Solo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herr Stern laughed.

‘Perhaps you’re right!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Really?’ Ulrich asked, unconvinced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4

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

He was dressed as a soldier.

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

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

He has forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My baby. Don’t ever leave me!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ulrich let it sink in.

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

Boris said,

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

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

‘We’re just boys. We can’t die.’

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

It took some time for Boris to add,

‘We could be hit by a motor car.’

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

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

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

Keep them on a slope

And you’ll lose your hope!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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