Best European Fiction 2017

by Eileen Battersby

  One

  Svitych was born the same year as Gagarin. His Nostratic hypothesis is perhaps mankind’s principal secret discovery, says the interpreter, and his lively expression invites the Commissioner to listen closely to his recollection. When Svitych was twelve years old, during some Cultural Olympics, he first had the intuition that all languages are descended from a common ancient ancestral tongue. Years later, at university—distressed by Gagarin’s recent orbital flight, disappointed at not being the first citizen to achieve this feat—he discovered that his linguistic theory had already been formulated, but not developed. That same afternoon, he understood what his own odyssey would be, which border he would have to cross.

  The Commissioner keeps loading the tin into the golf cart, but he starts following the interpreter with his eyes. Svitych, says the interpreter, trained a cohort of young philologists who devoted themselves to the comparative study of ancient languages, trying, through their concerted efforts, to see if they could trace the path backwards or, rather, plumb the depths of time: through lexemes and endings, uniting the Altaic family with the Uralic, the Uralic with the Indo-European, long before genetic mapping was able to show us with certainty that humanity truly descended from a single original trunk.

  The Commissioner freezes spellbound before a hex nut while pausing to catch his breath. Yes, says the interpreter, Svitych found the rudiments of that prehistoric tongue, the common seed of all the civilizations. Later he killed himself on the steppe, like Gagarin, barely five kilometers from Russia, in a little car belonging to the linguistics department, two years before the cosmonaut’s jet crashed. It seems he cranked the wheel ninety degrees while driving on a straight road and the car flipped and rolled. The previous semester the authorities had sent one of his colleagues to the gulag for being Jewish, and they had also terminated all Nostratic studies, declaring them to be both unpatriotic and insufficiently pro-Slavic. As the interpreter finishes the story, the Commissioner places the last scrap of iron atop the pile in the golf cart and the three of them, Commissioner, interpreter, and camel, start to head back with great difficulty, the humans walking on both sides of the cart. Two hundred meters further on, descending the slope of a sand dune, one of the pieces of iron slips loose and plummets downhill, striking the camel and slicing a deep wound into its right side. Suddenly the front hooves come to a halt and the animal collapses head first onto the sand. Noticing the desperate expression on the Commissioner’s face, perhaps because the man is imagining yet another death on the steppe, the interpreter explains to him that people will come looking for them in a few hours. GPS? asks the Commissioner. The interpreter doesn’t answer.

  Zero

  Night falls over the desert. To ward off the cold, the Commissioner and the interpreter huddle up against the side of the wounded camel, which emits an occasional groaning bleat. They’ve tried to stop the blood but the wound keeps bleeding profusely. The Commissioner misses his tattered moth-eaten blankets and wonders if it wasn’t a mistake not to have scratched his own name into the door alongside the cosmonauts who came back alive. The interpreter watches the sky, naming constellations to try to fall asleep. The Commissioner has his eyes closed and thinks about Gagarin and Svitych, and about Svitych and Gagarin.

  During that night, for the first time he understands that the two stories actually make up one single story. Beyond the fact that both men were born the same year, and both died in ridiculous accidents on the outskirts of Moscow, the story of the linguist and the cosmonaut seem to him like the very semblance of the downfall of the Soviet Union.

  The superhuman challenge of the conquest of space reduced to four-color posters bearing Gagarin’s likeness, petrified into hundreds of smiling sculptures, in burned negatives of children’s science fiction movies.

  The dream of radical equality between peoples exterminated by the rejection of Svitych’s common ancestral language, exiled from any scientific vanguard, confined to Siberia, erased from the textbooks, completely ignored like some two-bit Paleolithic Esperanto.

  And the effort of both to construct that new society, to expand the boundaries of the Revolution—the Commissioner keeps thinking as he listens to the interpreter’s strong, calm breathing, and the camel’s plaintive groaning—annihilated and converted into the catastrophe of forty thousand square kilometers of spaceport city filled with rust and weeds: without any other future than becoming a destination for nostalgic tourists or cynics. Communism as an amusement park in ruins.

  When the morning finally comes, a vehicle arrives to pick them up. Out steps a space station worker with two blankets and a Kalashnikov. The man hands them the blankets and aims his rifle at the camel. The sound of the weapon jamming reminds them of the long cold night all over again. The worker removes the magazine, checks the weapon, and reinserts it. This time it fires. This is the first time that the Commissioner witnesses the execution of a mammal. The worker feels the camel’s neck for a pulse. The Commissioner wonders how they’re going to drag that pile of metallic space scrap all the way back to the base.

  TRANSLATED BY BRENDAN RILEY

  [SWITZERLAND: ITALIAN]

  GIOVANNI ORELLI

  death by Laughter

  I’M NINETY-NINE POINT NINE years old, a hundred let’s say, thus I am, and have been for a while, a depontanus. What’s a depontanus? Let’s look to the Latins for a little illumination. Varro, a prodigious erudite (116–27 before Christ), says that depontanus was the term for the aged who, once they turned sixty, were cast off (deiciebantur) a bridge. Hitler used less spectacular methods to get useless old people out of the way, out of circulation.

  There are a thousand ways to die. Of illness, from external violence. From hemlock to the electric chair. By being cast off a bridge to a firing squad. Can you die from laughing? You can! I recall three of my schoolmates. Names Zeferino, Sebastiano, and Severino. The three, at the time aged fourteen, with their parents’ permission, had decided to take an Easter ski trip to the Blinnenhorn, a glacier Swiss-German tourists loved. Heading towards the summit, the three followed the Germans; but going down on that holy Thursday they veered off the path of their sage confederates. Zeferino, the boldest of the three, had a daring gleam in his eye. Go, he said, where I go. Do what I do. And he shot off. Three hundred meters down he lifted his arms for a big jump. Sebastiano, a few meters behind, imitated him instinctively, without knowing why, and Severino did the same. Zeferino was the only one who realized that they had jumped a crevasse. It could have been a negligible crevasse, just another wrinkle on an old man’s brow; it could have been a proper crevasse, the kind from which you don’t come out alive and it’s a miracle if they can find your body and put you to rest in the cemetery like a normal person. The tragic thing, as Sebastiano would say years later, telling the story for the hundredth time, the tragic thing was that Severino had started laughing like a idiot. At first the other two had also laughed, but like normal people. When they noticed that Severino’s laughter was becoming convulsive, as if a legion of lice were under his jacket tickling him, and his face started turning red, they yelled for the Germans, who were also skiing down the slopes, but like orderly and prudent Swiss people on the less adventurous but more secure trail further away. Luckily, one of those Germans must have been a doctor, because as soon as he saw Severino’s face and terrorized eyes, he gave him two good slaps around his mouth, all agape from laughing. Severino stopped, just like that. He was still all purple, but safe.

  Less than a year later, two of those three guys from the Blinnenhorn set off, not magnis itineribus, but at a moderate pace, stopping to ask people they came across whether they were headed in the right direction for the city villa where they had been invited for a Sunday meal. Yes, this is the way, someone finally replied: here you are, buon appetito, boys! The two were Severino and Sebastiano, one of whom had ended up in high school with the priests, the other in another high school with the non-priests. Another path had been chosen by or for Zefirino. A path that
could have been considered foretold by the kids’ alphabet book under the letter Z: Zefirino goes to Zurich. Zürich vier. Where he would discover crevasses altogether different from the ones in the Blinnenhorn glacier between Ticino and Valais. He would also quickly discover the sheer size of the city: long gone the mumbo jumbo of his two mouth-breathing buddies from the Blinnenhorn. He would soon learn to distinguish the five work days and the two weekend days, easy. His teacher was a clever fox, an astute and enterprising woman, a girl from some Mediterranean puddle of the northern city, where it was as if the crevasses were covered and concealed by damned fresh light snow. You could only discover them by falling in. At any rate, they weren’t fatal. The two mumbo-jumbo brothers, having reached their destination for that Sunday’s meal, weren’t thinking about crevasses. Sebastiano proclaimed: let’s hope there’s no chicken.

  —Why, you don’t like chicken?

  —It’s not that I don’t like chicken, I do, but I like to eat it with my hands, not a knife and fork. Like the bourgeois with their delicrapitudes do.

  At Sebastiano’s reply, Severino fell silent, into private meditation. Thinking of Severino, even when he grew “up” (he was nearly 1.65 m tall, with five cm extra for having been declared fit in the formidable Swiss army), of what one would write on his gravestone to epitomize his life, a conclusive phrase—assuming that a life can be summed up in the half line that goes beneath one’s first and last name and dates of birth and death (a line like, for someone who was a teacher, “devoted to school and family”)—his phrase could be keep stirring your coffee, even after you’re dead and gone. OK, that’s not an acceptable phrase. But that was him. That was his signature, his calling card. Once he’d taken his cup of coffee, he’d stir it for at least five minutes, never laughing, not even smiling. With sacerdotal seriousness. One daren’t say like Christ, because they say in the Gospels (as, for example, St. John Chrysostom in the sixth of his Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew) that Jesus was seldom to laugh. Or smile. They also say, going further back, that for a time laughter was not permitted in the Academy. Some say that no one ever saw Pythagoras laugh or cry.

  Severino stirred at length, even if uselessly, as the sugar had long dissolved. He was afraid a few granules had not. Was he risk averse? It could be said of him (if one were so bold, after Leonardo when he mentions all those who come into the world as mere passage for food) that he had come to the globe to stir the sugar into his coffee. Naturally for him, just as much as for the many other passages for food, no one had the right to keep them from dressing up those actions, essential for them, with occasional, casual chatter of various sorts: sports, for example, especially sports, but sex too, and other things.

  Occasionally, Severino’s laughs were gigantic, with his mouth opening all the way to his ears—as if he were facing a sudden, unforeseen, terrifying crevasse. With his mouth yawning like a sea monster’s swallowing hapless little fish.

  With the second laugh that may warrant a brief recollection, it is important not to forget the location. Right on time, the two mumbo-jumbo brothers, Sebastiano and Severino, greeted, as one does, not in mumbo-jumbo but in the vernacular, the lady hosting the lunch. Who had invited them to an “engagement” (as the locals call it) because during the ration years during World War II (which is unfortunate to have to mention, especially for the good percentage of female readers who prefer to busy themselves with fashion, good recipes, domestic architecture), she spent her summer vacation months in the hometown of the two mouth-breathers turned high schoolers. Whose parents had provided at convenient prices and even given away delicacies from the local salami shop and cheese shop. Naturally, the lady, delicate by definition, didn’t expect from the two the least compliment about the decor per se, or its “ontology” (to use a word often repeated by her firstborn), and not especially in its metrically calculated location, much less for the genealogical tree of plates and saucers, though the lady of the house had naturally made sure to get the best service, even for those two who, as you could tell by their faces, would have eaten out of a shoe as long as they were eating, without stopping to ask if they could wash their hands (Matthew 15). With their publican hands, clumsy and squat, they greeted the dowager and her two not unpleasant—au contraire!—daughters, about ready to move from high school to university, thus to getting lucky, or more likely, seeing as they were girls, to getting married. She led them straight to sup (is that the right word?) to settle the engagement chop chop. In moments like this, the capital question came back to the fore: what is there to eat? Motivated, this question, not by the what but the how. As with refined aesthetes in the field (field?) of poetry. Let’s pray (the two: avertat Deus, from the two greenhorn-yokels, utinam …) it’s not chicken. Here you can’t eat with your hands. Never ever, not yet being aesthetes, would they have dared to do so (not at age fourteen or fifteen, but later on: the fastest thing in the world is perhaps the passing of years), like the Swiss sculptor who came down to this southern canton on the invitation of a troupe of local artists. Served first, as was polite, he didn’t wait a half minute. He grabbed his T-bone with both hands and gobbled it up like an animal, moving a young literature teacher to effuse in his tablemate’s ear a little parody of a sonnet he’d been teaching at school: “Of the modern arts no concept / that a single bone doth not confine / with its flesh: and its bone align / the mouth that obeys …” The teacher paused. Obeys what? asked the neighbor to whom the poetic variation was addressed. It’s a matter, the teacher was quick to reply, of finding a rhyme for the term “concept” that Michelangelo placed at the end of the first line. It’s not a difficult rhyme. I can even rhyme with Giacometti, his spines like spaghetti, thin as a machete, all bone and no flesh, in short the complete opposite of our friend’s steak. We’re back to the baroque! Whereas Sebastiano and Severino were struggling with the classical. Classical chicken, tough like Cicero.

   —It’s not chicken, it’s turkey, the Hostess curtly specified. But more curt than her genteel correction was a sudden backhand of a bone. Because the knife in Sebastiano’s grip, due to an excess of vigor (his hands and arms were specialized, to put it sportsmanlike, in pitchforks and shovels, not table forks and knives), caused him to project off his plate a bone from that stupid turkey or subpar chicken, whatever it was. It shot off like a puck in a hockey game with just seconds left on the clock, the home team up four to three, and a defender in the penalty box for interference. And so someone hits the puck across the ice: either it’ll make it or it’ll be over. The bone landed just to the right of the hostess, who jumped like a referee ready to call a foul. And a whistle, shrill and short (though a malign coincidence of Fate), was heard: perhaps it came from the street, from an officer who had damned to holy penance a reckless biker? Maybe even an Italian.

  There at the table, tangible, immense in its heedless vulgarity, cowardly, country, uncivilized, medieval-hottentot, unqualifiable-zulu, came Severino’s cackle for the foul expulsion committed by Sebastiano. Who wanted to say, for his part (finally, about time!): mind that he’s not laughing, he’s yelling, crying, as if on the edge of a crevasse on the Blinnenhorn. Is he laughing out of despair? And instead, with the same astonishment, he started laughing too, but not with his mouth boorishly agape like Severino’s, which would keep on going if he had no ears to stop it … what a buffoon.

  Naturally the lady shot up, with newfound athletic prowess. She left the two fools without uttering a word, calmly stepping away in her heart from those beastly peasants who kept on breeding indiscriminately based on the great heavenly command to go forth and multiply, assiduously encouraged in this by the priests, those hucksters. Her two daughters, the schoolgirls, to cancel out the vacuum created by the crevasstic cackling, asked, almost stealing the words from her mouth, if people in the mountains often ate turkey.

  —What? Sebastiano said awkwardly.

  —Turkey, the younger schoolgirl clarified.

  —It’s nicer than chicken.

  —Of
course, why yes of course we eat it. My aunt makes it very well.

  This was, for Severino, such a colossal lie, that he managed to hold back the urge to laugh. He looked at Sebastiano as if to say, like a father-confessor (with their tone of “How often do you touch yourself?”), how many lies do you tell in a month? But the light in his eyes changing abruptly seemed to silently and abruptly suggest: quiet, we’re concentrating on our meal. Schoolgirl Number One, more detached from the conversation than her sister, took the salad with her hands, but they were fairy hands, electric fingers. The second observed with a smile that the two ate like Germans—or chickens, who mix all their courses into one big dish, including the salad. We separate, Italian-style. Distingue frequenter, says the philosopher. You haven’t done philosophy yet? And at the pair’s “no,” she asked: So what are you studying? Sebastiano said to Severino:

  —You talk, you’re second in the class, silver medal.

  —My compliments, said Schoolgirl One.—And who’s first?

  —Some guy who the Latin teacher, a priest, always gives high scores on everything he turns in, he even takes his hands …

  And here instead of more words came a giggle quite like the one from the crevasse.

  —He touches him? Schoolgirl Number Two asked, serious.

  Severino nodded emphatically, still laughing with his entire mouth, already a little purple in the face. He became so consumed by a coughing fit at the thought of the battles over getting to the head of the class and making all the parents and relatives happy that pragmatic Schoolgirl One took his hand and practically dragged him to the privy, i.e., the can, the bathroom. There he could cough without making a scene. But back at the table, all it took in the silence was the sound of a fork making a banal cling against the plate, all it took was a light kick in the shins from Sebastiano urging him to compose himself, or as they say at school, to behave, to provoke more laughter.