Little by little, Sebastian seems better and clearer-headed. I put him on my shoulders, so he can look at the landscape. When I look for Anne again, she’s gone. A little later I see the sign clearly. Imagine opening a take-out place in such a desolate area. Imagine actually breaking even.
Sebastian spots a butterfly and flaps his arms like wings. He asks how long butterflies live. For a brief moment the sun penetrates the cloud cover and sends a jolt of warmth through me. My son is healthy and happy. I have a feeling that things will get increasingly simple, clear. But when we turn into the yard at the restaurant, the first thing I see is Anne. She’s with a man, and they’re sitting on a bench. The man has an arm around her, and she’s burying her face in his chest; it looks like she’s crying. I stop. Sebastian says, “Mom.” She raises her head with trepidation and looks at us for a moment. Then she collapses again into the man’s arms. He has dark, curly hair and is very tan. “Anne’s not feeling well,” he says. He speaks in the local dialect, slow and dull, the dialect that Anne and Tine dropped a long time ago.
“My son hit his head. I need an ambulance right now.” The man shakes his head despondently. “A phone,” I say. He gets up from the bench. “What kind of man are you?” he asks. Slowly, slowly he moves toward me. “I’ll tell you what kind of man I am, I’m Anne’s husband, and I need to use your phone.” I go to the counter. A strong smell of burnt oil hits my face.
“A hell of a husband,” he mutters. I reach over the counter and get hold of a cordless phone. But he must have crept up on me, because as I’m about to dial the number, he tears the phone out of my hand. He’s so close, his eyes are slits, his upper lip curling back a little.
“You deserve a good beating, you,” he hisses. Sebastian pulls my hair. “Just call,” I say wearily. Out of nowhere, Anne cries out. I reach out for the phone again and try to wrench it out of the man’s hand. He lets go of it, it tumbles down to the ground, he puts a big hand on my shoulder. “Give me the boy and get the hell out of here.” I lose my balance and nearly drop Sebastian. He must have pushed me hard. “Dad?” Sebastian says. His voice is weak, polite, he’s scared. I turn around and look at Anne.
“Who is this man?” I ask. She gives me a grim look.
“This is Sebastian,” she says, and the boy, who’s still on my shoulders, jumps. “Do as he says. Get out of here.”
Sebastian, our son, takes hold of my head with both hands, I feel his warm breath all the way into my auditory canal. “I want to go home,” he whispers.
“Come, Seba,” Anne says, standing up. “Come.” She draws closer with her arms stretched out. “Come and have an ice cream from Sebastian, he’s the one you’re named after.” Her face twists and turns into a crazy grimace.
He looked like a monkey, standing there with his broad chest and hairy arms. He stepped forward and pointed at me, threateningly, with his short, fat finger. I moved backward and started to run. He didn’t follow us. When I looked back a little later, I thought I saw him standing in the middle of the road, kissing Anne deeply and pulling her ponytail. I also thought I could hear her mooing, like a cow, but perhaps it was him, I don’t know. We reached the main road. Sebastian was silent and stiff. I didn’t say anything. Tine’s white breasts and the small, dark nipples. The fat finger pointing to the soft spot between my eyes. I was sweating heavily and jumped at the sound of my own breath.
It was almost dark before a car finally picked us up. Sebastian was basically fine. The doctor examined him, the nurse tried to make him laugh. He didn’t say a word. They bandaged his wound and sent us home. You were sitting in the dark by the window late that night when we returned to the summerhouse. You hadn’t even picked up the dog.
TRANSLATED FROM DANISH BY ANNE METTE LUNDTOFTE
[ESTONIA]
ELO VIIDING
Foreign Women
I remember numerous kind women translators and poets bringing me all sorts of knickknacks when I was a child—pencils, calendars, and erasers; and then, for my parents, creams, facemasks, and aftershave. During the Russian days we simply couldn’t buy anything from the local shops. These women, generous and outspoken, were foreign women. Usually they’d managed to go straight from the airport to meet their bohemian friends at the local Artists’ Club. These foreign women would stay at a hotel, and all sorts of interesting things were always happening to them there: for instance, at five-twenty in the morning, they would often be woken up by the clanking of some triumphant janitor’s buckets as his shapeless body hauled these by their door; or else their sleepy eyes would find the crumpled corpse of a cockroach, pregnant with young, in their morning cup of coffee, the creature having been squashed by the blow of a spoon.
So, generally speaking, these foreign women seemed to be living the good life—they could risk taking things less seriously than their Soviet sisters: they would even demand the right to be treated with respect at customs, would demand to be allowed to leave with suitcases full of cosmetics and, of course, countless bottles of liqueur—they wouldn’t allow the customs officers to rifle through their belongings just like that…or would have the guts to scream their heads off at the very least. They would allow themselves to make their presence known in the company of men, on the street, or even in bars, and sincerely believed that they were being treated seriously, and that men wanted to treat them as equals. The foreign women lived their noisy, bohemian lives to the full, without being much bothered by their conscience. Their husbands were back home taking care of all their practical concerns, after all, in their native lands—and if they weren’t, well, it was relatively easy for a foreign woman to get divorced from a man who complained too much.
The foreign women hinted to my mother and other silent wives of male authors—about whom they often talked behind their backs—that they might perhaps be petit bourgeois crackpots, sucking their untalented and unlucky husbands dry in order to secure a better social position for themselves.
The women over here did not, unfortunately, learn anything from the foreign women, and one or two became completely convinced that their single duty in life was simply to keep their husbands alive.
The foreign women would never have believed, if anyone had told them, that writers in our occupied country only managed to stay alive thanks to the ministrations of their drab and patient wives. What our women saw, even loved, in the self-destructive lifestyles of their husbands remained inexplicable to the foreign women.
A clean, sharp, and expensive fragrance would always waft into the room when the foreign women came. I remember one of them would often be sitting on the leather sofa in my father’s room, behaving in a relaxed, uninhibited way, her long hair falling loose; they would have brought photos of their fatherless little sons, or books that they themselves had written, or many other such treasures, all to present to my father as gifts. I also remember that for some reason or other, my mother never felt that she could disturb the foreign women’s private conversations with my father, nor to criticize the length of time they spent alone with him—though I was pretty sure she didn’t approve.
The non-poet wife of a productive poet living under such dismal political circumstances as ours was obliged, I understood, to be understanding and willing to make concessions to said poet, something that my mother hardly found easy. And yet, I thought that these heroic foreign women would never have stood for such treatment—they would have smoked any other women out of father’s study in no time, or at the very least said something cutting or even openly offensive to their rivals. Or perhaps just threatened to leave their husbands. No, the foreign women would never have allowed themselves to be ordered around. They never would have sat by and watched their health and good looks be systematically destroyed over the course of their lives by any so-called intellectual of the male persuasion.
Not one contemporary foreign magazine, dedicated as they were to the enjoyment of life, ever dared demand that the foreign women subjugate or sacrifice themselves without recompense. They did, ho
wever, recommend that the foreign women walk with their hair uncovered in the Middle East; that they bathe in the blazing desert sun and talk about human rights; that they shave their bushy eyebrows and draw them in again with eyeliner; that they cut off their hair and try a wig for a change; that they sit cross-legged on their carpets for hours with their husbands and talk candidly about labor relations; that they believe shy men would cheat on them less often; that they always smell good while at the same time seek to combat the use of toxins in the production of cosmetics; that they seek psychotherapeutic help and sue their most recent ex-husband to cover the expense; that they find the Ur within themselves by having affairs with younger men; that they only wear jewelry from a Tibetan monastery, with whose cause they would of course empathize deeply; and, likewise, the foreign-women journalists did of course advise the foreign women to seek their animus inside every uncultured repairman. Clearly, the foreign women would never have been able to live with our brilliant male writers who, during one of their rare visits to a grocery store, were usually incapable of finding a bag of salt on the dry-goods shelves, and who, after one of these unsuccessful forays, began to act completely insufferable. The foreign women weren’t interested in getting a more in-depth knowledge of the suffering of men, and although they were interested in the various paradoxes of modern life, and even in what our local male authors wrote, they could only really manage to be enthusiastic about their own lives and problems. Obviously, they also wouldn’t have mothered their husbands or pretended to believe the muddled lies they told during their evening walks, but would have shot them down devastatingly and without hesitation. Presumably, the foreign women often wished—when they were between husbands—that their exes, irrespective of their social status or the relative size of their egos, had participated wholeheartedly in every element of their marriage, even the divorce process, even in helping their foreign women move away, or, at the very least, wished that their men had gone along to their lawyers’ offices to finalize things in a spirit of equanimity and resignation.
Educated Soviet women would never, for the most part, have been able to make such demands of their husbands. And even when a local woman did manage to ask for some concession, she usually ended up falling back on the generally accepted rules for her gender almost immediately: apologizing, even feeling ashamed.
Soviet women, with their gaunt faces, exhausted on account of being deprived of spare time, loved to smile and chuckle over and noisily publicize the stories of the dishonorable declines that had, like lightning, followed the scandalous acts of any proud but treacherous members of their gender to have dared express some discontent with the status quo—the better to feel that they were secure in the unshakeable sanctuary of their own high social standings, which had been obtained only after terrible effort and anxiety in that male-dominated world.
This brand of treacherous female, refusing to acknowledge the sanctity of the male essence, refusing to live lives centered around some man’s sense of self-importance, nor lives of twisted self-assertion, could easily end up being labeled vain and vulgar sluts, little wailing dykes, even half-witted, half-crazy whores. Impugning their sanity was especially offensive, since these women tended to be strong, pithy, sharp-minded, in-the-know, indomitable—all things that clearly disturbed our men.
Of course, it was usually the younger intellectuals who kept these insults alive, men who were always complaining about the latest beautiful but self-centered woman who’d disturbed their lives, men who used such barroom talk to engender a sense of community between themselves and their peers, a sense of equality; while older men, on the other hand, given the opportunity, would simply mutter something admonitory and reserved into their moustaches, strewn with breadcrumbs, glaring at the woman in question with their lustful but rigidly maintained, conservative stares.
A good woman, with whom a proper Soviet intellectual would want to live—working, eating, sharing their home, sleeping—was always bright, alert, effective, discreet, handy, and well-liked; she never whined, never drank or talked too much, knew when to make herself scarce, knew how to sacrifice her own needs when necessary; was simultaneously ladylike, childishly dependent, politely adult, and wise as an old sage. To expect such qualities in a man was a terrible crime against our societal norms, not to mention dangerous to a woman’s equilibrium both psychologically and socially—such a woman could easily risk her reputation if she didn’t quickly show herself, at least in front of other women, and in as demonstrative and emotional a manner as could be managed, to have realized the ridiculousness of such expectations.
With regard to sex, it wasn’t the custom among our women, their hair falling out from giving birth so frequently—and especially not the custom among their humanist husbands—to bother spending money on those extremely uncomfortable, ridiculously priced condoms from Ukraine, which were in any case thought of as being inimical to life, since it was clear that they would speed the extinction of so small a nation as ours, and which were, regardless, rarely available in the shops. Polish anti-conception hormones, which give our women light dizzy spells and damaged their livers, were much more convenient, especially when working one’s way through the Kama Sutra, and, according to the men, made their women far more permissive, made them much better in bed, almost as good as whores; and besides, a woman could always run to some doctor she knew to get an abortion if it was really necessary.
The foreign women thought all this was completely unhinged; as often as not, they would leave their middle-aged friends with the gentler sorts of sex toy available back in their countries, like those innocent pink furry handcuffs, which, according to the foreign women’s instructions, were meant to be used by the stronger party, i.e., the woman, on the weaker, i.e., the man; or else bestselling sex manuals would emerge from the depths of their Burberry suitcases, adorned with pictures of married couples smiling frankly.
Of course, by giving such daring presents, they were risking some of the more patriarchal family fathers breaking off their friendships, but since these women represented the better, capitalist, free world, they were usually forgiven. Various pink Taiwanese sex toys were, in any case, often given to the children to play with, while the sex manuals, intended to enlighten and embolden, were usually used to light the stove.
I liked these foreign women, so meticulous, in their cheap-looking broad-brimmed hats, hiding their stark smokers’ faces. Some of them were even poets themselves, or were members of the feminist movement. In my opinion, they were each proud and brave in their own way, and sometimes a little comical too, for instance when they couldn’t understand why Estonian men were unwilling to empty their own ashtrays or take a dirty shirt even as far as the kitchen tap. The foreign women actually believed that our local women were joking when the latter hinted at the extent of the wearying but inescapable double burden of home and job, and laughed loudly at their stories, laughed with sympathy, heartily and in solidarity. However, some of the other foreign women, who, on account of their spiritual nature, weren’t particularly bothered by stinking, overflowing ashtrays, and who might perhaps have harbored a certain resentment toward their Estonian gender-mates, and who might even have been in the habit of emptying ashtrays in their own families, merely shrugged their shoulders. In their opinion, focusing on such pseudo-problems was simply suffocating—no wonder Estonian women had no self-esteem. At least I can say that these minor frustrations were never a problem for them during their visits to our own home, since my mother was attentive enough to silently collect all the ashtrays from all corners of the apartment towards morning, fumbling and stumbling, half-asleep, between living room and kitchen, emptying them one after the other into the trash.
Our men, of course—even my father—wanted to be liked by these proud and independent-minded foreign women: they were drawn in by their superficiality, their easy laughter, their ability to live in the here and now, their open displays of animal sexuality and strength, and the foreign women enjoyed the boyish att
ention they were being paid, happily teasing our ranks of toy soldiers.
When the foreign women, now back in their homelands and reunited with their better halves, phoned us at night, tipsy, thanking us for our hospitality, they would always tell my mother to feed my father better, since he’d seemed exceptionally thin, or they would advise my mother to wear more colorful clothing—maybe a little more revealing too. On one occasion, my mother burst into tears when some especially candid woman—a literary type, a feminist—asked her in genuine bewilderment why she would ever wear such a horrid, featureless, and pointlessly modest dress.
Still, when the foreign women arrived at our place, my mother would always make them nice sandwiches to go with their vodka, or else oatcakes to go with their coffee, which the foreign women would eye with suspicion at first, then gulp down with delight, full of praise.
The foreign women talked and laughed a lot; it seemed they had little in common with Soviet women, who’d always had a certain tendency toward depression. Furthermore, the foreign women were never able to pay attention to anyone else’s problems for more than a few minutes at a time. Not that this really mattered: no one in their right mind would risk confiding anything in them—with their big mouths, firm convictions, and sharp tongues; even their silence, when they were silent, seemed a ploy to make them all the more audible. Thus, they found my mother entirely too cautious and unapproachable—though my father’s social skills compensated for my mother’s shortcomings in this respect.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 9
