Best European Fiction 2013 (16 page)

We do not stay long. He quickly gets bored, talks to me for the first time in ages. “I can’t be bothered looking at these ordinary things.” So he says. Reaches out his hand and I take it in mine; I’d squeeze it if I were more autonomous. If I’d had permission, I would have looked up. Never so beautiful before, exulting. Though this only out of the corner of my eye.

Later: acts unusually, very different. Does not want to read the new newspaper beside his food. The newspaper stops coming. The old one lies by the sofa, wrinkling. Appetite has decreased, says so himself, tells me not to cook anything but pasta. That is what he eats, by the bowlful, nothing else, doesn’t want to buy anything else. Weeks go by, there are seven days in a week. No longer goes out in the evenings, instead buys big bottles of stuff and sits in the living room with one of them beside him. Once, I sniff the bottle, out of curiosity, because I have felt a twitch in the left side of my neck. He snorts: “That won’t suit your plumbing.” Then pours it into his depths.

Once I get scared. In the morning I have been on for as much as ten minutes and thirteen seconds, and then the lights go out. At first I think he shut me down again, but no, I can sense and move. There is understanding, it is not night but a dark day, whatever that may be. But the lamps have gone out, and not a change in my innards. He says very loudly: “Damn, now they’ve cut off the electricity!” I would scream if told to: I can’t survive without electricity, not for long, the next day is my electricity day.

He telephones somewhere, through the wall I hear the voice but not the words. First he’s angry, then amicable, to me he’s never been so beseeching, so polite. Never. But the electricity comes back. Why, he is capable of anything.

After that keeps me on later in the evenings, strokes me more slowly than before, maybe he wants to smooth my lumps and bumps, remove the dark oxides from my case, maybe he wants to make me gleam. When it is already far into the night—I have never been on so late in the night—he sighs, touches my innards, and switches me off. As if he did not want to stop, to close, to be without. Things are necessary, and I am among them.

Everything I think feels to me as if my shoulder joint is loosening. I do not report the fault. Sometimes I find such astonishing little actions within myself.

Seventeen days ago, almost exactly, I experienced something new. Earlier in the day, I had been set to read a book again, far into the evening. Meanwhile, he sat in a chair with his eyes shut. The wrinkle at one side of his mouth tautened and relaxed from time to time, human skin is remarkably flexible. After, we went to bed.

Maybe he switched me off wrongly somehow, because I found myself in the midst of blackness but was present there too. My mind stayed on, I could not move but on the other hand I did not wish to either, I did not think about moving at all, or about my own parts. I saw unfamiliar, impossible things: things that don’t really exist, I know well—but I saw them move and be in the same way as all of us who exist, move, and be, myself among them.

These things I saw:

Men with horns growing in their heads.

A big bird with a human face.

A blank wall you can walk through.

Furniture—a table and stools that jumped around.

Among them all, myself, I flew and floated, although I have not been granted such capacities.

Then he must have switched me off, because next it was morning.

One morning he is more talkative, less red-eyed. Some of them are coming here, men from the exhibition, I remember shapes from their faces and their ways of walking, no one human being is the same as the others. First the telephone rings, beep-be-beep, and then they come, driving into the yard one at a time. Before he opens the door he puts me in my own chair in the corner of the room, telling me to be nice. But my being is always nice.

“Shall we begin straight away?” one down-cheek shouts, not even coming all the way into the room, just putting his head around the door, and I am not used to such half-and-half behavior. In all my programlessness I begin to click my thumb, I can’t think of any other actions. There are three of them. They are happy, even merry, I would say, if I was asked. “Good shenanigans?” asks one, and I have to consult my vocabulary. Apparently we have not had a lot of shenanigans in our house. His cheeks glow red, this speaker’s, and all of them have bright eyes. They negotiate in loud voices, louder than I would ever be allowed to speak.

They bring in the kind of devices—mediocrities, he would say— that I have seen at exhibitions. But then from a distance, out of focus, now close-up; I could make contact with them if this was to be considered necessary. The things are silent: they take them out of boxes and set them out side by side in the corridor. “Let them wait their turn,” one says, younger than the norm, then eyes me as a continuation of the queue. “You must be part of the furniture,” he goes on, and winks—I remember him, because he has winked before. A funny person, male, I allow him to touch my case. One of them hasn’t brought anything, he just watches. Stares at me, too, but I do not allow it to affect my settings.

When they aren’t looking, I just turn my sensors toward the others, when the men talk together loudly but with different words in the living room and forget to monitor the world, I walk back and forth in the corridor and inspect what they brought, the beauties.

The first: small and white as a mouse, would fit on my upper limb and that is indeed where I would want it to sleep—its curled form, its nose touching its back toes. I bend over it and stroke it, its coat is enormously soft, and if I were really small, a tiny particle, I could hide in it. The head, though, has no fur; it is as smooth a skin as my surface, in that respect I am perhaps lacking. It has no eyelids, but its eyes are closed. What my eyes look like closed I do not know.

The second: I cannot make it out, it is the size of a stool and so full of protuberances and ends or wiring that it, too, looks furry. I circle round it, crouch beside it, try to see what manner of being it is. I find a little hole that could lead to its insides—for a moment I feel like opening it and touching—but of course I do not. You are no toucher of insides, he said to me once. Although I do know how to fix things, a car even.

The third, to me, is the most beautiful: the size of a large dog, and the shape of one too, because it stands on four paws and has a long neck stretched out to the front and side. I have seen pictures, and once even a live one. At the rear is a thin and long tail, an animal’s tail, it is curled round one of the back legs like a printer’s cable on a desk. The nose is longer and narrower than the dog’s I saw, its head was like a ball; on the end of the nose are two narrow nostrils. Ears I cannot distinguish at all, its big eyes are closed. Not everybody has ears, and some have only inner ears. Most beautiful of all in the creature are its color settings: the dark blue of the snout changes to the purple of the neck, the orange of the side elements and the bright yellow spot of the lower back, asymmetrical, and then through the red of the thighs and root of the tail to the bluishness of the tail-tip and paws, sky-color.

The men pour the last drops from a bottle and look very happy, although the bottle is proven empty. The funny man doesn’t drink anymore, but walks past me into the corridor, does not want to touch my side this time, although I would allow such a thing. I guessed that the beautiful creature is his, the one that is as gaudily colored as the sky on evenings when the sun goes out and dyes the clouds. The creature does not appear to have any innards at all—the man bends down in front of it, strokes its side, breathes into its nostrils. At first nothing happens, the other men glance at funnyman but he just smiles. His forehead looks damp—perhaps he’s the kind that is called a pantshitter. “Pantshitters don’t know how to keep their nerves in order,” he said once when he was watching TV, and laughed. Not at me, he didn’t mean me. My nerves are very well-disciplined.

But then the dog-snake, that’s what I’ll call it, opens up. First the eyes: their brilliance is fractured, as if they were made up of a countless number of little red lamps. Then the mouth: the creature opens its maw for a second and from its throat comes a quiet cooing, and I feel my internal rhythm missing a beat, for I have a rhythm too, after all.

“Forma,” says the man, “sit!” The creature has lolloped around him with its sides like fire, flaring, we once had a fire in the grate here, but now it sits on its tail very obediently, just as I would sit down if I were commanded to do so, and if there were a tail behind me. They are so proud, all of them: the uncomfortable man of his mouse creature, red-shirt of his tousle-fleece, and then this last, the one with the dog-snake. There is a tickling in my innards: I would like to know what pride feels like.

It is my turn last. He nods to me from his chair, is so relaxed, I’ve never before seen him like this. Doesn’t come to get me as the others did, trusts in the fact that I’m no vacuum cleaner, that I don’t need to be pulled from the cupboard.

I walk into the middle of the room and look pretty damn good.

They leave at last, when I have read myself to exhaustion and done all sorts of other things, showing off my talents. He is still sitting in his chair and does not look as if he intends to get up. Tired head nods onto the table where the empty bottles stand. In his hand is one that is not yet empty. Outside, the sun has been taken away.

“Creation,” he says as if in thought, “makes a person into something sublime. Almost a god. If one can create, one can no longer be an ordinary person.” Then raises the bottle to his lips again. Sighs as the bottle empties, and lets it crash to the floor. I hasten to pick it up as I was intended to. Grasps my wrist. The wrist joint has been playing up over the past few days, really creaking, creak-creak, is he going to mend it now.

But he pulls me to him, slightly into his lap and slightly onto the arm of the chair. Puts his hand on my face element and strokes a point on my temple where the casing is particularly smooth.

“Do you understand?” he demands, as if I thought about such things at all. “Because of you, I am not ordinary, I am something quite extraordinary.” Suddenly he smiles again. Gets up from his chair, pushes me off his lap. “Stand there,” he orders, and his eyes gleam; he presses his hands to my sides and raises my chin into a better position. So I stand there. He paces around me and chuckles about something else, in a low voice that eludes my senses. From time to time he taps my surface, bends my fingers, at one point opening my insides but then closing them again.

“You’re some beast, you,” he says at last, nodding his head. Although I am no beast, but a being of quite a different kind.

I begin to tidy up, and go on tidying even after everything is in order.

“What does creation mean?” I ask it casually, in passing, as I take the rug out to beat it, although I probably did that already. It is not my custom to question, to question anything, after all one would hardly suppose that I would take an interest in the nature of things in general. One would not suppose it, not of one like me, not even an exemplary one like me.

He mumbles something, at first I doubt that he has heard me. Quite often a fault in the senses, ears not very accurate. He raises his hand in the direction of where the empty bottle was, I have not taken it away. Can’t reach it. I want to help, but really, why should I pass him an empty bottle?

“Gods create,” he then says, his voice coming muffled as if he was shouting at other people from the other side of a wall.

“Are y —, are you one of those?” I ask. I would like to tighten a screw somewhere deep down where something must have been jerked out of place—I am almost making mistakes. He begins to laugh, laughing from a deeper place than before and sounding different. I could even believe that it is not mere tiredness that makes him so fatigued.

“Yes, people do create. Books, for example, which you also read. And paintings. It’s quite normal.” He leans his head back against the chair, is clearly pleased with me since he is talking so much. It doesn’t happen often, that. “Creation is making something that has not existed before.”

A car light from the street makes a red streak on the floor. I click my head back and forth and try to understand, all sorts of things. Later he falls asleep in the chair and I am left on all night, for the first time ever.

A long time ago when I first arrived, so shiny and smooth-cased, I was kept in a place where there were children, almost the same age, I spent time with them and learned to be. He thought it important. While the children drew, I sat on my chair by the table and was very charming. Sometimes someone came up and bashed me, but the dents only became evident later, at home, after he had fetched me back.

“Great, very clever, you should be proud.” That’s the kind of thing they said to the children, and I listened.

I read again:

O how all speech is feeble and falls short

Of my conceit, and this to what I saw

Is such, tis not enough to call it little!

O Light Eterne, sole in thyself that dwellest,

Sole knowest thyself, and, known unto thyself

And knowing, lovest and smilest on thyself!

He no longer laughs at what I read, just nods. Then does something strange—leaves me alone in my own company and goes away, saying he will come back later: “I’m just going to do a couple of things, you’ll be fine alone for a couple of hours.”

I fall into myself. First I stretch out on the floor, he encourages it because it straightens a lot of things out. When I’ve done it, I feel lonely and grease my bends. After that I walk around the house and look good, stroke my details and their permanence, keep stopping at the window for a moment, looking at the world as it happens to be at this moment.

I read to myself, trying to pronounce well:

Within itself, of its own very color

Seemed to me painted with our effigy,

Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein.