Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  A few paces away, you see your brother and his swimming goggles, still dangling from his hand, swinging by his leg. He squats down at the edge of the pool and dips his hand in up to his wrist, as if he’s checking the water temperature. He stays there squatting with his hand in the water: The temperature seems to suit him. More than it ought to. When he sees you watching him, he steps away. You’ve always felt what you considered a reasonable amount of love for your brother, but as you look at him now, standing between his guests and the water, it’s clear to you that he belongs to the pool, not to the people. You can read from his lips that he’s telling the people on the other side of the pool the same thing he’s telling you and Dad: “How nice to have you all here!” And you realize it will eventually swallow all of you, you’ll be stacked up on top of each other at the bottom of the pool, if there’s such a thing as a bottom.

  Thinking about the bottom distracts you, so you fail to notice that the pool women have been washed up dangerously close to you again. The one closest to you is wearing a string of giant faux pearl beads around her neck, reflecting the blinding rays of sun. With frantic strokes, you start kicking the water away from your side of the pool, but the women linger about, floating around in place. Dr. Vlah shouts to you in a feeble voice: “It’s no use! You can’t stop female neuroses!” He gasps for air. “It’s the only weapon they have!” You give up—Dr. Vlah’s words have always had a deterrent effect on you. Returning to your father, you see a wet stain around his crotch, and he says to you: “My son.”

  You tell him that you’re going to get him away from there, but at the same time, you feel the pool looking at you over your shoulder. Dad leans in closer: “I know that what I’m about to tell you might sound crazy, but I really feel something bad is going to happen to me if I try to get away from it. Do you know what I mean?”

  You look toward the pool; yes, it’s unpredictable. The reflections in the water have a certain air of inevitability about them: Your eyes are transfixed. Is it possible that your brother could father something as horrible as this? When you look at his scrawny biceps, it’s obvious that lifting more than a pencil would be beyond him. Would that puny little body of his be capable of such a horrendous conception?

  Now you see your father’s sweaty forehead and you simply snap. You feel ashamed, but you are unable to control yourself: Your teeth are chattering. Your father finally asks you to leave him alone for a while. You stand up straight as best you can and withdraw. The people in the beach chairs show definite signs of dehydration and the pool is getting more sinister and more beautiful by the minute; you wouldn’t dream of leaving it: The pool becomes as intrinsic a part of you as your own subconscious.

  The woman with the pearl necklace is getting dangerously close to Dr. Vlah now, stretched out languorously on her floating mattress, with one leg up to her knee in the water: even in death, she exudes complete confidence as she floats all the way to the psychiatrist, right when he’s leaning over the water, his face close to the surface, as he says, “I know I’m fallible compared to you, but you have to admit—they are deadly.” The woman’s knee, sticking half out of the water, brushes against him, and this is the last you see of Dr. Vlah, as he jumps in after her, slipping off her pool mattress. Only his hand is seen as it drags the neurotic down with him into the depths of the pool. The empty mattress undulates innocently.

  You lean over the edge and stare at the surface. How can you explain yourself? In no other way than in relation to the dreadful pool. It keeps looking over your shoulder, where are your hands, what are you looking at, listening to whatever you say. The pool has designated you a certain position next to itself; you are committed to it. Deserting it would be utterly irresponsible.

  And now you’re standing next to it: You’re holding a special pool net in your hands, which skims off everything, including the insects that keep falling in the water. The surface is completely smooth, but you go on skimming. Your progress is slow because you are meticulous, you go around it several times. A while ago, you would regard this as completely unnecessary, especially at this impossible hour. What’s particularly surprising, for instance, is that you are not bothered by the scorching sun. Any other bareheaded person of normal body weight would suffer a sunstroke, if we consider that the sunbeams are not just blazing down upon the top of your head, but also reflect off the splashing water, glinting in your face. Have you fallen into some psychological trap? You don’t understand your own actions—you only know you have to perform them. You know you have to perform them properly, otherwise something terrible will happen to you. Then your phone rings, which you keep clipped to your belt. You hesitate, the people around you wave their hands dismissively, understandingly, it’s not important, why answer it. But they’ve been here longer than you, they are more strongly committed to the unusual situation you have found yourself in. Despite your reluctance, you turn away from the splashing water, tensing up, your entire body trying to remember what your past life meant to you, and only then do you gather the strength to reach for the phone and press the green button. You hear your wife’s voice sobbing in your ear: “Martin? Christ, Martin, is that you?” You hear the familiar beep again—the battery will run out any moment now. You have to decide whether or not to tell her the address of the hell you’re in. Are you going to be selfish and tell her, where you’ll all die together from sunburns and thirst, or keep the location of the horrible pool from her, out of love for her and the children? You take the middle path: “Whatever you do, don’t come to 224 Richkill Street, honey.” A pool mattress carrying a female cadaver comes floating by. You dip your net into the pool and continue serving it.

  TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY ŠPELA BIBIČ

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  SUSANA MEDINA

  Oestrogen

  April, orgasmic green, the intensity of the green was a visual massage and she had to pass by field upon field of green pasture, vivid green, on her way to the Sleep Research Institute. The laboratory was off junction 14 of the M1, down a track through a field just after the turning for the town center. The track was barely wide enough for one car, so you had to squeeze over to the side whenever one came the other way, destroying this or that patch of plant life and aggressively rearranging the molecules of the field. A white rectangular building of simple lines, the lab shone out in the darkness against the fir trees that surrounded it. The windows ran along the length of the building from floor to ceiling, letting you glimpse the surrounding vegetation from within, and there was also a skylight that ran from one side of the roof to the other so that, inside, if you looked up, you could see the clouds by day, and the lightly starred sky by night. The architect had designed the building to be conducive to sleep. In spite of its simplicity, the building retained a palpable air of mystery because of its location in the fields, the large windows that let in light from all sides, the rounded aluminum doorways, the unseen foxes, and all the sleepers between its walls.

  Those were perfect days, perhaps too perfect. Eureka had reached a strange equilibrium in her life. For once, everything was going all right. She’d just finished her masters in clinical psychology and after months of filling in forms full of squares and rectangles, waiting for and receiving negative replies, she’d been invited to work part time at the Institute, under Doctor Mossman. Eureka was hoping her new employers wouldn’t notice that her thoughts were always elsewhere, that they wouldn’t read too easily into her erratic state of mind, or find out that when she was younger she’d committed pretty much every indiscretion in the book.

  Eureka headed for the lab, cruising along in her Capri 2.8i. It was a silver ’70s classic, a collector’s item. It had been a gift from Toshi, her lifelong partner. Sometimes she went on foot, taking it easy, but never when she was on the night shift. She always took the car for the night shift. The roads were pretty empty then, and driving was a pleasure. She sped along with the windows down so the night air would help keep her sharp for the long hours of work to
come. She didn’t drink coffee to stay awake. She preferred guarana extract, which she found worked better. Passing by the airport, with its svelte, slight tower and palatial appearance, she allowed herself to be swept away by a dangerous fantasy, a sort of psychic recklessness. She imagined zigzagging from lane to lane, sometimes in control, sometimes letting the car veer wherever it wanted, maneuvering like a rally driver, overtaking cars on the motorway with aggressive sensuality, treating the drivers to a touch of danger, the little edge of fear their lives lacked. She liked giving in to her fantasies, letting those strange images reveal the mysterious lives that lay buried in her mind—in this case, a fantasy that was soothing and terrifying all at once. Eureka would never have hurt a fly, and she was a terrible driver anyway. But she didn’t let this knowledge interfere with her fantasy life. All those other lives she could live were always there, latent, inside her; so long as she didn’t act on them, they could be as violent or irresponsible as she liked. Now her psychic recklessness faded and she started to make out the leather of the steering wheel once more—the Capri’s outdated suspension keeping her in inescapable contact with reality, with the tarmac, with the potholes.

  At dusk the orgasmic green would disappear, but its smell became stronger. The cows, whose expressions wavered somewhere between placid and depressed, let the hypermarket of fluorescent lights burning unrelentingly into the night go by. The thought of the cows made her remember a paper she had read somewhere, a study carried out by a genetic engineer who had decided that cows didn’t need heads, and so was working to alter their DNA so that they were born headless, with nothing but a tube with which to suck in nutrition.

  The foxes dozed unseen around the laboratory. They were wild, urban foxes, and ever since the lab was built, they had loitered there, delighted by the chance to feed undisturbed. Eureka went inside and nodded a greeting to a triptych of photos. Three enormous images of brain scans during wakefulness, regular sleep, and REM sleep, respectively, presided over the entrance to the Institute. The active areas of the brain were shown in red, the less active areas in blue, and the background in yellow. She crossed the driving and drowsiness testing room, which housed the front end of a wrecked red car that had been sliced in half, a Volkswagen Scirocco that the lab had adopted as the emblem of their studies into the heightened incidence of sleep-related car accidents in recent years. She went into her office, put on her lab coat, and turned on one of the seemingly endless rows of equipment, which began to emit green, amber, and red light through little translucent rectangles. She thought about the Gin twins, who’d volunteered to take part in experiments recording instances of sexual arousal in sleep. They were attractive, the Gin brothers, attractive in a quirky way, with curiously blond hair and black eyelashes and eyebrows. She’d dreamed about them a few times, as if there was something about their waking presence that needed decoding. Surrounded by polygraphs, she primed herself for a hectic night and turned on her computer.

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  The study to catalogue sexual arousal began that night. Under Doctor Mossman’s orders, Eureka now found herself complicit in the incursion of sexuality into sleep science. She had been put in charge of experiments on erectile function, dilation, and oestrogen during sleep. Everything about sex had to be understood from a scientific basis. The experiments related to the physiology of sleep—it wasn’t just dream content they were after. Even the sleeping body was riddled with sex.

  The Gin brothers canceled at the last minute. Eureka felt herself slump a little, the crumpling of disappointment. It was raining, halfheartedly. Thankless drizzle. Tedium hung in the air like a virus. The penile tumescence experiments were dull, routine. Although female orgasms were still an almost virgin field of study, the topic of men’s nocturnal emissions had been pretty much done to death. There were enchanting volunteers, but even so Eureka found them somewhat bland, unworldly. They did it for the money, convinced that the opportunity to get paid for having an ultra-uncomfortable plastic apparatus attached to their genitals while they slept was the greatest thing ever. She was surprised by her own irritation with the volunteers. When she was working the night shift, between one thing and another, she barely saw Toshi. His working hours meant their paths never crossed. This week they wouldn’t see each other at all, for that matter. Toshi was away on a trip to Dublin.

  The nights dragged on. Eureka dragged. The polygraphs dragged. It was as though some airborne tedium virus had snuck in through the vents—unless of course it was simply the absence of the Gin brothers alongside the monotony of the tumescence experiments that was putting Eureka to sleep. Or else, perhaps it was in fact she who was infecting everyone else with the virus . . .

  This too would pass. Everything started to liven up when the volunteers arrived. This lively group was made up of single women who shared a real spirit of camaraderie, as if they were going to a ladies’ sauna or some other girls-only get together. That was how she met Luciana, Doctor Mossman’s strange friend. It was also how she discovered what sort of neural circuitry delivered her up to particular daydreams, after the third study with three groups of women. It all came down to oestrogen. That was the subject of the study, oestrogen levels. It was discovered that in both the preovulatory and premenstrual phases, the subjects’ oestrogen levels rose, leading the women’s dreams to contain a higher than normal amount of sexual imagery. Oestrogen being the primary female sex hormone—as testosterone is in males—studies were always being carried out into the hormone’s relationship to libido, strength, and depression.

  When she woke the participants from the three groups during different phases of REM sleep, both groups A and B described dreams full of highly attractive sexual partners, dreams that were explicitly pornographic, obscene, and unutterably exciting. Doctor Mossman dubbed group C, t
he one whose dreams lacked any explicit sexual content, “Group Chastity.” From both groups A and B there was just one woman who maintained that she received nightly visitations from dazzling satyrs and succubae, and that night after night she awoke rejuvenated. She insisted that she didn’t dream about the sex act in itself, but rather the act of seduction, limitless seduction. The woman was called Luciana, which wasn’t her real name but a code name, to preserve her anonymity.

  Even the steeliest celibates, the most devout, faithful, chaste, pure, monogamous, and prudish among us have an intensely erotic oneiric life, a dream life that is polymorphously reckless. Its intrusive pleasures catch us by surprise: Nature turns us all into nocturnal adulterers. To deny it is to deny our true selves, our boundless sexuality. Fidelity, monogamy, and celibacy are perversities inflicted upon our real natures by the lie of our waking lives. We all have wet dreams. We all have dirty dreams, though we rarely remember them. But Luciana always did. Eureka ended up going out for a few drinks with Luciana. Vodka and cranberry juice. And on the day the sexual arousal studies finished, they met up at El Chiquito and drank yet more vodka and cranberries. They talked about war, the corruption blighting the planet, and the versatility of Meryl Streep. Between giggles and embarrassed gestures, searching for affirmation or acknowledgement, fiddling all the while with her black, metal-studded purse, Luciana confided that she had nearly total recall of her dreams. And that the vast majority of them were dirty. She had come to understand, some time ago, that these dreams would be more common when her husband wasn’t around, when they were apart for a few weeks. On her own, her dirty dreams became more regular and vivid. But these days they came all the time, who knew why: Her husband’s permanent absence since their divorce; general loneliness; the sexual apathy that left her chronically listless; her rebellious biology . . . or perhaps something had simply broken inside her?