PLACES FOR EVERYBODY
Christ’s brides are at the door, vulvas off limits. No confessions of sin here. Butts strain against tight skirts, pubic hairs glisten. The brides’ bodies serve only Jesus. Birgitta would rather not remember losing her virginity, she despises that painful moment in the barn when the hired hand stole her maidenhead. Ripa is a midwife who found ten angels on her first day on the job, the mother and both twins dying in childbirth. Ripa and Birgitta found a better life in the sect, where nothing can bruise them, the world outside is all pollution, the devil’s playground. The joyful ladies ring the doorbell ninety times. Arttu is certain that behind the door stands some eager writ-server, some broad-shouldered balding man who hides the street-fighting days of his youth from his loved ones. Arttu is supposed to go to court and perjure himself as a witness in the matter of the beating of a poet, honest your honor those guys didn’t mean to turn the guy into a vegetable. Arttu has been avoiding the summons, fearing the long arm of the law. In his younger years he went to church and admitted many weaknesses to pulpit supply. Arttu feels repulsed by the world and justifies that feeling with the tribal rituals of the dispossessed. His father’s moose rifle passed to Arttu when his father had himself passed violently in the public sauna. Arttu fetches it from under his bed, loads it with shiny bullets. Four sharp reports follow. The entire apartment building wakes up. Telephones begin to ring off the hook at the police station; domestic disturbances, the unhappy fingering of many a teenaged girl, and the eating of many a cheap liver casserole are all interrupted. The police arrive within allotted response-time parameters. They find two middle-aged women in unnatural positions with their skirts around their ears and their flesh torn by bullets. Arttu sits in the living room humming some hymn and reading the literature the two women had brought. The police join in the hymn. Arttu in the third year of his majority smiles, looks up to heaven, and is taken into custody.
SWAP
Jokke wanted to fall in love with a courtesan, but they don’t exist any longer. Jokke found Helena, who’d been to all seven seas and whose eyes had given up. A seagull was their only witness on the windy rock where rings bought on credit were exchanged. Jokke claimed that it was the same day the Berlin Wall fell, though that was ten years before. Helena was eager to rub up against him, but not sexually, the movement was mechanical, and Jokke saw no future in it. Helena swapped her rags for a beer in the company of some dangerous men. Jokke closed his eyes and watched it all with sadness. Helena didn’t want to go to work and Jokke knew that something had happened at sea. Even her mechanical rubbing died out in time and impossibility. Helena was going to swap Jokke for a couple of beers, but his jeans stank and his socks were dirty, and the ladies sunning on the lawn wanted nothing to do with him. Helena cared for Jokke and let the magpies take from the windy rock the rings they finally owned free and clear.
TEX WILLER
Lauri got really pissed off when Saara wanted to role-play Tex Willer. To Lauri’s mind she’d read the comic books so totally wrong. Saara called Lauri a man without sleep. Lauri called Saara goiter-proud. Lauri felt Saara’s salmon had never developed, since Saara had given herself to the rich rancher’s son too early. Lauri had heard—since everyone considered him a doctor’s son—that penetration at too young an age prevented full female development. Saara denied it. Saara insisted that she was still pretty as a virgin, and only looked at straying townspeople. Lauri asked Saara if she’d ever given it to someone named Sir. Saara disdained to answer and handed Lauri a cowboy hat. Saara whistled and out on the balcony Lauri hollered at the neighborhood kids to shut up. The neighborhood always hollered back, but by then the balcony door was closed. Lauri went along with Saara’s desires, it wasn’t sex, just dressing in silence and living ordinary lives in different clothes. For a brief moment the prairie was a possibility for them, until their next-door neighbor Aaron asked if he could have a beer. Lauri went to the front door out of habit. Aaron gulped and giggled like the janitor who stole fire from a stevedore. That was the end of his career as a stand-up comic. It was a relief to his father figure, because Aaron was an only son and that was reason enough for anything. For the rest of their lives Lauri and Saara watched adult entertainment in sweaters, and the neighborhood wept for its children.
TRANSLATED FROM FINNISH BY DOUG ROBINSON
[FRANCE]
CHRISTINE MONTALBETTI
Hotel Komaba Eminence (with Haruki Murakami)
Murakami spoke to me, he was addressing me, but really, I felt as though none of his sentences had been composed especially for me. The things he said were well used, he was drawing from a stock of phrases that he must have tried out a thousand times before, as though we were still in his bar and he was playing a record for me, many records in fact, having decided to make me, me in particular, listen to them, naturally, but having chosen all the selections long before.
I was listening, his body was like a record player for me, his glottis was the needle, his vocal chords were the grooves in the vinyl. I liked the jazzy bits best. Yes, it was jazz, it was improvisation, but frozen in the imprint of a record, to be played in exactly the same way, over and over again.
There’s nothing wrong with that. When it comes to slightly mundane situations, like the one we were in, we’re all the disc jockeys of our own internal radio stations, pulling out tried and tested 45s as needed, one after the other, from our libraries. Still, I would have liked it if my presence had made Murakami say something new, had made him speak a new phrase that took even him by surprise. I was dreaming of, desperate for, what one might call “conversational gems”—those phrases that form unexpectedly in the presence of other people, and that we then offer to them, at once their muses and recipients. With this phrase in hand, our interlocutor departs, contented; he may now return home with his gift, a gift of which he was by no means undeserving, having caused the phrase to be formed in the first place, having been its mysterious inspiration. I would have liked it if such a sentence had left Murakami’s lips, a sentence arising from our situation, the specific result of those immaculate net curtains having been released from their tiebacks, of the green mass of vegetation that could be made out through their transparent layers, of the layout of the tables, of the white cotton tablecloths decorated with magnificent, twisted patterns, and of both our presences, there, looking down on our white earthenware cups and bowls, now partially empty.
I imagined him jogging in the gardens before getting back to the Hotel Komaba Eminence. I imagined his stride, his breath, its acoustic intensity increasing on the garden paths, his body moving through that narrow scenery.
Because at this same hour of the day when I, for my part, was barely emerging from the vague fabric of my dreams—having forced myself to leave the tiny bed where I’d gone to sleep the night before, motionless like a guard in his sentry box, readying myself for dream journeys throughout which I would be forced to lead my body along, constrained, stiff as a board, floating there in that rigid posture (bigger beds, allowing us the comfort of free movement, of adopting lazy, hunched, crooked postures, open up paths to far more luxurious, voluptuous dreams, in my opinion)—the person I was speaking to, as was his habit, was already well into his day. Up at four in the morning to work at his desk, he would only leave it at nine to go running or even swimming, heading for some pool in Tokyo I knew nothing about.
I let my mind conjure up his body sitting at his desk, which I imagined was situated in front of a window, facing the Tokyo night, a lamp lit and reflected against the windowpane, where his silhouette, bent over his work, was also reflected—when he lifted his eyes, his self-portrait would be spread in the grain of the glass, superimposed onto the town.
At that same hour, confined to its thin mattress, my own body was nothing more than the screen onto which a short, incoherent, and sterile film was being projected.
To follow up on this metaphor, I could easily imagine Murakami and myself on parallel sides of a split-screen interlude: T
o the left of the frame the moment when, still lethargic after the summons of my alarm clock (it was nearly nine A.M.), and having undone my nightgown, I entered the confined space of the shower—almost the same size as my bed, though aligned vertically (keeping my balance as best I could, I rubbed my skin with the tiny soap I’d been provided, which gave off the same bland and slightly acidic scent of all hotel soaps); to the right, separated, say, by an opaque, coloured strip, the precisely concomitant moment when his body was displacing torrents of the chlorinated water enveloping him so sumptuously, the gently undulating surface ahead lapping against the plastic of his goggles.
Or should we have said it was armfuls of air being displaced, in the humid atmosphere of a park, his breath slipping between the various plant species there in little jerky wisps, a light cloud of dust being kicked up by his shoes behind him?
The disproportion between our two usages of the early morning gave me a strange feeling. It seemed to me that we were separated by a kind of schedule time-lag. It was as if this moment we were now sharing was happening to us both at a different point of the day: the middle of the day for him, since he’d already filled six hours in such active and productive ways; but only the beginning of the day for me. Our two bodies were operating according to entirely separate cycles. He represented a world in which the conscious portion of life begins at four in the morning, and I a world in which it only starts after nine. These two worlds bear no relation to one another. Thus, we were in the same space, but not governed by the same temporality. Witnesses to our two incompatible worlds, we faced one another from either side of the table as though we had found a neutral territory where our two presences could somehow, artificially, be brought into synchronization. The fabric of the white tablecloth and the deep folds of our fine, expensive napkins were absorbing the gravimetric stress such a meeting should rightly have generated. And we two ambassadors, representing our respective parallel universes, suddenly finding ourselves forced to coexist in the material city of Tokyo, soon were reduced to near-speechlessness beneath the weight of the fantastical burden that had fallen to us.
While we were both concentrating all our efforts to try and make our meeting possible, this meeting between two inhabitants of two such different worlds, something like a crack began to run through the beautiful veneer of our situation.
This crack was centred around the vegetation that rose up so luxuriantly in the area around the hotel, and whose mass I had noticed right away through the transparency of the net curtains. Its intense, almost obscure green, and yet a green endowed with such chromatic strength that it almost seemed to burn, had the effect of a kind of retinal massage—a sensation from which I found it more and more difficult to free myself. This optical fascination was so overwhelming that when my eyes left the dark and persistent sight of the foliage behind in order to return to my companion’s body or to the white tablecloth on which our dishes were still arranged, its image, now evanescent and fluid, continued to appear to me as a ghostly superimposition. From then on it spread out over the whole situation like a veil—something colored and transparent, floating over everything.
I was also preoccupied with thinking through everything that was necessary for each gesture I made to be successfully accomplished, paying attention to the way I had to deal with the various objects spread out on the tablecloth, putting as much precision as I could into everything. I responded as best I could when Murakami spoke to me—not to the question he was asking me (he rarely had any), but to whatever could be perceived as interrogative in any assertion he made. I prolonged whatever he said, fitting discrete little comments between his words; I tried to give my own point of view on the subjects he brought up, even though my natural propensities still drove me to withhold my opinion when it came to certain things. Where it was honestly impossible for me to offer an opinion, I tried to express my indecision, at the very least—searching for the proper terms to account for my uncertainties as accurately as possible, in order to give a full picture of my ambivalent and hesitant state.
At last I determined that, as far as this level of our conversation went, and in terms of the small, practical manipulations demanded by the occasion of breakfast, I could not be faulted. But despite the close attention I was paying to the situation, I still found there was always some underlying, hidden element to which my thoughts continually strayed.
My breakfast companion had his back to the main picture window, and he could only see the lateral shadows cast by the two others in the room, which must have frayed his field of vision, though he didn’t deign to pay these the least attention. He seemed much more engaged by the leaves of seaweed or the omelet he was savoring with an appetite worthy of one of his characters. Sometimes, a particular gesture he made—a folding movement of his arm—would cause the fabric of his sleeve to lift, revealing a waterproof watch with big red numerals, whose brand I didn’t manage to make out.
He seemed unaffected by the vague hegemony of the vegetation outside, which crowded the windows—it was all you could see out of them—and my thoughts with an inexplicable insistence. As I said, the sight continued to be etched in my mind even when I’d managed to tear my eyes away from it; and yet, these same eyes still found themselves drawn back, again and again. The power it seemed to have over me was becoming more and more threatening, as though it were the vanguard of a greater physical threat. Its density, its scale, and the intensity of its color had put so much pressure on the room that I couldn’t help but be alarmed. My suspicions, which had appeared without my recognizing them, a vague and sickly feeling that had crept up inside me, surreptitiously, along with the beginnings of my defiance, was growing now, all of a sudden; and in the terrible discourse of my suspicion, in my mind, I understood that we were, in essence, under siege by this vegetation, which was watching and waiting for us to show a moment’s weakness, at which point it would launch its assault.
It was as though the leaves were trembling behind the windowpanes, as though they were crouched, dying to pounce. From where I sat, I felt the effects of the quivering that ran through them, those waves of dreadful elation at the thought of what they were preparing to do; those waves coming through the glass to disperse and die in the center of the room, like those horrible little ripples that reach past the usual tide line and persist in stretching a little further onto shore, stubborn and lifeless.
Haruki, indifferent to the imminence of this attack, which I, however, was increasingly positive was about to take place, continued to devote himself happily to his nori. We were sitting opposite one another, close enough that our knees could have touched, or perhaps our shins, beneath the cotton of the tablecloth concealing the sides of the table.
I didn’t know whether his impassivity was a strategy, perhaps a method of averting threats by blatantly disregarding them, or indeed whether he was continuing to eat simply out of ignorance of the danger we were in, but in either case, it was less than encouraging, and I felt he’d left us both helpless. After all, what little of the vegetal pressure was reaching him from the sides must have had the blurred quality of some lacy décor faintly hemming his vision, a vague and diaphanous edging whose strange power he could hardly appreciate. To do so, he would have had to turn his head to either side and absorb himself in at least a semi-serious contemplation of the picture windows, taking in the sinister qualities of the overly powerful, overly verdant vegetation massing behind the panes of glass. But this was obviously a concession he wouldn’t permit himself, restricting his vision to roaming the limited perimeter of his plate, occasionally alternating this with my face—or sometimes, how could he help it, toward the distant entrance, just to the side of my face from his perspective, watching the other customers coming into the room, or else following someone getting up behind me and making their way toward the buffet.
The heat of Murakami’s body too almost radiated as far as my seat. And the distant, subtle fragrance of a mild soap he must have used after swimming to scrub away the smell
of the chlorine (which persisted, however, beneath the flowery scent) battled with the heat now, attacking it with voluptuous waves of jasmine oil, which did not fully dissolve its recalcitrant bitterness.
In this new, olfactory struggle, smells were emanating from the woven fabric of his shirt and wafting gently over the table. It also happened that through some gesture the collar of his shirt would suddenly come away from his skin before pressing back against it again, allowing a more powerful whiff—a condensed cloud of these conflicting fragrances—to escape from the fleeting gap.
Something about these smells made my head spin. And yet, I knew all too well that the vegetation outside was continuing to exert its pressure on the windowpanes, gathering up all the strength of its sap, ready to charge as soon as it decided the time was right. It would then shatter the picture windows and begin to spread into the room, deploying its branches, which would have been badly damaged by all their bumping, bending, and twisting against the barriers of glass. And finally, who knows, emboldened by its new freedom, it would begin producing an endless series of fresh offshoots, which, once they collided with the inevitable obstacle of the interior walls, would begin to wind in various curls, in order to continue to grow, tangling up our poor bodies and immobilizing us in their ever-tightening grip.
All Murakami seemed to be doing to oppose this terrible havoc was to perpetuate the little war going on between the faint but nonetheless perceptible smells of chlorine and jasmine, which were themselves under siege now by the encroachment of a more effective odor—the fumes rising from his omelet, sausages, and slice of toast, which constituted serious rivals. These food odors cut across the other smells almost at right angles, hitting them where it hurt; they pierced them with their powerful arrows, given extra momentum by the heat, breaking up their molecules with tremendous force, silencing them in the air. Off-balance, dumb-founded, the majority of the weaker scents let themselves be absorbed, fading between us under the pressure of the merciless food smell, which acted like a pressurized water gun dispersing all competitors beneath my helpless nostrils.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 11
