Best European Fiction 2011

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Best European Fiction 2011 Page 45

by Aleksandar Hemon


  “That’s right,”

  “You see what a lot I know, my friend. Ha!”

  At the time, after midnight, I couldn’t see anything funny about scraping a child out of someone’s womb. It even hurt me to imagine the womb (often just the womb, not the person it belonged to) resisting the extraction of its fruit. My girlfriend came over to me and hugged me. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. She was afraid that I would disappear if she so much as blinked.

  “Do you want me to take your pulse?”

  “Okay.”

  “Then come upstairs. You’ve been a king for long enough, come and be a slave for a bit.”

  She took off my crown and put it on the table. She said good-bye to everyone with her eyes and led me into the building. Twenty pairs of dark eyes followed us warmly on our way to bed. I didn’t really feel like leaving, but something spread from her hand into mine.

  Something that must have been love.

  P.S. That was the year my girlfriend and I saved someone else’s baby, but, in the end, killed our own. We spent a few more together. I bent apart the bars with which she had kept me away from others, widening them, until in the end I came and went as I pleased from my symbolic cage. Once, as often happens, I was late coming back. The apartment was empty. In the middle of the biggest and coldest room there was a bag waiting for me with a folded letter stuck to it with Scotch tape. Snow was coming in through the open, curtain-less window. I figured I would never again light a fire here or keep it going for anyone. When I opened the letter, there was nothing in it. But I still kept it. Even blank letters say something. At least to me.

  TRANSLATED FROM BOSNIAN BY CELIA HAWKESWORTH

  [BELGIUM]

  FRANÇOIS EMMANUEL

  Lou Dancing

  She took me to the Santiague, where people were breaking their glasses to the rhythm of the samba; she took me to La Maison d’Orange, where the waiters were wearing lavalieres; she took me to Screamy, where the floor creaked under the thud of the house music; she took me to Pianocktail, where the Marseillaise was a bitter, tropical delight; she took me to Cha cha cha, which wasn’t danced there; she took me to Fin de partie to finish the set. We ate face to face; we danced, when a dance floor presented itself, in long-drawn-out performances. Very drunk, she’d stagger on the chord made by a sad old piano, bounce up again at the throbbing of congas, or go into a trance to the din of techno. Her dance was often solitary, eyes fixed in her ophidian goddess body, in a state of untouchable offering. Toward two in the morning she had a taxi called and everything ended in an almost chaste kiss, in a hall soaked in red light, under the blasé eye of the bouncer. Before dancing, we’d talked plenty, but what had we said? We’d laughed, but about what? Here and there she’d made distracted movements of her hand, lightly brushing me, saying provocative things, but none of it was anything more than a game, still, of invitations and evasions, of dissimulations. I needed to untangle the truth of something, what was at stake with us, her reserve, her reluctance—unless it was a sinister self-interest. I forced my way with pleasure and anxiety into this love (which dared not, you might say, speak its name). Because I loved her too much already. I loved her spicy little-girl airs, this instinct she had for titillating me, provoking me, catching me, dropping me, taking me up again; for affecting serious, pitiful, charming expressions. I loved the kid in the full-grown woman’s body, tiny but bubbling with energy, snug in a pair of jeans or sheathed in a purple dress, and often wearing sneakers. I loved, without daring to touch it, her flecked mother-of-pearl skin.

  So what did we talk about? Poetry, Somerset Maugham, W. B. Yeats, the nouveau roman. She didn’t know much about these things but she flaunted this almost nothing with the talent of a worldly woman well used to literary cocktail parties. She laughed again at my book Subject Lessons—an outward manifestation, she said, of my unintentional funniness. I no longer found this offensive. The dialogues of Menelaus and Helen bored us quite quickly. If the music was soft, we spoke of soft music. If we were surrounded by aquariums, we spoke of fish—the fish brought us to sea-floors, the depths brought us back up to islands, from islands we moved to the feeling of insularity that inhabits the English soul, from the English soul we slipped to the Russian soul, or, just as easily, to peanut butter, according to the laws of linear conversation, which makes its way from one word to the other, with certain forks in the paradigmatic axis and certain holes rapidly filled with wine. Over the course of this idle chatter I learned two or three things about her: I discovered that she hated Wagner and Chinese waltzes; that as an adolescent she had done some acting; that she often dreamed of slugs (slugs around her bed, armies of slugs with silvery trails) and that she had a black cat named Chi Salang. The story of an animal ripped apart, recounted in a delighted tone, failed to put me on my guard. I took that for English humor; a nice, childish cruelty which added spice to her charm. For her part, she didn’t seem too interested in my life, which deep down was a relief. We lived a sort of holiday romance: her on holiday from Markus Gün and me on holiday from myself. As, inevitably, desire began to take up a little space between us, not to say become awkward, there were embarrassing moments, slips of the tongue, lapses of which we were all too aware, strange conversational shifts, sudden silences. One evening when she was drunk, she offered her throat to me to kiss, her throat and then her lips; said to me in a whisper: Eat me, Louis; then she flinched and stared at me with her dark eyes, sighed: I’m worn out, the taxi’s getting impatient; then, several meters on, in a falsely carefree tone: Let’s meet tomorrow evening at Chili and Pepper.

  I must admit she took me by surprise. I’d never have imagined she’d know the place. Fearing that she’d meet Aloïs Stein there, I chose a table buried in the shadows. Behind his sax, Stein pretended not to see me, but as soon as she pushed open the door of the vaulted cellar a strange phenomenon occurred. The old musician caught sight of her, greeted her, improvised an entrance for her made up of caresseses, then played an accompaniment to the long tracking shot of her swaying hips between the pillars and tables. She was dressed that night in a velvety blue, one-piece outfit with straps and wide pants cut mid-calf. Sitting down, she said to me, That sax has the voice of an angel, admittedly a somewhat fallen one, a postmodern angel. All the angels have become postmodern, I answered, they no longer play lutes or harps, you have to ask yourself how God makes head or tail of it all. We ordered a turquoise cocktail with little floating bits of peeled skin, she drank two of them in a row, sighed several more times (God, that sax…), then dove by herself onto the Chili’s dance floor—a narrow passage between the tables—and it’s there everything materialized: Lou Summerfield, her eyes rolling, hips moving, swimming in the warm water of jazz, diving, coming back up, spreading her palmiped hands, opening her arms like elytra, refolding them in complicated contortions, becoming a conger again, eel, garfish, while the light shimmered on the sinuous velvet on her hips, while the sax (God, that sax…) came over her, enveloped her at a distance, licked her with delight, slipped notes discreetly under her outfit, through the unraveled, sewn, stretched, endless variations of “Mississippi Sunrise.” You could even hear Josephine’s voice burping in pleasure. After that moment of rapture, there was “Galloping Mare,” then the hot version of “Shanghai Baby,” then still others, on and on. The Chili clientele didn’t have eyes for anyone but her, she was the unending prelude to a striptease number that never proceeded beyond the promise; and the secret complicity they were slowly plotting, she and Stein, when he came to breathe the sliding wa-was in her ear. Toward three in the morning those two were still together, but she was showing signs of exhaustion. I went over to her, told her you’re too beautiful, this time I’m taking you somewhere. It took her some time to understand but she let herself be pulled toward the exit. With his sax, Stein had exhausted her, left her like an old hide, worn out, made malleable. Even in the taxi, then the foyer, the stairwell, the hallway, the bedroom, she put up no resistance to the animality that had possess
ed me. Of course there were several hindrances: buttons, laces, zippers caught, a whole unsightly battle against the conspiracy of cloth, but at the end of all that the one-piece was at the foot of the bed, her blouse was dangling from the door handle, and she was lying completely naked though suddenly shivering, declaring she was cold, tired, had a headache, and curling up in the fetal position under the covers. Fortunately I had an old Duke Ellington CD, which revived some of her snaky movements. Lovemaking, as they call it, was set off by this languid writhing, but at the height of it, I was forced to recognize that she was with the Duke, not me, and no doubt with Stein even more so; that Stein and his sax had made love to her for four hours already, better than anyone else could, and that I was arriving dead last, like a candle snuffer. In her sleep she was still moaning: God, that sax…

  She slept until midday. There were, no doubt, other entwinements, moments when, without enthusiasm, she let herself be taken again, but I don’t remember them very well; after nights of lovemaking I’m only ever left with a few details in a sea of oblivion. They’re the insignificant or fantastic details, like those reddish speckles under her throat that made me think of the Micronesia section on my old, yellowish-brown planisphere; I can also still see her naked body through my translucent shower pane; and then, without laughing, she floats around lost inside the legs of my striped pajamas. Toward four o’clock in the afternoon, she looks me straight in the eyes, says to me somberly: Let’s stop telling fairy tales, Louis, tell me about yourself. I told her everything. Soon we’d become submerged in an unshakable gloom, she and I. Toward evening she slipped her blouse and one-piece back on, like any beautiful outfit worn once and suddenly seeming second-hand. So, dressed once more, she kissed me on the forehead. I followed her with my eyes, a small blue patch getting lost in the crowd on the sidewalks. She had smiled, she had said you’re the first sometime-poet I’ve met in the flesh.

  Poetry is a difficult art.

  I loved women so much, ones I’d glimpsed, passed by, lost, those reading on trains or walking in the streets, I loved young mothers with their weary tenderness, slender silhouettes separated by windowpanes, terrified beauties, elegant ones, pensive ones, ones who were lit up, I loved that private secret they guard, the art they have of appearing and then slipping away and vanishing behind the screens of chance. A meeting sometimes took place; a story was sometimes threaded together rendering the initial impression misleading. With Lou Summerfield the initial image was that of dancing face to face while drops of shadow rained down, a solitary dance, the rule of which was to maintain one’s distance. Had I broken the rule? For several days she stopped getting in touch with me. The following Saturday, I received this hurried message recorded in a toneless voice on my answering machine: Louis, I’ve something important to tell you, I’ll be at Vanitie’s Fair tonight.

  Vanitie’s was a factory that had been transformed into a club, an enormous warehouse where they’d repainted the bridge cranes, pedestals, and other metallic frames in bright colors for crazy nocturnal displays. That’s where I had to look for her, there at the back of the bar (a stripped-down machine of some kind, fluorescent yellow) or on the dance floor itself, in the human magma, the steamy anonymity, staring down everyone and no one. My life will have amounted to nothing more than this, then: the unceasing search for a face. And all those bodies moving jerkily in their purple neons around me were miming to the point of ecstasy the disjointed gestures of someone’s death throes. Lou Summerfield wasn’t there, I circled the dance floor three last times then ended up at the bar, perched on a stool, with some similar types all drinking their heartaches dry. Conversations crossed over and back muffled by the roar of the speakers, one guy mourning his Lorette, the other celebrating his total loss, the third sagging on the counter and waking up at intervals to shout about some minister, and lastly some guy who just kept saying I want to live. Hovering behind his counter, a Mauritian barman lent his tender ear to this chorus of misfortunes; with the unctuous gesture of a prelate, he cast out the white froth from the beer glasses or poured long drops of golden whiskey as though it were the very elixir of consolation. The man who wanted to live let me in on the secret of his life patched with little bits of love, odd jobs, and failed new beginnings. But life is stronger, he pounded this out, and Total Loss agreed, smiling away and paying for another round in honor of his eighteen-cylinder, special series, 117 horsepower vehicle, which had finished upside-down in a potato field. Minister was finally snoring vigorously while the air became blue and hazy and the guy in love with Lorette lifted his head a little, one down, ten to go in this brotherhood of the unfortunate—they always end up looking a little alike. I have no memory of being in the taxi that brought me home, but I awake at midday the next day, pull myself out of bed as best I can, sober up under cold water, find a sheet of paper folded in quarters at the bottom of my pocket:

  Too much noise, too many people.

  Come to the Valparaiso this evening.

  It’ll be quieter.

  Kiss, kiss.

  And so the dance started up again. Those two kisses warmed my heart. The Valparaiso was to Vanitie’s what a fishing boat is to a brand-new cargo liner. Its swaying walls, its corrugated iron roof, its faded signs (Exotic Cuisine, Full Menu) were erected on the bank of a sad old canal. Inside there were exactly six tables, the boss, his canary, and me. While waiting for Lou, who, hour after hour, failed to arrive, I chewed on crusty ends of dry bread while scrutinizing a print of a port in browned Technicolor and the slightly greasy poppies on the oilcloth. I told myself Lou was toying with me, that by her absence she was getting back at me for something: winding backward, and in a distorted reflection, the shining demonstrations of the Santiague or Pianocktail. Then, in my typical, volatile manner of thought, I mulled over melancholia, of which there were at least two distinct varieties: the slightly punishing Vanitie’s Fair kind, and the bittersweet Valparaiso kind. Valparaiso: that name of a port town so difficult for me to find on a map being the very paradigm of this dark mood (antique steamships in harbors, sun eternally setting, the oxidized tatters of old Europe, as if time sent all its trash over there, as if they were already reusing the theater sets which had been used as our own backdrop, and worn out much too quickly). The slightly square face of the boss now inserted itself into this meditation. He had to be some kind of mixed-race mountain Indian, with his prominent cheekbones and very black eyes. Leaning very close to me, he pronounced my name—accurately, in his own way—which, however, he had no reason to know. He repeated, Mr. Louis Uccello, someone asking for you on the phone. The receiver was placed beside the canary cage, but there was no one at the other end of the line. The next slightly worrying fact was that the owner claimed it was a man’s voice he’d heard. The wait having gone on long enough, he served me some old, burned lamb chops and we made conversation. He dampened his Js and stumbled over his Vs in recounting his life story: a melancholic one. His father was a whaler, his mother an Indian, of the Arayupu tribe, rechristened Incarnation of the Blessed Sea by her father, who, after his eyes had met the very human eyes of a mortally wounded cetacean, decided to give up this bloody career. From that point I lost the thread of his story a little, which moved from the storyteller’s being detained in an embassy to crossing the Atlantic in the bottom of a luggage hold, the rest of his existence now hanging on this old restaurant-bar whose sign was collapsing like his smile when he served me another tequila which sliced through my mucous membranes. As I’d told him a bit about my misadventures in turn, he suggested there was another man in my lady-story; without a doubt he was thinking about the voice on the phone again. Toward one or two in the morning, when I called a taxi to go home, I was suddenly on my guard. I stared at the dark night on the lookout for something out of the ordinary. No, there was nothing out of the ordinary. An even-tempered driver, blinding headlights, the nighttime smell of my building’s foyer, the dull click of my door, then Lou’s voice on my answering machine: Too small, too shabby, the Va
lparaiso, let’s try the Rouskelnikov tomorrow evening. And then after a silence she added: It’s important, Louis, it’s very important. Aloïs Stein’s voice sprang up just after the end of her message; he wanted to see me too: a matter of great urgency. I rewound the tape. Lou’s voice was weary, I’d have said, maybe worried; Stein’s voice was Stein’s voice, heavy as always, a little insistent. I put the two voices on a loop, Lou then Stein, Stein then Lou, barely separated by the beep.

  Exactly fifteen days ago today, Stein said to me, you were in the Chili and Pepper with a young woman who danced on her own all night long. I’d like to know her name. This matter is of vital importance to me. I have the very distinct feeling of having known this woman before. We come across thousands of people and suddenly one of them leaves a special mark. I have a darkness in my life, Uccello, I’ve a darkness lasting several months…This woman is dancing in that darkness. She doesn’t stop dancing, I’m obsessed by her.

  And Stein made an unusual gesture with his hand, as if to dispel the image while at the same time depicting it with his long fingers that twiddled briefly in the air. For the first time with Stein, I had the impression of facing a man like myself. Up till then I’d only seen in him an unusual character, a saxophonist, I hadn’t seen him just as himself. Then I answered that her name was Lou Summerfield and that we were meeting that evening at the Rouskelnikov.

  He let out the yellow collar of his shirt, moving the knot of his tie off center so it started to look like a noose. I’d have been happier if the woman had nothing to do with this story, he muttered. And he turned toward the window for a long time as if to clean out his eyes with the fleecy autumn sky. The door opened several moments later on a decrepit character floating in a pair of trousers with suspenders. The man placed a tray carrying two cups of black coffee on the already cluttered desk. He answered to the name of Bakou, diminutive of Aram Bakoutmezaghian, and must have been linked to Stein by some long domestic-staff history. When Stein introduced him (“my old Armenian associate, my man for delicate missions”), I sensed that we’d be seeing each other again some day in murkier circumstances. Bakoutmezaghian had gray lustrine sleeves and big dumbfounded eyes which were obstructed by the upper frame of his glasses. Stein then took out the telephone directory from the bottom of a pile of files and looked up the address of the Rouskelnikoff. Funny name, he muttered, it’s almost Raskolnikov, bringing the cup of black coffee to his lips, I saw that he was trembling quite badly, and that made me think of something.

 

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