Solo

by Rana Dasgupta

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Khatuna. ‘It’s so lovely.’

  Tears started flooding over her cheeks, but she did not know why. She wondered where all the festive bullets would land, and if the century would begin with incomprehensible deaths across the city. She had not expected the new time to be so urgent, and wished she was not apart from her brother. She whispered his name to the gunpowder galaxies, and even the word Mother. She said to Kakha,

  ‘Make love to me.’

  They slipped away, Khatuna whispering,

  ‘When you understand me it is like the best wine.’

  They lay next to each other, and Khatuna undid the top buttons of his shirt. His chest was covered in tattoos.

  They made love. The incessant thud from downstairs filled her reeling brain with the dark pleasure of ducts, the moist embrace of membranes.

  Afterwards, she did not move, so she could rock in the continuation. Her thoughts drifted on thermals to the ceiling.

  He got up, and put on his shirt. She had been asleep. She asked him,

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to the party,’ he said. ‘You stay here. I like to think of you in my bed.’

  He tucked a blanket around her and she smiled drowsily. He opened the door.

  ‘Kakha.’

  He turned back.

  ‘Yes?’

  Her make-up was smudged across her face.

  ‘I have a favour to ask you.’

  Khatuna did not go home for four days. When finally she turned the key in the lock and opened the door, she found Irakli roasting aubergines. The room seemed newly bright and clean, and her mother was dressed and sitting at the table. Khatuna kissed her silently on the cheek.

  ‘Long time, sister,’ said Irakli, sprinkling pepper.

  Khatuna’s mother inspected her stonily.

  Irakli laid out three plates and served the food. He sat down and looked appreciatively at his cooking.

  ‘This aubergine is from the twentieth century,’ he said, holding a piece up on a fork. ‘It was kept in a fridge from that century to this. Cryogenic.’

  ‘It tastes good,’ said Khatuna. ‘Even now.’

  ‘I feel weightless in this new time,’ declared Irakli. ‘I love this emptiness. We have no idea what twenty-first-century music sounds like, because we have never heard it.’

  He ate with gusto.

  ‘When the year ended, I realised: this is the century I’ll die in. I feel protective about it. The last century was fucked up by other people. But this one is ours. This is the century when I’ll write all my books.’

  Khatuna could hardly eat. Her stomach was tense and twisted. She said,

  ‘What the hell are you going on about?’

  Irakli smiled indulgently.

  ‘Khatuna. How are you? How did you celebrate the dawning of the new millennium?’

  She glared at him. Her mother burst from her silence:

  ‘Where have you been, for God’s sake? It’s been four days!’

  Khatuna concentrated on placing her knife and fork parallel on her plate.

  ‘I’ve had some merry conversations with the police,’ said Irakli. ‘They told me you were probably sold by now, and far away.’

  ‘You couldn’t call? What has happened to you? Is this how you treat your old mother?’

  Khatuna retorted,

  ‘You’re not old. I hate it when you say that. You’re not even fifty.’

  Her mother began to cry. Khatuna kept on:

  ‘What do you do for this household? Everything comes from me. If you want me to earn all the money, you let me live my way.’

  Her mother was shaking, and Khatuna watched her with contempt. It was a feeling, she found, that made a lot of life’s troubles easier. She left the table and picked up her bag. Irakli said,

  ‘You’re tied up with bad people. It’s not unreasonable for us to get worried.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Irakli.’

  ‘Will you just stay for one moment?’ wailed her mother. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said tersely, and slammed the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ her mother cried again.

  Khatuna moved into Kakha’s house, and Kakha made good on his favour. He asked his best men to take care of it for him.

  It was only days later when a black car pulled up quietly near an antique shop in old Tbilisi. Khatuna sat in the front seat of the car. With her were four men with guns. One of them was Vakhtang.

  The lights were on in the shop, and she peered in from the other side of the road.

  ‘That’s him,’ she said. ‘The young one on the stool. The man behind the counter is his father.’

  The men got out of the car and ran across the street. In the shop, Khatuna saw the younger man leap towards the door, trying to lock it against them, but he was too late. She checked her hair in the car mirror, and lit a cigarette. The smoke’s twist was slow and feline against the windscreen.

  She was aware of how she walked, careful across the street. A bell rang with the door’s opening, and what she was most conscious of was how the shop was completely bare, with just a couple of painted icons, modern reproductions, propped up on cheap shelving, and a few glass vases, and a telephone, and the two men held down on the floor.

  ‘The shop is empty,’ she said to Vakhtang.

  ‘Money laundering,’ he said. ‘That’s all they do.’

  She lifted the chin of the younger man.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She nodded to Vakhtang who smashed his rifle butt against the side of his head.

  ‘Do you remember me now?’ asked Khatuna while the father stammered entreaties.

  The man groaned. Khatuna said,

  ‘Put a bullet in his leg.’

  Vakhtang aimed his gun and the man writhed and cried out.

  ‘I remember! I remember.’

  ‘What do you remember?’ asked Khatuna.

  ‘A few years back. I remember coming to your mother’s house.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We stole some stuff. Paintings, I think.’

  Khatuna was still smoking her cigarette.

  ‘Hit him again.’

  Vakhtang hit him. The impact of wood on skull was deep and sublime. Khatuna said,

  ‘My mother came here to sell her antiques. She was miserable and ruined, and all she could do was turn to you. Every few days she came to hand over part of our family’s history. Did you know she is a princess?’

  There was no one on the road outside, no traffic, no evening sounds, just Khatuna standing over the man in her long black coat.

  ‘You threatened to kill my brother. I told you that day I would come for you, and I have come.’

  The father could not breathe properly with the muzzle of a gun in the back of his neck, and was dribbling saliva on the floor. The young man was dazed from the blows. He said,

  ‘I’ll repay you. In full. I’ll get everything back.’

  ‘I’m not here to bargain,’ said Khatuna.

  ‘There must be something I can do,’ whimpered the man.

  ‘No,’ replied Khatuna.

  She nodded to Vakhtang. The gun had a silencer, and the only sound was a brief sucking of air. The man slumped as if death had come from within. The father screamed hoarsely.

  ‘As for you,’ Khatuna said coldly, ‘I have nothing to say because you are old and ugly. You can have one last moment to think of everything you did to my family.’

  Crows were cawing with the end of the day, and the old man choked. Everyone watched Khatuna, who gave the signal, and he fell forward too.

  She wandered round the shop. Her heartbeat was out of control. She was shaking and unslaked. She wished she had pulled the trigger. Her voice wavered.

  ‘There’s nothing here to break.’

  ‘Break the window,’ suggested Vakhtang simply.

  She took his gun, went out of the
shop, the bell tinkling again, and swung at the plate glass with all her strength.

  The glitter-crash went on an age. She watched it all: the subdivision of crystal, and the shards’ rebound. It was a drastic cascade, and it did not touch her in the least.

  She had waited years for this moment. She had expected, when it came, she would feel everything shift back into its rightful place. She had expected to feel reborn: she had expected that the spider-clutch of memory would be released, and the treasure of her tenderness exhumed again. But she could detect none of these things. Her chemistry had not altered, and the sky looked exactly the same.

  The noise had brought people into the street, and she was aware of them grouped behind her, watching.

  ‘Burn it,’ she ordered, through the hole.

  She turned round to get back in the car, while the men emptied petrol canisters over the bodies, over the walls and shelves, over the telephone – and even as they drove away she watched the cloud of oil smoke until it was hidden by the buildings, and she could see it no more.

  Ichthyosaur

  8

  HIS CHAIR WAS AN EXPENSIVE OBJET D’ART that he’d picked out from a store in Soho. Early Meiji, with gold dragons and cranes flying over Mount Fuji against a background of black lacquer, painted layer upon painstaking layer. Signed Tokyo: Shibayama.

  A man who made his money from trends and cycles, predictions and futures, needed to seat himself on the firmness of the past – lest he become light headed and float away.

  In the middle of his office stood an imposing pair of antique globes from Germany. They were his talking piece, when people came. Engraved in Berlin, he told them, and manufactured in Nuremberg, the centre of eighteenth-century German globe making. He took his time, pointing out, on the celestial globe, the late addition of Uranus, just then discovered by William Herschel and, on its terrestrial twin, the brand-new Pacific coastlines mapped out by James Cook.

  He was on 53rd Street, on the forty-first floor, looking down through Midtown to the distant Twin Towers. At this moment he was pacing in the office, poring over a sheet of paper. He had printed out an email in order to consider it better.

  For the last month, Plastic Munari had been producing a band of mystic musicians from Morocco. It was a challenge, trying to focus the wailing rhaita into a regular lounge beat and still preserve the purity. He did it small: there was a bass and a woman on tabla holding it together, but he kept the instruments up front. There were moments when the beat disappeared entirely and you were thrown into that hectic infinity, speaking for itself.

  Plastic had rented a big apartment on the Upper West Side for the musicians to stay in: they didn’t want to be split up. They were a sight in the streets, fifteen Moroccan tribesmen in robes marching to the studio, and even Plastic took a few photos for himself. Before they flew out from JFK they went to Bloomingdale’s and bought up the entire stock of $300 cast-iron Le Creuset casseroles.

  The record was finished now, and Plastic could think about other things. The email came at a good time.

  There was a mirror on the wall of his office, set up so he could see the back of his guests’ heads as they faced him at his desk. He stood close to it now.

  Plastic had that enviable aura of a man whose inner obsessions have captured the imagination of millions, and so brought him, without obvious strain or compromise, enormous earthly rewards. He had hung on to all his hair and, as he approached the end of his forties, he slept with the kind of young women who would have been unattainable when he was their age.

  His suit was cashmere and his tan real. He worked out several times a week, and he’d never looked better in his life.

  He stood up when the two men were shown in. The younger one was all smiles.

  ‘I am Bozhidar Markov. This is my superior, Mr Gospodinov. He is Deputy Minister for Culture of the Republic of Bulgaria.’

  Plastic’s secretary hung the men’s overcoats in the corner and they sat down, taking in the framed awards and the Manhattan view. They wore ties under their leather jackets. Plastic sensed they didn’t have the least idea of how the music business worked. Sometimes a good thing, sometimes not.

  Plastic turned off his cell phones and studied the two men. Bozhidar Markov seemed earnest and hopeful. Gospodinov was older, with sunken eyes. Plastic said to him good-naturedly,

  ‘You look rather tired, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  Gospodinov did not return Plastic’s gaze. He looked away and surveyed the office. He let his eyes run over the furniture and the paintings while he reached absent-mindedly inside his jacket and pulled out three packets of cigarettes. He turned back and said,

  ‘So you believe the world is round?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Gospodinov smirked. He motioned with his eyes towards the globes.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ he said obscurely, piling his cigarette packets up on the edge of Plastic’s desk. The brand name was Smith & Wesson.

  Plastic passed it off with a nod. He said,

  ‘You can’t smoke in here.’

  Gospodinov smiled sourly, but did not remove the packets.

  ‘I think you understand from our email,’ began Bozhidar, ‘why we wanted to meet you.’

  ‘More or less,’ said Plastic. ‘But I’d like to hear it directly from you.’

  Bozhidar invited his boss to speak, but Gospodinov screwed up his face. Bozhidar said,

  ‘For the underline of our discussion, Mr Munari, it is necessary for you to understand the economic scene of Bulgaria.’

  Bozhidar launched into an excessively detailed presentation of Bulgaria’s economic breakdown after the end of communism. As he listened, Plastic fingered the custom-made penknife he had recently bought from a boutique in Stockholm.

  He noticed the steam rising from the men’s wet coats in the corner. He hated this weather.

  ‘Five hundred thousand people left Bulgaria to become housemaids and construction workers …’

  Most people in the city complained about the summer, but Plastic loved the heat. He would die if he didn’t have a job that took him frequently to hot places.

  ‘Our university-educated women went to work as nannies in Greece …’

  Plastic don’t melt, as someone put it once.

  Bozhidar ran off statistics with a bureaucrat’s ease. Gospodinov’s phone rang silently in his shirt pocket. He took it out, inspected the screen with distaste, and put it back. He interjected,

  ‘Mr Munari is here to do a job for us. Why are we giving him a history lesson?’

  His caller persisted, but he ignored it, and through his shirt, where his heart was, came a blue flashing light.

  Bozhidar pressed on.

  ‘Nowadays it is absolutely fashionable to say, In communist times everything was good! And now wild dogs are scaring people in the city and the roads are getting holes!’

  Plastic stole a glance at the clock. He was supposed to leave in forty-five minutes to attend the premiere of a biopic about a rapper he had worked with in the early days, when he ran a hip-hop label. An incredible talent who had died of an overdose.

  ‘But there is no going back, Mr Munari. The past is a disaster. We have to make a future …’

  Plastic was still wondering whether or not to subject himself to the movie. The singer had been a collaborator and a friend, and Plastic didn’t know whether he wanted to watch his death again on the big screen.

  He, Plastic, was portrayed in the movie by a scrawny twenty-something no-name actor.

  ‘The Ministry of Culture has employed an American PR firm to send out positive images of Bulgaria. We pay CNN and BBC to make nice articles about Bulgarian wine and sunshine destinations …’

  The actor had come to meet him over a year ago. So you’re the real Plastic Munari! Plastic was so depressed at the guy’s ugly face he’d kicked him straight out.

  His secretary came in with a tray of martinis. The room was turning dark in the winter afternoon, and she
put on the lights. Gospodinov looked suspiciously into his cocktail glass. Plastic said,

  ‘I’m a little pressed for time, gentlemen. Perhaps you should tell me what it is you want?’

  ‘I want to smoke a cigarette,’ said Gospodinov, taking one from the packet and holding it between his fingers.

  Plastic called his secretary.

  ‘Would you mind showing Mr Gospodinov to the fire escape? He would like to light a cigarette.’

  Gospodinov took all three packets with him.

  Bozhidar said,

  ‘We want you to make a global music superstar from Bulgaria.’

  He watched Plastic carefully.

  ‘The people who run this world, Mr Munari, are not well informed. They have no patience to learn our history. We cannot attract them with rational arguments. They understand only celebrity.’

  ‘Do you have any specific musicians in mind? Because without that, it’s all academic.’

  Bozhidar said,

  ‘Listen to me. For five centuries, our country was part of the Turkish Empire, full of every kind of music. Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbian, Gypsy. Then the communists banned everything. They sent expert musicologists to make police reports about musicians who used un-Bulgarian chords. Pop stars adored all over Bulgaria were taken to the camps for singing American songs …’

  The truth was, Plastic had wanted for a long time to find a big musician from that region. That was why he had agreed to this meeting.

  ‘The old music was suppressed, and we did not even hum it in our heads …’

  Plastic was known in the industry for the originality of his ear. Back when no one had thought of it, he had found big audiences for klezmer music and remixed Arab devotional chants for New York bars. He had turned small-time Pakistani qawwali singers and Cuban son pianists into some of the biggest recording properties in the world. But he had never found a musician from the Balkans, where they had some of the most exciting music in the world.

  Bozhidar was saying,

  ‘Pirate cassettes broke the stranglehold. I was a teenager when the Gypsies started to smuggle in cassettes, and I can tell you, it electrocuted our brains! We heard heavy metal! Absolutely real music! We were bored of the hollow idealism going on for forty years, we wanted music from the heart. We wanted pain music! Teenagers in Bulgaria were pumping feelings: it was crazy times in our country and we were already old when we were twenty years.’