Best European Fiction 2013 (12 page)

He managed to make out the lettering on the girl’s book, having learnt the Russian alphabet eight years ago. The cover had the name “Herzen” on it. Approaching the girl, he faltered: “I could hardly stay here with your spying on me. So there.” With that, he turned around and, already starting to walk away, heard a reply, in immaculate German, “You started spying on me first!” He stopped, turning back. She was looking at him, cheerful and composed. “I thought you were too busy with your Herzen to notice.” It was time for her to be surprised then, but she gave nothing away, retorting, “And I thought you were too occupied with your paper.” “Not at all—I was just contemplating what that misanthropic Socialist might have said were he to witness a parliament emerging in Russia, with the government led by that liberal Mr. Nabokoff.” “Do you think he would have been pleased?” “Unlikely.” “I think you’re right.” They laughed. They introduced themselves. She was proud of her Greek name, Lydia; she was proud and independent all around; she studied at Marburg, where her teachers were serious philosophers; she appreciated Marx; she was translating into Russian a French novelist who had, she told him, undertaken an epic work to eclipse Balzac. Although her parents, who still lived in a seaside town in Russia, supported her financially, she saw her dependent status as a burden and wanted to stay on in Germany, to teach. He felt a pang of envy—cupidity, even—in the presence of her young vitality, her posture never bent by a six-hour workday in an office, her carefree attitude to geography, her seriousness. Despite being seventeen years younger than him, she was more knowledgeable and talked with more confidence. She even saw her Jewish origins differently; when he recalled seeing a famous Chasidic Rebbe from Beltsov here in Marienbad six years ago, she listened to his story and remained indifferent, apparently having little idea of who that was, and when he asked her if she was going to Palestine she replied with an ironic smile that she preferred to be a subject of a Russian emperor than a Turkish sultan. And so the conversation went on, he telling her about Werfel and Meyrink, the “Falcons” and Kaiser Karl; she telling him about Rasputin and Plekhanov, Gumilev and Kuzmin. Ah yes, of course, it’s all coming back to him now, he read that novella once, in his previous life, it was by a Russian author, what was his name again, about Alexander the Great. Of course it was, there were crocodiles in it, whose urine was capable of burning a hole in a piece of wood. He caught himself too late, one doesn’t talk about such things with young ladies. “What, about crocodiles?” “No, no, I didn’t mean those, I’m sorry.” They chatted about everything and anything, even politics—she was well-versed in international affairs, suggesting at one point that when it came to the Aegean problem, Russia would always stay on the side of its ally, Turkey. “Then you and I will be in opposite camps,” he offered sadly. “It may be for the best,” she replied, somewhat awkwardly.

They finally parted in the evening, after dinner, as she hurried home to translate her French author, having agreed to meet the next day by the gallery; he, too, went home, to write a letter to his wife, finish reading his paper, calm his suddenly rebellious heart. Around ten, already in his pajamas, he went to bed intending to browse through Goethe’s travel diaries before falling sleep, the only book from his previous life he still allowed himself to touch. Outside it was a stormy night, the weather so inclement it would be best to stay indoors, yet for some reason he leapt out of bed, dressed quickly, and went outside. There, in the street leading to the town center, dark and empty, he experienced a feeling of loneliness, so unusual for Europe that one couldn’t help but call this feeling Russian. The town center was still smoldering with the usual resort activity, but he wanted no noise or light, so turned into the very first side street instead. Walking past low houses, he kept looking in their windows, as was his old habit. Although most of them were shuttered, he could still see through some: in one of them there was a woman sitting with her sewing in a yellow circle of light; in another a fat man in braces, reading a newspaper, looking somewhat aggrieved; in a third a chambermaid making a bed. The street was a cul-de-sac. He stopped, caught his breath, and went back. Drawing level with another window, he peered inside through the partially drawn curtains. He saw a girl at a desk with her back to him, writing something. Or rather, not so much writing as copying something from a book, and not just copying whole pages—she was being somewhat selective, from time to time leafing through a huge volume fixed vertically on a special stand. For a moment he imagined that the girl must be writing a commentary, perhaps to some Talmudic text, but he drove that absurd thought away. Next to the books on the desk he noticed a photograph of a young man with large sad eyes, his head resting on his left hand, the index finger sunk into his cheek. The young man looked Italian or French, but could just as well be Jewish. He came closer to the window and stood there for a while. She kept working with great concentration until another girl came into the room, probably German, a petite blonde with an amazingly large bosom. The scribe, as he dubbed her, dropped her pen, annoyed, and turned around. As he recognized Lydia it dawned on him that she was neither copying nor commenting but translating the very Frenchman she had mentioned. Perhaps it was the novelist himself in the photograph. He thought it apt; let the translator’s labors be blessed by the author’s presence, his benevolent gaze. Meanwhile Lydia must have said something very harsh to her friend, who became weepy and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. He would never forget what happened next. Lydia went up to the blonde and kissed the neckline of her dress. The blonde looked up and embraced her. It was a long embrace, long enough for him to realize he was awake. The lovers were kissing, whispering something to each other, then finally Lydia waved the blonde aside, went back to the desk, put the finished pages in order, closed the dictionary, and stole a glance at the portrait before going to the window, very quickly, giving him just enough time to step back. He was already walking away at a brisk pace when the screech of the drawn shutters scraped through his hearing. Early the next morning he packed his suitcase and took the first train to Prague. The day after that he was standing in his office, dictating to his secretary a letter to Phoenix Bohemian Insurance Company.

Still his wife did not come. The crowd around him was getting thinner, time to go, to have tea and talk to the other guests sitting at their table-d’hôte. He shook away the memory, so reminiscent of one of his dreams, and made a few circles around the pavilion with the mineral water spring. The relentless August sun burning through his dandyish light-colored suit made him take refuge in the shade again. And then he saw his wife at the end of the alley. She was walking fast, nearly running, her long bony face full of dismay and extreme anxiety, her large mouth askew, some terrible word she had to deliver struggling to come out of it, so he started toward her, a little frightened, her ugly face and awkward figure causing a wave of forgotten pity and tenderness in him, and as he grasped her hand with a thumbed newspaper tightly gripped in it—my God, what’s the matter with you, Felice my dear, what’s happened—she looked at him, her eyes full of fear, and said: “It’s war, Franz.”

TRANSLATED FROM RUSSIAN BY ANNA ASLANYAN

art

[MOLDOVA]

VITALIE CIOBANU

Orchestra Rehearsal

When the professor of linguistics went to see who was knocking on the classroom door, interrupting his soporific discourse from the lectern, I had a presentiment that the person out past the threshold had come for me. There wasn’t anything to justify this feeling, unless we are to believe that the longstanding expectations you nourish within yourself, often accompanied by a diffuse sense of guilt, are able to convey unmistakable signals from the outside world. A few moments later, after engaging in a short dialogue in the form of curt whispers, leaning half into the corridor, Mocreac turned on his heel. Above his thick lenses, his myopic eyes wandered over the class until they fastened on me. “Aristide, step outside for a moment: there’s someone here who wants to talk to you.” With an even gait, I made my way to the door, haughtily ignoring the indignant eyes of my classmates, all envious at my opportunity to avoid, legitimately, as it were, the monotony of an insipid and somnolent lecture. But only I knew, as I approached our professor’s mysterious collocutor, what anxieties undermined the aplomb I had been trying to project to the rest of the class. It was Porfirich, the head of the student folk music ensemble, the man they also nicknamed Quasimodo, out of the kind of malice that is always prone to monstrous exaggeration, because he somewhat resembled the famous character from Victor Hugo: squat, with a bulbous head and an unnaturally large mouth that looked out of proportion to the rest of his swarthy, deeply wrinkled face. It’s worth lingering for a few moments on that face: from the corners of his eyes the wrinkles spread out in a fan, which the mouth, acting as a spring, corrugated whenever he smiled or laughed, for he was constantly quipping, flinging innuendoes left and right, such as, “Natasha, stop blowing that clarinet on the stairs,” to the delight of his listeners. Because, after all, what else is an ambiguous wisecrack, spoken by the right person, but an invitation to indulge in a vicarious sexual fantasy? Porfirich liked to foster an atmosphere of merry complicity around himself, in a wholly natural way, the same as other people might exude a particular musk, and his entourage, it goes without saying, enthusiastically joined in his game. Of course, Porfirich lacked the cathedral to be a genuine Quasimodo. It would have been more apt to say that he had access to infernal
bolgie
.

He ushered me over to the window with a conspiratorial and concerned expression. If anyone had been watching they would have seen a comical duo framed by the window set deeply in the thick brick wall of the faculty building, gesticulating disproportionately, like actors in a silent film.

“What are you trying to do, Aristide, make a fool of me? Are you coming to any more rehearsals or not?” Ignoring my sudden discomfort, he went on in an irritated voice: “We couldn’t wait for you. We’re leaving for Italy and we have to get the paperwork ready. You know very well how long the whole business takes! The boys kept asking me about you, because you’re down on the list, but you forgot to come and see us!”

“Porfirich, I’m sorry, please excuse me,” I mumbled, conscious of the dual effect of the feeling that was suffocating me—made up of undermined self-assurance and self-esteem resuscitated as a result of being needed. “I haven’t had any time for the violin lately. I’ve been up to my ears in coursework, and other problems. But I’ll come. I promise I’ll come.”

Quasimodo shook his head.

“That doesn’t explain anything. It’s been more than six months since I last saw you. Do you think I like having to track you down, to yank you out of lectures and ask you what you think you’re doing? Do you think I like having to put off the decision all the others are waiting for? Look, we’re having a rehearsal the day after tomorrow, on Wednesday. If you don’t show up, then I’m striking you off the list. You’ve been warned. It’s up to you.”

And with that he turned his back on me, melting like a vampire into the gloom of the corridor.

You will never learn to read the signals fate is sending you. Or else you’ll read into them exactly the opposite of what they’re actually saying, because, out of some juvenile delusion, you still assume that fate will always pile gifts at your feet. Porfirich. What made him come looking for me? He might just as well have ignored me, or found someone to replace me, especially given that I was hardly indispensable to the ensemble. Quite the opposite, I would say. My encounter with Porfirich discomfited me, but more so the news that the ensemble was going to Italy, which was entirely unheard of, an event more fantastic than my flying to Mars or climbing Mount Everest. I felt all the more troubled by this given that the news came after a failed first attempt a year before. We had been due to go to a festival organized by the
L’Unità
newspaper in a number of cities in the north of the peninsula. This sortie into “enemy” territory, even under the cover of ideological allies, Enrico Berlinguer’s communists, still required lengthy preparations; everything still had to be sifted down to the smallest detail. It had seemed that things were bogged down somewhere in the upper echelons of the political machine, or else that our Italian comrades had had second thoughts, and so without caring about betraying my philistine, mercenary motives, I had given up going to rehearsals, fed up with the pointless efforts involved in that time-consuming and unrewarding “hobby.” I had looked on it as a blessing in my first year as a student, when all the freshmen had been corralled and sorted according to their “secondary” aptitudes, but the hobby had soon turned into a thankless chore: I played the violin, and so I had a talent that somehow set me apart from the gray mass of my fellow students; in their eyes, it lent me a kind of ludicrous aura. It was an artistic form of communal socialization, different from the usual panoply of drudgery to be borne by a journalism student in Soviet Moldavia. It didn’t mean that I wasn’t sentenced to punishment like all the rest, but it did offer me a way to spend my time differently, to alleviate the universal, withering tedium; it was a dram of entertainment, a refuge.

I was able to treat the folk music ensemble as an alternative to the kind of forbidden and perilous relationships that had been beckoning to me ever since I moved to this city. I took part in an unseen auction, without knowing that I myself was the lot under the hammer—the coveted trophy, the promised fulfillment of so many sustained efforts—and I had to learn how to root out and repress my own inclinations as I let myself be pulled now in one direction, now in another. Yes, it was something like the “redemptive alternative” magnanimously proposed to me by that secret policeman during our little talk in the caretaker’s room of the students’ hostel where I lived. He had asked me about the writer T., showing an especial interest in this leading figure of the intellectual world, who had a reputation for being a nationalist/dissident and was frowned upon by the official “organs”: “It would be a good thing if you didn’t see him anymore. You’ll make things complicated for yourself. What are you trying to do? Get kicked out of the university? Why don’t you find yourself a healthier pastime? Sports, for example. What about hang-gliding or parachuting? I know somebody at the club in town, if you’re interested. It’s very good for the health, you know. Much better than reading books in Romanian. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read them if it gives you so much pleasure, just don’t pass them on to other people.”