Solo

Magnesium

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Women use the cubicles, broken as they are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His father was exasperated by his early signs of introversion.

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

3

BY WHAT ALCHEMY is an obsession kindled in a boy?

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