Best European Fiction 2013 (39 page)

Then, out of the blue, one of the Dons or Doñas sent them a message. An elderly couple in France, in Lourdes to be precise, were in need of a guide. They wanted to cross the Pyrenees into Spain as soon as possible and would pay handsomely for any help they were given. As soon as he got this message, Pirpo began to dance: he had a good feeling about this new job. A day and a half later, when he went to Lourdes and learned more details, he not only danced, he skipped and sang. If he could, he would have leapt into the air and flown.

In the dingy hotel at which they were staying in the holy city, he set out the details to Chanberlán: “Do you know what they call this old man who wants to cross into Spain?
Le Roi du Champagne!
The King of Champagne! And he’s loaded. If what his maid told me is true, they’ll be traveling with a suitcase stuffed with jewels and money …”

Chanberlán did not like to be rushed. “If he’s so rich, why does he want to escape from France?” he asked. Pirpo explained that France was now in the hands of a general called De Gaulle, and that the King of Champagne had collaborated with the Nazis and with Pétain, De Gaulle’s enemy, and that his collaboration could now mean him facing either the gallows or a firing squad. “And how come the maid told you about the suitcase?” Chanberlán wanted to know. “Because she liked my face,” replied Pirpo, executing a few waltz steps. Chanberlán shrugged. It was always the same with women. Him they asked for money, but they happily gave it to Pirpo or else told him where to find it. “Oh, great! It’s snowing!” exclaimed Pirpo, looking out of the window. “What do you expect, it’s the end of November!” said Chanberlán grumpily. “But you do see what good news it is, don’t you?” Pirpo said. “Of course I do. We take the suitcase off them and then we kill them.” They had worked together in their circus for a long time and knew each other intimately.

Pirpo thought deeply and that night—the night before they were due to set off—he was worried. They had to take the suitcase from the old couple and kill them, but how? He was aware of the situation they were in: it wasn’t 1936 or 1937, it wasn’t even 1938, 1939 or 1940, and they lacked something that had been most useful to them during the war, something he could not quite define. Anyway, the fact was that they could not kill as they had in the old days. Still less someone as important as the King of Champagne.

When it grew light, he got out of bed and went over to the window. It was still snowing. And the snow was getting heavier and heavier. All the paths in the Pyrenees would be blocked, impassable. He suddenly launched into a very merry dance and went bounding over to the room where Chanberlán was sleeping. “Eureka!” he would have cried had he known the expression, but, as with “carte blanche,” he did not, and so had to make do with ordinary words. “I’ve got a plan!” he said to his companion. Chanberlán was still half-asleep and didn’t want to waste his time on silly stories. “So have I!” he retorted angrily. “We whack them over the head with a stone and that will be that!” “Listen to me, you idiot!” said Pirpo, grabbing his arm and shaking him. “Don’t push your luck, Pirpo!” warned Chanberlán, opening his eyes, and Pirpo immediately apologized for calling him an idiot. He and Chanberlán may have worked for years together in their circus, but Chanberlán’s eyes still frightened him.

Pirpo’s idea was an excellent one and very easy to carry out. They would set off into the snowy mountains and would lead the King of Champagne and his wife along the wrong path. “Oh, sorry, this isn’t the right way,” they would say after a couple of hours, when they had already walked a fair distance. “It’s easy to get lost in weather like this. We’ll have to turn back.” And so they would turn back and take another path. And once more: “We’ve got lost again.” And off along another path and another few hours in the snow, uphill. Frozen and drenched. And once more: “Oh, no, this is the third time we’ve gone wrong!” “I’ve seen them, Chanberlán,” explained Pirpo. “They must be getting on for seventy. Eight or ten hours of walking in the snow will do our work for us. They’ll die of exhaustion.” “But why the big performance? Why don’t we just bump ’em off as soon as we’re out of Lourdes?” insisted Chanberlán. “They’re French. They’ve got money. If we kill them ourselves, someone might come asking questions. And in France we have no protection.” He didn’t use the expression “carte blanche,” but he came very close.

Two months later, toward the end of January 1945, the two friends, quite untroubled, were making the journey to Paris. They were accompanied by the police, but this fact did not bother them. Chanberlán was annoyed—“right fools we were, fancy not killing the maid first”—but he wasn’t worried. And Pirpo could see no reason to feel alarmed either. “We didn’t do anything,” he said. “It was the cold and the mountains that did it.” Later, when the jury found that the slow, calculated way in which they had killed the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been particularly cruel, and sentenced Pirpo and Chanberlán to life imprisonment, the two friends were most surprised, especially Pirpo. “I don’t know why you find it so odd,” the judge said to him. “Did you think you had carte blanche to murder?” Pirpo said nothing, but, along with his anxiety about the sentence passed down, he felt a kind of relief. He had finally found the expression he had been looking for all this time. He would never forget it.

Chanberlán died four years later in a Martinique jail during a brawl among prisoners. It was another fourteen years before Pirpo could rejoin his circle of friends. Some Dons and Doñas did not hesitate to welcome him back into the family, since, after all, despite certain shared political sensibilities, the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been foreigners, not Spaniards. Besides, these were difficult times, and it was always good to have a loyal servant like Pirpo on hand. Strikes were becoming ever more frequent and the enemies of the political regime ever bolder. Pirpo, however, had grown wary. He would not commit himself so easily again. He had learned his lesson. Before doing anything, he would demand to be given the carte blanche that had saved him so much bother in 1936 and in the three or four years that followed.

TRANSLATED FROM BASQUE BY MARGARET JULL COSTA,
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE AUTHOR

[SERBIA]

BORIVOJE ADAŠEVIĆ

For a Foreign Master

One morning the postman brought me an unusual letter.
Mutatis mutandis
, this was it:

Dear friend, don’t be angry with me for addressing you like this even though we have hardly ever spoken, I am obliged to do so for the sake of the truth. Here, in Sent Andreja, I am holding your book again, having read it the dear lord knows how many times, and I can’t get over my astonishment that you should still be there, looking for heaven knows what in that crazy country! What sort of trouble drives you to stay sitting in a town that does not know you, nor will it ever know you, writing for a country that isn’t even sure it can look without envy at the most ordinary scribbler, let alone a serious man and writer of conscience! That’s Serbia, my friend, Serbia, and it has always lured the devil, and the devil never refuses to come for its own kind. From the moment I took your book in my hands—it was given to me by my friend Kaplan Refika, an Albanian from Belgrade who lives with his family in a Budapest B&B—from that moment I knew that I would always consider you a friend, no matter how hard it would be for you to bear that. My name is Milan Almaši. I’m exactly four years older than you, and when I decided to leave Serbia for good, I had behind me a university degree, a first, second, and third war, and a good fifteen months of work experience as a teacher in school, I left all that behind me, I don’t myself know how. Those years of hunger in Belgrade, when I was a student, that poverty which shackled me like ancient prison chains, then arrests, demonstrations, call-up papers, someone knocking the barrel of a pistol on my door in the small hours—all that comes back to me now in nightmares, persecuting me, the evil stamp of the past, like a darkness that wants to gnaw through my eye. You think it’s happening to someone else, surely it’s all happening at a great remove, people like you have always distanced themselves from everyone. That comes from sensitivity, a person simply has to protect himself, to protect his jangled nerves, and I understand that. But I tell you, when it comes to people like you and me, we all share one destiny. The only differences are in the paths that lead to the crushing realizations that drive us mercilessly to something like this, drive us into exile. For years before I fled, I hadn’t wanted to hear about so much as setting foot out of my town, not even out of my street, I’d never even allowed anyone to embark on any story of any length on that topic, but in the end I fled headlong, running as fast as my legs would carry me, tripping over the splinters of our lives. Now, when I look back, I see only the very end of the string that was long ago wound into a ball and which I intend to unwind, but not now, now I will dwell only on some of the main events of my life, which I have enough courage to call appalling. You have to measure the depth of a person’s experience not only by the sum of whatever’s been survived, but also by the degree of sensitivity possessed by the survivor …

But I don’t want to drag things out unnecessarily. I left Serbia two months after the end of the 1999 war. It was August, it was terribly hot. I was taking my wife and children, Stefan and Sofija, on a rather risky journey, but it was our journey and we accepted it, wholeheartedly, as such. Had our departure been like the departures of others at that time, I would be very happy, and now I’d be able to write to you about anything other than that, and I’d be more cheerful for sure—but it was not. Our departure was preceded by certain events, which affected you too, as well as all other honorable people in our country, but there were also events that affected only my family and myself, and which were in fact the straw that broke the camel’s back, such as it was. At the beginning of everything, like an epic preamble, stands an honorable obelisk erected in all our names to the memory of
Lazar and Kosovo
—much abused, and therefore now tilting, but propped up by the threadbare platitudes of many stale national bards. Throughout the country, joy in honor of the bloodletting grew, students in Belgrade and other university centers were arrested, laws were routinely repealed. Then came the beginning of mobilization—real fear began to rise in people, first a little timidly, but later with increasing ferocity. Then came March and with it war, and on the second day my call-up papers arrived. What could I do? I went. Mother—and this is where she solemnly enters the story—wept. She burned my father’s shirt, as she was ironing it, while he and I said good-bye outside the front door.

I left late in the evening and reported for duty. The men around me were stressed, half-drunk, singing nonsense while snot poured into their mouths. On the radio an announcer was holding forth about the courage of the Serbian army, and one of us shat himself with fright when we heard rumbling over our heads. I made my way through the crowd to a telephone to call a relative who lived near the airport. He said: “They hit damn close last night, I was rigid with shock for ten minutes.” I could see at once where it was all headed. I didn’t know how long the demon would hang on and how many of us he would push into the abyss before his final end.

The process I want to tell you about began to develop in me roughly a week and a half after the beginning of our campaign. All of a sudden I began to feel hatred toward everyone. Or more exactly, hatred and disgust. A kind of muffled nausea, revulsion at all those creatures, that whole heap of rotten human material around me. I should say that, despite my degree from the Arts Faculty in Belgrade, I’ve always been hostile to our so-called
elitists
, and I still am today.
Elitism
in our country always taking the form of a not-particularly-modern version of snobbery and racism combined. But for a long time that hostility made me foster a kind of sympathy for the common people in our country, who seemed to me to have been almost entirely innocent in all the tragedies that we had experienced throughout our history, everything that pulled us apart as a people and scattered us around the world. Indeed, I cultivated a kind of contempt and even a mild sneer of revulsion toward the Serbian intelligentsia, xenophobic philistines, conceited and bigoted from the outset—the kind of sneer one cultivates toward the particularly stupid and vain. I thought—rightly, I believed—that the ordinary person on the one hand and the pseudointellectual on the other were unbridgeably dissimilar, as though they hadn’t sprung from the same roots but had perhaps, one or other of them, landed on our soil from somewhere else, was entirely alien to it. But, some time around my induction, I realized that I had been seriously mistaken. Not only had both parties sprung from the same roots, they were the same people, in no way different—except, perhaps, in the number of years they had spent at school, but even there the disparity was often minimal. Something fundamentally at variance, a complete rift had now been established between them and me, and there was no longer any prospect of reconciliation. Now I looked at these people, ordinary, conceited, and uncontrollable, realizing at a certain moment that everything—the story I listened to every day on the radio or television and the one I listened to in the streets and the suburbs, dressed in my army uniform—had merged, to form one picture, one single, ugly figure. Our whole multicolored country was becoming for me a kind of Ireland in the eyes of an Irishman leaving it forever, it was becoming the
old sow that eats her farrow
and which had opened its hideous jaws, determined no doubt to finish us off. But enough of that. What’s important is what was happening in me, that definitive rupture with the Fatherland, however painful I found it. And when a person steps into the next stage of his destiny, there is no way back to the last.

When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that’s how it is and now I don’t know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well. In keeping with all that hatred and that disgust, my life had in store for me an event that would contribute to the further development of those fundamentally negative feelings, which are more a reflection of a man’s inherent weakness than the consequence of any repressive social system. Here, with the aforementioned event, I am already nearing the end of my story, because after it things moved quickly, leading right to our exile. Briefly, this is what happened: