Rana Dasgupta - Solo

‘It’s a new place, Mother. I think you’ll like it.’

She was very weak by then, but she was enlivened by the plan, and told stories from the old days.

‘Do you remember that Yezidi priest we met that time, near Mosul? What a beautiful place it was, deep grass, rice fields, and everywhere oleander. Storks wading in the rice.’

She was tiny in her seat, her head wobbling with the motion of the car. She looked out of the window, away from Ulrich, out across the flat fields. Her sunglasses looked too big for her now.

‘They had this idea that human beings would become smaller and smaller. Each generation smaller than the last, until they turned into tiny, insignificant creatures. Do you remember? What a fantastic mythology they had! Then a giant would come at the end of time and drink all the seas and rivers until he was full of water, and unable to move. And a mighty worm would come and eat him. Then the whole universe would be flooded and cleansed, and it would be time for judgement.’

‘That’s what he said?’

‘Yes. I remember it like yesterday.’

Her voice was almost gone, and she rasped through her words. It was Sunday, and the road was abandoned. Black factories went by, and orange housing blocks, and flocks of goats. Thistles sparked purple by the side of the road. Up the distant hills was a padding of clumpy forest.

‘We are so lucky in Bulgaria,’ she said. ‘We have the best yogurt and the best countryside.’

He had heard her say this so many times before.

‘Do you remember the picnics we used to have around here? When you were a child? I think about them so often. What beautiful times they were! We drank from pure rivers, and you could cry at the wealth in the trees. Do you remember?’

Ulrich inclined his head in a way that said neither yes nor no . It was a gesture he used often with her. But she was dying, and they had these two hours in the car. It gave her an autobiographical zeal.

‘Before I die,’ she said, ‘I want to confess something. I have no one else to tell it to.’

Ulrich’s forearms throbbed on the wheel. She said,

‘Long ago, in Baghdad, I had an affair with a man. You were a child, always needing attention, and he was so perfect with you. He was a Kurd. His name was Karim. It’s wonderful to say it out loud. Even now.’

She was looking away from him, out of the window. She said,

‘I loved him. It’s the most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me. We went on a journey together — you were with us, but you were very small — and everything we saw was magical. In the camp I kept myself alive with that feeling from so long ago. What did your father give me to draw on? When we came home I was pregnant with Karim’s child, and I never told anyone, not even him. I didn’t know how to contact him. I managed to get rid of it. I had to do that, for your sake.’

She wept silently. She said,

‘I’m sorry, Ulrich. You were a beautiful thing too. I don’t want you to think …’

But Ulrich was cynical.

‘I always wondered why you talked so endlessly about that part of our lives. All along, it was only because of a man.’

‘No, I loved those places,’ she said. ‘With all my heart. We’ve been trapped so long in this accursed country.’

She gave way to a fit of coughing.

‘I always hoped,’ she said, wiping the saliva from around her mouth, ‘you would find more love in your life.’

The seal around the car windows was broken, and the air was loud. Ulrich saw a formation of military jets flying overhead. He caught something in the distance.

‘We’ve arrived,’ he said.

Steel chimneys slashed the horizon, and white reactors clambered over it like domed pastries. In the distance, the ground gave way to a sea of mercurial piping. Vast clouds drifted from the coolers, white like dough stretched across the sky.

‘What is it?’ said Ulrich’s mother.

‘We’re near Kozloduy. Nearly at the border — the Danube is just ahead, and then Romania. And this is a miracle of our times, Mother. The first nuclear power plant in our country.’

‘ That’s what you’ve brought me to see?’

He parked the car, and lifted her out into her wheelchair. The land was very flat, and monumentally empty. While he walked round the car shutting the doors, the wheelchair stood in the road. She had a blanket on her knees, battling the rushing air.

He wheeled her as close as possible, but he was unable to push her up the verge. The fence was topped with barbed wire, and plastic bags were caught there, thundering in the wind. They were a long way from the installation, but the basic structures were visible, and Ulrich explained how the system worked. His mother listened with her tortoiseshell sunglasses on. Her white hair, so thin by then, was all blown to one side.

Ulrich took out their lunch, because she had to eat regularly. He knelt on the grass, feeding her with a spoon. The skies were grey, but beams of intense sunlight occasionally broke through, shining in their eyes. Elizaveta’s face was expressionless as she ate. Ulrich said,

‘Happy birthday, Mother.’

She began to weep.

‘How could you ever think I would want to come here?’ It took a long time for her to chew with her gums. ‘I am a nineteenth-century woman, with cancer. And this is where you bring me?’

‘I thought you’d appreciate a day out of Sofia,’ he said simply.

When she had finished eating, he wiped her mouth, and tried again to push the wheelchair up the incline, but it was too much for him. He left her sitting in a clearing by the side of the road, as occasional cars shook the ground, and climbed up to the fence to examine the power plant, shielding his eyes, and shouting descriptions and explanations to her down below.

She was put into hospital.

She was too old to withstand chemotherapy, so it was only a matter of time. She was allergic to morphine, and in her last days she could not sleep with the pain. After she died he found in her hospital bed some pages she had scribbled during the nights, while he slept in a chair. She had made plans for her funeral: she wanted roses to be given to all the mourners.

Once, she opened her eyes and said to him,

‘Have you heard the latest joke?’

‘No.’

‘A woman goes into a store and asks for six eggs. The shopkeeper says, You’re in the wrong store. Here we have no meat. You have to go next door if you want no eggs .’

He tried to smile.

‘The doctor told me that,’ she said.

She was no bigger than a child under the bedclothes.

‘You’re allowed to laugh,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing tragic about disease, or age, or empty shops. It’s time for me to die. The tragedy is when people don’t feel around you, and never laugh. I hope you laugh some more when I’m gone. Look into the eyes of others, Ulrich, and you’ll see there’s still a field of life there.’

Her hair was thin and greasy, and her plait kept falling open. She asked him to tie it up again.

He propped her up and sat behind her.

‘Mother,’ he said.

He was nearly seventy years old, plaiting his mother’s wispy hair. He broke down weeping.

‘I can’t live without you. I won’t survive.’

He curled himself around her, sobbing. She put her hand on his head.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Just remember everything we did.’

When her body gave out, he went back home. The house was cold.

It was as if all her possessions had died with her, for they were noticeably less animated than before. He touched her glasses, her knitting, her lifeless books. He overturned her shoes to contemplate the soles’ wear. He found the enormous pile of papers she had typed over the years, and, for the first time, he allowed his curiosity out. He flicked slowly through this thing she had made, seeing the curlicue script down the left-hand margin, inked in by hand.