won the Nobel Prize – an award that always held enormous allure for him. But as time passed, his ponderous rehearsals became detached from any reality of Berlin, which had moved on without him. His peers graduated, and moved on to more advanced things. New chemical discoveries were made every day, which Ulrich knew nothing of.
Clara Blum began to teach chemistry at the University of Berlin, and married one of her colleagues in the department. Ulrich had to hear it from someone else, for she had broken off all contact when she realised he was never coming back.
Meanwhile, in the cramped space of Ulrich’s Sofia home, his father sat in his chair, showing fewer and fewer signs of life. His leg stump became regularly infected, and every few months a little bit more had to be shaved off the end. And his deafness became more pronounced with the years, until he was finally delivered from the music he disliked so much. When he could no longer hear at all, Elizaveta erupted into a festival of song, chanting arias from Verdi to lah-lah-lah as she worked.
Ulrich took advantage of his father’s deafness, too. He found perverse satisfaction in whispering insults in his ear:
‘You whipped your son so hard into success, and look what he has become. He has come back to this godforsaken place, and now he will never be anything at all. Your son is a failure! How bitter your disappointment must be!’
His father looked at him in bewilderment, his eyes narrow under heavy brows, and he peeled off a ribbon from his tattered mind:
‘Nothing can sing like the lyrebird. It can imitate the song of every other bird. It can make the sound of branches creaking in the wind.’
Ulrich was invited to a piano recital in the house of the well-known doctor, Ivan Karamihailov, who had once been a regular associate of his father’s. He arrived directly from his work, and paid little attention to his surroundings. He waited distractedly in the audience, still preoccupied by the concerns of the day, eschewing the sociable gazes of people he knew.
He was snatched away from the accounting columns in his head when the pianist entered, and he realised that it was Magdalena. He was ashamed: he had not seen her since the night of Boris’s death, and he had convinced himself she must despise him.
She had tied her black hair back, exaggerating the exoticism of her pale skin and blue eyes. She was now approaching the age that Boris had been when he died, and the resemblance was more striking than ever.
She wore a long dress of radiant blue.
In the centre of the room was a music stand, which Magdalena picked up and moved aside so she could deliver some words to her audience. The stand was wooden, and carved in the shape of a lyre.
Against one wall stood a magnificent long-case clock, whose pendulum had been stilled so the chimes would not disturb the performance. Hanging behind the piano was a painting of a solitary man contemplating an Alpine lake.
Magdalena said,
‘I would like to dedicate my first public recital to the memory of my brother, Boris, who died two years ago on Saturday. I am delighted to see that some of his friends are here this evening.’
And Ulrich was carried away to see her smile at him, openly, and without restraint. He has kept that smile with him ever since, even as it has become progressively detached from the time and the place, and, finally, from Magdalena herself.
She sat at the piano. Ulrich watched the tightly laced black shoes that reached below for the pedals, and the narrow band of her legs that was visible beneath the blue of her dress.
Ulrich was astonished by her performance, which showed how intent she had become since he had seen her. She had become a musician, and he watched her with every kind of yearning. As she played, her toes were on the pedals, and only the point of her shoes’ long heels touched the floor. Ulrich found himself aroused by the click each time her soles made contact with the brass.
Afterwards, they walked in the garden together, and he told her about jazz, which it was impossible to hear in Sofia. She told him she had fallen in love with him long ago.
‘As a little girl I was always tender for you,’ she said. ‘And my brother told me such stories about you when you were away in Berlin. He knew you would do something wonderful: he knew he was less than you, and he put your ambition above his own. Since he’s been gone I’ve not stopped thinking of those stories.’
11
THE FRICTION OF ULRICH’S MEMORY, moving back and forth over the surface of his life, wears away all the detail – and the story becomes more bland each time.
Nowadays, Ulrich finds it difficult to remember any happy moments from his marriage to Magdalena. Whenever he stumbles upon such a memory, he adds it to a list so it will not disappear.
Item
Magdalena’s father paid for the newly wed couple to honeymoon in Georgia. She wanted Ulrich to see where her maternal family came from, and where she herself had spent many happy times. He loved Tbilisi, and her joy at showing it. Her cousins were eccentric, attentive hosts, who woke them in the middle of the night to climb into horse carts and travel for hours along mud roads just to see an old church, or a beautiful hill. Ulrich took Magdalena to see Tosca in the arabesque opera house, and their happiness was absolute.
When they emerged from their room each morning, Magdalena’s uncle made gestures to Ulrich that would have been obscene if it were not for the great generosity with which he delivered them.
After this journey to Tbilisi, Ulrich never left Bulgaria again.
Item
Ivan Stefanov invited Ulrich and Magdalena to dinner to celebrate the couple’s wedding. There was a strict dress code in the Stefanov mansion, and Magdalena wore her most sumptuous gown. Gloved waiters carried lobster aloft, and each place had its own cascade of crystal glasses. Ivan was merry, and stood up to make a speech about the deep affection he had always held for Ulrich. His lugubrious aunts blinked behind diamond necklaces, and ate little. After dinner Ivan became drunk, and he kept his guests up with his ideas about the company, his gossip about his workers, and his theories about life’s various dissatisfactions. Magdalena signalled several times to Ulrich that she wished to leave, but he could not find the appropriate break in his employer’s monologue, and they did not make their exit until Ivan Stefanov fell asleep in his chair.
Item
Boris and Magdalena had grown up in luxurious surroundings, which Ulrich’s bookkeeper salary did not allow him to match. They moved into a small house on Pop Bogomil Street, near the entrance to the city. But she liked the house very much, which was a relief to Ulrich. Every time he asked her, she said that she liked it.
Item
It became a tradition with them that Magdalena came to meet Ulrich after work every Friday, and they went to hold hands over the table in a nearby cake shop. He used to watch for her arrival by the upstairs window where he worked, and every week he had the same stirring of love when he saw her come round the corner, dressed up for him, and so small she fitted inside the eye on the casement handle.
Item
Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a chemistry trick. He put a glass vial in a bowl of water, and, calling her to watch, broke it open with pliers. The bowl erupted with boiling, and a pink flame hovered over the water. Magdalena started, while Ulrich looked between the bowl and her face, incandescent himself.
‘Isn’t it marvellous?’ he said, as it died down.
‘It’s very pretty. But what does it lead to?’
‘Oh! Something will come of it, one day.’
‘It’s childish, it seems to me.’
There was a coolness between them