Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

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  Most people don’t even know Antarctica is round, why, it’s unbelievable how little is known about the place, not even the most basic facts, griped Gina, who for her part knew everything about the lives of penguins, and it seemed that once again someone had posted a comment on her blog. Dear Gina, most people don’t even know what makes them happy, much less what Antarctica looks like. That was from Alan, who would normally comment only on his own area of specialty, oceans. For a moment everyone looked up. But they imagine they know what it’s like, continued Gina, unperturbed, just because they saw a few pictures, and here Gina raised both her hands and, in characteristically American fashion, curving her index and middle fingers just a tad, formed quotation marks in the air, “dramatic” pictures of icebergs and of one or two cute penguins, but don’t take it too hard, Anna, dear, I’m not blaming photographers, it’s not your fault, or at least it’s not just your fault. How comforting you are, dear Gina, I was practically starting to feel uncomfortable, and though her words came off sounding ironic, Anna really was feeling uncomfortable, uncomfortable was nothing less than the most suitable word to describe what she was feeling, indeed this feeling hadn’t left her in days. So what is it for example that makes you happy, Julie asked Alan at this unexpected opportunity, Julie who, as she was apt to put it, had been taken into the project as a “landscape worker” to beef up the art department, and who for days now had been seeking the right moment to strike up a little chitchat with the soft-spoken oceanographer. Oceans do it for me, said Alan without so much as stopping to think, at which they all started laughing. Alan, a New Zealander of Maori descent, cast an awkward, apologetic smile as he ran his fingers through his lustrous black hair. The snow and the ice suited him well: he was a black king on a white chessboard.

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  The light green tile on the wall behind the bed. The floor covered with light green linoleum washed respectably every day but still hopelessly stained. The suffocating heat of the room. The motionless leaves on the trees in the park beyond the window. Her mother covered only by a thin sheet, and even that only half over her as she lay completely naked underneath. Believe me, said the nurse, it’s better for her like this, there’s no other way to bear the heat, and as if to prove her point, Anna presently discovered two tiny beads of sweat between her mother’s breasts as they formed a little stream and trickled downward onto her belly. Not as if she had never seen her mother’s naked body, no, the sight of a body was not taboo to them, but then again, the sight was everything, said Anna aloud, as if speaking to the green tiles, to the grouted gaps between the tiles; the sight without touch, smell, sound, speech, just the sight of the body showering onto the retinas again and again: the now sagging breasts still somehow beautiful in their autumnal repose, the nipples with their enormous brown areolas resembling little yards, dvor in Russian, na dvare came the words from a long-ago Russian class, yes, na dvare full of tiny little bumps, especially when she was cold; and on the lower parts of the belly, the horizontal, state-of-the-art bikini cut superimposed by the striated marks of stitches, as if carved in stone by some ancient centipedal creature, a paleontological trace of a world before human beings, a world when there were only animals, as Anna had put it at the age of three, in words that, to her, meant simply a long time ago, yesterday included. And when this came to her mind as she watched her mother’s blue-veined hands resting upon that wrinkled bedsheet, hands speckled with faint brown spots, it seemed to her that all of this—childhood, the past, and even this present, suffocating moment—had indeed happened in some strange, distant space and time.

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  That’s why those Buckminster Fuller maps are so good, Gina rattled on as if nothing had happened. You know, those maps sprawled out like squashed frogs, maps that finally do justice to Antarctica by showing it like it is. Traditional mapmaking is pretty screwed up, ain’t it? It pretends to be scientific, though you know that’s not true, that it’s just a bad convention, and a dangerous one at that, seeing as how it drips ideology right into your brain without you ever noticing. Sure, it’s clever how it works, but that doesn’t make it likeable. Just look at those maps that don’t have Europe in the center, for once, but, say, Australia. Sure puts things in a different light, huh? While talking, Gina was busy carving her section of the ice bench. She’d learned this and many other things in training camp: how to carve benches, chairs, and tables out of ice, as well as how to make an igloo, not to mention a bed—everything needed for survival when survival is at stake. They were almost finished making three benches and a table to have their lunches at, since it would have been a shame not to take advantage of that day’s searing sunlight, even if the unusual warmth was also an ill omen. While the effects of global warming on the lives of penguins was among Gina’s favorite subjects, it was nonetheless possible to talk with her about other things. Human relationships, for example. Not long before, she’d been dumped by her girlfriend, a climatologist who, in a turn of events that surprised even herself, had fallen for one of the helicopter pilots stationed here. Now and then Gina flirted with Anna, if only to stay in practice. But she could see it wasn’t worth her time. The two-dimensional take on mapmaking really does screw things up, she jabbered on. When I was little, I too thought the South Pole was a sort of big white blotch spilling all over the place at the bottom of the map, but it seems there have been a few interesting developments since then. Remember that Australian dude the other day who told us about a project using sonar-equipped planes and other machines to measure gravitation and magnetic fields that give you a topographic picture of the land lying under the ice? Really something, huh? Like a murder mystery. A slippery business, representation. What do you say, Anna, you big white woman? You’re the authority, after all. Like some everlasting solar cell, Gina’s endless supply of working-class Italian-American spunk regularly filled up the team’s depleting energy reserves; had Gina not been on hand, Anna might already have lain right down on a bed of ice and not gotten up for a good long time. She hadn’t taken a single picture in two days, and Gina, as usual, in her no-nonsense, free and easy style, had once again cut right to the heart of things. Sometimes, said Anna evasively, it seems you don’t need special devices to figure out what’s under the ice. A few days ago I saw the carcass of a dog that belonged to the Scott expedition. Just imagine, the ice melted right off it in this insane heat, and even the chain is still around its neck. Anna now recalled that apt little idiom from her native tongue that had come to her mind on encountering the dog, Here’s where the dog is buried, but as she’d seen little sense in saying it aloud to the others, and then having to either explain or not explain that what she was really saying was, That’s the root of it, Anna had simply said nothing.

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  At the foot of the bed there was a card that read, 3 part. mat., gave birth three times, partus maturus, which Anna read again and again as if immersed in a masterpiece of world literature, one that contained everything, like the great classics, but even better, for who could have put things more concisely than this? Maybe the minimalists. Not that they wrote great, epic novels. No, doing so would have run counter to their ars poetica, mused Anna. Only the tip of the iceberg, that alone must be visible. That’s no way to go about writing an epic novel. Or was it? The words on the card suggested to Anna that maybe, just maybe, it was. And whoever had written those words—a born genius of a nurse or, perhaps, some doctor—had obviously chosen the wrong career, yes, they would be well advised to hide away somewhere and write till they drop, because anyone with such a vein, a poetic one, that is, shouldn’t be fiddling with medical instruments, wallowing in blood and mucus, pressing pus-filled wounds, or groping about among tumors. No, there are plenty of people to deal with all that, but few can say so much in such little space. But then again, thought Anna, what was so good about brevity after all? What was there to like about it? Wasn’t it better if words were spoken proper
ly—not swept under some rug, not clipped, but given all the time in the world? To Anna, it pretty much looked like her mother was the greatest minimalist of all, and unconquerable at that, considering that before having Anna, she had already given birth twice—as Anna discovered only by chance while rummaging through some of her mother’s old medical papers and photos. One picture, which looked like it was from around the early forties, was of a little boy: blond, around two years old, playing in a striped sunsuit among the hens in a dusty farmyard. Who is this kid, Anna asked, to which her mother replied, don’t you see I’ve got things to do, and coming from her this was somewhat surprising. After all, she’d always wanted to document everything, to carve all of life into a neat little story, to use picture books and albums to recount that this happened like this, and that like that: marriage, pregnancy, little baby Anna, little Anna going to nursery school and then to school, little Anna at a poetry recital competition, wedding anniversaries, Father with his arm around Mother’s bare shoulders as they sat in a lantern-adorned garden restaurant, award ceremonies, Outstanding Worker Medal, Workers’ Gold Medal, little Anna’s marriage (but not her little divorce), summer on Lake Balaton, friends and colleagues and relatives (not that too many of them were still around after all that), but grandparents and great-grandparents nonetheless pasted in meticulously along with Great-granddad’s beloved colleagues: Miksa Weisz’s furniture factory in the city of Szeged, 1905, Great-grandma in rustling silk dresses and colossal, crazy hats. What a look! How could Miksa have gone to work every morning in that dumb furniture factory, leaving that voluptuous woman in bed, letting her lie fallow all day long? Who gives a damn about furniture? Let people live in tents and lie on straw! Yes, that’s what Great-granddad should have said, I’m not letting go of Kamilla for an instant now that I’ve got her, I’ll hold her and clutch at her and tear her and knead her till the day I die. But that’s not what happened, because die they did—of hunger, in the Budapest Ghetto, one day before the liberation. Not like that was in the album either, part. mat., checkmate. Later on, Anna couldn’t find the child’s photograph again.

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  This constant shower of light, this endless day, seemed bent on exhorting her to see, to finally see what must be seen rather than to be peering always into her camera’s viewfinder, fiddling about, waiting for suitable light and form. Not that she’d done much of that for days now. No, Anna would have much preferred to sleep all day and all night in that perpetual flood of light. Never in her life had she slept as well, as deeply, and with as much devotion as here, of all places; here in the snow, ice, and light. There’s no getting around it, said Gina, chattering away, they were at the penguin colony Anna had grumpily accompanied her to, where Gina proceeded to record the precise weight of each tagged penguin before the creatures swam off in search of food, and then did so once more after they returned to the ice floe. Everyone here’s got a screw loose, isn’t that so, my loveliness? You know, who else would want to come here, of all places, for weeks or months on end—here, to the ice and into this freezing air? Not that there’s all that much ice or cold, nowadays. But let’s face it, you’re a little odd yourself, what with this iceberg obsession of yours, and your mantra that icebergs are like people and that you’re not taking landscape photos but portraits. What kind of crazy idea is that? I mean, an iceberg is an iceberg is an iceberg. Who was it that said that? Whatever. But imagine if I ran around telling everyone that penguins aren’t really penguins, but little penguin-shaped philosophies? Anyway, as I see it, the best take on life is not to try doing what you do as if you’re doing something other than what you’re doing, if you catch my drift. Once again Gina had mercilessly dug right into Anna, as into some open festering wound, because Anna, when she went rock collecting earlier with Robert, the half-Indian ship builder from Alaska, had been pondering precisely this, of all things, this, as her back began to hurt from the weight of her rock-filled knapsack, and as a skua, that heavy-bodied gull, raptor of the south, kept swooping down on them with sustained aggression as if trying to drive them away, even though there couldn’t have been any skua nests around there, no, it seemed the bird was also trying to tell Anna something, that indeed the entire landscape wanted to lead her to something or other, so as to finally give some meaning to her having come here in the first place, here, to the end of the world, to give some meaning to the whole question of her having applied for this project and having been selected, yes, there must have been some reason more compelling than photographing icebergs, which all at once struck Anna as an inadequate and ludicrous endeavor, but she’d wanted to somehow make up for what now she believed was more than mere negligence, the fact that she hadn’t taken a picture of her mother then, and that she’d somehow thought that here, down here, she’d find one, an image capable of conveying what Anna had felt when her mother, waking up in the steaming hot ward after several days in a coma, suddenly said, in a hushed, measured tone of voice, my feet are cold, put on a pair of socks, at which Anna, startled, frantically rummaged through the nightstand until she finally found a homely pair of orange terry-cloth socks and slipped them slowly, carefully onto her mother’s feet, whereupon her mother sighed with satisfaction and died, Anna turning her head toward the patient in the neighboring bed, giving the woman a look as though to ask if she too had seen what Anna had seen, and the old lady stared back at Anna with frightened beady eyes as if to seal their mutual secret, the thin congealed surface of the cold stewed spinach sparkling on the nightstand all the while. Did you know, continued Gina rhapsodically, that the Antarctic is the only place on Earth where places can be named after living people, that you can nominate people to name places after, and then a committee convenes and names the lucky person, and you won’t believe this, but even I have a little island, a whole island, named after me. I’ve been coming here for almost twenty years, after all, and when I found out, I went to that island, pulled down my pants and panties and, swoosh, I pissed on it. I’m a motherfucking biologist, after all.

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  Mother in her hat, her ribboned, summer, girl’s hat. A colored hat, it seems, but on this jagged-edged, miniature photo even it is black and white, yes and no, everything still so simple. Mother smiling into the camera, not suspecting a thing. Mother in a stilted, confectioner’s apprentice cap, its blinding white enhancing the creamy white of the pastries lined up with pride on the tray in her hands. Mother with her tweed trekker cap cocked jauntily over her ear, standing proudly on a cliff, looking off into the distance as one should: Souvenir from Transylvania. Mother in a jockey cap, promenading buoyantly across the city’s main square, arm in arm with her girlfriends: Miklós Seidler, street photographer, Szeged. Mother in her festive lace shawl standing under an ornamented tent, with a dapper, trustworthy-looking young man beside her who is wearing an embroidered yarmulke. Mother in a peasant’s kerchief, as if it isn’t even Mother but someone just living her own life in Mother’s image, and her bewildered stare seems to suggest that this is exactly how it felt, too. Mother wearing her stenographer’s hat, in a gray costume and with a black purse, even the brim of the hat seeming to tell of her ready-and-willing resolve to get to work, of a belief that life is now starting anew, that the nation has a second chance, and that she, for one, will seize this opportunity by the throat. Mother in a restrained, rather plain-looking bridal hat recommended especially for workers, and yet her eyes sparkle underneath it all the same, eyes that say, with wonder, After all. Mother at a company event in her proper, lady worker’s hat. And now, all at once, Mother in a wide-brimmed, otherworldly summer hat, and although her eyes are covered by giant, butterfly-shaped sunglasses as she stands there with a coffee plantation in the background, the way she’s holding her head reveals the unhoped-for sense of relief that has come with freedom. Mother in a colorful, parrot-adorned shawl, her head down, gazing at her bulging belly. Here, with an uncovered head, hair drawn back in a tight bun as it never was later on, a newborn on her
interlocked knees, Mother not holding, not protecting, and not even touching the baby, her two palms instead turned upward on her thighs, resting there helplessly or, it seems, calling for help, as if she can’t understand how this little bundle got there in the first place and what she’s now supposed to do with it. Mother in a straw hat, her eyes scanning the foaming, billowing sea, like one time when she took Anna down to the sea coast near their flat, where they often went, perhaps it was a weekend, there was a huge crowd, not that this stretch of coast was sparsely populated even during the week, but Mother must have let her attention drift, for Anna, who was six or seven, suddenly realized while roaming about that she was lost, her mother nowhere to be seen, and Anna immediately despaired, bawling infernally as she made her way down the seaside and well-meaning adults stopped regularly to ask her what her mother looked like and where she’d seen her last, and then all at once Anna saw her mother, standing with her back toward her. Barely able to catch her breath from the joy and relief, Anna approached without making a sound, and as she did so she heard her sobbing mother, who hadn’t yet noticed her, say repeatedly, “My God, here too, even here?” but what these words referred to, Anna hadn’t a clue. And now her mother’s head is covered with a black mantilla, as if at the funeral of a Spanish don, Don Ernő, otherwise known as Dad, Mother standing in a tiny cemetery on a late-autumn hillside north of Budapest in the Danube Bend, chestnuts showering down upon the gravestones, he’ll like the view from here, said Mother, buena vista, she spoke seven languages, she did, not that she ever said a thing, and hasta la vista, but Mother said this—see you later—in Hungarian, viszontlátásra, throwing a handful of dirt on the coffin, at which Anna looked at Mother with surprise, thinking she must have said this by mistake, for they didn’t believe in the afterlife, insofar as they believed at all, for they’d long ago let that God loose in the wind who’d allowed all that to happen. Mother, in a tasseled knit cap, shrunk to half her size, on the tree-shaded grounds of a mountainside sanatorium, the pants of her warm-up suit hanging loosely on her thighs, as if she was wearing someone else’s hand-me-downs, one of her knees bent beneath her in a well-practiced pose, like she used to do back when she went to receptions in her low-cut evening dress, posing on the marble floor of their living room, palm trees out beyond the windows, her thick glasses weirdly enlarging her pupils underneath her cap, making her look as if she’d seen a ghost, and who knows, maybe that’s how it was, maybe by then she knew and she had seen what was to come, her rougeless mouth a bit agape, as if she was wondering whether she was really seeing what she was seeing, and then for a moment Anna was left wondering too: What exactly was Mother’s mouth like? Mothers’ mouths come in many varieties, after all: soft, full, fleshy, tender, sensual; lips pressed tight in anguish until they’re almost white; purple from cold; stern and slender as a blade; rouged or rougeless, but even within this category a mother’s mouth can be many things, depending on how it’s rouged or how it’s not; festively rouged; rouged for a reception, a dinner, the theater, or a soirée; rouged for flirtation or seduction; rouged in so many splendid shades of red, perhaps for official business, such as asking someone to pull some strings for you, discreetly or not so discreetly rouged for a working lunch, rouged while on the way to pick up important laboratory results, or rouged just to counter anxiety. And, if rougeless, a mother’s mouth might be sporty, as when having just emerged from a swimming pool, or having recently leapt with abandon into the sea; it can be rougeless in a disheveled, sleepy, or early-morning sort of way; rougeless when a mother finally shows her real face; rougeless in a hospital, while ill, or while just running down to the store for bread. But a mother’s mouth might even be defiantly or vengefully rougeless, as if to say, as hers surely did, no way am I going to spruce myself up for some commies. In a word, it’s all but impossible to take into account all the myriad states of rougedness and rougelessness that might characterize a mother’s mouth, to exhaustively map this complex and endlessly refined language. And yet one thing seemed certain all the same, as Anna stared at that picture of Mother on the sanatorium grounds: she could no longer conjure up her mother’s mouth; why, she had trouble even remembering how it looked, much less its texture.