Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  Last night the woman and the man went to the hotel restaurant where they eat every night and were told they couldn’t eat there. They were told someone had booked the whole place because he wanted to eat by himself, because he didn’t want to eat with others. Who was it? Maybe that’s why the reporters were there? Was he the reason the reporters came?

  Someone is trying to enter their room. Or is it another room he is trying to get into?

  She has also tried to enter, to break into the untrodden of the other. Sometimes successfully. At other times a painful failure. Best not to have any aspirations. Untrodden and avatar.

  And her untrodden? Her limit? Isn’t it madness? In love isn’t the untrodden the point where madness begins, the dependence on the other, that point where you lose yourself inside the other?

  “I think of relationships like spaces. How exactly is the space that two people create?”

  “Maybe it’s a country they create, a new country with its own language, its own customs and rituals, its own laws and prohibitions. An untrodden.”

  “There is violence in relationships. In those that aren’t good. The untrodden is nothing when it meets the lie, the lack of integrity, self-interest, small-mindedness, total inability to take responsibility.”

  “We live in a time when it’s easy to support our wrongdoings.”

  “Don’t think about that now. Think about the good relationships. Those you love. Those who love you and forgive you and want you near them.”

  On Mount Athos there is the untrodden of gender, the-prohibition-against-women-entering-or-staying, the-prohibition-against-eunuchs-and-children-entering-or-staying, the-prohibition-against-female-animals-of-any-kind.

  Elsewhere there are other prohibitions. And there are still borders with barbed wire, with bars that block entrances, outposts with armed sentinels, police on boats patrolling the sea. And there are all those people who have to emigrate, who are expelled, who arrive on unknown soil exhausted from the waves, the salt, the sun, the thirst, the hunger.

  At night some people try to get into the hotel. They wear robes as disguise. Or as protection from the plants, the cactuses, the thorns. Scritch-scratch-scratch-scratch, the material brushes past the plants. The glass door of the bungalow is wide open. The invader goes inside. Is a woman waiting for him? Is a man waiting for him? A couple? The invader stops being an invader. He becomes the fulfillment of desire.

  “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 untrodden presupposes the notion of the foreign, of the unfamiliar, of the undesirable. But it also presupposes the notion of the invader.

  “I have wished for an unexpected moment when you’d invade me. I have wished for a moment when I’d invade you. I don’t know the way. I would like to. I don’t know the way.”

  “Find it. Take the boat. Let the waves hit you, let the sun burn you, get thirsty, get hungry, take risks. Find yourself on an unknown shore. And you will find the door open.”

  TRANSLATED BY KAREN VAN DYCK

  [HUNGARY]

  ZSUZSA SELYEM

  Confectionery 1952

  I ONLY WANT TO EAT like everyone else. That’s all. My location is completely subordinate to this life program: after all, life is too short to be anything but happy. There are two concrete bunks in the cell and one concrete table with four holes along the edge through which an iron chain is threaded so that the nutriments can be tied down, although at this date there are far more nutriments in the cell than chains. Even now they are bringing in another one.

  The moment they hurl it in, before the cell door has time to close, the cellmates start bombarding it with questions: what’s going on outside, has the Devil or, failing that, the Western powers taken that foul gangster Gheorghiu-Dej? The new nutriment apologizes, it has no inkling about politics, it was not brought in from the city but from a malenkiy robot labor camp in Dobrogea. It is clad appropriately in shabby, torn shoes, shorts, and a short-sleeved summer shirt. I quickly size up my chances: I can get at it at any point. Better still, there’s no fat on it anywhere, finding the veins will be a piece of cake.

  All this I observe from my house. I have set up my hideout in a crevice in the wall and because I had a jab yesterday I can afford to relax for the next four days. I daydream about how delicious this new butt is going to be. I’ve gotten tired of the previous lot, the taste of crazies is slowly getting on my nerves; worse, the blood of the nutriments kept here long-term thickens from stress, no matter what quantities of anticoagulants I pump into them. One of them freaked out so badly the other day it started screeching “more light, more light.” They came for it, knocked it down, and schlepped it off by the feet.

  Everybody has their own drama. I, for instance, couldn’t care a continental about light, as I have little regard for vision, but the nutriments are forever whining about the neon light burning nonstop, without which, if they didn’t get the black squirt in the morning and if they weren’t chased out one by one to the bogs double quick, they wouldn’t be able to tell day from night. Nor can they bear the lack of air: there’s no window in the cell, and it’s only through the thirty-by-fifteen-centimeter grated opening under the door that they get a bit of oxygen. I of course am hardly incommoded by this—on the contrary, it is by warmth and carbon dioxide that I recognize my feed.

  For a while this new one doesn’t know what to do in the cell where normally two nutriments would fit but at present there are ten. They squeeze themselves together on one of the concrete bunks to make room for the eleventh and tell it everything nutriments need to know in the cell. When they bring in the black squirt it means it’s morning. If you drink it you’ll feel an irresistible urge to urinate but you are allowed to the bogs only once a day. If you insist on being taken out and bang on the door, the guard yells at you to keep your gob shut, that if he takes you out now it’ll be blood you’re pissing.

  I admit the atmosphere in the cell is a shade less than convivial, but then again, if you really try and don’t think too much and just let yourself go with the flow, always finding time to detach yourself, and if you can accept the low points along with the high, and if it just so happens that the only colors you have at your disposal are blue and yellow, and despite it all if you still manage to keep your pecker up, then with a bit of creativity you can mix them to obtain fifty shades of green, for life is but a journey and it is solely up to you how far you get, I for instance ended up living a splendid life because I never let hardship get the upper hand and always kept smiling and so whenever I want I can find the best possible nutriment with my rostrum, almost without moving, and I have time for meditation, for giving advice to others, for showing them the light at the end of the tunnel, for instance, aka the ray of hope.

  What if your other need comes over you? If you don’t eat you don’t need to shit either, one of the old nutriments answers. Indeed the nutriment would rather eat, several times a day even, it has the makings for that, somehow it tends to panic when it’s hungry. They would waste what little energy they have keeping track of every single crumb, organizing and selecting from among the bread lumps pushed in for lunch. They even get bean soup, sometimes as many as seven or eight beans floating in one tin cup or another, but that’s not enough either, they’re always counting and measuring each other up and down, one of the old nutriments used to systematically torment another by fishing out the same bean repeatedly and pretending to swallow it, but lo, one bean was still left in the can, while the other could only stare, close to tears.

  In the meantime I found out that the new nutriment’s name was Beczásy, formerly a landowner from Háromszék but with the nationalizat
ion they took away everything it had: land, house, agricultural machinery, horses. They came for them the night after Shrove Tuesday, the guests had barely left and the housefolk gone to sleep when the maid woke them with the news that five armed strangers were perching on the woodpile and wouldn’t climb down for fear of the dogs. Beczásy whistled back the dogs and was instantly told that they were allowed twenty kilograms of luggage, and that they’d better not keep the van waiting. The smaller larva had been promised a visit to the Sepsiszentgyörgy confectionery the day before, so when the van laden with the landowners was rattling into town the little larva asked aloud, Are we going to the confectionery?

  I have no name. I am a female of the genus cimex lectularius. Our males often fail to distinguish between us, they simply perforate our thorax with their saber-like reproductive organ and through this wound inject their sperm directly into our paragenital cavity, provided it’s a female they’ve mounted and not a male, who under the circumstances is forced to emit an odorous signal to the other to find a more appropriate vessel for his great copulatory drive. Our nutriments have termed the thorax-perforating position traumatic insemination, which I must say is awfully nice of them but there is zero trauma, we have no nociceptors of any kind. I’ve always stuck to the maxim, don’t try to be the only female in his life but the one who counts. The one he thinks about, the one he loves, the one for whom he is ready to fight the entire world. Try to be the one for whom he would sacrifice everything, the one he treasures. The one he protects and supports. The one by whose side he walks, whose hand he holds, never leaving her alone unless she asks him to. Be the female who lets him go if he wants to go. For however much it hurts, you must learn to accept that there are things you have to let go. Anyway, what is destined to be yours will be yours in the end; though others may enter the scene, they will be like specks of dust, too insignificant to change the course of fate. For indeed whatever is destined to happen will happen.

  The Beczásys were moved into forced residence in Sepsiszentgyörgy and stayed there for one year, then were deported to Dobrogea; the female is still there, the larvae are scattered about.

  I get hungry. The nutriments are fast asleep. I climb down the wall to the floor, direct my steps towards Beczásy, pierce the soft skin on the inside of one elbow with my rostrum. As I expected, the blood is tranquil and scrumptious. I fill my abdomen and slowly retire into my house. Another five days of relaxation.

  My favorite nutriment has cut down on all life functions to a bare minimum, keeps lying on the floor almost all day long and only turns over if one side starts hurting. It doesn’t mope, doesn’t think about anything, just lets things be, like someone who’s been sent on a cultural detox trip. Three weeks pass by, it only stirs when the bread or soup rations are distributed, and for the morning sprint to the bogs. In this time those unfortunate nutriments that keep brooding about why they were locked up, what offence they might possibly have committed, what they would be asked during interrogation, whatever they should answer, and, not least, what their people might be doing outside and so on and so forth, keep boiling in their own juice until they soften and welcome any kind of change. They give a sigh of relief when they are finally taken to interrogation and, pleased as they are, oblige by chattering about anything they’re asked.

  But my Beczásy rises from the cement floor when summoned to interrogation like a newly eclosed pupa. They bind his eyes and drag him out of the cell. He is led hither and thither at length, pushed in the end into an office where a nutriment in uniform is waiting for him behind a desk and asks him to take a seat, to write down his whole life on that sheet of paper, the names of his acquaintances, and what, where, when he talked with them. What he knows, what he does, what he hopes for.

  He fills the sheet and asks for another. The nutriment in the uniform hands him one, leans back with a smile of satisfaction and starts reading the first chapter. All you can see from outside is that his head begins to grow more and more red. When he reaches the part about the Italians eating the cat, for the cat will always be the Italians’ most prized meat, and small wonder since it’s the cleanest animal on earth, he starts screaming and smashes the paper into Beczásy’s face. What the hell is this? How dare he mock him? Is he trying to sabotage Socialist society, which is built on absolute equality? Has it not dawned on him yet that he is nothing, a nobody, a speck of dust? That it only takes him one move to blow his guts out, to crush him like a cockroach?

  I couldn’t say the fate of cockroaches is close to my heart, and I have no heart to begin with, but still, this is not a nice thing to say. And Beczásy looks at him with candid eyes and when the one in uniform stops to take a breath he remarks unperturbed that he has written exactly what the comrade major asked him to, that he hadn’t the remotest intention of mocking anybody, it is the very truth that the Italian war prisoners working in their orchard in Bolgár after the First World War when he was a small child had indeed caught their cats and … The major starts bellowing again. Do you really imagine that you can outwit me, you pest? With your cats and Italians and Bulgarians? What’s this got to do with us? When, where, with whom did you plot to overthrow the regime, who are your friends, may God bugger you together with your whole rotting class, why do I have to waste time with such degenerate morons, I’m telling you you’ll regret this, you’ll regret this bitterly.

  In the end the one in uniform shrugs and continues in a lower voice but stressing each syllable: I’ll give you another chance. Here’s a clean sheet of paper. I want an accurate biography. Write about conspiracy. About politics. Not animals.

  Beczásy starts again. The interrogating officer leaves the room; he returns in an hour and says that’s enough for today. He puts the densely written page aside for now to spare himself, lights a cigarette, and rings for the guard to remove the delinquent.

  The others of course pester him with questions. What happened? Beczásy sighs and tells them what a dirty scoundrel the interrogating officer is, but that everything is going to be fine as long as we keep our calm and sanity. With this he lies down on the concrete floor and closes his eyes. Again, he only gets up for the morning bogs and for eating at lunchtime. Sometimes he stirs a bit and turns over to his other side. I choose a pleasant point on him every five days and indeed, everything is fine, but for the fact that I am not the only one to frequent him now, some of my kin have discovered that his blood is fresher and tastier.

  Between two jabs he’s usually taken off for interrogation, the one in uniform is raving, for what he gets is either a detailed report on wheat crops, or on the specificities of various horse breeds, and my Beczásy keeps looking him in the eye with preternatural candidness, so that the officer is unable to decide whether this pest is indeed a perfect idiot or a first-class mime, but he’ll make sure to beat all those first-class skills out of him, for this is what he in his turn has first-class skills for.

  He wants to find out why László Luka, former finance minister, current convict, used to go hunting at his place together with his wife, Betty Birnbaum; he wants to know what they talked about in the minutest details: 1) how they plotted to play Transylvania into the hands of the Hungarians, and 2) what role Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, former justice minister, current convict, played in this act of high treason. To this, my Beczásy answers with the utmost sincerity: I have never invited that gentleman to hunt, he simply sent word that he knew mine was the region’s best hunting ground and that he would let me know the time of their arrival, some time in the autumn of 1947, I couldn’t tell you the exact date because after the nationalization my diary was left in Dálnok. I mean, if Gheorghiu-Dej announced he was coming to visit you, would you refuse him?

  During the interrogations that followed, Beczásy was not allowed to sit down. As instructed, the officer first exhausts the possibilities of psychic torture by employing a sort of chiasmus: reducing the number of words while increasing the volume of the voice. Repeating the combination of the words God, bugger, fuck, mother, u
ntil the delinquent stops protesting, stops resisting, and consents to repeat, accept, sign everything. The only problem is that no matter how long he keeps churning out such combinations, even though he goes as far as to describe at length the methods of terminating the lives of relatives, this particular one doesn’t protest and doesn’t resist, just keeps looking back at him candidly as though he weren’t there, so that at the end of some of the sessions the officer is more worn out than my pet.

  Beczásy’s method of pupation is unbeatable until the officer passes on to the chapter of Relentless Physical Torture. This I regret, for it means I’ll be forced to pass on to another nutriment, but then again, ultimately every defeat is a part of our becoming and we have to comprehend that no one is cheating at the card game: today we lose, tomorrow we win, that’s just how it goes. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect your efforts to be appreciated, your talent to be discovered, your love to be recognized. You need to bring every cycle to an end. Not out of self-respect, not because you can’t keep up the fight, not even out of pride, but simply because it’s no longer part of your life. Shut the door behind you, change the record, clear out the junk, shake the dust from the rag. Forget who you were and be who you are.

  First the officer hits him in the face with his bare hand while hollering about treason, a confectionery, nationalism, and Lord Lieutenant Gábor Szentiványi, then hands him a sheet of paper and barks at him to read out loud: “I, István Beczási, together with Dr. Gábor Szentiványi, discussed in the Ária confectionery in Sepsiszentgyörgy on September 27, 1949, between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., the methods by which ailing Communism could be eradicated in the county of Háromszék.” This is a patent lie from start to finish, Beczásy says and hands back the sheet. The officer doesn’t take it but hisses through his teeth: Sign it. Not even if you strike me dead, Beczásy answers, because if I … At this the officer gestures with his eye to the two screws at the door, who grab him and schlep him off to the torture chamber.