Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Just to put up a little resistance I insisted that things might have happened a bit differently. Rudi, it seems, hid the gift because he frequently recalled the good times he had shared with Teresa in the cellar of her father’s tavern and remained sentimentally attached to his former life in Prague. And today it had gotten here just like most of the other stuff at the Markale Market in the summer of 1992. And Teresa? Alma asked. What happened to her? Teresa quit working in the tavern and, as early as 1915, ran off with the very first officer ranked higher than corporal who showed up in her life, having decided to live a nomadic existence with a regiment whose movements were dictated by fragile wartime fortune. It goes without saying that her father was hopelessly depressed by all this.

  We laughed at the fates we had stitched together in our imaginations. In any case we had allowed our heroes to remain alive. That much was cause for celebration. We were in an excellent mood. I asked if she wanted the watch.

  “Then you’d have to change the inscription,” she said. “If you really did give me the watch, what would you put on the inside?”

  “Dear Alma: I’m not sure I can wait for the end of the war. Your R., Sarajevo, summer 1992,” I said quickly, as if I’d been waiting for the chance.

  I stared at her, waiting for her answer. Surprised, she tried to guess from my expression just how much of what I’d just said was premeditated. Then she turned her head and continued on as if she hadn’t heard me at all, as if the end of our conversation hadn’t happened. She looked left and right, honestly fascinated by all the goods on offer, beginning short conversations with the sellers, asking about prices, and slowly moving away from me. I’ll never forget how she walked through that crowded wartime market. There was no sign that she’d grasped any of what I’d said. I stood like a statue with the watch in my hand. Finally she turned around and waved me on. Nothing had happened. Our walk could continue. I understood the game. But somehow in the meantime the price of the watch had mysteriously risen from ten to twenty marks. Clearly the seller had been following our conversation. When he saw my surprise, he answered with a shrug of his shoulders: wartime economy, you shouldn’t invest any emotion in things. I didn’t buy it. In the end, only Teresa and Rudi could have understood that story about coming close and moving apart—in short, everything that love should be in time of war.

  TRANSLATED FROM CROATIAN BY ANDREW WACHTEL

  [BULGARIA]

  GEORGI GOSPODINOV

  And All Turned Moon

  Castor P. was going out to die. He had been living for seventy-nine years and three months and didn’t see any point in going on. There was no tragedy or self-pity in his decision. His grandfather had died at seventy-nine, and his father too had departed life before turning eighty; Castor found this age respectable, a natural span for a human being who hadn’t tampered with his genes.

  He had to settle a few formalities. Death makes us get organized, he thought, as he walked towards the Central Office of Last Wishes, the Department for the Finalization of Earthly Existence. “Last Wishes” sounded like “Last call!,” as in a bar. Once upon a time, people could just lie down and die, he thought with a touch of sadness. Now even death had been formalized. Another fifty-five years on Earth were due to him. His insurance was in order and it provided against death before his one hundred and twenty-fifth birthday. That was the official upper limit—though, off the record, there were plenty of rumors to the effect that VIPs and wealthy space bankers were buying themselves up to three hundred years or more.

  Castor was entitled to renounce the remainder of years due to him; he only had to submit an application in person, confirm it a couple of months later, and then have the exact date of his death arranged.

  It was now precisely three months since he had submitted his first application. The only request he had made to the Department was that they send a message to his son, letting him know about his decision. “Do you have other close relatives in our galaxy? We could send them messages as well. Your insurance covers it all.” “No, I don’t have any other relatives in…the galaxy,” he had replied. Language is a dangerous thing. Everybody was talking in these cosmic terms. It made him feel queasy. It was one thing not to have anyone on Earth, and quite another to know you were alone in the entire galaxy.

  He’d had to record the message himself. It took less than a minute. He thought up the words in advance and had even decided on the proper tone. And yet, his treacherous voice had risen right at the end: “I think it’s time. Please come to say good-bye.” There was no need for a long message. The girl in the Office helped him fill out the paperwork. The recipient’s location was too distant even for the new means of communication: the sub-orbit of a planet whose coordinates Castor P. had never been able to memorize. “Out in the middle of nowhere,” he said, in the idiom of the previous century, already unintelligible to the young girl. She smiled kindly and answered that the fastest transmission would reach the addressee in about two weeks. My father’s letters used to arrive faster than that, Castor smiled—in just a week or so.

  Actually, he had planned everything in advance. Two weeks for the telegram or whatever they called it to reach his son, a week for his son to be furious that his old man had apparently lost his mind. Another week during which his anger would subside and he’d start hesitating. Then the fifth week of decision. Two more weeks for him to request an emergency leave, sort things out before his trip, and then finally reach Earth—in almost a month and a half.

  But the three months had passed, and there was no sign of his son yet. Castor P. had been checking with the Department daily over the past several days, but the amiable employee just went on shrugging her bony, girlish shoulders as sympathetically as ever.

  Today was Castor P.’s last day. He had another few hours to roam the streets of the city. It should have been spring, according to the calendar. And indeed, the chestnut trees were topped like cream cakes. White acacias were swaying in the wind. Green flooded the streets. But it was nothing like the springtimes he remembered. Lavish though the blossoms were, they had no scent. Castor P. still remembered the way things used to smell—and he remembered too all his unsuccessful attempts to describe the scent of acacia to his son, born in a world without odors. There’s no way, however, to describe a smell without comparing it to another. Yes, acacia smells like lilac, though it’s more delicate—but lilacs don’t have a smell anymore either. Nor were there any bees hovering around the blossoms. It had been a long time since biological bees had become extinct. They had started vanishing mysteriously forty years ago. Some people believed that cell phone transmissions had confused the bees’ own means of communication; others said it was a new, aggressive virus. The extinction of the bees was yet another sign that things were going wrong. Technology was developing faster and faster, but it was still limited in the ways it could patch up the damage it had already caused. The attempts at a new global artificial pollination system, and, indeed, the gene modification of common houseflies in an attempt to turn them into a new species of bee, were already heading for total catastrophe—thus opening up new chinks in the chain.

  Castor P. had spent a lifetime trying to fight against these insane projects. Early in his youth, at the beginning of the century, he had started work at the biggest European telescope of the time—forty-two meters in diameter. In distant 2011, he had even discovered the smallest black hole in the universe. Until recently, he had kept the newspaper clippings about his success, with all their sensational headlines. There was a certain irony about using the biggest telescope in the European Union to discover the smallest black hole. Then he decided the job was too uneventful and slow. He joined a radical group of “green” scientists. They were trying to prove that biofuels were not an alternative energy source. They were the first to issue warnings that the extinction of the bees would bring about a biocenotic apocalypse. Nobody took any notice of them.

  He sat in the shade of a silicon acacia. Everything around him confirmed the serie
s of failures that characterized his life. The world was developing in a direction contrary to all he had hoped for. He looked up: even the sky looked as though it had been ineptly sewn up after surgery. The enormous yellow spots came from unsuccessful attempts to patch up the holes in the ozone layer by means of injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere. That was the last battle he had lost, his last effort to take up arms, proving that the ozone layer would get even thinner after this kind of treatment. Now he knew he had been right, and that made him even more miserable.

  It was time. He only had another three hours remaining on Earth. If he was going to write any farewell letters, it had to be now. Of course, no one had been writing on paper for years. It had been smart of him to put aside a pencil and unused pad. He had purposely saved this job, or rather ritual, until the last minute. He still hoped his son might arrive.

  He decided to start with a letter to his father. He was more than fifty years overdue to give his father a proper good-bye. Castor hesitated about the form of address, then simply wrote, “Dad.”

  The scratching of the hard graphite against the paper delighted him. And suddenly the words started flowing, as if they’d always been waiting for a pencil and some paper to let them out. He told his father how the world had developed and how happy he should be that he had managed to avoid seeing it all. His father had been one of the last true gardeners; he had loved talking to his trees. He’d had one tone of voice for the apple and cherry trees, another for the pear and walnut. He would go to his beehives without a mask, entirely calm, and talk to his bees as well. What was happening now would have been the end of his personal world. “Dad,” Castor P. wrote, “I couldn’t save the garden; the bees are gone, but the old walnut tree is still alive.” At last he wrote that he had decided (here he groped for the right word for a long time)…to go. “Everything’s okay, don’t worry. My son even came back,” wrote Castor P., “unlike me, who didn’t manage to return for your final hours. Forgive me. Yours, Castor. P.S. Soon we’ll be able to meet and talk as long as we like. Unless they’ve destroyed the hereafter too…”

  Castor felt relieved: he realized that he’d spent longer writing this letter than he’d ever spent talking to his father while he was alive.

  The letter to his son was more difficult to start. He tried again and again, tore up the page, then started over from the beginning. He didn’t want any pain or grief in it. Eventually he settled on the following, surprising even himself: “Since I’ve failed in everything I’ve ever attempted, I took to fractals and chaos theory over the past few years. I observed the clouds and the rivers, trees and ferns, as long as there were any to see. Through the geometry of nature, I wanted to see how the little that has survived here on Earth might develop. You know that I, unlike yourself, have never quite believed in space, or its colonization. It feels draughty, dark, and cold. But then it’s already the same here. What my grandfather and father grew in their gardens—what I’m trying to describe—is gone now. And the geometry of nature makes no sense without it. This might make you angry, but I still think that we were too reckless rushing into outer space. We weren’t quite ready. Long ago, when the Bedouins were roaming the deserts, they used to take frequent rests, not only to rest their camels, but so that their souls would have time to catch up. The soul’s speed is different, you see. Just think how many lost and late souls there are who’ve missed the caravan, still roaming through the desert of space. I can hear them weeping. I lie back at night and watch the moon—where I’ll be in a couple of hours. Do you know what the basic substance of space is? What it’s made of? It’s made of loneliness. And loneliness is volatile—it expands to fill the area around it.

  “My grandfather, your great-grandfather, lived in a house he built himself, worked in his garden, and the farthest he ever got was the forest near his village—so his loneliness was only as big as his house and his small garden. My father’s loneliness was the size of the apartment and the city he moved to. My grandfather used to say that my dad had ‘run away’ to the city. Then I ‘ran away’ to another country, and now you yourself have run away to somewhere in space. I’ve been thinking tonight about what your loneliness is like: does it have the dimensions of the universe itself? Is it lighter and more rarefied? What is its mass? How does gravity affect it?

  “In the past, loneliness used to be more concentrated—smaller. You could tame it, pet it like a cat. Now I find it impossible to cope with its new, cosmic proportions. Now I’ll never be able to finish my ‘Treatise on the Fractal Geometry of Loneliness’: I can’t put it all into an equation, can’t figure it out…Now that I’ve grown old, you know, I’ve started complaining, turning into my father and my grandfather. And it’s time I went back to them. Don’t hate yourself for having come too late; it will be enough for me to know that you are on your way.

  “Oh, and before I forget—when you come to collect these letters from the Department, pay attention to the nice girl who’ll deliver them to you. Talk to her; ask her out for a drink in my memory. We knew each other—she’s a good, decent person.”

  Castor P. caressed the closely written sheet with his hand and folded it. He had said farewell to all the people he cared about in the universe. He walked to the Office to leave the letters. He was watching the people streaming in the opposite direction in the early evening—aloof. He walked past a few Angelina Jolies and Brad Pitts who had already started ageing, rapidly and irreparably. Cheap clones—probably pirate versions of cells from doubles, grown to indulge other people’s whims. And now, all their lives, they were condemned to wear these bodies that had gone out of fashion years ago. Thank God, the girl at the Department simply looked like herself. Before going in, Castor P. stood outside a while—watching, from the corner of his eye, the discrete space capsule that would soon take him to the new cemetery on the Moon.

  As she was taking his farewell letters, the girl suddenly embraced him for a second. That was certainly against the rules.

  “He’s definitely going to come, one of these days,” said Castor P., trying not to burst into tears like a child, now that it was time.

  “I know,” said the girl.

  Dusk was beginning to fall, and now the soft phosphorescent glow Castor P. had known so well ever since he was a child was getting closer and closer. And all turned moon.

  TRANSLATED FROM BULGARIAN BY EVGENIA PANCHEVA

  [CROATIA]

  NEVEN UŠUMOVI

  Vereš

  1.

  After a certain length of time—or would it be better to say: uncertain?—I began wasting hours and hours on questions such as: “Budapester,” “Budian,” or “Pester”? That is, what’s the correct name for these people around me, my temporary fellow citizens? This problem acquired undreamed-of dimensions when I set off from Déak Square (i.e., in Pest) to the other side of the Danube, to the Déli railway station. Because: which station is it where Pesters get out but Budians get in? Is it before or after crossing over/under the Danube?

  What I mean is, George Soros’s money had never been so pointlessly wasted! Yes, I completed all my course assignments enthusiastically, I perfected my English until it was intuitive; but when I went outside, into the street, when I plunged breathlessly into the murky depths of Hungarian babble, I shriveled up and shrank to the size of a question mark: Budian or Pester? Pest is beautiful, I wrote on the postcards I sent home. The Danube is wide, and Gellért Hill is high. After that I stopped sending postcards. I became a Pester. A Budason! Luckily, with the payments from my scholarship arriving regularly, and with my pre-secured accommodations, my only real existential concern was in choosing a cheap but decent-quality menu (as though everything advertised in the big city wasn’t automatically both cheap and of decent quality!).

  Of all the cafeteria-style restaurants in town, I quickly settled for and became most used to the Chinese ones. The question of whether I would go to the Kínai fal, the Kínai nátha, the Shangai, or the Aranysárkány was entirely a matter of
my energy level and how much time I wanted to spend walking. The food tasted the same everywhere: the slight sweetness of the rice, the soy sauce, the mixed eggs and boiled carrots all went very well with the—to say the least, vague—taste of the tofu. Why, that’s me, I would say to myself at my worst moments—an unbearably vapid sweetness.

  Nevertheless, with time it was the Aranysárkány (The Golden Dragon) that came out on top. That is, one day as I waited my turn for my favorite meal of rice with eggs, tofu, and pickled bamboo shoots, I heard a familiar swear word, a curse in my own language. I turned and saw a young man whom I had thought till now to be one hundred percent Hungarian stringing together the most varied possible expletives in Croatian while staring unblinkingly at the ceiling! I supposed that this was his way of trying to alleviate some—to me invisible, but nonetheless concrete—pain.

  “What’s the problem, friend?” I called to him.

  And, as though our Croatian in the middle of Pest was the most normal thing in the world, he replied, his gaze still fixed on the ceiling, “Oh, I’ve just poured boiling Szechuan soup over my shoes, that’s all. Fuck, I might as well have stuck them in the oven!”

  A door at the back of the restaurant opened, and the young man—his name was Vereš, as I would soon discover—disappeared into the darkness.

  2.

  I usually went to the Aranysárkány for lunch, around two o’clock. I didn’t get in line immediately, but put my backpack with my notes and books on the first free table in the small back room, where there were four tables set with four chairs each. There would always be two employees taking turns working the counter: apart from one Chinese person, there was usually an Indian girl working there, or else our own Vereš.