Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Roberto Succo, directed by Cédric Kahn

  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY MARK KANAK

  [ALBANIA]

  ARIAN LEKA

  Brothers of the Blade

  No one knows out of what sort of stuff we cook up those few joys that nonetheless change from time to time to malice and poison inside us; no one can say why we turn our skins inside out, why we stick the thorns that we meant to reserve for the world deep into ourselves, down to the bone; why we pay such an exorbitant price, meet any cost, to fulfill the irrepressible desire to open ourselves up, to be together, the same as everyone else; why we bullshit; why we sing those things in chorus that we would never have whistled in solitude; why we forgive; why we laugh; why we give string to our kites in days of joy and then afterward feel so empty, seeing that our souls are farther away from ourselves than a ship from its anchor, that anchor which keeps the ship from crashing into the shallows in the doldrums or else in the fierce winter winds. So too thinks the big brother, who has dressed in his black suit today, who’s had his hair shorn to a close crop, who is freshly shaven, he who has downed a couple of glasses of raki, no more, just enough to perfume the insides of his lungs, as all men do, because he truly is a man, and he must bear a great burden through the night. At least, he must do so more than his father, whose only responsibility is to beam happily and raise toasts to the health of his sons; at least, he must do so more than his mother, who considers herself to be quite lucky, what with having two sons and all; at least, he must do so more than his sister, dancing with her husband, dreaming of pregnancy, of twins; at least, he must do so more than his wife, who is smirking at all their foolishness. At least, and most of all, he must do so more than all his new in-laws, who want to get him drunk and pin him down on this fresh September evening when he is marrying off his little brother.

  Though, really, he has never just been “the little brother.” For many years, since the time when their father was no longer good for anything, he has been the man of the house: their mother’s helping hand, the bars on their father and sister’s cage. It is for this brother that he is, today, wearing a black suit—a unique pleasure.

  As day broke on Sunday morning he was shaved by the barber. When he returned, he reeked of eau de cologne and a small bloody weal had appeared over the scrap of newspaper with which the barber had tried to conceal the nick left on his throat. He suffered a moment of overwhelming anxiety as he knocked on the door to wake his little brother—who, in the meantime, had wrapped himself in a white sheet, still in bed, still luxuriating in sleep following the obligatory midnight visit to his future in-laws. The older brother doubted and dreaded lest fate, perverse as always, should serve the bridegroom up into the hands of that same provincial barber—who had, it seemed, reserved for his razor the right of blood vengeance against their family’s many generations of sinners, hoping to punish them all in a single moment by spilling the blood of their most exalted son on the day of his wedding. This had all occurred to him in a flash as he stood knocking, summoning his brother to tell him that he must get up and prepare to be married.

  He got up, stitched his bones back together by stretching, and, completely unaware of the demons plaguing his big brother, said:

  “This feels like a wonderful day to get married. And for everything that goes with it.”

  And for everything that goes with it. For the potent and viscous coffee that he requested from his mother with a shout. For the homemade curd-cheese donut he demanded hot from his sister. For the tightly rolled cigarette that he had solicited from his father while still supine. For the glass of water “that I want from you, my most legally sororal one,” as he put it to one of his sisters-in-law. And then, for everything that goes with being a groom.

  “Fine! Beard, locks, and moustache—you can fix them up for me. What sort of goddamn groom would I be if I had to shave myself on my own wedding day?” he’d asked his big brother, after the latter had beseeched him—calmly as he could—not to see the town barber that day.

  “Me?”

  The big brother’s hands began to tremble. He had told the bridegroom not to let himself be put to the blade at the barber’s, but still—he had had no desire to carry out the task himself. He felt as though he was standing over a great pit. Then he saw himself surrounded by flames. It seemed to him that some force was maneuvering to undo the good he’d tried to accomplish, was interfering with what had been said and written, forward and backward. He himself no longer understood anything. Didn’t I want to save him from the barber where I myself was cut on the throat? the big brother asked himself, Didn’t I want to protect my brother from becoming a sacrificial offering on his wedding day, while his bride sits and waits in her parents’ house, staring at the walls down to the corners, waiting and longing, reciting between gritted teeth some tuneless lyric, like “When you come to your home, you’ll be coming as a guest”? The big brother had only wanted to strike a little match to shed some light on the path of fate, but he’d forgotten how many people are always waiting in the wings, their guts bursting with the breath they can’t wait to let out and so extinguish your little flame. He had also wanted to return to his little brother, in a single day, everything the younger man had done for the family. He had wanted to protect him, to conceal him. But no, it had come out all wrong. In trying to help his brother, he had played into fate’s hands, awakening the evil that had slept, like his brother, under a single sheet—hearing himself reminded:

  “You will fulfill your brotherly duty by serving me on this one day—one day in return for my entire life, which I have devoted, as you know, to you, to all of you.”

  Big words, of course, as the little brother’s usually were, but as was always the case, true. Arranging the round hand mirror, the bowl of hot water, the soap, and the brush on the well, the big brother raised his eyes to the sky. He’d never had to shave another man before, which is why his jaw was clenched, why he touched and touched again the now dried weal that the village barber had hidden under the scrap of newspaper, while he tried to hone the brand-new razorblade on the whetstone. Meanwhile, the little brother had come out into the yard. He left his half slurped coffee on the throat of the well and took his place in the chair he’d set out, dressed now in a snow-white poplin shirt, stretching his neck out like a lamb, joking and ordering everyone around, father, mother, sister and sister-in-law.

  The big brother smiled out of the corner of his mouth. It was the first time he’d ever seen his brother like this. It was the first time that in his head, shoulders, walk, and words, their father, that humble man, the old pillar of the house, was no longer recognizable. Moreover, he could almost hear footsteps. He imagined that all the elders and the wise men of the village were coming out and then beating a hasty retreat, finally leaving his brother alone. His little brother was freeing himself of all those ponderous shadows that had always more dragged him down than they had held him upright, that had prevented him from ever seeing the forest with the eyes of a child who wants the trees for his own kingdom but instead with the eyes of a man whose sole purpose is to sell the wood—so that his father could have tobacco in his pouch, so that his mother could have a black silk headscarf for her head, so that his sister could have a dowry, and so that his big brother could finish school. The little brother was freeing himself of those shadows that had forced him to become a man too soon, he was becoming a boy again as his father and big brother watched. Seeing him laughing, giddy, the big brother squeezed his wrist, lifted the razorblade, and blessed whatever force was again making the groom into child and brother.

  But after this, when my little brother will no longer be the clandestine father and unhappy angel of our household, what will our real father be? What will I be? the big brother asked himself, turning his head toward his wife sadly. He shut his eyes and drew the blade near the little brother’s neck, right over the jugular. He swallowed a big gob of spit. He touched the rough skin on his brother’s neck before the blade could advance
over its quivering fuzz, felt the anxious trot of his pulse. And he abruptly opened his eyes. Nothing could have been more tranquil than his brother’s smile.

  “Maybe it would be better if you just gave yourself a good combing and left it at that,” the big brother said. “It would be easier for both of us.”

  Only then did he remember to soften his little brother’s stubble with hot water and soap. He started lathering the soap as if possessed—as if wanting to fill in and white out the toasted sun color of his brother’s face as quickly as possible, as if wanting to hurry on to the rendezvous of blade and flesh, to the thrilling caress wherein metal comes to understand all the divots and scars on our skin, toward that motion that, scraping over stubble, skin, and veins, adds a new face to the world, the face of a new man.

  But having done this, the big brother found he couldn’t proceed. His eyes were dim, a small drop of spittle was gradually gathering in a corner of his mouth, and a gleaming stream of sweat was dripping from his neck toward his chest. He was entirely spattered and sullied with shaving foam. He knew he needed to get started, get started and finally be done with his gruesome responsibility. But looking again at his brother’s face, eyes closed, happy, perhaps dreaming, he couldn’t bring himself to act.

  “I have a cyst on my neck,” said the little brother, “careful when you go around it.”

  The big brother dropped the brush in the bowl, again took up the razor, passed it twice over the palm of his hand, and pushed up at his brother’s sideburns so as to stretch the wrinkles taut where his skin folded under his neck.

  “Leave me a little something,” the little brother said absentmindedly, “I don’t want to look like a little kid.”

  The big brother sighed. And after this, when my little brother is not our father anymore, what will our real father be? What will I myself be? he wondered again, the words ringing like bells in his ear as he got ready to slide the blade down the waiting cheek at last. His fingertips detected a deep scar, about two thumbs under the chin. This is from the wound he got when he fought a sixteen-year-old boy over our sister, he thought, and raised his finger a bit further up so as to find a new place from which to begin. I need to start from the neck, I think, moving the blade against the grain, he told himself, but when his fingers found another scar there, the big brother pulled his hand away as if bitten by a snake, and remembered that this cut had been closed by six stitches and no small amount of suffering, because the tin plate that had opened it, besides being huge, was also rusty all over. It happened when that neighborhood kid fell into the creosote pit and he jumped in to help pull him out, the big brother remembered. He lowered the razorblade once again—it glistened in the morning sun—and started to scrutinize his little brother’s face. Scars, welts, wens, and lines—a single careless pass would suffice to start a bloodbath. And meanwhile, their entire childhood, the time when they had been inseparable, was mapped right there in front of him, was there for him to touch; and in the space between two wounds he saw that day when they had rubbed each other with shoe polish, under their noses and on their cheeks, so as to look like men a little sooner.

  The big brother raised his hand. He placed the razor on the waiting cheek, and while standing rigid, ready to glide his hand down to clear a path—as skiers do, rushing down a snowy pass before jumping into the abyss—asked a question:

  “Where do we begin?”

  He waited a long time for an answer. So long that he wondered if his brother had been struck after all by the evil he’d sensed early that morning, which he had been dreading since daybreak, when he’d begun to suspect that the vines of fate had crept into the holes in the barber’s house and wrapped themselves around the man’s hands. But, then again, the odds were that his brother had simply fallen asleep, that he was napping there under the sunbeams, a few hours before he became another person entirely, a husband. Whatever we cook up our few joys from, it’s rare stuff indeed, the big brother thought. We change ourselves on account of others, we pay a high price just to be together, until at last the anchor chain snaps and the ship sails off to go about its own business…

  The big brother liked to think that his little brother was dreaming something nice, that he was smiling in his sleep—but there was no way to know, we understand very little about the people we share our lives with, and now wasn’t the time to speculate, especially after hearing the thick voice of their father call out, “I could have skinned a whole lamb with a piece of glass by now, let alone shaved my little brother!” a little brother who, by the setting of the sun, will have broken free of his chains to drift away, in excellent weather, to calmer harbors, over untroubled waters…smooth like a face without blemish.

  TRANSLATED FROM ALBANIAN BY SARA “PËRPARIM” SMITH

  Author Biographies

  For additional information on the writers and countries

  included in Best European Fiction 2011, as well as

  interviews with the authors, visit www.dalkeyarchive.com.

  PETER ADOLPHSEN was born in 1972 in Århus, Denmark. He attended the Danish Writers School from 1993 to 1995. At twenty-five, he made his debut with a collection of short prose entitled Små Historier (Small Stories, 1996), followed four years later by Små Historier 2 (Small Stories 2): pieces from both of these collections appear in this anthology. He has also published two novellas: Brummstein (2003) and Machine (2006), the latter of which was translated into English in 2008. Adolphsen has since received a three-year work endowment from the Danish Arts Foundation. His most recent book, Katalognien (The Catalogued Kingdom, 2009), is a novel in verse.

  MICHAL AJVAZ was born in 1949 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He studied Czech and Aesthetics at Charles University in Prague, and currently works as a researcher at Prague’s Center for Theoretical Studies. His novel, Prázdné ulice (Empty Streets), was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize in 2005, the most prestigious literary award in the Czech Republic. He was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Magnesia Litera Award for his latest novel, Cesta na jih (Voyage to the South, 2008), from which his story in this anthology was excerpted. Two other novels, Druhé msto (1993; The Other City, 2009) and Zlatý vk (2001; The Golden Age, 2010), are available in English translation from Dalkey Archive Press.

  VLADIMIR ARSENIJEVI was born in 1965 in Pula, Croatia. He was the youngest-ever recipient of the prestigious NIN Prize for his first novel U potpalublju (1994; In the Hold, 1996). Since then, Arsenijevi has published four other novels, including Angela (1997) and Mexico: Ratni dnevnik (Mexico: A War Diary, 2000). In his career as an editor, he founded and ran the RENDE publishing house, and was its editor-in-chief until 2007. He lives in Belgrade and currently runs the Belgrade division of VBZ, a distinguished Croatian publishing house.

  KEVIN BARRY was born in 1969 in Limerick, Ireland. He writes columns for the Sunday Herald in Glasgow and the Irish Examiner in Cork. His short story collection, There are Little Kingdoms, won the 2007 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. His novel, City of Bohane, will appear in 2011, and his stories have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Phoenix Best Irish Stories, The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, The Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review. He also writes plays, screenplays, and essays, and he collaborates on graphic stories and puppet shows. He lives in County Sligo and in Dublin.

  MARCO CANDIDA was born in 1978 in Tortona, Italy. He has published five novels in the last four years: La mania per l’alfabeto (Alphabet Mania, 2007); Il diario dei sogni (Dream Diary, 2008), from which his story in this anthology was excerpted; Domani avrò trent’anni (Tomorrow I’ll be Thirty, 2008); Il mostro della piscina (The Monster in the Pool, 2009); Il bisogno dei segreti (The Need for Secrets, 2010); and he has a novel forthcoming in 2011: Torneo (Tournament). Candida is also well-known in Italy for his literary blog at lamaniaperlalfabeto.splinder.com, and for being a great supporter and promoter of the horror genre, which is almost nonexiste
nt in Italian fiction, through his website at www.websitehorror.com. He is currently editing an anthology of stories published at this site.

  IULIAN CIOCAN was born in 1968 in Chiinu, Moldova. He graduated from the University of Brasov in Romania. He has published two books of literary criticism, Metamorfoze narative (Narrative Metamorphosis, 1996) and Incursiuni în proza basarabean (Foray into Bessarabian Fiction, 2004). He is also the author of an autobiographical novel, Înainte smoar Brejnev (Before Brezhnev Died, 2007). He has been a lecturer at the Pedagogical Institute in Chiinu and is currently a journalist for the Chiinu bureau of Radio Free Europe.

  KRISTÍN EIRÍKSDÓTTIR was born in 1981 in Reykjavík, Iceland. A graduate of the Icelandic School of Visual Art, she is completing her master’s in painting and drawing at Concordia University in Canada. Her first book of poetry, Kjötbærinn (Chop City), was published in 2004. Two more books of poetry and drawings followed in swift succession. She is a member of Nýhil, a movement seeking to redefine Iceland’s literary landscape.

  FRANÇOIS EMMANUEL was born in 1952 in Fleurus, Belgium. After studying medicine, he took an interest in poetry and theatrical adaptation. Since the publication of his nonfiction work Femmes Prodiges (Extraordinary Women, 1984), his output has been almost entirely fiction. His most recent book, Jours de tremblement (Days of Trembling, 2010), won the Grand Prix de Littérature from the Société des Gens de Lettres. His novel La Question humaine (2000; The Quartet, 2001) was adapted into an acclaimed film, retitled Heartbeat Detector by its English-language distributors, in 2007. Emmanuel now spends his time as a writer and as a psychotherapist. Since 2004, he has been a member of the Belgian Academy of French Language and Literature.