Solo (22 page)

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.

I
N
T
BILISI, 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.

A
S 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.’