Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  They continued their journey by boat from a Greek harbor to the port of Jaffa, and from there they walked the rest of the way, passing countless ramshackle huts, rusty iron hoops, huge tents, orange trees covered with fruit, and sandy plains with sparse, slender trees.

  After arriving in the holy city, Ariel found himself smoking his pipe among the motley inhabitants of the alleyways: Armenians, Persians, Arabs, and Turks. He prayed little and exchanged stories instead. One morning, in the steam rising from his tea, and then in the smoke of his hookah, he saw the face of his wife. After the glowing morsels of Galilean hemp resin burned themselves out, he put his hand on Ahmed’s and bade his friend and new-found partner in merrymaking farewell.

  He went to look for Mendel, his assistant, who was usually hanging around the marketplace at this time of the day, or else in the garden of an Armenian, praising the earthenware pitcher that stood on a stone table, in which the wine made by Salesians was kept cool. Mendel got up in his usual lackadaisical way.

  “Let’s go, Ariel, if your story’s ready. The Jews of Kandor can’t wait to hear it. Without it, those damned Jews won’t be too happy to see you.”

  They journeyed back to their city, where local Jews as well as ones who’d walked several days to see him all crowded around Ariel. But his story was not to their liking. One of his disciples actually spat on the master and said, “Oh, how I despise you.” The community decided not to commit the story to writing and not to spread it by word of mouth. It would be best simply to forget it, they said. Everyone should put it out of their minds, as if they had never heard it. And from that day on, they wouldn’t let their sons set foot in Ariel’s courtyard. The master should look for another line of work. Let him harness his father’s horses and become a hauler. After dark, however, the younger Jews showed up and listened to him, albeit more distractedly, taking their leave not long after.

  What on earth could Ariel have told them?

  TRANSLATED FROM HUNGARIAN BY IVAN SANDERS

  [ICELAND]

  STEINAR BRAGI

  The Sky Over Thingvellir

  We soar out of a clear, blue spring sky over Thingvellir and glide toward the mist rising over a waterfall and what will be, for a while, our destination, which begins along the scarp of the ravine. Two people, a boy and girl, are just settling down on a grassy patch near a waterfall. The boy, blond and unremarkable, but with a kind face, spreads a blanket out over the grass, and takes a wicker basket from the girl; then he says something to the girl and she responds, their mouths move but we can’t hear what they’re talking about yet. In order to get even closer to them—I see no reason for us to announce ourselves—we’ll continue on to our destination, set down at the base of the cliff, land on a branch on one of the little scrub trees by the riverbank, and discover the scents of the waking shrubs, grasses, and a single flower. After pacing the branch for a while, we fly to our ultimate goal in this little patch of the world: the minds of the girl and the boy, by turns—as it suits our needs.

  “…chill it,” said the boy.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the girl. “Put it in the river and prop it up with a rock or something.” It didn’t matter to her if the wine was cold or not. She just wanted to drink it, firstly, enjoy it, secondly, and then do it all over again before bringing their trip to an end. “Or leave it in the bag and throw it into Drekkingarhyl,” she said. “How about that? That water’s so cold it could freeze your soul out.”

  The spot they chose was just above Drekkingarhyl, far from the roar of the waterfall, but near enough that they could still hear it. Occasionally the spray would blow over them; she found that refreshing.

  She hadn’t said much in the car on the way up, and he’d finally asked her if everything was all right, and the tone of his voice was so tender and full of concern that she wanted to smile. On the other hand, he got on her nerves whenever he wasn’t like that, when he was like he usually was—happy and easygoing, always getting carried away by his little fantasies.

  “I brought a cooler,” he said, “but I forgot to bring any ice, what are they called…those bags…”

  “Put it in the river,” she said. He walked over to the riverbank, stepped carefully between the rocks, and placed the bottle in a small pool a safe distance from the whitewater; afterward, he came back and sat down next to her on the blanket.

  They smoked cigarettes, were silent and looked around at the scenery. In the parking lot below them, next to Lögberg, there hadn’t been any cars or tourist buses, and they hadn’t seen a single person in the ravine. So unusual on such a nice day in May—though it was a Wednesday. Everyone must be stuck at work.

  “Aren’t there any midges at Thingvellir?” asked the boy and looked around. “I can’t remember if I’ve ever seen midges here.”

  The girl couldn’t decide how she felt—she was simultaneously sad, angry, and frightened. The sadness came on when she’d decided to break up with Baldur, which was the boy’s name, although now it was changing to hate. She thought he was very intelligent and often funny, handsome too, but there was something about him that she just couldn’t stand—probably it was all his brightness, which bordered on what some women might see as smugness. With him, everything was always good. He was a man who marched ahead, who didn’t seem to harbor so much as a speck of self loathing, self destructiveness, not even a hint of any unbridled, conflicted angst that might need to find some means of expression. They couldn’t have been more different.

  In the end, she was frightened because she thought she might not find the words, the courage to end the relationship before the day was over, and to do it with dignity. Otherwise, there would be a fight: someone would get hurt. She would simply have to ignore the beautiful weather and scenery until she decided what to say.

  “I want to take a nap,” she said, and lay down along the edge of the blanket.

  “We just got here!” he said.

  “I have a hangover,” she said. They had gone to a cocktail party at Vigdis Finnbogadottir’s office, where the girl worked, the previous afternoon, to see off a staff member who was moving overseas for a job. After the party, they’d gone to a bar and then to another party. And it was at the second party that she decided that they couldn’t be together anymore, just before she passed out on someone’s bed. She wasn’t certain how her reasoning went, exactly, she just knew. They’d been together for three months. It had been pretty good, so breaking up after three months shouldn’t be a problem. Three months was nothing.

  He decided not to say anything, she could do whatever she wanted to do, probably she’d be more fun if she slept her headache off. He closed his eyes and listened to the lazy drone of the insects that rose and fell like an unfinished melody. Unfinished melody, he thought: a title. A composition for buzzing bees, broken up by a ridiculous, over-the-top heavy-metal drum solo, nothing else. Maybe a little flowery, sentimental, lisping baby-girl singing, too. The drone quickly became irritating, an intolerable thrumming, a communiqué from nature about frost or a trip to the country.

  He stood up, ate a piece of dried-out baguette that he had picked up at a bakery, went down to the river to check on the bottle, and saw a patch of snow below the cliff face, across the river.

  “Last snowdrift in the ravine,” Baldur mumbled to himself. “Alone. Nothing but sun and death all around…A vampire that didn’t make it home.”

  He grabbed the cooler, stepped carefully across on the river stones, and filled it with snow. When he looked over to the blanket, he saw that Ella, which was the girl’s name, was awake, sitting and smoking another cigarette. He crouched over the snow which was thin and covered with grit, made a snowball, and threw it at her. The snowball blew apart in the rocks next to the girl but she said nothing, just continued to smoke.

  He didn’t know what was going on, but the night before, at the party, something had changed. It was as if there was a distance between them, or that he had moved closer to her and she had stepped away. A coldnes
s had come into her eyes, or a hardness that hadn’t been there before—not a single time in the past three months. Her eyes had always lit up when she looked at him. The first time he remembered her eyes going cold, he had been standing and talking to someone—but it didn’t register at the time. He had looked across the room to where Ella was sitting and smoking and realized for the first time that he loved her, undeniably. This sensation was warm. He felt his frozen sense of trust begin to thaw, melt through him, spread through his chest, then bubble up into his mind. He loved everything about her: her eyes, her long eyelashes, her smell, how she smoked—everything. It was unimaginable for him to try and pinpoint one thing out of this totality that was Ella and try to identify it as the primary reason. He couldn’t, so he stopped trying. He had wanted to put his arms around her right then and tell her he loved her, more than he’d ever loved anyone, but decided to delay. He was drunk. Anything he said would come out slurred and pathetic, and she would have thought he was making it all up, would’ve looked right through him and laughed, would’ve asked him to tell her all about it in the morning when they were in his bed, and then when he repeated his confession it would’ve made her uncomfortable. The first time would have been awkward, and everything that followed would be clumsy, compromised. All the delicate nuances that should really have been the foundations of an anecdote they could have told all their lives about how they met and first fell in love would be ruined because of his drinking. And then, the next time he looked over at her, after having just roared with laughter—probably too loudly—over some tidbit in the general conversation, he saw Ella looking at him with drunken eyes, deliberately cold, as though she’d just caught him in a lie, or was seeing something loathsome in him. But it was probably only his imagination. The glance had lasted only a second, and then she looked away.

  No, she was angry about something, he thought. He had to fix it. But he was still certain that he was in love with her—probably he’d known for some time now, two or three weeks perhaps, or at the very least he’d been pretty sure since he’d filled the wicker basket for their trip, bringing along the gift that he intended to give her—arranged with the help of a friend. This was the perfect day to give it to her, and for her to read what he had written on the label.

  He tiptoed back across the river, stuck the white wine into the snow in the cooler, and sat down next to her.

  “Last snowdrift,” said Baldur, pointing over to it. “Smart snow. A survivor.” She didn’t reply, looked at the rainbows in the waterfall’s mist. She had noticed them as she was lying down for a nap. Hundreds of small rainbows were scattered through the mist. There hadn’t been any when they arrived, she thought—the sun must be higher in the sky.

  She put out her cigarette, lay down again, and closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids she saw halo bursts, distorted faces that seemed familiar—people’s faces she had known in previous lives, perhaps, over the course of some other short existential interval, sneering children blowing around in a nuclear mushroom cloud. There were also dead suns, and jellyfish, and skates swimming in the cold murky depths.

  “Did you see the tree up there, up on the rim?” he asked, and she made a noise. “Or I should say, dwarf tree. I came here once when I was trying to cultivate a bonsai. Iceland is teeming with dwarf trees. The Japanese would kill for them. All their highlands and beaches have been picked clean of trees that grow in poor conditions—in the cold or wind or salt. The conditions stunt their growth, and you can make any stunted tree into a saleable bonsai in two to three years, if you know how to do it. Trees can grow everywhere in Iceland in a few months. One hundred thousand bonsai-starters right here. In grams, a good bonsai is as valuable as gold. We could open a major factory here, have compressors, wire, and hydraulic equipment, and people with little scissors, and export bonsais to the States or Japan. Bonsais are in right now.”

  “What a practical dream,” she said without opening her eyes. “And you can employ little elves to do the trimming, little Sigur Rós androgynes with iPods.”

  “I also got a pine tree from Thingholt, stole it from a garden on Bergstastræti, a dwarf pine that I wired up for three years and sold on the Internet.”

  “To Japan, I assume,” she said and felt a wave of nausea, a terrible ennui about their conversation. If he said one more word about dwarf trees, a vein would burst in her head.

  “California,” he said, “but to a Japanese company.” She jumped to her feet and grabbed the bottle out of the cooler, was about to reach over to the basket for the corkscrew, but he shouted at her to leave the basket alone. She wasn’t allowed to look in it yet. He stood up, retrieved the corkscrew from the basket, and contemplated his dull outline against the bright sky reflected in the silver, shining wrapping paper around the gift.

  He removed the cork, poured some white wine into plastic cups, and they drank and looked out over the Thingvellir plain, toward the west. The sky was blue and empty, but in the opposite direction toward Skjaldbreidur, some glint in a black cloudbank made it seem to him that it was heading their way.

  “Clouds…Are those clouds over there?” he asked and pointed over to Skjaldbreidur, but she didn’t respond, sat down again on the blanket. Her face was drawn, eyes distant and bright, as though she were thinking about terrible things. He didn’t know why he didn’t let her just have the package right away. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. Maybe he’d give it to her after she drank off her hangover.

  “Clouds over Skjaldbreidur,” he said and looked into her eyes. “…Our thoughts are clouds,” he added, feeling that he wanted to provoke her—she was treating him as though he was simple or stupid, which he wasn’t, but he could tell that’s what she thought of him.

  “You’re an expert on the sky now?” she asked, and handed him the glass to refill.

  “The sky doesn’t exist,” he said and filled her glass. “It’s distinct layers of atmospheric densities fracturing the sunlight, harmonizing, making it all appear blue. The layers diminish gradually until there’s nothing left but emptiness. The sky isn’t like a glass dome over us—it’s like a complex melody.”

  “Distinct layers, harmonizing,” she said. “What a surprise for a musician to talk about nature like that. It’s like you just can’t see anything except yourself, mirrored everywhere you look.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “You even said that the sky was like a melody.”

  They both fell silent.

  “Have you heard about the Copenhagen interpretation?” he asked.

  “Have you ever heard of psychological projection?”

  “It’s always the same with literalists,” he said, ignoring the girl’s rejoinder, “people who claim to be ‘grounded,’ who consider themselves to be practical and, in general, use science as an excuse for everything, are always the same people who turn out to be the loudest objectors and archconservatives, who still believe in antiquated nineteenth-century philosophy and wander around in a dense fog, denying everything that’s been discovered by real scientists in the first half of the twentieth century, and that musicians and artists have always known. There is no reality. Everything is beauty. Impressions are made on our neural receptors—across clouds. We’re clouds wearing pants! The earth we’re sitting on is a cloud, and our brains are crackling clouds full of lightning! Niels Bohr investigated the double nature of light particles, for which Einstein received the Nobel. Light behaves both as a particle and as wave, or to put it another way, like a ball, for example, and a water ripple after a stone has been dropped into the water. This was considered incomprehensible, but Bohr designed an experiment where light particles were shot or pushed in the direction of a partition with a photosensitive screen on the other side that had recorded their journey.”

  “I know this,” she said, wishing she had a gloomy Heathcliff-type man, someone who was capable of ordering her around like a parent one minute and fucking her on the floor the next. Someone she could handle—someone she c
ould keep right at the brink of violence without ever pushing him over. “There were two slits on the partition, just like on a woman.”

  “Two slits?” he laughed.

  “The mouth and the pussy, Baldur! The ass just has a hole. And when the particles were fired off, some of them were all hot for the slits in the partition, but their path through it was recorded by a voyeur, drooling over their every move—you won’t find that fact in the overwrought erotic science-for-laymen love stories called textbooks. The light particles manifested as a pattern on the screen and this was wave oscillation, meaning that the light particles flowed through both slits at once, which is just like pushing your cock into one slit but somehow splitting it in two along the way so that it goes into both. If it had been possible to view this phenomenon in slow motion, the scientists would have seen the particles move through the partition by going through each slit simultaneously, behaving like a particle and wave all at once. It’s all so cliché!”

  “Everything is cliché!” he yelled. “You can’t avoid it! To be born is a cliché: we’re all born at the same level and die at the same level! Life’s challenge is to learn about clichés—which also happens to be a cliché—and to figure out how to handle them on our own terms. And look, that slit thing was an important experiment! It should be on the FRONT PAGE of the newspaper every goddamn day of the year! It demonstrates that the timeless, formless breath of existence, or whatever it’s called—life or God or music!—isn’t subservient to any law of nature except those that we’ve imposed on it. The possibilities are endless! Reality doesn’t exist beyond what we make of it! Everything is POSSIBLE!”

  “More clichés,” she said, and found that she was uncomfortable with this debate, or whatever it was that they were having. “And clichés—both yours and the ones even guys like you find trite: guys who actually enjoy sitting around and spouting off about this shit—don’t change anything. People need to understand that. If the possibilities really were endless, we wouldn’t all sit around feeling impotent all the time—people could change, learn to cope with their problems, go to a monastery, do asanas, reflect on life, whatever. I know for a fact that we can’t do a thing to reality—all we can hope to do is carve out a small plot of land for ourselves in the formless, gigantic universe around us, pretend that we deserve it, and call it truth or knowledge or good or a ‘real experience.’ That’s obvious! But at least I see things as existing within some kind of framework, while you just want to blow everything apart, as usual—you just go on making everything meaningless over and over again, and that’s all you’ll do as long as you live. You fixate on your premise so much that you can’t even understand what I believe in. And this makes you a slave to your own language. You talk and think and only practice what you preach when it comes to work or money. In Asia, for example, no one discusses the Copenhagen interpretation. There are no representatives of recreational culture who go around talking about ‘formlessness’ on the level that you do, who want to subsume all religions and systems and disciplines into their nothingness—who want to own thought.”