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‘My father? Are you sure you’re talking about my father?’

‘He was the one who introduced us to piano music, and orchestras, and classical violin. When we first came to Sofia we had never heard those things, and he took us to concerts. He played his violin in the evenings, and we thought he was a genius. Later he went to study in Freiberg, if you remember, and he heard every kind of music there. He taught himself to play the entire Mendelssohn concerto.’

The wine was served, and the dead woman’s son stood up to say some words. His face was deformed by grief, and there were sniffles around the room. Ulrich whispered urgently under the speech,

‘But my father hated music.’

‘Oh, your father was a true musician! But of course he got into engineering, and his railways, and I suppose he didn’t have time after that.’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘I don’t know what happens to us. It’s difficult to sustain our passions through life, and we become mournful for what we’ve given up.’

The speech was still going on, and suddenly Ulrich was seized by a mutiny within, which broke out in wild and foolish laughter. He was forced to leave the room and walk in circles among the gravestones for his seizure to subside. It was a light-headed laughter, like falling through time.

T
WO
S
ECRET
S
ERVICE MEN
came to the door and asked to speak to Ulrich.

Elizaveta tried to tell them he was not at home, her old fears creeping back. They looked at her coldly and waited for Ulrich to emerge from his room.

‘Let’s go for a walk,’ they said to him, a hand on his shoulder.

‘No need to worry,’ they reassured his mother. ‘We’ll have him back in a short while.’

They went downstairs, saying nothing. The two men sat on a bench in the courtyard, and Ulrich stood before them. A mother hurried her children inside from their games.

‘You work in that factory in Vakarel,’ said one of the men, and it was not a question. ‘Doing quite well, isn’t it?’

‘Thank you, comrade.’

The men seemed to expect more, and Ulrich said,

‘We have received our quotas under the Fifth Five-Year Plan. We’re working out the best way to fulfil them.’

‘You’re working very hard,’ said the man soothingly. ‘Everyone in that factory is working hard.’

‘It doesn’t go unnoticed,’ said his companion.

‘Denov,’ said the first man. ‘That’s the name of the director, isn’t it? What kind of a man is he?’

‘He’s honest,’ said Ulrich hesitatingly. ‘He works hard.’

‘You’re close to him, aren’t you? You’ve been to his house several times?’

‘
Close
is not the word. But he has been good to me.’

‘Has he? After all, you haven’t been promoted all these years. You were even in the newspapers some years back for your achievements in the factory, but he didn’t put your name forward for advancement.’

Ulrich said nothing. The men continued.

‘Comrade Denov has had several encounters with foreign businessmen over the past two years. Chemical industrialists from Yugoslavia and even France. Can you explain why he might meet such people?’

‘No,’ said Ulrich truthfully. ‘I can’t.’

‘No idea at all?’

‘No.’

The two men looked at each other, as if consenting to let Ulrich in on a confidence.

‘Clerks in the Planning Department have come across discrepancies in the numbers coming from your factory. What goes in is greater than what comes out. Isn’t that strange?’

‘It’s impossible,’ said Ulrich.

‘Why
impossible
?’

‘There’s no spare capacity in our factory. Sometimes we work for a month at a time without a break, until the workers collapse at their machines. We are constantly behind our quotas. There is no spare barium chloride for anyone to conceal from the authorities.’

‘It’s because you’re all working so hard that this seems so unfair.’

‘I can tell you a hundred stories,’ said Ulrich, ‘of Comrade Denov’s commitment to this factory. And to his country.’

‘Are you saying we’re lying?’

‘I think there must be a mistake.’

The men studied him.

‘That’s why we’ve come to you. We need more reliable information. You see him every day – tell us what you find out. Strangers he talks to on the phone, things on his desk that have no right to be there. Jot them down. We’ll be in touch to find out what you’ve learned.’

‘Comrade Denov has been kind to me. As I just told you.’

‘You believe that, because you don’t know the whole story.’

‘I’ve known him for many years. He’s not that sort of man.’

‘You know, there are many things opening up just now in our country. Wouldn’t you like to be part of them? There are so many new opportunities in chemicals, for instance. Look at your house, the state
it’s in. We could get you on the list for the modern housing blocks they’re building. Imagine that.’

‘Just so you know who your friends are. After all, we only want the truth. If he’s doing nothing wrong, he has nothing to fear.’

They left him without farewells, and Ulrich began to shake. He sat down to steady himself.

When he went back upstairs, his mother was gulping vodka.

‘What did they want?’ she asked.

He stared at her, and felt a sudden distaste. He realised he could not remember the last evening she had been sober.

Ulrich began to wait behind in the evening for Comrade Denov to leave the factory so he could look through the accounts in his office. The ledgers were piled up on a shelf behind the bust of Todor Zhivkov, where anyone could find them.

The gaps between the pages were stuffed with receipts and torn-off notes, and Ulrich frowned with disapproval. It was difficult to make sense of the hastily written columns of numbers. Other workers passed the office and looked in at him quizzically, and it took him several evenings to build up a full economic picture of the factory.

He had not lost the talents he had developed during his accounting days, and when he opened the page in the ledger where the discrepancies were revealed, he knew it instantly. The grids, the column headings, the underlined totals – all spoke clearly to him, and he knew that everyone in the factory was labouring under a fiction. He trembled as he looked through the pages, for he realised that most of their hard-won barium chloride went missing every month. The enormous sacrifices they made to fulfil the official quotas were directed, in truth, to some quite different end. Comrade Denov had deceived them all. He had betrayed their factory.

Ulrich began to file weekly reports about Comrade Denov to the secret police. He did so without hesitation or doubt. He wrote his reports carefully, giving evidence for each of his assertions, and footnoting every number and quotation as if it were a thesis. Every week, when he set out to deliver his envelope, he held his head high with conviction.

U
LRICH AND HIS MOTHER
were selected for an apartment in Zapaden Park, the miraculous new scientific housing project in the west of the city. Elizaveta was baffled as to how it could have happened to a political outcast like her.

The mighty development was not even complete when they moved in. The forest had been cleared, and the towers rose out of a swamp: white, and repeating endlessly to the sky. The roads were still just sketches in the mud, and the grind of great machines became a roar whenever a window was opened, even from their tenth floor. New turf was already laid in places, like felt over the wasteland, and naked twigs were propped up in the expectation, one day, of trees.

Journalists visited to report on the modern living, and famous artists came to prepare paintings of the fury from which peace and harmony are born.

Ulrich was not happy with the new communal living, where there was no escape from talking, prying people. He walked down the stairs to avoid the lift, but on his ascent he regularly found himself confined with neighbours, whose sociability he tried to repel by counting the passing floors through the ribbed glass, or concentrating on the spoiled shine of his shoes. He closed the curtains at home, preferring twilight, for he could not bear the pressure of the thousand panes of glass staring in.

Elizaveta followed him around, opening them again, for the sparkling altitude made her gleeful. She sat on the balcony on sunny afternoons: she liked the views of children playing on the swings, and the people coming and going, and the interiors of the opposite apartments. She bought a reproduction of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
to hang above the dining table, lined the windows with potted plants, and hung up a birdcage. She became a propagandist for
modern facilities
, commenting
joyfully on the hospital downstairs, and the pharmacy, and all the other new things she found such a comfort in her old age.

Zapaden Park seemed ignorant of Elizaveta’s compromised past, and at this late stage in her life she seemed suddenly unburdened. She sat in her headscarf chatting on the benches that lined the paths downstairs, and when she was in her kitchen she left the front door ajar, so that visitors could walk in whenever they wished. She was always surrounded by people drinking and laughing, and Ulrich returned home with trepidation.

When he bought a stereophonic record player, which cost him months of savings, she invited an artistic neighbour to give his opinion on the sound, and he came with his friends, the kind of people Ulrich hated, who had gathered at the Café Bulgaria and written revolutionary poetry when they were young, and now were comfortable and arrogant, and gave meaningless speeches at the Writers’ Union that were printed in the newspaper. They inspected the new acquisition, without emotion, and one of them, who was a decorated poet, said to him gravely,

‘No one needs stereophonic sound in Bulgaria, my friend.’

And Ulrich said
Why
?, already dreading the answer, and the poet said,

‘Because we already hear the same information from every side!’

They all laughed at the joke, one woman coughing on her cigarette, but Ulrich did not find it funny. These people had their fashionable suits, and sunglasses as big as welders’ masks, and they affected this revolutionary cynicism when in fact they had ceased to be revolutionaries years ago, and loved their established positions.

His mother had given up her typing – or perhaps she had finished what she was writing. Ulrich did not know. Now she hosted parties at night, where her acquaintances came to drink and gamble, and she talked of nothing except entertainments. She began to brew brandy, and she made garish, extravagant clothes to wear. She bought a pair of sunglasses in imitation tortoiseshell that cost half their monthly rent, and she wore them indoors when her friends came. She spent Ulrich’s money on foolish things, though she had always been prudent with
money; she played the hits of Pasha Hristova on his stereo. She kept moving the furniture, so that nothing was in its right place when he came home, and it drove him to fury.

‘Are you a blind man?’ she taunted him. ‘That you are scared of bumping into things?’

With her nightly drinking, she began to lose the mornings, and Ulrich emerged from his dreams to find an empty room. He squatted on a stool in the grey hour and remembered how terrible was solitude.

Ulrich developed a friendship, without expecting it, with a woman who lived near by.

She sat next to him on the bus one day, saying she had seen him coming and going. She was not much younger than Ulrich, and had her husband and her life. She worked in a printing press, and her name was Diana.

He made her curious, she said, for he seemed so private. She spoke about the way she felt and how she saw things. Ulrich talked about chemistry, telling her stories of what was now possible. She listened to him while the bus growled between stops.

He was walking home one evening when she saw him on the path and called out.

‘I have something for you. Can you wait? It’s upstairs.’

He watched her walk back to her block, where the fluorescent lamps set her off for a moment before she disappeared inside. Ulrich surveyed the mute concrete, imagining the elevator passing up through the building, counting the equidistant lights as she went down the corridor, the key in the lock. She came down. She wore a long coat for the weather, and carried a plastic bag.

Inside was a magnifying glass.

‘I don’t know if it’s useful for your chemistry,’ she said. ‘But I never use it myself.’

When they met, they walked together, and it became a routine. Talking to Diana was a relief from the trials of Ulrich’s home. He was growing old himself, and he mostly found it difficult to concentrate on
other people’s conversation. But with her everything was fresh, and pregnant again. Though he told himself that their friendship meant little, he could feel his anticipation rise each time their rendezvous approached.

They met at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, as if by repeated accident. Ulrich assumed her husband was not around at that time, though she did not say so.

She loved architecture, and took Ulrich to see buildings she found interesting, so they could discuss them together. Her sister was a famous architect who won the Red Banner of Labour and was sent on a trip to Italy once as a reward for her work. Later she designed hotels on the Black Sea, and something in Cuba.

A sanatorium, Ulrich thinks.

Diana thought the Moscow styles were not suited to the Bulgarian climate, and decried the new apartments with their thick walls and small windows. She had ideas about how a building should respond to the shape of a human. She took him to the massive Rila Hotel, and they walked all round it, discussing how it felt, and trying to remember what stood there before. She was unafraid: she took him into the lobby and pointed out the features, and they sat there for a cup of tea.

She talked about her children, grown up and married, and her husband, who was somebody in the party. He was involved in planning, and Diana asked Ulrich about his views on the economy. They talked about the Kremikovtsi steel plant, just then opened. Ulrich said,