Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  During a flashing fraction of a second, right there, before our bewildered eyes, accompanied by a delicious tickling at the base of the spine, everybody was young and exchanged kisses, our mothers, our cousins, that milkman who knew how to whistle through his nose, the music started to play in the garden, there was a party with little paper lanterns, someone offered a toast, someone brayed like a donkey, the revelry flowed round among the tables, firecrackers exploded, couples danced all night wrapped in the tenuous glow of the fireflies and then got lost among the trees in the back, extenuated and happy, no one had gotten sick yet, and even Uncle Roque, that gentleman, stepped up out of his grave laughing cheerfully and brushing the dirt off his suit.

  He died. All that died. Buried. rip. A niche in the cemetery. A wreath of flowers. Rest in peace. A prayer for his soul. A flame that died out. Messy inheritances. Lawyers. Lawsuits. Battles between brothers and sisters. The land where the house stood was sold at public auction, acquired by a speculator, a pickaxe cut down the few remaining trees, and in the garden they put up a parking garage with a security guard. Today, our aunt, purblind, snoozes in a wheelchair, and we don’t even know if she recognizes us. Oh, mystery of time. The hands of time creaked on. The clocks’ soft tick-tock marked the time. We began to say our Good-byes. Good-bye to all this. We are ghosts of the past who have come to disrupt her routine. We realize this. It’s distressing. And one day, far from everything, solitary and dignified in a rest home, she will lay her head on her shoulder and it will all be over, dear aunt, because it just won’t do to try God’s patience.

  We sat back down on the three-seater sofa.

  Nothing else happened. A change of light. Then we learned that our provincial aunt had fallen in love once, for the first and only time in her life, and it had happened suddenly. It happened one afternoon when she visited the office of a homeopathic doctor, looking for a remedy for certain, shall we say, feminine, ahem, aches and pains. Let’s not get into details. The nurse opened the door to the doctor’s office, and there he was. The homeopathic doctor was a sad man, with a cough, with sunken shoulders and resigned hands which in that moment were stealthily shuffling note cards and fountain pens. The doctor turned his large lazy blue eyes toward her and greeted her by way of asking: “How are we doing?” He said nothing more. Four words. That was enough. Enough—with such a small thing a heart can tear and bleed. Our provincial aunt fell in love all at once, so that she wouldn’t have to repent it later on, and that very night she wrote it down in her diary, the diary that we inherited after her death in the rest home, oh my dear aunt, along with the urn containing her ashes, and that’s how we learned it. They exchanged glances. And he said: “How are we doing?” She committed the indiscretion of falling in love right there, standing up in the middle of the doctor’s examination room, in front of the nurse in her uniform, how embarrassing, body and soul, our Aunt Dorotea from above the pharmacy, hard to believe it, with her curved back, her dry skin, her facial tics, her muttered words, her little music boxes, her crocheted table covers, her silhouette like a chimney, her mantecados. To hell with the mantecados. Even those of us who are a bit ridiculous still deserve someone to love us. We all need a hand to close our eyelids when our hour comes round at last. For the first and only time in her life our aunt from the provinces fell in love with that homeopathic doctor, and it was a small love, homeopathic too, the minimum dosage.

  After examining her, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong; it was just nerves. She returned home feeling relieved. Nerves, yes. That must have been it.

  She saw him for the second and last time in the street, by chance, a few days later. He was standing in front of the window of a clock shop, and upon seeing her he tipped his hat in greeting. At his side, a young, pretty woman was holding a baby in her arms. She returned his greeting timidly, tilting her head slightly, then continued walking past with short little steps without saying a word. It was winter, the weather was quite cold, he was coughing. He had snow on his shoulders.

  She was on the verge of succumbing. She sketched out a plan. She repented of it. The two of them were married. No, it couldn’t be done, what a foolish idea. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. Don’t even think about it, no. In a small provincial town. In those days. Above the pharmacy. Everyone knew one another, everyone watched one another, it couldn’t be done. She carried that adulterous secret with her for the rest of her life. Without knowing why, she felt dirty. She wrote convoluted letters that she never sent. She ate apples. She repented. Because she wanted to do something for that tall man with a hat, and she didn’t dare to do anything more, she began to knit him a wool sweater, for the winter. Hospitals are chilly places. The war broke out and they hustled the homeopathic doctor up onto a truck and sent him off to the front, far away from there, among the living and the dead, and he never came back again. He came and he went. So much madness. The woolen sweater remained half knitted, with both arms still undone. It was not the moment to ask questions or seek advice. Unthinkable. It couldn’t be done. Not to her confessor, not to anyone. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. No, nobody ever discovered that feverish passion. She buried it in the deepest possible place. Better that way. Nothing came to pass. Time passed. For years she tried in silence to kill off that feeling, to drown it, to murder it thoroughly so that she could go on breathing. Our aunt unraveled the sweater she had begun for that sad doctor with snow on his shoulders, and with the wool she knitted an oven mitt, which turned out to be more practical. She ate baked apples. She helped run charity raffles. She went to choral and dance festivals. She became cold, with weepy eyes. Life, meanwhile, passed her by, indifferent, with its exacting caravan of noises, annoyances, toasts, obligations, illnesses, nieces and nephews, trips, lunches, coitus, bills, presents, Christmas processions, Sundays, births, and deaths. And after all that: a wingback armchair.

  A wall of time, impossible to knock down, separated them. There were the two of them, both disconcerted and too shy, she was alive and he was dead, like two pale actors on stage, beneath the spotlights, twisting their hands in silence, incapable of saying a word, and the fact of having renounced a dream that was perhaps beautiful and central—the magnitude of that sacrifice—gave their trivial existences a phantasmagorical radiance capable of converting them into epic creatures. Where was the love? Stretched out in a cold tomb? It came and it went. Nothing came to pass. A breeze. Upon the cuckoo clock thirty years (tick) passed by (tock).

  Order exists and chaos exists. Medicines exist that cure imaginary sicknesses, minor disorders of the soul, infections of the spirit.

  Clothes hanging in the bedroom armoire, her own and her husband’s. The clothes that they had bought together at sales and which would last long after both of them had died. And one of those dresses, chosen by herself, would serve as her shroud.

  Oh, the mystery of time. Until one cold, sunny day in winter we decided to visit her in her house out in the provinces and our aunt welcomed us on the threshold gnawing on something small and vaguely startling—a live bird?—and her eyes slid from one side to the other like a polyp or ectoplasm. And one of us, it might have been me, pulled himself out of his stupor on the sofa, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger toward the shadowed window, and said emphatically: “It’s getting late.”

  And then specified—I specified—more terrified, if possible: “Very late.”

  And then, we all saw it, our provincial aunt, very startled, made an odd movement, as if a chill ran through her, as if she was snuggling into her woolen shawl, shrinking her frame until it acquired the exact shape of her future coffin.

  Oh.

  TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY BRENDAN RILEY

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ

  My Heart

  Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.

  I was getting ready for work, taking a shower, when I felt a dull, metallic pain in my chest and throat, and the taste of cement on my tong
ue. I stepped out of the shower with a feeling of indescribable fatigue and wrapped my wet body in a bathrobe. Sanja was just about to leave the apartment to go to work, but then she caught sight of me through the open bathroom door. I told her I wasn’t feeling well, I was going back to bed for a bit, this weariness would soon pass, and she shouldn’t hesitate to go.

  She stayed. Wet, my hair dripping, wrapped in the bathrobe, I stretched out on the bed. And I felt increasingly worse. She brought me cold tea, which didn’t help, and then, having no choice, she called 911. After that, she stared out at the street impatiently, looking for the ambulance. I didn’t have the energy to turn onto my other side to watch her by the window. I looked at the sofa where she had been sitting. I felt suddenly uneasy because she wasn’t where she had just been. Then I looked at the photograph on the wall above the sofa …

  Llasa. Early morning. A young Buddhist priest in a red robe had come out through a high wooden door in the wall of a stone building, and was now walking down a narrow cobbled lane, with a wisp of morning mist in front of him—a small white cloud, like a ghost that the priest was following. I let my gaze follow the white cloud above the cobblestones in Tibet.

  Behind me, Sanja said: “Here they are.” Then she came back into my field of vision. She opened the door and looked down the corridor, then anxiously glanced back toward me. And then our room was filled with strangers from the emergency services, settling themselves briskly around me on the sofa. I had never experienced such an aggressive assault on my privacy. Quite uninhibited and sure of themselves, they looked around the room, glanced at me, admired the floral pattern of the coverlet I was lying on; strangers in my room. A girl in a blue uniform had just opened my bathrobe, so that I lay before them naked, and asked: “How old are you, sir?”

  “Fifty.”

  After the initial shock, there was peace.

  I looked at everything around me without emotion, and so— without fear. And now that it is over, I remember the event as though I had seen it from a distance, just as though my mind had become separate from my body and had observed what was going on almost with indifference.

  The shock did not come when the girl in the blue uniform said: “Sir, you’re having a heart attack!”

  That’s when I felt calm. In films, when they are describing a critical state such as this, the picture is often left without sound, and sometimes they even make it slow motion. That is a technical evocation of the mind at work.

  The mind behaves like a cold camera lens.

  In my case, the shock had come at the moment when the ambulance arrived, especially when a bunch of strangers filled my room. This was something that happened to other people, not to me, and it was something I recoiled from. And here my fear of illness was expressed as fear of doctors and hospitals. I never went to hospitals, even as a visitor. And now, the girl in the blue uniform leaned over me on my sofa, and said: “You’re having a heart attack!”

  My first thought: She’s wrong, it isn’t my heart. Then I thought: I know this girl from somewhere. I tried to remember where from, but now there were a lot of human hands above me, attaching me to wires, turning me to the left, then to the right, disturbing my train of thought. I could not remember where I had seen that girl before. Through her blue blouse, I saw the outline of her breasts, but this wasn't erotic in the least. She was looking at me anxiously, as though accusing me of something.

  And one other optical impression: the bodies of all those people around me were unnaturally big, while my body had shrunk. What was it I was feeling? Weariness. Weariness from the pressure in my chest, which was making me breathless, which had become the same as weariness with life. And I thought: So, is this it? Is this death? At that moment, in fact, I began to see everything not just as a participant, but also as an outside observer. And I thought: It’s good, just let it all pass, I’m tired, I want to close my eyes and not remember. I want it all to stop.

  The years I had lived through up to now were already too much.

  On the way to the hospital, lying in the ambulance, my knee crushed by the weight of an oxygen canister, I watched the passing clouds, the green traffic signals that I had noticed up to then only as a driver. Through the back door of the ambulance, after we slowed down for something, I saw a sign on the façade of a brick building with the inscription LIBERATION BOOKS.

  “What’s the name of this street?” I asked the girl in the blue uniform leaning over me to fix my headrest.

  Was my mind turning anywhere, just to forget the pain in my chest? The young man sitting by my feet kept shifting the heavy metal canister that was lying on my legs. He shifted it so that the cold metal lay uncomfortably against the bone of my knee, and for a while that became the dominant pain in my body. That made me silently furious with the young man, who was, perhaps, scraping the oxygen canister against my knees on purpose, intending to deflect my mind away from my heart to a different problem.

  Then I turned my attention to the tops of the trees lining the street. In the autumn, the leaves here take on such dazzling, sunny colors that even on a cloudy day one has the impression of a surplus of light. Was it a sunny morning? Or did the colors in the treetops give me an illusion of sun? I had always been disturbed by the thought of dying in a landscape where deciduous trees grew. There was something unconvincing, something obvious about that.

  It was somehow indecent to die in the autumn.

  It was kitsch to die in the autumn, along with everything else.

  The ambulance stopped in front of the hospital. In the parking lot, the first image I saw from my horizontal position was this: walking between the cars toward the hospital building was a girl in the red hockey shirt of the Washington Capitals. She was looking up, towarda window, or at a cloud.

  I had only ever been in this parking lot once before, when the wife of the poet F. was giving birth to their daughter. I remember that he had bought a new Toyota Camry that day, and asked me: “Would you like to drive it?” “Sure.” And I drove once round the parking lot. That was ten years ago. I can still remember the smell of the new car.

  My oxygen mask began to mist up in the icy November air.

  At the hospital entrance, I was met by a choir of smiling medical personnel. On my right, a nurse struggled to find a vein in my arm to take blood. On my left, two girls in green coats gazed and marvelled at the design of the coverlet I was wrapped in. at the same time, I caught sight of Sanja at the end of the corridor; a man (a doctor?) had just come up to her with some papers in his hand. She listened carefully to what he said and then began to cry.

  The man was now leaning over me. He felt my pulse with cold fingers and asked: “How old are you?”

  “Fifty.”

  I want to go back to my apartment for a moment.

  What is the answer to the question Who am I? While strangers are examining my naked body in my own room? And among them is that girl I know from somewhere. What fills me with unease and muffled shame is not the proximity of death, but the realization that my body, at this moment, is an object without emanations. My corporality is asexual.

  What is more, the ease with which these strangers shift my body through space creates an impression of my own weightlessness. I am what is left over of me, my mortal remains, as I lie in my bathrobe, under which I am naked.

  All I know about the body I know as a poet, and that is pretty selective, limited to those characteristics in which the body displays its abilities and strength, and not its weaknesses and shortcomings.

  About the diseases of the body, I actually know nothing.

  The mind draws logical conclusions on the basis of data accessible to it, and when the attack happened, while I was standing under the shower in the bathroom, I immediately connected the pain in my throat and metal taste in my mouth with an article I had read in Vanity Fair. It was an account of an attack experienced by the author (Christopher Hitchens, who was later diagnosed with cancer). In that description he says that he felt pain in his chest
and neck, and felt something like ‘the slow drying of cement’ in his chest (I’m quoting this from memory, but I think those were the words he used to describe his state, which was what I was now experiencing). And when I came out of the shower, and the pain in my chest increased, I was convinced that I had cancer.

  Later, the emergency services arrived, and the girl (a doctor in a blue uniform) leaned over me and said: “Sir, you are having a heart attack!” and my first thought had been: No, dear. This can’t be my heart.

  My mind was so firmly convinced that my symptoms were like those in the description of Hitchens’s attack that I favored the account from his article over the official diagnosis. In any case, at one moment I thought: this is comical! I’m dying thinking about Christopher Hitchens!

  It was comical: my reality, at such a crucial moment, was being explained by a columnist in Vanity Fair, who did not know I existed, and so could not know, either, that I was, perhaps, right now ceasing to exist.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifty.”

  This was a dialogue that kept being repeated today.

  The number of years I had lived represented important information for the doctors. I had the feeling that, in this way, for the first time —in this long life—my time was being accurately measured. This meant that today all my illusions of youth vanished. We rationalize our experience of time, but beyond the givens of the calendar, we are not conscious of it. Because ‘in spirit’ we stay the same. ‘In spirit’ I was the same person I had been in my twenties. That’s how it is, probably, with everyone; it is a characteristic of our species. That is how we protect ourselves from death. Western cultures see man in his asymmetry and disharmony, so they separate him into a body that ages, and a soul that does not age. Apart, presumably, from Dostoevsky.