Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Could it be that his daughters are space travelers and not, in reality, his daughters? Andrei Petrovich Petrescov doesn’t know what to do with his glasses, much less with his daughters.

  “Yeah, tell us. Why is there something instead of nothing?” he thinks he can hear Vasha say again, again repeating herself.

  He wants to have dinner and afterwards tell the girls a story and get them right to bed. Nothing sounds better. Moreover, he wants to get reacquainted with his own bed and, if it all possible, fall fast asleep as soon as possible. The twins look at him, smiling, with their stratospheric laughter. He again wonders if his daughters have chosen this hour of extreme fatigue and confusion to tell him that they belong to a superior civilization from some distant planet. But no, he repeats and repeats, I only suspect this because I’m very tired and probably about to lose my mind.

  As these thoughts are all so new to him, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov is a little terrified, and so decides to ring the bell in his office, summoning the aid of the levelheaded governess.

  “What is there outside of the family?”

  “What is there far away from here?”

  “Is there a void outside of the family?”

  Following this barrage, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov feels he’s been overcome by profound vertigo. When Maria Gergiev arrives, she finds him half slumped over in the chair in his office. His head drowsy, his eyelids heavy. Andrei Petrovich Petrescov recalls that yesterday he caught his two oldest children, Anna and Mikhail, repeating in unison a list of hated politicians’ names, devising brutal punishments for each. Their father, the district attorney, was also included on this list. He wonders now whether he hasn’t been keeping himself busy, at the Public Celebration Committee and at the courthouse—so much so that he’s put his already unstable health at risk—precisely in order to forget his immense displeasure and the subsequent horrible argument this had caused.

  The girls are still in front of him, with an odd look in their eyes, looking at him without really looking at him.

  “Far from here,” whispers Olga.

  “Father, far from here, outside of the universe,” says Vasha, her words broken and distant.

  2.

  An hour later dinner is interrupted by two inspectors banging at the door, sent by the police department to respectfully inform Andrei Petrovich Petrescov that his son Mikhail has been accused of belonging to the rebel faction under the command of the traitor Kirov and is in custody at the jail in the basement of the police station. Even though he had been expecting something like this, the news was crushing for Andrei Petrovich Petrescov. Desperation. He just isn’t strong enough to carry such a heavy family burden. And Anna? She also hangs around with that damned Kirov’s gang, as some good friends have already let him know. But it seems that Anna hasn’t been arrested. Where could she be? It would be best if he found her soon, before things get worse. He feels a certain tenderness for Anna, though in reality this affection is so minimal that it hardly makes the least difference. Of course, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov can’t feel even this amount of affection for Dimitri and Seriozha, who won’t stop fidgeting at the table and who, at this moment, are bombarding each other with bread-crumbs in an attempt to recover their sovereignty, lost earlier that afternoon in the embarrassing episode with the twins. As for the twins, with them it’s not a question of affection at all—just of knowing how to overcome the stupor that they provoke in him every time he witnesses them behaving as if they were sent from a nameless star in some unknown constellation…

  At this very instant, the twins are rolling their eyeballs around their sockets before the astonished stares of the two inspectors, whom they have just asked, undoubtedly at the worst possible time:

  “Mr. Policemen, why is there something?”

  “What?”

  “Yes, Mr. Policemen, why is there something instead of nothing?” says Vasha.

  It looks like this day is never going to end for Andrei Petrovich Petrescov, honorable citizen of Novonikolaevsk, who is not very optimistic about discharging his responsibility to raise six ungrateful children, or indeed about the task now set before him, namely, the horrendous prospect of going to police headquarters to give some initial legal assistance to his subversive son.

  There’s no way to undo this, no way. Dinner has suffered an inopportune interruption. And Andrei Petrovich Petrescov has to put his gloves and coat back on and leave with the inspectors.

  The copious snow stuns him with its sudden whiteness when he walks out into the open air. “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Andrei Petrovich Petrescov asks himself in desperation. “If instead of six ungrateful children, I had none, everything would be better,” he thinks as he cleans off his glasses.

  The sight of the snow enters the consciousness of Andrei Petrovich Petrescov together with an ancient desire for escape, from childhood, from the days when he wanted to be invisible. These very precise dreams of invisibility have been with him for as long as he’s had a memory, a yearning to be invisible and to move freely among other beings, who likewise turn out to be ethereal.

  “The ideal: a precise dream,” thinks Andrei Petrovich Petrescov. Then, at the next breath: “What better ideal than invisibility, the most precise of all my dreams?” On the other hand—how to make oneself invisible with six kids, jobs as district attorney and president of the Public Celebration Committee, fragile health, and an enormous house in the center of the city?

  In the slow rhythm of the carriage that transports him to the police station, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov ponders the fact that by this coming July, after thirteen years of hard work, the Trans-Siberian will pass through the Novonikolaevsk train station. The Trans-Siberian, as everyone refers to it, stretching ten thousand kilometers, will connect Moscow with the Russian Pacific coast—with Vladivostok, to be more specific, the city where Andrei Petrovich Petrescov lived for a few years, and to which he always says he doesn’t care to return.

  “Novonikolaevsk,” he whispers to himself, as if this word sums up all of his problems.

  In the slow rhythm of the carriage, the overwhelmed district attorney passes by the façade of the future Trans-Siberian station, thinking about how vulgar his two sons, Dimitri and Seriozha, are. He is horrified at their repulsive mediocrity and the fact that they look like so many other gray citizens of Novonikolaevsk, as alike as two drops of water. When they grow up, Dimitri and Seriozha will be nothing more than a couple of idiots, just like the majority of people in this burgeoning Siberian city. The impoverished spirit of the region has infected Dimitri and Seriozha, and you could say that they represent the present state of mind of Andrei Petrovich Petrescov: a present that somehow also includes Anna and Mikhail, and their own, somewhat bloodthirsty, ideals. And further down the road there was the future to worry about, undoubtedly represented by his stratospheric twins.

  Oh, poor Dimitri and Seriozha, stuck between the revolution of their older siblings and the futurist Novonikolaevsk of the girls. And while Andrei Petrovich Petrescov is thinking about all this he arrives at the police station and slowly climbs down from the carriage with a horrible fear of slipping on the snow, which would thus add one more misfortune to this exhausting day—a finishing touch.

  “Where’s Anna?” he asks Mikhail when, after a great deal of protocol and statements made, he is finally able to spend a few seconds alone with him.

  “You’ll never see her again,” says his son, with a contemptuous look on his face. “She’s going to sacrifice herself for the Cause.”

  “What cause?” asks Andrei Petrovich Petrescov, horrified.

  “The Revenge of the People. We’re going to assassinate reactionaries until we achieve the total downfall of the State. Police officers, high-court officers, and corrupt ministers will no longer exist…we’ll execute any attorney who isn’t on our side.”

  “You want to become a criminal,” says Andrei Petrovich Petrescov remorsefully. “The only thing I can understand is that you wan
t to be a murderer. As for the rest of it, I don’t understand a word. You belong to some gang and, even though I can kind of imagine what that means, I can’t even guess at what that could possibly mean to you. All I can understand is that you want to be a murderer and that you’re even capable of killing your own father in the name of your gang. Is that right?”

  “Not exactly,” Mikhail limits himself to saying, arrogantly.

  After some futile negotiations, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov realizes that his influence with the police isn’t enough to lessen the serious charges brought against his son and the Kirov gang, and so he ends up taking the painful trip back home wondering where his daughter, Anna, could be hidden. The police had been courteous with him, nothing more, allowing him to see his son and then putting a horse-drawn carriage at his disposal. But the favors stop there. Back at his house, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov senses that his extreme fatigue has now reached the point where it will prevent him from getting any real sleep. He decides to light up a cigar in his office, and simultaneously recalls the startling imitation of himself smoking that, two hours earlier, his twin daughters had performed. His eyes are like two headlights in the middle of the deep Novonikolaevsk night when he wonders if the twins have been able to get to sleep without hearing a story from him. The house is silent, everyone is asleep, except for Suvorin, the butler.

  “Suvorin, Anna didn’t come home, did she?”

  “No she didn’t, sir.”

  “Oh, Suvorin,” he says, exhaling a potent mouthful of smoke. “God has been a little hard of hearing as of late. I’ve been pleading with the Almighty for Anna to come back to the path of the righteous, but it’s no use.”

  “You don’t know how sorry I am, sir.”

  Andrei Petrovich Petrescov has once again proven that he can’t hold a conversation with a single other person in this world, can’t tell his problems to anyone, much less to Suvorin, no matter how much he trusts him, because Suvorin, well trained, will always respond:

  “No, sir.”

  “You don’t know how sorry I am, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Andrei Petrovich Petrescov is alone in the night and in the world, with a whole family in his care. He is an isolated and at heart very lonely person. Perhaps he could only breathe if he dared to step out into the empty space that must exist—thinks Andrei Petrovich Petrescov, suddenly putting out his cigar in the ashtray—outside of his family. But how do you step into that empty space? And how is it possible that empty space could replace the happiness that a family supposedly provides?

  “I’m going to make sure the twins were able to get to sleep without my bedtime story.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good night, Suvorin. You can go to bed.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  As he walks down the long hallway of the west wing of his house, he feels his loneliness more acutely than ever, but also, curiously, finds himself enjoying it. This pleasure is absolutely new to him, and it seems to be directly connected to the sorrow of walking alone down this familiar hallway. Continuing along the corridor, he immerses himself so deeply in an analysis of this newfound pleasure that he ends up feeling as though he is entering into an unknown land, a space where the limits of his capacity for thought can be found. It’s as though he has arrived at a point beyond which one can think no further. He has another, though fleeting, attack of vertigo, as if he were walking along the passage that leads to the empty space outside of all human families, starting with his own. It’s true that, ever since his operation, he has felt, day by day, a strange expansion of the nooks and crannies—or, rather of the cells—in his brain.

  He’s read a lot about cells—not revolutionary cells like the Kirov group, which to him are a mystery—for a number of years. He was always fascinated by the work of Robert Hooke, who in 1665 introduced the term “cell”—inspired by the cells in a monastery—in his book Micrographia, written after the tedious observation of plates of cork under the microscope, in which he discovered a series of alveoli that were, in reality, empty cavities, delimited only by the cellular walls of the cork: dead tissue.

  Andrei Petrovich Petrescov is contemplating these empty cavities, delimited by cellular walls, as he walks down the hallway that dead-ends—it’s only the far end of the hallway, but it seems to him the boundary of his mind as well—at the silent bedroom of Olga and Vasha, the twins. He enters this bedroom in such a state of nervous agitation that any story in the world would seem inadequate to his excitement. The girls, with smiles frozen on their faces, appear to be asleep. And Andrei Petrovich Petrescov looks at them for a while, observes them, trying to find some physical features that he can identify as being specifically his, belonging exclusively to the Petrescovs. He looks and looks again, and even starts to imagine them flying through space, traveling daily from some distant star to drop in at the house of the district attorney of Novonikolaevsk, where they pretend to be his daughters. Thinking they can’t hear him, Andrei Petrovich Petrescov tells them a story:

  There was once a man who always thought about his two frozen wives, dead, both of them buried in iron coffins under snow-covered mountains, both of them in the old cemetery of a city in which all of the families made up a gloomy, uniform, dead, interwoven tissue. This man is your father, who has always been nothing more than a character in a story, but also the district attorney of the high courts of Novonikolaevsk, twice a widower and father of six children from two marriages who greatly complicate his life. He is a man who was operated on just a few months ago and is putting his illness behind him as best he can, and who—having heard that some tribes in the equatorial jungle in Africa believe that when a sick person is cured he must change his name to a new one—is thinking of changing his name this very night. He is a man who tells his daughters a story every night, like this one, like the one I’m telling right now to you both, both fast asleep. Today’s story tells us that there was once a district attorney of the high courts of Novonikolaevsk who went about his life disillusioned because his two eldest children had turned into murderers in some revolutionary cell, his third and fourth children were complete idiots, and his two youngest daughters were eccentric and strange and had been sent to Earth by some mysterious race from a distant star. Caught between revolution, mediocrity, and a sidereal future, the district attorney of Novonikolaevsk worked like a slave every day, to the point of collapse, in order to keep his ungrateful family going. Even if he was absolutely exhausted, he told his daughters a story every night, while in his mind the novel idea of leaving it all behind, changing his name, and starting a new life far from Siberia grew stronger every day. He was the one with a true project for a revolution in Novonikolaevsk. And then, one day, January 17, 1904, in the dark of the night, feeling infinitely weary, but unable to even shut his eyes, while he watched his poor little sleeping daughters, he decided to leave the family home in silence and head on foot to the doors of the Daily News of Novonikolaevsk, to wait until the arrival of the first employees and write out a notice, a notice that would occupy a discrete corner of a single page of the newspaper the following day, a notice that would declare that it is more necessary than ever to set in motion the revolution desired by the enemies of Christian society, that society erected on the foundation of selfish families, and take the first step toward a more just and fraternal society of lone individuals. “I, an isolated being who will breathe henceforth surrounded by space that is as empty as it is distant from any sort of Christian family, hereby summon all citizens who likewise desire to unite and establish the fraternal Society of Solitary Fathers,” is how the announcement would read, which they would never allow to be printed, of course, but which, at the very least, he would have had the nerve, the courage, the good sense to write down.

  That’s how his story ended. The district attorney stayed quiet for a moment and ended up adding, merely for the pleasure of saying it:

  “Novonikolaevsk.”

  On this day, January 17, 1904, Anton
Chekhov debuted The Cherry Orchard in Moscow. It would be his final dramatic work. But Andrei Petrovich Petrescov never knew of this, and though he had certainly heard of Chekhov, who was already well-known in Russia, this was only information gleaned from books. Andrei Petrovich Petrescov couldn’t have known that this January 17 would go down in history as the day of the final Chekhov premiere. Just as Andrei Petrovich Petrescov couldn’t have known that my grandfather Maurice had chosen that day to come into the world, to be born in a country house in Massiac, not too far from Clermont-Ferrand, France.

  I think it would be nice of us to see Andrei Petrovich Petrescov as merely a character in a story, which is what he really wanted to be, and how he wanted to be seen by posterity, as he told his daughters Olga and Vasha on that day, believing that the two were asleep, when, in reality, Vasha was awake the whole time, listening in silence to that story whispered in the middle of a pathetic and profoundly provincial and forgettable night in Novonikolaevsk.

  Many years later, Vasha would remember, word for word, this story that, whispered in the nocturnal silence, aspired in vain to dissolve into nothingness. Around 1914, exiled in Berlin, Vasha recounted it as such—as a story—to her closest friend, my grandfather Maurice, who counted me among his grandchildren, me, to whom this story has been transmitted almost intact, faithfully passed down through a delicate family chain that has saved from oblivion the almost precise memory of the noctambulatory words of that district attorney from Novonikolaevsk who one night wound up wishing he were merely a character in a story and the founder of a more just society, composed of solidary, solitary men.