Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  But Juergen understood my mother and tried to comfort her. Really, he didn’t say anything more than I had, but he said it right, I don’t know how he did it; and somehow he managed to make her laugh. His absolute attention to others exasperated me sometimes. Well, it wasn’t really about the attention, I’m getting it mixed up; it was just that when he paid attention to someone, when he understood my mother, he seemed to take off from where he was and touch down in the other person’s place, forgetting where he’d come from. I did admire him for that as well. And if he wanted to handle my mother’s sobbing, so much the better. I watched them both and I had the impression that Juergen had hands, eyes, a mouth, made differently from mine, and that he knew how to pass through the bell jar that I myself saw around every human being.

  It was this sort of barrier that I wanted to pierce with my art. Juergen tells me that it’s idiotic to separate my work and my art, he’s right, there’s no need for a divide between the two. I don’t know. I’m trying to get to the other person, that’s all I know, and can I really do that by taking pictures of shoes? You don’t take pictures of shoes, Juergen says, you take pictures of people in shoes. That’s all. At one point I began to take photographs of myself, but I saw the bell jar everywhere. I saw it as I took the picture, and I saw it as I looked at the picture. I saw it around me and I saw its reflections on me. Passing through it became an obsession. Then I took nude photos of myself. At first, these self-portraits were successful. But even in my nudity, my skin was a barricade, and my face as well: I always had the impression, looking at the picture, that my eyes were veiled, as if covered by cataracts, or blurriness, like a zombie’s. I began to photograph parts of my body while avoiding my face, and I realized that I had to go for my orifices, for the interior of my body. People protested, cried obscenity. I made diptychs, and on one side would be my genitals, perineum, anus, and on the other would be rocky formations at the bottom of caves, calcareous clitorises, vulvas in rocky folds shining with humidity.

  Juergen and my mother courageously supported that, but people spoke of trash, of misunderstood feminism, and always about pornography. I didn’t understand how there could be pornography down there. It was a work about myself. If I managed to get closer to myself, I would finally get closer to others. Instead of being a thief of souls, photography would become an offering. Why should others unveil themselves if I held myself back? I wanted to suggest an exchange—give everything, show everything, and only then dare to ask the other person to offer me his face. Then the bell jar would be broken open.

  Juergen reproached me for my aestheticism. And he was right. He was wearing me down. “Why diptychs?” he asked me. “If you want to photograph your pussy, do it, if you see clitorises in rocks, take pictures, but don’t justify one by the other. Just show, that’s all. You don’t have to excuse yourself for anything.” And I told myself, once again, that it’s Juergen who ought to be a photographer instead of me. This unemployed man. That talent.

  It was around then that I convinced Dirk Bogarde to do a series of photographs with me. I like his enigmatic style, and the sadness at the heart of his gaze. Dirk, who knew about my photos and liked them, told me that he was fine with it all, except for the nudity. We set up shop in a large hotel room with French Rococo furniture. I played around completely naked, Dirk cuddled me, babied me, all the while impeccably dignified and elegant in a silk peignoir. Out of that whole series there’s one really striking photo: Dirk is hieratic at the piano, his gaze distant, and I’m on the piano, and I’m spreading my cheeks with both of my hands. Juergen thinks this photo is quite strong, but I wonder if he’s saying that to be nice. Looking at this series, which I entitled “Pompadour,” I started to have my earliest doubts: was I really the only one to find these pictures funny? Why did people talk about trash and pornography? Could I ever really dismantle the stereotypes, the clichés about women? If Juergen, for example, had fooled around in front of the lens, his butt sticking out and his finger on the shutter release with an iconic woman at the piano, would they have said of him what they’d said about me, that he had lost his dignity? Men who have fun at their own expense are irresistible, and Juergen had that talent. As for me, when I have fun at my own expense, everyone else is disgusted, is it because I’m a woman or because I’m a bad photographer? After this series, the glass of the bell jar seemed to grow thicker, and the faces around me, even the most familiar ones, became blurred.

  The cat never came back. Juergen had scanned a photo of the cat, made two hundred copies, and we put up LOST signs here and there all around the area, up to Munich. They said that cats could travel hundreds of kilometers and return months later. I repeated that to my mother. In any case, we had to go back to London. The children were waiting for us, and I had work to do.

  “At least come say hello to your father,” said my mother, and to make her happy, considering the state she was in, we went to put a chrysanthemum on his grave. I took pictures of mold on the marble, and lichens on the surrounding walls. I was in a gray period, and yellow, and brown. Someone had scrawled “LIEBE” on a wall, like he’d dipped his finger in blood or shit, maybe mud, and I took a photo of that as well. If I was becoming, well, more sentimental, losing something, touching on some crude form of love, I didn’t know. I always hope that my images speak for me, tell me things that I otherwise wouldn’t know. Juergen would take, I’m sure, an incredibly Romantic picture, deeply Romantic, as powerful as anything by Goethe or Schiller, but modern, cutting-edge. In any case, that’s what I really wanted to strive for.

  “Your problem is you’re married,” my mother often told me—she was one to talk, considering she was a widow. “You always believe that Juergen can do everything better than you, and that’s holding you back. Free yourself, my daughter!” That was what my mother, who absolutely loved Juergen, had to say. I couldn’t see how to free myself in any better way than to show what I had been showing. But that didn’t really show anything, it seemed. Everybody had an opinion about my photographs, all the time, and that annoyed me. I would have liked to take pictures that could shut them all up.

  I should have paid more attention to what happened with the cat. It really would have made my mother shut up if I’d brought her cat back. And that would have saved us from everything that happened afterward. We’d only just gotten back to London when the Bavarian fanfare came: my mother had found her cat. Dead, two steps from the house, flattened on the side of the road. Tears all over again. I take another plane, visit for the day. My mother had wrapped the cat in a small white flag, and set it in her basket while waiting. “Waiting for what?” I ask. For someone to make a decision. “The trash can,” I suggest, and immediately regret my cruelty: my mother is weeping. “We could bury him in the garden,” I say. I already see myself with a pickaxe, -10˚C outside, in this glacial winter of my Munich childhood, attacking the hard earth in rage.

  “We could have him stuffed,” sniffles my mother. I know what she’s thinking: her neighbor is a taxidermist, and I had often wondered if there wasn’t something going on between them, or if my mother, at least, hadn’t thought about it. But the neighbor is strict: no more then three days, the skin only lasts so long, and it’s already been ten days, no point in thinking about it. The cat isn’t so poorly preserved, thanks to the cold, but it’s completely flat, with a faint tire tread on its coarse coat, and there isn’t much left of its face. We’re not keeping it here, in any case. And my mother is against incineration. At least, that’s what I believe to be true. I pass the time watching her hold back her tears or mumbling to herself.

  Juergen is the one to come up with the idea, over the phone: a pet cemetery. I extend my stay. We have coffee at the taxidermist’s next door. He has Internet access, he looks for information. He has a few beautiful pieces at his place, especially a brown bear standing upright, paws in the air, like a huge beast sleepwalking that then follows me in a nightmare.

  I wonder
what I’m doing there instead of being in London. But it’s as if my center of gravity has been thrown off kilter, as if an old weight has finally caught up with me and anchored me here, thirty kilometers north of Munich, in the subdivision where my mother lives. Where do the dead go when they die? They come here, to this subdivision, and they drink coffee at my mother’s neighbor’s. And the neighbor himself is dead, as dead as the bear, and he doesn’t know it, like the bystanders peering through their blinds. More violently than ever, I have the impression of seeing everything, like them, through a pane of glass. My mother’s head rests on the doily covering the back of the flower-patterned couch. On the windowsill, porcelain deer surround a grassy plant that looks like algae. It’s like we’re under the sea, waiting for I don’t know what, for the past to come back, for us to be judged right there and executed. This torpor is familiar to me, and these objects frozen in time: the seventies of my childhood, the silence, the rustic but soft furniture, upholstered, in varnished wood. And everything seems strange and far away, I’m at my place but a sort of mute terror dwells in the objects, a frenetic sadness, and I tell myself that I’ve been tricked: I should not be a photographer, I should stay here, near Munich, in the former FRG, go from village to village as a carny, run a shooting gallery where someone could win stuffed animals or porcelain deer. That would be more sensible, yes, more logical . . . I thought I recognized people in the window, I gave them a slight nod of my head, and the reflections of my mother, her neighbor, and the bear shone in front of the other faces on the glass.

  “You’ve got your head in the clouds,” my mother reproaches. But she’s the one who starts murmuring again. We take more time off. All the formalities can be handled over the phone. We have to buy a small coffin the right size for the cat. I place the order after having measured the cadaver. The neighbor would have gladly made us one in his studio, but the purchase of a coffin is required. On the phone they don’t say “coffin,” they say “funeral receptacle,” so as not to offend our sensibilities, I imagine; we might want to bury the cat, we can make a distinction between humans and animals, but in the end, we’re all buried in catholic earth. I’d never envisioned my mother as caring about a cat, but I can see that she’s changed, or maybe simply grown older. At her request I also ordered a tombstone, and a plaque with the cat’s name.

  Juergen and the children came to Bavaria for the weekend. I didn’t ask for the children to be there, but it was more practical that way, and it may have cheered their grandmother up a bit to see them; it was as a family that we buried the cat. I’d never set foot in a pet cemetery before, and after the carefully chosen words of the employee on the phone, I had expected it to be rather somber, but since decorations are left to the discretion of the families, I saw more crosses, cherubs, memorial plaques, and garlands than in any human cemetery. Everything is simply smaller. The graves come in rapid succession, in rows by species: dogs, cats, rodents, or birds. There are monuments and even vaults, but with the dimensions of dollhouses—with exception of the canine sector, where the graves are almost as big as those of men, for the larger species such as Great Danes or German shepherds.

  My mother gave a short speech; I had asked her to restrain herself, out of respect for the children. Do animals have souls? We would have argued about it if Juergen hadn’t been there. He put up the plaque with the cat’s name and dates, with an estimate of three days, more or less, for the day of its death. My mother planted a box hedge and a small rose bush. And we were done.

  All this made me very uncomfortable and London was soothing by comparison, the normalcy of London, its rhythms, its activity, the routines of children, and the materiality of our lives. Nothing for three days, as if my mother could tell that I’d had enough. And then a Bavarian fanfare: the cat had come back.

  My mother didn’t say “resurrected.” But she believed it so thoroughly that Juergen and I decided that we should take the initiative and go see her: it was her mind, her age, her loneliness. We talked to her several times and discussed what we should do. Did we need to put her somewhere? My mother and I, we were still rather young. To think so early about such a future upset me.

  But the following weekend, at my mother’s, we could not help but notice that the cat was indeed back. He was a bit thinner, but it was him, he had found his food, his window, and his usual spot on the sill. We had buried the wrong cat.

  “Mother, you picked up a carcass on the side of the road. We thought it was your cat, but it wasn’t your cat. It was just something squashed flat.” It cost two thousand euros for the burial plot, the coffin, the marble tombstone, and the plaque. That’s quite a lot that shouldn’t have happened. But my mother is just amazed. She silently thanks God. I see her large pale face flush with delight. She hums as she thinks about the cat, she hardly dares to touch him. “It’s enough to make you religious,” she whispers. She speaks with an air of revelation. I had always known my mother to be an atheist, even rather anticlerical, and now she’s a holy fool because of this cat.

  We don’t lock up people for little things like this, Juergen chastises me. He’s fine with my mother. She had found her cat, and the neighbor seems to be keeping her company: now we’re headed zurück nach London, back to London.

  Life took on a regular pace for a while. The only thing that had changed was the regularity of my mother’s phone calls. Just once a week, and to talk about nothing, to give me news about the weather. At the beginning, I wasn’t worried. It was actually a relief. I didn’t dare ask about the cat or the neighbor. Even over the phone, I didn’t want to remember the subdivision, the bear, the blurred faces, the strange forms of moss on walls. The photographs of lichen and moss, the photos of that winter, I looked at them with a feeling of immense melancholy; and after a while I had to close my eyes, I had the impression that these walls and this frost covered an unnameable silence, something that made me want to scream, to curse everything that brought me back to my father, to my mother, and to Bavarian subdivisions.

  One evening, as if nothing was wrong, my mother called me to tell me that the lease on the burial plot for my father’s vault was about to expire. I didn’t know the details; it had been thirty-five years exactly, and after this time, we either had to pay for the plot again or proceed to incineration.

  “To what?”

  “To incineration. They empty the grave and collect the remains in an urn, they have professionals do that.”

  By the tone of her voice, I could tell that she had already organized it all; she talked about it as if it were nothing more than changing the drum of a washing machine. By tacit agreement, everything that had to do with my father was my mother’s responsibility, and so I let her do it.

  That wasn’t the end of it, though. Whenever I called, her phone kept going to the answering machine. I felt like I was always waiting for the Bavarian fanfare and I kept hearing it everywhere, in my children’s games, in the noise of the street, in the other chimes of London life, in normal life, in my own life.

  I didn’t know that the desecration of graves in a pet cemetery was a criminal offense. My mother had been caught sacking the cat’s grave, the tomb of the flattened carcass. It was the taxidermist next door who told me when I called him, unnerved after an especially long silence. My mother had planned a nocturnal expedition with all the necessary equipment: shovel, pickax, flashlight. Among the things they’d found on her body, there was also the urn containing my father’s remains. From what they were able to figure out, it seems that she was planning to put it in the small tomb. So that my father might come back, just like the cat. Since she’d had my father incinerated, she hadn’t bothered seeing the taxidermist first. When he went over to see her, he found her sitting and murmuring—it seemed—with the urn between her knees.

  I had to put my mother in a clinic close to London for her to rest. I wanted to confiscate the urn, but Juergen was opposed to it. “Where will you put it?” he as
ked me. “On the mantel?” I, who’d believed that I knew dead people—I had underestimated the cumbersomeness of their presence.

  My mother stayed with the urn, first in the clinic near London, then at her place again, when she was able to go back to Bavaria. At her place in Bavaria, all the prettiest things were on the windowsill, and the urn had pride of place there, as if my father needed the view. The cat kept it company. And my mother never quite forgot the idea she’d had about the pet cemetery. My mother never took no for an answer. She never admitted defeat, hadn’t even been cured, if we went by the clinic’s criteria.

  I went to Bavaria for the fifteen days following her stay at the clinic. The final weekend, the urn wasn’t on the windowsill, but there was a man my mother’s age sitting next to her on the sofa. She introduced him to me as my father. He had grown older, but I recognized him immediately, like a veil being torn away. I finally saw a face amid all these blurred faces. And it was shocking how much he resembled Juergen.

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY JEFFREY ZUCKERMAN

  I occasionally write for artists. I’ll look for a verbal equivalent to their physical work, rather than criticizing or illustrating it. As if the artist had to use words for his own materials.

  “Juergen the Perfect Son-in-Law” was inspired by the photos of Juergen Teller, especially his Nürnberg book, and his “Louis XV” series with Charlotte Rampling. This story was published in the exhibition catalog for “Do You Know What I Mean,” which took place at the Cartier Foundation from March 3 to May 21, 2006.

  Juergen Teller has a certain propensity for photographing himself in the nude. He likes soccer and bears, and he seems to have been born in Bavaria.

  —MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

  [NORWAY]

  BJARTE BREITEIG