Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  “I found them sitting in their chairs, empty-eyed and tired.

  “‘It’s time to go,’ I said, but they didn’t hear me. The words passed through them without a trace. ‘Okay, guys, as you wish, but I’m going to get moving,’ I threatened, yet I couldn’t get up. A strange, leaden heaviness filled my body and weighed me down. This attack of weariness will soon pass, I thought. I reached out for my glass on the table, but halfway I changed my mind and slumped back into the armchair, my shoulders bumping against the backrest. I felt a dull emptiness in my head and the irresistible urge to vomit. I was sick of it all.

  “Suddenly Kefir spoke, completely without warning:

  “‘You say they’re always here: whenever two people are together, one of them is present as a third. That’s what you said, isn’t it?’

  “Geiger raised his eyes: his face showed clearly how hard it was for him to reply, but he summoned the strength:

  “‘Yes, I used those words … You understood me correctly: wherever there are people, they are also present.’

  “Kefir didn’t give up: ‘Does that mean we’re not alone here this evening?’

  “Geiger tried to smile but his smile turned into a canine grimace: ‘We shouldn’t overestimate our own importance—there’s probably more interesting company than ours here tonight.’

  “But Kefir decided not to relent: ‘What would happen if one of them was here now? How would we recognize his presence?’

  “While Geiger was thinking what to say, words shot out of my mouth without any prior thought: ‘What would happen? What do you expect, Kefir—the end of the world?’”

  At that point Gonzales looked around as if to make sure that everything was in the same place as when he started his tale. Tulip had finished the washing up and was now sitting behind the bar filling in a crossword, the drunk hadn’t moved, and the fire in the hearth had burned to embers.

  “Put on another log or two—” Gonzales said, “the mornings are terribly cold.” I got up and did as he asked. When I sat down again I expected he’d continue the story but it seemed he was no longer inclined. We sat there in silence for a while, and when I started to get bored I decided to prompt him:

  “And? What happened after that?”

  He looked at me with a wry smile in the corner of his mouth.

  “Nothing—” he said, “the light went out.”

  The expression on my face must have been pretty asinine because the gentle smile on his lips grew into a guffaw. How stupid of me, I cursed myself: Gonzales had found someone to pick on tonight. I was angry at him, but I didn’t say anything. He did:

  “I think my words were still in the air when we suddenly found ourselves in the dark. We couldn’t see anything for a moment or two, but when the lights outside began to come in through the windows there certainly was something to see: in the middle of the room, right beneath the dome, there rose a regular-shaped cylinder of pulsating darkness. It moved quickly within the space bounded by the pillars but stopped and hovered next to each of them for a few seconds, as if gathering strength. Geiger got up and went toward the darkness, only to be stopped three yards from the closest pillar. He stood there utterly still, looking into the darkness before him, and then seized his head in his hands and fell to the floor without a sound.

  “As soon as the light had gone out, Kefir had drawn his pistol and loaded a bullet into the barrel. That was evidently his habitual reaction to unfamiliar situations. He pointed his gun at the hovering darkness and muttered, ‘Sweet, bloody heart’—his favorite imprecation.

  “And me? I didn’t budge from my seat. I wanted to flee but didn’t have any control over my body. Imagine—I couldn’t even close my eyes! It was as if I’d been destined to be there and see everything. I was a witness in this story.

  “When he saw Geiger fall, Kefir fired two shots and was instantly thrown back against the wall; he slid to the floor and didn’t get up. I heard laughter and growling, which grew louder with every passing second, and then I saw it—actually I only saw its face, eyes, and jaws, which exuded a colorless slime. The face (if that formless mass deserved that name) consisted of disarranged clumps of what looked like cooked meat. Bloated and stillborn, it changed its shape, while the eyes remained the same: filled with a cold gleam, and in their depths I sensed an inkling of satisfaction. The face was enjoying itself, as least inasmuch as we were interesting objects for its gratification. Soon I felt a terrible pain in my head—and then I heard the song: the meat of the face issued sounds and words in a language I’d never heard before. It sounded tender and ominous at the same time, intimate like a lullaby but incongruous with the horror that sung it. I lost consciousness, and now I’m so glad I did, because if I’d listened to that singing meat for one second longer I think I would have lost something much more valuable.

  “Day had broken by the time I regained consciousness and gathered my wits. Geiger was lying on the floor and trembling with spasms that washed through his body in waves, while Kefir crouched next to him and moistened his forehead and chest with water. We didn’t say anything: we waited for Geiger to come to so he could tell us what had actually happened.

  “It was late afternoon before Geiger spoke, and what he said didn’t please us at all:

  “‘If I’m right, and if that thing is what I think it is, we’re in big trouble and aren’t going to get out of it easily. I’m going to seek the help of someone who understands this sort of thing better than me, and until then it’s best that the three of us not meet. When I find help—I’ll let you know. I’m sorry.’

  “We parted with insults all round, and even today I burn with shame when I think of it. But that’s not important; what is, is that I realized that the apparition we saw wasn’t a surprise for Geiger as it had been for Kefir and me; later—reading the documents he left about the dark side of architecture, specifically about the connection between space and the demonic, which he admits he started to delve into in the final years of his studies—I became convinced that what we saw was the result of his experiments: he’d invoked that creature on previous occasions only to meet it that night unprepared and suffer the consequences, as did we who were with him. Whether we were innocent or to blame doesn’t matter a scrap now. We all bore part of the burden and paid a price commensurate with our stake in the game.”

  “What was the price?” I asked Gonzales.

  “In a nutshell: Geiger died in hospital three months later, as dry as a stockfish, with the doctors unable to tell why his body kept losing fluids so quickly, what was draining the life from him. They played around a bit, tried this, that, and everything else, and came up with the craziest conjectures, but in the end they could only watch as he shriveled before their eyes. Kefir, on the other hand, was found on the beach six months after the event with two bullets in his body, his heart torn out, and minus his right hand. A friend who knows a few guys in the police said they all wondered why Kefir ended up like that, but when their surprise wore off they concluded that he’d probably gotten mixed up in the drug scene, made a mistake somewhere along the way, and ended up on a hit list.

  “And me: one morning, nine months after that ghastly encounter, I discovered I couldn’t get out of bed. My legs had gone numb. And since then I’ve been a modern version of a centaur—half human, half wheelchair.”

  “Didn’t you want to know what was behind it all?” I asked him.

  “There’s no behind, sonny. Behind doesn’t exist,” Gonzales snarled, waving dismissively. “Everything is surface; it’s just that a few places are terribly deep, and if you look too long, you think you see something there.”

  TRANSLATED FROM MONTENEGRIN BY WILL FIRTH

  reality

  [GEORGIA]

  LASHA BUGADZE

  The Sins of the Wolf

  “It’s taken me ages to find your number. Two days I’ve been trying to call you.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  Silence.

  “Oh God, this is
so embarrassing …”

  “What was it you wanted?”

  “It’s embarrassing. Should I just say it?”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  Silence.

  “You sound different on the phone.”

  “Do I know you?”

  She laughs. “No, but I know you. I’ve seen you on TV.”

  I’m getting tired of this. “Right … What was it you wanted again?”

  Silence.

  “I really liked your book.”

  “Thank you. Which one?”

  (Silence again—has she forgotten the title?)

  “The Sins of the Wolf. I’ve read it twice already …”

  “Thank you, that’s very kind.”

  “Who are you talking to?” my wife asks.

  “It was just so true to life, so realistic …”

  She sounds like a young girl, and I can’t work out what she wants. Does she want to be my friend? Does she want to send me something she’s written? I mean, girls are always calling me to read me their poetry.

  “Thank you.”

  Maybe I should hang up? Pretend we’ve been cut off?

  “I feel really bad asking … Oh God, I’m sorry, but look …”

  Down to business, finally!

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “I wouldn’t normally bother you, but I just didn’t know what else to do …”

  “Who is it?” My wife pulls a face.

  “Please, go on. I’m listening.”

  Silence.

  “It’s Bakar Tukhareli. I really need to see him. Can you put me in touch with him? Or give me his number?”

  (Did I hear that right?)

  “Sorry? I didn’t catch that. Whose number?”

  “Bakar Tukhareli’s. You know, Bakar the Thief.”

  (She’s having me on.)

  “This is a joke, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not serious?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Well, how am I supposed to introduce you to Bakar Tukhareli?” I look toward my wife and smile. But really I’m already starting to get angry.

  “Why, don’t you know him?”

  “Okay, kid, you’ve had your fun. It was a good joke, very funny …”

  “I wasn’t joking …”

  “Good-bye,” I say and hang up. “Who was that?”

  “Some kid, wanted me to hook her up with the Thief.”

  “Which thief?”

  “Mine, Bakar.”

  “Oh boy …” She laughs.

  I was working on the third part of my trilogy. I needed to kill off the Gypsy Baron as quickly as possible and get my heroes safely to the coast. One dead body should have been plenty this time. In the second part (The Sins of the Wolf) there were so many bodies I almost lost track. In the end I actually counted them: 134 deaths in a five-hundred page novel. But no, that was too few for my publisher—he pretty much asked for one per page. Talk about bloodthirsty. His motto: new page, new corpse. When I took him the manuscript for The Sins of the Wolf, he asked me—and I’m not kidding—“How many are there?”

  Almost as if he was joking. But he was actually dead serious.

  “How many what?”

  “Don’t ‘how many what’ me. Bodies!”

  “Loads.”

  “What do you call loads?” He wouldn’t let it go.

  And it was then that I knew that if I’d had eighty-six bodies in The Pig Skin—the first part of the trilogy—then this time I needed even more.

  “Throw in another ten, some incidental ones,” he said when he’d finished reading the manuscript.

  He was still smiling at me. He was worried I’d laugh at him. But we talked about it anyway (again, almost jokingly), and he seemed absolutely convinced that it was because of the eighty-six bodies that The Pig Skin was such a bestseller. What could I say? Perhaps he had a point.

  This time around I had a big surprise in store—the third part of the trilogy, Children of the Sun, was going to be completely different from the first two parts. Maggie was about to write a letter to absolve the criminal … and declare her love.

  There were two things I was supposed to be doing that day: writing Maggie’s letter and taking my twins to their first guitar lesson (my wife wouldn’t back down on that one).

  There she was, standing by the entrance to my building, smoking a cigarette. She was dressed like a boy, in jeans and a denim jacket, a black Charlie Chaplin T-shirt underneath. She wore a silver ring on her thumb.

  As we came out of the building she called over to me:

  “Excuse me!”

  And she ran over. She looked like an angry dyke. At first, I actually thought she was a boy. Her gait seemed strange, somehow—almost ape-like. She hunched her shoulders too, like some street-corner hoodlum bending forward in the cold.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I phoned you the other day about Bakar …”

  I realized who she was, but I asked her anyway, instinctively: “Bakar who?”

  “Bakar the Thief. I asked you for his number … ?”

  “Oh come on, honey,” I said angrily, and shoved the twins toward the car. “Go take the piss out of somebody else.”

  “I swear on my brother’s life, you’ve got it all wrong.” She stood in front of me, her arms outstretched. “You said that to me last time too. You hung up on me before I could speak …”

  There was a hidden camera somewhere, surely? I looked around again.

  The twins were staring at me in astonishment.

  “What do you want, kid? Have you got a bet with someone? Is that it?” I had to bite my tongue to stop myself swearing at her.

  “The Baron did let him go, didn’t he? He’s not in hiding anymore and—I mean, that’s what you wrote, isn’t it?”

  She was insane. It suddenly hit me. Her face was deadly pale, her lips were twitching nervously. She wasn’t taking the piss; she was out of her mind.

  My anger vanished. For a second I was afraid; I grabbed the twins’ hands. Then I started to feel sorry for her …

  “What did I write?” I asked her, almost sympathetically.

  But she laughed. “No, I mean, what I said about him needing to be in hiding, it wasn’t a question. I was just saying—I know that much at least …”

  What was I supposed to do?

  It was pure fantasy. Unfortunately, I had to disillusion her.

  I spoke to her as a parent would a child. Tactfully. Warmly, even. “Listen, my dear. Bakar Tukhareli doesn’t exist. I made him up. He never lived with the wolves and he never stole for the Baron. I made the Baron up too; he doesn’t really exist either.”

  Silence.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Do you know what made me say sorry? Her face. Her already ashen face had become even paler. She pulled back, as if I smelled bad. Strange as it may seem, she was looking at me with fear, irony, and compassion in her eyes, as if I was crazy—in other words, the same way I’d looked at her just a moment before, when I realized she was crazy.

  And that’s how we left it. Neither of us said another word. In fact, I just walked off. She never moved from the spot.

  And I thought to myself that if there were two kinds of crazy people in this world—those who were wise with it and those who were just stupid—then she was probably the second kind.

  I was sure I would never see her again, but I was wrong; I saw her again the very next day and in the very same place, right outside the entrance to my building.

  “You think there’s something not quite right about me, don’t you,” she said, “following you around like a spy? But I swear on everyone I know, living or dead, I really need to see him … What you said to me before—about him not existing—I’ve realized now why you said it. I’m not stupid. I’m not the first person to come to you asking for his number, am I? I bet they drive him mad … but I’m not like that … He just doesn’t know me … How can I make you understand?”
/>
  (Well, do you understand?)

  What was I supposed to do now? All I could think of was:

  “Have you read The Three Musketeers?”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Once again she looked offended.

  “Answer me. Have you read it, yes or no?”

  “Yes, I think so. I don’t know.”

  “What about Otar’s Widow?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you go to school?”

  “Why are you making fun of me?”

  “I’m not making fun of you, honestly.”

  “Well, what’s that got to do with anything, then?”

  “Look, did you go to school?”

  “So what if I did? Is there something wrong with that?”

  “No, precisely the opposite.”

  “Okay, yes, I went to school. What’s your point?”

  “Well, did you do Otar’s Widow? Or—I don’t know—Othello?” Silence.

  “Do you think they’re real, those people? You think Giorgi actually existed?”

  “Which Giorgi?”

  “Giorgi, the son.”

  “Whose son?”

  “Otar’s.”

  “What?”

  “The son of Otar’s widow …”

  She looked at me with a smile on her face. She seemed to be more and more convinced I was mad.

  And you know what? That made me angry again. But somehow I managed to just laugh.

  “How old are you?” I asked her.

  “Twenty.”

  (Well, that was a lie; she looked younger.)

  “And do you know what it is that writers do?”