GREECE
Joke
Giannis Palavos
STAVROS LAID DOWN the screwdriver.
“Done,” he said. “Come look.”
Katerina came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a towel.
“What’s that?”
“An elevator sign.”
Katernia looked at the words on the bathroom door:
“caution: Before entering make sure the car is positioned behind the door and has come to a full stop.”
“I found it this morning in the garbage,” Stavros said. “I thought I’d hang it here as a joke.”
Katerina shook her head. They’d been housemates for six months. But not once had she laughed at any of his jokes.
“I made some fries,” she said. “Want to eat?”
Midway through spring semester, at the end of March, Stavros’s father went to the hospital for tests. The results showed cancer of the liver—luckily at an early stage. Stavros went back to his village for a month and a half. His mother spent nights at the hospital while he took care of their newspaper stand. When he returned to Thessaloniki, he found a stranger in his room.
“This is Vicente,” Katerina informed him. “He’s staying with us for a while. Hope that’s all right.”
Vicente was a year older. He was an architecture student from Barcelona on an Erasmus exchange in Greece. He and Katerina had met at a concert at the University three weeks ago. They’d gotten together the next day.
When the Spanish guy went out for groceries, Katerina hugged Stavros. She told him how crazy she was about the architecture student. They had only two more months before he had to go back to Spain. Too bad they met so late. How would she live without him? She took a piggy bank from her bookcase and shook it. “I’m saving up,” she said, “for my airfare in September.”
Stavros unpacked his suitcase.
“How’s your father?”
“Better, thanks.”
When Vicente came back, he took his bag into Katerina’s room. He was tactful. The apartment was small, and he felt bad that he was inconveniencing Stavros. When the two of them were at school, he’d cook up hot, colorful dishes—and then make sure the sink was sparkling clean. At night they’d all watch movies or sometimes sing karaoke together, something, he said, everyone did in Catalonia. They never fooled around when Stavros was in the house, or at least if that was happening, Stavros didn’t pick up on it. They were so quiet. The guy even liked the elevator joke on the bathroom door. “Muy bien, Stavros,” he said and slapped him on the back. The weeks passed, and there were moments when Stavros almost liked him, but only briefly, because he too was completely in love with Katerina, from the very first day they’d rented the apartment together.
Stavros didn’t talk about relationships or his feelings. On the contrary, he comforted Katerina when she’d say she was scared of losing her new boyfriend. He’d go out with the couple, accompany them for a drink. The last Saturday, two days before the Spaniard had to leave, the three of them went on an outing to Lake Kerkini. Stavros drove, and Vicente was in the back clicking picture after picture of pelicans. They ate at a taverna owned by an uncle of Katerina’s who used to be a volunteer for Doctors Without Borders in Malawi. The waiter brought the bill just when Vicente was telling Stavros how he was going to miss him. Stavros smiled as he looked for his wallet. “No, por favor,” Vicente insisted, “invito yo. I owe you one.”
Sunday evening they sat in the living room and shared a beer, a Kaiser. At first Katerina seemed calm, but then she began to cry. Vicente cried too. Stavros left them alone and took his beer to sweat it out on the balcony. It was 2 a.m. when the Spaniard gathered up his things, said goodbye to Stavros, and locked himself up with Katerina in her room. Stavros lay down and tried to sleep, but different stuff was going on in the room next door, crying at first, then moans. It was the first time he’d heard them in bed. When they’d finished, the crying started again, but this time it was more muffled. In the dark Stavros thought he smelled them breathing. He imagined them three feet away on the other side of the wall, his hand in her hair, hers on his chest. He wanted to vomit. He got up to pee, but when he opened the bathroom door, nothing was there.
Translated by Karen Van Dyck
ISRAEL/ENGLAND
Heavy Bones
Tania Hershman
IT’S ME BONES,” I say. “They’re real heavy, I’ve always been like that. Honest, it’s not you.” But he just stands there looking all washed out. Only a few minutes ago, we were still tipsy from the bubbly at the reception, our heads fizzing, and now I’m standing here freezing on the doorstep in my big white dress and he’s looking like he’s failed his first big husbandly duty and what does that say about all the rest of it and why don’t we just call it quits right now. I sigh real loudly, look up and down the street a bit, rubbing me arms warm, but he’s just staring into space and looking like he might cry, my skinny new hubby, with all of him drained away.
Suddenly I know what to do. I grab him under the armpits and heave him over the doorway. “How’s that, eh?” I say, puffing and sweating under all my frothy meringue. He’s shocked, staring at me boggle-eyed. Then he grins and once he starts he don’t stop grinning. “Not bad,” he says, “not bad at all, wifey.” And he plants a big one on me, right on me lips, with all the neighbors who think I don’t know they’re there, watching, going Oooh, look at that, bit cheeky, eh. He pulls me right in and slams the front door in all their nosy faces. “Last one to the bedroom’s got heavy bones!” he shouts. I pick up my skirts and start running.
EGYPT
Dream #6
Naguib Mahfouz
THE TELEPHONE RANG and the voice at the other end said, “Shaykh Muharram, your teacher, speaking.”
I answered politely with a reverent air, “My mentor is most welcome.”
“I’m coming to visit you,” he said.
“Looking forward to receiving you,” I replied.
I felt not the slightest astonishment—though I had walked in his funeral procession some sixty years before. A host of indelible memories came back to me about my old instructor. I remembered his handsome face and his elegant clothes—and the extreme harshness with which he treated his pupils. The shaykh showed up with his lustrous jubba and caftan, and his spiraling turban, saying without prologue, “Over there, I have dwelt with many reciters of ancient verse, as well as experts on religion. After talking with them, I realized that some of the lessons I used to give you were in need of correction. I have written the corrections on this paper I have brought you.”
Having said this, he laid a folder on the table, and left.
Translated by Raymond Stock
CHILE
Daniela
Roberto Bolaño
MY NAME IS Daniela de Montecristo and I am a citizen of the universe, although I was born in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, in the year 1915, the youngest of three sisters. Later my father remarried and had a little son, but the child died before his first birthday, and Papa had to be happy with what he had, that is, with my sisters and me. I don’t know why I’m explaining all this. It’s ancient history, or children’s stories if you like, of no interest to anyone now. I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen. That might interest someone. I was deflowered by one of the ranch hands. I can’t remember his name, all I know is that he was a ranch hand and must have been somewhere between twenty-five and forty-five. He didn’t rape me, I do remember that. At least I never thought of it as rape, afterward I mean, when it was over, and I was getting dressed behind an ombu tree, and the ranch hand, around the other side, was pensively rolling a cigarette, which he then lit and gave me for a couple of puffs on it, my first ever puffs of smoke. I remember that vividly. The bitter taste of tobacco and the plains stretching away endlessly and my legs trembling. What was really trembling, though, were my thoughts. I could have gone and told on him. All night I kept turning the idea over in my mind, and the next two nights as well. But I
didn’t do it. Partly because I wanted to repeat the experience. Partly because it wasn’t my father’s ranch; it belonged to one of his friends, so the punishment wouldn’t have been administered by my blood relations, it would have fallen outside what I took to be the ambit of real justice, the justice of the blood. My father never had a ranch. My older sister married a lawyer, a pathetic shyster who never tired of declaring his inordinate love for my father. My other sister married the son of a ranch owner, a crazy kid who within a few years managed to gamble away a small fortune and get himself cut out of the will. To sum up: my family was always middle class, and whatever efforts we made, from our various starting points, in our various and often contradictory ways, to climb up a rung and enter the rigid, immutable upper crust, official guardian of justice and morality, the fact is we never moved out of our social compartment, which, although comfortable, condemned the livelier minds in the clan (myself, for example) to a restlessness that even then, at the age of thirteen, on that ranch, which wasn’t our property, I could glimpse like a dizzying mirage, a space in time where time itself was cancelled, time as we know it, and that was why I began by saying that I am a citizen of the universe and not, as the saying goes, of the world, because I may be old but it should be quite clear that I’m not stupid, and the world cannot contain a dizzying mirage like that, although perhaps the universe can. But I was talking about restlessness. I was talking about the night when I thought about telling on the ranch hand who had deflowered me. I didn’t, and I didn’t have sex with him again. Restlessness, my first apprehension of restlessness, declared itself as a fever, so my father sent me back to Buenos Aires, where I was entrusted to the care of a physician, Dr. Guarini.
Translated by Chris Andrews
with Natasha Wimmer
NORWAY
Sovetskoye Shampanskoye
Berit Ellingsen
O IS WHOLENESS and emptiness at once. It is the crystal stars and the shivering path of the northern lights, blood from the sun that bursts in the atmosphere. The aurora spills green, blue, yellow, white across his retinas. The snow creaks under his stubby skis, pushed by his stubbier legs. He stumbles, having learned to walk just a year ago, but the ski poles catch him.
1 is a thin stream that trickles past birches and ferns and lady’s mantle. The mud makes it difficult to walk and easy to fight. Here he learns the difference between his own needs and those of others. The officers throw the recruits a raw salmon. He grabs the scaly flesh, bites and swallows without chewing, tears again, before someone punches him in the gut, elbows him in the back, and takes the fish from him. He wipes his greasy fingers on a black-and-white trunk, rough bark nipping his skin.
2 are the bulbous, multicolored domes of the capital’s cathedral that are not yet covered with snow when he arrives. White mutes long avenues, blanches red walls, and moistens heavy coats. He doesn’t appear native; Vilnius, his passport says. In a city of immigrants, nobody asks about Lithuania.
3 are the lace curtains that lift in the summer breeze as he moves in and out of the committee member’s young, dark-haired assistant. She types 100 words a minute and comes from somewhere behind the Ural Mountains. He warms her body with his smile, as he does with everyone he meets. He smiles like everything happens for a reason.
4 is the number of glasses his wife, the former assistant to the committee member, now a member herself, places on the oval table to include the committee secretary and his spouse. Unfertilized sturgeon eggs from the muddy and tepid waters of the Black Sea, in a leaded crystal bowl with a wide-handled silver spoon, along with sparkling Belarusian Chardonnay—Sovetskoye Shampanskoye, Soviet champagne—chill the teak wood. In the light from the living room candles, the serving cart burns golden.
5 is the cold mirror of the Moskva River and the stripped trees in Gorky Park that watch a Western asset on a long-term visa be garroted in a doorway, documents and microfilms in his briefcase, the man’s status exposed by a phone call. The gilded Regency doors of the newest central committee member’s apartment vibrate loudly at 3 a.m. Her husband opens in his bathrobe. The security forces push past him and into the committee member’s office. Under the tinkling light of the Czechoslovakian crystal chandelier in the hall ceiling, he presses his naked feet onto the checkered floor and doubles over.
6 are the white tiles he spatters when they ask about his wife’s documents and microfilms, repeatedly and with closed fists. He doesn’t lie, tells them about her late hours in the committee building, the meetings, the phone conversations. They apprehend her. Behind the gilded Regency doors, underneath the unlit crystal, he stands in silence while he considers the nature of truth. He takes up a new position in the city.
7 are the years that follow, when he gathers information like eiderdown. Years of wan smiles and cold handshakes, while ice shrouds and flays the Moskva River and clouds rush across the sky like time.
8 is the number of days it takes for the cosmos to entropy into chaos in the pewter sunlight off the river. Assets are lost, intentions blocked. They take him back to the white tiles and ask him again, this time more insistently. The information he transmitted was tailored to distract. Now he is no longer useful and his employer has been notified. He expects to be killed, desires it almost. Instead, they put him in a noisy plane and fly.
9 is the ammunition that bulges inside guns as he steps onto the steel of Glienicke Bridge. Will it come from the betrayed past or a preemptive future? The air smells of the West, fitful and variegated. When he reaches the midpoint of the water, he shifts his gaze to the person that passes him. He is surprised, although he knows he shouldn’t be. The spring wind rustles long dark hair, replaying in him the taste of unfertilized sturgeon eggs from the warm waters of the Black Sea, and sparkling Belarusian Chardonnay.
ITALY
Consuming the View
Luigi Malerba
THE SKY WAS clear and the air clean, yet from the telescopes on the Gianicolo hill the Roman panorama appeared hazy and out of focus. The first protests came from a group of Swiss tourists complaining that they had wasted their hundred lire on malfunctioning devices. The city sent out an expert technician, who had the lenses replaced. Nonetheless, protests kept coming, in writing and by phone. City Hall sent out another expert to test the telescopes again. A peculiar new element emerged: the panorama from the Gianicolo appeared blurry not only through the lenses of the telescopes but also to the naked eye. The city claimed the problem was no longer its responsibility, yet the tourists kept complaining, in writing and by phone. After gazing for a while at the expanse of rooftops, with the domes of Roman churches surfacing here and there and the white monument of the Piazza Venezia, many went to have their eyes checked. Some even started wearing glasses.
A professor of panoramology was called in, from the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She leaned over the Gianicolo wall at varying hours: dawn, daybreak, noon, sunset, even at night. Finally she wrote a lengthy report on the distribution of hydrogen in the photosphere, on phenomena of refraction, on carbon dioxide polluting the atmosphere, and even on the fragrance given off by exotic plants in the Botanical Garden below—without recommending any remedy.
A doorman at City Hall, who lived near the Gianicolo and who had learned of the problem, wrote a letter to the mayor explaining a theory of his. According to the doorman, the Roman panorama was being slowly worn away by the continuous gaze of tourists, and if no action were taken it would soon be entirely used up. In a footnote at the end of his letter, the doorman added that the same thing was happening to Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and other famous paintings. In a second footnote he emphasized, as proof of his thesis, how the view visibly worsened in the spring and summer, coinciding with the great crowds of tourists, while in the winter, when tourists were scant, one noticed no change for the worse; on the contrary, it seemed the panorama slowly regained its traditional limpidity.
Other expert panoramologists took photographs from the Gianicolo week after week, and t
hese seemed to confirm the doorman’s theory. The truth, however strange, now seemed crystal clear: the constant gaze of tourists was consuming the Roman panorama; a subtle leprosy was slowly corroding the image of the so-called Eternal City.
The City Hall public relations office launched a campaign, which, in order to discourage tourists, tried to ridicule the panorama in general, the very concept of a view. Their press releases had titles like “Stay Clear of the Panorama” and “The Banality of a View.” Others, more aggressive, were entitled “Spitting on the Panorama,” “Enough of This Panorama,” “One Cannot Live on Views Alone.” A famous semiologist wrote a long essay entitled “Panorama, Catastrophe of a Message.” Some journalists abandoned themselves to malicious and gratuitous speculation on the greater corrosive power of Japanese or American or German tourists, according to their own whims or the antipathies of the newspapers in which the articles were published. Fierce discussions were unleashed, which, though noisy, achieved the opposite of the desired effect: all the publicity, though negative, ended up increasing the number of tourists crowding the Gianicolo hill.
Eventually, the Roman city government, following the advice of an expert brought in from China, resorted to the stealthy planting of a row of young cypresses under the Gianicolo wall, so that, within a few years, the famous panorama would be completely hidden behind a thick, evergreen barrier.
Translated by Lesley Riva
UNITED STATES
Flash Fiction International Page 11