Now that Ferdinand was alone, the park regained its usual, recreational appearance. It was easy to imagine that this was the way it had always been: trees here, grass there. An oasis in a hostile environment. He moved slowly, taking on the pace of someone trying to comfort a tired and tearful baby, and who therefore can’t stand still.
Ferdinand finally turned right at the baroque park gates. The streetlights were coming on, giving him a familiar feeling of coziness, a sense of community that nonetheless receded as the lights became brighter. He soon arrived in a desolate neighborhood. The houses had become impregnable blocks, with no windows or openings through which the least light could trickle. In the first weeks of the New Measures, districts like this one had erupted in violent protest. The occupants denounced the ambiguity of a state that called on people to be on their best behavior, but still assumed that these same people would run around killing each other. The official projection was that the New Measures would severely reduce the overpopulation problem in less than ten years. Another positive result would be that everyone would have to become extremely pleasant to one another. Of course, there were a high number of minority citizens attending these protests, since a report was leaked that the State had high expectations that the lower social classes would decimate themselves if given the chance. That way, society would cull itself until all that was left would be right-thinking, law-abiding citizens (who happened to have the largest taxable incomes). Still, a week after the declaration, a high-class banquet thrown to show support of the New Measures turned into a bloodbath. None of the survivors could explain what exactly had led to the ninety-three reported deaths. There was a rumor that it had something to do with a party-crasher’s hand perhaps coming to rest on the ass of a waitress who was serving him pancakes—but a State inquiry was ruled to be unnecessary.
Ferdinand examined the houses, which were set far back from the street, their backyards hidden from view by high metal fences. He hurried on his way—he knew that some of these neighborhoods had curfew laws. He forced himself to look straight ahead as he walked. It felt as though he were moving down a long tunnel. He thought: bullets travel faster than the sound made by their being fired. I’ll be listening for the sound and won’t even know that I’ve already been shot.
TRANSLATED FROM DUTCH BY KERRI A. PIERCE
[BELGIUM: FRENCH]
JEAN-PHILIPPE TOUSSAINT
Zidane’s Melancholy
Zidane watched the Berlin sky, not thinking of anything, a white sky flecked with gray clouds lined with blue, one of those windy skies, immense and changing, of the Flemish painters. Zidane watched the Berlin sky over the Olympic stadium on the evening of the 9th of July 2006, and felt the sensation, with poignant intensity, of being there, simply there, in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, at this precise moment in time, on the evening of the World Cup final.
No doubt it came down to a question of form—form and melancholy, on the evening of this final. In the first case, pure form: the penalty converted in the seventh minute, an indolent Panenka1 shot that hit the crossbar, passed over the line, and re-exited the goal, a billiard-ball trajectory that flirted with Geoff Hurst’s fabled shot at Wembley in 1966.2 But this was still only a quotation, an inadvertent homage to a legendary World Cup moment. Zidane’s true act on the evening of the final—a sudden gesture like an overflowing of black bile into the lonely night—will only occur later, and then will cause us to forget everything else, the end of the match and the extra time, the shots at the goal and the winners, a decisive, brutal, prosaic, novelistic act: a perfect moment of ambiguity under the Berlin sky, a few dizzying seconds of ambivalence, where beauty and blackness, violence and passion, came into contact and provoked the short-circuit of a wholly unscripted action.
Zidane’s headbutt had the suddenness and suppleness of a calligrapher’s stroke. Though it took only a few seconds to accomplish, such an act could only occur at the end of a slow process of maturation, a long, invisible, and secret genesis. Zidane’s act has nothing to do with the aesthetic categories of the beautiful or the sublime; it is beyond the moral categories of good and evil; its value, its strength, and its substance stem from nothing other than its irreducible congruence with the precise moment in time at which it occurred. Two vast subterranean currents must have carried it there from afar. The first, from the depths, wide, silent, powerful, inexorable—as much a product of pure melancholy as of the painful perception of the passage of time—is linked to the sadness of the ordained end, the bitterness of a player competing in the last match of his career, a match he can’t make up his mind to finish. Zidane has always had trouble with endings: he is familiar with false exits (against Greece) and missed exits (against South Korea)3 both. It’s always been impossible for him to bring his career to a close, least of all to do so beautifully, for to end beautifully is nonetheless to end, to seal one’s legend: to raise the World Cup is to accept one’s death, whereas ruining one’s proper exit leaves prospects open, unknown, alive. The other current that carries his gesture, both parallel to and contradicting the first, fed by an excess of black bile and other saturnine influences, is the wish to be done with it all as quickly as possible, the wish, irrepressible, to leave the game at once and return to the locker room (I left abruptly, without telling anybody),4 he feels such weariness, sudden and incommensurable tiredness, exhaustion, a bad shoulder, Zidane is unable to score, he can’t bear his teammates any longer, can’t bear his opponents, can’t bear the world or himself. Zidane’s melancholy is my melancholy, I know it, I’ve nourished it and I feel it. The world becomes opaque, one’s limbs are heavy, the hours seem leaden, longer, slower, interminable.5 Zidane feels broken and becomes vulnerable. Something in us turns against us6—and, in the intoxication of fatigue and nervous tension, Zidane can only complete an act of violence, channeling his intoxication, or else of flight, relieving it, unable otherwise to defuse the pressure weighing on him (this is the final flight from the finished work).7 Since the beginning of extra time, Zidane, unconsciously, has continually been expressing his weariness with his captain’s armband, which keeps slipping down, this armband which keeps coming undone and which he keeps readjusting clumsily on his arm. Zidane thus signals, despite himself, that he wants to leave the game and return to the locker room. He no longer has the means, or the strength, the energy, the will, to pull off a last stunt, a final act of pure form; the header deflected by Buffon a few moments earlier, for all its beauty, will definitively open Zidane’s eyes to his irreparable impotence. Form, at present, resists him—and this is unacceptable for an artist. We know the intimate ties that link art to melancholy. Unable to score a goal, Zidane will score minds.
Night has fallen now on Berlin, the light’s intensity has lessened, Zidane has felt the sky darken palpably over his shoulders, leaving only flayed streaks of twilit clouds in the firmament, black and crimson. Water mixed with night is an old remorse that will not sleep.8
No one in the stadium understood what had happened. From my seat in the Olympic Stadium stands I saw the match resume—the Italians returning to the attack and the action moving away toward the opposite goal. One Italian player remained on the ground, the act had taken place, Zidane had been overtaken by the brutal gods of melancholy. The referee stopped the game and people started to run every which way on the grass, toward the prostrate player and in the direction of the assistant referee, whom some of the Italian players were now surrounding, I looked from left to right, then, through my binoculars, I instinctively singled out Zidane, one’s eyes always find Zidane, the silhouette of Zidane in his white shirt standing in the night at the center of the field, his face in extreme closeup in my binocular sights, and then Buffon, the Italian goalkeeper, appears and starts to speak to him, to rub his head, massaging his scalp and the back of his neck, a surprising gesture, caressing, enveloping him, a gesture that anoints him, as one would a child, a newborn, to comfort it, to calm it. I didn’t understand what was happening, no one in the stadium und
erstood what was happening, the referee headed toward the small group of players where Zidane was standing and pulled a black card out of his pocket, a card he raised toward the Berlin sky, and I understood at once that it was addressed to Zidane, the black card of melancholy.
Zidane’s act, invisible, incomprehensible, is all the more spectacular for not having taken place. If one limits oneself to the live observation of events in the stadium, and to the legitimate faith we can have in our senses, no one saw anything, neither the spectators nor the referees—it simply never happened. Not only did Zidane’s act never take place, but even if it did, even if Zidane were to have had the mad intention, the fantasy, the desire to headbutt one of his opponents, Zidane’s head would never have reached this opponent, since each time Zidane’s head would have covered half the distance separating it from his opponent’s chest, there would still have been another half to cover, and then another half, and then still another half, and so on eternally, such that Zidane’s head, progressing continually toward its target but never reaching it, as in an immense slow-motion sequence infinitely looped, could not, no, never, because it is physically and mathematically impossible (this is Zidane’s paradox, if not Zeno’s), come into contact with his opponent’s chest—never; the only thing visible, that all the spectators around the world could have seen, was the fleeting impulse crossing Zidane’s mind.
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY THANGAM
RAVINDRANATHAN AND TIMOTHY BEWES
[BOSNIA]
IGOR ŠTIKS
At the Sarajevo Market
She took me to the Markale Market. Alma said that you could appreciate the true soul of Sarajevo here. And she wasn’t talking about black-market food or the other quotidian products that were becoming more inaccessible to normal citizens by the day, but rather about the things that had until recently filled the apartments and houses of all Sarajevans. And indeed, here we found people trying to sell their precious possessions, or at least those with which they were ready to part. For now they’re still selling books—I thought as I walked with Alma through the crowd, listened to her talk to people, greet them, ask questions, and continue on—paintings of little value, majolica, beautiful but unnecessary knickknacks, dominoes, pipes, antiques. But tomorrow they’ll be bringing silver, gold, diamonds, and other rare items to the market, they’ll sell collections amassed over many years, expensive china, the finest Persian rugs or family heirlooms, and they’ll come to measure the worth of these relics of their past lives in sacks of rice, kilos of wheat, a couple of eggs or spoonfuls of oil. Simon is right, the noose is tightening. Soon they’ll understand this, and then despair will set in. Maybe the looters, who profit from anarchy, who take things from abandoned apartments, already sense or know this. Wouldn’t the old owners—refugees now somewhere outside Bosnia, or else on the enemy side—be shocked to see what low prices their stuff is selling for in today’s wartime marketplace.
Alma told me that at first she had allowed herself to buy some rare books or little household objects and even some antique jewelry, but now she understood how crazy she had been to think that this would all be over soon and so only came here to allow herself to be amazed at all the objects the city had been keeping hidden away. She said she wouldn’t be surprised to find the most incredible things here—great works of art that had once disappeared or been stolen might be brought to light from formerly sealed-up cellars, from underground sewer tunnels (some of which might even empty outside the ring of encirclement, far from the siege, who knows?), from old safes and chests; or else, conversely, someone might end up, sooner or later, wrapping a kilo of precious meat in a worthless Rembrandt self-portrait…
Why not, I said. Cities inscribe their history on walls and in objects, not in the unreliable and corrupt memories of their citizens. That’s the only way. Don’t we ourselves write our lives into those objects, diaries, jewelry, the painstakingly dried flowers that illustrate best of all the fragility of our memories and sensations and in this way link our existence to the existence of the city and to other similar attempts to preserve some record of our passage over this earth? That’s how nations and cities inscribe themselves, too, wherever they can, both the things they want us to know and think about them as well as their deepest secrets. It’s possible that we wouldn’t like what we’d find in those opened cellars, rusty safes, in the hidden pockets of grandpa’s clothes. Maybe there are thousands of enormous rats in those sewer tunnels that would be quite happy to attack us if we disturb them, to cut off that escape route and thus make their contribution to the siege of the city.
Then we examined the books on offer. People were selling their personal libraries, especially retirees no longer receiving their pensions. Most of the books were printed in Cyrillic or concerned communism. Regarding the latter category, no one here believes that such books could possibly be useful to anyone anymore. Still, some of the sellers were trying to keep their prices up. It must have been hard to part with what were clearly the most beloved books on their shelves. They weren’t even sure they wanted to sell to you in the first place. But these types were rare. In general, the market is pretty merciless. Some people were even selling books they’d found in other people’s apartments. One man had pioneered a peculiar approach—all his books cost one Deutschmark. I’m not sure how long he’ll be able to keep that up. To buy books instead of, say, noodles borders on insanity. Nevertheless, a lot of people had gathered round and they were looking, flipping through pages, putting books back, reaching for their wallets, but then hesitating…a pile of books in front of him, stacked haphazardly, clearly from all over his stall. Here and there I recognize the name of an author, sometimes a title. Spinoza, Hegel, Plato, Hobbes, Homer, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Babel, Musil, Joyce…all my old friends. Now they’re nothing but paper, stuff that has to be disposed of for at least some kind of profit, because soon it’ll all be totally superfluous, except perhaps as fuel for fires. One mark! I have the feeling, I told Alma, that the Deutschmark has never been worth more.
We found some youngsters, fifteen-or sixteen-year-olds, selling some really old books. Perhaps they’d burgled a used bookstore or gathered up the books from an apartment that had been bombed along with someone’s precious library. They had no idea what they were offering. I was beginning to believe Alma’s claim that we would be amazed by all the treasures the city is hiding. I pulled out a dusty and moth-eaten volume of Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie générale…there were also dog-eared anthologies of classics for use in the turn-of-the-century schoolrooms of the long-dead monarchy; in the same pile I found and flipped through a technical-statistical study called Das Bauwesen in Bosnien und der Hercegovina vom Beginn der Occupation durch die österr, ung. Monarchie bis in das Jahr 1887…edited by one Mr. Edmund Stix; then the first Gallimard edition of Malraux’s La Condition humaine from April 1933; I skipped over a couple of local titles; I saw Enzo Strecci’s songbook, the first issue of Das Fackel, a velvet-jacketed edition of de Sade’s Justine; last of all I dug out a German translation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice from 1935, in Gothic script and lacking Shylock’s famous monologue from act three. I recited it to myself from memory: Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands…If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
I asked one of them where the books came from and he just shrugged his shoulders. He asked me whether they were worth a lot. Depends to whom, I responded.
Alma called me over. She found something interesting at an antiques booth. She shows me a pocket watch on a chain. On the lid is an engraved picture of a girl next to a man in some bucolic spot, her head resting on his outstretched arm. She’s wrapped in a diaphanous shawl and looks seductively at some faraway something. Opposite her is a soldier, his rifle on his lap; with deep melancholy, he looks from his guard post toward a distant field, which lies somewhere near his beloved. Alma opened the watch.
Surprisingly, it still worked. On the inside of the lid it said, in German “Dear Rudi, with every second the war comes closer to its end, and we to each other. Your Teresa, Prague, 1914.”
We asked ourselves what had happened to those star-crossed lovers from Prague and how the watch had ended up in Sarajevo. The seller had no idea. Teresa’s prediction about when the war would end certainly turned out to be overoptimistic. We wondered whether Teresa had really waited for Rudi through the entire war. The cold Prague nights demand a little human contact, I figured, and besides, military desires need outlets too—perhaps Rudi had found relief in some mobile wartime brothel. Alma didn’t like that version. But she was not so sentimental as to imagine that the lovers had managed to reunite again after the war, that they got married, and lived happily until, say, 1939. Had that been the case, it would be hard to explain how the watch had ended up in Sarajevo. Alma surmised that in this admittedly unlikely scenario some Bosnian regimental comrade had perhaps stolen the watch from the gawky Rudi. No. Alma was sure that after having endured all sorts of wartime horrors Rudi had decided to spend a leave in Sarajevo in the summer of 1918 at the invitation of a regimental friend, and met said pal’s sister here. Love flared up and—despite the initial opposition of the Bosnian friend, who didn’t want to see his sister marry his best wartime comrade (with whom he’d spent more than a little time hanging around the aforementioned brothels), and who was well aware of the precarious mental state of a battle-tested K. und K. soldier after almost four years of fighting, a soldier about whom one could at the very least say that he was somewhat überspannt!—it all ended with a wedding. Rudi sold off Teresa’s present the day after his wedding, deserted his post, and awaited the entrance of the royal Serbian army into Sarajevo hidden in the attic of his cute little bride’s house.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 5
