Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  “Do you know the story of Grace S. Putnam and the baby doll?” scarlet-nails asked the hopeful seller and there was Carole, in a smart Art Deco summer shirt in black and white, smiling politely and following the movements of the scarlet nails with her own smooth mulberry ones.

  “No,” said Carole into Fliss’s sitting room, “I don’t know much about dolls.”

  Her face was briefly screen-size. Her lipstick shone, her teeth glistened. Fliss’s knees began to knock, and she put down her tray on the floor.

  Grace Story Putnam, the valuing lady said, had wanted to make a real baby doll, a doll that looked like a real baby, perhaps three days old. Not like a Disney puppet. So this formidable person had haunted maternity wards, sketching, painting, analysing. And never could she find the perfect face with all the requisite qualities.

  She leaned forward, her blonde hair brushing Carole’s raven folds.

  “I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

  “Well, now you’ve started, I think you should,” said Carole, always Carole.

  “It is rumoured that in the end she saw the perfect child being carried past, wrapped in a shawl. And she said, wait, this is the one. But that baby had just died. Nevertheless, the story goes, the determined Mrs Putnam drew the little face, and this is what we have here.”

  “Ghoulish,” said Carole, with gusto. The camera went back to Polly’s face, which looked distinctly malevolent. Fliss knew her expression must be unchanging, but it did not seem like that. Her stare was fixed. Fliss said “Oh, Polly—”

  “And is this your own dolly?” asked the TV lady. “Inherited perhaps from your mother or grandmother. Won’t you find it very hard to part with her?”

  “I didn’t inherit her. She’s nothing to do with me, personally. A friend gave her to me, a friend with a lot of dolls.”

  “But maybe she didn’t know how valuable this little gift was? The Bye-Los were made in great numbers—even millions—but early ones like this, and with all their clothes, and real human hair, can be expected to fetch anywhere between £800 and well over £1,000— even well over, if two or more collectors are in the room. And of course she may have her photo in the catalogue or on the website …”

  “That does surprise me,” said Carole, but not as though it really did.

  “And do you think your friend will be happy for you to sell her doll?”

  “I’m sure she would. She is very fond of me, and very generous-hearted.”

  “And what will you do with the money if we sell Dolly, as I am sure we shall—”

  “I have booked a holiday on a rather luxurious cruise in the Greek islands. I am interested in classical temples. This sort of money will really help.”

  There is always a gap between the valuation of an item and the showing of its auction. Fliss stared unseeing at the valuation of a hideous green pottery dog, a group of World War I medals, an album of naughty seaside postcards. Then came Polly’s moment. The auctioneer held her aloft, his gentlemanly hand tight round her pudgy waist, her woolly feet protruding. Briefly, briefly, Fliss looked for the last time at Polly’s sweet face, now, she was quite sure, both baleful and miserable.

  “Polly,” she said aloud. “Get her. Get her.”

  She did not know what she wanted Polly to do. But she saw Polly as capable of doing something. And they were—as they had always been—on the same side, she and Polly.

  She thought, as the bidding flew along, a numbered card flying up, a head nodding, a row of concentrated listeners with mobile phones, waiting, and then raising peremptory fingers, that she herself had betrayed Polly, but that she had done so out of love and goodwill. “Oh, Polly,” she said, “Get her,” as Carole might have said to Cross-Patch.

  Carole was standing, composed and beautiful, next to Paul Martin, as the tens turned into hundreds and the hundreds to thousands. He liked sellers to show excitement or amazement, and Carole—Fliss understood her—showed just enough of both to keep the cameras happy, but was actually rigid inside, like a stone pillar of willpower and certainty. Polly went for £2,000, but it was not customary to show the sold object again, only the happy face of the seller, so, for Fliss, there was no moment of good-bye. And you were not told where sold objects were going.

  All the other dolls were staring, as usual. She turned them over, or laid them to sleep, murmuring madly, get her, get her.

  She did not suppose Carole would come back, and wondered if she should get rid of the bed. The headmistress at the school was slightly surprised when Fliss asked her if Carole was coming back—“Do you know something I don’t?” Then she showed Fliss a postcard from Crete, and one from Lemnos. “I go off on my own with my beach towel and a book and lie on the silver sand by the wine-dark sea, and feel perfectly happy.” Fliss asked the headmistress if she knew where Cross-Patch was, and the headmistress said she had assumed Fliss was in charge of her, but if not, presumably, she must be in kennels.

  A week later, the head told Fliss that Carole was in hospital. She had had a kind of accident. She had been unconscious for some time, but it was clear, from the state of her nervous system, and from filaments and threads found on her swimsuit and in her hair, that she had swum, or floated, into a swarm of minute stinging jellyfish—there are millions out there, this summer, people are warned, but she liked to go off on her own.

  Fliss didn’t ask for more news, but got told anyway. Carole’s eyes were permanently damaged. She would probably never see again; at best, vestigially.

  She would not, naturally, be coming back.

  The headmistress looked at Fliss, to see how she took this. Fliss contrived an expression of conventional, distant shock, and said several times, how awful, how very awful.

  The headmistress said “That dog of hers. Do you think anyone knows where it is? Do you think we should get it out of the kennels? Would you yourself like to have it, perhaps—you all became so close?”

  “No,” said Fliss. “I’m afraid I never liked it really. I did my best as I hope I always shall. I’m sure someone can be found. It has a very uncertain temper.”

  She went home and told the dolls what had happened. She thought of Polly’s closed, absent little face. The dolls made an inaudible rustling, like distant birds settling. They knew, Fliss thought, and then unthought that thought, which could be said to be odd.

  [ESTONIA]

  KRISTIINA EHIN

  The Surrealist’s Daughter

  The first time I went to visit the Surrealist’s daughter, I was bitten by the Surrealist’s dog. He bit me in the thigh through the mesh gate. “A really surrealistic wound,” I thought, feeling my leg. It didn’t really hurt, but it was great to see how the Surrealist’s daughter and her mother came running with adhesive plasters and a bottle of iodine, how they knelt down in front of me to treat my wound. The Surrealist’s daughter looked at me with big, startled, slightly guilty eyes. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back.

  The next time we met was several years later. It happened to be St. George’s Night and it was the first time that I saw the Surrealist’s daughter completely naked. She stepped in suddenly through the door of the smoke sauna and in the darkness I didn’t immediately realize who this woman was. She sat down next to me on the sooty bench and we didn’t look at each other. Only later, when I saw one of her strange confirmation dresses and her patterned stockings hanging over a beam in the sauna’s front room, did I realize who I’d been having a sauna with.

  The third time I met the Surrealist’s daughter, I talked all sorts of nonsense. I told her that I had been dreaming of a woman just like her, all my life. I smiled at her again and repeated her name several times. In all seriousness. But the Surrealist’s daughter turned into a black stork and sat instead on the shoulder of one of my friends. She rubbed her long neck against my friend’s cheek. I saw my friend straining not to turn into a frog and he finally managed it, turning into a punk rocker instead. The punk rocker took the Surrealist’s daughter, who was still a b
lack stork, as his driver. “I’d like to go to Hiiumaa Island now,” the punk rocker said and the black stork sat down behind the wheel right away. I watched for some time as they were driving away. Then I went off to send some e-mails and went to bed. That night I dreamed that I was flying to who knows where in the dark of night on the back of a black stork that was croaking sadly. My friend later told me that in Hiiumaa he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation and had gone behind a lilac bush with a blonde, blue-eyed punk rocker to drink beer. At the same time the black stork was supposed to fill the tank and get some synthetic motor oil, mosquito repellent, and something to eat. But when the punk rocker went back to the black stork in the hotel room, none of this had been done. The stork had meanwhile turned back into the Surrealist’s daughter. She lay in her thin white dress on the red carpet and wept.

  My friend said he didn’t know from that moment on whether to take it or leave it. He thrashed around for a long time in some sort of confused and nameless identity crisis and finally decided that the stork was all right, as far as it goes—but the weeping Surrealist’s daughter was just too much.

  The fourth time I saw the Surrealist’s daughter, she was sitting on a tree and combing her long, silky hair. I looked up at her and said that she was so beautiful. I smiled and she smiled back at me. I said that to my mind she was very, very beautiful. I added quite loudly, to be sure that she heard me, that I had always wanted just her sort of woman. I thought about what else I might be able to say. I said that of course I had wanted just such a mother for my children as well. I got quite carried away. When I looked back up at her in the tree, she wasn’t there anymore. She had fallen down and broken her rib. When I drove her to the emergency room, she wept inconsolably and said, “Please don’t say such things to me. It’s more than I can bear.” And yet, right after that, she begged, with tears in her eyes, “Say some more, please.”

  I continued saying just such things to her the entire time. I gave my fantasy free rein. Although I saw that she was barely able to prepare a meal, that she drops plates, uses too much salt, burns the potatoes, I told her that I would like her to be the mistress of my farm, that I admire her ability to look after things and create beauty all around her. I smiled, for from the corner of my eye I saw the Surrealist’s daughter’s dusty bookshelves, unwashed windows, and other such things. Thereupon she kissed me, as if incidentally, yet more passionately than I had ever been kissed by any woman before that, and then she just as suddenly asked me to go away. She said she needed to get up in the middle of the night and perform.

  Perform … the Surrealist’s daughter knew how to do that. After all, she worked in a cabaret. Her job was frying the hearts and other body parts of her male audience over a low flame. She did that with her dancing and of course with her ability to transform herself. She was a woman of many faces and many bodies.

  Next time I told the Surrealist’s daughter about my other women. I told her about them as if incidentally, while we were driving around Egypt in a rented jeep. I had invited her on the trip with me. I wanted to completely entangle her mind in tales of my former and present women and then propose marriage to her. It was so good with her, I thought, why shouldn’t we go even further.

  But entangling the mind of the Surrealist’s daughter had very different and more serious consequences than I could have imagined. Between a sphinx and a pyramid in the desert, the Surrealist’s daughter turned into a fire-breathing dragon that had wound itself around a trembling maiden dressed in white. The maiden looked exactly like the Surrealist’s daughter, but half her age. The dragon sent caustic tongues of fire in my direction and they were very painful to me. The maiden looked on with an anguished air and I wondered with a feeling of revulsion why I should even bother fussing with this Surrealist’s daughter and all her conjurings. Of course I left her. And then I left her again. But our paths kept crossing, for in the course of time we had become friends.

  One warm, bright night when she had just come from performing and her body was hot and smelled of frying hearts, we met by chance on the street and went up the hill to look at the moon. I just couldn’t help myself and again brought up marriage while at the same time making her jealous with stories of my other women. “Yes, I’ve had innumerable lovers, in the first years I tried to keep count, but now it’s all hopelessly muddled,” I said as if incidentally. “But you’re different, with you I almost want to … Yes, with you and only you.” I called her by her name again, several times. In all seriousness. “And yet I’m afraid of that,” I continued. “Sometimes panic overcomes me when I think that I might have to be with someone for the rest of my life and be faithful to her.”

  I should have known I was playing with fire. Again the dragon was standing before me and the maiden was still watching me with her beautiful, trembling eyes. First the dragon bit a chunk out of my thigh. Then it ripped out one of my ribs and bit it in half. The maiden was still watching me gravely and beseechingly, and neither the full moon nor she, nor even the black stork that had suddenly landed on a blossoming white lilac bush, were of any help to me. Behind the maiden stood the cabaret dancer rolling her hips and stroking her breasts. It fried my heart and not only that. Then the dragon turned its seven heads toward me and got ready to tear me apart once and for all and then set me alight.

  For some reason I wasn’t able to run away, for the maiden’s innocent, beseeching gaze and the cabaret dancer’s rolling hips rooted me to the spot. Blood flowed from my thigh and my side and the dragon mocked me haughtily. I thought it would be good to fall asleep at that very moment, for death wouldn’t be so terrible in sleep. I closed my eyes. But in doing so I had freed myself from the spell cast by the cabaret dancer and the eyes of that grave young maiden. I turned into St. George on his white horse, and a sword as long as a ship’s mast grew in my hand. I hewed into the dragon. Or did I hew the Surrealist’s daughter? In any case, when every last one of its heads had been cut off, we were all dripping with blood. Me, the maiden, the white horse, the black stork, the cabaret dancer, the lilac bush and even the moon—we were all blood red. And so that there would be an end to all this hocus-pocus I rode home to my farm with them, washed them clean, and put them to bed. When the Surrealist’s daughter woke in the morning, she was again all of a piece, she still had the moon in her arms, and she smelt of lilac. She told me that she had become pregnant from the blood of her own dragon and we would immediately be having two pairs of three-headed twins who would all look exactly like me.

  TRANSLATED FROM ESTONIAN BY ILMAR LEHTPERE

  [POLAND]

  SYLWIA CHUTNIK

  It’s All Up to You

  I’m sitting in an office chair, propelling myself forward, backward, in a circle, with my feet. The girl in front of me is hot, is a babe, and I think she’s younger than me, but she looks older, with her French manicure.

  You can tell she double-majored and speaks four languages. Plus she’s thin, nicely thin, dressed in H&M, but tastefully. Unpretentiously. An element of surprise: dangling felt earrings, handmade. Her teeth shine, her eyes shine, her skin—you’ll never guess—shines, like it’s printed on coated paper.

  Men in bars like babes like this, when it’s nighttime. You might just go after work and relax, hang out, have a drink. Girls like this go so well with beer, like nuts or chips. They’re happy. Even if they’re not happy, they’re about to show you that they are happy. Carefree. They bubble over in endless laughter. They laugh with their whole selves, with their whole being, here and now and for all eternity. They just always find something amusing—they’re still giggling long after somebody’s told a joke. And their shoulder strap slips down, and their svelte shoulders are playing peek-a-boo—sometimes they pull it back up, but not most of the time. Oh my gosh, my shoulder strap slipped off! I guess I’m having that kind of day! Let me just run to the bathroom for a second.

  And the lovely body retreats, the men looking it up and down as it goes, saying nothing. Silence at the table.
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  And at the bathroom mirror a smack of lip-gloss. Her long, pretty hair—which fits her symmetrical facial features like a glove—is as sensational as tv hair. You look her over like you look through a women’s magazine, with all its formulas, its mantras of “radiant hair” and “glowing skin.” I mean, my God, sometimes they even use the word “taille,” instead of just “waist.” But the babe has a skinny everything, after all, that’s her thing. us scientists and the kgb both have proven that skinny people are fabulous.

  Beer isn’t full of empty calories when consumed by babes. Sometimes babes actually eat chocolate, but even then, nothing. Other girls have a single sandwich and blow up like blimps, but not a babe.

  And she wears thongs. Because her you-know-what is shaved. Because she never really has anything poking out down there, so she can safely wear whatever lingerie she wants. She’s so perfect you might even think she’s not real, you might think someone had cut her out of one of those magazines, but she lives and breathes, and this poses a problem for me.

  She goes back to the table, and people sigh with relief. Everything’s fun again. Sheesh, gosh, you know what happened to me in the bathroom? I’m just looking for the bathroom, and I don’t know where to go, I forgot if the women’s room had the circle on it or the triangle. Which one means women’s? So I go in through the first doors I come to, and there’s a guy just standing there, peeing. Peeing! Oh my God, I just turn right around and just say, “Sorry!” But I wanted to laugh so bad, God, like, I was in shock. What an idiot!