Best European Fiction 2012 Read online

  Aha. I can see them, out of the corner of my eye. The police. I’m sitting with my back to the sea, facing Taormina. They’re coming my way, from my right-hand side.

  Aha. I can see them, out of the corner of my eye. Nurses, and an ambulance behind them. They’re coming my way, from my left-hand side. What else . . . Hurry, hurry.

  In spite of it all, in spite of it all I would like for her, when I die, to come to my grave. For her to stand over it, look to the right, look to the left, get on top of me, slowly take off her underwear, lift up her skirt, open up her legs, and pee on me, right around where my head would be. Well. I’m an idiot, aren’t I? After which she would walk off, holding her underpants in her hand and spinning them around like a purse. Isn’t he an idiot? While the men sitting around watching would applaud. One of them could be whistling the whole time.

  Oh no, one of them . . . anything but that! One of them is holding a straitjacket. No, no, anything but a straitjacket, hurry, isn’t it just, oh my brothers of a certain age, that love, that fickle thing, always hangs us out to dry? That it’s only when looking in the mirror that we realize it’s not a hat we’re wearing, but a dunce cap?

  Not a straitjacket! In a straitjacket I won’t be able to write even a single wo—

  TRANSLATED FROM POLISH BY JENNIFER CROFT

  [IRELAND: IRISH]

  GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK

  “ . . . everything emptying into white”

  She herself was from Lipica. Lipica of the countless caves and souterrains. Snobbish white horses. If one may put it like that. Not so. They have airs and graces only when they perform. Leave them to their own devices and they are perfectly fine.

  “Born black, I understand?”

  She nodded. Tired of answering the same old questions, was she? I made a mental note not to ask too many questions. She responded nonetheless.

  “As black as your Aesop! Can’t say I’m terribly interested in them. They are so clichéd, aren’t they? Like yourselves and the leprechauns.”

  I let it pass. Lipizzaners and leprechauns. Tenuous. Good word that. A word to describe much of what we had heard during the conference.

  It was my first time in Slovenia. Miljana—that was her name—was my minder. I would have been happy enough to be alone (I think) but we lecturers were each assigned a personal assistant. Some of them more of a nuisance than an assistance, possibly. Mentioning the horses was just passing the time. Small talk. Talk for the sake of talk. For someone who earns his living by talking, I’m not much good at it, am I? Not unless I’m rattling on about folkloric motifs. The water nymph and the veil. Greek legend. Compare to similar myths and legends concerning mermaids and kelpies in Ireland and Scotland. Compare and contrast the sexual tropes in Greek myths and Irish tales concerning mermaids and nymphs.

  Yes, yes! Yes, you will give me back my veil, yes you will, but not before you have learned to love me more than any man has ever loved before. Then, and not until then, will you give me back my veil so that I may join my sisters again, nymphs immortal as the rivers.

  “If you’d like, of course, we can go and have a look at them after the conference.”

  Nymphs? Oh, horses.

  “I’m quite content to see them from my window. They fill me with calm.”

  That was true. To an extent. When they grazed I felt quite unruffled. But when one or two of them decided to trot around the field, flicking their tails for no obvious reason, only to return more or less to the same spot, sometimes rubbing one neck against the other; then I was no longer calm. No.

  She looked at me curiously, not knowing what to make of me. Her long, golden hair. Manelike. Her white body, whiter than the Lipizzaners.

  “And strength,” I added. “They fill me with strength.”

  True. And yet sometimes they drain me of everything.

  “Strength? Might it not be all in your imagination?” Hard to detect from her tone, her inflexion, if the observation contained irony or not. Myths and legends, their origins, that’s my field, yes, but that doesn’t mean I believe in fairy horses. Like most scholars, I’m a rationalist. I don’t know if I ever met a colleague who—that’s not quite correct. Finlay, from Edinburgh. He went a bit funny in the end, didn’t he?

  She kicked some leaves that had gathered together on the gravel path. Idly. Without any force or malice. But not quite playfully either.

  “Going by the paper you read yesterday, you must have some imagination!”

  I was slowly beginning to warm to her. She was trying to be friendly. Informal. That was her function after all.

  “Know something about ancient Greek fables then, do we?” I asked, teasingly.

  “Well, thanks to your paper, I do now. I had forgotten—if I knew it at all—that Aesop was black. Is your room okay?”

  “Fine.” I didn’t know what else to say. The bed is a bit lumpy? Sheets slightly damp? Wallpaper so old-fashioned. The prints on the wall. Those romantic sunsets. But the view from the window compensates for any defects. Something like that? But I wasn’t fast enough. I rarely am. Scholars think slowly. I kicked some leaves as if by repeating her action earlier we would, somehow, no longer be strangers to one another. They were already turning black and mushy.

  We were taking the air. Literally. I was trying to scoop as much of it as I could into my lungs. A little break before lunch. A stroll. Stretching of the limbs. I would have preferred to have been by myself (as I have indicated) but she had a job to do. To be my shadow. Not to let me out of her sight until I’d been shovelled onto the plane in Trieste. They had “lost” a lecturer at the last conference and it wasn’t going to happen again. His wife rang the day after the conference had ended. Where was Roberto? Why hadn’t he come home? A heart attack? Gone off with the fairies? (He was a world authority on Persian fairy tales.)

  Some distance away a cyclist dismounted. In full racing regalia, he stepped toward a fig tree, reached up and gently dislodged a fig, ate it slowly, but with relish, wiped the juice from his mouth, mounted his bike, and cycled away. As though he owned the world. He was all in blue. A modern, athletic version of The Blue Boy.

  I breathed in deeply.

  “The air is good here,” I remarked.

  “You don’t have good air in Ireland?”

  I looked at her. I wanted to say that the air was drier here but I just smiled, a little sheepishly. Some fifty yards from us I noticed a small apple that had been squashed underfoot. A crow was gorging itself on it, looking around every so often at a magpie who had also eyed the juicy prize. The crow, the blackbird, and the raven in Irish and Welsh folklore. Discuss.

  “You remind me of someone,” she said.

  I do?

  “France Prešeren, our national poet.”

  In what way? I would have liked to ask, but didn’t. I knew next to nothing about Prešeren but one thing I did know is that no portrait existed, not even a vague likeness. She should have known that this information was in all the guidebooks. Was she teasing me? Maybe she was thinking of something other than physical characteristics?

  The gong. She had appeared again, like some innkeeper from a Hammer horror film, or a supervisor in a concentration camp. Eight times the harridan gonged unflinchingly. Twice would have been more than enough. We made our way toward the dining hall. Miljana, my shadow, preceding me. For a minute, I felt we were prisoners.

  I had hoped our little stroll would have done something for my appetite. It hadn’t. Time to open the communication lines again. For the sake of good manners if nothing else. I glanced at her left breast and her name tag: Miljana Mahkota. I already knew her name. Why did I need to double check? Just in case. In case of what? In case she had changed her name overnight?

  It takes me a day or two to adjust to new surroundings, new accents. The air. The bedroom. The light. Everything, re
ally. How some people make such transitions effortlessly is a wonder to me. How do they do it? Six weeks ago I had given up smoking and that had made me a little fidgety, I suppose, not quite knowing what to do with my right hand. The loss of the familiar cigarette was, I felt, something akin to the phantom limb of an amputee.

  No, there was something else amiss. I couldn’t put a finger on it.

  “Well, Miljana. Do you do this often?”

  “What, eat lunch?”

  I attempted a little laugh.

  “Actually, you’re my first!” she grinned, lifting a grey napkin and shaking it, like one might shake a sheet, and reverently covering her lap with it. At least, it struck me as an act of reverence. Self-reverence.

  “It’s a part-time job. I used to work for a film club in Ljubljana. For about four and a half years. Then the founder died and things were never the same again. Something was lost forever. A vision. Know what I mean?”

  “I suppose,” I said, lamely.

  “It’s hard to explain. The vision died with him.” She looked into the distance, searching for a word, I thought, a word in her own language, with no exact equivalent to be found in the somewhat formal English we were speaking. Somehow I knew that I would never hear that word from her lips.

  “I understand,” I said. I tested the bread roll for freshness.

  “Are you interested in film?” I asked.

  “I was for a while,” she replied.

  She must have loved that person. That’s it, I said to myself, pleased with my discovery. Soup was served. Vegetable soup. Bland. Nondescript. It needed salt. But I had been told to cut back on salt. The bread roll was limp.

  “We were living on air in those days,” she remarked as she tasted the soup.

  I had no idea what she meant and she quickly picked up on this.

  “We were a new nation then. We wanted to taste everything, everything that was forbidden. Books, music, film . . .” She sprinkled some salt on her soup.

  “Of course,” I said. “One forgets about such things . . . I read something recently, a newspaper report. The film censor in Sweden said that they should get rid of his job. Adults should be allowed to look at anything they want.”

  “I—”

  Her response was interrupted by an announcement that the final session would commence at two o’clock. Why announce it? We all had the programme and everything was running like clockwork so far. But she babbled on nonetheless. I lifted a spoon, mindlessly, and saw myself in it, distorted, a monster from Tibetan folklore. Maybe this is me. Or maybe it’s Prešeren? The elusive France Prešeren, tracked down at last. I returned the magic spoon to its place. There was something about this dining space that unnerved me. It might have suited soldiers once. Or monks even. Wherever one looked, there was no sign of a feminine touch. How grey the napkins were and how uninviting to the touch. I thought, maybe there are some places left in Slovenia that are still looking back, people for whom the great leap to freedom was a leap too far.

  Main course was a choice of pork or fish. We both had the fish. She seemed to be concerned about the bones. Afraid of choking? She handled the dish as one might defuse a bomb. I asked what kind of fish it was. She couldn’t think of the English word. Was it caught locally? She didn’t know.

  We spoke little during the rest of the meal. I couldn’t get last night’s dream out of my head. I was in a coach. On my own. It was the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I was somebody of some minor importance. The horses were Lipizzaners. I was reading Heinrich Heine. I turned a page, casually looked out, and saw that the horses had sprouted wings. We were flying.

  “You didn’t like?” she asked.

  I had only eaten half of my lunch and what remained was cold, shapeless, desolate.

  “It was fine,” I answered. “Not very hungry.”

  “I suspect you spend too much time stuck in books? You should get out more often.”

  “So my doctor tells me.”

  It was then that I noticed how astonishingly healthy she looked. All over. Hair. Eyes. Limbs. Eyes. Mouth. Teeth. Gums. Everything. Breath. Fingernails.

  “Coffee?”

  I said yes.

  Neither of us bothered with dessert. She alluded again to my lecture.

  “So, Alexander’s soldiers brought dozens of tales back with them from India, tales which would influence European storytelling for centuries. You may not have noticed, but your theories annoyed a few people.”

  “Goodness, why?” I hadn’t noticed. I’m slow to pick up on such things.

  “Well, some of my fellow Slovenians in particular, I have to say.” She glanced briefly to her left and then to her right.

  “Go on.” I was curious. I couldn’t recall a previous occasion in which a paper of mine had been a source of annoyance. Boredom, yes. But annoyance?

  She licked some foam from her lower lip.

  “You see, we’re not in Yugoslavia anymore. We’re all Europeans now and—purely on an unconscious level, you understand—some of us don’t like anything that might diminish our sense of the importance of Europe. If Aesop is more Indian than Greek, as you claim, well that’s one small chipping away at the foundations of European culture and we won’t buy it. I buy it but right-wing bastards are on the move again. Had you said Aesop was influenced by the Irish, that would have been tolerable enough. The Irish are white. But India? A horse of a different colour.”

  I exhaled deeply. Bastards? Hadn’t expected that word from her lips.

  “I didn’t intend that people should take my lecture personally.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. How well she did that. What films did they show in that film club of hers? Had she studied them? Casablanca?

  “Isn’t everything personal?”

  Is it?

  I shrugged. That was the extent of my response.

  The eyebrow was still raised, suggesting she needed a better answer than that.

  “This conversation is personal, isn’t it?”

  I thought about this for a second or two.

  “No it’s not . . .”

  She’s confident almost to the point of cockiness. Well, she’s of a different generation. What is she, twenty, twenty-five years younger than I am?

  “Am I in love with my wife? Now,” I exclaimed, “had you asked me that, our conversation would have been personal.”

  “Are you?” she shot back.

  People had begun to disperse, the noise of chairs, laughter, conversation in German, Croatian, French, English, Slovene; lecturers, minders, administrators all making their way by circuitous routes back to the lecture hall. My name tag was askew. I straightened it and stood up. I closed the middle button of my jacket. My weight had been fluctuating a lot in the past six months but the jacket closed easily. I sat down again. A sudden dizziness. Had I taken the blood pressure tablets?

  “Feeling okay?” Her voice was somewhat distant.

  I took a swig of water and felt revived. After a little while I stood up. She offered me her arm.

  “What happened to your man?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The lecturer who never made it home.”

  “Oh! Roberto. The trouble he caused! They found him in that big cave, the one in Vilenica, you’ve been there. Three days and three nights he spent underground. Poor fellow didn’t know if he was coming or going.”

  I tried to imagine his ordeal.

  “We needn’t go back to the lecture hall,” she suggested.

  We were the last two in the refectory, apart from the staff.

  It was my turn to raise an eyebrow.

  “We could go and look at the Lipizzaners. If you like.”

  That was four years ago. I never saw her again. I was briefly reminded of her by an item on telev
ision about the Lipizzaners. Don’t ask me what it was all about. I didn’t hear the commentary, transfixed as I was by the horses. Dancing. Prancing. Leaping out of their skins.

  TRANSLATED FROM IRISH BY THE AUTHOR

  elsewhere

  [HUNGARY]

  ZSÓFIA BÁN

  When There Were Only Animals

  Why. Why take a picture of this too, why take one of everything. Will it make you feel better to have a picture of her looking like this, a picture that won’t even be of your mother, but of a stranger camouflaged as a corpse? Whose nose is this, whose mouth, and what are those tubes? Where the hell does that get you? No, it did no good shoving this obsession down my throat, all this organizing of everything in albums. You tried, but it did no good, gluing it all nice and neat into a book but leaving out life, sticky, gooey, running-all-over-the-place life, shaping it instead into a compact little story, a cock-and-bull story, if you ask me, because who’s going to believe that it happened like this and only like this, that it all played out high above the sordid world below, like some mountain climber who lives on the summit, but that didn’t keep you from acting cute and ignoring the asthma attacks, the bouts of fever, those numbing moments of humiliation, the lies, the smugness, the murderous impulses, and the fear. No, sweetheart (it’s time you tried on the word for size), enough already of always getting what you want, thought Anna, smiling faintly, for even these were her mother’s words, you can’t always get what you want, because you’re the kid and I’m the mother, and not vice versa. These words had always set Anna laughing, which in turn only sent her mother into more of a rage. Now what are you sniggering about, she’d say, cut it out, act normal, but this made Anna roar with laughter so much that she just couldn’t stuff it back into herself; sure, she took a little stab at shutting up, but that only made her gasp for breath, whereupon her mother turned beet red, ran out of the room, and slammed the door shut behind her, yes, this was their usual scene, one they’d played so many times before, indeed they’d refined it to such a degree of perfection that it would have hurt not to perform it on occasion, like taking a breath, like saying pass me the salt or run down to the store for some butter. They each needed the other to play their part; after all, in who else’s presence could they have stoked such well-oiled, raging, quavering passions? We only ever have one greatest adversary.