Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  And then? You heat up the dried bone-glue pellets in a water bath and dissolve them until you get a bright, slimy substance. You add gypsum and mix it up, dilute it with the right amount of water, then you apply it to the canvas. Let it dry, coat it again. Let it dry, coat it again. This tightens the canvas even more, and the pores of the fabric are sealed for the subsequent application of paint.

  Six white-primed canvases, six white squares: that’s as far as I get. No further.

  Jean doesn’t give a damn about the politics of proper stretching. He throws himself in bushes, hugs trees, sticks his head into garbage cans, lies down on the street, opens sewer grates and climbs in up to his belly. He holds each pose for a couple of seconds and calls it sculpture.

  We’re still his only audience, but they’ll notice him soon enough. This is neither presentiment nor omniscience. It’s simple logic: the resultant sum of expected events.

  Maybe those days in the swimming pool, when Jean wasn’t called Jean yet, were all preparation for what he’s doing now? I think of how he jumped in the water, a real show-off, and how muscular and tan he was. His hair was bleached by the sun, and he spoke in a completely different way, yelled more than he spoke. He fit so well in the countryside, and now he fits so well in the city. Now he’s tall and slim, his skin is white—no, blanche—and the way he speaks, well, anyone can hear it. What a dope he was in the country, and now he’s a freak in the city, and I envy him both—no, even more: I envy him no end.

  Maybe it was even a good thing that his father was such an asshole. It’s tough growing up the first eighteen years of your life, but maybe it helps when you want to leave home, helps you avoid making detours. Just up and leave, no niceties, and no pajamas either. I think of my nice little fish, what a contrast they are. Damn it all.

  We’ll think of something to do with the fish, says Jean, dressed up as Poseidon and rushing to my aid. Knees tucked in, he jumps into my stream of thoughts and rescues me from my sinking ship. This is not a metaphor, but exactly the way I picture it. He tromps through the water with his trident, yes. Maybe, says Jean, you need to stick to the fish, and from there, Johnny, take a stab in the dark, or jump into the ocean blue. Navy, cyan, indigo, calls Jean, reigning over the seas.

  Or blue like swimming pools?

  Yeah, like Hockney, hot like Hockney, cries Jean. Do it like Hockney, but different. Or Quappi in Blue! I love that title, says Jean: Quappi in Blue in a Boat. Beckmann, the painter, was pretty hot for his Quappi: Quappi with a Parrot, Quappi in Pink, Quappi here and Quappi there. And Jean repeats it a few more times: Quappi. But Beckmann also did a painting called The Little Fish. And Journey on the Fish. Sleeping Woman with Fish Bowl. Fish aren’t so bad, says Jean, and Beckmann isn’t bad either, any comic-strip artist nowadays will tell you that. Sleeping Woman with Fish Bowl, Jean shouts, oh, how I’d love to sleep with a woman right now! Maybe there’s one somewhere who’s hot for Poseidon?

  And with that, Jean swims away. And sure enough, he encounters a water nymph, beautiful and willing—but, alas, it’s common knowledge that there’s not a lot you can do with a nymph.

  Can Jean have your canvases?

  Somebody from the group shakes me by the shoulder. Johnny, were you sleeping?

  No, I was dreaming about water nymphs, I say.

  Can Jean have your six primed canvases?

  How come? I ask.

  He said I should tell the guy they belong to that he used them already.

  What, I ask, he took them already?

  Yeah, Jean piled them on his bike this morning and rode off with them.

  Oh, okay, I say, and sit down on the stairs in front of the entrance and think: At some point I’ll have to tell this Jean that he can’t just go and do that. I’ll talk to him: You probably remember me, I’ll say loud and clear, I’m the one who saw you climb down from your throne at the end of your barricade performance.

  Wasn’t everyone gone by then? Jean will ask.

  Exactly, you said you thought that everyone was gone, and I wanted to tell you: I’m here, my name is Johnny.

  That morning? Impossible, Jean will say, I was fooling around with Véronique. You mean Angélique, I say.

  Yeah! Angélique, the nurse, Jean yells, you know her?

  Hmm. Should I even try to explain to him—while trying to imagine at all what it’s like to have a conversation with Jean—that of course I don’t know his Angélique? That I only dream that he’s my friend, who tells me about his affairs?

  And would I, should I tell him he can’t take my six white canvases without asking? Should I mention that if he’d asked me I would have gladly given them to him anyway, and probably even helped him carry them? That, anyhow, they’d been lying around far too long without my knowing what to do with them?

  And that it was Jean himself who told me in my dreams how he walked out on Angélique, the nurse, once he’d finished his work.

  Should I tell him that I talk to myself and imagine we’re friends, Jean et Johnny, Johnny and Jean?

  Ha! yells Jean. That’s perfect. Then we can do it like Jules et Jim. Which one do you want to be? The quiet one with the faithful eyes, who’s difficult but loves so intensely? Huh? Or the dark-haired one, who’s the better lover, hmm? Take your pick, Johnny! We can scratch the bicycle scene. Your little fish won’t fill you up, though, neither you nor her. Hey! Pale Johnny snatches my Angélique, just like that. Well, says Jean, I would have preferred Jeanne Moreau anyway. If I’d lived in Paris as a young artist, I definitely would have taken Jeanne Moreau; I understand every Austrian poet who did.

  Jean, I say, there was nothing between Angélique and me. Really? Why didn’t you say so! Angélique, Véronique, Quappique! Jean laughs. Quappique is my muse, Quappi is my musique!

  Oh, Jean, you’re crazy.

  Nude drawing class is once a week. It’s not as thrilling as everyone thinks. No, it’s even more thrilling than that! I sweat, and my hands tremble—which isn’t so bad for drawing, actually. Because anything is good for drawing. You just have to get started. The fact is, I’ve never seen a human being completely naked. Without a swimsuit. Neither man nor woman. In magazines, sure, but not in real life. The problem is, I don’t dare look a nude model between the legs. Even if I dared, I couldn’t draw what I saw there.

  Just imagining that the others would see my trembling hands and think: Aha, now he’s drawing the penis. Or imagining our female instructor, peering over my shoulder and saying: Johnny, when drawing the vagina you need to use more red.

  I’m very pleased when a fat Thai lady shows up one day and refuses to strip all the way; she keeps on her big-flowered silken underwear.

  I concentrate on the floral pattern—and come up with a nice series of charcoal drawings, green and red, very bright with dark, angular contours. There’s a little bit of Quappi in my pictures too.

  I group the drawings on the floor in front of me so they form a giant frieze. Ah, you’re grouping your pictures in front of you to form a giant frieze, says the instructor when she gets to me. Come here, everyone, and see what Johnny’s doing!

  I’m very proud of myself, but try to keep my cool. The others gather around me—ah, if only Jean could see me now!

  Georgia O’Keefe, our instructor begins, who’s familiar with her work? A long, detailed, and enthusiastic talk ensues, about the symbolic use of fruits and flowers in the history of painting from antiquity to the present. The instructor calls a spade a spade, she says vagina, vagina, vagina, and at the end she even says genital panic.

  Of course it’s pathetic not to attend nude drawing class anymore after that, but the following week I couldn’t bring myself to go; the week after that I figured everyone knew I didn’t come because the whole thing is still too awkward for me; and the week after that I realized that after a three-week break, I can’t show up just like that.

  And I can’t tell Jean it’s because I’ve never slept with anybody, after months of imagining how I give him advice about his
affairs. Love is probably just like nude drawing: first you don’t go at all, then you think it’s too late to start, and finally you give up altogether. I imagine a group of young art students, standing before my life’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. An art historian, maybe Professor Mary Schoenblum, busily talks into her microphone with that typical biographical approach of the Americans:

  Johnny was a tremendous artist, but never had any luck with women. The whole of his creative powers went into his work, and we, the future generations, thank him with dutiful admiration.

  Then the young art students applaud, say their good-byes in the sculpture garden, sit in the sun and cuddle with their girlfriends. And the female art students cuddle with their boyfriends. And sometimes two men cuddle with each other, and sometimes two women, too. Professor Mary Schoenblum heads home, recalling the events of the day: Did I really say with dutiful admiration? Oh, boy!

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY DAVID BURNETT

  [BELGIUM: FRENCH]

  STÉPHANE LAMBERT

  The Two Writers

  I SHOULD HAVE KISSED Tom at the top of the observatory tower at Vilnius University. But I was the king of missed opportunities. And Tom was married. In a few weeks he would be the father of a baby whose sex he still didn’t know. And I dared not let the moment belong to us. An agreeable uneasiness had come over us when the guide had abandoned us at the base of the tower; we had then briskly ascended the old wooden staircase. Hearing the steps creak beneath our feet, I had realized how much these minutes would count. As always, my emotion had provoked the first stirrings of an erection that I tried to conceal. At the top—Tom knew it, I had no doubt—we were expecting more than a panoramic view. We found ourselves in a dizzying proximity, and in our isolation above the city a sense of the erotic was palpable. At first we had clumsily tried to take an interest in the view. The space inside the tower was so cramped that we had to take extreme care to avoid standing shoulder to shoulder. Each of us was forced to orient himself toward his own side until the exercise came to seem too absurd, and we began then to share our vantage points and exclaim to each other insincerely as we pointed out one or another site that we had already visited. I perceived immediately that this playacting would soon exhaust our resources. Vilnius was a medium-sized city; I could foresee the precise instant when we would arrive at the end of it. Down there, beyond the former city hall, was the Gate of Dawn with its Black Virgin—it was also the neighborhood where we were staying; in another direction, the opera house, a typical Soviet-era performance hall, where on the first evening together we had seen an antiquated production of Romeo and Juliet that Tom nonetheless seemed to like—this was our first disagreement; behind the opera house flowed the Neris, and slightly more distant still, near several looming spires, was the magnificent recreation center where I went swimming. At that point we could have taken a break from our viewing, let the silence get the better of our awkwardness, look at each other with light smiles, half-embarrassed, half-conspiratorial, feel our heartbeats quicken, and in any case not avert our eyes as I had stupidly done, pointing out the Church of St. Francis and St. Bernard—I who ordinarily took so little interest in churches—and reciting like an imbecile what was said about it in the guidebook, which I clutched in order to hide my discomfort. “Napoleon,” I heard myself proclaim, “would have liked to transport it to France in the palm of his hand.” When I mentioned the imperial name that still resonated through the city like a sinister memory, Tom moved toward me, and as he tried with one hand to indicate the direction of a cemetery he hadn’t yet visited, he nonchalantly laid the other on my shoulder. That was obviously enough to arouse me again. “Soldiers …,” he said in French, “are buried … there … in a pit …” When he spoke French, Tom would lose the quasi-aristocratic assurance that his cultivated British accent gave to his English, and then he would become like a small child who stammered while discovering the patterns of speech, and it was irresistible. “I wanted …,” he ventured, “to know … where … where it was … because … there are … several …” Tom got tangled up in his explanations, he had taken it into his head to inventory all of the city’s cemeteries in order to create a kind of literary almanac. The previous evening, we had meandered across the hills of the Rasos Cemetery, both of us under the charm of the old gravestones in such a natural setting, a romantic atmosphere in which death seemed as peaceful as the trees and the vegetation, and we had talked, we had not stopped talking, as we strolled along the narrow paths of the cemetery, between the rusted crosses and the timeworn slabs. With the passage of time, the tombs had become as humble as the ground they occupied, and we were so excited by the idea of knowing each other that we had never stopped conversing. I had tried in my rudimentary English to convey the emotion that this kind of place evoked in me, and Tom had approved in his spasmodic French. “I like … also … very much …” Throughout the afternoon, we had exchanged remarks darting in all directions, having no other motive than to bind us together. And there, at the top of the observatory tower at Vilnius University, we had arrived at the end of speech, the instant where our circumstances were about to change dramatically. We had exhausted all the sights, the horizon barred any further recourse. And it was going to be necessary—the thought frightened me—going to be necessary for me to be equal to his desire. The sensuality of the situation had pervaded the whole of the confined space where we were standing side by side. The city had closed in around us. There was no more than a second left. Tom had finished his sentence. I felt his hand on my shoulder. And our minds seized up, tense, awaiting a sign. And when he turned toward me, much as I would have wanted to reciprocate his gesture, I instead backed away. Despite the turmoil this aroused in me, I stepped away from him and moved brusquely toward the staircase. Then, already regretting my action, I stopped dead, and after pausing for a second or two, I turned back toward him. Tom had an embarrassed expression, yet with a composure that stupefied me he removed a camera from the inside pocket of his sport jacket and immortalized this moment that had escaped us through my fault. Fortunately, I told myself as we descended the old wooden staircase of the observatory tower of Vilnius University, fortunately, these lost opportunities are a godsend for novelists like me.

  The autumnal coolness and the throb of traffic were entering my Parisian studio apartment next to the Gare de l’Est, I pictured again that moment with Tom, and my mind went back to Jude, and everything became mixed up, the real and the imaginary, the present and the remembered, fresh air and pollution. A century after Rilke, I experienced the same lonely isolation he had felt in the midst of the city; more and more bewildered by the emptiness of the world, I heard a buzzing in my ears. From time to time I observed two pigeon chicks quivering on the window ledge. Their mother had built her nest in the gutter, she returned there every day around noon to feed her offspring, they battled for first place, and then they would both plunge their beaks into the maternal craw.

  The afternoon of the day I bungled the encounter with Tom, I learned of Jude’s death in the crash of an Airbus A330 en route from Paris to Los Angeles. It was a few hours after I had come down from the observatory tower at the university. The first news was a bulletin on Radio France Internationale. A plane had disappeared from the controllers’ screens while it was crossing an area of bad weather. Several minutes later I received a message on my cellphone from North, the only friend we had kept in common, telling me that Jude was on the plane. It took me several seconds to connect the two reports: Jude was aboard the Airbus A330 bound for Los Angeles that had dropped off the controllers’ radar screens. This was a blurry reality, difficult to work out. I was in Vilnius for a colloquium on European identity in literature. Here, two days earlier, I had met Tom, a Welsh writer with whom I had felt an immediate rapport. I thought back on the minutes spent with him late that morning at the top of the tower, and the episode already seemed distant. Missed opportunities, I repeated to myself, are excellent starting points for novelists
. Wasn’t that the way someone became a writer, I reasoned. First you developed the habit of missing opportunities, then you took the attitude of celebrating the misses, because you could make them a subject for your writing. Inevitably, you finished by absolving yourself beforehand for your cowardly inaction. Frustration became a way of life, literature would be victorious. In the evening, Radio France Internationale confirmed that the A330, missing from the controllers’ screens for several hours, had indeed gone down in the Atlantic, aircraft debris had just been spotted off the American coast, the hypothesis of terrorism seemed to have been dismissed, for the moment nothing more was known. And suddenly, while aeronautical experts were putting forth theories regarding the causes of such an accident, the news of it seized me in a whole different manner than it had in the afternoon; this piece of information that had fluttered around somewhere within my consciousness without knowing where to land assumed a new solidity, and I felt a shock stinging inside my abdomen, as if something knotted was violently disintegrating. It was almost six years since we had lived together, Jude had gone to live in Paris with someone else. She and Jude may have been flying together—that thought might have consoled me if my jealousy at not being next to him at the moment of his death had not immediately triumphed. We had sold our Brussels apartment, and I had stayed in that city without quite resolving whether I liked it or not. This small shade of difference would vary from one day to the next, and in this vacillation I came to suspect that it was not really the city that was causing the problem. I tried to imagine what Jude’s last moments in the aircraft might have been like, but it was impossible—had there really been a last moment? The violence of such a death was inconceivable outside of its own reality, and in the confusion in which I found myself, incapable of thinking concretely about his death, I understood how much the accident that had just happened was a logical sequel to the one that had separated us. Jude no longer had a body, it had vaporized. In essence, he had returned to the state in which I had always known him: in my eyes our relationship had remained improbable, never did I believe that this had really happened between us, that his presence beside me was authentic, for seven years I had been living on an unsteady cloud, I had tried to get closer to him, but Jude was aloof, that was his very nature—or mine was formed in such a way that this was how I perceived him—and his death, in separating him definitively from me, his death was merely situating him in his natural place. In his inaccessible kingdom. And the sorrow I felt that evening in Vilnius as I contemplated his death did not arise from losing him again, instead it was a matter of never having known how to win him. And if I must express the nub of my thought, it was that I could not mourn his death, because his death and life alike were remote, belonging only to him, there was nothing sad in this event. Whatever happened to him, Jude would always be on the side of those who emerged victorious. And he had no need to conquer in order to shine, he had the makeup of those solitary heroes of old who would advance unscathed through everything. Their mere existence was fully adequate. And yet there was also this: one never gives up completely on a broken love affair. The possibility of its revival remains lodged somewhere. And it is this remnant that enables you to survive its end. And in fact there is no end. The love continues to live disguised beneath the present. And when the other person dies, this tacit hope that kept you going perishes at the same time—and that was the cause of the pangs I felt that evening in Vilnius. If I had kissed Tom in the observatory tower that very morning, perhaps I would have returned with him to Wales, we would have lived there in the mountains on next to nothing, rather like recluses, we would have fixed up an old house together, we would have bathed naked together in the cool water of the stream, as Tom had told me that he often did, yes, if I had kissed Tom I would not have chosen Paris. But I had not kissed Tom, and Paris had worked its will on me.