Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  I was walking slowly with my father (I loved this time of the day), we met some chance acquaintances of his and the woman—remarkably, the woman—suddenly and somehow sharply (perhaps it was just her natural voice?) and very earnestly, said, “What lovely legs your daughter has.”

  My puberty-ridden brain didn’t perceive this cheap civil remark of the fading middle-aged lady in the way you might suppose—as a stimulant for my otherwise missing confidence of beauty.

  I actually thought I was on the chubby side, my face was unremarkable and the boys were dying to confide in me about the girls they had a crush on; basically, everything people said about me had been in the semantic vicinity of cool, streetwise, pretty smart (the greatest weapon against the beautiful “bimbos”) and weird—I especially valued the latter and tried to keep the legend alive and even enhance it by sitting on the floor at parties, three to four hours at a time, staring at nothing and keeping quiet. The very epitome of thought and weirdness, if you will. Thus, among the qualities which made me famous, there wasn’t a single one resembling beauty. Ordinary beauty we pretended to despise: eyes, lips, hair and body—“body” meaning “legs.” Mine were far from long (the necessary requirement for anything beautiful); what’s more, they were frankly short-ish and chubby-ish (the ish a feeble effort to evade self-loathing by a sickly sweet diminution).

  Until that afternoon at the seaside and the stupid civility of the middle-aged lady, the facts were well-known—but dormant on the fringe of my teenage consciousness, unable to activate the complexes everyone has, at least at this age. Anyway, I didn’t lack attention, safely barricaded behind coolness, streetwise, and pretty smart. I had a good life, but the middle-aged lady broke through my defences—they might have been fragile to start with, I don’t know, but what happened was like a bullet in the head. The bunker of my defence exploded, leaving me naked and alone.

  After that, the horror started. I spent the whole day looking at myself in the mirror, measuring the circumference of my thighs, calves and ankles, following insane diets (there was one which included drinking four litres of champagne and eating a kilo of grapes every day; I’m still fond of champagne, with grapes on the side), and working out with abandon. The results were paltry, at least in the body section I was interested in. Beauty equalled legs and thus I was forever deprived of it. No point in ever-more or less cool images I had designed for myself in the eyes of the world (i.e., boys). Because sooner or later they would inevitably look at me below the waist—straight to my shame, to my ugly legs, and this would be enough for them to forget everything else about me. In this moment, they would see me for what I was.

  I abandoned skirts and dresses and took to wearing trousers. Not shorts. In this way I was hiding what should not be seen. I started acting even more weird than usual and initiated long conversations, hiding in the blur offered by evenings and darkness.

  But I couldn’t hide my ankles. No matter how long the trousers were, the damned things were still visible. I kept my hands over them when I was sitting (I was still in the habit of sitting on the floor and keeping as silent as possible, because otherwise it was time for talking—a never-ending effort to demonstrate the number of books one has read, easily hopping from Hemingway—my “trick” was to dislike him—to Steinbeck or Vonnegut, a particular favorite of my friends and myself, the very best experience was to find the person of your “karas,” you might recall it, sitting on the floor and touching your feet; then on to the monumental artists of Mexico, and, of course, Sartre and Camus), and I stared at them when I was standing up. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. So it is with ugliness. It attracts attention, just like beauty. I realized that everyone saw them, my damned fat ankles, and this horrified me.

  And then, on cue, came the second time. I chanced at a party (the usual Sunday bridge was off, though we usually played partly to enhance our intellectual prowess, partly to attain the familiar sensation of safety and mysterious, mystical conspiracy among the players, born from the realization that you know something other people don’t), I only knew one of the girls—fatter than me—and an acne-ridden boy from school, I happened to sit on a chair (the floor already occupied by several of my kind), opposite a boy with long hair. This is important, otherwise I wouldn’t remember it, because boys with long hair were a rare catch these days, almost non-existent, and thus were considered a valuable score. Even if you don’t like him that much, the mere effect of him appearing by your side was enough to compensate for the sacrifices made in the name of the absolute bliss caused by the envy of girlfriends, schoolmates and women of all shapes and sizes. Why delude ourselves, envy is a great boost for our ego (I don’t have the time to check what Freud has to say on this but you can accept it as a truth based on experience, I think that’s what we used to say on such occasions). I, for one, used envy in all its boosting capacity wherever I could, because few things are more insecure than the ego of a young girl with fat ankles. The boy’s name was Paul. I don’t recall the words that were said, I don’t think they were many; I can’t formulate clearly the meaning of the looks that were exchanged, though they must have been more. As I already admitted, I was pretty methodical in my impression-making tactics. However, in a dark, late and very drunk hour Paul suddenly said, “You have gorgeous ankles.”

  No, really. He said it. He even put his fingers around and caressed the chubby proof of the absurdity of what he’d just said. This was the turning point. He chased me like a madman for months; I was not satisfied with avoiding him, no, at the end I hated him so much that I tortured the boy in every way imaginable, including the most mean way I could then (and even now) think of—by hitting on noted jerks in front of him and, of course, sadistically introducing them to him. I forgot to say that he was throwing knives. He did it as a hobby, had an impressive collection of knives and, when drunk, insisted on throwing knives at the wall, usually above the head of a girl he fancied. You can guess which was the girl on most evenings. Finally Paul surrendered and stopped calling me. I did not forget him, however, and kept thinking about his incidental homage to the most unattractive part of my body. The fact that someone had loved my ankles and desired their obvious roundness did not save them from my own contempt. I kept trying to put my fingers around them, I couldn’t and this drove me insane. I stared at the legs of every woman on the street and, in horror of my own imperfection, found out that even the most slovenly, fat, old and otherwise not eye-pleasing women have better ankles than me. They all had the beatific, elongated, smooth line from the delicacy of the ankle to the round, healthy firmness of the calf. I had a couple of bony lumps, topped almost directly by what I called “centurion” calves.

  The third time was at the hospital. I lay in the dark, pinned to the bed by the tubes which fed my weak body life in the form of nauseatingly red (because it was someone else’s) blood and clear, hopelessly slow-dripping glucose, and someone was lying next to me. I don’t know if it was a he or a she, the face was covered by a sheet, as was the body. I could only see the feet—blue and white, huge, with crooked toes and delicate ankles. They shone, lumunescent in the dark, and in their own terrible way made me look at them. Later they took the body out (much later, probably at dawn) and only then I moved my eyes. The effort of staring left me drained and I fell asleep. The dream was white. Light-white, to be precise. I saw myself in the hospital bed, in my short pyjamas, with my feet showing below like two lonely reeds, and above them—my beautiful ankles. There was even a thin silver bracelet on one (I’m certain because I know silver everywhere), gently hugging it, and the soft shimmer of the silver merged with my shining ankle. My infinitely thin, elongated and amazingly beautiful ankle.

  When I woke up, they moved me to another wing. The nurses there knew me (I had been with them about a year ago) and changed my pyjamas every day. I always had a short one and my ankles kept showing, fiercely alive. They were thin and I liked them. I walked them around the hospital corridors, full of open bellies with tubes hanging out. I pl
anned to buy a short skirt as soon as I got out. So that my legs show. My pretty legs, with my thin ankles.

  When they let me go, I took a shower. I hadn’t taken a shower for a week. Then they gave me an injection that hurt. And I didn’t buy a short skirt.

  TRANSLATED FROM BULGARIAN BY BOGDAN RUSEV

  [CROATIA]

  OLJA SAVIČEVIĆ IVANČEVIĆ

  Adios Cowboy

  The summer of 200X came early. A nasty heat had already built up in May and frazzled the early-summer roses in the city’s parks and flowerbeds.

  At the end of July I packed all my things, left the rented apartment where I’d lived a few wasted years, and traveled home.

  My sister was waiting for me in the kitchen of our old house with her suitcase, ready to leave. In the hour and a half we sat together she got up from the table four times—once to pour me some more milk and three times to go to the bathroom. Finally she returned with her lips painted bright pink, which surprised me, though I didn’t say anything. She never used to like that color of lipstick. She sent a few SMS messages and talked with me on the side, then got up, straightened her skirt, and went down the long hall and the stairs. Ma was lying in the downstairs room channel surfing.

  They said hello briefly as she left, I heard their voices, and from the balcony I saw my sister vanish around the street corner, behind the baker’s. For an instant she was an unreal apparition on a real stage, a simulation. I sipped the cold coffee from her cup with the print of a pink rose.

  Before leaving she told me how she’d got on with Ma over the last month.

  Their daily ritual was clear-cut: they got up early, always at the same time, and sat with their coffee for at least twenty minutes; then, before the sun got too hot, they’d set off on foot, one after the other, along the main road to the cemetery. The thin roadside strip, just wide enough for two feet, turns to a fine dust on summer days. This imaginary path leads between the road on one side and the blackberry bushes, ragwort, and unplastered houses on the other; the dust swirls up into your eyes and throat and creeps into your sandals, between your toes.

  “Did you know that some people eat soil?” my sister asked Ma as they walked through the dust along the road. “It’s called geophagia.”

  But Ma was off on a completely different tack: “Dust to dust . . . It’s better to be buried in the ground than walled up in concrete.”

  “I don’t give a damn about death,” my sister cut in. “Stupid fucking death! People can get used to anything, I guess.”

  “It’s normal that you don’t give a damn,” Ma said, but clearly offended. She shook the dust out of her wooden-soled sandals and went on, chin raised, with the dignity of the dead-to-be, a step ahead of my sister.

  After washing “our” grave and weeding out the dead flowers they’d go down to the beach with a livelier step.

  “Dead quiet, like in a microwave,” my sister commented as they were passing through backyards and drought-stricken orchards—well, she liked to speak her mind.

  At the beach Ma took bruised pears and bananas out of a paper bag that was in a plastic bag that was in a Tupperware container in her bag . . . and plied my sister with fruit, accompanied by her famous Hollywood grin, which would make any normal person feel better, my sister remarked. But Ma seemed to take that mien of hers out of a filing cabinet or out of the straw carry bag she lugged around with her, day in day out. That smile was an ace from the sleeve of soap-operatic gestures that Ma sometimes pulled out at the wrong time, my sister thought.

  Their togetherness would end when they returned home, after lunch, when my sister withdrew into her upstairs room; she stayed there until evening and tried to get on with her work, although she was on summer vacation—she was a schoolteacher. Ma would then feed our ginger cat Jill, get into position in front of the TV, and announce: “My show’s starting.”

  Minerva, Aaron, and Isadora resolved to find out the real identity of Vasiona Morales—a treacherous siren, and rescue Juan from her.

  All telenovelas and serials are important for Ma, without distinction.

  She’d fall asleep in front of the TV bundled up from head to toe, although on those days the temperature didn’t drop below thirty, even at night.

  My sister was worried that Ma might overdo it with the sleeping pills, one of these days—she didn’t move beneath the sheet or even breathe—just farted every now and then in her sleep.

  “She’s horrible,” Ma said about my sister once she’d gone. “She says terrible things. I don’t understand, Dada.”

  That’s my name—Dada. My parents gave it to me.

  When I took Ma to the main road, the heat was already rising up out of the ground: At seven it’s up to your ankles. On a dry Monday morning just after midday the heat begins to scorch down. The city is worst around five: The salty air becomes sultry, everything that moves has to plow through the afternoon molasses, and the symphony of a million sounds blurs to a monotonous electric hum. Intoxicating.

  Ma is ramrod-straight when she’s sitting or standing, but when she walks she sways over the edge of the road. Several centimeters of her shoulder vie with the gas tankers and ice-trucks with fish. Perhaps there’s no room for anyone other than motorists anymore, I thought to myself.

  “Those idiots ought to be shut away in pedestrian gulags, they don’t know when they’re taking their lives in their hands!” my sister snapped. I think it was when we were driving to Danijel’s funeral in her former husband’s turbo jeep and a few boys darted across the road.

  “You have to love pedestrians. They created the world. And when everything was ready, cars came along,” I said. Everyone looked at me as if I wasn’t all there. “I read that in a book.”

  I was sitting in the back seat on the sticky synthetic leather among wreaths of palm branches that pricked my bare arms, between a chrysanthemum arrangement and a bouquet of blooming roses with a big black bow. The wreaths were wrapped in violet ribbon with names written on in gold magic marker.

  “So that everyone knows who’s in mourning,” my sister commented, which was considered inappropriate.

  “How primitive we are,” she snorted and rolled up the window after flicking out a lit cigarette butt the color of blood. “You can see it in things like that. Love is always put on the scales. A bigger obituary, bigger announcement in the paper, marble, a golden cross, more dough, more love. It’s about throwing money around. The more luxurious the vacuum cleaner for the newlyweds the greater the love, it’s the same thing. There’s no such thing as a poor relative—he’s just a miser who couldn’t give a shit about you,” she ranted at me over her shoulder.

  I sat there dumbfounded between the prickly wreaths, trying not to crush the flowers, and watched the people picking cherries by the cement factory. They were in caps and blue aprons and up on ladders. They looked content—diligent digital proletarians. I wondered if cement dust fell on them when they used hooks to pull down the branches. The dust was like a soft carpet, a pleasant memory.

  I didn’t answer my sister, and that spurred her to reload; her words whizzed by me like projectiles. I wasn’t really there.

  “Come on, calm down just a bit!” mumbled her former husband, an insipid, peaceable sort of guy, soft and numb.

  Now in the distance my mother had shrunk to a mole beside the Jesus Loves You placard of the pastoral center, then to an extinguished shooting star next to the Kuna Komerc store, and to a little minus beneath the giant, faded poster of General Gotovina, as she shuffled along in the dust by the road, past the gas station, on the path just wide enough for two feet. The speed limit here is sixty, but people drive at least eighty; the four-lane motorway begins a bit further down and drivers lose their sense of relative velocity. And then a farmer on his tractor comes out from an unsealed track or side road and completely clogs traffic.

  You could even find horse manure on the main road until recently, but not anymore. It’s too dangerous to go by horse and cart now. I think there’s ju
st one person in the whole city who still owns a horse; it’s illegal to keep horses in the city, but he’s an old smith, so they’re waiting for him to pass away, if what Ma says is true. I wondered what would happen to the horse when the old man died. He used to run a smithy in Staro Naselje—down in the port where the restaurant La Vida Loca is. But it was closed down the same year that Danijel was born. I remember the sound of the horses being shod, their neighing, I remember the dark and the fire. I was very small and just saw things from the distance in the summer light that hurts your eyes when you look into the open dark of an old building. I was very small, and the clatter of hooves on the worn cobbles filled our street, an unreal sound, as unreal as that of the Ledo ice-cream truck jingling during my afternoon nap. Willy Wonka comes to your town too!

  But there are no fresh horse-droppings on the streets anymore. Only dog shit that no one clears away, just like no one did with the horse manure. But at least no one will chuck dog shit at you. Anyway, it would surprise me if someone did.

  When Ma’s image in the distance had become a little dash—the mirage on the road squeezed her horizontally into a minus sign rather than a vertical line, as you might have expected—I turned and rushed home, up the concrete stream beside the new buildings built to house war invalids. Once you could find everything you wanted, vile and useful, in it; spring would send it gushing into the sea over a weir of trash. Since it’s been cleaned up and concrete-bedded I’ve noticed a line of slime that oozes along the bottom, drying to green caked mud in summer.

  “How about you go to the cemetery by yourself tomorrow?” I suggested to Ma yesterday, my second day back. “I’ve got some things to attend to in town, they’re fairly important,” I lied.