Rana Dasgupta - Solo

‘What were you thinking?’ demands Boris.

They go back into the hotel, where the air conditioning is cold on their wet skin. Irakli’s eyes will not adjust to the light inside, and he is in darkness; his ears are full of water, and he hears only the caverns of his head. They take the elevator back to the room. Irakli lies down on the sofa. He feels drunk and exhausted.

Boris and Lara are kissing on the floor. They have thrown off their wet clothes and they lie naked in the rectangle of sunlight pouring in through the window. Their hair is still wet and their eight limbs move over each other like the lingering tentacles of sea creatures. Lara’s back shines in the sunlight, dappled by the protruding curve of her vertebrae. The hairs on Boris’s calves still hold the wavy pattern of pool water running away. Irakli watches the kneading route of their hands and it is as if he can feel the responsive flesh under his own.

Boris turns to him.

‘Come here.’

Irakli’s ears are completely blocked with the water, and he cannot hear what Boris says, but he understands the gesture. Lara looks round at him, her breasts small and perfect, and they are both open to him, waiting. But Irakli closes his eyes and, as their lovemaking resumes, he succumbs to his own great desire: to sleep. He has a glorious dream.

He wakes up with regret. He does not know how long it has been. The rectangle of light has moved, and Boris and Lara are lying in the dark shadow, passed out in each other’s arms. Irakli tilts his head to better see them lying there.

At that moment the water shifts in his inner ear. There are tremors as it pools together and begins to move; it thunders over the eardrum, and courses through the ear canal, his whole body shivering with the arousal of tiny hairs. It oozes round the curves, unblocking him and letting in the sound — and when it spills out, wet and final, on the cushion, Irakli lets forth an involuntary moan.

16

BORIS LEFT ON TOUR, and Irakli did not know exactly where he was. He was playing in Montreal and Seattle. He was in Madrid and Berlin. He played in Bulgaria. He played in Moscow and Vienna.

Irakli did not hear from him. He saw him only on TV.

Khatuna was always travelling too. She was working on buildings in São Paolo and Dubai. She spent weekends with Plastic in exclusive Caribbean resorts.

Irakli was left alone, trying to write. He composed phrases in his head, and sometimes they seemed good, but when he saw them on paper he realised they were stupid. He wondered whether he would ever write anything worthwhile again.

He received his copy of Boris’s album in the mail. It came wrapped in cellophane and sealed inside with holograph stickers. He cut it open carefully. Inside was the list of track titles, which Irakli had composed himself. They were the only thing he had managed to write for a long time.

The Delight of the Barbarians

It was after you understood everything perfectly that you realised she was speaking an unknown language

What disappointment, when you see a landscape from on high and realise that a map is true

It is thanks to the exacting olfactory standards of moths that night flowers smell so lovely

You assumed his fingernails were yellow from the nicotine until you noticed his toenails were yellow too

He said: ‘Modern life seems safe only because the ones cut down in its path never survive to tell the tale ’

Before demolishing the walls of my childhood, they should have taken care to remove the shadows I left there

Inside the CD was a photograph of Boris. He was pictured in black and white, sitting with his violin on a desolate mountainside against a thunderous sky. The caption read, Genius of the Balkans , but Irakli knew the picture had been shot in Colorado.

Irakli prised the disk out of the holder and put it in his stereo. He drew the curtains, pressed Play and sat down to listen.

When the CD finished he sat for some time in silence. Then he opened a bottle of whisky and turned on the television.

He watched moguls on chat shows explaining why they were rich and everyone else was poor. Because I dared to dream . He watched music videos and men wrestling with crocodiles. He enjoyed the endless cacophony of flicking channels. He saw infomercials for cosmetic surgery, fireplaces and phone sex. Water ballet. Horoscopes. Folk dancing. He watched documentaries on Jesus Christ, Stalin, Alexander the Great, Hitler and the Crusades.

Irakli let himself sink in television. Days floated past, and he did not clutch at them. He realised he could drink entire bottles of liquor, and he would find a blankness there that released him from the irrelevance of his thoughts.

When Khatuna returned home she found him twisted and immobile on his bed. He was unconscious with drink, and smelt like a distillery. He had saliva crust across his cheek.

She shook him until he came to. He opened his eyes and, seeing her, he smiled in bliss. As if still in a dream, he called her by her secret name. She brought water for him to sip, and he came back to life.

She thought of the night, many years before, when she had discovered him wrung out with fever in their freezing room in Tbilisi. She realised that the same scene had recurred many times in her life — coming upon her brother after a separation to find that he had settled down, in her absence, only just this side of death. This accounted for her background of panic whenever they were apart.

‘Why do you do this to me?’ she said, stroking him. ‘Why do you cause me so much pain?’

He closed his eyes with the pleasure of her fingers in his hair. She said,

‘You were always so happy when you were a child. You were the one who kept me happy. What’s happened to you? Now we have a nice life.’

He said nothing. She wet a finger in her mouth and wiped at the residue on his cheek.

‘Tell me if there’s something wrong,’ she said, ‘and I’ll try to understand.’

She was lying next to him on the bed, and her smell was intoxicating. She had that primordial smell of flesh to which one has once been joined. He said,

‘Sometimes this thing descends on me. It’s not like a curtain or a mist. It’s like a bridge falling, or a building, pinning me down. The only way to escape is to give in.’

Khatuna looked stricken.

‘What is this thing with Boris? Are you in love with him? Are you lovers?’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Irakli. ‘It’s nothing like what you think.’

‘I don’t like him,’ said Khatuna. ‘I don’t care how great people think he is: I don’t like the way you are when you’re around him. I think you’d be a lot better if you didn’t see him any more.’

Irakli said,

‘Why don’t we go back to Tbilisi?’

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t walk down the street where Kakha was shot.’

Irakli mused,

‘Things were all right when we were there. I was writing poetry. Mother was not alone.’

‘We’ll go back, I promise,’ said Khatuna. ‘But not yet. I can’t go yet.’

‘Where’s Boris now?’ asked the CEO.

Plastic was in the Universal boardroom, answering questions.

‘He’s supposed to be playing in London tonight,’ he said.

‘Has he arrived?’

‘The band’s there, waiting in the hotel. But they haven’t seen him since Amsterdam.’

‘So he’s missing in action. He goes missing for four days and you just sit here hoping he’ll show up. He’s our hundred-million-dollar property, and you’re telling me you don’t know where he is.’

‘He’s probably spending our cheque,’ said the head of Decca, trying to lighten the mood. ‘He’s just a Bulgarian peasant: give him that much money and he’ll be off at the Ritz doing coke with a couple of hookers.’