“Coming back was like landing on an alien planet,” the astronaut says.
“Do you feel lonely?” Claire asks.
“What?”
“Nobody else alive has experienced what you’ve experienced. That must make you lonely.”
“I have my friends here, they like to hear my stories,” the astronaut says, gesturing at the decomposing humans around him. He’s afraid he’ll wet his pants but he doesn’t want to leave just yet.
“Were you lonely on the moon?”
“I wasn’t lonely,” he says, “I was just tired. Really tired.” He’s remembering more now, and he spurts it out before it melts away: “I was tired the morning I set foot on the moon. I hadn’t been able to sleep in the LEM. We were protected only by its thin skin, surrounded by pumps and valves that clicked and hissed. The adrenaline kept me going that day, but I could barely think. I just wanted to sleep. The lander stood there perched on the rim of a small crater, ready to topple with the slightest gust of wind. But there was no wind. I put on my spacesuit and climbed down. The dust was springy under my boots, like walking on a sponge, and I felt queasy. I didn’t want to throw up in my suit, especially not on television. I wobbled away from the LEM like a drunken man. I got my tools from the LEM’s equipment bay: hammers and rakes and scoops and tongs to scratch the surface of the moon.”
“This is good,” Claire says. She’s scooted up to the edge of the sofa again and is typing words rapidly into her iPad. She takes a bite of the last peanut butter cookie.
“There was a huge boulder at the far edge of the crater near where we landed,” the astronaut continues, “and I rounded the crater to probe it. I heard only the sound of water pumping through my suit as it tried to cool my limbs, the oxygen flowing around my body, and the buzz of Mission Control and Carl’s voice in my ear. I’d never sweated that much before. I glanced up at the Earth. But it was distracting me, so I forced myself to forget it, and I reached the boulder. Everything was gray. But then a crystal lodged in the rock caught my eye. Its color was alien, like a rainbow trapped in amber, graceful and fragile and bound to give the geologists on Earth wet dreams.”
The astronaut hesitates. “Sorry about that,” he says. “I was getting carried away.”
“I can handle wet dreams,” Claire says. “Go on.”
The astronauts looks away from his granddaughter and stares into space, as if through the walls of his nursing home. “There were billions of years of history right there, in that single rainbow crystal. I’d never seen anything like it and I never would again. I scraped and hammered, tugged and pried and tried not to lose the dust and pebbles as I scooped them into my pouch, struggling to free the crystal. I almost had it when I dropped my hammer. I swore and hoped the mic didn’t pick up what I said. The hammer just flew away and bounced off a rock and twirled across the moonscape as light as a pinwheel. I hopped and spun after it and when I finally grabbed it with my glove again, I didn’t know where I was. I looked back and I saw my overlapping footprints spiraling up a crater around a boulder and all I heard was static. I couldn’t see Carl or the LEM. The hills in the distance blurred together. I couldn’t tell what was near and what was far. The moon was like a hologram, every tiny fragment a blurry likeness of the whole. Every black and white rock and crater and mound of dust was a reflection of every other. I saw myself wandering the moon forever, drifting from dune to dune, stumbling over shattered meteorites, falling into pillows of ash. Vomit rose into my esophagus and I was afraid I’d choke to death. And then—”
The astronaut struggles to find the right words.
“You had an epiphany?” Claire asks.
The astronaut looks at Claire’s face. She’s very young. She must be hoping that his trip to the moon and her visit to the nursing home might turn out to have been worthwhile. She doesn’t know much about life yet, or about him.
“No,” the astronaut says. “Then Carl’s voice crackled in my ear and guided me back to the LEM. I left the moon with rocks and what I came with.”
It’s all becoming vague in his mind again, like a dream swirling away at daybreak. He clings to the memories of memories, but they slip from his grasp. The rest is quickly told: tired cheers, routine debriefings, half-hearted hugs, and a life and a nation that gave up on shared projects and moved on to—what? He scans the deliberate, cheerful wallpaper of his old folks’ home, masking chips and cracks in plaster. He remembers the waitress from the Boom Boom Room now, her long, pale fingers, her black, black hair. He remembers her yelling at him that he never left the moon, and he remembers the way their daughter shrugged away from him years later, the last time he saw her, as if she were related to someone else.
His granddaughter waits for him to say more, but he doesn’t. “Is that it?” Claire asks.
“I’m afraid so. It was a lot of work, but I did the job.”
She gets up and packs away her iPad.
“Thanks, Grampa,” Claire says. She steps toward his wheelchair and almost hugs him but doesn’t. He’s glad she doesn’t: his pants are wet. He doesn’t think she notices the smell, but he doesn’t want her to get too close. “Mom hopes you’re comfortable here. If you remember anything else, let me know, okay?” Claire says and then she’s gone.
By the time the Russian nurse comes to pick him up from the common room, the memory of Claire is gone, too. The nurse wheels him back through an empty hall to his room. She helps him clean up his accident, he slurps his dinner like an astronaut in space, he watches Star Trek in bed and dreams of becoming a starship captain. He breaks his record in Doodle Jump and falls asleep.
He wakes up a few minutes later and remembers the smell of moondust, and he remembers the girl he met today. He wants to tell her how it smelled when he returned to the LEM from his moonwalk. He stripped off his spacesuit and he was caked in moondust. It was the first time he smelled and tasted and touched the moon without a helmet or gloves or boots. It was the only time the moon didn’t feel like a simulator. The alien dust invaded his pores and dirtied his fingernails and filled his nostrils and lungs and made him sneeze. It made him feel alive but alien, as if he belonged to the moon now. Back on Earth, the dust no longer smelled like anything at all. But here in the lander on the surface of the moon, it breathed oxygen for the first time, and it smelled like spent gunpowder, or like the remains of a barbecue on a rainy Fourth of July. It smelled like the ashes of an old body scattered into the sea. He wants to hold onto that memory until his granddaughter’s next visit. He’s the only man alive who remembers the smell of moondust. He can do this. He focuses on it and nothing else. He banishes every other thought. He rehearses the memory of moondust over and over again. His mind is sharp and powerful again, remembering what moondust smelled like, what it felt like in his hands, clinging to the unshaven skin of his face, the sandpaper pain of it in his lungs, and again that fleeting smell of exhaustion. But finally he falls asleep and he dreams of the Russian nurse, and by the next morning when he wakes up, no one remembers the smell of moondust.
TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY AUTHOR
[LITHUANIA]
UNDINĖ RADZEVIČIŪTĖ
Opium
“OPIUM,” SAID THE SCOT, opening the box. “You lose yourself completely but at the same time you also lose fear.”
But the Scot did not need opium for fear.
He had been stabbed with a knife a month ago but that didn’t stop him from going about his business at night.
The Scot in the city was as illegal as the opium.
An invasive species.
Only no decision had yet been taken to shoot him like some kind of raccoon destroying the nests of nightingales.
Even though, as has been mentioned, he had already been stabbed with a sharp object.
Most probably he used opium not to dampen down fear but as a form of spiritual therapy to heal his wounds.
“Where’s it from?” asked Winston.
“What?”
“The opium.”
/> Winston could not tell if it was really opium or just some new kind of “grass,” and he was left with two possibilities: to believe what the Scot was saying or—not. Opium was rather rare in twenty-first-century Europe.
But if you couldn’t believe the Scot, who could you believe?
The Scot was his oldest and best friend, and now his best friend was preparing an opium pipe in accordance with Chinese ritual.
You could also choose to believe that or not.
The Scot had bought the nineteenth-century opium pipe a year ago in the Netherlands.
He had bought the special table to hold the opium tools in West Berlin from some dealers in Chinese antiques.
It was dirty with bits peeling off when he bought it, but then he had it restored.
The Scot didn’t seem very pleased with the restoration, but the cherry blossoms depicted with shell inlays warmed his heart so much that he finally managed to suppress his displeasure and calm down.
The opium was kept in a dark-blue cloisonné metal box decorated with pink lotuses, which the Scot had also bought in the Netherlands.
The special knives and the five-centimeter-high copper ashtray, funnel-shaped and tapering down towards the bottom, in a London flea market.
The instrument for measuring out the opium looked like a miniature barrel, with crudely engraved flowers and birds.
The Scot had bought it in Berlin as well.
The tools for cleaning the pipe he had ordered from local artisans.
And the artisans had made them from brass to the Scot’s drawings and grainy black-and-white photocopies.
The Scot had everything.
For the opium.
Only there had been a shortage of opium for a long time.
“Where’s the opium from?” Winston asked again.
“From the same sources,” said the Scot
“From the same Scottish sources” was how he also got an endless supply of legal products.
Chinese tea directly from a plantation. Less than twenty days after it had been picked.
Dark-blue Uzbek raisins untreated with any chemicals.
Green almonds, braided dried melons, chocolate that a week earlier had been judged to be the best in the world.
The Scot’s world seemed somewhat bigger than that of the people around him, and if the town were to find out about the Scot’s Scottish life, they would stab him with knives more often and with even greater enthusiasm.
The Scot lived his life without paying the least attention to how things were supposed to be in the town.
For that reason, people no longer greeted him.
He hid in the shadows but Winston had never noticed that there was not enough light in the shadows for the Scot.
Or that is was too cold for him.
As it was, the Scot as a Scot would disappoint anyone.
His hair was not red, nor was it curly.
And he never went out into the street without his underpants on.
He looked like a rabid fox crossed with a French musketeer from a twentieth-century film based on an Alexandre Dumas novel.
He wasn’t even able to produce any documents to prove that he was a Scot.
Only ones that showed he was like anyone else.
He was a Scot only according to the stories told by his family.
And those stories, about the doilies and mirrors from his grandmother’s younger days but also reaching as far back as the seventeenth century, were different to other people’s stories.
The Scot always insisted that his family were not some kind of economic refugees.
They had been invited. To a new town being created in the center of Europe.
And its ruler had invited them to that town.
Invited them because of their faith.
They were, after all, Protestant, the new town was Protestant, and they were wealthy.
Somewhat.
Out of all the Scot’s Scottish stories there were two that Winston liked best.
One of the stories was about how one of his ancestors was going to build a Scottish house in that Protestant town.
And build it next to the town hall.
And the town hall, as it happens, was also being built at the same time.
By the municipality.
In keeping with the traditions of house building in that town at that time, many of the buildings stood joined to one another and shared a common wall.
The town elders tried to negotiate with the Scot’s Scottish ancestor regarding the common wall and wanted to divide the cost in half, but the Scot’s ancestor completely stopped the construction of his house.
And disappeared.
And reappeared only after several years.
When all six walls of the town hall had already been built.
The Scot’s ancestor surveyed the town hall and, quietly, without any hindrance, adjoined his house to it.
“You see, Churchill, that’s the Scottish way of doing things,” said the Scot, explaining the situation.
“You call deceiving people the Scottish way of doing things?” Winston then asked.
“No,” said the Scot. “It’s just that the Scots are a very patient race.”
“Wait for what,” asked Winston.
“The moment,” replied the Scot. “The right moment.”
That’s probably accurate, yes.
Especially taking into account how long the Scots waited for the right moment to exit the United Kingdom.
The other story about the Scot’s family was about how one of his ancestors, probably the same one, opened a tobacco shop in his new house and taught all the locals to smoke.
In a civilized manner.
A pipe.
He ordered some long white Dutch porcelain pipes from the Netherlands.
Half a meter in length.
But after five wars—two of them world wars—all that was left were shards.
But were shards not proof enough?
The Scot’s opium pipe bought in the Netherlands looked like a real work of art, even though it was an ordinary bamboo one, with a modest Yixing clay—and not ivory—bowl.
But.
With silver rings, jade tips, a tiger eye cabochon, and a beaten silver plaquette, decorated with a Foo dog, its teeth bared threateningly like a lion.
Most often these Foo dogs can be found in pairs outside Chinese restaurants.
Guarding the doors.
“That’s enough,” said the Scot’s black beard.
The Scot had the shortest beard of all the members of the rugby veterans’ club.
A French beard.
He came to this town because of the rugby.
It was through rugby that they had become friends.
Winston had to shave.
Not because Churchill needed to, but because the town’s inhabitants did not trust people and in particular mayors hiding half of their face under hair.
“How’s your side?” asked Winston.
“Healing. And how’s your blood pressure?”
The whole town already knew about the Mayor’s blood pressure.
“It’s jumping up and down.”
“That thing may quieten it down,” said the Scot.
Although opium both heals and kills. And one had to be careful in using it.
When you have been friends with someone for more than twenty years you only need to say one word.
Or two.
Winston did not want to ask what the stabbing with the knife meant to the Scot.
An end to his career?
But he asked anyway.
“Are you coming back when you’re fully recovered?”
The Scot did not reply.
But the opium covered up for him.
Would an international-class rugby referee return to the playing field after his side has healed?
The answer was obvious.
No.
And the reason was not just his wounded side but age as well.
; What one could be jealous of the Scot for was his wife.
Not so much his wife but the fact that she had run away to America.
The fact that she had left the Scot forever and had moved beyond the horizon line from where no one would ever be able to bring her back.
Excepting the Russians.
Not unless the Russians were to turn the world on its axis and all of America found itself underwater.
As a result of the opium?
A thought came into Winston’s head: it would be good if his wife were also to disappear.
Disappear in such a way that he would not even know to where and there would be no point in looking for her.
The Scot stood up holding his side in an unusual way.
He had no fat around his waist.
As far as one could see.
Crimes did occur in the town, but it was usually women that were attacked.
It wasn’t clear if the perpetrators were locals or the visitors who came in from elsewhere for the remedies.
Perhaps they were locals since they had more energy and less to lose.
Besides that, only the visitors found things of interest in the town, while the locals were bored.
Besides that, the male visitors on arrival found companions amongst the women who were also there for the remedies.
They drank the mineral water together and took turns rolling around in the mud.
Whereas running around the town streets with a knife in their hands was really not their thing.
The Scot was still in pain.
That was clear.
But as a real rugby veteran he had enough self-esteem not to show it.
After all, they were like gladiators.
At least that was what their trainer used to say when there were no other arguments left to motivate them.
“The Geographer,” said the Scot, yawning and shaking off the effects of the opium, his head enveloped by the pleasant smoke. “He’s flown in.”
Best European Fiction 2017 Page 19