Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  In moments of crisis, I go to my friend’s house in Markuiai. She’s a heartless cynic, but that helps me. Last time when she was upset and I showed up saying, “I just want to kill myself,” she immediately gave me a cold compress. Now wearing jay-feather earrings in the deepening darkness, she puffs on her pipe, her anger fermenting. Furious, she demands that I lie down and she rubs my back with coarse salt. While rubbing, she says: “Your everyday ontology, the dead bee’s empty thorax, and all those quiet essences are just full of shit. You have to give your son the best of everything, and that’s that. Instead of crying and feeling sorry for yourself, hold your head up. Damn it, you’re a teacher, a specialist, you should be sparkling with ideas! About how to marry him off to the daughter of a Mafioso or the head of the customs office! Then your little Vytautas will have his Harley Davidson, and after your chin is covered in whiskers and you’re suffering from gout, you will have a peaceful old age, covered up in a fringed shawl.” I know my cynic is right as usual. But for me, like for all mothers, it’s uncomfortable to go “forward.” I look around my “soft” home. I go out “feeding”: I feed an autumn fly to my San Sanych.

  I look around my pantry and bookshelves. A little bit of everything, all sucking up the oxygen of my life. Lots of sentimentality, but nothing worth passing on in my son’s hope chest. Not even a porcelain dinner service for twelve with an oversized soup bowl. Not even silver candlesticks made up of eleven parts each. Not even any family heirlooms: a great-great-great-grandmother’s gold incisor or a pair of scissors for trimming candle wicks. Of course there’s no sign of any Fabergé eggs. Instead, I’ve got my thorn-apple cocoon, into which I escape in moments of weakness. The time, I know, will come…when I will remain in it for eternity. For now, just in case, I keep my chin up and fill the cocoon with something intangible. Secretly—if we are successful—I hope that my son will be able to sneak it into the customs office director’s house…like contraband.

  TRANSLATED FROM LITHUANIAN BY JRA AVIŽIENIS

  [LIECHTENSTEIN]

  STEFAN SPRENGER

  Dust

  In Burgenfeld in Lower Bavaria a group of medical practitioners and therapists met in Wittelsbacher Castle every second Wednesday evening during the winter to experiment with the continuing developments in Family Dynamics since Bert Hellinger. The participants arrived with suggestions about what should be discussed that evening and during preliminary talks came to an understanding about approach. The range of topics was wide: everything from historical events to the question of future energy supplies to the existence of metaphysical presences was examined to the last detail. The basis for the group’s “performative mimesis” was the theory of morphic resonance postulated by Sheldrake, which states that the growth, behavior, and mentality of living beings are influenced by the experiences of their ancestors by way of a shared, location-and-time dependent field.

  One of the field studies of the Burgenfeld Circle concerned itself with the question of which stage in evolution emotion began. The biologists, physiologists, and neurologists all agreed unequivocally on this point, giving an answer quite familiar to the other participants: below humans and the higher animals, there can be no emotion. Therefore, in order to be able to measure emotion on an incremental scale, moving step by step from a wholly emotionless state to the level of human beings, the researchers attempted to establish a baseline of zero emotion by examining ordinary household dust. The results were astonishing: counter to all of their assumptions, the Burgenfeld Circle in fact detected a really quite considerable level, indeed an abundance, of emotion in the stuff, necessitating a revision of their entire emotional hierarchy…

  Frau H.’s studio was located in the attic of an industrial building; a paint factory, a carpenter, and a metal-worker occupied the three floors below. Never having expected that the attic might be used for anything besides storage, the owners had—for ease of maintenance, as well as to minimize the noise level in the neighborhood—installed an enormous air compressor there, rather than putting it outside; all the various tenants used it in their daily operations. So Frau H. shared her loft with a device that came to life with a loud clacking of its return valve every time someone in the workshops below drew compressed air, and it continued to clang, bang, and whistle until the system returned to full compression, which cacophony imposed random pauses in speech and thought upon Frau H. and any guests. Additionally, it happened that the vibrations of the device kicked up all the industrial dust that appeared in the poorly insulated loft and so spread it throughout the entire space with incredible efficiency. Yet, the compressor wasn’t the only piece of machinery that made its presence known in Frau H.’s studio: the motor of the freight elevator had its housing on the roof and howled and shook inside Frau H.’s head whenever goods or materials were transported between the floors. Frau H. was not only able to “take” all this, however, but indeed was endowed with the ability to lose herself in the noises as soon as she walked into her studio—having developed a kind of patience with or perhaps consideration for this technic-pneumatic pandemonium, despite its being quite enough to drive any other artist (not possessed of Frau H.’s unique temperament) out of their mind. Frau H. saw the arrhythmic alarum of the machinery as her fair share of the abuse that man committed against man. The studio, she understood, was her expiation. Beyond this, she never gave the noises much thought.

  Frau H. often sought the far away. Not its stillness, but its action, its hectic pulse.

  Once, after returning to her studio loft in E. after several months abroad, she found that a thick layer of dust had formed on her work table—a large, propped-up slab of black Formica—and all strips and leaves of paper she’d left lying on it. Because Frau H. was already looking ahead to her next project, she began to remove the papers without dusting the table beforehand. The compressor sprang to life as she worked, and her eyes widened in wonder as she took in the sight of bright dust flecks flocking onto the dark Formica slab, gradually whitening the clean black spaces, the rectangle and square shapes left by her efforts to tidy up.

  “Do you hate your instrument?” tour manager Brandstetter asked when he finally got the opportunity in W. to confront Klubka after a concert. The evening before, the third violin had decided to disappear into the night immediately after the final applause had died down. He hadn’t come back—still wearing his concert tux—until the rest of the orchestra was in bed. This time Brandstetter had lain in wait for Klubka at the artists’ entrance of the W. municipal concert hall and then tugged on the violinist’s sleeve after following him to the neighboring Havana Club. Klubka didn’t resist, accepted the proffered cigar and Cuba libre, and afterward observed in silence as the barkeeper, who’d had to open a new bottle of Havana Club Anejo Especial for Brandstetter’s drink, let the first drops of rum fall to the teakwood floor.

  “Ah,” Klubka said, “the lágrima.”

  “The what?” the tour manager asked. He wanted to come to the point with Klubka quickly. He still had eight points on his daily to-do list to cross off after this.

  “The ritual of tears,” Klubka said. “For the orishas. In gratitude that they came over the sea with the slaves. It’s difficult for gods to cross the big water.”

  The tour manager looked at Klubka, uncomprehending.

  “Forget it,” said Klubka. “In answer to your question: no, I do not hate my instrument.”

  The emotion discovered in the Burgenfeld dust plunged the group of researchers into embarrassed confusion: they knew that type and composition of this emotion had to be explored. After all, once a morphogenetic field is tapped, it must be exhausted then and there, or else continue to have influence in unknown ways from that point on. Nonetheless, they were understandably afraid of what they might find—was it possible that they might discover a new means of precisely measuring all emotion that would render their previous research into human psychology obsolete? One of them too expressed his fear that they might discover in the dust the source of th
e existential “ennui,” the entropic querulousness occurring so frequently in men of their age; while another made clear that he’d been raised a Catholic, speculating that it was possible they had all stumbled onto the concrete and omnipresent manifestation of evil in the form of this ever-present dust. So they moved out of the great hall in which they usually held their symposia and into the wood-paneled hunting room nearby to take a much-needed break and fish for dust-related information on their Blackberries and iPhones—something that the UMTS antenna in the castle tower, which also provided the whole city’s 3G coverage, facilitated within seconds:

  + Dust is a result of the divisibility of matter + The dust particle is the smallest object the human eye can detect + In terms of size, proportionally, a single unit of household dust represents the halfway point between a subatomic particle and the planet Earth + Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris + Household dust results from an attritive mixture of dead insects, particles of human skin, and cloth fibers + Dust mites, which feed on particles of human skin, live in household dust, discharge feces twenty times per day, and produce a new generation every three weeks +

  “Oh dear,” commented Gerlinde (Hawaiian massage, Constellation Work, past-life regression) who had pulled that last gem from the web. “Dust eats people.”

  The symposium chair, Sonja (systemic assemblies, life coaching, angels), sprung from her leather chair, visibly anxious, and said with forced cheer—trying to set a good example—“Let’s find out!” The group followed her halfheartedly back into the great hall and prepared themselves for an exacting analysis of the emotion of dust.

  Frau H. gazed wide-eyed at the dust tableau on her table because in her absence the very work had come into being toward which she had been striving for years and had only ever caught sight of, caught hints of, in flashes of intuition. She had tried to scratch it out of copper plates, to coax it out of mixtures of water and egg and limestone and pigment, to sift it out of the grain of enlarged photographs. In all of these projects, the merest hint of the sought-after something had become perceptible, but Frau H. wanted more. And she did more: making herself sick in order to experience again the gritty fever dreams of her childhood illnesses, curious if the same swirling, milling, cascading cataracts that the young girl’s brain had known how to produce would now return…But no, there was only lethargy. She set off stun grenades in the basement, having discovered in her research that sudden, overwhelming sensory experiences can affect the brain’s vision centers to such an extent that you lose the depth and sharpness and color provided by your photoreceptor cones for weeks on end, having to make do with nothing more than the grainy black-and-white night vision of your rods—a slow and indistinct form of vision that might help her to approach the effect she sought. Instead of giving herself perpetual night vision, however, Frau H. suffered hearing loss, and could only go out into open air with dark sunglasses for quite a while after. Also, she got horrible sweating attacks, leaving her body dripping wet, as though she were trying to sweat out the grenade’s effects.

  Asked what the hell it could possibly be, the thing that she’d been searching for so doggedly in her eye and brain, she only knew what it wasn’t: it wasn’t smooth, or clear, or new, or segregated; it wasn’t an image, some material, or an object. Was it only, God help her, some new way of seeing she was after?

  “No,” she said, “Or, if so, then that’s only the way in which it will reveal itself.”

  And now it had revealed itself.

  “But you don’t clean your violin anymore!” Brandstetter said to Klubka.

  Klubka pulled his little leather pouch of violin resin out of his pocket and laid it on the bar next to his cigar butt, all burned out in the expensive-looking ashtray. Brandstetter sighed to himself: again it was time to hear a little lecture.

  “Colophony,” Klubka said, “is gleaned from pine resin distilled in steam such that the turpentine volatizes and the colophony remains.”

  These lectures always occurred in instances when the orchestra’s musicians felt that they were being called to duty as guardians of culture, while he, in their eyes, was just a stupid little bookkeeper happy to run himself ragged seeing to their needs.

  “You add galipot, Venetian turpentine, beeswax, or mastic to it according to the area of application. You apply it to the violin bow so that stiction arises between the bow hair and violin string. The colophony bonds the bow hair to the violin string; the hair pulls the string in the stroke’s direction from the at-rest position.”

  Which is exactly what the tour manager’s musicians were constantly trying to do to him: pull him out of his at-rest position. Their salaries were too low, the hotels too dingy, cars too uncomfortable: complain complain complain. He never had a moment’s rest, thanks to these arrogant penguins.

  “If the resistance of the string is greater than the stiction, then it rebounds. That’s okay, because the speed of the bow’s motion across the string generates warmth and the colophony changes from an adhesive to a lubricating film, in which the string can safely slide back into place. If the heat from friction dissipates, the colophony hardens again and fuses the bow hair and string together until frictional heat arises again. Stick, slide, stick.”

  Before the tour Brandstetter had done some research and made out index cards for every instrument. He knew that you needed cleaning sheets with a magnesium layer for the keys of woodwind instruments so that the player’s spit doesn’t clog the keys and leave the thing making ugly kissing noises in concert. He knew that trombonists were discussing a new lubricant that didn’t have to be mixed from two substances, but was also considered a little too “monotonous.” And he knew that after concerts a violinist ought to cleanse his violin of colophony dust with a cloth and a mild cleaning agent and that Klubka had not done this since the beginning of the tour. Because of this, the fortissimi kicked up so much dust from the violin section you might as well have been sitting in a construction site. Of course, his colleagues had complained—Klubka would set off someone’s allergies, everyone’s clothes were getting dirty, complain complain complain. And that’s why he was sitting there with Klubka, playing with his Cuba libre and looking for an opportunity to suggest Klubka clean his violin.

  “Stick, slide, stick,” Klubka repeated slowly, as if savoring the meaning and hidden meaning of each individual word. “There’s something to that.”

  So there you have it, Brandstetter thought tiredly, another hurrah for the lecture circuit.

  “It’s like in life,” Klubka continued. “A person wants to stick to something no matter what. A woman. A kid. An instrument. But you always slide away. Or it slides away from you. Even if you think you’ve got a good hold on it—the woman because of marriage, the child because of its dependency, the instrument because it’s safe in its case. But you lose the inner adhesion. Because the resistance is too great.”

  “Yes,” Brandstetter said, and remembered the story one of the violas had told him: Klubka’s son had drowned years ago and Klubka had never gotten over it. So that was it: Klubka was having a crisis. He would—Brandstetter snuck a look at his watch—listen for twenty more minutes, saying “yes” and “I understand” before finally being able to turn his attention to the day before yesterday’s medical expenses, when one of the musicians had urgently demanded special medicinal herbs at half past midnight, despite everyone’s being in perfect health.

  Though the great hall of Wittelsbacher Castle had underfloor heating, it was cooler than the hunting room. Some of the researchers pulled their cardigans tighter while others nestled into their pullovers. Through a glass roundel the crescent moon gleamed on the western horizon, almost bent to a circle by the old and uneven glass. A cold January wind rustled in the ivy on the outer wall. Sonja, the chair, let her eyes wander from face to face. “We’ll establish the components of dust individually, then we’ll bring in a stand-in for emotion”—she nodded towards Maja (Bach flower remedies, chromotherapy)—“and we’ll
see where it goes. Agreed?”

  The circle nodded.

  “I need stand-ins for dead insects, human dandruff, and cloth. Oh, and for mites. Can you do mites, Georg?”

  Georg (grief counseling) nodded and over-exaggeratedly scratched his left armpit. The group laughed, thankful for comic relief, and pushed their chairs back to the wall while Sonja posted the stand-ins in the newly opened space in the middle of the room. She pointed to each and told her stand-ins firmly: “You are now Dead Insects, you are now Dandruff…”

  The stand-ins closed their eyes and concentrated on their performance energies. The moods of Cloth, Dandruff, and Dead Insects, respectively, were neutral; while Mites, according to Georg, were feeling “fit as a fiddle, restless, and smug.”