Found in Translation

by Frank Wynne

  “What’s the matter?” asked the policeman, looking down at the grating. “Lost your appetite?” A good inch and a half of the “hot dog” was sticking out of the bun. Nada Matić went pale …

  But at this point everything becomes so enveloped in mist that we cannot tell what happened next.

  2.

  Mato Kovalić, a writer (or, to be more specific, a novelist and short story writer), awoke rather early and smacked his lips, which he always did when he awoke though he could not for the life of him explain why. Kovalić stretched, moved his hand along the floor next to the bed until it found his cigarettes, lit one, inhaled, and settled back. There was a full-length mirror on the opposite wall, and Kovalić could see his bloated gray face in it.

  During his habitual morning wallow in bed he was wont to run through the events of the previous day. The thought of the evening’s activities and Maja, that she-devil of an invoice clerk, called forth a blissful smile on his face, and his hand willy-nilly slid under the covers … Unbelievable! No, absolutely impossible!

  Kovalić flung back the blanket and leaped up as if scalded. There he felt only a perfectly smooth surface. Kovalić rushed over to the mirror. He was right. There he saw only an empty, smooth space. He looked like one of those naked, plastic dummies in the shop windows. He pinched and pulled at himself several times, he slapped his face to see whether he was awake, he jumped in place once or twice; and again he placed his hand on the spot where only the night before there had been a bulge … No, it was gone!

  But here we must say a few words about Kovalić and show the reader what sort of man our hero is. We shall not go into his character, because the moment one says something about a writer all other writers take offence. And to point out that Kovalić was a writer who divided all prose into two categories, prose with balls and prose without (he was for the former), would be quite out of place in these circumstances and might even prompt the reader to give a completely erroneous and vulgar interpretation to the whole incident. Let us therefore say instead that Kovalić greatly valued—and wished to write—novels that were true to life, down to earth. What he despised more than anything was symbols, metaphors, allusions, ambiguities, literary frills; what he admired was authenticity, a razor-edged quality where every word meant what it meant and not God knows what else! He was especially put off by intellectualizing, attitudinizing, high-blown flights of fancy, genres of all kinds (life is too varied and unpredictable to be forced into prefabricated molds, damn it!) and—naturally—critics! Who but critics, force-fed on the pap of theory, turned works of literature into paper monsters teeming with hidden meanings?

  Kovalić happened to be working on a book of stories called Meat, the kingpin of which was going to be about his neighbor, a retired butcher positively in love with his trade. Kovalić went on frequent drinking bouts with the man for the purpose of gathering material: nouns (brisket, chuck, flank, knuckle, round, rump, saddle, shank, loin, wienerwurst, weisswurst, liverwurst, bratwurst, blood pudding, etc.), verbs (pound, hack, gash, slash, gut, etc.), and whole sentences. “You shoulda seen me go through them—the slaughterhouse ain’t got nothing on me!”; “A beautiful way to live a life—and earn a pile!”; “My knives go with me to the grave.” Kovalić intended to use the latter, which the old man would say with great pathos, to end the story with a wallop.

  We might add that Kovalić was a good-looking man and much loved by the women, a situation he took completely for granted.

  Well, dear readers, now you can judge for yourselves the state our hero was in when instead of his far from ugly bulge he found a smooth, even space.

  Looking in the mirror, Kovalić saw a broken man. God, he thought, why me? And why not my arms or legs? Why not my ears or nose, unbearable as it would have been.

  What good am I now? … Good for the dump, that’s what! If somebody had chopped it off, I wouldn’t have made a peep. But to up and disappear on me, vanish into thin air …?! No, it’s impossible! I must be dreaming, hallucinating. And in his despair he started pinching the empty space again.

  Suddenly, as if recalling something important, Kovalić pulled on his shoes and ran out into the street. It was a sunny day, and he soon slowed his pace and began to stroll. In the street he saw a child peeling a banana, in a bar he saw a man pouring beer from a bottle down his gullet, in a doorway he saw a boy with a plastic pistol in his hand come running straight at him; he saw a jet cross the sky, a fountain in a park start to spurt, a blue tram come round a bend, some workers block traffic dragging long rubber pipes across the road, two men walking towards him, one of whom was saying to the other, “But for that you really need balls …”

  God! thought Kovalić, compulsively eyeing the man’s trousers. Can’t life be cruel!

  Queer! the cocky trousers sneered, brushing past him.

  I must, I really must do something, thought Kovalić, sinking even deeper into despair. And then he had a lifesaver of a thought … Lidija! Of course! He’d go and see Lidija.

  3.

  You never know what’s going to happen next, thought Vinko K., the good-looking young policeman, as he jaywalked across the square. Pausing in front of a shop window, he saw the outline of his lean figure and the shadow of his stick dangling at his side. Through the glass he saw a young woman with dark, shining eyes making hot dogs. First she pierced one half of a long roll with a heated metal stake and twisted it several times; then she poured some mustard into the hollow and stuffed a pink hot dog into it. Vinko K. was much taken with her dexterity. He went in and pretended to be waiting his turn, while in fact he was watching the girl’s pudgy hands and absentmindedly twirling his stick.

  “Next!” her voice rang out.

  “Me?! Oh, then I might as well have one,” said a flustered Vinko K., “as long as …”

  “Twenty!” her voice rang out like a cash register.

  Vinko K. moved over to the side. He subjected the bun to a close inspection: it contained a fresh hot dog. Meanwhile, two more girls had come out of a small door, and soon all three were busy piercing rolls and filling them with mustard and hot dogs.

  Vinko K. polished off his hot dog with obvious relish and then walked over to the girls.

  “Care to take a break, girls?” he said in a low voice. “Can we move over here?” he added, even more softly.

  Squeezed together between cases of beverages and boxes of hot dogs, a sink, a bin, and a broom, Vinko K. and the waitresses could scarcely breathe.

  “I want you to show me all the hot dogs you have on the premises,” said a calm Vinko K.

  The girl opened all the hot dog boxes without a murmur. The hot dogs were neatly packed in cellophane wrappers.

  “Hm!” said Vinko K. “Tell me, are they all vacuum-packed?”

  “Oh, yes!” all three voices rang out as a team. “They’re all vacuum-packed!”

  A long, uncomfortable silence ensued. Vinko K. was thinking. You never knew what would happen next in his line. You could never tell what human nature had in store.

  Meanwhile the girls just stood there, huddled together like hot dogs in a cellophane wrapper. All at once Vinko K.’s fingers broke into a resolute riff on one of the cardboard boxes and, taking a deep breath, he said, as if giving a password, “Fellatio?”

  “Aaaaah?!” the girls replied, shaking their heads, and though they did not seem to have understood the question they kept up a soft titter.

  “Never heard of it?” asked Vinko K.

  “Teehee! Teehee! Teehee!” they tittered on.

  “Slurp, slurp?” Vinko K. tried, sounding them out as best he could.

  “Teehee! Teehee! Teehee!” they laughed, pleasantly, like the Chinese.

  Vinko K. was momentarily nonplussed. He thought of using another word with the same meaning, but it was so rude he decided against it.

  “Hm!” he said instead.

  “Hm!” said the girls, rolling their eyes and bobbing their heads.

  Vinko K. realized his case was l
ost. He sighed. The girls sighed back compassionately.

  By this time there was quite a crowd waiting for hot dogs. Vinko K. went outside. He stole one last glance at the first girl. She glanced back, tittered, and licked her lips. Vinko K. smiled and unconsciously bobbed his stick. She too smiled and vaguely nodded. Then she took a roll and resolutely rammed it onto the metal stake.

  But at this point everything becomes so enveloped in mist again that we cannot tell what happened next.

  4.

  “Entrez!” Lidija called out unaffectedly, and Kovalić collapsed in her enormous, commodious armchair with a sigh of relief.

  Lidija was Kovalić’s best friend: she was completely, unhesitatingly devoted to him. Oh, he went to bed with her all right, but out of friendship: she went to bed with him out of friendship too. They didn’t do it often, but they had stuck with it for ages—ten years by now. Kovalić knew everything there was to know about Lidija; Lidija knew everything there was to know about Kovalić. And they were never jealous. But Kovalić the writer—much as he valued sincerity in life and prose—refused to admit to himself that he had once seen their kind of relationship in a film and found it highly appealing, an example (or so he thought) of a new, more humane type of rapport between a man and a woman. It was in the name of this ideal that he gave his all to her in bed even when he was not particularly up to it.

  They had not seen each other for quite some time, and Lidija started in blithely about all the things that had happened since their last meeting. She had a tendency to end each sentence with a puff, as if what she had just produced was less a sentence than a hot potato.

  Lidija had soon trotted out the relevant items from the pantry of her daily life, and following a short silence—and a silent signal they had hit upon long before—the two of them began to undress.

  “Christ!” cried Lidija, who in other circumstances was a translator to and from the French.

  “Yesterday …” said Kovalić, crestfallen, apologetic. “Completely disappeared …”

  For a while Lidija simply stood there, staring wide-eyed at Kovalić’s empty space; then she assumed a serious and energetic expression, went over to her bookcase, and took down the encyclopedia.

  “Why bother?” asked Kovalić as she riffled the pages. “Castration, castration complex, coital trophy—it’s all beside the point! It’s just disappeared, understand? Dis-ap-peared!”

  “Bon Dieu de Bon Dieu …!” Lidija muttered. “And what are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Kovalić whimpered.

  “Who were you with last?”

  “Girl named Maja … But that’s beside the point.”

  “Just wondering,” said Lidija, and said no more.

  As a literary person in her own right, Lidija had often cheered Kovalić up with her gift for the apt image. But now her sugar-sweet sugarbeet, her pickle in the middle, her poor withered mushroom, her very own Tom Thumb, her fig behind the leaf, her tingaling dingaling, her Jack-in-the-box had given way to—a blank space!

  All of a sudden Lidija had a divine inspiration. She threw herself on Kovalić and for all the insulted, humiliated, oppressed, for all the ugly, impotent, and sterile, for all the poor in body, hunched in back, and ill in health—for every last one she gave him her tenderest treatment, polishing, honing him like a recalcitrant translation, fondling, caressing, her tongue as adroit as a keypunch, kneading his skin with her long, skilful fingers, moving lower and lower, seeking out her Jack’s mislaid cudgel, picking and pecking at the empty space, fully expecting the firm little rod to pop out and give her cheek a love tap. Kovalić was a bit stunned by Lidija’s abrupt show of passion, and even after he began to feel signs of arousal he remained prostrate, keeping close tabs on the pulsations within as they proceeded from pitapat to rat-tat-tat to boomety-boom, waiting for his Jack to jump, his Tom to thump, he didn’t care who, as long as he came out into the open …!

  Kovalić held his breath. He felt the blank space ticking off the seconds like an infernal machine; felt it about to erupt like a geyser, a volcano, an oil well; felt himself swelling like soaked peas, like a tulip bulb, like a cocoon; felt it coming, any time now, any second now, any—pow! boo-oo-oom! cra-a-a-sh-sh-sh!

  Moaning with pleasure, Kovalić climaxed, climaxed to his great surprise—in the big toe of his left foot!

  Utterly shaken, Kovalić gave Lidija a slight shove and peered down at his foot. Then, still refusing to believe that what happened had happened, he fingered the toe. It gave him a combination of pleasure and mild pain—and just sat there, potato-like, indifferent. Kovalić stared at it, mildly offended by its lack of response.

  “Idiot!” said Lidija bilingually, and stood up, stalked out, and slammed the door.

  Kovalić stretched. The smooth space was still hideously smooth. He wiggled his left toe, then his right … The left one struck him as perceptibly fatter and longer.

  It did happen, thought Kovalić. There’s no doubt about it. It actually happened. Suddenly he felt grateful to Lidija. The only thing was, did he really climax in his toe or was his mind playing tricks on him? Kovalić leaned over and felt the toe again, then went back to the smooth space, and finally, heaving a worried sigh, lit a cigarette.

  “Anyone for a nice homemade sausage?” asked a conciliatory Lidija, peeking in from the kitchen.

  Kovalić felt all the air go out of him: Lidija’s proposition was like a blow to the solar plexus; it turned him into the butt of a dirty joke.

  Kovalić was especially sensitive to cliches; he avoided them in both literature and life. And now he was terribly upset. By some absurd concatenation of events his life had assumed the contours of a well-established genre (a joke of which he was the punch line). How could life, which he had always thought of as vast—no, boundless—how could life give in to the laws of a genre? And with nary a deviation! Kovalić was so distressed he felt tears welling in his eyes. How he loved—literature! It was so much better, more humane, less predictable, more fanciful … In a well-written story Lidija would have offered him nothing less than a veal cutlet; in the low genre of life, Lidija, she gives him—a sausage!

  But suddenly Kovalić felt hungry …

  5.

  On Saturday, the seventh of April, Nada Matić awoke from a nightmare she had had for many nights. She would dream she was working in her office at Plastic Surgery. It was crammed with anatomical sketches, plaster molds, and plastic models—all of “hot dogs” of the most varied dimensions. Suddenly in trooped a band of students who tore them all to pieces, laughing and pointing at her all the while. Nada thought she would die of shame, and to make matters worse she felt something sprouting on her nose—an honest to goodness sausage! At that point the scene would shift to the operating room, where she—Nada—and Dr. Waldinger were performing a complex procedure. But there was a round hole in the white sheet covering the patient, and she couldn’t stop staring through it at his hideous smooth space. Then the scene would shift again, and she and Otto Waldinger were in a field pulling out a gigantic beet. She was holding Otto around the waist when suddenly she was attacked by a gigantic mouse! She could feel its claws on her thighs.

  Nada Matić was drinking her morning coffee, smoking a cigarette, and leafing through the evening paper. She would seem to have acquired the fine habit of perusing the Saturday classifieds. Suddenly an item in the “Lost and Found” column caught her eye. She did a double take, stunned by a wild but logical thought: if someone were to lose something like that, it would only be natural for him to try to find it!

  On the twenty-fifth of March, I left a collapsable umbrella in the Skyscraper Cafeteria. Would the finder please return it. No questions asked. Phone xyz and ask for Milan.

  Nada jumped out of her seat. The ad was perfectly clear! The umbrella was obviously a respectable substitution for that. The fact that it was collapsible made the whole thing absolutely unambiguous!

  Nada grabbed the telephone and dialed the number. The conve
rsation was to the point: That’s right. Five o’clock. See you there. Good-bye.

  At five o’clock that afternoon Nada Matić rang the doorbell of a Dalmatinska Street apartment. A dark man of about thirty opened the door.

  He could well be the one, thought Nada and said, “Hello, my name is Nada Matić.”

  “And mine is Milan Miško. Come in.”

  “Are you the one who lost his umbrella?”

  “That’s right.”

  “At the cafeteria?”

  “The Skyscraper.”

  “Collapsable?”

  “Yes, yes,” said Milan Miško, the owner of the lost umbrella, in an amiable voice. “Do come in.” Nada went in.

  They sat down. The owner of the collapsable umbrella brought out a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “So, you’re the one who lost it,” Nada said tellingly and took a sip of the wine.

  “That’s right.”

  “God, how thick can he be?” thought Nada, beginning to feel annoyed. She took a long look at that place, but could make nothing out. She had to put it into words! But how?

  “It must have been hard for you,” she said, trying a more direct approach.

  “With all the spring showers, you mean? I’d have picked up another one, but you do get attached to your own …”

  “What was it like? Your umbrella, I mean,” she asked its owner nonchalantly.

  “Oh, nothing special … You mean, what color, how long?”

  “Yes,” said Nada, swallowing hard, “how long …?”

  “Oh, standard size,” he said, as calm as could be. “You know—collapsible.” And he looked over at Nada serenely. “The kind that goes in and out.”

  Now there could be no doubt. Nada resolved to take the plunge and call a spade a spade, even if it meant humiliating herself. After all, she had played her own bitter part in the affair. So she took the sort of deep breath she would have taken before a dive, half-shut her eyes, stretched out her arms in a sleepwalker’s pose, and—jumped! I’m wrong, she thought as she flew mentally through the air, terribly, shamefully wrong. But it was too late to retreat.