Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Nip of this lad?” he whispered. “Greatly medicinal.”

  “They do know yer out an’ about, yeah?” said Joxie.

  By the time a second naggin had gone around, the travellers had in their civility produced tins of own-brand supermarket lager and flagons of cider. They questioned Doctor Sot as to what pills he might have in his satchel. He laughed them away.

  “It’s the six, just, is it?” he tried. “Just the six of you, for grown-ups?”

  “Well there’s Mag an’ all, ain’t there?” said Joxie. “Mag’s in her bender.”

  “Oh?”

  “She got one of her spells on, don’t she?” said Joxie.

  Quickly it was as if Doctor Sot had become part of the camp. The travellers largely forgot about him. They were in and out of the horse trailer, attending to children and dogs. They smoked their roll-ups with a resin crumbled in. They sipped at their lager and cider. They didn’t say no to a nip of the Jameson—Doctor Sot had fetched extra from the Mégane—but their conversation was no longer centred on the visitor. They talked drowsily about making some turnip mash. They talked about how they were going to get the van fixed. They talked, at some length, of the significance of the number 23.

  “Why have the children no hair?” asked Doctor Sot.

  “Nits,” said Joxie.

  Joxie rolled up the sleeves of his army shirt to show Doctor Sot the abscesses that had formed around old needle holes. Doctor Sot said that he’d be as well to come down to the practice and there they could have a closer look, there would be no charge for it. Joxie eventually agreed to rant. One of the hanks of hair battered some tom-tom drums, and Joxie launched into a half-sung, half-shouted diatribe. It was all Greek to Doctor Sot, though he recognised that there were repeated references to “Jah Rastafari,” the number 23, and, more aggressively, to “George Bush.”

  Night came among them. Doctor Sot was entirely painless as he sat back in the trailer and he dreamed of this woman named Mag. A hand placed before him a saucer of curried vegetables.

  “Really I should be making a move,” he said.

  He ate the food. It put sense in him. He picked up his bag. The dogs and children and adults were all around him in the dark as he climbed into the Mégane.

  “Been an education,” said Joxie.

  They all laughed, Doctor Sot as hard as the rest of them, and indeed until he wept. His eyes were full of the happy tears as he started up Elizabeth. He immediately drove her into a ravine. He sobered at once, with the impact, and the travellers helped him from the car. It was the end of the eleven-year-old Mégane. He brought out the rest of the naggins and the chocolate cake that he had bought earlier for Sal but had forgotten to give her.

  “Poor Liz,” he sighed. “Poor Sal.”

  He sat on the hard-packed soil of the camp, with a handkerchief held to his bleeding head. There was some of the relief that accompanies an old parent’s death.

  “Hell we gonna do with you?” said Joxie.

  The van was out of commission also—it would be next morning before he could be brought down the mountain safely. He would stay the night. The travellers found their way around the camp’s darkness by the lights of their mobile phones. Each was a pinprick of light against the mountain black. He used his own phone to call Sal. He told her he was caught above on Slieve Bo, of all places, that it would be morning before he could get back. Sally was not at all worried. She was used to his adventures and disappearances. Often Doctor Sot was gone for days at a time. Many was the ditch of the northwest he had woken up in. Once he woke beneath an upturned rowing boat on the shore of Lough Gill—one leg of his trousers had been entirely wet, the other entirely dry. He had never quite pieced that one together. Tonight’s accommodation wasn’t bad at all. He was shown into one of the rusted caravans. The travellers turned out to be early-to-bed types: the boredom. By nine, there were no lights at all but those dim cold ones hung in the sky above. Bald children and alien dogs stretched around the caravan with him and they all slept sweetly. Doctor Sot drew on a naggin and looked out to the camp. The chocolate cake, uneaten, was on his lap in its white box. His eyes adjusted to the night shapes out there. The beautiful young woman appeared from the trees by the shale outcrop, oh adieu all false-hearted loves. She squatted on the ground and urinated, with her striped leggings bundled around her boots. Doctor Sot waited for her to finish, and then he climbed from the caravan quietly. He eased the door closed behind him. She heard him come towards her and she turned her eyes to him and smiled. The serenity in her smile it was clear at once was that of a psychotic.

  “Ya wanna see my bender?” she said.

  “I’d love to, Mag,” said Doctor Sot.

  “Knows my name ’n’ all,” she said.

  The bender was on the one side a length of tarp stretched over a run of willow branches staked in the ground. The other side was walled by the shale outcrop and on this Mag had sketched drawings of great wingéd creatures and a series of mathematical equations.

  “Soon’s I get ’em right,” she said, “I paints over an’ I start again.”

  “You’re bringing forward knowledge each time, Mag,” said Doctor Sot.

  The bender was warmed by a tiny potbelly stove, its flue extended through a hole in the tarp. The bender was lit by a battery lamp and it had pallets for flooring.

  “Ya wan’ yer pallets down,” she said. “With yer pallets down, the damp it don’t get up.”

  “The way to go, Mag, unquestionably. We don’t want the damp getting up.”

  “Thing is,” she said. “Soon’s ya get yer pallets down, get yer rats run under, dontcha? So what I’ve done?”

  She stuck her head out the bender’s slit and tugged at Doctor Sot’s arm so that he did the same.

  “Chicken wire,” she said. “I’ve closed off space between pallets, haven’t I? Means no rat run.”

  “There’s peace of mind in that, Mag.”

  They had cake. She showed him her equations. Mag was involved in divining the true nature of time and memory. She believed that each of these ungraspable entities ran in arcs, and that the arcs bent away from each other. She had concluded this after long study of her staked willow branches. The diverging nature of these arcs was the source of all our ills. She might be onto something there, thought Doctor Sot. He wasn’t sure, at first, where she was getting the figures for her equations from. Then he realised that they were being carried to Slieve Bo in the talons of the great wingéd creatures.

  “Do you take medication at all, Mag?”

  “Poisons? Hardly,” she said.

  “Nip of this, Mag?”

  “Nah,” she said. “Don’t agree with me.”

  They sat beside each other with their backs to the shale. She drew up a blanket over her striped legs and offered him some of it. He took a piece and raised it to his face to smell it. It was the smell of a child’s blanket: stale rusk and hot milk.

  “Do you sleep, Mag?”

  “In daylight more so,” she said.

  But after a time her eyes did close. Doctor Sot slid a hand from beneath the blanket and lightly, very lightly, he laid it against her face. He felt the tiny fires that burned there beneath her skin. Her lashes were unspeakably lovely as they lay closed over her light sleep. If Doctor Sot could draw into his palm these tiny fires and place them with his own, he happily would.

  Down in the valley the blackbirds were singing against the winter dark. The White Lady’s River ran calmly beneath the humpback bridge and past the maytree whose blossom would in late spring protect us. The town slept, but in the back kitchen of the terrace house Sally was on her pink sofa yet. She shaped her mouth harshly and sounded an animal’s cry, as if she meant to devour the night. For fear that he would get back early, she would go and lay cloths now over all the mirrors of the house.

  [ICELAND]

  KRISTÍN EIRÍKSDÓTTIR

  Holes in People

  1.

  It was Sunday and on Sundays Dad rela
xed, sat the whole day in the living room in his mottled sweat suit, listening to records and reading science fiction or hi-fi magazines. He didn’t want to be disturbed.

  I remember his hair, he dyed it black. In the mornings he combed it with gel and mousse; he mumbled as he stroked his glistening raven-black mane. His skin was white and flabby as if he ate nothing but sponge cake.

  On this Sunday my brother and Mom were home. He sat in the living room, ungroomed in overalls, listening to records and flipping through the newspaper. Suddenly he called out to me. I was sitting on the floor in the foyer playing with my button collection, which I kept in an oblong tin box with a picture of Egyptian mummies on it. He startled me. I went to him in the living room and he stroked my hair.

  Let’s go out to the garden, he said.

  It was summer, the grass bright green and freshly mown, the sprinkler sprayed water in a circle, the fence beautiful with a new coat of paint. In the parking lot between the houses someone in a helmet rode a BMX bike all alone. Dad went into the garage and got a shovel, he began digging a hole in the middle of the yard.

  Are we going to dig for treasure? I asked and suddenly became a little worried for my button collection, but he didn’t answer me.

  Watch me dig, he wheezed and I waited as Dad vanished deeper into the hole, the shovel swinging and dirt raining down.

  I was confused, I didn’t know what Dad planned to do with the hole, what we would be putting into it and why.

  When the hole was as deep as Dad, as long as a grave, and the dirt pile as tall as me, he climbed out. He was sweaty across the chest and red in the face, between gasps he told me that I now had to fill in the hole myself.

  But Dad, I asked, aren’t we going to put something in it first?

  He shook his head and folded his arms; I began shoveling dirt into the hole.

  I remember wondering why I needed to fill an empty hole with nothing but dirt and worms.

  Loose dirt takes up more space than packed earth and once I finished filling it in there was a burial mound in the middle of the yard.

  We went back inside, Dad sat back down in the living room to browse through his magazines, and I played war with the buttons from my box.

  That was the day before Dad disappeared. No one figured it out until late in the evening, after Mom phoned his work friends who told her that Dad hadn’t even shown up that morning.

  I was only six years old and didn’t understand what was happening right away, didn’t understand why anybody would leave, why vanish like that. But I remember all of us searched for Dad—first for him, then for clues. Someone ripped up the garden. I remember that. The lawn was all torn up.

  Some people stalked through the swamp near our neighborhood. It was at night and they held flashlights and lanterns, I saw them through my bedroom window. No one called out Dad’s name, which I thought strange. All these bouncing lights in the darkness and silence.

  A month after Dad disappeared my brother found the first clue. I don’t know why he stuck his hand in the pipe under the kitchen sink. Maybe he had a hunch, maybe the sink was stopped up.

  But he put his hand in the old, disgusting plastic water pipe; it jutted out, cut open and useless.

  The clue he found was a small container that Dad had bought when he was a kid, when he went to Morocco with Grandpa and Grandma. It was as small as a bottle cap and made from thin polished wood; the picture on the lid had peeled off and no one knew what it might have been. My brother opened the box and inside it was a note. On the note Dad had written one word in block letters: EITUR—“poison.”

  Mom began crying again. She hadn’t been crying as much as she was after Dad first disappeared.

  But after my brother showed her the box, she closed the drapes, locked herself in her bedroom, and let out those painful sobs that my brother and I couldn’t stand.

  We sat on the swings next to our house and inspected the note, held it up to the sunlight to see if Dad had written something on it with invisible ink, but there was only that one word. EITUR.

  My brother was almost ten years old. And after Dad disappeared his personality changed a lot. He stopped teasing me, which I thought was wonderful, but I missed his smile, his stupid jokes.

  Now he became serious, as if he was pretending to be a grown-up, and if I tried to tease him he never got mad, he would just say to me in a low voice that I should stop misbehaving and leave him alone.

  Could Dad have taken poison? he asked, turning pale. I shook my head.

  No, I said. He got on a boat and sailed into the Bermuda Triangle, fell into a quagmire and piranhas ate him alive.

  I was getting bored with all the seriousness around my father’s disappearance; after he left there was nothing but darkness at home and I wasn’t even allowed to play. My brother slapped me hard across the face, stood up, and headed quickly in the direction of our house.

  I found the second clue. My brother was depressed because he searched all over the place for more clues but never found anything.

  I was toasting a piece of bread and looking for the preserves when I saw a piece of tape.

  The tape was wide and the same color as particleboard. I pulled back one edge and peeled it off, behind it was a small hole in the veneer, the size of a thimble. I put my finger in the hole; there was something inside that I tweaked out. It was a tiny blob.

  I snuck the blob into my bedroom, put it down on my desk, and brought out a magnifying glass that I stole from Dad’s den. I directed the lamplight onto the little blob, which was speckled just like a gold nugget, and raised the magnifying glass to my eye.

  I saw it was probably dried up glue, but there was something inside it. I began kneading it with my fingers and discovered a tiny, hard pellet. Under the magnifying glass the pellet was blue and green and white and brown, a globe. Poison, the earth. I tried to understand the connection between the two clues, but got nowhere.

  When my brother came home I showed him what I found. He studied the clue with the magnifying glass, then looked at me, seemed unsure, and looked even more depressed.

  The next day, after he had recovered from his mood, we put the globe inside the Moroccan box and my brother went pale again:

  Could Dad have taken poison in Morocco? he asked. I decided to keep my mouth shut.

  We put the clues inside a shoebox and hid it behind some old cloth and sewing things that Mom kept on a top shelf in my brother’s room. We didn’t tell her anything about the clues, we didn’t mention them at all.

  They would be our secret until we were through collecting enough to figure out what had happened to Dad. We realized that no one would take them seriously, or that’s what my brother said.

  People didn’t understand how Dad thought, he said, and I wondered what that would be like, how our Dad thought.

  Before he disappeared he spent most of his time at work; he worked for a large collection agency. He would come home tired at night and my brother and I tried not to bother him or make him angry. If we forgot and were loud or began fighting—like we did sometimes before he disappeared—he would raise his voice, slam doors.

  He shoved my brother once, swung at him thoughtlessly, and my brother locked himself in the bathroom. I stood outside the door, knocking lightly. I didn’t know what to say. I just knew my brother was sad and when he was sad I automatically became sad too.

  Often there were long stretches between finding clues, and then sometimes we might find several in a row. The next year we began finding them again—in a chink of the wall, in the creases of the furniture.

  The very last one was securely taped inside a broken lampshade that I found in the garage. I tore off the tape and a photograph fell into my lap. It was taken at Thingvellir Lake; it was of my brother and mother.

  In the photo, they’re standing on the veranda of the summerhouse that Dad’s company rented out to employees in the summer. With serious faces, squinting against the sunlight streaming straight into their eyes and creating sh
arp shadows. My brother is wearing only underwear with his baby belly popping out, and he’s clinging to a stuffed animal.

  Mom is skinny, her straight hair put up in a knot and light bangs falling across her forehead. She has a tender look on her face, wearing a pale pink summer dress.

  When I saw Mom in the photo I became very sad, I felt almost like she was fading out into the sunlight. I was guilty. We were often so difficult, my brother and I, and Mom so powerless, as if she didn’t have the energy to care for us, to yell at us, to discipline us.

  I stuck my hand back into the lampshade, felt around, and found another piece of tape, another photograph.

  At first I couldn’t make out what was in the photo. Eventually I finally figured out it had once been a picture of me in my crib. Dad had drawn along the outline of the baby’s body with Wite-Out and filled it in. I turned the photograph over and on the back was written, in Wite-Out, white on white: EITUR.

  Now the word jumbled around in my mind and changed. Inga Rut Elliadóttir—my name. EITUR. My name. I curled into a ball and cried. I finally understood that I was the reason that Dad left, because I am POISON.

  Many days passed before I showed my brother the photographs.

  One night he came home from band practice, was in such a great mood, made himself a sandwich, whistling loudly.

  He sat down at the kitchen table and began eating his sandwich. I sat across from him, laid the photos down in front of him, told him where I had found them and he stopped chewing.

  He lifted them up, felt along each edge and tossed them down on the table. I felt another pang of guilt, for ruining his good mood.

  Don’t you understand? I said. It’s my name. EITUR.