Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  The investment consultant told the woman with the stocks a terrible story about a young woman who had been really depressed because she couldn’t have children. And that this woman had then taken poison, and as she was dying had said that she had a perfect right to die.

  The investment consultant said that the woman with the stocks shouldn’t act as rashly as that young woman had.

  The European stock markets had once again closed weak. The US stock market was spreading its losses out, dragging down the European markets with it.

  Shortly after she had checked on the progress of her stocks again for the first time in twenty years, the woman with the stocks received, as if by coincidence, a letter from the cemetery superintendence asking if she wanted to turn over her mother’s grave for someone else’s use, as is customary in much of Europe.

  After twenty years, as stipulated in the cemetery regulations, the deceased’s survivors had to decide what should be done with the grave because at that time the official period of rest for graves expired. Turning over the grave at this pre-appointed time would cost nothing.

  The gravestone would be held for pickup for one year, after which time it would be destroyed. Otherwise a yearly payment of 500 CHF was required for grave maintenance.

  The woman with the stocks attempted to discuss the matter with her brother. But he didn’t care either way.

  The woman with the stocks ultimately signed the letter, confirming turnover of the grave, because she was afraid she would no longer be able to make the yearly payment.

  The woman with the stocks felt like a terrible daughter for agreeing to the turnover of her mother’s grave for financial reasons.

  The mother had been fully aware back then that she would die soon. While on a walk, she had seen the perfect gravestone and had shown it to her daughter.

  It was a serpentine stone block, smoothed by water over a long period of time.

  The mother of the woman with the stocks wanted a stone that would last for a long time.

  The woman remembered that it had been very difficult to transport the stone.

  From the streambed to the stonecutter to the cemetery. In silence, all her mother’s brothers had helped.

  III

  A magpie regularly flew by the woman with the stocks’s window. When the woman with the stocks stood near enough to the window, the magpie would land on the windowsill, as if to look at the woman with the stocks.

  The woman with the stocks wanted to give the magpie a name and so called it Pia.

  The woman had rarely before racked her brain over whether she had enough money or not.

  Now she would think for hours about nothing but money. She followed the development of her stocks’ market value, which had not interested her for twenty years, and it was as if the woman with the stocks’s life now only developed in step with this value.

  The woman with the stocks read the numbers and didn’t know where the missing money had gone, but she could not help thinking that it had to be somewhere.

  The woman with the stocks felt personally responsible for the decline in her stocks’ value, even though she knew that she had had nothing to do with it. Her fear that she had no future grew.

  The woman with the stocks dreamed of her mother more and more.

  She sat with her again in a restaurant. She heard a lonely violin playing a funeral dirge somewhere in the restaurant.

  Suddenly there were a lot of popping sounds, and shortly thereafter a person in a suit lay stretched out on the floor. On a screen hanging above the counter a video was playing in which a grasshopper was sucking the innards out of another insect.

  The woman with the stocks continued eating and watched what was happening on the screen, spellbound.

  The mother of the woman with the stocks likewise continued eating but only looked at her plate and admonished the woman with the stocks to pay attention to her food, saying she shouldn’t always shovel everything into her mouth so greedily.

  American currency and fiscal policy led to a continuously plummeting dollar, which put even more pressure on European exporters.

  IV

  The woman with the stocks’s mother had always said that the stocks were meant for emergencies.

  Those were the mother’s words: If the woman with the stocks or her brother ever had an emergency, then they could sell the stocks and would be taken care of.

  The brother, back when the stocks were still up, had bought a large condo for himself with his share.

  It had not really been an emergency. Now he had an apartment and a girlfriend, whom he had met through the Internet.

  The woman with the stocks’s brother sat with his girlfriend from morning until night on a pull-out couch. The woman with the stocks often thought how she had done everything wrong, compared to her brother.

  The woman with the stocks thought for hours about what her mother had wanted to say with these stocks. Did the stocks stand for the maternal hearth and the feeling of security it brought? Or were the stocks a promise of warmth?

  The woman with the stocks visited the investment consultant again, who attempted to calm her down. The depreciation of the stocks’ value did not mean that the woman with the stocks had nothing in the bank.

  It just wouldn’t be advisable to sell the stocks because then she would realize her losses.

  She should just have a little patience, and everything would get better soon.

  The woman with the stocks told the investment consultant that she couldn’t calm down, that she needed consolation for her losses, that he should console her, that he should give her a hug, and that in the future she expected him to hug her regularly and warm and console her.

  The banks in the Euro Zone had to enter losses of more than 283 billion euros in their books.

  It became clear that European banks in Asia and Eastern Europe were more heavily involved than had previously been supposed.

  V

  The woman with the stocks went to the main entrance of the exchange. People were streaming out of the doors. On the steps a few schoolchildren were sitting and eating. The woman climbed up the stairs. She passed through the doors and stopped under the display board. She was looking for stocks followed by a red arrow pointing down.

  The woman wanted to hear the sounds of the falling values. She wanted to hear the sound of the financial system crashing.

  As she left the exchange, she patted the outside of the building and wished it good luck.

  At home the woman with the stocks watched the magpie intently as it took a little walk along the windowsill, strutting around as if on an exclusive boardwalk among big shots.

  Then all of a sudden the magpie said, “Hello there!”

  The woman with the stocks didn’t know where the magpie had learned to make this noise.

  All she knew was that it had said, “Hello there.” The woman with the stocks looked at the magpie for a long time and then asked in return: “Where are you building your nest? And would you happen to have some room there for when I have to leave my apartment because I can’t afford it anymore?”

  “I’ll show you how to build a nest, so you can build one for yourself if you need to,” the magpie answered.

  Then it told the woman that bulky, black limousines had often been driving by the central bank of late, and that men wearing black would get out, go into the bank, and come out with big, heavy briefcases.

  The traffic of big, heavy limousines had been picking up, the magpie said. And she speculated that the men were carrying material out of the central bank to build nests for themselves elsewhere.

  VI

  The woman with the stocks ate warm oatmeal every morning.

  The magpie now came regularly for dessert. The woman with the stocks and the magpie would then sit in bed, stre
tch their legs out, and eye their potbellies.

  The magpie said that its birthday was coming up. The woman promised to decorate the windowsill with freshly cut banana slices and paper strips for the occasion. And she promised to write the magpie a poem.

  The woman no longer believed in a stock market recovery at all. She had come to realize that her investment consultant was a completely average person who wanted nothing more for himself than for the stock values to recover by New Year’s or the beginning of spring.

  It had become clear to her that, for this reason, the investment consultant would do anything to make it look as if the stocks had really improved.

  VII

  The woman with the stocks dreamed about her childhood home, about her mother and her father.

  The woman with the stocks had furtively taken a drag on a joint in the dream.

  When her father popped up, he only said, “I won’t have you smoking that stuff under my roof!”

  That was all. The woman with the stocks had been terribly ashamed when her father caught her smoking pot and woke up.

  The woman with the stocks finally saw that, if you didn’t take any risks, soon you didn’t have any to avoid, because you were no longer alive.

  The woman with the stocks wanted to live and forget about her worries over nothing. She wanted to give a witty reply to the whole system and ask: If money was everything, then what was nothing?

  The investment consultant began giving the woman presents every time she visited his office. Hungarian salami, for example, and ring-shaped apple chips too. The woman understood he had a guilty conscience. After all, he had her whole fortune on his conscience, so why not let him worry himself a little on her behalf?

  The investment consultant repeated that the prognosis for the coming year was exceedingly positive. Everything would be on the rise, and soon enough the woman with the stocks would be able to buy a nice condo like her brother.

  The woman laughed aloud: “‘A nice condo,’ ‘a nice condo.’ With what my stocks are still worth, best case scenario I could buy a hole in the ground. A hole in Afghanistan, got it?”

  Snow lay on the street. Many banks had fences staked off in front of them, and there were many police officers standing between the fences and the banks.

  The woman with the stocks saw cameras and reporters. On a banner she read: A TURKEY’S LIFE IS PRETTY NICE, AT LEAST UP UNTIL THE END.

  On a corner a demonstrator was demonstrating ways to set expensive cars on fire.

  Other demonstrators had brought their own gallows and were attempting to hang a banker in effigy.

  The rope they had tied around the effigy’s neck passed through a ring on one end of the gallows, ran under the crossbeam through a second ring, and then down to the foot of the gallows where a barrel could be hung as a counterweight.

  The activists were throwing coins and worthless stock certificates into the barrel.

  This devalued junk pulled the effigy up high into the air. Various bank logos had been pasted on the side of the barrel.

  VIII

  The woman with the stocks wanted to take the blame for everything. She wanted the money to have disappeared because she had acted like an idiot.

  The woman with the stocks wished the losses she had suffered could be traced back to something she understood.

  If she had laid all the money on a table in front of an open window and then been surprised when a strong gust of wind swept everything away, the woman with the stocks would have understood that.

  The magpie told the woman with the stocks that the men dressed in black didn’t appear at the central bank anymore, and the big, heavy limousines had likewise disappeared without a trace. Now there was a giant peacock standing in front of the main entrance, with a bald head and deep, dark bags under its eyes.

  The magpie also said she thought the bank had been cleaned out and the men with the suitcases didn’t come anymore because they had gathered enough material for their nests.

  The woman told the magpie that she’d found a flier in the park: We’re looking for our dog, Pavel. Our child’s lost his favorite pet.

  Next to the text were photos of Pavel in various poses. Sleeping in the car, lying on the kid’s bed, a close-up, lying on the living room floor. It was pretty bad if even dogs were being stolen nowadays.

  The woman with the stocks often wanted to gorge herself, and always gave in to this desire. With devastating speed she devoured everything in her path.

  The emptier her stomach was, the worse her mood. The woman with the stocks was depressed.

  She wanted to scream out loud. Instead she stuffed herself with vegetables and mustard. Everything caused the woman with the stocks pain. She felt ugly and poor and grubby.

  The woman with the stocks could no longer find her equilibrium. She often went to the refrigerator and took a strawberry from its container. There was nothing nicer than strawberries, ripe and freed from the earth.

  The woman with the stocks crammed a whole container of strawberries in her mouth one by one. The woman with the stocks hated herself for it. The woman with the stocks cried a lot and spent a lot of time lying in bed, and as if that weren’t enough, none of her pants fit her anymore.

  Politicians forced the central bank to make way too much money available to speculators and borrowers. It should have been the central bank’s job to close these help-yourself money stores, instead of continuing to support such madness.

  The central bank poured even more rum in the punch and turned the music up even louder, instead of recommending a little thought and reflection.

  The central bank sang the loudest:

  Pedal to the metal, pedal to the metal, pedal to the metal!

  IX

  The woman with the stocks sat at the kitchen table and attempted to concentrate on the improvement of her stocks. The name of the game: wait and see gains again.

  There was no alternative. She tried to focus on this vision and used clear tape to stick account statements to one another. She taped a lot of account statements to one another until a sort of rug formed. The woman with the stocks took this rug and attempted to lay it on the ground and walk over it.

  She sat at the table and painted the account statements.

  She painted all positive trends red. On the trend lines she painted sitting figures.

  These figures all looked like they were made of heavy potato sacks.

  She painted smiles on their faces.

  The figures only ever sat on the upward-pointing segments.

  On the downward-pointing segments the woman with the stocks painted tufts of grass.

  She wanted to take one of these drawings to the investment consultant and tell him he was a small-time crook and had been on antidepressants too long and that really he hadn’t been able to do his job for a long time.

  She wanted to ask him if he’d had to pull the noose from around his first client’s neck? Had one of his clients already thrown herself in front of a train?

  X

  The magpie had chicks.

  The woman with the stocks had already visited the magpie’s nest a few times and had even watched the magpie’s chicks for her a few times.

  The woman with the stocks wanted to move. She wanted to invite all her friends to dinner one last time and tell them she’d begun building her nest.

  The woman with the stocks sat in the local train and thought about how someone should shake all the passengers and tell them they ought to wake up and take to the streets.

  This crisis isn’t going to pass, the woman with the stocks wanted to scream to the train.

  The woman didn’t say anything, however. Instead, she simply pulled on the emergency brake. The train stopped abruptly. People fell on top of each other. The woman with the stocks got out!<
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  TRANSLATED FROM GERMAN BY DUSTIN LOVETT

  work

  [SPAIN: CASTILIAN]

  SANTIAGO PAJARES

  Today

  There’s something strange about today. I can feel it in my toes as I shuffle my feet across the carpet. I can feel it in the alarm clock, which I let beep for more than half a minute before turning it off, believing that it’ll somehow turn itself off. I look around at my house, empty as always, and I tell myself that I’ve got to, just got to set aside some time to vacuum and dust. Dirt is collecting in the gaps between the tiles of the bathroom floor and the lettuce in the fridge has more brown leaves than green ones. I know that it’s all a disaster, if a minor one, but I think—as I did with the alarm clock—that if I just leave it alone, it’ll get resolved without my help somehow. I don’t know why I think that, but that’s what I think. There’s something strange about today.

  I have a tough time tying the knot on my tie and I have to do it over and over and over. My name is Jack, and I have six ties. I have six ties, three suits, and five hundred books. I don’t know what else you could want to know about me.

  Today it’s exactly one and a half years since Claudia left me. We talk every once in a while, and she’s already dropped the news, as if it were nothing, that she’s with someone else now. I’ve told her that I’m happy that she’s putting her life back together, even though that’s not true. She’s also asked me—as if it were nothing—if I was with someone, and I told her I was, but that we hadn’t been together long. Lies, lies, lies, but I know that hearing it makes her feel better, and that now she’ll stop thinking that she abandoned me, which she did. But I don’t blame her. Not today.

  I think I’ve been brushing my teeth for a few minutes, focusing my thoughts on Claudia and the carpet in the bedroom. The bristles of the toothbrush feel like strands of straw in my mouth, but I keep brushing. I keep going because that’s what I have to do. I keep going because that’s what I’ve always done. I’ve been alone for a year and a half.

  It’s not that I haven’t gotten laid in a year and a half, of course that’s not it. I’ve had sex with three women. I met all three in a bar—not in the same bar—and I asked all three if they wanted to get breakfast the next morning, but they all declined. They had to get to work. All three of them worked on Sunday.