“Verdammte Schwule! Verdammte Schwule!* Open up!”
Well, the Arab managed to get away (without paying!), but Didi was grabbed by the even fatter and more repulsive-looking guard. Without so much as a how-do-you-do, he lands his fist in her face and blood begins flowing. She falls on the floor, on the tiles. The guard grabs her by the collar, screams something about the police, then throws her a bucket, a mop, and a rag. Didi tries to escape, but the fucker grabs her by the ear and holds her with all his strength. He keeps holding her by her tiny ear, like she was a schoolboy. She was afraid she’d never escape, our Didi—she’d end up as cheap labor, washing the floors. The guard cries “Polizei!” and “washrag!” in turn. It’s her choice. Eizer you gonna putzen zis whole parking lot for me right now, or I call ze police! Fucking faggot! Didi chose the rag. Bawling to high heaven, hungry and filthy as she was, she had to clean the entire multilevel garage, and then she had to clean the toilet where she’d been caught, the cause of everything. Finally she walked out into the night, with nothing, wiped out. That’s what they call it. She lifted her head and noticed an enormous luxury hotel in front of her. Hilton or Carlton. Snow was falling. Only one room had a light on in it. She’d seen her share of hotels like that with clients, their laptop computers loading on their king-size beds, Chanel perfume in the bathroom, and room service bringing up champagne on silver carts. The light went out, and Didi thought to herself in Slovak how unjust it was that so many rooms should go to waste, stay empty all night, while she was freezing and had nowhere to sleep.
How many times had I told her:
“Didi, drop it. This job is for people with the steel nerves. Who learn Deutsch, collect the Geld, and fuck men from the Mercedes and the underground parkings! But not here—you must to go to München, to Zürich! No bleiben here! Nicht gut, here kein Geschäft,* Didi. You will be surprised if I say you the many clients I have! Because I know how it is done! I even make little CDs mit the photos of me! Ponimaesh?† You understand, little tart, Milan, ptishku?”‡
Now, at five in the morning, in front of the shop with the chocolate composers, my words must have been drifting through her head like flakes of snow. That night, Didi realized that the entire West was like an electric amusement park wired on high-voltage. The little lights kept blinking regardless, whether you were having fun or biting the dust in the metro, dear Milan, you lovely, you beautiful angel. Perfectly indifferent. Forever happy. As long as the plug stays in its socket. And Didi was a hair’s breadth from turning into a Socialist that night.
But the lawyer. He took pity on Milan. He locked him in at home for the whole day and went to work. Didi had to do the kitchen, and all the other work, dust off the computers…Bored, running the vacuum, digging through wardrobes stuffed with boring suits on hangers wrapped in plastic. Eventually she started to regret that she’d ever run away from home and come to Vienna, where she thought she’d be quaffing champagne every night, where the streets were supposed to be full of hot boys and fast cars. In the meantime, there was Jürgen, this old, balding attorney, who got upset over everything, shouting and all—when someone wipes his ass with chamomile-scented cotton pads, how normal is that? Didi looked suspiciously at all the unfamiliar contraptions. What, for instance, was that enormous toothbrush plugged into the socket for? It looked like it was for cleaning bottles, but it had some kind of setup on the handle, buttons, nerozumiem tomu.* What a laugh that “toothbrush” got when she turned it on! It was a vibrator, for heaven’s sake!
Or one time she washed her hair with some shampoo she found in the bathroom, and Jürgen threw a shit fit because it was a special shampoo for gray hair—his—and was very, very expensive, and she absolutely must stay away from it. And once he beat her to a pulp, for no reason at all! That too! He’d told her countless times not to use the metal spatula when scrambling eggs in the Calphalon pan, she needed to use a wooden spoon! So what, big deal…Because wherever the coating gets scratched off, the pan will get burned. Didi really got it for that scratched pan. That’s when she realized that the first commandment of the urban professional middle class was: “Thou shalt not use metal utensils on Calphalon, only wood!” And these commandments had been revealed to the urban professional middle class by their Yuppie god, scratched into the surface of two Calphalon frying pans…
Well, eventually Didi rebelled. She began doing things wrong intentionally, just to spite him: she used his shampoo, moved his underwear around in the wardrobe, and—although he’d expressly forbidden her to—she called up Edwin, her friend from the good old days, her American…And she told him that she was going to slip out and visit him that evening, told him to wait. And Edwin once again explained to her how to get there on the U-Bahn, because Didi didn’t really understand how it worked. She waited until evening. That’s when she had her daily walk, when she could be alone for one hour outside the house. But if she didn’t come back at the agreed-upon time, she’d have all hell to pay. Edwin was a playboy of the first degree. Tall and slender, hair dyed blond, cowboy boots, jeans, chewing gum, and poppers, which were already illegal then and you could only find in porn shops labeled as “CD-washing fluid.” He waited for her near Hammergasse and took her to his place; then, an hour later, he sent her off. Still dazed from the poppers, Didi bounded down the stairs and bashed her head against a completely transparent pane of glass. When she came to, she was in the vestibule. The glass doors to the stairs had snapped shut behind her automatically; the exterior door was still in front of her, and it turned out to be locked. She tried to open the glass doors, but they were equipped with an intercom. What the hell was Edwin’s last name, what floor was he on? She hadn’t paid attention when they went in—how was she supposed to know she was going to need that information later? So there she was, trapped in just a few square feet and with time ticking away. Jürgen was probably already home, bitching her out in her absence. And probably no one would come through the vestibule before morning, because all the Austrian yuppies had gone to bed hours earlier. She rang one of the buzzers for the first floor; a woman answered. But Didi’s German wasn’t the best…She tried to explain her situation in the same language she spoke with me, a mix of Slovak, German, Russian, and Papiamentu, but the voice started shouting something about the police, so Didi stopped. She made herself at home on the stone bench and thought about how everyone in Vienna, really everyone in that rotten city, lived in old buildings…
When she got home, Jürgen refused to let her in. He’d thrown all her clothes out the front door. In the end, though, Didi whined so much that he gave in and let her sleep there until morning; he was afraid of the neighbors, and Milan kept sobbing louder and louder. But he wouldn’t let her sleep in his bed; he told her to sleep on the floor. That night Didi slipped into the bathroom, took the blade out of his safety razor, and…that’s how she got those cuts on her wrists.
TRANSLATED FROM POLISH BY W. MARTIN
[PORTUGAL]
VALTER HUGO MÃE
dona malva and senhor josé ferreiro
dona malva had prayed so fervently that her dead husband would come back, she’d wished for this so passionately, that she started hearing voices coming from the attic one night. the voices seemed to be whispering, whispering words she couldn’t understand, words that floated down in dry spirals and then seemed to fall through the floor as guttural grunts.
dona malva ran through the house yelling and rosa woke up but couldn’t get to her feet. mom, mommy, why are you yelling. and dona malva, bitter, furious, said that the dead had entered the house and that they were coming to take rosa away. after that she took her own head in her hands and didn’t know what she was saying or doing. sometimes she said one thing and did the opposite. the dead are in the house because they want to return someone to me. it’s my husband, she said to herself, they’re calling me to the attic because of my husband, and rosa started crying, she refused to believe it, until the voices in the attic finally went quiet. after a few minutes, dona malva quiet
ly climbed the stairs, tears leaking down her face as from an old faucet. she couldn’t stop herself, though fear was tight around her chest, and every second seemed to bring her closer to death, closer to heaven, or better yet, closer to eternal hellfire.
dona malva had hardly grasped the handle of the attic door when the noises began again, sending her rushing back down the steps. the dead struck the walls of the attic with such force that tremors reverberated throughout the whole house. they were speaking again too. when rosa and dona malva realized this, they both went quiet and listened. one dry voice whispered incessantly, and to dona malva it seemed gentle, full of tenderness. it seemed to be saying, i’m your father, i’m your father. but how could she be sure? after death, it’s easy to impersonate anyone you want, even a woman or an innocent child. as the voice continued whispering and the dead went on striking the walls, dona malva and rosa struggled to give definitive shape and sense to the words, but they weren’t comprehensible, weren’t understandable, and they made no progress. perhaps the dead only persist in the shadows of the mind, hidden from the human eye. and perhaps they’d leave the house if no one there ever wanted the dead to return again.
but no. as the days passed, the voices in the attic were heard more and more often. eventually dona malva and rosa thought it quite normal to see the sun shining outside while listening to the dead banging on the attic walls. something would fall because of the vibrations and dona malva didn’t bother asking why. silently, with trembling hands, she’d put the fallen objects back into place. she knew of course that supernatural beings could cause things to fall. and sometimes objects would be hurled with such force that anyone passing by the house would jump in surprise. and on the third day, the walls began to weep. it’s the blood of the dead, dona malva said to herself, though their blood is only an exhalation of vapor, a fine curtain of water that evaporates as soon as it touches the walls. but the water didn’t evaporate. it seeped through the whole house, from the attic down to the rooms below. they pulled rosa’s bed away from the walls so that she wouldn’t have to smell or touch it. dona malva even opened the windows in the hope that fresh air would cause the blood of the dead to dry. i watched as she gathered flowers from our garden and placed them on the windowsill, trying to make the house more cheerful. but every hope eventually gave way before the relentless dead.
on the seventh day, someone saw the figure of the dead man on the roof. people came running, but only a few could actually make him out, the others strained their eyes but saw nothing. even dona malva went out into the square, rosa crying in terror at being left alone. no one thought to enter the house and keep the girl company. maybe they didn’t care, or were too afraid. but there, though only visible to a few, was the ghost of senhor josé ferreiro, larger than life, standing on the roof, terrible in the gathering wind. then the gathering wind gathered in a storm, and the rain chased everyone back into their homes.
it’s true that dona malva had wanted senhor josé to return. at the same time, she wasn’t sure if she was all that comfortable with the notion of being a wife to the undead. come to think of it, she wasn’t even sure what she’d really seen on the roof that night. there had been such confusion. although she could hardly rule out the possibility that rooftop apparitions were an entirely normal part of the process of a dead person returning to the living. all in all, she was at a loss, and even my grandfather, who was, at heart, an ignorant and thoughtless man, tried to do what he could to spare her any more pain. anyone who hears and sees things that aren’t there is probably a liar, he said, but someone who encourages that kind of insanity is even worse than whatever evil thing has possessed the liar in the first place. sometimes when dona malva went out, we’d all stop whatever we were doing and crane our necks toward the street to see the crazy woman as she passed. eventually my grandmother changed the kitchen curtains for a darker linen. that way we wouldn’t have to see what was going on in the neighboring garden. that way, we wouldn’t have to think so much about the threat next door.
a short time later, senhor josé ferreiro appeared in the kitchen, a phantom giving off a weak and intermittent light. he sat down at the table and didn’t move or speak. dona malva watched him in the hope that he would eventually give her some sign or other, but he remained perfectly still. he was like a strange refraction of light, a dull reflection of what he’d been in life, or perhaps a television channel only partly tuned-in. rosa called for her mother and her mother ignored her. during this time, no one in that house paid the slightest attention to other people. it seemed they’d become ghosts themselves. all the members of the household, senhor josé as well as the insane mother and daughter who could see him, no longer bothered acknowledging the presence of anyone else in the neighborhood.
word still spread, however, and neighbors crowded into dona malva’s house to see if senhor josé really was sitting at the kitchen table. no one else besides an old widow could see him. most people just caught a strong scent of mold coming from the shadows. no weak refraction of light, they thought, no nothing. they told themselves that the old widow who’d corroborated senhor josé’s presence was probably just overtired, and while they wouldn’t rule out the possibility that something strange was going on, it certainly wasn’t that senhor josé ferreiro, they said, was back from the dead and sitting at his kitchen table as though waiting for his supper. after that, dona malva longed for someone to see him on the roof again, like they’d seen him the first time, looking like a rooster crowing at the night. that’s right, thought dona malva, he looked like a rooster, crowing at the night instead of the day, because it stands to reason that night is like day to the dead. though even then not everyone could see him. i certainly didn’t.
i went into rosa’s room and sat down on her bed which had been pulled into the middle of the room, away from the walls whose colors had started to blend and run. it’s vapor from the attic, she told me. my body is disappearing. my mother will find me evaporating too, i’m going to disappear forever. when we die, i said to her, we become nothing. it’s your imagination. she sat up so abruptly it shook the bed. my father is sitting at our kitchen table and one day he’s going to speak and he’s going to make everyone understand him.
the two crazy people in the house were due to get a few more surprises. one night dona malva went to bed late. she’d been begging senhor josé ferreiro to say something to her or at least to silence the other voices still coming from the attic. suddenly she heard the sizzle of something burning and thought the house was on fire. she got up and looked around but nothing seemed wrong. just the noise. the only other thing out of the ordinary was that the ghost of senhor josé had moved. he appeared right in front of her, and dona malva thought she was going to die of fright, but instead fell into a profound sleep. she dreamed that the voices had deepened, that they surrounded her, thick, tangible, capable of swallowing a person whole. she sank into the voices and then there was nothing but the sensation of being enfolded by them, suspended within them. rosa is screaming, she thought, and the voices are entering me. all at once, she woke up with her stomach enormous, bloated. she woke up pregnant, in the final weeks, needing to throw up.
the next day, my grandmother visited dona malva’s house and didn’t touch anything. dona malva was weeping in terror, and my grandmother waited to see how the lunatic was going to react to her famous empty chair today. that’s all we saw, an empty chair. but dona malva was overcome, begging, josé josé, tell me what you want from me, what are you doing to me, and it’s true that dona malva’s skirts were giving off a little smoke, smoke that writhed downward and disappeared before reaching the floor. of course, my grandmother didn’t want to believe that a ghost could get a woman pregnant, or that a woman could have spirits leaking out of her body like excess gas. dona malva put her hands on her stomach and stumbled to the front of her house. i myself went into their house then and made my way slowly and fearfully toward the kitchen, determined to prove to myself that senhor josé ferreiro didn�
�t exist. though it was getting harder and harder to know what to believe. as rosa said, if her father had returned and gotten her mother pregnant, who else could it be in her mother’s stomach right now. i saw dona malva at the end of the hall surrounded by my grandmother and some other women now and i imagined senhor josé ferreiro bursting out of her gut so that he could live again and buy himself nice things. that was the sort of nonsense filling my head. it was hard to keep oneself thinking sensible things when a ghost-birth was about to take place.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 25