Solo

Narwhal

1

IN A SMALL INDUSTRIAL TOWN some two hundred kilometres from the Bulgarian city of Rousse lived a youth named Petar, who was looking to prove his manhood.

Petar was small and spindly, and could not attract the girls, while his father was a bull of a man whose feats of strength were talked about even in the next town.

Old Petar never stopped remarking on it.

‘Don’t know what games your old mother must have played to bring out a gimp like you.’

Petar felt it was time to show everyone what he could do. He was twenty-one: he worked as hard as anyone else in the factory, and, if you did not take his size into account, he could look quite handsome.

His opportunity came when the mayor announced a party for his wedding anniversary. Old Petar was the mayor’s brother, and naturally it would fall to him to slaughter the pig. He was famous for it: he could slice a jugular in an instant, and with his bulk he pinned down the largest animals and held them as they died.

‘Pigs are sensitive beasts,’ he would say as he got up from his exertions and acknowledged the crowd’s approval. ‘You can’t let them suffer.’

On the morning of the mayor’s party, Petar approached his father and said,

‘Today I am going to slaughter the pig.’

Old Petar burst out laughing.

‘You? You wouldn’t have the first idea. It takes skill to kill a pig. Can you imagine what kind of beast my brother will have stored up for a day like this? — it will weigh twice as much as me! How could you keep it down?’

‘I’ve watched you all my life, and I know how it’s done. As for my size — I’ll make up for it with ingenuity.’

The argument went on until his father gave in.

‘But you’re on your own. I’ll have nothing to do with it.’

Around midday, people began to gather at the hall where the mayor was having his party. A steel bath was already heating on the fire to dunk the pig in afterwards, to remove the hair.

Old Petar arrived, his son in tow. Everyone knew what his arrival portended; they greeted him excitedly and walked with him in a jubilant crowd to where the pig was penned. Old Petar opened the gate to the enclosure while everyone else climbed on to the fence and sat there to watch. The pig was sleeping inside a wooden hut with its head resting in the mud outside. The sudden commotion roused it, and it blinked drowsily.

Old Petar stood in the middle of the enclosure and took his knife out of his belt. He raised it above his head, and everyone cheered. He spoke:

‘I’m not slaughtering the pig today. My son here thinks he can do it better. So see him try.’

There was general surprise. Old Petar walked out of the pen and handed the knife to his son. Then he turned his back on the crowd and set off down the street towards home.

Petar jumped down from the fence into the enclosure. Everyone was watching. The mayor and all his friends. The young men who had mocked Petar when they were at school. All the prettiest girls in the town were there. They were all sitting on the fence watching how Petar would fare with the pig.

The mayor was a little nervous.

‘Are you sure about this, young Petar? I have a lot of guests to feed today and I don’t want anything to go wrong. That pig’s been waiting a long time for this day. Ideally he would want someone with a bit more experience.’

Petar had brought three long pieces of rope. He tied them to sturdy posts on different sides of the pen, and laid the three loose ends together in the middle. Everyone watched curiously.

The mayor said,

‘Do you want some men to hold him down? You’re just a snip of a thing yourself.’

Petar approached the pig, which eyed him lazily. He took its ear and tried to pull it to its feet. The pig did not move. He seized both ears and leant backwards, pulling as hard as he could. The pig was oblivious, and the girls began to snigger. Petar took a sharp stick and began to poke the pig in the neck. It still did not react: its skin was as tough as bark. Finally, he threw himself into the ripe darkness of the sty, wriggled along the length of the pig’s warm flank, and prodded it vigorously in the backside. The pig snorted and flicked its tail in his face, and, as Petar dug in harder, it whined irritably and struggled to its feet. Finally, it stumbled out of the sty and into the open. Petar crawled after it, covered in filth.

The pig stood under the hot sun, drowsy and bewildered. It was the mayor’s prize boar, and the largest Petar had ever seen. Its head was larger than his torso. Its body was a long pink mountain of muscle and fat, and its legs were as thick as pillars. Its eyes were moist and human, with a thatch of stiff gold lashes.

Petar coaxed the pig into the middle of the enclosure. He stroked it to keep it calm, and pushed it gently ahead of him. The pig was in no mood for an argument. When Petar had it where he wanted it, he began to stroke its snout and to speak soothingly in its ear, until the pig folded its forelegs and lay down on the ground. Petar pulled the ropes taut and tied them firmly around the pig’s ankles.

Everyone was still. The mayor said quietly,

‘You’re sure you’re all right, boy?’

Petar nodded.

He took the knife his father had given him and held it ready. He lay down gently on the broad surface of its back, speaking softly in the pig’s ear, his arms around either side of its head. Suddenly, and so violently that even his expectant audience was taken by surprise, Petar thrust the knife into the pig’s throat.

The pig let out a scream that split their heads like the screech of an electric drill; it staggered to its feet, eyes flung wide. Petar gripped its head and tried to push his knife in farther, but the pig started to run. The two posts at the far end of the enclosure were pulled clean out of the ground, and spectators fell into the mud as the fence collapsed. The pig lowered its head and broke through the barrier at the other end; the crowd scattered in all directions as Petar gripped the pig’s back with his knees as best he could and sawed at its windpipe, opening a hole that gushed blood in the wind. The third rope tautened, and once again the post was ripped out — and now there were three fence posts bouncing on the end of ropes as the pig ran screaming down the hill, its eyes rolling in its sockets and Petar hanging on for dear life.

Behind them ran the party guests, calling and screaming and grabbing at the flying ropes, but none of them could stall the careering pig.

Ahead of them, Petar could see the main road coming close, where cars flashed by on their way to Rousse or the Black Sea, and still the pig charged pell-mell, hoofs a-clatter on tarmac and piston legs accelerating with the incline; and just as the road broadened out into a junction, still bucking and lurching, Petar managed to cut through the pig’s windpipe. Its shriek dried up in its throat and he felt it flag. Its giant lungs were heaving, sucking impotently at the air.

The pig came to a halt. The running crowd caught up and watched as the big eyes turned white, saliva coursed from pig lips, the legs buckled — and the huge animal rolled over, its nostrils still whistling. Petar did not loose his grip but clung on as if in his own rigor mortis. People formed a circle around the dying pig. It was covered in sweat, and blood was still pumping out on to the street. Its eyes opened wide and its back legs kicked, once, twice, three times. It took a long time to die. No one spoke.

The mayor marched after them. He was red with rage.

‘A fine mess, young Petar. What a way to kill a pig. The whole meal will taste of this. And now we have to carry a quarter-ton beast back up the hill. A big fucking mess. I should have just put a bullet in its head.’

Petar got off the pig. He was covered in blood from head to toe. Someone brought a tractor, and everyone heaved the dead pig on to the trailer. They walked behind it up the hill.

Petar went home. His father was sawing wood.

‘Did you kill it?’

‘Yes.’

His father smirked.

‘Looks like it put up quite a fight. You’d better get washed.’

Petar took a shower. His hair was matted with blood and pig shit. He felt depressed. He watched the brown water go down the plughole and vomited suddenly, holding in the noise.

In the evening, he put on a new shirt and set out with his father for the party.

The men came gathered round as they arrived.

‘Never seen a pig killed like that, Old Petar! Your son did it bareback! Did well to keep his focus, he did.’

Old Petar gave a half-smile. The men pressed rakia into their hands.

‘You’ll need a drink after that, boy.’

The pig had been roasting for hours on the spit, and the aroma displaced everything else. Women were still peeling vegetables and chopping onions and herbs. It was a beautiful autumn night, and the men gathered in lazy groups, smoking and drinking.

The mayor came over with more rakia.

‘Your son told you how he ruined my pig? Big mess. Big fucking mess. I saved that boar a long time.’

Old Petar did not look up. There was music coming from inside the hall, too loud for him to think straight, and he said,

‘My brother has rented a Japanese stereo from the Gypsies, with speakers as tall as me. He thinks it will make the young people like him. Meanwhile we can’t even hear what we’re saying.’

The stars grew bright, and the mayor announced dinner. They went inside to take their places. A life-sized photograph of the mayor and his wife on their wedding day had been pasted on one wall. The stereo was blaring pop music, and the worldlier girls were singing along. The tables were piled with food, and people began to eat hungrily. The mayor sat at the head table with his family, glaring all the time at his brother. He shouted through the music,

‘Can you taste it, Petko? Can you taste the upset your son made? The meat is ruined.’

Old Petar laid an arm across his son’s shoulders and said,

‘It tastes fine to me. At least he had the courage to try. You should have taken the pig on yourself. Then we could have laughed good and proper.’

The girls got up to dance in the middle of the tables. It was raucous music that Petar did not know. Several babies started crying at the same time. The mayor continued to complain about the pig.

Somebody came and hovered over Petar.

Petar had always loved Irina, but only from afar. In his private thoughts, she was an insouciant flock of laughter, a tumbling-sycamore girl, a bliss of damask roses. He had watched her grow up without her ever sending a glance in his direction. He sometimes went to the bakery where she worked, and she dealt with him swiftly and silently. He had seen her at weddings, singing songs until the old men cried, and she was perfect and fearless, and destined for extraordinary things.

‘Why don’t you ever dance?’ said she.

‘I’m not very good. I prefer to watch.’

‘Why don’t you try?’

She held out her hand and he took it. Standing next to her, he was half a head shorter. She led him into the middle of the room and succumbed to an energetic dance which was a perfect translation of the wild sounds into flesh. He tried to follow, awkwardly. She smiled at him.

‘That was the worst slaughter I ever saw!’

She laughed loudly.

‘It was a big pig,’ he said, not sure what she meant.

The dance was not working. She said,

‘Let’s go.’

They went outside and walked idly.

‘Don’t you like music?’

‘I don’t know much about it.’

‘You’re missing out. Music is the reason to be young!’

And then she said,

‘The Gypsies bring in music from England and Germany. I can teach you everything. In England there’s a style called punk, and there’s another kind called heavy metal. Motörhead, Iron Maiden — have you heard of them? I have headphones at home: you put those pads on your ears and hear the guitars groaning behind your eyelids, your brain melts and it’s crazy and fantastic.’

Petar looked at the ground while they walked, thinking, She is amazing.

‘Let’s face it,’ she said, ‘the world is shit, and full of lies. You need music. Then you understand that none of this matters — this punishment, this stupid Bulgaria.’

The factory had stayed closed that day, and the air was clear. She said,

‘I’m going to join a band some day. Get out of this town.’

‘You’ll be a great singer,’ said Petar assuredly.

‘What do you know? What have you heard, except for the stuff they play on Radio Sofia? The songs I write would scare you.’

Petar smiled. He said,

‘I know you well enough. I know we’ll switch on the television one day and see you on the big shows from Moscow. And we’ll still be here, living like we do. We’ll say, Once we knew her: she grew up here!’

He was wistful. He said,

‘It will make me happy. To know you did what you dreamed of.’

She thought about it.

‘They’ll never play my music on those stuffy shows.’

They had arrived at her house.

‘Come in. Everyone’s at the party. We can drink on our own.’

They went into the house. He sat down at the kitchen table. She took some vodka down from a shelf and poured it into two glasses.

Nine months later, Irina gave birth to a baby boy. She and her new husband, Petar, named him Boris.

They had moved into a small apartment in an old tower block, but Petar was making plans for them to move to Sofia so that Irina could pursue her musical dreams.

The new baby was tiny and frail. Boris breathed with difficulty and seemed to be in continual discomfort. The doctor warned he might not live. He advised that the baby sleep with an oxygen mask, since his lungs were not yet fully developed.

The anxious parents laid their baby between them each night and stayed awake for hours, watching every breath going into his lungs and every exhalation misting the mask. Finally, exhausted by the anxiety, they fell asleep. Long after they had drifted away, the cylinder of oxygen stood like a sentinel by the bed, its rubber tube looping over one parent and blowing gently into baby Boris’s mouth and nose.

And so it was, on a cold night in November, when a spiteful gust of wind caused the flame to go out on the young family’s gas heater, when gas started to fill the bedroom (whose windows had been closed against draughts), when all the oxygen was expelled from the air and a deathly heaviness began to descend — that only little Boris, out of all his family, survived.

2

AFTER THE DEATHS OF PETAR AND IRINA, Old Petar collapsed into incapacity and fell away from the life of the town. Orphan Boris was taken in by Irina’s mother, Stoyana, who was the accountant in the local post office.

Stoyana considered her grandson’s preservation to be nothing short of a miracle. She loved him to distraction, and his infant antics were her cardinal joy.

When Boris was two years old she heard him singing a tune to himself. She recognised the melody, but could not recall where she had heard it. Boris continued to sing the same tune every evening, until Stoyana remembered it was a lullaby that Irina had written for her unborn son, and sung to him in the womb.

The town had seen better times. Money did not do what it once had done, and people began to suffer. The old housing blocks were damp and crumbling, and light bulbs had become so scarce they were pilfered from every corridor and elevator. Half the factory buses had stopped working. Broken windows and balconies were mended with corrugated iron, and there was nothing in the shops. Outside the factory, the mountain of slurry had collapsed into the river, and people blamed it for their cancers. Every morning there was a repulsive scattering of syringes around the bus shelter.

The Gypsies made money, which only increased the plight. No one had ever liked Gypsies, but things were easy while they were poor, and their children safely stowed in a school for the mad. Now they were lording it around with second-hand ZIL sedans, and illegal satellite dishes, and sparkling frontages on their shabby houses — and it seemed as though their years of exile were bringing rewards. The socialist economy, which gave jobs to all the Bulgarians, had seized up, and now the only money was in contraband.

Another person who seemed to do well was the mayor. He was an exuberant character who was appreciated as much for his dancing and his erotic novels as for his political opinions, and he had been a well-loved fixture for many years. But behind his jovial façade he evidently had operations that no one surmised, for even in this dark era he had managed to buy himself a new villa by the Black Sea. So when it was time for his daughter to marry, everyone looked forward to an extravagant feast at which to drink away their privations.

Boris was seven years old. On the morning of the wedding, Stoyana took him to the mayor’s house to wait with the bridal party, where he sat uncomfortably in his new suit and observed the goings-on. Two girls, hardly older than he, ran around with some unaccountable glee. The mayor, dressed up like a battleship coming into port, banged repeatedly on his daughter’s door, Fifteen minutes! Ten minutes!, while his wife packed bottles of rakia into a box for the party later, weeping all the time and mopping her nose.

The bride’s door opened a crack, the bridesmaid’s head peeking through it, mouthing some secret need to another woman outside; behind them was a glimpse of the bride in the mirror, not fully dressed.

A rooster scrabbled in a crate in the corner. Boris knelt by it, his only ally. Its wings were tied and it seemed enraged. Boris put his head close. Its eyes were stupid, with only a dot of presence. He took the bird’s beak in his teeth and held it stiffly closed, eye to twitching orange eye, until its stifled struggling pulled it free.

An old lady said,

‘I will bring roses for all the guests!’

She grinned at the ceiling.

‘The flowers are arranged, Mother. We’ve already talked about this.’

Boris wondered what you might carry so many roses in. A wheelbarrow? Perhaps you would need a whole truck? But if there were that many, the ones at the bottom—

‘They are coming! They are here!’

The girls ran to open the window and the music came in from down the road. Boris heard it and ran too. What sounds! Somebody played clarinet like a painted spinning-top tripping and skipping on the uneven ground of the beating tapan, with kaval and violin leaping overhead. They have brought Petko Spassov to play at the wedding! He began to dance like a seven-year-old at the window as the musicians turned the corner and the sounds became louder: he could see the party approaching down below, the bridegroom looking even glummer than usual because of his shaved head, and Petko Spassov himself with black flowing hair holding high his clarinet as he walked.

The mayor banged again at the door.

‘They’re already here! What’s going on?’

Slowly, the door opened. Out came his daughter, stooped, her face behind a veil. The room went limp.

‘Oh, my darling girl!’

The mayor looked at her tearfully, his urgency forgotten. He kissed her on the head through the gauze.

‘What a day, what a day!’ he said.

His wife rushed out of the kitchen, shaking dry her hands, and her tears flowed again at the sight of her daughter in white. The two girls smashed a glass thing with their running round the house.

The bridegroom’s party arrived at the foot of the apartment block. There was already a crowd outside, listening and laughing, and the music continued, loud and muffled, up the staircase, the tapan still banging though there was little room for it around the corners. The mayor and his family could hear people opening their doors and clapping on the floors below, while they had fallen silent and stood transfixed by their own front door, shut solid in its frame. The music ascended slowly: there was a long way to climb, and those who played wind instruments blew less vigorously. Then they could hear the crowd on the landing outside, and the music finished, and there were three loud knocks on the door. The mayor began an argument with the party outside, winking at his family with each witticism, Begone with you! Unless you’re a millionaire! She won’t go for less!, with so much laughter, and Boris wishing he were not shut up in this crush.

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

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

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

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

‘Can I hold it?’ he asked.

The man frowned.

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

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

‘It looks old.’

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

‘What’s your name?’

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

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

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

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

‘Boris.’

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

‘Come on. Let’s go down.’

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

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

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

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

‘I want to stay with you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No.’

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

They finished eating and packed everything into the van.

‘Come on.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavo said,

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

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

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

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

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

Slavo said,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked around him mightily.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not abandon his music.

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

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

Beluga

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is more than a hint of sadism in the curiosity that stalks the chatter; there are those present who in the excitement of the evening have surrendered themselves to an inconceivable temptation, who have edged beyond the landmass of political prudence in order to prod the fantasy — incredible as it seems — of seeing the leader squirm. They ask about the implications of the bad harvest, the second in a row, and surely a challenge for the entire bloc? There is talk of the cutbacks in oil exports and the resulting disaffection in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia … A toast to Comrade Chernenko … They discuss the hijacking in Bulgaria, the French election, the Afghan war. Willi Brandt and Ronni Reagan. They move on to the troubling issue of Romanian debt.

Everything is observed with a combination of disdain and reluctant excitement by a woman with onyx hair who smokes her cigarettes through a holder. She is the wife of a prominent young party member who is currently exchanging glances with her every time Comrade Brezhnev opens his mouth. She claims descent from one of Georgia’s ancient royal families and has been known to sign ‘Princess’ before her name; she admires spirit and excess, and harbours only contempt for the cheap suits, the sycophantism and the cult of impersonality around her. But this is not like other party gatherings: tonight she senses something unfamiliar which arouses her interest. There is Brezhnev, of course: pathetic absence of a man whose astonishing position in the world is somehow (she has drunk not a little) beautiful and tragic — how can one not be moved by the discrepancy between this wilted figure and his epic office? There is his grey-eyed apprentice, whose razor youth eclipses every other man in the room with body and poise. But there is something else as well. She drinks more, the better to sense it. There is the romance of chaos. The delight of seeing petty men panic over the crisis of their system. The tremulous voices that understate cataclysmic things in the name of decorum. But there is still something more, something she has never realised before tonight, something new in the eyes of the party men who now hang on Brezhnev’s words with a heady mixture of public fear and private ambition. For the first time, she has seen bloodlust in these bloodless men. It is a revelation. Her spirit rises and she is glad; and there are bloodwings beating in her own organs. While they talk with concerned faces about the spread of the Polish counter-revolutionary contagion, while they drink with unusual gusto out of respect for their Russian guests, she smokes greedily and allows her mind to conjure scenes of stubbled heads banging on the glass wall of the future, giant fronds waving against the sky, and underground seas of lava heaving with grandiose slowness on a fantastic vortex.

Brezhnev announces his departure. It is still early, but the old man needs his rest. The woman is only vaguely aware of the Russians’ exit, and yet it is now that the night spills forth. They drink toasts to their guests in absentia, and review the highlights of the evening’s conversation. There are sweaty moustaches still constrained by neckties, and there are the beautiful necks of women. One man sings and another seeks to recruit the gathering to his chant of Dinamo Tbilisi and then there is a joke not for the ladies: the men gather, crouch headed and wheezy, with the voices low and the sniggers premature, and the story proceeds in starts till he gets to the punch; he stands up broad-faced, shouting, If I were a gentleman I would marry her!, laughing laughing crying with cheeks upon the table and even her husband is doubled up, his vodka glass the only vertical thing about him. She watches him as time sweeps them into oblong orbits and the senior party members begin to depart. She can drink no more and wants to escape these insignificant men; she demands her coat and wrestles her husband from his stupidity, Let’s go! Let’s go!, and though he is reluctant he hurries after her, grabbing some last ham from the table, down the corridor to the elevator whose attendant smiles, closing the grille, and in the mirror they are green night creatures with shining pitted faces and her folded arms find her own skin above her skirt. They land weightlessly and the grille crashes open again and the evening breeze is in the lobby the smell of the river and the city and they flow liquid into the limousine. The night is shut out with the car door and there is only her jealous tussle. She does not even like to make love to this man who is so unromantic in his soul but now, now! she pulls it from him and he is drunk, lost to it, holding the back of the seat fucking on cobbled streets and they are turning corners driver grabbing mirror glances she deep in herself, his tie swinging pestilence in her eyes headlights in his face laughing red in the night city thrusting into the corner and things turn breathing matter circumference diving axis she sees houses shapes depth out of the window they are reaching home now, now! the car stops and stills with engine silent and night seeping into the car and the driver sits endless immobile looking straight ahead as if the loud fucking is not behind his very head and she shouts out,

‘Keep driving, you imbecile!’

Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a baby girl, and named her Khatuna.

4

AS A YOUNG GIRL, Khatuna loved secret things. She had a secret name for herself that no one else knew. Her mother called her my treasure, and she smiled at the notion of a hidden wealth whose value is only to itself. For special occasions she donned outfits that had once belonged to great characters from literature, but she did not reveal their provenance. She liked the secret her mother had told her, that deep down she was a princess.

There was in the house an old box with a lock, which she took for herself. Accessible only with her key, her personal relics could breathe there safely and in silence. The box was of her, yet outside her, and so it offered the prospect of solemn reunions.

When she turned the lock and lifted the lid, the spirits of this box flowed into her. She fingered the objects entombed there: two glass marbles given to her by an important man; an ivory crucifix she had stolen from her mother’s bedroom; a picture of a beautiful woman, cut from a magazine; a lock of her own hair, tied up with silk; an instruction booklet for a radio which looked impressively official, like a passport; and a dead beetle of stunning iridescent green, mounted on a glass slide, which she had once asked her father to buy for her in an antique shop.

When she was four years old she gained a baby brother named Irakli. She loved him immediately, and, far from jeopardising her realm of secrets, his arrival promised to double its size and appeal. As he grew old enough to understand, she drew him in under the mantle of her world, revealing to him her secret name and showing off her box of relics. He responded fervently, full of admiration for everything she had worked out during her short head start on earth. He fancied she was another half of himself, carelessly separated before birth, and he plotted how they would be joined again.

She had a blue cloak she sometimes used to put on. It made her walk very upright, with her lips pursed to look like a princess. She also had a blue teddy bear that she endlessly stroked and cuddled. And there was another thing: the pen around which she clenched her early, gawky writing hand was blue.

Observing all this, the young Irakli one day took a paintbrush and painted blue over his penis, in the hope it would become another of her playthings. He emerged into her bedroom naked, glistening blue paint daubed even on his stomach and thighs, his blue infant penis wagging with expectation.

Khatuna burst out laughing at the sight; she summoned her mother and the two of them cried with mirth at what he had done, sitting and pointing and saying it again and again. He was ashamed, and hoped they had not uncovered his motives. He relegated it to his own realm of secrets, which in his case was not shared with anyone.

Things were changing in the country, and even their solid family home could not keep it out for ever. There were phone calls late at night, and guns in the house, and groups of men who arrived at strange hours to talk business. On certain days there was nothing to eat. Khatuna’s school was destroyed in the civil war, and the city became overrun with beggars and refugees. Until then, she had only read about poor people in books.

Her father took her to a factory. They drove out of Tbilisi with several other carloads of men and guns. Her father was the one in charge of these other men: they all looked to him. Guards waved their convoy through the gates, and the five cars drew to a halt, loud and exhibitionist. The factory was motionless and silent — and disappointingly small, Khatuna thought, for a factory. Her father stood in the middle of the semicircle and made a speech. He had bought himself a Red Army uniform to wear for the occasion. Some men leant on machine guns for the style of it. The speech was about milk. The applause was thin in this desolate air. They opened champagne and passed around plastic cups for a toast. They went on a tour, Khatuna’s father in his suit and overcoat pointing out condensers and explaining freeze-drying.

They drove back to Tbilisi. Khatuna said to her father,

‘I thought you worked in politics.’

He said,

‘Now I make milk. Powdered milk for people to buy. And that’s only the beginning.’

Khatuna was impressed. She knew how undependable the world had become, and she admired her father for knowing what to do.

He began to think only about foodstuffs. He read the ingredients on packets and talked about how different things were made, and where, and by whom. He was going to buy more factories: a vegetable canning facility and a plant for bottling water.

There were armed guards at the house, and everywhere they went. The stories Khatuna heard took on a wild edge. Communism had collapsed, and people were selling off the government’s chemical weapons on the street. There was a wave of suicides and murders. The electricity started to go off for days at a time, and there was no water.

Her father unveiled his new company, which was named after himself. It was a diversified foods conglomerate. He carried business cards with his own logo. He invited astonishing men to the house, who seemed no better than thugs, and whose speech he was forced to censor, Not in front of my family. He looked at maps and reports like an anxious general.

But he did not live to see the fulfilment of his plans. Unwittingly, he carried a congenital tissue disease, and he died one afternoon while climbing up to the roof of a building he hoped to acquire; his wasting heart burst from the exertions. His death certificate explained: Aortic rupture arising from Marfan’s Syndrome.

Khatuna’s box of secrets began to look bankrupt. Though she had always kept it locked, the essential had slipped out, and she no longer understood why she saved these things. Why this doubling up? — she had hair on her head, and had no need to hoard it in a box. The beautiful woman from the magazine now looked like a prostitute. The marbles reminded her of dead fish eyes.

She threw everything out — except the crucifix, which belonged to her mother.

She began to keep a diary. Whenever she felt something out of the ordinary, she wrote it down: an account of her eyes in the mirror, a description of a mad old woman shitting proudly in the street, a poem about an uncle she found particularly handsome.

Her periods came, one morning. Her mother inspected the situation and marched out of her room proclaiming balefully, Welcome to the world of women! Khatuna lay in bed, sticky between her legs, helplessly indignant that her mother might understand her in ways she did not yet herself.

In his own room, Irakli was also lying in bed. He was awakened by his mother’s epochal chant, and, though he did not know what it meant, he felt an icy pain in his throat, and the foreboding that his sister would never again belong to him as she had before.

Khatuna’s mother tried to keep control of the freeze-drying plant and all her husband’s other ventures, but she was outmanoeuvred by his rivals, who sent a band of nineteen-year-olds with AK-47s to surround the plant.

Her savings vanished rapidly in the inflation. She began to sell things. She had a house full of heirlooms, and though the prices she obtained were derisory, this store of wealth saw her a reasonable way. An antique dealer with international connections had set up in town especially to provide for people like her. She came every week with a ruby necklace, or an ancient icon, and he paid her in the new currency.

Then one night, five men broke into the house and stole everything she had left. They did not even bother to cover their faces, so she knew who they were. They had come from that same antique shop, whose owner had no doubt grown impatient with buying up her treasure one item at a time.

They herded the family into the corner of the room; they began to remove paintings and ornaments and stack them in a van outside. Khatuna’s mother was delirious with rage and impotence: she shrieked at them, and spat and flailed.

‘Where’s the jewellery?’ the guard said to Khatuna, ignoring her mother.

‘Find it yourself.’

He looked at her, sitting there on the sofa.

‘You’re not so young, you know. I can do you right now in front of your mother and brother. So just tell me what I need to know.’

‘You don’t frighten me.’

He punched her in the face, and her mother screamed.

‘Shall I show your little brother how he came into the world? Then I’ll send him out of it again with a bullet in his head.’

She glared at him.

‘The chest under my mother’s bed.’

Her mother let out an infernal howl while they brought out the chest. The house was violated. The men prepared to leave.

Khatuna said,

‘One day you’ll regret you ever came here.’

The man looked at her.

‘And what? And what?’ He put his hand up her nightshirt. ‘Shall I take this too?’

She looked defiantly into his eyes, his hand still between her legs, and he took it away.

The men left the house and started the van, offensively loud in the silent night.

After the losses of that night, Khatuna’s mother had to sell the house, and they moved into a single room.

‘How do people survive?’ cried Khatuna’s mother. ‘How are they surviving? They should all be dead!’

She began to rely on drink.

Girls followed Khatuna at school, and admired her. She dressed outlandishly, with no respect for fashion, and she led bands of youths to late-night bars where they ordered one mint water between them. She drank anaemic toasts to her own memories, and described the extravagant scenes of her future, and cackled, and mocked them for their meekness, and told them that everything was illusion.

They listened.

One time she looked at them all in dismay. She said to them,

‘You are all so fucking boring.’

Late one winter night, Khatuna walked home through the darkness of another night without power. Shapes clenched and tossed under street-side blankets, too cold for sleep, and occasional cars juddered over the cobbles, cutting brief swathes of rickety light. She pissed in a gutter before entering the building, for inside the toilets were frozen.

In their room a single candle was burning.

Her mother had passed out with vodka, and snored in her stupor. Her brother’s bed shook with agitation. She brought the candle close, and he was shiny with sweaty sleep; his lips looked blue. She shook him desperately awake and wrapped a blanket round him, she broke ice from the bucket and warmed it on the stove. He drank fitfully, and she wiped his face and neck. She gave him some bread. She wept.

‘Please get well. I’m sorry for leaving you. Please get well.’

He smiled at her wanly, and lay back under the blanket. She stroked his wet hair, and sobbed. Her mother was roused by the commotion.

‘What’s going on?’ she murmured.

‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’

Khatuna leapt up, beside herself.

‘Your son is delirious from fever! And look at you, knocked out with drink. He could die and you wouldn’t even know it!’

Khatuna took a swig from the vodka bottle and emptied the rest in the fireplace.

‘You’re a worthless woman,’ she said. ‘You should die.’

Her mother began to cry.

‘What can I do? There’s no money. I’ve sold everything. I’m miserable, Khatuna: be nice to me.’

Khatuna seized her box from the corner and unlocked it with the key she still kept around her neck. She took out the ivory crucifix and threw it at her mother.

‘Why don’t you sell this?’

Her mother fingered it, blankly.

‘I thought I had lost it.’

‘No. I took it from you. That’s why it isn’t sold yet.’

Her mother began moaning into the pillows.

‘Stop it!’ cried Khatuna. ‘This self-pity. Find yourself a man like everyone else. Someone to pay for your vodka and your son’s medicine.’

She looked at her deliberately.

‘Don’t worry yourself about us any more. I’ll take responsibility for Irakli and me. You just look after yourself. See if you can.’

After that, Khatuna burned all her diaries. She had written regularly, and had filled a large stack of notebooks. She put them listlessly on the fire, one by one, her mind becoming strangely void.

She got a promotional job with a foreign tobacco company. They gave her an outfit in the colours of a cigarette brand, and she stood by Philharmonia in the evenings offering free cigarettes to passers-by. She was attractive and flirtatious, and people liked to take her cigarettes: she promised ‘Best Brand in the World!’ as she exhaled gaily.

Men stopped to talk, and she moved them on. ‘Take another for your girlfriend!’ she shouted after them.

The job did not interfere with school, and gave her a little amount of money to stave off disasters. The company was satisfied with her performance.

Her mother sold her long, black hair to a wig maker. Khatuna thought it was a bid for sympathy, and offered no reaction when she saw her mother’s shaved head. Instead she asked,

‘Did you sell that crucifix?’

‘Yes.’

‘How much did you get?’

‘Three bottles of vodka.’

Khatuna spat in her mother’s face.

One spring evening, Khatuna was standing with her tray of cigarettes outside a bar on Perovskaya Street. The bar was named Beluga. Young playboys were out with Gucci sunglasses for the darkness, and models for each arm. There were man-hugs and back-slaps, and car keys rapped on glass when bouncers took too long to unlock doors. Eye make-up sparkled in the nightlights, and men dealt kisses on practised cheeks. A taxi clattered around the potholes, and three girls climbed out, singing together,

You’re just too good to be true.

Can’t take my eyes off of you.

You feel like heaven to touch.

I wanna hold you so much …

A black Mercedes drew up, spilling bodyguards. A man got out with velvety movements, lithe in a suit and T-shirt, and Khatuna was surprised to see that it was Kakha Sabadze, the footballer-turned-tycoon. He was unmistakable, for his face was disfigured by a wine-red birthmark in the shape of Australia.

‘What’s he doing in a place like this?’ she wondered.

Kakha Sabadze was one of Georgia’s richest men. Before Khatuna was born he had already been a famous footballer who had played for Dinamo Tbilisi, and for the USSR in the World Cup. They used to call him legendary, when the word still had a depth of meaning. When communism fell, Sabadze became Minister for Sports, and made himself rich selling Georgian football players to foreign clubs. He left behind politics for business. Now he owned an oil company, several mines and a chain of hotels, and he had a monopoly on the supply of Mercedes cars into Georgia. He was chairman of the national airline. His nephew ran a television company and his daughter was the country’s leading model.

Kakha Sabadze walked past Khatuna with his men all around and she held out a cigarette.

‘Would you like to improve your life, Mr Sabadze?’

He stopped.

‘My life is already perfect. What can you offer?’

‘Marlboro. Best cigarette in the world.’

‘I don’t smoke. I take care of my health.’

Khatuna looked at him patiently.

‘I know how rich you are. But at your age, youth must be more exciting than money. Every time you talk to a woman as young as me, you must think of what you can never buy.’

‘I’m not so old!’ He laughed for his men. ‘And I know a lot of women as young as you.’

‘Passing through your life, in and out of your bed. Do you remember it after it’s over, Mr Sabadze?’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Look into my eyes. The moon is full tonight, and you have met a beautiful Georgian woman. Wouldn’t you like to remember how it feels? Smoke one of these world-famous cigarettes and you can inhale this moment so it will never go away. It will stay with you and keep you young.’

Kakha Sabadze laughed.

‘Do they tell you to say these things?’

He took a business card from his pocket.

‘I don’t want your world-famous cigarette. But here is my card. You can call me and we’ll talk.’

‘I’m very disappointed.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Khatuna.’

‘Khatuna. Call me.’

And he disappeared into Beluga with his bodyguards, while Khatuna stood on the sidewalk staring at his business card in her hand. A little paper miracle.

5

KAKHA’S HOUSE WAS LARGE AND NEW, and set back from the street. When Khatuna arrived there, she found him in the kitchen, talking on the phone.

His movements were easy, and his birthmark less ruddy up close. She appreciated the smooth economy of his kitchen, the steely surfaces opening on to dishwashers and ovens.

She wandered out into the hallway. A bodyguard was sitting there, reading a paperback. There was a giant framed photograph of Kakha Sabadze from the football days, standing with a trophy, a mass of tousled hair and a blue-eyed gleam of boyish achievement. Pairs of shoes were lined up neatly; in the corner stood a small tree planted in a yellow oil drum. A staircase wound up out of sight.

She heard the end of Kakha’s conversation.

‘Step outside your house in three minutes. A black Audi will come to pick you up.’

She went back into the kitchen and found him sitting at the table with two glasses of beer. She sat down with him.

‘You’re still selling cigarettes?’ he said.

‘World-famous. Yes.’

‘Are you going to do that all your life?’

‘I’m going to travel all over the world. I’ll have a big house, and another for my brother, too, so he doesn’t get into trouble. I’ll drive a Mercedes and wear big diamonds on my finger.’

‘How are you going to make all that money?’

‘Business. I’ll make loads of money in business. When I’m really rich I’ll study architecture and rebuild Tbilisi.’

‘What is this fabulous business of yours?’

Kakha spoke lightly, with a smile on his face.

Khatuna said,

‘I’m still working it out. I haven’t got all the answers yet.’

‘Do you think today’s your lucky day?’

She glanced at him severely.

‘I’m not here to sleep with you,’ she said. ‘With that stain on your face you won’t seduce me, no matter how rich you are.’

They drank their beer, and he said,

‘Come on. I want to show you something.’

They got into the car. Bodyguards fanned out around the entrance while they reversed into the street.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Khatuna.

‘My house.’

‘I thought this was your house?’

He laughed. ‘This is just for storage: it’s temporary. While my house is being built.’

They drove up into the hills behind the old city, nearly to the television tower. Khatuna loved his car, which took no account of how steep the roads were. On top of a generous outcrop were the dilapidated outer walls of an old castle.

‘This is my house.’

He called from his phone. The gate opened, and they drove through into a courtyard.

Inside the ancient walls, the main building stood straight and thickset. There was a massive front door and windows with steel shutters.

‘The building is totally new. We pulled down the old fort and saved the bricks. We built the most advanced security installation in Georgia, then we put the medieval bricks on the façade so it looks just like it always did.’

There was a tower on one side of the house, with a steep conical roof like on the old churches.

‘The doors are explosive-proof steel, and there’ll be a new perimeter wall, four metres high, with electric fencing, cameras, the lot. It will be totally secure. I have a shipment of Rottweilers arriving soon from Russia. There’s a man called Sergei in a shitty small town outside Moscow who trains the best guard dogs in the world.’

They walked around the building. From inside came the sound of saws and drills. They ran into two men smoking together; Kakha introduced them.

‘This is my cousin, Vakhtang. And our architect from Moscow, Vladimir.’

The ground was wet and hacked. Hundreds of Corinthian pillars were piled up on tarpaulin sheets.

‘We’ll clean all this up,’ said Kakha. ‘We’ll landscape everything, put in trees and grass, make it look really good.’

‘It will look really good,’ confirmed Vakhtang, who looked like a weightlifter. ‘Kakha’s going to landscape it and everything.’

‘Vladimir is the best there is,’ said Kakha, putting his hand on the architect’s shoulder. ‘Ask him to tell you all the things he’s done. He’s just built that new casino everyone’s talking about. My young friend here, Khatuna, she’s interested in architecture.’

Vladimir bowed. He said,

‘What do you think of our castle?’

‘It’s beautiful. It’s like old Tbilisi.’

‘It’s just like old Tbilisi. Mr Sabadze was very clear on this point. The proportions, the materials, the decorations, the angles of the arches — they’ve all been taken from medieval Georgian architecture. Have you seen the interior?’

‘No.’

‘Let me show you. Come.’

Inside, men were laying a marble floor, and the place was raw and empty. A mosaic portrait of Kakha Sabadze had already been set into one wall of the main room — the backdrop, it appeared, to a future waterfall. Chandeliers hung prematurely from the ceiling, their wires trailing to the floor. Vladimir walked in front, commenting on the construction-in-progress, while Kakha Sabadze followed on, speaking on the phone.

‘This room has been designed to show off Mr Sabadze’s art collection. You probably read about the two Warhols he just bought. We’ll hang them here. Over there is the gym. Then the billiard room and bar. The other side: the study. Gold walls and leather floor. Completely soundproofed.’

‘Amazing,’ said Khatuna.

‘The entire installation is served with custom internet and phone lines directly from the backbone. The lines come underground to a bunker in the basement. The place has its own water reservoir and electricity generator. Mr Sabadze wanted to make something that would last a thousand years.’

They went upstairs. Kakha’s cousin, Vakhtang, was running madly through the bare corridors, dribbling a football. He scored a goal against the wall, and exploded with his own awe, like eighty thousand people.

‘Master bedroom,’ indicated Vladimir.

Workmen were fixing gold pillars into the four corners of the room. In the middle of the main wall was a tall window surrounded by a border of stained glass. It had been designed to frame the enormous aluminium statue of the Mother of Georgia higher up on the hill.

‘Every morning, that statue will be the first thing Mr Sabadze sees. He has a strong affection for her. He feels she is a personal talisman.’

Khatuna went close to the window and looked down. A muddy hole lay abandoned in the grounds, the size of a small house. There was a length of hosepipe in the bottom, and a rainbow of oil slick, and two crows pecking at a plastic bag. The future swimming pool.

‘Khatuna. Come here.’ Kakha Sabadze was standing in the doorway. ‘Come with me.’

She followed him down the corridor, which opened out into a large hall. The outer wall was a sweeping semicircular window as if for air traffic control, and there, spread out below, was the entire city.

‘This is what I wanted you to see,’ he said.

‘All Tbilisi,’ she murmured.

She tapped the glass absent-mindedly with her knuckle.

‘Bulletproof,’ he said softly.

Just below them were the tiled roofs, ornate balconies and winding streets of the old city, sloping down towards the river. She could see into ramshackle courtyards, where boys and girls kicked footballs and washing hung low between the houses. Far away she could see groups of apartment towers, flecked with the royal blue of tarpaulin.

‘When I was at school,’ said Kakha Sabadze, ‘we were taught the general story of the world: feudalism is replaced by capitalism, and capitalism is replaced by socialism, and then history ends. And look at this: socialism has gone, and here is Kakha Sabadze standing in his castle looking down on all the peasants.’

He seemed to find it very amusing. He said,

‘Come to Moscow with me next week.’

‘Why?’

‘You speak nicely, you look good. I’m sure there are things you could do for me.’

‘Are you offering me a job?’

‘If that’s how you’d like to see it.’

‘It has to be something real. I’m not going to be your mistress.’

Kakha looked at her appraisingly.

‘Why don’t you start by furnishing my house? You like buildings: get the plans from Vladimir and take charge of the interior. Since you want a challenge, I’ll give you the whole job. Let me see how capable you are, behind all that talk.’

During the five days she spent in Moscow, Khatuna put somewhere close to thirty-nine million roubles on Kakha Sabadze’s credit card.

On her last night in the city, he took her for a drink in a bar behind Novy Arbat, not far from the Kremlin. Bodyguards waited outside, their bulging jackets zipped to their chins. The waitress who led them to their table was the whitest woman Khatuna had ever seen, her pallor accentuated with dark pink lipstick and an immense black wig with ringlets.

They talked about the things Khatuna had purchased for Kakha Sabadze’s house. He quizzed her about each item, and she explained how she had arrived at her decisions. She described the antique Turkish rug she had found for his study, and the crystal chandelier she was putting in the reception room.

He nodded approvingly.

‘You’ve thought of everything.’

Her face shone with excitement. She had come with heavy make-up, a ‘K’ written in eyeliner on her cheek.

The bar was maroon and gold, and there was a florid painting on the ceiling, showing palaces, clouds and angels. Businessmen and politicians gathered with models and film stars, and the air swirled with church incense and cigar smoke.

Their wine arrived with caviar. She clinked his glass with her own.

‘To Georgia,’ she said.

He smiled and drank.

‘To women,’ he proposed, raising his glass.

‘To feelings.’

‘To God.’

‘To Stalin.’

She held out her glass for more wine, and said,

‘To secret dreams.’

Fashion TV was showing on the walls, and the latest Russian club hits played just loud enough to ruffle the atmosphere. She smoked her slim cigarettes, and everything felt perfect. She liked being with this strong man.

‘What do you do, Mr Sabadze? I can’t really imagine how you spend each day.’

He talked about his business. He had just returned from a military trade fair in Johannesburg, and he talked about strongrooms, interrogation aids and perimeter protection systems. He described the latest innovations in armoured vehicles and surveillance. He spoke easily, but without giving anything away.

Khatuna said,

‘I heard you like art.’

Kakha’s face lit up.

‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know anything about it until recently. In England they have these new artists who totally mess up your head. I have a woman in New York who buys for me and educates me bit by bit; you have no idea how sophisticated these people are. I wish some of our Georgians would understand: they’re like children, just drinking and squabbling all the time. They don’t know what it means to do something well. I’m just a dumb sportsman myself, but I want to learn about everything.’

Khatuna said,

‘You’re more serious than people think. You remind me of my father. He died when I was a child. He was a bit like you.’

A waiter brought more caviar. The DJ nodded in a glass booth, headphones against one ear. There was a mezzanine for models, and Khatuna gazed up at a woman on display there, admiring her breasts, her gestures, her dramatic make-up.

‘Look at her. She’s so beautiful!’

Kakha Sabadze glanced up neutrally.

‘She’s a TV hostess. Her father’s a general in the army.’

The ceiling spotlights pricked Khatuna’s retinas, and black patches swam over Kakha Sabadze’s face as she looked back to him. She said,

‘I’m so happy tonight. But happiness isn’t real. Don’t you think? Happiness is fleeting. When I’m unhappy I want to be happy, but when I’m happy I get tired of this happiness because it is only illusion.’

She was feeling drunk, and the mannered waiter made her laugh. She said,

‘I used to take heroin to feel good. When you take it you have everything: you have wife, husband, lover — you are king and queen. But it’s a mirage, and it vanishes.’

‘There are some things that are real, Khatuna. Land is real. Loyalty is real.’

She sighed. She said,

‘One day I will make a perfect bar like this, with perfect design and Fashion TV on every wall. Beauty gives you harmony. It makes you a perfect person.’

This was the mood she was looking for in her life. This security. She felt as if she were in a luxurious, velvet bomb shelter. She looked down at her own legs under the table, and she wished others could see how sexy they were, crossed like that with her shoe swinging from her toes.

‘Dying for another person, that is real,’ said Kakha Sabadze. ‘Would you ever die for someone?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I’m the most loyal person you will ever meet. I will do anything for the people I love.’

He sipped his wine, watching her. She said,

‘You and I are real, Mr Sabadze. The emotion we have at this moment is real. Everything else is just footnotes. If you cannot generate emotion you are just a big hole. Don’t you agree?’

He said quietly,

‘Don’t call me Mr Sabadze.’

The bar was decorated like a fantasy from tsarist times. The mezzanine was gilt, like an old theatre balcony, and the walls were ornamented with plaster lyres, and urns overflowing with fruit. There was a frenzy to the laughter, and the beat of the music was remote.

A man came in with a beautiful woman in furs, her face stern against the stares. She was barely older than Khatuna, and Khatuna could sense her contentment. My youth is registered with all these rich people, it said, it is not going to waste.

‘This place is like the end of the world,’ said Khatuna. ‘You could slit a waiter’s throat and they would thank you for it. They would apologise for the mess.’

‘It’s a millionaire’s club.’

Khatuna said,

‘I’ve always been surrounded by juveniles. Teenagers without a car between them. I didn’t realise how sick of it I was until now.’

She told him stories of her friends. A good-looking boy who played in a band, but had no ambition. Her friend Tako, who slept with older men in return for clothes and parties, and always talked about the same things. Kakha was staring at her, and he said,

‘Your eyes are so blue.’

The models on Fashion TV walked up and down, up and down. Khatuna leaned towards Kakha.

‘When I want to learn something about myself I look at my eyes in the mirror. I always discover something new.’

The candlelight showed up the fingerprints on their wineglasses. Their faces were close together.

‘With all this wine I’ve drunk,’ said Khatuna, ‘I don’t even notice your wine-coloured stain. You look almost handsome.’

She felt Kakha’s foot against hers under the table, but she could not be sure: perhaps it was an accident.

‘I always see the hidden meaning in things. I’m very sensitive. If someone is not aware of those things I break off contact with them.’

He was talking too, but she did not even know what he was saying any more. She watched his expensive suit sit easily across his shoulders, and the rings flitting on his fingers. Sometimes he left such great silences between his sentences that she wanted to dive in there and thrash about, blowing herds of scream bubbles.

Kakha’s inexpressive face was not so at all. It was just restrained. If you focused on it too much, the other conversations became an unbearable din.

The night wheeled, and she hardly noticed him pay the bill. He was standing up, putting her coat around her shoulders. At another table, a man looked at her lustfully, and Khatuna realised it was somebody she had seen in the newspapers.

‘I love this song,’ she said as they left. ‘You listen to this track at seven in the morning when you have no energy and you feel connected to the world. You can estimate the pleasure.’

Kakha’s Moscow apartment was not far away, and the journey took only a few minutes. Khatuna fell asleep in the car. Upstairs, Kakha pulled off her shoes and she said dreamily,

‘I’ll introduce you to my brother. He’s a lovely boy.’

He locked the door of the bedroom and turned off the light. She heard him undressing, and he lay down next to her.

‘I had the best evening,’ she said.

The wine was rushing in her ears.

He tried to kiss her, but she said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and turned away.

6

IRAKLI REMEMBERED THE BABY SPARROW he had found when he and Khatuna were children.

It fell out of a nest on to the pavement outside their house, and he picked it up and fed it. When Khatuna saw what he was doing, he said,

‘If I take care of it, it will grow feathers and sing like all the other sparrows.’

‘You can see red veins through its skin. It’s disgusting.’

When it was time for the evening meal, Irakli took the bird to show his mother. She said,

‘Leave that thing outside. And wash your hands!’

He tried to reason with her. It was getting cold, and the bird needed constant feeding. But she would not let him bring it in the house, and it was locked out for the night.

In the morning, the bird was stiff and dry. There was a drop of blood under its beak and, as Irakli watched, an ant scurried out from under a stubby wing.

Irakli might have blamed his mother for the bird’s death, but he realised she was only the instrument. His true resentment was reserved for the order of things, which made the divisions between sleep and wake, and human and animal, and inside and outside — divisions through which a defenceless bird might fall to its death.

Irakli never ceased to find it strange that he should be stuck in this place, with these people, when there were a million other ways it could have been. Why had he been born now, and not in another era? By what chance had he come to be poor and not rich, a man and not a woman? Life seemed nothing more than a series of improbable accidents, and yet everyone had a sense — didn’t they? — that there was something else, deeper and prior, to which they had to return.

Irakli chose for his associates other people who set no store by the way the world had fallen out. He sought a truer place, and he paid little attention to his body, or his food, or anything else that was merely accidental. He harboured an unhappiness about reality — and he wrote poetry, because straight talk could not capture what he meant.

Khatuna was returning from a meeting in Kakha’s Mercedes when she saw Irakli out of the window.

‘Stop the car!’ she said. ‘That’s my brother!’

The car stopped and her bodyguard jumped out warily. Khatuna opened the window and called to Irakli.

‘Let me give you a ride!’ she said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere,’ he said. He didn’t get in the car. He looked thin and scruffy and had a newspaper under his arm.

The afternoon was warm — hot, even, for autumn — but Khatuna’s bare arm on the sill had goose pimples from the car’s air conditioning.

‘Get in!’ she said, and he did so. The car moved away. Irakli said,

‘Is that a new haircut?’

‘Do you like it?’

‘You look like a gangster’s girlfriend.’

Khatuna was irritated. They drove up Rustaveli Avenue, and she directed the driver to pull up in front of the old Marriott.

‘I’m not going in there,’ said Irakli. ‘We can go somewhere else. We can go for a walk if you like.’

He set off along the street.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she called. ‘Why do you want to traipse around out here?’

‘I can’t afford to go into places like that.’

‘If you earned some money you wouldn’t have to worry.’

‘I have money. You give me enough money. What else do I need? All I need is to think and write my poetry. I don’t need to go to places where you pay a month’s salary for a coffee.’

‘Poetry.’ Khatuna scowled. ‘Where’s your self-respect? Look at your clothes. Look at the state of your hands. I feel sick looking at them.’

‘You and I are exactly the same, it’s just that you get handouts from a gangster.’

‘I work hard for my money. And he’s not a gangster.’

‘There are thousands of Georgian women in other countries who pay for your coffees with their legs in the air.’

‘Don’t be gross, Irakli. Have some respect. All your money comes from Kakha.’

‘He’s stolen everything he has. That money was never his in the first place. Do you think I should be grateful?’

‘Kakha is a businessman. He loves this country, and he loves Georgians. He’s a role model. He has the best security forces: without him there’d be no law and order in this place. There would be pure chaos.’

‘You’d better be careful. People like Kakha kill each other for no reason at all. Think about what you’re doing. You’re becoming frantic: you go from one thing to the next, and you never stop to think.’

A girl approached them selling roses, and Irakli bought two for his sister. They crossed Freedom Square and headed down Leselidze Street. Khatuna mused,

‘One day I’d like to sit down and read lots of books. When I’ve lived this life and come back in another era I’ll teach myself a lot of things. I’ll learn about anthropology and economics. History, literature, philosophy, politics. Science. I’d like to know about those things. But how would that help me now?’

Irakli was studying her.

‘Your list,’ he said, ‘was in alphabetical order. Anthropology, economics, history … What are the chances of that? Every new word you added I was waiting for you to spoil it.’

Khatuna said,

‘Don’t you have a girlfriend to give roses to?’

He led her into a shop. A naked bulb hung down, illuminated for the late afternoon gloom.

‘No. A lot of girls like me, though.’

There was barely space to stand between the sacks of onions and potatoes on the floor. The shopkeeper was adding the last customer’s bill on an abacus. Irakli said,

‘Do you want some coffee?’

She shook her head, and he picked out a single sachet of Nescafé. She said,

‘Why can’t you buy a whole jar like everyone else?’

They passed a couple of collapsed buildings, the open interiors piled high with fallen roof tiles.

‘A jar is a long-term investment. You never know what will happen tomorrow.’

She looked sullen.

‘I wish you would live better.’

‘If I had ten million lari I would still live like this.’

He became inexplicably joyful, and Khatuna let herself relax. When he was happy he could make her laugh like no one else. They walked for a long time, crossing a bridge and coming down on the opposite bank of the river. She told him stories of Kakha, and people she had met. They passed a band of young men who were burning rubber to light up the encroaching evening. They had tied the tails of two dogs together, and were watching them for their entertainment.

Darkness came, and they walked on. Old people were begging in the shadowy doorways, or peeling sunflower seeds to sell. There were shops of second-hand clothes, old theatres converted into antique stores, and stalls for currency trading. They came to a freight depot where policemen inspected the contents of trucks, and men queued at the side of the highway waiting for night labour. There were stalls set up, lit by bulbs wired to car batteries, where people sold electrical components and construction materials, sinks, piping and cleaning fluids. Cabbages and potatoes were sold out of oil drums standing in the mud. A man gave his chickens water to drink out of a jam jar. Children chased each other around the stalls, and taxi drivers passed time by their line of Ladas, shaking their heads at the young man who was trying to sell a Coke bottle full of diesel fuel. Families were leaving at the end of the day, parents and children, their possessions piled up in old baby carriages.

Irakli and Khatuna arrived at a damp huddle of apartment blocks. The children’s swings had lost their chains, and were just a skeleton of rusted poles where a group of teenagers were nevertheless gathered, burning polystyrene with bitter, lung-stopping smoke. It was dark now, and the green of the flame tinged their pale skin.

‘Where have you brought me?’ Khatuna asked.

‘I’ve come to see some friends,’ Irakli said.

Khatuna looked uneasy.

‘I left the driver outside the Marriott. I didn’t even tell him where I was going.’

‘You can call him later.’

They entered an apartment block and started up the stairs.

‘Can you see?’ asked Irakli.

It was pitch dark, and Khatuna didn’t like to touch the handrail.

‘Just stick behind me,’ said Irakli. He climbed quickly.

‘How much further?’ Khatuna asked.

‘They’re on the twelfth floor.’

They climbed until Khatuna was out of breath. Irakli stopped on a landing and lit a match.

‘Two more,’ he said, setting off again.

A door opened to a strip of candlelight, and a man threw his arms around Irakli, cigarette glowing in his mouth. Inside, the room was crowded, people sitting where they could.

‘This is my sister, Khatuna,’ announced Irakli.

In the middle of the room were two low candles, which threw their glow over a cluster of empty beer cans and bottles.

‘She’s good looking, your sister. And well dressed.’

‘Are you sure she’s your sister?’

‘She’s a rich girl who pays Irakli for sex.’

‘She’ll never use him again after he’s brought her here.’

Someone got off the only chair and offered it to Khatuna, laughing.

‘So many of us are living here, and we only have two rooms. We take turns with the love room. Sometimes we have to wait all night.’

‘Have something to drink.’

‘We’re not used to chic people. We’re all bums.’

‘Give us more light! I want to see Irakli’s sister.’

They lit more candles. Above their heads was a clothes line, where underwear hung. Firewood was piled in the corner. There was a television on a plastic stool, and an Uzbek carpet hanging on the wall. In one corner, the ceiling had collapsed, and the beams were propped up by the wardrobe. Someone handed Khatuna a bottle.

‘Give her a glass, you bum.’

Khatuna sat down in her coat, her arms crossed defensively.

‘You must be proud of your brother,’ someone said. ‘He’s so talented.’

‘We all admire him.’

‘We carry his poetry around with us.’

‘Someone just gave me that poem with the long title. The eloquence of a drunkard’s hands when his mouth has stopped producing speech. I read it yesterday. It’s beautiful.’

‘I like to read your poems at night, Irakli, so my mind subsides.’

‘At night you’re so drunk, my friend,’ said Irakli. ‘You could read Shevardnadze’s speeches and your mind would subside.’

‘I love Irakli’s poems. They remind me of feelings I’ve forgotten.’

‘Stop it,’ said Irakli. ‘I feel ashamed you’ve read those terrible old poems. I get a cold sweat when I think of them.’

They drank. They talked about the taxi driver who had just been caught trying to cross the border into Turkey with a lead box full of enriched uranium. The hospital doctors who made up their income by sleeping with their patients. The twenty-year-olds driving million-lari Maybach cars. The rise of prayer and miracles, now that everything else was exhausted.

‘How about you, Khatuna? Where do you steal clothes like that?’

‘I don’t steal. I work for Kakha Sabadze.’

There was a moment of silence.

‘What does that mean? Have you met him?’

‘Almost every day.’

‘What’s he like?’

‘Is it true he never sleeps?’

Everyone was looking at Khatuna except for Irakli, who was lying on the floor with his eyes closed.

‘He’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever met.’

‘He’s the biggest criminal in Georgia. How can you work for him?’

Khatuna gave an exasperated sigh.

Someone said,

‘Half the Georgian women in foreign brothels, Kakha Sabadze has sold them. Don’t you feel ashamed?’

‘How can you go near a man like that?’

‘You should take advantage of your situation. Put poison in his drink.’

Khatuna retorted,

‘Look at you all, living in this cesspit! At least Kakha Sabadze can hold his head up. He’s a Georgian who works hard and doesn’t just sit all day playing video games in the arcades. You’re all losers, that’s why you hate him.’

‘Why is there nothing to do in our country except play video games? It’s because of criminals like Kakha Sabadze who suck everything out of this place and leave nothing for anyone else.’

Khatuna said,

‘There are some people who have to do a thing perfectly: it’s an obsession with them. They may do it five times, ten times, it doesn’t matter. In the end they set the standard so high that no one else can come close. Kakha Sabadze is like that.’

‘Does he line the people up against a wall? So he can kill them five times. Ten times?’

Khatuna snorted contemptuously.

‘If you’re ambitious you have to offend others. Sometimes you have to kill. That’s life. In Georgia, if you won’t fight for what you want, you won’t get anything.’

There was silence. Irakli still lay with his eyes closed, and a woman tore her cigarette packet studiously into little squares. Breeze made the candles shiver, and someone quoted an old Russian poem:

That was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

Khatuna was frustrated. She said,

‘Where’s the bathroom?’

‘It’s there,’ someone said, pointing. ‘You can’t use the toilet because the plumbing doesn’t work. Use the bowl on the ground if you want.’

‘Every morning we have to carry that thing down twelve floors to empty it.’

Everyone was staring expectantly at Khatuna. She said to Irakli,

‘Get me out of here.’

He opened his eyes and looked at her too.

‘We have to leave,’ she said.

The taxi rattled over the cobbles, and Khatuna was shouting.

‘Are these the people you spend your time with? Infected losers floating in their own shit? Stealing whatever they have? It’s disgusting that you’re around those people.’

‘Calm down, for God’s sake. They’re just ordinary people, like you and me.’

He sat forward in his seat, staring into the dim horizon of the car’s headlights. The two men in front were silent. A few nightclubs were still running, but most of the city was shut up. Khatuna said,

‘Our family was rich! We had everything taken away, we were humiliated, Irakli, do you remember that? — and now you’re wallowing in poverty and dirt as if you loved it. I won’t let you. I’m going to set us right again.’

In the distance Irakli saw a white horse lying by the side of the road, its head erect, watching the traffic. He squinted through the night: it was a glorious, miraculous beast, its coat as bright as cocaine, its mane billowing in the breeze. Then, as the car drew close, Irakli realised it was no horse, just a man in white overalls lying on his back by the side of the road, one knee crooked, which had made the head.

They arrived home.

Inside, their mother was asleep in an armchair. A candle was burning but the lights and television were all on, for the power had come back since she passed out. The room smelt bad.

‘Do you want anything to drink?’ asked Irakli, putting water on the stove.

‘No.’

Khatuna switched off the television and stood looking at her mother. She had become painfully thin, and her face had gone slack.

Irakli brought a bowl of steaming water, took his Nescafé sachet from his pocket, and stirred it in.

‘Did you see what I did?’ He pointed to the ceiling, where he had hung a string of plastic ivy. ‘Doesn’t the room look better?’

She sat down on the mattress, her hands between her thighs for warmth. She said more calmly,

‘I worry about you. That’s why I get worked up.’

‘Mother is the one you should be worried about.’

Irakli sipped his coffee in silence. Khatuna looked out of the window at the web of washing lines criss-crossing the courtyard, where shirts waved dimly in the night. Two pigeons were nestled close on the windowsill. She said,

‘You know something strange about Moscow? The pigeons are twice the size of ours. The sparrows too. They’re fat like you can’t believe.’

There was no reply, and she turned away from the window. He seemed so alone on the sofa, so unprotected. She got up and put her arms around him, and held him for a long time.

7

THE YEAR WAS CHANGING to the next millennium, and Kakha organised a party in his new house.

Khatuna arrived early. A DJ was testing the sound in the bar, and disco lights were laid out on the floor. Security guards searched the bags of the women who had been hired for the evening.

Kakha’s cousin, Vakhtang, was already dressed up, his hair slicked back, head-jerking to every ten-second burst of music coming from the sound check. He was short, and had enormous muscles. He said to Khatuna,

‘Have you seen the size of those speakers? This party is going to make some noise!’

And he raised his hands above his head and twisted his face into a silent scream of dance-floor ecstasy.

Then he remembered something serious. He said,

‘There’s no sauna in this house. I thought you would have put one in.’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘That was never in the plan.’

‘Oh.’ He looked crestfallen. ‘When you have as much money as Kakha your house should have a sauna.’

He did some heavy hip-hop moves which ended with a mock punch to Khatuna’s jaw. He asked,

‘So are you his girlfriend now?’

‘No.’

‘But you do—’

He simulated sex with his fingers.

Khatuna did not respond. Vakhtang pursued it.

‘He really likes you, right?’

‘I guess.’

Vakhtang said solemnly,

‘You should get together with him. It would be an achievement for you.’

Khatuna went up to Kakha’s room. He had just arrived back from a trip to London, and was unpacking in his bedroom. He smelt of perfume, and his hair was wet. A big Rottweiler sat in the corner, eyeing Khatuna with a low growl.

‘Don’t worry,’ Kakha said. ‘He’ll get used to you.’

He stroked the dog’s head reassuringly.

‘It’s such a pleasure, having him around. I’ve got fifteen of them, but this one stood out from all the rest. You should see him run.’

She sat on the bed. She was touched by how neatly he had folded his clothes. On the wall he had mounted an icon of Mary, and a football in a glass case. Above the bed were two modern paintings of medicine cabinets and skulls.

‘Was it nice?’ she asked, lying back and looking up at the seashell chandelier. ‘In England?’

‘They love meeting me,’ he said. ‘It’s very exciting for them. They’re all so bored in that country.’

He gave her a Gucci bag, full of tissue paper.

‘I got this for you.’

She took it out, a blue dress with a low-cut bodice and an extravagant crêpe skirt.

‘These shoes go with it,’ he said, handing her another bag. ‘I thought you could wear them for the party.’

She took them into the bathroom. The air was steamy, and the gold Jacuzzi still pebble-glassed with water. There were mirrors on the ceiling and all four walls, and as she changed there were countless other Khatunas putting on Gucci dresses and shoes. She went back out into the bedroom.

‘Fantastic,’ said Kakha.

She kissed him on the cheek.

She said,

‘Mostly I influence other people: my friends always told me I was a big influence on them. But you have influenced me. You’ve shown me what it is to be ambitious.’

She sat back on the bed.

‘All this time you’ve been away, I see other men and they’re nothing more than a cupboard or a chair.’

He looked at her for a while. He said,

‘You have to understand: my life is different. Tonight my house is full of people I can’t trust, and any of them could kill me. That’s how it is.’

She was drinking Nemiroff from the bottle by his bed.

‘I know you’re brave,’ she said.

‘No. The reason I’m still alive is because I’m constantly afraid. I’m afraid of everyone: I’m afraid of you. I analyse everything. Why did she come half an hour early? Why did he stop to buy milk?’

He took the bottle from her and swigged himself.

‘The moment I stop being afraid, it’s over.’

He chose a suit from the closet and laid it on the bed.

‘You haven’t been exposed to this. If you get involved with me I won’t be able to shield you any more. You’ll need protection, surveillance, all kinds of inconvenience. Not every young woman wants that.’

His phone was ringing, but he ignored it. He said,

‘I can’t stop thinking about you, Khatuna. I’ve not stopped thinking about you all the time I’ve been away. I want to have you near me. But it would mean a lot of changes for you.’

He was pacing in the room. The party music had started downstairs, and a regular beat came through the floor. Through the window, laser lights reached towards the stars, and the illuminated statue of the Mother of Georgia was like a smudge in the night.

‘Anyone can see how much you love your brother, and that would become a weak spot for me. People could put pressure on you by threatening him. We might need to have him watched. Do you see?’

She suddenly felt sick.

‘He would never accept it,’ she said.

Khatuna was breathing deeply, and she was aware of a sweet and reassuring smell, like crude oil.

Then there was a knock at the door, and the dog stiffened.

‘Who is it?’ asked Kakha.

‘It’s me,’ came the voice. ‘Nata.’

Kakha opened the door to his daughter, and commotion flooded in from downstairs. Khatuna found it strange to see someone like Natalia Sabadze standing there, whom she had seen so many times on TV. She was a famous model, and she had recently launched a pop album called Nata 2000 that was better than anyone expected. You could see her in the music videos that played in all the bars, singing her songs in the back of limousines, cute and self-absorbed, kissing lollipops and balloons behind the security of machine guns.

In reality she was not so good looking.

Natalia hesitated only for the briefest moment when she saw Khatuna sitting on the bed. She looked at the Gucci bag.

‘This is who you were talking about?’

He nodded. Natalia said stiffly to Khatuna,

‘Pleased to meet you.’

Natalia was in charge of the party, and she began to discuss arrangements with her father. She whispered so Khatuna could not hear, and as the conversation went on, she retreated into the hallway. Kakha closed the door behind them, and in the last crack Khatuna caught sight of the enormous steel heel of Natalia’s leather boots.

Khatuna lay back in her blue dress. She let her eyelids drop, and looked at the chandelier through the thick pulp of her lashes. She thought of a bunch of roses she had seen that afternoon discarded in a trash bin.

She thought of her brother with his books and poetry. She thought of him dead, and how it would be impossible to bear.

She could hear the noise swelling downstairs, as guests arrived and the racket of conversation overtook the music. She pictured the glamorous people who might be coming, but she did not wish to leave Kakha’s bed.

He came back in and put on his jacket.

‘Come on,’ he said.

He looked at her, lying there. She was still looking up at the ceiling. She said sadly,

‘In ten years’ time I’ll be an old woman.’

‘You will never be old,’ he said.

He leaned over the bed and kissed her: it was the first time. He lifted her up, and she felt as if a winged horse were in her groin. They walked together down the stairs, the dog running ahead, and the house had filled with people. There was a queue at the main entrance, where guns were checked. A waiter gave them champagne.

Then Kakha was enthronged, and Khatuna left him.

She wandered around the party, marvelling at the decorations: beautiful dancers, champagne fountains and rotating video walls showing clips of Kakha’s life. She saw politicians, beauty queens and famous assassins. She watched the musicians for a while — a turbofolk band that had been flown in from Serbia. She saw Vakhtang, who said to her,

‘Wow, Khatuna, you look like a model.’

She took him in her arms and danced against his bulk. In her heels she was much taller than he. She began to sing into his ear the sugary love lyrics of a Russian song. Vakhtang remained stiff.

‘Have you seen the women they’ve got here tonight?’ he said.

‘They look expensive.’

Vakhtang sniggered.

‘On the house, sister.’

His face was thickset, his mouth filled with gold teeth. He pointed with his eyes.

‘I’m going to have me that one over there. Have you seen the tits she’s got?’

He left her. Khatuna sidled through the perfume and clamour, looking for a place to be alone. In the billiard room she found an empty armchair, and she sat down and lit a Trussardi. There were men around her, arguing. A man in dark glasses said,

‘There are colleagues in this room who have invested good money in oil pipelines and they are losing their investments because the government wishes to interfere where it has no business to interfere.’

‘But Mr Maisaia has not invested anything! He set up a fictitious company overnight and he stole the money intended for that pipeline! He may be my friend: but friendship is friendship and activity is activity!’

‘Mr Kenchosvili, may I ask you to cast a veil of discretion over your lips when you speak of these things in public. There are some things that are known but not said.’

When she finished her cigarette, Khatuna got up and wandered away. She had Kakha’s kiss still on her lips, and her new dress like angel hands around her legs. People were dancing together: the party was whirlpooling, it was rearing up against the high walls, and she wanted to ride on top of it. Waiters brought in bowls of cocaine, and Khatuna took a couple of lines. She saw a pale man in foreign clothes who was taking discreet photographs of the models. She saw TV personalities and businessmen on the dance floor. The Serbian turbofolk singer sang Turkish tunes while a rapper in mirrored glasses cut in with Russian and English rhymes. Motherfuckin’ Tbilisi. A big gangster called the Raven walked in with his girlfriend, a porn star.

Khatuna went to the bathroom. An open toilet door was banging noisily where Natalia Sabadze was having sex with a male model. Khatuna checked herself in the mirror. She was amazed by herself. She went into a cubicle and locked herself in. She leaned back against the dim wall, closed her eyes and gave way to the luxurious feeling that she was many metres tall, and so was everyone around her.

She returned to the party, which extended outside and round the pool, for the night was not cold. She made deliberate sine waves through the crush, heading for the door, wanting to see the moon — and she almost collided with the foreign man who had been taking photographs. He stepped back to let her pass, and she said in English,

‘Such a gentleman.’

He grinned and walked with her out into the darkness. They stood looking at the moon, blurred through the clouds. She said,

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I met Kakha Sabadze a few times in New York and he asked me to pay him a visit. I’m in construction, he likes buildings. You know him?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s a classy guy. Very smart. I understand he’s big in these parts.’

‘He used to be a famous footballer.’

Faces were blue in the light of the swimming pool. Out here the music was lighter.

‘Amazing party,’ said the American.

‘I saw you taking pictures of that girl on the sofa.’

‘Oh.’ He laughed sheepishly. ‘We don’t have girls like that where I come from.’

‘I thought you had everything in America.’

‘Well. Yes. In a different sense. How come you speak such good English?’

‘I speak four languages,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Do you know I designed Kakha’s house? He came to me and said, Make me a futuristic Georgian castle that will last a thousand years.’

She felt she could tell this man anything and he would believe it. If she wanted she could make him fall in love with her like that.

‘Really?’ he said. He looked at it with renewed interest. ‘It seems like a high-tech stronghold. Looks like it has every kind of security system on the planet.’

She said solemnly,

‘The only way to survive is to be afraid.’

He nodded earnestly. She was entertained.

They had left the rest of the party behind, and could see the lights spread out. Her blue dress brushed his legs, and he was slowing the pace.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

‘Khatuna.’

‘I’m Charles.’

‘Like the prince?’

‘I guess so.’

‘But he’s not as good looking as you.’

He smiled, and stopped walking. He turned to look at her. He put a hand on her breast and leant to kiss her. She avoided his lips, and for a moment they stood looking at each other, nose to nose. His hand loosened, and he stepped back, uncertain.

‘You’re lucky no one saw you,’ she said. ‘You could have been out in the street with a broken nose by now. Or worse.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Of course you meant.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘You’re funny.’

For a moment they looked with parallel gazes back to the house, and the shrieks of the party flickered over their silence.

‘Shall we go back?’ she proposed.

They started to walk. He said,

‘If you ever come to New York, please give me a call. If you want to talk about architecture. I have lots of contacts. This is my card.’

She took it.

CHARLES HAHN CEO

Struction Enterprises, Inc.

Building the twenty-first century

‘Still a couple of hours before it starts,’ she said. ‘The twenty-first century.’

‘No. It’s nearly midnight.’

Inside, Natalia Sabadze had taken the stage and was performing some of the songs from her new album, Nata 2000. Her voice was breathy, as if she were whispering in your ear, and she kept her eyes half closed as she sang. When her performance was over, Kakha led the applause, and the crowd kept clapping for a full five minutes while Nata walked slowly down the steps of the stage and kissed her father ceremonially on the cheek. Then a prominent businessman grabbed the microphone and gave a long speech in praise of Kakha. He proposed toasts to Kakha and his family. He listed Kakha’s achievements and the many qualities of his character. He flattered for a long time. He said,

‘We would like to present Kakha Sabadze with a special millennium prize for his contribution to Georgian industry!’

A young woman presented a velvet case to Kakha, who took out a gold medallion on a chain. He nodded graciously, and the guests applauded. The businessman said into the microphone,

‘If you look at it very carefully, Mr Sabadze, you’ll see your own portrait engraved into the gold. You’ll see we’ve given you something very special.’

There were cheers, and then the DJ pushed the volume towards the mythic. Fat, breathless men in suits left behind political debate to sing old socialist anthems and dance with the end-time. Models in G-strings performed mannered lesbian acts on platforms around the room. The room was hot, and there was hardly place to stand amid the swaying people. On the sofa, Vakhtang leered ecstatically over the exposed breasts of the woman he had singled out hours before, on whose satin surfaces he had just arranged stripes of coke. In the doorways, impassive security guards stood watching the writhing gathering, glancing coldly at each other across the room.

Khatuna was dancing gently on her own when Kakha appeared by her side.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

She put her arms around him. He said,

‘I saw you with that American. Was he disturbing you?’

‘No.’ She laughed.

‘You realise there’s only ten minutes left?’

Khatuna was laughing long and hard. She said,

‘Nothing can ever harm me now.’

‘Come and see the fireworks.’

They walked out together, and he put his jacket round her shoulders in the fresh air. Natalia Sabadze staggered out of the house, her arm around a friend, the two of them shouting, Millennium! The first rockets went off, a few minutes premature. Charles was there, watching, and two men were pushed into the pool, coming up shining and breaking into a fistfight. A countdown gathered in the crowd, starting from sixty and soon losing all relationship to actual seconds — and before it was over there was an enormous explosion of coloured light. For a moment, 2000 was written in fire above them. Kakha held Khatuna tightly against him, and guards let off machine guns into the air to show appreciation. The sky boiled with red and green, and from this high point they could see chemical bursts glinting over the rest of the city.

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

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

‘Make love to me.’

They slipped away, Khatuna whispering,

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where are you going?’

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

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

‘Kakha.’

He turned back.

‘Yes?’

Her make-up was smudged across her face.

‘I have a favour to ask you.’

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

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

Khatuna’s mother inspected her stonily.

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

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

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

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

He ate with gusto.

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

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

‘What the hell are you going on about?’

Irakli smiled indulgently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khatuna retorted,

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

Her mother began to cry. Khatuna kept on:

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

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

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

‘Shut your mouth, Irakli.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She lifted the chin of the younger man.

‘Do you remember me?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

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

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

The man groaned. Khatuna said,

‘Put a bullet in his leg.’

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

‘I remember! I remember.’

‘What do you remember?’ asked Khatuna.

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

‘Yes?’

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

Khatuna was still smoking her cigarette.

‘Hit him again.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No,’ replied Khatuna.

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

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

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

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

‘There’s nothing here to break.’

‘Break the window,’ suggested Vakhtang simply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ichthyosaur

8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So you believe the world is round?’

‘I’m sorry?’

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

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

Plastic passed it off with a nod. He said,

‘You can’t smoke in here.’

Gospodinov smiled sourly, but did not remove the packets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bozhidar pressed on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plastic called his secretary.

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

Gospodinov took all three packets with him.

Bozhidar said,

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

He watched Plastic carefully.

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

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

Bozhidar said,

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

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

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

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

Bozhidar was saying,

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

Plastic was enjoying Bozhidar’s sudden verve.

‘Illegal Gypsy musicians became so famous that the communist state didn’t know what to do. Everything that was silenced came out again in joy, and the musicians walked like emperors. Music brought down the communist government, Mr Munari, because it showed clearly that everything illegal was beautiful and sophisticated and everything legal was shit.’

The door opened, and Plastic’s secretary showed in Gospodinov. He smelt as if he had bathed in nicotine. He looked from Bozhidar to Plastic. He sat down.

‘So when can you begin?’

Plastic eyed him coldly.

‘So far, I’ve not heard you make any proposal.’

‘Well: can you do it or not?’

Plastic gave a smile of finality. He said,

‘I thank you, gentlemen, for your interesting presentation. But this is not how music is made. I need to start with talent, with artists. Great music doesn’t come about because there is a government strategy.’

‘That is exactly how it comes about,’ retorted Gospodinov.

Plastic folded his hands.

‘It has been an interesting conversation. But now—’

Bozhidar spread his hands to slow things down.

‘My superior is a little impatient,’ he said. ‘Don’t be offended. I ask you just one thing: come to Bulgaria. We will organise for you to hear every kind of Bulgarian music. You will find incredible artists. You will not regret it.’

Plastic took his time. He said,

‘Let me give you some background, gentlemen. The record company I founded in the Bronx in the late seventies launched the brightest lights of hip-hop, and when I sold it to Universal, I became a very wealthy man. I left hip-hop behind and started this label. I invented what everyone now calls world music. I have an instinct for talent, and when I find an artist I want I’ll get him if I have to kill my own mother — and that’s why this label is bigger and better than anything else in the field. I have a seat on the board of Universal Music Group. Do you see what I’m getting at? My inner life is secure. I have no interest in the Bulgarian government or its objectives.’

Bozhidar was sweating. He said,

‘I would like to say this to you, Mr Munari. Do not talk as if we are idiots. If we did not know who you are we would not be here. We know all about you and your country; it is you who know nothing about us. Try for one minute to imagine our perspective. You live in the richest nation on earth, and yet you speak as if you have acquired all your power with just your own abilities. In Bulgaria we are surrounded by people as talented as you, but their abilities go to waste. That is what we are here to change.’

It was true that Plastic could not think of a single fact he knew about Bulgaria. He had a vague sense that it wasn’t much fun to live there, and Bozhidar’s speeches had done little to change that. And yet the man was convinced his obscure little country would have its fortunes transformed if people could only hear its music. Bulgaria grabs a chunk of the global pie with unique thirteen-time rhythms. There was something endearing about it.

He suddenly remembered that there had been a record of Bulgarian folk music that had sold in the millions some years ago. He tried to think of the title.

‘I wasn’t trying to imply that you are idiots,’ he said.

‘Come to Sofia,’ said the young bureaucrat, more amiably. ‘I’ll take you to hear things you never imagined. And I’ll give you nice warm weather, not like here.’

Looking into his cocktail, Plastic saw a tiny bubble escape from under the olive and surrender to the surface. He said,

‘Get in touch with my secretary about dates, and send me a plan.’

9

PLASTIC WAS IN A HOTEL ROOM in Sofia, staring at the winged statue in the square outside.

Bozhidar said,

‘I’m afraid the prime minister cannot meet you. He is away on official business.’

He appeared very regretful, and Plastic had the annoying feeling he was trying to show the level of his influence.

He was waiting for Bozhidar to leave his room so he could take a shower and freshen up from his journey. He had no patience at this moment for the twelve-page itinerary Bozhidar had prepared.

Plastic picked up his shampoo by way of a hint, but Bozhidar continued to read out the list of appointments. Plastic noted that two afternoons had been set aside for interviews with journalists, which he would cancel as soon as he could. It was not his style. He liked to go low key, his ears unburdened.

Bozhidar was saying,

‘Tomorrow you will meet Daniela Ivanova. She is talented and beautiful, with a recent big hit for the Bulgarian version of Eye of the Tiger. In Bulgaria we are very obsessed with her breasts.’

Later that day, Plastic was taken to attend the opening of a new business park. A delegation came to thank him for everything he was doing for the country.

He said to Bozhidar,

‘Do these people understand why I’m here? I’ve come on my own account. What are they expecting from me?’

Bozhidar waved it away. He took Plastic to the opening of the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the Sofia Art Gallery, which his ministry had been planning for a year. There were speeches and self-satisfied toasts, and the city’s elite stood around with wine. Though they laughed among themselves, Plastic did not manage to get beyond formalities with anyone. He looked at the paintings and was astonished to see they were all paper facsimiles, and bad ones at that.

The next two days passed slowly. He heard several mediocre bands. He had lunch with overeager teenage guitarists. A musicologist gave a lecture.

Plastic was discouraged by Bozhidar’s behaviour. He had liked him in New York, but in his own environment, Bozhidar appeared humourless and excessively preoccupied with punctuality, and Plastic began to find his presence burdensome. Over dinner he gave the same speech about heavy metal he had given in New York, almost word for word, and Plastic felt he had exhausted the young man’s spontaneity in that first encounter.

Gospodinov was nowhere to be seen.

Plastic escaped for a couple of hours, eager to be alone. He wandered through old residential streets where the shutters were all fastened. He peered through the opaque glass of defunct shops. He looked at the rows of buzzers outside the houses, and the graffiti whose lettering he could not read.

He admired the Alexander Nevsky church, and browsed the flea market in the square outside. The bric-a-brac calmed him down. He bought himself a presentation medal embossed with the heads of Lenin and Todor Zhivkov. It was very cheap, and probably fake, but that only made it more exotic.

That night, Plastic resisted Bozhidar’s invitation to after-dinner drinks, and went back early to his hotel. He sat and listened to the excellent ensemble playing in the lobby, and afterwards had a long conversation with a man named Slavo, an original Gypsy violinist. Early the next morning, Plastic gave Bozhidar the slip. He packed his bag at 6 a.m., paid his bill and left the hotel.

It was only April, but as he walked towards the bus station the morning sun was warm, and post-coital cats lay out in the shafts. Traffic was sparse at this hour, flashing double in the windows of the new boutiques. Plastic arrived at the bus station and read the timetable of departures for Belgrade, Bucharest and Istanbul. He conferred with a taxi driver, who had no problem taking him where he wanted to go.

‘How long will it take?’ asked Plastic.

‘Four hours,’ said the driver. ‘Maybe five.’

‘Great,’ said Plastic. ‘Give me a minute.’

He went off in search of a toilet. At the edge of the forecourt was a broken hut with the sign of the minimum man. Plastic stuck his head in, and immediately withdrew. There was an inch of still water on the floor, and his entrance triggered a jazz-cloud of mosquitoes.

He was thinking of braving it on tiptoe when he spotted in the distance a friendly wall, and a secluded alley behind. He ran over gratefully, still carrying his bags.

He was not the first to have discovered this spot. In fact there were two other men standing there now, and Plastic had to walk down to find a place. The wall was black with ancient urine, and Plastic held his breath against the stench while he added another layer.

Still pissing, he suddenly felt an unaccountable need to turn around. He craned his neck and looked up at the dilapidated building behind him. No one was there. There was nothing but rows of empty windows, old and blind.

The driver turns off the engine, and car doors slam. Such sounds are authoritative against this silence. Plastic stands for several moments in the expanse, motionless and uncertain, for the empty town is eerie, and he has impressions of ghosts.

The wind gusts, now and then, and there are flocks of butterflies, but he is unprepared for the pig that emerges loudly from behind a collapsed truck, snorting unrestrainedly. He is quite embarrassed at the strength of his reaction. He watches the pig amble for a moment and sees it is tied with a long rope.

He walks towards the building — which is a grand word for this flapping pile of corrugated iron. A conveyor belt, which once carried material from the ground level up to a hatch near the top of the factory, has collapsed, and lies shattered where it fell.

He calls out, Boris! and larks take off from the trees. The silence does not alter, and he tries again.

A young man appears in an entrance. He cannot be more than twenty years old. He is taken aback to be summoned by name.

Plastic approaches, but not too close.

‘You’re Boris?’ he calls across the gap.

The young man gives a nod.

‘Slavo sent me. He said you would be here. He said you play violin.’

The young man stares for a long while. Then he disappears inside, and Plastic follows. The place is a death trap, with rusting tanks burst open, and great pipes ready to fall at any moment from the ceiling. There is a bed here, and several books, and it smells of rat piss and cooking.

‘You live alone?’

Boris nods.

‘My grandmother was with me,’ he says. ‘She died a while ago.’

He has his violin in his hand. It is strung with wires he must have made himself. He plays a slow and enigmatic air.

Hearing the music, Plastic pictures himself walking along an empty road. Far ahead he sees people running towards him. When they draw close, they gesticulate fearfully to where they have come from, warning him against going there. They have no time to stop, and continue frantically on their way.

More people come, and more — and the line of people fleeing soon becomes so dense that Plastic is forced to walk by the side of the road so they may pass. He shields his eyes to look at the horizon ahead, but he can see nothing: no smoke, no flames, no dust. ‘What are you running from?’ he asks the crowd, but there is no answer.

Plastic says, ‘You composed that yourself?’

The question is superfluous, and Boris does not expend effort on it. From outside comes the mahogany call of a woodpecker, which he answers on his instrument.

There is an elastic energy in Plastic’s inner thighs: this is not some fake thing he has just heard. His senses are sharpened. Some nameless gratitude has descended on him and made his head light.

He takes a CD player from his bag and puts the headphones over Boris’s ears. He reads the boy’s face, watches his eyes widen. It is one of Plastic’s old records. The best he has ever done.

Boris has to sort a few things out before he leaves. He goes into a house and comes out with his violin case and a few possessions tied up in a sheet. He sets his pigs loose and speaks to them roughly. He touches his forehead to the earth and tastes the air with his tongue. Then he gets in the car.

10

KHATUNA WAS READING The Fountainhead when she realised she was pregnant. She was reading The Fountainhead and humming along to the song in her headphones. Her cigarette tasted perfect this morning.

Her phone flashed. The message invited her to a dance party hosted by a foreign vodka company. A DJ was coming in from Paris.

Somewhere between deleting the message and picking up her book, Khatuna realised she was pregnant with Kakha’s child.

Kakha wanted their wedding to be the biggest event in Georgia since Old King David won Tbilisi, but Khatuna bargained him down to a small affair in the mountains.

She was becoming wary of the dangers that lurked in crowds. Kakha spent the morning with the priest, walking out along a rocky path, and returning after several hours to pray in the church, the priest whispering in his ear while he knelt on the stone floor.

The couple were married in the afternoon. Irakli had refused to come to a gangster wedding, so the guests were all from Kakha’s side.

‘I will follow you for ever,’ said Khatuna into Kakha’s ear. ‘I will be a woman in a veil in the desert, following you.’

The crowd became drunk and festive. There were village musicians, and enormous piles of country khinkali, and the men danced, bellicose. Kakha disappeared and his daughter, Nata, talked to Khatuna about fame, and parties, and her fashion line that was opening up in London. Her leg was still in plaster because she had recently driven her Porsche into a wall.

Khatuna savoured her feelings. She thought about Kakha. She pictured him looking at a waste patch of earth and imagining what he could build there. In the small of her back she had tattooed a great eye, so there would never be a time she was not looking at him.

There were moments when she was terrified by the emotions that would be unleashed when her baby came into the world. The agonies she went through for her brother were already bad enough. In her pregnancy, she had stopped going anywhere without bodyguards. Her child would never be vulnerable to the dangers she had suffered: she would build defences so formidable that nothing could ever come close.

She had recently moved her mother and brother into a bigger apartment with better security. She had her brother under surveillance now, but it was discreet, so he would not know.

She left Nata talking and went to find Kakha. He was leaning against a wall outside listening to Vakhtang, who paced around him, ranting.

‘I’m your cousin. I’m family. Have you got so big you’ve forgotten your values?’

‘Who takes care of you, Vakhtang? I pay for your cars and your women, and you don’t do a stroke of work.’

‘I want to work! You give everything to her! People come, and you only introduce them to her. You sent her to those meetings in Dubai. You buy her diamonds. And now you’ve married her. What will happen to me? She doesn’t like me. She’ll kick me out of the house. You give her all the power.’

‘She’s a good businesswoman. She says she’ll do something and it’s done. Do you think you could ever have pulled off the deal she did with the Armenians? You’re erratic. You leave me in the dark about what you’re doing. You steal my friends’ cars and leave me to deal with the mess. You seem to think it’s only about dressing up. We’re running a big business. It’s no joke.’

‘I was managing the hotels just fine. Everything was fine until you pulled me out.’

‘Because you don’t understand politics, Vakhtang. You do something, and you carry on doing it, and you don’t realise that everything else has turned round a hundred and eighty degrees. Our situation is delicate now. You don’t realise what a fucking range of things I have to think about since those towers came down in New York. There’s a war in Afghanistan, the whole world is suddenly on our doorstep. The Americans are coming in here, muscling in on my oil, because they don’t want to depend on the Middle East any more. I have to think fast. You don’t understand these things. You don’t understand the big picture.’

‘I can learn,’ said Vakhtang. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘Don’t push me to say things I don’t want to say.’

Vakhtang started kicking the wall.

‘I worship you, Kakha. Since I was a kid, I’ve always worshipped you.’

‘A lot of people worship me. Do I put them all in charge of my business?’

Later on, Kakha joined Khatuna in their bedroom. Khatuna smiled and said,

‘Our wedding night.’

Kakha pushed the covers away and looked down at her body. The electric light threw rocky shadows behind her nipples.

‘A man can never compare to the beauty of a woman,’ he said. ‘There’s always that basic inequality.’

‘You still think I’m beautiful?’

He kissed her shoulder. He said,

‘Can we announce our son yet?’

‘It may be a girl.’ She hit him playfully. ‘It’s still early. I want to be sure.’

Kakha put his arms around Khatuna and held her against his body. He said,

‘I keep getting this dream. I get up in the middle of the night and that statue, the Mother of Georgia, is calling to me. I open the window and float out into the night, far above the ground. I drift over Tbilisi, and my eyes are like floodlights, and there’s nothing I cannot see.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think it means?’

He shrugged. He kissed her ear. He said,

‘I got a phone call this evening. Some of our men were attacked in the lobby of the Sheraton. Four men came out of nowhere. We lost two of our own guys, and we killed three of theirs.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Khatuna, and she put her hand involuntarily to her stomach.

‘It was a mess,’ said Kakha. He sighed helplessly.

‘Listen: I want to take you on a little drive,’ he said. ‘Now we’re married, there’s something I want to show you.’

They sped out of town in a procession of white Toyota Landcruisers, taking no notice of the roadblocks where policemen gathered bribes.

‘You and I need a proper army now,’ said Kakha. ‘That’s what keeps me awake at night. With the Americans coming in, our stability’s falling apart.’

The road was empty, and they cut quickly through the hills. The driver peered through the arcs carved by the wipers from the windscreen’s mud.

‘All these smugglers and terrorists in the Georgian mountains, running from the war in Afghanistan — the Americans are going to come in and get them. The Americans will come in, the Russians will come in, and between one and the other, Shevardnadze will go down. Then all hell will break loose. Every vulture in the Caucasus will come to tear up his corpse, and the country with it. Shevardnadze’s a bastard but at least he’s held things together.’

They climbed up high, and the valleys were hazy below. There was snow on the ground and patches of ice in the shadows. In the back of the car, Kakha’s dog sat watching the flashing landscape, front paws spread against the bumps.

‘The big countries need Georgia to be weak,’ said Kakha. ‘Do you think the Americans could just march armies in here to guard their pipelines if we were a normal, stable country? They keep us on the brink of crisis, so there’s always an excuse to come in. That’s why people in our country are so insane: they know they’re only raw material.’

‘But that’s why we’re stronger than everyone else. We know how the world is. We know the fairy tales aren’t real.’

Kakha said,

‘There are many who are resentful that we own the borders, and they’ll use the chaos to try and take that away. That’s when we need an army. Our oil, our mines, our drugs — they all need proper military protection.’

The rolling hills were becoming more icy and rugged, and the pylons more precarious in their perch. There was an occasional corrugated-iron village.

‘The site is up there,’ said Kakha, pointing as the car turned off the road. ‘It used to be a Soviet training base. It’s a natural fortress. Look at the visibility it has.’

They drove up the slope to a barbed-wire entrance. Armed guards opened the gates, and the Landcruisers drove through. In the distance were two helicopters, their blades collapsed, graceful in a dusting of snow. There was a generator building and soaring military radar. There were half-buried armoured vehicles and a series of pitted walls.

They got out of the car. Kakha opened the back and the dog bounded into the distance. The men in the other cars spread out to guard the site. The peaks were vast and silent, and the place was utterly alone.

‘Watch the dog run,’ Kakha said.

Khatuna sighed. ‘Nothing else is real when you see a mountain.’

‘If you carry on up the road you get to Mount Kazbek,’ said Kakha. ‘Chechnya and Dagestan are right over there. You are standing in a secure site in the middle of a massive zone of war. That’s why I grabbed this place, as soon as the USSR moved out.’

He inhaled deeply, and kicked an old mortar shell sunk in the grass.

‘It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen,’ said Khatuna.

‘Those are the firing ranges,’ Kakha said, pointing. ‘They’re derelict. We need to take them down. Probably the whole thing will come down.’

They wandered slowly across the site, enjoying the feeling of clean, cold air in their lungs. Kakha made for the entrance of the main building, a huge box-like concrete structure. Inside, a light bulb was smashed by the door, and sections of the ceiling had collapsed, leaving spewing wires. Fires had left sooty stains up the walls. A torso from an anatomical model was propped up against a pillar, its ruddy tendons dulled with dust. On the blackboards there were diagrams from ancient seminars, and vast crinkled maps showed the world as it had been thirty years earlier.

They went up the stairs, which opened out into a concrete expanse, walled on one side with glass. Rows of welded seats with numbers painted on the back were scattered haphazardly, and a giant hammer and sickle, cut crudely from steel, hung askew on the wall.

They stood at the window looking over the plateau below them, flecked with thistles and rusting metal, and surrounded by a high wall. Beyond, the mountains shone through the mist.

‘No government will interfere with us here,’ said Kakha. ‘It’s easy to guard. I’ve got rocket launchers stored here, and surface-to-air missiles. I’ve got small arms and chemical weapons. There’s no problem with men: this region is crawling with soldiers who want to make money. I’ve hired top-class instructors from South Africa and England. They’ve been in Angola and Congo. They trained both sides in the Yugoslav war. You see? All the pieces are in place. We’re talking about the most advanced private army on the continent.’

‘You’ve been planning this for a while,’ said Khatuna.

‘I didn’t want to tell you before. Now you know everything.’

The dog appeared at the top of the stairs and ran over to Kakha, panting and dribbling on the floor.

‘If it’s all as you say,’ she said, ‘we can hire this army out. It will pay for itself.’

‘It will do more than that! Just think about it for a moment. We have America, Russia and China building pipelines and nuclear installations with totally inadequate military back-up. We have — what? — forty conflicts in the region, many of them already armed. We have bankrupt national armies, twenty years out of date — the men don’t even have uniforms. You see what I mean? If you can’t make money from a situation like that you’re a fool. Our army will be equipped and trained for next-generation warfare, and governments and corporations will be queuing up to use it. This is business.’

Khatuna leaned her head on his shoulder. They looked out together at the mountains, and the haphazard gathering of Landcruisers parked below. The peaks had begun to run orange in the late afternoon light. Khatuna said,

‘I feel better, coming here.’

Kakha put his arm around her.

‘I’ve been so worried,’ she said. ‘With this baby on the way, I think all the time about security. I never cared so much before.’

‘Look around you,’ said Kakha. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of anymore.’

For a while they stood there, close together, looking out at the Caucasus mountains. The Rottweiler sat alert by their side, staring at the lines of birds flying towards the golden horizon.

11

SITTING IN THE BACK SEAT of her Mercedes, Khatuna saw a flock of pigeons take off from the roof of a building and wheel dizzyingly in the sky above.

The car swept past a big poster of Nata Sabadze, an advertisement for her upcoming concert. It showed her walking in the rain over a bridge in Moscow, intense against the romance of the old Stalinist buildings.

Khatuna was coming from a meeting with an arms dealer. She was working full-time on the military side of the business. In her pregnancy, she had become more preoccupied with security.

People were strolling in the streets as normal: groups of young men in leather jackets whiling away their unemployment, old women selling sweets and soft drinks by the side of the road, people queuing conversationally for the baker, whose shop was marked by an old loaf hung on a string. But it all seemed different today. She felt she was seeing her city like a surveillance satellite, with eyes that had no feeling. The clouds above had shaggy claws.

‘Drive quickly,’ she said to the driver.

The powerful Mercedes screamed past the other traffic, and on to the hill road that led up to the house. Something was indeed unusual, for there were cars parked haphazardly outside the gates, and here too the pigeons were flying in great, agitated circles. The car raced into the compound and Khatuna jumped out while it was still moving, her papers left unconsidered on the back seat. She ran into the house and the first thing she saw was Vakhtang.

‘They shot Kakha! Kakha is dead!’

Vakhtang buried his head in her neck, howling.

‘Kakha is dead!’

There was a great commotion outside, cars braking and everyone shouting directions, and four puffing men carried Kakha in and laid him on the floor. His head was bundled in his raincoat, which they unwrapped to show his face, and the cooped-up blood ran out over the floor. The shot had hit him in the forehead and most of the back of his head was missing. Vakhtang threw himself on the body, screaming. Every mobile phone was ringing, and Khatuna thought to herself,

‘Who are all these people?’

She knelt beside Kakha, and wiped his face with her sleeve. She whispered in his harrowed ear,

‘Couldn’t you even wait to see your baby?’

Kakha’s Rottweiler galloped into the house, skidding on the marble. The circle of people parted to let him in. His nose bobbed against Kakha’s motionless hand. He whined, and paced around the body. He sniffed Kakha’s face and began to lick at the brains on the floor.

Vakhtang bellowed,

‘Fucking dog!’

He kicked the animal in the jaw. The dog turned on him, but Vakhtang flailed at the animal until it ran away.

Khatuna wondered where Kakha’s daughter was. She was aware there were people in the house she did not know, come to ransack secrets. She felt an urgent need to escape.

She was in a daze as she ran upstairs to gather her things. She did not even know what documents she was flinging into her bag, and she hurried downstairs, passing men coming up. She heard a man on his mobile phone whispering, Wineface has been shot. She took a final look at Kakha laid out, put her hand on his stagnant chest.

She made for the front door, and Vakhtang flung his arms around her, sobbing.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I have to leave,’ she said.

‘Take me with you.’

‘I’ll call you soon.’

Her driver was standing by the door.

‘Take me to town,’ she said to him.

He stared at her with a new defiance. He was a big man, and he did not move. He simply leaned against his pillar, took a slow drag of his cigarette, and drew his finger like a knife across his throat.

Khatuna ran out of the house alone, carrying her bag; she walked out of the gates and down the hill until she found a church. She called her brother and asked him to meet her there. He arrived twenty minutes later and found her inside, rocking on a stone step, her arms clasped round her knees.

When she saw him she collapsed into his arms, baying like a terrified animal. Her convulsions did not cease, and there was nothing he could offer to staunch her grief. She screamed in the empty church, she was impossibly heavy in his arms, she was like a paralysed woman who could not support her limbs. He tried to soothe her, reciting her secret name. She made bestial sounds and he shouted at her to bring her back.

She said she would die here. She wanted only to die. He said,

‘You will survive this.’

The church was silent, and no one came in. The saints shone in the afternoon sun.

She stroked his face. She said,

‘I have to leave the country. I promised him I would.’

She struggled with herself. He is here. I cannot leave him. Then she took the other side. They will kill me if I stay. I won’t let them put me on TV crying at his funeral.

She said she was not strong enough.

‘You have to come with me,’ she said.

‘What about Mother?’

She began crying again. Will she die without you? I will die. I will die if you don’t come.

He nodded. He said,

‘I don’t have a passport.’

‘I have it all. I’ve got papers for you. Passport, visa, everything. I’ve had them for months, for just this situation. You’ll have to travel under a different name.’

They took a taxi to the airline office. Khatuna looked out at the city, trying to comprehend that Kakha was not part of it. They drove past the street where he had been gunned down, and she fancied there was something festive in the way the people walked there. A young man stuck his head out of a speeding car and yelled into the wind.

There was only one flight that evening, going to Vienna. The man made a couple of phone calls and printed their tickets. Khatuna looked blankly at the bright tourist posters of Amsterdam and Jerusalem. She had the sense that the objects in the room were not fixed, as they appeared, but floated an imperceptible distance above the floor.

They took a taxi to the airport. Khatuna said, You haven’t even met him, and this thought made her weep again. You don’t know anything, she said, thinking of the secret unborn baby. She buried herself in her brother’s shoulder. She said,

‘You would like him, I know you would.’

He laid his head on the back of the seat. He thought of his mother, and all the things he would leave behind. He watched the sky through the back window, where pigeons had settled on the lamp-posts. He counted four on the first, three on the second, then two, then one, then zero. A countdown of pigeons, he thought to himself.

They arrived at the ramshackle airport, apartment towers falling on every side and UN jets bristling on the runways. Inside, the posters warned women not to sell themselves into prostitution.

Irakli called his mother. He wandered away for the conversation, and Khatuna could not hear.

They arrived in Vienna late at night. Irakli fell asleep in the hotel. Khatuna left him and walked around the city in her fur coat, the one Kakha had bought her.

She walked round the Ringstrasse, where cars droned indifferently past the mournful opera house and the Bürgtheater, filling the night with the vinegar smell of burnt diesel. The place seemed to be astonishingly full of antique shops. The streets were desolate. She saw a man standing alone in the middle of the night, watching silent football replays on a television in a shop window.

She reached the hotel after sunrise and slept all the next day: a leaden, frozen sleep from which Irakli could not wake her. He sat by the bed and began a poem. The title was, The strange laughter when, looking for a place to lie down in secret, we crawled beneath a table and discovered, on its underside, the scrawls we had made together as children.

Khatuna awoke in the evening and discovered her mobile phone had been cut off and all her credit cards stopped. She called Vakhtang from the hotel phone.

‘Has anyone said what happened?’

‘Some people say he stopped to buy milk, and they opened fire. It doesn’t sound right. Kakha didn’t do that kind of thing. He didn’t go and buy milk.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m in the house. Nata has moved in here.’

‘I’m sure she has.’

‘They gave her Kakha’s job. They made her head of the national airline. She’s inherited his football club.’

‘They must have made a bargain with her. We have to kill your father but in return we’ll take care of you.’

‘There were speeches in Parliament. They want to name a road after Kakha.’

‘All right. Take care, Vakhtang.’

The tears were running down her face, and she did not want him to know.

He said,

‘Can I come and visit you? It’s terrible here.’

‘You should think about getting a job. Taking care of yourself.’

‘I don’t know what I should do.’

‘Bye, Vakhtang.’

She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for so many hours that Irakli got worried. He sat next to her and held her gingerly.

‘Are you all right?’

She whined in the darkness,

‘I already lost my father, and now he is gone too.’

He moaned with her, and held her tight, and she said,

‘I am bad luck for men.’

She lay awake as he fell asleep, and her body began to tremble with a crisis. She leapt up and miscarried in the bathroom. She was nearly three months pregnant, and there was a lot of blood. Weak and dizzy, she cleaned every last trace off the surfaces, not wanting Irakli to know. She went back to bed, and held herself under the sheets, sobbing.

When she awoke the next day she was coldly focused. She went to the phone and called Charles Hahn, the CEO of the construction company she had met at Kakha’s millennium party. She said,

‘Do you remember me?’

‘Of course I remember. But it’s three o’clock in the morning!’

‘You told me to call you if I was ever coming to New York.’

‘Right.’

‘I’m coming and I need a job.’

‘Right.’

‘And I need you to wire me five thousand dollars today.’

‘You want me to wire you five thousand dollars!’

‘Yes. I’m in Vienna at the Holiday Inn.’

‘I see.’ He paused. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you.’

Irakli was watching her gravely. As she put down the phone, he said,

‘I don’t think I know who you really are.’

The money arrived that afternoon, and Khatuna bought tickets to New York.

Charles met them at the airport, and was dismayed to discover he was taking charge not only of Khatuna but also of her dishevelled younger brother.

From the taxi, Irakli looked up at the skyscrapers, which were old and scaled like a prehistoric fish. Ichthyosaur, he thought.

The three of them went out to dinner. Irakli said nothing to Charles all evening, and Khatuna drank two bottles of wine. Charles thought, All along, she was just a Third World girl. Give them an inch, they take a mile.

Afterwards he took her home and fucked her while Irakli, on the couch outside, piled the pillows round his head.

Khatuna had only just stopped bleeding from her miscarriage. But her screams came less from Charles’ fucking, than from its insufficiency.

Dugong

12

THERE IS AN INCANDESCENT GAP between the buildings, and Ulrich realises he is close to Times Square. He wears a maroon tie and a blazer beneath his overcoat, which give him a distinguished air, even if they hang a little loose on his elderly frame. He wanders towards the light.

In his daydreams, Ulrich is somewhat altered from real life. The gold watch he was forced to sell glints once more on his wrist, and his blind eyes are seeing and undimmed. He stands more upright, and that pleading air, which he has always detested in himself, is gone — as if he had not spent his time dwelling on what was taken away. He walks naturally, like the other people on the street, as if there were no reason he should not be here. He resembles one of those men, perhaps, who has just emerged from a theatre — for it is night — or from a jazz club, and who wanders, satisfied with what he has seen.

He comes in under the marvellous light, and stops to watch. Dazzling screens wrap polyp towers, which spire against the orange sky. His white hair reflects the logos, and turns harlequin.

His attention is captured by the familiar features of Albert Einstein playing on a vast video display. Einstein’s face is the size of a large house and it lights up the damp ground. The screen dims, and text appears: The highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought — and Ulrich smiles possessively, for these are words he had once written on his wall: Einstein’s opinion of Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure. The text dissolves and converts to plasma. The advertisement ends with the logo of a mobile phone company.

It is late and he grows tired. He looks around to orient himself, and sets off into the dark streets. The wind is cool and he puts his hands in his pockets, which are heavy with marbles.

Boris’s signature on the contract is a work of art. Still, the lawyer asks him to do it again.

‘In English please. Our people can’t read Cyrillic.’

The document is forty-five pages long, and there are three copies. Boris has to initial every page. Hereinafter called ‘the Artist’. He is bemused by their heavy-handed ways.

The CEO of Universal Music has stepped into the room to give the moment some razzle-dazzle.

‘We’re really excited to have you on board,’ he says, shaking Boris by the hand. ‘You’re a great musician, and you’ve come to the right place. You’ll see what we do here when we pull out all the stops.’

Boris nods appreciatively.

It is eleven in the morning, and the ceremony does not last long. People turn away to discuss work, even over champagne.

The CEO is left one-on-one with Boris.

‘I want you to think of this place as your home. Universal is like your family, and the only thing we care about is helping you make great music.’

Boris does not reply. The CEO says,

‘It’s nice to get a bit of good news from Bulgaria. All I usually get from that part of the world is piracy. I guess you must have seen it on the streets.’

He shudders. He looks at his watch and says,

‘It’s an uphill battle. Consumers don’t pay for music any more because they think it’s free. They don’t respect the work we do, you and me.’

Plastic comes and puts an arm round Boris’s shoulders.

‘I need to steal this man away,’ he says to the CEO.

‘I’ve been telling him about piracy,’ says the CEO. ‘But you have nothing to worry about, Boris. You’re with the biggest music company in the world. You have a lot of muscle on your side.’

‘I’m taking him to buy a new violin,’ says Plastic. ‘Look at that old thing he uses.’

Boris is holding the violin that Slavo gave him, years ago. It’s somewhat knocked on the corners, and the varnish is dulled, but he doesn’t understand why these men look at it with such derision. It has new strings, and the sound is good.

Plastic makes a quick exit with Universal’s new star, and they get into his limousine, which is waiting outside the building.

By now, Boris has been in New York for a while. He has settled down with a small group of musicians: a piano player, a bandoneon player and a DJ. He is writing a lot of music.

Boris is staying in a company apartment, but he also has the keys to Plastic’s home. Plastic wants every kind of resource to be available to Boris while he composes. There is a full-time butler in his apartment who takes care of meals, and it has a soundproofed music room with a miraculous stereo system. Boris spends many days there, working through Plastic’s enormous record collection. He has taken to writing music at his Blüthner piano.

When he wants to think about other things, he sits in Plastic’s living room. He reads his books and watches his TV.

Today, Plastic is in a rush to buy the violin. The driver takes them to the violin dealer’s studio, which is open to a little courtyard, and invisible from the street. Mr Stern, the owner, has half-moon glasses hanging on a string of coloured beads around his neck, and is standing outside plucking a pomegranate from one of the trees in the courtyard. He is expecting Plastic, and leads them inside.

Boris gasps at the riches held there, and Mr Stern shows him violins from every place and time. He can recite the list of owners over centuries, though the names mean little to Boris. He has a lute and a viola da gamba, and curiosity instruments with ten strings.

He has made a shortlist for Boris, who begins to try them out. With each trial, Mr Stern identifies the precise cause of his dissatisfaction and offers him another instrument, nearer to perfection.

The ageing Mr Stern eyes Plastic as Boris frowns over each violin. His look says, Who is this boy?

Boris is absorbed by the sounds he is making with these instruments. He is already at work, testing ideas. It is impressive to see how he thinks, but Plastic is due to give a speech at a charity lunch, and he cannot stay long. Two violins are lying on the counter, and he pushes Boris towards a decision. Boris plays the same phrase on each, and Mr Stern smiles.

‘Now it’s obvious,’ he says, and he laughs delightedly when Boris indicates his choice. He picks up the violin himself, and caresses it.

‘Italian,’ he says. ‘Not such an old instrument, but extremely fine.’

‘And by far the most expensive,’ says Plastic. He looks at Boris. ‘You’ll have to pay me back when your album comes out.’

Mr Stern says,

‘Take it home, live with it a few days. If you don’t like it you can come back and try again.’

He lays the violin in its case.

Boris is looking at the battered fiddle he came in with. He turns it over and strokes it mournfully. Plastic picks up the new violin, trying to hurry things up.

They go outside. Prophets in tall hats are relating visions on street corners and drawing obstructive crowds. Plastic is trying to get away fast, and he’s zigzagging angrily. It takes him a while to realise Boris has not kept up. Exasperated, he turns around. To his consternation he sees that Boris is crouching over his old violin, which is already in flames on the sidewalk.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ demands Plastic, running back. ‘You can’t light fires on the street!’

Boris does not look up. He is completely absorbed in the burning violin. He has a small bottle of petrol in his hand. The wood is already turning black.

Plastic says,

‘You’ll get yourself arrested!’

Plastic is preparing to stamp out the flames in anger when he sees that a young woman is standing by, taking video of the burning violin on her phone.

The young woman is Khatuna. She is fascinated by the sacrificial fire, and she feels a wave of relaxation pass through her as she watches. Through the flames, she notices a streak of green where a metal string is burning, and she thinks this is the most moving thing she has seen for a long time. Boris turns and looks at her. She says,

‘Why are you burning your violin?’

She says it in Russian, she doesn’t know why.

The flames die down.

Boris stands up and looks at Plastic. He holds out his hand for the new violin. Plastic hands over the case, warily. He is uncomfortable at what he has just seen. But he is distracted by Khatuna.

‘You like fire?’ he asks her.

Plastic knows something about names, and when she tells him hers he says Georgian? and thinks he sees her interest awaken. He takes an invitation from his pocket and gives it to her.

‘This man is a great musician. Come to his show. I’m his producer. Plastic Munari.’

Boris’s first performance in New York is only a week away.

‘Will you come?’ Plastic insists.

‘Maybe,’ she says. She looks him over. She likes his suit.

Plastic is running very late, and can stay no more. He says, See you next Saturday and walks away. Khatuna watches him get into his limousine and disappear.

Boris prods the charred violin with his foot, and it scrapes on the concrete. He smiles at Khatuna and she begins to walk with him. He leads her through anonymous streets of warehouses and old factories. He opens a faceless entrance and takes her into a hallway of garish tiles. They go up aged wooden stairs, the stairwell cavernous around them. She follows him, thinking to herself, This is not me who is doing this, this is not Khatuna.

The apartment is huge, and built in an old factory. It has Persian rugs on the floor and antique maps on the walls. In one corner is a huddle of chairs, and Khatuna sits down on the sofa. Boris brings two glasses and a bottle of vodka. He pours for each of them.

I have a meeting in an hour, thinks Khatuna. What am I doing here?

There are pipes from floor to ceiling and the bricks show through the paint. There are windows instead of walls, and the great expanse of concrete floor ripples in the light, for it is not exactly flat. There are paintings stacked against the walls, and objects on the shelves that are worn and mournful with age.

Boris does not speak at all. When the silence becomes too big, Khatuna says,

‘What star sign are you?’

Boris does not know about such things.

‘When is your birthday?’

He tells her. She says,

‘The same day as my brother!’ She is strangely exhilarated. She asks which year he was born, and says,

‘You’re one year older than him. To the day.’

She tells him all about Irakli.

‘He’s an artist too. He writes poetry. He sits all day in our apartment, writing.’

She doesn’t know why she feels so happy with him, for he remains silent throughout. She feels something significant will happen because of him.

He gets up and leaves the room, and she waits for him to come back. She hears him playing the violin somewhere else in the house. She sits and listens to the music.

She takes out her phone. She puts on the video camera and turns it in slow circles, sweeping the clocks and paintings of this large and doleful room and coming back to herself, expressionless on the sofa. She wants to capture herself at this moment, sitting in this place, with this music in the background.

The music finishes, and still Boris does not return. Khatuna waits for several minutes. Then she gets up and looks for him in every room of the apartment. She cannot find him and finally, incredulous, she lets herself out.

13

KHATUNA AND IRAKLI EMERGED from the elevator and crossed the lobby. The doorman wished them a good night as they pushed through the glass carousel.

Outside, it was dark and cold.

‘You’re not wearing enough clothes,’ observed Khatuna unhappily. ‘Where’s that jacket I bought you last week?’

She stood on the edge of the sidewalk, the lights of the ziggurat terraced above her. She held out her glove; a taxi swooped.

She let Irakli in ahead of her. He had an old umbrella, which he’d bought at a flea market and took with him everywhere.

Khatuna had dyed her hair blonde for this evening, and she checked the effect in the driver’s mirror. She turned her head to both sides.

‘I look so sexy,’ she said. ‘I am jealous of myself.’

She put in sixteen-hour days at Struction Enterprises, and she had lost the habit of going out at night. She had taken pleasure in dressing up tonight. Normally, she thought only about work.

She was now head of security systems at Struction. It was a role for which she was superbly qualified. New York boardrooms had never heard anyone speak so nonchalantly about snipers, chemical weapons and truck bombs, and on her lips this breezy militarism seemed not retrograde but futuristic — and even profound. Everyone wanted a piece of her advice.

Her early estrangement from Charles Hahn had done nothing to hamper her advancement in his company, and within a year she had gained a seat on the board.

The taxi drew up in front of the club.

Inside, there was neon darkness. They stopped in front of a little wooden hatch to buy tickets. It seemed they were early. There was no queue in the lobby, and the old woman inside was playing solitaire on a computer. She stopped her game to write out their tickets.

‘That’s forty-four dollars, please.’

Khatuna paid, and stopped to leave her fur in the coat-check. Irakli handed her his umbrella. He murmured amusedly,

‘Did you see that woman?’

‘What woman?’

Khatuna looked at herself in the mirror.

‘The old woman who sold us the tickets. She added twenty-two and twenty-two on a calculator.’

Through the doors, the music was louder. A man played piano onstage, and sang a duet with a woman in a top hat. There were only a few people as yet, and the atmosphere was like someone’s house. People shouted jokes at the performers.

Most of the tables were still empty, and Khatuna chose a place near the front. She looked around at the battered furniture and said,

‘I thought it would be a fancier place.’

Irakli put his head close to hers. He was still thinking about the woman in the lobby.

‘She added the total on a calculator. Then she wrote out the tickets by hand.’

The singer hit a high note and lifted her bare leg on to the piano, and both performers dissolved into laughter. People clapped, and another act came on to the stage.

‘So what’s her computer for?’ said Irakli. He was full of glee. ‘It’s just for her to play solitaire. It’s just a two-thousand-dollar pack of cards.’

Plastic was backstage with his entourage. The editor of a big magazine was there, and some movie people, and a princess from the deposed Bulgarian royal family.

‘It’s absolutely true,’ he said sotto voce. ‘He grew up in a totally empty town. There was no one else except his grandmother. He grew crops and raised pigs — he made candles from pig lard to light his house, for God’s sake. When he came here he didn’t know — you know — anything. But he’s a genius. He’s just a pure natural fucking genius. When you hear him you’ll understand. I haven’t been this excited about an artist in years.’

The room was small, and the photographer kept flashing. Boris had turned his back and was warming up in the corner. He had on a green military uniform. Plastic introduced his guests to the owner of the club.

‘Isn’t this place great, though?’

They gushed compliments. Someone mentioned the antique chemical bottles so artfully laid out in the men’s bathroom. A conversation began about a fabulous little store in the Village where you could pick up the most eccentric things. They drank champagne and chatted happily.

‘I’m allergic to sulphites, you see.’

‘Once in his life, a man should buy a pair of leather pants.’

‘I saw him play in Carnegie Hall, just two months before he died.’

‘Africa? I said. There’s nothing to do in Africa!’

Noise was building in the club. The owner said it was getting full out there. The bandoneon player took off his jacket and warmed up with some tango. The magazine editor said,

‘Plastic has probably done more than anyone else.’

A mobile phone rang. The movie director took the call and got into an argument with someone on the other end.

‘He didn’t mean it in a negative way? Can someone please explain to me?’

‘Boris needs some water. Get some water over here. And keep the volume down!’

‘More than anyone else I can think of to dictate cultural taste in the world today. Can anyone think of anyone else who comes close?’

The Bulgarian princess lit a cigar. Her hair was shorn. Boris had a melody he was trying out, again and again. The movie director was indignant on the phone:

‘I’d like to know how someone can say genocide in a positive way.’

‘His influence goes beyond music, because it’s not just about music. It’s an aesthetic attitude to globalisation.’

The CEO of Universal stopped by with another bottle of champagne and they drank a toast. Boris signed a couple of invitations, and the CEO did a mock benediction. OK, said Plastic, OK, everybody out!

‘If he’d stayed in America he would have been as big as Duke Ellington,’ said the movie director to the princess. ‘But no one’s heard of him because he spent the whole of the thirties in Europe. I went to see him play in Carnegie Hall before he died: there were maybe forty people in the audience.’

‘Let’s have some quiet back here!’

‘He was playing in Berlin and Paris. He was playing in Latin America.’

Everyone filed out, still talking, and Plastic was left alone with the band. He shook hands with each of them.

‘You don’t need any advice from me,’ he said. ‘Go make some music.’

From the moment Boris came on the stage, Irakli was transfixed: he had never heard anything as magnificent as this. The DJ’s samples were sharp, like the brilliant ripples in a murky well. The bandoneon was like leather carving on the tune. Boris played four pieces, back to back, and the music came to Irakli like poetry.

She plane? She solstice?

She sixty forecast of seven breezes, the anticyclone miniature,

a mossy-flooring wading girl!

Was cirrus not she, nor tremor nor breakfast? She fair was timely –

but storm wind loafs impatient.

The whale is averse on a New England beach.

She bitter squints the squat-eye fool

and mirthly mock entire the mull:

My dearly friend, so faithful-word,

does your deliquesce recur?

Is your senescence waking up?

He not fuss the morphosis, his lugubrious style:

This is radium love, do not litter the arm.

They don’t count the corpses that sink to the deep.

Boris shone as he played, and all the people in that room were filled with new kinds of desire. They wanted to follow him through his hole in the sky. They tugged at him with infantile dependence. They coveted the perfection of his body’s sway. They applauded him, reached out their hands, and sucked at him with clammy eyes. They became wet with their own saliva: for he was unattainable, and his absence crept into their mouths. They understood the cannibal’s dream.

The music ended, the lights went up, and the crowd screamed and clapped. They were sitting under Boris’s feet, for the stage was small, and everywhere was free champagne.

Irakli said to Khatuna, raising his voice over the outcry,

‘He is amazing! Amazing!’

His face was glowing with excitement.

Khatuna raised her eyebrow. She said,

‘I’d like him to rebuke me.’

The DJ and the bandoneon player filed offstage, leaving Boris alone with the pianist. Boris said,

‘I will play the second violin sonata by Alfred Schnittke, written in 1968.’

It was a piece he had learned from Plastic’s CD collection, but Plastic was aghast.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ he whispered. ‘He’s supposed to play his own music!’

The sonata was dissonant and excruciating, and the faces in the audience went blank. Irakli heard it like an endless struggle –

radium cholera bitumen patriot

albatross desiccate fungicide pyramid

chemical Africa national accident

multiply hurricane industry motivate

— the violin not played but wrestled, the piano pummelled, like the repetition of a gun that has ceased to work.

terminal citizen management piracy

digital contribute parasite northerly

democrat corporate marketing ministry

generate synchronise quality property

Pakistan automate cellular weaponry

bullet hole Heisenberg certify history

Plastic wanted to stop it. He said,

‘This is suicide.’

alcohol medicine embassy recognise

dentistry personal hospital circumcise

It was interminable, and there was no refusal. The piano crashed the same chord a hundred senseless times, a psychopath’s barrage.

document educate financing bellicose

structural legalise radical standardise

borderline distribute rational wintertime

The audience was racked across silence. The music ended, and there was no relief.

Boris bowed, and people clapped with dull recognition. The hall was wrung out: they wondered why they had deserved it.

He said,

‘Now I will play music of my own.’

The violin began alone, the stirring of future love. The other musicians came quietly onstage. Plastic’s heart was grinding. The bandoneon trembled, the chords were poised.

The ptarmigan ruff, the mastodon mouth, an emerald cotyledon …

In a blink, embark rebellious!, the band has exploded with a riot-dance and Boris stamps exultant like a seven-foot Gypsy, vaulting in a circle, a Cossack caper, shouting the spirit for all he is worth, Hey! Hey! Hey! he cries like seven giant peasants, and in a slow-motion second the trussed audience unfurls euphoric, it opens like a canyon, proclaim the tsunami klaxon after flesh!, and they all stand like the glorious mountain-bud, they thank the journey, what relief, what exaltation, what—

Beautiful beautiful beautiful I am speechless before your song

Liquid is flowing again in the dry conduits

I cannot tell, I cannot tell, I cannot say the way it fell

The music has merged with tumult, and Irakli sees a passage open up before him. He is on the stage already, his Georgian dance erupting, his Caucasian footwork a-flicker. He jumps and reels and the crowd watches in delight, the band drawing round. This audience will rip down the building, it will howl and fornicate. Irakli leaps high in the air and lands flat on his back with the end chords, laughing unheard in the impossible roar. There are people standing on tables, weeping openly.

Boris gives Irakli a hand and pulls him up. The band goes offstage.

The crowd is on its feet, and Plastic has to shield his way through the corks they are throwing at the stage, which is empty with its piano and silent chairs. They shout for Boris but he is in the black-and-white backstage, the light bulbs burning and shadows under his cheekbones. The other musicians are there too, who have not words for what has happened. The pianist smokes a cigarette, trying to piece it together.

Plastic beckons to Khatuna and takes her hand in the crush. With her other she reaches for Irakli so as not to lose him. Plastic leads her out of the bellowing mass, he hauls her backstage to Boris’s dressing room — and she likes the strength of his grip. The doorway is thronged, and there’s no space to see what is happening inside. There are men trying to get in with tripods and video cameras. Plastic tells them to clear the entrance and forces his way through with Khatuna and Irakli. In the full light he notices Irakli for the first time.

‘Aren’t you the guy who danced onstage?’

A well-known novelist is drinking champagne from the bottle. The ones who have tricked and lied their way in here stand wide eyed, trying to look as if they belong. Boris is taking hungry bites of a hamburger.

A cameraman puts a microphone in Plastic’s face and asks him to comment on the show. Plastic serves up some simple but effective phrases over the noise. But the journalist is angling for something profound:

‘It’s a very tragic place, isn’t it? The Balkans? Would you say that came through in his music?’

Plastic wants to get out of here, he calls his people to evict the media. He gives everyone the address of the restaurant for dinner and takes his people through the back door.

Khatuna and Irakli do not go with him. They have to get their stuff from the coat-check.

They weave back through the crowd in the club. They are high on alcohol and sensation when they make it to the lobby. The attendant hands over coat and umbrella to Khatuna. Irakli looks in through the little wooden ticket hatch. The old woman has gone home, and the office is dark except for the glowing fishes drifting restfully across the computer screen. Slack faced, he watches them for a while and, such is his altered mind, he has the feeling, when he walks out to the street, that the wet splashes on his face are dripping from those fish. Khatuna puts up his umbrella, and he realises it is rain.

They walk towards the address Plastic has given them, and at the end of the first block they find Boris standing alone.

‘What are you doing here?’ asks Khatuna.

‘I wanted to walk on my own,’ says Boris. ‘But I don’t know which way from here.’

Khatuna holds the umbrella over him, and they set off, the three of them huddled close, happy and optimistic, three ordinary kids in the night.

‘It’s just down there,’ Khatuna says lightly.

At that moment, the umbrella flies out of her hand and catches in some railings. She runs after it in her heels, racing her brother, laughing at the rain on her dyed-blonde hair, her fur coat flaring on the wind.

Plastic had booked a private room in a Vietnamese restaurant. The table was already laid with hors d’oeuvres, and the music critics waited for him to seat them. Two waitresses walked the length of the room, ceremonially releasing disinfectant spray above their heads, like in an aircraft.

People applauded as Boris entered, and took photographs of him with their phones. There were crystal drops down the back of his jacket and his hair was damp. The Bulgarian princess shook her head with emotion and put her arms reverentially around him. The journalists gathered close.

‘What do you call your music? Is it jazz? Is it Gypsy?’

‘You’ve been described as a feral child. Do you know what that means?’

The novelist shook Irakli by the hand.

‘Your dancing was spellbinding,’ he said. ‘I would have done the same if I knew how.’

They sat down in groups. There were orchids on the table, and starters of tofu and soft-shell turtle. Everyone was seized by hunger. The room was full of steam and aroma, and they began to eat greedily. One of the critics said through his noodle soup,

‘Let’s not forget it was also the best performance of the Schnittke sonata anyone has ever heard!’

The movie director sat next to Khatuna and asked her about her work. She told him about advances in architectural security. She said,

‘We don’t make our buildings here any more. We bring them on a ship from China. They make everything there. If you want you can buy yourself a jail for next to nothing. It’s precast in concrete. You just tell them how many cells you want and they ship it over.’

There was roast duck, and beef with lemon grass. If you could have tuned out all the other sounds you would have heard a great cacophony of mastication.

The movie director was sweating a lot. He had taken it upon himself to explain to Khatuna a word she did not know.

‘It means what you’ve just written is wrong, and you know it’s wrong.’

He had coriander leaves caught in his teeth.

‘If you know it’s wrong, why would you write it?’

‘Maybe because you’re quoting someone else who wrote it wrong? So you put sic afterwards to show it wasn’t you.’

Khatuna was bewildered by the man’s approach. She thought he must be the most boring film director in the world. She said,

‘You get to sit next to someone like me, and this is all you can find to talk about?’

She wanted to know Boris. He had unbuttoned his military jacket, but still cradled his violin, even at the dinner table. She got out of her seat and went to him. She whispered in his ear,

‘You left me alone the other day! Where did you go?’

Her cheek had touched his forehead. Boris said,

‘I didn’t want to stay there any more.’

‘Why didn’t you take me?’

Boris did not reply. She said,

‘Will you come out with me now? We can find somewhere to be alone.’

Boris looked up into her eyes. He studied her, and then he said,

‘No.’

People began to change places around the table, and the bamboo room became jumbled. Clear-thinking waiters removed empty bowls and laid on full ones: stir-fried eel, shrimps with sugarcane, sautéed frogs, cuttlefish salad, lobster wrapped in rice and banana leaves. The meal was a riot for the tongue, and people slurped their wine loudly for the extra sensation.

Boris was trying out his chopsticks on the roasted suckling pig. He asked the Bulgarian princess whether they raised pigs in America.

‘Of course they do.’

He contemplated the meat. He said,

‘How much milk do you get from an American pig?’

The princess said,

‘I don’t know. I live in Spain.’

She put the question to the table, provoking lively debate.

‘Do pigs give milk? I suppose they must.’

‘Pigs give bacon.’

‘Suckling pig.’

‘We’re educated people, and we don’t know this?’

‘Pigs are mammals, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Suckling pig!’

The waiters brought more steaming plates, and looked for gaps in which to put them. Cooked snakes were coiled up in bowls, and the party examined them with ghoulish delight. There was a discussion about outlandish things people had eaten. Dog and alligator.

‘I once ate monkey brain,’ said a soft-spoken actress.

The group embarked upon a compilation of things eaten in China. There was a list of places where people supposedly ate insects.

‘In Papua New Guinea they eat the dugong.’

Haloed with alcohol, the conversation seemed brilliant. It carried on for a long time, coursing through the gathering, and no one noticed that Boris had slipped away, taking Irakli with him.

Irakli could not stop talking about Boris’s music.

The rain was harder than ever, and the wind was extreme. Irakli spoke breathlessly, as they ran through the streets,

‘This is what I thought of while you were playing. I saw joyful barbarians dancing through a stormed palace. They were hanging up their flags. They were running through the priceless rooms throwing cigarettes on the carpets and posing for photos in gold bathtubs. Chandeliers were smashed on the ground, and they were stashing paintings in suitcases. They were inventing ministries for themselves, and choosing imperial bedrooms for their offices. It was wonderful and terrifying.’

‘You say it so well,’ said Boris. ‘I could never say it like that.’

They were drenched when they arrived at his apartment. Boris brought Irakli a towel and a fresh shirt.

The apartment was on the forty-fifth floor, and there was almost nothing in it. There was an enormous window that looked over the Hudson River into New Jersey.

Irakli was rubbing his head with the towel. He said,

‘I want you to read my poetry. When I was listening to your music I was thinking, He has felt the same things! He’s had the same intimations I’ve had all my life. I’m trying to put them into words, like you put them into music.’

Boris poured brown liquid from a bottle with no label. Irakli continued,

‘When I saw how easily your music came I thought maybe the task is just too difficult for me. It’s beyond me.’

‘You’re just young,’ said Boris. ‘It will take you another twenty years.’

‘You’re the same age as me. But look how you play!’

Boris grinned.

‘Don’t judge me by what you heard tonight. Wait a few years, and you’ll hear what I can do!’

They drank avidly. They were filled with the rare elation that two people sometimes feel on finding each other. They wanted to know everything about each other. They told the story of their lives until that point. Irakli told Boris about Khatuna, and what had happened to her.

‘That was her?’ asked Boris. ‘Who was there tonight?’

‘She doesn’t usually look like that: she’s dyed her hair.’

‘I didn’t like her,’ said Boris.

He held his violin in his lap, and his left hand fluttered on the strings. Irakli was taken aback.

‘Men usually enjoy meeting her,’ he said.

The night passed, but the weather did not let up. The wind whistled around the building, and the window was lashed with rain. They talked about coming to America. Boris talked about the startling new sounds of New York: the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes. He talked about the way that strangers passing on the sidewalks looked you boldly in the eye.

Boris and Irakli were sitting facing the window, and they could see blades of lightning as they talked, and the hypnotic stream of car lights leaking into New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel. And then they saw a concrete water tower collapsing on the other side of the river.

The tower stood next to the highway, and it was brightly lit. First they saw the pillar sway unnaturally. With the enormous weight of the bulb on top, it could not right itself and, majestically, the entire structure slowly toppled over. Irakli started as it crashed, but from this distance all was silence.

The tower fell away from the highway into unlit grassland where nothing could be seen. A moment later, a raging wave emerged from the blackness and smashed over the highway, sweeping cars away to make a semicircular lake, blazing in the floodlights, while more collisions spread up and down the lanes in chain reactions.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Irakli.

‘I know!’ said Boris, incredulous.

The traffic tails, red and white, hardened in each direction. The water reached its greatest extent over the highway and began to subside. Silent sirens converged on the zone.

‘I wonder if anyone died down there,’ Irakli wondered dreamily.

Boris reached for his violin and began to play. He said,

‘I’ve spent nearly all my life on my own. Really alone, with nothing but the land and the animals and my violin. I wasn’t unhappy: I never thought that other people could help me with the essentials. But already I feel I’ve known you all my life. My music will be better now I’ve met you.’

Irakli smiled. Morning approached. The storm wound down, and the first sun appeared. Boris played slow melodies.

Irakli had been drinking for hours, and wanted to close his eyes. The sofa felt so warm.

He let Boris’s music flood over him.

Nothing can be wrong — the fancy? the corruption, the border?

Every one a flagrance, a fragrance that he made:

he made a delicate amethyst out of winter,

a crystal dodecahedron through a pinhole peephole — he snowflake he malleus he

cochlea he

eyelid.

14

WHEN KHATUNA AWOKE there was no one next to her. The room was strange, and her dress was snagged on a post at the foot of the bed. She rescued it, slipped it on, and walked out of the room. Plastic was already in his gym clothes. He had muffins and coffee on a tray.

‘I was about to get you up,’ he said, and kissed her.

He was handsome, which made up for a lot.

She sat down.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in this room before.’

‘No,’ he said, smiling.

‘I came here with Boris. I sat on this sofa.’

She took out her phone and showed Plastic the video she had shot in that very place. There was this room, and Khatuna’s face, stolid and foreign in the image, and the sound of Boris’s music in the background.

‘He brought you here?’ he said curiously.

‘I assumed it was his apartment,’ Khatuna said.

She got up and walked around, curious again. There was an ancient French tapestry on the wall, and a large Venetian mirror whose silvering had curdled like diesel oil in the rain. There was a set of old engravings of Vienna. There was a carved wooden statue on a pedestal, a Buddha with an arm missing.

She said,

‘Why is your place like this? You’re a rich man but all your things are falling apart.’

Plastic said,

‘Those antiques cost more money than you’ll see in your whole life.’

‘You like old things,’ she replied. ‘That’s not good.’

He kissed her on the ear.

‘I like young things too,’ he said.

She stood very still as he nibbled her lobe, trying to work out whether she liked it. She said,

‘Do you have a gun?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I like that tattoo in the small of your back. I feel I’m being watched.’

‘That eye is not watching you.’

He looked at her curiously, and drained his coffee. He said,

‘I have to get to the gym.’

She looked at him, incredulous.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘I work out every Sunday morning.’

‘Do you have a beautiful young woman in your house every Sunday morning?’

‘I get grumpy if I don’t work out.’

Khatuna curled her lip with distaste.

‘You don’t love women,’ she said.

‘We’ll see each other again, won’t we?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

After he left she wanted only to get out of his house. She collected her clothes and took a taxi home. She was unhappy to find that Irakli was not there. She fretted, and paced between rooms. He refused to carry a mobile, so she could not call him.

The only life in the house was the parrot in the kitchen. Khatuna had bought it as a present for Irakli so he would have company while she was at work. She took the cover off the cage, and the parrot scratched animatedly at the mesh, reciting all its phrases. Khatuna interrogated the bird, asking where Irakli could be.

‘Bye-bye,’ it said. ‘Good morning Baghdad.’

She shushed in exasperation and kicked off her high heels. She called Plastic to see whether he would know how to contact Boris, but he did not answer his phone.

‘His fucking gym,’ she thought.

She put on her slippers and lit a cigarette. She slid open the balcony door and sat on the chair she kept there. The storm had left a damp, cool morning, but Khatuna felt claustrophobic in sealed-up American homes, and liked to have access to the sky. The balcony was the most satisfying thing about this house, with its arabesque decoration, and ferns hanging down from the terrace above.

She sat with her eyes fixed on the front door, imagining the catastrophic things that could have happened to her brother while she was away with a strange man. She kicked one leg nervously and watched her slipper bounce on her foot. Suddenly she had the feeling that she looked exactly like her mother, and this made her even more anxious.

The door opened, eventually, and Irakli walked in with his umbrella.

‘Where have you been?’ she shouted resentfully.

He looked her up and down. He said,

‘You’re still wearing the same dress.’

‘So what?’

‘Who were you with?’

‘I went home with that producer. He’s very rich.’

She felt like punishing him now. She said,

‘He made that guy Boris out of nothing.’

Irakli came out on to the balcony and looked out across town. Just a couple of blocks away, the Empire State Building sparkled after its recent restoration. Khatuna said,

‘Where were you?’

‘I slept at Boris’s house.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’ she demanded angrily. ‘Why did he want to go home with you?’

Irakli shrugged wanly.

‘What did he want from you?’ she asked.

‘We talked all night,’ said Irakli, still high with it. ‘I had an amazing time. It was like running into an unknown brother by mistake.’

‘Did he want to have sex with you?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

Khatuna inspected her brother suspiciously. She said,

‘His smile was like a gay man’s.’

‘All you can think of is sex,’ Irakli said. ‘You don’t know anything else that people can do together. You should try and imagine.’

Khatuna smirked.

‘If I want advice about sex, I’ll ask someone with a bit of first-hand knowledge.’

Irakli leant on the rail and looked at the clouds, hanging like white rocks in the sky. There were sirens in every part of town. The sign on the side of the Empire State Building said in massive letters, For RENT.

15

HOW MANY TIMES has Ulrich imagined himself knocking at an American door, and finding behind it a young man with a resemblance to himself?

All those images accompany him now as he enters Boris’s building and takes the elevator to the forty-fifth floor. Everything has the echo of presentiment.

He rings the bell at Boris’s door. His heart is throbbing. He has put on good clothes, but he is old and does not resemble a father. The words have gone out of his head.

Boris answers brusquely.

He is taller than Ulrich expected. He is not wearing a shirt, and he carries his violin in his hand. Round his neck he wears a pendant on a string: it is made from gnarled pig leather, and looks vaguely obscene. There is a bad scar in his side, which makes Ulrich mourn.

They stare at each other for a time. Ulrich feels ashamed that he has reached such an age while Boris is still so young, and he is all too aware of how he must appear. This morning, with unsteady hand, he shaved the top off a pimple, which now bleeds periodically over his chin.

He looks past Boris into the apartment. It is full of cardboard boxes, neatly stacked, and labelled with a skull-and-crossbones hazard sign. On the floor are wood chippings, duct tape and other packing paraphernalia.

Ulrich would love to go inside, to sit for a while. He begins,

‘I am—’

It is absurd to say it like this. He does not know this boy. It would be an offence to say what he wants to say. He swallows several times to regain control of his larynx.

‘Will you play for me?’ he says in Bulgarian. ‘I would like it so much.’

He studies the stubble on Boris’s face. He sees his badly cut hair, his violin bow twitching in his hand, his youthful eyes shining with suspicion, the impatient muscles in his bare arms.

Boris relaxes his grip on the door handle, and for a moment Ulrich thinks he is going to let him in. But at the last minute, the young face turns wary, and Boris shuts the door. Ulrich’s tense shoulders slump, and he lets out his breath.

I was too eager, he says to himself in the corridor. He could see it. He doesn’t want some stranger coming and making claims on him.

But he smiles to himself, because even this unsuccessful contact has made him happy.

I have to be patient, he thinks.

He writes a polite note to Boris, telling him how he can contact him, and slips it under the door.

Boris and Plastic work late nights on the album. They are light headed with it, and need little sleep. Something wonderful is emerging, unlike any music they have ever heard.

Plastic has unexpected insights, and Boris gains respect for a kind of knowledge he has not encountered before. Plastic knows how to finish things: to push and polish until they slot into perfection.

Boris has bought himself recording equipment and sometimes turns up with strange sounds he wants to use on the album. He’s written a duet for violin and the rhythmic near-far moan of an industrial vacuum cleaner. Plastic doesn’t think it belongs here.

‘In my home town,’ explains Boris, ‘sounds lasted a long time. Here there’s so much other noise, they’re stifled immediately. I want to get that feeling in. The sounds desperate for space, all dying young.’

Plastic tries to set him right.

‘You’re at the beginning of your career,’ he says. ‘You don’t have to say everything in one go.’

Boris doesn’t look at him while he speaks. Plastic continues,

‘I’m not thinking about one album. I’m thinking about how we can make the next five albums. Ten. I’m thinking how we can sustain you as a great artist until you’re seventy years old.’

Boris grins. Plastic says,

‘You can smile now because you don’t know anything, and your talents are screaming to be let out. It won’t be the same for ever. Most people of your generation lose their way when they hit thirty-five. While they sit in their jacuzzis wondering how they ever did what they did, the system spits them out.’

He adds,

‘You should have heard me play piano when I was your age.’

Irakli opens the door of the parrot cage. The bird steps off the parapet and flutters across the kitchen, alighting on a chair.

‘Good morning,’ it says, though the day is quite over. It looks Irakli over with avuncular concern.

He has sat all day with his pen and notebook, but he has not a single word to show for it.

Irakli has always lived among visions, which come to him just like memories of the womb return sometimes before sleep. Under their influence, he feels his hands as big as planets in the absolute night, and hears the postponed echo of ancient sea monsters. Khatuna looms there, unseparated from him, and the horrors of the world are turned inside out. Beyond his nose, and impossibly remote, great spheres pass through each other, weightless and incandescent.

Since he met Boris, these visions have departed, and Irakli has become listless and depressed. He sits in the house day after day doing nothing. He tries to unstop himself with alcohol, but it does nothing to help.

Khatuna is getting irritated with him.

‘It’s like living with a corpse,’ she says. ‘You used to make me laugh. Now you’re always morose. I get depressed just seeing you.’

She tells him it’s time to give up this writing. Your fucking poetry! she says every day. She tells him how he should improve himself, and buys him presents — a biography of a famous CEO, a gold case for business cards — that are designed to draw him out of his slump. Irakli does not pretend to be grateful. She gives him a designer pen holder to stand upon his desk, and he fills it with vodka and empties it down his throat. He says,

‘I was born for one thing. When I’m on my deathbed there is only one thing I will look back on and feel proud of.’

He does not know how to speak to Khatuna any more. She is cynical, and takes pleasure in the humiliation of everyone around her. She says things like retooling, benchmarking and value-add. She meets many people at parties with Plastic and all she can say about them is how many dollars they are worth.

Today, it is late, and Khatuna is still not home. Irakli proffers some seeds to the parrot, which it eats messily, dropping husks on the floor. It sings some lines from a Russian pop song that Khatuna likes and rounds off with the beep beep of the microwave. It says, Come to Irakli! and Make a cup of tea! — which is a phrase it learned before it arrived in this house.

Irakli sits down to write a letter to his mother. The worse he feels, the brighter and more effusive his letters become. He tells her his book is going well. The parrot dribbles on the paper. Irakli writes more often to his mother than she to him. Her letters are brief. She has stopped drinking and is cutting hair in a salon. He has sometimes found bits of her customers’ hair between her pages.

Irakli addresses the envelope and puts the parrot back in its cage. It says Goodnight!, alternating between Khatuna’s voice and his own. Its imitation of voices is uncanny, and both Irakli and Khatuna are surprised now and then by ventriloquist visitations of the other.

Irakli picks up his umbrella and leaves the house. As he walks he sees the new zombies let loose in the street: the radio-wave imbeciles with wires in their ears, talking to the beyond. He sees the curving aerial highways, braided in concrete, and smooth-moving at this hour. He sees bars on street corners, and crowds outside packed into the electric glow. He sees helicopters overhead, and night markets. He sees the messages on fluorescent paper on the walls. UNDER THE WEATHER? If you’re fading, call us now. A friendly voice changes everything.

Irakli has begun to feel despondent in this city. He talks wistfully about Tbilisi, but Khatuna cuts off this line of thought.

‘There is still danger for us there,’ she says.

But he is not sure whether she really believes it.

He arrives at Universal Studios, and waits outside until Boris comes down. He fills in the time with a can of Coke, and makes notes of things around him. He sees an old man checking the slots in the phone booths to see whether any coins have been left behind. He sees a woman sprinting past him in high heels, holding her breasts against the jolts.

Boris comes down the steps and puts his arm around his friend.

‘We just finished a track,’ he says excitedly as they walk down the street. ‘It sounds really good.’

He ducks into a store to buy a chocolate bar and proposes they go to a late show at the cinema. It is his favourite place to talk. They walk quickly to get there in time, cutting the corners of the blocks to try to force a diagonal through the right-angle city. Boris has become formidable while recording this album, and people look at him as they walk. Some of them he greets and shakes by the hand: Irakli is always amazed how many people he knows.

‘Some Russian sailors I met once,’ explains Boris.

They buy tickets for the movie and settle down with a tray of nachos. Boris eats loudly and tells stories. He tells Irakli about the book he is reading. He has found gems he never dreamed of in Plastic’s library, and he is reading a new book every day. Today’s title is Robinson Crusoe, and Boris has found incredible revelations in it.

‘You have to read this book! He describes thoughts exactly as they are, thoughts you didn’t know there could be words for.’

He is full of his reading. He quotes entire paragraphs by heart so Irakli can admire them. He asks about Irakli’s poetry. Irakli tells him he is not writing anything right now. When Boris asks what he has done with his day he makes up a story of idleness — though this is belied by the exhaustion in his face.

The movie begins, a staccato symphony of grunts and gunshots. They are blanched in its glow. Boris says,

‘Will you write something for me? The tracks on my CD need titles. You’re the only one who can put my music into words.’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

Boris is irritated.

‘Why are you always so dismissive of yourself? I’ve read your poetry. I know how you write. I know what you say about my music, and how much you inspire me. Remember how you danced that night? Write like that.’

At that moment their conversation is shushed by a woman who is trying to record the movie off the screen with a video camera.

‘I’m getting your voices on the audio track,’ she complains.

They apologise, get up and leave the cinema. They buy some vodka and go back to Boris’s apartment.

These days, Boris’s energy is irrepressible, and he refuses to sleep. He gets out his violin and plays to Irakli every phrase from the day’s recording, asking him what he thinks. His head is coursing with music, and it keeps Irakli up all night, so he is useless the next day.

Khatuna thinks it’s funny that Plastic’s leather shoes creak as he walks. How can you stand it? she exclaims.

She crouches by his chair, undoes his laces and takes the shoes off his feet. She finds she can fit into them with her own shoes still on.

‘Your feet are so big!’ she says.

She marches up and down the concrete floor of his loft, his shoes clunking on her feet. He is irritated.

‘You’ll spoil them, for God’s sake. Those are fifteen-hundred-dollar shoes.’

She takes out her phone and starts to video her feet walking noisily in his shoes.

He says,

‘Bring them back! And stop constantly filming yourself.’

She drags her man-sized feet over to him and sits on his lap. Her camera is still running and she turns it on his face.

‘A woman is supposed to love how beautiful and sexy she is,’ she says.

She turns off the camera.

‘In this country you don’t know anything about love,’ she says pityingly. ‘You import Asian women to love the men and Mexican women to love the children. So how could you know?’

She laughs at his dour expression.

‘You’re good looking and rich. That much you have going for you, Plastic.’ She ruffles his hair. ‘What’s your real name, anyway?’

‘No one calls me that any more.’

Khatuna takes his shoes off her feet, kneels on the floor and puts them on his own. She proceeds to tie the most symmetrical of knots.

Plastic considers the focus she brings to the tying of shoelaces and wonders why he was so annoyed a moment ago.

Since Boris’s launch he has received email threats from Bozhidar Markov in Bulgaria, who is accusing him of abusing Bulgarian hospitality, and Bulgaria itself. His tone is unpleasantly vulgar, and Plastic finds himself brooding on it unnecessarily, even at times like this. He is frustrated by his own high-strung temperament. He wants spontaneity in his days; he wants a woman who is young enough to still know her own feelings, who will put him skin to skin with life. But when he finds her, his instinct is to stifle her and run away.

‘Come here,’ he says, and they kiss, her hand in his ample hair. ‘Let’s go away together. Let’s go to Paris. I’ll take you for the best food you’ve ever had.’

‘Let’s go now. Tonight!’

‘As soon as Boris’s album is finished. Then we’ll go.’

He kisses her again and carries her towards the bed.

‘Fuck me where I can watch you with my other eye,’ she says. ‘The one I have on my back.’

Boris’s album is soon to be released, and Plastic sets up preview concerts for the inner circle. He wants the journalists and critics talking about Boris even before the music hits the market. He sets up gigs in Chicago, DC and LA. Boris takes Irakli along for the ride.

The concerts create a furore, and Boris wants to go out all the time. People like to have him at their parties. They like to touch him, to see how he drinks, how he sits in a chair — and Boris is developing a style for dealing with it. He lets himself be taken here and there.

Irakli loses track. Most nights he ends up cutting loose early, and going back to their suite to sleep.

One morning in LA, Irakli is watching TV alone in the hotel when Boris comes back there with a girl named Lara. She is beautiful unslept. She carries a single yellow rose, which she stands tenderly in a glass of water. She puts her bare feet up on the table and lights a joint. Boris is in high spirits and sings. He says to Lara,

‘This is Irakli. He’s my muse. He’s my mentor.’

He is walking round the room in a goblin dance.

‘Just look at this hotel room!’ he says. ‘A herd of cows could live in here!’

His violin is never far away, and now he plays a rustic jig. Lara passes the joint to Irakli, and it tastes fantastic. He draws from it several times and feels the armchair fold like warm wax.

‘Lara can sing,’ says Boris.

Lara’s blonde hair is in braids and she has a pretty voice. She sings an old jazz song that Boris tresses with his violin.

He says,

‘We were at a party last night with some musicians, and Lara and I made a recording. This guy set up mikes and we improvised a whole session.’

‘It was fucked up,’ says Lara dreamily.

Boris takes a drag of the joint too, but it does nothing to still him. He is so full of energy he cannot sit down. He looks out of the window and says,

‘Who wants to swim?’

‘I do,’ says Lara promptly.

Irakli does not respond. He can feel the vibrations of the world rising through the feet of the armchair, and he does not want to disturb them with his voice.

Boris uproots him unmercifully and carries him out of the door. They get in the elevator, Lara chanting the descending numbers of the floors and drumming them on Boris’s head. Boris still holds Irakli in his arms, and when the doors open on the ground floor he marches him out into the lobby, speeds along the corridors under the arrows saying Swimming Pool, manoeuvres through the narrow exit to the hot LA morning and, breathless, lays him down on a recliner.

‘Now get your clothes off,’ he says, pulling off his own.

Boris and Lara jump into the pool. Boris splashes exuberantly while Lara glides underwater like a stretched white seal. She comes up laughing.

‘The water’s beautiful!’ shouts Boris to Irakli, who is not moving from the chair. The heat is blazing, and he shields his eyes against the force field of the sun. There are parakeets screeching in the palm trees. The grain of his own skin is like a mesh of glistening ravines, and he can smell the sweat gathering in the crook of his elbow.

Through the heat haze, Irakli sees Lara climb on Boris’s shoulders. Boris makes like an angry bull, roaring and snorting and trying to unseat her, but she digs her feet into his flanks and has an arm locked around his head. She is high above the water in her translucent bra and panties, singing defiantly, and she swings a rodeo arm round and round in the air. They struggle against each other until Boris tips her crashing into the water, and for a moment she is lost below a whirlpool. Two parakeets swoop low over the pool, their shining bellies reflecting turquoise. Lara bursts through the water’s surface, puts her arms round Boris’s neck and kisses him. Irakli closes his eyes to a crack, until he sees only the curved horizon of his own cheeks.

‘What are you doing?’ Boris shouts to him. Irakli does not answer, and Boris comes to get him. Wet-stepping over the hot stone, his shadow flashes across Irakli’s face, who flinches. Boris starts to undo Irakli’s clothes: dripping water from his hair on to his burning face and arms, he strips him down roughly to his underpants, picks him up and carries him into the pool. His torso feels clean and cool.

‘How can you be this heavy,’ Boris says.

As Irakli’s body touches the water, it turns to loam. Boris lays him with infinite gentleness on the surface, he holds him there for a long while and draws his arms so slowly away that Irakli does not know the moment when he is floating alone. Boris paddles away to intercept Lara, who is submarining from end to end.

Irakli looks up at the hot plate of the sky, the sun lighting rainbows in his eyelashes. Around him, the white water is duned with lapping blue, and it closes in a creeping tickle over his still-dry stomach. His ears are submerged and all the sounds are deep. He hears the protest of liquid as Lara and Boris fall over each other again, and the altered sound of their distant cries. With washed eyeballs he has new focus, and sees eagles circling in the remote sky — but then the surface floods over, and the palm trees turn molten. He closes his eyes and feels himself drift, his limbs outstretched, and eternity just around the corner. The water removes the impact from things, extracts their sound and colour, and soothes them all.

There’s something amazing about this kind of sleep. There is nothing so calm as the muffled deep.

He is suddenly uprooted again.

‘Breathe!’ shouts Boris in terror, dragging him out with adrenalin strength and laying him on the side of the pool. He slaps his face first one way then the other.

Irakli opens his eyes. He wants to say I’m fine, but he is seized with coughing, and chlorine water pours out of him.

‘What were you thinking?’ demands Boris.

They go back into the hotel, where the air conditioning is cold on their wet skin. Irakli’s eyes will not adjust to the light inside, and he is in darkness; his ears are full of water, and he hears only the caverns of his head. They take the elevator back to the room. Irakli lies down on the sofa. He feels drunk and exhausted.

Boris and Lara are kissing on the floor. They have thrown off their wet clothes and they lie naked in the rectangle of sunlight pouring in through the window. Their hair is still wet and their eight limbs move over each other like the lingering tentacles of sea creatures. Lara’s back shines in the sunlight, dappled by the protruding curve of her vertebrae. The hairs on Boris’s calves still hold the wavy pattern of pool water running away. Irakli watches the kneading route of their hands and it is as if he can feel the responsive flesh under his own.

Boris turns to him.

‘Come here.’

Irakli’s ears are completely blocked with the water, and he cannot hear what Boris says, but he understands the gesture. Lara looks round at him, her breasts small and perfect, and they are both open to him, waiting. But Irakli closes his eyes and, as their lovemaking resumes, he succumbs to his own great desire: to sleep. He has a glorious dream.

He wakes up with regret. He does not know how long it has been. The rectangle of light has moved, and Boris and Lara are lying in the dark shadow, passed out in each other’s arms. Irakli tilts his head to better see them lying there.

At that moment the water shifts in his inner ear. There are tremors as it pools together and begins to move; it thunders over the eardrum, and courses through the ear canal, his whole body shivering with the arousal of tiny hairs. It oozes round the curves, unblocking him and letting in the sound — and when it spills out, wet and final, on the cushion, Irakli lets forth an involuntary moan.

16

BORIS LEFT ON TOUR, and Irakli did not know exactly where he was. He was playing in Montreal and Seattle. He was in Madrid and Berlin. He played in Bulgaria. He played in Moscow and Vienna.

Irakli did not hear from him. He saw him only on TV.

Khatuna was always travelling too. She was working on buildings in São Paolo and Dubai. She spent weekends with Plastic in exclusive Caribbean resorts.

Irakli was left alone, trying to write. He composed phrases in his head, and sometimes they seemed good, but when he saw them on paper he realised they were stupid. He wondered whether he would ever write anything worthwhile again.

He received his copy of Boris’s album in the mail. It came wrapped in cellophane and sealed inside with holograph stickers. He cut it open carefully. Inside was the list of track titles, which Irakli had composed himself. They were the only thing he had managed to write for a long time.

The Delight of the Barbarians

It was after you understood everything perfectly that you realised she was speaking an unknown language

What disappointment, when you see a landscape from on high and realise that a map is true

It is thanks to the exacting olfactory standards of moths that night flowers smell so lovely

You assumed his fingernails were yellow from the nicotine until you noticed his toenails were yellow too

He said: ‘Modern life seems safe only because the ones cut down in its path never survive to tell the tale’

Before demolishing the walls of my childhood, they should have taken care to remove the shadows I left there

Inside the CD was a photograph of Boris. He was pictured in black and white, sitting with his violin on a desolate mountainside against a thunderous sky. The caption read, Genius of the Balkans, but Irakli knew the picture had been shot in Colorado.

Irakli prised the disk out of the holder and put it in his stereo. He drew the curtains, pressed Play and sat down to listen.

When the CD finished he sat for some time in silence. Then he opened a bottle of whisky and turned on the television.

He watched moguls on chat shows explaining why they were rich and everyone else was poor. Because I dared to dream. He watched music videos and men wrestling with crocodiles. He enjoyed the endless cacophony of flicking channels. He saw infomercials for cosmetic surgery, fireplaces and phone sex. Water ballet. Horoscopes. Folk dancing. He watched documentaries on Jesus Christ, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Hitler and the Crusades.

Irakli let himself sink in television. Days floated past, and he did not clutch at them. He realised he could drink entire bottles of liquor, and he would find a blankness there that released him from the irrelevance of his thoughts.

When Khatuna returned home she found him twisted and immobile on his bed. He was unconscious with drink, and smelt like a distillery. He had saliva crust across his cheek.

She shook him until he came to. He opened his eyes and, seeing her, he smiled in bliss. As if still in a dream, he called her by her secret name. She brought water for him to sip, and he came back to life.

She thought of the night, many years before, when she had discovered him wrung out with fever in their freezing room in Tbilisi. She realised that the same scene had recurred many times in her life — coming upon her brother after a separation to find that he had settled down, in her absence, only just this side of death. This accounted for her background of panic whenever they were apart.

‘Why do you do this to me?’ she said, stroking him. ‘Why do you cause me so much pain?’

He closed his eyes with the pleasure of her fingers in his hair. She said,

‘You were always so happy when you were a child. You were the one who kept me happy. What’s happened to you? Now we have a nice life.’

He said nothing. She wet a finger in her mouth and wiped at the residue on his cheek.

‘Tell me if there’s something wrong,’ she said, ‘and I’ll try to understand.’

She was lying next to him on the bed, and her smell was intoxicating. She had that primordial smell of flesh to which one has once been joined. He said,

‘Sometimes this thing descends on me. It’s not like a curtain or a mist. It’s like a bridge falling, or a building, pinning me down. The only way to escape is to give in.’

Khatuna looked stricken.

‘What is this thing with Boris? Are you in love with him? Are you lovers?’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Irakli. ‘It’s nothing like what you think.’

‘I don’t like him,’ said Khatuna. ‘I don’t care how great people think he is: I don’t like the way you are when you’re around him. I think you’d be a lot better if you didn’t see him any more.’

Irakli said,

‘Why don’t we go back to Tbilisi?’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t walk down the street where Kakha was shot.’

Irakli mused,

‘Things were all right when we were there. I was writing poetry. Mother was not alone.’

‘We’ll go back, I promise,’ said Khatuna. ‘But not yet. I can’t go yet.’

‘Where’s Boris now?’ asked the CEO.

Plastic was in the Universal boardroom, answering questions.

‘He’s supposed to be playing in London tonight,’ he said.

‘Has he arrived?’

‘The band’s there, waiting in the hotel. But they haven’t seen him since Amsterdam.’

‘So he’s missing in action. He goes missing for four days and you just sit here hoping he’ll show up. He’s our hundred-million-dollar property, and you’re telling me you don’t know where he is.’

‘He’s probably spending our cheque,’ said the head of Decca, trying to lighten the mood. ‘He’s just a Bulgarian peasant: give him that much money and he’ll be off at the Ritz doing coke with a couple of hookers.’

The CEO ignored him.

‘What’s the latest on our situation?’

‘Without knowing all the facts,’ said the lawyer, ‘it’s very clear that Boris is in multiple breach of contract. He seems to be willing to record with anyone who turns up with a microphone. Four other labels have issued original music by him. Some small pieces, one full-length seventy-two-minute album. Available for download on the internet.’

‘Maybe Boris didn’t know?’ suggested Plastic. ‘Maybe they recorded this stuff without him knowing?’

‘It’s possible,’ said the lawyer. ‘That’s why I say I don’t know all the facts. But the quality of these recordings suggests Boris made them in a studio. He knew what he was doing.’

‘All this is in the last two months,’ said the CEO. ‘His album’s only been out two months and already it’s through the roof. That kid should be promoting it with every cell in his body. Instead he’s recording other stuff on the side. Where did he even get time to write all this new material?’

Plastic said,

‘Some of it he was writing here. Experimental music that we couldn’t put on our album. The rest — I don’t know. You know what he’s like. It pours out of him, he doesn’t need time to think it up.’

‘All that is our property, goddammit, circulating out there for free without so much as a credit to this company. What the hell are we doing?’

‘I’m dealing with it,’ said Plastic. ‘I’ve left him a hundred messages.’

‘Oh, you’ve left messages,’ said the CEO savagely. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you’d left messages. So what am I getting concerned about?’

There was silence in the room. Under the table, the head of Verve Records typed a message on his phone. The CEO said,

‘I don’t need convincing about this guy’s music. His album’s one of the great achievements of this company. It proves why big music companies like us are still relevant. It shows we can still pull genius out of our ass. This kid’s like Piaf or Armstrong or Elvis — people will always pay money for him. He’s got a long career ahead: endorsements, collaborations, soundtracks — a solid revenue stream with no end in sight, which you’ll all agree is a ray of hope in today’s bullshit market. So you’ll forgive me if I’m a little sensitive when things go awry. I’m hearing a lot of strange things about this guy: unscheduled concerts, unauthorised recordings, trips to Morocco no one tells us about. Someone has to tell him how we do things.’

He looked around the circle of music mavens. He said,

‘If you have to get on a plane, Plastic, and hold his hand the entire tour, then that’s what you have to do.’

Plastic left the meeting cursing his colleagues and cursing Boris.

Outside, there was sleet in the street lights: it was one of those dark January five o’clocks that made him loathe New York. He buttoned his coat as he walked. The aerial highways seemed empty, and when sometimes an engine strained overhead, its Doppler fall was like a dirge.

Plastic had worked single-mindedly on Boris’s album for all this time, and now he was wondering whether his genius musician had taken him for a ride. He got home and his phone rang. He leapt for it, but it was Khatuna, not Boris. She was coming over. He almost said he couldn’t make it, but didn’t have the energy to invent an excuse.

They went downstairs for a meal in a small Italian place. The place was full of rich foreign tourists, and did nothing to improve Plastic’s mood. When they came back up, Khatuna lit a cigarette, which he’d told her not to do in his house. She said vacantly,

‘What do you want to do?’

He had no conversation. They went into the bedroom. They undressed and lay on the bed. But Plastic was unable to make love.

‘You’re disgusting,’ she said, rolling over. ‘You sleep with a beautiful young woman, trying to get your youth back, and still it’s not enough.’

His phone rang again, fallen out on the bed. She grabbed it and turned it off. Plastic said angrily,

‘That might have been Boris.’

‘Boris, Boris!’ she cried. ‘Everyone is fucking obsessed!’

She threw his phone across the room.

‘I hate your little phone. It makes you look like a woman.’

‘I thought phones were supposed to be small,’ he said impatiently.

‘That’s so old,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Kakha’s phone was huge like a fucking BMW. With diamonds.’

‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Plastic.

Khatuna picked up her jacket from the floor, and reached inside for another cigarette.

‘Don’t smoke in my house,’ said Plastic.

‘I want to smoke,’ she said.

She started to put her clothes on.

When the door slammed behind her, Plastic picked up his phone and went to sit on the toilet. He dialled Boris’s number again and again. He called the other members of the band. Looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, yellow and naked, he listened to the phone ringing endlessly in another country. Then he sent a grim torpedo into the underworld.

Boris came back from his tour, but he didn’t come to see Irakli. Irakli did not hear from him, nor could he get an answer on his phone. Eventually he decided to go to his apartment.

Boris wanted to get out, and they walked together. Boris told a story from Prague.

‘This guy came to meet me at the airport when I arrived, said he wanted me to do the music for his film. I discovered he was a famous film director. He took me to a restaurant and told me the story of the film and how he wanted the music to be. There was no time at all, I was only there for three days, but he said, I know you can do it. I sketched some things out with the band and on the last night after the gig he screened the film without audio and we improvised to the images. It started at three a.m., there were just ten or twelve people in the room, the actors were all there, absolutely silent. We played through in one take and went straight to the airport.’

He played the melodies to Irakli on his violin as they walked. They came to the gates of an old cemetery, and Irakli led them in.

‘You have no idea how much money he paid me,’ Boris continued. ‘I came back with a suitcase of money from this trip. People paid me to do anything. They paid me to record a piece for four minutes. They paid me to come to their restaurant. I have so much money I can buy you anything you want.’

They sat down on a bench. Boris said,

‘Where’s your umbrella?’

‘It was stolen,’ said Irakli unhappily. ‘Some bastard picked it up in a café and walked away with it.’

Boris studied him.

‘You don’t look well.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’ Irakli burst out accusingly. ‘You’ve been back for days. I’m having a terrible time.’

Boris stared in surprise.

‘I needed a few days to rest,’ he said.

Irakli tried to contain himself. He said,

‘I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. My skin’s peeling off. I walk around the city and everything makes me angry. I can’t write at all. I hate you because it’s no effort for you. I struggle with every single word. I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d get out of my head and leave me alone.’

A funeral was going on in a far corner of the graveyard. Mourners huddled around the grave, and snatches of the priest’s voice came in on the air. Boris said,

‘Look, I’ve been playing concerts non-stop for three months. I’ve been with people all the time. That’s all. I needed a few days on my own.’

Irakli studied him. He hung his head in his hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Something’s happening to me I don’t understand, and I can’t talk to my sister any more. I don’t want to see anyone except you, and you’re never here.’

The sun was dropping, and the shadows were long behind the headstones. In the distance, the funeral mourners stepped back for the filling in of earth, and Boris and Irakli watched for a moment.

Irakli said,

‘It’s strange: I can taste soil in my mouth.’

Boris played a funeral march quietly on his violin. Irakli inhaled the graveyard air. There was the faintest scent of flowers. He said,

‘Sometimes I’ve felt the exact sensation of death. It was like old wine from a cellar, and when it was over I wished it would return.’

Suddenly Boris remembered something. He put down his bow, reached in his pocket and pulled out a book.

‘I forgot: I bought this for you. It’s poetry. I picked it up in a bookshop and thought of you. She’s very famous in Ireland.’

Irakli opened the book and read from it. He read one poem, then he closed the book and put his hand on the cover. He looked up into the trees, which had lost all their leaves. It was cold, and the wind blew in gusts.

He pointed and said,

‘Look at that.’

A piece of videotape was unspooled in the branches. It was looped across the cemetery, passing from tree to tree. It shook in the wind, and glinted with the evening sun, and the untrapped lengths leaped and fluttered with inner life, like the ribbons of Russian gymnasts.

17

IT IS A GREY DAY when Ulrich goes to see the Woolworth Building. A long time ago, when he was in Berlin, he bought a postcard of this building — Tallest Man-made Structure in the World! — and he has always wanted to see the real thing. But today the summit is swathed in cloud, and the building does not have the anticipated effect.

He stands for some time, hoping for the clouds to lift. He has waited a lifetime, after all, and a few more minutes will not hurt. He looks at the gold script over the entrance — Woolworth Building — and the grand Gothic arches above. He hums a tune he used to know.

As he is standing there, motionless amid the Broadway swarm, he becomes aware of someone else waiting next to him. He looks round and sees it is Clara Blum. She is old, and quite stooped, but he recognises her at once.

‘Clara!’ he cries.

She smiles radiantly, and he stoops to kiss her cheek. He is amazed to see her again after so long.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.

‘I’ve come to see the Woolworth Building,’ she says, and he remembers the charm of her Czech accent.

‘You’ve never seen it before?’

‘This is the first time.’

Ulrich is astonished at this coincidence of time and place. There are so many things to ask he does not know where to start.

‘I recognised you immediately,’ he says. ‘You’re still beautiful.’

She smiles at his gallantry. He says,

‘How are you, Clara? What have you been doing? You became a chemist: I heard that. I heard you got married, too.’

‘True,’ she says, laconically.

‘I thought of you very often,’ he says, ‘after I left Berlin.’

She says nothing in response. She does not seem eager to speak of personal things. He says,

‘I lost touch with science after I left Berlin, and I never understood what it became. It was so far away from Sofia. What happened to everything we knew?’

The day is brightening, and all at once the sun breaks through. They both look up to see the top of the Woolworth Building. For a while they gaze at the ornate tower. Ulrich says hesitantly,

‘It’s big—’

‘But it’s not that big,’ finishes Clara, and suddenly they laugh with merry complicity. They look up again, and the building is quite ordinary, and this seems hilarious.

‘I imagined something far more,’ says Ulrich.

He is still laughing.

‘I don’t know what we were expecting,’ replies Clara. ‘It’s quite unimpressive!’

Ulrich feels relieved. It is wonderful to be together like this.

‘Shall we walk?’ he asks.

She leans on his arm and they wander slowly into the park, where businessmen are sitting around the fountain eating lunchtime sandwiches. They find a bench and sit down.

‘You always loved Einstein,’ says Clara. ‘Did you ever hear the story of his children?’

Ulrich wants to hear it. Clara says,

‘When Einstein was studying in Zurich, he fell in love with a brilliant Serbian student called Mileva. They were penniless: they lived together in a cramped apartment and worked on physics problems — and before long she was pregnant. You know what things were like in those days: Einstein was worried that a scandal might harm his career, and he sent Mileva away to the Balkans. While she was away, of course, he got his job in the Swiss Patent Office, and his fortunes were transformed.

‘Mileva had a little girl and she called her Lieserl. Einstein was excited to be a father but he couldn’t tell anyone. When Mileva came back to Zurich she was forced to leave their daughter behind.

‘And that’s the last anyone knows about Lieserl. Can you believe it, Ulrich? No one knows where she ended up, or whether she lived or died. Einstein was embarking on the greatest work of his life, and he was determined to keep his daughter a secret. And he did. The only trace of her was the melancholy she left behind in Mileva, who always spoke to her friends about the unhappiness of having no daughter.’

As Ulrich listens to the story, he thinks that he and Clara might have had children if events had been different. He wonders whether she ever had children of her own. He wonders whether she is speaking to him about the things that did not happen. He watches pigeons bobbing for crumbs.

‘Einstein and Mileva had two sons after their marriage, but over time their love turned bitter, and when he moved from Zurich to Berlin he left her behind. When you and I were in Berlin he was the most famous scientist in the world, but he suffered from an irrational fear that Mileva might bring him down. He agreed to give her the money from his Nobel Prize as a settlement in their divorce, but he could never bring himself to hand it over. He lost it in the Wall Street crash, and Mileva ended her days in poverty.

‘Poor Mileva had to take care of their musician son, Eduard, who was a schizophrenic. He had to be committed to an asylum, which she could hardly afford. Einstein only visited his son once, and he was horrified at what he saw. He didn’t want his scientific legacy to be tainted by it. He told everyone that Mileva was from degenerate stock, and had caused this madness all on her own. Einstein would have nothing to do with Eduard, and refused to respond to his letters.

‘Eduard was given insulin and electric shocks, and he attempted suicide several times. When his mother died, all the money for his care ran out, and he was placed in a pauper’s cell. When visitors came to see him he said he wished he could play the piano, but he had been told his playing disturbed the other inmates. He said he wanted to sink into absolute sleep, but the doctors had said it wasn’t sensible.’

‘Meanwhile Einstein was a celebrity in America,’ says Ulrich.

‘Quite,’ says Clara.

Clara’s story holds a revelation for Ulrich about his own life, but he needs some time before he can understand precisely what it is. For the moment, he is too moved by all that is happening.

‘Your story is making me sad,’ says Ulrich. ‘Let’s not be sad. It’s good to think of those old days. It’s good to find someone who knew me then. So much has happened since.’

Clara seems to agree, though she is strangely distant.

Smiling, he says,

‘I was never very good at chemistry, was I?’

‘No,’ she agrees.

‘I wanted so much to be good at it.’

‘You must have found other things to do with your life. You were always full of ideas.’

Ulrich is sitting on a bench, looking up at the sky. He sees an arrow of geese flying overhead, and though they are inconceivably high he fancies he can hear their cries. He says,

‘I’m sorry I failed you, Clara. You cannot have regretted it as much as I did.’

Clara does not respond, and Ulrich says,

‘I didn’t know how to hold everything together. I had to go and save my parents, it was the only thing to do. But I loved you, and I couldn’t live up to my love. I always wondered what would have happened if I had stayed with you in Berlin.’

Clara’s hair is tied up, but a slight breeze plays among the grey wisps at her temples. The strands are iridescent, for by now the clouds have all gone. It is a beautiful day.

‘You know this is all a dream,’ Clara says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You and me, together in New York?’ She cuffs him playfully with the back of her hand. ‘You must know I died long ago — a Jewish woman in Berlin in those days, married to a Jewish professor. In your heart you know that, yes? You know we’re not really here, and it’s only a dream?’

Ulrich says,

‘Yes, I know.’

But he cannot leave it there.

‘It’s a dream, Clara, but it’s not only a dream. There is far more to us than what we live.’

He speaks with unusual passion.

‘Life happens in a certain place for a certain time. But there is a great surplus left over, and where will we stow it but in our dreams?’

Clara stares into her lap. She says,

‘Those children of yours are imaginary.’

‘I have a real son, who is even more imaginary. These ones stay with me, and make me proud.’

A butterfly alights for a time on Clara’s floral dress, and then takes flight again.

‘When I die,’ says Ulrich, ‘they will put me under the ground, where even those with eyes become blind like me. I will lie with an eternity of dreamers, breeding visions that will flicker on the surface — and the children of my daydreams will roam free.’

18

ULRICH SITS ON A DOORSTEP opposite the entrance to Boris’s apartment block. He has tried repeatedly to gain entrance, but Boris is famous now, and security has tightened. Still, when he finally emerges, he is accompanied only by his violin, and for this Ulrich is grateful. He walks fast to catch up with him.

To his relief, Boris is not hostile. When he sees Ulrich he stops in his tracks and says,

‘Is it you, old man?’

Ulrich leans against a wall to regain his breath. Nothing about Boris’s appearance reveals his new-found success and prosperity. Ulrich would like to take him in his arms. But now is not the time. He says,

‘I wanted to say something about your friend, Irakli. I’ve seen him, wandering in the streets on his own. He’s not himself.’

Boris is surprised at this intervention. But he agrees with its spirit.

‘I’ve been worried about him myself. You think he’s very bad?’

‘He needs something to set him back on track,’ Ulrich says. ‘And it can only come from you.’

Boris thinks for a moment.

‘I know what to do,’ he says. ‘I know what’s good in these situations.’

‘Please think about him,’ says Ulrich. ‘He’s more delicate than you.’

He puts his hand in his pocket and takes out two marbles. Looking into Boris’s eyes, he puts the marbles into his hand, as if they were a token of his solemnity.

Boris arrives at Irakli’s apartment with an animal wrapped in a sack.

‘I was thinking about what might restore you to yourself again,’ he says.

He opens the sack and lets out a little pig. It’s small and pink, with two grey patches on its flanks. It feels exposed in the spacious room, and runs away squealing, keeping close to the walls, trotters clicking on the wooden floor.

‘You have this big balcony where he can live,’ says Boris. ‘Pigs are very intelligent and they fill your head with wild ideas. He’ll be good for your poetry.’

‘I already have a parrot.’

‘The parrot is nice, but you need something closer. A horse is good sometimes, but a pig is best. You’ll write much better with a pig around.’

Boris goes to get nails, wood and roofing, and he builds a shelter for the pig on the balcony. They drink beer and laugh while he works. Irakli is impressed by how fast Boris can build, and makes no attempt to get involved. The pig sniffs at the planks of wood and eats an apple from Irakli’s hand. Its ears are enormous for its little size.

Boris saws and hammers, his breath clouding in the air, and before long he has built a sty into the crook of the building, big enough for a man to stoop into. He lays down straw and newspaper inside, and the pig goes in of its own accord to look around. Boris says,

‘After everyone left my town, I grew up with pigs,’ he says. ‘I slept between them.’

‘Thank you,’ says Irakli. ‘Thank you.’

Afterwards, they go out to a bar. Irakli is suddenly animated and cannot stop talking. He tells stories, and finishes his drinks so fast that Boris tells him to calm down.

‘Are you trying to empty the bar?’ he asks.

‘I’m thirsty,’ Irakli says.

He tells Boris about things he has seen in New York.

‘There’s a tower where ten thousand Africans live. It’s not far from here. People from Senegal on one floor, Nigerian on the next. Some are legal, some are illegal; they’ve come to supply the city’s cravings for luxury handbags and DVDs. Can you imagine the stories in a tower like that — the friendships, the conflicts, the journeys people have taken just to get there? I tell you: no one is writing the real novels of our age. There must be more in that tower than in Tolstoy and Balzac together.’

Boris listens quietly, happy to see him spirited.

‘Writers have a lot of work to do,’ finishes Irakli.

The music is calling out to him and he says,

‘Do you want to dance?’

Boris shakes his head, smiling, and Irakli goes on his own. He stands next to the speaker and begins to move. His steps, once again, are Georgian. His legs scissor, slicing beats in half, and soon enough there are people gathered around him, who have never seen feet move so fast to keep a torso so still. He dances for several songs, transforming himself completely with every new mood. Now his heels stamp and he slices the air with his hands, his eyes gleaming with masculine seduction; now he beckons to the earth like a woman. He puts a bottle on his head and spins on his knees, finding a corridor through the crowd, and there seem to be no limits on his body — for now he is leaping close to the ceiling and there is gasping and cheering in the bar.

When he finishes they call for more, but Irakli is spent. He bows elegantly, heaving with breath, and he goes back to the table. He is happy and sweating. Boris puts an arm round him.

‘I love to see you dance,’ he says.

A stranger is sitting in Irakli’s place, who has come to ask for autographs from Boris. Irakli stands by, waiting for the man to leave. He has another drink to cool down. He suddenly feels tired and rests his head on the table. He has drunk too much.

He does not feel well.

He looks out of the window, trying to steady his stomach. The street is quiet, but he can see a figure he recognises. He goes to the door and calls out to his sister, who is walking with Plastic. They turn back when they hear him; they come into the bar and stand by the table.

‘Hello, Boris,’ Plastic says emphatically.

‘This is my brother, Irakli,’ says Khatuna to Plastic.

‘Yes, I remember,’ says Plastic, reaching out for Irakli’s hand. Irakli fails to register it.

‘Are you drunk?’ Khatuna asks him.

Irakli denies it, but he cannot focus properly on her face.

Khatuna sees Boris chatting to a scruffy stranger, while Irakli does not even have a seat at the table and is drinking himself stupid in the corner. She is seized with hatred for Boris, in whose company her brother is so pathetically diminished. She would like to erase this musician from their lives.

Plastic says,

‘I must have called you a hundred times, Boris. Everyone in the company has been trying to get hold of you. You’ve been back a long time and no one has heard from you. Why can’t you answer your damn phone?’

‘I don’t like the phone,’ says Boris breezily. ‘You should have come to my house.’

‘Do you think we didn’t try that?’ Plastic is beside himself. ‘Your house was full of people, but you were never there. Who the fuck are those people, Boris?’

‘Friends.’

‘That’s a company apartment. You can’t use it for just anything you like.’

His lips are tight as he speaks. He is trying to keep himself seemly.

‘You’re going too far, Boris. I’ve stood by you, but you’re making me look like an idiot.’

Boris says,

‘Would you like a drink?’

Plastic says,

‘No, I don’t want a drink. I want to know what’s going on. What have you been doing since you got back?’

‘I was resting. I was tired after the tour. Now I’m writing more music.’

‘I’ve been hearing all kinds of stories. You’ve made recordings with our competitors. It seems every last lousy music company is recording your music. Now I hear you’ve done a whole movie soundtrack.’

‘Yes,’ says Boris. He seems pleased.

‘You signed an exclusive contract with us, Boris: that means you record with us and us alone. I know you understand things perfectly well. Do you realise I have hundreds of thousands of your personal money which I can’t give you because you are in serious breach of contract? There are articles all over the press about it, asking if we’re going to send you to jail. And there’s everything else I don’t even want to go into, rumours I don’t even understand.’

Boris is not enjoying this conversation.

‘I can’t play the way you want me to play,’ he says.

Plastic calms a little. He has let the head off his anger. He says,

‘You’re a great musician. But there are ways of doing things. There are rules.’

Khatuna is frustrated with Plastic’s approach. She wants to see him take Boris into the street and beat him into oblivion. She says to Boris,

‘Isn’t it time you paid him back for your violin?’ She places her hand dynastically over Plastic’s. Her voice is caustic. ‘You’re making so much money and you can’t even pay your debts. Everything you have, you owe it to us.’

Boris finds the gesture absurd, and laughs in her face.

‘Everything I have,’ he says, ‘I had long before you knew me.’

A young woman approaches, and asks Boris to sign a napkin. Khatuna tells her to fuck off. There is silence around the table.

Irakli is suffering with all this. He says,

‘Boris bought me a pig.’

‘What?’ says Khatuna.

‘He bought me a pig.’

‘What are you going to do with a pig?’

‘Boris built a hut for it on the balcony.’

‘He’s been building on our balcony?’

Khatuna’s instinct tells her Boris is trying to sabotage her life at its very core.

‘You better get rid of it right away,’ she says. ‘And whatever Boris has built. I don’t want to see it when I get home.’

Boris has had enough. He gets up to leave, and Irakli joins him.

‘You’re drunk,’ Khatuna says to her brother. ‘I want you to come home with me.’

‘I’ll be OK,’ Irakli says.

Plastic says to Boris,

‘Come to the office tomorrow morning. We have a lot of things to discuss. Do you understand?’

Boris’s grunt is ambiguous. He and Irakli walk outside and disappear from sight. Khatuna stares after them.

She and Plastic wander in the streets. It’s a Sunday night, and the city is empty. The helicopters droning overhead are the only sign of life. They come to a corner that Khatuna knows well.

‘This is one of the blocks we’re developing,’ she says. ‘We’re going to pull down the whole thing and convert it into high-security housing for high-end individuals.’

They walk the length of the block, Khatuna pointing out its features.

‘Businessmen need a secure environment, which you can’t get in Manhattan. Manhattan buildings open directly on to the street. So we’re pulling this whole area down, we’re making a private road with barricades. It will be a totally secure block, as good as you can find in any modern city.’

High above, advertisements flash on and off, signalling to each other. Khatuna’s heels echo in the street. They pass an empty square where a three-storey-high inflatable puppet is cavorting with the night, flapping and flailing with the air blowing inside, and no one there to see. Suddenly Khatuna says,

‘I want to kill Boris.’

‘What are you talking about?’ says Plastic.

Khatuna goes silent, and Plastic can feel her harden towards him. They are walking under old bridges where the bricks are black and the rivets are mighty. There is scrawled graffiti, and people are sleeping here and there.

Passing under a bridge, they see a young man standing by a fire that he feeds every now and then with a squirt of kerosene. She and Plastic stop and watch for a moment. She calls out,

‘Why don’t you pour the whole bottle?’

The young man looks at her, wide eyed.

‘Why?’

‘I want to see it.’

She is suddenly flirtatious. The man unscrews the lid from his bottle and upends it over the fire. The blaze roars — at their distance Khatuna and Plastic feel a sudden heat on their faces — and the man is engulfed in flames. He backs away, yelping, and beating his head. The fire dies down quickly.

He is dazed, and his hair is singed.

‘You idiot!’ shouts Khatuna.

‘You told me to do it!’ he wails.

‘Next time I’ll tell you to jump out of a window.’

Plastic feels estranged by everything he has just witnessed, and he and Khatuna continue on in silence. There are no cars in the streets. They turn on to Fifth Avenue, where the mannequins are vibrant in the windows, but there are no people. They wander down the empty road and find a man who has fallen asleep while walking his dog.

‘I wish I was in Shanghai,’ remarks Khatuna bleakly, ‘where everything is new.’

They walk all the way to her building. She goes up the steps to the front door and Plastic stays below. She shuts the door behind her without looking back.

Upstairs, the apartment is in darkness. She puts the light on in Irakli’s room and contemplates his empty bed. Then she opens the balcony doors and goes out to see what has happened there.

Boris has built a giant, dirty thing that he has nailed into the side of her house. She can see his footprints in the sawdust, and everything smells of pig shit. She picks up a hammer and gives a few angry blows to the construction, but it is not as flimsy as it looks. She peers inside and sees the pig huddled in a corner, trying to keep warm.

‘Disgusting creature,’ she thinks.

She goes back into the apartment and sits down. She thinks about Boris, who has dared to take hammer and nails to her house. She smokes several cigarettes. She taunts herself with unhappy thoughts. She thinks of her mother, living alone, her poor mother who was beautiful once. She thinks of all the things she bought Irakli, and how he scorned all of them, only to be delighted by Boris’s pig.

She knows Irakli will not come home tonight, and she goes to bed.

She has been lying there only a few minutes when her phone rings. The call is from a hospital, where Irakli is recovering after being hit by a car.

The hospital is near by, and she runs there. Irakli has broken an arm. He is lying in bed with his arm in plaster, and he is still drunk. She says,

‘How could you get hit by a car tonight? There were hardly any cars on the streets.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he says.

She looks him over with concern.

‘Where’s Boris?’ she says. ‘Didn’t he stay with you?’

‘He was here. He just left.’

Khatuna sighs with contempt.

‘He’s a fucking coward.’

She touches the tips of her brother’s fingers poking out from the plaster.

‘I was clearly lit up in the headlights,’ says Irakli, ‘and still it drove into me.’

His eyes are closed, and his forehead wrinkles.

‘I think I’m becoming transparent,’ he says.

19

Item

Perhaps Boris would not have achieved such extraordinary fame if he had cropped up in another age. But these were unusual times. It was noticeable, for instance, that children knew less than their parents, who themselves preserved a mere fraction of what they had been taught. People no longer felt they could rely upon the future, and they fell upon Boris’s musical prophecies as if they were sparkling ponds in the desert.

Item

Khatuna employed a private detective to collect information about Boris.

‘Anything suspicious, I want to know it. Anything at all. Anything that can be made to look suspicious. There are a lot of stories circulating about him, so it shouldn’t be hard.’

The detective blew air both ways through his lips.

‘He’s a public figure, he’s a famous musician. It’ll cost a lot to keep tabs on him.’

‘I’m in security: I know what I’m talking about. He has no protection; he goes everywhere normal people go. He’s an easy target. Just do what I’m telling you.’

Item

Irakli went to gather food for himself and his pig. At the back of a local supermarket were bins into which mountains of good food were thrown out for regulatory reasons. He picked out cheese, meat, vegetables and a couple of loaves of olive bread. He found a packet of macaroons, which he thought Khatuna would like. Then he went for a walk in the Midtown orchards, where the last apples were still on the trees. His arm was mended now, and he felt light without his plaster.

In recent weeks, Irakli’s poetry had returned without warning. Now the obscure feelings of his heart broke out of him in words, and poems arrived, fully formed, without any urging. His book was nearly finished.

The season was ending, and the ground was covered in rotting apples. Irakli found a few good ones on the branches and put them in his bag. He returned home, and let the pig in from the balcony. It had already grown since Boris first brought it. It had developed the habit of staring longingly into Irakli’s eyes.

Item

Plastic flipped back through the article in consternation. He did not know what to believe any more.

The CEO had called him at 7.15 on a Sunday morning.

‘You get the Times?’

‘Yes.’

‘Read the magazine cover story and then call me back.’

The photo on the cover showed a simple stone room, with a wood stove in the middle where two men stood to keep warm. They had guns slung over their shoulders, and they watched two other men at a game of chess. One of these chess players sat amply, like their leader.

The journalist had managed to secure an interview with a fugitive Serbian general wanted for war crimes committed during the conflict in Yugoslavia. He had been blindfolded during his journeys to and from the hideout, which he surmised was in Montenegro. He had spent two days with the voluble Serb, who lived in a house in the mountains with only four bodyguards for company. A priest from the Serbian Orthodox Church stayed in the evenings to lead them in chanting and prayer.

The journalist was informed that a world-famous musician was coming to play a concert in the house. Do not think we are sad people, said the guard. Do not think we are poor. That evening, to the journalist’s astonishment, Boris arrived in a helicopter. This was during his European tour, and he came with a Hungarian accordion player he had met on his travels. The two of them played the whole night. The general wept for hours, drinking to Boris and his genius, and kissing his hands. In the morning, Boris got back in the helicopter to resume his tour.

‘The beauty of music,’ said the war criminal, shaking his head as the helicopter receded above the fir trees. ‘Whatever happens, no one can take that away from you.’

Item

Khatuna put her business card on the table. The man had heard of her company. He nodded at her title: Vice-President Security Systems.

‘You’ve been referred to me,’ he said, ‘because of the nature of your information. But so far I don’t have a real detailed … I only have a basic outline of what it concerns.’

Khatuna had a folder of papers and photographs. She placed it in front of him.

‘This is a file about an organised crime network operating between New York and a number of eastern European countries. Boris is a key player in these operations. His musical activities provide a front.’

‘Interesting,’ said the agent. He flicked through the folder, dwelling on the photographs. ‘These things happen all the time, of course, but you don’t expect it to happen with … When it happens with someone so well known it’s a bit of a surprise.’

He took out a sheet of paper and began to read.

Khatuna looked at the FBI crest on the wall behind him. It showed a pair of scales surrounded by a wreath. She was disappointed by it. What harm could you do to someone with a pair of scales? She had thought it would show a gun, at least, or maybe a missile.

In America, the strength lay with the government, and if you wanted to destroy someone you had to get the government to do it. But there was little gratification in that. People in the government looked like bus drivers and chewed their nails. Considering this man’s ugly suit and tie, Khatuna mentally jabbed her fingers twice down her throat.

Item

A song was released on the internet: a duet between Boris and a singer. There was no documentation of the performance, and it was never clear who had written it.

Everything that was difficult or obscure in Boris’s other music fell away for that song, and what was left was the simplest, most heartrending beauty. The song became a worldwide sensation of the purest sort. For a time, people played it everywhere, and it was the greatest moment of Boris’s fame.

Item

Boris never went back to his apartment, and Plastic did not know how to find him any more.

People called him every five minutes to get hold of Boris. They wanted him on TV. They wanted to hear him speak. They wanted to know what he thought about every possible subject.

Plastic read about him in the newspapers, like everyone else. He read about him getting kicked out of restaurants, and beaten up by angry film stars. He read about the drugs he took, and his excessive sexual tastes.

Boris appeared on the covers of all the big music magazines. He was the future of jazz and the future of folk. He had raw, beat-up good looks. He said crazy things that looked great in print.

Boris had ceased to be a single person. There were too many stories about him for them all to be true.

Plastic read that Boris was a sadist and a fake. He read he hated the American government and gave his money to terror. He read he played in Baghdad and Kabul. He read he was a laundry machine for eastern European crime money. He read he liked prostitutes and sometimes conducted rehearsals without clothes on.

Boris’s music began to torment Plastic. He stopped his ears in the streets, trying to shut out the radio play, the endless replays of bars and restaurants. They had turned his music into a public neurosis. As if they could absorb it only by beating it to death.

Item

The newspapers reported that two eastern European men who had entered the United States as part of Boris’s road crew had been arrested for drug trafficking. Pavel Alexandru, twenty-eight, from Constanta in Romania, and Vladislav Penkov, twenty-four, from Plovdiv in Bulgaria, were accused of bringing substantial quantities of MDMA into the country from the Netherlands. One journalist wrote:

Organised crime is the fastest growing sector of our economy. Hyper-violent criminal gangs from the Caribbean, eastern Europe and Latin America are taking over our cities, while international criminal organisations, as wealthy as the very largest corporations, are buying off our politicians and judges. We should not doubt the power of these organisations to infiltrate the glitz and glamour of our entertainment industry. Major celebrities move easily around the world without attracting the attention of security men, and they are a natural vehicle for international crime.

In their official statements, however, the police emphasised that Boris himself was not involved with these activities.

Item

The CEO of Universal said,

‘Are we going to let him attend, or not?’

‘He’s the brightest star this company has,’ said Plastic. ‘Not sending him would be suicide.’

The CEO had lost interest in Plastic’s opinions, and did not reply.

‘I agree with Plastic,’ said somebody else. ‘We can’t pull an artist like that out of the Grammy Awards. He’s nominated in every category there is. We’d look like idiots.’

‘The song that made this guy most famous,’ said the CEO, ‘we had no hand in. We don’t own it, and we’re not making money from it. So you tell me: how can we put him forward as our guy in the awards?’

‘I know we all wish that song had never happened. But let’s just admit it is a gorgeous piece of music. You can’t take that away. It’s like Louis Armstrong singing “Wonderful World” — you just can’t argue. Everybody loves it. We put that guy up in the Grammys and it knocks everyone else out of the park.’

‘How did that song get away from us?’ said the CEO. ‘Can someone remind me how the fuck that one got away?’

Item

When Irakli came home, the radio was on in Khatuna’s room and her door was open. She was standing naked in front of her mirror. Her dark hair fell tousled down her back, and above the curve of her buttocks was tattooed a terrible black eye.

She was shooting video of herself with her phone.

Irakli was paralysed with confusion. He crept out of the front door, walking backwards, undoing his steps. When he came back, later, he was careful to make a lot of noise.

Khatuna was dressed. She was putting on make-up. There was welding going on outside, and shadows kept flashing on the ceiling.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Irakli.

‘We’re going to a casino,’ said Khatuna. ‘I want to gamble. Tonight I want to drink and gamble like a falling empress.’

‘People never win in casinos. They win once, and then they give it away.’

‘I’m not going there to win,’ said Khatuna. ‘I’m going to lose. I’ll take Plastic’s money and bleed it out on the tables.’

‘What has Plastic done?’

‘Nothing! Plastic is not capable of doing a fucking thing.’

She had drawn Cleopatra flourishes on her eyes, and her lipstick was wild. She turned away from the mirror.

‘No man will ever be Kakha,’ she said. ‘All my life I will be in mourning.’

Irakli said her secret name, silently and to himself. He thought she looked like a whore.

Item

Irakli’s book of poetry was complete. He laid the manuscript on the table. He did it with some ceremony, and the parrot said, Dinner is ready!

‘Androgyne,’ proclaimed Irakli, reading out the title. For his book began with lost bliss: when creatures were whole, before they were separated into yearning halves of men and women. On the title page was a quotation from Plato:

When a person meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, he is lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy. The two don’t want to spend any time apart from each other. These are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. No one can think it is only sexual intercourse that they want, that this is the reason why they find such joy in each other’s company. It appears to be something else which the soul evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which it has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

For a moment, Irakli was distracted by the pig, which was sitting by his chair, staring at him. Sometimes the animal was uncanny. Irakli stared back at it. He thought, You’re the oldest creature I know. You’re only a few months old, and everything is ancient about you.

He opened the manuscript and began to recite the book aloud. He read from beginning to end. Somewhere along the way he went silent, and read in his head.

It became dim in the room as he went through, and when he had finished he rubbed his eyes from the strain.

Nauseous waves flowed over his skin, like an oil spillage in a mustard field. He tossed the manuscript on the floor and covered his eyes with his hands.

His book was completely worthless.

20

BORIS STOPS OFF to buy a car. It is impossible to get anywhere in Los Angeles without one, and they are going to be there for several days. He chooses a blue convertible, and puts it on his credit card.

Irakli sits in the passenger seat. Boris says,

‘I used to drive a tractor on the land, and sometimes an old Lada, while we still had gasoline. But never on roads like this.’

He is wearing sunglasses to cover up a black eye.

There are poor people all around. There’s an old man singing in a baby carriage, and scabby children passed out on air-conditioning vents. Skeletal women with bulging eyes are motioning to the traffic, trying in vain to sell themselves.

‘Khatuna’s going insane, knowing I’m out here with you,’ says Irakli.

‘Your sister doesn’t know what friendship is,’ says Boris. ‘She’s never experienced it herself and it makes her insecure.’

They drive for a long time in silence. Irakli looks drained, and has little to say. Gas stations announce themselves with fluttering pennants, like fairgrounds. There are palm trees, and the largest houses they have ever seen, and pale people staring out. They imagine they will chance upon some inviting destination. They imagine they will see places to stop. But they find nothing of the sort, and finally they drive back to the hotel.

When Boris’s first award is announced, Plastic seizes him with unfeigned delight. Enmity is forgotten, for Plastic never stopped believing in the music. He removes Boris’s violin deftly from his hand and pushes him into a funnel of smiling, clapping people.

Boris’s own music plays at excruciating volume through the speakers, but it has become unrecognisable. It has become military. He is passed from usher to usher, and propelled on to the stage. A tall woman hands him a trophy, a gold gramophone player, and puts a mike to his mouth. He looks at the audience head on, so many, the sweeping lights brown through his sunglasses.

The woman’s teeth are like beacons.

‘Boris, you have such an amazing story.’

Her voice does not come from her. There is the impress of a million eyes, and his name is sprinting on the screens over his head.

He forces words into the microphone, and his own voice is stolen too.

‘I spent a decade in an abandoned town, alone with the animals. Everyone should try it.’

The audience laughs, and he is stupefied by the scale, cameras spinning over his head. The many images of Boris turn their eyes upon the multitude.

‘I’m not joking,’ he says.

The cackling gallery gives way to clapping, and his music thunders again. He is led off stage, and with all the video screens it is like a hall of mirrors finding a way back.

‘No! Come back! We must have Boris!’

The man and woman who stand for the cameras either side of Boris possess two of the most well-known faces in the world, but he does not recognise them. He is bent over, laughing in the flashes, the woman’s bare arm brushing his cheek, the journalists shouting.

‘Boris! Take off your glasses!’

Irakli stands by, watching. He has become entirely invisible. He stands under the blazing lamps, and still people try to walk through him.

Plastic and Khatuna are standing near by. Khatuna wears dark make-up and has drawn silver lightning flashes on her cheeks. A journalist wants a comment from Plastic.

‘Is it true the American music industry is being taken over by eastern European gangs?’

Plastic is smiling for the cameras. He says,

‘That’s an insane question. Who gave you an idea like that?’

Security men are trying to protect the demigods who walk here so close to mortals. The love they inspire is so consuming that ordinary people cannot keep themselves from throwing themselves at them and ruining their hair. As they pass through the doors into the evening, humans line up along the immortal corridor and scream with the pain of adoration. Khatuna walks down the carpet on Plastic’s arm, looking at the goggling, afflicted faces, and wonders again how American youths can get so fat.

Boris leaves a cosmic shower behind him, as the camera flashes fade.

‘Where’s your girlfriend, Boris?’ shouts a photographer.

Boris is full of witty remarks. His hands are full of trophies. He is handsome and magnetic, and Irakli is entirely inconspicuous by his side. He looks at the way Boris holds himself and realises there are parts of his friend he will never know.

The four of them get into the same limo. The car doors shut and they can hear their voices again. Boris seizes the champagne with relish, and pours four glasses. Khatuna drinks hers straight down and grabs the bottle.

‘Are you OK, Irakli?’ asks Boris. ‘You’re very quiet.’

Irakli nods, and forces a smile.

Plastic’s face radiates gladness. He locks an elbow around Boris’s neck and kisses the top of his head.

‘That’s my boy!’ he shouts. ‘My genius boy!’

Plastic and Boris exchange tributes, and Khatuna gets increasingly impatient. There’s a line of limousines blocking the street, and theirs has hardly moved.

‘How far is this party?’ she asks irritatedly.

‘It’s in that building.’ Plastic points about a hundred metres down the road.

They are motionless in the traffic. Irakli’s face is turned towards the crowds outside, and Boris plays a snatch of music on his violin, though there is hardly space to move a bow. It’s a tune from his album, and he hams it up, crossing his eyes and playing like an idiot. Khatuna can’t stand it, and she shouts over the music at him,

‘Is it true you’re dating that actress?’

She manages to make it sound like an insult. Boris says,

‘I hate that word. Are we calendars?’

‘Jerk,’ she says.

Boris puts his window down, and hangs his arm outside the car. His violin is lying in his lap.

Khatuna says,

‘You’re losing your hair. I can see it in this light. You’ll be bald by the time you’re thirty.’

Plastic glares, trying to rein it in.

Suddenly Khatuna seizes the violin from Boris’s lap and begins to whack it against the window ledge. Plastic tries to save the instrument but she roars like an animal and her strength is unexpected. She smashes the violin three times, and it is entirely destroyed, only the strings holding the pieces together. She tosses the carcass through the open window.

It is Plastic who turns on her, hits her in the mouth and shouts obscenities. She laughs in his face, and touches her finger to her bleeding lip. A glass is broken, and there is champagne down Plastic’s suit.

Boris turns up at the party with nothing in his hands. Smiling moguls put their arms around him and lead him to the right people.

Irakli stands on his own, watching. The room is full of faces he has seen every day on television. Pop stars and movie stars are serving up smiles, and using gestures they have prepared beforehand. They are stealing glances at each other’s clothes. They fawn and are fawned upon: everyone loves everyone, but it is not the love of humans.

The most famous woman in the world is here, a woman so impossibly celebrated and beautiful that she must sit in her own private corner behind a velvet rope, surrounded by young men selected for their looks and their ability to keep talking.

Previously, at home, Irakli has watched some of these people with rapt attention, his pupils wide. If he has ever speculated about being in a room with them, he has probably imagined his emotions in a heightened state. But here he is excessively bored. Waiters are passing with cocktails and he takes them two at a time, and still he is unable to lose himself. The banality is strangely devastating.

Plastic and Khatuna are off among the crowds, sparking with their rancour. A bruise is coming up on Khatuna’s cheek, and she seems to be showing it off. Plastic is trying to be charismatic, but the strain is showing, and it’s noticeable that people walk away from his conversation.

The most famous woman in the world sends a message to Boris, inviting him to join her in her private corner, for she is not above the fascination of ordinary people. Boris sits down next to her and she asks him questions about himself. She says,

‘You’re quite a normal size. I imagined you would be big.’

Boris laughs. ‘People are getting smaller. Haven’t you noticed?’

He becomes restless during their conversation. He does not want to talk. While she is asking how he feels about the great number of his awards, he takes her cool hand under the table and positions it firmly on his penis.

The most famous woman in the world does not remove her hand. She looks him in the eye and says,

‘You’ll have to excuse me. I’m a vegetarian.’

Boris matches her gaze. He is enjoying himself. He says, obscurely,

‘I’ve heard of vegetarians. Don’t they lose their talents young?’

Irakli is on his own. He listens to conversations about the sensational hookers who have come into town for this night. He cannot get close to his friend, who is cocooned in the corner, and he decides to get up and dance. He spills his drink over his clothes, and curses. He starts to move to the music, and he knows he is very bad: he cannot hear the rhythm or master his body. He bumps into somebody, who turns round, complaining and indignant. Eventually Irakli leaves. A camera flashes as he comes out of the door, the photographer like a jumpy sniper realising too late that the person coming out is no one.

Irakli walks back to the hotel and takes the elevator to the twenty-first floor. His room has been altered in his absence, the signs of his existence removed. They have folded back the corner of the bed-covers, and put away his things. There is a promotional package from Universal Records on the table. He takes out Boris’s CD and looks at it again.

He looks at himself in the mirror. Turquoise half-moons are buried under his eyes. It is true that he has become difficult to see.

He unwraps the cellophane from Boris’s CD, and puts it into the player. He pours himself a drink from the minibar and lies down on the bed. Water has seeped into the corner of the ceiling of this expensive hotel, yellowing it, and making stale bubbles. Irakli presses Play on the remote.

Boris plays the crepuscule encounter, and the eighty leagues of sleep. The fulminating spiral-hair, the pale glow in the deep. It is beautiful and poisonous. Irakli lets himself be swallowed by the hungry ear. He bleeds blindness and weaves a mattress of vertigo; he wishes he could sacrifice himself to this loveliness. Boris plays the Arab shirt she saw and loved, the wart-faced Tetrarch and the falcon on his glove. Irakli weeps in the dark room, for this is perfect sound. Above his stone head, a congregation of wild scintillas spend themselves in the night.

Through the music, Irakli hears Khatuna and Plastic come back to the room next door. They too have left the party early, and Irakli hears the inarticulate bark of their discord. While Boris plays the insect mother, while he thanks the steamy air, Irakli can hear irate sounds coming through the wall, which ebb and flow, gather and evolve. The noises become rhythmic, and soon the sex is loud and undeniable.

The CD comes to an end.

Irakli lies in the darkness, listening. Plastic and Khatuna stab each other with obscenities, and Irakli coils up in a whorl.

At length he gets up, sits down at the desk, and writes on the hotel branded notepaper.

The dream of the embryo on the night before birth

The dream

Held prisoner in my dark head

Wants to escape, and prove its innocence to everyone on the outside.

I hear its impatient voice,

See its gestures, its furious

Menacing state.

It doesn’t know that I too am only someone’s dream.

If I were its jailor

I’d have set it free.

Irakli reads it back to himself, stands up, and tidies his belongings. He takes Boris’s CD out of the player and puts it back in its case. He takes a look around to check that everything is just so. He opens the sliding door to the balcony. He climbs on the rail and sits for a moment, his feet swinging above twenty-one floors of void. Then he lets himself go.

Manatee

21

WHEN BORIS ARRIVED at Khatuna’s New York apartment, he found the front door standing open.

Khatuna had a scarf around her head and was packing up the house. She looked up when Boris came in, but she did not greet him. She was shrouding things in bubble wrap. Paintings and vases, and many other objects whose shapes had been obscured in the wrapping. She was gagging their mouths with plastic.

The air stank of cigarettes.

Boris looked over the piles of clothes arranged in rows across the wooden floor.

‘Are you leaving?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

He nodded. He saw clothes of Irakli’s that he recognised. There was the shirt that was drenched in the rain on the night they had met. There was a pen he used to carry. On the top of a pile of books he saw the volume of poetry he had given to Irakli after returning from tour.

Boris listened to the slight noises in the room: the hum of glass, the collision of dust, the echo of before. There was nothing here that did not whisper of Irakli.

He imagined Khatuna returning to this place after the horror of LA. He imagined how she would have staggered, walking in, when she saw everything so unchanged. He saw her fingering Irakli’s imprint upon the rooms: his food half eaten in the fridge, his pocket coins spilled upon the sofa. He saw the devastation of a book half read, and an unwashed shirt. He saw her following the source of her brother’s radiation, looking at the parrot and the hollows in his half-made bed, and coming, eventually, to the pile of papers on his desk, where she stopped and placed her hand.

He could see all this vividly — as if it had been left behind in the room, too barbed for time to swallow away.

She had put Irakli’s manuscript in the middle of the dining table, and Boris could read the title. Androgyne.

He saw that the shelter he had built out on the balcony had been removed, and there was no sign of the pig. Everything had been fixed and cleaned.

The parrot was perched on the table. It had lost most of its feathers, and was covered in patches of scaly skin.

‘What happened to the parrot?’

‘Nothing happened. It decided to pull out its feathers,’ said Khatuna.

She lit a cigarette. Boris stroked the parrot’s bald head.

‘I came to read Irakli’s poems,’ he said. He gestured to the manuscript on the table.

‘Don’t say his name,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to say a word about him.’

But she didn’t stop him when he picked up the manuscript.

He took it out on to the balcony and slid the door closed behind him. He read the book from beginning to end. When he had finished he stood with his hand on the rail of the balcony.

His eyes were red when he came in. He said,

‘It’s a wonderful book. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.’

He waited for Khatuna to say something, but she was intent on her packing. He said,

‘What will you do with it?’

‘I’ll publish it. Even if I have to sew the fucking pages together myself. The whole world is going to know my brother was a poet.’

Boris put the manuscript back on the table. He picked up a button from the floor. He said,

‘I know you don’t like me. But I loved Irakli too, and I want to talk about what happened. I still don’t understand.’

Khatuna looked at him for the first time. There were hollows around her eyes. She said,

‘I’m not talking to you about anything, Boris.’

She was angry. She said,

‘Don’t think just because Irakli is gone that you and I are friends. I hate you and I wish he’d never met you. I wish I’d followed my instincts and made sure he didn’t get involved with you. I knew it would end badly, I knew it. I’m not going to talk about anything with you. Fuck you.’

Boris said,

‘I’ve never—’

‘You have no idea,’ shouted Khatuna, ‘what I’ve been through in the last few weeks. You have no idea what an effort it was just to pull myself out of LA, when I only wanted to stay with him and die. You have no idea. He was the one thing I couldn’t lose, he was the one thing that was absolutely necessary to me. You know nothing about me. I’ve lost everything many times and I can get through that, but I cannot lose my brother.’

Khatuna’s grief suddenly took her over. She fell to her knees, crying. Her face was terrible, and between her sobs she sucked loudly for breath. Boris went to her and took her in his arms, absorbing the spasms of her body.

She calmed down. She pushed him away and lit another cigarette.

‘I’m not ashamed of crying,’ she said, sitting on the floor.

He took one of her cigarettes too, though he never smoked. For a time there was only the sound of the two of them inhaling and exhaling.

Boris said,

‘Are you going back to Tbilisi?’

‘I’m going to Baghdad,’ she said. ‘I’m going to help design the new security city. Renovate the old palaces of Saddam Hussein.’

She took a drag of her cigarette.

‘I have to go on living,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead. I have to put myself somewhere and do something. I want to see a city at war. I’m fed up with this boring place. I want a place with real men, where real things happen.’

Boris did not know what to say. He stubbed out his cigarette, which tasted disgusting. He tried to conjure Irakli back into the room, picturing him on the sofa, where he had seen him many times. It was strangely hard, and he felt his memories, too, were being slowly taken from him.

Khatuna said,

‘Let me tell you something, because it doesn’t matter any more. I made reports about you to the FBI. I implicated you in all sorts of crimes. You’ve done some questionable things and it wasn’t difficult to exaggerate them a bit. I know a lot about crime. Those guys aren’t very complex, I know how to get inside their heads. It’s only a matter of time before they come down on you.’

She stood up and dusted cigarette ash off her knee.

‘It doesn’t matter now. I wanted you to go to jail and suffer. But now I don’t give a shit. All I want to do is smoke cigarettes in this apartment until I’ve inhaled everything he’s left behind.’

Boris walked over to the door.

‘Bye-bye, Khatuna,’ he said.

‘Wait!’ she said, and ran with sudden urgency out of the room.

He heard her opening doors in the kitchen, and the icy scrape of the freezer. She came back weighed down, her arms laden with a ruddy frozen mass.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take this away.’

She put it into Boris’s arms and he realised in horror that it was Irakli’s pig. Its throat had been slit.

‘How could you do this?’ he cried.

The pig was solid against Boris’s chest, and turned it numb. He began to cry like a baby.

‘How could you do it?’ he said. ‘This pig was part of Irakli. It’s like killing him again.’

‘No,’ said Khatuna. She had ice crystals on her T-shirt, and she was rubbing her hands to warm them up. ‘It was like killing you.’

22

THE CEO CALLED PLASTIC into his office. Plastic was in his gym suit. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. The CEO massaged a pile of business cards, aligning the edges. He said,

‘I’m sorry to have to do this, Plastic, but you’re fired.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not happy about it, but you haven’t left me any choice.’

‘What?’

The CEO put his neat pile of business cards into a golden box. He straightened the keyboard of his computer. He was in a mood for tidying up.

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re mixed up in. But it’s got to a stage where this company’s looking questionable, and I can’t have that.’

‘You can’t really believe all this! I thought you were on my side!’

‘I’ve just been interviewed by the FBI,’ said the CEO. ‘I didn’t appreciate it.’

‘Take a look at me. Look at the state I’m in. They’ve taken over my apartment: I can’t go home. I slept in the office — I haven’t had a shower for two days. They’ve taken my paintings, my papers, my laptop, they’ve had me in a room for two days, asking questions. They want to know where Boris is — how the hell do I know where he is? They’re asking me what are my links to organised crime. They arrived with piles of my bank statements and asked me to explain cheques I wrote ten years ago.’

The CEO did not feel obliged to comment. Plastic raised his voice.

‘That guy who committed suicide — I hardly knew him! I didn’t exchange ten words with the guy. He was my girlfriend’s brother, that’s true, but I hardly knew him. Now she’s my ex-girlfriend because she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened. Look: he was a depressed poet, and he committed suicide. End of story. They are manufacturing a crime around it because he was a friend of Boris, who has disappeared off the face of the planet. Because he was from Georgia and his sister was involved with a gangster — and they think the only thing that comes out of that part of the world is crime. Well, I have nothing to do with any of it!’

He seemed short of breath.

‘You’re an idiot if you fire me!’ he said. ‘If you believe there is any truth to this!’

The CEO exhaled into the mask of his hands.

‘Someone is setting me up!’ yelled Plastic. ‘I don’t know who. But the FBI knows things about me they couldn’t know. There are these Bulgarian bureaucrats who took a dislike to me when I stole Boris from under their noses. Maybe it’s them. I don’t know! All I’m saying is someone is cooking this up and you’re swallowing it without asking a single question.’

‘I’m sorry, Plastic. It’s not what it is, but what it seems that matters. Suicides? Artists disappearing? It’s all gone too far. All the newspapers can talk about is America’s new criminal underworld. And Boris is the poster boy. Boris is the Pied Piper, leading us all into the shit.’

‘He’s more famous than he ever was,’ said Plastic. ‘Universal has a legend on its hands.’

‘Do I have to remind you that we don’t own his music? It floats free, remember, in some very cool, post-industrial sort of way, and all the lawsuits in the world are not going to bring it back. That’s how my differences with you began, remember?’

‘Do you remember who you’re talking to? I’m not one of your managers, sitting on my suited ass. I’m Plastic Munari, for Christ’s sake! You can’t do this to me!’

‘You were great,’ said the CEO. ‘I’m not denying it.’

After this conversation, Plastic was not allowed to go back to his office. He was escorted down to the lobby. Security men put their hands on him and he lost his cool.

‘I need to get my stuff from my office, I’m not letting anyone else do that. I’ve worked fifteen years in this company: at least let me pick up my fucking things!’

Above the lobby, people had come out on to the landings to see Plastic evicted. The whole company was there, murmuring.

‘We’ll get everything sent to your home,’ said a security guard.

‘I can’t get into my home!’ shouted Plastic. ‘The FBI has taken over my home. Does no one understand anything I say? Just give me half an hour in my office to pick up my personal things. I have antique paintings. I have two eighteenth-century globes in there — do you think I trust you people to pack them up?’

Eventually, the security team forced Plastic out on to the sidewalk, where all New York was around him and there was no point shouting any more.

He got a taxi and checked into a hotel. He had a shower and changed back into the same clothes. He went out for a walk. He had to buy some deodorant. He had to calm down.

There were offices and lively restaurants around him, and he tried to get out of their way. The cacophony of clothes boutiques and hairdressers grated on him, and he looked for emptier streets. He turned a few corners and found his way out of the crowds.

He passed the red-light district, peaceful at this time of day. He saw a naked arm stretched out of a window, and a woman reaching on tiptoe, trying to put a sandwich into the hand.

He walked for a long time, not really knowing where he was going. He passed liquor stores and warehouses, and the roads became cracked. He saw two men labouring under the bonnet of a car, a crushed can of oil on the road beside them. He saw a cat sleeping in a doorway, and a young girl crying in an alley — and then no one at all. He reached a part of town where entire skyscrapers stood vacant. He walked aimlessly, and ran his hands along a wall.

Evidently, few people ever came here, and the thistles that grew between the paving slabs came up to his thigh. The cars parked here were old models, and they had merged with the tarmac and the trees. There were clocks on buildings, stopped at different times. The area was abandoned.

Plastic was surprised, therefore, to see an open music shop. The lights were on, and the windows had sparkling displays. Above the entrance was a wooden sign carved with lyres, and decorated with gold script. Plastic pushed at the door, and a bell tinkled inside.

‘Good afternoon,’ said the owner. He was busy polishing the keys of a clarinet, and spoke to him in the mirror.

‘Hello,’ said Plastic, looking around the shop. What a beautiful place it was. How amazing he had never seen it before.

‘May I have a look around?’

‘Be my guest!’ said the man, engrossed in his work.

They had old gramophone players on sale here, and hundreds of records. They had shelves and shelves of music scores. An entire case was devoted to metronomes. Plastic looked at the rows of flutes and oboes in the glass cases; he looked at the harps and organs laid out.

Finally he sat down at a piano and, hesitantly, he began to play.

23

ULRICH IS WAITING ON THE CORNER of Hudson and Canal. Boris pulls up in a brand-new car, and opens the passenger door. He leaves the engine running.

‘Don’t you want to stop for a moment?’ suggests Ulrich. ‘I’d like to buy you a drink.’

‘I have to go,’ says Boris. ‘I have to meet someone soon.’

Ulrich lowers himself into the car and settles in the seat. He shuts the door, and Boris sets off. The car turns a corner and heads down a slope, and now they are driving underground. There’s hardly anyone else in sight, and driving through the Holland Tunnel is like swimming in a yellow dream.

Boris is accustomed, now, to American roads.

When they come out on the New Jersey side, Ulrich takes a last look back at the Manhattan skyline. He doesn’t think he will see it again.

Boris finds that Ulrich has introduced a new smell into the car: a smell of old candles and much-worn wool. It’s a familial smell, and Boris is drawn to this strange old man. He feels bad that he shut the door in his face the first time he saw him.

The evening is pure sapphire light, and the empty road is broad and peaceful. There are green banks of grass along both sides of the highway, blocking out the view, but when they reach the crest of a hill they get a panorama over the rolling green of New Jersey. There is a sheepdog bringing in the flock at the end of the day, the sheep running in waves among the factories.

‘I look at the beauty of an evening like this,’ says Boris, ‘and the fact Irakli is in the ground and cannot see it is the most terrible thing in the world.’

Ulrich turns so he is facing Boris, and the new leather creaks. The car moves so smoothly there is hardly any noise from the engine.

‘I found that old note again,’ Boris continues, ‘the one you slipped under my door with your phone number — and I wanted to see you one more time. I keep thinking back to what you said about Irakli when I met you in the street. As if you already knew.’

Ulrich says,

‘I didn’t think it would go so far.’

They pass a fairground in the distance, the big wheel glinting in the sun.

‘He was like the other half of myself,’ says Boris, ‘and I thought he would always be around.’

He looks desolate and strung out. Ulrich says to him,

‘You haven’t lost Irakli, you know. I don’t know if it helps to say that. I lost a friend once myself, and I know how it goes.

‘He’ll find his way inside you, and you’ll carry him onward. Behind your heartbeat, you’ll hear another one, faint and out of step. People will say you are speaking his opinions, or your hair has turned like his.

‘There are no more facts about him, that part is over. Now is the time for essential things. You’ll see visions of him wherever you go. You’ll see his eyes so moist, his intention so blinding, you’ll think he is more alive than you. You will look around and wonder if it was you who died.

‘Gradually you’ll grow older than him, and love him as your son.

‘In the future, you’ll live astride the line separating life from death. You’ll become experienced in the wisdom of grief. You won’t wait until people die to grieve for them. You’ll give them their grief while they are still alive, for then judgement falls away, and there remains only the miracle of being.’

Boris drives on. Ulrich watches the play of thoughts on his face, and the swallow in his throat. His exterior is as thin as a meniscus, and Ulrich can see through to the grinding inside. This son of his daydreams has already done things that Ulrich could not do in a hundred years. But he is still so young, and he is tossed around by feelings he cannot understand. It will be difficult to leave him, knowing he will be alone.

Ulrich tells himself, reassuringly,

‘Millions of people manage to lead their lives, and there’s no reason he should be any different. He’s not a bad child. Considering what happened to me, I could have made something much worse. I could have made a monster.’

He worries about Khatuna. He doesn’t know where she will end up or what she will become. She has grown beyond him. She has become volatile, and he cannot even approach her.

‘They are not the children I thought I would have,’ he thinks. ‘I always imagined I would produce people more civilised. But a confounded man like me, living through such mess — it’s not surprising if my offspring carry a few scars. They’ll have a better life than I did, and things will smooth themselves out. Their children will be better than they. In a couple of generations they’ll give birth to angels, and there’ll be nothing left to show what bad times we sprang from.’

By now the highway is delivering prophecies of sea. There are seabirds overhead, and there’s a maritime smell in the air. When the gaps line up in the landscape, it is possible to spy the continent’s end.

Ulrich tells Boris that he’s been holding on to a story for him and now he wants to let it out.

‘Back in my day,’ he says, ‘there was a scientist named Albert Einstein. I had a thing for science when I was young and I thought Albert Einstein was the greatest man alive. I even studied at his university in Berlin, where I used to see him in the flesh.

‘One day I was walking behind him in a corridor and he dropped a sheaf of papers. He didn’t notice he’d lost them, so I picked them up and raced after him. I handed them over and he looked at me, smiled and said, I would be nothing without you.’

The old man gives Boris a look.

‘What did he mean? He would be nothing without me? It seemed so personal, the way he said it. It seemed like a divine verdict. In those days, I had such an opinion of the man that there had to be greatness in his words even if he was only talking about a few missing papers. I would be nothing without you. I had a hopeful ego in those days: I tried to think of something I had done that could have contributed to Einstein’s achievement. I assumed that a great success such as his must be fed by many smaller successes all around: perhaps I was part of this blessed orbit, I thought, perhaps I would grow to unfold exploits and discoveries of my own.’

Boris’s eyes are fixed on the road ahead. He has to be in a certain place at a certain time, so he has those thoughts in his head. He overtakes a solitary truck.

‘Later on,’ says Ulrich, ‘I heard new stories about Albert Einstein which altered my thinking.’

He tells Boris the story of Einstein’s pitiable wife, Mileva. He tells him about the Nobel Prize money lost in the Wall Street crash. He tells him about the daughter mislaid somewhere in Serbia, and the son abandoned in an insane asylum. He tells him all these stories and he says,

‘I’d imagined that Einstein would live in a realm of uninterrupted success. Fulfilment as far as the eye could see: happy people bursting with rich conversation and achievements. But it wasn’t true. He was surrounded by failure. The people close to him were blocked up and cut off. Their lives were subdued, and they were prevented from doing what they hoped to do.

‘And that is exactly the point. That’s how he could make such unnatural breakthroughs. Do you see? How could one man do what he did otherwise? He could not summon such earth-shattering energy on his own!’

Ulrich is speaking heatedly.

‘How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand? We can’t answer questions like that, they are simply too mysterious. But we know that if we are to feel the thrill of progress and achievement, there have to be sacrifices elsewhere.’

Ulrich raises his eyebrows at Boris.

‘So this is what Einstein meant, when he looked me in the eye that day and said, I would be nothing without you. It was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything in my life.’

At this point in the old man’s speech, Boris spies a gap in the railings and he drives the car off the road. It jerks violently over the edge, and Ulrich is forced to grab on to his door handle. The crest of the grassy bank bounces in the frame of the windscreen and the unevenness of the slope shakes them from side to side. They climb the slope and, still juddering, they reach the summit. The horizon opens, they see the great ocean glittering beyond, and the car comes to a halt.

Boris turns off the engine, and there is silence. They can see the containers stacked high in the port, and the cranes, and the trucks queued up for cargo.

Ulrich says,

‘I have a lot of failure to give away. Look at my music: a fantastic failure. A triumphant failure — I nurtured it for a lifetime!’

The sun is setting now, over the land, and the ships on the sea are aflame in the final rays.

‘My failed music, Boris, that’s my gift to you. That’s the legacy I leave behind.

‘If I could make an Einstein with my failed science, think what will come of my music!’

Boris is fully attentive, but Ulrich is not sure he understands everything he is saying. Ulrich has the impression, not for the first time during this ride, that Boris has become more absent than before. Perhaps it is because he no longer has his violin. He is acting strangely, as if he is worried about waking someone: his voice has become soft and he takes care to avoid sudden movements.

Boris opens the door and gets out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition. The wind is strong off the sea, and his hair is swept back. He takes Ulrich’s arm and walks him down the slope to the highway. The air smells of salt and kelp and manatee.

Ulrich says,

‘I’m happy I had this time with you.’

Boris is watching the highway, waiting for something, and before long a grey van appears in the distance. He steps into the road and waves to attract its attention. Ulrich realises that time is short and there are still so many things he has not asked. As the van draws up he says,

‘Where are you going?’

Boris puts his face close to Ulrich.

‘I have a new music in my head,’ he says. ‘Since Irakli died I’ve been hearing something new. But it’s so remote I can’t grasp it well. I need to find somewhere quiet. I want to be alone again.’

Ulrich treats this information as if it is an amazing revelation. He breathes it in and it sets him nodding for a while. A new music, he mutters to himself.

The van door opens from inside, and there are several men crowded there who haul Boris in, laughing and clapping him on the back. They greet him in Russian. Boris reaches for the open door.

‘These men are my friends,’ he says to Ulrich. ‘They’re sailors. They’re going to hide me in their ship.’

He grasps Ulrich’s hand, and Ulrich holds on tight. It is all happening so fast.

‘Thank you!’ Boris calls — but the van is already pulling away. Boris lets go of Ulrich’s hand and slams the door. He waves from inside the moving vehicle.

Ulrich shouts,

‘Wait!’

He runs as best he can, banging on the van’s metal rear with the flat of his hand until it slows again, and stops. He catches up finally, holding his chest.

‘That nearly killed me,’ he says breathlessly, supporting himself against the van. His face is radiant. He says,

‘I forgot. This is for you.’

He shows him the gold watch on his wrist.

‘Can you take it off me? I have trouble doing it myself.’

Boris can see the glow in Ulrich’s face, and it has an inviting authority. He steps out of the van to undo the watchstrap. He takes the watch off and puts it on his own wrist. Ulrich smiles, seeing it there. He puts his arms around Boris’s bigger frame and embraces him. Boris returns his affection, holding him like a vice while the air is whipped by passing cars and the sailors call out from the van. Boris turns and gets back in.

‘Goodbye,’ he says.

‘Goodbye,’ Ulrich replies, smiling. He has lived this parting before, and this time it is joy.

A tinnitus starts up in his ears. He still has the force of Boris in his arms, and from the depths of his memory, an ancient word floats into his throat, speaking itself through his involuntary mouth. So-i-né.

He has been trying to think of that word for — what? — decades and decades. It is a Japanese word he heard about long ago. It speaks of a feeling that is not named in the old man’s own language. The unique sensuality of holding an infant. Not erotic, but indecent, nevertheless, in its fervour.

The engine roars, the van pulls out, and Ulrich watches it drive away. The sun is bursting on the horizon, and gulls cry overhead, infinite and plaintive. At last the van turns into the port, and Ulrich can see it no more.