Solo (19 page)

‘No,’ said Ulrich. ‘I want to do it in the proper way.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The proper way. The authentic way.’

Ulrich remembers that his door wore padlocks like so many earrings, and it was reinforced with steel. He plugged his keyhole and kept his curtains drawn.

He began to manufacture plastic objects. He made plastic dolls and animals. He sculpted a plastic comb, painstakingly, tooth by tooth. He did not have moulds, and everything he made looked like craftwork: irregular and roughly shaped.

He conducted some experiments with colouring, and set himself the task of producing a replica of his mother’s imitation tortoiseshell sunglasses, which had sat on a sideboard in the main room all this time.

He had to construct his own equipment: a reactor loop made of two new car exhausts he found, and a pump he had stolen from the factory. He used a chromium catalyst that he powdered himself. He needed high temperatures, and the apartment sweated. He used phthalic anhydride to make the frames more flexible, which he produced on his own, from naphthalene.

How many years of work did it take him to produce the material for the lenses? He remembers producing the first successful sheet, pressed between sheets of aluminium foil under a pile of heavy books. When he drew it out it was unintentionally embossed with the words
Dictionary
of the Bulgarian Language
, and the device of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

He made moulds out of concrete, lined with aluminium foil. He used his own weight to hold the moulds closed while he injected the plastic with a hand pump, and he crouched there, on the mould, until it had cooled. He lifted off the top, pulled out the foil, and peeled it away carefully from the plastic. Glistening, and still warm.

He was unable to make hinges for the glasses, and he could not find out where to buy them. He was therefore obliged to go to the market and buy another pair of sunglasses to take the hinges from. That pair cost four leva. Over the years he had invested hundreds, if not thousands, of leva in his own production.

The police took years to return, but when they did they asked no
questions. They simply dismantled his laboratory so that he could not continue his work any more.

T
ODAY
, U
LRICH’S NEIGHBOUR
is preoccupied by the recent arrival of two more Gypsy families in the building.

‘They’re taking over,’ she says as she unloads Ulrich’s laundry. ‘These days I’m scared to come home after dark. Their young men stare at me while I walk to the lift.’

She has brought hot sausages, which Ulrich can smell. She puts a new packet of tea bags in the cupboard, and disappears into the bathroom with toilet paper.

In this weather, everything is storing heat. When there is absolute quiet, Ulrich can hear the wood of the window frame creaking with desiccation.

He hears his neighbour tidying up in the bathroom. She flushes the toilet.

‘You know they steal the electricity?’ she says, emerging again. ‘Their children are electrical wizards: they disconnect their meters and connect their supply to the meters of hard-working Bulgarians. That’s why our bills have been rising so much. The Gypsies don’t pay one stotinka. They spend it all on dancing and weddings. And if you try and confront them …’

She leaves Ulrich to picture the consequences. He feels he should show more concern, since she also pays his own electricity bill, but he can think of nothing to say.

‘You’d think they’d become more civilised, living among Bulgarians.
But it’s quite the opposite! They have marble floors and satellite dishes, they mint money like the National Bank – and still they steal from us!’

And with a sigh she said,

‘God save Bulgaria!’

Ulrich has his own pet hatred. There is a man on the ground floor who collects bits of old wood and iron, covers them in gold spray paint, and sells them. He picks up a rusty plaque with a lion on it, or a wreath, he sands the rust off and sprays it gold, and sells it to someone for their house. This building has a small garden, which at present is full of the man’s junk, though Ulrich is certain that no one gave him the liberty to store it there. On windy days he applies his spray paint inside, in the hallway, and the entire building smells of acetone.

These proceedings incite inexplicable fury in Ulrich. His mind dwells on this man for much longer than it should, and whenever his neighbour is counting out his pills, he asks whether she has news of him, to feed his irritation.

In the extreme of his life, Ulrich’s emotions have begun to pitch and toss on their own, with no proportion to what caused them. He no longer laughs at jokes, or weeps at things that are sad, but he finds himself weeping and laughing at other times, for no obvious reason. Nothing flows when expected, and then an entirely simple thing – the sun on his face in the morning, or the feel of a spoon in the hand – punctures an escape route, and a torrent bubbles out, erotic and sickly, of grief, or anger, or mirth.

Earlier today, the excited voice of a football commentator activated in Ulrich a sharp happiness that seemed to have been laid down decades ago, and never felt.

Ulrich has come to enjoy this unpredictability of his emotions. He feels as if something new is happening to him, even at his age.

‘You know what we found in the flooded apartment upstairs?’ his neighbour says as she opens the door. ‘Beetles.’

Ulrich nods, imagining the scene. But that is not what she meant.

‘He had them on the wall, in wooden cases. Must have been at least twenty wooden frames full of different beetles. Beautiful things, they
were: iridescent green, some of them as big as your fist. There was nothing else in the house: the place was emptied out. A radiator pipe had burst, that’s why we had all that water, and the floor was completely rotten. Don’t know who’s going to pay for the repairs. My husband’s going to see if he can get some money for those beetles, but that won’t begin to cover it.’

Ulrich asks if the owner of the flat was an entomologist.

‘I don’t know,’ she says hurriedly. ‘I never met him. But I have to get home and take the weight off these legs. They’re killing me.’

Ulrich takes the opportunity to ask what exactly is wrong with her legs.

She blows out her air.

‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs, as such. I don’t have any. Didn’t you ever notice? I lost them years back.’

Ulrich does not feel he can ask how it happened, since she has not volunteered it. She shuts the door, and he hears her limping hurriedly along the corridor. He feels a little guilty that he takes her so for granted.

It is the most beautiful moment in the day, and though Ulrich can no longer see it, he has lived in this room for long enough to sense when it is beginning. In the middle of the morning, the sun shines through his window on to the mirror, and the room glows joyfully for a few minutes with the travelling rectangle of light on the opposite wall. Even without his eyes, he feels the momentary transfiguration.

R
ELEASED FROM HIS OWN CHEMISTRY,
Ulrich realised Bulgaria had become a chemical disaster. The rivers ran with mercury and lead, and hummed with radioactivity. Fishing had dried up on the Black Sea coast, and, every year, more fields and forests were lost.

The Kremikovtsi steelworks and the Bukhovo uranium mine flooded
Sofia with lead, sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, ethanol and mercury. Radioactive sludge from Bukhovo was dumped in an open forest, contaminating the river and the surrounding land.

The copper mines in Pirdop devastated everything around them. Arsenic flowed straight into the Pirdopska river, and dead fish piled up downstream in enormous stinking banks. Nylon stockings melted on contact with the air.

Bulgarian sheep had miscarriages and died, and the cows went mad. Children were born with cancers and deformities. Like all his compatriots, Ulrich had become chemical himself, his blood a solution of cadmium, lead, zinc and copper.

Reactor 4 of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl blew up, and the atmosphere altered. The undead leaders clung to office and alcohol, but they had lost the power to stop talk. Intellectuals began to denounce the chlorine pollution from the chemical plant across the river in Romania, which poisoned the Rousse air. They criticised industry and the socialist ideal. They made films against chemical contamination, and demonstrated in the streets. They spoke with impunity, and it was clear that Zhivkov had lost his mastery.

The Turks protested the treatment they had received: their ghettos, their labour, the forced change of their names. The old factories churned but the shops were empty, and even a child could see that the eternal system was propped up now only by rust and contraband. The lording Gypsies worked in trucks and trains, and made money moving things from here to there. People said it rained banknotes at their weddings.

The forbidden music returned.

Ulrich watched his television, not really understanding what was going on. People said,
Communism is no more!
and, after forty years, Zhivkov stepped down from his height, and became subject to human things. His arrest and trial were shown to the world. He sweated in the courtroom, he was nervous and made mistakes, and it was impossible any more to believe in his divinity. Secrets were laid bare, and everything collapsed like a public demolition.

It was amazing how fast the old order was swept away. People told stories openly about their previous crimes and punishments, as if they were rumours from another place. The Secret Service archives were opened, and people could see the transcripts of their old phone calls and the reports their friends had filed against them. Ulrich watched a documentary on television about the labour camps, and howled for what his dead mother had kept inside her.

He never had an instinct for politics, and now he could not even tell what kind of world he was in. They said,
Now we are capitalist!
– but all Ulrich could see was criminality raised up into a principle. Murderers and thieves took over and called themselves
businessmen
, and kept the people happy with pornography. The United Nations cut off supplies to Milosevic’s Serbia, and gleeful thick-necked Bulgarian toughs stepped in to supply the food and oil, becoming billionaires overnight. They bought TV stations, hotels and football clubs, and they adorned those necks with gold crosses the size of dinner plates.

They were former sportsmen and Secret Service men, and they had manoeuvred well through the debacle, but even they could not believe how many millions they had managed to steal. For a time they lived out in the open, and everyone could see their incredulous carnival; but then they began to die in daylight assassinations, and they retreated behind walls.

Bulgaria became Asiatic again, as it had been when Ulrich was born. Big-breasted Bulgarian singers embraced the long-suppressed Turkish and Arabic music and turned it into anthems for the new gangster society. Heroin poured in from Afghanistan. Criminal companies selected the best-looking Bulgarian girls to work in brothels in Dubai.

The world returned to war. Armenia and Azerbaijan fought. Yugoslavia fell apart. Russia razed Chechnya, trying to hold on to it. There was civil war in Georgia – with tanks firing in front of the opera house in Tbilisi, where Ulrich had gone to see
Tosca
with Magdalena on their honeymoon so long ago. The Americans bombed Baghdad, which his father had tried so long ago to link harmoniously to Europe with his Berlin–Baghdad railway line. People said,
Now our country is open!
but
even if it had been possible for Ulrich to journey to the places of his life, they all seemed to be in flames. America bombed Yugoslavia, and chemicals flowed down the river into Bulgaria from the destroyed factories, and bloated corpses too.

Ulrich was reduced to absolute poverty. He could not afford the electricity in Zapaden Park, and nearly froze in the winter. He moved into a run-down building near the bus station whose hollow partitions were built against the grain, so that the windows stood half in one apartment, half in another.

He left behind many of his possessions. He could not transport the great volume of his chemistry books.

He brought some paving slabs into the new place, and built a fireplace under the chimney. In the winter, he collected bits of packing crate from the street to make a fire with, which blazed up in an instant, searing the room, and burned out without leaving any warmth.

He began to forage for food, but he moved slowly, and the competitive hordes were energetic and desperate. Even the young could not make it, and many of them left the city in the hope of sustaining themselves on a bit of chemical land. Ulrich sat in doorways, trying to preserve his energy, and he watched the drunk children and the women praying for miracles. There were stains on the pavements from where the people slept, and sometimes there were corpses in the morning.

One afternoon, Ulrich collapsed while trying to open his front door, and was taken in by his neighbours. That was when they began to give him money.

For weeks afterwards, he lay curled up on his bed, unable to think or move. He spent all night trying in vain to sleep, and groaned when he heard the first clatter of morning water in the pipes.

He leaned his head against the wall, which was like a great membrane capturing the sounds of the building. Conversations in other apartments came through as indistinct reverberation. Music, sometimes, and telephone rings. It was rainy, and at night the wall groaned with damp distension. Wet patches spread with clicks as molecules found new space, and the plaster ballooned.

In the afternoons, the air warmed up. The damp paint, hanging off in curled butterfly wings, dried out with the sun; crackled, and fell, finally, to the floor.

Ulrich’s heartbeat slowed, and his pressure dropped inside. He was tired, and his daydreams were not enough to keep out the news stories.

The national airline, Balkan Airlines, sent its air hostesses to pose nude for
Playboy
in order to save itself from bankruptcy. The Kremikovtsi steelworks were sold to an American company for one dollar.

The new leaders incinerated the communist mummy of Georgi Dimitrov, and decided to demolish his tomb, which had already become a glowering affront to the nobility of their new capitalism. Great crowds came to watch the mausoleum come down, while the prime minister surveyed the solemn proceedings from behind his office curtains. The country’s leading explosives experts came in clean uniforms to lay down their dynamite. With a magnificent lack of humour, they signalled their readiness, and everyone prepared themselves for the house of spirits to evaporate.

The explosion was so massive that the speakers crackled on Ulrich’s rickety television. People ducked and covered their eyes; the surrounding windows were blown out, and great cracks streaked across the stone square. But as the smoke cleared, the crowds burst into laughter – and even Ulrich laughed in his solitude. For the mausoleum stood indifferent, entirely unharmed. The experienced experts set more explosives, and still nothing happened. They claimed a technical hitch, and tried a third time. But still it would not fall. They packed up and went home, and returned after dark, with pickaxes. That was what it was to live in flimsier times, with the past simply too well made.

There was a knock at Ulrich’s door one day, and government agents asked for Elizaveta, who was twenty years dead. They carried a parcel containing her jewellery, a gold crucifix, an oil painting of the Blue Mosque in Tabriz, and a series of framed prints of the Ringstrasse in Vienna. These objects had been held in a vault for close on half a century, and now they were fastidiously returned.

This miraculous event contradicted everything Ulrich thought he knew, and he felt he had lived too long. He had seen the statues pulled down too many times – this time they were putting up shrines to Ronald Reagan – and everyone around him had passed away. He was living in the aftertimes, whose rules he did not understand. Forty or fifty years, he thought, were enough for a modern life, for the human frame could not hold up if the world was destroyed too many times and made again.