Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  BOXES

  In the prison camp, where I was interred along with many others, including some acquaintances of mine, every prisoner received a piece of cardboard cut in such a way that it could very easily be folded and put together to make a box. Once this was done, according to our warden, we were to label our boxes with our names and keep them with us at all times. We’d just begun putting them together when word came that these boxes were actually urns in which, after we’d been killed and cremated, the ashes of each prisoner would be stored. Putting our boxes together was nothing less than digging our own graves. Chaos then. Most of us believed the rumor and asked to be excused from our work. Others, myself among them, feared the punishment that would surely follow such a demurral. In order to avoid this punishment, I attempted to bring as many members of the opposition to our side as possible. I convinced them that the boxes weren’t themselves a danger but rather a concession of the administration to our own needs—the boxes were only containers meant to store the smaller objects we’d brought into the prison with us, so that they wouldn’t get lost. Really, the boxes might even save our lives at some point, since, if the administrators really wanted to kill us, and the method had something to do with drowning, for example, the boxes could serve as life preservers, keeping us afloat.

  TOKYO

  Images of Tokyo on the TV news, a panorama at first, then the people in the streets. Although no snow could be seen on the houses, the people had cross-country skis strapped on and moved ahead side by side in unending, disciplined columns. Then the clip ended and the anchorman appeared on the screen and said that we’d have to get used to such images in the future. The garbage accumulating every day in Tokyo would from now on be compacted into a substance similar to snow and spread on certain streets, a different one every day. Trails would be laid out so that residents could practice cross-country skiing the whole year round. My father, watching TV with me, was disgusted by these developments, but I found them perfectly acceptable.

  Not long after, I was in Tokyo myself. In a café in Ginza there was an exhibition taking place that attracted such an enormous crowd, I became curious too. The reason for the crowd was that the café was displaying the very latest in fashionable hair-clasps, which, despite their enormous price, drew so many young Japanese girls that the event gradually turned into an ongoing auction. The clasps were prisms about fifteen centimeters long with triangular bases and rectangular sides, each created from five to ten smaller prisms of the same design, consisting of an artificial resin into which a measure of dog shit had been mixed. Thus, color-wise, shades of brown predominated, some almost black; but then, in an especially expensive piece, which the auctioneer—who also happened to be the designer—clearly considered a masterpiece, one of these prisms glowed brick red in the middle of the brown, and I immediately remembered some dog shit of exactly this color that I’d seen on the sidewalk in front of our house a few days earlier. I’d had to look away in order not to throw up. I began to imagine how awful and demeaning the construction of such a hair-clasp must have been, but I was quickly forced to the side by a swarm of young girls waving money and looking ready to fight each other for such an unusual piece.

  BARBIE

  I was looking for a present for our seven-year-old daughter in the toy store when I happened to notice a Barbie playset called Barbie Kneels Naked in Front of Her Altar and Reads from the Bible. I took it off the shelf in order to get a closer look (Barbie was kneeling naked in front of her altar, reading the Bible). A salesperson appeared behind me and congratulated me on my selection. He thought it a particularly lovely item, and said it would certainly be a collector’s item someday. Still, he wanted to make it clear to me that I shouldn’t give the set to my child. It was meant for people eighteen and older. I put the set back in its place and said it seemed absurd to me that there should be toys in a toy store not meant for minors. The salesperson said that that’s just the way it was. After all, he didn’t make the rules.

  TRANSLATION RIGHTS

  I’d already been writing to the publisher of the American musician Loudon Wainwright III for a long time now, asking for permission to translate some of his lyrics into the Viennese dialect, and had already nearly given up hope of receiving a response, when Wainwright called me up personally and explained that he intended to combine business and pleasure and spend a few days’ vacation in Vienna. We could talk about everything then. He suggested I pick him up at the airport, so I took a rental car to our appointment, which—because I don’t have my own license—I had my seventeen-year-old daughter drive (though it was strange for this to be allowed, considering the driving age in Vienna is eighteen). She drove slowly and carefully so that, undisturbed, I could prepare some friendly greetings in English, with which I hoped to win Wainwright over. This turned out to be superfluous, however. He spoke fluent German, and right after we’d shaken hands he told me he still didn’t know where he’d be staying in town. Apparently he’d flown to Vienna on a whim and wanted to know if I could recommend a hotel, so I recommended the Hotel Praterstern on Mayer Street, as I’d done for many friends in similar situations in the past. Wainwright thought this sounded good; I leaned forward to my daughter and said, “To Mayer Street, you know, where Turrini stayed.” She nodded and took a wrong turn a moment later as though following my directions, taking us further into the third district, farther away from the city instead of toward it. No matter how much I tried to direct her and get her back onto the right route, she always did the opposite of what I asked. The day continued, and we continued to get farther and farther from Mayer Street and the Hotel Praterstern. We were already in Simmering and nearing the edge of the city. I apologized to Wainwright, telling him my daughter was actually a first-rate driver, but she didn’t really have her license yet, and was still learning how to navigate. I tried to joke with him: “Women!—am I right? Of course, no one knows that better than you! But it’s not so bad. We just have to turn left at the next intersection, and then…left!” I yelled, but my daughter would let nothing deter her and turned right. We passed a sign that indicated we’d left Vienna. My desperation grew. I stammered more excuses, but Wainwright smiled at everything, calmly saying that it was no problem, really, that he had plenty of time—but I knew that he didn’t. His politeness was fake. The translation rights were lost.

  EXECUTION 1

  Nazis ruled the land, but not historical Nazis, operatic Nazis, in colorful uniforms, dripping with medals. Still—they were dangerous. My mother and I were sentenced to death by crucifixion without even being given a reason and were led immediately by a former school friend who’d joined up with these Nazis and whose duty it was to guard us to the place of execution in Prater Park at the foot of Constantine Hill, not far from the children’s choo-choo. While I discussed the possibility of a pardon with our guard, who—if you ignored his inclination to obey orders without question—was very nice, proper, even friendly in dealing with us, my mother was being killed, nailed like Christ to a cross. Meanwhile, the head executioner was getting the ropes ready to tie me to my cross—I’d only just noticed him, and was suddenly convinced that he was the man responsible for our being denounced. But this wasn’t really the time to think about assigning blame. I wanted to save myself at least, so I shoved our guard to the side with the strength of someone who has nothing left to lose, running as fast as I could down the park’s main path leading away from the city…but as is usually the case in such situations, I didn’t come out ahead. My school friend and the other Nazis who had taken up the pursuit didn’t even make the effort to run after me—they simply walked at a leisurely pace, smoking, carrying on pleasant conversations, even doubling over with laughter on occasion, all without losing ground.

  EXECUTION 2

  Again I was condemned to death, this time by the noose, and not with my mother but by her. True, the death penalty had been abolished, de jure, but just as one can still find traveling knife-grinders, we also had traveling hangmen who were tol
erated by the authorities and went door to door taking on execution contracts and carrying them out for a moderate fee.

  One came to S—once a year and set up his gallows in front of the train station. I’d known about my mother’s condemning me for a long time now, but I’d never taken her threats seriously, reacting cynically and arrogantly whenever it was brought up. Now that it was clear to me she’d been serious, a great terror came over me. I searched my conscience, trying to figure out what wrong I could have done, but I couldn’t think of a single thing—except perhaps one tiny, entirely meaningless act, not even an act, really, but an omission with regard to my mother, which I guess she’d never managed to forgive me for. I screamed, I begged. It wasn’t like her to be so inhuman, but she didn’t react, so my father—who admittedly had no say in the matter—tried to comfort me, and likewise tried by way of alluding to the much greater suffering that would befall my mother and indeed the entire family thanks to this unfortunate but nonetheless necessary event, tried to lead me to a serene and dignified acceptance of the inevitable. What was my death, really, compared to the suffering of those who had to condemn me, he asked. And even this suffering was nothing compared to the suffering of other townspeople, for instance the family of my old principal. He’d had to condemn all three of his children. All three must be lying in front of the train station already hanged. Their parents would now have to collect all three and bury them—what agony!

  My struggling was useless; I was put in a car with my mother at the wheel. My father sat in the passenger seat. We took the short way to the train station. There was no way out. Nevertheless, I talked to them both, trying to show them how trivial my offense was—and it was—pointing out that no law or punishment existed for what I’d done, or, better, what I hadn’t done, but neither reacted. So, as a last attempt, I screamed at the two: “If you really do this, if you really allow my execution, then you’re both murderers, murderers!” Then my mother slowly turned toward me, without braking the car or deviating from our route, looking at me seriously, wordlessly, but with an expression on her face that seemed to say: “That is the most useless, the most laughable of all arguments, and you ought to know this better than anyone.”

  LOVER

  I slept with a young, petite, black-haired woman I’d just met for the first time, but who I knew was friends with E., my wife, and I didn’t really do a good job of it. It was awkward for me, doubly awkward: after all, what’s the point of cheating on your wife in order to fail as a lover? Covering up my embarrassment, I apologized to my partner. I said I’d probably had too much to drink, had a bad day, etc. I asked only, trying to joke with her, that she not feel too bad on my account the next time she talked to E. To which she replied very seriously that this wouldn’t be necessary. E. knew everything. She was E. Confused, I looked at her closely. No, she was lying. She wasn’t E. She didn’t bear the least resemblance to my wife. I told her that and she laughed and said it all made sense now. I really didn’t know anything at all about women. Of course she wasn’t E., but she, like every woman, was not only herself but simultaneously every other woman, and thus E. as well. “So, all the women in the world know about us?” I asked. And she nodded, as though at something entirely self-evident.

  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY DUSTIN LOVETT

  [BELGIUM: DUTCH]

  PETER TERRIN

  FROM “The Murderer”

  WITH THANKS TO ALEXANDER VERBRUGGHE FOR HIS SPECIAL “MEASURE”

  Ferdinand found himself back in his neighbor’s house. He held tight to his axe, a tool he’d used to chop kindling years and years ago. Of course, it had been ages since he’d last seen the thing. It had probably been stuck in the cellar sixteen years back when they’d still lived near the city. But now it rested naturally in his fist and even felt like an extension of his arm. This had allowed him to split his neighbor’s head quite efficiently.

  The young man, poorly dressed as always, lay at his feet. Blood still flowed from the wound that had parted the man’s greasy hair. Ferdinand, brow wrinkled in disgust, stepped back when the dark liquid began to creep too near his leather shoes. The music was still pumping through the computer’s speakers. Ferdinand walked to the corner of the living room and used the axe to hack the small machine to bits. The sudden absence of noise buzzed in his ears. He remembered how easy it had been to murder his neighbor. The only physical effort required had been prying the axe, which was still razor-sharp, out of the dead man’s skull afterward. You always imagine things will be harder than they actually are, he thought. It’s no different from slicing into a roast, as long as you use the right tool.

  He tugged on the blinds and daylight flooded the lived-in room. Ferdinand glanced through the slats at the street. Could it be that no one else had noticed the sudden cessation of pounding noise? Now and then he’d heard someone besides himself yelling at the shit who used to live here. The police had bigger fish to fry, however, since the government had instituted the New Measures; little things like noise complaints didn’t really concern them anymore. But none of the other neighbors were on the street, confused in the new silence. No one and nothing was showing any sign of relief that the music had finally stopped.

  Ferdinand adjusted the blinds again so that the room was hidden from prying eyes, though not from the light. Everything in this house was a mess, and the new silence was like a fresh wind blowing through it. The young man who lived there had claimed to be an artist, the romantic type, Ferdinand remembered. The sort of person who’ll never ever produce anything of value, who wallows in laziness and vanity, who thinks he’s been chosen for important things and spends his life waiting for some divine stroke of inspiration. In the meantime, though, this particular artist had played his music at a deafening volume, the music of his idols—all of whom had died young, all of whom had probably had more raw vitality in their little fingers than this so-called artist ever dreamed of. Even a beautiful summer evening like this one couldn’t change the facts. Ferdinand’s neighbor had lacked the will to kill himself, and likewise the talent to make his own death even the least bit interesting.

  In the beginning, Ferdinand had asked him politely to turn the volume down. The neighbor had simply looked down his nose and closed his door without a word. He didn’t turn the volume down. Over the course of a few months, Ferdinand formed a clear resolution concerning the young man. He’d heard the house tremble as the artist descended his stairs to open the front door. The smell of old carpet had hit Ferdinand full in the face.

  The house had been a gift from the artist’s father, an entrepreneur who sold cheap plastics. Along with the house, the young man also received a monthly allowance enabling him to pursue his sublime insights from within an oasis of financial security. Thank God the artist always slept late. But as soon as he tumbled down those stairs in the early afternoon, the bass started up, along with those nonsensical lyrics—and the drums. For the rest of the day, through the evening and a good part of the night, the noise penetrated every corner of Ferdinand’s house. He sat on his sofa and contemplated the walls centimeter by centimeter—the walls that were the boundaries of his home, walls that had been stolen from him by the arrogance of the nonentity next door. When Ferdinand opened his refrigerator, everything there—from the butter to the milk—seemed to have been curdled by the noise. He could never be alone in the bathroom. He could hardly bear the thought of his neighbor’s repulsive appearance. Of course, thanks to his disinterest in personal hygiene, the artist usually had a terrible cough—but though Ferdinand listened hopefully to his every spasm, these attacks had never, sadly, proven fatal.