LITMIR.BIZ

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      They were once invited to a wedding in the Jewish quarter. The guests spoke Ladino and Bulgarian both, mixed together. There was a klezmer brass orchestra, and Magdalena laughed with the music, and danced unrestrainedly with him, though she was exuberantly pregnant. She kissed him and said, I hope our baby will be Jewish.

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      Faithful to her maternal tradition, Magdalena wanted to give their son a Georgian name. Before choosing, she called several names from the front door to see how they would sound when, in years to come, she summoned her boy from his play.

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      Elizaveta loved Magdalena. I never expected such a wonderful daughter-in-law, she said. Her own situation was gloomy, with no money and her husband lost, and the life of the young couple gave her new joy. She came to the house with gifts she could ill afford, yodelling and prancing to delight her grandson. Early one sunny morning, when she was drinking tea with Magdalena, Ulrich came back from a walk with his son, and announced, ‘Birds don’t fly away from a man holding a baby!’ and the two women burst into laughter at the expression of awe upon his face.

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      An upright piano was brought into the house for Magdalena to continue her practice. Nothing gave Ulrich greater happiness than to sit behind her after dinner and request his favourite pieces, one after another.

      As the months drew on, Magdalena ceased to find romance in their meagre situation, and she and Ulrich were led more and more frequently into arguments.

      ‘When are you going to leave Ivan Stefanov and his leather company? It was supposed to be temporary, and now it’s been years. And you’re still earning the same as when you began.’

      ‘Think of Einstein. While he was doing his routine job in the Swiss Patent Office he managed to come up with his greatest theories. Perhaps something like that will come to me!’

      He smiled bashfully, and she tutted with exasperation.

      ‘You’re no Einstein! And you have a wife and a son to take care of.’

      At social gatherings he asked his acquaintances whether they knew of any jobs that would pay well. But his enquiries lacked conviction, and led to nothing. He said to Magdalena,

      ‘Perhaps I could set up a little chemistry laboratory here. Investigate some compounds in the evenings. Your father made some money that way.’

      She said,

      ‘Ulrich! Face up to reality! Sometimes I wonder if you know what the word means.’

      He looked at her strangely, and exclaimed,

      ‘What is reality? Is it this?’ – and he banged the table excessively, then the wall – ‘is it this?’

      She waited, impassive before his transport, and he said,

      ‘Did your brother believe in reality? Didn’t he spend his whole time thinking about how to overthrow it?’

      ‘I am not my brother, Ulrich.’

      One day, Ulrich arrived home with an old desk that had been discarded from the office. A colleague helped him cart it, and they carried it to the back of the house.

      ‘This will be my workbench!’ he announced happily to Magdalena.

      ‘It’s filthy,’ she said.

      ‘I’ll clean it. Don’t worry.’

      ‘There isn’t much room here. How much more junk will you bring?’

      He sighed gravely.

      ‘Please, Magda. I need to do this.’

      ‘I don’t know what’s happening to the man I married.’

      Ulrich took her hands and comforted her. She studied him for a long time, until tenderness flowed back into her cheeks. She put her arms round him and inhaled from his hair.

      ‘I don’t like to see you living below yourself. You need a plan, Ulrich. Right now I don’t think you have one. Soon all your intelligence will be accounted for in Ivan Stefanov’s books, and you will have none left for yourself.’

      He looked at the floor.

      ‘Mr Stefanov is a decent man. I will talk to him about the salary. He is not a bad man, and I’m comfortable there.’

      She put her hands over his ears and peered into his eyes as if they were dark shafts in the earth. She held his head tight and shook it back and forth.

      ‘Comfortable?’ she said, shaking him. ‘Comfortable? Are you comfortable now?’

      And she went on shaking him a bit too long.They attended a lavish party at the house of her parents, who were celebrating their wedding anniversary. The preparations had been going on for a month. Ulrich surprised Magdalena with a new dress, and that night she was joyful among so many people she knew. Her father was tall and jovial, and he put his arm across Ulrich’s shoulders and introduced him around, exaggerating his career: He has a lucrative line in leather.

      At home afterwards, Magdalena seemed unusually subdued. They went to bed, but neither could sleep, and they lay side by side, looking at the ceiling.

      He said,

      ‘Why don’t you play the piano any more?’

      She sighed with contempt, and turned her back.

      Ulrich drifted into sleep. He dreamed of a stormy journey on a ship full of pigs, and a shipwreck, and standing tiptoe on the summit of the mountain of drowned, sunken hogs to keep his mouth above water. When he came to, later in the night, she was standing at the window.

      ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

      She scanned the street outside, mournfully, and said,

      ‘I wish someone would come to take me away.’

      He bought some supplies for his laboratory. He lined the bottles up on his bench while Magdalena was out.

      He was polishing his shoes in the kitchen when she came in, brandishing a bottle embossed with a skull and crossbones. She cried What’s this? and, before he could warn her, she hurled it against the wall. He leapt at her as it smoked, and ran her out of the room.

      ‘What are you doing?’ he cried madly. ‘What are you doing?’

      He was shaking with emotion.

      ‘That’s sulphuric acid. You could have killed yourself.’

      She snarled at him,

      ‘And you bring it into the house when we have a small boy running around?’

      In her rage she twirled her fingers at her ears to show his insanity:

      ‘You are crazy, crazy! Why don’t you just throw him into acid right away? Be done with it!’

      She ran away, inconsolable. While Ulrich looked for something to cover his face while he cleaned up the acid, he heard the thrum of bass strings as Magdalena kicked the piano in the other room.

      One day, Ulrich came home to find that Magdalena had moved out with their son. Her family closed around her, and Ulrich could not get to see either of them after that.

      Their boy was nearly three years old, and Ulrich was used to taking him out for long weekend walks. He would tell him stories of the seasons, and his son would ask ‘Why?’ to every reason, to hear whether the world’s explanation had an end. Ulrich had found peace and fulfilment in simple fatherhood, and now he suffered actual physical pain at his son’s absence. He woke up in the night with the fantasy that the boy was crying in the room. In the morning he leaned into the abandoned cradle to inhale

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