Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

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  How curious it was for Ulrich to find his German name suddenly commonplace.

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  The rapturous crowd in the Admiralspalast shouted Bis! Bis! to the American Negroes playing jazz. The musicians exchanged frowns among themselves, hearing English words – Beasts! Beasts! – and in a few minutes they had packed themselves into cars and left Berlin. In their language they say not ‘Bis’ but ‘Encore’.

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  Clara Blum had a fascination for the new towers in New York. When we go to New York, they used to say, for all our fantasies. Ulrich once gave her a postcard of the Woolworth Building. Tallest Man-made Structure in the World!

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  A man and a woman, refugees, frozen to death on the street, with an infant boy between them who was quite alive, and crying for food.

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  Ulrich read that Fletcher Henderson had begun to play jazz only when America’s oppression of the Negro made his further pursuit of chemistry impossible. He had a degree in chemistry and mathematics, but he was a Negro, so he became a bandleader.

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  Almost every week, a shattering new scientific idea arrived from Rutherford in Cambridge, Bohr in Copenhagen or Curie in Paris. Someone would read the paper aloud, and young students would march madly around the laboratory, their bodies unable to absorb such news sitting down.

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  The first time Ulrich laid eyes on Albert Einstein, he was in the circus, screaming with laughter at the antics of midgets.

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  After the struggle, you could tell from the way the police slung the revolutionary into the ambulance that they knew he was already dead.

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  Clara Blum loved the dark things that happened in Berlin. She kept Ulrich awake at night reading aloud newspaper articles about all the suicides and murders. For a long time afterwards his love for her would well up again whenever he read a crime report.

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  His mother wrote solicitous letters every day, full of enquiries, advice and warnings about the consequences of romantic entanglements. My dearest baby Ulrich, they began each time. This phrase returned to him like a maddening chaperone during his caresses with Clara Blum.

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  Walking on the street in the early evening, he saw a famous film actress get out of a limousine in front of the Savoy Hotel.

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  Clara Blum helped Ulrich prepare for his examinations, for she was more accomplished in theory than he. ‘I want to make stuff,’ he protested when his throat went hard with academic frustration. ‘I didn’t come to study mathematics. I want to make plastic!’

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  Watching the men pushing barges, Ulrich and Clara Blum walked by the river and discussed chemistry, and he suddenly had the feeling that he would be a great man.

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  There were many Bulgarians arriving in Berlin, and they used to get drunk together, and speak Bulgarian, and play silly pranks. They spent nights laughing in the steam baths, where men poured in from the brothels and refugees from Galicia got clean from the streets. When German women saw them together in the street they would run away. They called them dark Balkan thugs, and other such things.

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  When Ulrich picked up the papers that Albert Einstein had dropped behind him in the corridor, the scientist looked him in the eye and said, ‘I am nothing without you.’ Ulrich managed to say, ‘Nor I you, sir,’ as Einstein turned his back and ambled on. Ulrich has thought back so many times to this moment that the figure in the corridor has transmuted into something more than a man. Now Einstein looks down on him with eyes that scan like X-rays, and his speech comes not from his mouth but from somewhere invisible and oracular.

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  The animated electric mannequin in the window of the optician’s shop had spectacles as thick as paperweights, but still reminded him of Misha the fool.

  When Ulrich made his abrupt departure from Berlin, the mighty German chemical industry was at its height. He believed afterwards that, if he had completed his degree and remained in Germany, his life might have been very different.

  But while the big German companies triumphed through the hyperinflation, which wiped out all their debts, many ordinary investors were ruined. One of them was Ulrich’s father, who, Germanophile to the end, had put the funds remaining from the sale of the old house into German investments. His mother held out for as long as she could, but at last the money dried up for Ulrich’s fees, and for everything else too – and she wrote a desperate letter begging him to come home. Ulrich dropped everything and rushed to Sofia.

  8

  ULRICH FINDS THAT HE CAN ASSIGN dates to his life only through reference to the events recounted in newspapers. He wonders sometimes why it is not the other way around, and whether it signifies some weakness in him. Should a man not have fostered his own time by which other things could be measured? But he suspects it is the same for others too, and he concludes that the time inside a human is smooth and lobed like a polyp, and only history is striated with the usefulness of dates.

  History allows Ulrich to date his return to Sofia with precision. April 1925: for it was only two days after he arrived that the bomb went off in the St Nedelya cathedral, dividing Bulgarian time into before and after. The bombers put their dynamite under the dome and detonated it during a state funeral, wiping out the country’s elite. The city had never seen so many corpses. The king’s was not among them: he was recovering from another assassination attempt, and did not make it to St Nedelya in time.

  Sofia filled with foreign journalists. They called it ‘the worst terrorist attack in history’, they talked about ‘the misery of defeat’ and ‘economic collapse’ and ‘more convulsions in the Balkans’. Ulrich took his father to see the damage, where crowds of onlookers and photographers looked up at the missing dome, and the surviving cupolas all askew. The interior of the grand church was filled with rubble, and the air was still hazy with dust. Ulrich’s father said,

  ‘Everything is fog. I cannot see.’

  His mind had gone by that time, but even he was overcome.

  Elizaveta wept often.

  ‘See what has become of your father. He doesn’t get up from that chair. He doesn’t say anything. I have had to sell things to get by.’

  She had begun sewing dresses for money, and she was keeping geese to supply to the royal palace, where she knew people in the kitchen. She found many things to do like that.

  She said,

  ‘I’ve found you a job, Ulrich. Remember your father’s friend Stefanov? I think he has something for you. Go and see him.’

  She wept again.

  ‘I’m trying to keep you out of harm. The king has decided he will tear this city apart and root out terrorists for good, and I don’t want you getting caught up in it. Every young man is a suspect. It’s so awful for a mother. Look how thin you are, after all that time away. Did you not eat?’

  A note arrived from Ulrich’s old friend, Boris. The two had not communicated for three years. It said, I know you are back. Do not come to see me. Too dangerous now. Greetings.

  After days of uproar and terror, they produced the men responsible for the bombing and hung them in the square. People climbed on each other’s shoulders to see the gallows. The explosion had put their minds in a spin. They could not stop looking at the cathedral’s open roof: it was like a festering cavity from which society’s bad smells drifted up. They would not go to their homes, and the streets were full of crowds and fights and eruptions that the army had to quell.

  Ulrich followed his mother’s instructions, and went to see Mr Stefanov, who ran a leather company. The old man received him in a mighty drawing room. He was dressed in an immaculate suit and tie and he sat in a wheelchair.

  ‘Your mother seemed desperate, so I agreed to see you. Your father and I were friends once, and I stay loyal to things like that. I need a bookkeeper.’

  Ulrich began work at the l
eather company. He sat at a table facing rows of junior clerks, whose work he was supposed to supervise; but the table was not enclosed like a proper desk, and his legs were fully on display underneath, which, he felt, diminished his authority. High up on the wall opposite him was a mirror, angled down in such a manner as to allow him to monitor his subordinates’ activities without leaving his chair. In the top of this mirror, his disembodied legs were also reflected.

  He heard nothing more from Boris, and resolved finally to pay him a visit, in spite of the note he had sent.

  The grand house looked exactly the same, and it was moving to ring the bell again after all these years. The woman who opened the door was an echo of someone lost, and he realised it was Boris’s sister, grown up from a girl. She was wearing a short dress in the Paris fashion.

  ‘Stop staring and come in off the street,’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t be here. They’ve already come for him once. Every time the doorbell rings …’

  She shut the door behind him, and they stood facing each other inside.

  ‘How was Berlin?’

  ‘Fine.’

  She looked at him. His shirt, his hair. She said,

  ‘You don’t know what’s been happening. Since the uprising, they’ve killed so many of our friends. Every day it’s another pointless tragedy. I don’t hold with this communism. I think all their dreams are absurd fantasies. No unemployment, no hunger. They are idiots, and they’re dying for nothing.’

  He agreed. She brightened.

  ‘I still play the piano. When things have calmed down, I’ll play for you.’

  She went to fetch Boris from his room.

  Disappointed as he had been to curtail his studies and return home, Ulrich had consoled himself with the idea that he had now seen everything the modern world could offer, and his prestige in this provincial city would be greatly enhanced. He looked forward to the gap being closed with Boris, who had been stuck in Sofia all this while. He pictured his friend sitting awestruck while he told him his stories of metropolitan life.

  But as soon as Boris appeared in the hallway, Ulrich realised it would not be like that at all. Boris had become mature and imposing, and evidently his character’s growth was in full proportion to Ulrich’s own. Ulrich fell back instantly into looking up to him.

  Boris put his arms around him firmly.

  ‘Welcome back, my friend,’ he said. ‘What a time to come!’

  He stepped back appraisingly.

  ‘You’ve become thinner since I last saw you. But less fragile. It’s good.’

  Boris’s hair was longer than before, and so uneven he must have cut it himself, but his tie was neater and he stood more erect. He and Magdalena were a handsome pair: tall, with the same blue eyes and dark hair from their Georgian mother.

  Boris took his sister’s hand.

  ‘Have you seen Magda? How grown up she is these days!’

  She fought her brother off, cheeks red and hair tossing.

  ‘Don’t talk about me like that!’

  Boris took Ulrich’s elbow and led him to his room. Books and paintings were stacked everywhere. It smelt of cigarette smoke, and the floor was covered with electrical components. There was another man sitting in the armchair.

  ‘This is Georgi. He and I are trying to make a radio.’

  Georgi was a big man with features that Ulrich found coarse. His smile uncovered broken teeth.

  ‘We can’t make it work,’ said Boris. ‘They send us instructions from Moscow but you can’t get the parts in this damn city.’ He moved a pile of books. ‘You can sit here. How was Berlin?’

  Ulrich said,

  ‘Fine.’

  Boris filled three glasses with vodka.

  ‘Just when we’re all trying to escape, you come back. I can’t believe it. No one wants to be in Sofia. There aren’t enough steamships for all the peasants who are running off to Argentina. Even Georgi and I are planning to go somewhere for a while. Paris or Moscow. There’s no point waiting here to be killed. They killed Geo Milev last week, you know that?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘As ever, Ulrich, you don’t know anything. The police took him in and strangled him in a basement. That’s how we treat our great men in Bulgaria. Did you get any news in Berlin? You know the Agrarian government was overthrown by the fascists? And now it’s war?’

  ‘I know all that.’

  ‘In their immense wisdom, the Bulgarian Communist Party decided that their sibling feud with Stamboliiski and the Agrarians was more important than opposing the fascists. They didn’t raise a fingernail to help Stamboliiski when the fascists took over. They bear a lot of the guilt for his murder. He was a decent man.’

  ‘His head was sent to Sofia in a tin,’ added Georgi simply.

  ‘So then they realised – quelle surprise! – that things were much worse now than they had been before. With epic dullness they decided they needed some heroic offensive against the fascists – better late than never! – so they planned this bomb, which any fool could have seen was pure suicide. Now the government is purging the entire country. When they can’t find the person they’re looking for, they just destroy whole towns. Remember Petar, the one in your class who played football? Shot down yesterday in the street while he was out with his mother. Just like that.’

  Boris’s fingers moved as he talked, but his body remained still. He was in complete command of his words, which lay at rest until needed, then formed themselves into deadly beams of coherence. Ulrich realised he would now go to great lengths to avoid an argument with him.

  ‘On top of all this, the Macedonian revolutionaries are going crazy. Assassinations every week. We all sympathise with their cause but they’re making things much worse.’

  On the wall was a framed sketch of Boris. The artist had drawn only one continuous line, but in its charcoal loops and zigzags it captured exactly the way he looked. There were a number of photographs of Boris and friends in theatrical make-up.

  ‘You saw this?’ said Boris, noticing his gaze. He passed the photograph down to Ulrich. ‘That’s me playing a Balkan shepherd. I was acting in this theatre group until it became too dangerous. Geo Milev designed the stage set full of skyscrapers. The shepherd wanders in among the colossal geometry with his stubble and his flute, and the sky is the only thing he can recognise.’

  In another part of the house, Magdalena began to play the piano.

  ‘The prime minister has told the British, French and Americans that the whole problem is caused by communist terrorists, which is just what they want to hear. They’ve given him seven thousand extra troops to murder us with. I suppose we should be flattered, eh, Georgi? You see what firepower they need to defeat the thoughts in our heads?’

  Georgi said, with a thin-lipped smile that Ulrich found condescending,

  ‘How is it you don’t know all this, Ulrich?’

  ‘He’s been in Berlin for three years,’ said Boris. ‘Studying chemistry. He doesn’t like politics.’

  ‘Chemistry?’ said Georgi. ‘Do you know how to make bombs?’

  Boris glared.

  ‘I said he doesn’t like politics.’

  Georgi said, not looking at Ulrich,

  ‘Your friend doesn’t have that choice any more. There is no life outside politics now. There’s not space enough for the toes of one foot. People like him will be mad in the streets one day, talking to themselves.’

  In the other room, Magdalena paused in her music. Boris said,

  ‘She’s playing for you, Ulrich. Ever since she heard you were back she’s been asking me when you are coming to see us. We’ve talked about you often, these years.’

  Ulrich considered Boris’s face. He felt it had acquired new expressions since he last saw him, and at times it could look entirely unfamiliar.

  Boris said,

  ‘Georgi and I have been involved in several operations. He’s a forger. He makes visas for people going abroad. They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs
and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive. I write for some of the underground newspapers. I’ll show you some of my articles some day. You’d be proud of me. Many important people have made it known that they admire my analyses!’

  He laughed.

  ‘But the imbalance of forces is too great at present. Everything is aligned against us. At this point, the greatest service I can render to the world is to stay alive. My parents are suffering with all this, and Magda too. It’s time to get out and let someone else deal with these bastards.’

  He drained his vodka.

  ‘By the way – you’ll like this story – my father sold an invention to your Germans. Have you heard of a company called BASF? They bought a compound he invented. You’ll have to ask him – he loves talking about it.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Some kind of resin. He’s been messing around with trees for years, and we never took any notice, and finally he’s come up with something that people want. It’s a new material that’s useful for electrical insulation, apparently. They paid him quite a lot of money for it!’

  Georgi yawned inimically, showing his teeth.

  ‘I should leave,’ he said. ‘Getting late.’

  Boris thought for a moment.

  ‘Let’s all go,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a drink to celebrate your return, Ulrich, and then I’ll go home with Georgi. He has an apartment on his own; no one knows the address. I try not to sleep here, because they often come at night.’