Solo

In one of Max Planck’s lectures, he thought that his father, with his admiration of far sight, would have approved of all those eyes set on the remote country of atoms.

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He took Clara Blum to his room. He had set up a long glass tube with holes drilled along the top. He had removed the horn from a gramophone player and led a pipe from there into one end of the glass tube, while in the other end was a supply of methane. ‘Watch,’ he said, lighting the holes so there was an even line of flames. Then he set the record going and a Beethoven symphony was fed into the glass tube. The sound waves in the tube bunched the gas and the flames dancing on top were arranged as a graph of the symphony. And Clara Blum laughed gaily with his gimmick, and begged to see a hundred other pieces of music in fire.

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How curious it was for Ulrich to find his German name suddenly commonplace.

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The rapturous crowd in the Admiralspalast shouted Bis! Bis! to the American Negroes playing jazz. The musicians exchanged frowns among themselves, hearing English words – Beasts! Beasts! – and in a few minutes they had packed themselves into cars and left Berlin. In their language they say not ‘Bis’ but ‘Encore’.

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Clara Blum had a fascination for the new towers in New York. When wego to New York, they used to say, for all our fantasies. Ulrich once gave her a postcard of the Woolworth Building. Tallest Man-made Structurein the World!

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A man and a woman, refugees, frozen to death on the street, with an infant boy between them who was quite alive, and crying for food.

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Ulrich read that Fletcher Henderson had begun to play jazz only when America’s oppression of the Negro made his further pursuit of chemistry impossible. He had a degree in chemistry and mathematics, but he was a Negro, so he became a bandleader.

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Almost every week, a shattering new scientific idea arrived from Rutherford in Cambridge, Bohr in Copenhagen or Curie in Paris. Someone would read the paper aloud, and young students would march madly around the laboratory, their bodies unable to absorb such news sitting down.

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The first time Ulrich laid eyes on Albert Einstein, he was in the circus, screaming with laughter at the antics of midgets.

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After the struggle, you could tell from the way the police slung the revolutionary into the ambulance that they knew he was already dead.

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Clara Blum loved the dark things that happened in Berlin. She kept Ulrich awake at night reading aloud newspaper articles about all the suicides and murders. For a long time afterwards his love for her would well up again whenever he read a crime report.

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His mother wrote solicitous letters every day, full of enquiries, advice and warnings about the consequences of romantic entanglements. My dearest baby Ulrich, they began each time. This phrase returned to him like a maddening chaperone during his caresses with Clara Blum.

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Walking on the street in the early evening, he saw a famous film actress get out of a limousine in front of the Savoy Hotel.

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Clara Blum helped Ulrich prepare for his examinations, for she was more accomplished in theory than he. ‘I want to make stuff,’ he protested when his throat went hard with academic frustration. ‘I didn’t come to study mathematics. I want to make plastic!’

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Watching the men pushing barges, Ulrich and Clara Blum walked by the river and discussed chemistry, and he suddenly had the feeling that he would be a great man.

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There were many Bulgarians arriving in Berlin, and they used to get drunk together, and speak Bulgarian, and play silly pranks. They spent nights laughing in the steam baths, where men poured in from the brothels and refugees from Galicia got clean from the streets. When German women saw them together in the street they would run away. They called them dark Balkan thugs, and other such things.

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When Ulrich picked up the papers that Albert Einstein had dropped behind him in the corridor, the scientist looked him in the eye and said, ‘I am nothing without you.’ Ulrich managed to say, ‘Nor I you, sir,’ as Einstein turned his back and ambled on. Ulrich has thought back so many times to this moment that the figure in the corridor has transmuted into something more than a man. Now Einstein looks down on him with eyes that scan like X-rays, and his speech comes not from his mouth but from somewhere invisible and oracular.

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The animated electric mannequin in the window of the optician’s shop had spectacles as thick as paperweights, but still reminded him of Misha the fool.

When Ulrich made his abrupt departure from Berlin, the mighty German chemical industry was at its height. He believed afterwards that, if he had completed his degree and remained in Germany, his life might have been very different.

But while the big German companies triumphed through the hyperinflation, which wiped out all their debts, many ordinary investors were ruined. One of them was Ulrich’s father, who, Germanophile to the end, had put the funds remaining from the sale of the old house into German investments. His mother held out for as long as she could, but at last the money dried up for Ulrich’s fees, and for everything else too – and she wrote a desperate letter begging him to come home. Ulrich dropped everything and rushed to Sofia.

8

ULRICH FINDS THAT HE CAN ASSIGN dates to his life only through reference to the events recounted in newspapers. He wonders sometimes why it is not the other way around, and whether it signifies some weakness in him. Should a man not have fostered his own time by which other things could be measured? But he suspects it is the same for others too, and he concludes that the time inside a human is smooth and lobed like a polyp, and only history is striated with the usefulness of dates.

History allows Ulrich to date his return to Sofia with precision. April 1925: for it was only two days after he arrived that the bomb went off in the St Nedelya cathedral, dividing Bulgarian time into before and after. The bombers put their dynamite under the dome and detonated it during a state funeral, wiping out the country’s elite. The city had never seen so many corpses. The king’s was not among them: he was recovering from another assassination attempt, and did not make it to St Nedelya in time.

Sofia filled with foreign journalists. They called it ‘the worst terrorist attack in history’, they talked about ‘the misery of defeat’ and ‘economic collapse’ and ‘more convulsions in the Balkans’. Ulrich took his father to see the damage, where crowds of onlookers and photographers looked up at the missing dome, and the surviving cupolas all askew. The interior of the grand church was filled with rubble, and the air was still hazy with dust. Ulrich’s father said,

‘Everything is fog. I cannot see.’

His mind had gone by that time, but even he was overcome.

Elizaveta wept often.

‘See what has become of your father. He doesn’t get up from that chair. He doesn’t say anything. I have had to sell things to get by.’

She had begun sewing dresses for money, and she was keeping geese to supply to the royal palace, where she knew people in the kitchen. She found many things to do like that.

She said,

‘I’ve found you a job, Ulrich. Remember your father’s friend Stefanov? I think he has something for you. Go and see him.’

She wept again.

‘I’m trying to keep you out of harm. The king has decided he will tear this city apart and root out terrorists for good, and I don’t want you getting caught up in it. Every young man is a suspect. It’s so awful for a mother. Look how thin you are, after all that time away. Did you not eat?’