Solo (33 page)

He had coriander leaves caught in his teeth.

‘If you know it’s wrong, why would you write it?’

‘Maybe because you’re quoting someone else who wrote it wrong? So you put sic afterwards to show it wasn’t you.’

Khatuna was bewildered by the man’s approach. She thought he must be the most boring film director in the world. She said,

‘You get to sit next to someone like me, and this is all you can find to talk about?’

She wanted to know Boris. He had unbuttoned his military jacket, but still cradled his violin, even at the dinner table. She got out of her seat and went to him. She whispered in his ear,

‘You left me alone the other day! Where did you go?’

Her cheek had touched his forehead. Boris said,

‘I didn’t want to stay there any more.’

‘Why didn’t you take me?’

Boris did not reply. She said,

‘Will you come out with me now? We can find somewhere to be alone.’

Boris looked up into her eyes. He studied her, and then he said,

‘No.’

People began to change places around the table, and the bamboo room became jumbled. Clear-thinking waiters removed empty bowls and laid on full ones: stir-fried eel, shrimps with sugarcane, sautéed frogs, cuttlefish salad, lobster wrapped in rice and banana leaves. The meal was a riot for the tongue, and people slurped their wine loudly for the extra sensation.

Boris was trying out his chopsticks on the roasted suckling pig. He asked the Bulgarian princess whether they raised pigs in America.

‘Of course they do.’

He contemplated the meat. He said,

‘How much milk do you get from an American pig?’

The princess said,

‘I don’t know. I live in Spain.’

She put the question to the table, provoking lively debate.

‘Do pigs give milk? I suppose they must.’

‘Pigs give bacon.’

‘
Suckling
pig.’

‘We’re educated people, and we don’t know this?’

‘Pigs are mammals, for Christ’s sake!’

‘
Suckling pig!
’

The waiters brought more steaming plates, and looked for gaps in which to put them. Cooked snakes were coiled up in bowls, and the party examined them with ghoulish delight. There was a discussion about outlandish things people had eaten. Dog and alligator.

‘I once ate monkey brain,’ said a soft-spoken actress.

The group embarked upon a compilation of things eaten in China. There was a list of places where people supposedly ate insects.

‘In Papua New Guinea they eat the dugong.’

Haloed with alcohol, the conversation seemed brilliant. It carried on for a long time, coursing through the gathering, and no one noticed that Boris had slipped away, taking Irakli with him.

Irakli could not stop talking about Boris’s music.

The rain was harder than ever, and the wind was extreme. Irakli spoke breathlessly, as they ran through the streets,

‘This is what I thought of while you were playing. I saw joyful barbarians dancing through a stormed palace. They were hanging up their flags. They were running through the priceless rooms throwing cigarettes on the carpets and posing for photos in gold bathtubs. Chandeliers were smashed on the ground, and they were stashing paintings in suitcases. They were inventing ministries for themselves, and choosing imperial bedrooms for their offices. It was wonderful and terrifying.’

‘You say it so well,’ said Boris. ‘I could never say it like that.’

They were drenched when they arrived at his apartment. Boris brought Irakli a towel and a fresh shirt.

The apartment was on the forty-fifth floor, and there was almost nothing in it. There was an enormous window that looked over the Hudson River into New Jersey.

Irakli was rubbing his head with the towel. He said,

‘I want you to read my poetry. When I was listening to your music I was thinking,
He has felt the same things! He’s had the same intimations
I’ve had all my life
. I’m trying to put them into words, like you put them into music.’

Boris poured brown liquid from a bottle with no label. Irakli continued,

‘When I saw how easily your music came I thought maybe the task is just too difficult for me. It’s beyond me.’

‘You’re just young,’ said Boris. ‘It will take you another twenty years.’

‘You’re the same age as me. But look how you play!’

Boris grinned.

‘Don’t judge me by what you heard tonight. Wait a few years, and you’ll hear what I can do!’

They drank avidly. They were filled with the rare elation that two people sometimes feel on finding each other. They wanted to know everything about each other. They told the story of their lives until that point. Irakli told Boris about Khatuna, and what had happened to her.

‘That was her?’ asked Boris. ‘Who was there tonight?’

‘She doesn’t usually look like that: she’s dyed her hair.’

‘I didn’t like her,’ said Boris.

He held his violin in his lap, and his left hand fluttered on the strings. Irakli was taken aback.

‘Men usually enjoy meeting her,’ he said.

The night passed, but the weather did not let up. The wind whistled around the building, and the window was lashed with rain. They talked about coming to America. Boris talked about the startling new sounds of New York: the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes. He talked about the
way that strangers passing on the sidewalks looked you boldly in the eye.

Boris and Irakli were sitting facing the window, and they could see blades of lightning as they talked, and the hypnotic stream of car lights leaking into New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel. And then they saw a concrete water tower collapsing on the other side of the river.

The tower stood next to the highway, and it was brightly lit. First they saw the pillar sway unnaturally. With the enormous weight of the bulb on top, it could not right itself and, majestically, the entire structure slowly toppled over. Irakli started as it crashed, but from this distance all was silence.

The tower fell away from the highway into unlit grassland where nothing could be seen. A moment later, a raging wave emerged from the blackness and smashed over the highway, sweeping cars away to make a semicircular lake, blazing in the floodlights, while more collisions spread up and down the lanes in chain reactions.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Irakli.

‘I know!’ said Boris, incredulous.

The traffic tails, red and white, hardened in each direction. The water reached its greatest extent over the highway and began to subside. Silent sirens converged on the zone.

‘I wonder if anyone died down there,’ Irakli wondered dreamily.

Boris reached for his violin and began to play. He said,

‘I’ve spent nearly all my life on my own. Really alone, with nothing but the land and the animals and my violin. I wasn’t unhappy: I never thought that other people could help me with the essentials. But already I feel I’ve known you all my life. My music will be better now I’ve met you.’

Irakli smiled. Morning approached. The storm wound down, and the first sun appeared. Boris played slow melodies.

Irakli had been drinking for hours, and wanted to close his eyes. The sofa felt so warm.

He let Boris’s music flood over him.

W
HEN
K
HATUNA AWOKE
there was no one next to her. The room was strange, and her dress was snagged on a post at the foot of the bed. She rescued it, slipped it on, and walked out of the room. Plastic was already in his gym clothes. He had muffins and coffee on a tray.

‘I was about to get you up,’ he said, and kissed her.

He was handsome, which made up for a lot.

She sat down.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in this room before.’

‘No,’ he said, smiling.

‘I came here with Boris. I sat on this sofa.’

She took out her phone and showed Plastic the video she had shot in that very place. There was this room, and Khatuna’s face, stolid and foreign in the image, and the sound of Boris’s music in the background.

‘He brought you
here?
’ he said curiously.

‘I assumed it was his apartment,’ Khatuna said.

She got up and walked around, curious again. There was an ancient
French tapestry on the wall, and a large Venetian mirror whose silvering had curdled like diesel oil in the rain. There was a set of old engravings of Vienna. There was a carved wooden statue on a pedestal, a Buddha with an arm missing.

She said,

‘Why is your place like this? You’re a rich man but all your things are falling apart.’

Plastic said,

‘Those antiques cost more money than you’ll see in your whole life.’

‘You like old things,’ she replied. ‘That’s not good.’

He kissed her on the ear.

‘I like young things too,’ he said.

She stood very still as he nibbled her lobe, trying to work out whether she liked it. She said,

‘Do you have a gun?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I like that tattoo in the small of your back. I feel I’m being watched.’

‘That eye is not watching
you
.’

He looked at her curiously, and drained his coffee. He said,

‘I have to get to the gym.’

She looked at him, incredulous.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I work out every Sunday morning.’

‘Do you have a beautiful young woman in your house every Sunday morning?’

‘I get grumpy if I don’t work out.’

Khatuna curled her lip with distaste.

‘You don’t love women,’ she said.

‘We’ll see each other again, won’t we?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

After he left she wanted only to get out of his house. She collected her
clothes and took a taxi home. She was unhappy to find that Irakli was not there. She fretted, and paced between rooms. He refused to carry a mobile, so she could not call him.

The only life in the house was the parrot in the kitchen. Khatuna had bought it as a present for Irakli so he would have company while she was at work. She took the cover off the cage, and the parrot scratched animatedly at the mesh, reciting all its phrases. Khatuna interrogated the bird, asking where Irakli could be.

‘
Bye-
bye
,’ it said. ‘
Good morning Baghdad
.’

She shushed in exasperation and kicked off her high heels. She called Plastic to see whether he would know how to contact Boris, but he did not answer his phone.

‘His fucking gym,’ she thought.

She put on her slippers and lit a cigarette. She slid open the balcony door and sat on the chair she kept there. The storm had left a damp, cool morning, but Khatuna felt claustrophobic in sealed-up American homes, and liked to have access to the sky. The balcony was the most satisfying thing about this house, with its arabesque decoration, and ferns hanging down from the terrace above.

She sat with her eyes fixed on the front door, imagining the catastrophic things that could have happened to her brother while she was away with a strange man. She kicked one leg nervously and watched her slipper bounce on her foot. Suddenly she had the feeling that she looked exactly like her mother, and this made her even more anxious.

The door opened, eventually, and Irakli walked in with his umbrella.

‘Where have you
been?
’ she shouted resentfully.

He looked her up and down. He said,

‘You’re still wearing the same dress.’

‘So what?’

‘Who were you with?’

‘I went home with that producer. He’s very rich.’

She felt like punishing him now. She said,

‘He made that guy Boris out of nothing.’

Irakli came out on to the balcony and looked out across town. Just a
couple of blocks away, the Empire State Building sparkled after its recent restoration. Khatuna said,

‘Where were you?’

‘I slept at Boris’s house.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Why did he want to go home with
you?
’

Irakli shrugged wanly.

‘What did he want from you?’ she asked.

‘We talked all night,’ said Irakli, still high with it. ‘I had an amazing time. It was like running into an unknown brother by mistake.’

‘Did he want to have sex with you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Khatuna inspected her brother suspiciously. She said,

‘His smile was like a gay man’s.’

‘All you can think of is sex,’ Irakli said. ‘You don’t know anything else that people can do together. You should try and imagine.’

Khatuna smirked.

‘If I want advice about sex, I’ll ask someone with a bit of first-hand knowledge.’

Irakli leant on the rail and looked at the clouds, hanging like white rocks in the sky. There were sirens in every part of town. The sign on the side of the Empire State Building said in massive letters,
For RENT
.

H
OW MANY TIMES
has Ulrich imagined himself knocking at an American door, and finding behind it a young man with a resemblance to himself?

All those images accompany him now as he enters Boris’s building and takes the elevator to the forty-fifth floor. Everything has the echo of presentiment.

He rings the bell at Boris’s door. His heart is throbbing. He has put on good clothes, but he is old and does not resemble a father. The words have gone out of his head.

Boris answers brusquely.

He is taller than Ulrich expected. He is not wearing a shirt, and he carries his violin in his hand. Round his neck he wears a pendant on a string: it is made from gnarled pig leather, and looks vaguely obscene. There is a bad scar in his side, which makes Ulrich mourn.