Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The vowel O was only used between lovers, and then only during lovemaking, as a type of improvised poetry recited to describe one’s partner and the state of the speaker. This “conversation” was an inseparable part of the sexual act and considered a source of pleasure on par with the physical component of the act. The important thing was that the shift from I to O was smooth.

  The only written account we have of this language is from a missionary with the name Bartolomeo Jimenez Ribero, who in his journal wrote about a people whose speech “…sounds as though they have a frog in their throat and a fly in their nose.”

  MADELEINE, OR THE SAD LITTLE NOVEL

  Marie Madeleine was born by caesarian back when this procedure was more or less a death sentence for the mother.

  As a little girl, she ran over fields and water seeped into her lace boots and most of all she was fond of geography.

  Later, she sold flowers at a train station and fell in unbearable love with a soldier on his way to war.

  She enlisted as a nurse. One winter night the soldier she had seen was carried into the field hospital following an attack where gas had been used. He was laid near an opening in the tent in order to give some air to his abused lungs, and while a snowdrift piled up by his head, Madeleine tried in vain to find the right words.

  Afterward she stole a bottle of morphine and became a whore in a port city. At the end of the pier sat a Belgian man fishing without a hook. He tied a knot around his bait and said that if they were going to get any fish to come up, they would have to hold on tight.

  The police doctor treated her for syphilis with arsenic salve.

  She became pregnant and at the birth, since the child’s head was too large, the doctors decided to crush it, as the baby was more than likely both syphilitic and brain damaged, thanks to the mother’s drug habit. Madeleine lost her mind when she heard the crushing sound.

  She went to the madhouse and there she lay, bound tight, disinfected nightly with carbolic acid and as happy as could be.

  IOTYN

  Nearly two billion years ago, on a mist-shrouded planet shrouded at the center of the Milky Way, intelligent beings evolved—beings that didn’t possess bodies in any real sense, but consisted instead of invisible gas clouds whose size and movements were controlled by their disembodied minds. Their maximum size was five and a half cubic miles and minimum the size of an atom. They could accelerate from zero miles per hour to the speed of sound in a nanosecond. They couldn’t however penetrate solids or in any other way influence their surroundings, and they neither ate food nor generated waste, aged nor produced offspring. Each of the nearly three million individuals of this race possessed a unique consciousness, but their memory was collective.

  “Iotyn” was the name they gave each other.

  About a billion years ago, curiosity drove the Iotyns to travel out in the galaxy. They first arrived on Earth during the Cretaceous. Soon after becoming part of their communal memory, the little blue planet in Orion’s belt became an attraction for Iotyns throughout the galaxy: They had seen life before, but never at such an advanced level of cellular organization.

  After approximately a hundred million years on Earth, the Iotyns discovered that they could reside in a mammal by slipping into a fertilized egg just after the sperm cell had penetrated it and had left a hole in its membrane. The Iotyn was then united with the mammal for the duration of its life; a symbiotic arrangement that the animal never noticed and that terminated at its death, at which time the Iotyn was returned to its original, shapeless form. The tactile universe was a revolutionizing experience for the Iotyns, and it quickly became popular to take up residency in earthly organisms.

  One million years ago, yet another leap in their evolution occurred, as two Iotyns occupied one egg at the same time and lived together in the host organism; and after this animal’s death there weren’t two Iotyns that emerged from its body but one. Their consciousness was from then on doubled in depth and intensity, but not in essence. Such amalgamations escalated, and after a period of time, two thirds of the Iotyns became unified, after which the fusion of more than two began to become the vogue: three, four, and even more Iotyns converged to consciousnesses of staggering dimensions.

  This development has continued until reaching its inevitable end: The three million Iotyns have now been unified into one massive consciousness, which at this very moment can be found inside a bristly haired dachshund in Lower Saxony.

  THE KING OF ENGLAND’S TWO VISIONARY PARABLES

  King Edward of England and his first minister had stopped on a little bridge during their daily walk in the castle gardens. Affairs of state were generally the subject of their conversations, but today would be different, as the King thrust his right arm out into the air and stated: “An English yard is the exact distance from the tip of my nose to the end of my ring finger, is it not?” To which the first minister promptly responded: “Correct, Your Majesty, that’s what the law says.”

  “And if we now imagine that this yard represents all the time that has passed since the creation of the earth,” the King continued, “how much time would a single file stroke on my ring fingernail then be?” he asked, looking sternly at his companion.

  “Oh, ah, I couldn’t say, offhand,” the first minister said, blinking his eyes and jerking his head backward like a child who hasn’t understood a question. “A day, a year?”

  “Ha! No,” shouted the King, “one single file stroke on my nail would be the entire history of humanity, my good man, all the time that has passed since we evolved from apes!”

  “Your Majesty will need to explain…” the first minister stammered.

  “And if we now imagine that my scepter’s golden ball is the sun, and the sapphire in my ring is the earth,” the King persevered, taking a ring from his finger and giving it to the first minister, “at which distance should they be placed to represent the actual distance in space? Can you answer me that, my most esteemed first minister?”

  “Er, hmm,” the first minister coughed and accepted the ring with a deferential little bow. “I must admit that I don’t follow Your Majesty’s train of thought, if…”

  “You would have to go on quite a trip, my dear first minister, for my ring would be all the way down with the Pope in Avignon!”

  “My dear Majesty, would You be so kind as to explain what it is You’re saying?” interrupted the first minister despairingly. “Your humble servant doesn’t understand a single word of…”

  “How could I explain?” thundered the King. “It’s just the way it is. Strictly speaking, of course, I can’t know any of it! How the fuck am I supposed to know all this when we in this century haven’t even developed a heliocentric view of the world, and when we still calculate the age of the universe by adding together the life spans of the Old Testament patriarchs?”

  And now the King was utterly dumbfounded. He asked, “What am I actually talking about?”

  The first minister scratched his pointed beard and said:

  “Don’t look at me, Your Majesty. To my ears it was nothing more than what the common people would call devilish talk.”

  “How peculiar…” the King mumbled.

  “If Your Majesty would forgive me for saying so, I believe it might be advisable to visit the royal confessionarius. Who knows whether this might have been the devil’s work, these strange thoughts that have emerged from the royal soul…?”

  “Why, my good sir, you’re quite right—to the cathedral!”

  THE SLOW GIANT

  Without reflecting back a single one of the light waves whizzing through the air—and therefore invisible to everyone—a giant as tall as eleven Eiffel Towers stacked on top of one another now stands with his foot raised over a small town in northern Sweden. But it is not standing still, this giant: it’s in the middle of a step that has lasted centuries and will last centuries more. The giant is as old as the earth itself and the rhythm of its breaths and its sense of time are of geological slown
ess: the giant has seen the glaciers glide slowly away, the trees shoot up like small fountains, and experiences the seasons as a continuous, unremarkable tremor. It’s only fairly recently that it has noticed the upright-walking ape that has suddenly proliferated across the globe.

  THE PERFECT TEXT

  The perfect text exists, and anyone who gazes upon this abomination becomes caught, reading it, until he or she dies of hunger and thirst, helpless, unable to let their attention drift, not even after the book’s conclusion, when it ties every conceivable thread together in such a mesmerizing way and, at the same time, opens such a wealth of follow-up questions that the reader in his or her quest for answers is immediately sent back to the beginning, which in its inexorable perfection sends the reader’s eyes on and on down the pages. The only possible salvation is if another person, eyes averted, removes the text from the reader’s field of vision before the end; if not, the perfect words will be indelibly stamped in the unhappy reader’s memory. This murderous object, described by a Basque village priest in the eighteenth century as a simple quarto, is stored in the cellar of the building housing the Royal Spanish Academy, which decided upon its discovery to keep the text’s existence a secret from the world, and has since renewed this decision every twenty-five years—which is understandable, as only few would believe them, and everyone who might hope to have their doubts confirmed would die reading. So far, dozens of people have met just such a fate. And since the Academy has decided to leave the steel box in which the text is stored unlocked, from time to time a despondent member is found bent over its open lid, at which point there’s nothing left to do but put the literary suicide in bed, where his wide eyes will go on scanning from left to right across already memorized letters and words until rigor mortis sets in.

  BLOODY LOVE

  Once upon a time there lived a man who loved a woman who didn’t love him. “I’d rather die than live without you,” he said. “Piss off,” she replied. “I’ll prove it to you,” he said, but she’d already gone. That same evening he hacked the tip of his left pointer finger off and put it in an envelope with a note written with the bloody finger: “Love me, or it’ll be the hand next time.” A month later she received a package with a severed hand, but still she didn’t want him. The next step was to slice his whole arm off, but he lost his nerve and he had to live the rest of his life one-handed and alone. They met again as old people and she said: “Look, apparently you wouldn’t rather die than live without me.” And he replied: “Yes, I gradually came to understand that, bit by bit.” “Aren’t you funny—bit by bit…” she sneered, and went on her way.

  THE SCATTERED BONES

  After Satan had killed God and devoured his flesh, he scattered God’s bones across the earth and hid them in inaccessible places, under glaciers, inside volcanoes, under the foundations of tall buildings. Much later, a small boy crawled into a ravine and found one of the nasal bones, which was as big as an elephant’s skull. That night the boy dreamed that the entire skeleton was reassembled and God came back to life. He saw the muscles grow from the bare bones, the organs inflate, the veins interweave, and the skin settle softly on the steaming flesh. He dreamed that God rose again and dethroned Satan. The boy grew up and traveled the globe in search of other oversized bones, but he got old and died without having found more than scattered pieces, an anklebone, half a shoulder blade, some splinters and other pieces of the skull not quite substantial enough to form an eye socket. In his will the old man bequeathed his collection of bones to a museum, where they all thought he must have been senile or simply out of his mind. Later, a restorer brought the bones home as a toy for his son. This boy, who was fond of math, measured the collection’s partial eye socket with a ruler, putting it at twenty-two inches, and by comparing the 1.5 inches of his own eye socket and his own height of fifty-three inches, he was able to calculate the full height of God to about sixty-two feet. He went to a nearby cemetery and laid out the bones according to the same measurements, as if God Himself had been outstretched on the ground, and he buried each bit of bone in its rightful place. The boy hoped that this fragmentary burial would give some sort of peace to the ghost of a deity who ravaged the earth, but only succeeded in robbing it of an eye, a shoulder, and a heel.

  EARTH CONFUSED

  One day, for reasons unknown, the Earth dislodged itself from its axis and tumbled pell-mell in its orbit around the sun. As seen from Earth, the sun seemed to have lost all sense of direction and sailed across the heavens like a drunken fly. No longer did it make sense to speak about night or day, summer or winter, as these things changed incessantly and unpredictably. But our confused planet still cast its shadow at regular intervals onto the moon, which thus, in time, assumed the sun’s old function as divider of time.

  DEUS, LIBER ET PAGINA

  Before the beginning of time, God opened the Book of Creation and tore out a page, for if He did not do so, the Book would be perfect and thereby render His existence impossible, since one of His attributes is being the only possible perfect being. Afterward, He started reading and the universe was created as its story passed under His eyes, but when He came to the point where he had torn out the page and simply continued reading, from that moment on there was something He did not know, and therefore His existence was equally impossible, since omniscience is another of His attributes. But being omniscient, He knew from the beginning that whether He tore out the page or not, He would sooner or later be forced to cease existing—ergo, God or the Book or both could not exist simultaneously, which in any case also renders this story impossible. Unless He has not yet reached the missing page.

  AT HØJER FLOODGATE

  In Højer, the floodgate city in the southwest Jutlandian marsh, a young local by the name of Alfred Erling Larsen stood by the oven in the bakery where he was an apprentice at the exact moment the sea breached the dikes during the flood of 1976, when thousands of sheep drowned, and wanted to hang himself. His particular reason for choosing to end his life comes down to a very short tale: His fiancée, Karen Margrethe Nielsen, the baker’s daughter, had that same morning swallowed a ping-pong ball and choked to death. He put the rope around his neck and braced himself to say a few last, well-chosen words, but nothing came to him; he thought about it for a long time, but no words seemed worthy to be his last. This hesitation gave the water in the bakery time to rise, thus saving his life.

  A CLASSIC FONT

  Suddenly Marcel had the creeping sensation that this situation could appear in a book. Suzanne stroked her hair with an irritated gesture, and he saw it written in his mind’s eye: She stroked her hair with an irritated gesture. His first reaction was to grip the armrests in panic. A moment after having also seen this sentence in writing he tore himself loose by changing position on the chair and saying: “It’s not my child.” The feeling of literature was gone, but it returned the instant she opened her mouth and the words stood before him like a little wall in a classic font: “You’re one mean prick, Marcel.”

  TRANSLATED FROM DANISH BY K. E. SEMMEL AND THE AUTHOR

  [CZECH REPUBLIC]

  MICHAL AJVAZ

  The Wire Book

  There was still fighting going on in some quarters of the capital when old Vieta got into his car and headed out to Cormorant Bay. He wove his way through streets clogged with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and crowds of people. On the northernmost edge of the city he was stopped by guards wearing the uniforms of South Floriana; luckily it turned out their commander was a former student of his. The roads to the north of the city were still quite dangerous, so the commander offered Vieta a lift to the camp in his jeep.

  The camp was made up of low barracks standing in a long row on a sweltering plain of sand and rock above the sea. The government troops had by now abandoned the place. Confused and emaciated prisoners were wandering about the scorching sands; they bore witness to the departure of the troops the day before, in a ship that had been waiting below in the harbor. They had seen the troops lo
ading aboard some heavy crates; presumably these contained documents they hadn’t succeeded in burning and intended to dispose of at sea.

  The professor asked all the prisoners about Fernando. Many of them had met him in the camp. Vieta discovered that his son had arrived there the very day martial law had been imposed. But none of the prisoners knew what had become of him. This was an ominous sign: Vieta was told that prisoners would be driven away in trucks that later returned to the camp empty. Eventually he managed to find a man called Pablo, with whom his son had worked for several weeks in the depot. He had Pablo lead him there. From the outside the depot building looked like all the other barracks, except that it had no windows. Professor Vieta walked about a long, dark room whose floor was covered with battered crates, iron bars, clamps, and large balls of wire. He walked right to the end, where there was a view of wide-open gates, forming a rectangular screen on which were projected the glowing yellow sand and the rock. The sunbeams that penetrated the room carried in a fine, whirling sand. The tin roof over Vieta’s head was incandescent; it was incomprehensible to him that anyone could bear the heat in there for longer than five minutes. The prisoner waited in front of the depot. Vieta rejoined him and he explained that Fernando had struggled most with the fact that he was prevented from writing. He never complained about anything else; all those weeks Fernando spent in the sweltering depot he thought of nothing but literature, it was as if nothing else had any importance for him. He once confided in Pablo that in his last weeks of freedom he had planned a novel. Pablo knew that Fernando’s only desire in the camp was to write his novel.