Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  Dietmar Panskus had achieved astounding results with his text-labyrinths, which shuffled numerals, letters, words, whole sentences. He arrived at such insights that everyone who held fast to standard language had trouble believing he’d come to them by his stated means.

  “Have you already forgotten why you write?” he exclaimed. “Have you given up curling your hands into fists? We have to break the cross of common language—and we’ll start with the teachers, those agents of power!”

  Smoothness of style, he held, was nothing but a stratagem designed to thwart the writer. The more one aimed for comprehensive understanding, the more one found oneself entangled in cliché. (Thus, for him, a stammerer was always preferable to the most brilliant orator.) His goal was to defeat rhetoric and win his way to a natural poetry, in which things could simply be themselves. So he sympathized with the Viennese poet’s social role-playing. The latter’s poetic performance concealed many surprises, and paradoxically, the more they threw one off, the better the result.

  “My wife has left me,” he laughed. “She couldn’t take my disorder. Jacket, hat, shoes—none of it orderly enough for her. My books, notes, scrap paper—she never looked through them. And when I spoke to her, she didn’t understand me—because I heaped words up at random, allegedly. Her need for reason went unfulfilled, while I asked: Which reason? What kind of order? First she got a grip on herself, and then packed up her suitcase. We still phone, though, sometimes.”

  And that was what he called true interaction—forcing the audience to turn their thoughts away in shame. If literature is the expression of an idea, then something is expressed by the failure of that idea as well. An idea reflects a proper spiritual position—as does a paucity of ideas, or their utter absence.

  “But literature has nothing to do with women.”

  Voluble protests from Heike Kuhn (the saucy Berliness, she of the Bilderraetseln, also known as rebuses), Antonia Mikulov, and several others—men as well.

  Panskus wanted to overturn Reason’s reign of terror by means of pluralism, which in his opinion fostered tolerance.

  “Look,” he said, “if you find what I have to say boring, I can certainly leave.”

  “No, no! Please go on!”

  So Panskus went on: “Naturally, everything’s subjective—what else could it be? Maybe the thing in itself exists—I don’t intend to deny it—but the moment I turn around, it disappears. That’s Plato’s problem.” No wonder he got depressed and began to dream of unreason.

  One was reminded by all these various positions of Dada, and of what the publisher Kurt Wolff (no relation to Gerhard Wolff, the Painter) had said: “Even before I became aware that what was performed and deformed in the name of Dada was utter drivel, the pedantry, tedium, and sheer dreariness of their [Tzara and Hülsenback’s] correspondence had cured me of the delusion that they might be the source of any creative fun.”

  Gerhard Wolff—with a double f, like the Kurt just quoted—known as the Painter, hailed from Kassel. His “counterfeit love letters” with their fictitious, nonsensical system of writing, had brought him a certain celebrity. Though they certainly looked like letters, their calligraphy only simulated meaning. The suggestion of meaning, and its refusal, were the central themes of his work. Script and punctuation were aesthetic objects, gestural love letters, lacking a message—which meant that the message was evidently on a higher plane, inasmuch as it was the writing itself (rather than its contents) that signified.

  As far as the audience for such a message, there is little to say aside from noting that they—if they existed—were the only intended recipients of these letters. That address wasn’t feigned—but the letters themselves were only “as if.” Hence “counterfeit.” And, indeed, collected under that same title—Counterfeit Love Letters—they became an unexpected bestseller, and because Gerhard Wolff had once had a beer with Arnold Bode, he hoped to be able to show his love letters in the second documenta exhibition in 1959.

  Juergen Riesmann-Raab, the Cabbalist, wrote with an abacus. His poems were math problems. From endless lines of numbers—prime or Fibonacci sequences—emerged cryptograms; to decipher them, he supposedly called upon ancient, esoteric Jewish doctrine. In doing so he accepted that he himself would often be as confused as any of his readers, for he thought of himself as a medium, a printer’s-devil to the Lord, like the mystic Jakob Lorber before him.

  A letter was even more than a convenient sign, as Kandinsky claimed, it was a creative force, an alchemical game. This magical sign brought the Logos into the world, but the code is foreign to us. One would have to summon an angel from heaven, for only the angels know the magic formulas, because they were watching over God’s shoulder when he created the alphabet.

  “Every letter is powerful. And the powerful band themselves together and form an army, called the alphabet. Their creative strength has stood unbroken for a thousand years, because God is on their side.”

  The Cabbalist—incidentally an eminent mathematician—taught algebra at Frankfurt Polytechnic. He sat on the window seat, swinging his legs and blowing his cigarette smoke out into the open air. Because he’d studied in Paris, he was later known as a companion of Isidore Isou, which established his connection to the French student movement.

  The Word is an ambiguous thing. Its alchemical being slips perpetually from our grasp. Images in one’s head are images of the world. The brain has to distinguish between the hare and the duck, and has learned to compare its various options with the alphabet’s aid.

  “Or, as Einstein says: Theory helps, but brings us no closer to the secrets of the ancients.”

  And Roberto Altmann, the Letterman, added: “The ancients encrypted the book of nature using the rail-fence cipher. So that now we stand faced with their cryptography, clueless: DrAt a a uhdr Ntrmt dr Grezumt oevrclsete lehtds Bce auie atnan ehd eshusl.”

  He began, like the Dadaists, by using a vague, sympathetic force to smash words up, but unlike them, he believed in a deeper meaning, which it was necessary to extract from the wreckage. The goal wasn’t senselessness, but apeiros, the infinite: that fount from which everything flows, and into which everything will return. Not capriciousness, but sympathy.

  “I have concluded that Anaximander was a gentleman.” The Letterman devoted himself to his family, his children, and the riddles of the world, which was difficult to coordinate, because Margarethe, his wife, suffered from terrible loneliness when little Claudine and Moritz went off to school. That is, every day. Apart from that, he put out a literary journal, which was called Apeiros and financed by his father. In all, only eight issues had appeared.

  Altmann, like the Cabbalist, had lived in Paris, and had seen Debord’s film Howlings in Favor of de Sade (Hurlements en faveur de Sade) back then; though in fact the howling had been in the theater itself, rather than on the screen, as the latter remained mostly black. The scratched film stock had made for an irritating flicker, and it was this that finally pushed the audience to riot.

  And then there were a pair of Utopians, Heinrich Lorm and Antonia Mikulov, who performed in cabarets as finger artists. Using their finger-alphabets—meaning specific taps on various predetermined sections of their open hands—they were able to produce their texts almost as fast as with speech. For training purposes, they had developed a sort of glove marked with dots: tapping with the tip of the thumb = A; a quick slash at the middle of the palm with the index finger = B; tapping the wrist = C, and so on. Admittedly, it took about half an hour before the audience stopped laughing, and accustomed themselves to this twitching. Then they began to understand what was meant. Bearing in mind that the role of the accompanying facial expressions and gesticulations should not be underestimated.

  The academic artists with their written drawings and text-pictures sought to shift the border between literature and the visual arts. Among this group were Maxim Henze, the Typographer, Boris Sokolov, known as the Falcon, and Alfred Zimmerman, the Objective.

  Henze shrank
from representing any sort of content, and refused to subordinate any one medium to another. For him, all were equally efficient, in terms of function. What interested him was pure form, the aesthetics of the typogram—be it on paper or canvas. With his Typographical Fairy Tales he had moved past painting, over and above it, into the public sphere.

  Sokolov was a chirographer, and had originally trained as a typesetter, joining the Cryptologists in the course of his typographical experiments. His concern was the deformation of both type and content. Though outwardly playful, his procedures opened one’s eyes in an unsettling manner to the relationship between form and content. In his youth he had written a single novel, and it would have seen print, too, if the prospective publisher hadn’t abruptly filed for bankruptcy.

  The texts of Zimmerman, the Objective, ultimately consisted of objects combined with arid words. Each of them was the size of a barn door. His publications, books one could walk into, were routinely found in galleries or exhibition spaces, and soon afterward disappeared again into warehouses. If Gerhard Wolff, the Painter, had distanced himself from literature with his written paintings, Zimmerman, with his installations, had put it definitively behind him. He was followed in this by Wolff, who had marked the transition from the written and spoken word to a gestural painting, one no longer legible in any sense.

  One thing united the Cryptologists: the question of the representation or production of certainty by verbal means. Two positions emerged. On the one hand, the Realists, who held fast to the sign and what it was originally meant to represent; and on the other, the Objectivists, who turned away from conventional signs, and allowed objects themselves to speak.

  Thus, while the one side circled the essential difference between literature and painting and pushed the dividing line between them now to the right, now further to the left, the other argued about political relevance. The formalists among them—like the Mechanic—spurned relevance entirely. They weren’t interested in mimesis. They no longer trusted their medium. For the functionalists—like the Polyglot—communication stood in the foreground. They were pragmatists, for whom the artwork was first and foremost the vehicle for a message. And when they missed their target, then the vehicle had broken down.

  In the gradual transition from traditional printed paper books to text installations, some went so far as to fold public spaces into their text landscapes.

  It finally happened that fraction and schism struck the Cryptologists, and the group split into two new organizations, because, according to some functionalists, art must even conquer the skies. The stormer of heaven, Helmuth Seidel, had written his political messages in the firmament with a single-prop airplane. He would later become famous enough that a monument to him was erected in Stadt Kassel: a twenty-five meter long steel pipe that stretched up at a sixty-three-degree angle, upon which a male figure (Seidel himself?) was reaching for the heavens. A female variant (Seidel’s wife Ingeborg?) can be seen in Strasbourg. He turned his back on the Cryptologists, and was received by professional visual artists with open arms.

  Should literature invade public spaces? Are broadside posters a suitable medium for poetry? And what about Poetry in Motion, that is, poems on public transportation, buses, subway trains? Question after question.

  “And what about copyright law?”

  “Forget about that!” Vehement protests from all sides, even from the few women in the circle.

  Dietmar Panskus’s idiosyncratic answer rang out: “Literature isn’t any more understandable if it’s read by two hundred people or more.” He’d studied Max Stirner’s philosophy of individualism with great attention. And happily accepted all charges of elitism and hermeticism. Still others now demanded that they be able to protest against the Vietnam War, or the nuclear reactor in Garching, near Munich.

  “Gentlemen, get ahold of yourselves!”

  Vehement protest from the women.

  Kraus-Góngora thought: Just look at these people: At first they clowned around, they played the smart-ass, and now the learned harangues go on and on. One of them works at the butcher’s shop. Whence his concern with meat, with blood, decay—in sum, with death. And there’s the one who’s constantly scrounging around for a job, and fucks up every interview he’s given. And again, there’s one who brags about having dragged an old drunkard back to his room, a woman old enough to be his mother. But finally, instead of screwing her, he simply shoved her down the stairs.

  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY NATE LA MESHI

  [LITHUANIA]

  HERKUS KUNČIUS

  Belovezh

  Kalina Baluta slammed the door and left. He, a good-hearted fatso, was tired of his wife’s complaints that he was always in the forest, that he was just a guest in his own home, a stranger.

  But how else could it be—Kalina was a forest ranger. When your work never ends, when your responsibilities are so wide-ranging, you’re hardly going to lounge at home in front of the fireplace. But this was no excuse, as far as his wife went. She wanted him to clean the well, then she wanted kids, then the roof of the house was leaking, then the chimney was collapsing; you never knew what she would want next. All Kalina ever heard from her lips was a constant string of complaints—it was hell, no kind of life. Anyone else would have gotten fed up long ago, would have done himself in. But Kalina Baluta wasn’t like that—he was calm, gentle, and humble. Not a man, as people say, but a doormat. The lowest of the low. All he had it in himself to do was leave. Slam the door and leave. Like just now, heading out to the forest, to his beloved Belovezh Forest.

  Kalina felt rejuvenated in the forest. He chugged along. He calmed down. It was here he could forget about his wife’s grumbling, the way she smelled. It was only in the forest that Baluta ever felt good. It was there that he was in his element: he never got lost, always finding the way home. In the forest, everything knew him, and he in turn knew almost every living thing. Wild animals, trees, and birds were Kalina Baluta’s best friends—they greeted him, spoke with him, and often consoled him.

  Kalina Baluta was in no one’s debt. He took care of his friends. It’s no coincidence that the feeding trough he made was awarded a silver medal at the International Friends of the Forest Exhibition. His nesting boxes too received a special prize. And as much as the organizers of the exhibition tried to talk Kalina into selling his troughs, even offering huge sums of money, Baluta wasn’t tempted. He kept repeating that he’d made them for his friends in the forest, which is why he wouldn’t give them up to any strange animals he’d never met, not to speak of foreigners.

  The troughs returned to the forest, as did the nesting boxes. Kalina Baluta never regretted it, though his wife grumbled that it would have been possible to buy a house in Minsk if he’d sold it all. No, Kalina Baluta would never move to the republic’s capital. What would he do without the forest? He’d suffocate right on the asphalt.

  And what pure air there was in the forest! All that oxygen! You want to breathe it all in, fill your chest, suck that freshness in.

  Look, a squirrel galloping along the pine branches: his little tail twitching back and forth. And there Kalina could see moose tracks. Looks like the poor thing was limping, injured. Baluta wished he could take care of it—he feelt sorry for the elk.

  Everyone needs sympathy, love. If it wasn’t for Baluta, there would be no wisents left for Europe to take pride in. Kalina fed the calves with his own hands, gave them milk, swaddled them, rocking them in his arms. Later they thanked him with their affection, following Kalina around as though he were their mother, never letting him go anywhere unaccompanied. They would stare down any strangers who approached. Kalina’s wife was jealous again. And for no reason.

  Kalina Baluta didn’t like hunters, he didn’t understand the morbid pleasure people took in killing animals, especially wisents. They were such trusting beasts. Baluta had never owned nor would ever buy a rifle. However, such was life: Hunters open fire at wild animals in the forest, claiming the animal population would skyrocket
otherwise. Nonsense!

  A badger ran off, thumping along . . . How adorable! Most likely going back to his family. And here’s a little river, a beaver dam. Those crazy beavers, look how many trees they pulled down without showing the least remorse. Baluta will have to have a word with them.

  He bent over, scooped up some water with his palms, and drank it greedily. Good-tasting water from the river—clean, pure, almost like bottled water.

  Refreshed, Kalina Baluta stood up, wiped his thick mustache with the palm of his hand, and headed deeper into the forest.

  It became darker and darker, harder and harder to force his way through the pine.

  A hare bounded off, frightened. And this long-eared tailless wonder made good its escape.

  Kalina smiled. He proceeded further. “What might be awaiting me?” he wondered. What is awaiting the marten, the forest polecat, the mink?

  There was a problem with the wild boars. It was impossible to come to an agreement with them. Kalina tried one way to appease them, and then another, but no matter what he did, they still liked to make their way out of the forest, dig up the potatoes of this or that collective farmer, and leave tracks all over the fields. The collective farmers were angry, calling for revenge. Which was understandable—when there are no potatoes left, whole families go hungry. What can a forest ranger tell them (the people)? Nothing. Which is why he guiltily lowers his head, when they threaten to shoot all the wild boars.

  Baluta was very angry, of course. The wild boars aren’t to blame. The brown-nose fox, having killed his neighbors’ hens, isn’t guilty either, nor is the mad gray wolf that stalked and bit a bunch of students out mushroom hunting. All of whom died last fall. They should have been more careful. That’s what nature is like; if you don’t know how to deal with it, keep away. Don’t go into the forest if you’re afraid of ticks and snakes.