Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘He’s not only rich, he’s handsome. Open the door and see for yourself!’

  The mayor opened the door a crack and Boris forced his face and shoulders through the legs, through the door and out into the crowded stairwell.

  The musicians waited a few steps down, big Petko Spassov sweating and panting from his climb and the man on the tapan smoking a cigarette.

  The violin was held easily like a giant would hold a woman, looking like music already, and deeply wood. Boris stared at it with longing.

  ‘Can I hold it?’ he asked.

  The man frowned.

  ‘I don’t think so, boy. If anyone’s going to break it, it should be me.’

  Boris clasped his hands behind his back and stared avidly. The strings were like silver electricity lines arching between pylons, and the sky behind.

  ‘It looks old.’

  ‘A hundred years. Look here. Mihály Reményi, Budapest, 1909. The best violins were made there.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Slavo.’ He laughed. ‘This is Petko Spassov, the famous clarinettist.’

  ‘I know! I knew who you were as soon as I heard you from the window!’

  Boris sang the rushing clarinet line from a cassette someone had made of a Petko Spassov concert. His grandmother loved music, and played these things all the time in the house. The musicians laughed, and Slavo joined in lightly on the violin, his bow bouncing on the strings, Petko clapping and bear-dancing on the spot – but quietly so as not to disturb the merriment of the wedding crowd above: their mock, their hoots, their disputation. The rooster crowed through the middle of it all. Boris finished. Slavo said,

  ‘You sing well. What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Boris.’

  The tapan player threw his cigarette butt on to the concrete.

  ‘Come on. Let’s go down.’

  They set off down the stairs with their instruments, and Boris followed, saying,

  ‘I can sing the whole concert if you like!’

  It was a sunny morning. The mayor’s Lada was polished and decorated with roses. A few people were waiting for the wedding party to come down. Boris sang more tunes to impress the big musicians.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be upstairs with the wedding?’

  ‘I want to stay with you.’

  ‘He is one of us,’ said Slavo the violinist.

  A cart came up the hill, piled high with hay, and Boris read Yamaha from the barrel of Petko’s clarinet. Birds soared high. The yellow cloud rose from the chemical plant like a ponderous genie.

  The wedding party started to emerge from the building. The tapan player banged out a rhythm which fired Petko’s instrument into the air, followed behind by the soaring kaval. Slavo joined in.

  The guests gathered downstairs, with whistles and mirth. Boris hid while they all got into cars. The mayor directed things, six or eight to a vehicle; doors slammed, neighbours threw flowers, there was a great cheer as the bridal Lada started up, and one by one the cars drove away to the town hall. The remaining neighbours returned to their apartments.

  Petko stopped playing, mid-phrase, and wiped his mouth, and once again there was just the sound of the street and the birds. Slavo put his instrument in its case. They had sandwiches and beer. Boris sat down with them, meekly.

  ‘Still here, I see,’ said Slavo to him. ‘Do you want a sandwich?’

  Boris shook his head. He watched them eat. He watched how they were: their beards and the way they talked.

  ‘Does anyone know you’re with us?’ asked Petko.

  ‘No.’

  Boris hummed his own improvisation on an old song, as if he were not aware of it.

  They finished eating and packed everything into the van.

  ‘Come on.’

  Boris climbed in, and they drove to the hall where the evening party was happening. In the back of the van were their speakers which they carried inside, and Boris followed behind with Slavo’s violin, which he held as if it were a fledgling bird fallen from a nest. Some men were laying food out on the tables, and there were decorations on the ceiling. The musicians set up amplifiers and stands and plugged cables into sockets that set off electronic screams. Petko warmed up on his clarinet. Boris sat on the stage kicking his feet. They had offered him a sandwich. He had driven in their car.

  The kaval player stood at the back semaphoring while they adjusted volumes. There was a lot of time before everyone arrived from the wedding.

  A woman put out flowers on the tables. Petko tossed his song with a honey tone, and the fluorescent lights went on. The tapan was like the pounding of the earth through the speakers, it was a beating and a life! and there were trestles all along one wall that made a great corridor underneath where a boy could hide away from everything, under the tablecloths, under the dishes and cakes that the guests would eat; then the kaval player took up his flute and began to play and all of them joined in the tune, the whole band playing in this empty hall, the arabesque jaunt, the newcomer’s flaunt – and he, Boris, in the offbeat, in the heartbeat. The clarinet sang nar-whal nar-whal with its elbow-vowels like treasured smells, and over it the silvery lattice of the violin. And Boris thought, He is one of us.

  Boris’s grandmother was at first indulgent towards his sudden involvement with the Gypsy musicians. He is young, and it will pass, she thought; and she did not prevent him from going every day to that part of town. She did not object to the old violin the Gypsy gave to her grandson, and she listened patiently to his tales of music and learning. She even spoke to others of the remarkable aptitude he showed for his instrument.

  But Boris’s enthusiasm for the Gypsies began to extend too far. He started to use slang and mannerisms that appalled her. He played nothing but Gypsy music. She said,

  ‘You should spend less time with Slavo. The music you play is all illegal – where will it get you?’

  But Boris loved his new teacher, and nothing could keep him away.

  Slavo said,

  ‘Now we’ll play an hour of our lives.’

  He raised his violin and played the things of sixty minutes. The colours, the thought. The unclipped nails, the oval pool of vision. The time, the need, and the sounds that break through from beyond. The book on the fence post. The other person drawing close. The normal emotions, the thing-at-hand, the body’s suck and pump.

  He did it in a couple of moments, which was another part of the feat.

  Boris tried too. To play an hour of his life on his own violin. But he did not know how, and his sound spoke of nothing at all.

  Boris was intimidated by Slavo, who was a man where he was only a boy. In the cleft of Slavo’s open shirt was a chest of hair hung with chains, and he had manly concerns that sometimes kept him silent and thoughtful for minutes on end. Next to him, Boris felt he did not occupy space adequately or well. While Slavo did other things – while he spoke on the phone, or discussed business with his brother, or simply looked meditatively out into the street – Boris was not sure how to be. He was certain of himself only when he was playing.

  Slavo said,

  ‘Let’s try to play a person who looks at an angry crowd. I will play the crowd. You play the person who looks into all the furious eyes.’

  At such moments, both of them were entirely involved, and happy.

  One day, the chemical plant shut down. Almost everyone worked there. Boris’s own father had been a hand there, and most of the men he knew. The plant set the rhythms: the buses came in the mornings to pick people up and to drop off those who had worked through the night. And suddenly it closed: the gates were padlocked, the yellow plume disappeared, and with it that omnipresent, tangy smell.

  It was remarkable how quickly the town emptied. There was no slack in the lifestyle, for salaries had not come for months. With the factory gone, the economy immediately seized up: shopkeepers could not buy in supplies, there was no petrol, no beer, no bread. So the people locked up their houses and piled together in clanking c
ars, and set out for the cities. Every evening the diminishing bar talk was of those who had gone and those who had still to go.

  In their frustration, they pulled down the statue of Lenin that had always stood in the town square. Boris was shocked, for the old man had always pointed to the future, and with his other hand he had gripped his lapel in a permanent way. Now his outstretched arm had broken off, and it was hollow inside, and he lay unclaimed on the ground. Boris wondered whose job it was to clear fallen statues away.

  The mayor was among the last to go. All the remaining townsfolk came to the big house to help load trunks and paintings and squawking chickens into the car. The mayor’s wife came out first, leading his confined brother, Old Petar. Everyone was appalled to see him, the man whom everyone could remember for his feats of physical strength now shuffling like a vacant idiot and leaning on his brother’s wife for support.

  She sat him in the back of the car among the coats and photographs. The mayor wore his best suit, and shook with grief.

  ‘Goodbye to you all!’ he cried. ‘Goodbye to our beloved town! Goodbye to these streets!’

  He looked around him mightily.

  ‘Fate has spoken, and we have no choice but to bend. I loved you all! I hope you find a place in this godforsaken future! Forgive me! Goodbye to you all!’

  He got into the car, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. The engine jerked to life, and the laden vehicle moved slowly away. Everyone waved. Still driving, the mayor stood up through his open window, clutching the air and shouting into the wind, ‘Farewell! May we meet again!’

  Boris’s school gathered its eight remaining pupils together for an official closing day, with prayers for the future. The petrol station closed, the pharmacy, all the restaurants. His last friends departed, and all the faces that had made up his childhood.

  Boris went to Slavo’s house and found it empty. The whole Gypsy precinct had emptied, in fact, without anyone seeing them go. He broke a window of the house and climbed in; he sat in Slavo’s room and sobbed. The man had gone with no acknowledgement or sign. The house was a scene of hurried departure: unwashed plates still lying on the table, unwanted clothes abandoned on the bedroom floor, an overturned chair, and posters that had been ripped away from the ghost-line of their four pinned corners. Slavo had left some gramophone records which Boris claimed and took away.

  He walked back home through the empty streets, and ran upstairs. He climbed out of his bedroom window, up the drainpipe and on to the sloping, red-tiled roof. Steadying himself against the chimney, he took the gramophone records out of their sleeves and spun them angrily into the distance. One by one he flung them, black glinting circles against the sky, spinning too fast for music, and crashing, finally, into pig troughs and lamp-posts and bus shelters and front doors, all of which had lost their own voices, and made no protest.

  Boris’s grandmother chose not to leave. ‘What will I do in a strange city?’ she asked as she paced in the house. ‘It’s all very well for those who have sons and daughters to show them the way. But my daughter is gone. At least here I know how to survive. I grew up on what I planted and tended, and I can die that way, too.’

  A few months were enough to clear the place finally of everyone else, and Boris grew up with his grandmother in the empty town. They cultivated pumpkins and turnips together, and beans and herbs.

  Boris looked after the pigs himself, for he enjoyed their company. The sows were tender and knowing, and it was a quiet rapture to share their pregnancy with them every season. He slaughtered the young boars when they reached a year; he cured the meat, and made shoes from the skin. He used the fat for candles and soap.

  Stoyana turned quiet. She thought about the dead: for according to the custom, obituaries were put up in the bus shelter on the anniversary of every death; and with the town empty, she assumed this responsibility for all its deceased. In the mornings she wrote out a little account of some departed life or other, and pinned it up – even though there were no longer any buses, or people to wait for them, and her tributes went unseen by human eyes.

  She continued to love Boris as before, but her speech had turned inward, and when their work was finished at the end of the day, they sat together on the earth, saying nothing, and looking up into the hills.

  Boris roamed through the strange museum that his town had become. He went into all the houses, and searched through their contents with no sense of trespass, for the lives had been withdrawn that once gave these things their secret pique, and now they lay flagrant and matter-of-fact. He went through drawers of old coins and certificates. He read diaries and letters with innocent curiosity, intrigued, merely, by the variety of life. He lay on the double beds of the town’s absent couples to see what they had seen as they awoke in the mornings.

  The old bookshop became his library, and even as the years curled the pages of its volumes and condemned their facts and opinions to obsolescence, he continued to return there, seeking hopeful pleasures in books he had previously rejected.

  Buildings crumbled and grew wind-prone. Trees and animals made their own adaptations to houses. Two trains had stopped in the railway station: they were loaded with steel barrels stencilled with skulls and crossbones, which crumbled over the years, and grew over with moss.

  Boris became a young man. He masturbated in overgrown gardens or rusting bathtubs looking at pages ripped from histories of art, and medical textbooks.

  He did not abandon his music.

  The chemical factory became his studio. The bare walls and steel reflection gave his instrument a broad sound, and every day he took his violin there to try new improvisations. In the early days he played cassettes in there, too, listening for inspiration as he lay on the concrete floor looking up at the ranks of pipes – but after some time the town ran out of batteries and surrendered all music except his own. So Boris made his own tunes and styles, angling his mind askew to the world as his Gypsy master had taught him.

  For year after year, he sat in the factory, playing music. On the vast concrete floor there were smudges where Boris cleared out his ambit in the dust – and in the gloom his violin bow flashed like a sewing machine, gradually stitching his youth.

  Beluga

  3

  IN TBILISI, THE PICTURESQUE CAPITAL of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, it is a cloudless evening near the end of May 1981. Dignitaries are assembled in the banquet hall of the Hotel Iveria, talking light and smoking heavy, collecting in corners in twos and threes, abandoning wives who whisper together and adjust hair. Out of the windows, the Mtkvari river flows towards the sunset, cars circulate idly, ordinary people sit on balconies in the last warmth: and generally the world is lowly, and insensitive to the momentousness of the night. For Leonid Brezhnev is in Tbilisi, and behind these closed doors there is to be a parade of political tenterhooks.

  The table is decked with place names as big as licence plates, but no one sits yet, for the guest of honour is not here. And since the room is heavily populated by local party members, the time is given over to mutterings of ill-controlled glee that have little to do with matters of state: for Tbilisi’s victory in the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup is not two weeks old and the memory of those two winning goals sits recent even in party minds. Dinamo Tbilisi is still the chant around town, and Gutsaev and Daraselia are national heroes.

  There are those who stand at the window above Rustaveli Avenue watching for the limousines of the Moscow contingent, and now they signal the arrival. Ties are straightened and expressions banished. The room holds its pose for an awkward length of time, for the old man is sick and his ascent arduous to this lofty room. At last he arrives, in a party of five, accompanied by the First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, Eduard Shevardnadze. He delivers a half-smile to the assembled guests and takes his seat.

  Four waiters pour wine. There is a very long silence, embellished only by the trickle of Georgia’s finest vintage and the inattentive shuffle of the chief guest, who is looking unde
r the table for a place to comfortably rest his feet.

  When all the guests are served, First Secretary Shevardnadze raises his glass and offers a toast. All stand.

  ‘The Georgian Communist Party is honoured to welcome you, Commander Brezhnev, and all the members of Central Committee. We lay before you all the hospitality our country can offer. Raise your glasses to Commander Brezhnev and to the glorious Communist Party of the Soviet Union!’

  The General Secretary drinks falteringly from his glass. He offers some words in response, which fail to rise. ‘Invitation’ is there, and ‘productive’. He is heard to say ‘sporting success’; and there is applause from the Georgian nomenklatura.

  The waiters begin to bring food. There is every kind of roasted meat, cold chicken and ham, pork shashlik, baked aubergines, garlic potatoes, khajapuri, breads, cheeses, plates of dill and parsley, pickled vegetables, khinkali – and now plates are piled upon plates and others are coming and already there is not one patch of tablecloth visible through the feast that has been stacked up. People begin to eat loudly and with gusto. Toasts are drunk to Georgia and to Comrade Shevardnadze, and wine is flowing freely. The blandness of party members becomes more ardent. After all, Brezhnev is a man assailed by crisis and every grey suit conceals a human chest throbbing with questions. What will happen? They bring up Poland – in entirely proper tones, of course – how is the threat being addressed, whether it will be possible to retain the country as a member of the Warsaw (yes) Pact … Other conversations give way to the actual question:

  ‘We would be honoured to hear, Commander Brezhnev, your learned opinion as to the glorious future of socialism.’

  Brezhnev is tired and sick, and his eyes are full of water. He murmurs a prearranged instruction to a young man to his left, and sucks some wine to clear the dill from his teeth. The young man stands, earnestly impersonal and impeccably suited, with a smile like an American president’s. His eyes are grey like the northern sky.

  ‘We have been demanding for several months that the authorities in Poland declare martial law in order to stamp out the counterrevolutionary menace. We have lost much time. The government has been too lenient towards Solidarity, and now has a serious situation on its hands. The lengthy legal procedures for introducing martial law are finally being completed, and I believe that the tide will now turn. But damage has been done among all our neighbours, and we must learn from these events. The Polish people have had too much contact with the West, and from it they have learned the evils of self-interest. It is a salutary lesson for us all.’