Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  He doesn’t waste words on the extent of your luggage, which might well seem suspicious to him—the big, heavy suitcase and the stuffed shoulder bag, though you’re only spending one night at his place. Maybe he’s happy, you think, that I’ve got a lot of luggage because it shows off the huge size of the trunk that he opens with an inviting gesture, the first important thing to notice, and you know you’ve got to say something about the car.

  “Big,” you say, “comfortable,” you add, after sitting down on the black leather passenger’s seat, and “amazingly quiet” after you’ve been moving along for some time. And it’s actually true: the car is big, comfortable, and quiet, at least when you’re in it, but it also belongs to the class of vehicles you wanted banned not so long ago when you signed that petition for a referendum about it.

  “I’ve only had it a few days,” your brother says and points out the factory-built features. “Special trim. Only in the States. Feel that power?” he asks, and pushes down on the gas pedal.

  “Yes,” you say, faking delight, your eyes glued to the dash and fixed on the fuel gauge because you’re firmly convinced that the gas supply will noticeably sink with every increase in speed. The dash is trimmed in reddish brown wood, the same as part of the door covering, and you hope at least it’s not mahogany.

  “What CD do you want to listen to?” your brother asks, but he doesn’t mean you, he means the kid.

  “The one with the old man.” the kid says.

  “Which old man?” your brother asks.

  “The one with all that wood,” the kid explains, and your brother gets it.

  “Oh, this old man,” he says, pressing a button. “This works the CD changer in the trunk,” he explains, and you fear the worst. Some god-awful, stupid comedian or Peter Maffay’s kiddie kitsch. But from the very first note even you know which old man was meant.

  “Good choice, my boy!” Your brother is so pleased. “That’s real music!” And you concede the point, though you haven’t heard this music for half a lifetime, not since one of your rituals was to smoke a joint on the stairway to heaven with Led Zeppelin ringing in your ears.

  Back then you walked in your brother’s footsteps. He was the model rebel for you; he’d bash his head against the wall in front of you just so you could imitate him. But when it was your turn to strut around chasing after freedom in a leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, all in black of course, your hair long and stringy and your eyes red from smoking pot all the time, that’s when he didn’t believe you were serious; he even went so far as to think you were fucking with him. Still, you kept on acting like that for a while until you found another role and another and still another. And wound up making acting out different roles into your profession.

  Rebellious brothers way back then, you think to yourself, but today one of you drives a car the ad men say typifies independence and individualism, while the other is standing at the station with nothing in his hands but his suitcase. That’s just the point! you keep thinking, feeling a twinge of revolt. But freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, that’s what Janis Joplin used to sing! A second later you’re thinking that freedom, if it’s to deserve that name at all, should be spontaneous, and that’s hardly going to be you in the near future.

  “Tomorrow it’s Deggendorf!” you say to yourself in a soft voice. “The community center in Deggendorf!” you mutter, but the leaden Zeppelin makes your words inaudible to the others.

  Your mother beams when she sees you but stays seated. Like she’s already exhausted by late afternoon, you think, and too tired to get up right now, even though she’s having a coffee. You give her a hug and feel how emaciated her body is, how frighteningly thin, no, fragile she’s become.

  “How much did the train cost?” she asks you as soon as the hug’s over and reaches for her purse. “Is a hundred enough?”

  “Mom, I don’t need any money for the train.” You try to fend her off, but you’ve already got the bill in your hand.

  “Then give it to the barber!” she counters in a friendly voice, and her smile renders you speechless. I’m forty-three years old, you think. Can somebody please tell my mother that? You’ll slip the bill back into her purse surreptitiously as soon as she goes to the john.

  Meanwhile your brother out on the patio has fired up the grill and is already having a beer.

  “Come on, Uncle, I’ve got something to show you!” The kid grabs your hand and drags you into the garden. Here’s where I’d like to have grown up, you think to yourself, and not for the first time. A house with a large garden, surrounded by meadows and woods. Your brother probably sees it the same way; after all, he’s willing to work his butt off for this house, so much so he hardly has time on the weekends to enjoy this refuge.

  “This is my snail collection. You can eat the big one! Daddy said so. I gotta watch out that he doesn’t barbecue it. I think he’s just kidding. And that’s our new trampoline!” The kid orders you to take off your shoes and is already doing his warm-ups.

  “Will you do your somersault for me, Uncle?”

  When your brother’s wife calls you to come to dinner, you breathe a sigh of relief. Not only because you’ve just wrecked your whole skeleton doing your first somersault in thirty years, but because you ended up falling right on your nephew, who stoically claimed it didn’t hurt—though it really must have—probably to reward you for your effort.

  “We’ll play some more after dinner,” he says in all seriousness, more than you’ve ever seen in an adult, then he dashes into the house.

  Your brother has tied on a barbecue apron, THE BOSS IS COOKING, and fusses around masterfully with his tongs.

  “How do you want your meat?” he asks, as if he hadn’t known for years that you don’t eat any.

  “Alive!” is your answer, as always. He’s got you a meat substitute, soybeans shaped like bratwurst. The brown stripes that appear when it’s fried have been put onto the tofu by the meatpacker. Probably made in China, you think. Child labor. A little girl’s tiny little hands painting grilling stripes on sausage with a tiny little brush with carcinogenic paint in eighteen-hour shifts. You have red wine with dinner and, as usual, when your brother conjures up a bottle from his well-stocked cellar, it tastes utterly fantastic. This doesn’t escape your mother, who suddenly grabs the wine, too fast for anybody to react, and fills her glass to the brim, her water glass, because it’s the only one she has.

  “Mom, you don’t like red wine!” Your brother nudges her memory along, as he takes her glass and the bottle away.

  “There’s no white wine, apparently,” your mother gripes and looks around, offended.

  “Hey, is there any ketchup in the house?” Your question is meant to change the subject to something innocuous—quite apart from the fact that the tofu sausage has zero taste and is as dry as a sandstorm—but it totally misses the mark and starts a marital spat instead. Only your nephew showed some understanding, backing you up enthusiastically.

  “Ketchup! Me too! Ketchup!”

  “Well done!” Now your brother looks offended too. “Won’t you at least try for once to see how your meal tastes without a red apron on it?”

  “Now leave him alone!” Your sister-in-law stands up. “Since we do have ketchup, he wants to have some, and you’re the one who always buys it.”

  “For my fries, not for him to drown everything in!”

  “Oh, yeah! I want some fries!”

  “This is a nice kettle of fish!”

  “There aren’t any fries today and there’s no ketchup either!”

  “And I want a glass of white wine!”

  After dinner you all sit in silence for a while, sipping wine, except the kid of course who’s painting a picture in ketchup on the tablecloth.

  “I’m going on tour again . . .” You try to get the conversation going
. “Nothing special, Molière’s Misanthrope, but the pay’s pretty good.” You don’t get any farther. You can’t understand why your brother’s getting so worked up; you clearly hear him say, “Keep it up, Mom, and you’ll wind up in a retirement home!”

  An outing seems to be obligatory in this weather, so you soon start off—too soon, fortunately, for a second round of somersaults. Even five can fit comfortably into the new car. Your mother is in the front, you and your sister-in-law in the back—the kid in the middle—and your brother on the royal throne, steering wheel in hand, like the insignia of his power. The switchback road over the pass to the Bündner Herrschaft region provides him with ideal conditions to coax all he can from the car. It’s too much for your mother, who keeps complaining and closes her eyes in protest near the end—and too much for a child’s stomach as well. Just before the top of the pass your nephew pukes ketchup red into your lap and you think, Lucky my suitcase is in the car.

  “Bravo, my boy!” your brother says when you get to your destination and he can check to see that the leather upholstery is unharmed. “It’s a good thing you were sitting beside your uncle.” There’s not a word of praise for you, the recipient of the half-digested vomit. “It’ll wash out,” he says curtly and lights up.

  The first walk I went on that I can remember, you think to yourself after a change of clothes, as you amble along beside your mom, must have been here, on an autumn day like this, not quite forty years ago. And because this involves a pleasant memory from a hidden corner of your childhood, it seems to you as though this stretch of the country were inculcated with an insatiable longing. A longing that overwhelms you all the more powerfully because the landscape appears to be more or less unchanged. The same trees, you think, these wonderful lindens with the overhanging branches I used to swing on as a kid, they’re a little older but they were already old back then. The gravel paths along the walls around the vineyards, walls to protect the vines from the night frost. And the old villages, hardly affected by the years, basically always true to themselves. Everything’s relative, you go on thinking, especially the past. I found the train station horribly depressing, trumpeting how backward my homeland is, but here, the lack of progress makes me happy all of a sudden.

  And the gunshots are still there, from the gas-powered automatic guns scaring away the birds, banging on in a random rhythm in the Sunday morning calm; in the old days they didn’t exactly keep you from pinching grapes off the vines by the bushel. They’re apparently more efficient against birds. Starlings in particular pose a threat in the autumn, since that’s when they’re heading south in huge flocks and get so hungry from flying that they can strip a vineyard bare in minutes.

  Your brother hardly chose your destination by chance, being a fan of the wines of the region, which is famous for its autumn grape harvest and where there’s a torkel, a wine-press restaurant, always open on the weekend. As it was this Sunday too. Like many wine cellars they try to get you to come and eat by using folksy entertainment.

  “Mom’s had enough as it is, and the little guy’s hungry,” he says by way of justification and heads right for the first torkel. The patio tables are filled with cheerful guests and you’re in luck because a party is leaving, or lurching, as if punning on torkelnd, tipsy, because they’re literally staggering.

  Your party orders a bottle of Grauburgunder, the local pinot grigio, and a platter of cold cuts and cheese. The kid gets some fizzy new wine and the promised piece of cake. You all have a toast with the regional salute of “Viva!”—your mother too—as you drink the wine from the vines around you. The sky overhead knows no bounds, its blue draws you upward into nothingness, a window on eternity, appealing in its offer of so much room for speculation but daunting for that very reason.

  The sound of an accordion comes from the cellar up to the patio and envelops the world in gentleness—the customers’ cheery gossip, the light so pure and clear that it almost hurts, and the air with a hint of the south—it’s as if a filter lay over your senses, absorbing any sharp edges. Yours is the only table not caught up in this buoyant atmosphere. Arguments threaten to break out on all fronts, and you’re glad your nephew has to go to the john right this minute and picks you to go with him, so you can escape from the tense situation for a moment. Your mother empties her glass in quick, long gulps, your brother watches the contents disappear and shows signs of stubborn opposition, under his wife’s watchful eye. Their mutual, unspoken reproaches are palpable.

  It’s a little boy who’s making that music in the cellar entranceway—his instrument is almost as big as himself—eyes closed and a smile on his face, as if seeing a glow from within, and you and your nephew both sit down on the cold stone at his feet and get lost in the music. The accordion tells of faraway lands, distant times, distant joy, and distant sorrow. In times past you used to like the nostalgia—these kinds of songs float you along—probably because they sound so naïve. But the sadness you sink into on hearing them again hides a little something that alarms you: When did I stop feeling that being on the road is an opportunity? you ask yourself. Stop seeking out the unknown and all its potential and stop liking foreign countries because they were bewildering? And you know that you’ve been left high and dry though you’re always on the move. Tomorrow it’s Deggendorf, you think, and wouldn’t you know, I’m the misanthrope again. Your nephew’s sitting quietly beside you and squeezes your hand, taking it so much for granted that it moves you. What can he be hearing in these sounds? you ask yourself. How to figure out what the longing and melancholy in them mean? You think back on your own childhood. The world of your different feelings back then don’t seem alien to you; deep down they’re connected to your feelings today, even though back then they’d have been less marked by hopelessness and more by wild, effervescent hopes, and full of dreams.

  When the accordion boy takes a break, both of your legs have long been asleep, and you can get up only with great effort.

  “Can I give him something?” your nephew asks quietly, and you press a few bills into his hand. He goes up to the music-maker very deliberately, but respectfully and with a certain circumspection, sort of as if he weren’t seeing a child in him, a person of like mind, but an artist, a magician of sounds who had access to another world. I love that boy, you think, and it was always like that, from the very beginning. Kinship is certainly a curious thing. It binds you, grounds you whether you want it or not. As if your mother had heard his thought—she was sitting out in the sun and arguing with your brother—you now hear her voice quivering as she shouts against the noise of the guns driving off the crows:

  “I am not going into a retirement home!”

  And you know the outing is over.

  On the way back to the parking lot you swing a bit to the accordion’s rhythm in your head, a feeling as if the scenery is swaying, this place where everything revolves around wine-growing.

  “Uncle, can you help me up?” You’ve stopped by the lindens, magically attracted by the golden yellow sheen of their leaves, and your nephew wants to climb a tree. You help him get to the lowest branches, watch him as he carefully goes higher—you are a little worried he might fall off—and you see yourself as a child in him, yourself as a five-year-old.

  Once you’re back home, you split up. Time to take a breather, you think, to gather strength before the last act. While your brother’s wife is getting supper, your brother’s smoking his cigarettes, and your mother’s asleep on the sofa, you and your nephew go racing around. You’re thankful he doesn’t bring up somersaults again because you definitely feel how much it still hurts, and you know for sure it will be much worse tomorrow morning. The community center in Deggendorf, you think, Alceste with aching leg muscles and a stiff lower back.

  After supper you and your brother take Mom home. She can hardly walk now and all of you practically carry her into bed. It doesn’t smell particularly clean, nor does the rest of her apartme
nt. As you turn to leave, she beckons you over again and takes your hand.

  “It was nice that you could be here. Come back real soon! Do you have enough money for the train?”

  “Yes, Mom, you gave me some,” you say and tuck her in, and you can’t decide which emotion is affecting you the most, because you’re moved by all three: pity, disgust, and love.

  In the car neither of you says a word, you and your brother rehearse your silence. What grand words are there to say, you think to yourself. Words don’t change a damn thing. And when you notice that your brother’s missed the intersection where he turns off to his house, family, and garden, you don’t comment on it. He stops in front of a bar and gets out. You follow without delay or question. Two beers later you still haven’t exchanged one word. You are the only customers, and the man behind the bar keeps quiet, like you two. And if it weren’t for those songs in the room, that music especially for difficult and lonely times, you could hardly stand the silence. So you order a third round of beer and that breaks the silence.

  “How’s the acting business?” your brother asks and orders a schnapps.

  “Show’s on tour,” you quickly answer and think, Sore muscles won’t be all that I’ll hurt from tomorrow. “We go from one hick town to the next, Molière’s Misanthrope.”