■ ■ ■
A helicopter was due to set out the next day for Cape Evans, so Robert told Anna he’d take her along to see Scott’s Hut, left behind from the Terra Nova Expedition. Until then Anna had only seen the hut from Shackleton’s Nimrod Expedition. During the flight, Robert told Anna that he’d studied veterinary medicine in Texas, but that when his marriage failed he’d wanted to get as far as possible from his original home, and so he wound up in Alaska. His only regret, he added, was that he so rarely saw his daughter, who by now was grown-up and living in California with her husband and two little kids. Unbelievable, he said, lost in thought, that I’ve got grandchildren, and you, he asked Anna, do you have a family, my last relative died a year ago, and the ease with which Anna pronounced that bleak, neutral word, relative, surprised even her. It seems everyone around here has a fragmented family, mused Robert, if they still have a family at all. Come on, take a look at the stables, and here, he said while clambering onto a knoll of ice, here I always get goose bumps at the thought that I’m standing where Mawson was standing in that picture. Stepping into the hut, Anna was surprised at how different it was from Shackleton’s, how much bigger and, on account of the many objects left behind and the sundry traces of life literally frozen in time, far ghostlier. The spacious kitchen was still stocked with myriad supplies, and then there was a science lab, not to mention Herbert Ponting’s darkroom, in which the photographer evidently slept as well. A stuffed penguin even stood atop a desk, and the entire hut was well endowed with shelves, recesses, boxes, and more, as if only waiting for someone to come along and put everything to use once again. Anna lingered in front of a wall mirror, one whose silvering was so deteriorated that the mirror reflected practically nothing, but this nothing wouldn’t let Anna go, for all at once she felt that it had something to do with what Gina had said the previous day, that she shouldn’t always try reading anything into things, but instead to see them as they are, and that’s what she was pondering when Robert now pointed to an out-of-the-way little section of wall, by a bed, on which one of the men had written the names of those who had already died. You’d never think this was here, said Robert, unless someone showed you. All at once it struck them that it was getting late, and that if they didn’t hurry they would miss the helicopter back, along with that evening’s presentation on base. Stepping out the door, Anna and Robert saw that they saw nothing. The sky had turned overcast while they’d been inside the hut, and the diffused light that filtered out from behind the thick clouds perfectly concealed the surface of the snow and the ice, rendering it impossible to gauge any distance whatsoever. The entire landscape had become an exquisite splotch of grayish white that swam about in the glimmering light. The horizon had disappeared. There was no up, there was no down. Knolls and inclines alike had vanished into thin air, and all surfaces of snow and ice seemed irretrievably lost in alternating tones of white, the foreground being a shade grayer, the background brighter. They stared goggle-eyed out into the Antarctic summer night and saw nothing, nothing but light and space. Somewhere off in the distance was smoldering Mount Erebus, and somewhere, the frozen, endless plain of the Ross Sea, but all Anna and Robert could see were so many sparkling crystals of ice blown about by the storm clouds. Whiteout, Robert announced, at which Anna nodded, for they’d drilled the word into her at training camp, the same as they’d drilled into her the things you had to do if this exceptional, terrifying natural phenomenon struck when you were out on the ice. Now, though, it had hit when they happened to be at Scott’s Hut, so they were not in any immediate danger. But they did have to wait until it stopped before they could head back to McMurdo Station. Come on, said Robert, let’s go in, what’s the sense of us freezing out here, but Anna just kept standing motionless by the door. She’d travelled here for this, for this moment alone; nothing that she’d seen and experienced up until then counted, neither the icebergs nor the people; neither Captain Scott nor any of the other legendary figures mattered one bit, not even the region’s fauna, and suddenly everything else, her pictures included, seemed an insignificant little sideshow. Without once taking her eyes off the swirling light, Anna unzippered her bag, pulled out the camera that she’d carried around untouched for days, popped off the lens cap, raised the machine to her eyes, and took the picture that was finally capable of conveying the serene and enveloping whiteness of the moment that had transpired in the hospital a year before, a moment when colors, smells, sounds, and space itself had disappeared, a moment in which they and everything else had dropped back into that singular, uncanny stratum of time, the time when there were only animals.
TRANSLATED FROM HUNGARIAN BY PAUL OLCHVÁRY
[SWITZERLAND: RHAETO-ROMANIC · GERMAN]
ARNO CAMENISCH
Sez Ner
The dairyman’s hanging from a paraglider, in the red firs below the hut on the alp at the foot of Sez Ner. You can hear him cursing from the hut. He has his back to the mountain, is facing the range across the valley where, shoulder to shoulder, peak after peak rises, Piz Tumpiv at the center, all 3,101 meters of it, that amazing presence it has, outdoing the other—snowless—peaks. He’ll come down when he’s ready, his farmhand says. Let him wriggle for another while, just. That’ll teach him not to clear the trees.
The cheese is swelling. During the night, the stone weights crash to the floor, wakening everyone. The swineherd and the cowherd carry the over-ripened cheeses through the clear night, across the square, through the cowshed, to behind the cowshed, and dump them in the slurry. Neither the dairyman nor his farmhand budges to help. They stay where they are in the doorway, their hands in their pockets.
The farmhand has eight fingers, five on his left hand, and three on his right. His right he keeps mostly in his pocket, or resting on his thigh beneath the table. When he lies in the grass outside the hut, next to the pigpen, fast asleep with his boots off, and socks off as well, the swineherd counts his toes. The farmhand sleeps in the afternoons because, by night, he’s out and about. He vanishes when everyone’s gone to bed, comes back at some point during the night. He takes the dogs with him, to stop them barking.
The swineherd has a bad conscience. A pig’s lying in the pen and won’t get up. Its cold snout, the swineherd knows, means the pig’s a goner, but he pokes the lump of ham with his steel-toed boots anyway. It could still get up, sure. Quel ei futsch, ti tgutg, the dairyman says. Just nineteen pigs now. Twenty, counting you, the swineherd thinks. The dairyman returns to the cowshed, his one-legged milking stool around his waist, and the swineherd takes the pigs back up to the pigsty, willing that stool to collapse. In the pigsty, he counts the pigs, makes it eighteen standing and one lying down. That one’s a goner, too. That’s how quick it can be, the swineherd thinks. Keep going at this rate, and there’ll be none left in the morning and I can take myself home. The evening sun’s already sinking behind the mountains, Piz Tumpiv dark yellow in the dusk, when the vet arrives, your man Tscharner with his beard, fat stomach, and fat son, who doesn’t acknowledge the swineherd, just the dairyman. They’ve eaten too much, the vet says to the dairyman, their insides have burst.
Clemens’s cow, the dark one, head-butts the fence-post, knocking it over. Clemens’s cow gets out, and his other five cows trot after her. The vet says cows are bright, much brighter than horses. With horses, it’s all about status, he says. They might look elegant, but, basically, they’re thick. Cows may well be more intelligent. Right now, though, the cowherd’s scouring the forest, hoping to find Clemens’s cows before the sun goes right down.
Later in the evening, the cowherd from the alp bordering with Stavonas comes by in the car. She’s just back from Glion, apparently, where she had her dog neutered. It all went smoothly, it seems, but the thing’s totally dazed, still. She opens the rear door of the red car—where the dog’s been allowed to lie, just this once. Whimpering and whining, it is. He doesn’t seem to want out, she says, and the dog lies where it is
, just. It’ll be fine, the farmhand says. Takes a bit of time, that’s all. The cowherd says to come with her, to help her carry the dog in, up at the alp. The farmhand does so, takes his own dogs too. They run along behind, there’s no space in the car. He whistles out the window to make them keep up. Make sure they don’t turn back.
In the morning, on the bench outside the hut, the dairyman’s out for the count with a half-empty bottle of schnapps in his hand, while the goat’s up on the divan, up in his room, admiring the view of Piz Tumpiv, maybe; peeing on the bed, for sure.
Every day, the pigs get out of their pen, down from the hut. They dig beneath the electric fence and head across the pastures, down to the trees where the dairyman was hanging. The swineherd doesn’t care, knows—come the evening—they’ll be back. The dairyman does care. Show them who’s boss, he says, thrusting the rod with the rings into the swineherd’s hand, and packing the farmhand off with him. In the pigsty, the farmhand takes the rod and the rings, and the swineherd picks a pig, grabs it by the ears, and jumps on its back, making it squeal even louder. He pulls back its ears and digs his knees in its ribs, to help the farmhand get the rod in its snout, and press. Once the ring is on, the pig bolts to the opposite corner, to hide behind the other pigs who lick the blood from its snout.
Tourists arrive on the dirt road, improved last spring, stop their beautiful cars at the fence outside the hut, and toot the horn. Seeing Cowherd and Swineherd sprawled on the grass on the slope above the hut, they toot again. They keep tooting until—finally—they give up, get out of their beautiful cars, open the gate themselves, and drive on. Twenty minutes later, they’re reversing back down as the road doesn’t go much further and doesn’t have a big enough turning place. They have to stop at the gate again, the gate they left open, but is now shut again, to reopen it. This time, the herdsmen, sprawling on the grass still, wave to them.
You hear him before you see him: the priest rounds the corner on his moped, sending dust flying everywhere. He’s wearing a helmet in the afternoon sun, and his cassock flutters in the wind he’s creating. Seeing this, the dogs bark and leap at the priest, send him spinning down the slope, nearly, and into the roses. The priest parks his moped beside the hut and is given a coffee before he asks them all to gather in front of the hut that looks onto the mountains; gives the dog jumping up and licking him a slap; then invites them to pray to God Almighty, Lord of all they see before them, for the summer they’ve not yet had. A wind comes up, and the herd moves down in front of the cowshed as the priest, now with a stole around his neck, hands out prayer books from among the cows and beasts. He announces which page it is, then reads it to them. The pigs have got out too, and come up to the priest and snatch at his cassock. The parishioners repeat whatever the priest says, like parrots. A good half hour it is before the final Amen, before everything’s been blessed that needed blessing, and, a wheel of cheese and five kilos of butter richer, the priest gets back on his moped, pushes his way through the waiting, already grumpy herd, and—in the last of the light—vanishes.
The black ram with the white patch on its head is bang in the middle of the cowshed when the cows come crashing in and break its legs. Both front legs end up in plaster. The black ram is anything but tame. Normally, he wouldn’t let you pet him. In plaster, he does: he can’t get away. One time before, when he was tied to the cowshed—his legs, at that point, were still in one piece—he snapped the rope in two when the swineherd tried to go up to him, and ran away. There’s no need to be afraid of the swineherd, the farmhand says.
The rooster isn’t afraid, it doesn’t run away, is one aggressive bastard, the farmhand says. When the farmhand gets too close, it jumps up at him. Your man’s steel-toed boots it takes, to shoo it away. The rooster, a handsome beast, guards its hens, covers them constantly. Any time, any place, anywhere.
Kneeling at his bed, the cowherd shows the swineherd the projectiles he found among the edelweiss and roses. The length of your lower arm, the projectiles are, all twisted and bent, some with, some without heads. The swineherd turns them all the way around, throws them in the air, and catches them. They end up back under the bed, with the cloth over them. On one occasion, when the dairyman—for once—goes into the pastures, he finds a projectile too. He orders the two herdsmen to put a fence up round it right away, a good distance away, then puts the cowherd on sentry duty, and drives down to the village in his Subaru Justy. Early that afternoon, a military convoy rounds the corner, three huge vehicles with specialists in them, wearing gloves and special uniforms. They’re careful not to touch the projectile, crawl up to it from different angles, have instruments they note down readings from. Finally, they dispose of the projectile, and walk, in step, back down the pasture to outside the hut again, the officer out in front. Not a word is spoken as they climb into the camouflage vehicles. And disappear, in a cloud of dust.
The dog’s jumping up, and licking away at the cowherd, the other dog, the older one, is trotting ahead, in front. The young dog jumps and sinks its teeth in the cows’ tails, gets a free ride until the cow gives it a kick, and the dog, with a whimper, lets go. Its tail between its legs, it gives the cows a wide berth on its way back to its master. They get on well, the young dog and the old gray one. They only ever fight over food.
The one with the limp doesn’t want to move, the one with the limp trots behind the others, stopping time and again. The cowherd takes his stick to her, beats her on the back till the stick breaks. The herd’s vanished, long since, into the trees.
Late in the evening, at the side of the hut, the dairyman’s at the wheel of his gray Subaru Justy, the bottle of plum brandy in his hand. His farmhand’s beside him, in the passenger seat. The cowherd and the swineherd and the dogs are behind him, in the back. The car’s the safest place, the dairyman says. Each time the lightning strikes, ruins the cowherd’s fences, or sets the firs at the edge of the forest alight, he winces. The rain sweeps across the alp, giving both it and the filthy Subaru a good clean.
TRANSLATED FROM RHAETO-ROMANIC AND GERMAN
BY DONAL MCLAUGHLIN
[PORTUGAL]
RUI ZINK
Tourist Destination
He arrived in the morning on the night flight. There were no problems at the airport. Or, rather, he was expecting more problems, but since he experienced none of these expected problems, there were no problems.
His visa was in order, his passport valid until Methuselah’s next birthday. There weren’t many people on the plane. Nowadays, the only people who landed there were either fools, suicides, soldiers of fortune, arms dealers, or else journalists without much in the way of brains but with a great desire for glory. Nevertheless, it took a while to cross the border. A passenger with the look of an experienced traveler, possibly a businessman, murmured: Damn bureaucrats.
And he was right. It was a known fact that the country was just a fragment, that it wasn’t even a country, only a zone, a zone of death, a savage, brutal hunting ground, so what were they up to, pretending to be great defenders of order? That was the impression given by the entrance to the frontier: a grandiloquent gateway, full of arabesques and curlicues, that opened onto nowhere, pretending not to know that the palace it served as entrance to had been wiped from the face of the earth. In a way, though, the frontier was an accurate forecast of what lay ahead. Farewell, outside world. Hello, hell.
Best European Fiction 2012 Page 10
