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Boris said,

‘What do you think of Georgi?’

‘He has a vicious face.’

Boris laughed.

‘I knew you wouldn’t like him,’ he said. ‘The strange thing about Georgi is that he holds a devilish attraction for women. You and I would think, with those teeth and that face, he’d have to make a big effort. But Georgi treats women with contempt, and they still fall over themselves to get him. I can never understand it.’

Boris said under the music:

‘Do you remember the conversation we had before you left? When I came to your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve thought of it very often. I was wrong. You were right.’

Ulrich was taken aback. Boris added,

‘I sometimes wonder if I should not just have carried on playing music.’

To Ulrich’s astonishment, Boris’s eyes began to overflow with tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. He wiped his face.

‘Things can’t continue as they are,’ said Ulrich, trying to help. Boris gave a doubtful smile.

Georgi came over.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to Boris. ‘It’s very late.’

Boris dropped an offering of coins among the glasses and shook a man whose head was collapsed upon the table. The man would not stir. They left the gathering, pushing through the crowd of people waiting for the musicians’ next song, and made for the door. Outside, the night was cool, and with the air on their necks they realised how drunk they were.

‘He wouldn’t even wake up!’ said Boris, who was suddenly overcome with giggles. ‘He couldn’t raise his head to say goodbye!’

Ulrich had no thought of returning home, and walked where they led him. Georgi said to Boris,

‘He can’t come with us.’

‘Why not?’

‘My room is secret. No one goes there.’

Boris put his arm around Ulrich.

‘He
will
come with us!’

Georgi was unhappy, and walked ahead. Boris sang with drunken sentimentality,

The street was empty, and the echo of their footsteps ricocheted between the rows of houses. Men dozed under fruit barrows, and horses slumbered by a line of caravans. On the steps outside a church, a man was sitting patiently with wakeful eyes, and, seeing him, Ulrich felt a wave of happiness. He said to Boris,

‘Soon we’ll go for a long walk, and I’ll tell you everything!’

There were bats overhead, and a sense of life pent up behind locked doors. Cats wailed.

Ulrich said,

‘Did you ever see Ida? The Jewess?’

‘No. I never heard from her again.’ Boris laughed loudly. ‘And you? Did you see the angels in the Admiralspalast?’

‘I did. Everything you said was true.’

Boris screamed with joy. He called out to Georgi in the distance,

‘Georgi! Let’s all go away to the country! We’ll find some pretty girls. We’ll take books and keep some pigs. I’ll get my violin out again!’

They came to a gate, which surrendered to their drunken rattling, and climbed two lurching flights of stairs. They arrived in Georgi’s room, the ringing worse than ever in Ulrich’s ears. Georgi lay straight down on one of the beds in his clothes and boots and went to sleep.

Belatedly, Ulrich realised.

‘That man we saw. Outside the church. It was Misha the fool.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I knew I recognised him. I’m sure of it.’

‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

Boris took a swig from a bottle of brandy.

‘I’m sure of it,’ Ulrich repeated, and they fell together on the narrow bunk in a dreamless embrace that lasted until the next afternoon.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, Boris was arrested for sedition, and executed.

The police went out in force, with names and addresses, and many were taken in. Georgi was arrested too, and thrown into jail.

Afterwards, the police sent word to Boris’s parents that his body was available for collection.

When the coffin was lowered into the earth, Magdalena and her mother collapsed simultaneously into their skirts.

Ulrich walked home afterwards with his parents. Elizaveta was disabled by it.

‘I loved that boy,’ she kept saying. ‘I loved that boy.’

She forbade Ulrich from going out, fearing that something might happen to him, too. But when evening came he could not stay shut up any more. He ran to Boris’s house.

A storm had come up suddenly, and unfastened shutters banged. He battled through a wind so fierce that the entire sky was too small a pipe for it, and the air groaned in its confines.

Outside Boris’s house was a crowd of street people. Magdalena stood in front, handing out clothes, while her mother wept on the steps. Boris’s shrunken father watched from an upstairs window.

‘Ulrich!’ cried Magdalena when she saw him, and she threw herself at his chest.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘I’m giving away his clothes.’

She had brought everything out of the house. Jackets, shirts and sweaters flapped in the gale. Ulrich could not bear to see it all disappear.

‘So his warmth stays alive,’ she said. ‘Look how many have come.’

Ulrich saw Misha in the crowd and, for the first time, burst into tears. The fool approached him. He secreted two cold marbles in Ulrich’s hands.

‘I did not know that fish could drown. Those marbles were his eyes.’

It began to rain. The people dispersed, only a scattering of unwanted shirt collars and neckties left on the ground. Magdalena went into the house and emerged with Boris’s umbrella.

‘Let’s walk,’ she said.

‘But it’s late.’

She ignored him.

The storm became stupendous. She led him, pulling his arm, and they found a place for sex. There were no lips, no hands, no hair: just genitals. In the tumult, the umbrella blew away and they were entirely exposed under the flashes. Her skirt was at her thighs and she screamed: not with the sex, but with its insufficiency. Over her shoulder, Ulrich saw a man watching them from his shelter in a doorway, and he felt ashamed. He sank to the floor, sobbing in the downpour.

‘No,’ he said.

She stared at him in disbelief, untrussing her skirt.

‘You know how much I need you,’ she shrieked into the tempest.

She beat his head with her fists, and ran away, clacking and splashing on the street. He pulled up his trousers and retrieved the umbrella from the iron fence where it had lodged. When he reached the main road she had disappeared.

Disturbed crows were wheeling overhead, their wet wings slapping ineffectually at the air.

He did not know where to escape to. The city was suddenly without dimension, like a whipped-up ocean, and the umbrella, in this horizontal torrent, a flailing superfluity. He arrived finally at the bar where they had been two nights earlier. He found Else, the guileless prostitute, and took her upstairs. She was alarmed at his inconsiderate, uncouth pounding, but he did not stop until the barmaid knocked angrily at the door, complaining of the noise and the hour, and he grabbed his clothes and went home.

For a long time, Ulrich avoided all places where he might run the risk of meeting any member of Boris’s family.

Many years later, Ulrich heard a story about the great pianist, Leopold Godowsky, whom he had once seen in Berlin playing the music of Franz Liszt.

Leopold Godowsky was born in Lithuania but spent his life in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and then New York. He had a gift for friendship and hospitality, and, wherever he lived, his home became a centre for artists and thinkers. His friends included Caruso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Chaplin, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Gide, Matisse, Ravel – and Albert Einstein.

Godowsky was one of those people who are born to do one thing, and when a stroke rendered his right hand useless for piano playing, he fell into a deep depression. He never played in public again.

During his final unhappy years in New York, Godowsky saw Einstein frequently, as the scientist had moved from Berlin to nearby Princeton.

Leopold Godowsky had an Italian barber in New York, named Caruso. Caruso was a great follower of Einstein, and when he discovered that his customer, Godowsky, knew him personally, he begged him to bring the famous man to his shop. Each time Godowsky saw Einstein, he told him that Caruso the barber wanted to meet him, and Einstein each time agreed to go and see the man whenever he was next in the city. With one thing and another, however, the visit never took place.

Eventually, Godowsky died. When the news reached Einstein at Princeton he did not say a word. He immediately picked up his hat and coat, took the first train to New York, and went to visit Caruso at his barbershop.

Ulrich thinks back, sometimes, to the conversation he had with Boris in that attic laboratory so long ago, when they discussed the news of an uncle who had died. He feels that he did not ever progress far beyond his childhood bewilderment, and is ashamed of the inadequacy he always felt in the face of death. He has always been affected by stories of people who knew precisely how to respond when a person has died.

Perhaps it is because his behaviour after Boris’s death fell so short of the mark that the terrible finality of it never truly settled.

Whenever he thinks back to his wedding day, he remembers the smile on Boris’s face, and the way his hand was tucked in the belt of his green army uniform. But such a thing is impossible: for Boris had been dead for years by then – and he would never have worn army clothes. There are many other memories like that, which have all the flesh of terrestrial recollections, but must have slipped in somehow from another world.

U
LRICH THREW HIMSELF
into his bookkeeping at the leather company. It was not the kind of work he had imagined for himself, but the sense of finitude he discovered there turned out to be a surprising relief. When he immersed himself in grids of numbers, every ache in his head went away. He developed a knack for spotting the errors in a page of figures with just a casual glance, and he traced several routes to every total to ensure the computation was robust. He became notorious among his subordinates for spotting even the most trivial lapse, and asking them to do the work again. He delivered the completed books at the same time every day to the office of Ivan Stefanov, the son of the owner, and, when his work was finished, he applied himself to the greater task of overhauling the bookkeeping systems to make them more accurate and efficient. Ivan Stefanov, who was bored by procedure, was delighted by Ulrich’s devotion to it, and quickly promoted him to financial controller, a post that carried with it an office with his name on the door, and a fully enclosed desk.

When his thoughts were not occupied with bookkeeping, Ulrich could not prevent himself wondering how so much had been snatched away from him so fast. He tried to deny it had happened: he played
tricks on himself, marking time in Sofia by the timetable in his Berlin diary, full of far-off lectures and exams. He even chose to ask directions around his home town, and feigned gaps in his Bulgarian speech – as if he were an outsider here, who might be called away at any moment. He lay awake at night, completing in his head his thesis on plastic fibres in time for the deadline, which passed unobtrusively by.

In Sofia there was no one who understood the scientific wonder he had left behind, and it became like a heavy secret he could only dwell on alone. He maintained an archive of Berlin science, full of notes and news clippings about the people he had encountered there. Every year he added to the list he kept of all his Berlin teachers and colleagues who won the Nobel Prize – an award that always held enormous allure for him. But as time passed, his ponderous rehearsals became detached from any reality of Berlin, which had moved on without him. His peers graduated, and moved on to more advanced things. New chemical discoveries were made every day, which Ulrich knew nothing of.

Clara Blum began to teach chemistry at the University of Berlin, and married one of her colleagues in the department. Ulrich had to hear it from someone else, for she had broken off all contact when she realised he was never coming back.

Meanwhile, in the cramped space of Ulrich’s Sofia home, his father sat in his chair, showing fewer and fewer signs of life. His leg stump became regularly infected, and every few months a little bit more had to be shaved off the end. And his deafness became more pronounced with the years, until he was finally delivered from the music he disliked so much. When he could no longer hear at all, Elizaveta erupted into a festival of song, chanting arias from Verdi to
lah-
lah-
lah
as she worked.

Ulrich took advantage of his father’s deafness, too. He found perverse satisfaction in whispering insults in his ear:

‘You whipped your son so hard into success, and look what he has become. He has come back to this godforsaken place, and now he will never be anything at all. Your son is a failure! How bitter your disappointment must be!’

His father looked at him in bewilderment, his eyes narrow under
heavy brows, and he peeled off a ribbon from his tattered mind:

‘Nothing can sing like the lyrebird. It can imitate the song of every other bird. It can make the sound of branches creaking in the wind.’