“Please, leave it on the table.”
Ignoring him, she began to read the first lines.
“Leave the book, for goodness sake. You don’t need that agitation, neither you nor the baby,” he said, getting loud this time.
He thought Carver’s stories would have a negative influence. But he wasn’t sure how. There was a brilliant vagueness and a queasiness to them that he couldn’t grasp. He sat down next to her, but she turned away.
“I’m going to the bedroom. I’ll read there. Good night,” she said and got up.
He also got up.
In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand. With the other he gripped the book. She felt Carver slipping away from her.
“No!” she yelled just as her hands came loose. Today she would read. She would have this damn book.
She caught one of the covers and a dozen pages and leaned back.
But he would not let go. He felt the book slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.
In this manner, the issue was decided.
TRANSLATED FROM MONTENEGRIN BY WILL FIRTH
[MOLDOVA]
IULIAN CIOCAN
Auntie Frosea
Because of the heavy shopping bags, crammed full of squash and potatoes, Auntie Frosea’s hurried pace looked more like a penguin’s waddle. The woman was running, she was out of breath, and sweat beaded her furrowed brow. She had to get back home quickly. There wasn’t a minute to spare. A neighbor overtook her, calling out as she went, “Faster, Frosea, faster, it’s just about to start!” She shivered with fright. What if she was late? She paused for a few moments to catch her breath, under a billboard that read, “ ” (Perestroika! Glasnost! Democratization!) And then she resumed her grueling race against time. A man with a bottle of brandy tucked under his arm burst out of a grocery shop, jumped into a car and sped off. A mother was dragging along a tearful, obstinate little girl behind her, yelling at her to hurry up. From the window of a block of apartments, an elated housewife shouted down to her husband, beating carpets in the yard, to drop everything—because “it’s starting!” Every passerby was rushing home. Soon the streets were deserted, as at the dead of night. Something out of the ordinary was in the air. The city, exhausted by its anguishing wait, was yearning for the moment of deliverance.
When at last Auntie Frosea reached her own apartment block, there wasn’t a soul to be seen. The silence was almost total. The only sound was the squeaking of a swing from which a little girl had leaped but a minute before, impelled by an irresistible desire. With a feeling of foreboding, Auntie Frosea climbed the stairs, her eyes bulging. The handles of her huge, over-laden shopping bags cut into her calloused palms. She shoved open the front door of her apartment with her shoulder and, drenched in sweat, burst into the tenebrous hallway, where shoes, sandals, and boots of varying ages all lay in a heap. Sprawled in an armchair, her husband was goggling at the television screen. On hearing the noise in the hallway, the man yelled, annoyed: “What kept you, woman? Isaura’s started!” Auntie Frosea winced: she had missed some precious moments in the never-ending drama of Isaura the Slave Girl! All of a sudden she felt real resentment toward her husband, a malice such as she had never experienced in all their long marriage. She looked at the man with muted hatred. Why, she asked herself, was she always the one who had to do the shopping? Why was she the only one who had to lug heavy bags across town? And, entering the room, she raised her voice at her husband for the very first time, shocking him into silence: “Why don’t you ever lend me a hand, Vova? Why am I the only one who has to go out and buy the groceries?”
When, one rainy afternoon in the autumn of the year 1988, the first Latin American soap opera ever to be broadcast on Soviet television came to Auntie Frosea’s attention, she was suffering from a terrible toothache. But the plot of the soap opera was so gripping that, by the end of the episode, it had taken the ache away—better than any painkiller could. Never in her life had Auntie Frosea seen anything so enthralling. Never had she felt such unease after watching something on television. She had been moved. It was as if a ray of sunlight had pervaded her entire being. Soviet films no longer mattered. There were still those Indian films, of course. They were an old passion of hers. But in this Latin American soap opera, everything was different: the music was more exuberant, the vegetation more luxuriant, the atmosphere more dramatic, the stories more authentic, and the relationships between the characters far more complicated. Soon she could also add that the soap operas drew out their suspense far more deliciously, endlessly postponing their always unpredictable finales. Her soul ached with pity for Isaura the Slave Girl, a beautiful and diligent girl exploited by a hard-hearted landowner named Leoncio. The master not only treated her badly, not only humiliated her, but also made distasteful advances toward her. But Isaura had strength of character and refused to sleep with this exploiter, because she was in love with a free man, Tobias, against whom the jealous, tyrannical Leoncio bore a grudge. After every episode, Auntie Frosea would feel the need to share her overwhelming reactions with her friends. In the yard outside the apartment block she would meet with Viorica Ionovna and Olga Leonovna and they would talk for hours on end about Isaura. Other housewives of that period of political transition would also linger there talking about this and that, but Auntie Frosea was always simply horrified at the sufferings of the Brazilian slave girl:
“Poor Isaura! How can she live in slavery like that? How can she put up with the cruelty of that bandit Leoncio?” she would whisper, wiping away her tears.
“That’s right, Frosea. The poor suffering girl…” Viorica Ionovna sighed, in chorus with Auntie Frosea’s lament.
Olga Leonovna, on the other hand, liked to play devil’s advocate. “You shouldn’t grieve for her so much! She isn’t all that badly off…You keep going on about slavery. What use is it that I’m free if I’ve never been farther away than Koblevo? Have I got the money to go off to Brazil? No, I haven’t. And even if I had, would the authorities let me?”
Auntie Frosea looked puzzled: “What are you going on about, Olga? Haven’t you got any idea what it means to be a slave? It’s true we don’t live in the lap of luxury, but at least we’re free. What with perestroika and all, you’re free to say whatever you like now, more or less…”
At this point there intervened an implacable old woman, a war veteran, who was convinced that Gorbachev was an agent provocateur working for the Americans.
“This perestroika will be the ruin of us! We’ll end up envying Leoncio’s slaves! Just you wait and see! It won’t be long now!” she warned them, and this brought the conversation to a dead halt.
The most harrowing episode was the fourteenth. The cruel Leoncio had laid a trap for Tobias. Isaura’s lover let himself be caught and was burned to death in an abandoned building. Tobias’s death was an injustice that cried to the heavens for vengeance! How could he have been so gullible! Why did he have to die? Why did Auntie Frosea have to be parted from such a beloved character? There were other episodes to follow, but Auntie Frosea just couldn’t imagine how the story would go on without Tobias. That night, Auntie Frosea couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned until dawn, irritating her husband no end. He had to get up early to go to the factory and in his mind he cursed the reckless hero of the soap opera for ruining his night. After her husband, his eyes bloodshot, left the house in the morning, slamming the door behind him, Frosea jumped out of bed and telephoned Viorica Ionovna.
“What’s Isaura going to do now? How do you think she’ll be able to go on living without Tobias?”
Viorica Ionovna had also been deeply upset by the untimely death of Isaura’s lover. “Oh, Frosea, it’s a real catastrophe. She was devastated, poor thing. Did you see the look on her face? And you know…I’m afraid there might be worse to come…”
“What do you mean?”
Viorica Ionovna fell silent for a few seconds, finally saying in a strangled little voice, “Frosea, I’m afraid Isaura is going to give
in to Leoncio…”
Auntie Frosea gasped. The thought that Isaura might end up rolling in the hay with Tobias’s murderer was utterly unbearable.
But what frightened Auntie Frosea even more were Olga Leonovna’s theories. The latter not only found Viorica Ionovna’s sinister supposition plausible, but also had the deep-seated conviction that Isaura shouldn’t play so hard-to-get: “A shame about Tobias dying. But let’s be honest, Frosea, he was a bit puny, he was a bit of a weed compared to Leoncio. I don’t see how Isaura could have loved him. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think that Isaura would be stupid not to go for Leoncio now. He’s tall, the bastard, and he’s got beautiful eyes…”
“But…don’t you see that he just wants to sleep with her? Don’t you understand that he’s not going to make her his wife?” Auntie Frosea blurted out.
Yes, Olga Leonovna understood, but she couldn’t see a more alluring alternative on the horizon.
Auntie Frosea kept thinking all day about the choice Isaura was going to have to make. While trying to guess the intentions of the unhappy slave girl, she forgot all about making supper. Then, when she remembered and started bustling about the kitchen, her mind wandered and she burned the steaks. Tired and hungry, her husband got home shortly before Episode Fifteen was about to start—an episode that promised to be enlightening in many respects. He quickly went to the kitchen, saw the charred meat in the pan, and started screaming his lungs out: “Where’s my goddamn dinner, you stupid bitch?” Auntie Frosea jumped as though catapulted from the armchair where she was awaiting the beginning of the episode. She felt guilty. She told her husband she would fry him some eggs right away and tried to explain that the death of Tobias was to blame. Uncle Vova’s eyes widened and he yelled, “You stupid woman! What do you mean, you bitch? You expect me to eat eggs after I’ve worked like a pack mule all day? Can’t you understand, you stupid bitch, that the actor’s not dead? It was the character that died, woman!”
Auntie Frosea bowed her head. She could not and would not distinguish the actor from the character he played.
Auntie Frosea, Uncle Vova, and their son Valeriu had lived all their lives in a dowdy, forty-two square meter apartment. Their block had been built in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. The building turned thirty-five the year that Auntie Frosea discovered Latin America and Valeriu came home after finishing his military service. Like every other stalinka, the place was decrepit before its time, but Auntie Frosea was content: To have an apartment in Chiinu, even a dowdy one, was no mean feat! The misfortunes of Isaura had reinforced this conviction. In comparison to the sufferings of the Brazilian slave girl, Auntie Frosea’s problems were trifles. Yes, her husband had grown quite petulant lately, and sometimes he would even get plastered and yell at her to go fuck herself, but it wasn’t as if you could compare those minor excesses with the ferocity of the diabolical Leoncio. Auntie Frosea knew that her husband was essentially a good and kind-hearted man. Yes, their dowdy flat had become even more cramped after Valeriu brought home a pregnant wife in the 1990s, and especially after their son was born, whom Auntie Frosea took charge of so as not to jeopardize the young parents’ studies. But Isaura didn’t even have a shed to call her own! Yes, after she had chanted “Unification, Moldavians!” for days on end along with Olga Leonovna and the thousands of other people demonstrating in the city’s main square, Auntie Frosea felt like she had been duped by the “Romanianizers” who had consigned the economy to oblivion. And yes, sometimes the family didn’t even have enough money for food, and so for half a year Auntie Frosea had sold tins of fish on the street corner, which she’d bought at a lower price from a shop on the other end of town. The lugging of those tins from one part of the city to another came to an abrupt end one rainy autumn day when, carrying two fully laden shopping bags, Auntie Frosea bent double with pain and collapsed into a huge puddle. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital they diagnosed her with a run-of-the-mill slipped disk. But—did the slaves on the plantation have it any better under the lashes of the whip? True, the factory no longer paid Uncle Vova’s wages on time and in the end they even declared him redundant, though he hadn’t yet reached retirement age. But Leoncio’s slaves could never even dream of wages and pensions!
And so Auntie Frosea was content. When she thought about the lives of Isaura, Maria, and Leticia, and then about the lives of the female characters in the other Latin American soap operas, Auntie Frosea saw the truth: she was outrageously lucky. There was, it’s true, one minor problem: the seemingly never-ending soap operas would occasionally come to a real conclusion, and for a few days Auntie Frosea would feel adrift. But a new serial would always begin in time and Auntie Frosea would recover her spirits and her optimism. Everything was fine! Perhaps it would have been like a wonderful fairy tale if Isaura, Maria, and Leticia had been able to overcome their fate, but for some reason this was impossible—so Auntie Frosea could always find comfort in commiserating with them.
But then, one day, a doubt nevertheless stole into her mind. She remembered Isaura’s friend—Januaria the cook, a black woman who slaved in the kitchen from dawn to dusk and who used to comfort Isaura. Strangely enough, even though she was a slave, even though she toiled away, Januaria was serene and meek. She hated Leoncio, but she would never dream of defying him. She used to tell Isaura to be patient, because one day all would be well. What strange advice! What inexplicable resignation! Auntie Frosea was puzzled. How could this woman be so reconciled to her fate? I mean—it would have been easy for her to put poison in the landowner’s food and rid them all of the cruel oppressor! But Januaria did nothing. It was the height of absurdity. Was she afraid of the consequences? Or perhaps…Was it that she liked the life of a slave? That really would take the cake! There must be something else to it, but Auntie Frosea couldn’t quite understand what…
One evening, going out onto the balcony to look for a basin among the piled-up junk there, Auntie Frosea glanced down into the yard. Outside it was cold and muddy. People had ensconced themselves in their houses. A bearded tramp was rummaging in a heap of garbage. A crow cawed sadly in a bare tree. The block of apartments opposite looked like a barracks before reveille. Everything was gray, colorless.
And, all of a sudden, Auntie Frosea was struck by a revelation. She understood why those South American landscapes so caught her eye: they contained no gray. The colors of the New World were vivid, striking! Isaura’s world—with its azure ocean, its exotic fruits, its shady palm trees, its zany parrots and beaches bathed in blinding sunlight—was enchanting! No, Moldova, with its long, cold winters, couldn’t compete with the New World. And then, almost immediately, Auntie Frosea found herself facing what seemed a logical contradiction: How could slavery exist in such a paradise? How could man exploit his fellow man in the midst of such beauty? It was a blatant contradiction, one that Auntie Frosea could not comprehend, however hard she tried. She liked Brazil, but slavery horrified her. After much cogitation, Auntie Frosea saw the light: Isaura and all the other slaves belonged to a bygone world. There was no slavery in Brazil nowadays! But for a good few years now Auntie Frosea had lived with the certainty that Isaura was her contemporary, that the slave girl’s sufferings had some sort of relevance for the present day. What’s more, Auntie Frosea had even been watching the shows about contemporary Latin Americans—the characters in modern dress—through the lens of Isaura’s plight. For some inexplicable reason, all the wronged heroes of the soap operas had been “slaves” to Auntie Frosea. This fresh revelation bewildered her. Isaura had escaped Auntie Frosea, slipping back into another time. It was unacceptable. Isaura had to belong to the same age as her, to the same moment—she had to stay put, had to stay suffering.
Auntie Frosea couldn’t bear to see her slave go free.
TRANSLATED FROM MOLDOVAN BY ALISTAIR IAN BLYTH
[MACEDONIA]
BLAŽE MINEVSKI
Academician Sisoye’s Inaugural Speech
Sisoye was finally made a member o
f the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He just needed to deliver his inaugural speech and he would at last be admitted to those hallowed halls.
But on the day this was supposed to take place, something entirely unpredictable happened, as we shall mention in the EPILOGUE.
Yet when one knows the end, one should also know the beginning.
INTRODUCTION
The sun had just risen above Mount Petelino and the air was already pulsing with excitement on the morning of the day Sisoye was to hold his speech. It was not yet officially summer and the nights were still brisk; dew gleamed like sugar crystals on the pine trees and on the lawn in front of his building. Satisfied with himself as never before, Sisoye opened his bedroom window wide, breathed deeply, and watched the atoms wandering along Einstein Boulevard and turning into little pine needles, the tiny flies that hovered around the garbage bins, and the droplets of dew that glinted on the grass. One of the main points of his speech was to be that when we die and no longer operate as mass in motion—and we are only in motion because we all have souls—our atoms dissociate, as when you scramble a Rubik’s Cube; they depart and reconfigure elsewhere, for example in the tip of a leaf, in the eye of a woman in love, or as part of a droplet of dew. “Who knows what Slavko Sivakov will turn into, after he and those other senile academicians from his macabre little clique prevented me from becoming an academician for ten whole years…” Sisoye thought and smiled, winking as if making jokes with an invisible companion, and he tossed his head to make a drooping strand of hair return to place. He patted down said hair in the same motion as if smacking a fly on his forehead, and once again his head resembled that of an intellectual.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 19
