Best European Fiction 2011

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “How distasteful!”

  “Maybe money from some council program needed to be allocated somewhere.” Dolph doesn’t fully share his wife’s indignation. Deep down he finds the arrangement consoling. Nevertheless, he immediately agrees to raise the subject at the next session of the Environmental Commission, for which he serves as secretary.

  While listening to the gravel crunching under his feet, he wonders to himself if he should tell his wife about his meeting with Brüno. He feels the substance of that event is still eluding him, as if the whole thing had been a dream. He’s afraid she would ask him about their conversation, and he isn’t quite sure what he could tell her.

  In the end he simply announces: “Brüno has returned.”

  “I know. Inge told me, before Karl cut her up.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “If I knew, I would have told you. What do you take me for? Have you spoken to him?”

  “No, but I’ve seen him. He just sits there, under the bridge. There’s a bench on the opposite bank of the river. I often sit there and watch him eat or read or wash his feet. There’s usually a big dog with him. It doesn’t look too friendly. To be honest, that’s why I haven’t gone up to talk to him.”

  “I know why he left.”

  “Yes, I suppose he doesn’t like us and will go on not liking us. But does it really matter? We don’t like each other either. Maybe that’s precisely what he’s trying to teach us…”

  Imperceptibly, it had started to rain. Dolph senses that Heidi is thinking about sex. The tips of her fingers are trembling in his palm.

  On their way back home, the two pass by the bus stop at the bottom of Bergstrasse, where they first met many years ago. Every time he passes by this spot, Dolph tries to remember what he told Heidi then, but nothing precise comes to mind. With the years, the design of the bus shelter has changed several times, as often as the schedule of the bus. Today, only the No. 36 stops here, on its way to the train station. On the bench in the bus shelter sits a solitary figure squashed between two enormous suitcases. The couple passes on, but after a few steps Dolph turns back.

  “Herr Plumber! Is that you? Where are you headed?”

  The man stands nervously, not accepting Dolph’s outstretched hand.

  “I’m going back home.”

  “But why?”

  “They shut down the program. There’s been talk since the incident…The others have already left. I waited until the last moment, but today it was officially voted to terminate our contracts. They gave us a small severance compensation, so I can’t complain.”

  “I’m sorry, prejudices are hard to kill off, even in the most civilized societies. Please forgive my emotional outburst at our first meeting. It was human, I know, but after all that’s happened, I feel particularly ashamed.”

  Plumber is awkward, silent. Heidi’s figure continues its lone climb up the steep street.

  “Were you Inge’s plumber? We were close family friends, that’s why I’m asking.”

  “No, it wasn’t me. She was plumbed by Fikret, from Pristina. He was the first to leave.”

  “It really doesn’t matter now. Did you buy a present for your wife, Herr Plumber, for when you see her?”

  “Well, yes…” mumbles Plumber in embarrassment.

  “What did you get, if I might ask?”

  The bus pulls up just then and Herr Plumber starts fussing with his luggage. Dolph helps him load it on board. Suddenly, one of the suitcases springs open and toys start pouring out—Barbie dolls, Transformers, water pistols…and a big pink dildo tied with a purple ribbon. Plumber turns as red as a tomato and rushes to gather his things. The rest of the passengers on the bus pretend not to have seen anything. Dolph leans over, picks up the dildo, and ceremoniously—as if it was a wedding bouquet—hands it back. The doors close and the bus pulls away. Dolph is left standing in the bus shelter, his hand still outstretched.

  “My God,” he thinks. “This surely is how Prometheus felt when he gave fire to Mankind.”

  TRANSLATED FROM BULGARIAN BY KRISTINA KOVACHEVA

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  GORAN SAMARDŽI

  Varneesh

  In this story, which is simply stifling me in its desire to get out, I see myself sitting at an enormous table, covered with a waxed tablecloth. The food is virtually pouring off the edges. They’ve had to squeeze it together tightly to get it all on. There’s so much drink and food that it occurs to me that it can’t all have been paid for honestly. There is even, in front of me, a bottle of cognac, still in its box, with CAMUS (Produce of France) written on it, and a crisply roasted suckling pig with eyes shut tight, their lashes still in place. This overdone carcass’s little legs are painfully contorted, as though the agony of its slaughter has not yet worn off. I pull the pig apart with my bare hands and throw pieces onto the nearest plates. All that will reach the people at the far end of the table, well away from me and therefore of lesser importance, will be the aroma. The richest foods, the most expensive, have all been shoved toward me, and hardly a minute passes without my being offered something else. I’ve unbuttoned my shirt and Bermudas to give my stomach room to spread. It’s not quite an hour since I started eating. My jaws, canines blunted by evolution, keep on crunching monotonously. They even grind the bones. Everything that finds itself between my two rows of neatly flossed teeth is flattened, crushed, punctured. It’s like killing that pig all over again as I chew it, I think.

  This food and drink piled in several layers onto the table has been brought into the courtyard and set out in honor of myself and my girlfriend, who is seated nearby, gazing at me adoringly. She’s afraid that, if she so much as blinks, I’ll disappear. The vortex into which I leapt from our balcony and so saved a little life had rekindled her love for me and increased, or rather, restored my value. Stars shine from the sky, and candles from the earth. I was present last month when a workman accompanied by the police cut off the cable bringing stolen power into this courtyard. Three generations of people whose forebears had been brought here from India on the wings of geese crawled out of their basement and stood and watched a thing with a hooklike beak bite into a cable as thick as my little finger. The cable had been cunningly hidden for years, connected to the nearby streetlight. Its camouflage had been removed by crows. The black birds used to fly over our courtyard in clouds. In the end, their actions proved just as sinister as their appearance. They pecked through the cable’s covering and revealed it at last for all to see.

  I was on the balcony at the time, working out with a punching bag. All sorts of exercise props were strewn about me. The place of honor was occupied by an enormous metal weight that had begun to be devoured by rust. It always amazed me that I didn’t fall right through the floor when I lifted it. The explosive echoes of my punches now spread in all directions. In my head I was hitting the workman with the pincers, and then especially that huge enforcer of law and order who’d come along with him, truncheon and pistol buried in his flab. There was still half an hour before my girlfriend came home from work. She didn’t like watching me sweating and training and disturbing the order of the house. She liked to think that my figure and my muscles just came naturally, and weren’t the result of hard work.

  It was no use to my neighbors, however, beneath my feet, buried up to their waists in the earth (in the basement), of whom there was one more every year, that I was rebelling internally and fighting against the state. At that time, when human and civil rights were vaguely intimated rather than known about, any public expression of discontent was likely to end with a rubber truncheon to the head. Unlike today’s police, the militia then used less paper and more force.

  No, it was something else entirely that changed my relationship with the courtyard-tribe, and it happened one rainy night, a month and a half before the gala feast. For hours before the rain came, my girlfriend and I—each on our own side of the bed—had been melting from t
he heat. We were trying to breathe our way out of it, panting. Many tenants had taken folding beds out onto their balconies and were hoping to fall asleep under the stars. The sun burned down from above by day and then the moon by night.

  We touched each other with the tips of our toes and fingers—closer contact would’ve been a health hazard: we didn’t dare embrace and double the heat! We had pushed our bed toward our balcony so that we were half in and half outside. Our neighbors were babbling, snoring, moaning. There were also these mournful, long drawn-out farts, unbelievably exaggerated by the acoustics of the courtyard. Everything living in the building and around it (dogs and cats) sighed and suffered in the same way.

  I conjured up autumn and winter in my mind. An idyll in which I lit a fire and wrapped my girlfriend, my final love (I always think that), into a blanket. My girlfriend was pregnant. My sperm had found a way into her, despite all our highly scientific precautionary measures—as though it were a corrosive acid and not a warm, slimy substance whose surplus I even expel from myself in my sleep, from time to time. Yes, I had somehow overcome all obstacles and managed to swim into the most secret—and, in our case, or so we’d thought, the most secure—chamber of the female body. For me, this was exciting, seductive; for her, alarming. I was truly impressed by my tenacious little tadpole worm: heart no bigger than the period at the end of a sentence. But, in any case: while her stomach was still beautifully flat and attractive, we knew it was no longer empty. The mechanics of our sex, its swaying, riding, rolling, or slow thrusting, had escaped our control, and hidden away a little future surprise for us.

  Thinking about winter cooled me down a little and I rolled over to my girlfriend. I found my way into the parting beneath her belly button. The hairs around it were shaved in the shape of an equilateral triangle. They were just long enough to prick me. Her familiar sex accepted me wearily and released thick moisture as though to order. Encouraged by this perfectly slippery substance, whose viscosity could outdo engine oil, I hurried into its depths, and, to this day I don’t know how or why, came right away. My girl pushed me off her like some useless sack that had been weighing her down and told me to go to hell. “You can stuff cabbages with that thing from now on—not me, you bastard!” “Forgive me. I’ll be right back, just going to have a smoke.” “Yeah, you know exactly where you can go!”

  We lay naked and crucified on the bed, with our feet virtually in the courtyard, and prayed to God to take us into some other, cooler age. The groans, sighs, and curses from various balconies had merged into a monotonous drone. You couldn’t tell who was breathing (or where) or what they were saying. A general mumbling, a dull animal wail for just one breath of fresh air or a single drop of rain, filled the square well formed by our buildings, whose bottom was dry. The bottom of the well was the courtyard.

  I smoked and blew the smoke over the balcony from the bed. It seemed to me that the light of the cigarette made the heat even worse. Three meters away, in a niche without a plastic curtain, my girlfriend was taking a shower. The cold water exploded angrily onto her taut, smooth skin. The little drops reached almost as far as me. I watched her indifferently until, inclined to fantasy as I am, I began to imagine that she was someone else’s woman. I imagined a man, quite unknown, going into the shower and smacking her naked rump, his hand bouncing off her tight skin, not sinking into it. I just didn’t know what to do about the baby in her! She had already entered her third month. A heart like a little signal flare was quivering inside the fetus. That was my child. A knocking on the door of the world to open up—for him, or her. I was old enough to have made myself a replacement me, just in case.

  There’s no more ungrateful creature than the male, especially if he’s human and especially if he’s me. Three years earlier I had used every trick I could think of to get her. By the time she woke one morning, warm and contented, her legs wrapped round one of mine, and looked around, unused to finding me beside her and my things scattered around her room, she was mine. I decided not to let go of that little piece of her that I had conquered (a woman gives, apparently, while a man conquers). Afterward, the excitement wore off. Our balloon of happiness began to shrivel. The little piece of her I had taken grew into a great lump, and it began to smother me. Quarrels turned into fights (her hitting, me trying to defend myself), fights into caresses. And so on for years…Balkan-style.

  As I watched her, imagining what someone who wasn’t me would do for her and how much he would love her, the square of sky above our buildings was rent by lightning, confirmed afterward by an immense clap of thunder. A sponge had been spread over our square of sky and it was being squeezed. Water began to pour through the dry gutters, still hot from the day. The heavy rain put out my cigarette butt, thrown through a window, in mid-air. People on the balconies woke up, flustered (those who had managed to fall asleep). I pulled on my underpants and jumped from the bed onto the balcony. I shouted something inarticulate, without any specific meaning, just to announce that I was happy and alive. Something naked came up behind me, out of the dark, and put its arms around me—my girlfriend. “Idiot, what on earth are you shouting about, eh?” she whispered. “Well, it’s raining,” I said as though no one apart from me had realized. She was fresh. She didn’t smell of shampoo, but of herself. I hid her body with mine so that the neighbors hanging over their balconies wouldn’t see her naked, and with my arms twisted backward pressed her to me (stuck her to me, that is). I rested my hands, roughened from punches and weights, on her protruding hemispheres. “Oh sweet, naked creature, who is making something in her belly, how could I have thought that you had begun to bore me and that I didn’t love you?” I wondered to myself. Tuning into the current of my thoughts, she pushed her hands into my underpants. Everything I had under my navel fit into them. She was touching me. The signal from my brain that I was aroused hadn’t reached down there yet. It was only later that down there got hard and peered out of the cage whose bars were her warm fingers.

  And so, connected to each other by our hands and wetness, we fell onto the bed again and began to make love. Our two bodies made contact and fused at our mouths and sexual organs. From outside came the scent of soil imprisoned in asphalt. The spindly little tree growing in the middle of the courtyard, where the concrete had broken away to remind us that it was only an artificial deposit upon the earth, and not the earth itself—was bathed in rain. When I told her, just as we reached our climax, that I loved her, she did not hear me through the noise of the rain. The downpour had already reached a tempo that indicated that it would go on raining for a long time. Our neighbors had withdrawn into their hanging caves and were sleeping; cats, dogs and the other creatures that shared our life in the town…at the last minute, all of us had been saved by the water.

  I woke some time before dawn. To my delight it was still pouring with rain out. The sky was drenching the town with great skill. The relief that the rain had brought had now changed into an enduring pleasure. Conditions in our room, building, neighborhood, town had again become livable. I had fallen asleep on top of my girlfriend. My back was being cooled by the freshness of the air, the little breeze from her nostrils tickled my neck. She was simply stuck to me. Especially to what was inside her. In my sleep my sperm had turned into glue. I thought of ancient buildings, their blocks of stone held together with egg white.

  I slowly parted her legs and gradually withdrew from her. A reflex of selfishness, which people call love, woke her and she drew me back. She had interpreted my hardness as early morning arousal.

  “I have to go to the bathroom, my love,” I whispered as softly as possible.

  “Be sure to come right back!”

  “Okay.”

  In my sleepy, tottering state, the journey to the bathroom was long. I stepped into the shower, where my girlfriend had been, where I had imagined her in an embrace with someone else. Something cracked under my foot, followed by two—one after the other—under my other foot. I was already aiming at the hole I knew how to fin
d by heart, when a shower of something dry scattered over my head and shoulders. Each hard drop weighed several grams.

  I turned on the light and suddenly saw, in all their vileness, in their incalculable number, the only thing that revolted me in the world—cockroaches. I shrieked and leaped out of that center of repulsion, my wobbling cock still dripping. My girlfriend, immunized against disgust by being in the medical profession, woke up and immediately began to shake and bounce off our bed with laughter. She found it delightful and terribly strange that I too was afraid of something. I wiped my bare feet, filthy with crushed cockroaches, on the carpet and swore explosively. Our building was old and damp. Its inhabitants weren’t exactly the cleanest. There was room here for bugs and people both.

  The light finally drove away our unwanted neighbors (black, with shiny armor and bare legs), who outnumbered the human variety a hundred to one, and I remembered that I still had to piss. I went out onto the balcony and sent a warm arc down. The liquid from me merged with the water from the sky. The sound of my issue blended into the general sound of pattering, splashing, dripping. And then some devil, or whatever you want to call it, persuaded me to direct my jet onto the roof of the shed, which—though I didn’t know this yet—our underground neighbors had taken over and made into a room. So many of them had been born in the basement that they’d run out of space; they had begun to squeeze each other out through the windows and doors. The curtain on the little shed window was a kind of announcement that people lived there, a surplus of them, rather than discarded things. But I hadn’t figured this out. Our neighbors had overflowed out of their basement into the shed—but covertly.