Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  But the governing party was loath to give up on the work of a national hero who had died in the struggle for freedom. By the circumstances of its genesis the work was bound to become a tool of propaganda; its actual content was of no great importance. It was necessary only to find in it some sentences and phrases that could be put to use when honors of state were being conferred, that could be chiseled into the plinths of memorials. These sentences and phrases were easily found: any phrase chiseled into marble will take on the meaning we require of it. Fernando’s father was not resistant to such interpretations; although he knew them to be a violation of his son’s work, he also knew that this violation was of no account; in the depot, Fernando must have foreseen the fate awaiting his book if ever the wire should be found, and without doubt he would have been utterly indifferent to it. But the elder Vieta, like everyone else, was mistaken in his view of the book. Although he knew the text of his son’s novel by heart, he read it as a testimony that replaced his lost memories. In the cadences of its sentences he distinguished Fernando’s movements, gestures and facial expressions, all of which he had known and forgotten; out of the flow of language there emerged, albeit faintly, other gestures he had never known. Thus, the currents and forces of language begot a false image of the son that he had never known.

  TRANSLATED FROM CZECH BY ANDREW OAKLAND

  [CYPRUS]

  NORA NADJARIAN

  Exhibition

  Chairs hang from the ceiling. Do not touch. They move themselves, not all the time, not all at the same time. So it’s a bizarre effect when a chair, a ward robe, a bed, seemingly decides to express itself. They hang by invisible wires from the beams and have pencils attached. Their motions write indecipherable messages on blank sheets beneath them: meaningless, desperate, like a memory, or a child’s attempt at an alphabet, all over the place. Each one seems to have something to say: the longer you look at it, the more meaningful, the more insistent, the more enigmatic.

  The one that spoke to me was the piano stool, the round, wooden, spinning one. I hadn’t seen one of those since the days I used to sit next to my piano teacher, the formidably Russian Miss Nina. A red velvet cushion was placed under my little bottom to make me taller, my small fingers concentrated on Brahms’s Waltz in G-sharp Minor while Nina repeated, More! More open! More open! You are playing closed! You are playing like a cage!

  When she left me to pee, always a few minutes before the end of the lesson, I would swirl a full three hundred sixty degrees on the stool until she came back. I tried to play “more open” in the last five minutes just to please her, whatever playing open meant. I wanted to play round and round, open and opener, sharper and Majorer, but it all came out sad, flat, G, Flat, Minor.

  And the trace made, on the white sheet, is a circle of lines that criss and cross as the stool spins and my little feet swing in and out.

  The exhibition space is like a stage. I would like to thank…I’d like to thank… And the artist’s tongue is tied, she can’t remember who. The only person who comes to her mind is her father who used to pack and unpack his suitcase, all on the same day, without traveling anywhere. He would put all his clothes in, and his pipe, and his tobacco. Then he’d lock the suitcase and carry it all the way down the stairs, only to carry it back up again, into the bedroom, onto the bed. And open it. It was a ritual that reminded her that her father was alive, that he was there. She often wanted to slip a message into the suitcase when he wasn’t looking: Dad, I love you. Or: You have no idea how much I’ll miss you. Or: Please don’t go.

  The spotlight faces her like a full moon. It blinds her. And they all applaud because her exhibition has reminded them of things about their life that they had long forgotten. The piano stool, the table, the gramophone, the suitcase—all part of the past hanging from the ceiling into the present.

  Somebody hugs her. It’s her father, dead now for almost four years. He tells her he has read the catalog notes, that it finally now all makes some sense to him. Thank you, he says, I packed my whole life into that suitcase, and there is no longer any need to unpack. I’m home. Finally, I’m home.

  The exhibition space is one street away from the Street of the Whores. The whore is cooking a stew with bay leaves, stirring in other spices from her rack, at random. The front door is open and the place smells divine. Any passerby would be tempted. Soon, there is a cockroach scratching its legs behind the gas cooker and there is a man sprawled on the sofa, wearing shorts and a stained singlet, and she is saying, I’m coming, I’m coming. They are a romantic couple, the whore, her client. Even a ménage à trois, if you count the cockroach.

  She closes the door and starts taking off her clothes. A big, fat lump of nothing, that’s what she knows she is. Her feet almost shuffle as she walks toward him in the dim pink light. She wants to tell him something indecipherable, something meaningless, something desperate about her life. But this is business, and business is business.

  The whore’s mother insisted on her deathbed that she had three daughters, not four. No, no, the third one died when she was very young, I only have three daughters, she declared. Her eldest daughter, the one with the perfectly shaped eyebrows, sat on a wobbly chair by her side, holding her hand all the time.

  A long time ago the whore was a girl. You can come and kiss me on a first-come, first-serve basis, said the girl with fuchsia breath, and she smiled like the bold-colored flower that she was. She breathed onto their faces, watched them turn pink, red, fuchsia, fire, free.

  There is always a beginning, and in the beginning, she sold kisses by the hour. Men came, men went. Gradually, slowly, time passed, life passed, they did strange things to her lips, mouth, nose, ears, hair, skin, turned her body inside out, outside in, smiled, swore, broke her, unbroke her, touched her, undressed her, dressed her, told her stories, bought her, sold her.

  She is now a ghost of her former self in the dim pink light. She writes her autobiography in her head. The words are all there, the questions, too. Tell me, did you once love me? No, I mean really love me. Tell me, did you think of me as a woman or as a whore? Do you still dream of me in fuchsia dreams, the girl I was, the girl I became? If you saw me now in the street, would you recognize me?

  She thinks of the man, sometimes. The man without a name. The man she loved. She loved him, but he insisted on paying her. He loved her, but wouldn’t leave his wife for her. Long, long, long ago.

  After the exhibition, the restaurant is full of literati and glitterati sipping chilled white wine. Snippets of conversation collide in the air. Yes—absolutely incredible—I simply—did you?—purest materials—They couldn’t possibly have—No, of course not—the raw one…

  A mobile phone rings. The zipper of an enormous handbag opens, zzzzzzzzzip, and then closes again, zzzzzzzzip, somebody talks to the phone and to the party at the same time, a pregnant woman coughs, a glass of water is knocked over.

  It is mid-summer and there is a slight breeze. The candle on the table is blown out, the waiter reappears, apologizes, strikes a match, lights the candle, and retires again into the shadow, somewhere to the left of the palm tree. The baby moved, the pregnant woman whispers to her husband. He moved, she whispers again, and holds his hand.

  The morning she finds out she’s pregnant, the woman looks at the sky and smiles. It looks almost painted, she thinks. It could have been painted this morning. In nine months’ time she will give birth to a son. He will be the most beautiful creature her eyes have ever seen.

  But for now she admires the sky. It reminds her of a mural she once saw in Florence. She looks for the photo of the mural but she can’t find it. She can never find the photo she wants, in the same way she can never think of the right word to complete a sentence. Instead, in an envelope in one of the drawers of her desk, behind a pile of old letters, she finds five photos. Five photos of her and her husband and a blue sky above their heads. Behind each of the photos, her small, neat handwriting says: Italy, 2005. Behind the sky, she thinks, is a date I had
forgotten. On the other side of the sky is a date.

  She is not in Italy but the sky is so blue. The sky is so blue, almost a blessing. Five photos of a blue sky, they lift her spirits. She lays them on the table in front of her, plays around with the order, arranges and rearranges her own private exhibition. She takes a deep breath, takes in the past, lets it meet her future.

  The baby will grow up to become a man. But for now it is a fetus in the dark. His bones are still soft and pliable, he has not yet been fully formed but his life has started. His mother tells him his life has started, that he will have black hair like his father, that she has given him her green eyes.

  There is a sunny spot in the garden, and this is where she stops, like a satisfied tourist, and talks to her unborn son about things he should know about herself and his father. Because we might change, she says, as you grow older. One day we will be different people, we may not even recognize ourselves in the mirror. One day, we may not be able to recognize you. So I want to tell you all this now. I love your father and he loves me. I love you as much as I love the blue, cloudless sky.

  The baby moves slightly, it is as slight a movement as the blink of an eye, but enough for her to know that he’s listening. We made you, she whispers to him, a long time ago. You were born many years ago, in Italy.

  Days later the artist thinks there is something wrong with her, the way she sees the world all askew, the way she can’t balance her feet when she’s walking. Like a bird, she can’t keep still on the ground. It’s almost as if the road she’s walking on doesn’t exist anymore. But it was here yesterday, she mutters, to no one but herself. But I was here yesterday. Step by step, she thinks she is escaping reality. Her life is a figment of her imagination, playing tricks on her mind. Whenever she passes by a mirror she smoothes the worry lines, she smiles, tries to remember her face when it was younger.

  On difficult, unbalanced days, she photographs graffiti or takes found objects home and polishes them like there’s no tomorrow. Once she found a pebble. A pin. Part of a sponge, a shell, a broken light bulb, a shoelace, a receipt. She wanted to record the sound a pebble might make under her foot as it clicks against another. She wanted to make an asymmetrical sculpture, one that would inspire longing in people. The feeling of longing, the sensation that only those who have lost something would know about. Excuse me, have you lost something?

  She wonders how long the road is back to her childhood. But you can’t go back, said her father, only forward. Yet she longs for something. For what? asks her father. I just long for, she replies. It’s a state of being, longing for. Something.

  The bird lands, and hops. She feels that she is hopping from one place to another in the same city, like a homeless person, a nestless bird. Her father visits her in dreams and tells her: You’re making an exhibition of yourself. She wants to make sculptures out of things people have lost. I’ve lost a pin, a pebble, a coin, an eyelash, my heart, my mind. What are you longing for? What have you lost? When did you last see your heart? Did you pack the suitcase yourself? Please do not leave baggage unattended. People always want an answer to make them feel good, she thinks. And she knows that when there is no reply to a question, it is considered an asymmetry.

  She thinks of her mother. They went to church every Sunday, she lit candles. But her mother was discovered one afternoon, when her husband came home early from work, went up the stairs, and opened the door. The whole neighborhood held its breath. So you’ve been married to a whore all these years, they didn’t ask. So your daughter might not even be your own, so nothing you know is true, so somebody pulls a carpet from under your feet, and you lose your balance. Look out, you’re about to fall. And her father lost everything he thought he had, securely, in his hands, his head, his past, his present. Start packing, follow her, change your mind, unpack. You’re a loser, a fucking loser, whose wife walked down some stairs and disappeared from his life. He sometimes wishes he’d come home early that night only to find that the lock on the door had been changed. Then everything would have been different. Then nothing would have happened.

  The city hides its secrets. If you want to explore, walk in and out of the present, into the past, way back into the past, follow narrow paths and open doors to re-enter the present, to go round cement blocks, in and out of artificial lights.

  I, the author of this story, am putting things in the right order or no order at all. I am trying to express in words how I was never able to play the piano openly. My playing was rigid, cemented. Nowadays I prefer to listen to CDs, and write. I am opening up in other ways, I suppose. I’ve found the key of the cage. I’ve discovered some words and I’m putting them together and I’m writing and writing.

  The exhibition of the hanging chairs is still on. I went to see it again yesterday. There they were, all the seemingly random objects on seemingly random display, hanging from the ceiling. The whore’s chair, the artist’s father’s suitcase, her mother’s bed, Miss Nina’s piano stool. I stood in the middle of it all, and I didn’t know how long I spent listening to their stories, to the silence charged with their unearthly frequency.

  Tonight there is a gecko on the wall, a tiny creature with tiny black eyes like beads, a transparent body. I want to keep it there for company, on my wall, forever, to illuminate it with a colored light. But it moves away, runs away from me, hides somewhere in the dark.

  Miss Nina plays a nocturne by Chopin. I try to catch the music in my hands, I pretend to be playing it myself beautifully, faultlessly. I am seven years old. For once, Miss Nina does not speak. For once, I long for her to tell me off, to tell me I’m playing it all wrong. I long for her irritated voice, her Russian accent. But she says nothing at all. She turns the pages of the book and plays another nocturne and then another. I swirl three hundred sixty degrees on the stool next to her and finally I lose her, she’s gone. All I have is the music in my head. C. Sharp. Minor. There is no book, no piano, no room.

  Things shift from here to there and from there to here. The ghosts of the old town write their diaries. Please don’t touch the exhibits, they move on their own.

  [CROATIA]

  MIMA SIMI

  My Girlfriend

  My girlfriend is blind. If I wanted to I could fool around, or even have sex, with another girl, as long as we keep it down—with my girlfriend in the same room, boiling the kettle, microwaving popcorn, drying her hair.

  When I come home from work she doesn’t ask how my day was, she wants to know about the density of traffic, the progression of construction projects in the neighborhood, and what people on the bus talked about. She wants to know if my day was louder than usual.

  Sometimes I won’t go to work at all. I’ll kiss her, shout good-bye at full volume, slam the door—and stay in. I’ll hold my breath until she’s turned her back to me. There’s a good spot in the corner by the window where I can sit for hours; I situate my body downwind, for the draught to breeze my scent away. I synchronize my breath with hers, my chest doubling her chest, my lungs following hers around the room. She talks on the phone, sings along with the radio, dances a little perhaps, swinging her head like a hen pecking up grain in the yard. When she eats, crumbs fall around her like shredded confetti. She touches things to make sure, counts the tiles and her steps wherever she goes.

  My girlfriend loves going to the movies. We sit in the love seat, hold hands, chomp on candy, drink soda, laugh as loud as anyone. When the movie ends we hurry to the toilets and listen to people talk about it. This gives her a rounder picture, she says. It’s easier to figure out what she thinks about it. And on the way home she wants me to retell the movie, arrange the storyline neatly in sequence, describe it in detail. The actors, their faces, the silences. Especially the silences. She’s taught me to watch movies as though my life depended on it. When we first started going out I used to give it my all—I’d bring a notepad, write it all down. Then reconstruct it for her meticulously, like a paleontologist putting together a dinosaur skeleton. This would exc
ite her—we’d make love all night long, and then I’d go over the story again for breakfast.

  Lately, though, making stuff up is far more exciting. I’ll twist the story around, change the setting, the time, switch the relationships around, make them sexier, platonic, polyamorous, incestuous. Some might say this is cheating, but only the same sort of dull people who’re always happy to explain the difference between love and make believe to you. Besides, she seems to enjoy my stories all the more since I’ve let them run wild. Now she wants to listen to them all night long. Her sex drive seems to have gone down too.