Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  After mentioning the year, I realized that I wasn’t speaking my own words. They had come from a passage in the notebooks of Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, which, in turn, came from the first page of Pan—the book Emilia’s sister was holding in her hands when she was buried here in this town. I felt a sudden compulsion to tell the journalist about that girl. It would have been a truly personal impression and anecdote—from prior years. I glanced at the reporter but she was looking at the cameraman now and no longer smiling. Not feeling I was getting the kind of life-support I needed in that sort of situation, I choked up. Hoping to avoid the camera’s eyes, which from this distance seemed remarkably like the hollow in a tree, I crouched down. I touched the springy, emerald-green grass. I saw four legs belonging to two people, which now seemed as though they belonged to a single being. I could find neither a handful of hay nor any moss, nor even a tuft of some dry foliage. Then, hurriedly and without rising, I peeled the seal off the one-liter jar that was slipping from my grasp, stuck four fingers into the honey Emilija had given me—the honey that helped get her through autumn—scooped out a generous handful, and smeared it on the lens of the camera. (Exactly what the people of the ancient Far East would have done—telling their secrets to a tree whenever they needed to stifle what they knew in the darkness.)

  TRANSLATED FROM LITHUANIAN BY DARIUS JAMES ROSS

  [MACEDONIA]

  GOCE SMILEVSKI

  Fourteen Little Gustavs

  All his sons bore his name. When he died he left behind fourteen little Gustavs. Gustav Klimt had a face of a good-hearted man and the body of a warrior and he would sometimes get into fights with the male models in his studio; it was during one such fight that he accidentally broke his arm. Almost certainly the bed was a battleground for him, a place where pleasure and anger became indistinguishable—and, as the creation of his paintings advanced, large bruises sometimes appeared on the bodies of his female models. Even his paint wasn’t safe from attack—he would jab his brush into his palette and then swipe it over his canvas like the victor in a duel magnanimously granting a foe his life. If there was one word to sum up his existence, it would be “fight”: he fought the people who bought his paintings, the mediocre critics who misevaluated his art, and then the bankers, merchants, and workers whose wives hung around his studio. He won all his fights except one: the fight with his mother. His mother was determined not to let him leave the family home. Even though he could have bought a quarter of Vienna with the money he earned from selling his art, he went on living with her, staying to protect his sister Klara from his mother’s abuse and to listen to the offensive, familiar words, said over and over, until they reached number fourteen: “I heard a whore bore you a son!”

  It was the models who posed for him, the women he met at the receptions held at his patrons’ houses, the prematurely aged women who looked ten years older than they actually were and who cleaned his studio, it was these women who gave birth to his children, and all these children were male and they were all called Gustav and they all had different last names: their mother’s. The only woman he really loved never bore him a child; her name was Emilie Flöge. She saw his infidelities as his way of deceiving his mother and thus a way to remain faithful to her alone, and in her childlessness she didn’t see a cruel trick of nature but her determination not to split the love she felt toward the artist between the man and his child. For her, this relationship with Gustav was something holy, even back in 1891 when she was seventeen years old and the artist painted the portrait that her father ordered for her birthday, even when she found out that Gustav already had several sons, as the days went by in his studio while he was painting, even when she sometimes arrived there unannounced and found him between the legs of the ladies who were posing for him. This dedication continued even after she asked him to marry her and he responded that two people as free as they were didn’t need the formality of marriage and even after she asked him to move in with her and he replied that he needed to stay at Westbahn Street #36 to protect his sister from his mother—the same house where he remained even after his mother died in 1915 so that he could continue to take care of Klara. Emilie Flöge took all of this with faith and devotion, even when one after another of his sons continued to be born…It’s possible that her faith and devotion resulted from her realization that of all the women Gustav had slept with, she was the only one he loved. That same faith was in her eyes even when, in winter, at the beginning of 1918, he suffered a stroke and fell on the floor of his studio; he lies unconscious, she sits by his bed, and for the first time she’s looking at him not as her husband but as her child, she’s trying to wake him up and she talks to him not in the voice of a lover who’s been devoted to him since she was seventeen years old, not in the voice of a woman who had been seducing him for nearly three decades, but in the voice of a mother trying to comfort her own child in his silent pain, though her voice is different from his real mother’s voice, it’s a voice in which Emilie Flöge is trying to convince her child that everything is going to be all right, that all of this will pass, forgetting while she says these things that it’s she herself whom she would like to comfort with these words. And even after he dies, she goes on saying these things, and even after his body is removed from his bed, she goes on sitting by his bedside, she goes on staring at his pillow, at the sheets on which twenty-seven years have passed as though in a second, and indeed, she thinks, all those years passed by just like the single moment of her staring at the pillow and sheets and there’s no fear or desperation in her look, only a kind of shattered resignation, and it’s with this same look in her eyes that she will bid him farewell at his grave.

  And nothing that strayed into her field of vision after his death changed that look in her eyes. Her view of the world didn’t even change when the Nazis marched into Vienna in March 1938; what could have brought her back to life when her inner world had already languished? Yes, something in her cringed whenever she heard that a child had been murdered, that an old man had been beaten, that thousands had been put on trains and transported who knows where, but this feeling was fleeting, it only lasted a second or two, her terror a testament only to her continued presence among the living, after which her whole body resumed its usual languor.

  Sometimes she would try recreating his image in memory, and with her eyes closed she would build his image out of fourteen tiny children’s heads, fourteen children’s heads that—she presumed—all looked like Gustav had when he was a child; fourteen heads combining into one big head, Gustav’s head in profile, a turned-up nose, wide cheeks, large forehead, thinning hair, fourteen children’s heads like stones in a mosaic creating the image of Gustav Klimt in Emilie’s imagination…And yet, his image remained incomplete, there was still a space in it, room for one more child’s head, for one more son, for the fifteenth child, the one she was supposed to bear him.

  In 1907, on one of the hills in the western part of Vienna, an entire small town had sprung up with sixty separate buildings housing five thousand people. At the time, this was the world’s largest psychiatric clinic. The inscription above the entrance read: “Steinhof: Institution for the Cure and Care of Mental and Nervous Disorders.” A path that started at the entrance and led up to the top of the hill had patients’ pavilions on either side. Gardens and pine trees separated the pavilions. During the opening ceremony, the institution’s director said that Steinhof was going to put an end to the barbaric treatment of psychiatric disorders, and that from now on humane and scientific methods would be used for the treatment of patients with mental and nervous illnesses. The patients worked in the gardens around the pavilions, sculpted in clay, and prepared dramatic performances that they then performed in front of an audience in the small theater built inside Steinhof.

  In the spring of 1918, Klara Klimt’s name appeared on the list of the patients admitted to Steinhof. Klara was the eldest child of the gold engraver Ernst Klimt and his wife Anna. After her father died, Klara continued to live with h
er mother, brother, and one of her sisters. Her brother painted, and with the money he made from his art they lived modestly in their house on Westbahn Street #36. They continued living modestly even after Gustav’s paintings were no longer considered the work of a skillful artisan but started being recognized as “high art,” and when he could, it was said, have bought an entire district of Vienna with his earnings.

  Gustav Klimt never asked about his sons, the fourteen little Gustavs. For him, his sons were just the product of some old, long-completed act. His sister, however, went from one part of Vienna to the other, helping the mothers of fourteen Gustavs. Once she even went to the prison to plead for the release of a sixteen-year old Gustav who’d been arrested after injuring a peer in a fight. Every month, Klara went from home to home with the money she’d received from her brother, leaving some at each. When one of the children got sick, she took them to the doctor.

  After her brother’s death, Klara Klimt became silent and inert. When somebody asked her how she was, she wouldn’t answer. She lay in bed without speaking a word. Her sisters took her to Steinhof. When the eldest of fourteen Gustavs found out that Klara was in the hospital, he went to ask for permission for his brothers and he to visit their aunt.

  “Come on Wednesday,” said Dr. Mann, who numbered Klara Klimt among his patients. On Wednesday, fourteen little Gustavs showed up at Steinhof. Dr. Mann took them to the twelfth pavilion. They went through a long corridor with six doors, each an entrance to a large bedroom. They entered one of the bedrooms. There were more than ten beds, each with a woman patient lying in it—some of the women lay motionless, some mumbled while they tossed and turned, one woman had her arms and legs tied down. Toward the end of the room, on a bed in a corner, they found Klara. She was wearing a white nightgown. She was lying curled up on the bed, legs pressed together, knees beneath her chin, her feet pointing outward. Her arms were folded and pressed to her chest. She was staring at the wall. Fourteen little Gustavs stood by her bed. The eldest brother sat next to her.

  “Aunt Klara,” the eldest, seventeen-year-old Gustav said.

  Her expression didn’t change at the mention of her name, nor at the sound of a familiar voice. She continued breathing and blinking at even intervals. “We came to see you,” he continued. “We are all here. All fourteen of us.”

  Klara didn’t move. She went on staring at the wall. The youngest Gustav, who was four years old, walked up to Klara’s bed and stroked her hair. The eldest brother, the one who was sitting by her, put his hand on the back of her hand. Her fingers were curled up in her palm, forming a fist. But this was a loose fist, peaceful.

  A woman from the other part of the room started screaming. Others followed. One woman threatened to set them all on fire. Only Klara Klimt remained silent. The fourteen little Gustavs who stood around Klara’s bed thought that her silence was the loudest sound in the ward.

  The eldest brother turned to Dr. Mann:

  “Isn’t this too loud for her? Everybody’s screaming. She doesn’t make a sound…”

  Dr. Mann raised his index finger and wrote a “no” in the air, he then said “no” aloud a couple of times and continued:

  “Until now she’s been assigned to the quiet pavilion, with the patients who usually don’t speak unless spoken to. She spent several weeks there without saying a word. Silence isn’t good for her—it’s making her numb. She needs provocation. I think that the screams here will break her silence.”

  “Screaming like this can only force her further into silence,” the eldest brother said.

  “You are wrong,” said Dr. Mann.

  “It doesn’t matter whether I’m right or wrong. What’s important is that you stop torturing her by keeping her in the middle of all this screaming.”

  “I don’t think she considers this torture. Look at her face. When I first brought her here from the quiet pavilion, where she’d spent several weeks, she looked quite anxious. Now she radiates calmness.”

  And, indeed, Klara Klimt’s face had a corpse-like tranquility. Gustav Klimt’s sons looked at their aunt on the bed, curled up like a fetus, her face likewise as expressionless as an embryo’s. The youngest Gustav touched her feet, which were as cold as death. She continued staring at the white wall, breathing evenly.

  “Come on children,” said Dr. Mann. “You saw your aunt. It’s time for you to go home now.”

  And fourteen Gustavs started leaving, each to a different home. The youngest Gustav went back to the bed before going; he wanted to kiss his aunt, though she had her back turned to him and the bed was too high and he couldn’t reach her face. He went to the other side of the bed and kissed his aunt’s feet. Then he ran toward the exit to catch up with his brothers in the hall.

  TRANSLATED FROM MACEDONIAN BY ANA LUCIC

  [NETHERLANDS]

  STEPHAN ENTER

  Resistance

  Hans Jurgen Roelof Wiesveld is dead. I never even realized that that was his name. I knew him as Mr. Wiesveld, the man who, for three winter months, had taught me and eight other boys chess at the Brevendal Chess club, En Passant.

  I just happened to see his death notice one day: I would never have known, otherwise. It reminded me of the time I found myself back home in my attic bedroom after years of being away. In the twilight by the tilting window, broken-spined volumes of Karl May suddenly appeared beneath a pale layer of dust—and shoe boxes too, containing that sky-blue Märklin model train, those pieces of track, and the damaged signal-box-and-trees, once trod upon by my father’s giant foot. They had waited for me, motionless, breathing in that unmistakable wood scent to prove that nothing moves on, except for time.

  How long had it been since I’d last thought of Mr. Wiesveld? Decades. But now he’s back. Not as a corpse, nor as the sixty-seven-year-old that the dates on the death notice tell me he must have been—he’s there just as he was when I first saw him, when I was thirteen. He’s so very clear to me; once again I can see the way he moves, his stiff little gait. His thin voice is in my head, as well as his asthmatic cough. And yet there’s something else too: a sense of shame and regret. This is no ordinary memory. This is a splinter that’s been left.

  Every Saturday morning at half past nine, we would gather in a side room at Café Centraal, near the Old Church. Chessboards, double-faced clocks, and sturdy wooden boxes holding chess pieces were laid out on the tables, which were all pushed together. In the corner, on a tripod, a magnetic demonstration board was displayed like a painting on an easel. The room was deep and narrow, with a window high up on the street side and two matte-glass sliding doors leading to the barroom with its ethereally green billiard table and chestnut-brown bar, polished until it could serve as a mirror.

  I can remember the stale smell of the cigars smoked by the farmers on market day. I can hear how the sliding doors rattled discreetly as they were being opened. The only person who ever came in during our lessons, however, was Lina, the proprietor’s eighteen-year-old daughter—an unapproachable and mythical figure. She would serve glasses of cassis and Fanta and we would only be able to tear ourselves away and get back to chess tactics after her body had once more dissolved behind the rippled glass. I can see how the morning sun would pierce the stained net curtains in horizontal beams, and how the dagger-shaped leaves of the sansevieria intensified the glare; my eyes and mouth dry up as I recollect the fierce heat of those cumbersome, gurgling old radiators. But what I remember most is how good, how cared for, I felt. A delicate seed in a firm, hard husk.

  One December morning after we had all settled down to games of speed chess and tandem chess, a strange man emerged from between the sliding doors. He looked at us; we looked at him.

  “Good morning, boys,” he said. “My name is Mr. Wiesveld. I’m afraid Mr. Vink will be away for a while. I’m his replacement.” He laid his slim leather case on an empty table, mumbled, “Let me just get some coffee,” then nodded shyly and returned to the bar.

  We exchanged looks; a couple of us began to gi
ggle. This man would be replacing Mr. Vink? What a joke! Mr. Vink was a major in the army and everything a thirteen-year-old boy could imagine an officer to be: broadshouldered with incredibly hairy hands and a red, curling mustache. Above his caterpillar-like eyebrows was a deep groove set in a severe and permanent frown. But he was never severe to us: without his having to say a word, we would sit there attentively, as quiet as mice. Mr. Vink smelt distinctly of outdoors, of oak wood and sandy paths, as though he had only briefly interrupted his military exercises to teach us about chess, after which he’d return to maneuvers immediately. There was no doubt in our mind that he was unparalleled in his ability to jump from a parachute, fight, shoot, and kill the enemy.

  The new teacher came back; we went on playing. Only when he had finished his coffee and clinked his cup twice with a teaspoon did we bother looking up.

  “Mr. Vink has unexpectedly been dispatched to Lebanon,” he said in a soft, almost frail voice. “He’ll be returning in three months time. Until then you’re going to be stuck with me.” He ventured a smile but no one responded.

  “So where have you gotten up to? Have you finished Chess for Young People yet?”

  “Oh ages ago!” replied a familiar voice. “We’ve already got our kings diploma! Even the little kids have.”

  It was Jan Boot, the oldest of our group. He was fifteen, and would often come yawning into the Saturday morning class and claim with a smutty grin that he’d been to The Comet, the village disco, the night before, and that he’d really “painted the place red.” We were cowed by this, even though he spared us the details. Still, when he casually remarked one day that he’d “felt Lina up,” we laughed in his face.