Rana Dasgupta - Solo

Plastic says, ‘You composed that yourself?’

The question is superfluous, and Boris does not expend effort on it. From outside comes the mahogany call of a woodpecker, which he answers on his instrument.

There is an elastic energy in Plastic’s inner thighs: this is not some fake thing he has just heard. His senses are sharpened. Some nameless gratitude has descended on him and made his head light.

He takes a CD player from his bag and puts the headphones over Boris’s ears. He reads the boy’s face, watches his eyes widen. It is one of Plastic’s old records. The best he has ever done.

Boris has to sort a few things out before he leaves. He goes into a house and comes out with his violin case and a few possessions tied up in a sheet. He sets his pigs loose and speaks to them roughly. He touches his forehead to the earth and tastes the air with his tongue. Then he gets in the car.

10

KHATUNA WAS READING The Fountainhead when she realised she was pregnant. She was reading The Fountainhead and humming along to the song in her headphones. Her cigarette tasted perfect this morning.

Her phone flashed. The message invited her to a dance party hosted by a foreign vodka company. A DJ was coming in from Paris.

Somewhere between deleting the message and picking up her book, Khatuna realised she was pregnant with Kakha’s child.

Kakha wanted their wedding to be the biggest event in Georgia since Old King David won Tbilisi, but Khatuna bargained him down to a small affair in the mountains.

She was becoming wary of the dangers that lurked in crowds. Kakha spent the morning with the priest, walking out along a rocky path, and returning after several hours to pray in the church, the priest whispering in his ear while he knelt on the stone floor.

The couple were married in the afternoon. Irakli had refused to come to a gangster wedding , so the guests were all from Kakha’s side.

‘I will follow you for ever,’ said Khatuna into Kakha’s ear. ‘I will be a woman in a veil in the desert, following you.’

The crowd became drunk and festive. There were village musicians, and enormous piles of country khinkali , and the men danced, bellicose. Kakha disappeared and his daughter, Nata, talked to Khatuna about fame, and parties, and her fashion line that was opening up in London. Her leg was still in plaster because she had recently driven her Porsche into a wall.

Khatuna savoured her feelings. She thought about Kakha. She pictured him looking at a waste patch of earth and imagining what he could build there. In the small of her back she had tattooed a great eye, so there would never be a time she was not looking at him.

There were moments when she was terrified by the emotions that would be unleashed when her baby came into the world. The agonies she went through for her brother were already bad enough. In her pregnancy, she had stopped going anywhere without bodyguards. Her child would never be vulnerable to the dangers she had suffered: she would build defences so formidable that nothing could ever come close.

She had recently moved her mother and brother into a bigger apartment with better security. She had her brother under surveillance now, but it was discreet, so he would not know.

She left Nata talking and went to find Kakha. He was leaning against a wall outside listening to Vakhtang, who paced around him, ranting.

‘I’m your cousin . I’m family . Have you got so big you’ve forgotten your values?’

‘Who takes care of you, Vakhtang? I pay for your cars and your women, and you don’t do a stroke of work.’

‘I want to work! You give everything to her! People come, and you only introduce them to her. You sent her to those meetings in Dubai. You buy her diamonds. And now you’ve married her. What will happen to me? She doesn’t like me. She’ll kick me out of the house. You give her all the power.’

‘She’s a good businesswoman. She says she’ll do something and it’s done. Do you think you could ever have pulled off the deal she did with the Armenians? You’re erratic. You leave me in the dark about what you’re doing. You steal my friends’ cars and leave me to deal with the mess. You seem to think it’s only about dressing up. We’re running a big business. It’s no joke.’

‘I was managing the hotels just fine. Everything was fine until you pulled me out.’

‘Because you don’t understand politics, Vakhtang. You do something, and you carry on doing it, and you don’t realise that everything else has turned round a hundred and eighty degrees. Our situation is delicate now. You don’t realise what a fucking range of things I have to think about since those towers came down in New York. There’s a war in Afghanistan, the whole world is suddenly on our doorstep. The Americans are coming in here, muscling in on my oil, because they don’t want to depend on the Middle East any more. I have to think fast. You don’t understand these things. You don’t understand the big picture.’

‘I can learn,’ said Vakhtang. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

‘Don’t push me to say things I don’t want to say.’

Vakhtang started kicking the wall.

‘I worship you, Kakha. Since I was a kid, I’ve always worshipped you.’

‘A lot of people worship me. Do I put them all in charge of my business?’

Later on, Kakha joined Khatuna in their bedroom. Khatuna smiled and said,

‘Our wedding night.’

Kakha pushed the covers away and looked down at her body. The electric light threw rocky shadows behind her nipples.

‘A man can never compare to the beauty of a woman,’ he said. ‘There’s always that basic inequality.’

‘You still think I’m beautiful?’

He kissed her shoulder. He said,

‘Can we announce our son yet?’

‘It may be a girl .’ She hit him playfully. ‘It’s still early. I want to be sure.’

Kakha put his arms around Khatuna and held her against his body. He said,

‘I keep getting this dream. I get up in the middle of the night and that statue, the Mother of Georgia, is calling to me. I open the window and float out into the night, far above the ground. I drift over Tbilisi, and my eyes are like floodlights, and there’s nothing I cannot see.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think it means?’

He shrugged. He kissed her ear. He said,

‘I got a phone call this evening. Some of our men were attacked in the lobby of the Sheraton. Four men came out of nowhere. We lost two of our own guys, and we killed three of theirs.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Khatuna, and she put her hand involuntarily to her stomach.

‘It was a mess,’ said Kakha. He sighed helplessly.

‘Listen: I want to take you on a little drive,’ he said. ‘Now we’re married, there’s something I want to show you.’

They sped out of town in a procession of white Toyota Landcruisers, taking no notice of the roadblocks where policemen gathered bribes.

‘You and I need a proper army now,’ said Kakha. ‘That’s what keeps me awake at night. With the Americans coming in, our stability’s falling apart.’

The road was empty, and they cut quickly through the hills. The driver peered through the arcs carved by the wipers from the windscreen’s mud.

‘All these smugglers and terrorists in the Georgian mountains, running from the war in Afghanistan — the Americans are going to come in and get them. The Americans will come in, the Russians will come in, and between one and the other, Shevardnadze will go down. Then all hell will break loose. Every vulture in the Caucasus will come to tear up his corpse, and the country with it. Shevardnadze’s a bastard but at least he’s held things together.’