Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  PANGUITCH, UTAH. SATURDAY, APRIL 11.

  We noticed earlier that the roads in this country are patrolled by scores of campers that stop frequently on the shoulder of the highway; it’s always a couple of retirees who get out, who you’ll then see photographing or filming the countryside before taking off again. They seem for the most part to be heading west, idle and doddery modern incarnations of the former pioneers, for whom conquest now consists of an exhaustive but exclusive appropriation of territory through the image.

  America is so vast that you find a type of place there that Europe has lost to the point of completely forgetting: the relay post. The increase in means of transportation being a factor, each of these stopovers now extend to the dimensions of a hamlet, always developed with the same layout: a main street lined on either side with single-story or sometimes two-story dwellings and a succession of motels, restaurants, and service stations. The activity of these small localities revolves entirely around the refueling and relaxation of the traveler and his vehicle, respectively. They’re a little like the geographical equivalent of those beings Flaubert wrote about, if memory serves, who only exist to serve as bridges between men.

  We ate earlier in a kind of saloon. Several tables were occupied, clearly by locals who’d come in couples; the men were for the most part dressed in jeans and checked shirts, wearing Stetsons; the women wore colorful dresses made from thick fabric; they were all plump, and their flesh overflowed the hemispherical armrests of their wooden seats. They were digging into huge, thick filets of beef and piles of French fries, which were served to them on enormous plates, while they listened attentively to a country singer with a nasal voice, barely filtering through an abundant handlebar mustache, performing in front of them on a makeshift platform. They requested extra helpings of fries, ordered desserts, all the while bringing frequently replaced half-liter glasses of beer to their lips. Barely had the singer finished his set when they all got up from their table and exited the premises, as if the music had had some kind of aperitif effect on them.

  ZION VALLEY, UTAH. SUNDAY, APRIL 12.

  We spent the night in a motel in Springdale, run by Mormons. Before leaving, in the early morning, we asked for some coffee. The polite response we received was that the house didn’t serve any, on the grounds that Mormonism prohibited this drink, something we hadn’t known. On the other hand, continued the employee we’d spoken to, it would be the house’s pleasure to offer us the Book of Mormon, which is, after a fashion, the Bible of this religion. “We asked for a stimulant,” Marc replied to him in French, “not a soporific.”

  Unlike that day last March when I’d come here with Philippe Durand, Zion Valley was now overrun with tourists, to such a degree that the red tarmac road which passes it for thirty or so kilometers was sometimes congested like a Los Angeles street at rush hour. Luckily, American tourists seem to abhor walking, which ensured that we didn’t pass anyone as we strode alongside the Virgin River between the tall pale rocks, leafed like the edge of a book and pleated like fabric, placing our feet on the virgin ground, where only animals, including a puma, had left their mark.

  LOS ANGELES. TUESDAY, APRIL 14.

  Los Angeles never gives the impression of being turned toward the open sea, as coastal cities usually are. For all that, it doesn’t seem to turn its gaze inland either. In fact, the city appears to look at itself, to feed on its own image. It’s perhaps for this reason that some of the biggest movie studios are found here.

  I recently read in a paper that the American pornographic cinema industry produces approximately 10,000 films per year, 95% of which are shot in Los Angeles, notably in the San Fernando Valley (by way of comparison, Hollywood produces no more than four hundred a year). The taboo on the explicit performance of the sexual act in mainstream cinema has, quite obviously, created a gap.

  Advertisements are ubiquitous in this city. Thus there isn’t, just to give one example, a single public bench that hasn’t been covered in them. Should you wish to avoid their visual solicitation by raising your eyes to heaven, you’ll then be regaled by the plane overhead pulling a promotional banner, or a zeppelin bearing some name brand in large letters. Every surface here seems to be considered first and foremost as a potential advertising venue, from public benches to the sky.

  However stubborn or hermetic one is in this regard, there’s no way these days of avoiding pop music, which is broadcast in every last public space—and in Los Angeles more than elsewhere, where certain streets even have music played through loudspeakers. Also, it isn’t unusual to end up knowing by heart, and despite yourself, certain hits—it even happens that you surprise yourself by liking some of them. While traveling, this phenomenon is even more noticeable, without a doubt due to the hyper-sensitivity into which our constant attentiveness plunges us. In this way I discovered I’d developed a weakness here for the song “Frozen,” by Madonna (a singer to whom I was completely indifferent till then), which all the radio stations played over and over again and of which I’ve just now, at a record shop located on Sunset Boulevard, bought the single; on the sleeve is a photo of the artist’s face: her long hair, in wild, wavy locks, dyed a strawberry blonde, slipping along her cheeks and falling over her shoulders in chaotic arabesques, which can’t help calling to mind Venus’s hair as painted by Sandro Botticelli, that same goddess who had welcomed me here, exactly one month ago, on a Venice fresco—I’ve come full circle, as they say.

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY URSULA MEANY SCOTT

  [FINLAND]

  ANITA KONKKA

  The Clown

  1.

  It’s been raining for a week. Nature seems to have decided on my behalf that I shall write my memoirs, because on a rainy day you can’t do anything but write and drink wine. I remember that when I was a child, rainy days at the dacha were unpleasant, my brother threw tantrums, Father complained, Grandmother clattered the dishes angrily in the kitchen, and Mother cried and drew princesses, from underneath whose hoop skirts a yellow trickle flowed, forming a puddle on the floor. The princesses stood stiffly like paper dolls, they had fans in their hands and golden curls. I had no talent for drawing and not for much of anything else either, but I was a great liar. I told stories about things that had never happened, neither on the moon nor on the earth, but I told them as though they were completely true and I even believed them myself. I got beaten for telling lies, even though without lies we couldn’t manage in our country. My father told lies every day and was very successful. He became a Party member and a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Culture. But my grandmother, who considered lying a sin, landed in a concentration camp in Stalin’s time. She managed to get out of there alive, thanks to her temper. It was she who taught me that people are already full of sin when they’re born and that sin must be beaten out of a person, like dust from a carpet. When she’d given me several sound beatings I stopped telling lies if there was any chance of her overhearing.

  I just now went outside to see how it looks. The rain is sneaking slowly along the leaves of the orange trees and the sky is dark gray, but there’s hope of something better, because gaps have appeared in the cloud cover, where a yellowish light gleams through. The rain will stop by tomorrow, I’ll manage till then, because I still have a couple of liters of wine and some bread. I drink wine and consider how I could begin my memoirs. In order to refresh my memory I’ve attached a picture to the book shelf. It was on the cover of Der Bild during my days of greatness. In the picture I’m looking up at the sky, as though I’d again committed some terrible sin and was expecting a brick wall to fall on me, or else the voice of Yahweh to thunder down in reproach. There’s a sad look in my eye, like a dog’s when it’s just been kicked by its unpredictable master. My face is pale and narrow, my lips are red, there are dark patches under my eyes, my nose is sharp, its pointed shadow falls on one cheek, the other cheek rests on my hand, I look worried, as though I was thinking of the world’s natural resources being exhausted, or the populat
ion explosion, or the fate of the rain forests or endangered species. Every morning the picture looks different. It’s begun to live its own life. Sometimes there are more, sometimes fewer, wrinkles on my forehead, and one morning I could even see the trace of a smile in the corners of my mouth. On some mornings my face looks really miserable, as though I’ve got a severe toothache, and then the shadow of my nose is longer than usual too. What can a person do about her nose, when Grandfather’s name was Israel and Father’s was Isak? They thought of naming me Hannah, but they came to their senses in time.

  In the picture I’m wearing blue work overalls, with an old, worn-out hat on my head. I remember those clothes well, because I was playing the part of a workman who’s afraid of his boss, so afraid he ends up doing everything backwards. It was one of my best performances, because when I was playing that role I brought together all my experience from the twenty-five jobs I’d held down before my career as a clown started gaining momentum internationally. The audience laughed until their sides ached, not only the children, but also the adults, when they saw me making all the same mistakes they themselves were afraid to be caught making at work. The audience also laughed a lot when I appeared as a woman. Perhaps that routine was so popular because I was basically playing myself, Albertina Vinniyeva. No one knew that I was really a woman, you see—they thought that I was a man playing the part of a woman. Probably that’s why I was such a good clown. I didn’t have to act—I was honestly terrified of failure. And the more afraid I became, the better I failed, and the more the audience enjoyed it. When I became world famous, I stopped being afraid, and that’s when I lost myself, stopped being a good clown, because my genius was really in my fear. I knew that my performances were poor. In spite of that, the theaters were full and everyone laughed at me because I was the famous Milopa, and because the newspapers had said I was a good comic. People don’t believe their own eyes and ears, they believe the newspapers. That’s the reason it’s so easy to cheat them.

  I was funny only as long as I was just being myself. Fellini asked me to appear in one of his films, but he had to cut my part because I was boring and stiff like a wooden horse; it was all clear as day on film. That’s when I was at my most popular—the critics went on praising me and never noticed I wasn’t doing good work; they never could tell good from bad, and only loved me the more when my act went from being based on real experiences of failure to becoming a failure in itself.

  My vanity grew along with their praise and I began to imagine that I was the world’s greatest clown-artist, a sort of Picasso of the clowning world. I no longer listened to myself; I just tried, in my desire to please, to satisfy the critics, who always just wanted to see something new. As a failure, I was a success, but as a success, a failure. I completely abandoned my original act, making each one of my performances fresh and different, but now, being a celebrity, I found I was only able to imitate my former, funny self, and my performances became so mechanical that I got tired of hearing my own jokes. Everything that I said and did seemed hollow and affected. Nowadays that’s called “burning out,” I suppose, but I think it’s more accurate to say that I had become a sort of prostitute of the spirit—I didn’t burn out so much as whore-out. I did it both on and off the stage for various boards of directors and committees, the ones that manage variety shows and give out grants to magicians, trapeze artists, trick riders, lion and tiger tamers, and other people in the field who have demonstrated promise. I had power, money, fame, and two competing circus directors as lovers. They loved my fame, not me as a woman, but then there wasn’t much about me as a woman to love, since I didn’t even have breasts.

  I was on a German tour, in Berlin, when I had a breakdown just before a performance. I lost my voice and couldn’t move anything except for my eyes. I couldn’t even lift a finger. A doctor came and gave me a tranquilizer, but this didn’t cure the paralysis. My body was wiser than I was. It refused to continue the pretense. I was carried to the ambulance like a chunk of wood and taken to the hospital, where I lay in a near-catatonic state for a month. I took sick leave after I was released from the hospital, and after that started collecting a temporary pension, being listed as physically unable to work. I never went back to the ring. I was an incompetent clown, nothing more. I’d never learned any other profession.

  2.

  Gallimard has asked me to write a memoir about my life as a clown, because apparently there’s an audience for that sort of thing. I still don’t know how to get started, even though I’ve thought the matter over for another week. Maybe I should go into therapy. They say there’s a good analyst on the island named Pere Calsina. Of course, I wouldn’t know a good analyst from a terrible one, in Spanish. My Spanish is so terrible I could hardly bare my soul to anyone around here. Maybe Pere Calsina could explain to me in Italian or French why it was that even as a child I wanted to be a clown? What’s so funny, really, about a circus clown’s pants always falling down, or his getting hit in the head with a brick or a ten-ton weight dropping on his foot or a pole whacking him in the face and knocking off his nose? My brother wanted to be a streetcar driver when he grew up. He didn’t get his wish. He became a lawyer.

  I asked Mother to sew a clown suit for me and she sewed a Harlequin outfit out of varicolored scraps of cloth and made a hat with bells on it. I went as a clown to a class costume party, but nobody laughed at me. When I tried to be funny, I failed completely. When I tried to be serious, people laughed. It was almost as confusing as trying to remember which stories of mine were lies.

  When I was fifteen, I still wanted to be a circus clown. Mother didn’t tell me not to, but she did suggest that I learn some proper profession as well, since a clown’s career is very uncertain—there’s a lot of competition, and directors tend to be suspicious of female clowns, since they’re all men themselves, and men tend to think women can’t become great clowns, because they have smaller brains, or whatever excuse might be fashionable at the time. Besides, I might fall in love at some point, which could end up meaning children. Children, for their part, were the main reason for my mother’s saying she thought it would be worth my while to learn to become, say, a librarian, because an itinerant life would disrupt my children’s attendance at school. She knew this from experience, since she was the daughter of a fire-eater, after all.

  “I’ll never fall in love and I’ll never get married. I’m not that stupid.”

  “I thought exactly the same thing when I was your age,” she said.

  She was a former trapeze artist who’d given up her career when she married my father, who had begun his career as a lion tamer, advanced to being a teacher at the Moscow circus school, then rose through the Ministry of Culture to become the Republic’s coordinator of vaudeville arts. After Mother stopped working on the trapeze, her legs hurt all the time. First she got varicose veins, then her bones began to break all by themselves, as though her legs couldn’t endure life on the surface of the earth. Most of the time she lay in bed, humming wistful songs and reading people’s fortunes in tea leaves, though she never consented to tell what sort of future awaited me. She just looked at me sadly with her hand on her cheek and sighed deeply. What could she do about the fact that the circus was still in her blood too, even fifteen years later? She really wasn’t suited to normal life. She pined away and died before her time.

  After high school I applied, and was admitted, to the Moscow circus school. Father knew the principal and arranged for me to get in.

  “There’s nowhere else for you to go. You don’t know how to prepare food and you can’t get married—you’re too ugly,” he explained.

  He was right. Before I became famous, I only had one lover—a bear tamer. He was so drunk that anybody would have been good enough for him. I happened his way and he held me in his arms and pressed me against his hairy chest. He smelled of vodka, onions, and bear piss. Not really such a bad smell, once you get used to it. I went to bed with him because I wanted to know what it was like, what all the
women murmured about, why they were so eager and had such great enthusiasm about getting married. But in my opinion it wasn’t worth the bother. It felt stupid to lie in bed with my legs spread while a man lay groaning on top of me. Maybe it would have felt different if I’d loved him. The rubbing began to bore me. A copy of Pravda was on the night table; I thought that I might as well get some reading done, so this time wouldn’t be completely wasted. I reached out to grab the paper but I couldn’t quite reach it. The bear tamer was furious—he almost knocked my head off. He grabbed me by the shoulders, threw me back against the bed, and said, “I’ll show you Pravda!”

  He squirted some liquid between my thighs as he said this, then slumped down to lie on my stomach, wheezing so heavily that I thought he’d had a heart attack and was about to die, since he was so fat. Fortunately, he pulled through. Afterward he asked whether he’d been good and wanted to kiss me on the mouth. I didn’t want that, and I couldn’t answer his question either, since I had no one else to compare him to.

  I was the only woman in the clown course and probably the worst student in the history of the school, but because of my father’s position, I wasn’t kicked out. For my graduate thesis, I only barely managed to throw together the required Marxist study on how class distinctions are enacted in the art of clowning. I didn’t mind the subject matter: clowning has always been a proletariat art, by and for the oppressed. The problem was doing research. Without filling my thesis with the requisite quotes from Marx and Lenin, I’d never get my degree—but whenever I opened their collected works, I began to feel terribly drowsy. Even in the classroom, hearing either of those names triggered a yawning reflex and made my ears close up. As such, I yawned constantly in school, and nothing of what I heard there made the least impression on me.