Solo (2 page)

Much of Ulrich’s childhood was spent in train compartments and hotels, following his father’s work. The entire household set out for weeks on end, journeying to where the tracks gave out. There were the armies of the workers, thousands of them, tented in the brushland under a dome of dust that signalled their labour for miles around: Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Arabs and Kurds, and others from all over the empire – hammering at the desert floor under the supervision of turbaned envoys from the Sublime Porte and handlebar-moustached German engineers. Crowds of cooks, doctors, prostitutes, fruit sellers, musicians, tobacco sellers and dancers advanced with them along the envisioned highway, and, as the daylight expired, an endless congregation of wood fires sprang to life under the stars, chickens and goats were thrust upon spits, and great iron cauldrons were set upon the flames. Everywhere men were eating, joking, sleeping, arguing and pissing, while packs of camels and horses looked dispassionately on. This was the assembly that hauled the silver lines from the mouth of the metropolis across the scrub of Anatolia; and Ulrich’s father could weep with the grandeur of it.

The earliest memory Ulrich still retains is this: he is lying alone at night under translucent canvas, a blanket folded carefully around him. At the edge of his hearing is the hubbub of the multitude, and he watches the twitching shape of a lizard on the roof above him, outlined by the lapping firelight. The brightness of his eyes comes not from these things, however, but from the sounds of the musicians. Even at this age, he does not need to see the dancing to know what reflexes the music induces in the men’s bodies.

After so many years, the melodies have drained away, but he can still recall their effect on his tucked-up child flesh.

He stores another memory from that time, or shortly after: his father’s temper in a café in Constantinople when politics interfered with his work. ‘If the British Empire is so fragile that a pair of steel rails
can bring it down – then let it fall! Will they threaten us, because we approach their routes, because we near their India, their precious Suez Canal? We are here to bring the peoples of the world together, and such a mission will stand before any rebuke!’

He stamped on the floor with the injustice of it, and Ulrich learned it was possible to be angry with people one did not know.

Ulrich’s father’s idealism proved to be a liability in the long run. When, during the war, the British destroyed the railway tracks he had helped to build, he took it as a personal calamity, as if the charges had been set at his own nerve junctions, and he fretted about it for the rest of his life. Trying to pull his country as fast as possible out of Asia, he never thought he would be razed by an excess of Europe.

Ulrich’s mother’s name was Elizaveta. Throughout Ulrich’s life, whenever he has wished to picture her happy, he has returned to one memory. He awakes in his tent in the desert to find his parents already arisen. He crawls out into the dawn, still confused by sleep: the fires are burning for breakfast, a camel coughs clouds in the chill, and the horizon is smooth and bichrome. His mother sits on a wooden stool sipping steaming tea, and she stares from under her shawl at the sun’s bubble, ascending over the edge of the world and turning her smile orange.

She picked up Turkish and Arabic, and she loved to set out among the villages with a muleteer and pay visits to the local women. She made sketches for them of Bulgarian peasant costumes so they would have an idea of the place she had come from, and she kept notebooks full of observations about their beliefs and customs. Sometimes she stayed away for three days at a time, journeying with her young son through the Tigris valley with only her Bulgarian manservant and a Kurdish guide for company.

Is Ulrich deceiving himself when he imagines that he has stood with her in an ancient monastery carved entirely out of rock, somewhere on the way to Mosul, where the aged bishop has taken vows of silence and lives in solitude on the top of an inaccessible mountain? Surely not: for
he remembers looking up to the astonishing incline where every day the man lowers a basket for his food – the basket in which, when his last mortal sickness comes upon him, he will send down a message so they may climb up to collect his body. Ulrich remembers eating mulberries and pomegranates plucked from trees by the Tigris, and all the flowers, and his mother laughing with her Kurdish guide, saying,
This is paradise
. Another snatch of the past: Ulrich has been dressed in a red shirt (for the wearing of blue is offensive to these people, and how marvellous that there can be prohibition on a colour!) and he sits in a dim room in a low-built house whose threshold is decorated with a painted snake. There is a woman seated on a mat who wears a flowing headdress (whose unfamiliar folds are disquieting to the young boy) and who cuts up into squares, with great delectation, a pulpy substance that is shiny on her fingers. She eyes him all the time with heavy curiosity, and without warning she is possessed with the desire to stroke his cheeks with her sticky hands. He runs to take shelter behind his mother, who appals him still further by eating these syrupy squares and declaring her delight. On the journey home, she tells him that these people have experienced violent raids and live in terror of a great massacre: their religion is an offence to the Musulmans who live in these parts and, now the empire is breaking up, they are in perpetual peril. And with the narcissism of childhood he is filled with regret at having denied the woman his cheek when she was about to die.

Ulrich remembers his father’s late-night fury at Elizaveta when she returned from one of those rural expeditions – and perhaps they were less numerous than he now imagines. For he also recalls the heavy tedium of big city hotels where the family stayed for weeks together, and restaurants where his mother sat in unending debates over politics. Elizaveta had a consuming passion for the affairs of that region – she wrote about them regularly for the Bulgarian newspapers – and she was never so content as when exchanging political analyses with other informed observers. But these conversations drove her young son to distraction. He hated the diplomats and businessmen whose arguments absorbed her so, and he tried to disrupt their speeches with tears and
full-blown choking tantrums. He developed an array of ruses for prising Elizaveta’s attentions away from them and, though she held out for a while, his complaints of sickness, headaches and ringing in his ears would eventually force her to board a train with him back to Sofia.

He sang on the journey, happy to have her to himself again. He was joyful when they arrived back at home (the house cold and dim save for the small corner kept alive by his grandmother’s movement) and he ran off to play with the children he knew in the houses round about. But each time he discovered that they had grown out of the games he had shared with them before he went away, and turned to others he did not know – ones that seemed calculated to exclude casual visitors such as he.

Perhaps this was why Ulrich became such a solitary child. The stuccoed cube of his bedroom, perched up in that big house, became the most dependable thing in his world, and he filled it with the ample emission of his daydreams.

His father was exasperated by his early signs of introversion.

‘You are privileged enough, at a young age, to enjoy the society of talented and influential men – and all you can do is stammer and scratch, and hold your foot in your hand like a fool. You will not be a failure, my son. Whatever it takes, I will not allow it.’

B
Y WHAT ALCHEMY
is an obsession kindled in a boy?

Another child who passed through Ulrich’s early experiences might have emerged with a passion for machines. His father encouraged him in that direction, with his tender demonstrations of engines, and the delightful way he simulated moving parts with his long white fingers. Or he might have conceived a fascination with exploration, or the study of peoples. But there was something Ulrich’s early attentions found more marvellous.

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.’