Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Mentally composing the first paragraph of this putative paper, I ask X, somewhat diffidently:

  – And do you detect the influence of the great composers on this “music?” a question to keep Mr. X feeding data into my recorder.

  – As I‘ve told you, Doctor, this music is unlike anything that you or I have ever heard. And, believe me, I know what I’m talking about. For I’ve listened to the music of all the great composers: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Delibes, Rimsky-Korsakov … all the way down to the moderns, like Philip Glass. I have researched the Ceòl Mór, the Great Music of the Scottish pipes, the classical ragas of India, the various musical traditions of Africa and their influence on the music of the Caribbean and the Americas. Trying frantically to gauge the origin of this music in my bones, I ransacked every musical tradition beneath the sun. From the Sean Nós of Connemara to the gríhe of the Berbers. From the rocks of Cape Verde to the deserts of Mongolia, I have listened to the traditional voice of seldom-heard peoples. From Joe Heaney to Benny Moré to Victor Jara to Lightnin’ Hopkins. And I know how to separate the grain from the chaff, the true voice from that of the phoney, Woodie Guthrie from Bob Dylan, for example. You would hardly believe, Doctor, the long nights I have spent till the dawn listening to recordings of every type of music on this planet. And this obsessive cosmopolitanism is nearly driving my wife out of her mind.

  – Not surprisingly! And all of this study brought you no nearer to the root of your condition?

  – My effort was all in vain, Doctor. For no music that I heard from whatever tradition came even close to the ethereal music that my orchestra plays … An eminent Professor in our National School of Music suggested to me that I learn musical notation. Knowing this musical alphabet, he said, I would be able to transcribe my music into a written form. And thus be in a position, maybe, to make a startling new innovation in world music. However, I discovered before long that the form of musical notation that is perfectly adequate to a description of classical European music, say, has no relevance whatsoever to the music that only I can hear. The pre-classical pentatonic scale is, likewise, unable to describe the music of my soul … But all of that was before I realised that I was a conductor, not a creator …

  – What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. X?

  – Well, one day as I was walking on a beach near my home, I was confronted with something totally unexpected. And the word “unexpected” puts it mildly, indeed …

  Mr. X’s last revelations have the effect of suddenly awakening me from a pleasant reverie, in which Mrs. X, the scent of whose perfume is still faintly—but tantalisingly—perceptible in the consultation room, was playing a central role.

  – How interesting, I said. Now, please tell me what you mean by “totally unexpected”!

  – Well, as I was walking along, listening to my music, I started to imitate the gestures of musical conductors up there on the podium facing their orchestras. And then I suddenly realised that I was able in fact, with the help of the movements of my arms, to conduct the music being played by my internal orchestra.

  – Or, rather, you were able to adjust the nature of your arm movements to the music to which you were listening.

  – No, you’ve got it wrong, Doctor. It was the other way around. Because what I found out was that my arms were capable of determining exciting new variations on the basic theme of the music to which I was listening. And to direct the musicians within me, so to speak, to obey my personal diktat, as expressed through the movements of my arms.

  – I understand, Mr. X, that this “discovery” changed your life. And not only your life? And not necessarily for the better?

  As I slowly enunciate those words, I simultaneously scribble the following words into my jotter:

  emergency case

  admit X immediately

  under no circumstance must he be allowed to leave the building

  – Well, it certainly did change things, Doctor, continues Mr. X. From the ground up, so to speak! Every time my orchestra visits me—and this happens three or four times a day lately—they expect me to conduct them in playing new variations on their basic theme. This is both an intense pleasure and an enduring challenge. For there is no limit to the variations I can create by concentrating exclusively on the movements of my arms. Nor is there any boundary to the beauty I can now bring into being. By paying not the slightest heed to the rules and regulations, so to speak, that determine what is and what is not music as defined by the times in which we live …

  X spends a period of three months with us in the clinic. But no medication or therapy, nor combination of both in the various treatments we try, manage to silence his internal orchestra, as he calls it. For said orchestra now appears to be in permanent residence in his bones. Things have gone from bad to worse, as he now spends all his waking hours, from morning to night, “conducting” his phantom “musicians.” Nobody but X can hear their “music,” of course. But there they are, he insists, playing away inside him. The other patients derive great amusement from observing him conduct a ghostly orchestra playing his Great Symphony of Total Silence on the lawn behind the clinic. Not surprisingly, they call him Tchaikovsky …

  I am in a deep sleep late at night—at three A.M. to be exact—when the most beautiful music that ears have ever heard wakes me suddenly. I sit up in bed and think instantly of Mr. X. Is it from his room, just over mine, on the floor above, that this music is coming? He will wake up all the other patients in the clinic unless his music is stopped immediately. I wonder why the damned night nurses haven’t suppressed it already. I turn on the light switch, dress hastily, open my door, and step out into the corridor. The decibels are even higher out here.

  A night nurse passes me on the stairs as I climb them on my way to Mr X’s room.

  – From which room do you think that strange music is coming? I ask her.

  – Are you having me on? she answers, with a tired smile. But to be honest with you, Doctor, this place could do with a bit of music to liven it up. It’s as quiet as a graveyard here tonight.

  Is this night nurse as deaf as a post, I ask myself, while this unearthly music pours down on us like silver rain.

  As I place my hand on the doorknob of X’s room, the music rises to a crescendo. Hundreds, if not thousands, of orchestras address themselves simultaneously to the same theme. Now I know where this music is coming from, with absolute certainty. As I open the door, the volume of the crescendo doubles. I place my hands over my ears. To no avail.

  Mr. X is nowhere to be seen. It is as if he has never been here. His bed seems as if it has never been slept in. Then I open his wardrobe, and I detect again the fragrance of the perfume of the woman in the black dress in my nostrils. There is no sign of X’s clothes or suitcase. Anywhere. Did he ever exist? Just then, I get the greatest shock of my life. For hanging there is the black dress of Mrs. X. My clinician’s white coat, my gray suit, and my striped shirt hang beside it, where X’s clothes should be.

  The music is welling up inside me now.

  Mr. X was telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  For, with an imaginary conductor’s baton in my hand, I extract whatever music I will from this unearthly orchestra within.

  TRANSLATED FROM IRISH BY THE AUTHOR

  [FINLAND]

  TIINA RAEVAARA

  My Creator, My Creation

  Sticks his finger into me and adjusts something, tok-tok, fiddles with some tiny part inside me and gets me moving better—last evening I had apparently been shaking. Chuckles, stares with water in his eyes. His own hands shake, because he can’t control his extremities. Discipline essential, both in oneself and in others.

  What was it that was so strange about my shaking? He himself quivers over me, strokes my case, and finally locks me, until the morning comes and I’m on again, I make myself follow all day and filter everything into myself, in the evening I make myself shut down and in the morning I’m found in bed again. Between evening
and morning is a black space, unconsciousness, wham—dark comes and clicks into light, light is good, keeps my black moment short. He has forbidden me it: for you there’s no night. Simply orders me into a continuum of morning to evening, evening to morning, again and again. But in the mornings I know I’ve been switched off. I won’t tell about it. Besides, why does he exclude me from the night? I don’t ask, but I still call the darkness night. There is night and day, evening and morning will come.

  Today is a visiting day. A collecting day, an exhibition day, a walking-around day, a following day. He goes, and I follow, clop, I pound the floor but don’t feel comfortable, I would prefer to be at home doing my things, following my settings, being directed. I am intended for the home, for one space, elsewhere I am surplus, unnecessary. Of course, there are others intended for elsewhere, to each his own.

  The exhibition space is too cold, the temperature eighteen point three Celsius, to be accurate. I do not generally mind cold or heat, nevertheless I feel stiff and creaky—but is the temperature the cause? Maybe not. Maybe I actually feel something. “I’m so pissed off my head is splitting,” he once said, at the beginning of time, and since then I too have sought in myself something of the kind, the union of emotion and body, this my one and only. Stiffness is a new thing, and is that a sensation of mind or body? Hard for me to understand such distinctions, the division between mind and body, mental sensations and bodily sensations are certainly quite different, although rarely in my case.

  Bumps into me as he stops, I let myself be bumped into a little bit on purpose, because here he hasn’t yet said a word to me. Doesn’t say anything now either, looks pensive. Rests one hand on his temples and scratches his head. I would dearly like him to speak, but of course orders can’t come from me.

  What have I learned lately? It is one of the great purposes, learning—development.

  He taught me to read, it wasn’t even difficult. Closed me for a moment so that I was on a black break again, whamm, like a quick night, a click, then he appeared in the middle of light, the new morning was quickly over, he said he’d updated me, and so I had learned. “This will increase your value,” he said and passed me a book. The shelf is groaning with them, side by side, flat, formerly unnecessary to me, although unpleasant because they gather dust. Now they are full of words, maybe he wrote them while I was in the night. The one that he passed to me was thick indeed, a total of 1,108 gram-units, I opened it—he directed me a little—I read aloud from the point that first hit my visual sensors:

  In presence of that light one such becomes

  That to withdraw therefrom for other prospect

  It is impossible he e’er consent …

  He laughed so much that he doubled up in the armchair. He: no name from my innards, for I am not allowed to address him by name. Any kind of title, I tried once, but then too he began to shake, eyelids wrinkled. Stroked me more eagerly for a while, it’s true. But when I said it again, he slapped me so hard that my side element was dented. Slap! I straightened it myself later on. “Let’s not get too close,” he said as the reason for this new practice.

  So, about the exhibition: We are in a giant room, huge, we have been here before—that much I’ve managed to extract from myself—but that was a while ago. I do not consider these things important enough to record very accurately in my memory, even I have my limits, you have to prioritise. I walk behind him. Now and again gives me glances although he’s been pretending not to notice me all day, his posture is straighter than usual, quite splendid, and his expression I would call proud. From time to time he makes me stop, goes a bit farther away but keeps an eye on me, I would recognize his eye among a thousand, I am confident of that. Speaks with a few people, males, I do not recognize them even though I have seen them before, I am certain. Many of them inspect me, one winks and looks me over slowly, first my feet and then upward. What do I care, clop clop I go on pounding the floor. An ugly floor here.

  We have arrived early: The exhibition hasn’t begun yet, men adjust their creations, as yet not a wholesome multitude of people around me. We are just looking, I am not going to be shown today, we circulate, and every now and then he tells me to wait and I don’t hear what he says to the others. Once a man who almost passes me by, older and with more facial hair than average, touches my back. I smile, I am now programmatically, exemplarily friendly.

  We do not stay long. He quickly gets bored, talks to me for the first time in ages. “I can’t be bothered looking at these ordinary things.” So he says. Reaches out his hand and I take it in mine; I’d squeeze it if I were more autonomous. If I’d had permission, I would have looked up. Never so beautiful before, exulting. Though this only out of the corner of my eye.

  Later: acts unusually, very different. Does not want to read the new newspaper beside his food. The newspaper stops coming. The old one lies by the sofa, wrinkling. Appetite has decreased, says so himself, tells me not to cook anything but pasta. That is what he eats, by the bowlful, nothing else, doesn’t want to buy anything else. Weeks go by, there are seven days in a week. No longer goes out in the evenings, instead buys big bottles of stuff and sits in the living room with one of them beside him. Once, I sniff the bottle, out of curiosity, because I have felt a twitch in the left side of my neck. He snorts: “That won’t suit your plumbing.” Then pours it into his depths.

  Once I get scared. In the morning I have been on for as much as ten minutes and thirteen seconds, and then the lights go out. At first I think he shut me down again, but no, I can sense and move. There is understanding, it is not night but a dark day, whatever that may be. But the lamps have gone out, and not a change in my innards. He says very loudly: “Damn, now they’ve cut off the electricity!” I would scream if told to: I can’t survive without electricity, not for long, the next day is my electricity day.

  He telephones somewhere, through the wall I hear the voice but not the words. First he’s angry, then amicable, to me he’s never been so beseeching, so polite. Never. But the electricity comes back. Why, he is capable of anything.

  After that keeps me on later in the evenings, strokes me more slowly than before, maybe he wants to smooth my lumps and bumps, remove the dark oxides from my case, maybe he wants to make me gleam. When it is already far into the night—I have never been on so late in the night—he sighs, touches my innards, and switches me off. As if he did not want to stop, to close, to be without. Things are necessary, and I am among them.

  Everything I think feels to me as if my shoulder joint is loosening. I do not report the fault. Sometimes I find such astonishing little actions within myself.

  Seventeen days ago, almost exactly, I experienced something new. Earlier in the day, I had been set to read a book again, far into the evening. Meanwhile, he sat in a chair with his eyes shut. The wrinkle at one side of his mouth tautened and relaxed from time to time, human skin is remarkably flexible. After, we went to bed.

  Maybe he switched me off wrongly somehow, because I found myself in the midst of blackness but was present there too. My mind stayed on, I could not move but on the other hand I did not wish to either, I did not think about moving at all, or about my own parts. I saw unfamiliar, impossible things: things that don’t really exist, I know well—but I saw them move and be in the same way as all of us who exist, move, and be, myself among them.

  These things I saw:

  Men with horns growing in their heads.

  A big bird with a human face.

  A blank wall you can walk through.

  Furniture—a table and stools that jumped around.

  Among them all, myself, I flew and floated, although I have not been granted such capacities.

  Then he must have switched me off, because next it was morning.

  One morning he is more talkative, less red-eyed. Some of them are coming here, men from the exhibition, I remember shapes from their faces and their ways of walking, no one human being is the same as the others. First the telephone rings, beep-be-beep, an
d then they come, driving into the yard one at a time. Before he opens the door he puts me in my own chair in the corner of the room, telling me to be nice. But my being is always nice.

  “Shall we begin straight away?” one down-cheek shouts, not even coming all the way into the room, just putting his head around the door, and I am not used to such half-and-half behavior. In all my programlessness I begin to click my thumb, I can’t think of any other actions. There are three of them. They are happy, even merry, I would say, if I was asked. “Good shenanigans?” asks one, and I have to consult my vocabulary. Apparently we have not had a lot of shenanigans in our house. His cheeks glow red, this speaker’s, and all of them have bright eyes. They negotiate in loud voices, louder than I would ever be allowed to speak.

  They bring in the kind of devices—mediocrities, he would say— that I have seen at exhibitions. But then from a distance, out of focus, now close-up; I could make contact with them if this was to be considered necessary. The things are silent: they take them out of boxes and set them out side by side in the corridor. “Let them wait their turn,” one says, younger than the norm, then eyes me as a continuation of the queue. “You must be part of the furniture,” he goes on, and winks—I remember him, because he has winked before. A funny person, male, I allow him to touch my case. One of them hasn’t brought anything, he just watches. Stares at me, too, but I do not allow it to affect my settings.

  When they aren’t looking, I just turn my sensors toward the others, when the men talk together loudly but with different words in the living room and forget to monitor the world, I walk back and forth in the corridor and inspect what they brought, the beauties.

  The first: small and white as a mouse, would fit on my upper limb and that is indeed where I would want it to sleep—its curled form, its nose touching its back toes. I bend over it and stroke it, its coat is enormously soft, and if I were really small, a tiny particle, I could hide in it. The head, though, has no fur; it is as smooth a skin as my surface, in that respect I am perhaps lacking. It has no eyelids, but its eyes are closed. What my eyes look like closed I do not know.