Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  3.

  With Father’s help I got through my thesis and graduated with a degree in the art of clowning, after which I was sent to the Murmansk area as a third-class circus clown. I had to be a red-nosed, stupid, fat clown, which wasn’t really my style, because I was more the small, thin, sad Pierrot type. The director of the circus said that the people didn’t understand elitist French-type comedy, however.

  I was a great idealist in those days and believed that the public’s taste could be developed, but the director was a realist and kept me on a very short leash. When I performed as a fat clown, only the sympathetic young girls laughed at me out of pity, not wanting to offend. What could I do about the fact that the people didn’t find it the least bit amusing when my pants fell down, I banged my head, and stumbled over my own feet? I didn’t find it amusing either.

  After half a year the director said that I had no talent for the clowning profession and offered me a post as a ticket taker and concessions girl, but I took offense, packed my things, and went back home. After that I had many jobs. I was an assistant in a mental hospital, an export chocolate quality controller in a candy factory, a guard at the Pushkin Museum, a janitor in a detox center, a nursing assistant at a children’s daycare, a ticket seller at the ballet, an assistant at the Lenin Library, a food server in Cafeteria Number 3, and a floor assistant at the Peking Hotel. I’m good at languages: I know English, German, and a little French. But I got fired from the hotel because I didn’t understand that I was meant to inform on the guests and my coworkers.

  Through his connections, Father finally got me a job as a rabbit keeper at the Moscow Grand Circus, and then a promotion to clown’s assistant. His last good deed was organizing a foreign tour for me. He’d been diagnosed with cancer of the liver. He was dying. He wanted me to go abroad and stay there, though of course he never said aloud that he hoped I’d defect—he was a cautious man. I decided to do as he wished, because after his death I had no other close relatives in the Soviet Union except my brother, and, as a lawyer, he would know how to worm himself out of any difficulties my defection could cause for him.

  I defected in Milan. I said to my roommate late one night that I was going out to buy cigarettes around the corner. Annoyed, she crawled out of bed to accompany me, since we weren’t allowed to go out by ourselves. We were all under orders to report everything that our workmates did to the circus political instructor, except for going to the toilet. In addition, we’d given assurances to the official who’d issued our passports for the trip that we wouldn’t indulge in any conversations with foreigners, and that we’d be especially careful with members of the opposite sex. I told my roommate, who was a magician’s assistant, that she didn’t need to trouble herself on my account: I’d be back in a minute or two. When I left, she was sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair tousled, yawning like a hippopotamus. The last I saw of her was her pink tonsils.

  When I stood around the corner from the hotel, waiting for a bus, and looked at the Café Dante’s green flashing neon light, I had a strong feeling that I’d stood in the same place and lived the same moment before. I was strangely calm, as though I knew there was no reason for nervousness or fear. I can’t explain why. Perhaps I was calm because I was only doing what was proper for me at the time—fulfilling my destiny, as they say. When the bus came, I rode to the train station and bought a ticket for Bologna, where some old acquaintance of my father lived. Clearly fate was on my side, because I got to Bologna without any mishaps: no one paid any attention to me and the train wasn’t even late, as they usually are in Italy.

  I consider Italy the country of my spiritual rebirth, because that’s where I became the clown Milopa, naming myself after Milan—and because that’s where I parted from my former homeland and circus comrades. For the first time in my life, I was able to breathe freely and be my own self. The Italians liked my sense of humor and received me well. They got to see my best performances, because of that. Spain and France understood me too, whereas Germans prefer the red-nosed, drunk type of clown. It was in Germany that I discovered people tell lies in the West too. I was very surprised. What on earth do they have to lie about? They don’t get into trouble if they tell the truth, as they did in my country.

  I’m out of red wine, so that’s all I can say about lying today. Besides, the typewriter platen moves so slowly, like a louse in tar, and the letters all stick to each other. Are the batteries low? I have to go to the store to buy red wine and new batteries before I can start writing my memoirs in earnest.

  TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY A. D. HAUN

  [ESTONIA]

  TOOMAS VINT

  Beyond the Window a Park is Dimming

  In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river: And behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favored; and they fed in a meadow: And behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favored and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness: And the lean and the ill-favored kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning. So I awoke.

  [GENESIS 41:17–21]

  Dusk. Someone quite obviously turned the light down, put out the lamps, or pulled a thick blanket over the daylight. That’s what the end of the Estonian year is like: with disconsolate haste the days get shorter—one’s eyes haven’t yet gotten used to the light when darkness takes over again. A meager afternoon flurry had covered the parkland with a thin veil of snow, like a stain, had annihilated the green, turned the roads ashen-gray. Only the limestone pavilion on its island, reflected in the seemingly bottomless water of the pond, struck the eye with an unreal whiteness. It didn’t seem to belong to the gray-black crepuscular landscape.

  Vilmer, a relatively well-to-do businessman of fifty-eight, was gazing at the park from the window of his home, as he had looked at hundreds of times before, with hundreds of different feelings. Now he was studying the change of the delicate greens, from daylight brightness back to black and white as the months passed, until they were almost colorless. Even in a winter thaw, when there was nothing remarkable to strike the eye, he could watch a car laboring through a snowdrift and make a bet with himself as to whether the driver would get through without help.

  Outside it was getting dark, and in the room the electric flowers growing on the ends of delicate chromed stems were taking on a yellowish light, which allowed them to be reflected in the window-glass, and the gray-haired man too, thrown against the background of the darkening park. It was like an artistically composed portrait, nature providing the background.

  A splash of water was unexpectedly heard in the little apartment, possibly coming from a radiator, or possibly from the bathroom. I should have put some music on, thought Vilmer, but his mouth distorted into a wry smile as he imagined himself selecting a piece of music and lighting candles. That sort of romantic behavior would make me look ridiculous, he thought. At our age it’s no longer appropriate to put on trivial performances simply for the sake of making love.

  The splashing ended as suddenly as it had begun. Vilmer calculated that it would take his visitor a minute or so to dry her hands and comb her hair. She might, after a pause, take lipstick from her handbag as well, so as to appear especially beautiful when she finally reappeared in the doorway of the living room; her smiling host, waiting by the window, starting at once to caress her ears with words, despite the fact that they would surely sound ridiculously false.

  The thought that had struck him, that he might make himself appear ridiculous, made Vilmer cautious. He called to mind a ramble in a thicket of juniper bushes—every step making escape more hopeless, whether one pressed on or tried to turn back.

  “The least likely route is always the best option,” Vilmer told himself, and he remembered the liberating relief that had come over him—that time in the thicket—when he had decided at last that going back t
he way he’d come was after all the most sensible solution.

  The woman had still not reappeared, and Vilmer reflected: it was chance, coincidence, a whim of fate that brought us together. She is only a woman, just like dozens of others in my circle of acquaintances.

  Vilmer was himself a little dismayed by this turn in his thoughts. What had looked at first like a pleasant interlude now appeared in quite a different light. In a dimmer light, he told himself with a chuckle, and looked back outside, where at that moment the streetlights were coming on, and before his eyes appeared the memory of hundreds of little lamps being lit in the dusk of a spring evening by the Eiffel Tower.

  Like a Christmas tree, thought Vilmer at the time, but this ironic allusion was meant to suppress his doubts. He was about ten years younger then, and then as now a new relationship seemed to be flaring up, and then as now Vilmer had been afraid that emotion would make him ridiculous. Then the woman with him had squeezed his hand, clearly moved. Around the steel tower, against the background of the evening colors of the sky, there had appeared a noble aureole, and the couple felt that some part of that celestial halo must have descended upon them too.

  Vilmer recalled that the married woman whom he’d befriended on that trip to Paris had finally yielded to him in a flood of tears, but after that had developed the presumptuous notion that Vilmer owed her something. Rude would be a good way to describe the way Vilmer broke off that relationship after getting home. Rudeness seemed the only possibility at the time, but it had been an unpleasant situation, and it continued to depress him when he thought of it. He had always tried to keep away from emotional women, but the fact that this one had raised a real hue and cry in pursuit of him, was, at the time, obviously Vilmer’s own fault. One must never sing the same song as a woman. There has to be some palpable difference in key, or at least in the lyrics.

  When Vilmer was flying home from Toronto a week or so ago, a woman happened to sit next to him who, without ceremony, started chatting to him as they waited for take-off. At first Vilmer was reticent—after exchanging a few polite words he retreated into the thicket of his own thoughts, but the woman skillfully lured him out again. By the time their plane left the ground, Vilmer was happily and openly talking away, something that, given his nature, was rare—a downright peculiar way for him to behave.

  The ice was broken, Vilmer concluded happily, observing himself sitting next to the woman, and it was strange that throughout the whole long journey he didn’t worry once about the future course of his life.

  But he should have worried about it. More precisely, he should have admitted that his twenty-two year marriage to Kristi was coming to an end. Everything good in this world must surely come to an end sooner or later. But once you stand face to face with the facts, such endings are hardly uncomplicated.

  Vilmer dwelled now on a bitter memory: Kristi hadn’t even gone with him to the airport on his way out.

  He’d gotten a ride from his son-in-law, with whom he didn’t have a close relationship, and couldn’t have had one, because how can you get close to a person whom you’ve only ever seen a handful of times? Vilmer’s poor knowledge of English restricted their conversation still further. The only real point of contact between the two men was that this person was the father of Vilmer’s daughter’s children. Being with his son-in-law made the sense of alienation Vilmer had felt throughout his visit all the more acute. All around him in Toronto they had jabbered in a rapid English that Vilmer couldn’t follow. His six-year-old grandson had wondered how his Grandad could have gotten so “stupid.”

  When Kristi had visited their daughter a couple of months before, her primary concern was to get their grandchildren talking Estonian. But now she agreed with their daughter’s cynicism on the subject: “There’s no sense in teaching the children Estonian. In ten years’ time they’ll have no more use for the language.”

  When the woman sitting next to him on the plane started talking in pure Estonian, he, after a brief reluctance, felt a sense of pleasure and even of intimacy in being able to pour out everything that had been contaminating his soul over the past few days.

  “Just imagine,” complained the woman, “five of my friends’ grandchildren don’t speak a word of Estonian!”

  At first Vilmer didn’t like the woman, whose name—strange to say—he still didn’t know. She gave the impression of being a superficial babbler, an impression that deepened at the moment when, searching for something in her handbag, she simply tipped most of its indescribable contents onto her lap and the floor. When Vilmer was helping her retrieve her belongings, their hands touched for a moment; he flinched at this, but the woman just smiled, and that smile, somehow, managed to win Vilmer over, despite his numbness and recalcitrance.

  Vilmer now let himself get embarrassed over the fact that he still didn’t know the woman’s name. Or, rather, that he still couldn’t remember it. Surely the woman would have introduced herself when she sat next to him? Slid her name along his earlobe?

  But what good would it do to know her name anyway? wondered Vilmer. Maliciously, he found himself wanting to go on referring to her as “the woman.”

  He imagined what it would be like to stay involved with the woman for weeks at a time and still manage to avoid learning her name. Vilmer smirked.

  Then he pretended that their intimacy, what had not yet happened, represented a lasting, indefinite commitment. Vilmer chuckled at first, but soon his expression turned sour. He realized he had assumed all along that he and the woman would sleep together today. And, indeed, the sheer unequivocal nature of the situation seemed difficult now to deny.

  “How ridiculous!” he muttered, but his muffled voice unexpectedly climbed in volume, winged its way beyond the bathroom door, and reached the woman within as a risible vocalization.

  Vilmer pressed his hands to his ears, as if afraid to listen to himself, and said: “I must have had precisely this in mind when I stuffed my business card into her hand at Helsinki Airport.”

  “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he added callously.

  On the day of her arrival in Toronto, Kristi had said: “I’ve found feelings in me, unexpectedly. I understand now that I’ve been given only one chance to live, and if I don’t live it to the fullest then I’m a fool, plain and simple.”

  “Well,” said Vilmer. He would have liked to say something smart, something so biting that it would break Kristi’s heart. Instead he shut his mouth.

  “Nothing I can do about it,” said Kristi, and it seemed that at that moment she was sincere and just a little bit unhappy—as if a cheap cup had fallen from her fingers and shattered into pieces.

  Now Vilmer was looking solemnly at the blurred reflection of his portrait in the window, behind which he could see the dimming prospect of the park. What did the man reflected in the window want to say? What sorts of feeling had been inside him when he heard that the woman with whom he’d shared half his life was leaving for good?

  He couldn’t remember anything but the crushing sense of being insulted, and then the desire to rise above his own reaction, to on no account appear ridiculous in his wife’s eyes.

  All this had taken place some time ago, and now instead he had to content himself with the knowledge that he was no longer alone in his apartment, that in a moment or two there would emerge from the bathroom a woman whose name he didn’t know, a strange woman with whom he was meant to begin an affair. It seemed to him that he was now like a novelist who has dozens of possible plot twists available to him—any one of which would let him go on writing for hundreds more pages—but who, unable to pick a suitable one, decides instead to conclude his story right where he left off.

  How ridiculous, thought Vilmer, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain to himself what it was that felt so ridiculous to him at that moment.

  This woman had called him one morning, a week after he got home. “I’ve got a suggestion for you…but I can’t talk about it on the phone,” she added after a short pause. There
was a weepy disappointment audible in her voice, as if she had staked everything on one card and was already sure of losing.

  They agreed to meet during their lunch hour, but a few minutes later Vilmer was already beginning to realize how much the telephone call had disturbed him. Hundreds of thoughts and speculations fought for ascendancy as they ran through his mind, and the woman’s body and smile hovered in front of his eyes. He suspected that he had been too indiscreet about himself when he’d first met the woman—that garrulousness felt now like a severe cold he’d since recovered from. Vilmer thought that the woman would find him entirely different this time. With a trace of sadistic pleasure he was even enjoying the woman’s anticipated incomprehension, amazement, awkwardness.

  As the lunch hour approached, however, he felt again the strange mood that had caused him to give the woman his card in the first place. A gesture she couldn’t help but interpret as an unambiguous desire to continue their acquaintance.

  Vilmer would have been glad to erase the whole flight from his mind. He wasn’t interested in any woman, much less in dealing with a person who had once blurted out so many personal things about herself, like…Vilmer searched now for an apt and exact comparison, and happened upon the image of those very intimate items she had strewn about on the plane after upending her handbag, but this excellent simile was accompanied by the memory of the fleeting touch of her hand, and so the woman’s smile appeared before his eyes again, an echo reverberating inside his soul.