resulted in a powerful glue that his mother adopted, with no apparent dissatisfaction, as her sealant for letters. There was every reason to hope that in his dim shed he would one day have one of those historic moments of realisation that was the high point of all his scientists’ biographies.
When Ulrich’s classmates came to visit his laboratory, he would set up the right atmosphere by dripping sulphuric acid continually on to chalk so it bubbled and steamed. This simple magic was guaranteed to impress, and he kept his laboratory in a constant chemical haze until one winter’s day, with the windows closed, he fainted from the carbon dioxide and was discovered only just short of asphyxiation by his horrified mother. Boris was delighted when he heard the story, for Ulrich’s gimmick had always seemed ridiculous to him.
When Ulrich’s father arrived home from the war, his left trouser leg was rolled up and empty, and his ears were damaged by the shells. Ulrich watched with disbelief as his father was installed in the house like an incapable infant.
Elizaveta cleared out a disused room whose view of the garden recommended it for convalescence, and she arranged it with flower vases and ornaments. Though the family’s finances were approaching a crisis – for the war had destroyed the economy, and her husband had been away for years – she made new purchases to diminish the impact of his injuries: a wheelchair from England, for instance, and an armchair with a folding table, where she encouraged him to read and write. But these acquisitions failed to penetrate the blankness into which her husband had retreated, and all her most inspiring speeches extracted little more from him than complaints and accusations.
Ulrich knew he ought to feel pity for his father, but this emotion refused to come. In fact he found it hard not to blame him for having returned so unlike himself, and over time he began to punish him in countless insidious ways.
On one occasion, Boris came to dine with Ulrich’s family. By that time it had become clear that Boris’s musical talent was exceptional: he had been taken on at the Bulgarian State Music Academy by a famous teacher from Moravia, and had already given a number of well-received recitals around the city. As dinner was served, Ulrich chattered proudly about Boris’s musical accomplishments, shouting for the benefit of his father, who sat at the head of the table with the morose air he kept in those days. Ulrich said,
‘Boris is going to play the Mendelssohn concerto next week in the national theatre. His teacher has told him to give up everything else and to devote his life to the violin!’
His father did not look up, but bellowed deafly,
‘No more of this talk! What are your parents thinking of? You’ll fall in among criminals!’
Boris wrestled with confusion, but Ulrich looked triumphantly at him and smiled in happy complicity. In plotting this conversation, he had reasoned that what linked siblings was their sharing of the most irrational aspects of their parents’ characters; and, having exposed Boris to his father’s insanity, he could now truly consider him a brother.
Ulrich remembers that he kept, for some years, a notebook about his friendship with Boris. He felt that their sentiments for each other were so noble, and their conversations so remarkable, that everything had to be preserved for posterity. In the inevitable way of things, this notebook has disappeared, and with it the detail of those adolescent feelings. Thinking back on Boris too many times has buried him with rememberings, and turned him into a shining icon that glides unblinking through the past without smell or voice.
There is one event he can still call to mind. He was sixteen, perhaps, when the two of them were invited by other men to a foray into the brothels of Serdika. Ulrich had never been with a woman before, and was terrified; but he could not find an excuse that would pass in public, and he found himself carried along against his will to the streets of pacing men where whores beckoned from the windows. Once inside, a cudgel in his chest, there were women stacked up on the stairs, smoking and talking, their breasts peeking out, and Boris, pointing, said, ‘You like the one in green?’
Ulrich was startled by his friend’s self-possession, but the woman had already responded to the signal and led them away into a corridor with gold-framed mirrors, her pale behind clearly visible through her robe, and Boris went in ahead. Ulrich sat in the armchair outside, wretched at his own uselessness. The curtain over the doorway was inadequate to its function, and he could see the whole room through the chink, where his friend hopped on one foot then the other to pull off his boots. The woman sat on the bed, watching him coolly and removing her gown, while Boris threw off his clothes. He stood naked in the lamplight, his penis tall, and the woman pulled him close. Boris lifted her up and fell with her fully on the bed, where he kissed the breasts she offered and moaned over them and suddenly, so expertly, entered her! And there was a cold burn in Ulrich’s heart at the realisation that Boris had done this before without telling him. He stood up and ran from the brothel, not stopping till he reached home, and the refuge of his laboratory.
Perhaps that is the last memory, in fact, that Ulrich has retained from his garden laboratory, for it must have been immediately afterwards that the house on Dondukov Boulevard was sold. After it no longer belonged to his family, he used to walk past it every day on his way to school. It was later destroyed in the bombings, and now the site is occupied by a car showroom.
5
THE FAMILY MOVED INTO A HOUSE on Tsar Simeon Street. It was much smaller than the previous one, and built in the old style with clay and straw. It shared a courtyard at the back with several other houses.
A girl lived in one of these houses, whose name was Tatiana. After dinner, she used to take a lamp up to her bedroom so she could read novels, and Ulrich liked to sit at the top of the steps outside his house watching her. She spread out in a chair with her bare feet up on the windowsill, and, during the long hours when she read, Ulrich could follow the unfolding of the story in the splaying and clenching of her toes.
He decided he would make a photograph of her sitting there. He discovered the principles of glass-plate negatives, and he built a pinhole camera out of wood, sealed at the joins with tar. On one visit to Boris’s house he made an excuse to go up to the laboratory alone, and, with beating heart, he sought out the bottle of silver nitrate and purloined enough for his secret project. He knew it was wrong, but he would neither compromise his experiment nor make it public.
One evening, he set his camera up on the steps. He estimated an exposure of twenty minutes in that darkness, and he waited for Tatiana to become comfortable in her position before uncovering the tiny hole. But instead, to his alarm, she got up from her seat and came to the window, calling out to him,
‘Why do you always sit there watching me?’
Ulrich was paralysed and could not reply.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I’m coming down.’
He waited for her to retreat into the house before snatching up his camera and running inside.
‘What is the matter?’ his mother asked darkly, and Ulrich could see her suspicions were aroused. He shut himself up in his room.
Later on he tried to make a print from his negative. But there was hardly any exposure, and only Tatiana’s lamp showed up, an almost indiscernible smudge in the night.
One night, when Ulrich was approaching his eighteenth birthday, Boris came to visit. Ulrich’s mother opened the door, and embraced him effusively. Boris was now fully a head taller than her. He wore his tie loose, like an artist, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Though it was quite dry, he carried an umbrella: it was his latest affectation,
