Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  But writing was strictly forbidden. The camp guards took pains to ensure that no prisoner ever came by the merest scrap of paper or anything that could be used as a writing implement. Once Fernando managed to steal several blank record sheets, which had escaped the attention of the warders because they were printed on both sides and as such not considered fit for use as writing paper. After this Fernando would get up early, before reveille; guided by the first cold rays of the sun to appear over the barracks, he would use a nail in place of pencil or pen, inscribing his text into the forms. Then he would bury the lacerated sheets in the sand behind the depot. Someone informed on him, however, and an officer forced Fernando at gunpoint to dig up all the papers and burn them. His punishment was a week in the darkness of the solitary-confinement cell.

  Fernando without pen and paper reminded Pablo of a narcomaniac whose drugs had been taken away. Often Pablo would catch Fernando in front of the depot with a piece of metal piping in his hand, carving letters in the sand that were immediately smoothed away by the wind; or he would find him scribbling something invisible on a wall with his finger. After a while Pablo was put to work elsewhere; he never saw Fernando again.

  Some days later the Conservative Party held its first conference, at which Professor Vieta was elected party leader. Thanks to the work connected with his new position he was sometimes distracted from thoughts of Fernando, but every time the telephone rang he felt sick with fear that the call might bear tidings of the discovery of his son’s body. But the body of Fernando Vieta was never found.

  Although the leaders of the various radical and partisan parties were in the majority in the provisional parliament, their disagreements ran so deep that they failed to agree on a common candidate for president. Thus it happened that the race was won with relative ease by Ernesto Vieta, the candidate proposed by the Conservative Party, whom no one had taken too seriously to begin with. Vieta spent most of his time in the presidential palace, working long into the night, then pacing the empty corridors and meeting the ghost of his son, or standing on the palace balcony looking down at the sand of the empty square as it shone in the moonlight.

  On a yacht at anchor by a belt of small islands off the coast of North Floriana, within view of the mainland, a group of students from the capital saw in the new year together. They had diving gear with them, and on the first day of the new year, after a night of champagne and fireworks, they swam down to inspect a coral reef whose many colors and shapes were illuminated by rays of sunlight that penetrated the warm, shallow sea. One of the students separated from the others and went deeper, into some kind of gorge that opened up before him. In the beam of his flashlight he saw tentacles wriggling about, then big, round, staring eyes and a flash of grooved fins. He was suddenly aware of a dark, twisted line in the water, which continually vanished and reappeared amid the pink and white feelers of sea anemones. The lone diver thrust his hand in among the pulsating anemones and felt the hardness of metal. What he was holding appeared to be wire; lifting it out of the bed of anemones he saw that the twists in the wire described carefully shaped letters of the alphabet. He bent to read, with astonishment, the following: As Richard’s car plunged toward the green hillside of the Chapultepec, a dark figure holding a sub-machine gun leaned out of the back window. There were three flashes and the sound of three short bursts of gunfire. As the student began carefully to extricate the wire from the stinging jungle of anemones, he witnessed the flight on uncertain little legs of a school of small, translucent shrimp that lived in among them. There were places where he had to tear the wire away from shells that had become affixed to it. The wire seemed to have no end; in the flashlight beam above the rippling anemones more and more words and sentences presented themselves. There in a rift in the coral reef the amazed diver read a story about a car chase through the streets of Mexico City—a fragment of some kind of wire-book thriller. Several meters in he came to a place where the wire was knotted and clogged with aquatic plant life. His touch provoked a soundless, dreamlike explosion—a school of fish of the widest variety of colors and shapes that had made a nest in the tangle of wire, pursued in a dignified march by a hermit crab in its shell. After this the diver followed the wire in the other direction and found another knot; here, too, was a confusion of wire sentences in which fish, sea snails, and small crustaceans had made their home. The wire was fractured in several places; around the knot and in among the anemones there were several smaller broken-off fragments.

  The student called his friends, and together they pulled the wire out of the water and laid it on the deck next to empty champagne bottles. Boys and girls in diving kits and swimwear grouped together around the under-sea wire text, the words of which were plugged with seaweed, shells, and thrashing fish. The wind had dropped and the surface of the sea was still, like a great floor of smooth blue stone. The students began to tidy up the wire, pulling out aquatic plants whose long flexible stalks had woven themselves into its bends, tearing off mollusks that clung to it. As the debris of the sea was stripped away, the rusty curves that came into view in the radiant sunlight revealed themselves as fragments of wire sentences treating of the torments of love and hate, of ecstasy and humiliation, of demons and man-made men, of despair; then there were sentences describing gunfights and car chases, and others describing the torpid atmosphere of a roadside motel and then a stuffy hotel in some big city. The students succeeded in working free one of the ends of the wire; it comprised the sentence Diamanta disappeared behind the low rocks that lined the coast, and a little further along, the word Finis. To all appearances this was the end of the text. The students turned immediately to the second great knot of wire and groped about in its damp and greasy innards; it wasn’t long before one of the girls pulled out the other end. The students cleaned off the slime to reveal the words The Captive, which were written in letters somewhat larger than the rest of the text. After the last letter of the second word the wire ran straight for about ten centimeters before forming the next two words: these gave a name that all the students recognized, that of Fernando Vieta. Everyone was now aware that they were looking at a sort of title page, bearing the title of this work and the name of its author. What they had found in the sea was a book, a book such as had never been seen before, a book written in wire by the national martyr, the son of the President, during his time in the detention camp.

  The students decided to stop their work: the wire was so badly corroded they were afraid they might damage it. By evening of the same day the tangle of wire sentences, still scented by the sea and covered with the corpses of tiny marine creatures, was on the carpet of the President’s study. Ernesto Vieta sat next to it, running the ends of his fingers along words the hands of his son had fashioned in wire in the unbearable heat of the depot; the father, too, was afraid to straighten out the brittle wire. Fernando had succeeded in outwitting his warders after all: there in the camp he had found something that was at once pen and paper. Ernesto remembered seeing in the dim light of the depot coils of wire scattered about. Obviously it had occurred to Fernando to use the wire as a solid ink, an ink that need not be applied to paper or any other base. The President imagined his son in a corner of the depot, performing patiently the endless task of bending the wire into a long string of words. Perhaps he didn’t even bother to hide it, left it scattered about the depot for everyone to see; it would never cross a soldier’s mind that this jumble harbored a work of literature. In all likelihood the wire text had been noticed only at the end of the war, by one of the commanders, when all documents were being destroyed. It had been loaded on a ship along with everything else that needed to be disposed of, and thrown into the sea. Professor Vieta imagined Fernando’s joy at managing to complete his work in spite of the guards’ attentions. He tried to fix in his imagination the expression of bliss on Fernando’s face, but it was so many years since he had seen his son that he couldn’t guess at what he must have looked like then. All that came to him was the face of a ten-year-o
ld boy.

  The wire was entrusted to restorers. For the next three months they tended to it and treated it with oils; painstakingly, centimeter by centimeter they opened it out on the floor of the great hall of the State Conservation Institute. As Fernando’s text was gradually revealed, the restorers were taken aback by what they read. But it was not their task to criticize the President’s son’s novel, so during their regular meetings with the elder Vieta they kept their feelings to themselves. They proposed to the President that his son’s work should be cut up into lines, each about a meter in length, making it possible to set it on panels, each of which would form a page of a great book. But the President would not permit such a drastic modification. So the unfolded, restored segments of wire text were placed along the wall of the Institute’s main hall, which was circular, and gradually arranged in a spiral which revolved inward and whose outer perimeter more or less matched the circumference of the circular hall, which was thirty meters in diameter. The scents of the sea gradually faded, to be replaced by the smells of conserving agents.

  Every day the President made time to have himself driven over to the Institute, where he would see how the work was progressing. On each visit he would kneel and read over and over the passage that had been revealed since the previous day. On some days there would be a whole meter of newly restored text, on others just twenty centimeters. Images from Fernando’s work would settle in his brain and then present themselves with painful insistence during governmental meetings; wire sentences would appear with the clarity of hallucination between the lines of the dossiers prepared for his attention. This made it difficult for him to concentrate on his work; with increasing frequency he left the handling of affairs of state to his advisors. Complaints about his idleness proliferated. But at this time all the newspapers wrote daily about the salvage of the wire manuscript of the President’s son, a man tortured to death by the previous regime. This moving story aroused great sympathy and love for the President, not least among the lower classes, who until recently had regarded him with perfect indifference. For sale in the markets, in among pictures of the saints and figurines of Our Lady of Guadalupe, there were now statues and color-print portraits of the President and his son. Young people wore T-shirts bearing pictures of both Vietas. Such a groundswell of sentiment was useful for the Conservative Party, and it served to strengthen the government, which in the chaos of the immediate post-war period had been quite unstable. Not even the opposition, composed of members of the radical parties and former partisans, dared challenge too openly a President so beloved by his people.

  The nation was impatient for the restorers to finish their work. All but the President and the team of seven restorers were expecting a great work that addressed the struggle for freedom from tyranny—a work that would yield passages for recital on festive and ceremonial occasions and sentences to be chiseled into the plinths of monuments. The President forbade all outsiders from entering the Institute until work had been completed. Although every evening the Institute was thronged with journalists who thrust microphones at anyone departing the building, the restorers were silent about what was slowly emerging from the submarine tangle, thus keeping their promise to the President.

  Restoration work was still in progress when Vieta announced he would build a mausoleum with an empty tomb as a symbol of his son’s remains. The mausoleum would also contain a room that would be the final resting place of the original wire book. All the publishing houses battled for the right to publish The Captive; after long deliberation the President granted permission to the Golden Age Press. The contract stipulated that the book would be published in three forms: the first would be the usual means for reading works of literature; the second a facsimile edition of the wire original, in which the lines of pages would be reproductions of segments of wire; the third a single page in the form of a long strip of paper that would bear a facsimile of the wire text in unbroken flow. The paper strip of the third of these editions would be rolled up and attached at each end to a roller, in the manner of ancient scrolls reading would progress across the page from one roller to the other.

  By the beginning of August the last section of wire was restored; on the floor of the hall of the Institute Fernando’s book lay in an almost perfect spiral. Its last turn, into the sentence Diamanta disappeared behind the low rocks that lined the coast, took it to what was practically the dead center of the room. After the word Finis, there was a space in the shape of an irregular circle about twenty centimeters in diameter. Regrettably, the wire was broken in a number of places. The President had three expeditions of professional divers sent to the coral reef, and these succeeded in fishing out from among the anemones a few more sentence fragments. But some of the missing pieces were never recovered. Soon all three versions of the book were published in a print run of many thousands. On the day of publication, lines formed in front of the bookshops before first light. By evening the book was sold out and the publishers began planning the next edition.

  But the book was received with disappointment and consternation. Instead of the novel about the struggle for freedom so keenly anticipated by readers, what appeared was a tale so strange that no one could make much sense of it. Indeed, it was no easy matter to establish its genre; it was set in 2001—which was then still the future—like A Space Odyssey before it, so eventually the critics decided it was science fiction. Still, the incomprehensibility and oddity of Fernando’s novel was in no way detrimental to the Vieta cult of the father and son as it existed among the people: these qualities belonged to the world of the sacral, for the Vieta cult had taken on something of a religious character. In the villages and the slums that skirted the cities, The Captive went unread (nor would anyone there have read a novel about the national struggle for freedom either), but newspaper cuttings containing extracts from Fernando’s novel were pinned to household altars, next to pictures of the President and his son. When people there read, syllable by syllable, the inexplicable sentences, these were not entirely without meaning: the readers invested them with veneration, love, and hope.

  The reaction of the educated classes was far less favorable. Intellectuals had imagined a great personal theme (probably love) woven through scenes from the revolutionary struggle. The motif of subjugation suggested by the work’s title was indeed present, as was the motif of love, but the account of the hero’s yearning for freedom and the story of his amours had little in common with what the impatient intellectuals had imagined. It was as though Fernando had known what his readers were expecting and was making fun of them. The educated classes would have been perfectly accepting of the work had it been composed of a formless, difficult stream of interior monologue that broke down the contours of things, connections between elements of plot and the unity of character; it would then have been a simple matter to declare the book a modernist work and thus assign it to a familiar category. Nor would it have been difficult to ideologize such a work of modernism—by declaring it a protest against the classical forms of art promoted by the previous regime: a representation of the struggle for freedom of expression within the national struggle for greater freedoms. But Fernando’s wire was bent into chains of words in classically constructed clauses, in which were set out long, detailed descriptions of characters and places, together forming a strange but fully coherent story. In bending the wire into thousands and thousands of words, Fernando had surely cut his fingers to shreds; the writing of the book must have caused him unspeakable pain. Many of his readers imagined the bloodied hands forming word after word in the sweltering heat of the depot, and they said to themselves, “Why did he suffer so for such a thing as this?” Few of them read The Captive to the end.

  The literary critics were as bewildered by the book as everyone else. But their profession demanded that they be able to write something about anything; polite reviews began to appear in newspapers and literary magazines close to the Conservative Party. Some of these praised the novel for the elegance of its form, others
forced on it some underlying message; typically the critic would use his closing paragraph to express regret that the tragic circumstances attending the book’s creation had not permitted the author to address its deficiencies in the final version and make of it a truly exceptional work. In this way the reviewers made clear they did not, in fact, think very highly of The Captive. And their hypocrisy was founded on a fallacy: to all appearances the work was indeed properly finished and its author had reworked it thoroughly to make it so. It was possible to straighten and re-bend the wire in the act of revision, and the state of the wire testified that Fernando had performed many such rewrites and deletions in the search for expressions that at first escaped him.

  Critics of magazines supportive of the previous regime thought it in slightly poor taste to write unfavorable reviews of a book whose author had been a victim of a dictatorship under which they themselves had prospered, so they expressed a hypocritical regret for the fact that the young writer had been unable to develop his talent to the fullest. Typically such a reviewer would make this position clear in his very first paragraph; this allowed him to devote the remainder of the article to an enumeration of the work’s perceived shortcomings. It must have been a pleasant task to describe in detail how the son of the current president, whom the reviewer detested and who in turn held him in open contempt, was a bad writer.

  So it was that the wire book from the bottom of the sea became first a subject of incomprehension and indifference, then of weary debate that excited no one, not even those taking part. Above all this debate provided a forum for declarations of loyalty, spiteful taunts, the settling of old scores, toadying, exhibitionism, the repairing of reputations, ridicule, and a number of other, similar demonstrations of foolishness and immorality. Perhaps someone could be found who was able to read the book without prejudice—a young person with no interest in the conflicts of his father’s generation and no desire to understand them, for example. But young people had no wish to read a work that had become—its incomprehensibility notwithstanding—the official book of the regime merely because its author was the son of the current president and a hero of the resistance. So perhaps the only person in the whole of North Floriana able to read Fernando’s book for what it was, to understand it, to realize that the work was a crystalline growth of images born of the borderlands between the realms of nothingness and sense, was an old man who was indifferent to political discord. Such a person, however, if indeed he existed, did not step forward to bear witness to his reading.