Solo (37 page)

He speaks with unusual passion.

‘Life happens in a certain place for a certain time. But there is a great surplus left over, and where will we stow it but in our dreams?’

Clara stares into her lap. She says,

‘Those children of yours are imaginary.’

‘I have a real son, who is even more imaginary. These ones stay with me, and make me proud.’

A butterfly alights for a time on Clara’s floral dress, and then takes flight again.

‘When I die,’ says Ulrich, ‘they will put me under the ground, where even those with eyes become blind like me. I will lie with an eternity of dreamers, breeding visions that will flicker on the surface – and the children of my daydreams will roam free.’

U
LRICH SITS ON A DOORSTEP
opposite the entrance to Boris’s apartment block. He has tried repeatedly to gain entrance, but Boris is famous now, and security has tightened. Still, when he finally emerges, he is accompanied only by his violin, and for this Ulrich is grateful. He walks fast to catch up with him.

To his relief, Boris is not hostile. When he sees Ulrich he stops in his tracks and says,

‘Is it you, old man?’

Ulrich leans against a wall to regain his breath. Nothing about Boris’s appearance reveals his new-found success and prosperity. Ulrich would like to take him in his arms. But now is not the time. He says,

‘I wanted to say something about your friend, Irakli. I’ve seen him, wandering in the streets on his own. He’s not himself.’

Boris is surprised at this intervention. But he agrees with its spirit.

‘I’ve been worried about him myself. You think he’s very bad?’

‘He needs something to set him back on track,’ Ulrich says. ‘And it can only come from you.’

Boris thinks for a moment.

‘I know what to do,’ he says. ‘I know what’s good in these situations.’

‘Please think about him,’ says Ulrich. ‘He’s more delicate than you.’

He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out two marbles. Looking into Boris’s eyes, he puts the marbles into his hand, as if they were a token of his solemnity.

Boris arrives at Irakli’s apartment with an animal wrapped in a sack.

‘I was thinking about what might restore you to yourself again,’ he says.

He opens the sack and lets out a little pig. It’s small and pink, with two grey patches on its flanks. It feels exposed in the spacious room, and
runs away squealing, keeping close to the walls, trotters clicking on the wooden floor.

‘You have this big balcony where he can live,’ says Boris. ‘Pigs are very intelligent and they fill your head with wild ideas. He’ll be good for your poetry.’

‘I already have a parrot.’

‘The parrot is nice, but you need something closer. A horse is good sometimes, but a pig is best. You’ll write much better with a pig around.’

Boris goes to get nails, wood and roofing, and he builds a shelter for the pig on the balcony. They drink beer and laugh while he works. Irakli is impressed by how fast Boris can build, and makes no attempt to get involved. The pig sniffs at the planks of wood and eats an apple from Irakli’s hand. Its ears are enormous for its little size.

Boris saws and hammers, his breath clouding in the air, and before long he has built a sty into the crook of the building, big enough for a man to stoop into. He lays down straw and newspaper inside, and the pig goes in of its own accord to look around. Boris says,

‘After everyone left my town, I grew up with pigs,’ he says. ‘I slept between them.’

‘Thank you,’ says Irakli. ‘Thank you.’

Afterwards, they go out to a bar. Irakli is suddenly animated and cannot stop talking. He tells stories, and finishes his drinks so fast that Boris tells him to calm down.

‘Are you trying to empty the bar?’ he asks.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Irakli says.

He tells Boris about things he has seen in New York.

‘There’s a tower where ten thousand Africans live. It’s not far from here. People from Senegal on one floor, Nigerian on the next. Some are legal, some are illegal; they’ve come to supply the city’s cravings for luxury handbags and DVDs. Can you imagine the stories in a tower like that – the friendships, the conflicts, the journeys people have taken just to get there? I tell you: no one is writing the real novels of our age. There must be more in that tower than in Tolstoy and Balzac together.’

Boris listens quietly, happy to see him spirited.

‘Writers have a lot of work to do,’ finishes Irakli.

The music is calling out to him and he says,

‘Do you want to dance?’

Boris shakes his head, smiling, and Irakli goes on his own. He stands next to the speaker and begins to move. His steps, once again, are Georgian. His legs scissor, slicing beats in half, and soon enough there are people gathered around him, who have never seen feet move so fast to keep a torso so still. He dances for several songs, transforming himself completely with every new mood. Now his heels stamp and he slices the air with his hands, his eyes gleaming with masculine seduction; now he beckons to the earth like a woman. He puts a bottle on his head and spins on his knees, finding a corridor through the crowd, and there seem to be no limits on his body – for now he is leaping close to the ceiling and there is gasping and cheering in the bar.

When he finishes they call for more, but Irakli is spent. He bows elegantly, heaving with breath, and he goes back to the table. He is happy and sweating. Boris puts an arm round him.

‘I love to see you dance,’ he says.

A stranger is sitting in Irakli’s place, who has come to ask for autographs from Boris. Irakli stands by, waiting for the man to leave. He has another drink to cool down. He suddenly feels tired and rests his head on the table. He has drunk too much.

He does not feel well.

He looks out of the window, trying to steady his stomach. The street is quiet, but he can see a figure he recognises. He goes to the door and calls out to his sister, who is walking with Plastic. They turn back when they hear him; they come into the bar and stand by the table.

‘Hello, Boris,’ Plastic says emphatically.

‘This is my brother, Irakli,’ says Khatuna to Plastic.

‘Yes, I remember,’ says Plastic, reaching out for Irakli’s hand. Irakli fails to register it.

‘Are you drunk?’ Khatuna asks him.

Irakli denies it, but he cannot focus properly on her face.

Khatuna sees Boris chatting to a scruffy stranger, while Irakli does
not even have a seat at the table and is drinking himself stupid in the corner. She is seized with hatred for Boris, in whose company her brother is so pathetically diminished. She would like to erase this musician from their lives.

Plastic says,

‘I must have called you a hundred times, Boris. Everyone in the company has been trying to get hold of you. You’ve been back a long time and no one has heard from you. Why can’t you answer your damn phone?’

‘I don’t like the phone,’ says Boris breezily. ‘You should have come to my house.’

‘Do you think we didn’t try that?’ Plastic is beside himself. ‘Your house was full of people, but you were never there. Who the fuck are those people, Boris?’

‘Friends.’

‘That’s a company apartment. You can’t use it for just anything you like.’

His lips are tight as he speaks. He is trying to keep himself seemly.

‘You’re going too far, Boris. I’ve stood by you, but you’re making me look like an idiot.’

Boris says,

‘Would you like a drink?’

Plastic says,

‘No, I
don’t
want a drink. I want to know what’s going on. What have you been doing since you got back?’

‘I was resting. I was tired after the tour. Now I’m writing more music.’

‘I’ve been hearing all kinds of stories. You’ve made recordings with our competitors. It seems every last lousy music company is recording your music. Now I hear you’ve done a whole movie soundtrack.’

‘Yes,’ says Boris. He seems pleased.

‘You signed an
exclusive
contract with us, Boris: that means you record with us and us alone. I know you understand things perfectly well. Do you realise I have hundreds of thousands of your personal
money which I can’t give you because you are in serious breach of contract? There are articles all over the press about it, asking if we’re going to send you to jail. And there’s everything else I don’t even want to go into, rumours I don’t even understand.’

Boris is not enjoying this conversation.

‘I can’t play the way you want me to play,’ he says.

Plastic calms a little. He has let the head off his anger. He says,

‘You’re a great musician. But there are ways of doing things. There are rules.’

Khatuna is frustrated with Plastic’s approach. She wants to see him take Boris into the street and beat him into oblivion. She says to Boris,

‘Isn’t it time you paid him back for your violin?’ She places her hand dynastically over Plastic’s. Her voice is caustic. ‘You’re making so much money and you can’t even pay your debts. Everything you have, you owe it to us.’

Boris finds the gesture absurd, and laughs in her face.

‘Everything I have,’ he says, ‘I had long before you knew me.’

A young woman approaches, and asks Boris to sign a napkin. Khatuna tells her to fuck off. There is silence around the table.

Irakli is suffering with all this. He says,

‘Boris bought me a pig.’

‘What?’ says Khatuna.

‘He bought me a pig.’

‘What are you going to do with a pig?’

‘Boris built a hut for it on the balcony.’

‘He’s been building on our balcony?’

Khatuna’s instinct tells her Boris is trying to sabotage her life at its very core.

‘You better get rid of it right away,’ she says. ‘And whatever Boris has built. I don’t want to see it when I get home.’

Boris has had enough. He gets up to leave, and Irakli joins him.

‘You’re drunk,’ Khatuna says to her brother. ‘I want you to come home with me.’

‘I’ll be OK,’ Irakli says.

Plastic says to Boris,

‘Come to the office tomorrow morning. We have a lot of things to discuss. Do you understand?’

Boris’s grunt is ambiguous. He and Irakli walk outside and disappear from sight. Khatuna stares after them.

She and Plastic wander in the streets. It’s a Sunday night, and the city is empty. The helicopters droning overhead are the only sign of life. They come to a corner that Khatuna knows well.

‘This is one of the blocks we’re developing,’ she says. ‘We’re going to pull down the whole thing and convert it into high-security housing for high-end individuals.’

They walk the length of the block, Khatuna pointing out its features.

‘Businessmen need a secure environment, which you can’t get in Manhattan. Manhattan buildings open directly on to the street. So we’re pulling this whole area down, we’re making a private road with barricades. It will be a totally secure block, as good as you can find in any modern city.’

High above, advertisements flash on and off, signalling to each other. Khatuna’s heels echo in the street. They pass an empty square where a three-storey-high inflatable puppet is cavorting with the night, flapping and flailing with the air blowing inside, and no one there to see. Suddenly Khatuna says,

‘I want to kill Boris.’

‘What are you talking about?’ says Plastic.

Khatuna goes silent, and Plastic can feel her harden towards him. They are walking under old bridges where the bricks are black and the rivets are mighty. There is scrawled graffiti, and people are sleeping here and there.

Passing under a bridge, they see a young man standing by a fire that he feeds every now and then with a squirt of kerosene. She and Plastic stop and watch for a moment. She calls out,

‘Why don’t you pour the whole bottle?’

The young man looks at her, wide eyed.

‘Why?’

‘I want to see it.’

She is suddenly flirtatious. The man unscrews the lid from his bottle and upends it over the fire. The blaze roars – at their distance Khatuna and Plastic feel a sudden heat on their faces – and the man is engulfed in flames. He backs away, yelping, and beating his head. The fire dies down quickly.

He is dazed, and his hair is singed.

‘You idiot!’ shouts Khatuna.

‘You told me to do it!’ he wails.

‘Next time I’ll tell you to jump out of a window.’

Plastic feels estranged by everything he has just witnessed, and he and Khatuna continue on in silence. There are no cars in the streets. They turn on to Fifth Avenue, where the mannequins are vibrant in the windows, but there are no people. They wander down the empty road and find a man who has fallen asleep while walking his dog.

‘I wish I was in Shanghai,’ remarks Khatuna bleakly, ‘where everything is new.’

They walk all the way to her building. She goes up the steps to the front door and Plastic stays below. She shuts the door behind her without looking back.

Upstairs, the apartment is in darkness. She puts the light on in Irakli’s room and contemplates his empty bed. Then she opens the balcony doors and goes out to see what has happened there.

Boris has built a giant, dirty thing that he has nailed into the side of her house. She can see his footprints in the sawdust, and everything smells of pig shit. She picks up a hammer and gives a few angry blows to the construction, but it is not as flimsy as it looks. She peers inside and sees the pig huddled in a corner, trying to keep warm.

‘Disgusting creature,’ she thinks.

She goes back into the apartment and sits down. She thinks about Boris, who has dared to take hammer and nails to her house. She smokes several cigarettes. She taunts herself with unhappy thoughts. She thinks of her mother, living alone, her poor mother who was beautiful
once. She thinks of all the things she bought Irakli, and how he scorned all of them, only to be delighted by Boris’s pig.

She knows Irakli will not come home tonight, and she goes to bed.

She has been lying there only a few minutes when her phone rings. The call is from a hospital, where Irakli is recovering after being hit by a car.