Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  And in the last few months, something surprising has been happening to me. Watching my husband’s emotions from so close up—I had never noticed how deep his passion was—the words have started to bubble out of me. Ever since I started watching my husband while I write, I write better, I write with greater passion, it feels like the letters seize the page with their fingernails, the words bite when you read them. And the words come to me one after another endlessly, to the extent that I managed to finish the novel that I haven’t been able to finish for the last two years. Watching my husband released a knot I carried inside me.

  Watching my husband, I decided that the protagonist of my latest novel had to rebel, leave his job as a lawyer, and start painting, following his true passion. And when he finished his paintings he would cry, he would sob, with happiness, with satisfaction, with pleasure. And he would start a new life, a new and happy life led by his passion.

  When my editor read it, he called me at one o’clock in the morning. He couldn’t wait until the next day to call. He said my writing had made him cry, it was my greatest novel, it would be incredibly successful, and so on, while I stood there in my nightgown rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  The novel was published a month ago, and my publisher’s predictions have come true. It’s at the top of the best-seller list and has had good reviews so far. In their comments, the critics use words like emotion and passion. I receive emails from readers, many of them thanking me for helping them unleash their true passion, some have found the courage to begin writing, others have started singing, a few have revealed the attraction they feel for people of the same sex. That is, they have started doing what their passions dictate, because of my novel.

  And surprising as it may be, the book has had an effect not only on my readers, but also on my husband. He left page ten behind long ago and this week I keep seeing him around the house with the book. Apparently, for him, it’s not just another one of my books. If I speak to him when he’s reading, he doesn’t answer, just like when he’s watching the World Cup on television.

  And I am grateful to soccer in a way I never thought possible. Every day, I keep watching my husband as I sit in the corner where I write. And little by little I’m coming to realize that I’m watching him more and writing less, because it’s so moving to see the tears in his eyes when his team fails a penalty kick, or the way he gulps at a direct free kick.

  Today I got up from my chair and went to sit beside him. He has my novel right next to him on the sofa. The bookmark shows that he’s almost done with it. I sit next to him to feel his body heat and ask him to take off his headphones so we can watch the match together. I read in the newspaper that it’s an important qualifying round. (Ever since I’ve started writing while watching my husband, I’ve been reading the sports pages.) And I felt a closeness I haven’t felt for years, with both of us doing the same thing, side by side, together. That moment watching television together was one of life’s bright and shining gifts. One I hadn’t experienced since we used to go to the movies when we first started going out.

  And there we were, when suddenly my husband looks away from the television, picks up my book from the sofa, and starts reading. I can’t believe it. I can’t even look at him, I don’t want him to see how surprised I am so, as if what’s happening is completely normal, I keep looking at the screen.

  And there, on the screen, I see the ball rolling down the field, and behind it, four sweating players. The one in the red shirt touches the ball with his right leg and the others run after it, urgently, as if their hearts were trapped in that ball. The announcer says that the white team is putting on the pressure and that that makes the red team’s counterattacks risky. The red player has the ball, he shoots, another player breaks away, now he’s got it, he’s running with it, he’s all alone, it’s just him and the goalie. The announcer talks faster and louder, the spectators are on their feet, the goalie moves forward with his hands and legs outstretched, and suddenly the forward kicks hard, he shoots, and the ball goes right between the goalie’s legs and into the net.

  “Goal!”

  My husband looks at me, astonished.

  “Did you just say goal?”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you just screamed goal.”

  “Don’t be silly, it must have been your imagination.”

  “Would you mind using the headphones? I’m just finishing your book …”

  I want to tell him I don’t need the headphones, but I see him concentrating so hard on my book that I put them on, and now the announcers are inside my head, speaking right into my ears. They speak with passion, I can hear their heartbeats through the headphones and my own heart starts to beat faster.

  My husband watches the replay of the goal and then goes back to reading. This is unbelievable. I could turn off the television and start writing, but I don’t feel like it. And now I’m afraid that I might not be able to write if I can’t see my husband’s excitement as he watches a match.

  There he is. He’s not even blinking. But he’s not watching the match; he’s reading my book.

  On the television, in the meantime, the score is tied at one and there are five minutes to go. The announcer says it could go either way. And my husband is reading. I need the answer to one question. Is my novel really more interesting to him right now than the last five minutes of a qualifying match? That can’t be right. I have to test this. I take off the headphones and turn up the volume on the television.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “The match is almost over,” I say.

  “Okay, just a second though. Turn it down a little, I’m just about to finish …” he says without looking up from the book.

  And I put on the headphones again. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, he’s on the last three pages, and then I notice that his eyes are bright. Mmm, he says, taking a deep breath and letting out a long sigh. Yes, even though I can’t quite believe it, my husband is about to cry reading my novel.

  I look back at the screen, at the last five minutes of the match, and my hands start to shake, and the blood is moving faster than ever through my veins.

  It’s a miracle.

  The white and red shirts of the players, the colors of the referees, spectators, and advertisements around the field, green, yellow, blue, black, and orange all mixed together make a palette of colors; the players passing to each other make strong white brush strokes, the forward’s dribbling is a swirly Van Gogh line, there is a certain plasticity that gives volume to the screen, an impressionistic intensity of light, and above it, suddenly, when the announcers’ voices get louder, I see the goalie of the white team stretching out his arm the way Michelangelo’s Adam reaches toward God. But his hand does not quite reach God’s ray of light.

  Goal!

  I see red shirts jumping up and down and hugging each other, red banners waving among the spectators, a sparkler ignites the screen. And in the middle of it all, the forward who got the goal, on his knees and looking to the heavens, screaming ecstatically.

  The tears in my eyes give the image a sfumato effect, blurring the edges and bringing unity.

  I can’t contain my tears. The colors are screaming on the television screen, and my eyes can’t bear so much beauty.

  TRANSLATED BY KRISTIN ADDIS

  [SPAIN: CASTILLIAN]

  CARLOS ROBLES LUCENA

  Don’t Ask for Gagarin

  For Jaume Bonfill, cognate

  Ten

  As he’s been fascinated by space travel since he was a boy, the Commissioner is euphoric when—in order to acquire some authentic space gadgetry for an as-yet-undefined exhibition—he convinces the bank managers to fund his trip to visit the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

  The Baikonur launch facility was the main center of aeronautical innovation during the Soviet era and, although geographically located in the state of Kazakhstan, it still belongs to Russia according to a special agreement that remains in effect between both republic
s.

  After making some inquiries at the consulate, however, the Commissioner cannot really be sure how much activity still goes on at the Cosmodrome.

  Nine

  Spurning the small sheaf of dollars, the Kazakh taxi driver argues that he’s got no passport and will go no further. He abandons the Commissioner in the middle of the desert, right in front of the ruinous marker that represents the border. In a surprising rush of obsolete English, the driver encourages him to step lively and make quick work of the three-mile walk to the space station before he finds himself stranded in the freezing nighttime temperatures. During the walk—the sun beats sharply on his temples to the rhythm of his suitcase clicking behind him on the asphalt—he imagines that he’s treading upon the remains of an underwater city to which, strangely enough, no water ever arrived. The sides of the highway are littered with the accumulated scraps of antediluvian vehicles covered with lichen and sprouting reeds. A group of camels stand there nibbling on them. The Commissioner cannot stop thinking that those inexpressive oval pupils were the first to ever observe the launch of the R7 spacecraft that carried Sputnik nestled inside its hull.

  Eight

  Inconceivably—or so they’ve led him to believe—the Commissioner has managed to find lodging in the outbuildings of the Cosmodrome for three consecutive nights. The interpreter they’ve assigned him, with a white—or almost golden—smiling sexagenarian mustache, comments in an English worthy of Marlowe—seemingly the norm around these parts—that he’s part of a pilot project to turn the old complex into a kind of resort; that due to the reduced funds arriving from Moscow they need to be capable of generating their own income.

  The Commissioner turns out to be the only guest in the enormous room filled with rusty iron cots and flickering florescent lights. The interpreter asks him if he wants dinner. The menu consists entirely of space flight rations.

  Before going to sleep, the interpreter shows him the Cyrillic letters carved into the dormitory door. They are the names of all the cosmonauts who went into outer space and returned alive, he says, slowly tracing the outline of the letters with the tip of his ring finger.

  Seven

  The Commissioner sleeps badly, stiff with cold between ragged, moth-eaten blankets, at the mercy of the building’s rumbling intestines and a strange dream about an exhibit that contained at least one exceptional piece, some of the best-kept experiments of the secret Soviet cities, namely: the granddaughter of the space dog Laika maneuvering within an armored Red Army combat exoskeleton; the hypnotizing satellite that would spread communism throughout the West by means of a danceable balalaika rhythm; and the robotic mole needed to burrow under the earth into America in order to put an end to the Cold War.

  Six

  That same morning, after the interpreter takes him to visit the abandoned repair shops, the pre-computer age offices, and the rail depot where they loaded the rockets to take them to the launching area, the Commissioner discovers that his mission is not only turning out to be ridiculous, but that it’s flat out doomed to disaster. The Space City is in a ruinous state and has almost no remaining equipment, materials, or workers to speak of. The people in charge have sold almost every piece of value—or copies of the valuable pieces—to small-time scrap metal dealers and other two-bit peddlers.

  Five

  Over dinner, the Commissioner tries to explain to the interpreter the problems he’s going to be facing if he cannot secure an interesting piece for the exhibition. The interpreter nods as he pours boiling water into a pouch of freeze-dried blinis.

  After a while, he tells him that he can design an exhibition that tries to explain the true story of Yuri Gagarin.

  The Commissioner, meanwhile, putting the vodka gelatin to good use, thinks that the Russian is only trying to earn a tip, or his admiration, but he listens to him as the afternoon fades into night beyond the dining room’s large dirty windows.

  The interpreter explains to him that when he was a young man he was Yuri Gagarin’s personal secretary; he met him in the flight academy when they were both aspiring cosmonauts. The official story says that they selected Gagarin, from among all the hardworking elite candidates, for his courage and his short stature. Vostok 1, the tiny capsule used to send him into outer space, was not powerful enough to carry any man weighing more than seventy kilos. On the afternoon when they had to say good-bye to one another, Gagarin confessed to him a different theory: he suspected that the real reason he’d been chosen was his amazingly photogenic looks. Later, the cosmonaut’s life devolved into a never-ending sideshow, a pantomime of alcohol and honors, and Gagarin, only thirty-four years old, crashed his fighter jet on a routine flight over the steppes, barely five kilometers from Moscow.

  Probably due to that suspicion, says the interpreter with a sad look. A look, thinks the Commissioner, that contains the flaming ruins of the MIG 15, the useless helmet with a cracked five-point star, and the anguish of the young pilot condemned to orbit around the ever-present camera eye, like the dead body of Laika tracing infinite ellipses around the solar system.

  Four

  The Commissioner finds it no easier to get to sleep the second night, but this time for reasons other than the soundtrack of coughing heaters and the punctual tap dance of the rodents. With increasing clarity he imagines the exhibition he is going to mount about Gagarin’s secret life, but he first wants to tell the interpreter about it.

  In the morning, when he explains it to him, the interpreter nods and tells him that it’s not a bad idea, but that making a work of video art only for connoisseurs might be too conformist. The interpreter says that he shouldn’t try to hide the story inside such cutting edge contemporary jargon, that he needs another perspective, a pop culture one, for example.

  The interpreter adds that it could be something about Gagarin and Soviet science fiction films; he describes how in his favorite one, two cosmonauts flying aboard a strange rocket land on the moon; the young men, without air tanks, slip on some skis and go slaloming down the lunar slopes, the mountains of the moon that all the young people in the fifties grew up dreaming about. Can I find those tapes? Maybe even see them? asks the Commissioner. The interpreter shakes his head and says “Only in here,” while delicately tapping his temple. The Commissioner refills the thermos with hot water from the central samovar, and stows his little picnic—he’s sick of freeze-dried space rations, and the interpreter has managed to get him a few sandwiches—in his backpack for what looks to be their last outing.

  Three

  When they go outside, the interpreter removes his uniform shirt and drapes it over a cactus in flower. He huffs and snorts while he busies himself with an old dead golf cart bearing the logo of a Mediterranean resort on the side. Help me attach these, he tells him, and shows the Commissioner the parachute cords that he’s trying to hook onto the saddle of a camel sitting there resting, either distracted or completely resigned to its fate. The Commissioner laughs until he understands, and then he quiets down and takes off his shirt, too, and helps the interpreter properly secure the knots to the anchor points, taking care to not disturb the camel.

  Once they set out on the road driving towards the old launching site, the animal’s strength leaves the Commissioner amazed. Then the interpreter tells him that the interesting story he needs might not only be Gagarin’s; he also knows another. A little while later the interpreter hauls back firmly on the reins of his retro-futurist stagecoach. The hot sun glares off the dry cracked earth.

  When the Commissioner considers how camels, with their ability to serenely travel such long distances, were the forerunners to spacecraft, he thinks it was probably right that the beasts had the privilege of being the first spectators in the world to witness these launches into orbit.

  Two

  At the launching pad, the launch tower still stands, like a megalithic monument to abandonment. The Commissioner thinks he spots some pieces of a rocket hull on the surrounding tarmac and tries to convince the interpreter to let
him take them with him. The interpreter answers that he would sell them for at least a hundred dollars, if they weren’t really just scrap metal from old cars. It doesn’t matter, says the Commissioner. Besides, we wouldn’t even be able to pick them up, the Russian responds, under this sun the metal alloy can heat up to a hundred degrees centigrade.

  While the Commissioner takes some photos of the old launch tower, the interpreter asks him if he can tell him the other story he’d alluded to. As the Commissioner doesn’t answer, wrapped up in examining the labyrinth of options on his digital camera, the interpreter begins to explain how during one of the endless publicity tours on which he accompanied Gagarin, he drank too much and made some remarks about a union leader’s fading beauty. The comments reached the ears of the Committee three thousand miles away; they forced his transfer and his descent down the party ladder. The interpreter ended up spending several years working as a janitor in the Classics Department at Moscow University. That apparent tragedy—the miserable pay, working like a slave, and public dishonor—eventually opened up for him a new, personal horizon.

  The Commissioner interrupts him to tell him that a hundred degrees centigrade isn’t really so very hot, that his wife who is seven months pregnant takes the lasagna out of the oven when it’s twice that hot using just a pair of teddy bear mittens. The interpreter nods and both of them, with great care, using their shirts to protect their hands, begin stacking pieces of tin and bolts from the presumed fuselage in the golf cart.

  After barely five minutes they decide to stop to smoke a cigarette and then, for the first time, the Commissioner hears the interpreter’s thin lips pronounce the name Vladislav Illich-Svitych. Svitych’s story is difficult to explain, he says. It begins with his linguistic studies and then intersects Gagarin’s space flight and the death of both men under strange circumstances.