Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  Later, when I learned geometry at school, I didn’t like it because it was all so abstract. Physics was more practical, but it didn’t interest me either. I especially disliked the problem of the inclined plane. I disliked the guarantee that a heavy body placed on an inclined surface will stay in motion indefinitely and continually accelerate. I disliked even more the explanation that heavy bodies have the tendency to move toward the center of the Earth and only with effort are able to move away from it. The truth is I never liked school. I never accepted the fact that everything can, should, or has to be explained. Explained and communicated.

  At three o’clock we’d run into the water. My brother’s body became essential for all my mischief. Just as mine did for his. We liked to topple each other over. The more contorted we were when we fell, the better. Sometimes we smacked against the rocks on the river bottom and hurt ourselves. We also liked to race. Neither of us was a great swimmer, but we liked to believe we were. We asked our mom which of the two us was the better swimmer. You both swim well, was the answer she always gave. It was the same when we drew pictures and wanted to know which one looked the best. I like one just as much as the other, they both look very nice. As much as we insisted, we never got any other answer.

  In the middle of the river, where we could no longer touch bottom, there was a tree trunk stuck between two rocks. It was like some kind of unattainable goal, as close as it may have been. We were forbidden to venture out there. Because of the current, our dad used to tell us.

  Only once the skin of our fingers turned wrinkly, our lips turned purple, and we couldn’t stop shivering would we return to our towels, laid out on the flagstone. We’d keep quiet as we felt our hollow, pulsating chests warm up from the heat of the air and the heat of the stone. As soon as we were dry we’d head back into the water. On those summer afternoons, time took longer to come to its end. And this I knew well.

  We were coming back from the river and going up the path we always took. I carried the picnic basket, which was the heaviest item, and my brother carried the small wooden stool. Sometimes my brother would start slowing down, without noticing it. Our mom would call it to his attention, and the three of us would be side by side once more.

  A car is a heavy body. The Opel Kapitan that the doctor owned was undoubtedly a heavy body. My brother and I liked that white Opel Kapitan better than all the other cars we’d ever seen. Even counting the ones in newspapers and magazines. There wasn’t a single kid who didn’t come over to the car whenever the doctor parked it on the street. We admired its brilliant chrome and held our breath so that we wouldn’t fog it up. We’d run our fingers along the body. But lightly, since we were scared to scratch it. We’d peer inside it, marveling at the big, fancy steering wheel and the dashboard, which had three chrome gauges with numbers and symbols that looked like they controlled complex machinery. The seats were worn down and the stitching in the napa leather made very precise furrows in it. The headlights were round and hypnotic. It was a model from 1959, but so treasured that it felt brand new.

  The motor of the Opel Kapitan made a growling sound that we all recognized. As soon as the doctor turned the key, the trademark growl of the Opel Kapitan could be heard for miles around. But on that day when, as we rounded one of the sharp curves of the path, we saw the Opel Kapitan taking up the entire width of the pathway, there was nobody at the steering wheel and nobody in the car. And nobody else anywhere near it. The Opel Kapitan was imposingly all by itself. Yet, nevertheless, it was moving. But no growl. Not even a single clicking noise. The Opel Kapitan was moving, and that heavy body was bearing down on us.

  On that day the doctor had been called to attend to our neighbor, who awoke unable to remember where or who she was. While the doctor tried to discover the cause of our neighbor’s illness, the Opel Kapitan inexplicably bore down on us.

  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.

  Our mom was also a heavy body. Even my brother and I, despite being really lightweight, were heavy bodies. Only with great effort could we move away from the center of the Earth, walk away from it. And the more tired we were, the greater the effort. When the Opel Kapitan inexplicably began to glide down the path, my brother and I were very tired from the walk up the hill and from playing in the river. Moreover, we became paralyzed when we saw that our beloved Opel Kapitan had chosen, of its own accord, to come find us. Advancing indefinitely, continually accelerating. It would take a superhuman effort for my brother and I to get out of the way of the Opel Kapitan, the beautiful Opel Kapitan, brought to life of its own free will, and also taking up the entire path in front of us, facing us. Close. Ever closer. Fast. Ever faster.

  When my mom pushed me to the side, I don’t know if I lost my balance or if it was her body on top of mine that made me fall. Our mom only had time to throw me to the side and protect my body with hers. I could see my brother, still standing in the middle of the path, the wooden stool in his hand, wearing a blue t-shirt and brown sandals, and the puffy shorts that we both hated, my brother, just a little taller than the glittering chrome of the Opel Kapitan. My brother, staring at the Opel Kapitan in front of him.

  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.

  The Opel Kapitan stopped suddenly before touching my brother. It simply stopped. No squealing of brakes or anything. As if it had forgotten the way things are. Or as if my brother had made it stop with some sort of machine-directed, targeted hypnotism. The beautiful Opel Kapitan, stopped by the eyes of my brother, who was still standing in the middle of the path, with the wooden stool in his hand, wearing a blue T-shirt and brown sandals, and the puffy shorts that we both hated. My mom’s body off to the side, on top of mine.

  We got up, and our mom went over to my brother, took the stool from him, and held her hand out to him. Almost reverently. My brother allowed himself to be led away from the front of the car. I waited on the side of the path. We went around the car and continued up the hill. It wasn’t much farther to our house.

  We never spoke about what happened that day when we were coming back from the river, going up the path we always took. We went on behaving as if nothing had happened. But everything was different.

  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.

  Many years passed. Perhaps all this didn’t occur exactly as I’ve said. But I’m certain that the day was coming to an end. And that the river water flowed gently.

  TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY RHETT MCNEIL

  [LATVIA]

  GUNDEGA REPŠE

  How Important Is It to Be Ernest?

  Spring, summer, and now autumn have passed, but Ernest is still living in the cabin in the woods. They had agreed that they would live apart for a while.

  “You’re not thinking straight,” Maije had said to Ernest almost every day. For several years. Three years. Day by day he grew more and more miserable, and finally he calmly agreed, yes—okay, let’s live apart for a while. Who knows, maybe Ernest would learn to think straight and everything would change. Maije says that everything, absolutely everything is determined by one’s tho
ughts. Even the illness that will cause one’s departure from this world.

  Now here he is. And he doesn’t even know if he thinks at all.

  He has put away sufficient firewood, piled it up in lovely decorative rows to last him all winter. Because who knows if Maije will ever come back. And he thinks—he hasn’t even given her a thought. The house is like any house. It’s not important. Why do people bother to erect these walls around themselves only to suffer from isolation in the end? Everyone needs a home; everyone needs a home—so preached not only Ernest’s grandma, but also his mama, his first wife, and Maije too. Perhaps you really do need one. But then you shouldn’t complain that you need so many other things besides. Day after day. On and on. Endlessly. More and more. Yes, long, long ago he just happened to buy this cabin, but he’d neither longed nor hungered for it, he simply liked it. The spruce forest, the cowberry patch that he’d since turned into a javelin throw and track, the smell of the nearby bog, and the people who for some unknown reason had decided to live a life or part of a life together. Maybe children had once been born there. Yes, that’s how it usually happened. Though children also liked little houses, toy blocks, and towers. Ernest’s children were born in the city, because Annette, his first wife, had found the country terribly depressing, and even he himself had only come here to escape, until now. Now it is different. Ernest doesn’t pour new wine into old wineskins.

  Nature, nature. To hell with nature. For Ernest it’s no cataclysm, no book of revelations, he doesn’t need to get close to it, or keep his distance from it either; he doesn’t need to race to the sea to be energized by the force of the wind, or cry out against self-destruction while sitting among the moss. He himself is nature. On occasion. No need to salivate for it. Yes, rabbits, dormice; yes, cranes, whose call makes you want to take off for hell-knows-where; yes, red clusters of cranberries and a spider’s macramé; yes, copper sunrises on the silken trunks of birch trees, fine, fine. Titmice chirp chirp in November’s unrelenting dampness, clamminess, fire—in place of a woman. No, nothing like that, none of the predictable reasons for living in the forest, no special desire to commune with nature. In any case, nothing extraordinary, nothing that would be worth mentioning. In general, there are very few things that Ernest wants to discuss. Well okay, maybe there was that one time when lame Juris brought back the liver he’d cut out of some beast he hunted down. Juris had fired up the wood stove, hopping on one webbed foot like a ballerina, flipping over that bit of game, fat crackling, his face as happy as a Catholic’s at Easter, but it was only liver, after all. Fine, he’d eat it, had to eat it, but why all this bullshit talk about peppering, tenderizing, how a stag’s differs from a wild boar’s. Lame Juris, of course, knows all about it—so let it be. Then the two of them drank reddish-black wine as thick as motor oil, and soon thereafter you couldn’t shut Juris up. He launched right in on the subject of art. A potter, he was. That’s it. Now, Ernest likes his neighbor, and he likes pots, and he likes wine and a full stomach as well, but all his life, all his short thirty-nine-year-long life, Ernest has known that life is much more beautiful than it seems to be for Juris, Maije, Annette, Mama, and Grandma—more than for the majority of people, or so it seems. Then why so much angst about it? Why?

  Because you don’t think straight.

  Ernest, grumbling, had spent the entire autumn creating a clearing in the woods to set up a little javelin throw and track there. For Maije. If she should come back and want to practice. Maije is a javelin thrower. That, you see, is really something. And the fact that he now likes his women with muscular legs, women who can run faster than he does—that really is a miracle. Before Maije he had only liked fluffy, soft, small sugared cupcakes of women, the kind you want to take in hand and protect from the pitfalls of the world, but—look who he ended up with! Maije.

  Eating that liver had offended Ernest’s imagination. Despite the fact that he wasn’t picky. He could survive on pea soup, fried eggs, and stale bread for days, but as he and lame Juris ate, the thought hit him that the two of them were dining on Prometheus’s liver. Who knew what his neighbor was really feeding him—or out of what sort of animal the liver had come. Ernest suddenly felt so sick to his stomach that he chased lame Juris home. Another year, another winter. Yes, yes. Go with God, go with God, the one and only. It was good that Juris listened to him. Ernest cleared the table, flung open both the door and the windows to air the house, but he still couldn’t rid himself of thoughts about eating. About Maije. No matter how much he liked her, no matter how much he liked everything that made up Maije, Ernest couldn’t stand how the woman talked with her mouth full. For example, he remembered how he couldn’t take his eyes off the red tomato slice rolling around on her likewise red tongue, slithery slop being bitten into by small, sharp teeth, but through which, incredibly, flowed the twittering streams of Maije’s voice. As if the voice was an independent phenomenon, as if it had no connection to the gluttonous human being through whom it flowed. It was incomprehensible. The sucking of chicken bones, the chewing of eelpout skin amid laughter and happy chatter. A human voice in a beast. That was Maije.

  Now, out of nowhere, thoughts of sex popped into his head. How blushingly lovely and alluring were Maije’s curves, her peaks and valleys … how wisely and well she had been created in the most perfect proportions. And what a symphony of fragrance, by God! All this despite the fact that, when making love, Ernest felt totally alone, felt himself being rough-hewn into a merciless, solitary concreteness. Nothing to complain about, he liked it, it was good, glory be, but Maije had filled his ears full of nonsense about how it was supposed to be some kind of cosmic flight, with myriad explosions of light within light, and it had occurred to him that she was enjoying it more than he was. Was that so? No, it wasn’t true. Ernest hadn’t been thinking straight. About the warm flesh in brothels, about the sense of fucking. But now there was nothing. Neither the valleys nor the cosmos. He wanted his Maije dreadfully.

  Spattering raindrops, the wet autumn hobgoblins were now creeping in a gray mass across the windowsills, so the windows had to be shut. Before he latched the door, Ernest heard an angry snarling in front of the cabin. Having turned on the outside lights he went to see what was up.

  It was like this. A few steps from the door there was a dog with his paws clamped firmly into the ground, chest thrust aggressively forward. An irregularly shaped head, with prominent cheekbones and round, sulfur-yellow eyes. Ernest knew for a fact that the dog’s ancestors were Asiatic mastiffs: it was purebred—a Turkmenistan Alabai. Lame Juris had often told tall tales about a cutthroat dog who now and then was seen roaming the neighborhood hunting for rabbits and other fresh meat. He had bitten or frightened or something the child of some distant forest resident. Such foolishness. The dog was like any other dog. It was just the animal’s bad luck to have had an irresponsible master, and now he was all alone in the world. The same as Ernest.

  “Hello Pavlov!”

  The dog lowered his ears and, straightening his forelegs, stretched slightly forward. His cropped tail twisted into a letter shape. A low growl.

  “Don’t bother putting on a show! When you’re in a stranger’s yard, you ought to keep your mouth shut!”

  Annoyed, Ernest went back inside, latched the door, and sat down by his woodstove. A drop more of the oily wine, and the day would be done. Was this one of those days that Ernest had every so often, when he felt like his body was the body of the entire Universe, not just one discrete form in a cabin in the woods, the body of someone who had been separated from his loved one? Probably not. But on those days he felt happy. And he knew what the feeling meant. That not one of his cells would disintegrate into dust, that he was himself but at the same time the Universe, which included not only Africa but Russia too, not only wars and starvation but also stars and nebulae, and what humanity knew as “existence.” But he had made the mistake of telling Maije about this feeling from the start. And what did the woman say? Well, what could the woman say? She
laughed and accused Ernest of being enormously conceited.

  “Oh, is that how it works? And on what part of your cosmic body is my own little microbe existence to be found, oh Father of the Universe?”

  Maije was being coquettish, which wasn’t at all becoming. All that was missing was for her to throw herself into Ernest’s lap and begin to fool around.

  When she left him, Maije had scoffed, since Ernest was the Universe, he could neither lack anything nor need anyone—he was already everything, so how could anyone abandon him? That’s how it was and how it had remained.

  Yes, Ernest had always known that at any moment something decisive and significant might happen. He learned to be vigilant and patient, and he’d had some successes, but he couldn’t, even by force, be made to feel at peace. This constant waiting for a revelation got on his nerves, and he would short circuit from time to time, hissing like a bouquet of sizzling snakes, until the tablecloth, the table, and finally the whole house caught on fire … well, in his imagination, anyway.

  “Please take me to the Mediterranean!” she had begged. “Please? Please! Please.”

  That too. So they went, they went.

  “Brooding, Ernest, is a sin. You’ll never become a yogi if you’re always so sullen.”

  Ernest shrugged this off. “I’ve never wanted to be a yogi!”

  Two weeks in the scorching sun completely killed his desire, but this brought with it the fear that he was hurting Maije’s feelings. Ernest bought her a handful of pearls, telling himself off for being a tourist all the while, but Maije really did seem to relax, become calmer, more tender toward him.

  “When you give me gifts, I feel important. Like you’re investing in me.”

  Ernest shrugged once more.

  “Do you really expect to win me over with this sort of attitude?” Maije asked again, as they were flying home.