Best European Fiction 2013 (28 page)

Later, I heard Cierny breathing with difficulty, as though he were having an asthma attack. That lasted for a while, and then he calmed down, and I no longer heard his breathing. And each time that happened, I thought he had died.

In the course of the evening, the nurses who looked after the two of us changed.

That evening there was an African Muslim girl wearing a violet silk scarf, with full make-up, including bright red lipstick, as though she was going out for the evening, to a restaurant and not a hospital ward. She was quite cheerful and sweet, young. She may have been twenty, perhaps twenty-five, but she addressed Lukas Cierny and me as though we were children.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

She laughed, and asked back: “Where do you think?”

“Ethiopia?”

“Close.”

“Sudan.”

“Close,” she said, and waited for the guessing game to go on. But I didn’t feel like going on guessing, so, disappointed with my faint-heartedness, she admitted: “Somalia.”

She stood in front of the board—on which she was going to write her name and mine—and asked, with a felt tip in her hand: “What’s your name?”

After a brief hesitation, I replied: “Me’med.”

From the perspective in which we found ourselves, the differences that are so fundamental to us became unimportant: whether she was from Sudan or Somalia? That mattered only to her; it left the entire continent where she now lived—indifferent. And the entire cosmos was indifferent to the differences in our identities. Seen from the perspective of death, it was a matter of total indifference which of the two of us was Slovak, and which Bosnian, Lukas and Me’med, patients stuck in the same room.

Just before midnight (she had come into our room to take blood samples), the young Somali girl asked the old Slovak: “What’s your name?”

He said nothing. She asked: “And what year is this?”

“1939!”

That’s what he said:
1939
.

What did 1939 mean to him? He must have been ten, perhaps fifteen then. That was the year before the big war. Maybe that was when he had to leave his home for good, and now, in his old age, it turned out that he had never left that year. Truly, what had happened to him in 1939? I would have liked to hear his story, but he was no longer in a state to tell it.

There’s a year in my past I’ve never left as well.

1992.

Sometimes I’m woken by the clattering of Kalashnikovs over Sarajevo. I get up, make coffee and stay awake till morning. Through the window I look at the lights of Washington, or snow falling over the Pentagon.

During the night, Lukas Cierny got out of bed, and the young Somali put him back. “Where were you going?”

He replied: “To get dressed, I must go for a walk.”

He didn’t actually know he was in hospital.

Then in the morning, when she was encouraging us to get out of bed, he refused, and she ordered him loudly: “Get up! Stand up!”

“No!” said the old man.

And then—over the old Slovak who was refusing to get out of bed —she began to sing: “Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights!” Youth is beautiful in its arrogance.

The young Somali girl, with her turquoise scarf, with her new make-up, gleamed in the morning light, bending over the Slovak at the end of his life. She was happy because she was at the end of her shift, and singing.

I was waiting very impatiently to be let out of hospital. In fact I was afraid this wouldn’t happen today. It was Friday, and that would mean I’d have to stay here over the weekend.

But the doctor appeared and asked me to walk down the corridors hooked up to all those sensors and sonars. I walked down the corridors while the doctor followed the behavior of my heart on the monitor in front of him. I enjoyed that walk: in an hour I’d be outside, beyond the hospital walls.

When I came back into the room, the doctor checked the working of my heart once again, this time with a stethoscope and, as he didn’t find any sinister sounds in my chest, in the end he gave me precise instructions about how to behave—when I got out of hospital.

And then I could go home.

I looked at him. He was Indian, he was called Rayard. And I thought: this man saved my life and we’re parting like complete strangers.

I said: “You saved my life.”

He said: “Yes.”

And left.

After that a smiling middle-aged man arrived, with a mauve bow tie (“I’m your limo driver”), and took me in a wheelchair through the corridors to the main entrance. This was a hospital ritual. Regardless of the fact that I could walk, a man I had never seen before was pushing me in a wheelchair out of the hospital. There was something childish in that ritual move out of the world of the sick into the world of the healthy.

I parted from the stranger warmly, as though we had always known each other, and was left alone in front of the hospital. The fresh November air startled me. I’d been impatient to leave, and now that I was on the street, waiting for my taxi, I felt a mild uncertainty, and fear.

When you come back from a journey, you find things just as you left them at the moment of departure. After all the days of being away, you are now back in your own room, perhaps there’s an ashtray on the desk with a cigarette butt in it, perhaps a half-finished glass of wine, or a book you were reading on the day you left, open. Everything that retains a living trace of your presence in these objects becomes an image of the time that has passed and cannot ever be replaced.

I came back from hospital and the first thing I saw from the doorway was the nice cover on the bed, the one with the floral design à la Paul Gauguin, which had come home before me. Washed, it lay over the bed, and its textile essence was unchanged—there was no trace on it of the hospital, or of my illness.

Sanja had carefully removed from all the rooms most traces I had left of my previous life, which, according to the doctors’ instructions, I ought to give up. There were no ashtrays. The smell of tobacco smoke had quite disappeared from the air.

I went into the sunroom, my covered balcony, my office.

I wasn’t there either.

Erased from my rooms, now I could start over.

And then, reluctantly, I went into the bathroom, where it all began.

I undressed and stood in front of the mirror. I looked at the area beside my genitals. It was no longer a swelling but a bruise that was growing pale, with reddish edges, almost the color of rust.

I shaved.

Then I stepped cautiously into the shower, listening to the behavior of my body. The water was too hot. There was no pain in my neck, no pressure in my chest. Nothing hurt. The bathroom filled with warm steam. Water poured over me; was there anything simpler than this? a naked body with water pouring over it?

And I remembered a short film called
The Room
.

This is the story: a young man walks down the street as the light is fading, and through the open window of a room, above him, he hears the sound of a piano. And he stops. Then he sees the silhouette of the girl who is playing the piano. But the reason he stops is not only the music he heard, nor only the girl whose silhouette he saw. He does not know where that attraction comes from, he does not know the reason for his stopping, but he is aware of a strong magnetic pull emanating from that room, sensed through the open window. And years pass. He leaves that town and lives all over the world, then, as an old man, he returns. He buys an apartment, and lives out his last years in it. One day, after bathing, he leaves his room and hears the siren of an ambulance stopping in front of his building. It is night. And then he becomes conscious of everything. The room where he now finds himself is the room he had once seen, as a young man, while the sound of a piano reached him through the open window. And why had he felt such a strong attraction? The young man could not have known what the old man knows now: what he had seen then was his room, the one in which, when the time comes, he will die.

I came out of the shower; wrapped in a towel I walked through the whole apartment. Now I’m looking out of the window, and I say: “this is not
that
room.”

Sanja hears me. She stands behind me, leaning her head against my wet back, and asks: “What did you say?”

TRANSLATED FROM THE BOSNIAN BY CELIA HAWKESWORTH

[AUSTRIA]

LYDIA MISCHKULNIG

A Protagonist’s Nemesis

So why do you think furniture stores don’t sell coffins? That’s what the young intern asked me at the last office party. I raised my eyebrows. But when I tried to answer her, I couldn’t think of a convincing argument. A coffin wasn’t a piece of furniture, I ventured hesitantly; it was at best a container, a shell.

But a coffin is an essential part of the furniture at wakes, the young woman insisted. We stock the right furniture for every stage and purpose in life. It goes without saying that we supply everything for newborn babies, so why not everything for the dear departed?

It also went without saying that we supplied everything for our own midsummer picnic—our office party. We brought along our own brand of garden furniture, tablecloths, and tableware so that we could enjoy our day in the park in true company style. Everything was stowed in our capacious yellow-and-blue shopping bags, which look a bit like wide-bellied boats. We ferried our stuff along the avenues to the historic Lusthaus, the pleasure pavilion where imperial hunting parties found shelter and amusement in days gone by. In front of its baroque façade, we set up the furniture, laid the tables, and put out the food from our own delicatessen. Meanwhile, the employees’ children cavorted on the grass.

We—the adults—ate and drank our fill and stretched out to relax on our own brand of rug. Then the intern asked, since we were used to having our office party outdoors, why couldn’t we organize a wake outdoors too? And again I couldn’t think of any good reason why we— meaning my company—had allowed ourselves, up till now, to ignore the very substantial line of business represented by funeral supplies.

I attended our staff parties in Moscow, Riyadh, and New York too. We’re expanding in every direction and bringing a family ethos to consumer culture; speaking for the company, I welcome this, but not the shortsightedness of excluding death. It is my job to connect mundane episodes and form a unified whole. Just as a wreath needs a frame, life, which is a series of episodes, needs a scaffold, a skeleton. A firm needs backbone, and people need backbones, for all people are brothers, and for “brothers” you can also read “sisters,” since they’re just as subject to mortality. I see it as my ideological mission to globalize the concept that both living and dying are affordable and part of everyday family life. Using innovative PR and marketing concepts, I gave the company a frame of reference for human existence that is understood the world over, while to the world I gave a culture of cordiality and to our staff a climate of congeniality in which a person can not only bloom and grow but also fall ill and die. But something is bothering me and I can’t put my finger on it. I keep feeling I’ve forgotten something, something that’s almost within my grasp … Our furniture company is prolifically permeating every aspect of life.

In principle, a corporation is a body, but not bodily in the sense that a body can be arrested or locked up; the corporate body is defined by its function, its role being to put skin on our flesh and keep it all wrapped around our bones so that we can embrace our nearest and dearest without literally assimilating them, merging or decomposing into a shapeless mass. Indeed, this is why you might characterize a coffin as a sort of wooden skin for the deceased.

My company’s branding is all about conveying a sense of security; we want our customers to trust that we are there for them.

I wanted to get to grips with my own self-deception too. What I’m saying right now sounds strange, as if I were merging with myself, my own plans and goals, and my own horror of death. Of course—death. Why didn’t I think of it first, instead of that impudent intern? There’s the room where the body is on view, the room where mourners are greeted or served refreshments, maybe another room where people can say a prayer … At the very thought of these spaces I could see before my eyes flat-pack coffins in pine, tie-it-yourself funeral wreaths, print-it-yourself sympathy messages, candles for the wake, lanterns for the cemetery, self-assembly crosses for the grave, in metal or wood. Of course, it would all have to be cheaper than the traditional undertaker’s wares.

I faced Death and overcame my fear. I lay back on the company rug and surveyed the set: woodland clearing, historic pavilion, horse-drawn hearse.

The children were playing baseball. A cradle with the latest employee offspring in it was nestled in the grass to one side. Patterned textiles fluttered in the wind, like flags run up a mast. A successful business playing its part in conquering death. The crown in our company logo symbolizes our Corporate Eternity.

Man is, and always will be, mortal, the intern asserted. I turned away; I had no desire to discuss the finer points of a monarchic corporation versus a corporate monarchy with some young intern. She was neither a political scientist nor a sociologist, nor had she any other authority to be voicing opinions. With every word she spoke, it became more obvious that she simply wanted to be noticed. She was trying to hook my attention with her determined obsequiousness. Once she realized that her pretentious blather was boring me, she moved on to topics that naturally interested her. Some of these were quite interesting, and I built them into the model of our furniture company, which would embrace the generations entering this life as well as those on the way out. Seeking was a way of life for her, she told me. She sought meaning and purpose in every word. She found meaning bit by bit, she told me; and the purpose of words was to make reality speakable and readable. The word was mighty, it ought to be so mighty that it could call itself forth; the word was almighty, she said. She confided in me that she wanted to be a writer. She wanted to write right into power, and write all the way through power. That’s highly ambitious, I replied patronizingly, and yawned. She apparently didn’t believe I had what it took to take her ideas and make them my own. She wanted to grasp each individual word, she continued, clearly not getting the message. She wanted to command the spoken word; to have power and be able to communicate what struck her as powerful.