Best European Fiction 2013

by Unknown

  TRANSLATED FROM SERBO-CROATIAN BY CELIA HAWKESWORTH

  marriage

  [SLOVENIA]

  MIRANA LIKAR BAJŽELJ

  Nada’s Tablecloth

  Fucking complicated, you think to yourself, as you walk along the smooth, slippery, shining surface and beneath your thin leather soles feel every joint between the paving stones. You’re afraid that you will get tangled up in this dress, to which you are not accustomed. If you do, that will be a sign, and if you do not, likewise; the whole street is somehow bulging, because of fear, rainwater, or time, certainly because of something. A few months ago you would have described this moment with the word paradoxical; now that word, along with several others, is stuck somewhere behind you, somewhere in time. Tell me which words you use and I’ll tell you with whom you spend time and what you are. You can still change your mind, in spite of the fact that the world has been speeding up from month to month, from week to week, from day to day; today it’s speeding up from hour to hour, and that’s all you can think of, that there’s no time left, and of how everything is so fucking complicated.

  In front of you is the red, white, and blue flag with the checkerboard, probably there’s also one somewhere at the back, not to mention those left behind in the parked cars; around the flag are hired musicians who sing of the beauties of our homeland and about the beautiful Dalmatia that they will defend with their last drop of blood; everyone is singing along, Goran is walking beside you and behind you are a whole lot of people. All your folk from back home are here and you know exactly what they’re thinking, that this isn’t our kind of climate, it’s too hot. They’re mixed in with Goran’s people, brown, green, and washed-out pastel shades among black, blue, and colorful modern; your folk aren’t used to being away from home, the most elegant colors for them are brown and moss green, they’re not made for these hot white stones on this hot Saturday afternoon, but for you they’d do anything and what our Nuša does is always right. You don’t even know that at the pub your father is known as OurNuša because he begins every sentence with your name. OurNuša, he says, adjusting his glasses. Goran’s people are also dressed up. The men in elegant suits, on their feet sharp Italian shoes but no socks. This is another reason for that pain in your diaphragm. What kind of world is it where men dressed for a special occasion are not wearing socks? What’s wrong with them?

  You go along the seafront, there’s a smell of salt in the air, mixed with a smell of oil and, come on, let’s admit it, a smell of sewage. On your right yachts are moored, flags hang in the still air like limp rags: the foreigners on deck watch and size you up. A small man on an Italian yacht stretches to take a picture of the men. You are somehow floating but you notice all this, your eyes take in all this confusion. You see yourself walking on the centuries-old stones, you know you’re hot, you’re afraid that something isn’t quite right, you also see the camera in the Italian’s small brown hand. It’s possible that as early as the autumn some male models with icy, imbecilic looks will be stalking down the catwalk without socks, a nice trick, skin against skin, he’ll be dreaming about these tall Dalmatian men, flags, this scene. In memory of this summer day he’ll dress the models in shorts and raincoats, he’ll put a flag in their hands, your wedding will be frozen in the bizarre images of an upside-down world. Damn queers, Goran will say one day sitting in front of the television, and change the channel. But where will you be then?

  Even last year you yourself would also have said they were good looking, these Dalmatian men, and they sing nationalist marches at weddings, interesting, and they have flags with them, which isn’t all that strange when you think how those madmen from the hills bombarded them … But last year is last year, while this year is this year and this is no longer just a bit of exotica for you to photograph and keep for a rainy day. Now those flags are above and below you, and the questions have only increased, they’re multiplying and getting under your feet, and it’s not the best time for questions to which you don’t have answers, although in reality you do, otherwise you wouldn’t feel so bad. Over a couple of days a whole arsenal of images has appeared, each bad in its own way, while the moment is approaching when all the questions will be combined into one and there will be only one answer.

  Suddenly, for instance, you noticed Nada’s tablecloth, Nada and the kind of things she said … Goran wasn’t at home. Two days before the wedding and he hadn’t been home all night. He had said he was just popping out, that he’d be right back, and that right back had stretched until morning. His mobile phone stayed at home, you see, that’s what life with him is really like, and you sat with Nada in the kitchen waiting for him, quiet more than anything, strangers. You noticed that her tablecloth was plastic and worn and, come on, admit it, also dirty. It wasn’t as if you had never seen a plastic tablecloth before, it wasn’t that. It was that you would be living with Nada, Goran has already told you. And will you rip the tablecloth that has suited her all these years right off the table? That’s what your home will be like. Will such a home help make you a new homeland?

  Nada was looking at you in despair; through the cigarette smoke you heard those words that threw a new light on everything. What can I say, she said, you know where he came from, and with disgust she gestured somewhere between her legs. Now you’re asking yourself if this is hereditary. From mother to son. Forever. Can it be fixed? What do you do with despair?

  The most frightening thing about your own mother’s reaction was the hint in the words look here, plus the same desperate look, plus the same silence. Look here, she said to you, when you told her. Look here. Is this what you studied for? Is this what you worked so hard for? Your father won’t be able to bear it. He used to get up at night just to check that you were still breathing. Who’s going to give you a job there? And you hadn’t even told her the half of it. Now your mother and father are somewhere at the back asking themselves whether this is really happening, and what’s going to happen next.

  Your mother is so afraid. Last year she showed you a holiday photo in which there were some female refuse collectors. Female refuse collectors seemed a safe and neutral theme; there are donkeys here, a cathedral damaged by shelling, but women on a garbage truck, yes, it’s terrible that in Dalmatia they have women refuse collectors. It seemed good that in your world at least that wasn’t the case. Nor was it the case that men came home in the morning, saying give me a glass of mineral water, dear, I drank a bit too much, and went to bed without another word, and you weren’t even allowed to ask them any questions because the answer was always the same. That’s what I’m like, you know what I’m like, so what now? Is the first pain not better than the last?

  You told him immediately that you were pregnant; you could have waited and made your own decision, but you went charging in there regardless. Bam. Did you think he’d make the decision for you, or what? You know what his outlook on life is. What happens happens. It’s all the same to him. If you decide you should get married, then you will; if you decide differently, then you won’t. But if that’s what you decide, then you’ll live here with him and Nada, he’s not moving anywhere. He’s not exchanging a weekend lover for a weekend wife.

  Very soon now you will enter the church, it’s still full of holes outside, they haven’t repaired that; you’re increasingly afraid, the nave is decorated with white tulle and white flowers, while you experience moments in which you’ve decided and moments in which you’ve changed your mind. Your life is now made up of these moments; quite a few of them have already built up, creating something that could even be called fate. Are you thinking of that architect? When you met him he had just gotten divorced. I knew, he told you, I knew it would end badly, even when I went to get married at the town hall. But I didn’t have the strength to stop the wedding, everyone dressed up to the nines, the presents bought, the apartment furnished. Everything would have been better if I’d followed my instincts. When you heard that you thought you would never let yourself be dragged that far, that you and y
our inner voice were one, and now look at you.

  Even a year ago … The upper floor at your parents’ house to begin with, some colleague from the legal world who would be transformed overnight into an ideal lover and wonderful husband; on Saturdays you’d leave the kids with mother and go off on your own: skiing in the winter, Egypt in the summer; a billable hour of a lawyer’s time costs such and such and each day has so many working hours, multiplied by two … That’s why you went sailing with colleagues from work. To try to draw from the drabness of office life some kind of color picture, some kind of opportunity … which became null and void in that moment when, after seven days, somewhere in the middle of your intellectual love games, Goran crawled across your bed toward the space where the autopilot was kept. When it broke down you didn’t know that it was there in your cabin, at the end of the bed, behind a small door. The only one in the town who might be able to fix it is Nada’s Goran, they said in the marina when you told them how your holiday had been spoiled. But he’s hard to get, at this time of year he’s always at the Kornati Islands. Without any real hope you took the phone number.

  You’ve got no instructions, you’ve got no circuit diagram, you’ve got no idea, he noted and swam across your sheets to look at the autopilot which had gone crazy so that the yacht went its own way regardless of what the men up on deck typed on their screen. They should have steered manually, but how can you do that and drink beer at the same time? Fucking useless, he decided, electronics are always fucking useless, without a diagram there’s only logic and give me a screwdriver. After two hours the sheets were wet with his sweat but he had fixed it. Logic won the day. So where has that day gone? And what about now? You have no instructions for yourself, you have no circuit diagram, you’re no longer thinking logically.

  You gladly offered him a beer. He drank it without any particular enthusiasm for you all or for himself among you. He said he was heading for the Kornati, to sleep a bit in the shade, swim a bit, and maybe grill a fish, that’s all he was interested in. He played with the golden cigarette lighter over which your eyes first met and because of which you thought Leo, he’s a Leo. You should have fled then, but you couldn’t because after that look his tone of voice changed almost imperceptibly. When I was still going to maritime college small boats didn’t have these things, he told you, but two years ago I was sailing a boat for some rich guy where the system was even more complicated, but with logic you can sort everything out. When he was still a kid he had used logic to dismantle his moped and put it back together again. There were just two parts left which he didn’t know what to do with, but the moped went faster.

  Rich guy, boat, logic … You were all eyes and ears. Yes, you all know the name of the famous person Goran was working for, so he won’t tell you who it was, only that it was really hard-earned dough, not that it was physically demanding, but the atmosphere was terrible because to that sort you’re always, regardless of what they pay you, just a second-class citizen. It’s hard to take if you have even an ounce of self-esteem and Goran, after all he’s experienced, has a great deal of self-esteem. What’s more, he had been responsible for the entire crew. When one day on Malta he was instructed to tell them to clean the grooves in the white soles of the shoes of the boss’s guests, which the ordinary sailors polished every morning in any case, he simply packed his bag and left. He doesn’t give a damn about money, when he can’t take something anymore he’s off. He’s a free man and no one is going to take that freedom away.

  At that point you wanted only one thing, to lie with him on the Kornati Islands, just as freely. And now, at this moment? How much freedom do you still have? And you simply can’t tell anyone that the very same day you really did lay with him there. And after that there was no going back, not to the yacht, not to your old, nothing-special story, not to your life. When you lay with Goran you had to immediately take on the whole of him. He told you there and then that he would never do much more in his life than lie around like this, and now and then fix this or that fucked-up thing and get well fucking paid for it. He told you then, but it’s only these last few days that you’ve understood what he was actually telling you. That he had already seen all there was to see and that there was nothing more to see than what he was looking at now. He had volunteered to fight in the war and no rich faggot was going to tell him about life. He was in an outfit that hadn’t been mentioned in any military documents, there was nothing in his service record to show that he had fought in the war for his homeland. Officially, he had never had any contact with the Croatian army. They reported directly to the minister of the interior and the minister only passed on to his detachment a general order about what they should do and how. And they did. They did everything right. Every time. They thought that the homeland would be grateful, but the homeland had lost all their papers, if there had ever been any, and so it was that Goran and his comrades in arms preferred to look at the Kornati Islands and the calm sea, and so it was that little else interested them. A nonexistent unit, he said. When you asked him what they had done, he said everything. They’d done everything. Everything they believed they had to do. While other, ordinary folk had been refugees dependent on foreign aid, burning parquet flooring in the dark, Goran and his comrades from the detachment that didn’t exist had stayed in the most protected building around, with their own generator, their own fuel, good food, whisky, cigarettes, and everything else in abundance, as well as the most up-to-date weapons that had ever come to Croatia. Every comfort for those who did everything. Last year you still thought that Goran had piloted a Black Hawk in the Platoon that saved Private Ryan, you were in love, but now, girl, now you know what he meant by everything and what he meant by detachment, because you looked online, where it clearly states: a detachment is a special military unit or formation of indeterminate size made up of squads and companies set up to perform a specific task. In this case, everything. And now you somehow know that he didn’t charge around against a background of sound and light effects, he operated more in the dark, in silence. Since he cries out in his sleep it could be that above all else he crawled. But what did he have in his hands, then? They don’t make films about Goran’s everything. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, you know that it isn’t all over yet, that the year he spent on a fishing boat immediately after the war to erase everything and then live normally erased nothing, because it can never be erased. Is this what you wanted? To spend your life with a man who drags with him something that cannot be erased? Who has no illusions? Who has already seen everything?

  In front of the altar the priest awaits you. He’s learned some Slovenian words for the occasion, but who cares, you’re not marrying the priest, if you marry at all. You come back down to earth; now beneath your shoes there’s red coconut matting, the ceiling is high, that’s what cathedrals are for, to make people yearn for the heights, for the heavens. They are playing the wedding march and you’re still weighing your options. You stand on the right; on the benches behind you are your people and on the benches behind Goran, his, and they all know what’s going to happen, everyone does, apart from you. Near the ceiling a bird flies silently; the windows in the cupola, which seems to be sinking beneath the evening light, are open, and the bird too is seeking a way out. If you wrote that down somewhere no one would believe it, what a stale metaphor they would say, but the bird really is there and it really is seeking a way out. If it finds one, you think, if it finds one that will be a sign and you will say no, and try to salvage what can be salvaged. If it doesn’t, you’ll say yes and all the mothers in the church will cry, moved, and all the men outside the church will then shout she’s ours …

  The priest is saying something, Goran is swaying almost imperceptibly, people are clearing their throats, flashes are flashing. When the priest asks you, Nuša, do you take … you forget to look at the bird and you say …

  TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY DAVID LIMON

  [DENMARK]

  CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT

  Cami
lla and the Horse

  … and the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.

  SYLVIA PLATH

  [CAMILLA]

  First we go into an expensive Italian restaurant across from the strip club and drink a bottle of wine to kill time, it soon becomes clear that the waiter is attracted to my husband, who’s getting older but is still hot-blooded. The waiter’s getting older too, he’s been photographed with both Sophia Loren and Helmut Kohl in this restaurant, and that arouses my husband’s interest. By now it must be nine o’clock, and we cut across the intersection to the opposite corner. We go in. I start by asking whether it’s okay for me to be there even though I’m a woman. I do that to ingratiate myself and make contact. It’s perfectly okay, and we’re also the only guests. The girl behind the bar is from Romania and strong with short hair. My husband thinks I’m good at making contact and taking things easy. You have to be careful not to praise me too much, because it really gets me going, and then I can cross the line and become totally unstoppable. There are so many hookers I can’t even tell you how many; we’re the only guests and weren’t planning on buying sex, I tell the bartender this several times. That’s perfectly okay too, we can just drink, three drinks are included in the price of admission, I take the strongest one and down it fast. Up on stage the show begins, a mulatto girl makes the expected movements and gestures with and around a pole until she’s naked. I think about the circus and great fatigue, wearying routines, because I’d rather not say “like a tired circus animal.” As soon as she’s leaving the stage she gets self-conscious, she bows her head and presses her costume against her stomach.

  Meanwhile, at the bar: a woman has taken the stool beside me, another Romanian (from here on I’ll refer to her as my darling), I ask her if she’s familiar with Herta Müller, she asks for titles, I mention The Fox Was then Ahead of the Hunter, it’s not an easy title in German, not for me, with my German; her German isn’t so great either, she’s taking courses and claims she speaks German that’s 85% correct. I don’t know how to respond, “the modal auxiliaries, you know,” she says. Those I know. But then I realize that I’ve completely forgotten how articles and nouns are declined, and that nothing I’ve said has meant a thing. In effect I’ve spoken German that is 0% correct, so I switch to English. I’m sitting with my back to my husband, he’s very interested in hearing what we’re talking about, and once in a while I turn around and give him a summary. Then he nods and puts some additional questions. I ask my darling if she sends money home to her elderly parents, because you always read about that, but no, they didn’t help her, so why should she help them. “Is that a bit harsh?” my darling asks. It seems harsh to me. It seems that way even to my darling. Each time we slip my husband into the conversation, she treats him with great respect, he gets all the time he wants. This makes me jealous, I really want her full attention.