Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  In the guesthouse we prepare ourselves for sleep, it is early evening. A yellow room with no windows encloses us. Woolen blankets with black-and-white patterns hang on the walls and off the ends of the beds, reminding me of outside, serving as vents for claustrophobia. Krassa wafts around in a white, square nightgown, brushing her teeth. At the end of her sleeves, her small hands emerge, not without grace, olive brown like her feet which pad about under the big, white legs. She moves around the hostel, preparing this and that. I have thrown myself onto my bed in my clothes. Then I get up again, roll up the blanket at my feet, remove my bra, remove my trousers, cover myself with the sheet and close my eyes firmly. Krassa shoves herself onto her bed and lies in fetus position, facing me.

  “You do not vont to come to me?”

  “No.”

  “Then you do not live the same thing as I.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Hm,” she says. “I thought you do.”

  “Sad, no?”

  “Yes. Very sad.” A reproach, awaiting something, some kind of hope lies yet in this sentence.

  Should I, even now, come over to her? Surprise her with the opposite—fabricated, without conviction? Surprise her with brutality, my only answer to her fondling? Over her, around her—I swear, I would have to stop short after two or three seconds, nothing would guide me. I would build roads of asphalt arbitrarily over her body, and later nothing would keep me there, so close to her, except a feeling of guilt. Every one of her limbs would be too much for me, their heat an ugly hell. Her proximity means my own removal. I praise myself for staying put and keeping my eyes shut hard. I am cool, I am cool, and fall asleep, sending rakish thoughts toward the ceiling.

  “So you really do not live the same thing as I?”

  I am startled awake, lift my head slightly and answer again: “No.”

  We have no goal, we race over the rock desert and the dunes with our curves, we clamber over the dunes, climb them like the Himalayas, dust in our lungs, hearts, hands, camp in the flank of one. Stars rise over the dunes, it is quiet, but the silence seems prickly, it is empty, but the emptiness is like a slinky, restless, dangerous animal. It chases my thoughts into eddies as I climb the flank of the dune, shins twisting in the sand, to see the lights of three cities from the top, to the north, to the west, and to the south. Twice we have changed the tires when they were pierced by thorns. Ahmed, the guide we obey, searches and finds secret trails where they lie open on the surface of the desert. We walk a few paces to stare at immense wadis, our clothes fluttering, turn and still Manu Chao is pouring out of the 4×4. We drink water from the Chinese 1.5-liter-bottles whose caps tear around the mouth of the bottleneck if you screw them closed too hard. The senselessness of our driving around is terrible. Should we write poems about the wadi, the distance, the fact that a third thorn would have us stranded? Would it be better if we had a mission: repressing people, for example, revenge, or trade? Rapt, but moody, I continually rewrap my turban and painstakingly botch sketches, rumpled by the careen of the car, into my notebook.

  In the evening, on the roof of the fortress, Krassa sits in her bedsheet of a nightgown with the insides of her thighs on my hands laid onto our bench before me, astraddle and almost nose to nose. I continue to extrapolate. I believe I am telling a story about some ex-lover. Is it revenge, is it just a sadistic kind of seduction? I seem to take pleasure, drawn by some strangely irresistible pull, in pushing my cool, solipsistic game further and further while I sit across from her. I free my left hand to gesticulate. She removes herself from the other, of her own accord, so to speak, and sits back, a heavy specter filled with human interest.

  Dusk draws in with its army of intensity, we watch it from the parapets of our fortress, a huge phenomenon crossing the great salt lake. On the lake, an inconstant light swerves around, a 4×4 containing a soul full of enjoyment and longing. For the whole hour that we sit there, the light blinks in various places and finally finds its way back into the palm grove, into the labyrinth of small lights and neighborly errands through the dark, the hot excitement of a body that lays itself to rest and celebrates its rituals now that it is cooler.

  We go back to our room. My gaze follows Krassa as she moves, in her square nightgown, under the yellow storm lamp, through the room. She emerges from the shower with a hairbrush, she stands on her bed, sits down, brushes her hair, rolls around. Now she is lying on the bed, the nightgown flipped up high on her back, reading an essay on aesthetics. Blanchot, brought from Paris. I look up from A Hero Of Our Times, which I am reading for the second time, and find my eye resting on the back side of her legs. How unbelievably hideous they are! White, irregular flesh, pierced by phalanges of black stubble which gather to give off denser comments wherever the mass of the flesh demands a fold, comments that seem to determine the world as grumpily as letters. I understand how necessary it is, and must be to her, to have this loved, loved and forgotten—what is love but forgetfulness?—and in it, through it, to touch her soul … I avert my eyes, half in fear that she might catch my glance and misinterpret it, half out of cowardly, lame love for the so regular, disciplined letters that spell out, line for line, the story of Pechorin, and between the lines allow my taste to behave like someone lithe in a uniform, fetching his foil. With a horsewhip I pass through the rows of letters and caress round backs, the soft underbellies of u’s, tickle the k’s. Ah, if I had the Russian text here, y would propel me down into sweet hells; I would come; I would readily come along.

  Time passes. In Berlin, outside the window, the sun gazes on the merry and yet somehow wistful-looking foliage of the ailanthus tree as it moves in the air above the parking lot. Sun and trees seem to know that I am using my time badly. Children scream in the preschool next to the graveyard. A circular saw goes from time to time. Where is the curly audacity with which Prätz just a moment ago approached me, took me around the middle and seemed to entice me to come back into the undefined area that lingered around him on my bed? I turned off the flame under the potatoes I was making for us and followed Prätz, in the distance of his head start that made him invisible, prowling through the jungle of my own apartment, breathless. The scent led me through the hallway past the bicycles to where my bed lies, in the last corner, where I found Prätz’s back. Prätz was lying fully dressed on my bed with bent legs, unmoving.

  His back looked like an instruction, perhaps a music program, I thought, that on the one hand attracts the newcomer and tempts her to try it out, on the other hand puts her off by giving no information on how to activate it. I took so long to learn to use these programs, to try more and more often, and to try blindly even if I was hoping for beauty—not only in black, angry nocturnal moods where nothing could go wrong because I hoped for nothing. I learned to attempt thoughtless forays, like how Prätz speaks. When he speaks, it’s as if joy spewed a satin ribbon out of his mouth and it hung in the air, blown upward by amused zephyrs. Then again he will spit and mumble, address the ground, and sometimes he is, understandably, quiet. Prätz’s curse is to be so beautiful that one hardly cares how he behaves and whether or not he works.

  Prätz lay there waiting. In front of me was the white alley of his pelvis, a sweet firewall running into the top of his jeans. The covered part of his hip seemed as far away as a place high up on the side of a building across the lot, shone on in pink apathy by the morning light. No hint of a psyche to hold on to. A fold of his T-shirt gave off an idle comment, explaining nothing but itself, the fold. Prätz’s nape, confusedly focused in form, stopped any play and seemed to channel my attention like a regulated brook full of long streaming algae, or like the thought of death—as rivers are regulated to avoid floods. Like clouds in a dramatic sunrise, the nape hung between his head and the upper end of his torso. In front hung the belly, softer than usual, inclining a little into my hand. Farther up it was more stony, like the narrow flying buttresses of a cathedral. All centimeter-close, touchable, all completely unattainable because of the silence of the pro
gram. I spoke. It murmured: mhe. I asked,

  “You aren’t sleeping, are you?”

  It answered:

  “m.”

  I threw myself grimly onto the other side of this grey entity and saw dark eyes under pink eyelids.

  Something like a reproach in the question I had sent with my eyes, which were searching for too much, made me start back, I apologized and gave the backside of the entity a push, catapulted myself onto my legs and went off to do something useful.

  This strange program called Prätz lies in me like a heavy, not very nourishing dish. It is good that dodos exist, good that platypuses exist, one shouldn’t slaughter them and shouldn’t ask them what kind of animals they are. One should make them breakfast and ask them, once, then later once more, one should be more serious and ask differently, I told myself. The sun shone on, it was late morning, early afternoon, late summer, early fall, I had a lot to do, I had done a lot, I shuffled, playacting, through my apartment like a Japanese secretary, I sprang with heavy trumps through my apartment like a slap-happy jaguar in a tree, pounce, pounce, pounce. Grabbed some headphones, put on some music, Gruppa Leningrad, oh no, T. Rex, oh no, Can, checked my emails, wiggled my legs, went to get eggs, still awfully confused.

  You should have seen Prätz’s face when he appeared in the doorway among the flycatching streamers, as if in pouring rain. Face of lead, above it hair like kelp, tired, friendly, and more in tune with the air above him than with himself. If one has traitors above one’s head, one must always sally straight upward, that is how I understand Prätz, and that is enough information, one shouldn’t overtake others in understanding themselves.

  Later, in the night bus, I forget to count the strokes that Prätz’s fingers lay down on my arm. With surprise I acknowledge that it is far from being unpleasant to me, although it is exactly the same thing that Krassa was doing. I think, and draw Prätz’s long white arm in front of my eyes. His face goads me on, throws me up in the air, rather than pushing me along in front of it like Krassa’s. I had become a wheelbarrow and in my imagination I placed her feet in rubber boots. That was mean of me, in her own view her feet were princess-like. I look up at Prätz, he looks up at me, we receive joy, somewhat more than one can get by looking up at the sky on a random day. As if his traits were a kind of code that I would be able to understand one day, I try to learn to read them, today his face looks like

  (ima, now).

  TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY THE AUTHOR

  [GREECE]

  ELENA PENGA

  The Untrodden

  SHE RETURNED WITH HIM to their hotel bungalow and sat in the shade of the private yard while he turned on his laptop inside. All morning she had been at sea on a boat for tourists, the kind that take you to see the monasteries of Mount Athos. She saw the monasteries, but they were so far away they flitted by like pictures. Pictures of a world clinging to those rocks since ancient times. Odd feeling not to be able to get close, to walk there, to visit. Untrodden. Unscalable. A sacred place forbidding you to set foot there, forbidding you to visit from fear of desecration. What is its opposite? Trodden?

  Aboard the boat she was amazed by all the amateur photographers, mostly middle-aged hobbyists, but also old people with professional equipment, expensive cameras with large zoom lenses and other accessories. Almost everyone around her was equipped and taking photos incessantly, the rocks, the seagulls, the sea, the monasteries up there in the distance. Couldn’t they just sit still for a minute? Untrodden. A sacred place forbidding you to visit from fear of desecration with all the clicking cameras, the eyes, the brains. A mania, almost nightmarish, to capture everything. To what end? To make it one’s own?

  From the bungalow now she can see part of a wonderful garden with many red flowers and white circular benches. She can see a group of reporters. They are sunning themselves. They are sitting in the middle of the garden on the white benches. No one is talking.

  “Come, Loneliness! Sit down here, Loneliness,” someone shouts. Who is he talking to? The voice again, even more demanding: “Come, Loneliness! Sit down, I say, sit down!” Someone has named their dog Loneliness? Who would do that?

  The woman is sitting completely still. She doesn’t hear anything else. The man comes out of their room, draws near, sits next to her. “I dreamed,” the woman tells him, “that we were sleeping with the bungalow doors open, completely open, we had fallen asleep like that, and I dreamed that while we were sleeping a man came into the room wearing a long dress, he walked softly, the garment dragged on the ground and made a weird scritch-scratch sound.”

  “You didn’t dream it. It happened. When you were sleeping I opened my eyes and saw him. I saw him from behind leaving through the bushes.”

  “Weren’t you afraid? Who was it? What was it? A thief?”

  “No, it wasn’t a thief. Something else.”

  “Something else? What?”

  “He wasn’t coming for us. It was a mistake. I think he made a mistake.”

  The man touches her softly on the cheek and goes back in, returns to his computer screen. The woman remains outside suspended in midair. She looks at the book she has abandoned on the lawn chair. She picks it up, brings it close, opens it, tries to read it. She can’t, she closes it, she shuts her eyes. Love stories flicker through her head.

  There exist love stories that are full of light, she thinks. From start to finish. She knows that because she has lived it. Everything happens slowly, no rush. Sure, there’s pain and disagreement, but they aren’t the main things. Like in the sixties, she thinks. Not that she lived through the sixties, but she knows they were full of life, hope, people were moved, they had dreams, they gave birth to whole movements. That’s the feeling she has from the light-filled stories—like a party, very alive. Maybe their light has to do with the chemistry between people, maybe with mysterious causes that the common mind can’t grasp.

  There are also dark love stories. And they’re like that for dark reasons. Both kinds always involve a hotel. If not more than one, at least one. And that one is a hotel in summer. Near the sea or a lake. And it’s a beautiful hotel, she thinks. She has repressed the ugly hotels and remembers only the beautiful ones. She remembers a room with a sea view where she lived a chapter of a light-filled story. She remembers a room with a lake view, a room with sun pouring in, where she lived a chapter of a dark story.

  Now she thinks about the untrodden in her relationships. The limits. To desire? To action? And then she remembers some stories where the untrodden suddenly evaporated. She remembers doors that opened wide and she went inside.

  She has suffered a loss. And came here to get away from where she was before, from her life. She thinks about what happened, but her thoughts are scattered, her feelings are too raw, she can’t interpret the facts. She attempts to put the inside in order, but the order is undone. Best to concentrate on the pictures, plants, flowers, the view of the sea, the sparrows that fly across the sky-blue background. She looks at it all. She is calm as long as she is looking. She stands motionless until she herself becomes a part of the picture, the landscape. The landscape doesn’t change. The light doesn’t change. No movement, no variation. There’s a bar at the hotel entrance and a sentry house with guards who take turns day and night, but from the beach whoever wants can enter. And not just from the beach, but from other points. At night. When the light disappears and the landscape disappears from sight.

  The woman turns her back to the light. Now she goes into the room. She sees the radio by the side of the bed and turns it on. She listens.

  “Six women demonstrators chained themselves to the entrance of the factory for over twenty-four hours. They were joined by locals in demanding a repeal of Article 36, which legalizes the mining company’s arbitrary actions. The demonstrators remained all night at the factory gate, while the locals gathered in the morning from all the neighboring villages. The demonstrators maintain that the expansion of the mines will turn the whole region into a mining belt of
heavy industrial exploitation, which will cause irreversible damage to the water, the forest, the air, the people, and the local economy.”

  She turns off the radio. She leaves the room. She looks out. She sees the cactuses. Many of them. Impervious. There are people with thorns that poke out so no one will touch them. There are people who pull themselves in so no one will touch them. People who turn their backs on you and distance themselves suddenly and forever so you can’t get to them. The untrodden. And then there are the others. The invaders. Those who come and come back and break in and get inside.

  The reporters in the garden have turned to stone. Or maybe they’re asleep. But aren’t they going to the factory? Isn’t that why they came here? For the demonstrations? Did they come for something else? What else could it be?