“You’re not his mother,” he’d remonstrated. “Why do this?”
“Because you won’t.”
Sebastian knelt down on his studio floor, his hands held stiffly by his sides. He couldn’t think of a single word of comfort to offer, but maybe that wasn’t what was needed just yet? He found a use for his hands eventually, pressing his palms down gently on top of Nell’s shoulders. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“And you think I did?”
Nell took the opportunity of wiping her eyes on the loose cuff of his shirt (he never wore cufflinks), before delving in her coat pockets. She produced a scrap of paper and handed it over. “That’s my address. I want you to come and look at Indigo’s things.”
Sebastian studied the address: 8 Enys Road, Eastbourne. Nell left without saying another word, and he slowly got to his feet. He went back to the escritoire and made a note of the address in his little leather address book. As he wrote, he acknowledged how he had never written down the address of the squat, because he believed that would have legitimised what his son had done. He had moved away and started a life that Sebastian had always held to be his life—the one he had before his three children were born and he’d had to support them teaching at the local secondary school. A life where every choice had been made for an objective in hand and not left hanging because of a child’s cry.
“Talk to him,” Maura had urged. “He’s your son. You should be proud of him.”
She had been Indigo’s ally, as his divorce dragged on. Maura had known the minute she first saw his carvings that they were a kind of miracle. She cried when she found an early stone cross abandoned near the rhubarb patch, such a tour de force of carving for someone barely out of childhood, but Indigo claimed it was a failure and wouldn’t take it back in. Maybe that’s when they had first become competitors, Sebastian reflected, brushing down his jeans and hunting for his studio keys.
“You must go,” Maura had insisted when he told her about his unexpected reunion at the studio. “Think what she must have been through.”
“I was a bastard,” he admitted.
“You were out of your mind,” she corrected him. “We all were.”
He caught the train to Eastbourne and asked at the ticket desk for directions to Enys Road. It was only a short distance from the station, so he decided to walk. He found Nell on the second floor of a large, shared Edwardian house. She took him on a haphazard tour through a dozen rooms filled with heavy 1930s furniture. The original fireplaces had all been displaced by ugly, imitation coal fires, whilst the ornate ceiling medallions were submerged under ugly ’70s light fittings. The incongruity of so many clashing period styles blinded Sebastian at first from seeing that his son’s sculptures were to be found in most of the rooms. Next, he became aware of the many drawings mounted in clip frames on the walls, all signed by Indigo. Nell disappeared into the basement kitchen to make a pot of tea, which she served with shortcake biscuits still in their wrapping.
They drank their tea in her bedroom, squatting on the bed. Above their heads, a unique objet trouvé made out of the glass doors of an antique cupboard pressed down on a cluttered montage of sepia photographs. Sebastian wondered if it was an alternative family photograph album, but there were no pictures of Indigo inside the frame, nor of anyone else who might have lived beyond 1940.
“I buy them in junk shops,” Nell explained. “I change it round whenever I find someone new I like the look of.”
Sebastian was stunned.
“What about your real family?”
Nell shrugged.
“And no Indigo either.”
“I thought if I put him up there, it would all go wrong. Like a jinx…” Her reply petered out. Then she started up again. “You know, one minute, it was just like any other day. The next, his blood was running over my blue pumps. I loved those shoes…”
“And my son?” he broke in, unable to help himself.
But of course she’d loved him. He only had to think of the strangers in the photos masquerading as family. Nell had seemingly lost more than her lover in her short life. Why had he not understood before that someone else could love his son as much as he had, and why had he never let Indigo tell him about Nell’s history? He imagined all sorts as he picked up a shortcake biscuit and dunked it in his mug of tea. Nell followed suit. He reached out and squeezed her hand.
“It can be like that with families sometimes,” he tried reassuring her. “Hell in a handbasket. I mean, look at me: you’d never have imagined me here once upon a time, would you?”
Once upon a time, his son had thrown down a challenge and he had erupted like a storybook ogre. He’d huffed and puffed—and blown it.
“Is there anything that takes your fancy?” Nell asked, changing the subject abruptly. “Maybe a sundial. They were his speciality.”
Sebastian was reminded of the botched sculpture abandoned in the rhubarb patch. He’d rescued it, but then slung it behind the organic compost bin in a rage when Indigo won his place at the very same art college which had rejected him over twenty years earlier. He’d been the child, he realised that now. Nell let her biscuit sink down into her tea. He saw tears on her cheeks, but knew he couldn’t comfort her.
“It’s not right, is it?” she barely whispered. “Indigo dying before you?”
He hunched over his cup, trying to warm his hands on his mug. The room was cold now that the late winter sun had disappeared behind the roofs of the houses opposite. Sebastian put his mug down by the side of the bed and then stretched himself out over Nell’s lime green quilt.
“I haven’t slept since Indigo died,” he confessed.
“Try now,” Nell said.
He looked over at her, rather bewildered. She sat cross-legged next to him, like an overgrown doll. Her cable-knit cardigan was too small for her, and she wore her Aztec-patterned gloves round her neck, secured on a piece of elastic. She wasn’t looking at him, but concentrating on her disintegrating biscuit. Sebastian put his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. He was conscious of his breathing and Nell’s too; somewhere in the far depths of the house a Hoover whined. He felt a hundred years old. He heard Nell shift about on top of the quilt and then everything went still. The quilt warmed his back and he began to relax. He pinched his eyes tight shut, so tight he could see colours buzz against the back of his eyelids; acid green, harsh yellow, pink and orange, all the colours on Nell’s gloves. A dance of colour which he watched like a play.
“Sebastian?”
His name was a label peeling away from his skin. He wasn’t concerned about it anymore. Who was Sebastian anyway? Someone repeated his name. A voice he had trouble identifying, until he let his eyes snap open. A woman in a white wool coat bobbed around on his sightline. It was Nell. He pulled himself up, but was disorientated by the squashy quilt. “You’re going out?”
“Yeah.” She rammed a black beret down over her cropped hair. “And you still haven’t chosen anything. You must choose something, before I get back.”
She left the bedroom, carefully closing the door behind her, as if he were still sleeping. Sebastian lay back on the quilt. He was exhausted, but he couldn’t fall asleep again. He checked his watch. It was already seven o’-clock and he needed to catch a train back to Lewes. He levered himself slowly off the bed. Reaching down for his boots, he found one of Indigo’s Celtic style crosses caught up in the voluminous folds of the quilt. In its centre, a small disc carrying a tiny portrait of Nell. He licked his fingers and scrubbed away the dust that had filled in the contours of her face. Indigo had captured his lover’s expression in just a few confident incisions.
Sebastian propped the cross up against the wall and returned to bed. He wrapped himself in the quilt and lay on his side studying the cross. He must have slept again, because when he woke it was morning, snow was falling and the cross was wrapped up in brown parcel paper and string. A label was sellotaped to the parcel. The message on it read: “Happy Christmas.” Sebastian got up a
nd tidied the quilt, before taking the mugs down to the kitchen. Then he slipped out of the front door and began his journey home, Indigo’s mermaid tucked safely under his arm.
Author Biographies and Personal Statements
INGA BELE, novelist, playwright, short story writer and poet, was born in Riga, Latvia in 1972, and studied in the Department of Film and Drama at the Latvian Academy of Culture. Abele first achieved international fame as a playwright. Her play Tumsie Briezi (The Dark Deer) was staged by the Stuttgart State Theater in 2002, and Dzelzszale (The Iron Weed) has been produced by amateur companies in both Finland and Denmark. Her short stories have been included in Italian and French anthologies, and in 2005, a short story collection entitled Nature morte à la grenade (Still Life with a Pomegranate) was published in France. Her collection of poetry Nakts pragmatike (Night Pragmatist) appeared in 2000, and her first novel Uguns nemodina (Fire Will Not Wake You) in 2001; her most recent collection of poetry is Atgzenes stacijas zirgi (The Horses of Atgazene Station), 2006. Her second novel Paisums (Flow) was published in 2008, and her latest play, Sala (Island), will be staged in 2009 at the New Drama Theater in Riga.
NAJA MARIE AIDT was born and raised in Greenland. Her family moved to Copenhagen when she was seven years old. She made her debut as a writer in 1991 with her poetry collection Så længe jeg er ung (As Long as I’m Young). Since then she has published eight additional collections of poetry and three collections of short stories. She has also written several plays, children’s books, song lyrics, and the screenplay for the feature film Strings (2005).
All of Naja Marie Aidt’s short stories have been translated into German, and her collection Bavian (Baboon) has also been published in Sweden, Norway, Germany, France, Canada, Latvia, and the Czech Republic. In 2008, Bavian received the most prestigious literary prize awarded in the Nordic countries—the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. As the jury wrote, her work contains “a graceful and ominous realism that draws out undertones of reality, allowing the reader to become aware that everyday life is resting on a mycelium of potential disasters.”
“Bulbjerg,” the short story included in this book, is the opening story of Bavian.
Naja Marie Aidt cites many inspirations and influences from European and, especially, Scandinavian literature, with the Danish poet and novelist Inger Christensen and the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson—both of whom have been published in English translation—among her favorites. Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Duras, and Charles Baudelaire are all classic authors to whom she keeps returning, and among newer writers she has been most influenced by the Italian writer Niccolò Ammaniti and the Rumanian/French Agota Kristof.
As far as American literature, she feels closest to such authors as Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Paula Fox, Joe Brainard, Lyn Hejinian, John Ashbery and Gary Shteyngart.
Naja Marie Aidt is currently living and writing in Brooklyn, New York.
DAVID ALBAHARI was born in Pe, Serbia in 1948.
He writes in Serbian and has published ten collections of short stories, including Opis smrti (Description of Death, 1982), Jednostavnost (Simplicity, 1988), Drugi jezik (A Second Language, 2003), Senke (Shadows, 2007) and Svake noi u drugom gradu (Each Night in a Different City, 2008).
He has published twelve novels, among which are Snežni ovek (1995; Snow Man, 2005), Mamac (1996; Bait, 2001), Gec i Majer (1998; Götz and Meyer, 2005), Pijavice (Leeches, 2005) and Ludvig (2007).
His books have been translated into eighteen languages. Bait, Snow Man, Götz and Meyer, and Tsing have all appeared in English translation, as has Words Are Something Else, a selection of his short stories.
He has been living in Calgary, Canada since October, 1994.
Albahari writes, “As a writer of short stories, I have always felt a greater affinity for the American tradition than that of Europe. Although I have been most influenced as a writer by three Europeans—Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke—it’s always been the American short story writers who have most shaped my work in the form, particularly authors of ‘metafiction,’ such as Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and, most of all, Robert Coover. There have been periods, however, when the stories of John Updike, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and, of course, Raymond Carver, have influenced me as well. Generally speaking, there are many American writers in the period between William Faulkner and Carver, through J. D. Salinger, S. Bellow and T. Pynchon, who have influenced me in one way or another. After Carver that influence no longer exists, or rather, the American short story no longer works its ‘magic’ on me. Perhaps this is a sign that I have found my own narrative voice, but it also may mean that, at least for me, current American literature does not have story writers as exciting and innovative as their predecessors.”
TRANSLATED FROM SERBIAN BY ELLEN ELIAS-BURSA
ANDREJ BLATNIK was born on May 22nd, 1963, in Ljubljana, Slovenija, where he studied Comparative Literature and the Sociology of Culture and got his master’s in American Literature and PhD in Communication Studies. He started his artistic career playing bass guitar in a punk band, was a freelance writer for five years, and now works as an editor for the Cankarjeva publishing house, teaches creative writing, and has been on the editorial board of Literatura since 1984. He is currently the president of the jury for the Vilenica Prize.
So far, he has published three novels, Plamenice in solze (Torches and Tears, 1987), Tao ljubezni (Closer to Love, 1996) and Spremeni me (Change Me, 2008), as well as four collections of short stories: Šopki za Adama venijo (Bouquets for Adam Fade, 1983), Biografije brezimenih (Biographies of the Nameless, 1989), Menjave ko (1990; Skinswaps, 1998) and Zakon želje (Law of Desire, 2000). In addition to this, he has published a collection of essays on contemporary American literature, especially metafiction, entitled Labirinti iz papirja (Paper Labyrinths, 1994), a collection of cultural criticism entitled Gledanje ez ramo (Looking Over the Shoulder, 1996) and Neonski peati (Neon Seals, 2005), a collection of essays about literature in the digital age.
He has written for television and radio, and translated several books from English, including Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. He has won numerous major Slovenian literary awards, and his short stories have been translated and published in magazines and anthologies in over twenty languages.
STEINAR BRAGI was born on August 15, 1975, in Reykjavík, Iceland. He does not hold a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from the University of Iceland. He has published five books of poetry, Svarthol (Black Hole) in 1998, Augnkúluvökvi (Eyeball-liquid) in 1999, Ljúg u gosi, ljúg u (Lie Pinocchio, Lie) in 2001, Útgöngulei ir (Exits) in 2005, and Litli kall strikes again (Little Guy Strikes Again). His first novel, Turninn (The Tower), appeared in 2000, followed by Áhyggjudúkkur (Worrydolls) in 2002, Sólskinsfólki (The Sunshine People) in 2004, and Hi stórfenglega leyndarmál Heimsins (The Magnificent Secret of the World) in 2006—all published by Bjartur. In 2008 he published the novel Konur (Women) with Nýhil Publishing, and later with Forlagid. Steinar Bragi lives in New York.
Asked to speak a little about his influences and his place in European literature, Mr. Bragi responded with the following essay:
THOMAS MANN’S BOWELS
In literature you don’t choose your own influences—in fact, the opposite seems to apply. At least for me. I was a practically a baby when I first read Thomas Mann—Death in Venice—and since then I’ve been stuck with him, which in a sense feels kind of uninspired; he’s too well known, too much of a given. Soon, with terrible results, I’d made Tonio Kröger, the character, with his unstable mix of sensitivity and arrogance, into an ideal for my personal life. And The Magic Mountain is still my favorite book, which is pathetic—there’s nothing in the least bit personal about it, and not in my reading of it either. But that’s how it is.
In his book Written Lives, the Spanish author Javier Marías writes about the lives of a few well-known authors. Among them is Thomas Mann. Right away it becomes clear that he
has a few bones to pick with Mann, and so he pits everyone’s all-time favorite, the Coca-Cola of literature, none other than Charles Dickens, against him. Marías refers to Mann’s criticism of Dickens, wherein he said that Dickens was too humorous, but lacking in irony, and soon Marías has admitted that he laughs at Dickens’s books “on almost every other page,” but less so—though how much less isn’t clearly specified—when it comes to Mann. Finally he states his point, which is that Mann—as a person, at least in how he’s represented in his diaries and letters—is boring and “dreadfully serious.”
Unlike Marías, when it comes to Dickens, I weep with boredom over every single page he’s written; with time I’ve even begun to weep just seeing his books on a shelf. For those who haven’t read him, I would still suggest you do have a look, just so you can make up your own mind—I’m not a fascist! But don’t spend too much time on it; really, it’s easy to make a quick survey: the first paragraph—of any of his books—is exactly like the rest of the book, and each of his books is exactly like the others. Nothing in Dickens will ever manage to surprise you. And if you want those characters, if you’ve really got a craving for those “Dickensian characters,” just go to a wax museum. It’s faster.
So, I say Dickens is all the same. Am I thereby making surprise into an aesthetic criterion? Do I have to be surprised, do a writer’s words have to shoot right up my ass on every page?—No. But I demand a certain tension from literature, preferably unresolved, that demonstrates, in some way, how an author struggled with life, reality, the world, or whatever you want to call it. I want a duel, I want to feel the author’s sickness—as I do on almost every single page of Mann (and I laugh as well—probably not on every single page, but often…let’s say often enough). I want to smell the author’s bowels.
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 37
