Rana Dasgupta - Solo

‘Who are all these people?’

She knelt beside Kakha, and wiped his face with her sleeve. She whispered in his harrowed ear,

‘Couldn’t you even wait to see your baby?’

Kakha’s Rottweiler galloped into the house, skidding on the marble. The circle of people parted to let him in. His nose bobbed against Kakha’s motionless hand. He whined, and paced around the body. He sniffed Kakha’s face and began to lick at the brains on the floor.

Vakhtang bellowed,

‘Fucking dog!’

He kicked the animal in the jaw. The dog turned on him, but Vakhtang flailed at the animal until it ran away.

Khatuna wondered where Kakha’s daughter was. She was aware there were people in the house she did not know, come to ransack secrets. She felt an urgent need to escape.

She was in a daze as she ran upstairs to gather her things. She did not even know what documents she was flinging into her bag, and she hurried downstairs, passing men coming up. She heard a man on his mobile phone whispering, Wineface has been shot . She took a final look at Kakha laid out, put her hand on his stagnant chest.

She made for the front door, and Vakhtang flung his arms around her, sobbing.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I have to leave,’ she said.

‘Take me with you.’

‘I’ll call you soon.’

Her driver was standing by the door.

‘Take me to town,’ she said to him.

He stared at her with a new defiance. He was a big man, and he did not move. He simply leaned against his pillar, took a slow drag of his cigarette, and drew his finger like a knife across his throat.

Khatuna ran out of the house alone, carrying her bag; she walked out of the gates and down the hill until she found a church. She called her brother and asked him to meet her there. He arrived twenty minutes later and found her inside, rocking on a stone step, her arms clasped round her knees.

When she saw him she collapsed into his arms, baying like a terrified animal. Her convulsions did not cease, and there was nothing he could offer to staunch her grief. She screamed in the empty church, she was impossibly heavy in his arms, she was like a paralysed woman who could not support her limbs. He tried to soothe her, reciting her secret name. She made bestial sounds and he shouted at her to bring her back.

She said she would die here. She wanted only to die. He said,

‘You will survive this.’

The church was silent, and no one came in. The saints shone in the afternoon sun.

She stroked his face. She said,

‘I have to leave the country. I promised him I would.’

She struggled with herself. He is here. I cannot leave him . Then she took the other side. They will kill me if I stay. I won’t let them put me on TV crying at his funeral .

She said she was not strong enough.

‘You have to come with me,’ she said.

‘What about Mother?’

She began crying again. Will she die without you? I will die. I will die if you don’t come .

He nodded. He said,

‘I don’t have a passport.’

‘I have it all. I’ve got papers for you. Passport, visa, everything. I’ve had them for months, for just this situation. You’ll have to travel under a different name.’

They took a taxi to the airline office. Khatuna looked out at the city, trying to comprehend that Kakha was not part of it. They drove past the street where he had been gunned down, and she fancied there was something festive in the way the people walked there. A young man stuck his head out of a speeding car and yelled into the wind.

There was only one flight that evening, going to Vienna. The man made a couple of phone calls and printed their tickets. Khatuna looked blankly at the bright tourist posters of Amsterdam and Jerusalem. She had the sense that the objects in the room were not fixed, as they appeared, but floated an imperceptible distance above the floor.

They took a taxi to the airport. Khatuna said, You haven’t even met him , and this thought made her weep again. You don’t know anything , she said, thinking of the secret unborn baby. She buried herself in her brother’s shoulder. She said,

‘You would like him, I know you would.’

He laid his head on the back of the seat. He thought of his mother, and all the things he would leave behind. He watched the sky through the back window, where pigeons had settled on the lamp-posts. He counted four on the first, three on the second, then two, then one, then zero. A countdown of pigeons , he thought to himself.

They arrived at the ramshackle airport, apartment towers falling on every side and UN jets bristling on the runways. Inside, the posters warned women not to sell themselves into prostitution.

Irakli called his mother. He wandered away for the conversation, and Khatuna could not hear.

They arrived in Vienna late at night. Irakli fell asleep in the hotel. Khatuna left him and walked around the city in her fur coat, the one Kakha had bought her.

She walked round the Ringstrasse, where cars droned indifferently past the mournful opera house and the Bürgtheater, filling the night with the vinegar smell of burnt diesel. The place seemed to be astonishingly full of antique shops. The streets were desolate. She saw a man standing alone in the middle of the night, watching silent football replays on a television in a shop window.

She reached the hotel after sunrise and slept all the next day: a leaden, frozen sleep from which Irakli could not wake her. He sat by the bed and began a poem. The title was, The strange laughter when, looking for a place to lie down in secret, we crawled beneath a table and discovered, on its underside, the scrawls we had made together as children .

Khatuna awoke in the evening and discovered her mobile phone had been cut off and all her credit cards stopped. She called Vakhtang from the hotel phone.

‘Has anyone said what happened?’

‘Some people say he stopped to buy milk, and they opened fire. It doesn’t sound right. Kakha didn’t do that kind of thing. He didn’t go and buy milk.’

‘Where are you now?’

‘I’m in the house. Nata has moved in here.’

‘I’m sure she has.’

‘They gave her Kakha’s job. They made her head of the national airline. She’s inherited his football club.’

‘They must have made a bargain with her. We have to kill your father but in return we’ll take care of you .’

‘There were speeches in Parliament. They want to name a road after Kakha.’

‘All right. Take care, Vakhtang.’

The tears were running down her face, and she did not want him to know.

He said,

‘Can I come and visit you? It’s terrible here.’

‘You should think about getting a job. Taking care of yourself.’

‘I don’t know what I should do.’

‘Bye, Vakhtang.’

She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling for so many hours that Irakli got worried. He sat next to her and held her gingerly.

‘Are you all right?’

She whined in the darkness,

‘I already lost my father, and now he is gone too.’

He moaned with her, and held her tight, and she said,

‘I am bad luck for men.’

She lay awake as he fell asleep, and her body began to tremble with a crisis. She leapt up and miscarried in the bathroom. She was nearly three months pregnant, and there was a lot of blood. Weak and dizzy, she cleaned every last trace off the surfaces, not wanting Irakli to know. She went back to bed, and held herself under the sheets, sobbing.

When she awoke the next day she was coldly focused. She went to the phone and called Charles Hahn, the CEO of the construction company she had met at Kakha’s millennium party. She said,