Solo

Magnesium

1

THE MAN HAS WOKEN SUDDENLY, in the dead zone of the night. It is unnaturally hot for the time of year; his throat is raw and there is sweat in all his creases.

He stumbles to the sink for water. Then he sits in his armchair, and snorts a few times to clear his nose.

The bus station outside his window is being modernised, and he can hear the drills screaming even at this hour.

In the interests of reducing crime, two blinding floodlights have been installed in the station forecourt. They seem to have deceived the local birds, which now begin their dawn chorus in the middle of the night, just as the man succeeds in dozing off. At this very moment, they are squawking as if possessed.

Breathing heavily in his chair, the man is scorched by a halogen glow from outside, though there is darkness in the room.

Unmindful of the time, the travellers in the bus station bring great ingenuity to the making of noise, shouting and clanging and revving their moribund cars, as if no one were trying to sleep.

The man is nearing the end of his life’s tenth decade, and his apartment is on the fourth floor.

The main room measures four by three and a half metres. There is a bathroom to the side, and, at the end, an area for cooking. The window looks out on the stalls in front of the bus station, where people sell goods from China: alarm clocks, watch straps, plastic plants, batteries, T-shirts, souvenirs, and so on. There are also currency sellers who sit waiting to trade with those who arrive on buses from other countries.

There is a leak in one corner of the man’s ceiling, which lets in water when it rains. This water has leached slowly into the plaster in a shape that resembles a map of Australia, causing paint to fall and a smell of cisterns to hang continually in the room.

The window faces west; so the apartment is brightest in the evening.

The government still sees fit to pay the man a pension every month in order to sustain him in his penury. When he retired, many years ago, this money was quite adequate: he lived alone and had few requirements. But with everything that has happened in the economy, his pension has become worthless, and his savings have disappeared. If it were not for the generosity of his neighbours, who buy food and other supplies for him every month, he would now find himself in an alarming situation. They are good people: they pay for the man’s television subscription, and the wife even cooks his meals, since he can no longer manage it himself.

But he does not like bothering them every time he needs more coffee or toilet paper. He has put in many years on this earth, and he feels he has a right to expect that such things will come to him unbidden.

Events have turned the man blind. But his hearing is quite intact, and his primary entertainment is still his television. He looks in vain for programmes about jazz, for these they do not show; instead he sits in front of beauty contests, infomercials, German pornography, travel shows, and other similar kinds of modern wisdom.

Sometimes, late at night, when his television is turned off, he hears the interminable ring of a telephone somewhere below, and he lies awake wondering where in the world this yearning might be housed, and what it might seek so insistently in this building.

In the afternoons, the breeze brings with it a slight scent of old urine from the wall below his window. All the men who pass through the bus station duck behind that wall to relieve themselves against it. There are public toilets in the station, but they do not seem to be able to compete with the wall, which holds an uncanny attraction for any man with a full bladder. Even men who have never been there before, and do not realise it is already filled with the reeking sludge of twenty years, give not a second glance to the broken cubicles at the edge of the square. At any moment, two or three of them can be seen standing in the shelter of this wall, shaking out their last drops.

Women use the cubicles, broken as they are.

On hot days, the smells become overpowering, and rain comes as a relief, washing everything away. The blind man sits by the window when the rain is heavy and he can hear the different patters of near and far: the silky spray in the trees, the heavy drumming on plastic water tanks, the hard scatter of roads and pavements, the different metallic pitches of car roofs and drain covers, the baritone trilling of tarpaulin, the sticky overflow of mud, the concentrated gushing of drainpipes — and, for a moment, the landscape springs forth, and he is reminded how it is to see.

With the exception of his back, which tortures him every morning, the man’s health is still passable, and yet, by the sheer force of numbers, his death cannot be so far away.

As a child, the man watched his grandmother stick up biographies of the dead on the trees outside their house. She had come from a village near the Black Sea — cut off, now, by the border — and it was the dead from this distant village whose accomplishments were listed on the trunks of those proud and equidistant plane trees. Every day, it seemed, was the death-day of someone or other from that remote place, and his grandmother told him the stories over morning tea as she wrote out her obituaries. She tied them with string to the trees, where they decomposed gradually in the rain, to be renewed the following year.

‘How do you remember?’ he asked her again and again, for it seemed marvellous that the entire history of that lost dynasty could be preserved in her mind. But his father disapproved of the rural practice and her own life was never written up on a tree.

Sensitive, like all infants, to the beyond, the man had in those years a powerful sense of the infinitude of generations. He had seen people buried in the ground with their eyes closed; and in his mind he envisioned the earth in cutaway, with the stacked-up strata of sleeping bodies so vertiginous in its depth that it was simple to believe the lightness of life on the surface to be no more than their collective dream. For the dreamers, quiet and eternal in their moist refuge, greatly outnumbered those with open eyes.

These old intuitions returned to the man recently, when he listened to a television programme about a town that was buried under water after the construction of a dam. Eighty years later, the dam was decommissioned and dismantled. The lake subsided, the river resumed its previous route, and the town rose again into the sunlight.

There had been extensive damage, of course. Water had dissolved the plaster from walls, and roofs had caved in. Wooden buildings had floated away, bit by bit. Trees had died, and the whole town stank of dead fish and river weed for weeks after it was drained. But there were a couple of cars still parked on the streets — antique models, as the man remembered from his own youth. There were clocks arrested at different times, and a cinema with the titles of old films still stuck up outside. Road signs had stood firm all this time, pointing the way to underwater destinations. In every house, things had been left behind. A man found a jar of pickles in a kitchen, and tasted them, and pronounced them still good.

There were some old people who had lived in the town before the deluge and were taken back to see it again, and it was for them as if they were transported back into a childhood fantasy.

These days, the man devotes himself to wading through the principal events of his life in order to discover what relics may lie submerged there. Of course, he has no family around him, his friends have all gone, and he knows that no living person is interested in his thoughts. But he has survived a long time, and he does not want it to end with a mindless falling-off.

Before the man lost his sight, he read this story in a magazine: a group of explorers came upon a community of parrots speaking the language of a society that had been wiped out in a recent catastrophe. Astonished by their discovery, they put the parrots in cages and sent them home so that linguists could record what remained of the lost language. But the parrots, already traumatised by the devastation they had recently witnessed, died on the way.

The man feels a great fraternity with those birds. He feels he carries, like them, a shredded inheritance, and he is too concussed to pass anything on.

That is why he is combing through his life again. He has no wealth and no heirs, and if he has anything at all to leave behind, it will be tangled deep, and difficult to find.

2

THE MAN IS CALLED ULRICH. The absurdity of this name can be blamed on his father, who had a love affair with all things German. Over the years, a lot of time has gone into explaining it.

Ulrich was born here in Sofia, in an imposing house on Dondukov Boulevard just opposite the Shumenska restaurant. Ulrich’s father built the house in the Viennese style during his years of affluence: he employed an Austrian architect, and had the façade plastered with lyres, and urns overflowing with fruit, and the bold-faced year: 1901.

In those days, men like Ulrich’s father, the men in suits and hats, were the minority in Sofia. They were outnumbered by the pigs and donkeys and the kerchiefed peasants driving poultry and pumpkins. They were outshone by the august Jewish and Armenian merchants who struck business deals amid scented smoke, silks and spittoons. They could barely understand the speech of the women at the market stalls, who sat jangling with iron hoops. The rhythms of commerce were supplied not by the opening times of their banks but by the gait of camels, which came in trains from all over the Ottoman Empire to provide carpets and gold to the Turkish traders around the Banya Bashi mosque. And they were powerless against the Gypsies who came to take over the city now and then, assembling in an afternoon a swarming settlement of skin tents and fires, filling the bazaars with curiosities from abroad and sowing restless thoughts among the children.

But the men in suits had plans for expansion. As the Ottoman Empire’s tide retreated, Sofia found itself beached in Europe — and these men plotted to turn their provincial Turkish town into a new European capital city. They studied Berlin and Paris to find out what was required, and all of it — cathedral, tramway, university, royal palace, science museum, national theatre, national assembly — they recreated faithfully in Sofia. At the entrances to the future metropolis were haystacks piled up like mountains to sustain the multitudes of horses carrying stone and steel for the new constructions, and traders and labourers swarmed over the swampy void left by everything that had been torn down.

Ulrich’s father was a railway engineer. He had had the good fortune, in his youth, to study engineering at the mining school at Freiberg in Moravia, and his career was begun on the Vienna— Constantinople railway line built by Baron Hirsch. By the time of Ulrich’s earliest memories, his father was engaged across Anatolia and Mesopotamia under Philipp Holzmann, the contractor for Deutsche Bank’s enormous railway investments in the Ottoman Empire, who appointed him senior engineer on the new line from Berlin to Baghdad.

For Ulrich’s father, there was no calling more noble, more philosophical, than the railways. As he dreamed, his moustache trembled with the snaking of glinting rails across continents. Next to the churches, synagogues and mosques he saw new edifices hatching roofs of steel and glass, and departure boards unfolding within, full of the promise of discovery. In the ecstasy of his reverie, he hovered above the cartoon face of the planet, now wrapped in twin lines of steel and given over, finally, to science and understanding.

When he took a journey, he travelled second class in order to encounter the awestruck families in traditional clothes who found themselves in a railway carriage for the very first time. He eavesdropped on their anxious commentaries, he grunted conspicuously and shook his head; and while Ulrich’s mother gave him discouraging flicks with her gloves, he waited for the right moment to intervene.

‘I beseech you all: fear not!’ he began, grandiloquently. ‘This is a scientific road, built according to the principles of Newton, and should we travel at triple this speed, still we would come to no harm!’

Having verified to his satisfaction that all mindless gossip had ceased, he stood up to address the company.

‘You good and simple folk, who have never travelled faster than the poor horse could drag you through the mud, are lucky to see this day when suddenly you are plucked up and propelled as fast as thought! Treasure this moment, and think upon this speed which now sends your minds descending into chasms of terror; for this is the rumbling inside you of the new age.’

When some village woman drew her shawl around her and complained of the nausea that the flashing landscape produced in her stomach, he pointed at the horizon and adjured her:

‘Do not look at the poppies outside your window, madam, for they race more rapidly than your senses can apprehend. Look instead at the church spires and mountains in the distance, whose movements are more steady. For this is the vision of our new times: we have been liberated from the myopia that kept human beings peering at their own miserable patch of earth, bound to proclaim with sword and drum its superiority to every other. From now on, they will see far, and look upon a common future!’

As the unfortunate target of this outburst withdrew farther under her wrappings, a meek husband would draw the fire gallantly to himself, asking some timid question about how rails were laid, or how signals operated — to which Ulrich’s father gave long and ecstatic answers, gesticulating with the loftiness of the spirit within him, and drawing technical diagrams for the edification of his audience.

Whenever the newspaper arrived in the morning with the story of a railway accident, it would throw him into a temper for days. He cursed the drowsy signalmen or drunken drivers who betrayed the scientific age with idiocy, mutilations and death. ‘These abominations will cease,’ he would retort angrily when anyone chose to engage him on the subject. ‘It is only a matter of time.’

Much of Ulrich’s childhood was spent in train compartments and hotels, following his father’s work. The entire household set out for weeks on end, journeying to where the tracks gave out. There were the armies of the workers, thousands of them, tented in the brushland under a dome of dust that signalled their labour for miles around: Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Arabs and Kurds, and others from all over the empire — hammering at the desert floor under the supervision of turbaned envoys from the Sublime Porte and handlebar-moustached German engineers. Crowds of cooks, doctors, prostitutes, fruit sellers, musicians, tobacco sellers and dancers advanced with them along the envisioned highway, and, as the daylight expired, an endless congregation of wood fires sprang to life under the stars, chickens and goats were thrust upon spits, and great iron cauldrons were set upon the flames. Everywhere men were eating, joking, sleeping, arguing and pissing, while packs of camels and horses looked dispassionately on. This was the assembly that hauled the silver lines from the mouth of the metropolis across the scrub of Anatolia; and Ulrich’s father could weep with the grandeur of it.

The earliest memory Ulrich still retains is this: he is lying alone at night under translucent canvas, a blanket folded carefully around him. At the edge of his hearing is the hubbub of the multitude, and he watches the twitching shape of a lizard on the roof above him, outlined by the lapping firelight. The brightness of his eyes comes not from these things, however, but from the sounds of the musicians. Even at this age, he does not need to see the dancing to know what reflexes the music induces in the men’s bodies.

After so many years, the melodies have drained away, but he can still recall their effect on his tucked-up child flesh.

He stores another memory from that time, or shortly after: his father’s temper in a café in Constantinople when politics interfered with his work. ‘If the British Empire is so fragile that a pair of steel rails can bring it down — then let it fall! Will they threaten us, because we approach their routes, because we near their India, their precious Suez Canal? We are here to bring the peoples of the world together, and such a mission will stand before any rebuke!’

He stamped on the floor with the injustice of it, and Ulrich learned it was possible to be angry with people one did not know.

Ulrich’s father’s idealism proved to be a liability in the long run. When, during the war, the British destroyed the railway tracks he had helped to build, he took it as a personal calamity, as if the charges had been set at his own nerve junctions, and he fretted about it for the rest of his life. Trying to pull his country as fast as possible out of Asia, he never thought he would be razed by an excess of Europe.

Ulrich’s mother’s name was Elizaveta. Throughout Ulrich’s life, whenever he has wished to picture her happy, he has returned to one memory. He awakes in his tent in the desert to find his parents already arisen. He crawls out into the dawn, still confused by sleep: the fires are burning for breakfast, a camel coughs clouds in the chill, and the horizon is smooth and bichrome. His mother sits on a wooden stool sipping steaming tea, and she stares from under her shawl at the sun’s bubble, ascending over the edge of the world and turning her smile orange.

She picked up Turkish and Arabic, and she loved to set out among the villages with a muleteer and pay visits to the local women. She made sketches for them of Bulgarian peasant costumes so they would have an idea of the place she had come from, and she kept notebooks full of observations about their beliefs and customs. Sometimes she stayed away for three days at a time, journeying with her young son through the Tigris valley with only her Bulgarian manservant and a Kurdish guide for company.

Is Ulrich deceiving himself when he imagines that he has stood with her in an ancient monastery carved entirely out of rock, somewhere on the way to Mosul, where the aged bishop has taken vows of silence and lives in solitude on the top of an inaccessible mountain? Surely not: for he remembers looking up to the astonishing incline where every day the man lowers a basket for his food — the basket in which, when his last mortal sickness comes upon him, he will send down a message so they may climb up to collect his body. Ulrich remembers eating mulberries and pomegranates plucked from trees by the Tigris, and all the flowers, and his mother laughing with her Kurdish guide, saying, This is paradise. Another snatch of the past: Ulrich has been dressed in a red shirt (for the wearing of blue is offensive to these people, and how marvellous that there can be prohibition on a colour!) and he sits in a dim room in a low-built house whose threshold is decorated with a painted snake. There is a woman seated on a mat who wears a flowing headdress (whose unfamiliar folds are disquieting to the young boy) and who cuts up into squares, with great delectation, a pulpy substance that is shiny on her fingers. She eyes him all the time with heavy curiosity, and without warning she is possessed with the desire to stroke his cheeks with her sticky hands. He runs to take shelter behind his mother, who appals him still further by eating these syrupy squares and declaring her delight. On the journey home, she tells him that these people have experienced violent raids and live in terror of a great massacre: their religion is an offence to the Musulmans who live in these parts and, now the empire is breaking up, they are in perpetual peril. And with the narcissism of childhood he is filled with regret at having denied the woman his cheek when she was about to die.

Ulrich remembers his father’s late-night fury at Elizaveta when she returned from one of those rural expeditions — and perhaps they were less numerous than he now imagines. For he also recalls the heavy tedium of big city hotels where the family stayed for weeks together, and restaurants where his mother sat in unending debates over politics. Elizaveta had a consuming passion for the affairs of that region — she wrote about them regularly for the Bulgarian newspapers — and she was never so content as when exchanging political analyses with other informed observers. But these conversations drove her young son to distraction. He hated the diplomats and businessmen whose arguments absorbed her so, and he tried to disrupt their speeches with tears and full-blown choking tantrums. He developed an array of ruses for prising Elizaveta’s attentions away from them and, though she held out for a while, his complaints of sickness, headaches and ringing in his ears would eventually force her to board a train with him back to Sofia.

He sang on the journey, happy to have her to himself again. He was joyful when they arrived back at home (the house cold and dim save for the small corner kept alive by his grandmother’s movement) and he ran off to play with the children he knew in the houses round about. But each time he discovered that they had grown out of the games he had shared with them before he went away, and turned to others he did not know — ones that seemed calculated to exclude casual visitors such as he.

Perhaps this was why Ulrich became such a solitary child. The stuccoed cube of his bedroom, perched up in that big house, became the most dependable thing in his world, and he filled it with the ample emission of his daydreams.

His father was exasperated by his early signs of introversion.

‘You are privileged enough, at a young age, to enjoy the society of talented and influential men — and all you can do is stammer and scratch, and hold your foot in your hand like a fool. You will not be a failure, my son. Whatever it takes, I will not allow it.’

3

BY WHAT ALCHEMY is an obsession kindled in a boy?

Another child who passed through Ulrich’s early experiences might have emerged with a passion for machines. His father encouraged him in that direction, with his tender demonstrations of engines, and the delightful way he simulated moving parts with his long white fingers. Or he might have conceived a fascination with exploration, or the study of peoples. But there was something Ulrich’s early attentions found more marvellous.

One day, when Elizaveta was alone with him in the house, she heard him singing. Following the sound, she came upon him, not yet six years old, giving a solo performance in the middle of the lavish drawing room, where there hung a series of prints of the Ringstrasse that her husband had once purchased in Vienna. Ulrich produced from his boyish throat a passable imitation of a violin’s whine, and he improvised a tune with such zeal that Elizaveta wondered where this spirit had come from to enter her son. He moved while he sang, a jerky infant’s version of a grown man’s dance, and he clapped a drum here and there. His music became faster and more breathless, and, as he rolled into the last variation on his theme, his eyes widened and his head shook with what he felt inside — until the performance exploded in one final stamping flourish. Ulrich stood entirely still for a moment, the hiss of the fire the only sound in the room. Then he burst into his own applause and bowed low to an unseen audience, and his mother took her opportunity to withdraw.

Whenever news reached Ulrich that the Gypsies had come to Sofia, he would run through the streets to their encampment and beg the weary fiddlers to play for him, jumping on the spot with impatience until they gave in. As long as they were in the city, he would follow them wherever they went, capering on the street corners where they played, and imitating, with an imaginary violin under his chin, their sway, their foot-tap, and their bow.

The Gypsies always left without warning, so there would come a morning when he went out to find only a forlorn patch of ground, flattened and smoking, where dogs and pigs sniffed the leftovers. He would take out his handkerchief and wave it at the empty road — a gesture he had observed at railway stations and presumed grandiose.

Ulrich heard about gramophone records, in which men captured music and sealed it up, and he developed a fascination for them. The family did not possess a gramophone player, but this did not prevent him from wanting them, for it made him happy to arrange the records around his room like talismans. In those days there were few gramophone records available in Sofia, and Elizaveta therefore discovered a means of appeasing her son when they set off for journeys abroad. His favourite place on earth became Herr Stern’s Odeon record shop on the Grande Rue de Pera in Constantinople, where it was possible to listen to records in an enchanted room festooned with rugs and paintings.

It was Herr Stern who introduced Ulrich to the music of Cemil Bey, the great Turkish tanbur player, and who expanded his tastes to include the Armenian and Greek musicians, and singers from Egypt. Together they discussed music, and innovations in recording equipment, and news from the big companies who manufactured Ulrich’s delights — Odeon from Germany, Gramco from England, Baidaphon from Lebanon and Victor from America.

‘Is Odeon the very best company, Herr Stern?’ he liked to ask.

‘Odeon certainly has a very great range,’ replied Herr Stern, without condescension. ‘In our part of the world, they have recorded many more musicians than the others. Many excellent masters who were only known in their own small towns until a few years ago — now Odeon has made them into celebrities that you and I can listen to in our homes.’

‘But Odeon invented the double-sided record, and now all the others have copied them. So they must be the best!’

Herr Stern laughed.

‘Perhaps you’re right!’

‘Will someone invent a triple-sided record some day, Herr Stern?’

Ulrich was full of questions, but he chose not to ask why his own family did not possess a gramophone player, when modern brass horns had begun to bloom proudly in all the other houses they visited in Sofia. There was an evening when his father, increasingly irritated by the piano exercises of the girl in the adjoining house, suddenly banged down his spoon and appealed furiously: ‘Can that child not be made to stop?’ Other things added up along the way: the absence of musical instruments and Sunday afternoon concerts. Ulrich noticed that his mother’s singing voice fell silent when his father was around, and he began to sense in her a philharmonic sadness, looming like the outsized shadows in the modern paintings they saw on their visits to Vienna.

He was therefore surprised when his mother announced, during one of his father’s absences, that she wished to buy him a violin. He knew it was an assault on the household’s unspoken rules.

He went with her to the violin maker’s shop, and of course it was the climax of all his hopes: the gloomy room where rows of ruddy instruments were hung, redolent of wood and varnish. The violin maker played on them so Ulrich could judge the tone, the children’s half-size instruments tucked like toys under his enormous beard. Ulrich chose the one that was the most beautiful of all. Elizaveta was delighted, and she said to the violin maker, ‘Please just show him how to put his hands. He doesn’t have a teacher yet.’ So the man crouched behind Ulrich and operated his hands like a puppeteer, supporting the instrument and moving the bow, and Ulrich felt it was all much more difficult than he had imagined.

He threw himself into his violin practice. Mealtimes and lessons became inconveniences, and all his other pursuits were forgotten. Lacking a teacher, he studied photographs of violinists to see how they positioned their fingers, and he invented exercises to make his movements more assured. When the Gypsies next came into town, Ulrich ran with his violin, and pestered them for advice and demonstrations. He studied their performance with the attentiveness of a fellow musician. By the time they left, he was confident that the mysteries of music would not resist him, and he would play his violin as well as any human being. He told himself, ‘I am one of them.’

‘Do you think that Father will allow me to take lessons?’ he asked his mother doubtfully.

‘I think when he sees how much progress you have already made on your own, it will be impossible for him to refuse.’

‘Really?’ Ulrich asked, unconvinced.

‘Why not?’ she said, with a hint of evasion. ‘Why don’t you give a concert for him when he returns? He will be amazed at what you have achieved.’

Given his father’s love of all things Viennese, Ulrich decided to prepare a waltz that was often performed by the orchestra in the Shumenska restaurant opposite their house. He listened at the restaurant window until he had memorised it, and then began to reproduce it on his own instrument. He practised it until every note was perfectly sculpted for his father’s return.

On that evening, he set up the drawing room as a concert hall, with two armchairs for his parents, and an upturned chest as a podium. He put on a little black suit, and took a bow tie from his father’s dressing room. When his preparations were complete, he summoned his audience and sat them down. After a few vigorous swipes of his bow in the empty air, he began.

Ulrich’s eyes were set on his father, who sat folded in one half of his armchair. He saw the lines gathering on his father’s forehead, and he watched the tips of his moustache rise to meet them. He thought of a stormy tangle of telegraph wires, and a flock of birds above the bars of lowered railway barriers. He thought of a set of photographs he had once seen in a bookshop, which showed the expressions induced in mental patients by the application of electric currents to the various muscles of the face. He thought of a day when he had posed with his parents in the sunlight for a photograph in front of the opera house in Vienna, the folds of his mother’s parasol ticklish against his bare legs, and his father said, ‘If only we had been conquered by the Austrians, and not by the Turks, we would have had some of this Enlightenment for ourselves,’ and Ulrich had wondered if he was talking about a kind of cake. He thought of anything but the music, and, in the middle of the waltz, a great buzzing filled his ears, and his playing simply tailed off.

His bow caught a violin string awkwardly as he lowered it, and there was a catastrophic plink. And the family sat once again in a silence punctuated only by the funereal bark of the crows outside.

His father seized the violin from Ulrich’s hand, and brandished it at his wife like a meat cleaver.

‘You bought this for him? Haven’t we talked about this before?’

His anger raised him up, and he circled the room.

‘You won’t do this, my son! I won’t have you waste your life. Musicians, artists, criminals, opium addicts … You’ll end up poor and disgraced. I won’t have it!’

As he threw the violin into the fire, Ulrich’s mother was already sobbing, and, when the sparks flew up with the impact, she howled with grief and ran from the room.

Ulrich, still holding his listless violin bow, joined his father in contemplating the incendiary demise of his instrument. He noticed that the varnish burned differently from the wood underneath — more furious, and almost white — while the copper from the bass string sent a streak of green through the conflagration. The mahogany did not burn fully, and a charred rack was left behind when the fire died down later.

The next day, Ulrich had occasion to note that the shellac from which gramophone records were made burned differently again. A broad orange, with a diffuse, sooty, pungent flame.

Ulrich was too young to imagine that his father’s opinions could be simply brushed aside. For a long time he bore a grudge against both father and music. But since the former would not be altered, he pushed the latter far down inside him where it could not cause more damage. Only in the concealed realm of his daydreams did it emerge again, inviolate.

In the rest of his life, Ulrich resolved to be more circumspect in his attachments, and to surrender them when necessary. Later on, when he saw what happened to people who refused to give up their convictions, he wondered if this is why he survived so long.

A curious fact: Ulrich’s father made an exception, in his strenuous censorship of music, for the song of birds. In fact he had an unusually passionate love of birdsong, and could recognise a hundred different species by their calls. He taught Ulrich how to imitate birdsong with whistles and throaty warbles. On such tender ground, Ulrich and his father found common cause; and his memories of the walks they took together to hear the dawn chorus remain some of the happiest of all his childhood.

4

ONE DAY, ULRICH’S FATHER came into his bedroom. He said, ‘Remember everything.’

He was dressed as a soldier.

All at once, Ulrich’s father stopped taking him for Sunday walks. His exercises. His excitement at new scientific discoveries. Buying pork at the market. He abandoned all this and became a soldier in a war.

He came into Ulrich’s bedroom and sat on the bed in his improbable uniform. He looked at his son and said, ‘Remember everything.’ When Ulrich thinks back now, he feels that he was staring into the gas lamp to examine its glare. Was there also another boy with him, crouching by his side? It seems to him there was. It was so long ago: and as he pictures it now his father is but a military silhouette to his dazzled eyes.

He has forgotten.

Those were the days of his father’s wealth, when he was admired in the city, and would strike out into the world with projects and opinions. He had travelled widely, and dressed in a way that made him seem idiosyncratic and cosmopolitan. He liked dogs and cameras. He was proud of his Russian samovar, and had many discussions with his servant about its use. He took Ulrich to the fair, and roared with delight as he soared on the swings. He attended lectures by famous scientists, and tried to reconstruct their arguments over the dinner table. He had a system of exercises to which he ascribed his vigour. He loved to travel by tram, even on the most crowded days. He saw signs in every morning’s newspaper that the world was getting better. He stood rigid in church, and irritated Elizaveta with his devotions. He requested daily letters from Ulrich, even when they were in the same house, and insisted that he learn German and French. He took him to the opening of the first cinema in Sofia. He became a soldier in a war.

‘I chose your name, Ulrich. I have always thought it sounded noble.’ He said that, too; and then he left the room in a manner that indicated he had not got what he came for. He was gone for years.

Ulrich does not know which war his father was going to on that day, since there were several at that time. But he knows he fell sick with typhus while his father was away. It was the year of the epidemic, and the disease was all around. He had seen a dead woman lying by the side of the road, and while his mother had yanked his hand and said, Don’t look, don’t look! he had turned back obstinately to look at the unhappy corpse, and wondered whose job it was to clear such things away.

But typhus was not supposed to enter clean, well-aired houses such as theirs, and Elizaveta was terrified. She burned all his clothes and filled the closets with mothballs.

Ulrich cannot recall the feeling of typhus, only the effect it had on adult faces. His eyes are burning with formalin, and the doctor sits heavily by his bed. The stethoscope is great and cold on his chest, and the medical gaze is intent behind the pince-nez, in whose steady glass the reflection of the window is two bright dancing rectangles; and, as Ulrich lies motionless, searching in the doctor’s eyes for the intuition of whether he will live or die, twin white feathers fall there, scything side to side in the miniature double sky.

When he recovered, his mother clasped him to her and said,

‘My baby. Don’t ever leave me!’

Some time after, on an evening when she had filled the Dondukov Boulevard mansion with guests, he remembers descending the broad staircase quite naked, and weaving unselfconsciously through the adult crush to find her. Seeing him so exposed, she hurried over, furious with shame, and sent him running back up the stairs.

At breakfast the next day, Ulrich had to listen to an indignant speech about how he should behave in public. His mother was too simple minded to understand that his humiliating display was intended to prove that he was innocent of the knowledge that would turn him into an adult, and take him away.

With his father’s absence came the end of their travels, and Ulrich began to attend the local school. He sat next to a boy named Boris, who had been born on the same date as he, a year before. Such a coincidence gave Ulrich a sense of predestination, which was redoubled when he discovered that his classmate played the violin.

Boris lived in a grand house where Ulrich loved to go. It had modern blinds that you raised with a cord, and a Blüthner grand piano, which Boris’s little sister could play delightfully well. There was a tree house in the garden, where you could sit looking down on the breeze in the grass. Boris’s mother was from Tbilisi in Georgia, and Ulrich thought her beautiful, with her blue eyes and black hair; she liked food, and she laughed often, and spoke with a rich accent.

In that house Ulrich discovered conversation. What he had thought to himself in his most obscure and original moments could be expressed there, for Boris was also filled up with thoughts.

One afternoon Boris took him up to the attic. Up the steep wooden stairs hidden behind an upstairs door, all dim in the afternoon, and, at their summit, the highest door of all, which opened into exotic smells and great glass sculptures in the half-light.

‘What is it?’ said Ulrich, and Boris replied that it was chemicals. There were lines of glass bottles with the emboss of skulls, as if good and evil struggled inside, and on the bench was an assemblage of glass flasks and funnels joined with rubber tubing. Mercury Bichloride, read Ulrich to himself, and the name felt considerable.

Boris’s father was interested in chemistry experimentation, though Boris could not say well what that meant.

The boys sat on the floor amid all these wonders, and Boris reported the news that his uncle had been killed in the war.

‘He didn’t look like the sort to die. If you saw him. He was always playing football with me, more like a friend.’

‘Only old people are supposed to die,’ said Ulrich. ‘Maybe when they are fifty. Not people who can still play football.’

‘He knew about every kind of animal. And now everything in his head has gone.’

Ulrich let it sink in.

‘Why was he born? Just to die when he wasn’t even married yet?’

Boris said,

‘One day I will die. And you will die as well. All these thoughts in our heads will disappear.’

Such an idea had occurred to Ulrich before, but it had never been corroborated by anyone else. It was still difficult to appreciate fully.

‘We’re just boys. We can’t die.’

‘Those boys from school died of cholera. It could have been us. Many things could happen. We could fall out of a window.’

It took some time for Boris to add,

‘We could be hit by a motor car.’

A big accident had happened the previous week in Sofia, when a speeding motor car had ploughed into a market and killed three people, and for a time no one could talk of anything else. The two boys sat in silence, imagining their tragic death under a gleaming motor car — and the thought was unutterably glamorous.

They talked on so long that they could no longer see each other’s faces. It was secret and wonderful to be in the laboratory at that forbidden time, trying to find words together in the darkness. Ulrich felt as if the blinds had been raised on the world, for when you sat with another human being and launched out into new thoughts, there could be no end to it.

Boris introduced Ulrich to the fool, Misha, who was sometimes found at the tea stall near his house. Misha wore rags and sang them strange rhymes that he made up himself. There were stories about Misha: that he was actually a Turk who had committed a terrible crime, that he had once owned a famous perfumery where princesses and dignitaries went to shop. He had a way of imitating a machine, and asked people to pull his crooked forearm to turn on the motion, which sent his body juddering violently until Ulrich and Boris exploded with laughter. He always seemed to have marbles for them in his pocket which he reached for conspiratorially and pushed into their hands, two for each, saying,

Keep them on a slope

And you’ll lose your hope!

Ulrich’s mother did not like him talking to Misha. She tolerated it until Ulrich told her that they had seen the fool tying the tails of two dogs together. The dogs could go neither forward nor back, and barked in bewilderment, the bigger one dragging the smaller one behind, while Misha warmed his hands on his fire and laughed at the startled animals until the tears cut channels in the dust of his face. Boris protested the cruelty, and cut the animals apart, but it was enough for Elizaveta to forbid Ulrich ever to talk to Misha again.

On their voyages abroad, Ulrich’s mother had always carried magnesium wire for lighting up the interiors of caves and ancient buildings. Her reserves now lay uselessly in a drawer in her study, and Ulrich would sometimes cut off a length with scissors to light up for his own amusement. He loved the white brilliance that left a black hole in his vision when he looked away, and the smoke that ribboned coolly from the ardour.

In the decades since then, Ulrich has tried to see his emerging interest in chemistry as the revisitation of his entombed love for music. It has struck him that the two have this thing in common: that an infinite range of expression can be generated from a finite number of elements. But this was not apparent to the boy who now began to quiz his friend’s father on the nature of molecules and the meaning of alkalinity. Boris’s father often answered these questions with an invitation to his laboratory, where substances were made to do startling things out of their obedience to laws. He decanted some copper sulphate solution into a small bottle for Ulrich to take home and grow blue crystals from, and he showed how you could plate steel with copper by putting electrodes in sulphuric acid. He told Ulrich affecting stories of Ernest Rutherford and Marie Curie, who had peered into the mists of the atom.

Those years all merge together in Ulrich’s mind, so he cannot remember the sequence of events. But it was certainly while they were still living in the house on Dondukov Boulevard, and while his father was still away in the army, that he first set up his chemistry laboratory.

The feeling of that laboratory still comes back to Ulrich sometimes, in the moments before sleep, when the mind is unmoored. The wooden door, rotting at its bottom, could be locked from the inside. There was a large barrel in the corner which he kept filled with water for his experiments, and a table where his beakers and retorts were lined up. At that age he read biographies of inventors, and these books were collected here, as well as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, who was a chemist and violinist as well as a detective.

The teenager who laboured there believed he would chance upon something that would change the world for ever. Ulrich had read The Time Machine by the Englishman, Wells, and many other such books, and he loved the descriptions in these stories of the rickety domestic workshops in which eccentric inventors tinkered uncertainly towards earth-shattering ideas. And though he knew little of the scientific breakthroughs that were then taking place in other parts of the world, his immature trials were not without success. His investigations of the chemical properties of discarded animal bones resulted in a powerful glue that his mother adopted, with no apparent dissatisfaction, as her sealant for letters. There was every reason to hope that in his dim shed he would one day have one of those historic moments of realisation that was the high point of all his scientists’ biographies.

When Ulrich’s classmates came to visit his laboratory, he would set up the right atmosphere by dripping sulphuric acid continually on to chalk so it bubbled and steamed. This simple magic was guaranteed to impress, and he kept his laboratory in a constant chemical haze until one winter’s day, with the windows closed, he fainted from the carbon dioxide and was discovered only just short of asphyxiation by his horrified mother. Boris was delighted when he heard the story, for Ulrich’s gimmick had always seemed ridiculous to him.

When Ulrich’s father arrived home from the war, his left trouser leg was rolled up and empty, and his ears were damaged by the shells. Ulrich watched with disbelief as his father was installed in the house like an incapable infant.

Elizaveta cleared out a disused room whose view of the garden recommended it for convalescence, and she arranged it with flower vases and ornaments. Though the family’s finances were approaching a crisis — for the war had destroyed the economy, and her husband had been away for years — she made new purchases to diminish the impact of his injuries: a wheelchair from England, for instance, and an armchair with a folding table, where she encouraged him to read and write. But these acquisitions failed to penetrate the blankness into which her husband had retreated, and all her most inspiring speeches extracted little more from him than complaints and accusations.

Ulrich knew he ought to feel pity for his father, but this emotion refused to come. In fact he found it hard not to blame him for having returned so unlike himself, and over time he began to punish him in countless insidious ways.

On one occasion, Boris came to dine with Ulrich’s family. By that time it had become clear that Boris’s musical talent was exceptional: he had been taken on at the Bulgarian State Music Academy by a famous teacher from Moravia, and had already given a number of well-received recitals around the city. As dinner was served, Ulrich chattered proudly about Boris’s musical accomplishments, shouting for the benefit of his father, who sat at the head of the table with the morose air he kept in those days. Ulrich said,

‘Boris is going to play the Mendelssohn concerto next week in the national theatre. His teacher has told him to give up everything else and to devote his life to the violin!’

His father did not look up, but bellowed deafly,

‘No more of this talk! What are your parents thinking of? You’ll fall in among criminals!’

Boris wrestled with confusion, but Ulrich looked triumphantly at him and smiled in happy complicity. In plotting this conversation, he had reasoned that what linked siblings was their sharing of the most irrational aspects of their parents’ characters; and, having exposed Boris to his father’s insanity, he could now truly consider him a brother.

Ulrich remembers that he kept, for some years, a notebook about his friendship with Boris. He felt that their sentiments for each other were so noble, and their conversations so remarkable, that everything had to be preserved for posterity. In the inevitable way of things, this notebook has disappeared, and with it the detail of those adolescent feelings. Thinking back on Boris too many times has buried him with rememberings, and turned him into a shining icon that glides unblinking through the past without smell or voice.

There is one event he can still call to mind. He was sixteen, perhaps, when the two of them were invited by other men to a foray into the brothels of Serdika. Ulrich had never been with a woman before, and was terrified; but he could not find an excuse that would pass in public, and he found himself carried along against his will to the streets of pacing men where whores beckoned from the windows. Once inside, a cudgel in his chest, there were women stacked up on the stairs, smoking and talking, their breasts peeking out, and Boris, pointing, said, ‘You like the one in green?’

Ulrich was startled by his friend’s self-possession, but the woman had already responded to the signal and led them away into a corridor with gold-framed mirrors, her pale behind clearly visible through her robe, and Boris went in ahead. Ulrich sat in the armchair outside, wretched at his own uselessness. The curtain over the doorway was inadequate to its function, and he could see the whole room through the chink, where his friend hopped on one foot then the other to pull off his boots. The woman sat on the bed, watching him coolly and removing her gown, while Boris threw off his clothes. He stood naked in the lamplight, his penis tall, and the woman pulled him close. Boris lifted her up and fell with her fully on the bed, where he kissed the breasts she offered and moaned over them and suddenly, so expertly, entered her! And there was a cold burn in Ulrich’s heart at the realisation that Boris had done this before without telling him. He stood up and ran from the brothel, not stopping till he reached home, and the refuge of his laboratory.

Perhaps that is the last memory, in fact, that Ulrich has retained from his garden laboratory, for it must have been immediately afterwards that the house on Dondukov Boulevard was sold. After it no longer belonged to his family, he used to walk past it every day on his way to school. It was later destroyed in the bombings, and now the site is occupied by a car showroom.

5

THE FAMILY MOVED INTO A HOUSE on Tsar Simeon Street. It was much smaller than the previous one, and built in the old style with clay and straw. It shared a courtyard at the back with several other houses.

A girl lived in one of these houses, whose name was Tatiana. After dinner, she used to take a lamp up to her bedroom so she could read novels, and Ulrich liked to sit at the top of the steps outside his house watching her. She spread out in a chair with her bare feet up on the windowsill, and, during the long hours when she read, Ulrich could follow the unfolding of the story in the splaying and clenching of her toes.

He decided he would make a photograph of her sitting there. He discovered the principles of glass-plate negatives, and he built a pinhole camera out of wood, sealed at the joins with tar. On one visit to Boris’s house he made an excuse to go up to the laboratory alone, and, with beating heart, he sought out the bottle of silver nitrate and purloined enough for his secret project. He knew it was wrong, but he would neither compromise his experiment nor make it public.

One evening, he set his camera up on the steps. He estimated an exposure of twenty minutes in that darkness, and he waited for Tatiana to become comfortable in her position before uncovering the tiny hole. But instead, to his alarm, she got up from her seat and came to the window, calling out to him,

‘Why do you always sit there watching me?’

Ulrich was paralysed and could not reply.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’m coming down.’

He waited for her to retreat into the house before snatching up his camera and running inside.

‘What is the matter?’ his mother asked darkly, and Ulrich could see her suspicions were aroused. He shut himself up in his room.

Later on he tried to make a print from his negative. But there was hardly any exposure, and only Tatiana’s lamp showed up, an almost indiscernible smudge in the night.

One night, when Ulrich was approaching his eighteenth birthday, Boris came to visit. Ulrich’s mother opened the door, and embraced him effusively. Boris was now fully a head taller than her. He wore his tie loose, like an artist, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Though it was quite dry, he carried an umbrella: it was his latest affectation, and he took it with him everywhere.

‘You know our house is always open to you. Just because Ulrich is going away, you mustn’t stop coming to see us. Come for dinner whenever you want. You’re part of our family. You know how proud we are of you.’

Boris smiled at her, assenting, and murmured a greeting to Ulrich’s father, who was staring in his armchair.

‘Ulrich is out in the courtyard,’ said Elizaveta. ‘He doesn’t like to sit with us in the evenings any more.’

Boris went out of the back door and climbed up to where Ulrich was perched on the steps.

‘So are you ready to leave?’ he asked stiffly. They had recently got into an argument over Ulrich’s departure, and had not spoken since. Down below, four young boys were kicking a small rubber ball around.

‘I still have another week.’

‘I suppose so.’

Boris offered a cigarette. Ulrich shook his head, and Boris lit one himself. He tried to lighten Ulrich’s mood:

‘When you come back, can you bring a chorus girl from the Admiralspalast? That can be your gift to me. I met a trumpet player who told me Berlin girls are like a more evolved species. They do things that Bulgarian girls won’t be able to imagine for centuries.’

Ulrich said nothing. Sometimes Boris irritated him. The boys downstairs shrieked in dispute over a goal.

Boris sighed smokily. He said,

‘What are you going to do in Berlin? Day to day.’

‘I’ll study. Do my experiments. I’ll go to lectures by Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst. I’ll live and breathe chemistry. I want nothing else.’

‘I still don’t understand why you couldn’t stay here and study.’

‘I’ve already told you: there’s no chemistry in Sofia. If you want to learn chemistry you have to go to Germany. They invented chemistry, and they lead the world.’

‘They lead the world with oppression. Their chemical companies are great tentacled monsters, exploiting the poor of all nations, and making fuel for wars.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. German chemical companies are saving lives every day with their new cures and treatments.’

‘I know Bayer invented mustard gas. Is that the kind of cure you mean?’

‘Why can’t you see the good in anything?’ exclaimed Ulrich. ‘A great new age is being born through chemistry. Polymers. That’s what they’ve discovered in Berlin: long carbon molecules they can use to make furniture, utensils and houses. It is all completely new, and society will be better for it. One day you’ll understand.’

Their arguments were often like this. They were still young, and they spoke sententiously, reproducing opinions they had read or heard.

Boris was watching the sport in the courtyard, his long hair over his eyes, his cigarette burned down to his lips. He had his hand tucked in his belt, as he often did. He said nothing to Ulrich’s outburst. He wanted to tell a story.

‘Last night I went with Georgi to see this Yiddish theatre troupe from Prague. The story was absurd: people were beheaded and shot and set on fire, there were love affairs, and a scene with Lenin and Mussolini which had us shrieking on the floor. The female characters were played by men with enormous lipstick but there was one woman in the troupe, a beautiful Jewess, and the climax of the play comes when she is taking a bath in red wine: she’s dragged naked from her bathtub and viciously raped by a group of marauders. But this Jewess was a magnificent presence and the other actors were too timid to touch her, so she just lay in her bath, waiting for them to rape her, and nothing happened! I’ve never laughed so much in all my life. After the play we went to the house of an artist named Mircho. He had a large collection of high-quality liquor, to which I paid due respect, and there was excellent gossip about society men, there was a little dog barking all night, which for some reason seemed hilarious, and the women were pretty, and a man recited Latin poems that were apparently very erotic. After a well-planned sequence of manoeuvres, I ended up sitting next to the Jewess: I was so close I could smell her washed-off make-up, and she touched my arm when she spoke. She was a jewel! She had dramatic gestures: she would spread a long-fingered hand with horror on her cheek, or cover her breasts with her handkerchief. She sang Bohemian love songs and told comic stories from her travels. Someone had a violin, so I played a folk dance for her, which she admired, though I’m sure by that time I had no control over my fingers at all. I offered to show her around Sofia, and she said, Next time I come! Then a photographer arrived, it was already the early hours, he had printed the photographs from the performance, some exquisite ones of her under the lights, and I asked her for one, which she gave me and signed it on the back.’

He took the photograph out of his pocket.

‘Look at this.’

‘God,’ said Ulrich. ‘She is lovely.’

‘Yes. And look.’

He turned the photograph over and read:

‘For Boris. Next time we make music together! Ida.’

Ulrich contemplated the handwriting for a moment.

‘She is much older than you,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Boris, joyous.

The stars were bright overhead, and fireflies glimmered.

‘Look what else is written there,’ said Ulrich, bending close. He indicated with his finger where the photographic paper was embossed with the manufacturer’s name.

‘Agfa,’ he said.

Boris sighed. He ran his hands through his hair. He said,

‘I have to tell you: I’ve given up playing music.’

Ulrich looked at him in disbelief.

‘Why?’

‘There’s no point any more.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Ulrich. ‘Just last week you were so excited about your concert of Bach!’

‘I don’t know, Ulrich. You’re caught up in all your ideas about chemistry and I can’t talk to you about it. If you opened your eyes you’d see our society is destroying itself. Bulgaria has already lost the best of its men in the wars, and things are only getting worse. I can’t stand by and watch. Will I just throw in my lot with the nations, whose governments are more bloodthirsty with each passing day? They will end up killing us and each other. No: the only chance we have of surviving until we are old, you and I, is the international revolution. It has happened in Russia, it will come soon to Germany, and before long we will have no nations, only international socialism. Then there’ll be time for Bach. When there’s no more Bulgaria.’

Boris flicked his cigarette stub down into the courtyard. Ulrich watched the red glow skate across the pavings in the breeze, and then die.

‘This is some insanity that’s got into you.’ His voice trembled. ‘It’s not even fifteen years since Bulgaria was independent, with so much joy, and now you want to destroy it?’

‘Joy?’ cried Boris, with unpleasant emphasis. ‘You borrow everything you say from other people; you don’t see anything for yourself. Is your father joyful since he lost his leg and everything he worked for? Did the independent nation thank him after it had sucked out everything he had? The truth is there in your own household, and you cannot see it: nations are steel boilers pitching madly with our soft flesh inside. I cannot think of anything that was not much better when we were just a territory in the empire, scratching our backsides for entertainment. And it will not be better again until we have abolished this Bulgaria, and all the other killing machines.’

‘And for this you’ll give up your violin?’ said Ulrich. ‘You’re an idiot. You could do much more for the world with your music.’

Down below a mother banged a spoon on the kitchen window to summon her sons in from their game. It was early in the year, and still cold outside, and her boiling pot had steamed up the window.

Boris took a magazine from inside his jacket. There was a bloated capitalist on the cover, stifling houses and factory chimneys in his enormous arms. There was jagged geometry, and words split up at different angles.

‘Have you heard of Geo Milev?’ Boris asked.

‘I heard he’s a dangerous man.’

‘He’s a genius! A bloodstained lantern with shattered windows. That’s what he wrote after he lost half his skull in the war. One of his eyes has gone and he’s completely without fear. He’s a true poet and revolutionary, and he’s asked me to write for his magazine. This is where I’m going to devote myself.’

‘You’ll be lucky if you don’t get yourself killed.’

‘We die anyway. At least this way there’s hope.’

‘These people have poisoned your mind!’ said Ulrich. ‘I couldn’t stand it if you didn’t play the violin. I only live it through you.’

‘Oh, don’t be such a child!’

Boris’s face was contorted with anger.

‘Damn you, Ulrich! Until you wake up and take a look at the world around you I have nothing to say to you.’

Boris stood up and went down to the courtyard below, step by step.

‘I warn you: when you arrive in Berlin you’ll find the crisis even more advanced than here.’

And with that, he walked out of the gate.

Ulrich sat for a while, watching candles illuminate the upper rooms around the courtyard. He did not call on Boris before his departure for Berlin.

His father had roused himself from his deafness to oppose it.

‘What use is chemistry in this town?’ he raged. ‘Do you see any opportunities here? Our family will starve for this chemistry.’

But Elizaveta supported him. She shouted in her husband’s ear, as she had to in those days,

‘You must let him grow up in his times, my dear. How did your father make his money? With his pig-farming! And look at you, an engineer, a railway builder, a man of the modern world. Have you lost your hope of the future? Look at Germany now with its chemical industry. Do you think things will not improve and it will not spread everywhere? He will be a pioneer in our country, as you were. You know his passion for the subject.’

Ulrich’s father gave in. He sent his son off to the University of Berlin to study chemistry, and, with this last-ditch investment, hoped he might hold the old world together.

Carbon

6

ULRICH PREPARES TO FRY SOME POTATOES. Even without his eyes, he is capable of that much, and on this day, his neighbour has failed to come with food.

It is a long time since he has cooked anything. He puts his hand into the plastic bag, and withdraws it with a shock. It has been months, and the tubers have sprouted into a blind underworld tangle, which provokes disgust in him, unexpectedly intense.

He throws the bag out, and eats instead from a tin of beans, which he does not bother to heat.

Ulrich’s kitchen activities are mostly restricted, these days, to the making of morning tea. It is a ritual he has stuck to for most of his life, and he still uses the same cup, only survivor of a once-complete tea set. For many years he has held this hot cup in the morning, and it has given him the resolve to put the night away.

He switches on his television for a bit of sound to eat his beans by.

He is irritated by the weather programmes that come on the international channels. Ignorant people judging the world’s weather. In that place it will be a nice day because there is pure sunshine. They estimate a nice day as when you can sit outside in sunglasses and drink coffee that no normal person can afford. Their minds cannot consider that a place is full of people cursing because there is no rain. They say: There it will be a nice sunny day today. Or: There they will have to suffer rain. What do they drink, these people? he thinks.

And here there has not been rain for so long.

He hears explosions: there is another war in Iraq, and now Bulgaria is sending troops to assist the Americans in their occupation. He pictures the journeys of his childhood, when Baghdad was part of his family, when his father strived to connect that great city with silver rails to Berlin. He thinks of his dead mother, who would be driven mad if she knew of her country’s assault on those places she loved so much. How time changes things, he thinks: making people forget who they were, and turning them against their own kind.

He switches the channel.

It is a science documentary, and Ulrich hears how the world has far more computing capacity than it needs. Most computers are idle for most of the time. He hears that when a modern computer is idle it switches into a reverie, and displays on the screen a meditative pattern, like fishes swimming, or whizzing stars, or geometric designs. At any one moment, most computers in the world are occupied in this way. They sit alone in dark, after-hour offices, considering the movement of fish or the emptiness of space.

Ulrich thinks about a planet full of computers with nothing to do except daydream.

In his own idle moments, Ulrich makes lists in his head. He makes lists of journeys he has made, and animals he has eaten. Making lists gives him a sense that he is in command of his experiences. It helps him to feel he is real.

He makes lists of the pills he has to take each day, though in reality it is his neighbour who takes the responsibility. She draws up grids that she pins to the cupboard door to remind herself, and she walks back and forth to check them as she pours out the pills, because she is never sure. Her step is uneven as she goes, and the floor creaks with the heaviness of one side, the left or the right. She has referred before to problems with her legs, but Ulrich does not know exactly what is wrong.

He has a strong feeling about the calendars that she makes: they seem like divine plans, sustaining him in life.

‘I cannot die yet,’ he jokes with her as she draws them, ‘or who will take all those pills?’

He has many more lists. He makes a list of activities that, when they have been proposed to him, have always triggered the thought ‘That is not for me’. A list of things he would tell his son about himself, if he ever saw him. A list of things he never enjoyed, though he always said he did. A list of things that comprise, in his view, the minimal requirements for a happy life. He makes a list of his possessions, as if it were a will:

Item: One armchair. Item: One television. Item: One writing desk. Item: Two photograph albums with photographs. Item: Books, assorted. Item: Gramophone records, assorted. Item: Gramophone player. Item: One bed. Item: Kitchen utensils, various. Item: Clothes, various. Item: Tools, various.

There are several things he does not include. Paint, ashtrays, various kinds of string and sewing thread, medical supplies, writing ink, cleaning fluids, playing cards. There is a host of objects like this that seem too insignificant to be part of a list.

7

SOME DECADES BEFORE Ulrich arrived in Berlin, German scientists made a philosophical leap that would change history. They rejected the idea that life is a unique and mystical essence, with different qualities from everything else in the universe. They reasoned instead that living things were only chemical machines, and they speculated that with enough research, chemical laboratories could emulate life itself.

They began to experiment with making medicines, not merely from trees or plants, but from man-made chemicals. A triumph came in 1897, in the laboratories of the chemical company Bayer, when chemists observed several positive effects of the first synthetic drug: aspirin. Not long afterwards, the chemist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for the sleeping sickness that devastated his compatriots in the German Congo, injected infected mice with hundreds of different chemicals until he found that an industrial dye cured the disease — and so discovered the first antibiotic. Ehrlich coined the term ‘chemotherapy’ to describe the great new work he had started off.

German scientists also wanted to see whether chemical laboratories could make materials that were usually found only in nature. The world was running out of natural nitrogen deposits, for instance, and agriculturalists were concerned about how they would continue to fertilise crops. Populations were exploding. Doomsayers began to warn of imminent famine, and people dying off in swathes. The Berlin chemist Fritz Haber began to seek a chemical solution to this problem. Working with BASF, he discovered a way of fixing the enormous supplies of nitrogen in the air, and turning them into ammonia for fertilisers. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and a large fortune, and the newspapers called him the saviour of the human race.

When its empire was taken away after the First World War, Germany was deprived of access to essential raw materials. It was set far behind Britain, which could take all the Malayan rubber it wanted, and Middle Eastern oil. Germany’s chemical firms — BASF, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Casella, and the rest — were consolidated into a vast chemical cartel, I. G. Farben, whose objective was to produce chemical versions of these lacking natural resources.

Farben’s synthetic rubber and oil technologies soon became the envy of the world. Within a few years, it was the largest corporation in Europe, with stakes in oil companies, steelworks, armaments manufacturers, banks and newspapers — in Germany and across the globe. It had its own mines for coal, magnesite, gypsum and salt, and cartel arrangements with leading American companies DuPont, Alcoa and Dow Chemical.

It was in Farben’s laboratories that a chemist named Hermann Staudinger, while attempting to synthesise natural rubber, first hypothesised that there might exist molecules much more extensive than any hitherto imagined. These giant molecules, he suggested, would be arranged in mobile, chain-like structures, which explained the unusual flexibility of rubber. Staudinger’s work on polymers won him a Nobel Prize, and set the course for a new direction in chemistry: the development of plastics.

This new area of innovation transformed the human environment. Until that era, every human being had lived among the same surfaces: wood, stone, iron, paper, glass. Suddenly, there emerged a host of extraterrestrial substances that produced bodily sensations that no one had ever experienced before.

This was the production that Ulrich wished to be a part of.

When Ulrich arrived in Berlin he realised immediately he had walked in upon the wonder of his age. Berlin was the capital of world science, which lifted him upon its tremendous current, and made him certain of his own great future. But Berlin was also the studio of mighty artists and musicians. Bertolt Brecht was there, Marlene Dietrich and Fritz Lang. It was a carnival of boxing, jazz and cabaret.

Later on, after Ulrich left it, this miraculous metropolis ceased to exist. With the next war, old Berlin was gutted, tossed away and forgotten, and it sank into forgetful waters, until only a few bent tips were visible above the surface, twitching with the bad dreams below.

This has had a curious effect on Ulrich’s memories of the time he spent in that city. They do not hang together, or fall into sequence, because they were later scattered like refugees, and were forced to take shelter in other times and places. Some of them were lost entirely in the great dispersal.

Ulrich tries to assemble the remnants into one place.

Item

How lovely was the Jewish girl, Clara Blum, who took notes in the chemistry lecture with her left hand.

Item

As a boy Ulrich had wandered so many times among the parasols and dogs of Unter den Linden, but now there were staring, mutilated soldiers and penniless refugees. The men in Berlin had lost more limbs than the men at home.

Item

He saw Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst. Their thought was so clear it was terrifying, and Ulrich felt reborn with every lecture he attended. He often struggled to follow their theories. But he loved them because they were also practical men who reminded him of the old-fashioned inventors he had read about as a child. In his spare time, Walther Nernst applied himself to such tasks as the invention of light bulbs and the development of an electric piano. Fritz Haber, whose chemical weapons had failed to achieve a German victory in the war, was looking for a method to pay off his country’s war debts by distilling gold from the sea.

Item

Clara Blum had a habit of reading books as she walked in the street.

Item

Ulrich was afraid of spending money, for his father’s wealth was already exhausted by his university fees. But there was an irresistible world of jazz in Berlin, and Ulrich fell in love with the new sounds as deeply as he had once fallen in love with Gypsy music. He could not keep himself out of debt.

Item

In one of Max Planck’s lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country of atoms.

Item

He took Clara Blum to his room. He had set up a long glass tube with holes drilled along the top. He had removed the horn from a gramophone player and led a pipe from there into one end of the glass tube, while in the other end was a supply of methane. ‘Watch,’ he said, lighting the holes so there was an even line of flames. Then he set the record going and a Beethoven symphony was fed into the glass tube. The sound waves in the tube bunched the gas and the flames dancing on top were arranged as a graph of the symphony. And Clara Blum laughed gaily with his gimmick, and begged to see a hundred other pieces of music in fire.

Item

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

Item

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’.

Item

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!

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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

Item

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

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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!’

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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.

Item

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 leather 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.’

They made to depart. Magdalena was still playing the piano, now some modern work that Ulrich did not know. It was strident and brave, and he looked towards the closed door. Boris smiled.

‘Let me call her.’

She came out of the room, her shirtsleeves rolled up.

‘Goodbye, Magdalena,’ said Ulrich, and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Goodbye!’ she said. She came to the door as they stepped out into the street, and she called after Ulrich,

‘We are all so happy to have you back.’

They wandered through the square around the Alexander Nevski church, whose vastness made it tranquil in spite of the remaining trinket sellers, and the packs of roaming youths. The golden domes were lit up, and the moon shone overhead, almost full.

‘Do you remember this, Ulrich? Berlin hasn’t crushed your memories?’

‘It’s coming back.’

Boris carried an umbrella, the same one from the old days.

‘I haven’t been to Berlin. Or anywhere very much. But I think nowhere else has this altitude. I still love the way that you can look down our streets in the afternoon and see them walled off by cloud. That’s when you feel that the city lives up to its name. A city called Wisdom should float on clouds.’

‘What about a city called Murder?’ offered Georgi. ‘That would need a veil around it.’

Boris sniggered boyishly.

‘Georgi pretends he’s a revolutionary,’ he said. ‘But look at the quality of his suit. His father owns coal mines: you should see the house they have. Even the flies wipe their feet before they go in there.’

Georgi scowled.

‘Have you seen the police?’ Boris asked. ‘Lining every street? That must be new for you. Everywhere you go they’re watching. You should see them when they give chase on horseback. I never realised what a powerful formation was a man on a horse until I saw a poor wretch being chased down in the street. Three hissing men on horses with pistols and raised batons — it was a terrifying sight. They beat him senseless.’

Boris led them down a narrow passageway and through a courtyard. They entered a grimy bar where the wall lights had red handkerchiefs tied around them for atmosphere. They sat down, and Boris called for beer. He looked expectantly at Ulrich.

‘So now. Tell us everything about Berlin.’

Ulrich had been looking forward to this moment, but did not know how to begin.

The sullen barmaid brought a tray of beer. At the next table the men played cards, roaring with victory and defeat. The barmaid said,

‘I hope this time you have money to pay?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ replied Boris humorously.

They raised glasses. Over the lip Ulrich watched Georgi, whose face became a sneer when he puckered to drink.

There was a loud exclamation at the door, and a large man came bellowing to their table, his arms theatrically spread. Boris gave a broad smile, and stood for the embrace.

‘You’re here! You’re back!’ he cried.

The man shook hands with Georgi and Ulrich, and sat down. He was red faced and ebullient, and talked a lot about his journeys.

The air was thick with vapours: tobacco smoke, and the smoke from the paraffin lamps that had left such ancient black circles on the ceiling. An old man played an out-of-tune piano that had been wedged in behind the entrance so that the door hit it every time someone entered. The red-faced man was saying,

‘Everywhere I went I saw him. First he was looking pointedly at me in a bar in Budapest. Then he was waiting when I came out of a meeting in Vienna. Then, a few days later, I spotted him at my elbow while I watched two men fighting in the street in Bucharest. And every time I caught sight of him, he looked away. I thought he was secret services: I couldn’t understand how they’d got on to me.’

The man was entirely bald, and, as he talked, Ulrich wondered at how the mobility of his lined, arching forehead stopped suddenly and gave way to the utter inexpressive smoothness of his pate.

‘Then I saw the bastard here in Sofia, sitting calmly in a café, and for once he hadn’t seen me. I listened in to his conversation and I realised he was a revolutionary like me. He’s from Plovdiv, would you believe? Now we’re great friends. Turns out he was even more scared of me than I was of him!’

Two other men joined their table, and more beer came. The table was soaked with spilt drink. A large group of people, actors evidently, came into the bar and took over two more tables; and now the noise of arguments and conversations became such that you could hardly hear the person next to you. One man brought out some dog-eared pages from his pocket, offering to read his poems, but everyone protested scornfully.

Boris’s face was shiny in the close air. He asked Ulrich something inconsequential, and Ulrich soon found himself discoursing about music. He told him about jazz, which Boris had never seen; he described the shows in Berlin, and explained about Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. ‘If only you could have been there,’ he kept saying, because he could not find words to convey the music. He told him about the women who dressed as men and the men who dressed as women, and how no one took any notice in Berlin when they saw lovers of the same sex, for everything was possible in that place. There were people from all over the world, and all they cared about was to do things as well as human beings could do them.

He said,

‘I saw Leopold Godowsky play. I am convinced he is the most spectacular pianist in the world: he piled his own embellishments upon Liszt. He’s a little man, with small hands. Albert Einstein was in the audience, just a few rows in front of me.’

Boris was impressed by Einstein, and Ulrich went on happily with other anecdotes about the scientist. In his gesticulations he sent flying a full glass of beer, and the man next to him had to mop his thighs. The group at the table was large by now, and the red-faced man was telling another story.

‘The whole Russian army comes through Sofia on its way to fight the Turks. And they see my father, a nine-year-old boy, and take him off with them to war. And they beat the Turks and they bring the boy back to Sofia and say, Boy, you’ve served us well. Tell us what you’d like to be and we will help. They expect him to say, A general, or something like that. But he says, A cook. And the men all laugh, but the boy sticks to his guns so the Russian soldiers, good as their word, take him to Petersburg to work in the tsar’s kitchen.’

More beer came, and the red light began to curdle: Georgi’s face looked almost green in the corner. Ulrich watched the woman behind the bar, who used it to rest her breasts on. She made evident her displeasure when a customer ordered a drink and obliged her to haul them away again.

‘My father works his way up over the years and becomes a great cook, and when our independence comes around, Tsar Nicholas wonders what he can give to the Bulgarian king in congratulation, remembers that my father is from Sofia, and sends him. So my father becomes the Bulgarian royal chef.’

A young woman sat down next to Ulrich and introduced herself as Else; they talked about why they both had German names. She was pretty, but he did not like the prominence of her gums. Her stockings were full of holes.

‘So — listen! — so the years go by. My brother and I grow up. My father makes good money and he builds himself a house in the Centrum, the first two-storey house on the street. The new king comes in, and hears rumours of his chef’s wayward sons. He says he would like to come and see the house. So my father brings the king to Ovche Pole Street and shows him, and the king asks him how much it cost. My father works in a good margin and says that all in all it cost around twenty-five gold napoleons, and the king takes the money from his purse and gives it to him. And it’s obvious what the money says: You and I both know that no one can kill me more easily than you. So don’t forget it was I who bought you your house.’

Amid the hubbub, Else smoked unhappy cigarettes and told Ulrich that the girl who used to work here was coming back and she, Else, would be out of a job. The other girl had a more attractive body than she, and this thought made Else melancholy. She asked Ulrich whether he would go upstairs with her and he declined, so she slipped away to another table.

‘My brother keeps company with revolutionaries and he keeps falling into scrapes. The king covers it up each time, but he tells my father, You have to control those boys because I can’t protect them for ever. One night two foreigners come into a restaurant and start to harass the girl my brother is courting, who’s having dinner with her mother. Word gets to him and he comes down and shoots both the foreigners dead. Everyone sees it, and most people support him, though it was an extreme response. But the king says, This time you have to get that boy out of the country. Otherwise I’ll have him killed. My father sells some land, gives him the money, tells him to go to Paris, live a good life and never come back.’

Boris was talking to the people on his other side. There was a chorus of shouts at the other end of the bar, where an old singer was sitting. A crowd was pleading with her to perform. The red-faced man took a sip of beer and resumed his story.

‘So last week — he’s only been gone ten months, hasn’t written a single letter since he left — last week he appears at the door, says he’s spent everything and he’s got nowhere else to go. I asked him a thousand times what he’s done with the money but he couldn’t account for it. Paris is full of Bulgarians, apparently, and he fell straight into a high life. His lover was a Romanian princess who loved gambling, and it all seems to have left him with a perpetual smile on his face. That’s what sends my father close to apoplexy.’

There was laughter all round, and people raised glasses to the obstinate rake.

‘So I tell this idiot he has to leave. Does he realise what he’s doing, coming back here with things as they are? He takes no notice, he’s out every night, and eventually he doesn’t come home. They found him face down in the river yesterday morning. The king was as good as his word.’

They fell silent. Someone murmured,

‘Bastard.’

On the other side of the bar, the folk singer had agreed to sing, and there was enthusiastic applause as she made her way to the piano. She had lost nearly all her teeth. Her companion tuned his violin. Ulrich had a glass wedged between his knees, and Boris clinked it to rouse him from his reverie. He said,

‘Did you meet any girls?’

His eyes were velvet with drink, and a tinnitus started up in Ulrich’s ears as he told the story of Clara Blum. Boris shook his head as he listened. He said,

‘Why have you come back, Ulrich? You love this woman and you’ve left her there. You’ve sacrificed this chemistry degree, which was all you ever dreamed of. What are you thinking?’

‘What could I do?’ asked Ulrich fiercely. ‘There’s no more money to keep me there: that’s the clear reality. You should have seen what my mother wrote to me. Surely you can imagine what it’s like when you hear your mother in despair? I have no choice but to stay here and help her.’

‘Reality is never clear,’ said Boris. ‘It’s never final. You can always change it or see it a different way. If you’d asked me for money I would have given it to you. I want you to become a great chemist, not to sit around here in Sofia. This place is a disaster. You should have asked me, and my father would have sent you money. He’s still got more money than he knows what to do with.’

Ulrich stopped short, for he had never considered such a thing. Boris said,

‘You never once wrote to me from Berlin, as if you broke everything off as soon as you left. And now you’ve given up your degree and this wonderful woman. It’s as if you’re never truly attached to anything. Except your mother, perhaps.’

Ulrich felt foolish. He made a silent resolution to solve future dilemmas by imagining what Boris would say. He said weakly,

‘Well, there’s nothing I can do now.’

Boris drew curly lines with his finger in the beer on the table, extending the reflections of the lamps. The folk singer began to sing, and the bar became hushed. She had a deep, raspy voice, but sang with great sensitivity:

There sat three girls, three friends,

Embroidering aprons and crying tiny tears,

And they asked each other who loved whom.

Boris said,

‘What do you think of Georgi?’

‘He has a vicious face.’

Boris laughed.

‘I knew you wouldn’t like him,’ he said. ‘The strange thing about Georgi is that he holds a devilish attraction for women. You and I would think, with those teeth and that face, he’d have to make a big effort. But Georgi treats women with contempt, and they still fall over themselves to get him. I can never understand it.’

The first said: ‘I love a shepherd.’

The second one said: ‘I love a villager.’

Boris said under the music:

‘Do you remember the conversation we had before you left? When I came to your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve thought of it very often. I was wrong. You were right.’

Ulrich was taken aback. Boris added,

‘I sometimes wonder if I should not just have carried on playing music.’

To Ulrich’s astonishment, Boris’s eyes began to overflow with tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. He wiped his face.

The third one said, ‘I love a huge dragon.

He comes to me in the evening,

In the middle of the night.

He lightly knocks and he lightly enters

So that no one will hear him

So that no one will know.

‘Things can’t continue as they are,’ said Ulrich, trying to help. Boris gave a doubtful smile.

This evening the dragon will come,

He will come to take me away.’

Georgi came over.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to Boris. ‘It’s very late.’

Boris dropped an offering of coins among the glasses and shook a man whose head was collapsed upon the table. The man would not stir. They left the gathering, pushing through the crowd of people waiting for the musicians’ next song, and made for the door. Outside, the night was cool, and with the air on their necks they realised how drunk they were.

‘He wouldn’t even wake up!’ said Boris, who was suddenly overcome with giggles. ‘He couldn’t raise his head to say goodbye!’

Ulrich had no thought of returning home, and walked where they led him. Georgi said to Boris,

‘He can’t come with us.’

‘Why not?’

‘My room is secret. No one goes there.’

Boris put his arm around Ulrich.

‘He will come with us!’

Georgi was unhappy, and walked ahead. Boris sang with drunken sentimentality,

This evening the dragon will come,

He will come to take me away.

The street was empty, and the echo of their footsteps ricocheted between the rows of houses. Men dozed under fruit barrows, and horses slumbered by a line of caravans. On the steps outside a church, a man was sitting patiently with wakeful eyes, and, seeing him, Ulrich felt a wave of happiness. He said to Boris,

‘Soon we’ll go for a long walk, and I’ll tell you everything!’

There were bats overhead, and a sense of life pent up behind locked doors. Cats wailed.

Ulrich said,

‘Did you ever see Ida? The Jewess?’

‘No. I never heard from her again.’ Boris laughed loudly. ‘And you? Did you see the angels in the Admiralspalast?’

‘I did. Everything you said was true.’

Boris screamed with joy. He called out to Georgi in the distance,

‘Georgi! Let’s all go away to the country! We’ll find some pretty girls. We’ll take books and keep some pigs. I’ll get my violin out again!’

They came to a gate, which surrendered to their drunken rattling, and climbed two lurching flights of stairs. They arrived in Georgi’s room, the ringing worse than ever in Ulrich’s ears. Georgi lay straight down on one of the beds in his clothes and boots and went to sleep.

Belatedly, Ulrich realised.

‘That man we saw. Outside the church. It was Misha the fool.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I knew I recognised him. I’m sure of it.’

‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

Boris took a swig from a bottle of brandy.

‘I’m sure of it,’ Ulrich repeated, and they fell together on the narrow bunk in a dreamless embrace that lasted until the next afternoon.

9

TWO DAYS LATER, Boris was arrested for sedition, and executed.

The police went out in force, with names and addresses, and many were taken in. Georgi was arrested too, and thrown into jail.

Afterwards, the police sent word to Boris’s parents that his body was available for collection.

When the coffin was lowered into the earth, Magdalena and her mother collapsed simultaneously into their skirts.

Ulrich walked home afterwards with his parents. Elizaveta was disabled by it.

‘I loved that boy,’ she kept saying. ‘I loved that boy.’

She forbade Ulrich from going out, fearing that something might happen to him, too. But when evening came he could not stay shut up any more. He ran to Boris’s house.

A storm had come up suddenly, and unfastened shutters banged. He battled through a wind so fierce that the entire sky was too small a pipe for it, and the air groaned in its confines.

Outside Boris’s house was a crowd of street people. Magdalena stood in front, handing out clothes, while her mother wept on the steps. Boris’s shrunken father watched from an upstairs window.

‘Ulrich!’ cried Magdalena when she saw him, and she threw herself at his chest.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘I’m giving away his clothes.’

She had brought everything out of the house. Jackets, shirts and sweaters flapped in the gale. Ulrich could not bear to see it all disappear.

‘So his warmth stays alive,’ she said. ‘Look how many have come.’

Ulrich saw Misha in the crowd and, for the first time, burst into tears. The fool approached him. He secreted two cold marbles in Ulrich’s hands.

‘I did not know that fish could drown. Those marbles were his eyes.’

It began to rain. The people dispersed, only a scattering of unwanted shirt collars and neckties left on the ground. Magdalena went into the house and emerged with Boris’s umbrella.

‘Let’s walk,’ she said.

‘But it’s late.’

She ignored him.

The storm became stupendous. She led him, pulling his arm, and they found a place for sex. There were no lips, no hands, no hair: just genitals. In the tumult, the umbrella blew away and they were entirely exposed under the flashes. Her skirt was at her thighs and she screamed: not with the sex, but with its insufficiency. Over her shoulder, Ulrich saw a man watching them from his shelter in a doorway, and he felt ashamed. He sank to the floor, sobbing in the downpour.

‘No,’ he said.

She stared at him in disbelief, untrussing her skirt.

‘You know how much I need you,’ she shrieked into the tempest.

She beat his head with her fists, and ran away, clacking and splashing on the street. He pulled up his trousers and retrieved the umbrella from the iron fence where it had lodged. When he reached the main road she had disappeared.

Disturbed crows were wheeling overhead, their wet wings slapping ineffectually at the air.

He did not know where to escape to. The city was suddenly without dimension, like a whipped-up ocean, and the umbrella, in this horizontal torrent, a flailing superfluity. He arrived finally at the bar where they had been two nights earlier. He found Else, the guileless prostitute, and took her upstairs. She was alarmed at his inconsiderate, uncouth pounding, but he did not stop until the barmaid knocked angrily at the door, complaining of the noise and the hour, and he grabbed his clothes and went home.

For a long time, Ulrich avoided all places where he might run the risk of meeting any member of Boris’s family.

Many years later, Ulrich heard a story about the great pianist, Leopold Godowsky, whom he had once seen in Berlin playing the music of Franz Liszt.

Leopold Godowsky was born in Lithuania but spent his life in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and then New York. He had a gift for friendship and hospitality, and, wherever he lived, his home became a centre for artists and thinkers. His friends included Caruso, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Chaplin, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Gide, Matisse, Ravel — and Albert Einstein.

Godowsky was one of those people who are born to do one thing, and when a stroke rendered his right hand useless for piano playing, he fell into a deep depression. He never played in public again.

During his final unhappy years in New York, Godowsky saw Einstein frequently, as the scientist had moved from Berlin to nearby Princeton.

Leopold Godowsky had an Italian barber in New York, named Caruso. Caruso was a great follower of Einstein, and when he discovered that his customer, Godowsky, knew him personally, he begged him to bring the famous man to his shop. Each time Godowsky saw Einstein, he told him that Caruso the barber wanted to meet him, and Einstein each time agreed to go and see the man whenever he was next in the city. With one thing and another, however, the visit never took place.

Eventually, Godowsky died. When the news reached Einstein at Princeton he did not say a word. He immediately picked up his hat and coat, took the first train to New York, and went to visit Caruso at his barbershop.

Ulrich thinks back, sometimes, to the conversation he had with Boris in that attic laboratory so long ago, when they discussed the news of an uncle who had died. He feels that he did not ever progress far beyond his childhood bewilderment, and is ashamed of the inadequacy he always felt in the face of death. He has always been affected by stories of people who knew precisely how to respond when a person has died.

Perhaps it is because his behaviour after Boris’s death fell so short of the mark that the terrible finality of it never truly settled.

Whenever he thinks back to his wedding day, he remembers the smile on Boris’s face, and the way his hand was tucked in the belt of his green army uniform. But such a thing is impossible: for Boris had been dead for years by then — and he would never have worn army clothes. There are many other memories like that, which have all the flesh of terrestrial recollections, but must have slipped in somehow from another world.

10

ULRICH THREW HIMSELF into his bookkeeping at the leather company. It was not the kind of work he had imagined for himself, but the sense of finitude he discovered there turned out to be a surprising relief. When he immersed himself in grids of numbers, every ache in his head went away. He developed a knack for spotting the errors in a page of figures with just a casual glance, and he traced several routes to every total to ensure the computation was robust. He became notorious among his subordinates for spotting even the most trivial lapse, and asking them to do the work again. He delivered the completed books at the same time every day to the office of Ivan Stefanov, the son of the owner, and, when his work was finished, he applied himself to the greater task of overhauling the bookkeeping systems to make them more accurate and efficient. Ivan Stefanov, who was bored by procedure, was delighted by Ulrich’s devotion to it, and quickly promoted him to financial controller, a post that carried with it an office with his name on the door, and a fully enclosed desk.

When his thoughts were not occupied with bookkeeping, Ulrich could not prevent himself wondering how so much had been snatched away from him so fast. He tried to deny it had happened: he played tricks on himself, marking time in Sofia by the timetable in his Berlin diary, full of far-off lectures and exams. He even chose to ask directions around his home town, and feigned gaps in his Bulgarian speech — as if he were an outsider here, who might be called away at any moment. He lay awake at night, completing in his head his thesis on plastic fibres in time for the deadline, which passed unobtrusively by.

In Sofia there was no one who understood the scientific wonder he had left behind, and it became like a heavy secret he could only dwell on alone. He maintained an archive of Berlin science, full of notes and news clippings about the people he had encountered there. Every year he added to the list he kept of all his Berlin teachers and colleagues who won the Nobel Prize — an award that always held enormous allure for him. But as time passed, his ponderous rehearsals became detached from any reality of Berlin, which had moved on without him. His peers graduated, and moved on to more advanced things. New chemical discoveries were made every day, which Ulrich knew nothing of.

Clara Blum began to teach chemistry at the University of Berlin, and married one of her colleagues in the department. Ulrich had to hear it from someone else, for she had broken off all contact when she realised he was never coming back.

Meanwhile, in the cramped space of Ulrich’s Sofia home, his father sat in his chair, showing fewer and fewer signs of life. His leg stump became regularly infected, and every few months a little bit more had to be shaved off the end. And his deafness became more pronounced with the years, until he was finally delivered from the music he disliked so much. When he could no longer hear at all, Elizaveta erupted into a festival of song, chanting arias from Verdi to lah-lah-lah as she worked.

Ulrich took advantage of his father’s deafness, too. He found perverse satisfaction in whispering insults in his ear:

‘You whipped your son so hard into success, and look what he has become. He has come back to this godforsaken place, and now he will never be anything at all. Your son is a failure! How bitter your disappointment must be!’

His father looked at him in bewilderment, his eyes narrow under heavy brows, and he peeled off a ribbon from his tattered mind:

‘Nothing can sing like the lyrebird. It can imitate the song of every other bird. It can make the sound of branches creaking in the wind.’

Ulrich was invited to a piano recital in the house of the well-known doctor, Ivan Karamihailov, who had once been a regular associate of his father’s. He arrived directly from his work, and paid little attention to his surroundings. He waited distractedly in the audience, still preoccupied by the concerns of the day, eschewing the sociable gazes of people he knew.

He was snatched away from the accounting columns in his head when the pianist entered, and he realised that it was Magdalena. He was ashamed: he had not seen her since the night of Boris’s death, and he had convinced himself she must despise him.

She had tied her black hair back, exaggerating the exoticism of her pale skin and blue eyes. She was now approaching the age that Boris had been when he died, and the resemblance was more striking than ever.

She wore a long dress of radiant blue.

In the centre of the room was a music stand, which Magdalena picked up and moved aside so she could deliver some words to her audience. The stand was wooden, and carved in the shape of a lyre.

Against one wall stood a magnificent long-case clock, whose pendulum had been stilled so the chimes would not disturb the performance. Hanging behind the piano was a painting of a solitary man contemplating an Alpine lake.

Magdalena said,

‘I would like to dedicate my first public recital to the memory of my brother, Boris, who died two years ago on Saturday. I am delighted to see that some of his friends are here this evening.’

And Ulrich was carried away to see her smile at him, openly, and without restraint. He has kept that smile with him ever since, even as it has become progressively detached from the time and the place, and, finally, from Magdalena herself.

She sat at the piano. Ulrich watched the tightly laced black shoes that reached below for the pedals, and the narrow band of her legs that was visible beneath the blue of her dress.

Ulrich was astonished by her performance, which showed how intent she had become since he had seen her. She had become a musician, and he watched her with every kind of yearning. As she played, her toes were on the pedals, and only the point of her shoes’ long heels touched the floor. Ulrich found himself aroused by the click each time her soles made contact with the brass.

Afterwards, they walked in the garden together, and he told her about jazz, which it was impossible to hear in Sofia. She told him she had fallen in love with him long ago.

‘As a little girl I was always tender for you,’ she said. ‘And my brother told me such stories about you when you were away in Berlin. He knew you would do something wonderful: he knew he was less than you, and he put your ambition above his own. Since he’s been gone I’ve not stopped thinking of those stories.’

11

THE FRICTION OF ULRICH’S MEMORY, moving back and forth over the surface of his life, wears away all the detail — and the story becomes more bland each time.

Nowadays, Ulrich finds it difficult to remember any happy moments from his marriage to Magdalena. Whenever he stumbles upon such a memory, he adds it to a list so it will not disappear.

Item

Magdalena’s father paid for the newly wed couple to honeymoon in Georgia. She wanted Ulrich to see where her maternal family came from, and where she herself had spent many happy times. He loved Tbilisi, and her joy at showing it. Her cousins were eccentric, attentive hosts, who woke them in the middle of the night to climb into horse carts and travel for hours along mud roads just to see an old church, or a beautiful hill. Ulrich took Magdalena to see Tosca in the arabesque opera house, and their happiness was absolute.

When they emerged from their room each morning, Magdalena’s uncle made gestures to Ulrich that would have been obscene if it were not for the great generosity with which he delivered them.

After this journey to Tbilisi, Ulrich never left Bulgaria again.

Item

Ivan Stefanov invited Ulrich and Magdalena to dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding. There was a strict dress code in the Stefanov mansion, and Magdalena wore her most sumptuous gown. Gloved waiters carried lobster aloft, and each place had its own cascade of crystal glasses. Ivan was merry, and stood up to make a speech about the deep affection he had always held for Ulrich. His lugubrious aunts blinked behind diamond necklaces, and ate little. After dinner Ivan became drunk, and he kept his guests up with his ideas about the company, his gossip about his workers, and his theories about life’s various dissatisfactions. Magdalena signalled several times to Ulrich that she wished to leave, but he could not find the appropriate break in his employer’s monologue, and they did not make their exit until Ivan Stefanov fell asleep in his chair.

Item

Boris and Magdalena had grown up in luxurious surroundings, which Ulrich’s bookkeeper salary did not allow him to match. They moved into a small house on Pop Bogomil Street, near the entrance to the city. But she liked the house very much, which was a relief to Ulrich. Every time he asked her, she said that she liked it.

Item

It became a tradition with them that Magdalena came to meet Ulrich after work every Friday, and they went to hold hands over the table in a nearby cake shop. He used to watch for her arrival by the upstairs window where he worked, and every week he had the same stirring of love when he saw her come round the corner, dressed up for him, and so small she fitted inside the eye on the casement handle.

Item

Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a chemistry trick. He put a glass vial in a bowl of water, and, calling her to watch, broke it open with pliers. The bowl erupted with boiling, and a pink flame hovered over the water. Magdalena started, while Ulrich looked between the bowl and her face, incandescent himself.

‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, as it died down.

‘It’s very pretty. But what does it lead to?’

‘Oh! Something will come of it, one day.’

‘It’s childish, it seems to me.’

There was a coolness between them for the rest of the day. And yet it was on that night that their son was conceived.

Item

They were once invited to a wedding in the Jewish quarter. The guests spoke Ladino and Bulgarian both, mixed together. There was a klezmer brass orchestra, and Magdalena laughed with the music, and danced unrestrainedly with him, though she was exuberantly pregnant. She kissed him and said, I hope our baby will be Jewish.

Item

Faithful to her maternal tradition, Magdalena wanted to give their son a Georgian name. Before choosing, she called several names from the front door to see how they would sound when, in years to come, she summoned her boy from his play.

Item

Elizaveta loved Magdalena. I never expected such a wonderful daughter-in-law, she said. Her own situation was gloomy, with no money and her husband lost, and the life of the young couple gave her new joy. She came to the house with gifts she could ill afford, yodelling and prancing to delight her grandson. Early one sunny morning, when she was drinking tea with Magdalena, Ulrich came back from a walk with his son, and announced, ‘Birds don’t fly away from a man holding a baby!’ and the two women burst into laughter at the expression of awe upon his face.

Item

An upright piano was brought into the house for Magdalena to continue her practice. Nothing gave Ulrich greater happiness than to sit behind her after dinner and request his favourite pieces, one after another.

As the months drew on, Magdalena ceased to find romance in their meagre situation, and she and Ulrich were led more and more frequently into arguments.

‘When are you going to leave Ivan Stefanov and his leather company? It was supposed to be temporary, and now it’s been years. And you’re still earning the same as when you began.’

‘Think of Einstein. While he was doing his routine job in the Swiss Patent Office he managed to come up with his greatest theories. Perhaps something like that will come to me!’

He smiled bashfully, and she tutted with exasperation.

‘You’re no Einstein! And you have a wife and a son to take care of.’

At social gatherings he asked his acquaintances whether they knew of any jobs that would pay well. But his enquiries lacked conviction, and led to nothing. He said to Magdalena,

‘Perhaps I could set up a little chemistry laboratory here. Investigate some compounds in the evenings. Your father made some money that way.’

She said,

‘Ulrich! Face up to reality! Sometimes I wonder if you know what the word means.’

He looked at her strangely, and exclaimed,

‘What is reality? Is it this?’ — and he banged the table excessively, then the wall — ‘is it this?’

She waited, impassive before his transport, and he said,

‘Did your brother believe in reality? Didn’t he spend his whole time thinking about how to overthrow it?’

‘I am not my brother, Ulrich.’

One day, Ulrich arrived home with an old desk that had been discarded from the office. A colleague helped him cart it, and they carried it to the back of the house.

‘This will be my workbench!’ he announced happily to Magdalena.

‘It’s filthy,’ she said.

‘I’ll clean it. Don’t worry.’

‘There isn’t much room here. How much more junk will you bring?’

He sighed gravely.

‘Please, Magda. I need to do this.’

‘I don’t know what’s happening to the man I married.’

Ulrich took her hands and comforted her. She studied him for a long time, until tenderness flowed back into her cheeks. She put her arms round him and inhaled from his hair.

‘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 and 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:

WHILST IT IS TRUE that, since the independence of our nation, we have, by war and enforced treaty, lost great expanses of our territory to neighbouring countries, AND thousands of our fellow countrymen live under the daily oppression of foreign governments, AND our politics have descended frequently into violence and chaos which have resulted in terrible deprivations for our people, NEVERTHELESS, the decades have revealed that the Great Powers are not swayed by these sufferings, and every alliance with them has rebounded even more disastrously upon us. WE OPPOSE the alliance with Germany, whose might will never be employed to right the wrongs of our Bulgarian history, and whose use of us in the past has been responsible for many of our present ills.

When Germany invaded Poland, and the Great Powers went to war, the king tried valiantly to keep Bulgaria out of the conflict, but there was no way to hold off the inevitable. The Wehrmacht pushed through into the Balkans and overran the country, taking command of its army and industry — and humble Bulgaria found itself at war, against its will, with America, Britain and the Soviet Union.

Ulrich was sent to man an observation tower, scanning the night skies with binoculars for British and American bombers, but the bombardment, when it arrived, was mighty and irresistible. He remembers looking up into the night at the lines of planes, their bellies lit up theatrically with the explosions, the deep noise out of phase with the flashes because of the distance. He wondered how the city would look from so high, and thought it must seem unreal, like a toy, and incapable of pain.

One night, sheltering in the basement with his mother, though he had a blanket pressed to his ears to protect his hearing, he heard a terrible screeching outside, inhuman and uncouth, as if a savage and relentless giant were sawing steel. It went on and on, undaunted by the explosions, tearing at Ulrich’s nerves, and all at once he went out to see what it was.

A house was hit near by, and flames sprang from the upper-storey windows, lighting up the street. In the gaps in the smoke he could see the domes of the Alexander Nevski church glinting in the flashes, and the red air shook with an overwhelming roar. Others were running to discover what the noise was. Someone brought a lantern, and soon they came upon a horse pinned down in the rubble, its raw flesh glistening in the lamplight, screaming as if it would wake the dead. In this pitch of war they could find no gun, and they had to dispatch it with an axe.

In the mornings, Ulrich wandered through the stench of quenched fire watching people digging corpses out from the rubble, and he saw women writing the names of missing people on trees. He looked up through Doric windows that now housed nothing, and were only frames for the implacable sky.

With the military leadership absorbed by the war, the long-suppressed partisan communists, in concert with Moscow, saw their chance for a full-blown uprising, and the government’s punishments saw whole villages destroyed. The country was ripped apart. Elizaveta honoured every side with obscenities that Ulrich had never before heard from her mouth.

‘Bulgarian soldiers are cutting off the breasts of our young women,’ she wailed. ‘They are throwing young Bulgarian men into ovens! And who is benefiting? Only our enemies, who will come in afterwards and build cities over our dead.’

She was consumed by the horror of what was happening, and she became grim and dogged. When Hitler ordered the king to round up the Bulgarian Jews and send them to the labour camps, Elizaveta became an organiser for the protests. Her house became a war office for the outraged teachers and lawyers who marched during the day and debated through the night. When the king finally announced he would not give up Bulgaria’s Jews, Elizaveta was exultant, for it seemed it was possible for decent people to make themselves heard. But after the war, all the Jews who had been saved departed for Israel and America, and the society she had fought to preserve was anyway broken up.

Ulrich saw her weeping every day, and he wished he could reach out and help her. But he felt inhibited around her suffering, and he could not bring himself to ask how she felt. It was an irrationality that he recognised about his character, but could do nothing about. For all their life together, his mother’s troubles made him panic, and he kept his distance from them — as if they contained a poison to which he was peculiarly vulnerable.

It was around that time that Ulrich glimpsed an aged vagrant in the street, and realised it was Misha the fool. Misha was filthy and carried a sack. He marched up and down Tsar Osvobiditel Place, where the bureaucrats parked their limousines. When cars drew up there, he guided them in, flapping his arms and grimacing with his missing teeth. Then he wrote out parking tickets that he pressed upon the uniformed chauffeurs, who threw them away and took no notice.

Ulrich watched for some time, but he did not approach. It was the last time he ever saw Misha. During the communist years, they cleaned out people like him.

The Red Army marched into Sofia on 9 September 1944, and was met by frenzied crowds. Ulrich and his mother watched the tanks arrive, and they cheered with the rest of them, for now Hitler’s hold was released. Bulgaria changed sides in the war, and fought with its Soviet liberators against Germany.

During those last months of the war, Ulrich’s thoughts were set upon distant Berlin. He read of the thousand American bombers flying over the city every night, and the million Russian soldiers encircling the city with their tanks. He saw pictures of wilderness where once he had sat in cafés, and he knew that the Berlin he remembered had already ceased to exist.

Albert Einstein had left for Princeton even before Hitler came to power, and, during the Nazi years, Berlin was emptied by a full-blown exodus.

His old teachers had gone. Walther Nernst had resigned over the anti-Jewish policies which had emptied his department. Fritz Haber, an ardent German nationalist, who had been decorated by the Kaiser for his invention of chemical weapons and who wore Prussian military uniform on official occasions, was thrown out of the university because he was a Jew who had converted to Protestantism. He fled to Switzerland and died of chagrin.

Max Planck had visited Hitler personally to ask him to spare the scientific community from persecution. He remained in Berlin during the war to tend to its ruins. His house was destroyed in the Allied bombings, along with decades of his notes, and his son tortured to death by the Gestapo for his role in a failed plot to assassinate the Führer. When the war came to an end, the eighty-seven-year-old Planck was discovered living with his wife in the forest.

Ulrich lay awake thinking about Clara Blum, who was not mentioned in the newspapers. He did not know whether she had escaped. He wondered what the canals looked like now, where he and she used to walk.

14

THE RUSSIANS PARKED their tanks on the courts of Sofia’s tennis club, and there was no doubt which way things were heading. So many were executed from the previous regime that the judge took days to read out the list of names. In the name of the People: death. Others were taken away and shot without any such performance, including those of Elizaveta’s friends who had been most outspoken in their criticism of the communists. The fresh government was filled up with party activists from the villages and communist stalwarts fresh out of jail — and after what they had been through, they were in a vengeful mood.

The new society had already been formulated in Moscow, and it was unrolled here even as the war still raged. The Stefanovs’ leather company was confiscated, and the scientific bookshop where Ulrich used to stop each day was closed. The newspapers he had grown up with disappeared. His family home was divided in half, and a party man from the countryside was installed upstairs with his wife and six children.

One afternoon, Ulrich opened the door to a delegation that had come to confiscate the remaining relics of his family’s one-time prosperity: his mother’s jewellery, an ancient crucifix with a gold figure of Christ that hung on the wall, and the framed prints of the Ringstrasse in Vienna.

Elizaveta turned apoplectic with these indignities, and never lost an opportunity to rant about them. She abused the policemen in the street who presumed to interfere with her, and she complained about the Russian tanks. Most of all, she seethed about the family who had taken over half her house, whose party membership earned them many privileges she did not enjoy.

‘We don’t even have flour or oil, and they have everything. People without a grain of civilisation who leave spit every day in the stairwell. Your father bought this house with his last money, and look at us now, crouching here like vagrants!’

She shouted such diatribes at the ceiling, hoping they would hear, and she hissed when she saw them on the stairs. The man said to her,

‘You should be more restrained in your expression, comrade. Your opinions don’t matter any more. They may land you in trouble.’

The war ended with one dictatorship crushing another. The exultant newspapers showed the Soviet flag raised over the Reichstag in Berlin.

A few months later, when America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the front pages were strangely mute, and Ulrich searched in vain for details of how it had happened. It seemed Einstein had started off the bomb with a letter to Roosevelt, and other scientists from Berlin had been involved in building it. But already the books from England and Germany had disappeared, and it was difficult to get reports from the West. He was left troubled and bewildered. What happened to those beautiful scientists when they got to America?

Now, in his blindness, his imagination of it has become more vivid. Two infernal flashes, immense shadows clutching for an instant at the earth, and survivors stumbling in the dust, their retinas burned.

The bombing of Sofia, just a year and a half old, already seemed quaint and remote. The bombs that dropped on Dondukov Boulevard were mechanical and comprehensible. You could imagine how they might look the moment they came through the ceiling. With these two bombs, everyone knew that humans had become entirely without substance, and henceforth there was only abject obedience.

Ulrich received a letter summoning him to the offices of the Council for Industry and Construction at 3.15 on a Thursday afternoon.

He was led through modern corridors, glimpsing men poring over tiny columns of numbers. Every closed door bore a name. He was brought to one inscribed I. Popov.

Popov sat at his desk looking at photographs. He glanced at Ulrich as he entered, not bothering with greetings. He placed one of the images in front of him.

‘Can you tell me what this is?’

Ulrich looked at the photograph.

‘It seems to be a factory,’ he said.

‘Continue.’

‘A chemical factory. This is a kiln, and there’s the reactor vessel. It would be used for making some kind of heavy metal salt.’

‘Good. Good,’ said Popov.

He turned his attention to the typewritten pages in front of him. He smoked curious yellow cigarettes, and left long gaps between his sentences.

‘You studied chemistry?’

‘Yes.’

‘University of Berlin?’

‘Yes.’

Popov looked at him quizzically, as if wanting more.

‘My teachers were Fritz Haber and Walther Nernst,’ Ulrich offered.

Popov nodded impatiently.

‘You’ve been supervising a leather factory for some years.’

‘No,’ replied Ulrich. ‘I was in the accounting department. I was not connected to the factory.’

‘And yet it says here—’

Popov stared for a moment. ‘No damage done,’ he said lightly. ‘None at all.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and took up a pencil. He crossed out a line from his notes, and wrote in an amendment.

‘I am an admirer of bourgeois science,’ he said magnanimously, making abstract diagrams on his paper. ‘In their day, the bourgeois scientists achieved some useful things.’

His diagrams followed the rise and fall of his speech, as if they were musical notation.

‘We have been a rural economy for many centuries, and it is difficult to put that behind us. But our leadership is strong, and the people are invigorated. Next year, our industrial sector will grow by sixteen per cent.’

The sharp tip of Popov’s pencil hovered.

‘Chemistry. Nothing will be more important than chemistry.’

He smiled at Ulrich.

‘It has been decided at the highest levels: Bulgaria will be the chemical engine of the socialist countries. We have ore, we have rivers, we have land and good climate. We have workers who will soon forget cattle and crude village dances and fill their minds with modern things. What we lack is chemists. We are training them: soon we will have world-class chemists in the thousands. But for now, everyone with even basic chemical knowledge has to do their part.’

The telephone rang.

‘Three million seven hundred thousand last year,’ Popov said immediately into the receiver. He wrote that number down absent-mindedly, as he listened to the commentary on the other end. Ulrich studied the sheet of paper to see whether he could decode Popov’s thoughts from his outlines.

Popov put the phone down. He looked into Ulrich’s face.

‘What are you thinking?’

There was a long silence. Ulrich said slowly,

‘Perhaps I could have some position at the university? I would like that very much. I could get back to my experimentation.’

Popov was unimpressed.

‘It’s many years since you studied chemistry, and science has moved a very long way since then. Moreover, your ideological credentials are unclear. No one knows where your loyalties lie. What kind of name is Ulrich?’

‘It’s a German name, comrade. My father chose it.’

Popov took a long time to consider.

‘I don’t even know how to say it properly,’ he said. ‘It does you no favours, holding on to a name like that. If I were a suspicious man I would see a reactionary statement there. You could easily have changed it to something more patriotic and revolutionary. Ilyich, for instance, after our beloved Lenin. You should consider it.’

He looked over his papers.

‘Your mother’s opinions are particularly disheartening.’

‘My mother?’ echoed Ulrich.

Popov skimmed through his notes.

‘She continues to dwell under the influence of bourgeois-fascist propaganda. She praises bourgeois society. She said she would kill herself if the Russians did not leave. Blah blah blah. It leaves a nasty taste.’

He returned to his photograph.

‘This factory was built by Germans. Now they have gone, we are looking for someone to get it running again. I thought such a task would fall within your capabilities.’

Ulrich nodded, not able to look Popov in the eye. He kept his eyes on the notepad, where Popov had made a sketch of a bird perched on a lamp-post.

A week later, Ulrich took a bus to the factory, which was thirty kilometres outside Sofia. He was the only passenger, and he sat on the back seat. The sun was just rising, and the land was dewy, unlit and desolate. Old bomb craters in the fields had filled with water, and the wind whipped through the naked window frames of the bus. They made slow progress: the road became muddy, and the gears whinnied. The driver honked the horn to the rhythm of some tune in his head.

Ulrich saw pylons rising above the green bar of the horizon, and then the factory appeared, its smokestack frigid, its steel reactor rosy in the dawn sky. The bus dropped Ulrich off and drove away, and he stood by the roadside, turning around to take in the scene.

On the other side of the valley were barite mines, where the ore came from. Cables ran overhead from the mines to the factory, but everything was dead for now, and the lines of buckets hung empty, squeaking in the breeze. The town was quiet, and shaggy pigs ran in the streets.

Ulrich climbed through a hole in the wire fence, and walked on to the factory forecourt. Bracken had taken there, and the pipes were damaged in places. From high up, the chimneys whistled with the wind on their lips. The ladders went to the very top, one missing a rung, and Ulrich thought of what he would find when he climbed up there and looked down into the shafts.

He walked around the installation, studying how it was set out. The kiln was mighty, a ribbed steel tower laid out on its side. Spindly conveyor belts fed it at one end, where sparrows lined up chattering. He looked over the leaching tanks and the reactor vessel, where moss had started to grow. The mills looked run down and exhausted.

The former owners had taken everyone out in a hurry, and the debris of departure lay all around: discarded overalls and tin lunch boxes, a pair of broken spectacles and, in the office, a dusty scattering of old invoices and cigarette ends. People had written on the wall in childish German. On a bench, a plant had shrivelled in its pot.

The logic of the plant was gratifyingly simple. It was built for the production of barium chloride, and its design was an architectural expression of the chemical process:

1. BaSO₄ + 4C → BaS + 4CO

2. BaS + CaCl₂→ BaCl₂ + CaS

Ulrich checked the state of the pipework, following the lines on his knees, tapping a steady chink-chink against the wind’s commotion outside, and noting the dimensions of sections that needed to be replaced. He opened every valve wheel, checking the seals. Corrosion had worn the reactor walls too thin for continued use, and he made recommendations for a new vessel.

In the office he found volumes of the old logs, and he set to calculating the factory’s capacity, and the volumes of raw materials it could consume. He worked out what labour would be required. He inspected the town, and described the provisions for worker housing.

After the first few days he took to spending his nights in the factory. He brought the gramophone player with him on the lurching bus, and he spent obscure hours lying by the kiln, wrapped in blankets, with the valves and pressure gauges just above his head, and the brassy sounds of Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson echoing in the expanse. He woke up stiff every morning, and lit a fire for tea, and he looked beyond the enclosure fence, where crested larks dipped over the straining grass, and he was absolutely, completely happy.

His report was later typed up and ran to sixty pages. The report was given to I. Popov for him to add his comments. He in turn handed it upwards, and it arrived, ultimately, in the lofty corridors of the Supreme Economic Council, where invisible experts of almost unimaginable intelligence performed the devilish calculations required to coordinate the production of barium chloride with the million other items necessary for the well-being of the Bulgarian People.

For months, iron balls swung against Sofia’s empty façades, watched by the murmuring crowds, who could still remember dimly what had once been inside. No matter how many times he saw the buildings come down, it was never enough for Ulrich to believe it.

He watched the cranes demolish the house he had lived in as a child. The neighbouring building had been directly hit, and his father’s Viennese fantasy had been blown wide open. The flues connecting the fireplaces to the chimney were now a gaping lattice on the outside of the building, and a wooden door opened into the void. The walls of Ulrich’s childhood bedroom were exposed to the sky, though the wallpaper had been changed since then. As they pummelled the stone, it was like a series of concussions, and the final dusty surrender came as a relief.

The intense new men who arrived in Sofia at that time to build a replica of Moscow made the men from Ulrich’s childhood, the men in suits who had tried to emulate Vienna, look infantile. Vast, wedge-shaped meteors were chiselled for party offices, with steel windows arrayed back towards the vanishing point. They made perfect restorations of the ancient bombed-out churches, and they put up angular memorials to stirring ideals. They liked neat flowerbeds, grand spaces, clear numbering, railings, scientific design, well-laid pavements, and clearings for flags. They liked culture and conversation to happen in the appointed places, and in the street they liked human figures to be evenly distributed, with ample space between them.

Outside the cities they built mighty factories and power plants. They had no affection for villages, where it was impossible to know what people believed; they confiscated animals, equipment and land, and sent everyone to live in the cities. The destruction of the farms and villages took less than five years, and everything that was ancient was cleared away to make room for a scientific nation. Fruit and vegetables, for instance, once the best in Europe, now disappeared from Sofia’s markets, leading to struggles and queues.

Housing projects were built for all the peasants who now arrived in the city, still stupefied from the confiscation of their sheep and cows. Some came with every brick and beam of their old house loaded on a donkey cart, vainly imagining they might recreate it in the capital. But there was no space amid the blossoming offices and schools and hospitals. In the new playgrounds, rocket-shaped climbing frames gave children an early passion for the future.

The former villains were cast in bronze and put up in the parks, and all the stories changed. The paintings of Geo Milev, who had been executed as a traitor, were now put on the postage stamps, and his poetry was taught in schools, while the old murdered prime minister, Stamboliiski, was given a statue outside the opera house. The newspapers claimed it was the Communist Party which had saved the Jews from the fascists, and everyone was speechless with the audacity of it — when it was still so recent and everyone could remember how it really was — but memories altered to fit the books, and many things passed into silence.

Prohibitions stamped out the music. Jazz became illegal — and Turkish music, Gypsy music, Arabic music, and most of the other kinds Ulrich had listened to as a child. Only classical music remained — and the folk music of Bulgarian villages, which Paris-trained composers rewrote for the concert hall, removing all the vulgarity and noise. Ulrich hid away his illegal records, and most of his last musical pleasures with them.

Over the years, an eerie calm descended over the city of Sofia. The trams ran on time, and things were fixed before they were broken. The disdainful glide of the Volga limousines was smooth over the gold cobblestones of the official quarter, the branches of the willow trees fell just so in the parks, and the military-green uniforms of the traffic police were unthinkingly pristine. Beggars, eccentrics and delinquents were deported to the camps, and even on the busiest streets the crowds were somehow well rehearsed.

Ulrich paid a visit, one evening, to Ivan Stefanov, who had been given work as a driver. The mansion had been confiscated, and the family was allotted a cramped and run-down attic for its nine members. Ivan insisted that Ulrich dine with them, and they sat around a long table with their heads banging on the eaves. The family emerged one by one from behind a curtain, where they had stooped in turn to don evening suits and dresses for dinner — though there was nothing except bread, cheese and tomatoes on the table. Old Stefanov was senile in his wheelchair, and dribbled through the meal. Having noticed how Ivan was surreptitiously chided by his wife when he made to serve himself with cheese, Ulrich also refrained from eating, claiming he was full.

15

THEY CAME AT FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning to arrest Elizaveta, and they gave her five minutes to dress. When Ulrich launched himself at them, they beat him with metal bars. There were four of them, in black leather jackets and helmets, and they used the time they were waiting to smash the bookshelves. They kept repeating Fascist as if it had become a reflex.

‘My mother is not a fascist,’ said Ulrich, trying to keep control of his voice. He was lying on the floor with one of the men standing over him. ‘She hated the fascists. She wrote articles against them in the newspapers!’

‘Don’t lie to us.’

‘I’ve met fascists before,’ said one of the men, so young he still had spots on his face. ‘Their houses always look like this.’

They called out to Elizaveta and opened the door to her room. She was standing in her dress. They pulled her out and marched her to the door.

‘I love you, Ulrich,’ she said. The expression on her face was terrifying.

He ran to embrace her, but they pushed him back.

‘Take me!’ he cried. ‘Take me!’

They had a jeep outside. They put her in and drove away.

The communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, executed his former allies, and the one-party state was complete. The purges were felt in families across the country, and the waiting rooms of police stations were packed with distressed folk searching for the disappeared.

Ulrich does not care to remember the extremes he went through at that time. He did not know where they were holding his mother. He haunted the Ministry of the Interior at 5 Moskovska Street, where the interrogations happened. He circled the central prison. He went to the State Security headquarters, where the colonel in charge of deportations threatened the desperate families with arrest if they did not have authorisation to sit there. He carried a file of his mother’s anti-fascist newspaper articles, which no one was interested in seeing. He grew sick with the uncertainty. He wandered the streets for days, and when he returned home he found Elizaveta’s dog lying dead in her bedroom.

One evening, he received a telephone call from the police telling him that his mother had been sent to the Bosna concentration camp.

It was an eleven-hour train ride to Burgas. He arrived in darkness and waited through the night for the local train, cradling the food and clothes he had packed for her.

The road from the train station to the camp was surmounted by signs saying ‘Hail to the Soviet Communist Party!’ and ‘Long Live the Bulgarian Communist Party!’

Ulrich reached the gate and waited by a small window. A man inside was trying to thread a needle so he could sew a button on his uniform. He was startled to see Ulrich.

‘Who told you to come here?’ he said.

‘I have come to see my mother.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am … the son of a prisoner.’

‘Have you lost your mind? Get the hell out of here!’

‘Is my mother in this camp?’

The man summoned a guard, who seized Ulrich and led him away.

‘I’ve brought food,’ cried Ulrich over his shoulder. ‘Will you give it to her?’ He struggled against the guard. ‘Leave me alone for one minute!’

An arm was extended through the window, and Ulrich handed over his bag of food and clothes.

The man rifled through the bag. He took out sweaters and threw them back at Ulrich.

‘Comrade, she is old,’ said Ulrich. ‘She will not survive hard labour. Please let her go.’

The man found the letter that Ulrich had written on the way, ripped it into small pieces, and flung them at him.

‘These things don’t go inside,’ he said.

Ulrich picked up the remnants, and got back on the train to Sofia.

He clung to his schedule as if it were a raft. Every morning, he cut through to his desk, ignoring the others’ tea and chat. The previous day’s logs were waiting for him, and he scanned the numbers with his ruler, checking they were correctly behaved. Then he retired to the laboratory, where assays of the previous day’s production were waiting, and tested their purity. After this, he poured some tea from his flask and walked the factory floor, always inhaling the acrid odour of chlorides with the same feeling of repellent reassurance, looking over the instrumentation for temperatures and flow rates. By lunchtime he had checked the factory’s stocks of raw materials, dealt with his correspondence, and made a report to Comrade Denov, the factory director.

Comrade Denov was an amiable man who was fond of hard work and long speeches. The factory was not merely a production unit for him: it was like a mission, and he introduced a great array of activities there. There were picnics and outings to the zoo. He hosted an evening reading group in Marxist theory. There were visits to the opera, for which he entertained a particular love. His wife often sent him to work with a cake.

One evening, he called Ulrich into the tiny cabin he called his office. Portraits of Marx and Lenin hung on the wall.

‘I’ve been watching you, Comrade Ulrich. You’re a curious individual.’

Comrade Denov had a tragicomic face that was prone to absurd grimaces even in his most serious moments.

‘You know the other workers make fun of you? They gossip about the lectures you give about chemical theories. They imitate the way you talk, staring at the sky over their heads. Did you know?’

‘No,’ replied Ulrich, simply.

‘Well, it’s true.’

The monthly production figures were lying on the director’s desk. All the graphs were rising. But they still fell short of the official figures, which rose much faster.

‘But it’s not malicious. They find you odd, but they can recognise you have a precious bond with this factory. Your affection is a strong thing. It commands respect.’

‘Thank you, comrade,’ said Ulrich uncertainly.

‘I’m a party man,’ said Denov. ‘I’ve believed in socialism all my life. You don’t know how poor my family was under the king, how desperately poor. I grew up with nothing — and now look at me. I’m running a factory and my sons are studying medicine at university. I owe everything to socialism.’

Ulrich found himself wondering where all the barium chloride went. It was strange he had not ever thought about this before. The factory was a logical universe whose processes came to an end when the finished barrels were loaded into a truck — and Ulrich’s thought stopped there too. But now he had visions of these barrels dispersing into every country of the Soviet bloc, and tried to imagine how they could all be used up.

‘They warned me about you, Comrade Ulrich. They said you’re a dangerous eccentric. But I’ve been watching you, and I like you. I want you to help me build a great factory. I’m not like others. I don’t care what your private opinions are. Is that understood?’

‘Yes,’ replied Ulrich.

Comrade Denov gave a jocular grimace again, and Ulrich suddenly felt a great loyalty to him.

Whenever the economic plans were announced, Comrade Denov summoned all the workers together for a speech.

‘These targets seem unattainable. But they have been calculated on the basis of the strength that each of you carries inside him. Strength you may not even know yourself. When it’s all over you will feel grateful that you have been tested like this.

‘The tales of your labour will be told far away! In Poland and Yugoslavia the workers will look jealously at the socialist Bulgaria you have created, and wish they had worked as hard as you. In the Soviet Union, they will say, They have out-Moscowed Moscow!’

But the Five-Year Plans necessitated almost inconceivable leaps in production, and even the director fell prey to the general anxiety and depression. Crippling work schedules were insufficient to lift output to the required levels, and for months the factory was underperforming. There was hardship and misery all round, and no money for anything except essential supplies.

Ulrich could recall moments when he had fervently wished to be delivered from his mother. Her presence had tired him, and he had imagined that his energies would be released only when she was no longer around. But now she was gone, he found he had nothing left. He was empty, and traversed only by ghosts and shadows.

His daydreams turned morbid. He invented damning reports against himself, which he would submit to the police in return for his mother’s release.

Item

I complained on many occasions about the poor supply of bread in Sofia, and expressed aloud the belief that senior party members did not have to undergo such hardships. I allowed such delusions to lead me into public approbations of imperialist societies.

Item

I owned a number of recordings of Western music which I played at licentious gatherings at my house in order to corrupt the aesthetic taste of those around me. These included a large selection of American jazz of the most indecent variety. I liked to encourage women to imitate Western dancing at these gatherings for my own entertainment. I drank heavily, and, in my intoxication, I uttered obscenities against the party and against Our Friend, the Soviet Union.

Item

I harboured a dream of escaping across the border and making my way, finally, to New York. I boasted that many of my acquaintances had already made this journey, and they had told me of the tall buildings they had discovered there, and the wonderful life.

16

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Ulrich encountered Boris’s old friend, Georgi, in the street. It was twenty years since he had last seen him, and he had grown stout and bald, but Ulrich recognised him immediately.

He had spent years in jail for his revolutionary activities, and now he found himself showered with honours. He had become a colonel in the Secret Service, and he walked expansively, as if to allow room for his new aura. He seemed strangely happy to see Ulrich, and led him away to an expensive café with flowers and bow-tied waiters. Sitting down, he displayed his large stomach with a sensuousness that made Ulrich feel muddled. Georgi talked incessantly.

‘In the last years I shared a cell with another revolutionary, Atanas. He was married to a woman called Maria. Maria’s father was as rich as Rothschild: he was a big industrialist with several mansions, and factories all over the Balkans. So Maria was from one of Bulgaria’s leading families, she was closely connected to the king and the entire fascist government — and she had staked everything on her love for a scruffy communist revolutionary. Her parents disowned her, so she joined the party and came every day to jail to see Atanas. She brought fruit and biscuits, and told us news from the world outside.’

He ordered wine.

‘So what happened? She began to bring me gifts, too, and after a while she hid letters in them, full-blown declarations. I cannot think for love of you, I am dead not having you with me.’

Georgi raised his eyebrows to insinuate more. Man to man.

‘Can you imagine? In the beginning I tried to stay aloof, but I’d been stuck in jail for more than ten years, and here was a soft-skinned young woman making offers. What choice did I have?’

Ulrich could muster no more affection for Georgi than on the first time he had met him. His face was sour, and his teeth as broken as before, and Ulrich tried in vain to picture what this woman had seen in him, lying like a dog in jail.

‘Obviously Atanas wasn’t happy. He and I went to war. Sometimes we beat each other through the night, until we had no more strength, and when Maria came in the morning our eyes were swollen like footballs. But after a while he realised he had lost her. He gave up hope in everything, and became like a pathetic animal. He slunk away to his corner when she came, so we could have space for ourselves. In a while he grew sick and died. Maria and I had our wedding in the prison. We have two little boys.’

He smiled fondly. He wore an impressive suit and the kind of steel glasses that were in fashion then.

‘Now her mother, who used to wear fur coats and drive sports cars, is getting a taste of how her workers lived. She comes to our front door to beg for cooking oil. A few years ago she was too good to even talk to her daughter. Now she begs us for soap.’

He exuded contentment.

‘Nineteen years in jail,’ he said, ‘and now I have to make up the time. We’re going to drive this country into socialism in twenty years, so it arrives while you and I have eyes to see it. You can already see the dams and factories we’re building. Todor Zhivkov is more ambitious than Georgi Dimitrov, and there will be no compromises. One day you’ll see the paradise we’ll make, and you’ll understand what all the fervour was for.’

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 strolled 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.’

19

THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED to Ulrich after his mother’s return from the camp are recorded in his memory differently from everything that went before.

He feels, in fact, that the environment turned hostile to the laying down of memories. Such slow sediment required a soft and stable bed, and he was too shaken up in those days by statistics, the roar of crowds, and bomb tests on the Kazakh steppe.

Ulrich remembers how he produced barium chloride in greater and greater quantities. That part is preserved. For everything around him had turned to chemistry, and his own production was part of something bigger than he. Bulgaria had become a chemical state: in the streets, there were posters of the nation’s chemical factories smoking in formation, like synchronised swimmers. The government issued chemical challenges to the workers, and the newspapers gloated over the achievements of famous Bulgarian chemists.

This development might have been Ulrich’s vindication, but it served instead to devalue the secrets he carried inside. Everything he had cherished as his own was taken away and turned into slogans.

It was the era of launching spacecraft, and when he thinks back, Ulrich sees himself as if from orbit. He can remember government statistics and the opening of new monuments, but he has trouble picking out what happened to him. His own figure is dwarfed amid the vaster wreckage: power plants and Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum. The might of Olympic wrestlers and Todor Zhivkov’s smile.

Sections of his life went missing, and there are decades he can hardly account for.

He remembers how a Soviet dyeing company wanted to obtain enormous quantities of barium chloride. Ulrich’s factory did not have spare capacity, and the Soviet company sent a delegation to discuss the plant’s expansion.

Ulrich went with Comrade Denov to the airport, and they waited on the tarmac. They saw the Aeroflot Tupolev touch down in the distance, and taxi slowly to its place. Steps were pushed against it, and the hatch popped open. The band began to play, and the Soviet visitors waited on the top steps to appreciate the coordinated kicking of the folk dancers.

Ulrich studied the distant faces of the Russians to see how it felt coming out of a plane, for he had never flown.

They descended with political smiles, and groups of dancers approached them with gifts of bread and salt while they shook hands with Comrade Denov and then with Ulrich. A young soprano from the conservatory sang a song of gratitude to Russian liberators.

The next day was a Sunday, and Ulrich had the responsibility of taking the Russians on an outing to Vitosha Mountain. Give them whatever they ask for, Comrade Denov had said. Don’t let them say a word against us. Ulrich arrived at the Pliska Hotel with a chauffeured car, and found them lively after their breakfast. The car drove them out of the city, up the wooded roads towards Kopitoto. The Russians were bureaucrats, not scientists, and, to Ulrich’s disappointment, they could not bring news of chemistry. They seemed distracted, and Ulrich had the sense they were mocking him.

They stood in a line looking down on Sofia from the mountain. In the foreground were rows of birch trees, leafless at this time of year. Down below, the city was like a brittle ivory star, with points spreading along the highways, and Ulrich had to suppress the desire to reach out and smash it.

He asked the Russians why they were laughing.

‘Everything is so small here,’ they said. ‘Your city is like a village. And your mountain is just a hill.’

Over lunch, they asked what Bulgarians thought about Nikita Khrushchev and Dinamo Moscow, the football team, and Ulrich said he did not know what Bulgarians thought. The Russians ordered a succession of vodkas, and Ulrich grew worried about the bill he would present the next day to Comrade Denov. They went on asking him what Bulgarians thought about many other Russian things, and Ulrich realised that all questions had begun to sound to him like interrogation.

In the car on the way back, they listened to a monologue by the leader of the Russian delegation. He had Tatar features and thick limbs, and alcohol made him joyful.

‘Your country is such a simple problem,’ he said. ‘The Soviet Union: twelve time zones. How can you ever solve such a thing? Bulgaria is so small, and your weather is gentle. That’s why your socialism has much better alcohol than ours, and your women look so modern.’

Ulrich was silent, looking forward to the moment when he would drop them at their hotel, and his responsibilities would be over. But when they arrived, the Russians were adamant that he should not leave.

‘Will you make us drink alone? We have no new jokes to tell each other!’

Reluctantly, Ulrich let the chauffeur go, anxious about what the rest of the night would hold. In the hotel room, the Russians pulled off their shoes and called for expensive vodka. They poured for him too, though he protested.

‘I don’t drink,’ he said. ‘I don’t like alcohol.’

They roared with laughter, as if it were a joke.

Ulrich began to drink out of conformity, while the leader told stories of his childhood in Minsk. The corners of his tales were jabbed out with cigarettes that he held between his fingers for a long time before he lit them. The others clapped around him and kept the glasses full. Ulrich felt the blood rise in his ears and allowed himself to sink into the cushions. He watched the indefatigable storyteller, who drummed his fingers on his belly, shook his head insanely into his enormous handkerchief, and sighed Ah! when others spoke.

He talked about old films, and how he had kept bees when he was young. He told stories about his first job in a factory, above the Arctic Circle, where he lived in a tunnel underground whose entrance he could never find for snow and the darkness that came for months at a time. At length he broke into verse:

My uncle, in the best tradition

By falling dangerously sick

Won universal recognition

And could devise no better trick.

The wingtips of his cheeks were raised in transport like the roped peaks of a tent, and his cigarette left an aerobatic trail in the air.

How base to pamper grossly

And entertain the nearly dead

Fluffing pillows for his head

And passing medicines morosely —

While thinking under every sigh

The devil take you, Uncle. Die!

They laughed and clapped, and the leader got up from his recline, backslapping and hugging round the room, seizing Ulrich with his powerful arms and holding him for a long while. He sat down and stared open mouthed into his vodka as if it were a miracle.

‘When we got permission to come to your factory, we knew we would drink a lot,’ he said happily.

‘But enough Pushkin,’ said one of the others, his socked feet resting on the wall. ‘We should have Bulgarian poetry!’

‘Geo Milev! The great one-eyed Bulgarian. Give us one of his!’

‘I don’t know any poetry,’ said Ulrich weakly.

They did not believe him, and took him for shy.

‘Drink more!’ they said. ‘You are far behind.’

Ulrich was already drunk, and in the clarity of vodka he felt his usual judgements collapsing. He looked at these men, men he would normally despise for their drink and their uncouth dissipation, and this evening he felt ashamed before their joy. He wondered what he carried inside him that could compare to such exuberance. He became despondent, wishing he were other than what he was.

He made a forced attempt at abandon.

‘Shall I call some girls?’

The three men roared in unison. The Tatar raconteur screwed his face into love-agony at the ceiling, and froze for a second as if he might topple backwards with joy.

The old tinnitus struck up in Ulrich’s ears, and he wondered how he would deliver what he offered. But his companions had already moved on to an exchange of jokes, the girls forgotten, as if all possible pleasure had been won from the mere suggestion.

‘They wanted to open a striptease club in the Kremlin Palace. The applications were made, permission was granted, billboards were put up around Moscow. But no one showed up.’

Ulrich ordered more vodka, looking for approval.

‘Central Committee called up in the morning. Why had the project failed? Telephones rang across Moscow. The report came back: the organisers were bewildered. The striptease club was well organised and all the striptease artists had a solid party record. In fact most of them were Bolsheviks from 1905 and some were even personal friends of Lenin!’

They seemed to have an endless supply of jokes, and the banter went back and forth. The hotel ran out of vodka, and they ordered rakia instead.

‘ … so Stalin opens the door and catches the couple in flagrante and he says to the man, I am very attached to my pipe. But sometimes I take it out of its hole!’

As the night wore on, Ulrich became so awash with drink that his gloom dissolved, and he grew happy on his companions’ cheer. He felt confident, and proposed an anecdote of his own. He told a story about a young man who had to slaughter a pig in a small Bulgarian town. It had an uncanny ending. He talked with some power, and they all listened.

‘Did that happen to you?’

‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘It’s something I dreamed up.’

‘He is a poet!’ they said. ‘No wonder he is so quiet!’

‘The quiet ones are the most dangerous!’

The night expired somewhere there, and when Ulrich woke up he was still lying in his place on the cushions. He slipped out, unnoticed by the snoring Russians, and went home to clean himself up. He met the men at the factory later, and looked at them remorsefully, as if he were a guilty lover.

In their official conversations, the Russians showed themselves in a very different light, and as the week drew on Ulrich found it difficult to believe he had shared such a time with them. They were hard nosed and inflexible, and they rarely smiled.

Their approach to technical problems was crude. To increase the factory’s productivity they wanted simply to build more of the same, introducing three more gigantic kilns alongside the existing one, lined up together like the microphones under Todor Zhivkov’s chin. They did not give scientific justifications for their ideas, and when they were challenged they only repeated them more gruffly, with added ideological weight:

‘Worldwide capitalist enterprise will be run into the ground!’

On the first day, Ulrich listened silently to what they had to say, but then he became more bold. He said this factory was built in the 1930s, and many new production methods had come in since then. He said they could achieve a substantial increase in production simply by replacing the coal-fired kiln with a new fluidised bed reactor that would run on gas. Natural gas had become very cheap, and the new technique gave a more efficient reaction.

The Soviet experts were uncertain about Ulrich’s proposal, but Comrade Denov praised it in such a way that it soon seemed as if it had originated with them, and not with Ulrich.

The Russians condescended, happy to have been of service. They seemed never to take off their thick coats, though it was spring, and hot enough for ceiling fans.

A deal was struck, and Comrade Denov was delighted. He said to Ulrich, You have worked a revolution in our factory, and he forgave him the tremendous cost of his entertainment. A Bulgarian — Russian Friendship Party was held on the last night. But Ulrich did not try again to find his way back into the Russians’ conviviality.

The ancient kiln was lifted out with cranes on to a long truck. The new, modern reactor was much smaller, and the factory looked strangely vacant.

Somewhere, Ulrich still has a photograph from the day when the new reactor was installed. An official from the ministry came to inaugurate the new machinery, and a photograph was taken to commemorate the occasion. Ulrich is in a row with four other men, all in slightly irregular suits, standing awkwardly because of the strong wind. Five shadows with ballooning trousers stretch behind them on the concrete.

When the economic impact of the new process became apparent, Ulrich was singled out for considerable felicitation. Comrade Denov presented him with a gold watch in front of all the workers, and a medal embossed with the heads of Lenin and Zhivkov. He said,

‘If ever a man has given his love to a factory, it must be him.’

Ulrich was asked to go to the studios of Radio Sofia to record an interview with a smiling official from the Internal Information Department. The man asked him how he came to think of installing this new reactor, how he felt about the astonishing improvements in productivity, what these would mean for the Bulgarian people, and why he was inspired to work so tirelessly and selflessly for the nation.

The interview was broadcast in the evening, and several of Ulrich’s colleagues, including Comrade Denov, came to his house to listen. They broke into applause when his name was mentioned, and gazed at each other in awe as the details of their small universe were broadcast to the nation. The programme called Ulrich an ‘ordinary hero’.

Comrade Denov congratulated Ulrich’s mother, and said she must be very proud. She held her vodka close, and smiled.

The photograph of the inauguration of the new reactors was displayed on Ulrich’s wall for many years, next to the photograph of Einstein with his violin. In the background of the photograph was the concrete water tower that once supplied the small town.

Shortly after the photograph was taken, this tower collapsed, without any warning. Ulrich remembers arriving at work the next morning, and seeing the entire town flooded. The savagery of the debacle rendered everyone speechless, and all they could do was stare. It took days to pump the water out of the mine.

Ulrich recalls that as he stood with the crowds at the edge of the water, he was intensely moved by this mysterious eruption of latent forces. To this day, he wishes it could be given to him again to set eyes on that spectacle.

20

ELIZAVETA ASKED HIM to get her a typewriter, and he brought home a cast-off from the factory that she banged on night and day. For years he woke up to that sound, but he did not ask her what she was writing.

She opened and closed her mouth in those years, and sound came out, but Ulrich paid little attention. She wept in the house, and complained about her life, and Ulrich withdrew into his thoughts.

He became subject to obsessions.

Todor Zhivkov announced that he would build the biggest steel combine anywhere in the Balkans, and Ulrich was preoccupied with it for years.

‘The Germans wanted to make steel here, during the war,’ he ranted to anyone who would listen. ‘But they couldn’t make it from Bulgarian ore. Our ore is of the lowest grade. Has the government not done any research? Do they not realise?’

He wrote letters to the newspapers and the ministry, laying out his arguments in a numbered list. As soon as these arguments were seen and acknowledged, he felt, this vast and foolish project would be abandoned immediately.

But no one took any notice. The Gypsy labour gangs still laboured on the site, and, after three years of construction, the vast Kremikovtsi Steel Works were opened near Sofia. Songs and poems were composed to the factory, and special coins were issued with a heroic engraving of it, but it was never able to squeeze any steel out of Bulgarian ore. They had to import the ore from Russia to keep the works going.

‘They built one of the most expensive factories in the entire Soviet bloc,’ Ulrich said to Comrade Denov, ‘on the basis of an ore they could not use. Where is the logic?’

‘Perhaps the logic was simply to build one of the most expensive factories in the Soviet bloc. Here in Bulgaria.’

Ulrich looked at him, appalled.

‘But no one could do such a thing. It’s completely unscientific. It’s impossible to believe.’

And he never stopped going back over the story, telling people how he had warned the government about it before the factory even opened, and they had taken no notice.

He used to dream, in those days, of his mother’s death, which also seemed to happen in a factory.

The machines churn, and he sees her suspended in the glowing tunnel: the burning sparks coming off her, and her limp head thrown side to side in the force field, some last animal reserves keeping her righted, head-on to the slipstream, before the vibrations become too violent to withstand, and suddenly the turbulence catches her, the roar lets up, and he sees her whole for the last time, jackknifing, white hot, flipping like a rag doll, and then there is a giant shower as she explodes, slow motion, among the stars, and bright lights disperse into the endless silence, from whose remoteness the thunder will take years to arrive.

When Ulrich awoke from this dream he would come down and find his mother already banging at the typewriter, and feel relieved that nothing had happened to her. But he still did not ask her what she was writing. He had a suspicion it was her memoir of the camp, because he knew she carried heavy things inside her that she had not told, and he had made it clear that he would never hear them.

When Sviatoslav Richter, the great Soviet pianist, came to play a week of recitals in Sofia, Elizaveta begged Ulrich to take her to hear him. Richter was a wild-looking man, even in his suit, and he tamed the piano monster with the mere application of his fingertips. Ulrich was terrified to see the speed at which he played Chopin, for no one could sustain such a fury. When he finished it with such a contemptuous flourish, the tears ran down Ulrich’s face.

It was the period when he had strong physical reactions if he witnessed some form of surpassing human achievement. He wept at athletes breaking records. He trembled when he saw a standing ovation in the theatre. When Albert Einstein died, he read his words in the newspaper, which made him weep too:

The years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, and the final emergence into light — only those who have experienced it can appreciate it.

At the time of Richter’s visit, there was an influenza epidemic in Sofia, and Elizaveta was one of those who coughed uncontrollably through the music. Her nose ran continually, and her constant wiping irritated Ulrich during the performance.

Many years later, after her death, Ulrich heard a recording of those recitals on the radio, and he could identify his mother’s cough, preserved during the long note that Richter held at the beginning of ‘Catacombs’, near the end of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

He can remember attending a funeral. It was his father’s sister, who was over ninety. The blue veins around her face were sunk in skin like candle wax, her closed eyelids were violet at the edges. There were red carnations all around.

After the coffin was lowered into the ground, the mourners walked slowly to the rented hall, old relatives on many arms. The day was bright and cold, and their breath clouded in the air. The stinging air transported the smell of mothballs rising from their clothes. Newly fallen oak leaves crackled, and a track of solid footprints was pressed in the frost. At the graveside, the funeral band packed up their instruments.

The meal was already laid out, and people made for the soup, which was good and hot. A photograph of the departed woman was displayed and garlanded on a table, and the bare planks of the walls were newly covered over with pleated cotton panels, pinned at top and bottom. Ulrich found himself seated between the priest and an unknown cousin of the deceased. Her face was a force field of wrinkles, and she eyed him between mouthfuls.

‘You have the eyes of your father,’ she said. ‘I would recognise you anywhere.’

Ulrich nodded politely. She said,

‘He went years ago. Isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

She asked about it, and Ulrich told her what he remembered. Tears came into her eyes as he spoke.

‘We lost so many men,’ she said. ‘And many of the ones who remained were lost, if you understand me.’

‘He wasn’t himself in his last years. He was deaf and withdrawn. He didn’t know what was going on around him. The day my son was born, we smoked a cigar together outside the hospital, and he asked me who was sick.’

She said gently,

‘At least he was there. Somewhere, he must have understood.’

She looked into the distance, lost in her own thoughts. Then she said,

‘When he was a boy, he was a miracle. We all admired him. We were just kids from the village — our parents were all pig farmers. But he was always reading, he knew about lots of things we had never heard of. I listened to him for hours, talking about this and that. He used to love birds, I remember, and could whistle just like them.’

Ulrich’s father had rarely spoken about his childhood.

‘He made the decision all on his own to come to Sofia for school. You youngsters can’t imagine what that meant. We were village people, we wore the kind of village clothes you only see nowadays in the museum. We were completely ignorant of other places. When Bulgaria became independent, we didn’t even know. It took weeks for the news to reach us that they had made a country for the Bulgarians, and our village was not in it. We packed everything up, took all the pigs, crossed into Bulgaria, and made a new village.’

She had cloudless blue eyes that seemed to open on to those distant times. Her head had a shake, and her earrings chimed.

‘When your father came to Sofia he was just a peasant boy. He didn’t have clothes or anything for school. Your grandparents had money but they weren’t that kind of people, if you understand me. He found himself a place to stay with some merchants they knew, and of course he became the best student in the school. That was his independence of spirit. He never had a violin teacher — did you know that? He taught himself to play completely on his own.’

‘My father? Are you sure you’re talking about my father?’

‘He was the one who introduced us to piano music, and orchestras, and classical violin. When we first came to Sofia we had never heard those things, and he took us to concerts. He played his violin in the evenings, and we thought he was a genius. Later he went to study in Freiberg, if you remember, and he heard every kind of music there. He taught himself to play the entire Mendelssohn concerto.’

The wine was served, and the dead woman’s son stood up to say some words. His face was deformed by grief, and there were sniffles around the room. Ulrich whispered urgently under the speech,

‘But my father hated music.’

‘Oh, your father was a true musician! But of course he got into engineering, and his railways, and I suppose he didn’t have time after that.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t know what happens to us. It’s difficult to sustain our passions through life, and we become mournful for what we’ve given up.’

The speech was still going on, and suddenly Ulrich was seized by a mutiny within, which broke out in wild and foolish laughter. He was forced to leave the room and walk in circles among the gravestones for his seizure to subside. It was a light-headed laughter, like falling through time.

21

TWO SECRET SERVICE MEN came to the door and asked to speak to Ulrich.

Elizaveta tried to tell them he was not at home, her old fears creeping back. They looked at her coldly and waited for Ulrich to emerge from his room.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ they said to him, a hand on his shoulder.

‘No need to worry,’ they reassured his mother. ‘We’ll have him back in a short while.’

They went downstairs, saying nothing. The two men sat on a bench in the courtyard, and Ulrich stood before them. A mother hurried her children inside from their games.

‘You work in that factory in Vakarel,’ said one of the men, and it was not a question. ‘Doing quite well, isn’t it?’

‘Thank you, comrade.’

The men seemed to expect more, and Ulrich said,

‘We have received our quotas under the Fifth Five-Year Plan. We’re working out the best way to fulfil them.’

‘You’re working very hard,’ said the man soothingly. ‘Everyone in that factory is working hard.’

‘It doesn’t go unnoticed,’ said his companion.

‘Denov,’ said the first man. ‘That’s the name of the director, isn’t it? What kind of a man is he?’

‘He’s honest,’ said Ulrich hesitatingly. ‘He works hard.’

‘You’re close to him, aren’t you? You’ve been to his house several times?’

‘Close is not the word. But he has been good to me.’

‘Has he? After all, you haven’t been promoted all these years. You were even in the newspapers some years back for your achievements in the factory, but he didn’t put your name forward for advancement.’

Ulrich said nothing. The men continued.

‘Comrade Denov has had several encounters with foreign businessmen over the past two years. Chemical industrialists from Yugoslavia and even France. Can you explain why he might meet such people?’

‘No,’ said Ulrich truthfully. ‘I can’t.’

‘No idea at all?’

‘No.’

The two men looked at each other, as if consenting to let Ulrich in on a confidence.

‘Clerks in the Planning Department have come across discrepancies in the numbers coming from your factory. What goes in is greater than what comes out. Isn’t that strange?’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Ulrich.

‘Why impossible?’

‘There’s no spare capacity in our factory. Sometimes we work for a month at a time without a break, until the workers collapse at their machines. We are constantly behind our quotas. There is no spare barium chloride for anyone to conceal from the authorities.’

‘It’s because you’re all working so hard that this seems so unfair.’

‘I can tell you a hundred stories,’ said Ulrich, ‘of Comrade Denov’s commitment to this factory. And to his country.’

‘Are you saying we’re lying?’

‘I think there must be a mistake.’

The men studied him.

‘That’s why we’ve come to you. We need more reliable information. You see him every day — tell us what you find out. Strangers he talks to on the phone, things on his desk that have no right to be there. Jot them down. We’ll be in touch to find out what you’ve learned.’

‘Comrade Denov has been kind to me. As I just told you.’

‘You believe that, because you don’t know the whole story.’

‘I’ve known him for many years. He’s not that sort of man.’

‘You know, there are many things opening up just now in our country. Wouldn’t you like to be part of them? There are so many new opportunities in chemicals, for instance. Look at your house, the state it’s in. We could get you on the list for the modern housing blocks they’re building. Imagine that.’

‘Just so you know who your friends are. After all, we only want the truth. If he’s doing nothing wrong, he has nothing to fear.’

They left him without farewells, and Ulrich began to shake. He sat down to steady himself.

When he went back upstairs, his mother was gulping vodka.

‘What did they want?’ she asked.

He stared at her, and felt a sudden distaste. He realised he could not remember the last evening she had been sober.

Ulrich began to wait behind in the evening for Comrade Denov to leave the factory so he could look through the accounts in his office. The ledgers were piled up on a shelf behind the bust of Todor Zhivkov, where anyone could find them.

The gaps between the pages were stuffed with receipts and torn-off notes, and Ulrich frowned with disapproval. It was difficult to make sense of the hastily written columns of numbers. Other workers passed the office and looked in at him quizzically, and it took him several evenings to build up a full economic picture of the factory.

He had not lost the talents he had developed during his accounting days, and when he opened the page in the ledger where the discrepancies were revealed, he knew it instantly. The grids, the column headings, the underlined totals — all spoke clearly to him, and he knew that everyone in the factory was labouring under a fiction. He trembled as he looked through the pages, for he realised that most of their hard-won barium chloride went missing every month. The enormous sacrifices they made to fulfil the official quotas were directed, in truth, to some quite different end. Comrade Denov had deceived them all. He had betrayed their factory.

Ulrich began to file weekly reports about Comrade Denov to the secret police. He did so without hesitation or doubt. He wrote his reports carefully, giving evidence for each of his assertions, and footnoting every number and quotation as if it were a thesis. Every week, when he set out to deliver his envelope, he held his head high with conviction.

22

ULRICH AND HIS MOTHER were selected for an apartment in Zapaden Park, the miraculous new scientific housing project in the west of the city. Elizaveta was baffled as to how it could have happened to a political outcast like her.

The mighty development was not even complete when they moved in. The forest had been cleared, and the towers rose out of a swamp: white, and repeating endlessly to the sky. The roads were still just sketches in the mud, and the grind of great machines became a roar whenever a window was opened, even from their tenth floor. New turf was already laid in places, like felt over the wasteland, and naked twigs were propped up in the expectation, one day, of trees.

Journalists visited to report on the modern living, and famous artists came to prepare paintings of the fury from which peace and harmony are born.

Ulrich was not happy with the new communal living, where there was no escape from talking, prying people. He walked down the stairs to avoid the lift, but on his ascent he regularly found himself confined with neighbours, whose sociability he tried to repel by counting the passing floors through the ribbed glass, or concentrating on the spoiled shine of his shoes. He closed the curtains at home, preferring twilight, for he could not bear the pressure of the thousand panes of glass staring in.

Elizaveta followed him around, opening them again, for the sparkling altitude made her gleeful. She sat on the balcony on sunny afternoons: she liked the views of children playing on the swings, and the people coming and going, and the interiors of the opposite apartments. She bought a reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper to hang above the dining table, lined the windows with potted plants, and hung up a birdcage. She became a propagandist for modern facilities, commenting joyfully on the hospital downstairs, and the pharmacy, and all the other new things she found such a comfort in her old age.

Zapaden Park seemed ignorant of Elizaveta’s compromised past, and at this late stage in her life she seemed suddenly unburdened. She sat in her headscarf chatting on the benches that lined the paths downstairs, and when she was in her kitchen she left the front door ajar, so that visitors could walk in whenever they wished. She was always surrounded by people drinking and laughing, and Ulrich returned home with trepidation.

When he bought a stereophonic record player, which cost him months of savings, she invited an artistic neighbour to give his opinion on the sound, and he came with his friends, the kind of people Ulrich hated, who had gathered at the Café Bulgaria and written revolutionary poetry when they were young, and now were comfortable and arrogant, and gave meaningless speeches at the Writers’ Union that were printed in the newspaper. They inspected the new acquisition, without emotion, and one of them, who was a decorated poet, said to him gravely,

‘No one needs stereophonic sound in Bulgaria, my friend.’

And Ulrich said Why? already dreading the answer, and the poet said,

‘Because we already hear the same information from every side!’

They all laughed at the joke, one woman coughing on her cigarette, but Ulrich did not find it funny. These people had their fashionable suits, and sunglasses as big as welders’ masks, and they affected this revolutionary cynicism when in fact they had ceased to be revolutionaries years ago, and loved their established positions.

His mother had given up her typing — or perhaps she had finished what she was writing. Ulrich did not know. Now she hosted parties at night, where her acquaintances came to drink and gamble, and she talked of nothing except entertainments. She began to brew brandy, and she made garish, extravagant clothes to wear. She bought a pair of sunglasses in imitation tortoiseshell that cost half their monthly rent, and she wore them indoors when her friends came. She spent Ulrich’s money on foolish things, though she had always been prudent with money; she played the hits of Pasha Hristova on his stereo. She kept moving the furniture, so that nothing was in its right place when he came home, and it drove him to fury.

‘Are you a blind man?’ she taunted him. ‘That you are scared of bumping into things?’

With her nightly drinking, she began to lose the mornings, and Ulrich emerged from his dreams to find an empty room. He squatted on a stool in the grey hour and remembered how terrible was solitude.

Ulrich developed a friendship, without expecting it, with a woman who lived near by.

She sat next to him on the bus one day, saying she had seen him coming and going. She was not much younger than Ulrich, and had her husband and her life. She worked in a printing press, and her name was Diana.

He made her curious, she said, for he seemed so private. She spoke about the way she felt and how she saw things. Ulrich talked about chemistry, telling her stories of what was now possible. She listened to him while the bus growled between stops.

He was walking home one evening when she saw him on the path and called out.

‘I have something for you. Can you wait? It’s upstairs.’

He watched her walk back to her block, where the fluorescent lamps set her off for a moment before she disappeared inside. Ulrich surveyed the mute concrete, imagining the elevator passing up through the building, counting the equidistant lights as she went down the corridor, the key in the lock. She came down. She wore a long coat for the weather, and carried a plastic bag.

Inside was a magnifying glass.

‘I don’t know if it’s useful for your chemistry,’ she said. ‘But I never use it myself.’

When they met, they walked together, and it became a routine. Talking to Diana was a relief from the trials of Ulrich’s home. He was growing old himself, and he mostly found it difficult to concentrate on other people’s conversation. But with her everything was fresh, and pregnant again. Though he told himself that their friendship meant little, he could feel his anticipation rise each time their rendezvous approached.

They met at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, as if by repeated accident. Ulrich assumed her husband was not around at that time, though she did not say so.

She loved architecture, and took Ulrich to see buildings she found interesting, so they could discuss them together. Her sister was a famous architect who won the Red Banner of Labour and was sent on a trip to Italy once as a reward for her work. Later she designed hotels on the Black Sea, and something in Cuba.

A sanatorium, Ulrich thinks.

Diana thought the Moscow styles were not suited to the Bulgarian climate, and decried the new apartments with their thick walls and small windows. She had ideas about how a building should respond to the shape of a human. She took him to the massive Rila Hotel, and they walked all round it, discussing how it felt, and trying to remember what stood there before. She was unafraid: she took him into the lobby and pointed out the features, and they sat there for a cup of tea.

She talked about her children, grown up and married, and her husband, who was somebody in the party. He was involved in planning, and Diana asked Ulrich about his views on the economy. They talked about the Kremikovtsi steel plant, just then opened. Ulrich said,

‘There is no viable ore in Bulgaria. They have built the mightiest steel plant of all the socialist countries, and there is no ore. They have lost their minds!’

She nodded, but made no comment.

She wished she could have been a cabaret singer. She laughed like a girl when she said it: how she would have liked to have legs like Marlene Dietrich and to sing love songs to an audience every evening. He brought her a gift of a jazz record he still had from Berlin, which she gently refused.

Occasionally she ran across him and said, I can’t see you this Saturday, and he felt as if his treasure had been snatched away.

He did not tell his mother about Diana, and never invited her to his home. It was an indefinable thing, only slightly beyond what would bear scrutiny by the world. Sometimes they just wandered along the grassy railway tracks, so they could be together. But they never called each other by their first names.

One day they went to the St Nedelya cathedral. Ulrich had not been inside it since just after the 1925 bomb, when he had visited it in ruins with his father. Now it was perfectly restored, and their footsteps echoed through the calm interior. They leaned backwards to look up into the dome, and their heads touched. He became talkative as they left. He told her about his father.

‘He loved God. I never understood anything about religion, but my father loved churches and God. He was very quiet about it. I think there were a lot of things he did in silence. When he was younger he talked a lot, but it was not necessarily about the things that were most important to him.’

He told her about Boris, whose death followed on from this building’s destruction.

She took him to a café and ordered Coca-Cola, which had come into Bulgaria. She offered it to Ulrich and he said,

‘I don’t like alcohol.’

‘It isn’t alcohol!’ She laughed. ‘All those Bulgarian films we saw, where American soldiers drank Coca-Cola to put themselves in a drunken fury before battle — they were all lies!’

Ulrich sipped it and told her he liked it. He gave the glass back to her, and watched the way she drank. He said,

‘I care very much about these times we spend together.’

She smiled, and took his arm. They walked outside, where there was a crowd watching a dancing bear. The bear towered over its two minders, lumbering to the drum. There was a chain through its nose.

‘You know how they train them?’ she said. ‘They bang a drum and set the cubs on hot coals, so they jump from one foot to the other to relieve the pain. After a while, they don’t need the coals any more. Just banging the drum is enough.’

The hopping bear looked inexpressively around the audience, its eyes like small buttons in its enormous head. The two men chanted to the crowd, tweaking children’s noses, trying to keep it festive.

‘It looks like dancing,’ Diana concluded. ‘But it’s not.’

She kissed Ulrich lingeringly on the cheek, though there were people all round.

It was the next weekend that she said,

‘I don’t think I can go out with you any more. My husband is jealous.’

Ulrich said,

‘You told your husband?’

‘Of course.’

It stopped at once, and then they saw each other only in passing. Once, Ulrich encountered her with her husband, carrying home a child’s tricycle, and she introduced them, and the man was very affable.

She was not yet old when she died. A kidney infection killed her. Ulrich found out only a long time later.

23

ONCE A YEAR, there was a maintenance shutdown at the factory. The entire system was drained and broken down for repairs.

Ulrich still remembers the astonishing silence of those intervals, and the echo of human voices in the metallic expanse.

There was a worker who liked to sing in the factory at those times. She was a small woman with a nimble soprano voice, and she loved the factory acoustics, which made the sound swell around her. She had a place where she used to stand, and she sang in all the breaks, not caring who listened: folk songs, arias, and whatever else she liked.

One day, during one of these shutdowns, this woman was singing an old drinking song from her part of the country. It was lunchtime, and people were playing cards. The day was mild, and Ulrich stood outside, watching the machines chewing in the open mines below. There were others around him, talking and smoking.

Comrade Denov came over, his shirtsleeves rolled up. He leaned against the wall, mirroring Ulrich’s own pose.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ he said warmly.

Ulrich was not sure what he meant. The day? The singing? The factory parts laid out on the concrete? But he did not ask. Whenever he met Denov he was gripped with guilt. He could not overcome that feeling, even though he was in the right.

They stood for a moment, not speaking. The song was beautiful. Comrade Denov said,

‘You were always a faithful colleague.’

And he gave one of his strange grimaces, which could be humour or gall.

Ulrich was thrown into confusion. Why did Denov speak in the past tense? Did he know what Ulrich was doing?

Ulrich could not summon so much as a grunt in response. The song ended in the factory and, humming it over the mining noise, Denov walked away.

Elizaveta burst into Ulrich’s room one night while her friends were drinking round the table. The door slammed into the wall.

‘Come and join us,’ she cried. ‘Come and have a drink!’

She stood unsteadily in the doorway in a tiger-print dress. He had been trying to sleep.

‘You look disgusting.’

She stared at him for a moment.

‘What did you say?’

She anchored herself with the door handle. He did not repeat himself. She said angrily,

‘One day I’ll tell you exactly what happened to me during those years. Exactly what I had to do to survive till I saw your face again. Now you say dirty things to me just because I want to enjoy my last days.’

To his consternation, she began to weep.

‘You won’t talk to me,’ she wailed. ‘You don’t like me talking to other people. You won’t so much as have a drink with your own mother.’

She sat on his bed and looked at him, her tears still flowing. Her bones protruded, and she smelt of alcohol.

‘You’re impossible to live with.’

She let herself down heavily beside him, forgetting her guests, and drew her feet on to the bed. They lay together in silence while the party continued in the other room.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, vaguely.

Soon afterwards, she began to snore, and he did not know whether she had heard him.

He put an arm around her. The noise outside no longer seemed to interfere, and he drifted into sleep himself.

It was announced in the factory that Comrade Denov’s duties had been curtailed. Ulrich rushed to his office, and found him packing up his things. Denov did not stop what he was doing, but asked him simply,

‘What did you tell them, comrade?’

‘What do you mean?’

Denov shook his head significantly, and Ulrich’s pent-up resentment poured out.

‘How can you look me in the eye, after everything you’ve done? All the people you’ve betrayed with your stealing. We worked like animals for all these years to meet our quotas, and you sold our barium chloride to foreign companies! You hoarded raw materials and sold them on the black market. You see: I know everything. How much money you must have piled up!’

‘You’ve been to my house many times. Did you see me lining my pockets? Did you see cars or jewellery? No. Do you know where that money went? With all your accounting genius, did you ever ask yourself where the money came from for your new baths, your new reactors? Comrade Denov, we need a heating system so the pipes don’t freeze in the winter. We need new pumps. We need this, we need that. It was you who spent that money, and you did it without a care in the world. What did you think: that I built up all that surplus by obeying the rules?’

Ulrich sat down.

‘You should have come to me,’ continued Denov. ‘You understand accounting ledgers well enough, like you understand chemical reactions. But human behaviour is much more complicated.’

‘But it was not right, what you did.’ Ulrich struggled. ‘Even if it wasn’t for yourself.’

Denov spoke without emotion.

‘Do you know how this system works? The numbers they come up with in the Planning Commission are pure fiction. When they say a ton of barium chloride will sell for so many leva, do you think that number has any significance? A bureaucrat comes to work on his mother’s eightieth birthday and he thinks, Eighty is a good number, so he writes it in a column, and for ever afterward we are forced to sell the product of our factory at eighty leva a ton, though it may cost three hundred to produce. This system is fatal. If you don’t have the ingenuity to invent another one, you die. And for this you inform on me to the police. I hope they rewarded you well, Comrade Ulrich.’

Ulrich was dazzled by the sun on the floor. He imagined himself jumping through the glass of Denov’s study window, out into the light, where the scattered words of this conversation would be no more than distant tremors on a clear day. He imagined falling down into the mine pit and smashing on the rocks, and what a release that would be.

He imagined himself standing far away, as if the whole world were no more than a small band of horses tossing heads in a far-off field, and he could let the nearby vastness of the wind in the grass take him over, sweeping him this way and that.

He asked thinly,

‘What will you do now?’

‘What do you think I will do?’ said Denov, standing on a chair and lifting dusty volumes down from the top shelf. ‘I have been appointed to run a much bigger factory near Varna. I will make coatings for satellites. I will have a big house and a driver, and my wife will be happy that I do not smell when I come home from work.’

Denov put the last books in a box and sat behind his desk.

‘They wanted information about me. They always want information. But they didn’t want to destroy me. They wanted to use me. People like me who supply the energy to our socialism. Do you think they value idiots who follow all the rules? They like people who can take a hopeless project, like this factory, and turn it into a success. Even if it means exporting to France.’

Ulrich stood up weakly. He wanted to leave. Denov reached out for the hand at the end of his limp arm and shook it.

‘Goodbye, comrade.’

Ulrich remembers that the factory began to make the wrong sounds, and he developed headaches when at work.

The mills where the ores were ground became deafening, the smell of chlorides suddenly unbearable. The slurry heap was like a mountain after twenty years.

Denov’s young replacement did not consult Ulrich about technical decisions. When Ulrich complained, he explained that he did not think he was competent to oversee a modern factory of this scale.

Ulrich came to work every day but did nothing. He was not asked to attend discussions, nor consulted on any issue, and he was prevented from intervening in the factory’s routine. He walked around giving his approvals to what he saw, but it was like a man conducting an orchestra on the radio.

Idle, he devised a rhapsody of chemicals for the worker who sang in the shutdowns, a scientific spectacle full of mystery and delight. He approached her at her station and invited her to take a walk with him to an abandoned place where he could set it up. Up close, her youth made him conscious of his thinning hair, and his sagging neck. She looked at him with alarm, and refused.

He began to steal regularly from the factory’s small laboratory. Mostly little things, here and there. Old valves from gas canisters. Rubber tubing. Every kind of safety equipment: goggles, gloves, breathing masks. He stole an old microscope that had lain unused for years. There was no dishonour in such behaviour. His old restraining principles were childish affectations, and these objects, he felt, were owed to him.

Ulrich was presented with a date for his retirement. When the day came, the director called him into his office and thanked him for all his work. He told him they were increasing security at the factory and that if Ulrich were to present himself there after that day he would not be able to gain entry. Afterwards there was a quick ceremony in the forecourt of the factory, where the director presented him with a bottle of rakia and spoke to him as if he were a sick person. Several people came up to Ulrich and shook his hand. Then they escorted him to the bus.

24

THE LAST OF ULRICH’S contemporaries from Berlin, some of whom had long since become world famous, died.

Bulgaria built its own oil refineries in Pleven and Bourgas.

The economy began to fail in conspicuous ways, and the shops ran empty.

In those years, the Sunny Beach resort was opened on the Black Sea coast, and the new foreign tourists came to lie in the Bulgarian sun. The East Germans covered the costs of their vacation by selling jeans and Nivea cream to Bulgarians, proving that years of communism had done little to blot out the secrets of trade.

It was the era when the Ilyushins and Tupolevs flown by Balkan Bulgaria Airlines never stopped falling out of the sky, and when Bulgaria took the Olympic medals for weightlifting and wrestling.

Khrushchev, Stravinsky and Louis Armstrong died in a cluster, and Duke Ellington soon after. Shostakovich died too.

Pasha Hristova, whose pop songs drove Ulrich crazy in the house, came down in an aeroplane.

Ulrich’s former employer, Ivan Stefanov, died. Boris’s old friend, Georgi, died of a heart attack while leaving a banquet for party officials. He was sixty-eight years old.

Ulrich’s appearance drew away from all the old photographs, and he began to look more like his elderly father than himself. And Elizaveta was diagnosed with cancer of the lung.

Suddenly their remaining time together seemed short, though she was anyway approaching ninety years of age.

On her birthday, Ulrich proposed a surprise expedition. He prepared some food early in the morning, and helped her brush her hair. He borrowed a car from a man he knew and drove out of Sofia along the E81.

‘It’s a new place, Mother. I think you’ll like it.’

She was very weak by then, but she was enlivened by the plan, and told stories from the old days.

‘Do you remember that Yezidi priest we met that time, near Mosul? What a beautiful place it was, deep grass, rice fields, and everywhere oleander. Storks wading in the rice.’

She was tiny in her seat, her head wobbling with the motion of the car. She looked out of the window, away from Ulrich, out across the flat fields. Her sunglasses looked too big for her now.

‘They had this idea that human beings would become smaller and smaller. Each generation smaller than the last, until they turned into tiny, insignificant creatures. Do you remember? What a fantastic mythology they had! Then a giant would come at the end of time and drink all the seas and rivers until he was full of water, and unable to move. And a mighty worm would come and eat him. Then the whole universe would be flooded and cleansed, and it would be time for judgement.’

‘That’s what he said?’

‘Yes. I remember it like yesterday.’

Her voice was almost gone, and she rasped through her words. It was Sunday, and the road was abandoned. Black factories went by, and orange housing blocks, and flocks of goats. Thistles sparked purple by the side of the road. Up the distant hills was a padding of clumpy forest.

‘We are so lucky in Bulgaria,’ she said. ‘We have the best yogurt and the best countryside.’

He had heard her say this so many times before.

‘Do you remember the picnics we used to have around here? When you were a child? I think about them so often. What beautiful times they were! We drank from pure rivers, and you could cry at the wealth in the trees. Do you remember?’

Ulrich inclined his head in a way that said neither yes nor no. It was a gesture he used often with her. But she was dying, and they had these two hours in the car. It gave her an autobiographical zeal.

‘Before I die,’ she said, ‘I want to confess something. I have no one else to tell it to.’

Ulrich’s forearms throbbed on the wheel. She said,

‘Long ago, in Baghdad, I had an affair with a man. You were a child, always needing attention, and he was so perfect with you. He was a Kurd. His name was Karim. It’s wonderful to say it out loud. Even now.’

She was looking away from him, out of the window. She said,

‘I loved him. It’s the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. We went on a journey together — you were with us, but you were very small — and everything we saw was magical. In the camp I kept myself alive with that feeling from so long ago. What did your father give me to draw on? When we came home I was pregnant with Karim’s child, and I never told anyone, not even him. I didn’t know how to contact him. I managed to get rid of it. I had to do that, for your sake.’

She wept silently. She said,

‘I’m sorry, Ulrich. You were a beautiful thing too. I don’t want you to think …’

But Ulrich was cynical.

‘I always wondered why you talked so endlessly about that part of our lives. All along, it was only because of a man.’

‘No, I loved those places,’ she said. ‘With all my heart. We’ve been trapped so long in this accursed country.’

She gave way to a fit of coughing.

‘I always hoped,’ she said, wiping the saliva from around her mouth, ‘you would find more love in your life.’

The seal around the car windows was broken, and the air was loud. Ulrich saw a formation of military jets flying overhead. He caught something in the distance.

‘We’ve arrived,’ he said.

Steel chimneys slashed the horizon, and white reactors clambered over it like domed pastries. In the distance, the ground gave way to a sea of mercurial piping. Vast clouds drifted from the coolers, white like dough stretched across the sky.

‘What is it?’ said Ulrich’s mother.

‘We’re near Kozloduy. Nearly at the border — the Danube is just ahead, and then Romania. And this is a miracle of our times, Mother. The first nuclear power plant in our country.’

‘That’s what you’ve brought me to see?’

He parked the car, and lifted her out into her wheelchair. The land was very flat, and monumentally empty. While he walked round the car shutting the doors, the wheelchair stood in the road. She had a blanket on her knees, battling the rushing air.

He wheeled her as close as possible, but he was unable to push her up the verge. The fence was topped with barbed wire, and plastic bags were caught there, thundering in the wind. They were a long way from the installation, but the basic structures were visible, and Ulrich explained how the system worked. His mother listened with her tortoiseshell sunglasses on. Her white hair, so thin by then, was all blown to one side.

Ulrich took out their lunch, because she had to eat regularly. He knelt on the grass, feeding her with a spoon. The skies were grey, but beams of intense sunlight occasionally broke through, shining in their eyes. Elizaveta’s face was expressionless as she ate. Ulrich said,

‘Happy birthday, Mother.’

She began to weep.

‘How could you ever think I would want to come here?’ It took a long time for her to chew with her gums. ‘I am a nineteenth-century woman, with cancer. And this is where you bring me?’

‘I thought you’d appreciate a day out of Sofia,’ he said simply.

When she had finished eating, he wiped her mouth, and tried again to push the wheelchair up the incline, but it was too much for him. He left her sitting in a clearing by the side of the road, as occasional cars shook the ground, and climbed up to the fence to examine the power plant, shielding his eyes, and shouting descriptions and explanations to her down below.

She was put into hospital.

She was too old to withstand chemotherapy, so it was only a matter of time. She was allergic to morphine, and in her last days she could not sleep with the pain. After she died he found in her hospital bed some pages she had scribbled during the nights, while he slept in a chair. She had made plans for her funeral: she wanted roses to be given to all the mourners.

Once, she opened her eyes and said to him,

‘Have you heard the latest joke?’

‘No.’

‘A woman goes into a store and asks for six eggs. The shopkeeper says, You’re in the wrong store. Here we have no meat. You have to go next door if you want no eggs.’

He tried to smile.

‘The doctor told me that,’ she said.

She was no bigger than a child under the bedclothes.

‘You’re allowed to laugh,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing tragic about disease, or age, or empty shops. It’s time for me to die. The tragedy is when people don’t feel around you, and never laugh. I hope you laugh some more when I’m gone. Look into the eyes of others, Ulrich, and you’ll see there’s still a field of life there.’

Her hair was thin and greasy, and her plait kept falling open. She asked him to tie it up again.

He propped her up and sat behind her.

‘Mother,’ he said.

He was nearly seventy years old, plaiting his mother’s wispy hair. He broke down weeping.

‘I can’t live without you. I won’t survive.’

He curled himself around her, sobbing. She put her hand on his head.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Just remember everything we did.’

When her body gave out, he went back home. The house was cold.

It was as if all her possessions had died with her, for they were noticeably less animated than before. He touched her glasses, her knitting, her lifeless books. He overturned her shoes to contemplate the soles’ wear. He found the enormous pile of papers she had typed over the years, and, for the first time, he allowed his curiosity out. He flicked slowly through this thing she had made, seeing the curlicue script down the left-hand margin, inked in by hand.

It was a dictionary. All those years she had been writing a dictionary. A Bulgarian — Arabic dictionary, which she had left piled up in neat bundles secured with rubber bands.

25

SOON AFTER HIS MOTHER’S DEATH, Ulrich converted her bedroom into a chemistry laboratory.

He moved her bed out into the corridor, where it stood on its side for years before he finally chopped it up for firewood.

He set up a workbench and laid out all the equipment he had stolen from the factory. He installed an extractor fan that propelled effluent gases through a length of corrugated piping hanging out of the window. He brought barrels of petroleum and canisters of chlorine. He erected a small oven.

There were echoes of the garden laboratory of his childhood, for though he had seen many real laboratories since then, he still had in mind the same dramatic descriptions from the same old adventure novels.

Ulrich set out to discover plastic.

The 1970s were already well advanced. In the shops downstairs from Ulrich’s apartment, there were plastic cups and trays. There was polystyrene packaging and polythene bags. His own house was full of plastic pens and vinyl flooring, and even the clothes he wore were polyester. His sofa was stuffed with plastic foam. The casing of his television was plastic, and there was a plastic clock on the wall.

But Ulrich’s knowledge of polymers dated from his time in Berlin, half a century before, when all of these materials lurked in the void of the future. The intervening time had added little to his theoretical understanding, for he had become cut away from the world of research. He had only vague ideas as to how nylon might be made, or even vinyl. In his scientific world, the entire empire of plastics still had to be invented — and he set out as a late-coming pioneer.

He devoted several years to fundamental experiments, and taught himself many of the principles of polymer science. He developed a range of materials with different properties, and he began to test how they responded under various conditions. He learned how to adjust hardness, plasticity and heat resistance.

He drew his plastic curtains on the world outside. There was a plastic lamp on the bench, in whose bright circle he lived, day and night.

There were occasional accidents and his neighbours sometimes came to complain about the smells and the explosions. They were suspicious of his perpetual confinement.

There were days of euphoria, the ethylene gas coming off in a hot polymer slurry, and drying solid. He gazed at glistening blobs of virgin plastic, and he felt the satisfaction of having planted himself in something outside himself.

His inner thoughts from those days are mostly sealed off to him now. When he remembers what he did, he is reminded of a monkey he once saw in the Sofia zoo, beating its head rhythmically in its cage. Or the parrots he read about in a magazine, who pulled their feathers out when explorers caged them and took them away.

The police came to the apartment. It was after his remaining hair had turned grey, because they remarked on it. They complained of the smells and the dirt. They seemed alarmed at the conditions he was living in. They took him to a small room for questioning.

Ulrich had lost the habit of conversation, and was intimidated by the interrogation room. His eyes were wide with confusion, and the interrogator had to steady him.

‘There is nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘We’re not trying to scare you. We just want to understand what you’re doing. Your neighbours are concerned.’

There was a lamp in Ulrich’s eyes, which released glowing spores in front of the interrogator’s face. They turned it off to calm him.

‘When did you last take a bath, comrade?’ the interrogator asked.

The question seemed easy, but Ulrich’s mind had become a vacuum. There were three men gathered around him who seemed to think there was a truth inside him that they would persuade him to part with. But inside him was nothing. He could not even remember when he last had a bath.

‘What is the purpose of the experiments you are conducting in your apartment?’

This, too, was impossible. Ulrich foundered on purpose. The interrogator tried to simplify his approach.

‘Are you making something?’

‘Yes,’ replied Ulrich.

‘Well, what are you making?’

‘Plastics. Various kinds of plastics.’

‘Plastic. Like this, you mean?’

He knocked his knuckle against the plastic clock that stood on the table between them. Ulrich picked up the clock and examined it.

‘No, not like this,’ he said at length. ‘This is made of polycarbonate. I don’t know how to make that.’

‘So what do you make?’ asked the interrogator patiently.

‘My experiments are still at an early stage, and I don’t know where they will lead. At present I am trying to develop some transparent materials using acetone and hydrogen cyanide. I may succeed, I may fail.’

‘Hydrogen cyanide. That sounds dangerous.’

‘I wear a gas mask,’ said Ulrich reassuringly. His nerves had calmed down.

The interrogator asked,

‘What do you intend to do with these transparent materials? Supposing you succeed?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ulrich.

‘Let me ask you this. Are you running an illegal business? Are you trying to undermine our socialist economy?’

‘No,’ said Ulrich.

‘You don’t intend to sell what you make?’

‘No.’

‘How can you afford to buy your supplies?’

‘From my pension. I have no other expenses. And I have some savings.’

The interrogator was silent. Ulrich said,

‘If someone wanted me to make plastic things for them I might be able to do so. I think I could make buttons for a suit.’

‘But it is easy to get buttons for a suit!’

Ulrich picked up the clock and looked at it again. The interrogator continued,

‘Why do you do this, comrade? You are behaving like an eccentric and making people nervous. If it continues we will have to confiscate your equipment. And who would suffer from that? You are using dangerous chemicals in a residential building. There are several chemistry clubs you could belong to, where everything would be above board.’

‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘I want to do it in the proper way.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The proper way. The authentic way.’

Ulrich remembers that his door wore padlocks like so many earrings, and it was reinforced with steel. He plugged his keyhole and kept his curtains drawn.

He began to manufacture plastic objects. He made plastic dolls and animals. He sculpted a plastic comb, painstakingly, tooth by tooth. He did not have moulds, and everything he made looked like craftwork: irregular and roughly shaped.

He conducted some experiments with colouring, and set himself the task of producing a replica of his mother’s imitation tortoiseshell sunglasses, which had sat on a sideboard in the main room all this time.

He had to construct his own equipment: a reactor loop made of two new car exhausts he found, and a pump he had stolen from the factory. He used a chromium catalyst that he powdered himself. He needed high temperatures, and the apartment sweated. He used phthalic anhydride to make the frames more flexible, which he produced on his own, from naphthalene.

How many years of work did it take him to produce the material for the lenses? He remembers producing the first successful sheet, pressed between sheets of aluminium foil under a pile of heavy books. When he drew it out it was unintentionally embossed with the words Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language, and the device of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

He made moulds out of concrete, lined with aluminium foil. He used his own weight to hold the moulds closed while he injected the plastic with a hand pump, and he crouched there, on the mould, until it had cooled. He lifted off the top, pulled out the foil, and peeled it away carefully from the plastic. Glistening, and still warm.

He was unable to make hinges for the glasses, and he could not find out where to buy them. He was therefore obliged to go to the market and buy another pair of sunglasses to take the hinges from. That pair cost four leva. Over the years he had invested hundreds, if not thousands, of leva in his own production.

The police took years to return, but when they did they asked no questions. They simply dismantled his laboratory so that he could not continue his work any more.

Uranium

26

TODAY, ULRICH’S NEIGHBOUR is preoccupied by the recent arrival of two more Gypsy families in the building.

‘They’re taking over,’ she says as she unloads Ulrich’s laundry. ‘These days I’m scared to come home after dark. Their young men stare at me while I walk to the lift.’

She has brought hot sausages, which Ulrich can smell. She puts a new packet of tea bags in the cupboard, and disappears into the bathroom with toilet paper.

In this weather, everything is storing heat. When there is absolute quiet, Ulrich can hear the wood of the window frame creaking with desiccation.

He hears his neighbour tidying up in the bathroom. She flushes the toilet.

‘You know they steal the electricity?’ she says, emerging again. ‘Their children are electrical wizards: they disconnect their meters and connect their supply to the meters of hard-working Bulgarians. That’s why our bills have been rising so much. The Gypsies don’t pay one stotinka. They spend it all on dancing and weddings. And if you try and confront them …’

She leaves Ulrich to picture the consequences. He feels he should show more concern, since she also pays his own electricity bill, but he can think of nothing to say.

‘You’d think they’d become more civilised, living among Bulgarians. But it’s quite the opposite! They have marble floors and satellite dishes, they mint money like the National Bank — and still they steal from us!’

And with a sigh she said,

‘God save Bulgaria!’

Ulrich has his own pet hatred. There is a man on the ground floor who collects bits of old wood and iron, covers them in gold spray paint, and sells them. He picks up a rusty plaque with a lion on it, or a wreath, he sands the rust off and sprays it gold, and sells it to someone for their house. This building has a small garden, which at present is full of the man’s junk, though Ulrich is certain that no one gave him the liberty to store it there. On windy days he applies his spray paint inside, in the hallway, and the entire building smells of acetone.

These proceedings incite inexplicable fury in Ulrich. His mind dwells on this man for much longer than it should, and whenever his neighbour is counting out his pills, he asks whether she has news of him, to feed his irritation.

In the extreme of his life, Ulrich’s emotions have begun to pitch and toss on their own, with no proportion to what caused them. He no longer laughs at jokes, or weeps at things that are sad, but he finds himself weeping and laughing at other times, for no obvious reason. Nothing flows when expected, and then an entirely simple thing — the sun on his face in the morning, or the feel of a spoon in the hand — punctures an escape route, and a torrent bubbles out, erotic and sickly, of grief, or anger, or mirth.

Earlier today, the excited voice of a football commentator activated in Ulrich a sharp happiness that seemed to have been laid down decades ago, and never felt.

Ulrich has come to enjoy this unpredictability of his emotions. He feels as if something new is happening to him, even at his age.

‘You know what we found in the flooded apartment upstairs?’ his neighbour says as she opens the door. ‘Beetles.’

Ulrich nods, imagining the scene. But that is not what she meant.

‘He had them on the wall, in wooden cases. Must have been at least twenty wooden frames full of different beetles. Beautiful things, they were: iridescent green, some of them as big as your fist. There was nothing else in the house: the place was emptied out. A radiator pipe had burst, that’s why we had all that water, and the floor was completely rotten. Don’t know who’s going to pay for the repairs. My husband’s going to see if he can get some money for those beetles, but that won’t begin to cover it.’

Ulrich asks if the owner of the flat was an entomologist.

‘I don’t know,’ she says hurriedly. ‘I never met him. But I have to get home and take the weight off these legs. They’re killing me.’

Ulrich takes the opportunity to ask what exactly is wrong with her legs.

She blows out her air.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs, as such. I don’t have any. Didn’t you ever notice? I lost them years back.’

Ulrich does not feel he can ask how it happened, since she has not volunteered it. She shuts the door, and he hears her limping hurriedly along the corridor. He feels a little guilty that he takes her so for granted.

It is the most beautiful moment in the day, and though Ulrich can no longer see it, he has lived in this room for long enough to sense when it is beginning. In the middle of the morning, the sun shines through his window on to the mirror, and the room glows joyfully for a few minutes with the travelling rectangle of light on the opposite wall. Even without his eyes, he feels the momentary transfiguration.

27

RELEASED FROM HIS OWN CHEMISTRY, Ulrich realised Bulgaria had become a chemical disaster. The rivers ran with mercury and lead, and hummed with radioactivity. Fishing had dried up on the Black Sea coast, and, every year, more fields and forests were lost.

The Kremikovtsi steelworks and the Bukhovo uranium mine flooded Sofia with lead, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, ethanol and mercury. Radioactive sludge from Bukhovo was dumped in an open forest, contaminating the river and the surrounding land.

The copper mines in Pirdop devastated everything around them. Arsenic flowed straight into the Pirdopska river, and dead fish piled up downstream in enormous stinking banks. Nylon stockings melted on contact with the air.

Bulgarian sheep had miscarriages and died, and the cows went mad. Children were born with cancers and deformities. Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.

Reactor 4 of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl blew up, and the atmosphere altered. The undead leaders clung to office and alcohol, but they had lost the power to stop talk. Intellectuals began to denounce the chlorine pollution from the chemical plant across the river in Romania, which poisoned the Rousse air. They criticised industry and the socialist ideal. They made films against chemical contamination, and demonstrated in the streets. They spoke with impunity, and it was clear that Zhivkov had lost his mastery.

The Turks protested the treatment they had received: their ghettos, their labour, the forced change of their names. The old factories churned but the shops were empty, and even a child could see that the eternal system was propped up now only by rust and contraband. The lording Gypsies worked in trucks and trains, and made money moving things from here to there. People said it rained banknotes at their weddings.

The forbidden music returned.

Ulrich watched his television, not really understanding what was going on. People said, Communism is no more! and, after forty years, Zhivkov stepped down from his height, and became subject to human things. His arrest and trial were shown to the world. He sweated in the courtroom, he was nervous and made mistakes, and it was impossible any more to believe in his divinity. Secrets were laid bare, and everything collapsed like a public demolition.

It was amazing how fast the old order was swept away. People told stories openly about their previous crimes and punishments, as if they were rumours from another place. The Secret Service archives were opened, and people could see the transcripts of their old phone calls and the reports their friends had filed against them. Ulrich watched a documentary on television about the labour camps, and howled for what his dead mother had kept inside her.

He never had an instinct for politics, and now he could not even tell what kind of world he was in. They said, Now we are capitalist! — but all Ulrich could see was criminality raised up into a principle. Murderers and thieves took over and called themselves businessmen, and kept the people happy with pornography. The United Nations cut off supplies to Milosevic’s Serbia, and gleeful thick-necked Bulgarian toughs stepped in to supply the food and oil, becoming billionaires overnight. They bought TV stations, hotels and football clubs, and they adorned those necks with gold crosses the size of dinner plates.

They were former sportsmen and Secret Service men, and they had manoeuvred well through the debacle, but even they could not believe how many millions they had managed to steal. For a time they lived out in the open, and everyone could see their incredulous carnival; but then they began to die in daylight assassinations, and they retreated behind walls.

Bulgaria became Asiatic again, as it had been when Ulrich was born. Big-breasted Bulgarian singers embraced the long-suppressed Turkish and Arabic music and turned it into anthems for the new gangster society. Heroin poured in from Afghanistan. Criminal companies selected the best-looking Bulgarian girls to work in brothels in Dubai.

The world returned to war. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought. Yugoslavia fell apart. Russia razed Chechnya, trying to hold on to it. There was civil war in Georgia — with tanks firing in front of the opera house in Tbilisi, where Ulrich had gone to see Tosca with Magdalena on their honeymoon so long ago. The Americans bombed Baghdad, which his father had tried so long ago to link harmoniously to Europe with his Berlin — Baghdad railway line. People said, Now our country is open! but even if it had been possible for Ulrich to journey to the places of his life, they all seemed to be in flames. America bombed Yugoslavia, and chemicals flowed down the river into Bulgaria from the destroyed factories, and bloated corpses too.

Ulrich was reduced to absolute poverty. He could not afford the electricity in Zapaden Park, and nearly froze in the winter. He moved into a run-down building near the bus station whose hollow partitions were built against the grain, so that the windows stood half in one apartment, half in another.

He left behind many of his possessions. He could not transport the great volume of his chemistry books.

He brought some paving slabs into the new place, and built a fireplace under the chimney. In the winter, he collected bits of packing crate from the street to make a fire with, which blazed up in an instant, searing the room, and burned out without leaving any warmth.

He began to forage for food, but he moved slowly, and the competitive hordes were energetic and desperate. Even the young could not make it, and many of them left the city in the hope of sustaining themselves on a bit of chemical land. Ulrich sat in doorways, trying to preserve his energy, and he watched the drunk children and the women praying for miracles. There were stains on the pavements from where the people slept, and sometimes there were corpses in the morning.

One afternoon, Ulrich collapsed while trying to open his front door, and was taken in by his neighbours. That was when they began to give him money.

For weeks afterwards, he lay curled up on his bed, unable to think or move. He spent all night trying in vain to sleep, and groaned when he heard the first clatter of morning water in the pipes.

He leaned his head against the wall, which was like a great membrane capturing the sounds of the building. Conversations in other apartments came through as indistinct reverberation. Music, sometimes, and telephone rings. It was rainy, and at night the wall groaned with damp distension. Wet patches spread with clicks as molecules found new space, and the plaster ballooned.

In the afternoons, the air warmed up. The damp paint, hanging off in curled butterfly wings, dried out with the sun; crackled, and fell, finally, to the floor.

Ulrich’s heartbeat slowed, and his pressure dropped inside. He was tired, and his daydreams were not enough to keep out the news stories.

The national airline, Balkan Airlines, sent its air hostesses to pose nude for Playboy in order to save itself from bankruptcy. The Kremikovtsi steelworks were sold to an American company for one dollar.

The new leaders incinerated the communist mummy of Georgi Dimitrov, and decided to demolish his tomb, which had already become a glowering affront to the nobility of their new capitalism. Great crowds came to watch the mausoleum come down, while the prime minister surveyed the solemn proceedings from behind his office curtains. The country’s leading explosives experts came in clean uniforms to lay down their dynamite. With a magnificent lack of humour, they signalled their readiness, and everyone prepared themselves for the house of spirits to evaporate.

The explosion was so massive that the speakers crackled on Ulrich’s rickety television. People ducked and covered their eyes; the surrounding windows were blown out, and great cracks streaked across the stone square. But as the smoke cleared, the crowds burst into laughter — and even Ulrich laughed in his solitude. For the mausoleum stood indifferent, entirely unharmed. The experienced experts set more explosives, and still nothing happened. They claimed a technical hitch, and tried a third time. But still it would not fall. They packed up and went home, and returned after dark, with pickaxes. That was what it was to live in flimsier times, with the past simply too well made.

There was a knock at Ulrich’s door one day, and government agents asked for Elizaveta, who was twenty years dead. They carried a parcel containing her jewellery, a gold crucifix, an oil painting of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, and a series of framed prints of the Ringstrasse in Vienna. These objects had been held in a vault for close on half a century, and now they were fastidiously returned.

This miraculous event contradicted everything Ulrich thought he knew, and he felt he had lived too long. He had seen the statues pulled down too many times — this time they were putting up shrines to Ronald Reagan — and everyone around him had passed away. He was living in the aftertimes, whose rules he did not understand. Forty or fifty years, he thought, were enough for a modern life, for the human frame could not hold up if the world was destroyed too many times and made again.

He was forced to sell all his mother’s valuables, and his gold watch too. He resented the smugness of the owner of the antique shop, who accepted these things with so little emotion. The shop was piled high with painted wooden icons, china horses, military decorations, sports trophies, stamp collections and old spectacles. There were boxes full of yellowed postcards sent from the Black Sea. The place swelled with the lives that were deposited there.

Till the very end, Ulrich had sustained the hope that there would be someone for him to bequeath his gold watch to.

Ulrich’s life had become minimal. He rarely left his tiny apartment and he had little to do. There was no telephone in his apartment, and the list of his possessions was short. He did not even cook his meals any more. He produced nothing at all. He spent some time every day making lists of the things he threw out. He listed toothpaste tubes, exhausted pens and sachets of coffee, and he found there some signature of his remaining significance.

One day, Ulrich decided to throw out two old canisters of sulphuric acid that were left over from his days of experimentation. He had kept them with the vague idea that they might come in useful for stripping electrical wire or something of the sort, but he had not touched them in many years. He took them down from the shelf, and, out of some inexplicable desire to see what state the contents were in after all this time, he tried to open one of them. It was sealed tightly shut. After several minutes of wrestling, holding the canister between his knees to keep it steady, the seal broke and the acid burst in his face. He ran to the kitchen to plunge his head in the sink, still full of dishwashing water, but the pain remained intense. When he could finally open his eyes he could see nothing.

His neighbours took him to the hospital, where the skin of his nose and forehead was treated for burns, but there was nothing they could do about his eyes. His corneas were destroyed.

28

THIS MORNING, ULRICH sensed a new, ripe feeling in the air, and now, in the afternoon, the storm is being prepared.

Just a succession of pinpricks at the beginning, but swelling to a single sighing sheet: a sonic layer over everything. The breeze in the window — thank God! — and the smell of dust flowing off the roof and dripping from the tree leaves. Ulrich can hear his neighbour’s hurried limp next door as she rushes between windows, throwing them open. It’s an even downpour, and he sees everything in fine grain: the cars are spraying now, the back-hiss of radials, and there is the bus park laid out, the long steel roofs resounding like tin drums. Figures caught unprepared: the street pours its people into the doorways, and somebody runs with a polythene bag held tutting overhead. Plastic takes on more of the roar as the stalls are quickly covered across the street. The windowsill is a delicate pattering bar.

Underneath, directly below, is an umbrella open wide, where the sill’s globules bomb. Silverdrops are swelling on the rib tips till they break and fall, smattering the ground plumply amid the slender rain. They burst on the paving and scatter into spray; and, caught in the flare — is he being fanciful? — is something too large to be one person, a dark doublemass absorbing the sibilance. Two hidden lovers holding each other close under the awning, a huddled shadow in sound.

By now, Ulrich has reconciled himself to the loss of his vision. In the beginning he was terribly shaken, and for months afterwards he mourned the sense he had lost. But his system gradually regenerated itself, and now he does not feel inconvenienced without his eyes. In fact, his gaze turned inward, he has become rejuvenated. Little disturbed by sensory impressions, his mind generates its own material, which absorbs him completely, and he finds his days are full.

Thinking back, he realises how much has slipped through the fingers of his memory. Everything he still retains could be told in an afternoon, and yet there is so much more. The substance of all those days, which has entirely escaped.

The days of dust drifting in the light shafts. Tea bags put out to dry. Listless newspapers with new dates on them every day. The pipes of grubby gloss that turn from the back of the radiator along the wall. The gradual death of things: plants and machines and animals; furniture and friends. Twisted hairs trapped in a hairbrush. The seasons, and their increasing irrelevance, even if there is still a sense of eternity about the clouds. Cracks in walls, and the refusal of windows to close properly after too many coats of paint. Filling in forms. New buildings whose purpose is unclear. Things that have not been seen for some time: a good pen, a souvenir key ring. Lying in bed, and ceilings. Surprises, such as window glass blown in by the wind. Small changes that appear in routes walked often: a new fence post, or a sawn-off tree. The shocking breathlessness of climbing just a few stairs, and shaving in the morning. Thoughts in the background: concerns about money, and whether he can still be considered good looking. The cleaning of things just cleaned: cups, and plates, and bathtubs, and cookers, and hands, and all the other parts of the body. Old-style banknotes discovered in jacket pockets, and the recollection of facts when the need for them has passed. The relief of television, and its futility. The persistence of shit, and its undue hold on the mind. The stuff that passes through the days: empty food cans, old batteries, rotten fruit, and notepaper.

It has all slipped away.

Ulrich has sometimes wondered whether his life has been a failure. Once he would have looked at all this and said, Yes. But now he does not know what it means for a life to succeed or fail. How can a dog fail its life, or a tree? A life is just a quantity; and he can no more see failure in it than he can see failure in a pile of earth, or a bucket of water. Failure and success are foreign terms to such blind matter.

Ulrich’s spirit has expanded in these last days, and he is no longer bereft. Though the memories are no longer his, he feels they persist nonetheless. Einstein said, considering his death, I feel such solidarity with all things, that it does not matter where the individual begins and ends. When his mind is particularly aware, Ulrich can sense the great black ocean of forgotten things, and, ignoring his beginning and end, he casts off into it. Everything he has known has drained, over time, from the actual world into this ocean, and he is blissful in the endless oblivion. Only when his surroundings insist — when the electric drill whirs downstairs, and the walls start with that powdery vibration, so unique to this place — does he alight again, reluctantly, in the narrow confines of his room.

In his childhood, Ulrich’s parents were often invited to evening parties. His father would come down first, his velvet coat resplendent and his moustaches waxed to dagger tips, and he admired himself in the fireplace mirror, saying, Look at your handsome old man! Then his mother, whose heart-shaped diamond necklace shone in the firelight, who lent over the flurries of her sapphire dress while he begged her not to go, and kissed him goodnight in a gust of perfume. Ulrich watched their departure from the window, the coachman’s whips and cries as the horses strained against the carriage’s inertia, and he sat back down, barefooted, with toys and books.

His grandmother enjoyed these moments when she had him to herself. She sat with him, and told him stories. Over the hours, the oil lamps burned out, until they were left only with the glow of the fire, which Ulrich prodded now and then.

It is a feeling that Ulrich has sought again and again through his life.

Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavour of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.