Best European Fiction 2010

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Don’t even try to talk to me about Asia,” he said, suddenly irritated. “I know everything about Asia.”

  “We live within a framework, and always will,” she said. “It’s meaningless to talk about what’s outside of it—probably it’ll even be impossible in the future, after this framework has collapsed, but it’s certainly impossible today. Nothing exists but the framework. Some guy in the sixteenth century sat next to a lake and played on his guitar—a small lute—and then, presto! He invents the electric guitar and then a Van Halen solo. Why would he do that? Electricity hadn’t even been discovered yet. There were no plugs or amplifiers. In order for his life to be complete, he perfected the technique of playing what was in his hands, at that moment—and he did it well.”

  “Or he could have discovered electricity, wired up his guitar, and then plugged it into an amplifier. You prefer to live life in a box—just know your limitations and never try to get past them. But there’s no difference between art and science. All of these things are just different ways of approaching the same end.”

  “And I’m saying that it’s all meaningless. When you lump everything together like that, you come up with nothing. You learned to read by figuring out the individual characters, one by one, despite the fact that each letter, by itself, has no meaning. Then you moved forward by picturing words, and later, sentences. If it were up to you, everyone would be illiterate and incapable of writing—they’d just be staring at clouds. What does music actually mean to you, for example? Just another thing to play around with? What do you want to do with music, though? Aren’t you afraid that one of those cloud-with-pants naïve musicians out there, those idealists—the people who pretend to be something—might appropriate you and use your music for whatever fascist or Nazi campaign they’ve cooked up, maybe pipe your ridiculous music into people’s rooms at night to brainwash them—infusing sentiment into ordinary communication, into the very framework that you reject, keeping them from knowing reality? People who reject reality always lose! Besides, your logic is all founded on narcissism, which owes no allegiance to anyone—it only attaches value to things that it can use to make itself look better.”

  “Are we fighting?” he asked. “For the first time? Buddha rejected reality, does he lose too?”

  “We are arguing,” she said, “and not for the first time.” She sipped from the glass and began to rip the grass next to where she was sitting.

  “When have we ever argued?” he asked. Then they were both silent. She looked at the clouds over Skjaldbreid, they flowed down the mountain and she couldn’t see the peak anymore. She tried to say something, but could only say, “We’re different. Maybe too different.”

  “What I was about to say…” he began, attempting to calm the situation down without giving in. He couldn’t really address the problem as long as she couldn’t understanding what he was getting at. “I’m not talking about escapism, or being some kind of pathetic conformist. I just wanted to say that, in practical terms, as far as our understanding of the world, everything is separate and well-defined and is, therefore, in complete harmony—everything is matter. A comes before B, and the light goes through both slits at the same time. Everything is good. And so, in order to control the world, humanity naturally sees itself as just another machine, we think we’re all individual little engines built to portion out eternity—to feed, even while we’re still young and unformed, off the corpse of life, creating a reality for ourselves that is itself a kind of machine: a machine world, full of machine nervous systems, machine brains, and machine love. Everything is a machine. But that doesn’t have anything to do with truth or happiness, you see?”

  “Do I see?” she said and giggled. “So now you’re going to ‘you see’ me to death?”

  “What’s the matter with you? What’s wrong with ‘you see?’”

  Squinting into the sun, blushing with anger, she said, “That expression should never be used to finish a sentence. It’s just an empty placeholder, a different way of saying ‘you know what I mean’ or ‘um’—like shaking your fist when you’re yelling at someone.”

  “And another thing,” he said, also angry, “sarcasm, something you’re clearly familiar with, is evil and originates in fear, a wall that people erect between themselves and life because they can’t find the strength to confront it—they’re defenseless in the face of the limitless possibilities of life, which only appeal to the imaginative and courageous. Evil is submission, contempt for both the world and the self, bound to figures of speech born in the powerful European courts of the past hundred years and which, like a nightmare, has insinuated itself into the whole of Western culture! Let’s talk about the Asia of the future! One and a half ZILLION CHINESE DO NOT UNDERSTAND SARCASM!” A small bird whistled up out of the shrubs beside them, but Baldur didn’t notice it, he was beginning to shake with emotion—and not in a pleasant way. In fact, he hadn’t lost his temper like this in more than a year.

  “Don’t talk to me about Asia,” she said, mimicking the way he had said it earlier, though she didn’t risk making her voice quite as strident and needy as she would have liked. “And another thing. Let’s talk about the women’s rights struggle of the future. In order for women to understand men better, to better control them, they all only need to understand one thing: that men are more emotional than women are. The reason for this is that women are all so much more self-assured than men, women have evolved away from their subservient status only to find themselves still subordinate to men when it comes to money, property, and so forth. Ergo, women’s emotions are now, generally speaking, centered around practical matters—profit, health, equilibrium—while in the meantime our marvelous, wild, mercurial, over-privileged men have managed to get themselves all worked up over the unlikeliest of phenomena—the Copenhagen interpretation, God, air, rocks, whatever’s at hand!”

  “Why are you telling me this? What the hell does that have to do with me?”

  “Because you’re just another example of the kind of man who always makes his way into my life. Men invented romanticism, you know—they like to make women into symbols, into unearthly beings! Nothing so ethereal and absurd has ever been written by a woman. Austen, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and Doris Lessing are each about the coldest and most elemental stylists that you can find. No man could ever approach the deliberate, cold-hammered styles of those women. Whining idiots like Schopenhauer or Michel Houellebecq are just pubescent boys, by comparison. Men simply can’t escape their own emotions. The books on the bestseller list are all written by frustrated middle-aged men who want to force their pessimism on us, want to tell us all how dissatisfied they are with their bodies, want to proclaim their latest theories about self-love or moan about the universal gestalt of WESTERN CULTURE. It’s nothing but hysteria! Men need to figure out how to vomit up their emotions once and for all, to purge themselves of whatever it is that’ll be their next crisis—now that would be a real form of cultural criticism! Until then, women will just have to learn to walk away from the problem, if they want to get ahead: men are pale, humorless, and thin-skinned—always resorting to suicide, alcohol, and depression. Men ooze emotional bullshit. They’ve become exactly what people used to call old crones.”

  “I don’t have a clue what we’re talking about anymore,” the boy said, holding his head in his hands and closing his eyes. “Or maybe I should say, we’re not talking about what we’re pretending to talk about…You aren’t, anyway…”

  She stood up, grabbed the bottle, and poured wine into the glass, putting the half-finished bottle back in the cooler and walking away from the blanket, from the small postage stamp that they’d fastened to the earth there, just for the pleasure of making each other suffer.

  “I want to go back to town,” she said loudly, walking back to the blanket and standing over him. He didn’t reply but reached over to the basket and took out the small package. The package was silver, thin, and rectangular. He handed it over without looking at her. There
was a small, red label on the front of the package. She turned the package over in her hand, saw the label, and read: “To Ella, the woman that I love.” A dark cloud welled up inside her, as well as an incomprehensible blend of surprise and despair. The fucker, she thought, the goddamn fucker, is he saying he loves me? It had never occurred to her that he might be capable of this, not once, but now, after giving it some thought, it seemed perfectly normal. Some people fall in love in a minute, a second, in a fraction of a second.

  She tore open the package and found a black-and-white photograph in an unpretentious ebony-wood frame. The image was a grainy, out-of-focus photograph. Along a wall, she could make out something that looked like a person, and a lamppost, maybe one or two cars. At the bottom, on the right corner, were numbers: 02.11.19. A delicate flower-filigree ran over the border of the frame.

  Something about the photograph made her think that this was a scam.

  After she had inspected every centimeter and every grain of the photograph, searching for a clue about what it was she was looking at, or what it could have to do with her or them, she realized she had to say something. “What is this?” she asked, the setting sun tearing into the lazy buzz of nature all around them as she turned back toward him. He was looking over at Skjaldbreidur, he seemed tired or maybe he was daydreaming; he said that he had arranged this with the help of his friend, a pastor.

  “He worked for the police during the summer. I’ve told you about him. He left a few telephone messages for me…Do you recognize anything about the photograph? The people there, or…?” He pointed to two shadows up by a wall—it seemed to her that the figures might be exchanging something, a package, or they could be shaking hands.

  “Will you please just tell me…?”

  “This is the exact second that we met,” he said. “The photograph was taken from a security camera. You can see there at the bottom—that’s the time it was taken: eleven minutes and nineteen seconds after two, Sunday morning, February 20th. We’re the shadows there. The third shadow, between us and farther off, is your girlfriend, the one who introduced us. We’re shaking hands…”

  She brought the photograph up to her nose and peered at their shadows there. After he’d told her what she was looking at, the picture became clear. She recognized her own silhouette, the nose, eyelashes; recognized his blond hair and profile outlined in the cone of light under the lamppost. The corner of Posthusstræti and Austurstræti. The second they met. Exactly two o’clock, eleven, nineteen…You goddamn whiny pathetic piece of shit, she thought and finally noticed the dimming light around them, looked over at the waterfall and said:

  “Do you know why no one paints landscapes in our country?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Midges.”

  “Midges?”

  “Midges. Midges everywhere. And while I’ve seen paintings of every form of wildlife on this pathetic island, I can’t recall ever seeing a painting of midges.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “You know that a midge,” she continued, “is as significant and real or beautiful or ugly as everything else. When you go into the Icelandic countryside during the summer, midges are the first thing you think about, and more often than not they become your main focus. You move around the landscape in particular ways because of them, contort into the most amazing shapes, swing your hands and legs around, hope for a breeze or rain. And finally you just want to go home. Maybe when you’re painting you’re supposed to get so caught up in yourself and your easel and in what your eyes tell you that you don’t notice them buzzing around your ears, flying up your nostrils, or biting your skin. The landscape painting becomes the goal—a memorial to the victory of your eyes! But only a very small—actually, an unreasonably miniscule—number of painters actually understands that nature is in as much pain as we are, and even fewer manage to get this into their pictures! And I’ll tell you why that matters.” She lifted up the photograph he’d given her. “Because the one thing—perhaps the only thing that the security cameras of this sad, compromised, apathetic little world are still unable to capture in photographs is love. So, even if someone’s love was meant to be photographed in this picture here—this ridiculous gift, this memorial to dread—whatever piece-of-junk machine was scanning and buzzing at us from outside someone’s house never managed to capture it. So I understand that you couldn’t tell that there’s no love in this picture—that love didn’t happen in the moment this photograph was taken. I’m trying to tell you, in other words, that I don’t love you. That I’ll never love you.” She tore the photograph down the middle, tossed it onto the ground, and walked away up the ravine without looking back.

  The boy watched her walk away and opened his mouth to yell something, but nothing came to him except “I love you.” He began to shake and then cry. He threw himself onto the blanket and cried until he couldn’t cry anymore.

  When he stood up again his body was numb. His head buzzed like all the midges in Iceland that went unpainted on a calm summer day. But we won’t examine his thoughts and feelings any more closely than we already have. Perhaps these will end up in some other book, someday…for now, they don’t much matter. (Or else: they’ll never matter.) The boy gathered up the food and dishes and put them into the basket, then he folded the blanket and laid it on top. He slipped the basket under his arm and walked down the trail toward his car.

  Back in the grass, where they’d been sitting, in among some torn blades of grass, there was a red thread from the blanket and some breadcrumbs that the flies immediately dissolved with their saliva and ate. In the air, the faint odor of the boy’s shaving cream and the girl’s body odor were carried off into the afternoon by the breeze. Then the clouds arrived, the rainbows disappeared from the waterfall mist, the flies quieted down, and it began to rain. Two black-and-white halves of the moment in time when the boy and the girl first met were blown into the river, carried into the depths, and turning in an occluded whirlpool throughout the summer, autumn, winter, and into the next spring. The river finally carries them all the way down to the lake where they sink into the silt bed and slowly dissolve. This is how the two of them spent their lives—they lived, died, and all traces of their existence vanished from the earth.

  But it seems that on one certain beautiful spring day in a small hollow by a little waterfall, one tiny human being was able to see all this in the palm of his hand, and realize how important it is to express oneself decisively, to try and break free from the chains of the slow, inevitable death that concludes human life. For one fleeting second in the eternity of the cosmos, a girl by the name of Ella demanded truth—and received it. Her efforts exposed her to our scrutiny—but perhaps, in that moment, she understood that this report might one day be written about her. Our story is another kind of confrontation. Also doomed to failure, in all likelihood. As such, we will withhold any further explanations, withdraw, and head straight back up into the sky—not just over Thingvellir, but over the entire globe. We’ll let that suffice. There’s nothing left to say—except, let us all remember that (as has often been said during one or another of the pathetic, pretentious errors that we call a human life) even a broken clock is right twice a day.

  TRANSLATED FROM ICELANDIC BY CHRISTOPHER BURAWA

  [IRELAND: ENGLISH]

  JULIAN GOUGH

  The Orphan and the Mob

  If I had urinated immediately after breakfast, the mob would never have burnt down the orphanage. But, as I left the dining hall to relieve myself, the letterbox clattered. I turned in the long corridor. A single white envelope lay on the doormat. I hesitated, and heard through the door the muffled roar of a motorcycle starting. With a crunching turn on the gravel drive and a splatter of pebbles against the door, it was gone.

  Odd, I thought, for the postman has a bicycle. I walked to the large oak door, picked up the envelope, and gazed upon it.

  JUDE

  THE ORPHANAGE

  TIPPERARY

 
; IRELAND

  For me! On this day, of all significant days! I sniffed both sides of the smooth white envelope, in the hope of detecting a woman’s perfume, or a man’s cologne. It smelt, faintly, of itself.

  I pondered. I was unaccustomed to letters, having never received one before, and I did not wish to use this one up in one go. As I stood in silent thought, I could feel the orphanage coffee burning through my small dark passages. Should I open the letter before or after urinating? It was a dilemma. I wished to open it immediately. Yet a full bladder distorts judgement and is an obstacle to understanding.