Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

She smiled at everyone now. It flattered her that the doctor had addressed her specifically.

  “Your face is much worse!” the doctor announced.

  And they sat down.

  “But I have your analyses here,” he continued. “There is no medical problem, here. You, Mr. Kartopeck, are not sick. This is clearly an external problem, and I mean entirely external, there’s no trace of any abnormality within your organism itself, nor is there any reason to suspect that whatever is on your face is making its way inside. Sure, it’s unpleasant to be deformed, but on the medical side of things all we can do is recommend some products to help relieve the irritation. You’re not going to die a single minute earlier just because your face has developed this…difficulty.”

  Kartopeck was relieved: in the past few weeks he had come to the conclusion that his blotches must be the equivalent of a death sentence. He had even practiced the courageous way that he would respond to the words that he was certain he’d hear: You only have six months to live!

  So, the doctor’s reassurances were received more or less like a victory.

  The rest of the examination was quick. Before the doctor opened the door for him to leave, Vass Kartopeck—wanting to show his gratitude—shoved his right hand into his pocket and pulled out a coin, which he held out to the doctor. The doctor refused to accept this token by shifting his weight away from Kartopeck and, doing his best not to laugh, smiling apologetically:

  “One doesn’t really tip doctors,” he said. “At least not in the city. Keep it for yourself.”

  Vass Kartopeck, embarrassed, shut his hand around the coin: he was a yokel, he told himself, nothing but a yokel! And once again, he’d made this quite clear. I’m an imbecile, he mumbled to himself.

  “Best wishes,” said the doctor, to both Kartopeck and the young woman.

  In the middle of the street, no more than two hundred meters from the spot where the precise center of the city was marked on the street, Kartopeck dropped his coin for the second time.

  “Again!” exclaimed Kartopeck, irritated.

  And the young woman laughed.

  TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY RHETT MCNEIL

  [POLAND]

  OLGA TOKARCZUK

  The Ugliest Woman in the World

  He married the ugliest woman in the world. As a widely known circus impresario, he made a special trip to Vienna to see her. It wasn’t a premeditated act at all—it never occurred to him beforehand that he might make her his wife. But once he had seen her, once he had weathered the first shock, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her. She had a large head covered in growths and lumps. Her small, ever-tearing eyes were set close under her low, furrowed brow. From a distance they looked like narrow chinks. Her nose looked as if it was broken in many places, and its tip was a livid blue, covered in sparse bristles. Her mouth was huge and swollen, always hanging open, always wet, with some sharply pointed teeth inside it. To top it all off, as if that wasn’t enough, her face sprouted long, straggling, silken hairs.

  The first time he saw her she emerged from behind the cardboard scenery of a traveling circus to show herself to the audience. A cry of surprise and disgust went rolling over the heads of the crowd and fell at her feet. She may have been smiling, but it looked like a woeful grimace. She stood very still, conscious of the fact that dozens of eyes were staring at her, avidly drinking in every detail, so that the audience members could describe this face to their friends and neighbors or to their own children, to be able to summon it up again, as they compared it with their own faces in the mirror—and then breathe a sigh of relief. She stood patiently, perhaps with a sense of superiority, as she gazed over their heads toward the roofs of the houses beyond.

  After a lengthy silence, swollen with astonishment, someone finally shouted: “Tell us about yourself!”

  She peered into the crowd, to the spot where the voice had come from. She was searching for the person who had said it, but just then a stout lady ringmaster ran out from behind the cardboard wings and answered on behalf of the Ugliest Woman in the World: “She doesn’t talk.”

  “Then you tell us her story,” the voice requested, so the stout lady cleared her throat and started speaking.

  After the performance, as he drank a cup of tea with her by the little tin stove that heated the inside of the circus trailer, he found her to be quite clever. Of course she could speak, and make perfect sense too. He observed her closely, wrestling with his own fascination with this freak of nature. She could see right through him.

  “You thought my speech would be just as bizarre and repulsive as my face, didn’t you?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  She drank her tea in the Russian manner, pouring it from a samovar into small cups with no handles, nibbling at a sugar lump between each sip.

  He quite soon found that she spoke many languages, but apparently none of them too well. Now and then she shifted from one language into another. It was no cause for surprise—since early childhood she had grown up in the circus, in an international troupe full of grotesques of every possible stripe, never in the same place twice.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said again, looking at him with those puffy little animal eyes. After a short silence she added: “Anyone who hasn’t got a mother hasn’t got a mother tongue either. I use many languages, but none of them is my own.”

  He didn’t dare reply. Suddenly she had begun to get on his nerves, though he wasn’t sure why. She was making witty remarks, she was coherent and specific—not at all what he’d been expecting.

  So he bid her farewell, and to his astonishment she gave him her hand—a very feminine gesture. The gesture of a lady, in fact; and a perfectly lovely hand it was, too. He bowed down toward it, but didn’t touch it with his lips.

  As he lay on his back in his hotel bed he was still thinking about her. He stared ahead into the damp, stuffy hotel darkness—the sort of deep dark that invited his imagination to kick into gear. He lay there wondering what it must be like to be her, what it felt like from inside, how the world might look through eyes like a pig’s eyes, what it must be like to breathe in air through such a misshapen nose—did she even smell the same things as normal people? And what would it be like to touch a body like that every day while washing, or scratching, while doing all the usual little things?

  Never once did he feel sorry for her. If he had sympathized with her, he never would have thought of proposing.

  Some people used to tell this story as though it were an unhappy love affair, saying that his heart had somehow gazed directly into hers, and that he’d fallen in love with the sweet-natured angel he saw inside her, despite her repulsive face. But no, it was nothing of the sort—that first night after meeting her he simply couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like to make love to such a creature, to kiss her and undress her.

  He hovered around the circus for the next few weeks. He would leave and always come back again. He gained the trust of the manager, and negotiated a contract for the troupe in Brno. He followed them there, and the circus people began to regard him as one of their own. They let him sell the tickets, then later he took over from the fat lady ringmaster—and it has to be said he was good at this job, warming up the audience before the shoddily painted curtain was raised.

  “Close your eyes,” he cried. “Especially women and children, because the ugliness of this creature is hard for sensitive eyes to bear. No one who has seen this freak of nature is ever able to fall asleep in peace again. Some people have even lost their faith in the Creator…”

  At this point he hung his head, seemingly leaving this sentence incomplete, though in fact it wasn’t—he didn’t know what else to say. He figured the word “Creator” put everything in its proper light. Some people might lose their faith in this Creator, looking at the woman waiting behind the curtain, but he himself had become convinced of the opposite: if anything, the Creator had demonstrated His existence by singling the impresario out, bestowi
ng this opportunity upon him. The Ugliest Woman in the World. Some idiots fought duels and killed each other over beautiful women. Some idiots gave away their fortunes at a woman’s whim. But he was not like them. The Ugliest Woman engaged his affections like a sad, domesticated animal. She was different from all other women, and she even provided him financial opportunities into the bargain. If he made her his wife he’d be set apart—special. He’d have something other people didn’t have.

  He started buying her flowers—not special bouquets, just cheap little bunches wrapped in foil with a flimsy tissue paper bow; or he’d give her a cotton neckerchief, a glossy ribbon, or a small box of pralines. Then he’d watch, hypnotized, as she tied the ribbon round her forehead, and instead of being an adornment, the colorful bow would become a horror. And he’d watch as she sucked the chocolates with her oversized, bulging tongue, causing brown saliva to form between her wide-spaced teeth and dribble down her bristle-coated chin.

  He liked to look at her when she didn’t know he was watching. He’d sneak off in the morning and hide behind the tent or the trailer, he’d sneak off in order to lurk nearby and watch her for hours on end, even through the cracks in the wooden fence. She used to sunbathe, and while she did she’d spend ages slowly combing her straggly hair, as if in a trance, plaiting it into skinny braids and then immediately undoing it again. Or else she would crochet, the needles glittering in the sunlight as they stabbed at the noisy air of the circus. Or, in a loose shirt, with her arms bare, she would launder her clothes in a washtub. The skin on her arms and upper chest was covered in pale fur. It looked pretty. Soft, like an animal’s.

  He needed this spying, because day by day his disgust was lessening, melting in the sun, disappearing like a puddle on a hot afternoon. Gradually his eyes were growing used to the painful asymmetry of her, the broken proportions, all her shortcomings and excesses. Sometimes he even thought she looked ordinary.

  Whenever he began to feel uneasy, he told them all he was going away on important business, that he had a meeting with so and so—and he’d mention a stranger, or, for contrast, a well-known name. He was making deals, he was holding talks. He’d polish his boots, wash his best shirt, and set off on his way. He never went far. He’d stop in the nearest town, steal someone’s wallet, and get drunk. But even then he was never free of her, because he’d start talking about her. He couldn’t do without her, even during these escapades.

  And the strange thing was, she had become his most valuable possession. He could even pay for wine with her ugliness, when he wanted—and, more than that, he could mesmerize beautiful young women by describing her face, women who told him to go on talking about her even later in the evening, when they were lying beneath him naked.

  When he got back he would always have a new story about her ugliness ready to tell the crowd—well aware that nothing really exists until it has its own special story. At first he made her learn them by heart, but he soon realized that the Ugliest Woman wasn’t good at telling stories: she spoke monotonously and burst into tears at the end, so he started telling them for her. He’d stand to one side, point his hand toward her, and recite: “The mother of the unfortunate creature that you see before you, whose appearance is so terrible for your innocent eyes to bear, lived in a village on the edge of the Black Forest. And there, one summer’s day, as she was picking berries in the woods, she was hunted down by a savage boar, who attacked her in a frenzy of mad, bestial lust.”

  At this point he invariably heard muffled, horror-stricken cries, and some of the women, who’d already wanted to leave, would start tugging at their reluctant husbands’ sleeves.

  He had several other versions:

  “This woman comes from a land cursed by God. She is the descendant of an evil, heartless race who showed no mercy to a sickly pauper, for which Our Lord punished their entire village with this terrible hereditary ugliness.”

  Or: “This is the fate that befalls the children of fallen women. Here you see the fruits of syphilis, a terrible illness that punishes impurity unto the fifth generation!”

  He never felt guilty. Any one of these might well have been true.

  “I don’t know who my parents were,” the Ugliest Woman told him. “I’ve always been like this. I was found at the circus as a baby. No one can remember what came before.”

  When their first season together was at an end and the circus was traveling in a lazy curve back to Vienna for its annual hibernation, he proposed to her. She blushed to the roots and trembled. Then she quietly said, “All right,” and gently rested her head on his arm. He could smell her fragrance—it was soft and soapy. He endured this moment, then drew back and began to tell her his plans for their life together, listing all the places they would visit. As he paced about the room she kept her eyes fixed on him, but was sad and silent. Right at the end she took him by the hand and said she’d like the exact opposite—for them to settle somewhere in the sticks, and never have to go anywhere or see anyone. And that she would cook, and they’d have children and a garden.

  “You’d never be able to cope with it,” he retorted indignantly. “You grew up in the circus. You want, you need to be looked at. You’d die without people’s eyes on you.”

  She didn’t answer.

  They were married at Christmas, in a tiny little church. The priest who conducted the ceremony almost fainted. His voice trembled as he recited. The guests were people from the circus, because he told her he didn’t have any family and was just as alone in the world as she was.

  When they were all drowsing in their seats, when all the bottles were empty and it was time to go to bed (even she was tipsily tugging at his sleeve), he told everyone to stay and sent for more wine. He couldn’t get drunk, though he was trying as hard as he could. Something inside him remained absolutely alert, tensed like a string. He couldn’t even relax his shoulders or cross his legs, but sat there bolt upright, his cheeks flushed and his eyes gleaming.

  “Let’s go now, my love,” she whispered in his ear.

  But he clung to the edge of the table, as if pinned to it by invisible tacks. The more observant guests might have assumed he was simply afraid of being intimate with her, naked—afraid of the obligatory post-nuptial intimacy. Was that in fact the case?

  “Touch my face,” she asked him in the darkness, but he wouldn’t do it. He raised himself above her on his hands so that all he could see was her silhouette, a little lighter than the darkness of the rest of the room, a faint patch with no distinct edges. Then he closed his eyes—she couldn’t see it—and took her, like any other woman, without a single thought in his head, as usual.

  They began the next season on their own. He had some photographs of her taken and distributed them worldwide. The bookings came by telegraph. They had numerous appearances and traveled first class. She always wore a hat with a heavy, gray veil, from behind which she saw Rome, Venice, and the Champs-Élysées. He bought her several dresses, and laced up her corset himself, so when they walked down the crowded streets of the cities of Europe, they looked like a proper human couple. But even then, during the good times, he still had to escape from time to time. That’s just the sort of man he was: the eternal runaway. A sort of panic would suddenly rise in him, an unbearable anxiety attack. He’d start sweating and choking, and so take a wad of cash, grab his hat, and run down the stairs, soon finding himself, unerringly, slumped in one of the dives near the port. Here he’d relax, his face would go slack, his hair would get ruffled, and the bald patch usually hidden under his slicked-down locks would emerge insolently for all to see. Innocently and joyfully he would sit and drink, letting himself ramble on, until finally some persistent prostitute would rob him blind.

  The first time the Ugliest Woman reproached him for his behavior, he punched her in the stomach, because even now he was afraid to touch her face.

  He no longer told stories about syphilis or the boar in the woods when they did their routine. He had received a letter from a professor of medicin
e in Vienna, and nowadays he liked to present his wife in scientific terms:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, here we have a freak of nature, a mutant, an error of evolution, the real missing link. Specimens of this kind are very rare. The probability of one being born is about as miniscule as the likelihood of a meteor hitting this very spot as I speak!”

  Of course they used to visit the university professor once in a while. At the university they posed for photographs together, she sitting and he standing behind her, with his hand on her shoulder.

  Once, while the Woman was being measured, the professor had a word with her husband.

  “I wonder if this mutation is hereditary?” he said. “Have you thought about having children? Have you tried? Does your wife…er…? Do you in fact…er…?”

  Not long after, perhaps unconnected with this discreet exchange, she told him she was pregnant. From then on he was a man divided. He wanted her to have a child just like herself—then they’d have even more contracts, even more invitations. If the need arose he’d be guaranteed a long livelihood, even if his wife died along the way. Perhaps he’d become famous? But then at once he’d have the thought that the child would be a monster, and that he’d really rather rip it from her belly to protect it from her poisonous, defect-infested blood than see it doomed to a life like hers. And he had dreams that he was that son in her belly, imprisoned there, damned to be loved by such a woman, and that by confining him inside herself she was gradually changing his face. Or else he’d dream he was the wild boar in the forest, violating an innocent girl. He’d wake up in a sweat and pray for her to miscarry.

  Her belly gave the audience courage, and made it easier for them to forgive her monstrous ugliness. They started asking her questions, which she would answer shyly in a quiet, unconvincing way. Their closer acquaintances began to make bets on what sort of child she’d have and whether it would be a boy or a girl. She took it all as meekly as a lamb.