Rana Dasgupta - Solo

‘Of course they do.’

He contemplated the meat. He said,

‘How much milk do you get from an American pig?’

The princess said,

‘I don’t know. I live in Spain.’

She put the question to the table, provoking lively debate.

‘Do pigs give milk? I suppose they must.’

‘Pigs give bacon.’

‘ Suckling pig.’

‘We’re educated people, and we don’t know this?’

‘Pigs are mammals, for Christ’s sake!’

‘ Suckling pig! ’

The waiters brought more steaming plates, and looked for gaps in which to put them. Cooked snakes were coiled up in bowls, and the party examined them with ghoulish delight. There was a discussion about outlandish things people had eaten. Dog and alligator.

‘I once ate monkey brain,’ said a soft-spoken actress.

The group embarked upon a compilation of things eaten in China. There was a list of places where people supposedly ate insects.

‘In Papua New Guinea they eat the dugong.’

Haloed with alcohol, the conversation seemed brilliant. It carried on for a long time, coursing through the gathering, and no one noticed that Boris had slipped away, taking Irakli with him.

Irakli could not stop talking about Boris’s music.

The rain was harder than ever, and the wind was extreme. Irakli spoke breathlessly, as they ran through the streets,

‘This is what I thought of while you were playing. I saw joyful barbarians dancing through a stormed palace. They were hanging up their flags. They were running through the priceless rooms throwing cigarettes on the carpets and posing for photos in gold bathtubs. Chandeliers were smashed on the ground, and they were stashing paintings in suitcases. They were inventing ministries for themselves, and choosing imperial bedrooms for their offices. It was wonderful and terrifying.’

‘You say it so well,’ said Boris. ‘I could never say it like that.’

They were drenched when they arrived at his apartment. Boris brought Irakli a towel and a fresh shirt.

The apartment was on the forty-fifth floor, and there was almost nothing in it. There was an enormous window that looked over the Hudson River into New Jersey.

Irakli was rubbing his head with the towel. He said,

‘I want you to read my poetry. When I was listening to your music I was thinking, He has felt the same things! He’s had the same intimations I’ve had all my life . I’m trying to put them into words, like you put them into music.’

Boris poured brown liquid from a bottle with no label. Irakli continued,

‘When I saw how easily your music came I thought maybe the task is just too difficult for me. It’s beyond me.’

‘You’re just young,’ said Boris. ‘It will take you another twenty years.’

‘You’re the same age as me. But look how you play!’

Boris grinned.

‘Don’t judge me by what you heard tonight. Wait a few years, and you’ll hear what I can do!’

They drank avidly. They were filled with the rare elation that two people sometimes feel on finding each other. They wanted to know everything about each other. They told the story of their lives until that point. Irakli told Boris about Khatuna, and what had happened to her.

‘That was her?’ asked Boris. ‘Who was there tonight?’

‘She doesn’t usually look like that: she’s dyed her hair.’

‘I didn’t like her,’ said Boris.

He held his violin in his lap, and his left hand fluttered on the strings. Irakli was taken aback.

‘Men usually enjoy meeting her,’ he said.

The night passed, but the weather did not let up. The wind whistled around the building, and the window was lashed with rain. They talked about coming to America. Boris talked about the startling new sounds of New York: the stricken alarm of reversing trucks, the industrial growl of electronic shutters, the hydraulic sigh of brakes. He talked about the way that strangers passing on the sidewalks looked you boldly in the eye.

Boris and Irakli were sitting facing the window, and they could see blades of lightning as they talked, and the hypnotic stream of car lights leaking into New Jersey from the Lincoln Tunnel. And then they saw a concrete water tower collapsing on the other side of the river.

The tower stood next to the highway, and it was brightly lit. First they saw the pillar sway unnaturally. With the enormous weight of the bulb on top, it could not right itself and, majestically, the entire structure slowly toppled over. Irakli started as it crashed, but from this distance all was silence.

The tower fell away from the highway into unlit grassland where nothing could be seen. A moment later, a raging wave emerged from the blackness and smashed over the highway, sweeping cars away to make a semicircular lake, blazing in the floodlights, while more collisions spread up and down the lanes in chain reactions.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Irakli.

‘I know!’ said Boris, incredulous.

The traffic tails, red and white, hardened in each direction. The water reached its greatest extent over the highway and began to subside. Silent sirens converged on the zone.

‘I wonder if anyone died down there,’ Irakli wondered dreamily.

Boris reached for his violin and began to play. He said,

‘I’ve spent nearly all my life on my own. Really alone, with nothing but the land and the animals and my violin. I wasn’t unhappy: I never thought that other people could help me with the essentials. But already I feel I’ve known you all my life. My music will be better now I’ve met you.’

Irakli smiled. Morning approached. The storm wound down, and the first sun appeared. Boris played slow melodies.

Irakli had been drinking for hours, and wanted to close his eyes. The sofa felt so warm.

He let Boris’s music flood over him.

Nothing can be wrong — the fancy? the corruption, the border?

Every one a flagrance, a fragrance that he made:

he made a delicate amethyst out of winter,

a crystal dodecahedron through a pinhole peephole — he snowflake he malleus he

cochlea he

eyelid .

14

WHEN KHATUNA AWOKE there was no one next to her. The room was strange, and her dress was snagged on a post at the foot of the bed. She rescued it, slipped it on, and walked out of the room. Plastic was already in his gym clothes. He had muffins and coffee on a tray.

‘I was about to get you up,’ he said, and kissed her.

He was handsome, which made up for a lot.

She sat down.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘I’ve been in this room before.’

‘No,’ he said, smiling.

‘I came here with Boris. I sat on this sofa.’

She took out her phone and showed Plastic the video she had shot in that very place. There was this room, and Khatuna’s face, stolid and foreign in the image, and the sound of Boris’s music in the background.

‘He brought you here? ’ he said curiously.

‘I assumed it was his apartment,’ Khatuna said.

She got up and walked around, curious again. There was an ancient French tapestry on the wall, and a large Venetian mirror whose silvering had curdled like diesel oil in the rain. There was a set of old engravings of Vienna. There was a carved wooden statue on a pedestal, a Buddha with an arm missing.

She said,

‘Why is your place like this? You’re a rich man but all your things are falling apart.’

Plastic said,

‘Those antiques cost more money than you’ll see in your whole life.’

‘You like old things,’ she replied. ‘That’s not good.’

He kissed her on the ear.

‘I like young things too,’ he said.