Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘I don’t like to see you living below yourself. You need a plan, Ulrich. Right now I don’t think you have one. Soon all your intelligence will be accounted for in Ivan Stefanov’s books, and you will have none left for yourself.’

  He looked at the floor.

  ‘Mr Stefanov is a decent man. I will talk to him about the salary. He is not a bad man, and I’m comfortable there.’

  She put her hands over his ears and peered into his eyes as if they were dark shafts in the earth. She held his head tight and shook it back and forth.

  ‘Comfortable?’ she said, shaking him. ‘Comfortable? Are you comfortable now?’

  And she went on shaking him a bit too long.They attended a lavish party at the house of her parents, who were celebrating their wedding anniversary. The preparations had been going on for a month. Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a new dress, and that night she was joyful among so many people she knew. Her father was tall and jovial, and he put his arm across Ulrich’s shoulders and introduced him around, exaggerating his career: He has a lucrative line in leather.

  At home afterwards, Magdalena seemed unusually subdued. They went to bed, but neither could sleep, and they lay side by side, looking at the ceiling.

  He said,

  ‘Why don’t you play the piano any more?’

  She sighed with contempt, and turned her back.

  Ulrich drifted into sleep. He dreamed of a stormy journey on a ship full of pigs, and a shipwreck, and standing tiptoe on the summit of the mountain of drowned, sunken hogs to keep his mouth above water. When he came to, later in the night, she was standing at the window.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  She scanned the street outside, mournfully, and said,

  ‘I wish someone would come to take me away.’

  He bought some supplies for his laboratory. He lined the bottles up on his bench while Magdalena was out.

  He was polishing his shoes in the kitchen when she came in, brandishing a bottle embossed with a skull and crossbones. She cried What’s this? and, before he could warn her, she hurled it against the wall. He leapt at her as it smoked, and ran her out of the room.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he cried madly. ‘What are you doing?’

  He was shaking with emotion.

  ‘That’s sulphuric acid. You could have killed yourself.’

  She snarled at him,

  ‘And you bring it into the house when we have a small boy running around?’

  In her rage she twirled her fingers at her ears to show his insanity:

  ‘You are crazy, crazy! Why don’t you just throw him into acid right away? Be done with it!’

  She ran away, inconsolable. While Ulrich looked for something to cover his face while he cleaned up the acid, he heard the thrum of bass strings as Magdalena kicked the piano in the other room.

  One day, Ulrich came home to find that Magdalena had moved out with their son. Her family closed around her, and Ulrich could not get to see either of them after that.

  Their boy was nearly three years old, and Ulrich was used to taking him out for long weekend walks. He would tell him stories of the seasons, and his son would ask ‘Why?’ to every reason, to hear whether the world’s explanation had an end. Ulrich had found peace and fulfilment in simple fatherhood, and now he suffered actual physical pain at his son’s absence. He woke up in the night with the fantasy that the boy was crying in the room. In the morning he leaned into the abandoned cradle to inhale the vestiges of his scent.

  Some time later, he read in a book of a Japanese word that described the unique pleasure of sleeping next to an infant. It spoke of a sensuality that was not erotic, but indecent, nevertheless, in its fervour. It captured the feeling of what tormented him so, in those days, by its absence.

  Nowadays, that word dances just beyond his grasp.

  Later on, Magdalena divorced him and married a Bible scholar from a well-to-do Protestant family. Ulrich went through extremes, and did regrettable things. He drank on his own and made a nuisance of himself in bars.

  One night he went to the big house on Krakra Street where his wife and son were now shut up. It was late, and he was incoherent with drink. There were no people in the street, though a dog pestered him, trying obstinately to lick his hand. A light was burning in an upstairs window. There was a route up to the window by the roof of the outhouse.

  In his stupor, he was intent on clear thought, and he climbed with excruciating slowness, monitoring the movements of each limb so it did not escape and set off the cymbals of the night. Silence returned his favours, and finally he crouched undetected beneath the lit window, and could lift his head to the view.

  Ulrich had heard that Protestants kept their windows uncurtained in order to prove that nothing furtive ever happened inside; and somewhere he believed that they were truly unacquainted with secrecy and urge. Even at this hour, he imagined he might fall upon some scene of decorous domesticity: novel-reading, perhaps, or symmetrical bedtime prayer.

  But when he looked inside, the man was fully inside her with his shirt still on, her crying More!, which Ulrich could hear through the glass. The room was scattered with objects he dimly recognised, though his attention was not there: for her mobile breasts shone under the electric lamp, her legs were open, and her face was transported no differently than once for him. The body pushing into her was thin and had a repulsive smoothness to it, as if it were without hair. As he squatted on the roof, his chin just clear of the windowsill, the sweat gushed from Ulrich’s armpits, and his clothes stuck to his back. While the preacher’s fishy foot soles flapped with his exertions, Ulrich became extravagantly aroused by the sight of Magdalena displayed luxuriant, so that he could not tear himself away even as the evangelist flurried his backside to a clench, and let himself collapse upon her, spent.

  So it was that Ulrich’s wide-eyed, jerking face, lit up by the room’s blaze like a glossy mask in the night, still bobbed at the window when Magdalena’s gaze came to rest there, and they locked eyes for a strange duration.

  No longer fearing discovery, he gave up climbing down and fell most of the way. He lay in the street for a while, his limbs gliding like the after-movements of a dead insect. When he pulled himself up, he saw Magdalena silhouetted in the front door, newly wrapped in a dressing gown. She beckoned to him.

  She put her arms around him and clasped him to her, still ripe from the other man, and he let himself be held until she pulled herself away and shut the front door against him.

  It was not long afterwards that Magdalena departed for America. Ulrich went to the railway station to watch the family board the train. Her husband extended his hand to cut the ceremony short, and Ulrich stared at its long thin fingers, which reminded him unpleasantly of those kicking feet. He felt vaguely nauseous at the thickness of the man’s new wedding band and the neatness with which he clipped his fingernails, but he took the hand and shook it. Magdalena looked him in the eye, and he mumbled some empty words of good fortune, to which she nodded.

  Ulrich wanted to embrace his son, asleep in her arms, but he felt unable to approach Magdalena, and the opportunity passed. The young family boarded the train, and Ulrich thought with bitterness about the prehistoric bombast of his father, who pretended that the railways would unite what was split apart.

  As far as he can remember now, he put his palms together in some perplexing gesture of prayerfulness, and turned to leave.

  The Bible scholar took Magdalena and her son to Detroit, where he studied at the seminary for some years before going to serve as pastor to a Lutheran church somewhere in Texas. At that point, Magdalena broke off contact with Ulrich and his mother, and Ulrich never knew more about them.

  For years afterwards, Ulrich remained convinced that the world was too systematic for a child to become lost to a father, and he continued to expect that his son would reappear at some point – if not in real life, then at least in the lists of names he sometimes read to this end. Lists of sports teams a
nd prize winners, lists of committee members, lists of students sent on exchange visits, lists of convicts, lists of important poets, lists of patriots and botanists, lists of marriages, lists of academic appointments, lists of the approved, lists of the disgraced, and lists of the dead.

  Chlorine

  12

  WHENEVER ULRICH’S NEIGHBOUR knocks at the door, he reaches for his pair of dark glasses. A residue of vanity.

  She has seen them a thousand times before, but she chooses today to make a comment.

  ‘They make you look funny, those sunglasses,’ she says. ‘They’re small for you, and a bit lopsided.’

  Ulrich explains that he fabricated them himself, and it was difficult to get them as good as this.

  ‘I never heard of a person making sunglasses before,’ she says. She sounds as if she does not believe him.

  Ulrich says he copied them from a pair his mother had. She became extravagant towards the end of her life, and asked her friends to make unnecessary purchases for her in town. She bought this pair for a lot of money: they were made to look like tortoiseshell, and she thought they were glamorous. Ulrich told her he could make a pair just like it himself, without the expense. And he did it, too, but only after she died.

  His neighbour is not interested in Ulrich’s story, true or not, and concentrates on what she has come to do.

  The shape of the world changed when Ulrich lost his sight. When he had relied on his eyes, everything was shaped in two great shining cone rays. Without them, he sank into the black continuum of hearing, which passed through doors and walls, and to which even the interior of his own body was not closed.

  His hearing is still perfect – which is why he wakes up so often at night, cursing the bus station, or the eternal wailing of cats.

  If cats were to make an atlas, he sometimes thinks as he lies awake in his sagging bed, Sofia would be a great metropolis of the world. It would be the legendary city of pleasure, he muses, so loud and ubiquitous is the nightly feline copulation.

  The blackness of his obliterated vision has made a fertile screen for his daydreams, and they have intensified during the last years. There he finds treasured smells, and tunes he has whistled, and other remnants that are lustred, now, with the mauve of nostalgia. He pictures the strange offspring that might have grown out of a man like him, whose blurred faces float among rows of lamps strung like greenish pearls in the darkness. He forgets that his own son, if he is still alive, would now be over seventy, and he dreams of strong young people filled with the courage he never had. He pleasures himself with implausible tableaux of revenge, and sometimes he can see himself in the streets of New York, as clear as day.

  His daydreams seem to come from without, like respiration, and they have the power to surprise him. They provide relief from the rest of his thought, which rarely brings up anything new.

  Whenever he recalls any event involving a horse, for instance, he always asks himself the same question. What happened to all the horses?

  He remembers the smell of them filling the streets, the lines by the river chewing in their nosebags, the constant sound of hoofs and shouting drivers. He thinks of the horses thronging in Berlin, heaving every kind of merchandise.

  He does the same calculation every time he thinks of it: one horse for every twenty people, he estimates, making twenty million across Europe at that time, and still their numbers exploding with the population. Then, after the centuries of coexistence, humans turned away from horses, and embraced machines. But he does not remember seeing how the surplus of horses was carried off.

  He tries to visualise the volume of twenty million horses. Did we eat them, without knowing? he asks himself. The question irritates him because he has gone countless times through this sequence of thoughts, and he knows it does not produce any answers.

  13

  ULRICH MOVED BACK into his parents’ house, where he watched his father die of chagrin.

  The days were already running out when people could die of such things. Ulrich knows his own will be a modern death, and his death certificate will require a mechanical justification for it: for even at his excessive age, bureaucrats will see his demise as a suspicious error. It is no longer possible to say on a death certificate that a person died of old age.

  But Ulrich’s father died of chagrin. He sat in a chair for the better part of a decade, looking out of the window and growing deaf, and squawking, sometimes, with snatches of birdsong. The gap between his breaths became longer and longer, until finally, almost indiscernibly, they ceased.

  While he was still alive, Elizaveta would say, ‘All he ever does is sit in that chair and look out of the window.’ It infuriated her to see him so inactive. But after he died she never said anything but, ‘That was the chair he loved.’ Or, ‘How he loved sitting in that chair.’ Or, ‘They are spoiling the view your father loved so much.’

  Ulrich had never played music again after his childhood violin was thrown into the fire. But his separation from chemistry was not so perfect. It continued to seep back in, diverting him from his proper life, and prodding him, sometimes, to do puzzling things.

  Though life had uprooted him from the pursuit of science, he continued to surround himself with chemical accoutrements, which acted like substitutes for the real thing. He fell into the routine of spending an hour or two after work in a scientific bookshop, which stocked some of the most recent international publications about chemistry. He liked to look through the contents of the German journals – the Zeitschrift für Angewandte Chemie, the Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft, the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie, and Liebigs Annalen – and to pose questions to the shopowner, who knew something about recent developments in the field. Ulrich usually came away with some small purchase or other: manuals for practical experimentation, mostly, and biographies of scientists. These books and papers began to accumulate in every room of the house, filling corners and covering chairs.

  ‘Are you trying to close up all the gaps?’ his mother asked bitterly, staring at the piles. ‘Make sure I never let down my hair?’

  Elizaveta viewed Ulrich’s return home as an admission of failure, and she was no longer indulgent to his whims. In the past, she had supported him whenever her husband had stood in his way, but now she turned on him in just the same way – as if she were trying to preserve the dead man’s memory by taking over his attitudes. She treated Ulrich’s chemistry as if it were a form of onanism that had to be rooted out of him, and she forbade experiments in the house. She quizzed him about how he planned to get on in life, and cursed him for losing the daughter-in-law and grandson she loved so much. For years, she continued to write letters to the last address they had, which always found their way back to her, unopened.

  Ulrich developed a routine. Every month, he delivered his salary to her, placing a pile of notes on the dresser, weighed down with a lead battleship that survived from his childhood. On Saturday mornings he set off with a shopping bag to the Ladies’ Market, where he bought groceries for the week. Afterwards, he went to the library, where he read for a few hours. He purchased a gramophone player that he listened to some evenings, with the volume down. After dinner on Sundays, he polished his shoes.

  Ulrich had good features and bright, even teeth, and he could look distinguished in the glasses he now used for reading. But since the failure of his marriage he had lost his desire for communication, and even his old acquaintances seemed uneasy around him. He sat in his father’s armchair, and made his displeasure felt when his mother invited guests to the house. On weekdays, he arrived home late in the evening and sat down to read at the kitchen table, and though Elizaveta offered a nightly monologue of thoughts and anecdotes, it did nothing to draw him out.

  She exploded, sometimes, with the emptiness.

  ‘I am full of thoughts, you know, full of feelings. Do you realise how lonely I am, living like this?’

  She found things to occupy her. She stripped everything out of the house,
and had the walls repainted. She organised old photographs, and resumed her dressmaking. She read every newspaper with close attention, and she began to write a series of memoirs about the travels she had made with her husband before the wars.

  She bought a dog to keep her company. She called it Karim, and she took it for walks in the evenings, which gave her some release.

  In the hour before they retired, the silence claimed his mother too, and Ulrich relaxed into contentment. While the ball of wool twitched with her knitting, his attention drifted from his books and spiralled into his own recesses, where old faces coasted past like comforting submarine monsters, and fine filaments lit up a route to the future. He came to find comfort in these daydreams, and on the days when he did not have an opportunity to cultivate them, he went to bed quite unsatisfied.

  After the fascist coup of 1934, democratic freedoms were cancelled, political parties abolished, and espionage and surveillance reigned in every sector of society. Elizaveta became the centre of a group of men and women who met regularly to discuss political affairs. The values of democracy, commerce and freedom that she stood for were being squeezed between the Bolsheviks and the fascists, who were both sweeping the country with their murderous recruitment drives. She clung to the hope that earnest discussions between learned, reasonable people would somehow help to restore sanity and moderation.

  Every Thursday, priests, lawyers, doctors and professors came to her house to debate the burden of war reparations and the rise of Macedonian terrorism, the oppression of Bulgarians in Yugoslavia, and the problem of the refugees. They discussed the awakening in the East, and the rise of China. They argued about Spain and Abyssinia.

  At one meeting Elizaveta gave an edifying lecture about the prospects of the new nation of Iraq, a land for which she still entertained an extravagant affection.

  Above all, they discussed German politics, and the increasing hold of that country over their own. German industrialists now filled the hotels of Sofia, planning new mining ventures and chemical plants, and taking over the Bulgarian tobacco industry. When the king allied himself with Chancellor Hitler, and German industry began to supply the Bulgarian army with gleaming modern armaments, Elizaveta and her associates wrote a plea for political prudence that they circulated to the newspapers and to several thinking people in the city. It began thus: