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‘She’s playing for you, Ulrich. Ever since she heard you were back she’s been asking me when you are coming to see us. We’ve talked about you often, these years.’

Ulrich considered Boris’s face. He felt it had acquired new expressions since he last saw him, and at times it could look entirely unfamiliar.

Boris said,

‘Georgi and I have been involved in several operations. He’s a forger. He makes visas for people going abroad. They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive. I write for some of the underground newspapers. I’ll show you some of my articles some day. You’d be proud of me. Many important people have made it known that they admire my analyses!’

He laughed.

‘But the imbalance of forces is too great at present. Everything is aligned against us. At this point, the greatest service I can render to the world is to stay alive. My parents are suffering with all this, and Magda too. It’s time to get out and let someone else deal with these bastards.’

He drained his vodka.

‘By the way – you’ll like this story – my father sold an invention to your Germans. Have you heard of a company called BASF? They bought a compound he invented. You’ll have to ask him – he loves talking about it.’

‘What was it?’

‘Some kind of resin. He’s been messing around with trees for years, and we never took any notice, and finally he’s come up with something
that people want. It’s a new material that’s useful for electrical insulation, apparently. They paid him quite a lot of money for it!’

Georgi yawned inimically, showing his teeth.

‘I should leave,’ he said. ‘Getting late.’

Boris thought for a moment.

‘Let’s
all
go,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a drink to celebrate your return, Ulrich, and then I’ll go home with Georgi. He has an apartment on his own; no one knows the address. I try not to sleep here, because they often come at night.’

They made to depart. Magdalena was still playing the piano, now some modern work that Ulrich did not know. It was strident and brave, and he looked towards the closed door. Boris smiled.

‘Let me call her.’

She came out of the room, her shirtsleeves rolled up.

‘Goodbye, Magdalena,’ said Ulrich, and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Goodbye!’ she said. She came to the door as they stepped out into the street, and she called after Ulrich,

‘We are all so happy to have you back.’

They wandered through the square around the Alexander Nevski church, whose vastness made it tranquil in spite of the remaining trinket sellers, and the packs of roaming youths. The golden domes were lit up, and the moon shone overhead, almost full.

‘Do you remember this, Ulrich? Berlin hasn’t crushed your memories?’

‘It’s coming back.’

Boris carried an umbrella, the same one from the old days.

‘I haven’t been to Berlin. Or anywhere very much. But I think nowhere else has this altitude. I still love the way that you can look down our streets in the afternoon and see them walled off by cloud. That’s when you feel that the city lives up to its name. A city called
Wisdom
should float on clouds.’

‘What about a city called
Murder
?’ offered Georgi. ‘
That
would need a veil around it.’

Boris sniggered boyishly.

‘Georgi pretends he’s a revolutionary,’ he said. ‘But look at the quality of his suit. His father owns coal mines: you should see the house they have. Even the flies wipe their feet before they go in there.’

Georgi scowled.

‘Have you seen the police?’ Boris asked. ‘Lining every street? That must be new for you. Everywhere you go they’re watching. You should see them when they give chase on horseback. I never realised what a powerful formation was a man on a horse until I saw a poor wretch being chased down in the street. Three hissing men on horses with pistols and raised batons – it was a terrifying sight. They beat him senseless.’

Boris led them down a narrow passageway and through a courtyard. They entered a grimy bar where the wall lights had red handkerchiefs tied around them for atmosphere. They sat down, and Boris called for beer. He looked expectantly at Ulrich.

‘So now. Tell us everything about Berlin.’

Ulrich had been looking forward to this moment, but did not know how to begin.

The sullen barmaid brought a tray of beer. At the next table the men played cards, roaring with victory and defeat. The barmaid said,

‘I hope this time you have money to pay?’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ replied Boris humorously.

They raised glasses. Over the lip Ulrich watched Georgi, whose face became a sneer when he puckered to drink.

There was a loud exclamation at the door, and a large man came bellowing to their table, his arms theatrically spread. Boris gave a broad smile, and stood for the embrace.

‘You’re here! You’re back!’ he cried.

The man shook hands with Georgi and Ulrich, and sat down. He was red faced and ebullient, and talked a lot about his journeys.

The air was thick with vapours: tobacco smoke, and the smoke from the paraffin lamps that had left such ancient black circles on the ceiling. An old man played an out-of-tune piano that had been wedged in behind the entrance so that the door hit it every time someone entered. The red-faced man was saying,

‘Everywhere I went I saw him. First he was looking pointedly at me in a bar in Budapest. Then he was waiting when I came out of a meeting in Vienna. Then, a few days later, I spotted him at my elbow while I watched two men fighting in the street in Bucharest. And every time I caught sight of him, he looked away. I thought he was secret services: I couldn’t understand how they’d got on to me.’

The man was entirely bald, and, as he talked, Ulrich wondered at how the mobility of his lined, arching forehead stopped suddenly and gave way to the utter inexpressive smoothness of his pate.

‘Then I saw the bastard here in Sofia, sitting calmly in a café, and for once he hadn’t seen me. I listened in to his conversation and I realised he was a revolutionary like me. He’s from Plovdiv, would you believe? Now we’re great friends. Turns out he was even more scared of me than I was of him!’

Two other men joined their table, and more beer came. The table was soaked with spilt drink. A large group of people, actors evidently, came into the bar and took over two more tables; and now the noise of arguments and conversations became such that you could hardly hear the person next to you. One man brought out some dog-eared pages from his pocket, offering to read his poems, but everyone protested scornfully.

Boris’s face was shiny in the close air. He asked Ulrich something inconsequential, and Ulrich soon found himself discoursing about music. He told him about jazz, which Boris had never seen; he described the shows in Berlin, and explained about Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson. ‘If only you could have been there,’ he kept saying, because he could not find words to convey the music. He told him about the women who dressed as men and the men who dressed as women, and how no one took any notice in Berlin when they saw lovers of the same sex, for everything was possible in that place. There were people from all over the world, and all they cared about was to do things as well as human beings could do them.

He said,

‘I saw Leopold Godowsky play. I am convinced he is the most spectacular
pianist in the world: he piled his own embellishments upon Liszt. He’s a little man, with small hands. Albert Einstein was in the audience, just a few rows in front of me.’

Boris was impressed by Einstein, and Ulrich went on happily with other anecdotes about the scientist. In his gesticulations he sent flying a full glass of beer, and the man next to him had to mop his thighs. The group at the table was large by now, and the red-faced man was telling another story.

‘The whole Russian army comes through Sofia on its way to fight the Turks. And they see my father, a nine-year-old boy, and take him off with them to war. And they beat the Turks and they bring the boy back to Sofia and say,
Boy, you’ve served us well. Tell us what you’d like to be
and we will help
. They expect him to say, A general, or something like that. But he says, A cook. And the men all laugh, but the boy sticks to his guns so the Russian soldiers, good as their word, take him to Petersburg to work in the tsar’s kitchen.’

More beer came, and the red light began to curdle: Georgi’s face looked almost green in the corner. Ulrich watched the woman behind the bar, who used it to rest her breasts on. She made evident her displeasure when a customer ordered a drink and obliged her to haul them away again.

‘My father works his way up over the years and becomes a great cook, and when our independence comes around, Tsar Nicholas wonders what he can give to the Bulgarian king in congratulation, remembers that my father is from Sofia, and sends him. So my father becomes the Bulgarian royal chef.’

A young woman sat down next to Ulrich and introduced herself as Else; they talked about why they both had German names. She was pretty, but he did not like the prominence of her gums. Her stockings were full of holes.

‘So – listen! – so the years go by. My brother and I grow up. My father makes good money and he builds himself a house in the Centrum, the first two-storey house on the street. The new king comes in, and hears rumours of his chef’s wayward sons. He says he would like to come and
see the house. So my father brings the king to Ovche Pole Street and shows him, and the king asks him how much it cost. My father works in a good margin and says that all in all it cost around twenty-five gold napoleons, and the king takes the money from his purse and gives it to him. And it’s obvious what the money says:
You and I both know that no
one can kill me more easily than you. So don’t forget it was I who bought
you your house
.’

Amid the hubbub, Else smoked unhappy cigarettes and told Ulrich that the girl who used to work here was coming back and she, Else, would be out of a job. The other girl had a more attractive body than she, and this thought made Else melancholy. She asked Ulrich whether he would go upstairs with her and he declined, so she slipped away to another table.

‘My brother keeps company with revolutionaries and he keeps falling into scrapes. The king covers it up each time, but he tells my father,
You have to control those boys because I can’t protect them for ever
. One night two foreigners come into a restaurant and start to harass the girl my brother is courting, who’s having dinner with her mother. Word gets to him and he comes down and shoots both the foreigners dead. Everyone sees it, and most people support him, though it was an extreme response. But the king says,
This time you have to get that boy
out of the country. Otherwise I’ll have him killed
. My father sells some land, gives him the money, tells him to go to Paris, live a good life and never come back.’

Boris was talking to the people on his other side. There was a chorus of shouts at the other end of the bar, where an old singer was sitting. A crowd was pleading with her to perform. The red-faced man took a sip of beer and resumed his story.

‘So last week – he’s only been gone ten months, hasn’t written a single letter since he left – last week he appears at the door, says he’s spent everything and he’s got nowhere else to go. I asked him a thousand times what he’s done with the money but he couldn’t account for it. Paris is full of Bulgarians, apparently, and he fell straight into a high life. His lover was a Romanian princess who loved gambling, and it all seems
to have left him with a perpetual smile on his face. That’s what sends my father close to apoplexy.’

There was laughter all round, and people raised glasses to the obstinate rake.

‘So I tell this idiot he has to leave. Does he realise what he’s doing, coming back here with things as they are? He takes no notice, he’s out every night, and eventually he doesn’t come home. They found him face down in the river yesterday morning. The king was as good as his word.’

They fell silent. Someone murmured,

‘Bastard.’

On the other side of the bar, the folk singer had agreed to sing, and there was enthusiastic applause as she made her way to the piano. She had lost nearly all her teeth. Her companion tuned his violin. Ulrich had a glass wedged between his knees, and Boris clinked it to rouse him from his reverie. He said,

‘Did you meet any girls?’

His eyes were velvet with drink, and a tinnitus started up in Ulrich’s ears as he told the story of Clara Blum. Boris shook his head as he listened. He said,

‘Why have you come back, Ulrich? You love this woman and you’ve left her there. You’ve sacrificed this chemistry degree, which was all you ever dreamed of. What are you thinking?’

‘What could I do?’ asked Ulrich fiercely. ‘There’s no more money to keep me there: that’s the clear reality. You should have seen what my mother wrote to me. Surely you can imagine what it’s like when you hear your mother in despair? I have no choice but to stay here and help her.’

‘Reality is never clear,’ said Boris. ‘It’s never final. You can always change it or see it a different way. If you’d asked me for money I would have given it to you. I want you to become a great chemist, not to sit around here in Sofia. This place is a disaster. You should have asked me, and my father would have sent you money. He’s still got more money than he knows what to do with.’

Ulrich stopped short, for he had never considered such a thing. Boris said,

‘You never once wrote to me from Berlin, as if you broke everything off as soon as you left. And now you’ve given up your degree and this wonderful woman. It’s as if you’re never truly attached to anything. Except your mother, perhaps.’

Ulrich felt foolish. He made a silent resolution to solve future dilemmas by imagining what Boris would say. He said weakly,

‘Well, there’s nothing I can do now.’

Boris drew curly lines with his finger in the beer on the table, extending the reflections of the lamps. The folk singer began to sing, and the bar became hushed. She had a deep, raspy voice, but sang with great sensitivity: