Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Behind the ball there’s a human hand.

  It’s wrinkly, with long, red fingernails, and it’s covered in caffelatte-colored spots: it’s the hand of a lady who’s getting on in years. I start pulling on the hand, but there’s an arm attached and a shoulder and a neck and a head; I feel them though I can’t see them. There’s an entire human being in this stuffed dog, and I’m pulling with all my might, trying to drag her from an opening some ten centimeters wide. And while I’m pulling, the person inside the dog starts saying, Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! I know that voice. That’s the voice of the lady who lives above my nonna’s apartment, and whenever my brother and I bounced our rubber ball around on our nonna’s balcony, she’d go out on her own balcony (which was tiny in comparison to ours) and she’d start in with her Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Who knows, I tell myself, maybe if I get her out, the lady upstairs—Signora Iolanda—will still be gripping that bamboo rod in her left hand that she always used to beat her rugs, and she’ll start chasing me around with it, whacking at my back and behind. Even so, I tear the stuffed dog open some more, stick both arms in and, straining quite a bit, I start to pull her out. First her right arm. Then her whole head—and as soon as her head’s out with her eyeballs all dirty and those mint-green curlers in her iron-gray hair, she sputters, Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Then her chest pops out, those big, fat tits under her flowered housecoat, then the rest of her. Once she’s out of the stuffed dog—which makes a noise like a creamy cake going splat against the wall, then just like that is back to normal—Signora Iolanda starts pacing up and down the room with all of its breathing, greasy things just like she used to do years ago, pacing back and forth on her balcony every time she heard my brother and me bouncing our red rubber ball on our nonna’s balcony, and every six or seven steps, saying exactly what she used to say: Stop that bouncing, you little monsters! You’re destroying your nonna’s plants! And my geraniums! You rotten little boys! Pulling Signora Iolanda out of the dog has made me realize something: every time I pull something or someone from something in my room, I’m literally pulling out something or someone that makes up the memory that this thing in my room (for reasons I can’t always explain) stirs up in me.

  Then, at the end of the dream, I’m searching for the things in my room that hold the memories of my grandfather. Nonno died some years back. I miss him terribly. Maybe he’s in my guitar, I tell myself in my dream, or in the television or the stereo or the mirror or the door to the closet. Or maybe the memory of my nonno—who was actually born on April 6—is in one of his gifts: the binoculars he gave me, or the saber, or the coin collection. In the dream—and also right now—I want to hold him, hug him, and even if he’s only like Signora Iolanda, even if he’s only restricted to my memories, it goes without saying that my memories of him would be vast by comparison.

  My dream on April 6, 2006 reflects a thought of mine, though turned upside-down, a ghost I’ve had running back and forth across my mind ever since I lost my job, and that’s made me think that all of us, we human beings, we mortal beings, all of us, so even nonhuman beings, we’re all living things. Maybe this ghost first showed up when I took to spending my days in bed or on the couch, waiting to fall asleep, to dream, and I lay in a position more like a thing, more like an inert body than a living one. I started thinking that just because we breathe doesn’t mean we’re any different from things. Some people might say this is just the foolishness of a depressed mind and aside from everything else—meaning, aside from the fact that we can move and blush and go pale and reproduce and lose blood and make feces and grow fat and grow thin—aside from all of this, what really makes us different from things is we can think. On the other hand, that ghost crouching in the crevices of my brain tells me that there are things that move automatically (robots), and there are things that blush and grow pale (dolls), and our blood’s not so different from gasoline and other fuels, and as for thinking—are we really so sure that we think? Aren’t we more like stones falling and accelerating at the speed of 9.1 meters per second who think of nothing but wanting to fall at 9.1 meters per second? Or more like trees that only think and say the word “tree,” or leaves that only think and say the word “leaf”? In the end, aren’t we simply living things that breathe and move and feel, but we’re still things, and so, sooner or later, aren’t we destined to go back to being things exactly like a leaf, a stone, a doll, a robot, or gasoline? And really, won’t we grow obsolete much faster than many of the things I’ve mentioned?

  Maybe this is why—because we’re growing obsolete much faster than other things—that we worship God with a symbol that’s just a thing. We kneel in veneration before a thing that resists the erosion of growing obsolete—that doesn’t wrinkle, doesn’t break, doesn’t change; or, if it does, then slowly, much more slowly than we things do. We observe things, we want them, study them, buy them, learn how to use them, and maybe all because we really want to be like them: we want to be the guitar hanging on the wall of our room, one of the pens in the penholder, pages full of words on philosophy—we want to be a book, probably. We’re things that revere other things, that look at other things with love, with envy, because we’re living, breathing things and when we become things like any other thing we’ll have crumbled into a million bits and won’t even have the dignity of a chair, a table…a book. Of things that survive, and I mean this literally.

  On the other hand, while I lay stretched out on my bed thinking about these things, that ghost crossing from one side of my brain to the other, I was also thinking that //time// of all our words is the one most founded on superstition, that it should be removed from every mouth and every dictionary—from every physics formula. Time, I thought while lying in my bed, doesn’t exist. What exists is the movement of matter—or better—matter in motion, because //motion// doesn’t exist any more than //time// and //space// exist; it’s just the word we use to describe matter in motion. Time is not a thing. When asked what time is, we can’t point to some specific object, the way we can if we’re asked what a chair is, a column, a lancet window, hemoglobin. Time isn’t tangible, just as space isn’t tangible, and the idea that we could turn these artificial (yet useful) terms into something tangible, into something that heals, or something you can kill, or something you have to fight against, this might be one of our last great myths.

  Time is even more nonexistent than space: consider how often we speak about time with words about space: //a stretch of time//, //an expanse of time//, //a length of time//, and so on. Or else we personify time; faced with time, we become animists: we say //time passes//, //time flies//, //time heals//, and so on. Or else we turn the things that represent time into time itself: the hands of a clock, a stick’s shadow on the sand. If a clock exists, we tell ourselves, then time exists. If a moving shadow exists, or a rising and setting sun, then, we tell ourselves, time exists. But time doesn’t exist. It’s like saying that because we hear something in the attic, because we hear chains shaking, a violin playing every night at midnight, our house must be haunted. Yes, maybe these ways of referring to space and time are useful, though I didn’t think so while I tossed and turned in bed and so-called time went by; those terms are useful like having a god to pray to is useful, or a Santa Claus to wait for, or a spirit to guide us, or a truth to believe in: sure, these things might be useful, but they don’t exist. And so the notion of a space-time continuum, which is actually curved and permeable, is only the result of believing that time’s a thing, which it’s not; time is just a word, a word that absorbs every movement of every last par tic le in the universe. Most of all, time is useful for constructing the universe according to physics, which, along with mathematics (much more than philosophy and literature) is our best
method, our most useful method, for representing the world—but even physics has its limits. It’s not an all-powerful, all-inclusive explanation of existence.

  And so the claim that //everything is relative// is certainly inspired, but probably no less false than Socrates’ statement //I don’t want examples of courage but the definition of courage//. If we think about it, these statements are complete nonsense that have influenced our ideas for centuries, because you can’t find a definition for an abstract concept, for a word that’s just a word and not a thing, and we can’t really know that everything is relative; it might sound good, but it’s also an incredibly confused bit of reasoning, because it generalizes the specific and specifies the general; it subsumes the particular in the universal and the universal in the particular; it induces and deduces at the same time, //everything is relative//, //relativity is everything//, the greatest possible hasty generalization and reductio ad unum that man’s come up with yet. And, even so, stretched out on my bed, staring at the things in my room, thinking, I still couldn’t help but feel that I myself, yes, I was everything and relative.

  TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN BY ELIZABETH HARRIS

  [IRELAND: IRISH]

  ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE

  Trespasses

  Clara reaches the footpath just as the bin lorry turns the corner and drives out of the estate. Now her rubbish will be festering away in the bin for the best part of a month because she’s going abroad the day after tomorrow and she doesn’t feel brave enough to ask her neighbour, Bubbles, to haul out the bin next week. She’s already asked Bubbles to feed Soots the cat, and you have to draw the line somewhere. So it will be there for her when she comes back home. Stinking like a fish graveyard.

  C’est la fucking vie.

  She drags the bin back up the garden and through the house and out the back with a certain ease, even though it’s heavy, and there are three steps to negotiate. But Clara’s arms are as strong as a weightlifter’s. You wouldn’t think it to look at her. She’s a petite woman, with a certain smart quality to her, even when dressed, as now, in an old faded dressing gown. (She was in bed when she heard the drone of the bin lorry.) Clara would look chic in a sack, some of her friends say. Gamine, is what she is, with her trim little body and spiky short hair, colour changing with her mood—it’s purple and blonde at the minute. She looks a bit like what she is, namely, a beautician. It’s her job that explains her physical strength too—most of her day is spent removing hair from women’s legs, faces, and other body parts. You need to be strong, as well as dexterous and sure of yourself to rip off the waxed paper so swiftly that the client doesn’t realize it’s happening until it’s all over.

  She puts coffee in the coffee machine as soon as she’s stowed the bin out in the back garden and lets it filter while she’s throwing on her clothes. There’s a hectic day ahead even though she’s closed her salon, as she calls the front room where she zaps unwanted hair off her clients. Before you go on a trip there’s always a load of things to do. Maybe if you were better organized it would be different, but Clara, who looks as neat as a knife, isn’t organized at all—she tends to put things on the long finger, to dump an important letter on the kitchen table and say, “I’ll file it away later.” And believe she’ll file it away later. As a result she spends half her life looking for mislaid items, usually of a financial nature. Today, when she has plenty else on her plate, she has to dash off to her accountant with the P60s and the other tax stuff. All those forms in that horrible shade of Revenue red. It’s Halloween next week. Which means, in Ireland, tax time.

  Naturally, she always leaves it till the last minute.

  The rain is still bucketing down as she makes a dash for the car, pulling her collar up around her neck. Such disheartening weather. It makes the suburbs of south Dublin (and this is supposed to be the good part of the city) look bleaker than they really are. All those pebble-dash walls turn grey as wet knickers. If there’s anything Clara can’t stand it’s pebble-dash. The hard little nipples just make her puke, always did, even when she was a child. One of those irrational aversions. The way some people are allergic to peas, or pineapples.

  But they don’t bother her right now. Nothing can really dent her happiness because in a few days’ time she will have left this place behind her and be with her son, Eoin, in San Francisco, for three blissful weeks. He’s been over there for two years, working in a hotel—he’s head bellboy now. She had to pretend to be pleased when he got promoted from being something else—junior bellboy. She doesn’t even know what a bellboy is, but it’s not the career she had in mind for her only son, who got a First in Greek and Roman Civilization and looks like a film star. Well, who is she to complain: her Two-One in Philosophy didn’t prepare her for her career as a beautician, although it wasn’t the worst preparation she could have had. And Eoin is happy is the thing. He likes America, even though it’s a drag that he can’t come home because he’s undocumented. Clara hasn’t seen him since he left Ireland. She didn’t realize how much—how very much—she missed him until she was filling in the form online for her air ticket. Then, as she keyed in her credit card number, she started crying and she didn’t stop for twelve hours.

  But that was ages ago. In two days she will be with Eoin and therefore everything makes her happy. She is playing “San Francisco” on the CD player—she’s been playing it for two and a half months, nonstop. There’s a tinned fruitcake, a porter cake, from Bewley’s lying on the passenger seat, ready to go into her case the day after tomorrow—Eoin’s favourite cake. She loves to see it there, waiting to be enjoyed. By him. Oh yes, today everything is wonderful. Even this boring suburb that she’s had to live in since her relationship with Alan ended, which wasn’t today or yesterday, and where she never felt at home. Such a haphazard sort of place. It looks as if all the roads and houses fell out of the sky and just happened to land on these unremarkable fields, miles from anywhere that makes sense. Miles from the city and miles from the mountains and miles from the river and the sea. Who would live here if they had a choice?

  If you come to San Francisco

  Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

  Watermill Grove. That’s where the accountant is, in a semi-detached house with pebble-dashed walls and a picture window looking out directly on other semi-detached houses with pebble-dashed walls and picture windows. His office is around the back in a wooden shed—the neighbours kicked up when he had it erected, but you don’t need planning permission for those wooden structures, Shomeras. Clara has considered getting one herself, and moving her salon to the back garden.

  She parks her car in the first free spot she sees, which as luck would have it is just opposite the accountant’s house. You’re gonna meet some gentle people there. She turns off the motor and grabs the big brown envelope. Off she dashes across the road.

  The accountant is not in the office.

  But his wife is.

  His wife is a woman with soft creamy skin and a big warm smile. She is padded and comfortable looking, in a baby-pink jumper made of cashmere or some smooth wool. A fawn skirt.

  “Michael had a bypass operation two weeks ago,” she says, cheerfully. Michael is the accountant.

  “What!” Clara says. What will happen to her tax returns now? She gives the office a furtive glance. It has a reassuringly worked-in look: papers are stacked in wire trays and a few letters are scattered on the desk. And there’s the smell of work: coffee and computer and sweat. “That’s terrible! How is he?”

  “He’s fine,” the wife smiles. “He made a really fast recovery.”

  “Oh, good, good,” says Clara. Only four days to the deadline. After that they’ll start shovelling on the fines. Heart surgery will be no excuse. “I’m really shocked. I didn’t know.”

  “He didn’t know himself until three weeks ago,” the woman says, and she laughs, proudly.

  “Really? Didn’t he have pains…” Clara fiddles with her brown envelope. “Angina or whatever?” />
  The accountant’s wife shakes her head.

  “Not a thing. No pain. Apparently when the blockage is on the left side you feel nothing. If it’s on the right you get shortness of breath and chest pains and so on.”

  “You get a warning…” Clara nods, interested. Her mother, who died two years ago, a month after Eoin went to America, used to have angina. She had pains on the right side. She got a warning. But she didn’t get a bypass because she was on the medical card, so she got some pills and then she died. Eoin couldn’t get back for the funeral. If he’d come home they’d never have let him in again.

  “But on the left, not a thing. No warning. I never knew about any of this until now,” the woman laughs.

  “No,” says Clara. “You only learn all the complicated details when something happens.”

  She gives the accountant’s wife the envelope with the tax documents in it.

  “He wants me to take files in to him already!” the woman says, pleased. “Can’t wait to get at them!”

  “Oh don’t, it’s much too early for that,” says Clara. “He should rest.” He could probably do her returns, sitting up in bed, on a laptop. Pass the time for him.

  “Don’t worry,” the woman smiles. “Most of them are done. It’s only a few of the stragglers that are left. I’ll do them myself, they’re the little ones.”