Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  A hundred ninety thousand Fritzes for one night’s work—not bad for a kid with a nail in a hayloft.

  And so Petka believed in the evil eye.

  It was for precisely this reason that he was scared to so much as stick his hand out from under the table when the roach he’d been tracking scurried away to the middle of the room. That’s how sorry he felt for Valerka.

  He sat patiently with the matchbox old Potapikha had given him, rustling it quietly, opening and closing it to interest the runaway roach and lure it back under the table. Petka wasn’t sure that roaches responded to the rustle of matchboxes, but he had no other options.

  “Come here, Hans,” he whispered. “Crawl over here, filthy little Adolf.”

  The roach picked up Petka’s rustle, hesitated, but then realized what this rustle might mean for him, and shot across the room toward Valerka’s bed.

  Petka cursed and stretched out on the floor.

  From there he could see the whole bed, a rumpled pillow and Valerka’s hand hanging down, lifeless, like a regimental banner that has fallen to the enemy. Useless. Looking at Valerka’s hand, it somehow occurred to Petka that he’d never seen dead birds. He’d seen plenty of birds that had been killed, but birds that died like people—slowly, from old age or illness—that he’d never come across. Because if they’d died naturally, then they should be lying around somewhere. After all, you wouldn’t fall from heaven anywhere but to earth. But neither in Atamanovka itself nor around it had Petka ever seen dead birds on the earth. Only the ones killed by cats or kids. And so it seemed they flew to another place to die. Or they didn’t die at all.

  “Bring him a bucket,” said old Potapikha. “Can’t you see—the little one’s getting upset. He’s about to throw up.”

  Valerka’s mama’s feet tramped off into the entrance hall and returned. The wooden bucket banged the floor next to the bed.

  “Hey,” said Potapikha. “I’ve got the same kind at home. I bet Artem made it.”

  “I don’t know,” answered Valerka’s mama and sat down again on the stool.

  She really didn’t know. And couldn’t know. It was Petka who had dragged this bucket over when he and Valerka had seriously considered sneaking off to the front. They didn’t make it, however. They’d waited too long for it to warm up. They didn’t understand then that it got warmer much later in Atamanovka than in Germany.

  “Go on, hold him tighter,” said Potapikha. “Can’t you see him shaking all over?”

  Petka stuck his head out from under the table to have a look at what they were doing with Valerka, but old Potapikha’s broad back, hunched over the bed, blocked his view.

  Over her head Valerka’s hand, thrust upward, was swaying. He seemed to be drowning. This hand, flung toward the ceiling from somewhere under the water, was reaching for the air with all its might.

  “Hush now, hush now,” Valerka’s mama repeated through her white lips, pressing down on him harder and harder, trying to restrain his hands.

  “Hold him tighter!” Potapikha hissed at her. “Even tighter.”

  “They’ll smother him,” thought Petka, and almost crawled out from under the table.

  He had always suspected that old bats like Potapikha smothered little kids in secret. Why else would so many of them have died in the past two years? He would swear to it, even in the name of Comrade Stalin—there was something mean in the eyes of these Atamanovka ladies.

  “Hey, you! Get back under there!” shouted Potapikha, who, God knows how, had detected Petka’s movement behind her back.

  “Hush now, hush now,” Valerka’s mama said again, speaking not to Valerka, but to Petka, who was sitting on the floor, gaping in fear.

  Because she’d turned around, Petka finally was able to catch sight of Valerka. He was lying on his side, his face wrinkled and his eyes clamped shut. A huge paper funnel was stuck in his ear. At first it had seemed to Petka that old Potapikha was hoping to finish Valerka off by ramming an aspen stake into his head, but then he realized it was only a newspaper.

  Actually, the most terrifying thing was yet to come. As if in some ghastly dream about fascists who simply couldn’t be killed, old Potapikha took some matches from the stool, lit them, and carried her flames to the opening of the paper funnel. The fire leaped down towards Valerka’s head. He opened his eyes, his jaw dropped wide without a sound, and Petka saw a stream of white smoke curling out onto the pillow from this open mouth.

  “Ah-ah-ah!” Petka finally heard Valerka’s scream. “Ah-ah-ah!” Valerka kept screaming, and his thin voice reminded Petka now of singing, now of weeping.

  Old Potapikha’s methods seemed a little strange to many people in Atamanovka. As for Petka, he didn’t understand them at all. She treated red spots with sparrows’ droppings, angina with kerosene, herpes with a mixture of tar, copper vitriol, hot sulfur, and unsalted pork fat. That sort of fat was the hardest to find, so Potapikha wasn’t always successful with herpes. On the other hand, if a dog scared someone, Potapikha would immediately fumigate the victim with smoke from a burned mixture of thistle and the same dog’s fur, with the result that the victim was never afraid of anything else again.

  Once when Petka caught a bad cold and for some reason his legs became numb, old Potapikha had had him bundled up tightly, put in a haystack rotted from summer rain, and kept there exactly three days. In a weakened state, Petka peered out anxiously from the haystack, dozed off, sweated, and fouled himself, but at the appointed time, his legs did indeed begin to come back to life. Of course, later on he strongly suspected that they had gone numb simply from hunger and that while he was sitting in the haystack, old Potapikha had suffered a fit of generosity and so kept shoving buttered pancakes into the hay. But it was only Petka who had doubts. After this incident, old lady Darya came to believe unconditionally in Potapikha’s powers, and when it was necessary, for example, to wean old man Artem off the bottle, she went straight to her.

  “Eh?” said Potapikha, peering under the table. “Did you collect some? Or did you fall asleep there, you little shit?”

  Petka silently held out the matchbox.

  “Is that all!” She was holding the crushed roach with two fingers, as if about to poke it in Petka’s face.

  “There weren’t any more,” Petka grumbled. “I barely caught that one.”

  “Caught it? Is that what you think! Look what you did to it—you mashed it all up! And I need a whole one! And not one, but a dozen!”

  “Well, there weren’t any more.”

  “Look at him, still talking back. Wait, you’re going to get it!”

  She jabbed the hand with the roach in Petka’s direction but he dodged it and nipped her on the wrist.

  “He bites, the son of a whore!” old Potapikha informed Valerka’s mama, who also peered solicitously under the table.

  “Please don’t bite, Petka,” she begged. “We have to look after Valerka. Can’t you see he’s not doing well?”

  “But why is she…?”

  “I’ll show you ‘why’ right away!” said old Potapikha, rubbing her bite. “Come out of there this minute!”

  “I won’t!”

  “Hand me a knife,” Potapikha said to Valerka’s mama. “I’ve got to check his hair. Sure, it’s not so good without roaches, but lice will work too.”

  A minute later Petka was sitting on the stool in the middle of the room and old Potapikha was scraping around in his hair with the knife. Again he covered his eyes, this time not from fear of hexing Valerka, but from pleasure. Whether it was because his mama had gotten so tired from work lately or just forgotten about him altogether, she hadn’t checked his hair for some time now. Someone scratching with a knife along his scalp always felt good.

  “Looks like we’re done,” old Potapikha said finally and Petka, with great regret, opened his eyes.

  “Do I have to go back under the table? I can’t see anything from down there.”

  Potapikha hesitated, but then waved her hand:

/>   “All right, stay put. If I’ve got to, I’ll cast the spell against the evil eye. You know, yours don’t seem so dark after all, now. Come on, get over here.”

  She dragged him to a chink in the shutters from which a ray of light was falling, narrow as a razor, placed his face under the tickling, warm sun, and Petka went blind for a moment.

  “No-o-o,” old Potapikha drawled from the teary darkness. “How are they dark? No, they’re not dark at all. What sort of trick have you been playing on us, you little shit?”

  “I didn’t play any trick on you,” said Petka and blinked so that his eye would tear.

  Then he sat quietly in the corner, watching how old Potapikha cooked up pies from the dough into which she’d carefully folded all the lice she had found, plus the crushed roach, and how Valerka was eating these pies and then throwing up into the bucket, with old Potapikha bent over him repeating, “Now, now, this’ll be over soon, this’ll be over soon, darling”—and then watching how she left the yard with a little speckled hen under her arm, its neck already wrung and dangling like drunken Grandpa Artem’s tassle, and how she kept going farther and farther down the street to her grandchildren who were probably tired of waiting for her, and how she began quietly to sing her favorite song:

  I’ll be da-an-cin’ reels,

  I’ll be put-tin’ on my shoes,

  Gonna kick up my heels,

  Higher than them stools.

  TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY SYLVIA MAIZELL

  [ROMANIA]

  LUCIAN DAN TEODOROVICI

  Goose Chase

  I was a child, growing up at my grandparents’, and one day someone stole the seven geese we had left to roam in the lane. On our street in front of everyone’s yards there were patches of grass, and the villagers were in the habit of letting their geese or ducks roam free. It wasn’t a problem; they never got mixed up. Geese and ducks have a herding instinct, if you can call it that with poultry: they loiter in groups near the yard where they were reared. What’s more, perhaps because they assumed that some mad goose or some mad duck might nevertheless abandon its group and wander off, the peasants used to paint a mark on the wings of their property. Ours had a kind of red comma painted on the right wing, a bit like the famous Nike logo, although at the time I didn’t know what the Nike logo looked like, and I doubt my grandparents knew either. But there were also geese that wore a blue cross, and others a yellow dot. Or stranger markings, even. One of our neighbors, for example, painted a little fir tree on each of his sixteen geese. With green paint, of course. Another aroused his neighbors’ indignation, including my grandmother’s, by painting a phallus on the wings of his geese, in brown paint. Grandma was angry because I was only eight and I shouldn’t have been exposed to that sort of thing, and so she made a complaint to the militia, along with some of our other neighbors. And the man then had to pluck the feathers of those eight geese emblazoned with a brown phallus on their left wing, and in its stead he painted a square, also brown, on their right. That neighbor hated us, because a square made no sense to him, but he hadn’t been able to come up with anything better at the time, because the militiaman insisted on seeing the entire operation through, the plucking of the shameful feathers and the repainting of the birds, and it all happened within the space of about half an hour. And so our neighbor didn’t have time to think up anything clever, especially seeing as he was under threat of a hefty fine, though there was no law on the books banning the painting of phalluses on geese. I know this because the neighbor, as he was plucking the feathers, said he wanted to see a copy of that law, and the militiaman explained to him, calmly at first, then with less patience, that in our village he was the law. And in the end he even started swearing and waving his truncheon at the phallus-painter menacingly.

  Grandfather too started cursing one day when he saw that our geese with their Nike mark were nowhere to be found. And he began to go from house to house, looking for them. I followed, more out of curiosity than anything else, although he let me tag along because he imagined that I, at the age of eight, must have had better eyes, and thus could spot things that he, at the age of sixty, would be unable to. In the end, it did turn out to be a good thing that he took me along. Because, while he was in a neighbor’s yard, I stayed in the lane, bouncing up and down the rather deflated ball I’d brought from home so as not to get too bored during the search. And as my grandfather was talking to the neighbor in the yard, a gap-toothed, hare-lipped friend of mine came up. I told him our geese had been stolen and he said:

  “I fink I know who shtole them. They were on the corner of the street.” He pointed to the place. “And that Gypshy who stole our ball that time when we were playing football on the pitch by the railway shtation turned up,” he added. “Honest. He was holding a shwitch and I shaw him driving the geesh up there to the water tower. I don’t know if they were yoursh, but they had marks and I even thought, what the hell, gypshies don’t mark their geesh.”

  I went into the yard after my grandfather to call him outside. Grandfather told me to leave him in peace because he had things to discuss with the neighbor. Then I explained to him that I had picked up a lead, and he abruptly broke off his discussion with the man and went outside. And my gap-toothed, hare-lipped friend told my grandfather the same story, which infuriated him no end. From my friend’s description Grandfather realized that he knew the Gypsy in question: he was the son of somebody or other, I can’t remember who.

  The water tower was on the street that led to where the gypsies lived, up on the hill. No one had the courage to go up there, because back then it seemed the gypsies somehow lived in another world. Even the militia didn’t pay them any mind. The village militiaman, the same one who had yelled at the neighbor who’d painted phalluses on his geese and threatened him with his truncheon, always used to say that the gypsies weren’t his problem, that they should form their own militia if that’s what they wanted, but he wasn’t going to get involved. My grandfather wasn’t afraid, though, and this was because he had many friends among the gypsies, what with him being a conductor on the train and all. Chief conductor, even, as he used to say. And over the years he had let many of the gypsies in the village ride the train for free. They respected him, and when they saw him they would say: “Long life to you, Mr. Chief, sir!” They respected him not only because he had let them travel without a ticket in the past, but also because they still had need of him, inasmuch as there were still a few years left until he retired. Once, when a neighbor’s cow vanished, a neighbor who was a friend of Grandfather’s, the old man had gone into the gypsies’ neighborhood all by himself and come back leading the cow by a rope, only two hours later. The gypsies respected my grandfather.

  Now he was cursing, though, because it was a matter of our very own geese, not some neighbor’s cow. And he told me to go home, because he was going to go and fetch the geese himself. But I didn’t want to. Grandfather got angry with me too then, and said he would give me two smacks on the ass if I didn’t obey. But I—because it was something that had worked for me before—just went up to him and hugged him, like this, from the side. I clasped my arms around his belly and begged him to take me with him. My grandfather was fond of me, after all, and so he said only this:

  “Listen, I’ll take you, tadpole. But don’t you budge from my side, or else I’ll smack your ass ten times, not two! And don’t you say a word, don’t you get to talking with the gypsies…”

  The truth is that my grandfather never smacked me, not even once, let alone twice or ten times. But he was always threatening me, and, though I have no idea why, sometimes I would even get afraid. I think now it was maybe because of his voice. Grandfather had a powerful voice. It always seemed like, if he said something, he was bound to follow through.

  We entered the Gypsy neighborhood. Rickety houses, which up until then I had only seen from a distance. It somehow smelled odd even in the street, a pungent smell of oldness and damp. I was, I must admit, amazed at what I saw and I was
thinking about how I would boast to all my friends that I had been down the gypsies’ street and about how I would tell them about all the things they’d never seen. At the same time, I was proud of my grandfather, because the other children’s grandparents or parents would never have had the courage to go there—let alone hand in hand with their children or grandchildren.

  Somewhere in front of us, on the right, we saw a few men and women gathered in a yard. I thought that must be where we were going, because my grandfather kept looking at them as we drew closer. But at the house right before, my grandfather stopped in front of an old fence, whose slats were largely rotten, broken, or missing, and unfastened the latch of the little gate. He went into the yard, dragging me behind him. In the yard, instead of a dog, there was a rather skinny pig, which was rooting with its snout under the doorframe. The door was crooked, hanging from a single hinge, and the pig kept thrusting its snout under, and the door was rattling around as though about to fall off at any moment. My grandfather aimed at kick at the pig, which squealed, looked at him, but didn’t budge. And then my grandfather gave it another kick. The pig moved aside, squealing again, and I laughed. It was funny how the pig glared at my father from where it decided to settle, about six feet away. Then my grandfather knocked at that door which was barely hanging from its hinge, and I thought it was sure to fall off. It didn’t fall off; it opened. And in the doorway appeared a Gypsy with wisps of white hair poking out from under his hat. He said:

  “Well…”