Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “So are you done?” he added a moment later. Slavik pulled out one of his cigarettes, lit it, let the smoke out, sighed heavily, and started again: “Very well,” he said, and then paused for effect, “very well, Georgy Davydovich, I understand where you are going, okay, well, I’ll talk to Grebenshchikov if you insist, only, I think, even for me, he wouldn’t do it for free . . .” “Fine, fine,” Goga waved him away, “Sanych, do it for me, get me some musicians, okay? And you,” he said to Slavik, “figure out who we’ll be inviting.” “What do you mean, who?” Slavik asked, brightening: “Firefighters by all means, tax administrators, and somebody from the culture administration. We’ll feel them out, in a word.” “All right,” Goga agreed, “but in addition to all those fags, do try to get us a couple of decent gay guys, okay?”

  The opening was held in early June. San Sanych hired a group that usually played in a hotel restaurant: they had a well rehearsed set, were reasonably priced, and didn’t drink at work. Slavik put together a guest list, only about a hundred people. Goga studied the proposed list for a while, then narrowed it down a little more, crossing out the cafeteria girls from the local government headquarters and the four striptease artistes from the Pioneer Club. Slavik attempted to keep the cafeteria girls at least, but yielded after a long argument. Goga invited his old business partners, from whom he had bought his drywall wholesale, as well as his childhood friends and the Leekhooy brothers. San Sanych invited his mama, and wanted to invite an old friend, a former prostitute, but then thought about his mama and dropped the idea.

  The opening came off beautifully. Slavik got wasted in half an hour; San Sanych asked the guards to watch him; Goga ordered everyone to relax—was it a party or what? San Sanych’s mama said that the music was too loud and soon left. Sanych called a cab for her and came back to celebrate. The wholesale guys took off their ties and were drinking to the owners’ health; Slavik sang loudly and kissed the representatives from the tax administration—indeed, all in all, he was acting gayer than anyone else in the crowd—gay, in any case, as he understood it; he was definitely doing it on purpose, to get the crowd going. And it sort of worked: the Leehooy brothers started a fight with the wholesale guys in the men’s room, just your usual kind of brawl, what else had they paid for? Grisha Leehooy’s offended screams—“Now who’s a fag!”—came from the bathroom, and everyone knew that his brother was backing him up. The fight was quickly contained, Sanych pulled everyone apart and drunken wholesale guys went to finish the party at a striptease club, since Sandwiches didn’t have any girls on stage. The tax administration people also went to a striptease joint, and they didn’t take Slavik along so as not to ruin their reputations. Almost everyone left, and after a while there was only some girl at the bar and a couple of middle-aged men whispering to each other in the corner. They looked exactly like the tax administration representatives, though maybe that was only because it seemed so difficult to say anything definitive about their appearance. “Who’re those guys?” Sanych asked Slavik, who’d started sobering up and was now remembering who he’d been kissing. “Ah, them,” he said, squinting. “I don’t want to offend anyone present but . . . I think that’s them. I mean, the gay guys.” “Do you know them?” Sanych asked, just in case. “Sure,” Slavik nodded. “It’s Doctor and Boosya.” “What kind of doctor?” Sanych asked. “Just a regular doctor,” Slavik answered. “Come on, I’ll introduce you. Hi, Boosya!” he addressed the guy who looked younger and more taxman-like; “And howdy to you, Doctor.” He shook hands with the somewhat more respectable looking of the two—that is, the one who looked less like he worked in the tax administration. “Meet Sanyok here.” “San Sanych,” San Sanych corrected him sheepishly. “Our manager,” Slavik insisted. “Nice to meet you,” said Doctor and Boosya both, and invited them to their table. Sanych and Slavik sat. A silence fell. Sanych was getting nervous, while Slavik reached for his cigarettes. “So, Slavik, you’re here now?” Doctor started in, hoping to ease the tension. “Yes,” said Slavik, lighting his cigarette and then smothering the match in their plate. “My friends asked me to pitch in, and I thought, why not, I have a free slot in my calendar just now. Clearly they could use a little guidance,” he went on, taking the doctor’s fork and spearing some salad. “Take tonight, for example . . . you could really do it right, with some sort of cultural program . . . I even had Grebenshchikov set up . . . But it’s not a big deal, it turned out fine,” he put his hand on Sanych’s shoulder, “just fine. I give them some advice here and there, you know, and I think things will work out fine, yes . . .” Sanych carefully removed Slavik’s hand, got up, nodded to Doctor and Boosya, wished them a pleasant evening, said he was sure they’d talk again soon, and moved to the bar. “Who are you?” he asked the girl who had just ordered another vodka. Her lip was pierced, and whenever she took a drink, the metal balls clinked against her glass. “I’m Vika. You?” “San Sanych,” said San Sanych. “Gay?” asked Vika matter-of-factly. “Owner,” said Sanych defensively. “I see,” said Vika, “can you take me home? I’m totally wasted.” Sanych called a taxi and, after saying good-bye to Goga, took the girl outside. The taxi driver turned out to be some hunchback. Sanych had seen him around. The guy seemed overjoyed to see them, and asked, “So, are you from the fag club?” “Yeah, yeah,” San Sanych answered uneasily. “Where to?” he asked Vika. As they drove, Vika got queasy. “What,” the hunchback asked, “planning to puke?” “Everything’s fine,” Sanych said, “no puking here.” “Whatever you say,” said the hunchback, seeming somewhat disappointed. “So where are we going?” Sanych grabbed Vika by the shoulder, turned her to face him, checked the inner pocket of her leather jacket, and pulled out her passport. “Try this,” he said to the hunchback, giving him her registered address, and off they went—right back to Sandwiches. Vika lived next door. It would have been easier to carry her home, but who’d known? Sanych pulled her out of the car, asked the hunchback to wait, and carried her into the house. At the apartment door he stood her on her feet. “Are you all right?” he asked. “All right,” said Vika, “all right, give me my passport back.” Sanych took it out and looked at her photo. “You look better without the piercing,” he said. “If you want, you know,” said Sanych, “I’ll stay with you.” “Mister,” said Vika smirking, “don’t you get it? I’m a lesbian. And you aren’t even gay. You’re just the owner. You know what I mean?”

  She kissed him and vanished behind the door. Sanych felt the cold taste of her piercing on his lips. Like a silver spoon . . .

  TRANSLATED FROM UKRAINIAN BY ANASTASIA LAKHTIKOVA

  evil

  [GERMANY]

  CLEMENS MEYER

  The Case of M.

  So you talk to the girl. No problem, you know her don’t you, you did an internship at her school, at the after-school club. Did you plan it all back then? I mean, not at the after-school club, I mean at that moment when you decided to lure her to your—well it’s not really your apartment to be precise, but anyway, where you live. Or did you want to wait and see how things turned out? You used to jerk off when you thought about it, and you always had to take a break in the middle and listen in case your mother was creeping around outside your bedroom door. You used to see her walking home alone. “I’ve got something for your mom,” you say. “Your mom said you’re supposed to come and pick it up from my place.” And she goes with you; you reach for her hand but then let go again, feeling how warm it is. You’re nervous, not much farther now, just around the corner; no one takes any notice of the two of you, you keep your head down and hope you don’t meet anyone you know. And you don’t meet anyone, not even when you’re both standing outside the house where you live with your mother. Did you know my mother used to live across the road, right there by the last bus stop? I grew up there, did you know, I lived there with my mother too; well, my sister was there too, and let me tell you, living under one roof with two women could be hell at times, and I got caught masturb
ating more than once; nearly ten years I lived there, I didn’t move out until I was nearly twenty-one—oh, you see, you’re twenty-one now too; no wait, you’re only nineteen, and now it’s too late to move away, or let’s say move out; you’re away from your mother now, in August 2009, but almost exactly a year ago you knew very well she wasn’t at home. “Hello Mum, can I introduce you to my new girlfriend?” No, that’s no good; you weren’t really one for the girls, were you? I wasn’t either at your age, by the way. When I was a kid I told my mother I wanted to live in a house in the forest when I grew up, with my friend J. H., who was my best friend back then but he’s dead now, sadly. Yes, she said, that’s perfectly normal; some men love each other too. Did my mother think I was going to be gay? But by the time I reached my big porn-mag phase between thirteen and eighteen she must have thought differently; it’s not all that easy to hide porn mags in an apartment full of women. Did you have porn mags too? Or at least the soft stuff: Praline, Neue Revue, and that kind of thing? Or did you—you must have sensed at some point that you have . . . let’s just say: a slightly different focus—did you buy those nudist magazines? Because, don’t get me wrong, there are a whole load of naked little girls in them. No, no, it’s fine, I bought one of those mags myself once, although I’m not even sure they still exist. But there’s still Landser and Junge Freiheit for the Nazis among us, so you must be able to get the other stuff too; mind you, we’re living on the Internet now, there are different ways to get hold of jerk-off material nowadays. And it was really expensive, that nudist magazine; I took it to the forest to have a wank and it was so embarrassing in the paper shop; who buys those things anyway, potential kiddy-fiddlers or uptight pedophiles? It was at a chess championship in the Black Forest, there was always so much going on at the youth hostel that I never got a chance to jerk off. I was fourteen back then, I think. Did you have Internet access at your mum’s place? Wait, let me have a look . . . well there you are at the computer, but as soon as I get closer you go all tense; oh shit, now I see, you’re playing Monkey Island because none of the new games will work on your ancient computer. No, sorry, I don’t want to be cruel, I’m just interested . . . I’m a voyeur of the first degree, you see, I’m really fascinated by things like that, especially things that get out of hand, so I’m pretty interested in the . . . let’s say the human soul. So I just want to take a careful look inside of you . . . by the way, of course I’m interested in the carnal side of things, if you get what I mean, I even had a bit of a sick obsession for a while; mind you, sick is taking it a bit far. But I want to put myself in your shoes so to speak, and I can, there’s no need to be scared, you just go ahead and trust me . . . IF HE’S SICK HE SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED OUT (Leipziger Volkszeitung, 18 August 2009), MY CLIENT WAS ALWAYS AN OUTSIDER; I used to stand on the windowsill, it must be nearly ten years ago now so I was about twenty-two, with the blinds down, and believe it or not with my pants down too; mind you, I can’t say that for sure after all these years . . . anyway I always had my binoculars at hand; they were good binoculars, I still take them to the races nowadays, not always though because they make you look like some dumb tourist or retiree; wedged a match between two slats of the blind and had the best view of the school sports grounds across the way. Well you know the school don’t you, that’s where she came from on 18 August 2008, she came from day camp. I didn’t even know there was such a thing anymore, I thought day camp was one of those old East German things; when I was her age, so nine, she was nine, right? Or have I dropped a year, more or less? When I was her age we used to go to the vacation day camp, me and my sister, we had one of those—what did they call it again?—a vacation pass; we made radios that only picked up one station, watched movies, painted pictures, once we went to the German Library for some special screen-printing thing, and we did all sorts of arts and crafts, and then there was some talk in the old town hall about myths and legends, and I remember now, some loser from a children’s home; sorry, that’s nothing to do with you, believe me; some kid put his hand up and said something about werewolves in helmets, yeah helmets, what a load of shit. We were very close back then, me and my sister, I mean; later we backed off a little. Can you imagine I dreamed a couple of times, it’s a while ago now though, I dreamed I fucked my sister? I don’t like talking about it—see how much I trust you?—but you can’t help what you dream about, can you? And I always think we’ve backed off a little now, but in a good way, I’d say; it’s because of the divorce as well, because we lived with my mother under one roof right then, at that critical age I mean when your hormones run riot and everything; Jesus, that was an absolute nightmare, the women were constantly on the rag, you know, and me constantly jerking off; it was never going to work out. And I was a bit out of kilter back then anyway, used to steal and started drinking too young, problems at school all the time; it was always like that, even back in the East, but then they wanted to kick me out of school twice, at grammar school, and back in the East my mother had to take me to a shrink a couple of times: “Now draw your parents as animals and yourself as well,” IF HE’S SICK HE SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED OUT, Jesus, can’t you all just shut up! Hey wait, stay, I haven’t finished yet, where was I? Right: on the windowsill and the sports grounds across the way. I went to that school too, you know. And you weren’t just an intern there (you wanted to be a Social Assistant, remind me to ask you what that is exactly), you were there yourself right from when you were an A-B-C-darian, what a stupid name, do you remember? First day of school and all that, I remember it anyway, and you stayed there until the end. I don’t think you’ll know the teachers I had there, they’re all somewhere else now or dead. Mind you, I’m only thirteen years older than you; some of them might still be there. And you must know the school caretaker, Shimmy we used to call him; no idea what his real name was. He used to say the same two things all the time, practically crazy he was, he used to shout them more like: “Your ass is gonna get busted!” when he was angry; old Shimmy was always pissed off about something; and “Heeme!” We spent ages puzzling over what that heeme meant. All it means is “at home” in Saxon dialect, and he said it in almost every sentence. “Your ass is gonna get busted, heeme!” And at some point us kids figured out what he meant by his heeme. He used to live there, at the school, I mean, with his family. And when he was out and about there, on his home ground so to speak, taking care of everything, doing all sorts of technical stuff, repairs and organization and who knows what else for us children and teachers (and back then for the Pioneer leaders and all the party bigwigs, but that won’t mean much to you)—and the guy was popular with us, believe you me—he just felt so goddamn at home: heeme. He was a funny guy, that Shimmy.

  And not long ago, in July 2009, to be precise, just so we don’t get confused—we’re actually still outside your building—there was a fire on the school grounds, right where the garage is with Shimmy’s car in it. I didn’t notice, even though it’s only five hundred yards away from my apartment, and the firemen must have been working on it all night while I was asleep. The fire was between the front building for the primary kids (boys and girls) and the gym. The flames must have been good and tall, and Shimmy’s car burned of course; no one knows how the fire broke out, some kind of spontaneous combustion, they say. I can still see the soot-stained façade with the black windowsills when I walk past the school complex. AN INEXPLICABLE CRIME. In the old days you couldn’t have seen the building from my side of the road, there were tower blocks in between but they’ve been knocked down now. PUPILS VERY UPSET. Anyway, where was I? There was a link a minute ago, I’d found something in the word-flow to take me back to where I wanted to go in the first place, or where I’d already been . . . Yeah right, windowsills, the soot-stained windowsills! And there’s me on my windowsill again, standing there with my binoculars and watching the little girls playing sports . . . but they were fifteen or sixteen, toward the end of high school, I mean I’m not a goddamn pedophile; sorry, nothing against you, you seem to be a sp
ecial case, my young friend, we’ll get to that soon enough; but I do like a nice pair of breasts and the girls I used to watch had them under their tight sports tops, and big ones too, sometimes; maybe there were a couple of fourteen-year-olds once in a while, how should I know; it’s not like they have their age printed on their shirts, and some of them you’d swear were over eighteen. It was different in my day but they’re real sex bombs at fifteen and sixteen now, and so there’s me on my windowsill; sometimes I stand there all through gym class and sway my binoculars to and fro, left to right, and they’re doing long jumps down there now, what a gorgeous bounce you get from that, and my biggest fear is getting caught. What about you? Weren’t you scared someone would knock or ring while the two of you were in there? And first of all you have to get into the room with her; you’re still going up the stairs now. In my building there’s—wait, let me think—there’s me all on my own down on the ground floor, but I don’t count; to meet myself I’d have to get caught in a time loop like the space traveler Ijon Tichy, so let’s start again: upstairs the couple, then the Arab, one guy’s in jail right now, should be out again soon though so we’ll list him as present and accounted for; so four people, and that’s it—the apartment above me is empty, there’s only one apartment on the ground floor and the first floor, it’s a very narrow building. So that’s four people, and very, very often—I have to say so because it surprises me how often it is—very often I meet one of them when I come home. What would you have done if the woman next door had suddenly been standing on the staircase, or the man from upstairs on his way out to go shopping? “Good afternoon,” or “Hello,” or maybe “How’s things?”—people liked you, at least that’s what I read, even though you used to get bullied of course, what with your disability. I mean it’s all right to say that, isn’t it; it’s not a real disability though, you went to a proper school, just slight problems with your motor skills and your speech a bit slow sometimes because of some genetic thing, trisomy 8, and you must be a mild case I suppose because you’re not such a Jerky Joey as other people who have it, extended thorax, peculiarities in the number and width of ribs, extraneous nipples, high, narrow palate, cleft palate, broad nose, frequently upward-pointing nostrils, sagging of one or both eyelids, short fingers, narrow wing of ilium, liquid accumulation in the neck area . . . holy ghost and Jesus H! You’d be a right Frankenstein, but you look more like a cuddly teddy; I saw you in the courtroom; no, I was right at the back, and yes, really, you look like a nice kid: a bit awkward, a bit chubby, but pretty much the boy-next-door type; my mother told me she saw you at the Schlecker drugstore a couple of times, she thinks so anyway, she just doesn’t know if it was before or after; you were down there every now and then chatting with the girls at the register: how awful it is what happened to that poor girl and how you can’t imagine anyone . . . I’ve lost the thread again: “Good afternoon”—no, because nobody came by, and you and she walked past the little closet in the corridor that used to be the outside lavatory, where you propped her up later on, I think, for several days even, at least two days or so; I don’t want to check my material again right now, it’s not nice digging and delving in all that, take my word for it; and then your keys jangle; can’t someone stick their head out and see what those voices are in the corridor? Voices, voices, in your head, there has to be . . . I’m not quite sure . . . absolute calm? Or chaos? Jesus, you know, when I had my first girl; I mean that was nothing like you of course, she was my age, my young friend, the way things should be; I nearly mixed her up with my second girl: she was older than me, it was in a brothel, some old decrepit apartment building and inside it a woman in every apartment; it was at Christmas, some time in the ’90s, with my friend M., he’s dead too now; but I was nervous both times, couldn’t think straight, trembling all over; Jesus, you’ve been imagining it all those times and then all of a sudden . . . SHOCKING PHOTOS OF THE VICTIM—CORONER APPALLS COURT WITH AUTOPSY FINDINGS.