Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘Last night I went with Georgi to see this Yiddish theatre troupe from Prague. The story was absurd: people were beheaded and shot and set on fire, there were love affairs, and a scene with Lenin and Mussolini which had us shrieking on the floor. The female characters were played by men with enormous lipstick but there was one woman in the troupe, a beautiful Jewess, and the climax of the play comes when she is taking a bath in red wine: she’s dragged naked from her bathtub and viciously raped by a group of marauders. But this Jewess was a magnificent presence and the other actors were too timid to touch her, so she just lay in her bath, waiting for them to rape her, and nothing happened! I’ve never laughed so much in all my life. After the play we went to the house of an artist named Mircho. He had a large collection of high-quality liquor, to which I paid due respect, and there was excellent gossip about society men, there was a little dog barking all night, which for some reason seemed hilarious, and the women were pretty, and a man recited Latin poems that were apparently very erotic. After a well-planned sequence of manoeuvres, I ended up sitting next to the Jewess: I was so close I could smell her washed-off make-up, and she touched my arm when she spoke. She was a jewel! She had dramatic gestures: she would spread a long-fingered hand with horror on her cheek, or cover her breasts with her handkerchief. She sang Bohemian love songs and told comic stories from her travels. Someone had a violin, so I played a folk dance for her, which she admired, though I’m sure by that time I had no control over my fingers at all. I offered to show her around Sofia, and she said, Next time I come! Then a photographer arrived, it was already the early hours, he had printed the photographs from the performance, some exquisite ones of her under the lights, and I asked her for one, which she gave me and signed it on the back.’

  He took the photograph out of his pocket.

  ‘Look at this.’

  ‘God,’ said Ulrich. ‘She is lovely.’

  ‘Yes. And look.’

  He turned the photograph over and read:

  ‘For Boris. Next time we make music together! Ida.’

  Ulrich contemplated the handwriting for a moment.

  ‘She is much older than you,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Boris, joyous.

  The stars were bright overhead, and fireflies glimmered.

  ‘Look what else is written there,’ said Ulrich, bending close. He indicated with his finger where the photographic paper was embossed with the manufacturer’s name.

  ‘Agfa,’ he said.

  Boris sighed. He ran his hands through his hair. He said,

  ‘I have to tell you: I’ve given up playing music.’

  Ulrich looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s no point any more.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded Ulrich. ‘Just last week you were so excited about your concert of Bach!’

  ‘I don’t know, Ulrich. You’re caught up in all your ideas about chemistry and I can’t talk to you about it. If you opened your eyes you’d see our society is destroying itself. Bulgaria has already lost the best of its men in the wars, and things are only getting worse. I can’t stand by and watch. Will I just throw in my lot with the nations, whose governments are more bloodthirsty with each passing day? They will end up killing us and each other. No: the only chance we have of surviving until we are old, you and I, is the international revolution. It has happened in Russia, it will come soon to Germany, and before long we will have no nations, only international socialism. Then there’ll be time for Bach. When there’s no more Bulgaria.’

  Boris flicked his cigarette stub down into the courtyard. Ulrich watched the red glow skate across the pavings in the breeze, and then die.

  ‘This is some insanity that’s got into you.’ His voice trembled. ‘It’s not even fifteen years since Bulgaria was independent, with so much joy, and now you want to destroy it?’

  ‘Joy?’ cried Boris, with unpleasant emphasis. ‘You borrow everything you say from other people; you don’t see anything for yourself. Is your father joyful since he lost his leg and everything he worked for? Did the independent nation thank him after it had sucked out everything he had? The truth is there in your own household, and you cannot see it: nations are steel boilers pitching madly with our soft flesh inside. I cannot think of anything that was not much better when we were just a territory in the empire, scratching our backsides for entertainment. And it will not be better again until we have abolished this Bulgaria, and all the other killing machines.’

  ‘And for this you’ll give up your violin?’ said Ulrich. ‘You’re an idiot. You could do much more for the world with your music.’

  Down below a mother banged a spoon on the kitchen window to summon her sons in from their game. It was early in the year, and still cold outside, and her boiling pot had steamed up the window.

  Boris took a magazine from inside his jacket. There was a bloated capitalist on the cover, stifling houses and factory chimneys in his enormous arms. There was jagged geometry, and words split up at different angles.

  ‘Have you heard of Geo Milev?’ Boris asked.

  ‘I heard he’s a dangerous man.’

  ‘He’s a genius! A bloodstained lantern with shattered windows. That’s what he wrote after he lost half his skull in the war. One of his eyes has gone and he’s completely without fear. He’s a true poet and revolutionary, and he’s asked me to write for his magazine. This is where I’m going to devote myself.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky if you don’t get yourself killed.’

  ‘We die anyway. At least this way there’s hope.’

  ‘These people have poisoned your mind!’ said Ulrich. ‘I couldn’t stand it if you didn’t play the violin. I only live it through you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a child!’

  Boris’s face was contorted with anger.

  ‘Damn you, Ulrich! Until you wake up and take a look at the world around you I have nothing to say to you.’

  Boris stood up and went down to the courtyard below, step by step.

  ‘I warn you: when you arrive in Berlin you’ll find the crisis even more advanced than here.’

  And with that, he walked out of the gate.

  Ulrich sat for a while, watching candles illuminate the upper rooms around the courtyard. He did not call on Boris before his departure for Berlin.

  His father had roused himself from his deafness to oppose it.

  ‘What use is chemistry in this town?’ he raged. ‘Do you see any opportunities here? Our family will starve for this chemistry.’

  But Elizaveta supported him. She shouted in her husband’s ear, as she had to in those days,

  ‘You must let him grow up in his times, my dear. How did your father make his money? With his pig-farming! And look at you, an engineer, a railway builder, a man of the modern world. Have you lost your hope of the future? Look at Germany now with its chemical industry. Do you think things will not improve and it will not spread everywhere? He will be a pioneer in our country, as you were. You know his passion for the subject.’

  Ulrich’s father gave in. He sent his son off to the University of Berlin to study chemistry, and, with this last-ditch investment, hoped he might hold the old world together.

  Carbon

  6

  ULRICH PREPARES TO FRY SOME POTATOES. Even without his eyes, he is capable of that much, and on this day, his neighbour has failed to come with food.

  It is a long time since he has cooked anything. He puts his hand into the plastic bag, and withdraws it with a shock. It has been months, and the tubers have sprouted into a blind underworld tangle, which provokes disgust in him, unexpectedly intense.

  He throws the bag out, and eats instead from a tin of beans, which he does not bother to heat.

  Ulrich’s kitchen activities are mostly restricted, these days, to the making of morning tea. It is a ritual he has stuck to for most of his life, and he still uses the same cup, only survivor of a once-complete tea set. For many years h
e has held this hot cup in the morning, and it has given him the resolve to put the night away.

  He switches on his television for a bit of sound to eat his beans by.

  He is irritated by the weather programmes that come on the international channels. Ignorant people judging the world’s weather. In that place it will be a nice day because there is pure sunshine. They estimate a nice day as when you can sit outside in sunglasses and drink coffee that no normal person can afford. Their minds cannot consider that a place is full of people cursing because there is no rain. They say: There it will be a nice sunny day today. Or: There they will have to suffer rain. What do they drink, these people? he thinks.

  And here there has not been rain for so long.

  He hears explosions: there is another war in Iraq, and now Bulgaria is sending troops to assist the Americans in their occupation. He pictures the journeys of his childhood, when Baghdad was part of his family, when his father strived to connect that great city with silver rails to Berlin. He thinks of his dead mother, who would be driven mad if she knew of her country’s assault on those places she loved so much. How time changes things, he thinks: making people forget who they were, and turning them against their own kind.

  He switches the channel.

  It is a science documentary, and Ulrich hears how the world has far more computing capacity than it needs. Most computers are idle for most of the time. He hears that when a modern computer is idle it switches into a reverie, and displays on the screen a meditative pattern, like fishes swimming, or whizzing stars, or geometric designs. At any one moment, most computers in the world are occupied in this way. They sit alone in dark, after-hour offices, considering the movement of fish or the emptiness of space.

  Ulrich thinks about a planet full of computers with nothing to do except daydream.

  In his own idle moments, Ulrich makes lists in his head. He makes lists of journeys he has made, and animals he has eaten. Making lists gives him a sense that he is in command of his experiences. It helps him to feel he is real.

  He makes lists of the pills he has to take each day, though in reality it is his neighbour who takes the responsibility. She draws up grids that she pins to the cupboard door to remind herself, and she walks back and forth to check them as she pours out the pills, because she is never sure. Her step is uneven as she goes, and the floor creaks with the heaviness of one side, the left or the right. She has referred before to problems with her legs, but Ulrich does not know exactly what is wrong.

  He has a strong feeling about the calendars that she makes: they seem like divine plans, sustaining him in life.

  ‘I cannot die yet,’ he jokes with her as she draws them, ‘or who will take all those pills?’

  He has many more lists. He makes a list of activities that, when they have been proposed to him, have always triggered the thought ‘That is not for me’. A list of things he would tell his son about himself, if he ever saw him. A list of things he never enjoyed, though he always said he did. A list of things that comprise, in his view, the minimal requirements for a happy life. He makes a list of his possessions, as if it were a will:

  Item: One armchair.

  Item: One television.

  Item: One writing desk.

  Item: Two photograph albums with photographs.

  Item: Books, assorted.

  Item: Gramophone records, assorted.

  Item: Gramophone player.

  Item: One bed.

  Item: Kitchen utensils, various.

  Item: Clothes, various.

  Item: Tools, various.

  There are several things he does not include. Paint, ashtrays, various kinds of string and sewing thread, medical supplies, writing ink, cleaning fluids, playing cards. There is a host of objects like this that seem too insignificant to be part of a list.

  7

  SOME DECADES BEFORE Ulrich arrived in Berlin, German scientists made a philosophical leap that would change history. They rejected the idea that life is a unique and mystical essence, with different qualities from everything else in the universe. They reasoned instead that living things were only chemical machines, and they speculated that with enough research, chemical laboratories could emulate life itself.

  They began to experiment with making medicines, not merely from trees or plants, but from man-made chemicals. A triumph came in 1897, in the laboratories of the chemical company Bayer, when chemists observed several positive effects of the first synthetic drug: aspirin. Not long afterwards, the chemist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for the sleeping sickness that devastated his compatriots in the German Congo, injected infected mice with hundreds of different chemicals until he found that an industrial dye cured the disease – and so discovered the first antibiotic. Ehrlich coined the term ‘chemotherapy’ to describe the great new work he had started off.

  German scientists also wanted to see whether chemical laboratories could make materials that were usually found only in nature. The world was running out of natural nitrogen deposits, for instance, and agriculturalists were concerned about how they would continue to fertilise crops. Populations were exploding. Doomsayers began to warn of imminent famine, and people dying off in swathes. The Berlin chemist Fritz Haber began to seek a chemical solution to this problem. Working with BASF, he discovered a way of fixing the enormous supplies of nitrogen in the air, and turning them into ammonia for fertilisers. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and a large fortune, and the newspapers called him the saviour of the human race.

  When its empire was taken away after the First World War, Germany was deprived of access to essential raw materials. It was set far behind Britain, which could take all the Malayan rubber it wanted, and Middle Eastern oil. Germany’s chemical firms – BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Casella, and the rest – were consolidated into a vast chemical cartel, I. G. Farben, whose objective was to produce chemical versions of these lacking natural resources.

  Farben’s synthetic rubber and oil technologies soon became the envy of the world. Within a few years, it was the largest corporation in Europe, with stakes in oil companies, steelworks, armaments manufacturers, banks and newspapers – in Germany and across the globe. It had its own mines for coal, magnesite, gypsum and salt, and cartel arrangements with leading American companies DuPont, Alcoa and Dow Chemical.

  It was in Farben’s laboratories that a chemist named Hermann Staudinger, while attempting to synthesise natural rubber, first hypothesised that there might exist molecules much more extensive than any hitherto imagined. These giant molecules, he suggested, would be arranged in mobile, chain-like structures, which explained the unusual flexibility of rubber. Staudinger’s work on polymers won him a Nobel Prize, and set the course for a new direction in chemistry: the development of plastics.

  This new area of innovation transformed the human environment. Until that era, every human being had lived among the same surfaces: wood, stone, iron, paper, glass. Suddenly, there emerged a host of extraterrestrial substances that produced bodily sensations that no one had ever experienced before.

  This was the production that Ulrich wished to be a part of.

  When Ulrich arrived in Berlin he realised immediately he had walked in upon the wonder of his age. Berlin was the capital of world science, which lifted him upon its tremendous current, and made him certain of his own great future. But Berlin was also the studio of mighty artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang. It was a carnival of boxing, jazz and cabaret.

  Later on, after Ulrich left it, this miraculous metropolis ceased to exist. With the next war, old Berlin was gutted, tossed away and forgotten, and it sank into forgetful waters, until only a few bent tips were visible above the surface, twitching with the bad dreams below.

  This has had a curious effect on Ulrich’s memories of the time he spent in that city. They do not hang together, or fall into sequence, because they were later scattered like refugees, and were forced to take shelter in other times and p
laces. Some of them were lost entirely in the great dispersal.

  Ulrich tries to assemble the remnants into one place.

  Item

  How lovely was the Jewish girl, Clara Blum, who took notes in the chemistry lecture with her left hand.

  Item

  As a boy Ulrich had wandered so many times among the parasols and dogs of Unter den Linden, but now there were staring, mutilated soldiers and penniless refugees. The men in Berlin had lost more limbs than the men at home.

  Item

  He saw Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst. Their thought was so clear it was terrifying, and Ulrich felt reborn with every lecture he attended. He often struggled to follow their theories. But he loved them because they were also practical men who reminded him of the old-fashioned inventors he had read about as a child. In his spare time, Walther Nernst applied himself to such tasks as the invention of light bulbs and the development of an electric piano. Fritz Haber, whose chemical weapons had failed to achieve a German victory in the war, was looking for a method to pay off his country’s war debts by distilling gold from the sea.

  Item

  Clara Blum had a habit of reading books as she walked in the street.

  Item

  Ulrich was afraid of spending money, for his father’s wealth was already exhausted by his university fees. But there was an irresistible world of jazz in Berlin, and Ulrich fell in love with the new sounds as deeply as he had once fallen in love with Gypsy music. He could not keep himself out of debt.

  Item

  In one of Max Planck’s lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country of atoms.

  Item

  He took Clara Blum to his room. He had set up a long glass tube with holes drilled along the top. He had removed the horn from a gramophone player and led a pipe from there into one end of the glass tube, while in the other end was a supply of methane. ‘Watch,’ he said, lighting the holes so there was an even line of flames. Then he set the record going and a Beethoven symphony was fed into the glass tube. The sound waves in the tube bunched the gas and the flames dancing on top were arranged as a graph of the symphony. And Clara Blum laughed gaily with his gimmick, and begged to see a hundred other pieces of music in fire.