Read Best European Fiction 2013 Online
Authors: Unknown
You told him immediately that you were pregnant; you could have waited and made your own decision, but you went charging in there regardless. Bam. Did you think he’d make the decision for you, or what? You know what his outlook on life is. What happens happens. It’s all the same to him. If you decide you should get married, then you will; if you decide differently, then you won’t. But if that’s what you decide, then you’ll live here with him and Nada, he’s not moving anywhere. He’s not exchanging a weekend lover for a weekend wife.
Very soon now you will enter the church, it’s still full of holes outside, they haven’t repaired that; you’re increasingly afraid, the nave is decorated with white tulle and white flowers, while you experience moments in which you’ve decided and moments in which you’ve changed your mind. Your life is now made up of these moments; quite a few of them have already built up, creating something that could even be called fate. Are you thinking of that architect? When you met him he had just gotten divorced. I knew, he told you, I knew it would end badly, even when I went to get married at the town hall. But I didn’t have the strength to stop the wedding, everyone dressed up to the nines, the presents bought, the apartment furnished. Everything would have been better if I’d followed my instincts. When you heard that you thought you would never let yourself be dragged that far, that you and your inner voice were one, and now look at you.
Even a year ago … The upper floor at your parents’ house to begin with, some colleague from the legal world who would be transformed overnight into an ideal lover and wonderful husband; on Saturdays you’d leave the kids with mother and go off on your own: skiing in the winter, Egypt in the summer; a billable hour of a lawyer’s time costs such and such and each day has so many working hours, multiplied by two … That’s why you went sailing with colleagues from work. To try to draw from the drabness of office life some kind of color picture, some kind of opportunity … which became null and void in that moment when, after seven days, somewhere in the middle of your intellectual love games, Goran crawled across your bed toward the space where the autopilot was kept. When it broke down you didn’t know that it was there in your cabin, at the end of the bed, behind a small door. The only one in the town who might be able to fix it is Nada’s Goran, they said in the marina when you told them how your holiday had been spoiled. But he’s hard to get, at this time of year he’s always at the Kornati Islands. Without any real hope you took the phone number.
You’ve got no instructions, you’ve got no circuit diagram, you’ve got no idea, he noted and swam across your sheets to look at the autopilot which had gone crazy so that the yacht went its own way regardless of what the men up on deck typed on their screen. They should have steered manually, but how can you do that and drink beer at the same time? Fucking useless, he decided, electronics are always fucking useless, without a diagram there’s only logic and give me a screwdriver. After two hours the sheets were wet with his sweat but he had fixed it. Logic won the day. So where has that day gone? And what about now? You have no instructions for yourself, you have no circuit diagram, you’re no longer thinking logically.
You gladly offered him a beer. He drank it without any particular enthusiasm for you all or for himself among you. He said he was heading for the Kornati, to sleep a bit in the shade, swim a bit, and maybe grill a fish, that’s all he was interested in. He played with the golden cigarette lighter over which your eyes first met and because of which you thought Leo, he’s a Leo. You should have fled then, but you couldn’t because after that look his tone of voice changed almost imperceptibly. When I was still going to maritime college small boats didn’t have these things, he told you, but two years ago I was sailing a boat for some rich guy where the system was even more complicated, but with logic you can sort everything out. When he was still a kid he had used logic to dismantle his moped and put it back together again. There were just two parts left which he didn’t know what to do with, but the moped went faster.
Rich guy, boat, logic … You were all eyes and ears. Yes, you all know the name of the famous person Goran was working for, so he won’t tell you who it was, only that it was really hard-earned dough, not that it was physically demanding, but the atmosphere was terrible because to that sort you’re always, regardless of what they pay you, just a second-class citizen. It’s hard to take if you have even an ounce of self-esteem and Goran, after all he’s experienced, has a great deal of self-esteem. What’s more, he had been responsible for the entire crew. When one day on Malta he was instructed to tell them to clean the grooves in the white soles of the shoes of the boss’s guests, which the ordinary sailors polished every morning in any case, he simply packed his bag and left. He doesn’t give a damn about money, when he can’t take something anymore he’s off. He’s a free man and no one is going to take that freedom away.
At that point you wanted only one thing, to lie with him on the Kornati Islands, just as freely. And now, at this moment? How much freedom do you still have? And you simply can’t tell anyone that the very same day you really did lay with him there. And after that there was no going back, not to the yacht, not to your old, nothing-special story, not to your life. When you lay with Goran you had to immediately take on the whole of him. He told you there and then that he would never do much more in his life than lie around like this, and now and then fix this or that fucked-up thing and get well fucking paid for it. He told you then, but it’s only these last few days that you’ve understood what he was actually telling you. That he had already seen all there was to see and that there was nothing more to see than what he was looking at now. He had volunteered to fight in the war and no rich faggot was going to tell him about life. He was in an outfit that hadn’t been mentioned in any military documents, there was nothing in his service record to show that he had fought in the war for his homeland. Officially, he had never had any contact with the Croatian army. They reported directly to the minister of the interior and the minister only passed on to his detachment a general order about what they should do and how. And they did. They did everything right. Every time. They thought that the homeland would be grateful, but the homeland had lost all their papers, if there had ever been any, and so it was that Goran and his comrades in arms preferred to look at the Kornati Islands and the calm sea, and so it was that little else interested them. A nonexistent unit, he said. When you asked him what they had done, he said everything. They’d done everything. Everything they believed they had to do. While other, ordinary folk had been refugees dependent on foreign aid, burning parquet flooring in the dark, Goran and his comrades from the detachment that didn’t exist had stayed in the most protected building around, with their own generator, their own fuel, good food, whisky, cigarettes, and everything else in abundance, as well as the most up-to-date weapons that had ever come to Croatia. Every comfort for those who did everything. Last year you still thought that Goran had piloted a Black Hawk in the Platoon that saved Private Ryan, you were in love, but now, girl, now you know what he meant by everything and what he meant by detachment, because you looked online, where it clearly states: a detachment is a special military unit or formation of indeterminate size made up of squads and companies set up to perform a specific task. In this case, everything. And now you somehow know that he didn’t charge around against a background of sound and light effects, he operated more in the dark, in silence. Since he cries out in his sleep it could be that above all else he crawled. But what did he have in his hands, then? They don’t make films about Goran’s everything. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, you know that it isn’t all over yet, that the year he spent on a fishing boat immediately after the war to erase everything and then live normally erased nothing, because it can never be erased. Is this what you wanted? To spend your life with a man who drags with him something that cannot be erased? Who has no illusions? Who has already seen everything?
In front of the altar the priest awaits you. He’s learned some Slovenian words for the occasion, but who cares, you’re not marrying the priest, if you marry at all. You come back down to earth; now beneath your shoes there’s red coconut matting, the ceiling is high, that’s what cathedrals are for, to make people yearn for the heights, for the heavens. They are playing the wedding march and you’re still weighing your options. You stand on the right; on the benches behind you are your people and on the benches behind Goran, his, and they all know what’s going to happen, everyone does, apart from you. Near the ceiling a bird flies silently; the windows in the cupola, which seems to be sinking beneath the evening light, are open, and the bird too is seeking a way out. If you wrote that down somewhere no one would believe it, what a stale metaphor they would say, but the bird really is there and it really is seeking a way out. If it finds one, you think, if it finds one that will be a sign and you will say no, and try to salvage what can be salvaged. If it doesn’t, you’ll say yes and all the mothers in the church will cry, moved, and all the men outside the church will then shout she’s ours …
The priest is saying something, Goran is swaying almost imperceptibly, people are clearing their throats, flashes are flashing. When the priest asks you, Nuša, do you take … you forget to look at the bird and you say …
TRANSLATED FROM SLOVENIAN BY DAVID LIMON
[DENMARK]
… and the blood of love welled up in my heart with a slow pain.
SYLVIA PLATH
[CAMILLA]
First we go into an expensive Italian restaurant across from the strip club and drink a bottle of wine to kill time, it soon becomes clear that the waiter is attracted to my husband, who’s getting older but is still hot-blooded. The waiter’s getting older too, he’s been photographed with both Sophia Loren and Helmut Kohl
in this restaurant
, and that arouses my husband’s interest. By now it must be nine o’clock, and we cut across the intersection to the opposite corner. We go in. I start by asking whether it’s okay for me to be there even though I’m a woman. I do that to ingratiate myself and make contact. It’s perfectly okay, and we’re also the only guests. The girl behind the bar is from Romania and strong with short hair. My husband thinks I’m good at making contact and taking things easy. You have to be careful not to praise me too much, because it really gets me going, and then I can cross the line and become totally unstoppable. There are so many hookers I can’t even tell you how many; we’re the only guests and weren’t planning on buying sex, I tell the bartender this several times. That’s perfectly okay too, we can just drink, three drinks are included in the price of admission, I take the strongest one and down it fast. Up on stage the show begins, a mulatto girl makes the expected movements and gestures with and around a pole until she’s naked. I think about the circus and great fatigue, wearying routines, because I’d rather not say “like a tired circus animal.” As soon as she’s leaving the stage she gets self-conscious, she bows her head and presses her costume against her stomach.
Meanwhile, at the bar: a woman has taken the stool beside me, another Romanian (from here on I’ll refer to her as my darling), I ask her if she’s familiar with Herta Müller, she asks for titles, I mention
The Fox Was then Ahead of the Hunter
, it’s not an easy title in German, not for me, with my German; her German isn’t so great either, she’s taking courses and claims she speaks German that’s 85% correct. I don’t know how to respond, “the modal auxiliaries, you know,” she says. Those I know. But then I realize that I’ve completely forgotten how articles and nouns are declined, and that nothing I’ve said has meant a thing. In effect I’ve spoken German that is 0% correct, so I switch to English. I’m sitting with my back to my husband, he’s very interested in hearing what we’re talking about, and once in a while I turn around and give him a summary. Then he nods and puts some additional questions. I ask my darling if she sends money home to her elderly parents, because you always read about that, but no, they didn’t help her, so why should she help them. “Is that a bit harsh?” my darling asks. It seems harsh to me. It seems that way even to my darling. Each time we slip my husband into the conversation, she treats him with great respect, he gets all the time he wants. This makes me jealous, I really want her full attention.
“Do you want to buy him,” I ask, “for 300 euros?”
She looks at him to see if he’s amused, and he is.
“Oh, that’s expensive, that’s expensive,” she says.
“He’s a little old, but he’s good,” I say, “he fucks like a stallion.”
“Ah, a stud-boy,” she says.
“Some boy,” I say.
“Prince Charles,” she says to him, and he likes that.
My husband leans back on his bar stool and laughs, my darling laughs, I laugh. It occurs to me that I’m using her time and I ask if she wants to be paid for talking to me.
“Nah, Camilla,” she says to me, “money, money, money isn’t everything.”
I make to hand her a bill and can clearly see she doesn’t think 50 euros is a whole lot, but the bill disappears into her clothing. She’s dark and could easily be a gypsy. Now my husband starts getting bored, he gets up and saunters over to a group of girls at a table, among them the Romanian bartender, who’s studying mathematics, she’s the one he’d like to chat with. He takes an interest in Romania’s standard of living, differences and similarities before and after Ceausescu. It makes me a bit insecure that my husband talks to other women; “Nun, mein Schatz,” says my darling, “let him do it anyway, that’s how it goes now and then, everyone needs to.” “Mmm.” Then I ask her if she has a boyfriend. Yes, but she doesn’t sound enthusiastic. I ask whether it’s hard to have a love relationship when you’re a prostitute. She takes a deep breath and says something about orgasms, she’s about to deliver a lecture on various types of orgasms, or the absence of orgasms, when some clients arrive, three short Chinese, and she has to run. I feel abandoned. She wraps herself around them. I get up and go over to my husband and the women at the round table.