Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The music had stopped.

  On the radio, the clock chimed noon, and I knew that I was in for the saying of the day. Someone read out a few aphorisms, but in my confused state of mind, they escaped comprehension. They seemed to form dichotomies: the first sentence stated something, and the next one refuted it.

  What possible significance could they have? Thesis and antithesis.

  A sea of speech and music washed relentlessly over me. It all sounded quite absurd. World news, domestic news, weather forecasts, traffic alerts—all the life of the world outside the cottage had become distant, unreal.

  Had I really taken part in all that? What had been so important about it, I wondered, as I shivered in a cold pool of urine.

  Had the life I’d been leading been, after all, someone else’s?

  The life of an immature person who was ignorant of all the essentials?

  A shadow life directed by instructions delivered through radio broadcasts, magazines, letters?

  Fear crept inside me, chilling my guts: I was growing numb, indifferent to my fate. Perhaps this was the apathy that preceded death. Was that why I had, after so many years, dreamed of Ilmari again?

  I shifted my arm. It looked blue. Dead blood had started to spread from the elbow toward the wrist.

  Ilmari died suddenly in the middle of lunch, after his fifth spoonful of cabbage soup. The man was gone so fast that he left his last sentence unfinished. I could see the rest of it in his eyes, while I waited for the ambulance. Ilmari escaped from our midst in such a hurry that it took the boy a week after his death to begin to understand that Dad would never again come to tell him goodnight.

  Ilmari got lucky. Died without suffering.

  That’s what they kept on telling me over the years. I can’t remember how many stories of slow human decay they’ve told me over the years to comfort me.

  Necrotic tissue crawling with maggots, ventilators shorting out during blackouts, brain death, partial paralysis, paraplegia: endless stories of death by inches. All these they related to me in detail.

  After telling their stories, they naturally expected me to nod and agree with them, to say that I was indeed relieved that Ilmari had been spared all that—relieved that I had been given the opportunity to wipe the cabbage soup off his chest and stare into his unblinking eyes and contorted mouth.

  As for myself, a different fate had apparently been chosen for me.

  I would dry up faster than the bunch of tulips I had set in the vase.

  The tulips reminded me of the grave.

  There was an empty stretch of grass next to Ilmari that I had reserved for myself. I hadn’t quite brought myself to have my name engraved on the tombstone, though an acquaintance, a widow herself, had suggested I get it done right after Ilmari’s funeral.

  She was put out that I didn’t, as I recall. I suppose I should have immediately crumbled into dust to join my husband. She even had the nerve to ask me whether I’d already found myself a new man, if a spot next to the old one wasn’t good enough for me.

  I told her that Ilmari’s death hadn’t robbed me of all my passions, particularly for life.

  I just wanted to live for the boy, to raise him.

  For years I sold handicrafts on the side. I knitted mittens, socks, hats, and woolen slippers, and deposited the money in the boy’s bank account to accrue interest. I managed to accumulate several grand there, but the boy wouldn’t take the money when he went off to school. There’ll be time for that, he called out from the door. He even left a freshly baked loaf of bread on top of the coatrack in the foyer. He was a big man, ashamed to carry a sweet-smelling loaf in his bag.

  I squinted my eyes. I suppose they would find all the papers, when the time came.

  The will was in the bedroom, inside a drawer in the linen closet. The boy would inherit my savings, and the cottage along with its plot of land; the niece would get some memorabilia and the rose-patterned linen sheets I had made for her wedding. A wedding that never took place. A week before the wedding day, the girl found out that the groom already had two children and paid alimony for them from his small mason’s salary.

  Now there was a girl who lost her passion for life all in one go, and at the tender age of twenty at that. Dropped out of school, and settled down to become a dormouse for the rest of her life.

  My vision was starting to go.

  Anxiety weighed down on me, and compressed my lungs.

  My heart beat like a drum in my ears. I gasped for breath, tried to gulp in as much life as I could. I wanted to last until Saturday, to see the boy one last time, to look peacefully at him for a moment, eye to eye.

  I had to calm down, had to force myself to listen and stay conscious for as long as I could.

  A middle-aged nutritionist, a young vegan girl, and an Orthodox monk from the monastery of Valamo were discussing the Lent fast in serious tones. After all, according to tradition, the fast was supposed to be at its most severe on Good Friday.

  A time of quiet. Of avoiding travel. Of fasting. Asceticism. Abstaining from eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse.

  The pit of my stomach started to twitch, and then my diaphragm. My larynx couldn’t produce any words, merely a low gurgle that I realized was the sound of my own laughter. Urine trickled along my thighs in short, warm pulses.

  I was being truer to the Passiontide than the inmates of even the most austere monasteries.

  I had had no meat—not even a slice of pickled cucumber or a spoonful of sauerkraut.

  Just half a dried-up bun, though even for that I had been punished with a painfully dry, parched throat.

  No alcohol. What a joke—I would have given up my pension just to lick at the gall-wetted sponge that the soldiers had rubbed against Jesus’ torn lips. I would have gladly lapped at any liquid: gall, vomit, even my own urine had I been able to reach it.

  As for sexual intercourse . . . Who would even want to touch my half-paralyzed, stinking body?

  I was observing the Passiontide, oh how well indeed I was observing it: I was having a real Passion of my own.

  The urine stopped with my laughter.

  I felt like crying out to Christ and Satan at the same time, felt like cursing the well-off know-it-alls philosophizing above my head, for whom life seemed to be full of options, full of choice.

  My throat clenched shut, and then let loose a sob, releasing the stream.

  Warm, salty liquid. A soothing rain from behind my own eyes.

  I managed to lure a few tears into my mouth before they dropped to the ground: they tasted divine.

  My mother’s womb must have been full of tears when I floated there, safe in that warm sea, back toward which I was now starting to travel—sleeping, shivering, sleeping, shivering.

  I heard the vegan girl raise her voice.

  People should know the suffering of the caged fox, even if just for a moment. Know that cold, cramped space where the animal is forced to huddle until its death.

  I sobbed, and was startled by the sound that tore itself from my throat. It sounded like the whine of a beast struggling to escape its prison.

  The monk grew enthusiastic, and declared that the girl had just stated the meaning of Holy Week: how we should, through our own suffering, bear the pain of others.

  I turned the other cheek to the floor and let loose another whine: a guttural sound that came deep from the pit of my stomach, as from a cave.

  It was Sunday evening when they came.

  They broke the lock, and immediately noted that the temperature was well below fifty degrees in every room.

  They found my cold and unconscious body on the floor, but their first attempt to lift me fell through, because the youngest of the boys from the ambulance had to stop to vomit. He had noticed that the skin of my belly was peeling
off, adhering to the floorboards. It looked like a pallid, urine-soaked scrap of dough.

  Afterward, they all told me how clever I’d been, squeezing lotion into my mouth from the bottle of Lemon Juice & Glycerin that had fallen out of the cleaning closet.

  That repulsive-tasting lotion and the minuscule amount of moisture in it had kept me alive.

  But the tears, I stammered, but no one understood.

  I woke from my long dream on Monday morning, and found myself in a hospital ward in the health center.

  I whispered; that was all I was able to manage. The nurses couldn’t make out what I was saying, and had to ask me several times. Finally they got it: please shut off the PA, which was blaring out an Easter hymn.

  They soon had something to chatter about, as I told them, stiff-jawed, that the certainty of resurrection was all down to luck these days.

  The light almost blinded me—the brilliant green and yellow tore at my pupils.

  Ryegrass and daffodils.

  There was an Easter bouquet from the boy on the nightstand.

  Something had come up at work, and he’d been unable to make it. It wasn’t the first time.

  I stretched out my hand toward the flower arrangement. I closed my eyes.

  The ryegrass stubble tickled the tips of my fingers. It reminded me of a boy, fresh from the barbershop. A little boy who always got a close trim, an easy haircut for the summer break.

  TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY ARTTU AHAVA

  [UNITED KINGDOM: WALES]

  DUNCAN BUSH

  Bigamy

  There was something in the paper this morning about this geezer, this lorry-driver, who had two wives, two houses, two domestic set-ups, and two batches of kids—six in all. One lot lived in Banbury and the other lot in Bedford. He’d kept this up for fourteen years, husband and father to two families, without either one knowing about the other and without anybody else knowing or suspecting what was going on.

  Tony Pye started reading out the details for us.

  “Christ,” he said. “These bigamists. How do they manage it?”

  It was our mid-morning break and we were sitting in the shed. He was reading Sunday’s News of the World—someone must have brought in and it had been lying round the shed all week. Mike Buller usually brings in a Mirror or a Western Mail, and sometimes I buy an Independent, and they get passed around from hand to hand during our breaks over the day: eleven o’clock tea, lunch, and the cuppa we brew up in the afternoon in this cold weather, if we’re working outside. But if nobody brings in a paper or today’s is being read by somebody, and there isn’t much talk going round, that old News of the World tends to get picked up. If only for another eyeful of that girl with big knockers and little knickers, giving you that panting look they have. Mouth open, eyes half-closed. As if you’re just slipping it in.

  Anyway, he was reading this piece about this geezer.

  “See this?” he said. “About this bloke? Been running two wives? In two different places? Six kids? They reckon it had been going on for fourteen years. How the fuck do you keep two women fooled for fourteen years? I can’t fool the one five fucking minutes.”

  He was sitting on the bench with his muddy wellingtons planted apart and his elbows planted on his knees and the paper open wide between his hands. He’s a great man with a shovel, but there’s something laborious about Tony Pye with a newspaper. You never see him double the pages back then fold them in half, to make it more manageable. Let alone fold them into a narrow strip of print like people standing in rush-hour trains. He holds it open like he’s keeping it as flat as possible. Brings his hands together when he wants to turn a page. It doesn’t even look as if he’s reading it. More staring at it, furious blue eyes, like he’s actually checking the layout and it’s wrong.

  But now obviously, on the fifth or sixth or dozenth time he’d picked this paper up, this one item had struck him.

  “Six kids!” he said. “All his, it says. Four with one wife, two with the other. The oldest fifteen.”

  He looked up from the paper at us, one after the other.

  “How the fuck do you manage to keep two households and six kids going?” he said. “On a lorry-driver’s money?”

  “Lorry-drivers earn bloody good dosh, these days,” Mike Buller said. “Of course, you got to put the hours in.”

  He opened a corner of his sliced-bread sandwich, looked at the stained inside.

  “Look at that,” he said. “The slag. Call that a corned beef sandwich? More bloody Branston than corned beef.”

  He folded the sandwich into his mouth, chewed it, swallowed it in one.

  Then he started talking about lorry-driving, how it was a job wouldn’t suit him, stuck in a cab all day with all the stress of driving, because driving wasn’t a pleasure, not with the traffic on the roads and motorways these days, he hated driving on motorways, especially in the rain, the other day he’d had to go up to Monmouth and he’d got on the M4 and it had started pissing it down, and all these big lorries, fucking juggernauts, throwing up all this spray, he couldn’t get the wipers working fast enough see the fucking road ahead.

  Tony Pye was still thinking about the bigamist. Looking at the story, anyway. Placid, but points of impatience stirring in his eyes. Waiting for Mike Buller to stop fucking talking. Which eventually he did.

  Still, Tony said, picking it up again. Driving a lorry was the kind of job where you could get away with it. Having two women. In two different towns. Two households, even. Two gangs of kids. Because the fact was, as a lorry-driver you were always away from home. Being away from home was your fucking job. Simple as that. When you weren’t with either one of the families, why would it occur to them you might be with the other? They’d think you were on the road. You could just say you had a trip to Spain coming up. Or Portugal. Or a run up to Dumfries. Whereas in fact you could be with your other family, and telling them you had the weekend off.

  Mike Buller said he wouldn’t mind having two women in two different towns. Or come to that, a dozen in a dozen. All about eighteen or twenty, like. But if you were married to them, like this guy in the paper, if you’d set up house and home with them, if you were the, like, breadwinner, you’d have to work every hour God sent to keep them households going. Just to get the rent paid and keep your kids fed and clothed and with shoes to go to school in. His kids were terrible on shoes.

  “Nah,” he said, “shagging two women sounds all very well. But you’d be too buggered from working overtime to manage it.”

  Tony Pye said he wasn’t thinking about the shagging. What he was thinking about was, you know: say you were this lorry-driver. Wouldn’t you get mixed up sometimes?

  Mike Buller said, “What do you mean, mixed up?”

  “Well,” Tony Pye said, “what if you forget which house you’re in, or which of your wives you’re with? What if you call them by the wrong name? What if you get the kids mixed up? What if you start talking in your sleep?”

  Mike Buller looked flabbergasted. “Why would you start talking in your sleep?”

  “Well, you might,” Tony Pye said. “And you’d never know you were doing it. Not if you’re asleep. It’s like snoring. You don’t know whether you snore or not. Somebody’s got to tell you.”

  But Mike Buller still wanted to know why having two wives and two families would make you more likely to talk in your sleep.

  “I’m not saying it’s more likely,” Tony said, turning his eyes up as if to say, I’m talking to an idiot here. “Just that you might. You might call something out.”

  “Like what?”

  “You might call out your wife’s name. Only it’s the wrong wife. It’s the other one.”

  Mike Buller went dramatic, electrified like he’d been suddenly persuaded. Instant conversion.

  “Hey, it mi
ght make you walk in your sleep too. You know, you get up in the middle of the night in your pyjamas”—he shut his eyes and held his arms out straight in front of him. “And you go downstairs. And open the front door”—he made out he was pulling a doorknob with one outstretched hand. “And get in the lorry and start it up”—eyes closed, lightly closed fists jiggling a steering wheel. “And drive it all the way to Bedford. Or fucking Banbury of course. Depending, you know, where you was to start with.”

  He laughed.

  “You could end up driving in your sleep and all,” he said. “You dull fucker,” he said to Tony. “Why should shagging two different women make you talk in your sleep?”

  Tony Pye ignored him. He looked at the yard through the bright doorway, thinking it all out, all the details and permutations.

  “You’d have to have two sets of clothes for a kickoff,” he said. “Two sets of shirts, vests, socks, underpants. One in each place. Two lots of shoes. What if you wore the wrong clothes? Turned up in a shirt or jacket your wife had never seen you in before?”

  Mike Buller shrugged this off.

  “You’d tell her it was new, you twat. You’d tell her you’d just bought it.”

  “But what if she could see it wasn’t new? What if it was an old jacket you always kept in the other place, and you could see the wear it’d had? What if it was an old pair of shoes she’d never seen before, all cracked and scuffed and the heels worn down?”

  Mike Buller shook his head, as if it wasn’t even worth his while to answer this.

  “You just think about it,” Tony Pye said. “My old lady knows more about the state of my bloody clothes than I do. She could probably tell you how many pairs of clean socks I got in my drawer. If a bloody sock goes missing in the wash, she notices. God knows what she’d say if a new one turned up. And what if one of these wives found something in your pocket? Like an electricity bill for the other address? How could you keep all them bills and paperwork from getting mixed up? I can’t keep up with one lot of fucking bills, let alone two.”