Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  “That sort of peephole was the first he’d ever encountered in a restroom, and who wouldn’t have been curious? ‘You would have looked through it, too, I think,’ he said with a very friendly grin. And he was right. I admitted as much, and we got right down to the business of smoke rings. It took ten minutes, and I needed a number of cigarettes before I could manage halfway decent rings, and I got a little lightheaded from all the smoking. But then, when I was more or less able to manage it, the man asked me—can you believe it?—asked me outright for a kiss. He even said I certainly would not regret it. I kept thinking: ‘Eyes shut, get it over with, just like blowing a smoke ring through a little hole in the wall.’ Because the man was so likeable and good-looking to boot, and it seemed harmless to me, I let him. I just hoped he didn’t have bad breath and would get it over with quickly. I stood up stiff as a poker right in front of him and closed my eyes. I thought he’d press a kiss onto my lips like you see in the movies, smush around a bit, and be done. But when he held me lightly by the shoulders and just as lightly pressed me back against the wall of the small shed and began to smooch with me at length—intensely, wonderfully—I wished he’d been teaching me to kiss these last ten minutes, rather than how to make smoke rings.

  “First the man had opened my not too unwilling lips with his, ranging with his tongue deeper and deeper into my mouth. I was somewhat taken aback, but I liked what he was doing. He played with my lips and my tongue, explored the entire space of my mouth. I imitated what he was doing and found a great deal of pleasure in my new discovery. He must have noticed this, and became more insistent. I had closed my eyes and was hoping he would never stop. The man tasted good. Not like peppermint candies or anything, no he tasted like much more. The taste of ‘I want more and more’ spread throughout my mouth.

  “On the one hand, Alfredo’s kisses were like a form of anesthesia, on the other hand they were delicious slaps waking me up, as if I’d been a sleepwalker. I was uninitiated in that sort of kissing, and hadn’t the least experience with such an active tongue.

  “Now I was even more lightheaded, and my knees had gone wobbly. Man oh man, I thought aloud, and in my befuddlement even said thank you. All out of breath, I held onto his arm. I’d become quite dizzy, and I noticed he’d kissed awake something inside me. But I immediately felt ashamed. I believe my ears had turned all hot and red. That sort of kissing was something I’d never experienced before, and something I’ve never known since.

  “Good thing I was standing against the wall of the shed, and that he still had hold of me. Otherwise I probably would have fallen over in my delirium of astonished pleasure.

  “Certainly, the kissing had only lasted a few minutes. But it seemed like I’d been swimming for hours, that’s how exhausted I was—though I also felt satisfied and excited and taller by several centimeters.

  “Since then I have kissed many men, dear Frau Merk. I am still waiting for those sort of Alfredo-kisses today. Back then, when the man had finally let go of me and was looking at me silently but inquiringly, I felt like a small child caught with my hand in a honey jar.

  “I heard my mother calling for me and flinched. The man took a big step backward and gave me his hand. ‘Pity,’ he said, smiling, ‘I would have enjoyed practicing more ring-blowing and kissing with you, Miss. You have a talent for kissing, Halfpint.’

  “‘Yes, a real pity,’ I said, and honestly meant it.

  “We never saw one another again. I never told anyone about it, either. I thought of Alfredo often. But gradually, his image went blurry in my memory. Sometimes I thought I had only dreamed it all, but when I make smoke rings like these, I remember him again. And I know it wasn’t a dream, just dreamlike.

  “Do you know, Frau Merk, why I thought of it today, of all days? When I stepped out of the bakery with the packet of cake in my hand, I saw a fifteen-year-old boy leaning against a wall, smoking. He looked at me with a wink and made smoke rings, yes, several tiny rings blown through a larger one.

  “I must have stared at him openly because the handsome boy said in a rather tauntingly impudent tone of voice, ‘Well, Granny, can’t believe your eyes, eh? No one can match me.’ I don’t know what came over me, but since no one else was around, and I felt as cocky as a fifteen year old, I handed him my packet of cakes, took the unfinished cigarette out of his mouth, and asked him just as impudently what he’d give me if I could match him. The boy must have been dumbfounded, and said ‘Hey, Grannykins, you’ll never be able to match this.’

  “‘And what if I do?’ I asked him. ‘If I do, then I get a kiss.’

  “The boy made a face as if to say eww, eww. I closed my eyes, took a drag on the cigarette, concentrated hard, and blew a big ring, opened my eyes and puckered my lips in dreamy memory of Alfredo’s kisses and sent several small rings right through it. My God was I happy that it worked. I hadn’t done it in so long. Lucky try, I thought, and looked at the boy with a triumphant smile.

  “The boy grew uneasy and shuffled from one foot to the other and said with a wagging head and sheepish voice, ‘Man oh man that’s cool, where did you learn that?’ I thought he would turn and run away, but he must have been too nonplussed for that and I was fast enough to claim my prize. Without further warning, I held him by the shoulders and kissed him lingeringly on the lips. Greetings from Alfredo. The boy still held tight to the packet of cakes that I’d pressed into his hands. He was motionless, but nonetheless I sensed what he was thinking: Old woman. French kissing. Nasty business. I didn’t kiss badly, mind you, but the poor boy was shocked anyway, perhaps even slightly revolted. He looked at me with enormous eyes. I quite calmly took the packet of cakes from his hands, told him to wait a moment, opened it quickly, and took out a particularly sweet tidbit. I held it under his nose and the boy opened his mouth quite automatically. He chewed on it with quick bites, visibly relieved. When he’d swallowed all of it, I asked him, ‘Well, what do you say?’ He shook his head in disbelief, mumbled, ‘Thanks,’ and ran away.

  “‘I thank you, my boy,’ I murmured after him. Looking all around, as if I had done something forbidden, I took off. But I felt good nonetheless and couldn’t help but think of Alfredo. Yes, dear Frau Merk, as if bewinged, I made my way to you today.”

  The Memory Cultivator had listened attentively to Laura, enthralled, and had smoked several cigarettes, all the while bobbing her head again and again in amusement. “Such a lovely memory,” she said, smiling. “That is truly a very special memory, suitable for our celebration of this halfway mark. Let’s toast to it with another glass of sparkling wine. I think our heads, both of them, have gotten quite warm, so that we’re in urgent need of something cooling, dear Laura.”

  She brought the tray over to the velvet couch. On it stood a silver wine bucket cooling the bottle of sparkling wine and two glasses. She poured the bubbling liquid. The two women clinked their glasses a second time.

  “One thing you still have to tell me, dear Laura,” said Frau Merk after the first few sips. “Did this special kissing experience so influence you that you flirted with other older men in order, perhaps, to experience something like it again?”

  Laura drank her sparkling wine in one swallow and said with gleaming eyes:

  “Oh yes, it was just as you say, my dear. And I had wonderful kisses from many men who were several years older than I was. But nothing like those Alfredo-kisses. They were always lovely and always different. No one person, I think, kisses exactly like another. In such kisses there’s always an interplay of souls, or of distinctive, individual thoughts. They are unique each and every time—the bodies that belong to these heads that are kissing with their mouths, experiencing something special. And that, dear Frau Merk, is why I think I’ll never ever experience an Alfredo-kiss again. Unless I were to run into him again. But even if that were to happen, I can’t imagine that I’d want to kiss a ninety-year-old man the way I did back then. No, that will remain deep within me as an especially lovely memory.”

  Fr
au Merk smiled, patting Laura’s shoulder. Then she stood up and went to stand in front of the bookcase. “I think it would be appropriate today to read each other a few poems out of this volume. It’s called Die lieben Deutschen. Frau Merk took the book from the shelf and handed it to Laura. The book was small but rather heavy. “645 Fiery Poems from Across Four Centuries” was written beneath the title.

  Then she said, “Dear Laura, I’ll loan you this little book; and as a farewell, I will read you these lines.” As she spoke, she pointed to a poem by Kurt Schwitters on the back cover of the bound volume, and read with sparkling eyes:

  My sweet dollface girlie

  the universe goes swirly

  when our lips go smacko

  I feel simply wacko

  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY MARILYA VETETO REESE

  [PORTUGAL]

  DULCE MARIA CARDOSO

  Angels on the Inside

  To my friend Anabela, who gave me this title We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. It was little more than a footpath. Very steep. The dirt was hard and faded. Hardly anyone ever took that path, but it was our mom’s favorite route. We were coming back from the river. My brother on the right and me on the left, with our mother in the middle. Our mom was proud of us, more than she was of anything else in life.

  The water was cold, even though summer was well underway. Above the most uneven parts of the river bottom the water turned white and bubbled noisily because of the strength of the current. The bubbles were so big that it seemed you might walk across the river stepping from one to the next. If we’d been able to do it, we would have arrived at the village we could see on the other bank in no time. It took hours in a car. Our car was old and the roads were in bad shape. We rarely went anywhere. Everything was too far away.

  Our mom laid out my towel and my brother’s on the flagstone and put our picnic basket in the shade of the umbrella pine. Our towels were identical, except for the color. Mine was orange and my brother’s was blue. Both had white stripes. Our mom always bought us the same clothes and toys, or at least similar ones. I was a bit taller than my brother and had started to grow hair on the hidden parts of my body. Other than that, there didn’t seem to be a big difference between us.

  The flagstone was a little bigger than our lean bodies as we lay out in the sun, side by side. We always brought a wooden stool for our mom to sit on in the shade of the pine tree. She never did anything. She looked out at the river and the trees, at the sky and the village on the other bank, as if she were seeing it all for the first time. Our mom didn’t like to talk. Sometimes she sang.

  We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. Our mom’s singing smothered the sound of the hard soil as it was crushed by the leather soles of our sandals. Wild roses grew along the side of the path. Sometimes daisies. But there were always rocks and broom shrubs.

  As soon as we reached the river, my brother and I would take off our sandals, T-shirts, and shorts and run toward the water. Our little feet trod a path full of pebbles and thistles as if it was nice and smooth. We weighed too little for the pebbles and dry thistles to hurt us.

  We could test out the water by going in just up to our knees. We had to wait to go swimming until we finished digesting our food. We never disobeyed. Since we had lunch at noon, we had to wait until three o’clock. With our feet submerged in the muddy river bottom, our legs as thin as twigs, we yelled as loud as we could, the water’s freezing today, it’s really freezing, ah, the water’s colder than ever today. We said that every day.

  Our screams broke through the tops of the trees and rose up to the clouds, then stayed up there yelling back down to us. Our mother said it was the echo. We imagined that an echo was another one of those animals that we’d never seen, but which lived up in the mountains surrounding the river. Just like wolves and snakes, the echo never allowed itself to be seen. But it made itself heard. It would even laugh with us. In a disjointed sort of way.

  We also used to yell Dad, we’re already at the river, or, we’re going to launch a boat, Dad. We thought that the echo would get these messages to our dad.

  Our dad was a technician at the dam, and every day he left the house early in the morning with a lunchbox in hand. He returned at the end of the day with his brow furrowed, as if he’d spent the day staring at incomprehensible things. He’d sit down on the best armchair in the house, and our mom would take off his shoes and serve him a glass of wine.

  My brother and I liked to make up stories about the dam. Our dad was always the hero and he always defeated the horrible outlaws attacking the dam. We were sure that our dad had a gun hidden in his lunchbox. We invented a number of ways of obtaining the gun, but we never dared to put any of our plans into action. We didn’t know if we were more afraid of handling the gun or of the possibility that it didn’t exist.

  The river flowed down to the dam and was the fastest way to get to it. However, nobody could take that route. Our dad had to drive through the mountains to get there and back every day. But the river ran directly to him and we were always awestruck when we looked down in the direction that it flowed. Even after it became hidden from view, down where there was a bend in the river, we knew that the water didn’t stop until it got to the dam. My brother and I wanted to go down to that bend and then on to the next and the next, we wanted to go past all the bends in the river to see where all that water was going, to see the dam and all the dammed-up water. But our mom never left our spot. She spent the afternoon sitting on the wooden stool, and we had to stay close by. We weren’t allowed to be out of her sight.

  While we waited for our food to digest we entertained ourselves by building boats, which we launched in the water so that the river would carry them down to our dad. We’d make designs or write little notes that we hid inside them. We launched a boat, Dad, we’d yell, we launched another boat. But our dad never received any of the boats, nor did he ever hear the echo repeat what we yelled. The echoes and the boats break apart or run aground before they arrive at their destination, our dad would tell us when he got home. It seemed impossible to us that this could be the case every time. Lying on our beds, before we fell asleep, we blamed the horrible outlaws who attacked the dam for the disappearance of our boats. And on the next day we went back to making boats, yelling, we launched another boat, Dad.

  Our chests expanded and collapsed whenever we yelled, but with or without air inside, our ribs were always visible. Our bodies still hadn’t taken it upon themselves to grow. There was no way that the spurt our mother talked about was going to happen. It won’t be long before you have a growth spurt, she’d say, it won’t be long before I’ve got two men in front of me. But our bodies seemed to be deaf, and remained little.

  We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. At certain points, the path became so narrow or the curves were so sharp that we could no longer see the way ahead of us. Since we already knew it by heart, this didn’t prevent us from continuing on. Me on the left side, our mom in the middle, and my brother on the right. Far enough apart that we weren’t touching one another. It was easier to walk this way, with some space between us.

  We would have willingly gone without lunch, but if we didn’t eat, we couldn’t go to the river. Our mom used bay leaves in her cooking the way other women use salt. Our dad would say, dejectedly, even in the eggs, woman, you even put bay leaves in the eggs. But our mom kept frying a bay leaf in oil before she cracked the eggs on the edge of the cast-iron stove. The eggs, more than the excessive use of bay leaves, really intrigued me. The yellow sphere always in the middle, the fragile shell that served as its packaging, the transparent part that turned white over heat. It was all inexplicable. A real mystery. The kind of mystery that nobody has any interest in solving.

  I spent a lot of time watching the hens. I tried to discern their knowledge of geometry by looking at their heads, especially their eyes, though they didn’t even know the word. Indi
fferently, the hens kept pecking at whatever there was to peck at in the backyard, making haughty movements with their necks. Their indifference didn’t bother me, since I considered them infinitely wiser than me. Aside from admiring their knowledge of Geometry, as demonstrated by their production of eggs, I admired the dignity with which they allowed themselves to be caught for slaughter on Sundays. The hens would scuttle around the backyard while our mom’s hands pursued the one she’d chosen. I never understood how our mom chose, out of all the hens, the one that would be sacrificed. I also never asked her. As soon as the chosen one was caught there was a strange silence. Our mom would hold the chosen one by the wings, letting it dangle. The chosen one rarely shrieked or struggled.

  We hated our mom for a time. We didn’t yet know that the greater violence isn’t what occurs after she’d chosen the hen. Or even the choice itself. The greater violence occurs before, well before, and it’s this violence that makes the choice possible, or necessary. We hated our mom for a few seconds. No more than a few seconds. We still felt everything in a provisional sort of way.