Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  My problem was that the plot of the novel left no room whatsoever for “corrections” or “revisions.” Thus, I was deprived of all possible means whereby I could relieve my frustration. The structure of the novel, enslaved entirely to the number three from page one, rendered any intervention whatsoever utterly impossible. At one point I even seriously considered replacing the number three with another cardinal number, any cardinal number. Like thirteen for example, bringing in the concept of bad luck and all. But it wasn’t long before I realized this was impossible. Starting from scratch with the number thirteen (writing/shaping/creating thirteen chapters/narrative perspectives/characters)1 would have been a massively cumbersome undertaking, and the patient only had a couple of critical months left (to put it in medical terms) before Wohmann arrived. That’s when I really began to pick up on how much I loathed her. I hurled curses at the one and only author who had succeeded in screwing me over; the worst things I could think of. I can say now that The Number Pi: A Romance was the only novel I ever translated that truly remained faithful to the original. I had, I think, been outsmarted.

  TRANSLATED FROM TURKISH BY IDIL AYDOGAN AND AMY MARIE SPANGLER

  [SWITZERLAND]

  VERENA STEFAN

  Doe a Deer

  Until lions have their own historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters

  [AFRICAN SAYING]

  When you pass the runover deer in the car, crows start squawking. The deer lies up high on a snowbank, all four legs sticking up in the air at the edge of the road, right at the spot where I come out of the woods on my snowshoes. A doe. I trudge up to her and turn her over. One side is already torn up, an eye is missing. Tracks of coyote and fox lead up to and away from the animal in all directions.

  In the woods I’m illiterate. The cold preserves a script of paws, hooves, claws, of bellyfur, of tailhair which has brushed the surface layer of snow—stories of encounters, trysts, of the hunt and the chase—which I could read word for word, if I only knew how to decipher the signs. For this I need a book about animal tracks, and a bookstore, Paragraphe, perhaps, or Renaud-Bray, and the good luck to find a parking place in the snowy wastes of Montreal. And then for the book Traces d’animaux I also need French-German and German-English dictionaries, so I can study the signs of red fox, raccoon, skunk, porcupine, and compare their names in the three languages.

  Here is the spread wing of a partridge; there are raccoon footprints in the snow. I learned these latter tracks from the raccoons themselves; one afternoon they ran by the window, one after the other, three or four of them. I went out to study their prints, the toes sharp and filigreed, the paws dainty.

  Every day on my walk I read my way along the trees, past boughs that hang lower when snow has fallen, that shoot up again as soon as it melts, past the towering base of an uprooted pine, past a bend and over the frozen brook at the point where the ice will hold my weight. Under gleaming sunlight I follow the tracks of a coyote, always around midday and still with worried glances over my shoulder. Rose Ausländer’s voice in my ear: my mother was once a deah…the way she says deah in her Eastern accent.*

  Years ago, in a bookstore in Rimouski, on a February day when each foot step was carved out of white or graying snowheaps, snowwalls, snowdrifts, I read that, according to Rose Ausländer, the carp in Bukowina is silent in five languages. Elle disait d’ailleurs de cette région que la carpe s’y taisait en cinq langues. Rimouski lay desolate under snow, ice, and fog, five hundred kilometers northeast of Montreal on the great river, which was itself covered all the way to its center with ice floes and snowdrifts. I fell silent in four languages and learned snow.

  The mirrorcarp / in pepper aspic / was silent in five languages—so goes the poem, “Czernowitz: History in a Nutshell.”† It would have been silent in Ruthenish, Polish, Yiddish, and German. In Czernowitz it seems there were more bookstores than bakeries, the streets were swept with dried rose bouquets, and housepets bore the names of Greek gods.

  The deer at the edge of the road is more disassembled every day. First the internal organs disappear, then one leg after another. In the meantime, it gets covered by snow flung up by the snowplow. Then only two ears of fur can be seen sticking out of the snowdrift, and that only if you know the spot. When the snowcover sinks again, the animal has become even more hollow, more picked apart. Day after day I trudge over there and check to see how the cadaver has changed overnight. Piece by piece it is being incorporated into something else. I imagine the coyotes racing over here, the foxes too, one after the other. Do they come singly or all at once? Do they scramble to get to the kill, snarl? First rip up the animal, then tear everything edible out of it. Nothing stays behind, nothing is wasted, nothing is buried. Hooves, ears, eyes, there’s a use for everything.

  Do, a deer, a female deer goes through my head, and I try as I walk on to remember the lines that follow, the ones with which English-speaking schoolchildren here learn the scales, a children’s rhyme that’s not in my blood, do, a deer, a female deer, re, a drop of golden sun, mi, a name I call myself, fa, a long long way to run, while I think about scripts in time and space, about footsteps and tracks that get covered over again, with snow or with sand. Recently I’ve felt the urge to improve my French and I watch the evening news on a French-speaking channel. Evenings at seven, if I so desire, Le Monde comes into my living room for half an hour. All the shocking news comes bubbling out of the tube in French, now as pleasantly abstract concepts that in no way encroach upon my familiar sensitivities, nor produce the least emotional reaction. To take a simple example, I read and hear L’OTAN as a random arrangement of letters with no resonance whatsoever. L’OTAN is not NATO, L’ONU is not the UN. Even boucliers vivants remain abstract; human shields by contrast hits me as close as the German menschliche Schilde.

  If I’m really up for learning, I watch, as I do this evening, an episode of Le grand reportage. An installation in the desert appears on the screen, high and low wooden crosses painted pink. Not the friendly playful pink of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s wrappings. These wooden crosses commemorate the carelessly buried or simply tossed-away corpses of women and children in the desert near Ciudad Juarez. The women, all of them dark-skinned, must have been very young and pretty, and so poor that they were forced to work in one of the maquiladoras in the borderland between Mexico and the USA. Migrant workers who toiled in sweat shops.

  Over three hundred and seventy-five women have been killed in the last ten years. The dead that were found all bore the same script on their bodies: torture, rape, mutilation, amputation. When you decipher these signs and traces, you end up with porn, presumably snuff films—i.e., torture and murder before a rolling camera—and the organ trade. The abducted women were held captive several days to two weeks, tortured, and finally, after being maimed and murdered, they were discarded. Now I have to fling open the front door and in the minus-twenty-degree cold walk a few steps up the path, count the stars that sparkle between the branches in the woods and high up in the sky. Nothing worrying me, no information, no horror—allowing the horror, the noise of information to lapse into deep freeze.

  Relatives of the murdered women, mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, grandmothers, wander the region summer and winter looking for clues. For every one of the victims they find, they put up a pink cross. High crosses for the women, low ones for the girls, a memorial of despair, terror, that has also inscribed itself in the landscape. The youngest victims are twelve years old.*

  The women—who go there again and again, brushing off every thorn bush, every prickly tuft of grass, tapping the ground with their sticks, turning over stones, throwing them aside, leaving behind their own fleeting traces in the sand that just as soon waft away—don’t want to accept the silence, their silenced-to-death daughters, sisters, mothers, cousins, aunts. What do their footprints amount to, the paths they tread in this time and place, in the desert, where no other human traces can be found?

  Was it cruel for the deer? Was i
t run over by a car? Did an angry or frightened person fling it up onto the snowbank?

  Other animals have preyed on it, gutted it, picked it clean, following the rules of the game. So one might say. That’s why I’m looking for the place where the disemboweling happened. I would like it to be a place that, by human standards, is cruelty-free. I would like to know a good word for the absence of cruelty.

  Living in Quebec, I’ve heard all the shocking news in English and French, the litanies of warscenes, Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Iraq, Chechnya, Congo, names of groups, factions, freedom fighters, of suicide bombers both male and female, white-collar criminals, the vocabulary of war that expands with each new war, that also insinuates into German such phrases as collateral damage, friendly fire, humanitarian bombing, embedded journalists, thus remaining abstract. In order to understand the real content of the news, I have to look up a deadly litany in English: briefing, compliance, containment, defection, deployment, deterrent, quagmire, mired, cakewalk, truce, without resorting to force.

  Certainly this list is already somewhat obsolete, dating as it does from the year 2003, as the U.S. was attacking Iraq. I was sitting with an American friend in a kitchen where I felt safe, having dinner, and we turned the radio on to hear whether the U.S. had already begun to attack or not, and there was nothing else to hear since all the stations were playing the same thing, just like on September 11th and then the week after, during the memorial service. Anyone who wanted to hear or see the news around the world had to follow along with the U.S. media to see what action the U.S. was contemplating at that moment, and even before the concept had come up in the news, we were already all “embedded” in the action. Then we listened to a Canadian journalist reporting out of Baghdad at about four in the morning, the classic time for military attacks, and along with his voice, the sinister silence, of which he was speaking, entered the kitchen where we were sitting, the silence of a ghost city behind a pair of miserable sandbags, the silence of empty streets, empty cleaned-out shops with blinds drawn. No traffic, he said, a pair of old men who’ve stayed behind; we’re waiting, everyone is holding their breath.

  Didn’t I keep hoping till the very last minute that the war wouldn’t happen, that the peace demonstrations around the world would see to it that there would be no war? After all, in Montreal there were a hundred and fifty thousand people in the streets. It was thirty degrees below zero and I learned to chant So-So-So-Solidarité! along with the natives.

  Farther down along the snowshoepath stands a stocky, rotten maple tree, its main branches protruding symmetrically. Its trunk on one side is covered from top to bottom with fungus, on the other side, it’s hollowed out up to my waist. The hollow is filled with ochre-colored bean-shaped scat. Here an animal sleeps, maybe several, like the bundles of flesh that hang from a maple branch in front of my window, their soft grumbling sounds waking me at dawn. Porcupines. Both places, the deercorpse and the sleepingtree, are for the animal world a meeting point, a marketplace, a newspaper stand, whereas I, loud and ungainly on my two legs, who can neither read nor understand their language, make myself an appointment in the woods, lumber over there to capture an image on film, move myself along on snowshoes through a landscape empty of humans and densely populated with trees, my destination a place where the immeasurable whiteness is interrupted by rare flecks of color, gold-yellow turds in which are stuck the needles of porcupines, or bloody ribs exposed to the sky.

  After two weeks the site in the woods is almost empty. A few tufts of fur are strewn in a circle, and an ochre-colored lump of crap lies there, deep-frozen through April, while the tourterelles tristes announce snowmelt and spring, a promising, plaintive sound to which my body responds as it used to respond to the song of die Amsel, the blackbird, which is missing from the landscape here, along with its guarantee of spring. The ear here is an ear emptied of die Amsel. Der Amsel unverfälschtes / Vokabular writes Rose Ausländer: the unfalsified vocabulary / of the blackbird. That’s from her “History in a Nutshell.” In Quebec, spring announces itself with the call of the tourterelles tristes, though not that of the Trauertauben, as it would be called in German; for it was not the call of a Trauertaube that taught me spring here, when I first arrived—when the earth in the middle of April suddenly gave off heat in the places bare of snow, as if for five months a volcano had been slumbering under the ice. In the warmth the great old white pines in front of the houses grew fragrant, a tourterelle triste or mourning dove called and then another one; out of their soft brown-red dovebodies they sent out the springcall, and the Frédérick too began to call, le bruant à gorge blanche, the white-throated sparrow, the Ammerfink. Its call intensified the smell of the pines and heralded summer; on the lake you could stand in a T-shirt on the ice, still a meter thick, and listen to the glugging gurgling rivulets that ran down from the hills. It rained half the night. The whole day, thunder rumbled behind the warmth. The ice steamed up, already covered with water. Warm air escaped over it in waves. I learned that spring is sun and ice, ice and fire, light that pours out and is reflected in snow and ice, that spring is white, not green and not adorned with colorful flowers.

  To snuff means to extinguish, to annihilate. I first learned this expression in Berlin, almost thirty years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. There we heard for the first time that a woman had supposedly been murdered in front of a rolling camera and that a new genre of underground film had thus been launched—whether this was really the first time it happened, nobody knows. You can find plenty of tracks and traces online on this subject, of course. If you search for Ciudad Juarez or Amnesty International or violence against women or feminicide or snuff, you’ll find news, reports, analyses, appeals, and images too, statements from members and affinity groups, information about solidarity actions by woman artists, feminist analyses about the mutilation of the female body, reports from delegations traveling to Ciudad Juarez for events and protests—in four languages: Spanish, English, French and German. After an hour on the net, I’m driven out of the house again, into the snow. But there are corpses here too. In Canada, over five hundred Native women have disappeared since 1985. In winter we hear in the news that once again a Native man froze in a snowbank, drunk, because no one driving by would stop for him, or because white policemen had dumped him out in the middle of nowhere, in the snow.

  The desert region near Ciudad Juarez where many of the murdered women were found is known as a “labyrinth of silence.” In it is contained the panicked silence that the women must have felt who arrived at work three minutes late and weren’t allowed to come in. Three minutes late and the door to work, to this hard labor for four euros a day, to life, is locked, a car comes, there’s not another soul on the street. In doremifasolatido she has only come as far as fa, a long long way to run, then her melody is abruptly cut short. She would give her life to be able to run a long long way, but all she has to look forward to is a horribly long ordeal and then her own murder. To want simply to live, to work, to eat, to have love, a family, to be young, to go to work, to dance on the weekends and perhaps, one day, to cross the border into the promised land, into the United States of North America. Filmmakers, politicians, businessmen, drugdealers, pimps don’t even need to go to the trouble of hunting these women down in order to torture and kill them. It’s enough that they’re poor, young, beautiful, dark-skinned, and that they’re standing in front of a locked factory door, or obliged to walk through unlit streets.

  Will the Iraq war reveal itself to be a quagmire or a cakewalk? This is the question being discussed on U.S. television several weeks after the attack on Iraq. Quagmire is a war word dating back to Vietnam; if you’re in a quagmire, it means you’re stuck in the swamp or the mud. A cakewalk, according to Langenscheidt’s encyclopedic dictionary, sixth edition, 1981, is

  1. a) A grotesque dance-contest with a cake as a prize (Amer. Negro usage)

  b) A ballroom or stage dance originating in such a contest

  c) The mu
sic for such a dance

  2. To dance a cakewalk.

  3. To walk as in a cakewalk.

  The woman who arrived three minutes too late at the locked door of a maquiladora and heard a car stopping beside her knew she was stuck in the mud, in a war that has never been publicly declared. The good thing about the landscape of Quebec is how empty it is of people. There are no alien thought systems polluting my mind when I walk through the woods. In winter the great cold helps to cleanse unpleasant news of its dirt. Bad news should only be broadcast in snow and ice, when the earth is frozen; not in summer, when it’s permeated by moist heat, when with every step the world reminds us that it breathes and lives.

  Do: a deer a female deer

  Re: a drop of golden sun…

  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY LISE WEIL

  [SPAIN: CATALAN]

  MERCÈ IBARZ

  Nela and the Virgins

  I neither can nor want to resist the image of the still hours, those hours that resound both in and outside of me—these are the important hours. As was said a long time ago: It’s then that the world shakes its ass. Though I don’t remember if that was said in Prague or at one of the sanatoriums where he’d go to recover from what he didn’t want to recover from—namely, writing all night undisturbed in front of the window of his home, or at the window of the sanatorium, it doesn’t matter, everywhere is home, whether it’s a house that puts you up for a few days or a house you built yourself or a house that tosses you out or a house you run away from. Repulsively, the world shakes its ass, like a pus-oozing fat man in a cage at the circus, the circus we call life. This pain we call life: a circus. Sure. I suppose that it’s for this that that man said if you watch and keep quiet as the world shakes its ass so obscenely, it’ll reveal to you what it’s really like, its sincerer side, its truth. And it does just so because it sells its ass without shame, openly, like at a circus or a cabaret. Did Kafka go to cabarets? No idea. But I do know that he didn’t spend all of his time staring out of a window. He also went around on a motorbike that belonged to his favorite uncle, who by contrast was a man who really knew how to live it up. What would Kafka have seen from up on top of those wheels? He kept quiet about that. Nevertheless, there are some key differences between speeding around on an old motorbike—be it from Kafka’s time or from when we were too young to care, some thirty years ago—and staring fixedly out a window, waiting for nothing the way you wait for nothing when riding a motorbike; all told, there are some key differences. The world reveals itself one way or the other, but the difference is in the things you see in it. When you stare for some time into a face, outer space, open sky, an interior patio, the street under your window, the lamppost at night or the traffic at day, you see in them more than you ever had before, you see them in another way, you see what the face, outer space, open sky, interior patio, street, lamppost, traffic all say. The speed of, say, a motorbike, turns you in toward yourself, everything goes by so quickly that your eyes, in order to stay fixed on the road and nothing else, roll back into your head, toward the inner consciousness of your body. Now that I’ve stopped, the still hours having kept still and quiet, I see how Valentina came to set up this strange dinner, which I say is strange because, well, you’ll tell me how everyone manages to rush to the island, buzz the intercom, walk up the stairs, come in and meet up with the host, and after that look everyone there in the eye, and after that sit and dine. I see Valentina looking through a large window neither saying nor thinking anything, I see her head open like the bud of a hibiscus when day and daylight both begin, she watches the way in which Mo tells what Nela did the first day she saw the apartment, that she didn’t pay any mind to either the hallway or anything else, but just sat absolutely silent on the balcony for no one knows how long, and after a few days headed up north and never returned again, breaking all ties with the island, with the entire city. Now, too, the world shakes its tail—and reveals itself. I can go on.