Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Two months later, toward the end of January 1945, the two friends, quite untroubled, were making the journey to Paris. They were accompanied by the police, but this fact did not bother them. Chanberlán was annoyed—“right fools we were, fancy not killing the maid first”—but he wasn’t worried. And Pirpo could see no reason to feel alarmed either. “We didn’t do anything,” he said. “It was the cold and the mountains that did it.” Later, when the jury found that the slow, calculated way in which they had killed the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been particularly cruel, and sentenced Pirpo and Chanberlán to life imprisonment, the two friends were most surprised, especially Pirpo. “I don’t know why you find it so odd,” the judge said to him. “Did you think you had carte blanche to murder?” Pirpo said nothing, but, along with his anxiety about the sentence passed down, he felt a kind of relief. He had finally found the expression he had been looking for all this time. He would never forget it.

  Chanberlán died four years later in a Martinique jail during a brawl among prisoners. It was another fourteen years before Pirpo could rejoin his circle of friends. Some Dons and Doñas did not hesitate to welcome him back into the family, since, after all, despite certain shared political sensibilities, the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been foreigners, not Spaniards. Besides, these were difficult times, and it was always good to have a loyal servant like Pirpo on hand. Strikes were becoming ever more frequent and the enemies of the political regime ever bolder. Pirpo, however, had grown wary. He would not commit himself so easily again. He had learned his lesson. Before doing anything, he would demand to be given the carte blanche that had saved him so much bother in 1936 and in the three or four years that followed.

  TRANSLATED FROM BASQUE BY MARGARET JULL COSTA,

  IN COLLABORATION WITH THE AUTHOR

  [SERBIA]

  BORIVOJE ADAŠEVIĆ

  For a Foreign Master

  One morning the postman brought me an unusual letter. Mutatis mutandis, this was it:

  Dear friend, don’t be angry with me for addressing you like this even though we have hardly ever spoken, I am obliged to do so for the sake of the truth. Here, in Sent Andreja, I am holding your book again, having read it the dear lord knows how many times, and I can’t get over my astonishment that you should still be there, looking for heaven knows what in that crazy country! What sort of trouble drives you to stay sitting in a town that does not know you, nor will it ever know you, writing for a country that isn’t even sure it can look without envy at the most ordinary scribbler, let alone a serious man and writer of conscience! That’s Serbia, my friend, Serbia, and it has always lured the devil, and the devil never refuses to come for its own kind. From the moment I took your book in my hands—it was given to me by my friend Kaplan Refika, an Albanian from Belgrade who lives with his family in a Budapest B&B—from that moment I knew that I would always consider you a friend, no matter how hard it would be for you to bear that. My name is Milan Almaši. I’m exactly four years older than you, and when I decided to leave Serbia for good, I had behind me a university degree, a first, second, and third war, and a good fifteen months of work experience as a teacher in school, I left all that behind me, I don’t myself know how. Those years of hunger in Belgrade, when I was a student, that poverty which shackled me like ancient prison chains, then arrests, demonstrations, call-up papers, someone knocking the barrel of a pistol on my door in the small hours—all that comes back to me now in nightmares, persecuting me, the evil stamp of the past, like a darkness that wants to gnaw through my eye. You think it’s happening to someone else, surely it’s all happening at a great remove, people like you have always distanced themselves from everyone. That comes from sensitivity, a person simply has to protect himself, to protect his jangled nerves, and I understand that. But I tell you, when it comes to people like you and me, we all share one destiny. The only differences are in the paths that lead to the crushing realizations that drive us mercilessly to something like this, drive us into exile. For years before I fled, I hadn’t wanted to hear about so much as setting foot out of my town, not even out of my street, I’d never even allowed anyone to embark on any story of any length on that topic, but in the end I fled headlong, running as fast as my legs would carry me, tripping over the splinters of our lives. Now, when I look back, I see only the very end of the string that was long ago wound into a ball and which I intend to unwind, but not now, now I will dwell only on some of the main events of my life, which I have enough courage to call appalling. You have to measure the depth of a person’s experience not only by the sum of whatever’s been survived, but also by the degree of sensitivity possessed by the survivor …

  But I don’t want to drag things out unnecessarily. I left Serbia two months after the end of the 1999 war. It was August, it was terribly hot. I was taking my wife and children, Stefan and Sofija, on a rather risky journey, but it was our journey and we accepted it, wholeheartedly, as such. Had our departure been like the departures of others at that time, I would be very happy, and now I’d be able to write to you about anything other than that, and I’d be more cheerful for sure—but it was not. Our departure was preceded by certain events, which affected you too, as well as all other honorable people in our country, but there were also events that affected only my family and myself, and which were in fact the straw that broke the camel’s back, such as it was. At the beginning of everything, like an epic preamble, stands an honorable obelisk erected in all our names to the memory of Lazar and Kosovo—much abused, and therefore now tilting, but propped up by the threadbare platitudes of many stale national bards. Throughout the country, joy in honor of the bloodletting grew, students in Belgrade and other university centers were arrested, laws were routinely repealed. Then came the beginning of mobilization—real fear began to rise in people, first a little timidly, but later with increasing ferocity. Then came March and with it war, and on the second day my call-up papers arrived. What could I do? I went. Mother—and this is where she solemnly enters the story—wept. She burned my father’s shirt, as she was ironing it, while he and I said good-bye outside the front door.

  I left late in the evening and reported for duty. The men around me were stressed, half-drunk, singing nonsense while snot poured into their mouths. On the radio an announcer was holding forth about the courage of the Serbian army, and one of us shat himself with fright when we heard rumbling over our heads. I made my way through the crowd to a telephone to call a relative who lived near the airport. He said: “They hit damn close last night, I was rigid with shock for ten minutes.” I could see at once where it was all headed. I didn’t know how long the demon would hang on and how many of us he would push into the abyss before his final end.

  The process I want to tell you about began to develop in me roughly a week and a half after the beginning of our campaign. All of a sudden I began to feel hatred toward everyone. Or more exactly, hatred and disgust. A kind of muffled nausea, revulsion at all those creatures, that whole heap of rotten human material around me. I should say that, despite my degree from the Arts Faculty in Belgrade, I’ve always been hostile to our so-called elitists, and I still am today. Elitism in our country always taking the form of a not-particularly-modern version of snobbery and racism combined. But for a long time that hostility made me foster a kind of sympathy for the common people in our country, who seemed to me to have been almost entirely innocent in all the tragedies that we had experienced throughout our history, everything that pulled us apart as a people and scattered us around the world. Indeed, I cultivated a kind of contempt and even a mild sneer of revulsion toward the Serbian intelligentsia, xenophobic philistines, conceited and bigoted from the outset—the kind of sneer one cultivates toward the particularly stupid and vain. I thought—rightly, I believed—that the ordinary person on the one hand and the pseudointellectual on the other were unbridgeably dissimilar, as though they hadn’t sprung from the same roots but had perhaps, one or other of them, landed on our soil from somewhere else
, was entirely alien to it. But, some time around my induction, I realized that I had been seriously mistaken. Not only had both parties sprung from the same roots, they were the same people, in no way different—except, perhaps, in the number of years they had spent at school, but even there the disparity was often minimal. Something fundamentally at variance, a complete rift had now been established between them and me, and there was no longer any prospect of reconciliation. Now I looked at these people, ordinary, conceited, and uncontrollable, realizing at a certain moment that everything—the story I listened to every day on the radio or television and the one I listened to in the streets and the suburbs, dressed in my army uniform—had merged, to form one picture, one single, ugly figure. Our whole multicolored country was becoming for me a kind of Ireland in the eyes of an Irishman leaving it forever, it was becoming the old sow that eats her farrow and which had opened its hideous jaws, determined no doubt to finish us off. But enough of that. What’s important is what was happening in me, that definitive rupture with the Fatherland, however painful I found it. And when a person steps into the next stage of his destiny, there is no way back to the last.

  When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that’s how it is and now I don’t know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well. In keeping with all that hatred and that disgust, my life had in store for me an event that would contribute to the further development of those fundamentally negative feelings, which are more a reflection of a man’s inherent weakness than the consequence of any repressive social system. Here, with the aforementioned event, I am already nearing the end of my story, because after it things moved quickly, leading right to our exile. Briefly, this is what happened:

  The machinery of war had not really gotten going yet when about ten soldiers moved into my parents’ house. It had become the custom at that time for the army to take shelter in private houses, while their owners put up with this honor without a word. Well, those ten of ours were the most utterly vile individuals imaginable, and drunkards to boot, so the house resounded with banging and crashing all day long. None of my family had ever been particularly quick to anger— they were always mild people. My father, but particularly my mother, put up with various insults at first—admittedly, still on the edge of the tolerable, but eventually developing into something really unpleasant. Up until the moment that I’m about to describe to you, right up to that moment—or, more exactly, right up to the third day after it—I knew almost nothing about what was going on in that house. I too had been mobilized and billeted in someone else’s house, and I considered it my duty to endure that burden silently as well, although the knowledge that soldiers were occupying my parental home was never far from my thoughts … (I even carried the key to the locked room in which I still kept most of my books and other personal effects, with me, just in case some stranger found his way in there.) It turned out that those soldiers did whatever they liked. They turned the house into a real pigsty. A certain Brekalović particularly excelled at this—a true alcoholic with a pale, drawn, ghostly face. Only the thin, blue veins on his nose disturbed the eerie pallor of it. He was particularly talented, I say. And he had several serious quarrels with my folks. You can imagine, I suppose, that they were about politics. He didn’t fail to mention, during every argument— for he had presumably heard me talking during one of my visits home—that their son, despite being in the army, was a traitor to his nation. Brekalović wanted, also, in the name of said nation, for my room to be unlocked so that he could personally see what I was hiding in it and what kind of books, if you please, the philosopher reads. Mother demanded that Brekalović leave the house. God only knows all the things she’d already learned about Brekalović—but, in any case, she didn’t dare share any of this with father and me. One evening, finally, that loathsome figure from our nightmare life broke down the locked door of my room and found himself among my things, among the books and papers of my philosophical work and essay-writing. He stood, the obscurantist, in the middle of the room with Kadare’s The Castle in his hands, God knows how he managed to hit on that, of all things, among all the works by Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, or Hegel … The author’s name was probably just what he was looking for—Albanian—for, at the height of the war and its atrocities, he was looking for a straw to cling to, and then … do what he did. Seeing him there, my mother screamed, and my father wasn’t at home just then, and I don’t think that I’ll ever forgive him for that. “Bitch, you spawned one treacherous bastard!” hissed Brekalović before he set about raping my forty-nine-year-old mother, who, apart from anything else in her life, had married her very first boyfriend, I mean the man who later became my father.

  I stopped by three days after Brekalović’s crime and found the house in silence. The soldiers had left, and my mother was sitting hunched up on her bed with a pillow clutched to her stomach. My father, broken. He was crouching in the corner of the room. Silent. Hardly fifteen minutes passed from the moment I heard what had happened till I found Brekalović in front of a nearby bar, led straight to him by some animal instinct. I beat him senseless. His injuries were severe enough that he will never be able to walk normally again, and the four months he spent in hospital are a testament to what happened that afternoon. I admit, I was wholly out of control, there was no voice of reason left in my consciousness then to point out the barbarity of my action. I’m writing this to you today, God help me, to report that a sentence kept resounding in me that day, as in an empty church, a simple, harsh sentence, as though read in some cheap novelette: “So you thought you could fuck an old woman and not pay for it, did you? Well, guess again!” And, over and over again, that sentence filled me, completely, with hatred. I had avenged my mother, and remained just aware enough not to take my action to its ultimate end. I left Brekalović alive and later I told the police and the judge the truth, down to the last word. What happened then, however, simply confirmed some of the attitudes I’ve already expressed over the course of this letter, I mean about our people and our country. It turned out that Brekalović was related to the dean of the school where I taught. There followed pressure, telephone calls. Soon I was summoned to have a “talk” with my superior. Briefly, I was told that if I did not withdraw my accusation of rape, I would lose my job. Which would be fatal for my family and myself—or so I was told. After all, I no longer lived in my parents’ house, which meant that I could hardly know what went on there in every detail. If I retracted my claim, they would, they said, for their part, do what they could. (In the office at that moment, I should say, in addition to the dean and myself, was Brekalović’s lawyer.) I repeat, they would, for their part, do what they could. As though it was I who had raped Brekalović’s mother, as though my mother had not been so viciously, cruelly humiliated! We did not withdraw the accusation. But now, thanks to you won’t believe what pressures, here we are, my wife, my children, and I, in Szentendre, outside that country—although, I have to say, not far enough away from those people there. At a certain moment my mother demanded that we go, because the threats and blackmail could no longer be borne. The judicial process is still going on and will continue to go on, no doubt, for a while longer yet. As long as it takes, I hope, for Brekalović to see the inside of a prison. And then, of course, I know that one day he will get out of jail. As though nothing had happened, he’ll stroll along to the first bar for a double brandy, he’ll knock it back, maybe pinch the waitress’s behind, or tell some drunk that he’d done time just because he humped some traitor’s mother. That his beloved country had punished an innocent man; that it was he, in fact, who was the victim and not that stinking old whore who could ha
ve given him a nasty disease. But there we are! Everyone gets what he deserves. He’ll go to prison, while I’m already in exile. Voluntary or not—that’s a different question. Besides, I am not myself blameless as regards the country in which I spent virtually all my life up to now.

  Incidentally, it’s nice here. This “little bit of Serbia” is extraordinarily good for my nerves, and it seems to me that, although there aren’t many of them, the Serbs here live quite differently from those there. Or perhaps I should say “you there”?

  Tomorrow we’ll be getting money from Stockholm: a relative is sending us German marks to buy supplies for the coming three months, which I believe is as long as it will take for us to get Swedish immigrant visas for my family and myself. Refika brought me your collection of stories and one dreadfully bad volume of poems, translated into Serbian, by one of his countrymen, which I intend to throw in the trash. He laughs, the bum, and says, pointing at the book of poems: “Read one every night, before you go to sleep.” “All right,” I say, putting it aside. And he falls onto the bed, roaring with laughter. He told me I was a “Serbian cultural racist.” Once in a while, I do feel better. We were right to leave Serbia, because of the children, because of my wife, because of my mother. That’s how it is in a foreign land, my friend. Here, my hand writes of its own accord: “Waging war, shedding blood for a foreign master …”