Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  That afternoon the girl from Galičnik and I climbed onto the garage roof to sunbathe. I’d attempted to make Bermuda shorts out of a pair of old jeans, just like Auntie Beba’s. Up top, I had on a short vest with fringes, like a Native American. I had great strength within myself. I felt as if I could fly. I told the girl from Galičnik that one day I’d get married to Kay. She burst out laughing. Insulted, I turned away to face the street in front of our building. What appeared to be a bundle of rags was falling from the roof of our building toward the entrance. It fell at great speed. I heard a scream.

  “What was that?” the girl from Galičnik gave a start, grabbing hold of my arm.

  “Something fell from the building. I didn’t see exactly what it was.”

  A crowd of people gathered at the entrance. They began calling out for help. Auntie Beba came running out in her colorful kimono as well. A crazed shriek had replaced the laughter on her face. She was no longer gleaming like a goldfish.

  TRANSLATED BY PAUL FILEV

  [NETHERLANDS]

  PHILIP HUFF

  A Comfort of Sorts

  ISABEL EMERGED FROM the house’s shadow in her socks, trainers in hand, holding a blue cap over her eyes.

  “Good afternoon, signorina,” I said.

  I was squatting near the little wall next to the swimming pool, and put the trowel back into the black bucket containing the last of the cement, sweat pouring off my back and brow.

  “So, sleepyhead,” I said, walking over to the deck chair in the shadow of the large holm oak. “Did you sleep well?”

  Isabel nodded, still somewhat sleepy.

  I put my arm around her waist and pulled her tightly to me, her running shirt taut over her breasts. I pressed my head against her belly. The fine hairs on her thighs had a golden sheen. Isabel put her hand on my neck and turned my head toward the staircase I was in the process of constructing.

  “So,” she said. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Inspiration,” I said, pulling her shirt up and kissing her flat stomach.

  Isabel freed herself and moved to sit in front of me, on the foot of the deck chair. She put on her shoes. There was dirt under her fingernails. Her lower back was the color of caramel.

  “You’re already getting a tan,” I said.

  Isabel nodded, pulled up her socks and then rolled them down just a little bit. She stood up with a sigh. Her legs cast two thin shadows on the terrace.

  I put my hand on her calves. “Show-off,” I said.

  “Well, a little bit, yes,” she said, now appearing to also feel the heat. “But at least I still can. For a while. Not long. Soon I’ll be round as a frying pan.” She pulled up her nose and stuck out her tongue in disgust.

  “Be careful,” I said.

  She put on her cap.

  “Of course.”

  As Isabel disappeared among the quiet blue spruce trees at the end of the road, I turned to the steps. They would lead to the outdoor kitchen that was to be built on this side of the house.

  When I had bought the house from a local official seven years earlier, it was a modest three-room dwelling. It had expanded over time: an addition with an extra bedroom; a larger swimming pool; a garage; a second terrace that caught the afternoon sun. The next obvious step was an outdoor kitchen.

  I had built that garage myself. I had poured its foundations. I had leached planks, built a frame, and put up a roof. The latter was the most difficult. And I had wanted to do it well. I used more than twenty tubes of adhesive fixing the shingles. I later told this to the contractor who was building the outdoor kitchen, causing him to almost wet himself laughing. “For a roof of this size,” he told me, “two tubes should be more than enough.”

  A twenty-minute cold shower, washing away the heat of the day. A clean pair of linen trousers. A shirt. A bottle of wine, silently uncorked, poured into a solitary glass.

  The absence of work, of course, but also of a social life. No friends, no dinners, no birthdays, no acquaintances encountered in the grocery store. This was what drew us to Umbria again and again. Isabel and I could go for miles without coming across anyone we knew.

  I packed the small blue box that I would give to her shortly, my book, two glasses, and two bottles: white wine for myself, water for Isabel. I set down two ceramic bowls on the table. These were local products that Isabel had bought. One of them was filled with pistachios.

  I opened my book at the folded page and started to read. I only looked up again when I was disturbed by the drone of a helicopter. Once the helicopter passed, I noted how silent and empty it had become.

  It was half past six. The sun was approaching the end of its high arc through the sky. I looked at the blue box.

  What time did Isabel leave for her run? At three? Half past? How long did she usually stay gone for?

  I got up and walked to the edge of the terrace, up to where the graveled path began. Fixed to that spot, I gazed out over the valley. There was no movement, no sound; even the river seemed to be quiet. On the other side of the valley, the dark trees on the hill were utterly still. Behind them the sky was soft, and pale, and bottomless.

  A bird appeared, flying up from behind the hill, tracing slow circles in the summer sky.

  Then the gravel cracked under the broad tires of the neighbor’s car at the curve in the road.

  I walked down the path, just as Isabel had done, heading along the spruce trees, through the open gate, and stopped the approaching SUV. The tinted window on the passenger side rolled down. I greeted Mrs. Vierchowod and her husband, Silvio, in the driver’s seat. Mrs. Vierchowod’s hair was freshly dyed raven-black, her skin turned dark brown by the sun, wrinkled and sagging down into the deep décolletage of her dress.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I smiled at her carefully. “Have you,” I began. “Have you by any chance seen Isabel?”

  “Isabel? Just now?”

  I nodded.

  “No,” said Mrs. Vierchowod and turned to her husband.

  “She went for a run more than two hours ago,” I said. “Usually she doesn’t stay out for so long, but now she’s, of course …” But the words got stuck in my throat.

  Near the dilapidated, large wooden billboard for Casa Vattimo, on the way to Todi, we saw a car on the side of the road: an Audi Cabriolet. The road surface was torn up. It showed fresh brake marks.

  Mr. Vierchowod put the SUV into reverse, parked it on the shoulder, and pulled up the handbrake. He switched on the hazard lights. As he opened his door, the car emitted a long piercing tone that cut through the regular tick of the hazards: the headlights were still on, illuminating nothing, a safety measure.

  Even with my espadrilles on, the surface of the road warmed my feet. I walked towards the vehicle, sweat on my brow. The Audi was damaged on the front right-hand side. The headlight was cracked. The metal of the engine valve was slightly contorted. The air smelled of rubber.

  That was when I saw Isabel’s blue cap lying in the grass, spattered with drops of blood, like a darker and more permanent version of raindrops.

  I looked at Mrs. Vierchowod. She had lifted her hand to cover her mouth. A car came racing past at high speed.

  “Please, don’t worry about it too much,” Mrs. Vierchowod said on the way to Perugia. “This kind of thing usually turns out fine. In my experience …”

  I wasn’t listening. That’s the advantage of a foreign language: if you don’t focus on it, you don’t have to understand any of it. I looked out the window, at the sycamores lining the road. “Army trees” is what my brother used to call them. He was dead now. I hadn’t though of him for some time, although I saw those trees every day.

  But then some of Mrs. Vierchowod’s words did reach me after all: ospedale, la tua Isabella, niente.

  I met Isabel for the first time in Rotterdam. It was summer. We were at an office party. She was standing in the hallway, queuing for the men’s toilets, wearing a thin summer dress. Her bra was clearly visible
.

  “Quite the party,” I said.

  “Yes,” she nodded, her drink’s straw clamped between her pearly teeth, her long, slender fingers wrapped around it. The skin of her shoulders had the sheen of an orange. I felt the need to touch her.

  “Let me introduce myself,” I said.

  Isabel let the straw fall back into the glass. “Isabel Niemandsverdriet.” She stuck out her hand.

  “What a beautiful name,” I said. “Niemandsverdriet—No man’s sorrow. Is it your own, or your husband’s?”

  She gave an almost invisible smile. “My father’s.”

  “And what else did you inherit from your father? Your passion for the law? A castle? Musical talent?”

  “Well, not exactly,” she said, this time with a bigger smile.

  We both glanced at the toilet door. It was still locked.

  “You work here in the data room, right?”

  “Yes. And I’m still studying.”

  “What?”

  “International and European law.”

  “There you go. You inherited the passion after all,” I said, taking a pack of cigarettes out of my inside pocket and offering her one.

  “My father works for the harbor.” And: “Thanks, but I don’t think we’re allowed to smoke inside.”

  I lowered the cigarettes. “Not even tonight?”

  “Not even tonight.”

  We shared a moment of silence. I was hoping that whoever was occupying the toilet would take his sweet time.

  “You’re taller than I expected,” Isabel said.

  I gave her a questioning look.

  “Word on the street is, you’re a little despot. But you’re actually quite tall.”

  Later that evening, when I let her walk ahead of me into the hotel room, I touched the skin of her shoulder for the first time. It was even softer than I had imagined.

  I entered the room through two sets of automatic doors. It smelled of antiseptics and plastic. A squat woman in a blue uniform and disposable hair cap approached me. Before she could say anything, I saw Isabel.

  She was lying in a large bed, between green sheets. Her torso was covered with all kinds of tubes and cords. There was an ECG monitor behind her. Then I heard the mechanical drone of the respirator, echoing the sound of the helicopter, and started to shake all over: my hands, my knees, my arms shivering. As I stepped closer, I felt my heart tighten.

  Isabel’s face was as still as a high and empty sky. A sky where there was nothing to see.

  I visited her grave for the first time ten days after the funeral. It was an anonymous spot in the earth, not yet covered by grass.

  “It is a pretty place,” I said, “where you’re buried. Your mother, in any case, finds it quite beautiful. It looks just like the garden at your old home. So she says.” I had to smile. “You know, Bel, I think your mother still doesn’t quite like me … But what I said about you at the funeral … Well, at least she thought that was nice. I think. I decided to rather not tell her …”

  But I couldn’t finish the sentence. The remaining air in my lungs escaped in spurts and gasps.

  During the funeral, I had felt emptier than ever, all emotions having been wrung from my body. It was with difficulty that I hoisted myself up from the wooden bench to address the people present. My mouth was so dry that the inside of my lips kept sticking to my front teeth. The microphone hissed every time I pronounced an s.

  The world became blurry. “It’s unreal,” I said, kneeling at Isabel’s grave. “And I’m sorry about it. But I have real difficulty picturing your face. Even though I want to. The only thing I can imagine with any degree of sharpness is your hands. And your belly. That too. But I can barely remember your face. Or your voice. So I call your cell phone, to listen to your voicemail. It’s wonderful to hear you speak. A comfort of sorts.”

  “I’m not a smoker anymore,” she said the next day, in the hotel room. “Haven’t been for four years now.”

  “But,” I said, “when you, when I, when yesterday we …”

  “Telling you then would not have been a good start,” she said. “I wanted to give you some space. To figure out what you wanted.”

  And upon parting she said, “I would quite like to see you again soon. But that’s up to you.”

  I smiled and thought: I will remember this until the day I die. I’m kneeling behind Isabel on the bed. It’s warm in the room. My hands slide slowly over her back. I can count the fine hairs. I take off my underpants and throw them onto a chair in the corner.

  Now she’s lying before me on the bed, her legs folded underneath her body, her rump facing me, her arms alongside her body. I slide my fingertips further down, along her spine, down to the shallow basins above her backside. This is the softest place on her body, softer even than her cheeks or shoulders or the hairless streak behind her ear. It’s the softest skin I have ever touched.

  I kiss the two hollows, the two soft parts. A selection of fine hairs, quite isolated, quite vulnerable, are pulled upright as her skin tightens with the excitement of gooseflesh. My hands slide down the side of her back to her belly. I slip my fingers under her black panties and feel a clump of short, coarse pubic hair. Isabel breathes in long and gently, arching her shoulders backward.

  I let my hands slide up her and take hold of her breasts. Then I move my torso slowly up her back, until my chin reaches the vertebrae of her neck, and I press my lower body hard against her rear.

  “I want you so badly,” I say.

  “Yes, I can feel that.”

  I push my hard cock through the fabric of her underpants, deeper into the cleft of her buttocks.

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “I want to fuck you,” I say.

  “Where?”

  “Where I said I wanted to fuck you this morning.”

  “And where was that?” she asks.

  I place my right hand firmly on her ass, between my body and hers, and slide a finger into her panties, pushing it up against a small opening, and further until my fingertip is engulfed.

  “Here.”

  She didn’t think when she was out running. That’s what she enjoyed about running: the thoughtlessness, the automatism of putting one foot ahead of the other.

  As was her habit, she set out to cross the road diagonally. She would continue down a path that curved around the hill, leading to the house.

  She didn’t look before crossing. Didn’t think of it. She was running.

  When a young woman stepped in front of the vehicle, it was too late for the driver to slam on the brakes. He swerved to the side.

  She needs to concentrate when I enter her, but it’s a nice kind of concentration, she says. It lets her feel like she’s completely surrendering to me, and that I am occupied with her and her alone. That we are the only people on earth, the only bodies that matter.

  I carefully slide myself into her, only the first few centimeters until I notice the resistance waning and the muscles in her thighs beginning to relax. Then I go deeper.

  “You belong to me,” I say. “To me and to nobody else.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I belong to you.”

  Barely visibly, her shoulder blades keep tempo with the mounting rhythm of my hips.

  “The point is that you are here,” I say. “Here, and nowhere else. In this moment. In this place.”

  I got down on my knees and touched the grave’s dark soil. The ground was wet and cool. I produced a small box containing a ring out of my jacket’s inner pocket and opened it. Using my thumb, I pushed the gold deep down into the earth. I sat there for some time, staring at the pores of my skin, the loose hairs. I tried to breathe out the rage I was feeling and to find some of the other emotions I used to have.

  I knew that ultimately we are time, and that time is nothing more than a place we continually have to leave behind. But she wore the sunlight so well, I thought, and I would have loved to keep her close.

  I covered the holes left by my
fingers with earth, stood up and brushed off my hands.

  As the cemetery gate shut behind me, a murder of crows took off from the tree near the entrance. Cawing loudly, they flew over the grassy field next to the cemetery. I followed them with my eyes until the last of them disappeared into the shadow of a tree on the other side of the field and once more it became quiet. I got into the car.

  TRANSLATED BY JAN STEYN

  [NORWAY]

  MIKKEL BUGGE

  Surrounded

  “I’M SO GLAD WE HAVE a daughter,” my wife says after she finally manages to get Marie to sleep. “If there’s something I hate, it’s these gangs of teenage males.” I glance up from the local paper. A couple of pages back I was reading about how the neighborhood is being taken over by immigrant gangs from North Africa. It said that I was the only one who could prevent chaos. I could use all necessary means. I had been given a mandate from the highest order.

  Our apartment has two small rooms and a kitchen. At night we lie close together, but we haven’t had sex for several months. The electricity fails several times a day and the butter is soft when I take it out of the fridge in the morning. The windows are small. While we eat breakfast I hear the dull sound of iron bars beating on flesh and bone. The youths don’t stop. Do the cries come from the old man in the cellar? From the caretaker? I know my turn is coming soon, but I don’t say anything to my wife, who is feeding Marie with a little plastic spoon.

  Two nights later, on the way back from the corner shop I am surrounded. They have black batons and pocketknives. I throw myself backwards while I fumble for the gun in my ankle holster, but one of them strikes my skull and the pain pounds through me. They stab me in the arms, they hit me in the face. Static noise reverberates in my ears. Somehow I manage to get hold of the gun. I fire the first shot, then the next. I can’t feel anything anymore. Two of the boys fall, the third one runs away. I shoot him in the back. He falls, but keeps crawling along. I get up and hop towards him on one leg, then I shoot him in the head as he lies there.