Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The directory must’ve been old, because it listed the Rouskelnikoff at 106 rue des Péniches1 and the rue des Péniches sank, after number 40, into a huge excavation planted with concrete stakes and strewn with metallic roofing. At the appointed meeting time, Stein and I were following the fence overhanging the pit. I didn’t dare speak to him about the sort of logical continuity that this bitch Lou was constructing, running from Vanitie’s to the Valparaiso then to the Rouskelnikoff, and I wondered once again what on earth I could’ve done to her, other than making love to her one night when she hadn’t said no. Stein stared, mesmerized, into the bottom of the excavation. Obviously, he muttered, she didn’t reserve a table. We went in search of a more recent directory, consulted it on a bar at the back of a garish tobacconist’s where they also served glasses of wine and games of darts were going on. Between the Rousseboeuf and the Rue des Lilas, there was no longer any trace of the Rouskelnikoff, though one of the clients did remember the sign for a little Russian restaurant that had disappeared without a trace in one of the building blitzes which tore open craters in the city later dubbed office blocks or parking lots. With it went the soul of the district, the spirit of the premises, and three quarters of the rue des Péniches, which no longer had any barges beyond those in its name (the canal having gone underground). Rather than staying to dwell on nostalgia, Stein suggested we head for the countryside and sundown; if we’d been near the sea he would’ve suggested the sea. He was at the wheel of an old black Volkswagen whose roof his head almost touched and which made such a worn-metal meat-grinder sound so that we had to shout to make ourselves heard. When we’d finally left the city, he started driving faster and faster, turned off suddenly onto an asphalt road then onto a narrow track, covered in potholes, which rushed, jerkily, towards the top of a plateau. At the end of the track, a rusted barrier prohibited access to an enormous expanse of concrete paving between which young shrubs sprouted up. It’s an old airfield, Stein roared at me before killing the engine; then he jumped out of the car and started taking long strides towards the center of the runway. There he remained at a standstill, motionless, the wind inflating the panels of his open jacket. I come here when I’m thinking of my darkness, he murmured, I sit down on the excrescence, I look south, southwest and I wait.

  South-southwest there was a forest and the straight groove of a railroad track. In the foreground stood a square building all of whose windows were broken. It was the control tower, Stein explained, it’s overrun with wild pigeons, they wanted planes and control towers; this place plunges us into the depths of time. Then he invited me to sit down beside him on what he called the excrescence, an old metal post right on the runway. You could hear a mournful chorus of crows in the distance making a dimming spark in the dark part of the setting sun. Stein seemed pensive. Sometimes, he resumed, I drive through the gate, I line myself up on the runway—I gradually build up speed and then suddenly cut the engine, first there’s the sound of metal, then the noises of the car, then the grinding of the axle and shock absorbers dies down until the vehicle becomes completely still, silence descends on my cockpit then and I feel good.

  We left again when night had fallen. He wanted to show me something else. By long detours we arrived at the railroad and took a very narrow trail which, leading toward a rocky mound, climbed away from the train tracks. Stein forced the car up to the summit of the promontory, cut the engine, and opened his window without getting out. Listen closely, he said, at sixteen minutes past eight a freight convoy passes here, imagine that it’s the basso continuo. So we waited for 8:16. As soon as the sound of the train could be heard, Stein switched on the car radio, a Miles Davis solo, pure, polished, tragic, drawing out its haughty arabesques on a background of slow, powerful, continuous drumming: freight carriages. Enclosed up there in the black Volkswagen, it was like we were in the cabin of a yacht stranded forevermore on top of a reef, and I thought of that music-mad navigator who had built himself a sailboat around his grand piano for the sole pleasure of making the tragic tones of the Appassionata resonate in a storm. Once the convoy had passed, we listened to the end of the piece in a very pure silence. After Miles, growled Stein in a muffled way, after Miles there’s nothing left but the scum on things. Not that that woman was beautiful, he went on without transition, beautiful, I mean, according to the canons of beauty, but that she was there, simply there. And in the glow of the interior light he fixed me with a terrible look. He said if the Rouskelnikoff no longer exists, if the Rouskelnikoff and all the Russian restaurants, and all the canals, the barges, the airports, have been swept from the earth’s surface, where should we look for her, Uccello, answer me that. It was a question with no answer, a kind of touching utterance that he wasn’t, for that matter, really addressing to anyone. After which he put his head on the back of the car seat, mopped his forehead at length, sighed again, What beauty, what beauty, closed his eyes and fell asleep. An hour later he came to. I’m a little mad from time to time, he apologized. And he started the engine up again.

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY URSULA MEANY SCOTT

  [BELARUS]

  VICTOR MARTINOVICH

  Taboo

  Angela was going out with Grisha. Before, she was going out with Lyama, but Lyama was weird. Freaky. When he drinks, he pukes all over himself. Or he forgets to zip himself up and walks around like that in public. Or he knifes someone. Scruffy beard. Runny nose, he snorts it up. And his eyes—all wild. Who knows how he’ll turn out in five years. A daddy for my kids? No thanks. But Grisha is normal. Cool. His cream-colored shoes, yeah, are something else. And how about his white pants—you have to wash them every other day, but Grisha doesn’t mind. He washes them, tries to look good for her.

  One of Grisha’s arms ended in a cloudy, half-liter bottle, the other—in Angie’s waist. But Lyama, he always held her a bit lower, and would start feeling her up right in front of people, the moron. She begged him not to, but he thought she was playing hard to get. What Angie liked most about Grisha was that when she asked him not to do something, he never did it. And she also liked that when they met couples with children, he’d hide the bottle behind his back, so the kid didn’t see the juice. A good guy. You can’t teach that. You have to have backbone to get it.

  Today, there weren’t too many couples with children, couples without children, or even half-couples—people, lonely people—out, despite the languid May noon, when it’s so nice to be out. The path, receding in an emerald green, looked like an empty landing strip, but Angie wanted to escape this solitude into a still greater solitude, to their own shared solitude, and she enticed Grisha onto the trails, where his cream-colored shoes sank in the fresh, moist earth not yet baked by the July heat, where among the bushes of juniper and wild currants, plaster statues of workers showing up for their last shift rose up solemnly, wet from dew, eroded by rain, with the faces of ancient gods.

  The passages between the trees here were tangled with a spider web sparkling in the sun; now and then on her cheeks, in the intimate corners of her neck, created only for Grisha’s lips, Angie felt the tickle of weightless spider strands. The spiders themselves seemed like creatures with whitish, infinitely long hairs, hung along the trees, and when she and Grisha strayed off into these hairs, the spiders would try to escape, scurrying and gliding down along their clothes.

  Here there was a rusty board, “Glory to the Workers of the Ball-bearing Factory,” with photographs, faded, of the most glorious workers, now looking like ghosts, who had once toiled in the factory, now abandoned, nothing but ruins, where the park now sprouted with its paths through the tumbledown fence. Here stood swings, horizontal bars, and even parallel bars, straight lines never meant to intersect, which someone’s caring hands had nonetheless helped not only to intersect, on one end, but to entwine. Grisha set his bottle down, grabbed onto the bars, hoisted himself up twenty times, and then, catching his breath, in one graceful stroke, executed a full turn.

  Angie thought his face was just like those an
cient statues of foundry workers and tractor drivers. How strong he was. Yet with all this strength, still a good man. She sipped the frothy, bitter liquid from the bottle, keeping up a slight buzz, woozy with May. Once the bottle was empty, she threw it away.

  Grigory tucked in his unbelted shirt and even grimaced reproachfully, as if telling himself he was out of shape, that it’d only been two years since the army and here he’s already gone to pieces. Angela was melting. She chucked his chin with a blade of grass. Angela was happy. Angela would have drawn a huge heart on the pavement if only she had chalk.

  Yet another moist path opened up ahead, leading into even darker depths of the park’s subconscious, and Angie pulled Grisha on, and he didn’t resist—he’s gorgeous, and lets her lead him around like a bull by its nose ring: so cool. Angie wanted to reach the caves, overgrown with moss—the grottos and pyramids. That was the promise of the incredible, endless, deserted park. She wanted to reach the place where, among the thousand-year-old sequoias with bark red like an Indian’s skin, the bison-hunters had camped; she almost hoped that in some remote corner of the park a bunch of thugs would attack her and Grisha, and Grisha would kick the shit out of them, send them running, like in the movies—running from Batman. And then she would embrace Grisha and find that they had broken his nose or lip and a red juice is oozing out, and she’d sit him down on a bench or the roots of the sequoias and would take out a handkerchief, snowy white like his pants, and would pat him with it, and he’d wince slightly and look right in her eyes, oh yes!

  They kept walking and didn’t talk much. When she asked him to tell her a story, he always told the same one from his army days, about a tank that fell off a bridge, and by now she could reproduce it exactly, with all his intonations and pauses intact, with his usual opening, “To make a long story short, there was this incident,” and his usual ending, “and like they say, tanks just don’t fly.” Anyway, they found themselves by a dilapidated wall, crowned with a lace of rusty, sharp wire. And then, from behind a tree, out came Lyama with a knife to quickly and cleanly cut Grisha’s throat.

  No, of course not, nothing like that happened—but she thought about it happening. Lyama’s kind of puny, but if he and Grisha had a face-off, it wouldn’t be a foregone conclusion who’d win. Lyama would bite and kick and hit Grisha in the balls. Grigory would fight fair, and that sort always loses.

  The lilies of the valley hit them with their smell—almost unbearable, making them dizzy (“Like perfume,” Grisha said)—and only a second later, Angie noticed that the grass all around was dotted with someone’s scattered pearl beads. She bent toward a plant and, the way they teach you on TV, sniffed it, not touching the stem. The smell was unbelievable. She imagined a tiny bouquet at home, on the night table, by the bed. You would wake up in the morning and everything would smell of lilies of the valley.

  “Grish,” she whispered. “Let’s pick some?”

  “You kidding?” He looked around quickly to see if anyone had heard them. They hadn’t.

  “Oh, come on, who’ll notice us here?” Angie hissed.

  “It’s a crime, Angie. Lilies of the valley have been entered into the Book of Endangered Species,” he said firmly.

  Angela knew there was no point arguing. He’d only cross the street when the walk sign was on, the idiot.

  “Oh, Gri-sh-sh-sh,” she inched closer to him and snuggled up. Lifted her eyes. Zero reaction. Shit, he’s such a square. The only way to win him over was to prove that what she had in mind was fair.

  “Look, Grish—I read in the news just the other day that it’s good to pick lilies of the valley, because it makes them grow quicker the next year! It doesn’t mess up the roots one bit.” It was very easy to lie to him—you just had to focus on his wheat-colored lashes and not get distracted by the deep, sweet blackness of his eyes. Or else you’d feel sorry for him. “So carefully, without crushing them. Like this…”

  Angela squatted, knowing full well that her skirt was inching up in the front and the lily snow-whiteness of her underpants becoming visible. Without taking her eyes off him, with a slight smile and raised eyebrows, she clasped a stalk with the tips of her fingers and pulled it up before he could stop her. Several snow-white beads trembled on the slimmest of threads and here, the whole filament was in her hands. A lily of the valley had been picked. Picked. No matter what, to put it back was impossible. You had to keep on going. That is, picking.

  “Are you out of your mind or what?” Grigory chided her gently. “How can we carry them out? Well, I mean, to the dorm? They’ll catch us for sure!”

  “The main thing is to get to the Metro. There’s some old ladies standing there. Like, they sell seedlings. And each one has a packet by her feet. And in the packet are lilies of the valley. If the cops catch us, we’ll say we bought them from the old ladies.”

  “But haven’t they shot all the old ladies?” Grisha asked.

  “Well, these pay off the cops. So they’re allowed.” Angie wasn’t lying now.

  Grisha, naturally, didn’t move. Angie pouted.

  “Won’t you present your lady with a bouquet?”

  “I tell you, I’d rather get ripped off buying you some roses,” Grigory said nervously, looking all around.

  But Angie had already detected a note of hesitation in his voice. She had only to add yet another little note so that the melody of uncertainty, the polyphony of uncertainty, would emerge, and she knew well how to handle the keys of Grisha’s piano. She touched her lips to the snow-white pea of a flower. On it remained the bloody trace of lipstick. Angie tore off the pea and brought it to Grisha’s cheek, rolling the lipstick along the stubble. Still he hesitated.

  “No one can see us here,” she whispered in his ear, leaning into him with her hip, feeling his erection.

  “And what about the surveillance cameras in all the parks and woods where they grow lilies of the valley? What, you don’t watch TV?”

  “Oh, come on now, you little idiot! Do you know how many surveillance cameras they’d need to keep an eye on each flower?” She picked another and reached it out to him, then crouched down for the next one.

  “Okay.” He sat down next to her. “Okay.” He pulled up several flowers. “Okay.”

  Picking lilies of the valley turned out to be easy, even pleasant. There was something in their compliant resistance, when a stem didn’t quite want to forsake its bed, something like…Well, it’s like when your eye itches, and you can’t scratch it, and you want to, and you scratch, although you shouldn’t because then it’ll hurt, and it’s already tearing, but you keep on scratching.

  And so they kept on picking lilies of the valley. At first Grisha picked them one at a time, selecting the ones with the most beads, but then he began gathering them quickly, one after the other, frantically trampling on the plants and dropping the frailer blossoms in the process. The flowers clung to their shoots. Clinging to a shoot—how ridiculous! The same as clinging to life, which is nothing more than a temporary escape from death.

  Having picked a handful, he’d give it to Angie, each time shuddering at how many of them—a bunch, and now a little bouquet, and now an enormous bouquet—they had. They had to stop—it was lunacy. The lily of the valley was entered in the Red Book; they should have just bought them from those old ladies, or paid through the nose for the roses, but he, but they…

  “Angie! Is it enough now? Do you have enough?” he asked again and again, but she only waved him away, thrusting her fingers in the hairs of the moss and coaxing out more and more of her beads. And he himself felt that he couldn’t stop, that once they started they had to go on, that the price they’d pay would be the same regardless, for a stem, for a bouquet, for a heap. And now they put together an enormous, beautiful, fragrant bouquet for Angie: it looked like the drawing of a bouquet that was printed in his army discharge photo album, opposite the pictures of his relatives waiting for him to arrive, and he loves her and she’s waiting for him. Even when he’s right next to her
.

  The bouquet was almost ready, a luxurious shock of hair, a mane, a sheaf. They only had to decorate it along the edges with torn lily of the valley leaves, which suggested hands, a multitude of hands, solemnly bearing a mountain of pearls to the altar for sacrifice. And while Angie was furtively pulling up the last flowers needed for her bouquet, Grisha began searching for bigger leaves. He straightened up, looked around, didn’t have time to get surprised, noticed a quick movement behind the tree trunks, in the twilight of the bush, and hushed her, and Angie froze, and that’s when both began to hear the crackle of branches underfoot and the muted sputtering of walkie-talkies.

  For the first time Angie could remember, Grisha cursed: “Fuck.”