Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The Mégane had a personality. It was companionable and long-suffering and he had named it Elizabeth for his mother. Car and mother had in common a martyr’s perseverance and a lack of natural advantages.

  “Small devil loose inside my head, Liz,” said Doctor Sot, “and it’s like he’s scrapin’ a blade in there, the little bastard.”

  As he crossed the humpback bridge over the White Lady’s River he whistled the usual three-note sequence for luck, a bare melody that rose once and then fell. He sucked in his cheeks against the pain and reached for the satchel on the passenger seat. He groped inside for a naggin. He wedged the naggin between his thin thighs. He unscrewed the top and fate dug a pothole and the pothole caused the Mégane to jolt. The jolt splashed whiskey onto the grey trousers of his suit.

  “Oh thank you very much,” said Doctor Sot.

  He checked the mirrors before raising the naggin. Clear. And just his own eyes in there, which was a relief. Mirrors were more troublesome earlier in the mornings. He drained what was left of the whiskey and great vitality raged through him and he tossed the empty naggin in back.

  “Another dead soldier, Liz,” he said, and with his grey lips he bugled a funeral death march.

  The Tesco at eleven this weekday morning was quiet and the quietness for Doctor Sot had an eerie quality to it. As he walked the deserted aisles, wincing against the bright colours of the products, he felt like the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse. What would you do with yourself? All the fig rolls on earth wouldn’t be a consolation. So taken was he with this grim notion he walked into a display of teabags and sent the boxes flying. He was upset to have knocked them and got down on his hands and knees to remake the neat triangle they had been stacked in. He felt a hot seep of urine against the inside of his thigh. He summoned his deepest reserves to staunch it.

  “This is a nice bag of sticks,” he said.

  The seeping was slight—a mercy—and the boxes of tea were at least in some manner restacked. He proceeded with as much nonchalance as he could muster. From the bakery counter he picked up a chocolate cake for his wife, Sal, who was the happiest woman alive. Also in his basket he placed mouthwash, a family pack of spearmint gum, and eight naggins of the John Jameson. A patient, Tim Lambert, appeared gormlessly from around an aisle’s turn with a duck-shaped toilet freshener in his hand.

  “Tricks with you, Doctor O’Connor?” he enquired.

  Doctor Sot put his basket on the floor and went into a boxer’s swaying crouch. He jabbed playfully at the air around the old man’s head.

  “You’re goin’ down and you’re stayin’ down, Lambert!” he cried.

  Lambert laughed as he eyed, for the full of his mouth, the contents of the doctor’s basket. Doctor Sot picked up the basket and primly moved on, the humour gone from him. The consolation was that Lambert’s lungs wouldn’t see out the winter—he had told no lie. Oh and he knew full well what they all called him behind his back. He knew it because another of his elderly patients, Rita Cryan, was gone in the head and had forgotten that the nickname was slanderous and meant to be secret.

  “That’s not a bad mornin’ at all, Doctor Sot,” she always croaked when he paid a house call now. He tended with Rita to strap on the blood pressure monitor a little too tightly. There was temptation to open one of the naggins before he got it to the counter but he denied himself and bore the small devil’s caper.

  “You’d want a good class of a pelt on you,” he said to the girl at the till. “Brass monkeys.”

  But she was an Eastern, and as she blankly scanned his items, he realised that pelt was perhaps a little rich for her vocabulary, not to mind brass monkeys.

  “Pelt like a bear,” he said. “For the cold, I mean. Look it! Here’s Papa Bear inside in his lovely warm pelt!”

  He flapped his arms delightedly against his sides to indicate Papa Bear’s cosiness.

  “Fifty-three euro and eighty-nine cent,” she said.

  In the Mégane, he opened a naggin and took a good nip for its dulling power. He saw a distressed van come coughing and spluttering into the car park. The rainbow colours it was painted in could not disguise the distress. It was driven by a young man with braided hair. Many small children, all shaven-headed, wriggled and crawled along the dashboard and against the windscreen. The man climbed down from the van and slid back the side door. More shaven-headed children poured out and more braided adults. These, Doctor Sot realised, must be the new-age travellers the paper had been on about. They were camped in the hills above town. On Slieve Bo, if he recalled. They were colourful and unclean and wore enormous military boots. There were bits of metal in their faces. They made a motley parade as they went across the car park. The driver remained at the side door of the van and gave out yards to someone inside. A young woman poked her head out and spoke to him. He huffed and he gestured and he followed the rest of the travellers across the car park. She remained. She stepped out and leaned against the van and rolled a cigarette from a pouch. Doctor Sot’s breath caught as he watched her. She was remarkably beautiful and vital. Her hair also was in braids and piled high and she wore striped leggings tucked into her boots. She felt his stare and returned it. She smiled and waved at him. He slugged hard on the naggin and took off.

  There are wolves in our valley—this is what Doctor Sot knew. We do not know when they will attack us but attack us they surely will, with their hackles heaped and drool sheering from between their yellow teeth. The only illusion of permanence is that which is finagled by love. The careful study of sickness had taken a great toll from him but a moment’s connection with this young woman had lifted him, had in an instant remade the illusion, and Doctor Sot wasn’t back across the White Lady’s River before he had a plan formed.

  The tinkers, those older travellers, held that the river’s crossing was here auspicious because on the bank by the hump-back bridge was a maytree hundreds of years old and Doctor Sot, who would take all the luck from the world that he could get, whistled again his three notes as he crossed back into town. His home and practice was on a neat terrace of greystone that was of some prestige in the town. It had been bought cheaply in the long-gone heyday of his practice. Having come from less—his persevering mother had put him in the university out of a council house—Doctor Sot enjoyed still the mild grandeur of his address. The three stone steps that led up to his door, the nine-panel fanlight above it, the fine parquet blocking of his hallway’s floor, these were details that he greatly enjoyed and all the more today, so elevated was his mood—the guilt of the mood’s provenance had not yet begun to seep.

  Details were important to Doctor Sot. The likes of a Doctor Sot doesn’t get to fifty-nine years of age without grasping the trick of it, the trick of it being that we must move out and back from the foreground of things, occupy our minds with the fine details, paint in the far corners of the view. Happy Sal was all foreground.

  “Oh adieu! Yes adieu! Oh adieu all my false-hearted looooves!” sang Doctor Sot as he tapdanced through to the back kitchen, one hand flapping a minstrel’s wave, the other clasping the satchel. Sal flushed and chortled at the sight of him. She threw down her serial killer novel and bounced up from the small pink sofa by the stove.

  “You’ll never guess!” she cried. “He’s only taken the head and buried it in the desert!”

  “This is the prostitute he met at the truckstop?”

  “One and the same,” she said. “Had the head in his fridge but it started to stink.”

  “Neighbours might be alerted, Sal.”

  “He’s making a move to be on the safe side,” she said. “He’s headed for Tulsa. Ham sandwich, lovie?”

  “It would fill a hole, Sal.”

  “Your glass of beer with it?”

  “Might take the fear of God off me.”

  They embraced. Sot was stick and bone, Sally was hot and pink and fleshy.

  “Mind you,” he said. “I’ve a bit of a rush on. I need to make a call before surgery.”

>   “Oh?” she said. “A call?”

  She was already slicing the batch loaf. There weren’t many calls these days.

  “Health Board,” he said.

  She opened the fridge for the ham, the butter, the can of Smithwick’s. Happy as a duck she was, unshakable from her good humour, and of the opinion that her husband, if anything, grew more marvellous with every passing year.

  “They givin’ you gip again, dear-heart?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “It’s just I’ve had a think about this Outreach programme.”

  He sipped from the glass of beer she handed to him. He raised his eyes guiltily over the foam of it.

  “But they can’t force you, Carl?”

  “Of course not, babycakes. It’s just I’ve thought maybe I was a little quick to rule it out…Maybe I should, you know, give something back?”

  With his bloodshot eyes and his hammering heart! Doctor Sot hurried the beer, and he would leave the sandwich uneaten on the plate. He needed five minutes before surgery for the business with the mouthwash and the gum. His hurry would carve out another five for the call to the Health Board. As he downed the last of his beer, pain ripped the back of his skull. He went to the sink to block the wince from her. He squinted out and up to the white sky. Great wingéd creatures were taking shape up there. He turned quickly again to Sal.

  “Service!” he cried. “What ever happened to the notion of serving the people?”

  “You know what, sweetness?”

  Sal’s mouth shaped with awe as she grasped the brilliance of his idea.

  “It could be just the thing for you! Take you out of yourself!”

  Whatever this heroically complicated husband came up with was fine with Sally. She soon enough forgot the details of his adventures. Before he had even reached the phone in the hallway’s nook, she was deep in the pink sofa and in the tale of her Tulsa-bound maniac. He was snacking on innards as he zoomed along the blacktop.

  “Obviously, Carl, we’re delighted you’d volunteer.”

  “I’m sensing a but,” said Doctor Sot.

  This Mannion fella at the Health Board was easy enough to read. All he wanted for Outreach was the young guns with the big grins and the surfer hair. Sot raged:

  “Thirty-five years of experience! And I offer it up to you! I am offering, Mr. Mannion, to take part in your bloody Outreach programme! Just like you asked!”

  “Carl, it was just a circular. Just a general call for volunteers. This was three months ago and really we’re sorted now. All the halting sites are serviced. The seminars for the community centre are looked after. I’ve a couple of lads who’ve…”

  “What about the new-age travellers?” said Doctor Sot. “Who’s providing Outreach there?”

  “You mean the crowd above on Slieve Bo?”

  That had him. Mannion had to admit that the new-age travellers had not, in fact, yet been added to the Outreach list.

  “Animals, are they, Mr. Mannion?”

  “Oh I mean they’d qualify, I suppose, if they’re receiving benefits but…”

  “But but but, Mr. Mannion!”

  It was agreed by sighing Mannion that the new-age travellers would be assessed to see if they qualified for Outreach.

  “In the meantime,” said Doctor Sot, “it’d be no harm, surely, to go up there and show a friendly face? Just to introduce oneself? Maybe a few leaflets about nutrition? About chlamydia, that type of thing?”

  “Whatever you think, Carl,” said Mannion.

  It was Doctor Sot’s experience that the longer he stayed on the phone to people, the more he got what he wanted.

  “And what’d be my best road up Slieve Bo, Mr. Mannion?”

  His surgery ran from noon until two. It was as slow as it always was now. Only the old and fatalistic still patronised the O’Connor practice. The lady of the Knotts whose twin had died in the winter was in about the voices again but the voices had turned benevolent and she was less disturbed than she had been. Ellie Troy had that grey, heartsick look but she was seventy-two now and she’d had the grey, heartsick look since she was forty: it was a slow death for poor Ellie. It was the weather for sore throats, Doctor Sot told Bird Magahy. His own headaches weren’t so bad during surgery and he was careful not to gaze out toward the white sky. Last in was Tom Feeney, the crane driver.

  “It’s the man below, Doctor O’Connor.”

  “Do you mean, Tom…”

  “I do.”

  “He mightn’t be doing all you’d require of him?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “No?”

  “It’s the opposite of that.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m in a state,” the sixty-year-old crane man said, “of constant excitement.”

  Doctor Sot prescribed a week’s Valium and the taking up of a new hobby. He was in the back kitchen by five past two, kissing Sal, and telling her he was away on a mission.

  “Outreach, Sal!”

  “Bloody hell they’ve snapped you up quick enough!”

  “I’ll be back for the tea surely.”

  “Careful how go, honeybob!”

  Over the bridge, a three-note whistle, and the main road he turned off for a side road. The side road became a boreen. The boreen as he climbed became track. Track became narrower track, and it turned onto a rutted half-track. It was like a path that animals had trampled down. Suddenly space opened out on all sides and Doctor Sot steered his Mégane through the high air but she laboured, Elizabeth. The high country had its own feeling. Ascending into the iron-grey of its colours as the afternoon light fatted up, Doctor Sot was alerted to the different intensities of these greys and shale tones. Austere from below, they were radiant when you were up and among them. The high reaches were now everywhere open to him, the valley below glistened its turloughs, and the gorse was seared to a winter bronze. The half-track hairpinned, and the travellers’ camp was announced by a sudden assault of skinny dogs. Which was all the Mégane needed.

  “Easy, Liz,” said Doctor Sot, as he steered the old girl through the dogs.

  The camp was sheltered from the west winds by a great outcrop of shale. There were as many shaven-headed children as there were skinny dogs. The grown travellers skulked in the rearground, and were watchful; they came nearer. There was something that resembled a teepee. Inside it was a generator, juddering. Hooded crows stomped all around. There were rough shelters made with lengths of tarpaulin and these were strewn around a copse of trees by the outcrop’s base. There was a horse trailer with a smoking chimney. The distressed van of rainbow colours was parked up on blocks beside it. There was a pair of old rusted caravans. Children and dogs surrounded Doctor Sot as he climbed from the Mégane. The ground was hard-packed underfoot, brittle and flinty, the frost wouldn’t think to lift up here for months at a time. The children were pin-eyed and unpleasantly lively. The dogs might have been alien dogs, so skinny and yellow-skinned and long-headed they were, like bad-dream dogs.

  “Ah down off me now please! For the love o’ God!”

  Five portions of fruit and veg daily seemed immediately beside the point. He might have landed in far Namibia such was the foreignness of things. The young fella who had earlier driven the van came through the barking children and the laughing dogs.

  “S’about?” he said.

  “Doctor Carl O’Connor!” cried Doctor Sot. “North Western Health Board!”

  “Oh yeah? I’m Joxie.”

  “Outreach!” cried Doctor Sot. “Welcome to Slieve Bo…Joxie?”

  Languorous, the young man, as he swept back his mass of braided hair. He arranged it away from his face with a lazy hand. He was sharp-featured, sallow, bemused.

  “I’m here about the nutrition,” said Doctor Sot. “I’m here about the sex diseases.”

  “You jus’ piss yerself?” said Joxie.

  More adults came forward. They swatted the children and kicked the dogs. The beautiful young woman was not among them. A forest of braided hai
r sprang up around Doctor Sot. He shielded his crotch with his satchel. Indeed there had been a little seepage.

  “Aim of the Outreach programme,” he explained, “is to bring the, ah…the services…to…”

  He should have boned up on the stuff in the leaflets. He should have learned some of the lingo. But the travellers smiled at him regardless. They were not unwelcoming. Their accents were mostly English, the lilt of them specifically southwestern.

  “Devon, so happens,” said Joxie.

  He poured for Doctor Sot a cup of green tea. They were in back of the horse trailer by a turf-burning stove. The young man’s full title, it emerged, was Joxie the Rant.

  “Rant, Joxie? Why so?”

  “Coz I get a rant on,” he said. “A ranter, yeah?”

  “Do him a rant, Jox!”

  “Bit early, is it no?”

  The adults of the camp were greatly taken with Doctor Sot. There were a half-dozen of them packed into the horse trailer around him. He was a break from the boredom. Boredom was bred into them by suburbs and by drab English towns. Doctor Sot found it difficult to tell them apart, even to sex them, but he knew well enough that the beauty was not here. They were entertained by him. There was muffled hilarity to the brief silences that yawned out between them. To fill these, he spoke of the importance of five portions daily of fresh fruit and veg.

  “Your broccoli is a powerful man,” he said. “Handful of florets? There’s a portion, there’s one of your five.”

  He spoke of oily fish, such as mackerel, for the sake of its omega-3.

  “Ground control to Omega 3,” said Joxie.

  The travellers smoked their roll-ups and drank green tea. As this was not an official Outreach session, as it was more a break-the-ice visit, Doctor Sot saw no reason why he shouldn’t offer to strengthen their tea. He opened the satchel and with a wink produced a full naggin.