Best European Fiction 2012

by Aleksandar Hemon

  So, every day I walk to the bus stop and see the same people, and never say anything to them, even though we see each other five days a week. I get on the bus and then, before I sit down, look around for elderly or pregnant women. I like giving them my seat. It gives me a good feeling in the pit of my stomach, which usually lasts me until I arrive at the office and see one of my colleagues. I say hello to them, and they say hello to me as well, and I like it, but not as much as I like offering someone my seat on the bus.

  Sometimes there’s a woman on the bus who glances over at me. She raises her eyes slightly—hidden behind small, thick-rimmed glasses—over the top of her book. She has brown, vivacious eyes. I know this because I’ve stared at her eyes as they swiftly scan the lines on a page. I’ve also glanced back at her a few times, while she was looking at me, but neither of us has ever done anything about it. We never do anything.

  Since before Claudia left me, well before, I’ve been taking paroxetine and halazepam, as advised by my doctor. Maybe since I was twenty-five, if I’m remembering right. Ten years on antidepressants is a great burden for someone like me, as I imagine it would be for anyone. I don’t believe in antidepressants anymore. I think the doctor prescribed them for me because he didn’t know what was wrong with me, because he didn’t know who I was. I can’t blame him. Ten years later I’m still in the process of figuring it out myself. Maybe on the day I figure it out, I’ll go crazy. Maybe I won’t do anything at all. At any rate, I never do anything.

  I work for a technology company, a midsize company that’s been acquired by a large corporation, so that even though I still work in the same office, and the majority of my colleagues are still around, our logo is different now. They gave me a transparent plastic jewel case containing some small business cards with my name embossed on them and the logo of the new company to the side. I looked at them for a few minutes and asked myself if those cards were me, if that was the answer to my question. I had to run to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and put my head between my legs and try to control my breathing until the cold sweats stopped. When I returned to my office I put the business cards in a drawer and I haven’t looked at them since. It’s not a big deal, of course; after all, I’m never going to go anywhere. Though that’s not quite right, now that I think about it. Before I put them in the drawer, I slipped one in an envelope and sent it to Claudia. I never received an answer, but that’s what usually happens to me when I don’t ask any questions.

  For eight hours a day, nine if I count the hour we have for lunch, I work side by side with my colleagues in the department. We talk about the problems we have to solve in order to finish a project, and the obstacles we face, imposed by the company or by our own bosses. Sometimes we get it done, sometimes we don’t, but we always try. I like to eat something light at lunch, while my colleagues, the closest thing I have to friends, chew their enormous fillets and baked potatoes. I stuff pieces of lettuce and tomato in my mouth while I pretend to listen to them and hum Brahms symphonies under my breath. So far, nobody has noticed. Sometimes they give me a friendly punch in the shoulder and tell me that I don’t talk much, but I just smile and that seems to be enough for them.

  Some days, whenever we don’t get out of work too late, or sometimes precisely because we get out late, we go to a nearby bar and play darts. I like darts. I like how they sound when they hit the board and the applause that follows. I’ve got good aim, the best out of all my colleagues. Everyone wants to be on my team. There’s always someone who brings me a beer and then knocks the neck of their bottle against mine whenever I make a good throw. It’s not that I’m a beer-lover, but it feels odd to drink a soda when everyone else is drinking alcohol. I don’t always drink, though; sometimes I just let my beer get lukewarm on the tabletop, next to the small army of empties. Nobody notices. If they did, they would certainly drink it. And I wouldn’t tell them it was my beer. I never say anything in those types of situations. They usually resolve themselves. It’s a pity that the same isn’t true for my bathroom, which needs a good cleaning.

  We see a lot of women on these occasions when we all go out. Just like us, they go out to have a few beers after they’re done with their day’s work. My colleagues pounce on some of them, the most attractive or the drunkest, and try to strike up a conversation. At first they’re usually laughing and the women aren’t, but after a few drinks the situation typically balances out. There have been a few times when I’ve found myself doomed to talk to one of the women after being pressured by my colleagues. In the beginning they’d go over first and pave the way for me, but now I’ve learned to do it myself. It’s not terribly hard, I just have to start talking and ask them a question, and then they get carried away talking and a few minutes later they tell me that I have really kind eyes and ask me why I don’t talk very much. I respond that I prefer to listen and this spurs them on to talk even more. What normally happens is that after a half an hour they tell me that they have to go, or I tell them I have to go. Then I go back to my group and tell them: She was married, can you believe it? And they all applaud as if I’d just made a nice throw at the dartboard. They all seem happy. Everyone but me.

  When I get back home I usually listen to some music and read a book. I like The Clash and The Who, but I like other bands too. I read one of the books that I take from the bookshelf at random, where they pile them up without rhyme or reason. It doesn’t matter if it’s a book I’ve already read. For me, it’s like talking to someone I’ve talked to before. It gives me a very pleasant feeling of familiarity. Whenever I don’t like a book, I usually leave it on one of the benches I pass on the way to the bus stop. When I come back in the evening it’s already gone. Sometimes I tell myself that if I were a better person, I’d leave the ones I like. I also sometimes watch movie trailers on the Internet. It’s not that I don’t have time to watch the whole movie, just that I prefer the trailers. A trailer is like a first date with someone. It’s an attempt to condense all the good experiences of one life down to a few minutes. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to see the rest. One time, out of curiosity, I saw one of the movies, but experience has taught me to opt for the shorter version. I feel the same way about people. Except for Claudia.

  Before I go to bed I usually think about things like the marooned ocean liners in Mauritania. I try to bring to mind their rough, rusty metal surfaces. Or I think of Kolmanskop, the city that was overtaken by sand in the Namib Desert. I know it’s odd to think of these things before going to sleep, and I know this because I’ve asked other people what they think about. For that reason I’ve never mentioned this to anyone. Well, that’s a lie. I mentioned it to Claudia, but she didn’t think it was weird. Maybe that’s the type of thing that made us a good couple, in my opinion. In her opinion we weren’t a good couple, but I can’t blame her. After all, she never thought about things like that before she went to bed.

  But today is different. 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 will 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. But I know I won’t do it today. Because today marks eight months since I last took a halazepam or a paroxetine. Because today, for the first time in a long while, I’m not afraid to get out of bed, and I don’t feel a knot in my stomach while I’m tying one of my six ties. Maybe that’s why I find it so hard to tie. I savor the buttered toast and run my tongue over the surface of it, a mixture of crunchy and creamy textures. I drink the coffee from my coffee maker, the first of the three cups that I’ll drink during the day, and I don’t feel it gurgling in the pit of my stomach. Even better, it’s almost tasty.

  It’s a cloudy day today, but it doesn’t matter to me. Today it’s exactly one and a half years since Claudia abandoned me. I see that she left me a message
on my answering machine while I was at work, but I don’t listen to it. It will be just like all the others, to assure me that I’m doing all right. I’m not, but now I know it. Now I know it.

  I take a few of my favorite books down off the shelves and put them in one of the plastic shopping bags that accumulate in my kitchen, which I never know where to put, one of those non-biodegradable plastic bags that take four hundred years to break down in the environment. I put Dumas, Hobbes, Palahniuk, and Tolstoy in there. I head out the door, and it doesn’t bother me that it’s started raining; I leave one book on each bench and watch the raindrops land on their leather or plastic covers. When I get to the bus stop I’m drenched, and there’s rainwater dripping from my bangs and forehead. The people there look at me out of the corners of their eyes, and I look straight at them until they look away. It’s a new feeling, like seeing specks of dust floating in the air for the first time. It seems like magic, but it’s not; it never has been.

  I take my cell phone out of my jacket pocket and text Claudia, telling her that I’m not seeing anybody, that everything I’d told her was a lie. I don’t tell her that I’m sorry, because that’s not true. After I send it, I turn off my phone, open the bus window, and throw it out into the street. A woman looks at me curiously, and I respond by shrugging my shoulders and smiling, as if there was nothing else I could have done. She smiles back and then returns to her book.

  I spend my day in the office handing out my business cards. I go down the aisles, shake the hands of everyone I come across, tell them my name, and put one of my cards in their jacket pocket. Sometimes they laugh, other times they give me strange looks, but the fact is that after a couple of hours I’ve given away all of my lives. I throw the plastic jewel case into the garbage and never think about it again. They send me a report to revise, but instead of doing that I stick it to the wall with a thumbtack, pull out the box with my three darts in it, and toss them at the report from across the room, landing one right next to the other. A bunch of my colleagues applaud and pat me on the back between peals of laughter. It’s just like we were in a bar, except I don’t feel out of place. At lunch I eat a T-bone steak and French fries, and I get so full that I have to loosen my belt. In the afternoon my drowsiness gets the best of me, and I fall asleep during a strategic planning meeting with one of my bosses. I don’t know if it bothers him, but it doesn’t bother me, of course. At the end of the day, I think they’re going to fire me, but I’m not sure. No matter what happens, I don’t know if I’ll come back to the office tomorrow. I don’t gather up anything before leaving. There’s nothing I want to keep.

  After I leave I stop by a bar, alone, and ask for a shot of tequila. I drink it down in one gulp, and when I go to pay the bartender, he tells me it’s on the house.

  I stop by the supermarket before heading home and buy food that I’ve never bought before. I put hot chilies, barbecue sauce, and basmati rice into my basket. A bottle of triple-distilled vodka as well. When I get to the cash register, I walk right past the metal arch of the anti-theft device without stopping and it doesn’t beep. Nobody stops me.

  I get on the bus and see the woman with the brown eyes and thick-rimmed glasses near the back. She isn’t reading her book like she usually does in the morning. She looks tired. I sit down beside her, despite there being many other open seats. She glances over at me out of the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t dare say anything. So I tap her on the shoulder.

  “What do you think about before you go to sleep?” I ask. She stares at me in silence, surprised. I smile at her. “Seriously.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know.”

  “Make something up, the first thing that comes to mind.”

  “Boats,” she responds, right away.

  “Boats that are marooned in the sand?”

  “No, boats out in the water.”

  “Oh,” I reply. “Does it seem odd to you that I think about boats marooned in the sand?”

  “No more than anything else would,” she says.

  “My name’s Jack.” I reach to give her a business card, but I don’t have any more.

  “I’m out of cards,” I tell her.

  “No problem.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Maria.”

  “Do you like The Clash?”

  “No.”

  “What about The Who?”

  “Don’t like them either.”

  “Well, maybe now I don’t like them either.”

  I invite her to my place. She accepts, but she warns me that nothing is going to happen.

  “Nothing ever happens,” I reply.

  “Your place is really dirty,” she tells me.

  I glance around, looking at the house as if it were a hotel room.

  “I thought the same thing this morning.”

  TRANSLATED FROM CASTILIAN BY RHETT MCNEIL

  [UKRAINE]

  SERHIY ZHADAN

  The Owners

  . . . This story was told to me by one of the original owners of the club. I’d heard about these clubs quite a bit, but never actually visited any, which, after all, is not that surprising, considering the specific nature of these institutions. But rumors about the first official gay nightclub, accompanied by a variety of names and addresses, had been circulating for a few years now, and since no one knew exactly where it was located, every joint fell under suspicion. They talked the most about the club at the Dynamo sports stadium; the right-wing youth of the city who came to watch the games positively condemned all such institutions, and kept threatening to set fire to the nightclub together with all the gay people gathered there for their so-called parties. Once during the soccer season of 2003–2004, they even set fire to Pinocchio, a coffee shop near the stadium, though the police, of course, didn’t think to connect this incident with the activities of the rumored gay club, because, think about it, what kind of gay club would meet at Pinocchio, which was such a homophobic name?

  On the other hand, the media often mentioned the nightclub in its various cultural bulletins or features about the rough-and-tumble club scene in the city. As a rule, these bulletins from the city’s club scene were reminiscent of letters from a war—first toasts, then machine-gun fire rang in the video reports on the subject, and sometimes, when the cameraman didn’t neglect his, ahem, professional duties, getting shit-faced on cognac on his expense account, he’d actually catch the machine-gun fire before the wedding speeches and violent profanities had finished, and show the tracer bullets perforating the warm Kharkiv sky like a salute to loyalty, love, and other things that nobody cares about on television. In this context, reports about the gay club intrigued the audience because there was never any mention of standoffs between the “criminals” and the authorities; the reports said: there was a party at the gay club, everything was civil and calm, there were no casualties. There had been interest for a time, but then the club’s reputation began to wane, which wasn’t too surprising; there’s only so long a lack of excitement can seem novel to the general public, especially when our city has far more exciting establishments, like our tractor assembly factory. Anyway, the problems of a sexual minority in a country with such serious financial problems could hardly hold anyone’s interest long. And when word got out that the nightclub was under the governor’s official protection, the general response was muted—who expects the government to behave? Just mind your own business—the most important things are a clear conscience and getting your taxes done on time.

  I met San Sanych during the elections. He looked to be forty, though he was actually thirty-two. Biography is simply stronger than biology, and Sanych was a clear case in point. He wore a crisp, black leather coat and carried a handgun—a typical run-of-the-mill gangster, you know what I mean. Though a little too melancholic for a gangster; he almost never used his cell, except to call his mother every so
often, and as far as I can remember, nobody ever called him. He introduced himself as San Sanych and gave me a fancy business card that read, in gold lettering, “San Sanych, Civil Rights Advocate.” Underneath, there were several phone numbers with a London dialing code. Sanych said they were office numbers; I asked whose, but he didn’t answer. We hit it off right away. After the introductions, Sanych pulled a gun out of his pocket, said that he was all for honest elections and informed me that he could get as many of these guns as necessary. He had his own idea of honest elections, and why not? The thing was, he knew someone who worked at the Dynamo stadium and could get starter pistols there and make regular guns out of them at home. Look, he said, if you saw off this crud—he indicated the place where, apparently, the crud that had been sawn off used to be—it can be loaded with regular bullets; but the coolest thing is that it’s only a starter pistol: the cops have no complaints when you buy them. If you want, I can hustle up a batch, forty bucks a piece, plus ten on top for sawing off the crud. If you want—to make it totally legit—I can even hustle up a Dynamo sports club ID for you. Sanych loved guns, and even more than guns he loved talking about guns. After a while, I became his best friend.

  One time, the gay club came up. He just let it slip, at one point. Before becoming a civil rights advocate and defending honest elections, he had been in the nightclub racket and, it turned out, was directly involved with the first official gay club, the same phantom institution that our ever-so-progressive city youth had been trying to burn down for so long, and so ineffectually. So I asked him to tell more and he agreed, said no problem, okay, it’s all water under the bridge, sure, why not.