Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  He couldn’t imagine keeping away from nature himself. He loves it. Love, love is the only foundation for it all. As the forest ranger likes to say, nature tears down even the mightiest walls of distrust.

  Baluta stood near a pine. He looked at its trunk. The bark was damaged, it’s clear that a bear had sharpened its claws there. That disobedient bear—the forest ranger knows him well. A four-year-old male.

  Kalina Baluta put his hand on the tree’s wound. He caressed it. His fingers became smeared with resin. Kalina began to cry, together with the tree. He embraced it like a brother, like a beloved one. He comforted it. Baluta felt sorry for the tree, sorry for the broken branch, sorry for the trampled moss, the needle, the little dug-up lingonberry bush, the fallen leaf, the worm-ridden mushroom.

  A cuckoo bird cuckooed somewhere nearby. Kalina Baluta listened. A nightingale sang in the depths of the forest. Another joined in. A third. A black grouse. The deafening chirping of this bird orchestra sounded sweet to Baluta’s sensitive ear. Baluta would have liked to sit there and enjoy the concert, but he had to keep moving—there was work to do. Ever deeper.

  It was already well past midday.

  A small meadow opened up, as if there were no thick forest surrounding it. This was the territory of a regiment of timid partridges. Kalina Baluta, following them with his eyes, lay on the grass; he always did that. He looked at the sky. Not a cloud. Blue. A jet was flying by, leaving a white tail behind. It dirtied the sky, which was annoying. A little beetle crawled onto Baluta’s cheek. It tickled pleasantly. The forest ranger closed his eyes. The little beetle went along Kalina’s forehead and stopped at his eyebrow. It waited. The forest ranger carefully reached for and picked up the little beetle. It flailed its legs, wanting to escape. A hawk circled in the sky. The freed beetle tripped, ran, and soon hid itself in the depths of the grass.

  In Belovezh Forest.

  Mushrooms. There are so many of them there: slippery jacks, gypsy mushrooms, red-capped scaber stalks, and yellow knights.

  A beautiful little red-capped fly agaric mushroom met Kalina Baluta and saluted him. Baluta immediately repaid this honor and then marched ceremoniously toward a small spruce grove, raising his legs high. There was a plantation of chestnut boletus mushrooms under its delicate, scarf-like branches. Just take some if you’re hungry, and aren’t afraid of getting poisoned.

  Kalina Baluta knew the mushrooms of his forest well. He doesn’t eat them. He never has. He could eat one if he forced himself, but no, he will never put one in his mouth.

  For Baluta, the forest mushrooms are works of art. Right there is the boletus, the king. And here are the others—his subjects, his courtiers. Kalina Baluta stepped carefully, trying not to touch any of them; heaven forbid he should injure them.

  A good feeling. Calm.

  “It’s not far now, it’s actually quite close,” the forest ranger said to himself. Soon. There’s the hundred-year-old larch, a pine with two trunks, an anthill. They, along with the forest, didn’t seem so imposing anymore.

  Kalina Baluta began to breathe deeper. His steps became faster and faster. The sweat of excitement covered his face. His hands began to shake, without his knowledge—and he saw a roe deer caught in a trap. The helpless creature, tangled in a noose, was laying on its side, not struggling anymore, dying. In her eyes—a dutiful resignation to fate.

  “I made it just in time,” Kalina Baluta thought. By a hair, he repeated as he listened closely to the weakening beating of the roe deer’s heart.

  Soon it will be dusk.

  Still trembling terribly, forest ranger Kalina Baluta undid his belt, finding himself fighting a particularly uncooperative buckle.

  He was nervous.

  The roe deer was barely breathing.

  It was time to save her.

  Baluta deftly took off his pants and lay down half naked by the creature. For some time he didn’t move, as if waiting for something, listening intently to something. Kalina waited.

  Ready, he inhaled.

  He tightened his buttock muscles.

  He made the wailing sound of a roe deer male.

  The threatening call of a deer buck echoed through the forest, frightening any and all nearby animals. You could hear them as they scattered in all directions.

  Baluta pressed himself against the dying animal as though it were the Motherland itself—any closer would have been impossible. He placed one hand lightly on the warm fur of the roe deer, while the other grasped her tightly. A moment, and he’s already . . . in her. At the beginning he moves very cautiously, slowly. Later, as his conscience clears, faster and faster, as if wanting to get somewhere, as if he was pursuing something, like a predator giving chase.

  After some time, the forest ranger was stroking the fur of the roe deer with one hand, squeezing her hip with the fingers of his other, quietly lowing to himself under his breath, and panting.

  The creature groaned.

  Soaked with sweat, Kalina Baluta straightened his back.

  He froze for a moment.

  He’d burst inside her.

  The roe deer, pierced through its side, winced. And yet, there was hope in her eyes.

  The dew-covered forest ranger Kalina Baluta, having just freed the creature from that noose, slapped it on the back firmly with his palm, and leaned back. The roe deer jumped up on her legs as though awakening from some dreadful dream, then plunged into the forest. Free again.

  Kalina Baluta, smiling mischievously, followed the beautiful little deer with a kind-hearted glance. He said good-bye in his thoughts. Would he meet her again in this life? Yes, they will see each other once more, he consoled himself, smelling the sweat of the doe, which had soaked into his body.

  Satisfied, Baluta curled his mustache upward, and returned to the trap. He resets it for another creature.

  It’s as if nothing has happened in this forest protected by the state. The satisfied creatures got ready for bed, and the birds quieted down. Who will wind up in the trap next time, forest ranger Kalina Baluta wondered, making his way through the dark forest, heading home: a forest polecat, a lynx, or perhaps a very lost giraffe?

  Once again full of energy, Kalina Baluta returned to his wife, and she was bawling. And our sensitive forest ranger had no reason to suspect that today, with just barely a year between himself and retirement, the largest country in the world, the USSR, had been erased from the map thanks to a few careless signatures in Belovezh.

  TRANSLATED FROM LITHUANIAN BY JAYDE WILL

  [MACEDONIA]

  VLADA UROŠEVIĆ

  The Seventh Side of the Dice

  THE SECRETS AROUND US

  All around us there are creatures we know so little about.

  Have you noticed a new resident strolling Skopje’s terraces and gardens or hanging around vine-covered streetlights on summer evenings—a tiny, translucent lizard called the gecko? It’s not a native to these parts; it arrived from the Mediterranean some ten years ago and now clings to the walls above our heads, noshing on the midges attracted by the light and listening in on our conversations. How did it get here? All right, that’s easy to answer. Let’s say it arrived hidden in a crate of oranges or figs and immediately made itself at home. But for what purpose?

  My neighbor, an electrician, told me that the rats in our attics have become remarkably intelligent: They gnaw away at the plastic coating of the electric wires, but never those with deadly current passing through them—only “zero phase” wires that pose no danger to them. How do the rats know which wire is live, whether they can bite into its insulation or not? What do they think about electric power in general, to what extent are they aware of our energy supply problems, and do they have a way of solving them?

  Or at an even more basic level, take the behavior of houseflies. They all suffer from a form of compulsive behavior: A huge percentage of them (eighty-seven percent, to be precise) have the habit of rubbing their forelegs together when they’re about to dive down and land on the roas
t suckling pig, oozing scrumptious juices, that’s just been taken out of the oven. Why do they make that movement, which at first glance has no visible justification? Is it perhaps a nervous reaction to our kind of diet, dissatisfaction with the fare on offer, or a feeling of guilt for succumbing to temptation? Could science please solve this riddle for us?

  But for me I guess the key question is: What do these creatures that observe us every day think about our actions, our behavior, and our lifestyle? What are they planning in order to correct our mistakes?

  DEMIURGE

  The man came down to the beach every day. He’d sit on his reed mat and examine his surroundings attentively. The waves had cast some sizeable stones up onto the sand during the night; he bent over and returned them to the sea. Looking around, he was bothered by a protruding branch among the scraggly, yellow-flowering plants a little further back from the shore; he produced a pair of shears, pruned it back with several resolute strokes, and placed the cutting in his cloth bag. He couldn’t stand mess, everything had to be in its place.

  Sometimes he had his doubts: Did the bunch of seaweed washed up on the beach really contribute to the uniqueness of the site? As soon as he made up his mind, he got down to work. A few adept moves here and there: Ah, that’s better now, he said to himself.

  Several tussocks of spiky grass would look good on top of the neighboring hill against the backdrop of those trees, he felt; and the grass appeared. If the little path leading down the sandy hillside didn’t have to wind around those thornbushes, it would certainly harmonize with the line of the mountains that rose in the background; and the thornbushes disappeared.

  Briefly he had the idea that a kiosk selling donuts (with apricot-jam filling!) would go well at the end of the beach, as a kind of finishing touch, but as soon as it appeared and the children started whining and pestering the adults for money so they could go for a treat, he gave up the idea and erased the shop from the landscape—it hadn’t been well thought out.

  Every now and again he’d make a rock plunge into the sea and come up again a little farther away. Sometimes he made two rocks appear in a spot where no one had seen them. It was best that no other visitors to the beach see the changes as they were taking place. Besides, chances were they’d think him some sort of eccentric ecologist or absentminded esthete. But he was much, much more important.

  When he saw that all the changes he’d made were good, he’d lie down on his reed mat for a rest. The world deserved to have its perfection consummated, and it was sometimes worth investing that little extra effort.

  THE CLOUD SHIFTER

  My job is a little unusual: I’m a cloud shifter.

  Most of you aren’t aware why a cloud that has loomed threateningly above the hills suddenly changes direction and drifts away toward the mountains instead of spilling its watery cargo over the plain. That’s just how it turned out, you think, and it doesn’t occur to you that a fellow sitting a little further along the shore of the lake, who seems to be looking inquiringly into the sky, is the cause of that change.

  That man, whom you take for a casual sky-gazer but who is actually concentrating very hard, is me. I change the course of the clouds, and that obviously demands a certain effort.

  The amount of effort depends on the task at hand: There are clouds and there are clouds. Cirrus are the easiest—you can wipe them from the sky like a classroom monitor wipes away chalk scribbles on the blackboard with a wet sponge. It’s hardest with cumulonimbus—the ones that look like a burgeoning cauliflower at the top and a pile of wet, dirty rags at the bottom. You really have to use force with them, sometimes! They don’t give up easily, but I’m no quitter. However stubborn they are, in the end I always wrangle them away over the mountains.

  Sometimes that saves a field of ready-to-harvest wheat from being flattened, other times I prevent rain from spoiling people’s day down by the lake, and occasionally I help an ambitious amateur photographer (without his knowing!), whose shot of pine trees and rocks would look Photoshopped without that magnificent cloud towering above it. Shoved there by me, of course.

  But it’s not just about exercising a psycho-physical force; I also use some basic equipment. I have a rather loud whistle and two colored pennants: one yellow, one green with black stripes. These allow me to determine the direction and strength of the wind and then to contend with the clouds using that information. And while I’m doing this I toot away on my whistle—it helps, believe it or not.

  People who observe me while I’m working think there’s something’s wrong with me. But their opinion doesn’t concern me: I know I’m useful.

  THE PEBBLE COLLECTOR

  A woman goes down to the beach in the morning and is immediately drawn to the pebbles. She picks them for their shape, color, and pattern. There are whitish ones, whose slight milkiness seems to promise the transparence of crystal; there are ones with greenish-turquoise layers alternating with clear lines of regal black; some are a dignified gray but at the same time spangled with dark-blue leopard-like spots; there are pink, orange, and purple ones. Some pebbles bear the mark of a signet ring that made its solemn, rust-red imprint on their ivory-colored parchment; others have a bulging, dark eye that stares inward with Hesychastic persistence into its own mineral being; others again are covered with the secret calligraphy of a capricious geological pulse that beat in the molten magma eons ago as it lay cooling on the shore of an ancient sea. Rising up above the waves, moist and gleaming, the pebbles glint in the sun. The woman collects them from that wet line of sand at the edge of the sea where the waves cast them in the last hours of the night. There they have the sheen of fabulous riches scattered from a stolen chest by drunken bandits as they divided up the treasure on the run, soon to murder each other.

  The collector washes the sand off her shiny gems and puts them covetously in her straw bag.

  In the evening, back in her hotel room, she spreads out a piece of newspaper and tips a heap of gray, colorless stones onto it. Dried of the sea water that gave them their magic, they look nothing like the lovely baubles she collected during the day. She stands dismayed for a moment before these debased, devalued treasures—and then throws them noisily in the bin.

  Later, when she watches television in the hotel foyer and hears in the news about the global economic crisis and the fall of share values, she smiles maliciously. She knows the reason why.

  TRANSLATED FROM MACEDONIAN BY WILL FIRTH

  [MOLDOVA]

  IOAN MNĂSCURTĂ

  How I Was Going to Die on the Battlefield

  I dedicate this story to my friend Nicolae Roşca, with whom I used to go hunting for illusions

  I am convinced—I feel it in the very marrow of my bones—that the spirit of self-sacrifice is the thing that best sums me up. Not just in a manner of speaking. It’s the plain truth. For example, since my earliest childhood I’ve wanted to sacrifice my life on the battlefield. For the winning side, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t agree to the sacrifice and the war would seem a complete waste of time to me. It would have to be victory or death, or both the one and the other, if it was going to be interesting.

  I could almost picture the columns of brave soldiers advancing into battle, with me in the vanguard. And then the enemy bullet hits me right in the heart. That bullet, for some unknown reason, and subject to hitherto unknown laws of physics, would first have had to orbit the battlefield and even the entire Earth, whizzing between weeds and soldiers, ricocheting off rocks and other solid matter before it finally swiveled and hit, precisely, me. The bullet would resemble a pudgy bumblebee or, perhaps more accurately, a mosquito.

  The truth is that, also from earliest childhood, I’ve had a special relationship with those insolent creatures. If, for example, there were five guys sitting in a room and a single mosquito had been allocated to all five, the sole representative of that vile species would wander around until it found precisely me. I don’t think the situation would be much different even if there were a thou
sand individuals of the same age, sex, and even eye color in the aforementioned torture chamber. Which clearly goes to show that you can’t buck fate.

  Well, this is more or less how the fatal bullet would set to work: After multiple, convoluted peregrinations, after scouting out the terrain, after sniffing out all the potential targets, it would identify me and then do me in.

  Impatient as I was at that age, I had scripted my death as follows:

  So, I’ve been identified. I’ve fallen and the bullet is lodged in my chest. My blood is streaming everywhere . . . In the twinkling of an eye, my comrades rally and give the enemy a sound thrashing. They give them a really good beating, whacking them back with anything they can get their hands on. The enemy, bloodied and perfidious, flee in terror, wiping away their tears with their pistols and anti-tank grenades. My comrades return to find me punctured. They wrap me in the flag and bury me with full honors. Some weep, some smoke cigarettes, others stand to attention. C’est la guerre, as they say. The main thing, as far as I was concerned, was that there should be plenty of salvoes from canons, rifles, and other firearms to mark my passage. Yes, the main thing would be that there should be as much noise as possible.

  The finale would have to be stupendous: The supreme commander, having turned up from somewhere or other, gives a patriotic speech; the military brass band, conducted by a drum major, plays waltzes and rousing marches; fireworks light up the battlefield and the mound of earth beneath which I lie . . .

  The only thing that upset me and even saddened me about all this was that I wouldn’t be there to witness our victory. To tell the truth, at the time I couldn’t really imagine what it was like not being able to see something. It seemed absurd to think that you’d have stopped seeing anything, forever, once you were dead. But the situation, on the whole, was even worse than that. And here’s why. So, you’ve done everything you had to do, you’ve taken a bullet, ultimately you’ve sacrificed your life, and, if you please, it’s others who get to enjoy the victory! Everybody is making merry, the sky is thundering with the army’s cheers, the officers are clinking goblets of foaming champagne, the fireworks are turning night to day, and there I am, stock-still in my grave, because that’s the proper way for a dead man to go about things, the valiant soldier who has fallen on the battlefield for the independence and freedom of his beloved motherland.