Best European Fiction 2013 (25 page)

Other subjects. Age. The years. Time.

Oh, children, at my age the years fly by and time is unforgiving. We count coffins instead of birthdays.

Oh, she had been young once, too, what were we thinking, at one time she too had done some foolish things with her friends, like making prank phone calls to strangers or drinking carbonated beverages.

Silence.

That provincial city with its red cathedral. Black. Oblong. Slow. With towers that trembled against the watery sunset and gothic belfries filled with the sound of identical birds and amplified music. A cathedral that was not one but thousands, tirelessly repeated in the changing images on gaudy tourist postcards sold for a few coins at all hours, everywhere, along the damp archways and colonnades with drawings in schoolroom chalk and the echo of children’s voices scurrying downstairs, toward the river, which is always on the left-hand side as you go down, you can’t miss it.

And the cathedral grew and grew, enormous, it didn’t stop growing taller and crashing down upon its stones, high as a tide, curved and wet, awash in the green waves of its stained-glass windows and its murmuring masses. Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Its walls of living rock guarded, in an urn, the relics of some local martyr capable of working a miracle, of restoring eyesight to the blind, let’s say, and there they were, in the urn, the martyr’s tiny little bones.

And it smelled like wax (and a little bit like cocoa), the smell of the melted candles floated along the whole street, it permeated people’s clothes and slipped into the shops selling salted fish and pickles, it stormed the Athenaeum, where an usher sat snoozing between plaster busts, it crossed the gardens made not so much of trees and plants as memory and the past, it filtered beneath the doors toward the convent tables set with a still life composed of a white tablecloth, a loaf of bread, a jar of water, and the very whitest hardboiled egg, as if just freshly painted: supper. And the whole valley ate supper at the same time, the kitchens bubbling with spirited activity and conversations and not a soul in sight on the provincial city’s deserted cobblestone plazas, not one single passerby, the wind scurrying across them, hastening the flight of a newspaper page, a bandstand moaned with loneliness, nobody, only once in a while the sight of a cat’s sharp cinematic shadow flowing along the wall or the last old pious churchgoing woman hurrying home, God help us, coming back late from the doctor, having her blood pressure checked. And after a little while the lights of some balconies began to flicker and go out and the creaking of bedsprings was heard and the dream that pulled down the sleepers’ eyelids took possession of everyone and everything.

Our visit was drawing to a close. Our aunt stood up from her rocking chair, smoothed her completely white hair, as white as powder, and suddenly time pounced backwards like a lynx, and for an instant she was once again young Dorotea from the past, happy, tender, skittish, the young girl who was afraid of the mercury in the thermometers, with blonde braids and stockings, on her wedding day with Uncle Roque, that gentleman, and she was neither alive nor dead, the one who coddles us, who spoils us, who indulges all our whims and silly outbursts, who gives us presents, sticker albums and superhero comics, who teaches us to read and write and ride bicycles, who cures our cuts and bruises with iodine and saliva, be-cured-you-shall-of-frog’s-bad-spell-if-not-all-cured-today-tomorrow-good-and-well, who dries the tears we squandered on an unlucky love, who consoles us, who makes us laugh, who blows our noses and then, with a slap on the bottom, sends us back out to the garden, upsy daisy, go get some sunshine, to go play with our cousins. But first she squeezes us tight in her perfumed arms, which produces in us the bittersweet sensation of being hugged by a wild rosebush.

During a flashing fraction of a second, right there, before our bewildered eyes, accompanied by a delicious tickling at the base of the spine, everybody was young and exchanged kisses, our mothers, our cousins, that milkman who knew how to whistle through his nose, the music started to play in the garden, there was a party with little paper lanterns, someone offered a toast, someone brayed like a donkey, the revelry flowed round among the tables, firecrackers exploded, couples danced all night wrapped in the tenuous glow of the fireflies and then got lost among the trees in the back, extenuated and happy, no one had gotten sick yet, and even Uncle Roque, that gentleman, stepped up out of his grave laughing cheerfully and brushing the dirt off his suit.

He died. All that died. Buried. rip. A niche in the cemetery. A wreath of flowers. Rest in peace. A prayer for his soul. A flame that died out. Messy inheritances. Lawyers. Lawsuits. Battles between brothers and sisters. The land where the house stood was sold at public auction, acquired by a speculator, a pickaxe cut down the few remaining trees, and in the garden they put up a parking garage with a security guard. Today, our aunt, purblind, snoozes in a wheelchair, and we don’t even know if she recognizes us. Oh, mystery of time. The hands of time creaked on. The clocks’ soft tick-tock marked the time. We began to say our Good-byes. Good-bye to all this. We are ghosts of the past who have come to disrupt her routine. We realize this. It’s distressing. And one day, far from everything, solitary and dignified in a rest home, she will lay her head on her shoulder and it will all be over, dear aunt, because it just won’t do to try God’s patience.

We sat back down on the three-seater sofa.

Nothing else happened. A change of light. Then we learned that our provincial aunt had fallen in love once, for the first and only time in her life, and it had happened suddenly. It happened one afternoon when she visited the office of a homeopathic doctor, looking for a remedy for certain, shall we say, feminine, ahem, aches and pains. Let’s not get into details. The nurse opened the door to the doctor’s office, and there he was. The homeopathic doctor was a sad man, with a cough, with sunken shoulders and resigned hands which in that moment were stealthily shuffling note cards and fountain pens. The doctor turned his large lazy blue eyes toward her and greeted her by way of asking: “How are we doing?” He said nothing more. Four words. That was enough. Enough—with such a small thing a heart can tear and bleed. Our provincial aunt fell in love all at once, so that she wouldn’t have to repent it later on, and that very night she wrote it down in her diary, the diary that we inherited after her death in the rest home, oh my dear aunt, along with the urn containing her ashes, and that’s how we learned it. They exchanged glances. And he said: “How are we doing?” She committed the indiscretion of falling in love right there, standing up in the middle of the doctor’s examination room, in front of the nurse in her uniform, how embarrassing, body and soul, our Aunt Dorotea from above the pharmacy, hard to believe it, with her curved back, her dry skin, her facial tics, her muttered words, her little music boxes, her crocheted table covers, her silhouette like a chimney, her mantecados. To hell with the mantecados. Even those of us who are a bit ridiculous still deserve someone to love us. We all need a hand to close our eyelids when our hour comes round at last. For the first and only time in her life our aunt from the provinces fell in love with that homeopathic doctor, and it was a small love, homeopathic too, the minimum dosage.

After examining her, the doctor told her there was nothing wrong; it was just nerves. She returned home feeling relieved. Nerves, yes. That must have been it.

She saw him for the second and last time in the street, by chance, a few days later. He was standing in front of the window of a clock shop, and upon seeing her he tipped his hat in greeting. At his side, a young, pretty woman was holding a baby in her arms. She returned his greeting timidly, tilting her head slightly, then continued walking past with short little steps without saying a word. It was winter, the weather was quite cold, he was coughing. He had snow on his shoulders.

She was on the verge of succumbing. She sketched out a plan. She repented of it. The two of them were married. No, it couldn’t be done, what a foolish idea. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. Don’t even think about it, no. In a small provincial town. In those days. Above the pharmacy. Everyone knew one another, everyone watched one another, it couldn’t be done. She carried that adulterous secret with her for the rest of her life. Without knowing why, she felt dirty. She wrote convoluted letters that she never sent. She ate apples. She repented. Because she wanted to do something for that tall man with a hat, and she didn’t dare to do anything more, she began to knit him a wool sweater, for the winter. Hospitals are chilly places. The war broke out and they hustled the homeopathic doctor up onto a truck and sent him off to the front, far away from there, among the living and the dead, and he never came back again. He came and he went. So much madness. The woolen sweater remained half knitted, with both arms still undone. It was not the moment to ask questions or seek advice. Unthinkable. It couldn’t be done. Not to her confessor, not to anyone. Uncle Roque lay sleeping in the other bed. No, nobody ever discovered that feverish passion. She buried it in the deepest possible place. Better that way. Nothing came to pass. Time passed. For years she tried in silence to kill off that feeling, to drown it, to murder it thoroughly so that she could go on breathing. Our aunt unraveled the sweater she had begun for that sad doctor with snow on his shoulders, and with the wool she knitted an oven mitt, which turned out to be more practical. She ate baked apples. She helped run charity raffles. She went to choral and dance festivals. She became cold, with weepy eyes. Life, meanwhile, passed her by, indifferent, with its exacting caravan of noises, annoyances, toasts, obligations, illnesses, nieces and nephews, trips, lunches, coitus, bills, presents, Christmas processions, Sundays, births, and deaths. And after all that: a wingback armchair.

A wall of time, impossible to knock down, separated them. There were the two of them, both disconcerted and too shy, she was alive and he was dead, like two pale actors on stage, beneath the spotlights, twisting their hands in silence, incapable of saying a word, and the fact of having renounced a dream that was perhaps beautiful and central—the magnitude of that sacrifice—gave their trivial existences a phantasmagorical radiance capable of converting them into epic creatures. Where was the love? Stretched out in a cold tomb? It came and it went. Nothing came to pass. A breeze. Upon the cuckoo clock thirty years (tick) passed by (tock).

Order exists and chaos exists. Medicines exist that cure imaginary sicknesses, minor disorders of the soul, infections of the spirit.

Clothes hanging in the bedroom armoire, her own and her husband’s. The clothes that they had bought together at sales and which would last long after both of them had died. And one of those dresses, chosen by herself, would serve as her shroud.

Oh, the mystery of time. Until one cold, sunny day in winter we decided to visit her in her house out in the provinces and our aunt welcomed us on the threshold gnawing on something small and vaguely startling—a live bird?—and her eyes slid from one side to the other like a polyp or ectoplasm. And one of us, it might have been me, pulled himself out of his stupor on the sofa, pointed with a nicotine-stained finger toward the shadowed window, and said emphatically: “It’s getting late.”

And then specified—I specified—more terrified, if possible: “Very late.”

And then, we all saw it, our provincial aunt, very startled, made an odd movement, as if a chill ran through her, as if she was snuggling into her woolen shawl, shrinking her frame until it acquired the exact shape of her future coffin.

Oh.

TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY BRENDAN RILEY

[B
OSNIA AND
H
ERZEGOVINA
]

SEMEZDIN MEHMEDINOVIĆ

My Heart

Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.

I was getting ready for work, taking a shower, when I felt a dull, metallic pain in my chest and throat, and the taste of cement on my tongue. I stepped out of the shower with a feeling of indescribable fatigue and wrapped my wet body in a bathrobe. Sanja was just about to leave the apartment to go to work, but then she caught sight of me through the open bathroom door. I told her I wasn’t feeling well, I was going back to bed for a bit, this
weariness
would soon pass, and she shouldn’t hesitate to go.

She stayed. Wet, my hair dripping, wrapped in the bathrobe, I stretched out on the bed. And I felt increasingly worse. She brought me cold tea, which didn’t help, and then, having no choice, she called 911. After that, she stared out at the street impatiently, looking for the ambulance. I didn’t have the energy to turn onto my other side to watch her by the window. I looked at the sofa where she had been sitting. I felt suddenly uneasy because she wasn’t where she had just been. Then I looked at the photograph on the wall above the sofa …

Llasa. Early morning. A young Buddhist priest in a red robe had come out through a high wooden door in the wall of a stone building, and was now walking down a narrow cobbled lane, with a wisp of morning mist in front of him—a small white cloud, like a ghost that the priest was following. I let my gaze follow the white cloud above the cobblestones in Tibet.

Behind me, Sanja said: “Here they are.” Then she came back into my field of vision. She opened the door and looked down the corridor, then anxiously glanced back toward me. And then our room was filled with strangers from the emergency services, settling themselves briskly around me on the sofa. I had never experienced such an aggressive assault on my privacy. Quite uninhibited and sure of themselves, they looked around the room, glanced at me, admired the floral pattern of the coverlet I was lying on; strangers in my room. A girl in a blue uniform had just opened my bathrobe, so that I lay before them naked, and asked: “How old are you, sir?”