Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  A curse, really.

  But then, why “soul”? What precisely is a soul? Just another metaphor? Or something real that simply can’t be touched?

  You’re really the ultimate fool, Vilmer reproached himself in the restaurant during their “date,” but despite this, he carried on talking and talking. The woman joined in their chat enthusiastically. She kept repeating his words, taking such pleasure in them, until Vilmer heard himself inviting the woman back to his place for a glass of wine.

  For some years now, Vilmer hadn’t been thinking of women as women. His body was no longer in the habit of prompting him to indulge in wild fantasies. His fellow citizens had been retired to their assigned places, all taking on the same sane and balanced proportions. Women were women, they did their work and that was that. Women weren’t special anymore. This was important for Vilmer’s peace of mind.

  Kristi’s breaking up their marriage was nothing more than an offense to his pride. It didn’t mean anything more. And the wound would heal soon enough.

  This change—which he’d always associated with old age—had set in some time ago for Vilmer. Like a pinwheel, his last outburst of extramarital emotion had thrown off some sparks, then smoldered and died, and Vilmer had realized that he would have an easier time of living if he completely withdrew into his shell. He didn’t want to get involved with anyone. It seemed to him that whatever internal erotic cinematograph had once tormented him with its images all day and night had now broken down. The bodies of women caused him only a strange disquiet.

  Yet, there was that fleeting touch on the airplane, which made him flinch and withdraw his hand as though scorched.

  Their meeting had just been a coincidence, Vilmer assured himself. It meant nothing. And if he had invited the woman to visit him, it was only because she seemed to expect such an invitation. I have nothing else in mind but taking advantage of her, he told himself.

  Not that it would do any harm to keep seeing her, really, Vilmer thought. Her company seemed to suit him. They could have lunch together from time to time, go to the theater or a concert. They might even share a seaside holiday in the sun? As long, that is, as he could keep his mouth shut. That would make things easier.

  Vilmer looked at his hands, which seemed too big, and he imagined his gigantic fingers groping the woman—an unpleasant picture. These hands were nothing like his own hands. Somehow alien, borrowed from somewhere, maybe even hired—to do heavy, dirty work. I should take better care of my hands, he thought, staring at his splayed fingers. And then: I should take better care of my skin, and so forth, in that vein.

  Then it occurred to him: What would his guest think if she came out of the bathroom and saw him staring at his extended hands? He folded them behind his back.

  What the hell is she doing in there anyway? Vilmer wondered, annoyed. What if he went and knocked on the bathroom door? “Everything all right?” he would ask, like they do in American movies, and through the closed door he would hear that everything was all right and then some grunt-filled love scene would follow—likewise pilfered from some American movie.

  Vilmer smiled bitterly. He imagined a scene with them lying naked in each other’s arms in the marriage bed, her whispering sweet nothings in his ear. At first he dismissed the image with a shiver of disgust, but then it started to interest him—how their love scene might look. He viewed it in his mind’s eye like any voyeur, but then he recoiled—he’d never imagined himself married to someone else before. His whole love life to date had been bound up in marriage, which he valued in his own way. His terror of damaging that marriage was what had first conditioned so many of his strict rules regarding other women. The marriage bed was sacred, after all.

  But not anymore, Vilmer remembered.

  “Why the hell am I even bothering?” he asked aloud. A vision of a dog chasing its own tail loomed before him, and it seemed to him that he was the tail. “My life is like a rerun,” he said at last, pacified, and then it occurred to him that The A-Team would be on TV soon. It ran every day in the early afternoon, and Vilmer did everything in his power—even rearranging his work schedule—to leave time for him to indulge this vice at least once a week. Quite often he succeeded, and it seemed to him that a day when this happened was a success—a well-ordered day.

  It takes so little to feel happy, he thought. But then he realized that it would be completely impossible to watch the naïve, ridiculous A-Team—so clearly written with an audience of adolescent boys in mind—with his guest in the apartment. Stupid things like that can only be enjoyed as a couple after a long while living together, Vilmer concluded with an irritated sigh.

  I’ve become terribly wrapped up in myself, he decided at last. He couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed this before.

  “An idiot, you’re an idiot,” he repeated in a low, malevolent voice, and he realized to his surprise that there was nothing simpler than just explaining to his guest that he no longer wanted to share his life with anyone…that being alone made him happy.

  “How happy?” he wondered. But he wasn’t much interested in the answer.

  It was quiet in the apartment. No matter how intently he listened, there wasn’t a sound from the bathroom.

  As if nobody’s in there, thought Vilmer, sneaking along the corridor. An impossible thought: the woman had vanished without trace, vanished into thin air, passed right through the walls. Vilmer pressed his ear against the bathroom door, but heard nothing more than the usual hum inside his head. He listened for another minute or a minute and a half, but then something else, worse than the woman’s unlikely disappearance, began to worry him—what if she found him spying there? So he hurried on tiptoe back to the living room, where he stood shifting his weight from one foot to the other in front of the sofa, unable to decide whether to sit down or not.

  Better to stand by the window, decided Vilmer, though unable to explain to himself why it was better there. The woman’s endless stay in the bathroom had upset his plans. Plans? He had to admit to himself, feeling a little ashamed, that in going to meet the woman, he’d seen in his mind’s eye how he would ask her in an offhand tone what kind of wine she liked, and, getting a hesitant answer, could then show off his expertise by making his own recommendations. Nothing more than showing off, but why deny himself this pleasure? After all, wasn’t that why he had invited her?

  In fact, had he really just asked this woman home because he wanted someone to whom he could show off his park-side apartment and splendid selection of wines?

  Outside the window, the streetlights were glowing orange around the park. The sky was noticeably brightening and Vilmer felt that the darkening park-scape was slowly being absorbed into the sky.

  Vilmer drew the golden-brown curtains. All connection to the outer world was severed. But somehow this didn’t make him feel any more secure. The opposite, rather—Vilmer was appalled by the knowledge that he wasn’t answerable to anyone. It was this lack of culpability that frightened him most.

  “But if I’m not to be held accountable, who am I afraid of?” he demanded in voiceless exclamation—but this was like a voice crying in the wilderness: it neither echoed nor was heard.

  “I don’t understand why, but I have a feeling that I’ve reached the end,” Vilmer thought, exhausted and still afraid. “But I don’t care, really,” he reassured himself…If he looked the facts squarely in the face, there was really nothing and nobody left to worry about. There was very little left to keep Vilmer clinging to life. He had, without noticing it, played everything out—drawn a metaphorical curtain between himself and the world, just as he had done at his unmetaphorical window a short while before.

  But I have a visitor today, thought Vilmer. Who knows, she might just be the beginning of something good. The end need not be the end.

  Yet for some reason the visitor was still not sitting with him drinking wine or having a satisfying chat. The lady was still in the bathroom. How long had it been now? Three minutes? Thirteen? Thirty
?

  Vilmer kept on staring at the golden-brown folds of his curtains. He remembered how proud he and his wife had been when they first put them up. “Now the apartment is perfect!”

  It seemed to Vilmer that that had happened a very long time ago. But really “a very long time ago” had only been last spring. Before things had begun to go bad between them. But now Vilmer collected himself and moved again with uncertain steps toward the bathroom door.

  Vilmer was astonished to see indefinite little flecks of red on the floor in front of the bathroom door—which to his great surprise did not seem to be locked. He knocked, but got no reply. His heart hammering, he finally pressed down on the handle and opened the door slightly. He saw no more than light reflecting off the bright blue tiles.

  In order to see more than this, he would have to open the door wide and step in. He couldn’t bring himself to cross the threshold, however, and see where the scarlet flecks of blood were surely washing down from his snow-white enamel bath.

  Again, it was rather like a bloody scene in some movie. Vilmer had seen plenty. Perhaps, he told himself, because he had been so well prepared by Hollywood, he wouldn’t be too horrified when he at last opened the door the rest of the way.

  “Hello?” he called through the half-open doorway, as if over the telephone. Still no reply. He closed the door.

  Vilmer surmised—well, he was quite sure—that the woman had died in the bathroom. She’d had a stroke or committed suicide. Vilmer stumbled back to the living room, and stood in front of his television. Then he bent down and picked up the remote control from the incredible chaos of sharp white cup fragments and dark bottle shards. He clicked the television on.

  “Nothing I can do for my visitor now,” he said to comfort himself.

  On the screen, Face was just jumping over a high wall, while the other A-Team men had driven their black van into place so that Face could hop aboard and escape his pursuers; at the same time, some homeless people—led by Murdock—were singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Then there were commercials, and pink Energizer rabbits started running across the screen.

  Vilmer saw no reason, if his visitor had died, that he shouldn’t now enjoy The A-Team all the way through to the end.

  “You win some, you lose some,” he thought, rather pleased. But then his mood again swung to the opposite extreme: Why the hell did this woman have to choose his apartment to die in? It would cause no end of trouble. He wouldn’t even be able to tell the ambulance people what her name was. And then of course they’d suspect that he’d done her in. He didn’t really want to pursue that loathsome thought—but at once it occurred to him that he might indeed, in his confusion, have done something insane, irreparable.

  Some movie characters do indeed commit murders they have no recollection of, Vilmer considered. He felt a chill in his bones.

  “I have to go in there and see what’s actually happened.” But his legs would not obey. It’s like a nightmare, thought Vilmer. Just like a nightmare…perhaps this really is a dream? A comforting thought. He stepped shakily toward the bathroom door once again. Vilmer saw that there were red footprints by the bathroom door. Inexplicable. But it was time now to open the door wide.

  There was nobody there.

  Blinking his eyes in the bright light, Vilmer saw himself in the mirror. Greasy, messy hair, a week’s growth of beard, and a giant, obscene, yellowish-violet bruise under one eye. He was wearing a torn, wine-flecked shirt, and below it a filthy, stained pair of underpants. It was a horrible picture. The mirror wouldn’t let him wish it away.

  After a long while looking, Vilmer’s attention was caught by a bottle with a striking red and gold label that was lying just behind him in the mirror. He turned around and picked the half-full bottle up with a heavy sigh. He drank from it. And again. Clutching the bottle to his breast, he hobbled back to the living room, where he cast an abstracted glance over the confusion that reigned there.

  The same commercial was still on TV. Vilmer was seized by the feeling that he’d gotten stuck on the wrong side of the glass.

  For him, reality was like an old married woman, too exhausted to nag, sitting on the corner of the settee, staring gloomily at her empty, infinitively wrinkled palms.

  TRANSLATED FROM ESTONIAN BY CHRISTOPHER MOSELEY

  [DENMARK]

  PETER ADOLPHSEN

  Fourteen Small Stories

  A DULL FATE

  Once upon a time there was a dull baby. Everyone could see it right away. The mother lost interest in the child and sent it to an orphanage. Even there no one paid any attention to it—it hadn’t even been given a name. In the beginning, the other children teased it. But that too quickly grew dull. Most of the time the child sat alone in the corner, bored. In this manner the years passed and it began to grow hair on its chin. On the night of its first wet dream, it received a revelation. A glowing angel brought it big news: Your name is Arne and you are God. Arne went out onto the streets right away to preach this joyous message: I am God. But nobody listened to him. Arne repeated it over and over, shouted it from the rooftops, and whispered it into the ears of the clerks in the shops, but to no avail, and Judgment Day was quickly approaching. The dreadful day came when all the other gods waged war against each other and Arne stepped forward into their midst and said: I am God. But still there was no one who listened. They were too busy killing each other. In the end they all died, except Arne. Earth was destroyed, but Paradise remained, as empty as on the first morning of creation. Arne wondered whether he should create something. He began with a subscription to a do-it-yourself magazine. But that quickly got dull, so he decided to stop creating entirely. And so an eternity passed and Arne saw that everything was good.

  BUTCHER GOUGH

  Once in London, when the plague laid its dark hand on the city, there was a butcher by the name of Hubert Gough. At the beginning of the outbreak he had had a dream that caused him to sell his possessions and purchase beer, dried vegetables, and salted meat, and lock himself in the room behind his butcher shop and seal up all entrances and every crack and crevice. He rationed what he consumed with absolute self-control, but the day still came when there was no more food, and he began to starve. He knew that if he left his hiding place too early, he would die just the same. And his time had not yet come. On the brink of death, he decided to eat his own flesh. With the shop’s largest axe he hacked his left leg off under his knee. It required enormous effort to ignore the pain long enough to ensure that only a little blood was lost, to stop the bleeding with a wet cloth, to not pass out, to not scream. But he succeeded and was able to drink his blood and eat his flesh, and lived for a good while longer before he was forced to lop off his other foreleg. When the time had finally come when it was safe to leave the butcher shop, both Hubert’s legs had been sawed off at the hip and his left arm at the shoulder. He lived another twelve years in a little box on four wheels.

  REPORT ON THE GITII LANGUAGE

  Among the many languages to disappear in the Americas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a particularly interesting tongue is known as Gitii, after the word used by the race of Gitii-speakers to refer to themselves. Literally translated, it means “to walk on two legs.” This tribe lived in an inaccessible part of the southern Andes Mountains, and thus their language developed along wholly different lines than other Arawakan languages—the linguistic family to which Gitii can be traced, if only with considerable ambiguity.

  Phonetically, Gitii had only one vowel (except in special circumstances, explained below), that which corresponds to our letter I. Thus, their speech must have sounded like a single long tone that, interrupted by breathing, was modulated by consonants, of which there were ten: D, F, H, K, M, P, R, T, V, and Z. There were four ways to express their one vowel: gutturally, as Ï; nasally, as Î; rising in tone, as Í; or else falling: Ì. In addition, the vowel could either be short or long. These phonemes were essential to the meaning of a given word. For example, rïtí meant
“to sail against the stream” rïtï, “to bathe a child” rítîî, “to turn pale” and rítì, “to eat fish.”

  As will be evident, these examples are all verbs, and this is because verbs are the only part of speech—excepting a type of preposition—that the Gitii language possessed. It is not, as in the Semitic languages, that other parts of speech could be formed from a root verb; speakers of Gitti were entirely restricted to communicating with verbs. Example: a translation from English to Gitii and directly back to English. “A black bird flies” might be rendered mîdîkí dìmïï tî zíkí—but translating this into English gives us: “to flap with wings,” “to absorb light,” “over and upwards,” and “to fly.” Since English doesn’t possess the same wealth of verbs as Gitii, it is generally necessary to include a noun in translation that is not literally present in the original language, in order to give the English reader an understanding of which action a speaker of Gitii would have connected to a given word. Gitii included verbs to differentiate between a speaker’s washing hair, vegetables, or a child. Indeed, to translate back into Gitii one of the nouns included as a convenience of translation above, you would need a completely different verb. Gîtíí for example, as noted earlier, means “to walk on two legs.” The word for leg, on the other hand, is tïzï, which means “to transport a living creature.”

  The Gitii people viewed the world in verbs, which is to say in actions; they had no words for what was static and thus had no concept for it, seeing all things as identical with the action they triggered or carried out. One can say they identified an object or a phenomenon with the transformation it went through over time. Enduring things were seen as a chain of events; a person or a tree was always the preceding moment in such a chain.

  As noted at the beginning of this report, Gitii did contain, under special circumstances, vowels other than I. The vowel A had approximately the same function as a swear word might when used to give emphasis to a spoken phrase; depending on how much one wished to emphasize a given word, its vowel would be modulated from I to A.