Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Hm. Interesting.

  His good mood restored, Greg lay down. Contrary to his expectations, he soon fell asleep again.

  This time he did dream. He dreamed about an enormous dinosaur, possibly a tyrannosaurus, grinning broadly, with a flattering, reptilian smile; it had vast back legs, pure muscle, that contrasted with its comically feeble arms, with which the tyrannosaurus was doing . . . crochet! Crocheting with the bones of its victims? Making a pair of bone bootees for a baby that was on the way?

  It was the very definition of a comforting dream.

  By the second day, he was beginning to get acclimatized. He still couldn’t make out the names of the streets, most of which, as far as he could see, were more like goat tracks than streets, and used by shepherds with goats and sheep and by carts drawn by donkeys or mules. A woman had walked past him only minutes before, barefoot, carrying her child in her arms, its head and arms hanging limply, and leaving a trail of blood on the ground. Where was she going? Was there a hospital nearby? Why didn’t anyone help her? Was it normal for a woman to walk down the street holding her dying child, so normal that no one offered to help? And who was there to take her to the hospital? The few cars on the streets must have other things to do than go out of their way for someone else. Fuel was expensive. And, of course, only those involved in the war would have access to it.

  Besides, memorizing street names would take up time and willpower he no longer felt he had; yes, he was lacking in both items, time and/or willpower. However, he felt that he could safely explore the streets within a radius of five blocks from the hotel without getting lost. If, that is, they would leave him alone. They wouldn’t. His short morning walk was taken under escort from the hotel security guards. He tried to shoo them away, but to no avail: “Those are our orders, sir.”

  Even this failed to dent his good humor. On an impulse, he took his cell phone out of his pocket, checked that there was a signal—there was—and called his wife. The answering machine responded, of course, but he spoke to it as if he were speaking to her:

  “It’s really nice here. Yes, you’re right. It is dirty and chaotic, but even the dirt and the chaos are nice. A little while ago, a woman walked past me holding her child in her arms. It looked like the child had been hit by a cluster bomb, you know, those bombs that explode before they hit the ground and which don’t kill, but maim.”

  The signal died. He didn’t try to phone again, even though he felt like talking, with an enthusiasm that was only partly feigned. He imagined the rest of the conversation: Did she understand the beauty of the cluster bomb concept? Yes, exactly, to do as much damage as possible to human flesh, by spraying out thousands of nails, an instantaneous zap-zap-zapping. Like a harpooner, not of whales, but of sardines, who, when he throws his harpoon (it doesn’t matter in which direction), releases a thousand mini-harpoons, each going off in search of its sardine or its baby. Anyway, I’d better go. Lots of love. Yes, I’ll wrap up warm, don’t you worry.

  TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY MARGARET JULL COSTA

  war

  [GEORGIA]

  DAVID DEPHY

  Before the End

  The soldiers are standing in a line. I am pressed against the wall and they are aiming at me. The moment is dragging on. The order of the chief is heard: “Fire!”

  They fire.

  In this interminable moment, the flight of the bullets slow after they emerge lazily from the guns. The guns stink with the smell of gunpowder. The bullets are slowly, lazily floating. Turning around and around. The soldiers’ livid faces look like masks in the mist. They stare at me in rage. The spinning bullets are approaching me. Impudently and steadily moving forward. Their determined advance is ruthless. Don’t you see that time doesn’t exist? I can run away before the bullets enter me, can’t I? But my body doesn’t listen to reason. I am standing, pressing against the wall with my back. The bullets are halfway between the soldiers and myself. The soldiers are still aiming. At this moment, they don’t exist; they’re stuck back in the second before my idea cropped up and got hung on this dragged-out moment. The smoke from their guns is swaying. It’s not dispersing yet. The bullets are swirling, moving forward. Three of them in front of the other two.

  I feel hot.

  I see my childhood behind the soldiers. I’m playing in the yard. A cockroach is on my palm. I pet it with my finger. My mother is calling me from the balcony. I hear music. I hear the melody of “Strawberry Fields” from a distance. My favorite, “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

  The bullets are two paces away from me. They approach lazily. On my left I notice a familiar face.

  “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” it’s saying to me.

  “What?” I ask.

  “The thing you’re feeling and seeing.”

  “Is death like this?”

  “Like this as well.”

  “I’m not a deserter!”

  “I know.”

  “Nor a traitor . . . Why are they shooting me like a traitor?”

  “It’s wartime now. Nobody is responsible.”

  “That doesn’t matter. The tribunal made a mistake. I don’t deserve to be shot.”

  “It’s wartime now. Maybe they mistook you for somebody else? . . . But there’s no point worrying anymore.”

  “Are you my death?”

  “Yes.”

  He goes quiet. He is looking in the direction of the soldiers. They’re still standing in the same position, with guns aimed. The smoke has drifted farther up, the bullets have come nearer. They are turning around steadily, slowing down even more.

  “And now?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” he answered. “Now what usually happens, happens. It’s quiet.”

  “Stop making fun of me, stop tormenting me.”

  “I’m not laughing at you or tormenting you. War justifies everybody’s death.”

  “War?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t end, it doesn’t begin, it always exists. No matter whether you win or lose, it exists and nobody can avoid it. How tired I am . . .”

  “Why are you tired?”

  “You are not responsible for death in war. War itself absolves you of that responsibility. That’s why I’m tired. Immortality, too. That’s another enemy, and it never dies. Enough, your time is up. Don’t be afraid.”

  “Why should I be afraid? I’m a soldier.”

  “I know.”

  “And I’m not going to give up so easily.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you. You are standing with your back pressed against the wall. The bullets are already flying. So don’t speak to me like that. I’m your fellow soldier, and I love you like my brother.”

  “What have I done to deserve your love?”

  “You aren’t alone in this.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Everyone. I stand by everyone. I can’t leave anyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s always the same. I keep myself at this distance.” He extends his hand, touching me on my shoulder. I feel hot and cold and hot. The bullets have almost reached my chest. I look down at them, they are spinning. One of the soldiers has raised his gun, the rest are standing in the same old positions. Everybody is motionless. The smoke seems to have dispersed.

  “I am a brother to every one of you, I fight only because Death exists and because we can be enemies, but to fight you should be able to do the most important thing . . .”

  “What?”

  “Enmity,” he looks into my eyes. “How beautiful and how terrible it is. If you want to love, you should be able to hate at first sight, yet fight for the one you hate as well. But nobody fights by this rule: only myself. This is why I am the end of everybody, because I have enough courage to love you and still be your enemy, yours and
everybody else’s . . . I am the last enemy and I am looking forward to the day when my eternity ends. But now your time is up, come along with me.”

  He embraces me.

  “Be strong, you’ll be amazed when you see and understand everything,” I hear him say as the bullets enter me, two into my chest and one into my head. My body, covered with bullet wounds, falls down to the ground, sliding down the blood-stained wall. As if time has been switched on again. The soldiers hang their guns over their shoulders and disperse quickly; my childhood disappears. Over there heavy machine guns can be seen. There is more smoke all around. The wounded are being placed in the trucks. Far away, lines of soldiers are rushing off somewhere. The music has stopped. There are trumpets instead of “Strawberry Fields.” The war is continuing. The tanks are rattling. The helicopters are flying in the sky. There is smoke everywhere, heavy smoke rising up.

  TRANSLATED FROM GEORGIAN BY TSISANA GABUNIA

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  DESMOND HOGAN

  Kennedy

  A nineteen-year-old youth is made to dig a shallow grave in waste ground beside railway tracks near Limerick bus station and then shot with an automatic pistol.

  Eyes blue-green, brown-speckled, of blackbird’s eggs.

  He wears a hoodie jacket patterned with attack helicopters.

  Murdered because he was going to snitch—go to the guards about a murder he’d witnessed—his friend Cuzzy had fired the shot. The victim had features like a Western stone wall. The murder vehicle—a stolen cobalt Ford Kuga—set on fire at Ballyneety near Lough Gur.

  The hesitant moment by Lough Gur when blackthorn blossom and hawthorn blossom are unrecognizable from one another, the one expiring, the other coming into blossom.

  Creeping willow grows in the waste ground near Limerick bus station—as it was April male catkins yellow, with pollen, on separate tree small greenish female stamens. In April also whitlow grass which Kennedy’s grandmother Evie used to cure inflammation near fingernails and toenails.

  In summer creeping cinquefoil grows in the waste ground.

  He was called Kennedy by Michaela, his mother, after John F. Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy, both of whom visited this city, the latter with a silver dollar haircut and tie with small knot and square ends. He must have bought a large jar of Brylcreem with him, Kennedy’s father, Bongo, remarked about him.

  “When I was young and comely,

  Sure, good fortune on me shone,

  My parents loved me tenderly.”

  A pious woman found Saint Sebastian’s body in a sewer and had a dream he told her to bury him in the catacombs.

  Catacumbas. Late Latin word. Latin of Julian the Apostate who studied the Gospels and then returned to the Greek gods.

  The Catacombs. A place to take refuge in. A place to scratch prayers on the wall in. A place to paint in.

  Cut into porous tufa rock, they featured wall paintings such as one of the three officials whom Nebuchadnezzar flung in the furnace for not bowing before a golden image of him in the plain of Dura in Babylon but who were spared.

  Three officials, arms outstretched, in pistachio-green jester’s apparel amid flames of maple red.

  The body of Sebastian the Archer refused death by arrows and he had to be beaten to death. Some have surmised the arrows were symbolic and he was raped.

  As the crime boss brought Kennedy to be murdered he told a story:

  “I shook hands with Bulldog who is as big as a Holstein Friesian and who has fat cheeks.

  It was Christmas and we got a crate and had a joint.

  He says, ‘I have the stiffness.’

  He slept in the same bed as me in the place I have in Ballysimon.

  In the morning he says, ‘Me chain is gone and it was a good chain. I got it in Port Mandel near Manchester.’

  He pulled up all the bedclothes.

  He says ‘I’ll come back later and if I don’t get me chain, your Lexus with the wind-down roof will be gone.’

  He came back later but he saw the squad car—‘the scumbags,’ he said—and he went away.

  A week later I saw Cocka, a hardy young fellow, with Bulldog’s chain, in Sullivan’s Lane.”

  The crime boss, who is descended from the Black and Tans, himself wears a white-gold chain from Crete, an American gold ring large as a Spanish grandee’s ring, a silver bomber jacket, and pointy shoes of true white.

  He has a stack of Nude magazines in his house in Ballysimon, offers you a custard and creams from a plate with John Paul II’s—Karol Wojtyla’s—head on it, plays Country and Western a lot:

  Sean Wilson—“Blue Hills of Breffni,” “Westmeath Bachelor.”

  Sean Moore—“Dun Laoghaire Can Be Such a Lonely Place.”

  Johnny Cash—“I Walk the Line.”

  Ballysimon is famed for a legitimate dumping site but some people are given money to dump rubbish in alternative ways.

  “Millionaires from dumping rubbish,” it is said of them.

  By turning to violence, to murder, they create a history, they create a style for themselves. They become ikons as ancient as Calvary.

  Matthew tells us his Roman soldier torturers put a scarlet robe on Christ, Mark and John a robe of purple.

  Emerging from a garda car Kennedy’s companion and accomplice Cuzzy, in a grey pinstripe jersey, is surprised into history.

  Centurion’s facial features. A flick of hair to the right above his turf cut makes him a little like a crested grebe.

  South Hill boys like Cuzzy are like the man-eating mares of King Diomedes of the Bistones that Hercules was entrusted to capture—one of the twelve labours King Eurystheus imposed on him.

  “If I had to choose between Auschwitz and here,” he says of his cell, “I’d choose Auschwitz.”

  As Kennedy’s body is brought to Janesboro Church some of his brothers clasp their hands in an attitude of prayer. Others simply drop their heads in grief.

  Youths in suits with chest hammer pleats and cigarette-rolled shoulders. Mock-snake skin shoes. With revolver cufflinks.

  One of the brothers has a prison tattoo—three Chinese letters in biro and ink—on the side of his right ear.

  The youngest brother, who is the only one to demur jacket and tie, has his white shirt hanging over his trousers and wears a silver chain with boxing gloves.

  Michaela’s—Kennedy’s mother—hair is pêle-mêle blanche-blonde, she wears horn-toed, fleur-de-lys patterned, lace-up black high heels, mandorla—oval—ring, ruby and gold diamante on fingernails against her black.

  Her businessman boyfriend wears a Savile Row-style suit chosen from his wardrobe of dark lilac suits, grey and black lounge suits, suits with black collars, wine suits, plum jackets, claret red velvet one-button jackets.

  Kennedy’s father Bongo had been a man with kettle-black eyebrows, who was familiar with the juniper berries and the rowan berries and the scarlet berries of the bittersweet—the woody nightshade—sequestered his foal with magpie face and Talmud scholar’s beard where these berries, some healing, some poisonous, were abundant. He knew how to challenge the witch’s broom.

  John Joe Criggs, the umbrella mender in Killeely, used to send boys who looked like potoroos—rat kangaroos with prehensile tails—to Weston where they lived, looking for spare copper.

  “You’re as well hung as a stallion like your father,” Bongo would say to Kennedy. “Get a partner.”

  In Clare for the summer he once turned to Michaela in the night in Kilrush during a fight.

  “Go into the Kincora Hotel and get a knife so I can kill this fellow.”

  He always took Kennedy to Ballyheigue at Marymass—September 8—where people in bare feet took water in bottles from the Holy Well, left scapulars, names, and photographs of people who were dead, child
ren who’d been killed.

  He fell in a pub fight. Never woke up.

  His mother Evie had hung herself when they settled her.

  Hair ivory grey at edges, then sienna, in a ponytail tied by a velvet ribbon, usually in tattersal coat, maxie skirt, heelless sandals.

  On the road she’d loved to watch the mistle thrush who came to Ireland with the Act of Union of 1801, the Wee Willie Wagtail—blue tit—with black eyestripe and lemon breast, the chaffinch with pink lightings on its breast who would come up close to you, in winter in fraochán—ring ouzel, white crescent around its breast, bird of river, of crags.

  On the footbridge at Doonass near Clondara she told Kennedy of the two Jehovah’s Witnesses who were assaulted in Clondara, their bibles burned, the crowd cheered on by the Parish Priest, and then the Jehovah’s Witnesses bound to the peace in court for blasphemy.

  Michaela’s father Billser had been in Glin Industrial School.

  The Christian Brothers, with Abbey School of Acting voices, used to get them to strip naked and lash them with the cat of the nine tails. Boys with smidgen penises. A dust, a protest of pubic hair. Boys with pubes as red as the fox who came to steal the sickly chickens, orange as the beak of an Aylesbury duck, brown of the tawny owl.

  Then bring them to the Shannon when the tide was in and force them to immerse in salt water.

  The Shannon food—haws, dulse, barnacles—they ate them. They robbed mangels, turnips. They even robbed the pig’s and bonham’s—piglet’s—food.

  “You have eyes like the blackbird’s eggs. You have eyes like the céirseach’s eggs. You have eyes like the merie’s eggs,” a Brother, nicknamed the Seabhac—hawk—used to tell Billser.

  Blue-green, brown speckled.

  He was called Seabhac because he used to ravage boys the way the hawk makes a sandwich of autumn brood pigeons or meadow pipits, leaving a flush of feathers.

  He had ginger-beer hirsute like the rufous-barred sparrowhawk that quickly gives up when it misses a target, lays eggs in abandoned crow’s nests.