Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  …

  Perhaps I should start at the end that is not an end. Where it all starts to unravel. In life we think we have an infinite amount of time left ahead of us. In death this time condenses, flattens. Time disappears. We sink into the bosom of lost nights. As we die. (You can claim that writers, with a touch of perversity, still habitually dabble with thoughts about the end.) It occurs to me that ultimately it could well have been the umbilical cord that marked me with the thought about the end. I was born with it wrapped around my neck three times. Some said that even then I wanted to leave. Get it all over with. Take a quick peep and slam the door shut again. Process it in a single charge, to experience a summer storm, to feel the wind, and then forgo this worldly mess. In return, cause immeasurable pain to my young creators and deny them the joy of their tiny screaming achievement. So I preferred to drag it out a little, perhaps out of curiosity over what hides behind it all, or just to be obliging to my parents. I still like wearing necklaces. And I am, to this day, obliging. What a strange notion, wearing beads around your neck, not to show off your attractiveness or out of vanity, but to accentuate your transience. People are unaware that the decorative kitsch you wear is a reference to your finality. A string of beads that now restlessly roll towards the sea.

  …

  To begin. To end. To try to pursue befittingness. Yet in essence I am still here, waiting for deliverance. Procrastinating. Waiting for someone to corner me and force me to launch. For someone to remove my training wheels. For someone to push me into the water. Waiting for a magical deliverance. How pathetic. Where do I get that from? Deliverance can come in the form of a pot full of cooked spaghetti and a tin of red beans, enough to fill us, settle the intestinal disquiet and, though only for a short time, fill our emptiness. Our pancreas tells the brain that all is fine and tricks it into replacing the ever-growing emptiness that is becoming the shadow of itself. I don’t really know. All I know is that what remains is the record, the empty space of deception. Recovery? Like a river running through the Karst Plateau that disappears underground and then reappears. Even though we know all the tricks of how to replace this emptiness with being healthy, with running or other exploits, a sort of echo of it is always present. With determination we pedal our mountain bike up the hill until our back hurts and our knees ache, and even after an operation, after you’ve been interfered with and tagged, marked with certain words, scalpels, broken illusions, you still pedal away, sweat and curse the hill which you are at the same time grateful to for being so merciless, for not giving in to your wish that, for a moment at least, it would let up; for then, once and for all, you would have to face the fact, you would be forced to see. There, on the flat section, everything is visible, everything is exposed. The pellucid valley spreads before you like the lines on the palm of your hand. Yet seeing things too soon cannot be good. The bright light, the over-powerful rays of truth, might burn us out. Whose truth? Not to leave. Not to die. By knowing, will I die? Is finding out really linked to dying? With tying the thread between two dwellings, two homes, between the home of my childhood and the home of my adult womanhood. Will I dare step above this abyss?

  …

  That is why you pedal up the hill, because you never see the summit. You never see the end. And just as you believe you have reached the top, another summit appears beyond. Or you insanely create one yourself. Again and again, you step before the Wailing Wall. Again and again, you fear the realization. Realization of what? That upon the final acceptance of love you would have to die? And if the difficult track levels out, only for a brief moment, you start thinking, and you always start thinking about it when it’s least appropriate to do so.

  …

  If only I would come to terms with it, be like the thin trail of white sugar accidentally sprinkled across the table, I would discover that it is always there, still present, and what’s more, that it has never moved from there because I don’t want it to move. Always landing on the same wobbly table, the cherrywood table from my childhood. And I would stare up at myself in the presence of my favorite face that is no more. Father’s face.

  TRANSLATED FROM THE SLOVENE BY GREGOR TIMOTHY ČEH

  [SPAIN: BASQUE]

  KARMELE JAIO

  Two Stories

  “The Mirror”

  THE STEAM FROM THE SHOWER stall has clouded the mirror before you. You can hardly see your naked body in it as you towel yourself dry.

  You put cream on your skin, slowly, very slowly: breasts, chest, neck, inner arms, outer arms, elbows, belly, butt, inner thighs, outer thighs …

  As you smell the cream, the same old thought comes to mind: you can’t compare women to flowers, that’s a terrible thing to do.

  Kepa used to do that. Again and again, he compared women to flowers: if she wasn’t a carnation, she was a rose. Women were always like flowers to Kepa. And he always lived among the flowers at the university, surrounded by young students, students who never get old since they are the same age every year. He thought he was the same age every year too.

  You also work surrounded by young people at the high school, even though fewer and fewer of them choose your Latin classes, but you know all too well that the only one in your classroom who gets older from year to year is you, and that for the students before you, you are a dead language, like the dead body of a cat on the edge of a highway.

  Some clearings have opened in the steam on the mirror. You can see your face in one and in another, lower down, your belly.

  You are starting to appear.

  You were also a flower for Kepa, at least for a time. It’s been two years since he left, left this house, left this bathroom as well, even though you have not yet thrown away that bottle of his aftershave there. And now you are beginning to realize, after fifteen years together, that in the last few years you were still a flower for Kepa, but no longer a rose, a carnation, a poppy in the meadow blowing in the south wind. For Kepa you were a geranium by the end. A geranium in a pot.

  And given the choice, he would rather have the freshness, vitality, and freedom of a wild daisy. Because a daisy grows on the mountainside, in a green meadow, in any park. The geranium, on the other hand, grows in a pot; in a pot on an old lady’s windowsill or balcony. Daisies laugh at the sun, geraniums cough in the narrow, dark, and windy streets of an old city. And when winter comes, old ladies cover their geraniums with plastic so they won’t die. Not daisies, daisies die and come back to life endlessly. They are always young, like university students.

  The steam on the mirror hides only your chest, everything else is visible: your face, arms, belly …

  You shake lavender water into your hands and spread it over your chest and between your legs. You like the freshness of lavender, it banishes the smells of your body.

  Your skin has started to smell more and more these last years, especially since Kepa left. You have begun to understand how that unbearable and stifling smell emerges in old folks’ homes. The smell of your body has become a specter that haunts you. So, with the idea of banishing all smells, you started turning the shower head directly on your pussy, close up, and you still do it, though not exactly for the same reason. Now you enter the shower stall seeking the caress of the water.

  You get into the shower, change the mode of the spray, and when a narrower and stronger spray comes out, aim it at your pussy and set your soul to dancing. From your pussy up to somewhere around your navel the waves rise and you feel them breaking inside your body, crash and crash, one wave after another. You finish with your forehead against the glass of the stall, gasping, and let the shower head fall to dance like a crazy snake. Your face against the glass, like old ladies who spend their lives looking at geraniums.

  You would like to be neutral, like the deodorant you put on. You are afraid a man will smell the wet smell of stagnation on your naked skin. It frightens you that a man could smell the attic smell on your body, and maybe that’s why you haven’t even tried to have sex with anyone these last two ye
ars. Why Kepa’s aftershave is still in your bathroom. Maybe that’s why.

  No, that young girl, that student of Kepa’s, she was no daisy, nor were you, and you are not a geranium. Comparing women to flowers is a terrible thing to do. People don’t know anything about flowers. People don’t know anything about women. Not even most women.

  When the steam on the mirror disappears, you stand looking at your naked body, and see that black hairs have grown around your nipples.

  They are very black. And yes, they look like the thorns of a thistle.

  “The Scream”

  I write at night. When my husband and children go to sleep, I turn on the computer in the corner of the living room where I’ve set up a sort of desk—my home isn’t big enough for a room of one’s own—and that’s where I work, playing with words, or perhaps more accurately, fighting with them. But even before I start writing, I’m writing in my mind, thinking over what I will write at night. In this way, by writing without writing, I’ve made many strategic decisions for my creative work. Two years ago, for example, I was on my knees at the tub lathering my children’s hair when I decided that the protagonist of my latest novel would have a hidden passion: he would be a great painter hidden behind the mask of a lawyer; and I’ve been known to decide whether to kill off a character in a story or let him live while I make dinner. There are lives at stake while I beat the eggs.

  I don’t make a living writing. I work in the library at the Fine Arts Museum. It’s no coincidence, then, that a passion for painting has appeared in my latest novel—a writer’s life sneaks into his or her fiction like a lizard among rocks. I wouldn’t say I don’t like my job, for it’s no bad thing for someone who loves culture to spend the day surrounded by art books, and I do especially like painting, but the eight hours a day I spend there is time I would more happily spend writing. For the moment, however, I have no choice but to write at night, and I manage quite well that way, even though the next day I’m nearly falling asleep while I sort the books.

  That’s how I’ve written until now, but things have changed in the last year, because something has happened that makes it difficult for me to be alone in the living room at night. And as a result, the way I write has been completely disrupted.

  My husband is a soccer fan. Or rather, not merely a fan; he is a true believer. He is a passionate follower of Athletic Bilbao, but his passion goes beyond that, and it is soccer itself, soccer in its entirety, that is his greatest passion. Soccer is inscribed on his mind in capital letters. Or rather, not merely on his mind, but on his heart. My husband loves everything about soccer the way another person—the protagonist of my latest novel, for example, or I myself—might love everything about painting. You might be an ardent lover of Monet, but that doesn’t prevent you from greatly admiring Cezanne, Goya, Renoir, Zuloaga, Gal, Zumeta, or Kahlo.

  So it is with my husband. He loves soccer, not just his own team. He’ll watch Barcelona or Bayern Munich without even blinking, but he’s equally capable of feeding his passion by watching Eibar or Lemoa. He enjoys the goals, passes, and free kicks by the stars of Real Madrid, Manchester United, or Chelsea just as much as a counterattack by Deportivo Alavés or a save made by the goalie of Bermeo, the club from his parents’ home town. And what can I even say about when the national teams play? When the players line up and the anthems play, he gets nervous and raises up his head, as if he too were on the field with them, staring off into the distance. I am a World Cup widow.

  So soccer has changed my writing routine. Or to be more precise, soccer itself is not at fault; I blame those who decide on the match schedule; those who have decided that soccer matches should be not only on weekends, but also during the week, and starting late besides. Ever since soccer matches started being scheduled at ten o’clock at night, I’m no longer alone in the living room. Now I have my husband at my side. And it’s just not the same.

  This past year, I’ve been sharing the living room with my husband, twenty-two players, and three referees. And that’s not counting the television announcers and all the fans in the stadium. What used to be my realm at night, that solitary living room, has become a soccer stadium. And it’s hard to imagine a writer, desk out on the field, writing in the middle of a stadium. That’s how I saw myself at first, and it was impossible to write a single line. At that time, I was even looking forward to going to work in the morning, because at least there I could feed my soul by reading passages from art books or looking at photos of works of art. I started looking for writings by artists about their most famous works, perhaps trying to find a hint that would help me understand what I was looking for in literature. Then I read a sentence by Edvard Munch that stuck in my mind. He said that he found the inspiration for his famous painting “The Scream” when he saw a sunset with clouds as red as blood. The colors were screaming, he wrote, remembering that moment. The colors were screaming.

  This last year, I have had to accept that I have no choice but to write while my husband watches soccer on television. And I still write like that now. Our living room is large, the corner where I write is far from the television, and I write with my back to the television in any case. My husband uses headphones so I won’t hear the sound.

  “You do your thing, and don’t mind me,” he tells me.

  But he doesn’t realize that from time to time I hear

  “Ohhhh …”

  Sometimes it’s

  “Hmmm …”

  Or

  “No, no! How could that be a foul?”

  I’m sure he doesn’t realize he’s doing it. I know that he’s very careful not to make a sound, and he bites his tongue to stop himself from screaming when there’s a goal. But it doesn’t matter if he screams “Goal!” or not. When a team scores a goal, I hear a sort of muffled hiccup behind me, a silent scream that moves the pictures on the wall a millimeter or two, a sigh, and I look over my shoulder and see my husband leaning forward a centimeter or two. Stretching out his neck and his legs, eyes wide and fingers spread apart like two spiders. His whole body screams goal, even if he doesn’t open his mouth.

  Ever since I’ve been writing with my husband in the room, I keep thinking that if I could excite a reader with my writing half as much as soccer excites my husband, I would be happy, it would meet all my literary dreams and desires. But I don’t think that anything I’ve written has ever inspired such emotion in anyone. Sometimes I wonder why I write, for whom, and whether my words have what it takes to move someone. And if they can’t stir anyone more than a soccer ball, whether it’s really worthwhile to keep writing. This is why recently I’ve been looking for a purpose in the writings of artists—Frida Kahlo, Van Gogh, Picasso …—a clue that will make me believe that it’s worthwhile to keep believing in art.

  My husband doesn’t feel the same burning desire for literature that he feels for soccer, nor for what I write, there’s no doubt about that, and I’ve had to accept it since my first book was published. He reads my books, or it might be more accurate to say he starts reading my books, but I know he doesn’t finish them. When I publish a new book, he picks it up, makes a comment about the cover, makes another about how thick it is or about my picture on the back cover, and says:

  “It looks good.”

  Or he’ll point to my picture on the back and ask the kids:

  “Who do you think this is?”

  Or he’ll read the first few lines and say:

  “It starts off well, doesn’t it?”

  But I know he won’t make it past page ten. His bookmark stays there for months, right in the same place. Right on page ten. He doesn’t ever make it to page eleven. As if the number eleven were reserved solely for soccer.

  Ever since I started writing while my husband watches soccer, ever since I keep hearing ohhhh, hmmm, and silent screams behind me, one idea has become my obsession. I look at the screen, then I look at my husband with his eyes glued to the screen, and I ask myself over and over what on earth does this sport have that insp
ires such passion in my husband and in millions of other people? What is it that rouses their most basic instincts? And in my mind this question has become my obsession: is it possible to transfer that passion to literature?

  With that question in mind, I started trying. I started writing while looking at my husband, as if I wanted to bring his passion to my writing, as if I wanted to suck his blood like a vampire. I look at the screen first, then at my husband, screen, husband, screen, husband. Like a painter looking at the horizon, I keep looking up at the man sitting on the sofa with his headphones on. When I see his lower lip tremble when they’re about to make a risky throw-in, I ask myself how I can achieve the same effect in a reader, using only words. What adjectives should I use? What arguments?