They were sitting under Boris’s feet, for the stage was small, and everywhere was free champagne.

Irakli said to Khatuna, raising his voice over the outcry,

‘He is amazing! Amazing!’

His face was glowing with excitement.

Khatuna raised her eyebrow. She said,

‘I’d like him to rebuke me.’

The DJ and the bandoneon player filed offstage, leaving Boris alone with the pianist. Boris said,

‘I will play the second violin sonata by Alfred Schnittke, written in 1968.’

It was a piece he had learned from Plastic’s CD collection, but Plastic was aghast.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ he whispered. ‘He’s supposed to play his own music!’

The sonata was dissonant and excruciating, and the faces in the audience went blank. Irakli heard it like an endless struggle –

– the violin not played but wrestled, the piano pummelled, like the repetition of a gun that has ceased to work.

It was interminable, and there was no refusal. The piano crashed the same chord a hundred senseless times, a psychopath’s barrage.

The audience was racked across silence. The music ended, and there was no relief.

Boris bowed, and people clapped with dull recognition. The hall was wrung out: they wondered why they had deserved it.

He said,

‘Now I will play music of my own.’

The violin began alone, the stirring of future love. The other musicians came quietly onstage. Plastic’s heart was grinding. The bandoneon trembled, the chords were poised.

In a blink,
embark rebellious!
, the band has exploded with a riot-dance and Boris stamps exultant like a seven-foot Gypsy, vaulting in a circle, a Cossack caper, shouting the spirit for all he is worth,
Hey! Hey! Hey!
he cries like seven giant peasants, and in a slow-motion second the trussed audience unfurls euphoric, it opens like a canyon,
proclaim
the tsunami klaxon after flesh!
, and they all stand like the glorious mountain-bud, they thank the journey, what relief, what exaltation, what—

The music has merged with tumult, and Irakli sees a passage open up before him. He is on the stage already, his Georgian dance erupting, his Caucasian footwork a-flicker. He jumps and reels and the crowd watches in delight, the band drawing round. This audience will rip down the building, it will howl and fornicate. Irakli leaps high in the air and lands flat on his back with the end chords, laughing unheard in the impossible roar. There are people standing on tables, weeping openly.

Boris gives Irakli a hand and pulls him up. The band goes offstage.

The crowd is on its feet, and Plastic has to shield his way through the corks they are throwing at the stage, which is empty with its piano and silent chairs. They shout for Boris but he is in the black-and-white backstage, the light bulbs burning and shadows under his cheekbones. The other musicians are there too, who have not words for what has happened. The pianist smokes a cigarette, trying to piece it together.

Plastic beckons to Khatuna and takes her hand in the crush. With her other she reaches for Irakli so as not to lose him. Plastic leads her out of the bellowing mass, he hauls her backstage to Boris’s dressing room – and she likes the strength of his grip. The doorway is thronged, and there’s no space to see what is happening inside. There are men trying
to get in with tripods and video cameras. Plastic tells them to clear the entrance and forces his way through with Khatuna and Irakli. In the full light he notices Irakli for the first time.

‘Aren’t you the guy who danced onstage?’

A well-known novelist is drinking champagne from the bottle. The ones who have tricked and lied their way in here stand wide eyed, trying to look as if they belong. Boris is taking hungry bites of a hamburger.

A cameraman puts a microphone in Plastic’s face and asks him to comment on the show. Plastic serves up some simple but effective phrases over the noise. But the journalist is angling for something profound:

‘It’s a very tragic place, isn’t it? The Balkans? Would you say that came through in his music?’

Plastic wants to get out of here, he calls his people to evict the media. He gives everyone the address of the restaurant for dinner and takes his people through the back door.

Khatuna and Irakli do not go with him. They have to get their stuff from the coat-check.

They weave back through the crowd in the club. They are high on alcohol and sensation when they make it to the lobby. The attendant hands over coat and umbrella to Khatuna. Irakli looks in through the little wooden ticket hatch. The old woman has gone home, and the office is dark except for the glowing fishes drifting restfully across the computer screen. Slack faced, he watches them for a while and, such is his altered mind, he has the feeling, when he walks out to the street, that the wet splashes on his face are dripping from those fish. Khatuna puts up his umbrella, and he realises it is rain.

They walk towards the address Plastic has given them, and at the end of the first block they find Boris standing alone.

‘What are you doing here?’ asks Khatuna.

‘I wanted to walk on my own,’ says Boris. ‘But I don’t know which way from here.’

Khatuna holds the umbrella over him, and they set off, the three of
them huddled close, happy and optimistic, three ordinary kids in the night.

‘It’s just down there,’ Khatuna says lightly.

At that moment, the umbrella flies out of her hand and catches in some railings. She runs after it in her heels, racing her brother, laughing at the rain on her dyed-blonde hair, her fur coat flaring on the wind.

Plastic had booked a private room in a Vietnamese restaurant. The table was already laid with hors d’oeuvres, and the music critics waited for him to seat them. Two waitresses walked the length of the room, ceremonially releasing disinfectant spray above their heads, like in an aircraft.

People applauded as Boris entered, and took photographs of him with their phones. There were crystal drops down the back of his jacket and his hair was damp. The Bulgarian princess shook her head with emotion and put her arms reverentially around him. The journalists gathered close.

‘What do you call your music? Is it jazz? Is it Gypsy?’

‘You’ve been described as a
feral child
. Do you know what that means?’

The novelist shook Irakli by the hand.

‘Your dancing was spellbinding,’ he said. ‘I would have done the same if I knew how.’

They sat down in groups. There were orchids on the table, and starters of tofu and soft-shell turtle. Everyone was seized by hunger. The room was full of steam and aroma, and they began to eat greedily. One of the critics said through his noodle soup,

‘Let’s not forget it was also the best performance of the Schnittke sonata anyone has ever heard!’

The movie director sat next to Khatuna and asked her about her work. She told him about advances in architectural security. She said,

‘We don’t make our buildings here any more. We bring them on a ship from China. They make everything there. If you want you can buy yourself a jail for next to nothing. It’s precast in concrete. You just tell them how many cells you want and they ship it over.’

There was roast duck, and beef with lemon grass. If you could have
tuned out all the other sounds you would have heard a great cacophony of mastication.

The movie director was sweating a lot. He had taken it upon himself to explain to Khatuna a word she did not know.

‘It means what you’ve just written is wrong, and you know it’s wrong.’