Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Vilmut was from another town, and while receiving treatment in Vilnius, she stayed at my place. We cut off those locks of her hair in the kitchen, following her doctor’s suggestion (because they would fall out anyway), after we’d filled a pot with stuffed cabbage. Joking around (back then we still joked around a bit), we each decided to keep a lock for ourselves, “as souvenirs.” Vilmut’s friend, also a junior, having dyed his hair orange, the color of hope, gave up his studies in that other city and moved in with us, sleeping on an inflatable mattress. He put a lock of his hair into the pages of his physics textbook. Vilmut’s cousin, also a student, pressed his lock into the pages of his address book. My son, then a sixth grader, with no idea why anyone would want a lock of human hair, tied his lock with a string and hung it from the table lamp. I was shocked. When I looked at it, I saw the sad, drooping mustache of a Jew sentenced to death. I told my son that the locks were souvenirs and must be preserved. We found a place for ours in the box I kept my pewter ring in—the box with the secret compartment.

  Vilmut’s parents were divorced. Her father was a musician. When drunk, he’d turn expansive and generous, and the world became his stage. One day while observing a solar eclipse through an X-ray of his wife’s lungs, it occurred to him that he was suffocating in his own home, where nobody understood him. That’s when he decided to sell his two saxophones and buy a cottage in the country. Worn out by all the city noise and constant bickering with his wife in their common but unshared apartment, he was now a happy man, with nobody nagging him, able to sleep until noon and shave his beard outdoors using the shard of a broken mirror. He kept a goat, and with it (because it never got bored or interrupted him), he would discuss his many existential dilemmas. Sometimes he would go back to the city, to his former home, because one room still belonged to him there. He’d heard about Vilmut’s diagnosis, but he never knew what city or to what hospital she’d been admitted—nor what her temperature was, what she was eating, or if she was eating at all. In fact, he was annoyed when his wife’s relatives would force him to concern himself with such matters, forcing them “through the eye of the needle of banality!” His relationship with his daughter—well, it was intense. Spiritual. He couldn’t care for her or help her in any way because he’d suffer too much in the process. He couldn’t endure it. He’d die himself. And so, just to feel that he was contributing to the cause, he’d leave some farm-fresh apples on the table in the foyer. But his daughter, coming back from the hospital after chemotherapy, usually found that these had already rotted in her absence. If she still hadn’t come home by the time of his next visit, the bowl of rotten apples would so infuriate her father that he would break everything in sight.

  Vilmut melted like butter, however, and little by little forgave everyone. Even her father, because he really did love her, after all—it was just that his love was trying to find some new means of expressing itself, and it hadn’t had any luck so far. And then she forgave Paris, though she had been condemned to never see it. And the little black dress with spaghetti straps. Her peach-colored lipstick. With her belongings in a plastic shopping bag from Maxima, she went from hospital to hospital. Already visiting the foreign clinics when her doctors still had hope, “in theory,” one evening she quietly asked her mother to bury her in the cemetery next to her grandparents. To plant snapdragons there, because “their mouths are happy.” She promised to look after them all “from the other side.” On her last day, having tidied up her things, she told them what to give to whom, and then she washed up and brushed her teeth. She prepared herself like someone who’d lived for ninety years, for whom death had not appeared unexpectedly but was just one more little hill in the map of her mind.

  During the funeral, Vilmut’s father—a tragic figure by nature—wailed, truly wailed, clinging to the shoulder of his own mother, an old woman, because, as usual, he had arrived “a tiny bit late.” To try and salvage something of the vent, he poured some dirt from his daughter’s grave into his mitten (where does he keep that dirt now—in a bottle? a bottle with a false bottom? did he spill it while drunk?), but, not having been invited to the funeral dinner, he disappeared soon after. To the horror of his parents, Vilmut’s friend dropped out of school and dyed his hair black, but fortunately only for a short while. Vilmut’s mother (“I am, but I’m not!”) had already cried out all her tears. Yes, you can run out of tears. I know a woman who seemed to have been singled out for suffering: she lost her father, then her mother, and then her only son—who was hit by a truck while trying to change a tire on the side of the road—and now spends all her time taking care of her mother’s sister, whose legs are swollen like balloons. The old lady wets her bed and yanks at her caregiver’s hair and spits porridge in her face whenever she’s being fed. The woman’s eyes are all cried out by now: they’re as dry as gravel. In order to be able to cry her feelings out like most people, she would need an operation on her tear ducts. Obviously, that’s out of the question. So she’s forced to make do with fake tears. Which she nevertheless has to buy. They cost thirteen litas, seventy-five cents. There’s always a vial full of tears in the fridge. She often asks her husband, “Bronius, where did you put my tears? Is it time for me to buy new tears already?”

  When people start dying around you—and once you turn forty, that’s pretty much unavoidable—you start to notice what happens to the things the departed have left behind. These objects are valuable, after all: juicers, dishes, bedding, towels…frequently with price tags still hanging off them, having been kept for “special occasions.” These leftovers are distributed to relatives like prizes. The most loyal things, however, the things most deserving preservation—the things used so often as to become irreplaceable, almost second skins—tend to get thrown out when their owner dies: not worth anything to anyone. Dentures, shaving implements, bandages, a container for kidney stones, underwear, shoes shaped by one’s own feet…all are sent off to their ends in the garbage can—for bums perhaps to discover and use again. Things carry away our entire lives, piece by piece. As if we’d never even existed.

  Those on their way out of this world have to leave their things behind, whether they like it or not, even though their possessions made up a large part of themselves. The living, on the other hand, hold onto their things tightly, as if they won’t ever have to die. And they accumulate even more the longer they live. Yet, everything that is accumulated and warehoused sucks up life’s oxygen. But to have only as much as one needs requires superhuman strength. Perhaps the things themselves won’t let go of us? Perhaps they’re manipulating us according to their own evil ends? Over there, a moth-eaten rug inherited from a deceased relative has pitted brother against brother. And a pair of cousins is beating up one another over a small handheld eggbeater, worth no more than a few litas. I read somewhere that things follow the same social patterns as human beings: they seek revenge, hold grudges, lie, quarrel, and kill. And this is especially true of tables, wallets, and knives. My friend’s uncle, who left for America, sold all his family’s gold and silver in a time of need, but he kept and cherished his most ordinary kitchen knife. He’s certain that he only made it because of that knife. It’s true, little knives have always had to shoulder the heaviest burdens and be party to the most difficult tasks. Look how much they figure in stories of poverty, fear, hope, making a (comfortable) living, and death. But most often it’s the violins and pianos that really go bad. At my house, everyone sighed with relief when four men pulled our Ukrainian piano out onto the stairwell on a greased hide. I decided to sell it when I heard my son tell his new Internet girlfriend over the phone: “If you really want to know more about me, I’ll start with the worst: I play the piano…”

  To get rid of what you don’t need anymore, the things that suck up your life’s oxygen, is an enormous relief. That’s probably why we’ve found ourselves with less and less decoration in our homes—the winds of time have whisked all the clutter away from our contemporary, minimalist interiors. Accordingly, I categoriz
e homes as “hard” or “soft.” “Hard” ones are furnished with nothing more than what is needed by someone exhausted by the stressful tempo of contemporary life: lots of clean, empty space. No irritants to assault the psyche. The past has been surgically removed. Blinds. Halogens (operating-room lighting). Silent, creeping constructions. Laminated flooring. Plastic ceiling tiles. Euphorbia and chamaedorea. Cacti. A computer. One hundred percent functional. True, such blinding newness sometimes affects homeowners in a strange way: they feel like guests in their own homes. That’s why the rich spend such outrageous sums of money to send their designers to London to learn how to falsify the marks of time, to age things stylishly: to retouch the walls and furniture with a patina of time—even the lighting fixtures—to soften the kitchen mirror with the suggestion of steam, to graze the sink with rust. For the “soft” homes, there’s no need to invest in age. Time does all the redecorating for free. In the cluttered halls of these homes, things no longer serving any purpose rise high in piles all mired in sentimental sap—no one makes a move to toss them out. Sparrows make their nests on the windowsills, and no-longer-fashionable geraniums become overgrown. Doors creak. The floorboards make their own footsteps.

  Sometimes, if you’re home alone, a metaphysical wind blows out of some dark corner. It brings in with it—through what tunnels?—the smell of the other side, the smell of grayness, and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. In the “soft” homes, all the voices, footfalls, and dust need to settle somewhere—so they creep into the drapery and shades. Spiders are never at a loss for places to weave their lacy blankets—and there are always plenty of those unfortunate spiders to feed to the green salamander named San Sanych who came here in a box of oranges from Spain. There’s always something to break: the framed and glassed Chardin Grace before the Meal that hung on the wall for twenty years has a fatal fall at two o’clock in the morning and shatters. That probably means something.

  Nonetheless, during a person’s life, things do vanish of their own accord—in diminishing concentric circles around you—and this has nothing to do with fads or fashion. You have no choice in the matter. It’s a banal comparison, but does a tree in autumn choose to drop its leaves around itself in a ring? First to go is the gold sequin matron of honor dress. And the formal suit with white pinstripes and the hankie in its pocket. Ties. Hats and hat pins. Sixty place settings and as many champagne flutes. You won’t have to borrow any from your neighbors, though. All sixty of your relatives, friends, and acquaintances have died or forgotten you—only one or two visit you now. The fishing net and bamboo spin-cast rod. Shish kebab skewers, pruning shears, the electric juicer, the meat grinder, the sausage maker, the shovel, the hammer you kept under your bed (for protection). Finally the thimble, spools of thread, pens, knitting needles, checkers, photographs, toothbrush and toothpicks—because there’s nothing left to pick—until only “hard” minimalism remains in your newly narrowed circle: chamber pot, eyeglasses (held together with wire), the pressed-glass tumbler. It’s too heavy for your X-ray of a hand to lift, but that’s why, perched at the edge of the table, it doesn’t tip over when the green love bird swoops down to get a drink. Yes, you share your last sips with a bird…But this person hasn’t yet turned into a thing. If he keeps his wits about him, if he pays attention to what goes on, he can be a real prophet till the end of his days…he can see through walls, he can hear the unheard “Forward!” shouted by time. He knows what his relatives will say before they’ve said it. They putter about him, but he’s a “thing unto himself.” A rock that will not be moved until it’s good and ready.

  But it’s a different story entirely when a person actually becomes a thing. Officially he still has a passport and an identification number, a pensioner’s certificate, a line in the census taken by the Republic of Lithuania, and, during elections, a vote. But, unofficially, he’s a thing. An old suitcase with a checkered lining, once upon a time taken to Petersburg or Bauska and later used to transport Clapp’s Favorites, fruit that practically melts in your mouth, to the market. Now it’s in the attic under a heap of rags, wrapped in a dusty scrap of fur. Such a person, lost in time and space, living in his children’s apartment on the ninth floor, wakes up at three in the morning (for his children, it’s night) and goes to feed the pig and the chickens. He goes out to do his “feeding” every half hour, every day, sometimes even more often. Or he ends up somewhere strange, and when he’s there, he has “bowel movements” (anyone who’s ever been to the hospital has heard doctors ask during their morning visits: “When was your last bowel movement?”), and in his mind’s eye there are no more hills, dales, or steep slopes, only plains. That’s when the relationships between the children of these old folks (God’s little birds) become sorely tested: “If you force me to take Dad, I’ll lock him in a closet—I have no other place to put him.” Or: “If you won’t agree to take Mother, I’ll just leave her on the doorstep—in the morning you’ll find a nice little present.”

  But that’s not even all. Not too long ago I read a story in the paper about an accident on the German Autobahn that killed three Lithuanians. Young, attractive, traveling around Europe. They were returned to Lithuania in zinc coffins. When their relatives—and later the court-appointed forensics expert—opened the coffins, they were horrified. The dearly departed had been thrown into the coffins like logs, “uncomfortably,” with their arms broken and legs twisted, already disintegrating, faces rotting (they had not been refrigerated), probes still in their mouths, taken directly from the intensive care unit. Their relatives immediately tried to take the German authorities to court—to protect the right of the dead to their dignity. But the pragmatic German burial laws dismissed their claims: a body being transported has the same status as an object; which is why you can’t file a suit on its behalf—at least not seeking redress for an insult to its dignity. Theft or destruction of property…now that would be another story. In other words, don’t go looking for something you never had. You got back what you sent out: things. We apologize for the poor quality of the objects on their return. For their depreciated value.

  You wake up in a cold sweat when your blood pressure is up and you imagine what will become of you after death. Your hair, your nails, your skin. Where will you go? What kinds of states, situations, or deceptions still await you? If your faith is limited to what you can see and touch, most likely you’ll come back as a thing: a remote control for a television, a Siemens telephone, a pen, a potato peeler, a lavender sachet. An aromathera-peutic bar of soap.

  I like things. I guess I’m a slave to things. I like the very physical essence of things. Their texture. Their roughness, their coarseness…A close up of Amélie’s hand reaching into a bag of slippery peas in that movie…her hand could be mine. At my friend’s house, I open up her old kitchen cabinet without permission and breathe in the scent. It’s not the scent of pearled barley or buckwheat in three-liter jars, but of a past world long gone. That world, I’m guessing, is made up of bags of wool and a patch of muslin, a dark green bottle of turpentine, a dry cough, bread wrapped in cheesecloth, nutmeg and cardamom, heart medicine, and, in a secret corner of the cabinet, a gold ring—but that’s another story—which, because of carelessness, had been sold to my friend along with the cabinet. Her husband had worked long and hard on the piece when they first bought it from an old lady: squirting a special mixture into each termite hole he could find. Thus embalmed, it survived the old lady and her daughter—the ring’s owner—and the orchard, which was leveled, and the village, whose name everyone has already forgotten. At another friend’s house, I secretly dig my nail into her Malaysian hardwood table (it’s only called hardwood: it’s soft as butter). Damn my oversensitive sense organs! I must smell everything, touch everything with my fingertips…

  Besides that, I find it hard to part with things. It’s harder than I’d like for me to throw the things I can easily do without down the garbage chute. I am especially fond of little things. All kinds of knickknacks, sho
rt stories, wisdom that can be summed up in one sentence. I could write an entire treatise about the smallness of things. But smallness is more palatable for the Chinese, because they have such tiny fingers. Lithuanians, though…My father told me how his father, my grandfather, many years ago in the village whose name everyone has forgotten, was repairing a watch that he had taken apart on the kitchen table. This big-nosed guy named Peredavi ius stopped by the cottage and spent some time chatting. When he was ready to leave, Grandfather suddenly noticed that a tiny watch piece was missing—probably a spring. The whole family fell silent, concentrating, Peredaviius along with them, searching for that spring in the pots and pans, in the cracks between the floorboards, in the bucket of ashes; they even studied the garbage. After about two hours of hunting, Peredaviius, to his great surprise, found it under the nail of his ring finger, big as life. “What a little shit,” he said on his way out, as if he had been offended or tricked by someone…

  In the oppressive heat of the afternoon, as I look at the pumpkins, squash, and zucchini, all scattered in the matte-gold dust, I realize that the very soul of summer is locked in those seeds. The poplar bonsai is dropping its yellowing leaves: on its miniature shoulders, it balances time’s cosmic turn from autumn to winter. From my ninth-floor apartment window, the silver Mazda looks like a wrinkled piece of aluminum foil after the accident. The wasps’ nest under the ceiling of the woodshed, like a water-soaked Japanese paper lantern…That’s more or less how I wanted my students to look at things. But they wrote only about having them. To have this, that, and the other thing. To have things is also what my son wants. Since his earliest days, I’ve been trying to teach him to appreciate the intangible—in the absence of this, that, or the other thing—which is impossible to buy or to own. For example, the golden threads of a good story. Metaphors and metonyms. Beauty itself without any possession. Especially beauty invisible to the naked eye. I teach him to cherish small things. In the way that Arundhati Roy’s protagonists cherish them in The God of Small Things: “They laughed at ant-bites on each other’s bottoms…At the minute spider who…camouflaged himself by covering his body with bits of rubbish—a sliver of wasp wing. Part of a cobweb. Dust. Leaf rot. The empty thorax of a dead bee.” And so on. But inevitably the time will come when one’s child will want big, serious things. It’s his God-given, human right to have a Lamborghini, or at least a Harley Davidson. The kind of car that, when you press a button, instantly turns into an office; from its depths emerge a computer, a modern telephone, a chilled bottle of champagne, silver goblets, and even a naked woman.