Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Peter the Deleter, she called him—because his mind always deleted whatever wasn’t actually present. He forgot everything, immediately. One day he arrived at the conservatory without his cello. Lost somewhere along the way, he said with a broad grin. They tramped all the way back to his room, five of them, but the cello wasn’t there. Then he remembered the sandwich he’d bought at the bakery on the corner. There they were, cello and sandwich.

  I have a fantastic memory, said Peter. Because, he said, and I quote a well-known philosopher, memory is the capacity to forget.

  With this same memory he forgot names, dates, and promises. He forgot where he had parked the car, forcing them to search half the city in the middle of the night. He sat waiting two hours early in the wrong restaurant for the wrong girl.

  Forgetting, he said, was a precondition for happiness.

  He forgot his wallet one day, left it on a bench in the park and never found it again. But even that was quickly forgotten, so!

  Esther, he said. You’d be better off forgetting me.

  As a consequence, zealous and obedient, she started right away, at night in bed, her quilt high over her ears, her knees pulled up and her ice-cold feet rolled in her long nightgown, to delete Peter. It didn’t differ much from desiring Peter, it was just that Peter could no longer be part of it. Deleting Peter was nothing more than an exercise in concentration, a technique like yoga or Zen, a question of rhythmic breathing and muscle relaxation. Alas, deleting Peter turned out to be more exhausting in the end than desiring him once had.

  After a while, forgetting becomes a matter of course, like old age. Esther sees a woman in the mirror, forty-five, a matter of course. There’s no technique necessary. But it is an exterior woman, with an adulthood that continues to be strange and unrecognizable inside.

  Some painters maintain that the lines on their own faces are also carved on their own hands, so that whoever begins to draw a face blind automatically draws a self-portrait, much to his or her surprise. The question is, how can the hand know from inside how the face should look from the outside? It’s already strange enough that a head should appear to know so many things, especially the things that come from the body, like someone dreaming about a lump in her belly, who feels no pain and knows nothing about any lump but afterward turns out to actually have a lump in her belly.

  The woman she sees is unquestionably an ugly woman, and that’s a shame. It’s a woman with short, wiry curls of an indeterminate color between drab brown and dark gray. She has a long, pointed nose and dark deep-set eyes with high eyebrows. Her lips are thin and a little too tightly pressed together over teeth that are too big, the cheeks pale and gaunt, the neck long and thin. But she paints herself as a woman who sees herself, and thus with that look in her eye, a look from elsewhere. For that reason alone she paints herself other than she is, because she becomes other when she looks at herself and paints herself. Something disappears.

  One of the men she’s drawing writes letters in which he says how beautiful he finds her. When he comes, they never say a word about the letters. The first time Esther wrote him back. She wrote: I’m sorry, some things are simply not possible, that’s how life is. But when he comes, it’s as if he never wrote those letters and certainly not her who wrote that reply. She draws him in three-quarter profile, with his eyes facing the door. He is a handsome man in every respect, raven-haired and dark-eyed, but when she draws him, he’s not a man anymore. There is no difference between a man and a plaster statue, a bowl of fruit or a sansevieria. It’s always the same pencil she holds in her hand, and what she feels is never more than the smooth surface of the paper.

  She reads his letters quickly, hurriedly, standing by the mailbox; she doesn’t even take the time to go inside. She reads them and rereads them, over and over, searching for what they contain; she can’t get enough of what they contain. She reads that she’s beautiful, that he is waiting for her, and that he cannot sleep. She hopes he will always write to her. But when he comes, he’s not the same and all she can do is draw him.

  She can only draw Peter too. Draw and delete.

  And Peter in love. Jumpy, difficult to draw, as if his contours wouldn’t stay still.

  Esther, he said, in that tone. I’ve met someone.

  Who is she? she asked. Do I know her?

  Yes, he said. Her name begins with E.

  And in that short second, the possibility that it would be like the movies, the veiled declaration of love, initially misunderstood, the doubt, the certainty that it had to be someone else, the impossibility of so much happiness.

  She knew precisely who it really was.

  I hope we can stay friends, he said.

  Yes, of course, said Esther, sheepishly.

  Friendship’s more important, no matter what, Peter would later say.

  Yes, of course, said Esther, self-assured.

  Peter’s sorrow was magnificent to draw. It gave him dark rings around his eyes that already looked like charcoal, and an ashen hue that was the same as that of the paper. To cap it all he had never sat so still, his restless hands motionless on his lap, heavy, as if it were impossible to lift them. Real robot hands, the kind you find in the sketchbooks for beginners, where they explain how to draw hands, beginning with a broad cube as a palm, to which you attach each finger in the form of three articulated cubes, the phalanges. The sadness penetrated into every fingertip, yet still it wasn’t such a terribly awful sadness, because Peter forgot quickly and Elisabeth was easy to forget, and he still had his friends, and his cello, which he left behind from time to time.

  I don’t understand it, he said. She said she loved me.

  Love passes, said Esther, intending, she presumed, to comfort him.

  And she thought: I must remember that, love passes; it might indeed comfort someone, especially if one is the one who loves, which also passes.

  But real love? Might as well say: life passes. But real life? Yes, real life also passes. And there is no other life than the life that passes. And it’s not even a question of: the longer it lasts the more real it is. Children who die a crib death have really lived, if for an instant; length of time is absolutely not the test.

  And then his shoulders shuddered all at once. With men that’s a sign that they’re crying. A crying man is impossible to draw; it’s even worse than a naked man.

  Esther stood up and went to wash the charcoal from her hands. She hoped that it would be over by then. With men it’s over quickly, it’s a moment of weakness.

  But not with him, not then. When she turned he was sitting there sobbing like a child. She went toward him and rested her cold, still damp hands on his neck. He threw his arms around her as if it was love, and it was indeed love, just not love for her.

  Later he said: I’m sorry.

  You can stay the night if you want, she said.

  You’re sweet, he said, but better not.

  At the door he kissed her again, something he had to do, then.

  This shouldn’t have happened, he added, while he kissed her.

  No, said Esther. Not like this.

  Not like anything, he said with his mouth on her neck.

  No, said Esther. Of course not.

  It happens every day, every second, more often than people die or are born: people are rejected. If it’s not clear what rejection is, it depends on what one wanted. Varanasi or Lourdes. People go to Lourdes from far and wide, the sick, crippled, the incurably handicapped, looking for a miracle, a cure, a new life. People go to Varanasi from every corner of the world, lepers, the lame, the incurably sick, looking for a redeeming death, liberation into the great nothingness, and they lie down in rows on the banks of the Ganges and feel rejected by eternity because it won’t let them in. What is rejection, anyway?

  The sketched body of a man at the door, that’s what he was. As lo
ng as he was sketched standing there, it was impossible to say whether he was coming or going. He came in. After standing at the door for a long time and hesitating, he finally came in. It was a man who had returned, you could see it immediately. Rather, it was the portrait of a man who stayed.

  No man had ever remained so still for her as this one, now, in the wicker armchair, under Gao Qipei’s tiger. He’s not stiff or tense, he’s completely relaxed, motionless as if asleep with his eyes open. He appears to be absent in his body. When the telephone rings he’s undisturbed and doesn’t even take the opportunity to scratch himself or adjust his position.

  It starts to rain, heavy, black droplets on the zinc roof of the atelier, and he doesn’t seem to notice. She would like to take a look inside his ear to see if anything’s vibrating there. And if his heart is beating, if he’s breathing all right. Conversations while listening to the rain, that’s like the title of a book written about Gao Qipei by a contemporary. Somewhere inside it says: “I heard that when he painted tigers he pressed his elbow in the ink in order to portray their crouched position prior to pouncing on their prey.”

  She doesn’t know him. She hasn’t read a single one of his books. She knew his name, of course, and his face from photos. And now she knows his ear, his neck, his nose, his chin. And words come from his mouth that probably existed first as thoughts in his head, and she knows them now too. But she doesn’t know him. He’s somewhere inside, if he’s there at all. She has the impression no one is there, as if she is sketching a sketch.

  Actually she already met him, very briefly, he probably won’t remember. That evening in the theater, each with a friend who knew the other, leaving them suddenly next to one another on the way out. It was after that particularly terrible play with a young actor playing Nero, and she asked him if he found it terrible too.

  He said it was all right.

  You’re not serious, she said.

  He smiled.

  I only half listen, he said, maybe that’s why.

  Are you joining us for a drink? he asked.

  No, she said.

  No is actually the most beautiful word. Esther repeats it as often as possible, out loud, in the dark, as lovers do with I love you. Je t’aime. Ich liebe dich. Te quiero. No, non, nein, njet. And then there’s that song, Je suis une poupée-hee-hee, qui dit non non non non non non.

  He has blue eyes, surprisingly blue for someone with dark hair. He says he was blond when he was a child. Next time he comes he brings a photo as proof, twelve years old, short pants, a sweet boyish smile, and, indeed, blond hair, although it’s not so clear in black and white. He didn’t wear glasses in those days.

  His eyes seem different without glasses, deeper, bluer, hazier, as if he had just been swimming underwater or peeling an onion. But his eyes are impenetrable, they only reflect. You can see in them what they themselves see and nothing more. And what they see is the doorknob. Still, he’s not really staring, he’s only looking, with a strange, penetrating, questioning gaze, at the doorknob.

  Blue is the deepest color. It is the color of the sea and the night as dawn approaches. It is a color that appears like velvet, like violets, and like desire. That song, Bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu.

  Not always, he says when she asks if he always wears silk shirts.

  He always wears the same shirt because he thinks it’s easier for her to draw.

  It makes no difference, she says. Shirts are all the same.

  People too, he says. Why bother painting them then?

  It’s not about people, Esther says, it’s about drawing as such.

  Actually, it makes absolutely no difference to her whatsoever, what she draws. It just gets a little monotonous if she draws the same thing all the time and it doesn’t help her technique. What’s nice about drawing different people is that you also get paid more than once. And that they all think their face is extremely exceptional, that it must almost be a privilege to be allowed to draw it.

  People are vain, says Esther.

  Especially writers, he says.

  But your face, says Esther, there’s something about it, something very special.

  Come on, he says, irritated, I’m actually very shallow.

  His cheeks are soft, a little pliable, with deep furrows running from the nose to the corners of his mouth. The nose is neutral, neither big nor small, neither a hawk nor a button, an ordinary nose, short and blunt. He wears a moustache and a beard, but cut very short, so that it looks more like a well-tended way of not shaving for a couple of days; not the rough stubble of the more nonchalant types. On his upper lip and chin the hair is dark, but on the lower jaw and the cheeks it’s grayer and even completely white here and there. He has four children, two boys and two girls; they came evenly, in turns: boy, girl, boy, girl. He and his wife had intended to stop at two, but then a third came along and his wife thought four would be better.

  Anna likes everything to be even, he says.

  A strange notion, says Esther.

  She also sees a lot of strange people, Anna, he says.

  And a writer, says Esther, lives for his work, of course.

  So you’d think, he says.

  For writing, says Esther, women, and drink.

  Women don’t interest me, he says.

  Then there’s only drink, Esther concludes.

  Moderately, he laughs. Everything in moderation.

  Do you think it exists? asked Peter.

  They were in a rowing boat in the middle of a lake, scorching sun and the incredible blue of a cloudless sky with a ripple-free reflection. It was summer, the summer of Elisabeth, when Peter suddenly appeared unable to forget and kept returning again and again to the same thing. He sat at the back of the boat with his knees hoisted up and his big hands with their broad wrists on the paddles. Set off against the blue, he looked like a prisoner condemned to forced labor. You could easily have imagined a ball and chain around his ankles, preventing him from running away, or here on the lake from jumping into the water and swimming to the bank. Although he could easily have let it drag him to the bottom, help him end his life, if he had wanted. Peter the galley slave, with his pale complexion and his crew-cut, flattop hair. Esther dangled her hand over the railing in the water and watched the ripples undulate, the irregularities vanish from the surface. Water is the most difficult thing to draw; it’s like light turned hard, almost a mirror.

  No, she said.

  TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY BRIAN DOYLE

  [CROATIA]

  MAJA HRGOVIĆ

  Zlatka

  My head was hanging over the hair-washing basin like a drooping pistil. With her soft, sensually slow circular movements Zlatka made her way through the wet mass of my mane all the way to the roots. Pleasure spread down my neck in the form of goose bumps; I closed my eyes. Naturally, the tips of her fingers were seductively certain of their work.

  Later, she sat me in front of a large mirror. In it I caught sight of well-thought-through scissor snips munching at the cracked tips of my hair, and two crinkles incised into the corners of Zlatka’s mouth as she said, “I’ll get that mane of yours in order.”

  ■ ■ ■

  I lived near the train station in a neighborhood built many decades ago for the families of railroad workers and machinists. Like tombstones over grave mounds, hardened chimneys rose from parallel rows of elongated one-story buildings. Decaying, hideous buildings made of concrete, separated by narrow tracks of municipal ground and an occasional wild chestnut, shivering before the sudden passage of express trains from Budapest and Venice.

  My apartment blended in perfectly with the picturesque sorrow of the neighborhood; it grew out of it like a twig from a gnarled, old mulberry tree. I had two rooms at my disposal, but one smelled of damp and worms so badly that I gave up on it. I slept, read, and at
e in the other, larger room, in which I was—perhaps because of a red futon, the only new piece of furniture in the apartment—less often overcome by the feeling that someone had recently died there. The wardrobe looked like a vertically placed coffin into which someone very clever had installed shelves. A large square window opened upon yet another horrible one-story building and just barely let in enough light to give me a sense of what I was missing.

  The cold crept in through the worm-eaten window frame, and as I exhaled it made the air from my nose disperse in light little clouds. The space seemed impossible to warm up. I sat next to the radiator, wrapped in a blanket.

  Although I lived alone, I could feel the presence of others: every word of the neighbors’ arguments reached me through the porous walls, and in the evening when they made up and fucked, I could tell who came first by their muffled or piercing screams.

  ■ ■ ■

  Through the poorly ventilated underpass, gleaming with neon signs and small shop windows, working people and students hurried downtown, gushing, unstoppable, like viruses. At the station, by the entrance to the underpass, the rattling buses that had brought them here from the suburbs gathered their strength for another ride. Homeless people with red noses dragged around with their plastic bottles and hauled their heavy stench behind them. Loudspeakers whined advertisements for contests, perfumes, and meat product sales in the supermarket on the underground level.

  That winter, life spun around in circles of drunkenness, hangover, and sleep. Despite the no-crossing sign, I crossed the railroad next to the switchman’s box. I tugged up the legs of my pants so as not to get them dirty with black grease that covered the rails—and jumped across looking left and right. I stayed at the Railroader’s until closing. When I stumbled home drunk, I paid less attention to the grime on the rails: after a few weeks in the new neighborhood, the legs of all of my pants were soiled with that black goo, which wouldn’t come off in washing.