Solo (38 page)

The hospital is near by, and she runs there. Irakli has broken an arm. He is lying in bed with his arm in plaster, and he is still drunk. She says,

‘How could you get hit by a car tonight? There were hardly any cars on the streets.’

‘I don’t know what happened,’ he says.

She looks him over with concern.

‘Where’s Boris?’ she says. ‘Didn’t he stay with you?’

‘He was here. He just left.’

Khatuna sighs with contempt.

‘He’s a fucking coward.’

She touches the tips of her brother’s fingers poking out from the plaster.

‘I was clearly lit up in the headlights,’ says Irakli, ‘and still it drove into me.’

His eyes are closed, and his forehead wrinkles.

‘I think I’m becoming transparent,’ he says.

Item

Perhaps Boris would not have achieved such extraordinary fame if he had cropped up in another age. But these were unusual times. It was noticeable, for instance, that children knew less than their parents, who themselves preserved a mere fraction of what they had been
taught. People no longer felt they could rely upon the future, and they fell upon Boris’s musical prophecies as if they were sparkling ponds in the desert. 

Item

Khatuna employed a private detective to collect information about Boris.

‘Anything suspicious, I want to know it. Anything at all. Anything that can be made to
look
suspicious. There are a lot of stories circulating about him, so it shouldn’t be hard.’

The detective blew air both ways through his lips.

‘He’s a public figure, he’s a famous musician. It’ll cost a lot to keep tabs on him.’

‘I’m in security: I know what I’m talking about. He has no protection; he goes everywhere normal people go. He’s an easy target. Just do what I’m telling you.’

Item

Irakli went to gather food for himself and his pig. At the back of a local supermarket were bins into which mountains of good food were thrown out for regulatory reasons. He picked out cheese, meat, vegetables and a couple of loaves of olive bread. He found a packet of macaroons, which he thought Khatuna would like. Then he went for a walk in the Midtown orchards, where the last apples were still on the trees. His arm was mended now, and he felt light without his plaster.

In recent weeks, Irakli’s poetry had returned without warning. Now the obscure feelings of his heart broke out of him in words, and poems arrived, fully formed, without any urging. His book was nearly finished.

The season was ending, and the ground was covered in rotting apples. Irakli found a few good ones on the branches and put them in his bag. He returned home, and let the pig in from the balcony. It had already grown since Boris first brought it. It had developed the habit of staring longingly into Irakli’s eyes.

Item

Plastic flipped back through the article in consternation. He did not know what to believe any more.

The CEO had called him at 7.15 on a Sunday morning.

‘You get the
Times
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Read the magazine cover story and then call me back.’

The photo on the cover showed a simple stone room, with a wood stove in the middle where two men stood to keep warm. They had guns slung over their shoulders, and they watched two other men at a game of chess. One of these chess players sat amply, like their leader.

The journalist had managed to secure an interview with a fugitive Serbian general wanted for war crimes committed during the conflict in Yugoslavia. He had been blindfolded during his journeys to and from the hideout, which he surmised was in Montenegro. He had spent two days with the voluble Serb, who lived in a house in the mountains with only four bodyguards for company. A priest from the Serbian Orthodox Church stayed in the evenings to lead them in chanting and prayer.

The journalist was informed that a world-famous musician was coming to play a concert in the house.
Do not think we are sad people
, said the guard.
Do not think we are poor
. That evening, to the journalist’s astonishment, Boris arrived in a helicopter. This was during his European tour, and he came with a Hungarian accordion player he had met on his travels. The two of them played the whole night. The general wept for hours, drinking to Boris and his genius, and kissing his hands. In the morning, Boris got back in the helicopter to resume his tour.

‘The beauty of music,’ said the war criminal, shaking his head as the
helicopter receded above the fir trees. ‘Whatever happens, no one can take
that away from
you.’

Item

Khatuna put her business card on the table. The man had heard of her
company. He nodded at her title:
Vice-President Security Systems
.

‘You’ve been referred to me,’ he said, ‘because of the nature of your information. But so far I don’t have a real detailed … I only have a basic outline of what it concerns.’

Khatuna had a folder of papers and photographs. She placed it in front of him.

‘This is a file about an organised crime network operating between New York and a number of eastern European countries. Boris is a key player in these operations. His musical activities provide a front.’

‘Interesting,’ said the agent. He flicked through the folder, dwelling on the photographs. ‘These things happen all the time, of course, but you don’t expect it to happen with … When it happens with someone so well known it’s a bit of a surprise.’

He took out a sheet of paper and began to read.

Khatuna looked at the FBI crest on the wall behind him. It showed a pair of scales surrounded by a wreath. She was disappointed by it. What harm could you do to someone with a pair of scales? She had thought it would show a gun, at least, or maybe a missile.

In America, the strength lay with the government, and if you wanted to destroy someone you had to get the government to do it. But there was little gratification in that. People in the government looked like bus drivers and chewed their nails. Considering this man’s ugly suit and tie, Khatuna mentally jabbed her fingers twice down her throat.

Item

A song was released on the internet: a duet between Boris and a singer. There was no documentation of the performance, and it was never clear who had written it.

Everything that was difficult or obscure in Boris’s other music fell away for that song, and what was left was the simplest, most heartrending beauty. The song became a worldwide sensation of the purest sort. For a time, people played it everywhere, and it was the greatest moment of Boris’s fame.

Item

Boris never went back to his apartment, and Plastic did not know how to find him any more.

People called him every five minutes to get hold of Boris. They wanted him on TV. They wanted to hear him speak. They wanted to know what he thought about every possible subject.

Plastic read about him in the newspapers, like everyone else. He read about him getting kicked out of restaurants, and beaten up by angry film stars. He read about the drugs he took, and his excessive sexual tastes.

Boris appeared on the covers of all the big music magazines. He was the future of jazz and the future of folk. He had raw, beat-up good looks. He said crazy things that looked great in print.

Boris had ceased to be a single person. There were too many stories about him for them all to be true.

Plastic read that Boris was a sadist and a fake. He read he hated the American government and gave his money to terror. He read he played in Baghdad and Kabul. He read he was a laundry machine for eastern European crime money. He read he liked prostitutes and sometimes conducted rehearsals without clothes on.

Boris’s music began to torment Plastic. He stopped his ears in the streets, trying to shut out the radio play, the endless replays of bars and restaurants. They had turned his music into a public neurosis. As if they could absorb it only by beating it to death.

Item

The newspapers reported that two eastern European men who had entered the United States as part of Boris’s road crew had been arrested for drug trafficking. Pavel Alexandru, twenty-eight, from Constanta in Romania, and Vladislav Penkov, twenty-four, from Plovdiv in Bulgaria, were accused of bringing substantial quantities of MDMA into the country from the Netherlands. One journalist wrote:

In their official statements, however, the police emphasised that Boris himself was not involved with these activities. 

Item

The CEO of Universal said,

‘Are we going to let him attend, or not?’

‘He’s the brightest star this company has,’ said Plastic. ‘Not sending him would be suicide.’

The CEO had lost interest in Plastic’s opinions, and did not reply.

‘I agree with Plastic,’ said somebody else. ‘We can’t pull an artist like that out of the Grammy Awards. He’s nominated in every category there is. We’d look like idiots.’

‘The song that made this guy most famous,’ said the CEO, ‘we had no hand in. We don’t own it, and we’re not making money from it. So you tell me: how can we put him forward as
our guy
in the awards?’

‘I know we all wish that song had never happened. But let’s just admit it is a
gorgeous
piece of music. You can’t take that away. It’s like Louis Armstrong singing “Wonderful World” – you just can’t argue. Everybody loves it. We put that guy up in the Grammys and it knocks everyone else out of the park.’

‘How did that song get away from us?’ said the CEO. ‘Can someone remind me how the
fuck
that one got away?’

Item

When Irakli came home, the radio was on in Khatuna’s room and her door was open. She was standing naked in front of her mirror. Her dark hair fell tousled down her back, and above the curve of her buttocks was tattooed a terrible black eye.

She was shooting video of herself with her phone.

Irakli was paralysed with confusion. He crept out of the front door, walking backwards, undoing his steps. When he came back, later, he was careful to make a lot of noise.

Khatuna was dressed. She was putting on make-up. There was welding going on outside, and shadows kept flashing on the ceiling.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Irakli.

‘We’re going to a casino,’ said Khatuna. ‘I want to gamble. Tonight I want to drink and gamble like a falling empress.’

‘People never win in casinos. They win once, and then they give it away.’

‘I’m not going there to win,’ said Khatuna. ‘I’m going to lose. I’ll take Plastic’s money and bleed it out on the tables.’

‘What has Plastic done?’

‘Nothing! Plastic is not capable of doing a fucking thing.’

She had drawn Cleopatra flourishes on her eyes, and her lipstick was wild. She turned away from the mirror.

‘No man will ever be Kakha,’ she said. ‘All my life I will be in mourning.’

Irakli said her secret name, silently and to himself. He thought she looked like a whore.

Item

Irakli’s book of poetry was complete. He laid the manuscript on the table. He did it with some ceremony, and the parrot said,
Dinner is ready!

‘
Androgyne
,’ proclaimed Irakli, reading out the title. For his book began with lost bliss: when creatures were whole, before they were separated into yearning halves of men and women. On the title page was a quotation from Plato:

For a moment, Irakli was distracted by the pig, which was sitting by his chair, staring at him. Sometimes the animal was uncanny. Irakli stared back at it. He thought,
You’re the oldest creature I know. You’re only
a few months old, and everything is ancient about you
.

He opened the manuscript and began to recite the book aloud. He read from beginning to end. Somewhere along the way he went silent, and read in his head.

It became dim in the room as he went through, and when he had finished he rubbed his eyes from the strain.

Nauseous waves flowed over his skin, like an oil spillage in a mustard field. He tossed the manuscript on the floor and covered his eyes with his hands.

His book was completely worthless.

B
ORIS STOPS OFF
to buy a car. It is impossible to get anywhere in Los Angeles without one, and they are going to be there for several days. He chooses a blue convertible, and puts it on his credit card.

Irakli sits in the passenger seat. Boris says,

‘I used to drive a tractor on the land, and sometimes an old Lada, while we still had gasoline. But never on roads like this.’