Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Yeah, but you’re a fucking nincompoop,” Mike Buller said.

  But Tony Pye could see it all in front of him by now.

  “And it’s not just about paying two lots of bills,” he said. He was getting excited, flecks of spit coming off his mouth. “Or having the money to. How could you keep all the other things separate? All those names and facts and all the things you’ve said and done? Over fourteen years? So you never once slipped up and said the wrong thing, or forgot which one of your families you were with or where you were? So you never forgot which kid had had mumps or a toothache or which set of kids you’d gone to Alton Towers with? So you never raised a whiff of a suspicion, in all that time? Never gave a clue to what was really going on?”

  Tony Pye looked at Mike Buller, then at me, amazed blue eyes. He kept on looking at me. As if I was the fucking umpire. Because, well, I suppose, I was in charge and I’d been sitting there listening to all this and so far hadn’t said a word. He took off the cap and scratched his head, his flattened white silk hair.

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said. “That any man could be that bloody clever.”

  “Or any two women that fucking dull,” Mike Buller said. He got up and stretched as if that was it, he’d had the last word.

  Me, I looked as if I didn’t know either way, and couldn’t care. I looked at my watch.

  “We’d better get back out there and do a bit,” I said.

  “Mike,” I said when we got outside, “I think you’d better slip into JJ Williams’s and get some more half-inch staples for that fencing. So we can get it finished off.”

  He probably thought it was favouritism. Cushy little trip in the van while the rest of us are working. But it was to get him off the job for an hour really. Because he’s a tired bastard. And there’s something about Mike Buller that grates on me. It always has. His manner, I suppose, and his big mouth.

  Well, no: who he is.

  Tony Pye went back to barrowing hardcore and I went to measure up in the old greenhouse. They say they’re going to put a swimming pool there, once it’s a health spa. It’s a shame, the way the whole structure, all that Victorian ironwork, has just been left to rust, till the glass dropped out of the frames. A century of neglect. All it’s good for now is scrap. Just bring a skip up and sling it in. With the old cast-iron guttering they stripped off the stables. All the crockets, or finials are they, along the roof. All the bars and hinged quadrants and winding mechanisms to open the top windows and air it. You’ll never see ironwork like that again. Made in Walsall, Staffs stamped on it.

  It was the First World War which changed everything in the upkeep of a big old place like this. I suppose for those four years there wasn’t the labour. All the men and boys out in France and Belgium. Then a shortage of men for years after. And even for those who did come back in one piece, working on the big estate wasn’t the same. Attitudes had changed.

  Anyway, I paced out the distances. I didn’t have my long tape. But three strides of mine are 2 metres 50 more or less exactly, so I knew I wouldn’t be a lot out.

  I was doing this, and putting the rough figures in my notebook, and thinking about the landscaping. But all the time I was thinking too about what Tony Pye had said. How a man could manage his life so as to not only marry two women, with all the complications that involved, but keep both of them without a clue of the existence of the other. For fourteen years. Whereas me, I’m not even married to Andrea, but I meet someone, I spend an hour sitting in a café with her, an hour nobody else knows ever happened. And Andrea senses it.

  That something’s changed. That I have.

  Last night we were watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers on TV, the old black-and-white version. And it was that weird scene where the old feller, Uncle Ira, is mowing the lawn. By now most of the people in the village have been replaced by the aliens. Occupied’s a better word. They look the same, sound the same, put on the same clothes, do the same things they’ve been doing every day of their lives. But they’re different. It’s not anything you can name or put your finger on. But they’re not the same person. Something’s died behind their eyes. The old feller goes on pushing the mower up and down, up and down, but you can sense he’s an automaton. His eyes haven’t exactly gone blank. It’s not that obvious. But they’re focused differently. What’s blank’s the brain behind them. It’s waiting for instruction. He’s not your grandfather any more, he’s not a member of your family or even of the human race.

  And perhaps that’s how I looked to Andrea all weekend.

  Distant. Different.

  Lovesick.

  And how I must have looked on Sunday when it stopped raining and we could get out. And we went for that walk, and the river was high and flat and the same colour as the mud in the puddles, this mass of water moving one way. And I stopped and I stood there staring at it falling over the lip of the weir like a long glassy fringe, and she must have been watching me. I don’t know for how long, but she said:

  “You’ve gone into it again.”

  I looked at her.

  “Into what?”

  “That trance.”

  “Have I? What trance is that?”

  “The one you keep going off into.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That one.”

  She was still staring at me.

  “So what were you thinking about?”

  There was a long moment. She was still watching me. I could see the flecks of her eyes. Then her pupils wobbled and widened, and I knew it was fear. And that’s when I knew she knew. That second when she wished she hadn’t asked, when she got scared that I was going to tell her.

  [SLOVENIA]

  BRANKO GRADIŠNIK

  Memorinth

  Soon after the Shangri-La episode I heard that Charley was at the old trauma ward. He had jumped out his bedroom window onto the green twenty feet below. His back was broken, but the spine remained miraculously intact. I went to visit him. He was tired but serene. He said: “I let Vitzliputzli out of his cage, because I felt sorry for him being behind bars all the time. He waited a bit and then he flew out of the window, so I followed.” There was something tranquil and graceful about Charley’s report, something surpassing the contentment of ordinary people. It wasn’t suicidal oblivion that had sent him through his window; he hadn’t been running away from figments of his imagination: his flight was just a metaphor, a substitute for all the angels that would hover in the golden windows of his icons if only he could afford the paint.

  For no obvious reason, Mocca stopped using her litter box when she got older. My favorite librarian, Zdenka, was the only one who could offer an explanation: Mocca resented being inside all the time. So we started to let her out, hoping that nothing would happen to her in our apartment block consisting of several narrow interior courtyards. Zdenka was right: Mocca never took revenge on us again. But cats that stay at home all the time live an average of twelve years, while European alley cats usually die by the time they’re three. Somebody out there gave her heavy-metal poisoning, and after three months of getting thinner and thinner, she passed away.

  Charley’s parents simply couldn’t understand the rapture that began to shine through his writing. His father was an old-school policeman, his mother a simpleminded peasant picked up at some remote outpost of Yugoslavia where he had once served. Charley’s idée fixe—that he could somehow make up for the absence of “The Absolute” in the world—made it impossible for him to hold down a steady job. His father procured various unassuming sinecures for him, but Charley was quick to declare each of these jobsites to be “Armageddon,” and his fervor made him look quite aggressive, at times, even though he wouldn’t harm a fly.

  Crackle was the honorable descendant of many generations of white mice who had been trying in vain to flee from the labyrinths of the Department of Clinical Psycholo
gy at the University of Ljubljana. I was still pretty much a slacker—I’d been forced by Ivana’s birth, two years earlier, to start earning my living as a translator, but I had no sense of discipline yet. That meant I had a lot of time to teach Crackle tricks. He’d run to me when I whistled, climb my trousers and jumper, and nibble a kiss on my earlobe. Then I’d get a kick out of scaring my drinking buddies—wannabe writers like myself—by pretending there was no mouse on my shoulder. I think that drinking, combined with my feeling of having been tricked into marriage, had a lot to do with me letting Crackle wander freely around the house. Once I went to take the plastic tub with Ivana’s cotton diapers to dry out and so I had to open the bathroom door a bit. Ivana who was two at the time stood in the anteroom and was able to see Crackle at the doorpost. She shrieked: “No!” but I had already started to close the door. I pushed it open immediately. There was no blood. Crackle was able to pull himself out of the slit beneath the hinge. For a moment it seemed to me that everything would still be all right. But than he started spinning, once, twice, and then fell over, twitched, and became just as numb as me. Ivana was saying in the meantime—I hadn’t even been aware that she could express thoughts like this, let alone that she could express them in a proper, temporal sequence, at only two years of age—“He is going to die . . . he is dying . . . he is dead . . .” It all happened just as fast as she was uttering those words.

  After a few months of watching (we thought) a very forlorn Nibble, we decided to give it another shot and went and bought a new bride. We kept Linden (as Klemen called her) separated from Nibble for six months so she wouldn’t get pregnant too soon—not really necessary, as it turned out, because we had been sold yet another male instead of a female. But they are still very much alive and reasonably fond of each other.

  The only real difference, I think, between humans and animals, is that the latter will take their fate—whatever it might be—for granted. They share this naïveté—which humiliates and exalts at the same time—with small children. But animals (as well as children) are guided by the same free will that we humans claim was given solely to us—and which, when we perceive it in animals or in children, we disapprove of as nothing more than stubbornness. Aside from their usual, puerile faces, angels could as easily be given the faces of rats, fish, hedgehogs—the faces borne by Gothic gargoyles.

  When Klemen and Ana were four years old, their much older half-sister Ivana got them an unannounced birthday present—a guinea pig. The twins showed it exemplary care, but the pet was weird, antisocial, and even prone to biting. As it turned out, this was because she was pregnant. She had a litter of three guinea piglets; we gave two to a friend of a friend and kept the third one as company for the mother, Chewy; but as it turned out, mother and daughter didn’t care much for one another, and we had to separate them, giving each her own cage. Ana and Klemen started to cool off toward the animals pretty soon thereafter, and then I just kept looking for somebody, anybody, but nobody would take them. Once, I was on the brink of giving them away to the zoo, we even drove there, gave the cages to a caretaker who seemed really kind, but on our way out the cashier who knew me well enough asked if I was aware that there was no need for breeders just then. “Meaning what?” “Meaning they’ll go to the, uh, reptiliary, sooner rather than later.” Even the twins understood the implication, if not the word itself. We went back and took them home again. Three months later I persuaded the director of the same zoo to put our guinea pigs on display for a couple of weeks, and just when this period was almost up and we were getting desperate, another caretaker decided to take them both. From then on I kept on rejecting each new animal initiative with the unspoken sentiment that the twins could get a new pet when they were old enough to bury it themselves. Notwithstanding the fact that death of a pet endows a child with a sense of loss for which no amount of philosophical serenity can ever compensate.

  If a man is doing nothing but sitting and typing, sitting and translating foreign words into his language, all those hundreds and thousands of pages are, after so many decades, liable to collapse at last into a single page, typed over and over so as to be illegible. When my father, a famous translator in our country, was over eighty-seven, his doctor prescribed him a gingko extract for his memory, but Dad had grown up during a time when it was seen as unmanly if you couldn’t endure with as few fluids as possible, and so he was stubbornly declining to drink. Once, a year before he died, he expressed his regret that his beloved wife Katarina had been unable to find him a particular book he had been looking for. I’d had enough of this after a few repetitions and finally said to him, “Listen, Dad, why do you keep saying Katarina can’t help? She’s right here, standing in front of you, serving tea.” And Katarina, who had preferred to remain discreetly silent in the face of Dad’s mnemonic shortsightedness, mustered her courage and said: “Yes, Janez, here I am, don’t you see me?” He eyed her carefully for some time and then shook his head: “Well, this sure is a puzzler. But you can talk it over with Katarina when she gets back.” As he settled back, he inadvertently overturned the stack of books by his elbow, and the very one he’d been looking for was revealed. “Here it is! Open it at page seven, Branko!” “Okay, now what?” “Read it aloud!” “The Master and Margarita. So?” “What does it say below that?” “Translated by Janez Gradišnik.” “You see? While everybody knows you did it . . .”

  Where can a clever man hide what we now call religious mania and what used to be considered harmless zeal in the olden days? After five or six years apart—I had turned to other things, and wasn’t really in contact with him; just sending, through a mutual acquaintance, some money on his birthdays—I ran into Charley on the street. He wasn’t in good shape. His mother had died; his father, as an officer of the Yugoslav “occupational army,” hadn’t opted for Slovenian citizenship in 1991, and therefore became one of the “erased,” losing his tenant’s rights, his papers, his pension, his neighbors. He’d moved to Serbia and lost touch with Charley, who was thirty-five at the time. Charley was living off his disability pension now. Since he’d been born in Slovenia, he didn’t lose his tenant’s rights. But living by himself was tough. He heard voices (one of them mine) and some of them were unpleasant. He couldn’t write essays or even reviews anymore. I advised him to join the Franciscan order.

  My oldest daughter Ivana was very attentive as a child. As a toddler of fourteen months, she’d started using a mysterious word: “moochi-goochi”—“Granny moochi-goochi not home,” for example, and it took me a month before I grasped that this wasn’t Japanese but an adaptation of the Slovenian word “mogoče”—meaning “maybe.” Maybe! No wonder I was like an open book to her, even before she went to school—a feat I myself still struggle with at the age of sixty. Around 1976, my former wife and I had reached the stage where we argued openly, without even noticing Ivana’s presence. At first, she tried to stop us, beseeching and crying, but later on she just retreated into drawing and painting in the corner. Once, we were fighting in front of some visiting friends. Ivana went out for a moment, and I remember wondering what for—she had never before separated willingly from us—and we called upon her to judge who was exploiting whom—was it me exploiting Mummy or Mummy exploiting me? Ivana just raised her little fist, clenched tight as if she had some candy hidden in there. But it was a carefully folded piece of paper and I read: “YU TWOO ARE XPLOYTIN ME NAU.” She had only just learned how to make the letters, but she had me right there in the palm of her little hand. I would have cried if I’d been able to do so—but I wasn’t, and I didn’t, didn’t, I didn’t even give her a hug, upset as I was, I just carried on, and I never got her off her treadmill, and in spite of all her brightness, she kept treading and treading it until it got stuck.

  There were many other animals that my family and I tried to keep, but ultimately failed with: Gigi, the gracious cat that followed Mitko to his bus stop every day and got hit by a reckless driver; Franko, my guinea pig that knew how t
o sing on my command and that my mother gave away while I was on my first holidays on my own; Huckly, my gerbil, who got so old—twenty-seven months!—that he finally went blind and became hemiplegic and had to be put to sleep, and then I met Charley, my high-school classmate, on my way home from the vet’s, and because I couldn’t speak I just showed him my receipt reading 1 GERBIL—EUTHANASIA—20 DINARS, and he said, “Why Branko, next time just tell your good pal here to help you out and I’ll do it for ten!”; and when I was twelve, the moth with sodden wings, with burnt feelers, just because I was afraid of its markings, its glossy eyes, of fire, of wind and water, just because I was afraid, just because . . .

  All of a sudden, the twins were ten. During the previous two or three years, they’d come along on visits—together with me and their mom—to our respective mothers at a home for disabled senior citizens, so I could no longer deny them the right to assume responsibility for a loved one. Preferably a cat, since they’re suitably independent. Unfortunately, Klemen was allergic to cat hair. Okay, a small rodent then. I didn’t want them to cry their hearts out after only a year or two, as would surely happen with mice or rats. The most long-lived rodents—up to nine years, I was told—would be degus, energetic but child-friendly squirrel-faced cousins of chinchillas. The twins loved the pair I bought them from the very start and cared for them wholeheartedly. But there were glitches. After two months, Klemen’s Flickety died with absolutely no warning. In the morning he had been lively and happy; in the afternoon when they returned from school they found him cold and numb. After the initial shock and a suitable mourning period, we found a new mate for Ana’s Nibble. She got pregnant. How proud Nibble was, fussing around the nest and bringing Figgy all kinds of seeds and rags to make it warmer! But after two days of agony Figgy died from exhaustion, in spite of all our efforts. Only later did I find a warning on the Internet saying: “Female degus can conceive frighteningly young, but get exhausted giving birth to large and rather developed litters, so it is advisable to keep them apart from males until they are at least six months old.” Nobody had told us about this beforehand. The young ones, they died, still naked, still blind, but twittering long into their last night. I don’t want to write about it.