by Drago Jancar
None of it matters, but he’s a working man and keeps that uppermost in his mind and the old lady says that the mighty shall serve the low and if you’d just look at the stories in the bible it’s all very simple. I don’t really understand that, since I’ve never seen anyone serving her, and anyway the stuff you get from books is just a confusing mess.
This is all a nest of something I don’t want to let inside me and when I’m in it myself I try to act like I’m swimming in piss, all my bodily orifices closed, not letting any of the juices in even if the old lady does talk like it’s all as clear as water. A person might even believe it if you forced them into a corner. Or maybe I’m the crazy one, I’m the filth, the worst of the bunch when I don’t swim over to her saints’ corner, not even a real person when I’m out dreaming in the forest.
This is the sustenance I’m given, I think, when the old man’s fist hits me in the side. He says I’m a deaf, crazy cow who doesn’t have a man. I run outside, feel the evening and the mist from the shore against my face. He doesn’t strike in malice, only when appropriate.
I can see the hole he’s dug. There’s a stink of gasoline in the shed and soap in the sauna. Will I die if I eat the soap and pour gasoline over myself? If I eat nails and the chain from the chainsaw and drink lighter fluid and then run into the dark road and someone comes around the corner and runs over me? If I walk to the beach and try to stay underwater long enough? If I could just lose myself without having to try. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to do it right.
I set traps for him in my mind every night when I got to bed. I think about these things all the time, about how I could be left alone. I don’t have the courage to really do anything and he knows it, from the moment he wakes up in the morning.
A skinny little cat comes into the yard from the beach. It rubs up against my legs and tries to jump into my arms. I pet it, the sun warms us, and a seagull is calling. The old man is standing on the beach and he has that satanic grin on his face. I remember what he’s said about cats that come into the yard. I know what he’s about to say. I pick up a broken branch and strike. The cat jumps away but the blow gets its back. It cries out in pain and I cry out too. I run out of the yard and I hear the old man yelling that there might be a little spine in that slut if she didn’t start bawling at the drop of a hat. I yell and run and everything’s churning around in my stomach. When I get to the woods I yell some more and pray to god that the cat will forgive me. Why the hell did he send the cat into our yard?
Is this all I know how to do, amuse the old man, then complain that I’ve hurt myself, and hurt an innocent part of nature? Am I like the old lady, like my whole family—the whole family of humanity—a predator, a bully?
He says that they’re going to put the old chemicals and oil from the garage at the bottom of the pit, it’ll keep the ants out of the yard, and besides, an ordinary person can’t begin to pay the exorbitant fees at the dump, not with a household to support. He says let the worthless girl fill up the hole since she seems to have nothing else to do. It’ll make her forget her daydreaming for a minute.
I carry the bags to the edge of the pit and all the old man’s poisons go flying in. I shovel dirt over them and I’ll shovel him in too, like I do every night, put him under that pile of stuff, and this time he’ll have something burning under his butt, why not since he’s always complaining about his aches and pains anyway. He’ll really have something to complain about now, from all these different bottles.
One of his old workmates came into the yard and asked him something, and he talked a lot of shit, running off at the mouth, explaining the hole so that I laughed a shit laugh into my sleeve and the old guy thought I was crazy, and I am.
The neighbor comes over, a little old man who’s a real whiner. The old lady’s at home, the old man’s at a meeting in the village. The neighbor complains about me tearing his nets and tangling them up. I did it when I saw what a shit he was, rubbing his car in the yard with a little piece of cloth, subscribing to gun magazines. The old lady tells him I haven’t done anything. He yells that he saw me and she says you saw wrong and then he leaves and she goes after him and says she prays for everybody and especially troublemakers and wrong-thinking people. When I hear those two crazies I laugh out loud with a voice that fills the beach and then I crouch down behind my old man’s nets and piss on the waders he left thrown over them.
That night the old man rants about what he heard at the meeting and the old lady comes in now and then with passages from the bible. I’m lying down in my room. The door’s open—it always is, since the doorframe droops, and you can’t get it shut. The old man says the house is not falling down, that if anything’s out of whack around here it’s young lunatics like me, and maybe I’ll do a little less playing with myself with the door open. He’s the one who jerks off, and he used to go to cheap whores when he was still working. Me, I don’t have the urge to satisfy myself anymore. I only do it once in a while. It’s lonely sputtering at something that isn’t there. The only thing is that I feel a little calmer afterward. I don’t understand these things, even though there’s sex and cooing on television and whores on the covers of magazines. In school the teacher used to talk about “sexual matters” and say that it’s a beautiful thing that happens between married people when they’re close to each other. I don’t know anything about that. When I start to bleed I know there’s no point in it for me. But my body wants to give birth. It’s really despicable. It would even go for the old man.
I would close the door between us if I could, be alone and at peace and sleep better. I wouldn’t have to listen to the old man snoring and farting, the old lady walking around at night, the sound of her going to pee, muttering prayers. I could nail a board over the door and use the window to come and go and have my own life, but that’s not allowed in this house. I’m reading a book but I don’t understand anything that’s written in it. I quietly tell myself that it’s the wrong book, that I’ll look for a better book, one that’s written in a different way.
They sing their songs and read their bible every so often. The old man’s gone down to the beach and is banging around with the boat, pretending to do something. I was supposed to tighten the screws in the oarlocks and I didn’t do it and now he’s cursing me. A piece of crap plastic dinghy, not even a real boat. I sit on the stoop of the shed and wait for him to go somewhere else, to take the boat somewhere.
He doesn’t leave, keeps hanging around. Waving a shovel around at the end of the dock and talking to himself. He doesn’t know how to do anything right, but he talks like he’s some kind of unusually knowledgeable person. He insists that I should be doing something all the time, even though he says women haven’t got the hands or the brains for work. He was one of the first to get the boot from the factory, and it must have been because they didn’t want to hear any more from the crew about how they could never find where the shithead was hiding on the job site. A head full of bullshit. He should have been a gentleman, so he could use that head of his, spin his wheels in bullshit to his heart’s content.
My sister got out of this hell when she moved abroad. She sends Christmas cards and calls the old lady sometimes. She asks me to come to the phone, but I’ve told them if she asks I’m not home. She left me here alone, even though she ought to know.
When the migrating birds come in the spring, I start writing. I write like I’m writing to the birds, and I also write down what they answer. It’s like real life, a life where I’m good, and they’ve noticed it too. The way they watch me is wonderful and awful. I’m separate, lower. So much more crippled than they are. That bright space that’s constantly changing shape, that moves along inside their circle, their combined voices offering a real song in every direction. And what do they say when they answer me? They say “You one-feather, you one-feather, your night is dark and your day is black, one-feather, you fly alone from the rock, an arrow got you, one-feather.”
They know, because I tell
them, and only them.
I also write to the others who come with the spring growth. I speak to the wind directly, I don’t write much about it, but sometimes about the things it makes happen. The wind’s tricks make me smile. It tears at the hedges and sweeps and smooths things as it goes and tells me I can do things, even bad things. The wind is like my friend and family, all the parts of the weather, which are servants of nature and visitors in nature at the same time.
The person inside me is coming out. She would like to be with other people, to calm down. The thing that would remain in me when that person left would be pure like a lichen and I could be at peace. I don’t know how to be a real person. I wouldn’t know how regardless of what my old man was, even if the old lady had a brain. People are all the same. This kind of monster in our house, other kinds of monsters in other houses. I see it on television and in the paper all the time, although sometimes they’re so attractive that I give in and make up dreams about them. They’re always a disappointment.
I win a prize when I send my writing to a contest. It feels good, although the old man’s sour about it. I go to meetings and I’m like other people for a little while, but it’s all a dream. These friendly people come and touch me on the shoulder and I think they can see me. A fast talker wants to print my new writing in a book, hands me a business card, writes in pen on the back and says that it’s his private number, says to get in touch with him anytime, and I promise to send some pages. He hugs me tight, holds me there against him and asks me to swear I’ll send him the things I haven’t shown anyone. He says that I’m unique, that he’s completely sold.
Later I send the pages, but I use a pen name so that the prize and the fog of the party drinks aren’t the main thing, the main thing is what’s most important to me. I tell myself I don’t care, but I’m nervous waiting for the mail. I think I’ll get a response right away, but it doesn’t come. I’m left waiting.
Many months go by and I get a letter. It’s large and pure white. The old man and the old lady don’t get a chance to see it and taunt me, because I get to the mailbox first, and I walk straight to the trail in the woods with the envelope folded under my shirt.
I sit on a rock. It’s a special moment and I look to see if there are any birds. The sky is empty, no one. I open the envelope. There’s a white paper inside that looks blank at first, but it’s just the wrong side. I turn it over and read the letter, which says that the company thanks me for the trust I’ve shown in them, but the material I sent doesn’t fit their list at this time. At the bottom is the name of the person on the business card in my room. Suddenly I feel horrified that the card is in my room, in the same box with my writing tablets. As I’m running I scrunch the paper up into a thin horn and twist it like I’m wringing out laundry.
The surface of the water is smooth. The wind is somewhere else now, and I don’t see any birds. I haven’t been fishing in a long time—I don’t want to kill them anymore. In this calm you can see their lives clearly. I let the boat stay where it is and sit motionless. First the little fish come in a school, then the bigger ones. They’re listening to voices from faraway seas, because they all live in the same pool. There’s complete silence around me, but everything I’ve seen is shouting in my head and it can’t get out and I can’t get out, nothing that yells like that can get out even though I can see the fish listening to the same sound.
I’d like to touch a fish sometime, but that’s impossible. Fish are smart, they run away from people.
I’m told to go look in the old man’s pack when he comes home from hunting. Dead birds and a thermos. Get a whiff of that so you’ll know its scent, girl, he says, so you can sniff out meat, the basis of life and everything. He’s crazy as hell. The old lady’s brought her own carrion back from her prayer circle, and is spreading it around. Another crazy. This is hell and this is what I was born into, and you can’t win paradise as a prize when you’re in hell, so I could be any way at all, and the way I exist and how that feels bounces from one wall to the other, sometimes stabbing, sometimes stinging.
Next to the house is the speed demons’ road that leads to the summer cabins. Their cars are like glistening snot, and so are they. Sometimes they stop to ask something and you’re supposed to act like a person around them, you can’t just glare at them and pluck your banjo or stare into their eyes and not say anything.
One of them drives into a ditch and stands there wondering at it. He doesn’t understand that a car can end up in a ditch if you drive fast on this little road. The brat neighbor comes to wonder at it, too, and moan over it, but I say that it’s a simple law of physics that everybody’s taught in grade school. The speed demon says that this isn’t something for a country girl to get smart about, it’s a serious matter and I say serious serious shit flyer and I leave and the brat shakes his head and I hear him say something about me to the guy and I think let the dried-up turd say whatever he wants.
I go back there when they’ve gone looking for a neighbor to tow the car out, and the nearest neighbor is far away. The car door is unlocked. Between the two front seats there’s a cup holder with an unopened can of cola in it. I open it and pour about half of it on the driver’s seat. I put the can back in the cup holder and close the door. Later on the guy comes into the yard making a racket and says he’s going to send us a cleaning bill, but Ma and the old man tell him that he’d better have a witness if he’s going to start making accusations. Then the old man gives me a real beating later on, but the cola-ass’s anger is still a sweet memory.
The autumn land is soft and dim. A little wind blows through the yard. Red spreads out to cover the whole western sky.
I heat up the sauna. Some good memory of a lost time comes to mind as I sit on the sauna bench. The fire I built on the beach is still smoking. I watch it from the sauna window. I feel good, languorous. I don’t know if it’s evening or morning.
I wake up on the bunk in the outer room of the sauna. The heat has dissipated, it’s a little cool, but I don’t want to leave. I pull the towel from the nail on the wall over me and fall asleep again.
I hear a car pull into the yard. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat. Someone is talking to someone else, walking around the yard. They walk to the house and then back to the yard. Their steps are coming closer. The door opens and I open my eyes at the same moment and I can’t see anything. They ask me questions and another car comes into the yard and more people and more questions.
I’m perfectly tranquil and I think it’s good to be asked questions calmly, and listened to, and have someone look me in the eye. I could talk about anything, but they only have their own problem to discuss.
They’re looking for them, because they’ve disappeared completely. They’re not in the house anymore, and I don’t know where they are. They might be in the woods or on their way to someplace of their own. I was out in the yard all day and then in the sauna and I’ve just been thinking my own thoughts and haven’t noticed anything.
They leave for a moment and then come back. They ask me to come along and I’m happy to go with them, to leave this place.
TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY LOLA ROGERS
[FRANCE]
ERIC CHEVILLARD
Hippopotamus
Don’t expect anything sensational out of him. His name could be Jules or Alphonse. His name could be Georges-Henri. He’s just as French as a Sioux adorned with war paint is Sioux. He doesn’t hate the rain in Brittany. He’s a good guy, but quite frankly has no business going to Africa. It doesn’t even cross his mind. Africa? He would be less surprised if he gave birth to eleven puppies.
He has been invited to live and write in a village in Mali, on the Niger.
Ridiculous. Guatemala or Suriname would seem less random, as destinations go. Mali is the name of a meteorite, that much is certain. Of course it had to fall right in his backyard. It had to go and fall right in his little backyard right at the moment when he himself was there. And what was he doing in his little garden? H
e was gardening. It fell right on top of him. He was trimming his rose bushes, he was hoeing his square of vegetables.
His name must be Jean-Léon.
Why in the world must one always leave? What if it were more adventurous to stay? Life is there, at any rate. He asks himself if those who leave might nurse the dream of going where life is not, without admitting as much. He develops a solid argument based on the beauty of habits. He raises his heavy philosopher’s head. His eyes wander along the walls of his bedroom.
Oh! He won’t go.
To Mali, not so fast. One hardly even knows where it is. Another one of those countries. He’s quite happy enough on his native turf. He knows the area. Sometimes he nurses the idea of taking a trip to Prague, or to Portugal. We’ll see. But Mali, what an idea. Not once has he ever concerned himself with Mali, either from close-up or far away, not even with Lima or with Bali, even, while he’s at it.
He’s not going to pretend all of a sudden that he has some reason to go there.
He has been invited to be a writer-in-residence in a village in Mali, on the Niger. As though he needed to be there in order to write. Let someone bring him a table, a chair, a pencil and some paper. Subject, we said, Africa. Easy. Such is his frame of mind that he thinks right away of the great animals of the savanna. His limited imagination instantly calls up the giraffe and the elephant.
Let’s read.