asking some timid question about how rails were laid, or how signals operated – to which Ulrich’s father gave long and ecstatic answers, gesticulating with the loftiness of the spirit within him, and drawing technical diagrams for the edification of his audience.
Whenever the newspaper arrived in the morning with the story of a railway accident, it would throw him into a temper for days. He cursed the drowsy signalmen or drunken drivers who betrayed the scientific age with idiocy, mutilations and death. ‘These abominations will cease,’ he would retort angrily when anyone chose to engage him on the subject. ‘It is only a matter of time.’
Much of Ulrich’s childhood was spent in train compartments and hotels, following his father’s work. The entire household set out for weeks on end, journeying to where the tracks gave out. There were the armies of the workers, thousands of them, tented in the brushland under a dome of dust that signalled their labour for miles around: Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Arabs and Kurds, and others from all over the empire – hammering at the desert floor under the supervision of turbaned envoys from the Sublime Porte and handlebar-moustached German engineers. Crowds of cooks, doctors, prostitutes, fruit sellers, musicians, tobacco sellers and dancers advanced with them along the envisioned highway, and, as the daylight expired, an endless congregation of wood fires sprang to life under the stars, chickens and goats were thrust upon spits, and great iron cauldrons were set upon the flames. Everywhere men were eating, joking, sleeping, arguing and pissing, while packs of camels and horses looked dispassionately on. This was the assembly that hauled the silver lines from the mouth of the metropolis across the scrub of Anatolia; and Ulrich’s father could weep with the grandeur of it.
The earliest memory Ulrich still retains is this: he is lying alone at night under translucent canvas, a blanket folded carefully around him. At the edge of his hearing is the hubbub of the multitude, and he watches the twitching shape of a lizard on the roof above him, outlined by the lapping firelight. The brightness of his eyes comes not from these things, however, but from the sounds of the musicians. Even at this age, he does not need to see the dancing to know what reflexes the music induces in the men’s bodies.
After so many years, the melodies have drained away, but he can still recall their effect on his tucked-up child flesh.
He stores another memory from that time, or shortly after: his father’s temper in a café in Constantinople when politics interfered with his work. ‘If the British Empire is so fragile that a pair of steel rails can bring it down – then let it fall! Will they threaten us, because we approach their routes, because we near their India, their precious Suez Canal? We are here to bring the peoples of the world together, and such a mission will stand before any rebuke!’
He stamped on the floor with the injustice of it, and Ulrich learned it was possible to be angry with people one did not know.
Ulrich’s father’s idealism proved to be a liability in the long run. When, during the war, the British destroyed the railway tracks he had helped to build, he took it as a personal calamity, as if the charges had been set at his own nerve junctions, and he fretted about it for the rest of his life. Trying to pull his country as fast as possible out of Asia, he never thought he would be razed by an excess of Europe.
Ulrich’s mother’s name was Elizaveta. Throughout Ulrich’s life, whenever he has wished to picture her happy, he has returned to one memory. He awakes in his tent in the desert to find his parents already arisen. He crawls out into the dawn, still confused by sleep: the fires are burning for breakfast, a camel coughs clouds in the chill, and the horizon is smooth and bichrome. His mother sits on a wooden stool sipping steaming tea, and she stares from under her shawl at the sun’s bubble, ascending over the edge of the world and turning her smile orange.
She picked up Turkish and Arabic, and she loved to set out among the villages with a muleteer and pay visits to the local women. She made sketches for them of Bulgarian peasant costumes so they would have an idea of the place she had come from, and she kept notebooks full of observations about their beliefs and customs. Sometimes she stayed away for three days at a time, journeying with her young son through the Tigris valley with only her Bulgarian manservant and a Kurdish guide for company.
Is Ulrich deceiving himself when he imagines that he has stood with her in an ancient monastery carved entirely out of rock, somewhere on the way to Mosul, where the aged bishop has taken vows of silence and lives in solitude on the top of an inaccessible mountain? Surely not: for he remembers looking up to the astonishing incline where every day the man lowers a basket for his food – the basket in which, when his last mortal sickness comes upon him, he will send down a message so they may climb up to collect his body. Ulrich remembers eating mulberries and pomegranates plucked from trees by the Tigris, and all the flowers, and his mother laughing with her Kurdish guide, saying, This is paradise. Another snatch of the past: Ulrich has been dressed in a red shirt (for the wearing of blue is offensive to these people, and how marvellous that there can be prohibition on a colour!) and he sits in a dim room in a low-built house whose threshold is decorated with a painted snake. There is a woman seated on a mat who wears a flowing headdress (whose unfamiliar folds are disquieting to the young boy) and who cuts up into squares, with great delectation, a pulpy substance that is shiny on her fingers. She eyes him all the time with heavy curiosity, and without warning she is possessed with the desire to stroke his cheeks with her sticky hands. He runs to take shelter behind his mother, who appals him still further by eating these syrupy squares and declaring her delight. On the journey home, she tells him that these people have experienced violent raids and live in terror of a great massacre: their religion is an offence to the Musulmans who live in these parts and, now the empire is breaking up, they are in perpetual peril. And with the narcissism of childhood he is filled with regret at having denied the woman his cheek when she was about to die.
Ulrich remembers his father’s late-night fury at Elizaveta when she returned from one of those rural expeditions – and perhaps they were less numerous than he now imagines. For he also recalls the heavy tedium of big city hotels where the family stayed for weeks together, and restaurants where his mother sat in unending debates over politics. Elizaveta had a consuming passion for the affairs of that region – she wrote about them regularly for the Bulgarian newspapers – and she was never so content as when exchanging political analyses with other informed observers. But these conversations drove her young son to distraction. He hated the diplomats and businessmen whose arguments absorbed her so, and he tried to disrupt their speeches with tears and full-blown choking tantrums. He developed an array of ruses for prising Elizaveta’s attentions away from them and, though she held out for a while, his complaints of sickness, headaches and ringing in his ears would eventually force her to board a train with him back to Sofia.
He sang on the journey, happy to have her to himself again. He was joyful when they arrived back at home (the house cold and dim save for the small corner kept alive by his grandmother’s movement) and he ran off to play with the children he knew in the houses round about. But each time he discovered that they had grown out of the games he had shared with them before he went away, and turned to others he did not know – ones that seemed calculated to exclude casual visitors such as he.
Perhaps this was why Ulrich became such a solitary child. The stuccoed cube of his bedroom, perched up in that big house, became the most dependable thing in his world, and he filled it with the ample emission of his daydreams.
His father was exasperated by his early signs of introversion.
‘You are privileged enough, at a young age, to enjoy the society of talented and influential men – and all you can do is stammer and scratch, and hold your foot in your hand like a fool. You will not be a failure, my son. Whatever it takes, I will not allow it.’
3
BY WHAT ALCHEMY is an obsession kindled in a boy?
Another child who passed through Ulrich’s early experiences might have emerged with a passion for machines. His father encouraged him in that direction, with his tender demonstrations of engines, and the delightful way he simulated moving parts with his long white fingers. Or he might have conceived a fascination with exploration, or the study of peoples.