Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  BUREAUCRACIES

  One could go on about bureaucracy till kingdom come. Here are some random examples. I once wanted to recharge my phone in America. Buy a card with a code, which I would then tap into my mobile, acquiring thereby a given number of minutes of conversation. However, as the nearest kiosk was out of cards, I decided to avail myself of the widely advertised service of charging my phone via the internet. An internal voice told me this was not a good idea, but it was raining, discouraging me from walking to the next kiosk, so I returned home and connected to the T-Mobile website. I was already disturbed by the message explaining that a company representative might wish to obtain additional information from me, but it was Friday evening and who, on a Friday evening, needed additional information? Besides I was charging my own phone and paying with my own credit card. What could be so concerning to the representative? Less than half an hour had elapsed before he rang. He requested the number of my driving license, my mother’s maiden name, and the name of the secondary school I attended thirty years earlier. I refused to answer his question about the name of my long-deceased dog. I assured the representative that despite the weather, I would go to a kiosk. The representative was surprised: the questions were meant to establish my identity, so easy to forge in this era of electronic crime. I did not hear him out. Under an umbrella, I went to a kiosk and ten minutes later tapped the coveted code into my phone. Although it’s hard to believe, at more or less the same time M. had an even stranger adventure. For no reason at all, his credit card refused to obey him. Alarmed, M. made his way to the bank, where he learned to his relief that the cause of the trouble was a purchase he had made earlier in the day of three books. The books were to be sent to his home address, so the bank’s precautions seemed somewhat excessive, but since it was better to be safe than sorry, he said: “Please unblock the account as soon as possible.” The clerk threw up his arms in despair. The account was closed irreversibly! It took M. several weeks to open a new one. The associated tensions reached new heights. Such heights, that when the new card eventually landed in his trembling hands, another catastrophe struck. In the old days you used to put a card into the ATM and activate it by entering your PIN. Not anymore. Today an official introduces over the phone a long list of offers lying in wait for the customer. Only when the latter, by now on the verge of madness, agrees to one of them or plays really tough and rejects them all, does she reluctantly activate the card. During the course of their conversation M., like many before and after him, had to occupy his hands. Certainly, he could have done something significantly worse, but what he did do had inconvenient consequences. Convinced he was destroying the old card, he pedantically cut up the new one. The procedure began all over again … And finally, an optimistic tale. P. did not cut up his Green Card, although he had every reason to do so. In a world marked by terrorist phobias, he functioned for ten years with a document on which, as a result of a clerical error, his “sex” was stated in black and white as: female. And it’s not without significance that P. (accustomed to the adoration of women) had reason to be rather proud of his virility. Yet no one ever questioned him at any border. No one cast doubt on the authenticity of the card or its owner. P.’s decision not to rectify the mistake sprang not from anarchist sympathies, but from fear of the bureaucratic maelstrom which would have sucked him in on his first attempt at correction. It would have been easier to change sex, but for that—as I said—he was not prepared.

  POINT OF VIEW

  Enthused Internet surfers outdo one another’s comments on the subject of good news. It concerns the reaction of an American Airlines pilot who decided to wait five minutes for the final passenger—a grandfather hurrying to the funeral of his grandson, only a few years old, murdered by his daughter’s boyfriend. The surfers are unanimous: it’s the first good news in a long time!

  TRANSLATED BY URSULA PHILLIPS

  [PORTUGAL]

  DAVID MACHADO

  The Commander’s Endless Night

  WHEN HE OPENED THE DOOR to the building he noticed the dense shadows in the stairwell and began to tremble with fear. Immediately he moved his hand behind his back to the place on his belt where many years before he always carried the combat revolver they had given him in Moscow, and the absence of the firearm left him breathless, because he was sure they would kill him. Groping his way along the wall, he tried the light switch several times until he realized it wasn’t working. Then he summoned his old warrior’s instinct: he stood still, quieted his breathing, and looked into the darkness without fear. He coughed twice and shouted, so loud that he could be heard throughout the whole building:

  “I won’t see you kill me, motherfuckers. But you won’t see me die either.”

  He advanced with one arm protecting his face and the other raised in front of him, expecting the enemy to appear, climbing the staircase step by step as if each one would be the last, until he reached the second-floor landing without incident, and with his open hand he pounded on the door in anger. The door was locked, just as he had left it when he went out the day before. The darkness and the silence squeezed his heart, but from deep in his guts he drew the courage to insert the key in the lock and then to turn it. He opened the door, walked in, closed it after himself and then stood, his eyes open to the dark, waiting to feel the first gunshot from the past pierce his flesh. He remained this way for about two minutes, and when nothing happened, he placed his keys on the table, took off his jacket and threw it on a chair, and finally, without bothering to turn on the lights, crossed the hallway to the living room and sat down in an armchair draped with tribal blankets with a dry sigh of contempt.

  “I’m going to sit here all night,” he said. “Come on and kill me whenever you want.”

  His name was António Ferraz and he was a nurse in São José Hospital, and because he’d had to do several shifts in a row, he hadn’t slept in thirty-seven hours. And the reality was that no one was there to kill him. He was so exhausted that he couldn’t tell if it was morning or afternoon, he didn’t remember walking home through the hills, or the fierce brightness of the dusk at eight o’clock at night, which was the time he arrived at Bairro Alto, where he lived, and also the time that he awoke from his daze. In fact, he could have gone on alert well before opening the door to his building and encountering the omen of the shadows on the stairs, because as he crossed the narrow streets of the still calm neighborhood, he became aware of the lines of black soldiers who greeted him solemnly from the other side of his remote suffering. At a given moment along the way, an official with an unshaven beard and an opaque glass eye approached him and said: “Commander, let’s leave for the bush as soon as the moon rises.” He gave no reply and waved his hand so that they would not bother him for the rest of his life.

  Back at home, sitting in his armchair and trying to suppress the memories with menthol cigarettes, he heard the troops start to march north, he heard a chorus of voices singing an Angolan rebita, and finally he heard the same officer shout out to him from the underbrush of the forest: “Good-bye, Commander. We’ll see you at the river bank in two days.” And then he heard the impossible silence of the African mountain, its flanks still streaming with the blood of the last battle. Until, in Lisbon, the phone rang.

  On the other line he heard his mother’s voice and was startled that it was already Sunday, because she always called on that day of the week. She explained that it wasn’t Sunday, and also that at eighty-eight years of age she didn’t need appointments on special days of the week to speak with the only creature left to her in this world. António didn’t say anything more and waited. His mother caught her breath and then told him that she had been feeling upset since the early hours of the morning, without knowing why, and she was at loose ends with a restless need to talk with him. Because she had a tendency to have premonitions, she paced back and forth, wandering about in a sea of recurring palpitations, certain that something terrible was about to happen. Finally she ended up realizing that whatever was go
ing to happen had already happened, and that all the upheaval in her chest wasn’t anything more than the distant echo from another time.

  “Tomorrow morning it will be twenty-three years since you called me in tears,” his mother said. “You were in Angola, lost in the middle of the war, and I was here in Coimbra, in the same place I’ve always been, without being able to help you. At first I thought you’d been shot, but right away I remembered I hadn’t heard you cry since you were two years old, and then I realized it was something more serious than a bullet.”

  She paused, waiting for her son to say something, but António remained silent and she continued.

  “It’s just a memory, I know. In any case, take care of yourself.”

  He said good-bye to his mother with a few words, and hung up. The next instant he saw Captain Elias Vieira step out of the shadows of his living room with his face covered in sweat, his arm in a sling strapped to his chest due to the explosion of a mine that missed killing him by a thread, and chewing the same wad of tobacco from three decades earlier. He crossed the parquet floor limping on his left leg, just the way António Ferraz had always known him, and he tripped over everything, looking astonished at finding himself in a fully furnished living room on the Angolan plateau. Even in the dark, there was no chance of not knowing who it was.

  They had known each other from the time when Elias was still a slave on António’s father’s farm, and they had become friends on an afternoon when the black man had been sentenced by the foreman to fifteen lashes for distributing revolutionary propaganda among the other slaves. Back in those times, António Ferraz was too naive to separate acts of rebellion from the skin color of those who committed them, but even so, the punishment seemed excessive for a single man, and he spoke out in defense of the black man, who thanked him, days later, leaving two books at the door of his room that would end up changing the direction of his life. Marx’s Das Kapital, and a collection of Lenin’s speeches. Some years later, when António Ferraz returned to Luanda after a voluntary period in the Soviet Union, where he learned to fly airplanes, not to mention all the finer points of how to arm a revolution, he met up again with Elias Vieira by chance and the first thing he said to him was: “I’m back, Comrade. Now the whip will change hands.” Elias Vieira chose to ignore the pale skin of his old boss and four centuries of tyranny and took him on a campaign through the jungles of the whole country. Everywhere he introduced him to the troops as Commander Ferraz, recently arrived from Moscow, with a doctorate in war maneuvers and versed in original Communist doctrine. Since then, he had become his right hand, his most faithful protector on the battlefield, and sometimes his immovable confidant. Until the day of the stealthy and solitary desertion of the Commander. Because after that, they had never seen each other again, not even in their dreams.

  “It’s not time to sit down yet, Commander,” said Captain Elias from his involuntary memory. “There are only four of us here and we have the first night watch.”

  António Ferraz lit up another menthol cigarette and looked askance at his friend.

  “I’ve been on duty at the hospital for almost forty hours,” he shot back. “And it’s been twenty years since I’ve set foot in Africa. I just want peace.”

  “And so what do we do with this war, Commander?”

  “What war, Elias? The war is over.”

  The captain moved in the shadows of the living room and squatted down next to António Ferraz with a wide smile.

  “Commander, you know very well that this war goes on forever,” he said. And then, without hurry, he added: “I’ll be waiting for you behind the boulders. Don’t forget your weapon.”

  Then he stood and disappeared through the mists of the hallway. It was almost ten o’clock at night and António Ferraz turned in his chair to fall into his delayed sleep, although he knew ahead of time that he wouldn’t be able to, because even though it had rained all day on the plateau, the night air was becoming warm and thick like a wool blanket and the mosquitos were starting to bite relentlessly. From a distance, out near the kitchen, he heard the hoarse voices of two soldiers who were having dinner. The strong smell of grain stew and also the sweet vapors of cane liquor gave him encouragement. He felt the urgency to get up from his chair to join them at the hearth, but he waved the urge away with his hand. He knew the two of them well. They were called Inácio Montenegro and Zeca Baião, they were from Benguela and they had joined the group of guerrillas three months earlier. A year later, during the last battle he was in before fleeing through the jungle to the Congo, he would see them die, not far from each other, by two accurate shots from the enemy.

  And, nevertheless, he heard them very clearly as they talked in the kitchen while they had dinner, and then he heard them tune their guitars and play loose chords, and finally he let go of the weight of that insane longing and yelled:

  “Zeca!”

  “Yes, Commander,” they replied.

  “Play a Sofia Rosa song.”

  And they played. And finally Commander António Ferraz dozed off, if only for a few brief moments, and he dreamed of the patients in the hospital that entered alive through one door and left dead out of the other. Until, around midnight, he felt the light touch of Captain Elias’s hand shaking him, and he awoke to the lulling music of the interminable song.

  “Three soldiers have arrived with a prisoner, Commander,” said the Captain.

  António Ferraz looked at the other man through time and answered from the depths of his troubled soul.

  “The prisoner here is me,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

  Captain Elias Vieira explained there was nothing in life that he’d like more than to leave him alone, but that he couldn’t, since the order came directly from the President and it was urgent to follow it. The missive that accompanied the prisoner was short and so clear that António Ferraz would remember it the rest of his life: without any other reason than the fearful signature of the President, the prisoner would be shot at dawn. The Captain was going to tell him the name of the man they had brought to die, but the Commander interrupted him in time.

  “I forbid you to say the name of that man again,” he shouted. “I’ve known it for twenty years.”

  “Very well, Commander, but there’s one more thing.”

  Then António Ferraz stretched out his arm and lit the lantern that was on the table next to the armchair, a sad light spread through the room, illuminating the horizon of the Angolan night. He got up, bringing with him one of the blankets covering the chair to protect himself from the inevitable winds of the plateau. He took one step ahead and his eyes came within a palm’s width from Captain Elias Vieira’s face.

  “No, there is nothing more,” he said to him with a deep sigh. “I know what you are going to say now, and I’ll tell you right now, that when it’s six forty-two in the morning, I will not put another bullet in the head of that poor wretch who already died once.”

  Captain Elias Vieira put a hand on the Commander’s shoulder and squeezed it affectionately. He said:

  “I know it’s hard, Commander, but there’s nobody else.”

  António Ferraz knew as well as the Captain that there wasn’t anyone else. The three men who had brought the prisoner were going to eat what was left of the grain stew and then they were going to return to the town on the other side of the valley. Inácio Montenegro and Zeca Baião were still too green to give them that nefarious order; and the wounded hand of Captain Elias prevented him from shooting a weapon with the funereal precision that the task demanded. It had not been the first time that he had killed a man, since he had participated in enough armed conflicts to know that at least one of the bullets he’d shot had ended up hitting someone. However, this was the first time that he had done it against a defenseless man. He remembered the litany of slogans about the revolution, learned in Moscow so many years ago, and he anticipated his heart starting to palpitate at the orders regarding execution of traitors, archenemies, and other obstructions to th
e implanting of the doctrine. Above all, he didn’t understand why they were forcing him to kill the same man again, twenty-three years later, instead of leaving him in peace with what remained of his life.

  He sat down again in his armchair, wrapped in the blanket, and turned off the diaphanous light of the lantern. In the darkness of the room, he searched for his lost peace, but found only the turbulent tremor of his memories. Then he repeated the same lament as before.

  “Elias, leave me alone,” he said. “I’m adrift in this sea of big waves and the only thing I want is to arrive on dry land. Let me sleep tonight without the memories of other nights.”

  The face of Elias Vieira appeared in the middle of the gloom like a miserable angel.

  “I would like to leave you, António,” he said. “But the two of us know very well that to be left in peace you have to die.”