Best European Fiction 2013 (7 page)

“And me: one morning, nine months after that ghastly encounter, I discovered I couldn’t get out of bed. My legs had gone numb. And since then I’ve been a modern version of a centaur—half human, half wheelchair.”

“Didn’t you want to know what was behind it all?” I asked him.

“There’s no
behind
, sonny.
Behind
doesn’t exist,” Gonzales snarled, waving dismissively. “Everything is surface; it’s just that a few places are terribly deep, and if you look too long, you think you see something there.”

TRANSLATED FROM MONTENEGRIN BY WILL FIRTH

reality

[GEORGIA]

LASHA BUGADZE

The Sins of the Wolf

“It’s taken me ages to find your number. Two days I’ve been trying to call you.”

“What can I do for you?”

Silence.

“Oh God, this is so embarrassing …”

“What was it you wanted?”

“It’s embarrassing. Should I just say it?”

“Yes, go ahead.”

Silence.

“You sound different on the phone.”

“Do I know you?”

She laughs. “No, but I know you. I’ve seen you on TV.”

I’m getting tired of this. “Right … What was it you wanted again?”

Silence.

“I really liked your book.”

“Thank you. Which one?”

(Silence again—has she forgotten the title?)

“
The Sins of the Wolf
. I’ve read it twice already …”

“Thank you, that’s very kind.”

“Who are you talking to?” my wife asks.

“It was just so true to life, so realistic …”

She sounds like a young girl, and I can’t work out what she wants. Does she want to be my friend? Does she want to send me something she’s written? I mean, girls are always calling me to read me their poetry.

“Thank you.”

Maybe I should hang up? Pretend we’ve been cut off?

“I feel really bad asking … Oh God, I’m sorry, but look …”

Down to business, finally!

“Yes, what is it?”

“I wouldn’t normally bother you, but I just didn’t know what else to do …”

“Who is it?” My wife pulls a face.

“Please, go on. I’m listening.”

Silence.

“It’s Bakar Tukhareli. I really need to see him. Can you put me in touch with him? Or give me his number?”

(Did I hear that right?)

“Sorry? I didn’t catch that. Whose number?”

“Bakar Tukhareli’s. You know, Bakar the Thief.”

(She’s having me on.)

“This is a joke, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not serious?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, how am I supposed to introduce you to Bakar Tukhareli?” I look toward my wife and smile. But really I’m already starting to get angry.

“Why, don’t you know him?”

“Okay, kid, you’ve had your fun. It was a good joke, very funny …”

“I wasn’t joking …”

“Good-bye,” I say and hang up. “Who was that?”

“Some kid, wanted me to hook her up with the Thief.”

“Which thief?”

“Mine, Bakar.”

“Oh boy …” She laughs.

I was working on the third part of my trilogy. I needed to kill off the Gypsy Baron as quickly as possible and get my heroes safely to the coast. One dead body should have been plenty this time. In the second part (
The Sins of the Wolf
) there were so many bodies I almost lost track. In the end I actually counted them: 134 deaths in a five-hundred page novel. But no, that was too few for my publisher—he pretty much asked for one per page. Talk about bloodthirsty. His motto: new page, new corpse. When I took him the manuscript for
The Sins of the Wolf,
he asked me—and I’m not kidding—“How many are there?”

Almost as if he was joking. But he was actually dead serious.

“How many what?”

“Don’t ‘how many what’ me. Bodies!”

“Loads.”

“What do you call loads?” He wouldn’t let it go.

And it was then that I knew that if I’d had eighty-six bodies in
The Pig Skin
—the first part of the trilogy—then this time I needed even more.

“Throw in another ten, some incidental ones,” he said when he’d finished reading the manuscript.

He was still smiling at me. He was worried I’d laugh at him. But we talked about it anyway (again, almost jokingly), and he seemed absolutely convinced that it was because of the eighty-six bodies that
The Pig Skin
was such a bestseller. What could I say? Perhaps he had a point.

This time around I had a big surprise in store—the third part of the trilogy,
Children of the Sun
, was going to be completely different from the first two parts. Maggie was about to write a letter to absolve the criminal … and declare her love.

There were two things I was supposed to be doing that day: writing Maggie’s letter and taking my twins to their first guitar lesson (my wife wouldn’t back down on that one).

There she was, standing by the entrance to my building, smoking a cigarette. She was dressed like a boy, in jeans and a denim jacket, a black Charlie Chaplin T-shirt underneath. She wore a silver ring on her thumb.

As we came out of the building she called over to me:

“Excuse me!”

And she ran over. She looked like an angry dyke. At first, I actually thought she was a boy. Her gait seemed strange, somehow—almost ape-like. She hunched her shoulders too, like some street-corner hoodlum bending forward in the cold.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “I phoned you the other day about Bakar …”

I realized who she was, but I asked her anyway, instinctively: “Bakar who?”

“Bakar the Thief. I asked you for his number … ?”

“Oh come on, honey,” I said angrily, and shoved the twins toward the car. “Go take the piss out of somebody else.”

“I swear on my brother’s life, you’ve got it all wrong.” She stood in front of me, her arms outstretched. “You said that to me last time too. You hung up on me before I could speak …”

There was a hidden camera somewhere, surely? I looked around again.

The twins were staring at me in astonishment.

“What do you want, kid? Have you got a bet with someone? Is that it?” I had to bite my tongue to stop myself swearing at her.

“The Baron did let him go, didn’t he? He’s not in hiding anymore and—I mean, that’s what you wrote, isn’t it?”

She was insane. It suddenly hit me. Her face was deadly pale, her lips were twitching nervously. She wasn’t taking the piss; she was out of her mind.

My anger vanished. For a second I was afraid; I grabbed the twins’ hands. Then I started to feel sorry for her …

“What did I write?” I asked her, almost sympathetically.

But she laughed. “No, I mean, what I said about him needing to be in hiding, it wasn’t a question. I was just saying—I know that much at least …”

What was I supposed to do?

It was pure fantasy. Unfortunately, I had to disillusion her.

I spoke to her as a parent would a child. Tactfully. Warmly, even. “Listen, my dear. Bakar Tukhareli doesn’t exist. I made him up. He never lived with the wolves and he never stole for the Baron. I made the Baron up too; he doesn’t really exist either.”

Silence.

“I’m sorry.”

Do you know what made me say sorry? Her face. Her already ashen face had become even paler. She pulled back, as if I smelled bad. Strange as it may seem, she was looking at me with fear, irony, and compassion in her eyes, as if
I
was crazy—in other words, the same way I’d looked at her just a moment before, when I realized she was crazy.

And that’s how we left it. Neither of us said another word. In fact, I just walked off. She never moved from the spot.

And I thought to myself that if there were two kinds of crazy people in this world—those who were wise with it and those who were just stupid—then she was probably the second kind.

I was sure I would never see her again, but I was wrong; I saw her again the very next day and in the very same place, right outside the entrance to my building.

“You think there’s something not quite right about me, don’t you,” she said, “following you around like a spy? But I swear on everyone I know, living or dead, I really need to see him … What you said to me before—about him not existing—I’ve realized now why you said it. I’m not stupid. I’m not the first person to come to you asking for his number, am I? I bet they drive him mad … but I’m not like that … He just doesn’t know me … How can I make you understand?”

(Well, do you understand?)

What was I supposed to do now? All I could think of was:

“Have you read
The Three Musketeers
?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Once again she looked offended.

“Answer me. Have you read it, yes or no?”

“Yes, I think so. I don’t know.”

“What about
Otar’s Widow
?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you go to school?”

“Why are you making fun of me?”

“I’m not making fun of you, honestly.”

“Well, what’s that got to do with anything, then?”

“Look, did you go to school?”

“So what if I did? Is there something wrong with that?”

“No, precisely the opposite.”

“Okay, yes, I went to school. What’s your point?”

“Well, did you do
Otar’s Widow
? Or—I don’t know—
Othello
?” Silence.

“Do you think they’re real, those people? You think Giorgi actually existed?”

“Which Giorgi?”

“Giorgi, the son.”

“Whose son?”

“Otar’s.”

“What?”

“The son of Otar’s widow …”

She looked at me with a smile on her face. She seemed to be more and more convinced I was mad.

And you know what? That made me angry again. But somehow I managed to just laugh.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“Twenty.”

(Well, that was a lie; she looked younger.)

“And do you know what it is that writers do?”

“What?”

“They make things up, don’t they? You’ve read
The Sins of the Wolf
, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I made it up. From start to finish. There’s not a single character in it who really exists.”

“Well then why did you write ‘This is a true story’ at the beginning?”

“It’s just what writers do, isn’t it …?”

(How could I explain?)

She smiled again. A sympathetic smile. A pitying smile.

But eventually my patience ran out. I was old enough to be her father, at the very least, and so with as much authority as I could muster I said to her in a low voice, “I swear on my own life that Bakar Tukhareli is not a real person, and may I be struck down if I’m telling a lie.”

She actually jumped. She was dumbstruck … but only for a moment. Then she squinted at me again, suddenly, suspiciously. “He should’ve played his ace. Then he wouldn’t have needed to go into hiding.”

(Even swearing on my own life hadn’t done it!)

And then I realized she was referring to chapter seventeen, “The Casino Affair,” where Bakar trumps Neron Pilpon’s Jack of Hearts with his joker, and the Baron beats his ace with a second joker.

And now she’d made me angry with myself; I should have just laughed in her face! There’s nothing worse than a reader with blind faith. She really would have believed anything I’d written.

Fine. If she wasn’t going to believe me, what could I do?

There was no reasoning with her, but I still had to get away somehow. There was nothing else for it—I was going to have to pretend my character did exist after all.

I needed to draw a line here. Calmly, with no fuss, no irony …

Like this:

“Okay. There’s nothing else for it. I’ll tell you everything …” I paused. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him in over a month.”

She actually sighed. Oh my God, I’ll never forget how she sighed, with such relief.

“Has he sold the car, the Opel Vectra?” she asked me, seriously, like some weary co-conspirator.

I nodded.

“Did Maggie call him?”

And then I saw it: she loved him, my Bakar Tukhareli, my thief. She was scared to ask that question more than any other, but she asked it nonetheless.

How her heart must have pounded in her chest, the poor thing!

I don’t even know how to describe what I was witnessing; she was like some terrible enigma, this teenager, full of life, standing right in front of me, jealous of the lover of a man who existed only in my novel.

It was the stuff of fiction.

I felt sorry for her. I wanted to protect her.

“No, she never called. Edishera went to western Georgia instead.”

She wasn’t exactly pleased to hear this. Edishera was no less of a threat than Maggie (in
The Pig Skin
, he had shot Bakar three times, because while he was alive Edishera couldn’t become a thief), but it seemed to calm her down anyway.

All she asked me was this: “So why did you swear a minute ago that he doesn’t exist?”

She was right, that had confused things: neither she nor Bakar the Thief would ever have sworn such an oath unless they were certain it was the truth. What had I done? I had committed an unforgivable sin—the Gypsy Baron would have given me a beating for that—and cheapened the very act of swearing an oath, casting doubt upon its worth …

I suspect she just couldn’t understand how Bakar had ever trusted
me
—such a faltering, inconsistent, and deceitful man. How could he have let someone like me write him, how could he have told me his story?

I don’t know whether it was this or something else that made her look at me with that air of disgust again, as if I smelled bad. I was starting to rattle her, and her nerves were going to pieces.

But I wasn’t about to push this child too far, was I?

I said nothing. I just smiled at her like an idiot and went on my way. Once again I was sure I would never see her again.

Some time afterward I was appearing as a guest on a radio show, talking about literature, and I recounted the story of the girl who’d believed the hero of my novel was real.