Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Down There They Don’t Mourn

  The other boys in the class are swimming around the pool fighting for the ball, while the girls stand at the shallow end shivering, their skin pale. I’m sitting on the bench together with Karsten watching. It’s the first lesson of the day and sleep is still deep in my body, like some kind of glue. I’ve handed over the note to be excused because of my cold, but Karsten doesn’t have a note. He doesn’t need a note; he’s excused from swimming lessons because he’s got a fear of water. That’s what they say anyway, there’s a story about how he nearly drowned once, that he was dead for seven minutes and that he was brought back to life. Maybe that’s why he’s the way he is. Maybe he should actually have died.

  He turns to me and yawns, says he couldn’t be bothered with this. His eyes stare in opposite directions behind his thick glasses the way they always do when he’s talking to you. All the same, you know it’s you he’s looking at.

  What do you say we sneak out of here? he asks.

  Okay, I say.

  There are a lot of things that are weird about Karsten. For starters, there are those boots he always wears, no matter what the weather, green lace-up rain boots. No one else wears boots like that. And then there’s that thing with staircases, he always has to take one step with one foot and two steps with the other. Ask him why and he’ll tell you that the steps are just a bit too low to take one at a time and just a bit too high to take two at a time, but if you alternate they’re just right.

  That’s probably the kind of thing he thinks about when he’s shuffling around the playing field on his own at recess, his hands squeezed down into the pockets of those tight jeans of his. But I hardly know him. I don’t really know anyone at the school, and even though I’ll have been here almost a year soon, they still call me the new guy. He’s new, they say, every time there’s something I don’t understand.

  We stroll past the toilets and on down toward the arts and crafts rooms. Karsten’s boots scraping along the floor at every step. He tries the handle on each of the doors as we go past them: home economics, textiles, and the woodwork room. Everything is locked, and behind the doors it’s quiet, no one has arts and crafts classes this early. But the door to the ceramics room at the end of the corridor is open, and Karsten turns to me and grins:

  They forgot to lock it, the idiots.

  There are no windows in the ceramics room, and as the door slides shut behind us, it’s almost completely dark. The only light is from the emergency exit sign; it casts a greenish glow over the shelving along the wall, which is full of small, newly made pots. Karsten looks up at them and says there sure isn’t much to look at here. Several of the pots are cracked; they mustn’t have been able to take the heat in the kiln. He takes down a lopsided, pear-shaped vase and holds it up to the light.

  Look at the state of that, he says.

  And he’s right, it’s ugly. Its thin, wrinkly neck has sagged to one side and hardened.

  Let’s smash it to pieces, I say.

  Karsten grins. And without a word he raises his hand and smashes the vase on the floor. Then he picks out two more, holds them high up in the air and lets them go, the two of them at once.

  They’re so fucking ugly, he says, kicking the shards across the dark floor. I don’t know how anyone could screw them up so badly. All you have to do is slap a block down on the wheel and sit there holding it.

  He walks slowly down along the shelf, looking up. He’s the best in the class at arts and crafts. The rest of us just make the things that Engebret suggests we make, but Karsten comes up with projects himself. While we all sat shaping those stupid ashtrays, he made a spherical, hollowed-out candleholder, and then carved a lattice pattern in it. It’s only been a week since Engebret turned out the light and held the newly fired sphere up in front of us. A tea candle gleamed through the slits and we all saw the pattern outlined across the walls and on the ceiling.

  Almost like being in a tomb, says Karsten, as he stops by the massive kiln in the corner. Here’s the cremator and everything.

  A red light comes on as he turns a knob.

  Do you know how they do it in Nepal? he asks.

  Do what?

  When someone dies. They burn them on a bonfire.

  Why? I ask.

  To get rid of them, of course. The family stands in a ring around the bonfire, watching, but they’re not sad, because down there they don’t mourn. They don’t even know what it means to mourn. They have a party instead, they clap and sing and bang on drums.

  Behind him the kiln has started ticking. The warning light gives his hair a reddish tinge and makes his glasses glimmer. Then he starts talking about the corpse. He says that when it catches fire, it changes position; it sits up in the middle of the bonfire.

  It’s the gut drawing itself together in the heat, he says. The lips are burned off, and then the guy just sits there grinning at his wife and kids.

  Sometimes the skull explodes as well, he adds. Boom!

  He slaps his hand against the kiln door and laughs when he sees me jump. He gropes his way along the far wall, opens the supplies cabinet, and shoves something aside. Then he climbs up onto the shelf. The door creaks shut after him, and for a few seconds I hear him rummage around in there, but then it goes quiet. I figure he’s just sitting there waiting for me to open the cabinet, and when I do, he’s going to let out a roar or throw something at me.

  Karsten, I say. Cut it out.

  But nothing happens. The kiln starts to make crackling sounds and I go over to try and turn off the heat but I can’t manage it. First I turn one knob, then another, but the light doesn’t go out, and I feel the heat from the kiln door on my face. In the end I creep over to the cabinet and fling the door open. Karsten isn’t there. Then between the bags of clay I see that the cabinet is open on the other side, it’s brighter through there, and I can make out part of a row of carpentry benches. I climb in and creep across the springy shelf, between boxes and tins of paint. When I climb out, I’m in the woodwork room.

  Karsten is standing by a bench and he doesn’t look up as I come in. He’s placed a half-finished plywood and rattan pizza tray in the vise at the back, and now he’s about to tighten it.

  I can’t manage to turn that kiln off, I say.

  He doesn’t answer. He puts his weight against the vise handle. The iron jaws eat into the circular tray and the screws in the vise creak. Suddenly the tension is too much for the tray; it cracks and bends until it buckles gently.

  That’s the way it goes, says Karsten.

  He sits calmly up on the bench beside the broken tray.

  I tell him that the firing oven in there is just ticking and ticking, and ask if there isn’t a danger the walls will explode if we don’t turn it off. But it’s like he doesn’t hear me. He puts his toe against his heel, pulls his boot halfway off, and lets it dangle at the end of his foot. Then he starts asking me things.

  Where did you live before you came here?

  I’ve lived lots of places.

  Is it a pain starting in a new class?

  I shrug my shoulders. Then I say that maybe it’s a bit of a pain before you get to know people and stuff, and that for the first few days you just stand there hoping that someone will come over and talk to you.

  You don’t have that many friends, says Karsten.

  I don’t answer. I look out through the rectangular windows along the top of one wall. A yellow plastic bag blows by in the morning light.

  There aren’t many people who like you, he says.

  I shrug my shoulders.

  Is that a pain?

  No, I say.

  Karsten lets a sticky clot of spit drop to the floor. I imagine what he’d look like without lips. I picture him with empty eye sockets behind cracked, soot-blackened lenses.

  There a
ren’t that many people that like you either, I say. Weren’t you even dead once?

  He lets out a new clot of spit. It lands right on top of the last one.

  Seven and a half minutes, he says. I hyperventilated. Do you know what happens when you hyperventilate?

  I shake my head.

  You empty the blood of carbon dioxide, he says, and then you can’t feel it when you run out of air. Nothing hurts.

  Then he tells me how it happened. He’d decided to swim straight down as deep as he could. The mask pressed against his face and he could feel the water get colder the deeper he went. It was murky and hard to see, and in the end it started to get dark. When he reached the bottom, he grabbed hold of a huge clump of seaweed and decided not to let go. He was hanging like that for a long time, upside down from the clump of seaweed, but in the end he let go all the same, and it was then, as he floated up, that he blacked out.

  But it didn’t hurt, he says. Not until later. Being dead was beautiful.

  Beautiful? I ask.

  He nods. He looks at the floor.

  But when they brought me back to life, it was fucking awful. I should have just held onto that seaweed a little longer. Just a little longer. You know?

  I nod.

  No, he says, jumping down from the carpentry bench. You don’t know shit.

  He walks over toward the wall and starts opening the cabinets. He takes an angular spatula out from one of them.

  Ugly, he says, breaking it over his knee.

  He throws the pieces at me, and I can see that something’s gotten into him now, that his eyes are darting from side to side behind his glasses. He takes out a turned lampstand from another cabinet and slams it against a carpentry bench. The base of the lamp snaps off but the two pieces stay joined together by the fibers; he tears them apart and flings them across the room. Then he opens our own class’s cabinet, where the half-finished bird feeders are stacked on top of each other on the shelves. He takes one out that has walls on it but no roof yet. He runs his fingers along the edge and shakes his head. And then he does something. He walks over, turns on the circular saw, and lifts off the safety guard. Within the space of a few seconds the noise rises to a shrill screech, making it impossible to think of anything else. He pushes the bird feeder toward the rotating wheel and shouts something, but I can’t hear what. As the wood meets the blade, the screech becomes a scream. I stand motionless staring at Karsten’s hands, which begin to vibrate, and all of a sudden I notice how good it feels to see the spinning metal eat its way into the flimsy woodwork, first through the border that’s supposed to keep the breadcrumbs and oatmeal in place, and then, with a slightly more rasping sound, through the plywood panel itself. The sawdust is blown across the steel plate in tiny waves. When the two pieces come apart, I’m the one who gets a new bird feeder from the cabinet. My hands are shaking as I lay it down, but it’s a good shaking, that only gets better as the vibration of the blade spreads upward to my elbows.

  This is what happens when they can’t make anything better! Karsten shouts over the din.

  I notice I’m laughing out loud. I don’t shift my gaze from the blade, from the grayish area where the teeth fly around. It’s like the cut is eating its own way inward, as if it’s always a few millimeters in front of the blade. When the pieces come apart, I toss them at the wall, get a new one from the cabinet, and continue sawing. Karsten has found a hammer in the tool cabinet, and he’s letting loose with it on the flimsy cabinet doors so that they split open and swing back and forth on their hinges. I saw up table after table, feel how the wood resists but gives way in the end. It’s beautiful, and I can see that Karsten feels the same, he’s roaring and laughing. He empties the cabinets, throws everything out onto the floor, first the tools: saws, hammers, chisels, and screwdrivers, big rolls of sandpaper that he kicks across the floor. He tears folding rules apart and smashes levels against carpentry benches. Then he gets started on the students’ work: magazine racks, key holders, spice racks, and toilet-roll holders, bentwood boxes and milk carton holders, all these pathetic things we’ve stood hammering and whittling, now Karsten is smashing them to pieces, and the sweet scream of the saw blade is hanging over everything.

  I don’t know how many tables I’ve destroyed when I turn to see Karsten dragging along the kennel he’s been working on for the last few weeks. It’s made of small wooden beams that he’s notched together and jointed with wood glue, and I remember how I’ve seen him plane and sand the beams so the dog won’t get a splinter. He’s designed it himself, brought in drawings and explained it all to Engebret, and Engebret has been checking on him all the time to see how he’s getting along. This is going to turn out well, Karsten, Engebret kept saying. This is going to turn out well.

  Karsten tries to heave it up on top of the saw.

  Move! he shouts.

  But I don’t move. I can’t move, and when he tries to shove me out of the way, I cling onto the saw plate. He screams something in my ear, but I can’t make out the words, only notice the smell of his breath.

  You made that yourself! I shout.

  For a few seconds he stands there in front of me as if he doesn’t know what to do, but then he gets hold of me, twists my arm behind my back, and grabs hold of the back of my neck. At that moment I go limp. I can’t offer any resistance, and as he bends me down toward the saw blade, I just close my eyes and give in. I come so close that I can feel the breeze of the blade on my lips. Everything caves in inside me, and I become vaguely aware of a warm and wet sensation spreading down over my thigh. Then I think: I’m pissing myself, and that’s all I manage to think, that now I’m pissing myself.

  After that I’m lying on the floor, sawdust and broken bird feeders around me, while Karsten stands by a workbench chopping away at it with an ax. The beams of the kennel lie scattered around. Karsten isn’t laughing or yelling anymore, his face is as stiff as a mask, and he puts everything he’s got into every blow. It hasn’t left him. It won’t let go of Karsten. He chops away as if blind, the ax veering off to the side, but he raises it again and again. He doesn’t even notice Engebret coming in, that he’s standing in the doorway looking dumbfounded, holding his thermos flask and that green attendance book of his. Not even when Engebret turns off the saw and the noise abates does Karsten stop chopping. The ax slams into the bench and the solid wood splinters under the blade. He doesn’t let up until Engebret grabs him from behind and forces the ax from his hands. Only then does he collapse to the ground and allow himself to be hauled across the floor. Engebret doesn’t say anything as he catches sight of me, and I can see that he’s terrified, that he actually has no idea what to do with Karsten.

  Out of the way! he yells at some pupils who’ve gathered in the doorway.

  They move aside, but crowd together again as soon as he’s gone. A little farther away in the corridor I hear Karsten begin to bellow. Lengthy, hoarse roars that grow fainter the farther away he gets. The pupils stand in the doorway talking quietly to one another.

  It’s that new guy, I hear one girl say.

  I slowly get to my feet. The only thing I’m aware of is that I don’t care. I couldn’t care less that I’m standing here in front of these idiots with piss all over my pants. I couldn’t care less if I’m the new moron who’s demolished the woodwork room. I couldn’t give a shit about what’s going to happen to me and Karsten, if we have to pay for the damage, if we’re expelled, if we have to go see a psychologist or if it makes the local paper. I don’t care about anything at all, and I saunter across the floor, kick a piece of wood from the kennel out of the way, and then I climb in the cabinet door, while everyone’s watching, wriggle my way back to the warm, dark ceramics room, and once in there I close the cabinet door behind me, sit down on a stool and lean my head against the wall. Even though the kiln has stopped ticking, I can feel the heat radiating from the door. Up on the shelves the
pots stand in irregular rows, each representing a student, boys and girls I don’t know. And there, on one of the top, dark shelves I catch sight of Karsten’s candleholder, which Engebret must have put aside in order to show to other classes. I push the stool over, climb up, and take the sphere between my hands. It’s heavy. Heavier than it looks. Now that I’m looking at it close up, it’s even nicer looking than I’d thought. The surface is smooth and shiny, and the colors in the glazing twinkle in the dim light from the emergency exit. A faint tremble passes through me, a remnant of what I felt a little while ago. I lower the sphere slowly down by the chain and let it swing back and forth, like an ancient weapon.

  TRANSLATED FROM NORWEGIAN BY SEÁN KINSELLA

  music

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  MUHAREM BAZDULJ

  Magic AND Sarajevo

  MAGIC

  In the beginning of the 1990s, the social life of my town centered on a triangle, the corners of which were a dance spot club called the Gaj, the café La Mirage, and the row of benches alongside the old Ottoman graveyard on which people would sit all night long in the summer, right up till dawn, like at the ocean. The Gaj was situated exactly halfway between the Jesuit high school and the Orthodox church with its graveyard, while the Mirage was on the ground floor of the building containing the city’s main theater, below the hill where the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim cemeteries stood, one beside the other. In the midst of this imaginary triangle was the little café known as the Konak. It was built on the ruins of the old vizier’s residence.

  Back then I was an elementary-school twerp, familiar with the above-named places only as the immediate neighbors of our sporting venues. That is, our basketball court and soccer field were both next to the high school, and when we played there at night we could hear the music from the Gaj. The handball courts were over behind La Mirage, and we’d pass through the area with the benches when we were heading home, all tired, red-faced, and sweaty.