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Magdalena’s father paid for the newly wed couple to honeymoon in Georgia. She wanted Ulrich to see where her maternal family came from, and where she herself had spent many happy times. He loved Tbilisi, and her joy at showing it. Her cousins were eccentric, attentive hosts, who woke them in the middle of the night to climb into horse carts and travel for hours along mud roads just to see an old church, or a beautiful hill. Ulrich took Magdalena to see Tosca in the arabesque opera house, and their happiness was absolute.
When they emerged from their room each morning, Magdalena’s uncle made gestures to Ulrich that would have been obscene if it were not for the great generosity with which he delivered them.
After this journey to Tbilisi, Ulrich never left Bulgaria again.
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Ivan Stefanov invited Ulrich and Magdalena to dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding. There was a strict dress code in the Stefanov mansion, and Magdalena wore her most sumptuous gown. Gloved waiters carried lobster aloft, and each place had its own cascade of crystal glasses. Ivan was merry, and stood up to make a speech about the deep affection he had always held for Ulrich. His lugubrious aunts blinked behind diamond necklaces, and ate little. After dinner Ivan became drunk, and he kept his guests up with his ideas about the company, his gossip about his workers, and his theories about life’s various dissatisfactions. Magdalena signalled several times to Ulrich that she wished to leave, but he could not find the appropriate break in his employer’s monologue, and they did not make their exit until Ivan Stefanov fell asleep in his chair.
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Boris and Magdalena had grown up in luxurious surroundings, which Ulrich’s bookkeeper salary did not allow him to match. They moved into a small house on Pop Bogomil Street, near the entrance to the city. But she liked the house very much, which was a relief to Ulrich. Every time he asked her, she said that she liked it.
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It became a tradition with them that Magdalena came to meet Ulrich after work every Friday, and they went to hold hands over the table in a nearby cake shop. He used to watch for her arrival by the upstairs window where he worked, and every week he had the same stirring of love when he saw her come round the corner, dressed up for him, and so small she fitted inside the eye on the casement handle.
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Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a chemistry trick. He put a glass vial in a bowl of water, and, calling her to watch, broke it open with pliers. The bowl erupted with boiling, and a pink flame hovered over the water. Magdalena started, while Ulrich looked between the bowl and her face, incandescent himself.
‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, as it died down.
‘It’s very pretty. But what does it lead to?’
‘Oh! Something will come of it, one day.’
‘It’s childish, it seems to me.’
There was a coolness between them for the rest of the day. And yet it was on that night that their son was conceived.
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They were once invited to a wedding in the Jewish quarter. The guests spoke Ladino and Bulgarian both, mixed together. There was a klezmer brass orchestra, and Magdalena laughed with the music, and danced unrestrainedly with him, though she was exuberantly pregnant. She kissed him and said, I hope our baby will be Jewish.
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Faithful to her maternal tradition, Magdalena wanted to give their son a Georgian name. Before choosing, she called several names from the front door to see how they would sound when, in years to come, she summoned her boy from his play.
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Elizaveta loved Magdalena. I never expected such a wonderful daughter-in-law, she said. Her own situation was gloomy, with no money and her husband lost, and the life of the young couple gave her new joy. She came to the house with gifts she could ill afford, yodelling and prancing to delight her grandson. Early one sunny morning, when she was drinking tea with Magdalena, Ulrich came back from a walk with his son, and announced, ‘Birds don’t fly away from a man holding a baby!’ and the two women burst into laughter at the expression of awe upon his face.
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An upright piano was brought into the house for Magdalena to continue her practice. Nothing gave Ulrich greater happiness than to sit behind her after dinner and request his favourite pieces, one after another.
As the months drew on, Magdalena ceased to find romance in their meagre situation, and she and Ulrich were led more and more frequently into arguments.
‘When are you going to leave Ivan Stefanov and his leather company? It was supposed to be temporary, and now it’s been years. And you’re still earning the same as when you began.’
‘Think of Einstein. While he was doing his routine job in the Swiss Patent Office he managed to come up with his greatest theories. Perhaps something like that will come to me!’
He smiled bashfully, and she tutted with exasperation.
‘You’re no Einstein! And you have a wife and a son to take care of.’
At social gatherings he asked his acquaintances whether they knew of any jobs that would pay well. But his enquiries lacked conviction, and led to nothing. He said to Magdalena,
‘Perhaps I could set up a little chemistry laboratory here. Investigate some compounds in the evenings. Your father made some money that way.’
She said,
‘Ulrich! Face up to reality! Sometimes I wonder if you know what the word means.’
He looked at her strangely, and exclaimed,
‘What is reality? Is it this?’ – and he banged the table excessively, then the wall – ‘is it this?’
She waited, impassive before his transport, and he said,
‘Did your brother believe in reality? Didn’t he spend his whole time thinking about how to overthrow it?’
‘I am not my brother, Ulrich.’
One day, Ulrich arrived home with an old desk that had been discarded from the office. A colleague helped him cart it, and they carried it to the back of the house.
‘This will be my workbench!’ he announced happily to Magdalena.
‘It’s filthy,’ she said.
‘I’ll clean it. Don’t worry.’
‘There isn’t much room here. How much more junk will you bring?’
He sighed gravely.
‘Please, Magda. I need to do this.’
‘I don’t know what’s happening to the man I married.’
Ulrich took her hands and comforted her. She studied him for a long time, until tenderness flowed back into her cheeks. She put her arms round him and inhaled from his hair.
‘I don’t like to see you living below yourself. You need a plan, Ulrich. Right now I don’t think you have one. Soon all your intelligence will be accounted for in Ivan Stefanov’s books, and you will have none left for yourself.’
He looked at the floor.
‘Mr Stefanov is a decent man. I will talk to him about the salary. He is not a bad man, and I’m comfortable there.’
She put her hands over his ears and peered into his eyes as if they were dark shafts in the earth. She held his head tight and shook it back and forth.
‘Comfortable?’ she said, shaking him. ‘Comfortable? Are you comfortable now?’
And she went on shaking him a bit too long.They attended a lavish party at the house of her parents, who were celebrating their wedding anniversary. The preparations had been going on for a month. Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a new dress, and that night she was joyful among so many people she knew. Her father was tall and jovial, and he put his arm across Ulrich’s shoulders and introduced him around, exaggerating his career: He has a lucrative line inleather.
At home afterwards, Magdalena seemed unusually subdued. They went to bed, but neither could sleep, and they lay side by side, looking at the ceiling.
He said,
‘Why don’t you play the piano any more?’
She sighed with contempt, and turned her back.
Ulrich drifted into sleep. He dreamed of a stormy journey on a ship full of pigs, and a shipwreck, and standing tiptoe on the summit of the mountain of drowned, sunken hogs to keep his mouth above water. When he came to, later in the night, she was standing at the window.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
She scanned the street outside, mournfully, and said,
‘I wish someone would come to take me away.’
He bought some supplies for his laboratory. He lined the bottles up on his bench while Magdalena was out.
He was polishing his shoes in the kitchen when she came in, brandishing a bottle embossed with a skull and crossbones. She cried What’sthis? and, before he could warn her, she hurled it against the wall. He leapt at her as it smoked, and ran her out of the room.
‘What are you doing?’ he cried madly. ‘What are you doing?’
He was shaking with emotion.
‘That’s sulphuric acid. You could have killed yourself.’
She snarled at him,
‘And you bring it into the house when we have a small boy running around?’
In her rage she twirled her fingers at her ears to show his insanity:
‘You are crazy, crazy! Why don’t you just throw him into acid right away? Be done with it!’
She ran away, inconsolable. While Ulrich looked for something to cover his face while he cleaned up the acid, he heard the thrum of bass strings as Magdalena kicked the piano in the other room.
One day, Ulrich came home to find that Magdalena had moved out with their son. Her family closed around her, and Ulrich could not get to see either of them after that.
Their boy was nearly three years old, and Ulrich was used to taking him out for long weekend walks. He would tell him stories of the seasons, and his son would ask ‘Why?’ to every reason, to hear whether the world’s explanation had an end. Ulrich had found peace and fulfilment in simple fatherhood, and now he suffered actual physical pain at his son’s absence. He woke up in the night with the fantasy that the boy was crying in the room. In the morning he leaned into the abandoned cradle to inhale the vestiges of his scent.
Some time later, he read in a book of a Japanese word that described the unique pleasure of sleeping next to an infant. It spoke of a sensuality that was not erotic, but indecent, nevertheless, in its fervour. It captured the feeling of what tormented him so, in those days, by its absence.
Nowadays, that word dances just beyond his grasp.
Later on, Magdalena divorced him and married a Bible scholar from a well-to-do Protestant family. Ulrich went through extremes, and did regrettable things. He drank on his own and made a nuisance of himself in bars.
One night he went to the big house on Krakra Street where his wife and son were now shut up. It was late, and he was incoherent with drink. There were no people in the street, though a dog pestered him, trying obstinately to lick his hand. A light was burning in an upstairs window. There was a route up to the window by the roof of the outhouse.
In his stupor, he was intent on clear thought, and he climbed with excruciating slowness, monitoring the movements of each limb so it did not escape and set off the cymbals of the night. Silence returned his favours, and finally he crouched undetected beneath the lit window, and could lift his head to the view.
Ulrich had heard that Protestants kept their windows uncurtained in order to prove that nothing furtive ever happened inside; and somewhere he believed that they were truly unacquainted with secrecy and urge. Even at this hour, he imagined he might fall upon some scene of decorous domesticity: novel-reading, perhaps, or symmetrical bedtime prayer.
But when he looked inside, the man was fully inside her with his shirt still on, her crying More!, which Ulrich could hear through the glass. The room was scattered with objects he dimly recognised, though his attention was not there: for her mobile breasts shone under the electric lamp, her legs were open, and her face was transported no differently than once for him. The body pushing into her was thin and had a repulsive smoothness to it, as if it were without hair. As he squatted on the roof, his chin just clear of the windowsill, the sweat gushed from Ulrich’s armpits, and his clothes stuck to his back. While the preacher’s fishy foot soles flapped with his exertions, Ulrich became extravagantly aroused by the sight of Magdalena displayed luxuriant, so that he could not tear himself away even as the evangelist flurried his backside to a clench, and let himself collapse upon her, spent.
So it was that Ulrich’s wide-eyed, jerking face, lit up by the room’s blaze like a glossy mask in the night, still bobbed at the window when Magdalena’s gaze came to rest there, and they locked eyes for a strange duration.
No longer fearing discovery, he gave up climbing down and fell most of the way. He lay in the street for a while, his limbs gliding like the after-movements of a dead insect. When he pulled himself up, he saw Magdalena silhouetted in the front door, newly wrapped in a dressing gown. She beckoned to him.
She put her arms around him and clasped him to her, still ripe from the other man, and he let himself be held until she pulled herself away and shut the front door against him.
It was not long afterwards that Magdalena departed for America. Ulrich went to the railway station to watch the family board the train. Her husband extended his hand to cut the ceremony short, and Ulrich stared at its long thin fingers, which reminded him unpleasantly of those kicking feet. He felt vaguely nauseous at the thickness of the man’s new wedding band and the neatness with which he clipped his fingernails, but he took the hand and shook it. Magdalena looked him in the eye, and he mumbled some empty words of good fortune, to which she nodded.
Ulrich wanted to embrace his son, asleep in her arms, but he felt unable to approach Magdalena, and the opportunity passed. The young family boarded the train, and Ulrich thought with bitterness about the prehistoric bombast of his father, who pretended that the railways would unite what was split apart.
As far as he can remember now, he put his palms together in some perplexing gesture of prayerfulness, and turned to leave.
The Bible scholar took Magdalena and her son to Detroit, where he studied at the seminary for some years before going to serve as pastor to a Lutheran church somewhere in Texas. At that point, Magdalena broke off contact with Ulrich and his mother, and Ulrich never knew more about them.
For years afterwards, Ulrich remained convinced that the world was too systematic for a child to become lost to a father, and he continued to expect that his son would reappear at some point – if not in real life, then at least in the lists of names he sometimes read to this end. Lists of sports teams and prize winners, lists of committee members, lists of students sent on exchange visits, lists of convicts, lists of important poets, lists of patriots and botanists, lists of marriages, lists of academic appointments, lists of the approved, lists of the disgraced, and lists of the dead.
Chlorine (#ufdf1ee57-4FFF-11e9-9e03-0cc47a520474)
12
WHENEVER ULRICH’S NEIGHBOUR knocks at the door, he reaches for his pair of dark glasses. A residue of vanity.
She has seen them a thousand times before, but she chooses today to make a comment.
‘They make you look funny, those sunglasses,’ she says. ‘They’re small for you, and a bit lopsided.’
Ulrich explains that he fabricated them himself, and it was difficult to get them as good as this.
‘I never heard of a person making sunglasses before,’ she says. She sounds as if she does not believe him.
Ulrich says he copied them from a pair his mother had. She became extravagant towards the end of her life, and asked her friends to make unnecessary purchases for her in town. She bought this pair for a lot of money: they were made to look like tortoiseshell, and she thought they were glamorous. Ulrich told her he could make a pair just like it himself, without the expense. And he did it, too, but only after she died.
His neighbour is not interested in Ulrich’s story, true or not, and concentrates on what she has come to do.
The shape of the world changed when Ulrich lost his sight. When he had relied on his eyes, everything was shaped in two great shining cone rays. Without them, he sank into the black continuum of hearing, which passed through doors and walls, and to which even the interior of his own body was not closed.
His hearing is still perfect – which is why he wakes up so often at night, cursing the bus station, or the eternal wailing of cats.
