Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  I rented an office in the center of town. I furnished it minimally but tastefully, I think you’ll agree. Posters of good old movies went up on the walls: The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, Chinatown with Jack Nicholson . . . The posters were to discreetly prompt clients to compare me with the best. A little pretentious, I admit, but it proved effective. A massive oaken desk dominated the room. Period furniture was to give clients the impression they were engaging a company with traditional standards—and people still believe in tradition, although tradition always betrays them if they don’t betray it first. The desk sported a black Mercedes typewriter: a real antique—pure extravagance. I wanted everyone who came in to know that we didn’t allow any newfangled gadgets like computers in the firm. I wanted clients to know that our methods were time-tested. A detective needs to seem timeless. I wanted people to think: wow, this a hard-boiled, old-school detective who can be a real tough guy where necessary—a Sam Spade type of character who’s seen a lot and knows the mean streets but isn’t afraid to jump back into the thick of things if circumstances require.

  As soon as I opened my agency, though, it seems all of Ulcinj decided to start killing, robbing, abducting, and raping. And adultery—it must be a dozen marriages that I’ve torn apart. I’ll always remember those jobs most fondly, given the rest of my blood-soaked career. I’d follow the adulterers to their hotel, make myself comfortable in my car, and knock back a swig or two of whiskey—just enough to give them time to undress and get down to business. A few photographs as evidence, and the matter is settled. My own experience in such matters is rather scant, I should say, or at least not as extensive as I’d have liked it to be, but one thing’s for certain—women cope with adultery much better. A woman sees her partner’s adultery as a betrayal: she’s angry and offended. But a man who’s just found out his wife is cheating on him sees it as a humiliation—irrefutable proof that he’s not man enough. When a woman finds out she’s been cheated on, her femininity is abruptly heightened—it’s as if she has a “femininity switch” that her husband inadvertently activates by having an affair. But a cheated man crumples like a used condom. Little in this world is as fragile as masculinity—I’ve learned that lesson well.

  Another thing that quickly became clear to me: whether I’m solving serious crimes like murder or crimes of the heart (as one romantically inclined and, to my joy, promiscuous lady client once described adultery), the most important thing is to understand what the client wants. The ones who hire me to find out if their partner is cheating on them thirst for evidence that their suspicions are justified. If a wife is cheating on her husband, she’s a sow; if she isn’t cheating on him, he’s a swine for suspecting her. Faced with this choice between a negative image of her and a negative image of himself, he always chooses the former. Each of us obviously has unlimited potential for swinishness—whether and in what form that potential comes out is just a minor technical detail. So I always make a point of presenting extensive evidence of adultery—a photomontage works wonders—irrespective of whether said adultery actually took place. If it didn’t, it still could have, so in a way I’m communicating a deeper truth. And after all, the client comes first. If the client is satisfied, my own satisfaction is assured.

  Things are more complicated with murder. To generalize a little, I’d say there are two kinds of murder-investigation clients: those who want to know who committed the murder, and those who want to know why. With the latter it’s easy: you have a chat with them. When they drop in to inquire how the investigation’s going, you invite them down to a local bar . . . People loosen up after a drink. Sooner or later they’ll give you a hint as to their suspicions, and then the case is as good as cracked. From then on you just confirm the story they themselves have come up with. Tell them you’re close to solving the case, but make them wait a little longer. For some reason people consider what they call arriving at the truth to be a thankless job. The truth is a hard road, several clients have said.

  But those who want to know who the murderer was are hard to please. They usually want to take revenge, so you can’t point a finger at the first passerby. I try to resolve the case but usually don’t succeed. In the end I cancel the contract and just ask them to cover my expenses.

  The way people think is to a detective’s advantage. Tell them any old story and they’ll exclaim: I knew it! Whatever tale you tell, even if it’s got as many holes as Swiss cheese, people will say: Yes, it’s logical! There’s evidence for everything—all you need is a story to back it up. By way of illustration, let’s take the World Cup football final. A penalty shoot-out will decide who gets to be world champion. The last shot is taken by the best player on the planet. Whether he scores or misses, people will say: I knew it! Because it’s logical that the best player will score when it’s hardest, just as it’s logical that the best player will miss in a decisive moment because, as we know, fate is often unkind.

  My point is that a detective’s work isn’t so much about finding out the truth as inventing a story that people will accept as the truth. It’s not about discovering the truth but about discovering what truth is for those people. Truth always appears as a fiction and takes the form of a story. I am a storyteller.

  Around that time, I recall, the first of the e-mails arrived that caused my grand illusion to collapse . . . At that time, too, I was caught in a long line of cars after leaving Inspector Jovanović with his beer and his inability to accept that the massacre he’d described to me did actually happen. An inability that fortunately didn’t impinge on his ability to accept bribes. The massacre at the Vukotićs’ will always be an “incident” for him—something that happened despite the fact that things like that don’t happen. Or always happen to someone else. We’re able to overlook the horror of our own lives, and we owe our strength to that blindness. It’s only lies that liberate us: one drop of the truth would be enough to destroy what remains of our life.

  It was every bit of 40 degrees centigrade, the wind had turned to a dry jugo.2 The fishermen had hauled their boats up onto the sand the night before. They’re people who sleep with radios to their ear. Ulcinj doesn’t have a marina, so an accurate weather forecast and quick legs are all that saves their boats from the waves determined to smash them on the rocks. Radio Dubrovnik got it right again yesterday: the sea did rise after midnight.

  It’s as if someone’s started a vacuum over the town. Everything under the sky is gasping for breath. I search for a whiff of fresh air in the park across from the pub. Then I go up to the bar. A whiskey with two ice cubes. All in vain: wherever I go I breathe in the heat. It’s as if the world’s turned into an oven that I’m leaning into, and it’s open right in front of my face. But isn’t it like that with every change: we decide on it not because of things, but despite them?

  All the local schizophrenics are out on the streets—drinking Coca Cola, ranting, smoking as they walk, and often changing speed and direction as if they don’t know where they’re going. Indistinguishable from tourists. The town is full of people whose diagnosis is unknown but whose condition obviously requires immediate hospitalization.

  A little later I’m driving through a horde of tourists. Like a herd of animals heading to a watering hole. That’s how they go down the steep Ulcinj streets to the beach, knocking over and trampling everything in their path. They walk right down the middle of the road. It’s wider than the sidewalk, so they can move faster, and speed is important because it allows them to occupy a spot on the beach closer to the water. They don’t move to the side when a car comes—experience has taught them that the driver won’t run them over. They don’t react to the honk of horns and don’t comprehend verbal abuse.

  I saw on television that farmers in America have jeeps with rubber grill guards. The driver just drives straight ahead and anything in the way gets pushed aside. The vehicle doesn’t injure the animals but directs the movement of the herd. Give a little gas, and then it’s
just straight ahead. Go West, eh? But America is far, far away. For someone who’s decided to go to the pine forest today and get nicely drunk amid the pinecones and the scent of resin, the mistral and the shade, the problem is not just the pedestrians, not just the tourists—his fellow citizens are enough of a calamity. The ones with cars are the worst: they have driver’s licenses, names, surnames, and even biographies. They have everything—except regard for other human beings.

  People can rein in their desires. They really expect little of life. Simple things count—like getting in the car and driving to where there’s lots of whiskey and ice. But however little we desire, we end up getting even less. I sit and wait in a line of cars hundreds of yards long. People are hot and edgy. They sound their horns, some curse and swear, others are calm because the priests have taught them to accept fate (another word for chaos). After one or two minutes that seem like one or two hours, the line gradually gets moving again like a giant snake. I know from experience that when there’s a traffic jam in Ulcinj it’s always because of some brain-dead neanderthal stopping and talking with another driver, or because he’s parked in the middle of the road so he can go into a bookmaker’s. We pass the culprit of today’s stoppage: a square-headed young guy with a look of vacant stupidity who’s stopped in front of the pita bakery and blocked the lane leading down to Mala Plaža. He ordered a pita from his car and waited for it to be made and brought to him. Then he didn’t have the right change, so he waited—meaning we waited, for the pita man to go and fetch change for a twenty-euro bill. All this was done without any hurry, with the greatest philosophical composure, paying no heed to the other people and cars, to the heat and the horns blaring . . . Like a cow in serene Zen meditation—only cows on the road manifest quite the same indifference toward the surrounding world, a tranquility and resolve to do the first thing that comes into their heads: usually to dump a load of dung right where they’re standing.

  A person’s degree of primitivism in an urban setting can be gauged by his indifference toward other people and their needs, by the firmness of his conviction that he’s alone in the world and has a right to do whatever he wants here and now, regardless of the misfortune it may cause other people. His place is nature. There he learned that to exist means to mistreat. He’s unburdened by the illusions of Homo urbanus—for him nature is not a delicate equilibrium, a sensitive and complex organism; nature has only mistreated him and his tribe through history, harassing them with droughts, storms, floods, and frosts; they’ve fled from nature and have brought nothing but nature with them—they are nature. A person’s degree of primitivism in an urban setting can be gauged, I maintain, by the disturbance he represents for other people. A primitive person is unable to exist in quiet discretion: he always creates noise, unsightliness, and stench. He does everything he can to be noticed—he constantly emits his existence. His being is a blow to the senses and an insult to the intelligence. He mistreats us with his very existence. When he celebrates, a considerate, tasteful person unfortunate enough to live next door to him is bound to suffer. What a primitive person enjoys inflicts pain on the civilized.

  I read in the paper about an Austrian in Vienna who shot his Bosnian neighbor. It turned out that the Bosnian had driven the Austrian out of his mind for years with the loud Balkan folk music that he listened to in his apartment every afternoon. The Austrian complained to the police several times, and they intervened in accordance with the law, but that didn’t prevent the Bosnian from continuing to mistreat the Austrian. When he realized that all legal possibilities of protecting his calm and privacy had been exhausted, the Austrian shot the Bosnian in the head and calmly turned himself in to the police.

  This story has stuck in my mind because it tells us that the law can’t protect us from the primitive, who’s nothing but a walking disaster. However brutal the law is, it cannot compare with the brutality of nature. When law is about revenge, as in the case of capital punishment, it’s closest to nature—and thus farthest from the law.

  That’s why it’s so unbearable here: primitivism is not some random excess but the very essence of local culture, which therefore isn’t a culture. If you’re not primitive here you’re a foreign body and you’ll be made to feel it every day. With a lot of effort, luck, and money you can construct a fortress and preserve your own order of things inside it—for a while. You can erect high walls, dig moats, and build drawbridges to shut off your world for a while. But they’ll find a way in: like in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” their nature will get through and wipe your little world off the face of the earth.

  Here people dump trash by the roadside and turn the landscape into a landfill. Their sheep and goats, which they need in order to survive in their suburbs, wander the asphalt and graze the parks, or what’s left of them. Their children imitate the cherubs in fancy fountains and pee in flowerbeds in front of the passersby. They shit on the beaches and in neglected recreation centers. Music is the form of art they like most because it doesn’t demand interpretation or reflection. Like the salt strewn on a vanquished ancient city they sow the world with noise—their repulsive music lasting late into the night, which they need in order to enjoy themselves. Walls and billboards are plastered with pictures of their big-titted women with frightening faces and grimaces that we can only assume are meant to suggest lust but which actually attest to nothing but stupidity and vacuousness. The males of the species thrust their ever-erect organs into that void, and from that nothingness their children are born to ensure the continuation of their world, nation, family, and culture—of their kind.

  There are times like that day, stuck amid all those people, every one of them a nerve-grating nuisance, when anger grips me so tightly that no insult I could ever think of and no salvo of sarcasm I could fire at their civilians—their women and children—could bring relief. Those are the times when anger grips me so tightly that I can’t move, as if the black monolith from 2001 was weighing down on my chest, times when anger is all that exists—when I’m anger itself. Then I think: death. What comes next has to be death. If there’s anything after and beyond anger, it can only be that. Those were my thoughts that day as I nestled into my car seat, gripped the steering wheel—and waited.

  It’s fascinating that something as dependable as death becomes so utterly unreliable if we dare to count on it for release—as a rule it arrives too late. A mitigating circumstance is that, because it takes its time in coming, we’re never truly disappointed. They say that Homo sapiens is an animal endowed with reason. I’d say that, despite his reason, he’s an animal punished with optimism. Because as soon as they remove the pistol from his forehead, lift their boot from his neck, and pull the blade from his belly he thinks: things will get better. But before he can even cross himself and pronounce faith, hope, and love a few times, he’ll be cast face-down in the mud again, and then death won’t seem so terrible and unfair.

  Nope, not this time either—everything’s as it was before, I said to myself, and noticed that the people around me were starting to get out of their cars. They raised their eyes to the sky, called out to one another, seized their heads in their hands, and spread out their arms in wonder. Then the first flake fell on the windscreen. I opened the window and peered out: as serene and dignified as a Hollywood White Christmas—snow fell on Ulcinj that June day.

  TRANSLATED FROM MONTENEGRIN BY WILL FIRTH

  [SWITZERLAND: GERMAN]

  MICHAEL STAUFFER

  The Woman with the Stocks

  I

  The woman with the stocks had a mother.

  This mother had thought she could make the woman with the stocks, who was still a little girl at the time, happy by buying her the stocks.

  The stocks were meant for later in the woman’s life. The investment consultant had assured the mother that the stocks would appreciate a great deal in value over the years without the mother having to concern herself too much wi
th them.

  The mother of the woman with the stocks and the woman with the stocks had always trusted the investment consultant and had never had any doubts about the growth of the stocks.

  The woman with the stocks left the stocks sitting in the bank for twenty years.

  The woman with the stocks had managed for years not to think about these stocks.

  Then one night the woman with the stocks had a dream:

  Sitting with her mother in a fast-food restaurant, she won €500,000 with the purchase of a pizza. At least that’s what it said on the bottom of the pizza box. Instead of being happy, the woman with the stocks looked again and again at the bottom of the pizza box, checking to see if the proof she had won was still there.

  Instead of thinking about how much of her winnings she could give away and to which of her friends, and how she might best celebrate her win, the woman with the stocks disbelievingly ran her hand again and again over the writing that guaranteed she had won and hoped this writing would never fade.

  When the woman with the stocks awoke from this dream, she was seized by the desire to interpret it.

  In connection with the interpretation of this dream, the woman with the stocks thought about checking on the progress of her stocks, which were still sitting in the bank.

  Thus began the woman with the stocks’s personal crisis.

  II

  The woman with the stocks’s investment consultant advised her to wait. She just had to wait! And she shouldn’t blame herself because everything was going badly now!