Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  The café was full of people, but the voices were measured and subdued. The laughter was appropriate. Every table had its maroon tablecloth and its starched white napkins.

  ‘You don’t know the challenges we face. People don’t want to work. Unfortunately, there are many who become sick and envious. They see beauty and achievement as black spots.’

  He threw up his shoulders resignedly and sighed, taking a gulp of wine.

  ‘Anyway. What have you been up to?’

  Ulrich told him about the factory. Georgi nodded distractedly. Ulrich felt out of place in this café, this conversation.

  ‘My mother,’ he began. ‘My mother was taken to Bosna. I don’t even know if she’s alive any more.’

  ‘Your mother?’ Georgi’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘She’s innocent!’ said Ulrich urgently. ‘She always had an amateur interest in politics. She mixed with the wrong people, she was confused, she didn’t know what she was saying. But she always opposed the fascists. She always wanted what was best for Bulgaria. She loved Boris. She never stopped cursing the king for what he did to him.’

  Georgi observed Ulrich wrestling with himself. He said,

  ‘There are many enemies of the Fatherland. You don’t know how riddled this country is. We’ve been forced to send out a clear message.’

  Ulrich whispered,

  ‘I have heard about the labour camps. She is old. She cannot survive it. She cannot break stones. She will die.’

  Georgi continued to watch him, unblinking. Suddenly Ulrich flung himself on the floor, and held Georgi’s knee to his cheek.

  ‘I beg you. Find out what has happened to her!’ He did not dare look up at Georgi’s face. ‘She is an old woman. What harm can she do?’

  There was a lull in the café while people looked on. Ulrich kept his arms clutched tightly around Georgi’s leg. Georgi tried to retain his dignity.

  ‘There is nothing I can do.’

  ‘I beg you,’ said Ulrich, still on the floor. ‘In the name of our friend. I will do anything in return. Anything. If you want me to take her place.’

  Georgi mopped his mouth with his linen napkin.

  ‘In the name of our friend,’ he repeated.

  Later, Ulrich heard the rumours about Georgi: that he had been exceptionally vicious in his revenges. It was said that he had hunted down his old enemies and shot them with his own hand. But there were many rumours like that during those times, and it was not easy to pick out the truth.

  17

  LATE ONE NIGHT, Ulrich’s mother appeared at the front door. Ulrich did not recognise her at first. She was half her previous size, and her hair was white stubble. She had terrible rashes on her face.

  ‘Ulrich?’ she said, hiding behind her hands. She seemed terrified of him.

  He let out a cry and pulled her to his chest, his sobs erupting. She fainted in his arms, and he carried her inside. She was dressed in peasant clothes, and she was weightless, like a woman of straw. He roused her with water.

  He brought her bread to eat. She took two mouthfuls and collapsed, clutching her stomach. She writhed with the pain and he massaged her hollowed abdomen, weeping with fear.

  When it had passed, he went to bring a shawl, for she was shivering. By the time he returned she had fallen into a dead sleep.

  Ulrich stayed at home to take care of her. Elizaveta lay on the sofa, watching him moving in the house, and covering her swollen face for shame. It was two days before she could speak.

  She said,

  ‘Where is Karim?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  She nodded, as if she had known it.

  ‘Anyway, I have grown afraid of dogs.’

  She had been plucked out of the fields and released from the camp, without any forewarning. They had told her that the public prosecutor had intervened on her behalf, and they had left her by the side of the road.

  ‘I would have died if it weren’t for the peasants who helped me. The people in the town threw stones at me.’ She was weeping. ‘In our country, only the ignorant still know how to be human and decent. They were saints. They saved my life.’

  Ulrich could not look at his mother while she said these things. He did not sit down, but paced between the walls.

  ‘Someone should pay for this,’ he said.

  ‘I am here with you,’ she said. ‘We should be grateful for that.’

  His face was baleful. She said gently,

  ‘You can’t ask anyone to pay back the life they have taken. Neither kings nor dictators have that power.’

  She was silent for a long time.

  ‘I didn’t speak while I was away,’ she said. ‘All the trouble was caused by words. The best chance I had of seeing your face again was to say nothing at all.’

  They were gentler with each other than before. It came to each of them to wake up, sometimes, screaming in the night, and these submerged agonies were a form of silent compact. There were things they could never share with anyone else. Elizaveta had become politically contagious, and old friends now crossed the street to avoid her. She often mused about the ones who had fled to the camps in Austria and Italy after the war, and now were in America.

  ‘We should have gone as well. We could have made another life. We could have found your son. I was too proud, and I thought there would always be time.’

  Their neighbour from upstairs dropped enough comments to ensure their fear did not subside too far. He knocked on the door of an evening to observe how they were occupied, and to offer his advice.

  ‘Yesterday I noticed you had a letter returned from America? Some of your phrases were hardly complimentary to our socialist nation. We all have to decide which side we are on.’

  He spoke in a strange, sententious style, and took the liberty of lifting up a book from the table to glance over the papers piled underneath. Ulrich did not speak to him, but stared at the door with hatred until he had closed it behind him.

  One day, Elizaveta asked Ulrich to join the party.

  ‘I will not,’ he said grimly.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, and they were walking in the park.

  ‘You must protect yourself,’ she said. ‘Your mother is an enemy of the state. There’s no place for subtle considerations.’

  Ulrich signalled to her to keep her voice down, as if someone were listening. He said,

  ‘I don’t want to discuss it. After everything they have done to you, Mother.’

  They walked on, her arm through his. She said,

  ‘You mustn’t think about the other people’s pain. It will never end. Look at the people you know, how much they have suffered, and multiply it by everyone in the world. You can never imagine the volume. It would destroy your own significance, and there’s no point in it.’

  The matinee had ended at the theatre, and people filed out into the square. It was a beautiful day in early summer, and cherry blossom drifted in the breeze.

  ‘You should take better care of yourself,’ she continued. ‘I won’t be with you for ever.’

  ‘Don’t say such things.’

  ‘Isn’t it true? I am old, and soon I’ll die. It would make me so happy to see you married again.’

  He did not answer her. She was tired, and they headed for a bench. They watched the dressed-up children, and the red flags hanging on the war memorial. Elizaveta said,

  ‘You travel so far to that factory, and you spend every day in that noise and heat. Your clothes stink when you come home. If you joined the party you could have an easier life. You would have comforts and promotions.’

  She leaned her head against his shoulder, looking up at the sky and the tips of the poplars.

  ‘Isn’t there anything you’d like to do? What do you think about? You’re always thinking. I wish you would tell me about it. I don’t know what happens in your head.’

  Soldiers were relaxing on a bench under the willow trees. There were wreaths around the war memorial, from a few days before, and people strolle
d in Sunday clothes, their cigarette smoke luminous in the sun.

  A few days later, Ulrich looked up from his evening reading and said,

  ‘Did I ever tell you my theories about the baths at Carlsbad?’

  ‘No.’

  Ulrich told his mother about Pierre and Marie Curie, the pioneers of radioactivity. He told her how the Austrian government had presented them with a tonne of uranium ore – pitchblende – that was dug up from the enormous silver mines of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. The precious gift arrived on a horse-drawn cart, still matted with Bohemian earth and pine needles, and the Curies set to work. They discovered that the ore was emitting very high levels of radiation, far higher than uranium, and they realised another substance must be present. After two years of work, they isolated from this tonne of pitchblende one tenth of a gram of a new element. Radium.

  ‘Pierre Curie’s mother had died of cancer a few years before,’ said Ulrich, ‘and he and Marie began to experiment with the effects of radium on tumours. They achieved positive results. They thought it would soon be possible to destroy cancer for ever. And that was the beginning of radiotherapy.’

  Elizaveta settled back in her chair, happy to hear her son talking about something he loved.

  Ulrich related how the rumours of radioactivity’s life-giving power began to circulate among the public at large. It was assumed that the new force of nature must be invigorating for the body, and popular magazines were suddenly filled with advertisements for radium compresses, radium bath salts, radium implants, radium chocolate and radioactive inhalations.

  ‘Can you imagine?’ Ulrich exclaimed.

  He told her about the fashionable spas of Carlsbad, which were close to the Joachimsthal mines. Carlsbad had already been an elegant summer resort of the European elites for a century or more, but now the sudden popularity of radium gave an additional boost to its prestige. Carlsbad boasted of the tonic radioactivity of its waters. And in 1906, a new ‘radioactive spa’ was built even closer to the mines, in Jáchymov.

  ‘I’ve always been struck,’ said Ulrich, ‘by all the famous people who went to those spas and later died of cancer. There were so many musicians. Johannes Brahms, the composer, and Niccolò Paganini, the most famous violinist who ever lived.’

  Later on, the harmful effects of exposure to radiation became well known. Marie Curie herself was covered with terrible welts from her laboratory work, and died a painful death as a result. But none of this stopped Leopold Godowsky, a pianist friend of Albert Einstein, from visiting the spas of Carlsbad in the hope that the special waters might reanimate his right arm, which had become useless after a stroke. Not long after that, he died of stomach cancer.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Elizaveta coolly. ‘What things you carry in your head.’

  ‘Soon after,’ said Ulrich, ‘Carlsbad and the mines were occupied by Nazi Germany. The Germans wanted the uranium for an atomic bomb, and they set up a labour camp in Joachimsthal, where non-Aryans were sent into the ground to pull out the pitchblende. Then the territory passed to the Soviet Union in the war, who did exactly the same thing. Enemies of the state were forced to dig uranium for the Soviet nuclear arsenal. Every day we have new stories about the Soviet Union’s glorious nuclear might. Well, this is how it happens. Can you imagine those people? Can you imagine the cancer?’

  After a while, Elizaveta said,

  ‘I don’t know why you would tell me something like that.’

  She began to cry, and Ulrich stiffened, as he always did.

  ‘You just have no sense of things,’ she said behind her hands.

  He did not look at her. He said,

  ‘A long time ago, Boris and I had a debate about chemistry. I said it was the science of life, and he said it brought only death. Now I see that our views were simply two halves of the same thing.’

  But Elizaveta did not reply.

  Barium

  18

  ULRICH’S NEIGHBOUR IS IRRITATED, and her limp sounds worse than usual.

  ‘Water is still pouring through our ceiling,’ she says bitterly. The man who lives above her has not been seen for months, and no one has the key to his apartment.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on up there. If he left a tap on or if his pipes have burst. It must be like a swimming pool, because our ceiling is completely sodden. We need an umbrella to go into the toilet.’

  She has come to give him his pills. She smells musty.

  ‘That man, he’s better off than a politician. He’s made so much money in a few years that he doesn’t even bother to sell his old apartment. He’s just locked it and gone: no one knows where he is. My husband’s looking for a crowbar to break it open. Who knows what he’ll find inside?’

  Ulrich sometimes thinks that his neighbour talks too much.

  ‘This building is slowly falling down,’ she continues. ‘I’m scared to walk in the stairwell! It’s dark as hell and so filthy you could catch a disease. When I open the front door at night there are cockroaches in the hallway, running from the light outside.’

  She sighs as she speaks, to make the point.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘At least in the old days we didn’t have all this. Now everything is shit. Excuse me, but it is. Did you hear about the rabies? The streets are full of dogs now, biting people, and we’ve just had another case. Who ever heard of rabies in Sofia? That’s capitalism, I suppose. You must have heard that Ilia Pavlov has been shot?’

  Ulrich has heard the news reports, but he is not sure who Ilia Pavlov is.

  ‘You don’t know? Don’t you use that television? Every month I go to deliver the money. It’s no use if you don’t ever watch it.’

  Ulrich thinks, Yes, I turn it on every evening, but he does not say it to her. He does not see why he should justify himself. He hopes she will live to a hundred so she can see how difficult it is to adapt to the new names.

  She has gone to fetch today’s newspaper, which has a big article about Ilia Pavlov’s life. She reads to Ulrich.

  Mr Pavlov, who died Bulgaria’s richest man, began his rise to power in the 1980s as head of the Bulgarian wrestling team.

  This triggers something in Ulrich. He says he thinks he remembers, but he cannot be sure.

  ‘You must remember,’ she says. ‘He had a big shaggy mane in those days. When he competed in the Olympics his picture was plastered everywhere.’

  His sports career put Mr Pavlov in touch with high-level party members and brawny men looking for jobs. He set up a number of gang operations, starting with extortion and protection, moving into gambling, drugs, prostitution, and expanding into hotels, real estate and construction. When the Bulgarian government began its privatisation drive in the early ’90s, he had become powerful enough to grab substantial chunks of industry for himself.

  She sits back on a chair and lights a cigarette. Ulrich doesn’t like her smoking in his apartment, but he finds it difficult to say so. He’ll ask her to open the window on her way out.

  Mr Pavlov had the wisdom to choose for his first wife the daughter of the chief of the Intelligence Service, which gave him access to the vast amounts of communist state capital that his father-in-law had transferred to his personal accounts after 1989. In collaboration with Andrei Lukanov, the former prime minister, Mr Pavlov siphoned money from state coffers to fund a conglomerate called Multigroup, which acquired hundreds of companies, including former state assets such as the flagship Kremikovtsi steelworks outside Sofia. Multigroup became the biggest business grouping in Bulgaria, running everything from food processing to gas, and quickly drew complaints from Bulgarian rivals and foreign governments for the violence of its practices. Though it has never been proved that Mr Pavlov was responsible for the assassination of Andrei Lukanov, he seized sole control of Multigroup immediately afterwards.

  Ilia Pavlov divorced his first wife and married the owner of a modelling agency that supplied contestants to the Miss World and Miss Universe contests. His friendship with Miss Bulgaria
2001 added glamour and popular appeal to his image, as did his presidency of football clubs CSKA and Cherno More.

  A bomb exploded under Mr Pavlov’s car in 1999, and he made attempts thereafter to improve his image. Multigroup withdrew from some illegal sectors and focused on tourism. Mr Pavlov gave money to restore old monasteries, and his wife suddenly became upset by the poor, and the plight of orphans.

  Mr Pavlov was shot yesterday afternoon as he was leaving the Multigroup headquarters. The sniper found a gap between the four bodyguards and shot him once through the heart. His body has been laid out in the St Nedelya cathedral.

  ‘If you turn on your TV you’ll hear his whole life story again and again,’ she says. ‘The journalists are all tearful. They say the next Miss Bulgaria contest will be devoted to his memory. People really loved Ilia Pavlov.’

  Ulrich says he cannot understand this.

  ‘People need saints,’ she responds.

  ‘But he was an appalling man!’

  ‘Our saints have always been thieves and murderers. That’s the proof of the loftiness of their hearts.’

  He can hear her stubbing out her cigarette. He asks her to open the window, hoping she will take it as a hint. But she carries on talking gaily.

  ‘When they brought in communism it was for the people, so they killed the people. Now they’ve brought in capitalism it is for the rich, so they only kill the rich. This time you and I have nothing to worry about.’

  She asks if he needs anything else. He says No, wanting to be alone to reflect.

  He has become completely absorbed in thinking back over his life. Remembering, Ulrich realises, has its own pleasure, like spreading wings. The mind unfurls and proclaims its own sensuality – and sometimes it does not matter if the memory is bleak.

  ‘I’ll go and check upstairs,’ she says. ‘See if they’ve managed to break into the swimming pool. It’s so ironic, you see. Outside it hasn’t rained for weeks. But in our bathroom it’s raining day and night.’