Free Solo by Rana Dasgupta Page B

you everything!’
    There were bats overhead, and a sense of life pent up behind locked doors. Cats wailed.
    Ulrich said,
    ‘Did you ever see Ida? The Jewess?’
    ‘No. I never heard from her again.’ Boris laughed loudly. ‘And you? Did you see the angels in the Admiralspalast?’
    ‘I did. Everything you said was true.’
    Boris screamed with joy. He called out to Georgi in the distance,
    ‘Georgi! Let’s all go away to the country! We’ll find some pretty girls. We’ll take books and keep some pigs. I’ll get my violin out again!’
    They came to a gate, which surrendered to their drunken rattling, and climbed two lurching flights of stairs. They arrived in Georgi’s room, the ringing worse than ever in Ulrich’s ears. Georgi lay straight down on one of the beds in his clothes and boots and went to sleep.
    Belatedly, Ulrich realised.
    ‘That man we saw. Outside the church. It was Misha the fool.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’
    ‘I knew I recognised him. I’m sure of it.’
    ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’
    Boris took a swig from a bottle of brandy.
    ‘I’m sure of it,’ Ulrich repeated, and they fell together on the narrow bunk in a dreamless embrace that lasted until the next afternoon.

9
    T WO DAYS LATER , Boris was arrested for sedition, and executed.
    The police went out in force, with names and addresses, and many were taken in. Georgi was arrested too, and thrown into jail.
    Afterwards, the police sent word to Boris’s parents that his body was available for collection.
    When the coffin was lowered into the earth, Magdalena and her mother collapsed simultaneously into their skirts.
    Ulrich walked home afterwards with his parents. Elizaveta was disabled by it.
    ‘I loved that boy,’ she kept saying. ‘I loved that boy.’
    She forbade Ulrich from going out, fearing that something might happen to him, too. But when evening came he could not stay shut up any more. He ran to Boris’s house.
    A storm had come up suddenly, and unfastened shutters banged. He battled through a wind so fierce that the entire sky was too small a pipe for it, and the air groaned in its confines.
    Outside Boris’s house was a crowd of street people. Magdalena stood in front, handing out clothes, while her mother wept on the steps. Boris’s shrunken father watched from an upstairs window.
    ‘Ulrich!’ cried Magdalena when she saw him, and she threw herself at his chest.
    ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m giving away his clothes.’
    She had brought everything out of the house. Jackets, shirts and sweaters flapped in the gale. Ulrich could not bear to see it all disappear.
    ‘So his warmth stays alive,’ she said. ‘Look how many have come.’
    Ulrich saw Misha in the crowd and, for the first time, burst into tears. The fool approached him. He secreted two cold marbles in Ulrich’s hands.
    ‘I did not know that fish could drown. Those marbles were his eyes.’
    It began to rain. The people dispersed, only a scattering of unwanted shirt collars and neckties left on the ground. Magdalena went into the house and emerged with Boris’s umbrella.
    ‘Let’s walk,’ she said.
    ‘But it’s late.’
    She ignored him.
    The storm became stupendous. She led him, pulling his arm, and they found a place for sex. There were no lips, no hands, no hair: just genitals. In the tumult, the umbrella blew away and they were entirely exposed under the flashes. Her skirt was at her thighs and she screamed: not with the sex, but with its insufficiency. Over her shoulder, Ulrich saw a man watching them from his shelter in a doorway, and he felt ashamed. He sank to the floor, sobbing in the downpour.
    ‘No,’ he said.
    She stared at him in disbelief, untrussing her skirt.
    ‘You know how much I need you,’ she shrieked into the tempest.
    She beat his head with her fists, and ran away, clacking and splashing on the street. He pulled up his trousers and retrieved the umbrella from the iron fence where it had lodged.