Best European Fiction 2014

by Drago Jancar

  Ere long, the two wayfarers were passing some thorny bushes. The poet recited the divine poem, and the publisher rejoiced, hopped and skipped until his garments and indeed his body were in wretched shreds—whereupon the poet banished him to the top of a very high tree.

  The poet stopped off at an inn. Nearby was a bookshop that was under a spell, the innkeeper told him. Whoever broke the spell would receive the bookseller’s hand in marriage.

  “Is it worth the effort?” asked the poet.

  “The bookseller is the most charming, companionable person around,” said the innkeeper.

  “Yeah, but is she beautiful?” asked the poet.

  “Word has it she has small breasts, but she makes such skillful use of her brassiere that no man can guess, just by looking, where nature ends and art takes over.”

  Upon hearing this, the poet sent for the manager of the bookshop and told him he wanted to break the spell on the shop. The manager warned against it, but the poet showed no fear and asked to be taken there late that evening.

  The bookshop that was under a spell looked as triste as the rest of the universe, but the poet took a Finnish novel down from a shelf and read until eleven. Not a single customer came by. Suddenly a critic entered, claiming he wanted to read too.

  “Go ahead and try,” said the poet, but the critic’s nails were so long, they were soon tearing every page he touched.

  “Stop! You mustn’t do that!” the poet declared, grabbing the critic by the collar. “Put your fingers in the cash register! I need to cut your nails!”

  He slammed the till shut, the poet, and the critic’s nails broke off.

  Hearing his moaning and groaning, scores of fellow critics rushed in. The poet reached straight for the divine poem and in an instant, whether they wanted to or not, the critics found themselves rejoicing and hopping and skipping. The poet caught one after another in his game bag. But first, the one caught in the till had to explain why the bookshop was under a spell.

  “When readers dare to enter,” he said, “we throw them all in a pit.”

  “But why?”

  “Out of anger. Show me the reader, man or woman, who is interested in, never mind follows, the recommendations of critics. Now let me go! Beneath this register, you’ll find a copper kettle. It’s full of francs and gift cards.”

  Hearing this, the poet said his magic words and this critic, too, ended up in the game bag.

  It was autumn now, and Book Fair time. The poet took the bag to Frankfurt and promised all his poet colleagues money and gift cards if they hit his bag hard. His colleagues beat the bag with evident relish, and the critics screamed. After a while, the poet said, “Now turn the bag round—to warm the behinds of the ones at the bottom too!”

  Finally, he released the critics. “We’ll never ever return!” they roared as they ran off.

  The poet now visited the manager of the bookshop and announced he’d broken the spell. He was offered the position of bookkeeper in the shop, and was thus able to marry the bookseller as a man of means.

  “Ivory-colored loveliness!” the poet exclaimed when he saw the bookseller for the first time.

  “Savior of the bookshop!” the bookseller sighed.

  On their wedding night, he saw that it was indeed the brassiere that helped the bookseller to make the best of what was there.

  When, then, the former poet and his wife went for a walk in the forest, they saw the furious publisher high above them. The former poet knew what to do. He whisked out the divine poem and began to recite:

  Beneath the almond, in the sun / his heart by her was surely won / with the books she was devouring / in the grass, among flowers flowering / There she lay and read, excited / of Finland and lives soon blighted / of heavy hearts and suns setting / girls dying, a blood-letting / Such a great time they had / he found no peace, our smitten lad / lost in the forest, deep in the night / two souls, now one, together, right.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll rejoice!” the publisher shouted down at the poet before shooting up from the treetop, right into the sky. The clouds were sent reeling, and he was never seen again.

  THE BOOKSELLER AND THE MULE

  A bookseller held a clearance sale in her bookshop, loaded her mule with the books that remained unsold, and betook herself to another land.

  En route, she saw a group of critics who were throwing a poet into a river and pulling him back out again with a rope they’d tied round his neck. What the bookseller witnessed scalded her heart.

  “Don’t do that!” she called over. “Let the poet go!”

  The critics said, “This is not your concern.”

  “What would I have to give you in exchange for the poet’s freedom?”

  “Essays! Unreadable essays! Whole deserts of letters!”

  So she gave them a few of the unsold books, and they let the poet go.

  The bookseller continued on her way and came upon a group of academics who were holding a poet in a half nelson.

  “Fly, we said!” they shouted, kicking his behind. “Fly, fly, we said!”

  The bookseller, again, was filled with pity. “What do I have to give you for the poet’s freedom?”

  “Old books, in Gothic print!”

  And she gave the academics the last of her unsold books, so they’d let the poet go.

  “Critics and academics,” she thought, driving her mule on. “Think only the absolute worst of them and you’ll not go far wrong.”

  Having given all her books away, the bookseller was now in no position to run a shop in her new homeland. She decided to “borrow” a basic selection of titles from the nearest distributor.

  She tied up her mule at a thicket in the forest, then made her way to the largest national distributor, hefted a box of books up onto to her back, and made herself scarce.

  Behind her, she could hear the cries: “Robbed—the distributor’s being robbed!”

  She was caught ere long and brought before the judge.

  “For such an act of impudence,” the judge said, “I order you to be put in a coffin, that it be hammered shut with an iron nail, and you be thrown into the river. The mule, however, should be turned into sausages.”

  The mule was slaughtered and hung up in the smokehouse. The coffin was thrown in the river but got stuck on a branch hanging down into the water. The coffin started to fill with water, and the bookseller came perilously close to drowning. “Whether old or young, a bookworm or a fool, a nomad or a stay-at-home—we all end up in a coffin!” she exclaimed with a sigh.

  At that very moment, something started tugging at the nail, and the coffin opened. The bookseller could now see the two poets whose release she’d secured. She climbed out and lay down in a meadow.

  Fine, she thought, just brassiere and panties will do the trick too. She undressed and laid her clothes out on the grass to dry.

  The poets brought her berries and fruit and alcoholic drinks, and together they decided, from that moment on, to avoid the production and dissemination of versification, given the time-consuming and risk-ridden nature of said activity. It was easier, the poets reckoned, to do something more serious.

  “More serious?” the bookseller asked. The juice of a berry was giving her lips a seductively red hue.

  “Poets are sensitive,” the poets said, “and tempting them, then acting dumb when things become too much for them, isn’t a decent thing to do.”

  At that moment, the bookseller spotted something bright in the water and sent the poets to fetch it. They returned with the iron nail, and three wedding rings were fashioned from it.

  Fast Forward:

  The now married triad makes enquiries about entering a serious profession. Veterinary medicine is recommended to them. Ere long, they’re known far and wide in the world of scholars for their successful reanimations of smoked mules.

  THE RICH POET

  Once, there was a rich poet. He started boozing and playing at dice and—ere long—was penniless.

 
; ETERNAL FRIENDSHIP

  Once, a poet and his Swiss-French translator met in an alpine health resort. At daybreak, they left the closing-time-less Chinchilla Bar in Kirchgasse, each with a bottle of apricot schnapps. While the translator bathed his eyes with warm spring water from the fountain on the village square, the poet strove to make poetic sense of the various monstrous hotel constructions surrounding it. Early birds with venous circulatory disturbances were wobbling towards the Thermal Baths in their white bathrobes.

  “Time to get our boots on!” the refreshed and cheerful translator urged. “Let’s walk a bit! The broad valley is much to be preferred to the constant danger of falling rocks here at the foot of the mountains,” he declared. “Let’s go!—Off into the valley! Regardons la rivière de plus près!”

  “On foot?” the poet asked.

  “Why not?” said the translator. “Allons-y!”

  The poet, however, did not wish to embark on such a foolhardy plan without first undertaking a wide range of preparations. Pringles needed to be transferred into good solid containers, headgear had to be procured, suntan lotion and topographical maps packed, the Agricultural Cooperative’s weather report consulted, and bandages carefully counted, he cautioned. Preparing their hike was almost as elaborate as transferring an army to its new quarters.

  “By the time we’ve finished packing,” the translator sighed, “we’ll have lost all inclination to walk.”

  On that point, the poet agreed, and so they headed—minus their rucksacks—for the end of the valley.

  The translator stormed ahead, and the poet shuffled along behind, stopping every few steps to record some poetic inspiration or other. “Birdsong, chaffinches,” he noted, for instance, in his notebook. “Wherever you turn, the ringtone of the great tit, the whispers of firecrests, and redbreasts warbling their little song.”

  The translator’s favorite things were the letters making up the notices along the path—be these signposts, or information boards, or the names of houses. Carefully, he typed everything into the vocabulary app on his smartphone.

  Leaving the bathrobes and flower boxes behind, they strode across a meadow contributing to the production of both animal fodder and human foodstuffs, passed the Larches (holiday apartments), then headed for the Weidstübli restaurant.

  Their clothing may indeed have been light, and they were walking on the side of the valley that was in the shade, but the heat of the sun was already warming their blood.

  The first bottle of apricot schnapps they emptied on the climb up to Wolf’s Paw—a not entirely harmless ledge, which fact the plaque in memory of a certain “Edith” impressed upon the pair. But it was a perfect view, too.

  They looked down onto the health resort, at the thermal baths and hotels that demonstrated both the imaginable and unimaginable in terms of structural engineering. Great savings had been achieved here with regard to architectural beauty, the two agreed. The translator handed the poet the bottle. “Salam-Ati. Salud. Santé.”

  “Blue tits, jays, wrens,” the poet noted.

  “Waste disposal prohibited” and “No tipping,” the translator typed in.

  “Wrens, tracks of cloven-hoofed animals, alpenroses”—but they must have taken a wrong turn at the fork, as they didn’t pass the restaurant, which annoyed them both, and they again found themselves at the top of an impassable rock face, into which wooden ladders had been secured that looked no less impassable. “Head for heights required!” the sign beside the first ladder warned—which frightened them both, well and truly.

  The end of the valley seemed an endless number of performance miles away.

  Below, the mountain river sounded like a motorway as it roared past and, from high above, the relentless sun was burning both their brows and writing hands. With a sigh, the poet sat down in an ecological compensation area and, using his fingers, measured the level of their liquid assets.

  “The apricots are almost finished,” he said, “our heat shield is insufficient, and our dehydration considerable. If one of us were to set out alone, he’d reach the next village, perhaps. If we both went, however, we’d be vaporized en route. Permit me, my friend, to tie my T-shirt round your head. I’d then ask you to make sole use of our supplies in order to fortify you for the remainder of the journey. I won’t budge from this spot. I prefer to wait, at these ladders to heaven, until such time as my friend reaches a village. There, he will find reinforcements, and it won’t be too late to return and bury me with full honors.”

  “How could such a plan ever be executed?” the translator replied. “We may not be descended from the same people, but preserving a friendship is a bigger deal than one’s blood and background. How could I ever bring myself to continue alone?” And as a smuggler would his swag, he threw the poet over his shoulder. “Allons-y!” he said. “Et que ça saute! Zut alors, merde.”

  At this, they climbed down the ladders. With each step, the rungs threatened to snap. On the other side of the earth, in a distant Mexican night, a vulture—resting in the shade of a cactus—woke from a visionary dream and opened its beak in expectation.

  The poet voiced his observations, “Look, a plaque in memory of someone who crashed to his death here! Look, another memorial plaque!” and, increasingly breathless, the translator contributed a simple “Oh?” or a brave “L’essentiel est que tu n’aies pas peur” to the conversation.

  They thus surmounted the challenge of the ladders and, in Mexico, the vulture took no pleasure in dozing off again.

  Down below, they found a veritable forest of signs. One warned to watch out for monster scooters. A second insisted that the mountains still shouldn’t be treated as waste disposal sites. A third advertised the sun terrace of Restaurant Flaschen.

  Wine menus! Parasols! These visions gave the poet and the translator renewed energy. There was practically no stopping them as they rushed down the aisle through the forest that, in winter, would be a ski slope noted for causing only average injuries.

  The restaurant was closed.

  In the bottle deposit behind it, they found items that were still home to a drop or two of beer, kirsch, or wine, but the poet said, “Not even my mother would drink that”—which the translator translated ad hoc as “Même mon chien n’en voudrait pas.”

  Disappointed, discouraged, and dropping into the mechanical trot of a Foreign Legionnaire in the stony Algerian desert, they followed a signpost to the next village that, an hour later, turned out to be so dead that neither God’s Table, the inn that was closed, nor deserted apartment blocks such as Evening Star and Tschangaladonga—“A corruption of champs à la dame!”—could get them in any way excited.

  “Not much happening here,” the translator said.

  “I don’t doubt that, were one to stay longer, one would even come across interesting and good people,” said the poet, quoting an illustrious predecessor. “But the sun and heat have become even fiercer, and our provisions more meager, and who will rush to our aid?”

  They looked around for a place to rest and discovered a half-full fountain that would offer some respite, perhaps. The translator helped the poet in. Fresh water dripped only sparingly into the trough.

  “I would ask my friend not to succumb to any form of self-deception,” the poet said. “He should continue, immediately. I shall breathe my last here. In the mountains it is calm, there’s no wind, the birds are silent—as I shall soon be too.”

  The translator burst into tears. “Continuing alone is, for sure, not how a just man would act. I can’t do it.”

  “But who will tell anecdotes about me after my death if we both die?”

  “The valley lies, horizontal, below us. We need only roly-poly our way down,” said the translator. “In the cellars and grottos and cooperatives of the valley’s inhabitants, we can purchase spirits on credit—so I would ask my friend not to linger any longer!” he went on, whereupon the poet climbed out of the fountain.

  “I see our friendship has remained unchanged, whic
h is of comfort to me,” he said as they left the village.

  The descent was lined by locked-up barns and boarded-up windows, and by unshorn sheep, gathered round the only tree offering any shade. When the trail reached the road, the poet—determined to throw himself in front of a mail bus delivering a new batch of rheumatics to the resort—raced onto the asphalt. The translator held him back, dragged him the final few yards into the village, and made him sit in the scant shade of the narrow street. As he fanned air towards him, he could hear and see the poet had fallen asleep.

  At that, the translator knocked the last of the schnapps back and, glancing over his shoulder as he walked off, looked one last time at his frère and ami.

  Since time immemorial, it has been said that translators are erratic types; that they have the same nature as fog and flowers: i.e., too little loyalty and too much concealment. The translator, having crossed the river and taken refuge in the air-conditioned kiosk at the station, didn’t turn right back with fresh supplies. Instead, he dilly-dallied and chatted to the shop assistant. He tried on numerous pairs of sunglasses, and praised the range of souvenirs and cold drinks in a bid to win a smile from the mature beauty serving at the till.

  “The station kiosk in Leuk,” the translator raved. “For me, it’s up there with Lafayette in Paris!”

  For the poet, there was the happy coincidence that the local councilor responsible for the appearance of the village had chosen that very moment to carry out her duties. Coming across a heap of poet asleep at the foot of the postbox, she rolled him into the coolest place in the entire valley—the church’s charnel house. There, surrounded by twenty thousand skulls and forty thousand thighbones, the poet thanked the councilor. “Had you not found me, it could easily have been the case that I’d have evaporated. And what’s the point of dying like an animal or plant? I shall never forget your good deed!”

  The councilor shrugged off his praise. What she’d done, she said, wasn’t worth mentioning. Was the equivalent of dwelling on the fact that, in Argentina, they lack a word for shoe rack; and, in Persia, a word for walker.