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I harboured a dream of escaping across the border and making my way, finally, to New York. I boasted that many of my acquaintances had already made this journey, and they had told me of the tall buildings they had discovered there, and the wonderful life.

O
NE
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, Ulrich encountered Boris’s old friend, Georgi, in the street. It was twenty years since he had last seen him, and he had grown stout and bald, but Ulrich recognised him immediately.

He had spent years in jail for his revolutionary activities, and now he found himself showered with honours. He had become a colonel in the Secret Service, and he walked expansively, as if to allow room for his new aura. He seemed strangely happy to see Ulrich, and led him away to an expensive café with flowers and bow-tied waiters. Sitting down, he displayed his large stomach with a sensuousness that made Ulrich feel muddled. Georgi talked incessantly.

‘In the last years I shared a cell with another revolutionary, Atanas. He was married to a woman called Maria. Maria’s father was as rich as Rothschild: he was a big industrialist with several mansions, and factories all over the Balkans. So Maria was from one of Bulgaria’s leading families, she was closely connected to the king and the entire fascist government – and she had staked everything on her love for a scruffy communist revolutionary. Her parents disowned her, so she joined the party and came every day to jail to see Atanas. She brought fruit and biscuits, and told us news from the world outside.’

He ordered wine.

‘So what happened? She began to bring me gifts, too, and after a while she hid letters in them, full-blown declarations.
I cannot think for
love of you, I am dead not having you with me
.’

Georgi raised his eyebrows to insinuate more. Man to man.

‘Can you imagine? In the beginning I tried to stay aloof, but I’d been stuck in jail for more than ten years, and here was a soft-skinned young woman making offers. What choice did I have?’

Ulrich could muster no more affection for Georgi than on the first time he had met him. His face was sour, and his teeth as broken as before, and Ulrich tried in vain to picture what this woman had seen in him, lying like a dog in jail.

‘Obviously Atanas wasn’t happy. He and I went to war. Sometimes we beat each other through the night, until we had no more strength, and when Maria came in the morning our eyes were swollen like footballs. But after a while he realised he had lost her. He gave up hope in everything, and became like a pathetic animal. He slunk away to his corner when she came, so we could have space for ourselves. In a while he grew sick and died. Maria and I had our wedding in the prison. We have two little boys.’

He smiled fondly. He wore an impressive suit and the kind of steel glasses that were in fashion then.

‘Now her mother, who used to wear fur coats and drive sports cars, is getting a taste of how her workers lived. She comes to our front door to beg for cooking oil. A few years ago she was too good to even talk to her daughter. Now she begs us for soap.’

He exuded contentment.

‘Nineteen years in jail,’ he said, ‘and now I have to make up the time. We’re going to drive this country into socialism in twenty years, so it arrives while you and I have eyes to see it. You can already see the dams and factories we’re building. Todor Zhivkov is more ambitious than Georgi Dimitrov, and there will be no compromises. One day you’ll see the paradise we’ll make, and you’ll understand what all the fervour was for.’

The café was full of people, but the voices were measured and subdued. The laughter was appropriate. Every table had its maroon tablecloth and its starched white napkins.

‘You don’t know the challenges we face. People don’t want to work. Unfortunately, there are many who become sick and envious. They see beauty and achievement as black spots.’

He threw up his shoulders resignedly and sighed, taking a gulp of wine.

‘Anyway. What have you been up to?’

Ulrich told him about the factory. Georgi nodded distractedly. Ulrich felt out of place in this café, this conversation.

‘My mother,’ he began. ‘My mother was taken to Bosna. I don’t even know if she’s alive any more.’

‘Your mother?’ Georgi’s eyes narrowed.

‘She’s innocent!’ said Ulrich urgently. ‘She always had an amateur interest in politics. She mixed with the wrong people, she was confused, she didn’t know what she was saying. But she always opposed the fascists. She always wanted what was best for Bulgaria. She loved Boris. She never stopped cursing the king for what he did to him.’

Georgi observed Ulrich wrestling with himself. He said,

‘There are many enemies of the Fatherland. You don’t know how riddled this country is. We’ve been forced to send out a clear message.’

Ulrich whispered,

‘I have heard about the labour camps. She is old. She cannot survive it. She cannot break stones. She will die.’

Georgi continued to watch him, unblinking. Suddenly Ulrich flung himself on the floor, and held Georgi’s knee to his cheek.

‘I beg you. Find out what has happened to her!’ He did not dare look up at Georgi’s face. ‘She is an old woman. What harm can she do?’

There was a lull in the café while people looked on. Ulrich kept his arms clutched tightly around Georgi’s leg. Georgi tried to retain his dignity.

‘There is nothing I can do.’

‘I beg you,’ said Ulrich, still on the floor. ‘In the name of our friend. I will do anything in return. Anything. If you want me to take her place.’

Georgi mopped his mouth with his linen napkin.

‘In the name of our friend,’ he repeated.

Later, Ulrich heard the rumours about Georgi: that he had been exceptionally vicious in his revenges. It was said that he had hunted down his old enemies and shot them with his own hand. But there were many rumours like that during those times, and it was not easy to pick out the truth.

L
ATE ONE NIGHT
, Ulrich’s mother appeared at the front door. Ulrich did not recognise her at first. She was half her previous size, and her hair was white stubble. She had terrible rashes on her face.

‘Ulrich?’ she said, hiding behind her hands. She seemed terrified of him.

He let out a cry and pulled her to his chest, his sobs erupting. She fainted in his arms, and he carried her inside. She was dressed in peasant clothes, and she was weightless, like a woman of straw. He roused her with water.

He brought her bread to eat. She took two mouthfuls and collapsed, clutching her stomach. She writhed with the pain and he massaged her hollowed abdomen, weeping with fear.

When it had passed, he went to bring a shawl, for she was shivering. By the time he returned she had fallen into a dead sleep.

Ulrich stayed at home to take care of her. Elizaveta lay on the sofa, watching him moving in the house, and covering her swollen face for shame. It was two days before she could speak.

She said,

‘Where is Karim?’

‘He’s dead.’

She nodded, as if she had known it.

‘Anyway, I have grown afraid of dogs.’

She had been plucked out of the fields and released from the camp, without any forewarning. They had told her that the public prosecutor had intervened on her behalf, and they had left her by the side of the road.

‘I would have died if it weren’t for the peasants who helped me. The people in the town threw stones at me.’ She was weeping. ‘In our country, only the ignorant still know how to be human and decent. They were saints. They saved my life.’

Ulrich could not look at his mother while she said these things. He did not sit down, but paced between the walls.

‘Someone should pay for this,’ he said.

‘I am here with you,’ she said. ‘We should be grateful for that.’

His face was baleful. She said gently,

‘You can’t ask anyone to pay back the life they have taken. Neither kings nor dictators have that power.’

She was silent for a long time.

‘I didn’t speak while I was away,’ she said. ‘All the trouble was caused by words. The best chance I had of seeing your face again was to say nothing at all.’

They were gentler with each other than before. It came to each of them to wake up, sometimes, screaming in the night, and these submerged agonies were a form of silent compact. There were things they could
never share with anyone else. Elizaveta had become politically contagious, and old friends now crossed the street to avoid her. She often mused about the ones who had fled to the camps in Austria and Italy after the war, and now were in America.

‘We should have gone as well. We could have made another life. We could have found your son. I was too proud, and I thought there would always be time.’

Their neighbour from upstairs dropped enough comments to ensure their fear did not subside too far. He knocked on the door of an evening to observe how they were occupied, and to offer his advice.

‘Yesterday I noticed you had a letter returned from America? Some of your phrases were hardly complimentary to our socialist nation. We all have to decide which side we are on.’

He spoke in a strange, sententious style, and took the liberty of lifting up a book from the table to glance over the papers piled underneath. Ulrich did not speak to him, but stared at the door with hatred until he had closed it behind him.

One day, Elizaveta asked Ulrich to join the party.

‘I will not,’ he said grimly.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and they were walking in the park.

‘You must protect yourself,’ she said. ‘Your mother is an enemy of the state. There’s no place for subtle considerations.’

Ulrich signalled to her to keep her voice down, as if someone were listening. He said,

‘I don’t want to discuss it. After everything they have done to you, Mother.’

They walked on, her arm through his. She said,

‘You mustn’t think about the other people’s pain. It will never end. Look at the people you know, how much they have suffered, and multiply it by everyone in the world. You can never imagine the volume. It would destroy your own significance, and there’s no point in it.’

The matinee had ended at the theatre, and people filed out into the square. It was a beautiful day in early summer, and cherry blossom drifted in the breeze.

‘You should take better care of yourself,’ she continued. ‘I won’t be with you for ever.’

‘Don’t say such things.’

‘Isn’t it true? I am old, and soon I’ll die. It would make me so happy to see you married again.’

He did not answer her. She was tired, and they headed for a bench. They watched the dressed-up children, and the red flags hanging on the war memorial. Elizaveta said,

‘You travel so far to that factory, and you spend every day in that noise and heat. Your clothes stink when you come home. If you joined the party you could have an easier life. You would have comforts and promotions.’

She leaned her head against his shoulder, looking up at the sky and the tips of the poplars.

‘Isn’t there anything you’d like to do? What do you think about? You’re always thinking. I wish you would tell me about it. I don’t know what happens in your head.’

Soldiers were relaxing on a bench under the willow trees. There were wreaths around the war memorial, from a few days before, and people strolled in Sunday clothes, their cigarette smoke luminous in the sun.

A few days later, Ulrich looked up from his evening reading and said,

‘Did I ever tell you my theories about the baths at Carlsbad?’

‘No.’

Ulrich told his mother about Pierre and Marie Curie, the pioneers of radioactivity. He told her how the Austrian government had presented them with a tonne of uranium ore – pitchblende – that was dug up from the enormous silver mines of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. The precious gift arrived on a horse-drawn cart, still matted with Bohemian earth and pine needles, and the Curies set to work. They discovered that the ore was emitting very high levels of radiation, far higher than uranium, and they realised another substance must be present. After two years of work, they isolated from this tonne of pitchblende one tenth of a gram of a new element. Radium.

‘Pierre Curie’s mother had died of cancer a few years before,’ said Ulrich, ‘and he and Marie began to experiment with the effects of radium on tumours. They achieved positive results. They thought it would soon be possible to destroy cancer for ever. And that was the beginning of radiotherapy.’

Elizaveta settled back in her chair, happy to hear her son talking about something he loved.

Ulrich related how the rumours of radioactivity’s life-giving power began to circulate among the public at large. It was assumed that the new force of nature must be invigorating for the body, and popular magazines were suddenly filled with advertisements for radium compresses, radium bath salts, radium implants, radium chocolate and radioactive inhalations.

‘Can you imagine?’ Ulrich exclaimed.

He told her about the fashionable spas of Carlsbad, which were close to the Joachimsthal mines. Carlsbad had already been an elegant summer resort of the European elites for a century or more, but now the sudden popularity of radium gave an additional boost to its prestige. Carlsbad boasted of the
tonic radioactivity
of its waters. And in 1906, a new ‘radioactive spa’ was built even closer to the mines, in Jáchymov.

‘I’ve always been struck,’ said Ulrich, ‘by all the famous people who went to those spas and later died of cancer. There were so many musicians. Johannes Brahms, the composer, and Niccolò Paganini, the most famous violinist who ever lived.’

Later on, the harmful effects of exposure to radiation became well known. Marie Curie herself was covered with terrible welts from her laboratory work, and died a painful death as a result. But none of this stopped Leopold Godowsky, a pianist friend of Albert Einstein, from visiting the spas of Carlsbad in the hope that the special waters might reanimate his right arm, which had become useless after a stroke. Not long after that, he died of stomach cancer.