Best European Fiction 2013 (31 page)

I hear Marylin’s request, which is the same as all the boarders’ and Madame Zabée’s as well. But for the moment I am unable to respond. How could I invent roles for them when I haven’t even started to write my screenplay? As soon as I start to think about it, my mind goes blank. Marylin’s request has come too early. She’ll have to wait. My response saddens her. She tells me that she can’t wait, that she’s in a hurry.

I am deeply troubled by living surrounded by men who seem to be women. I want each of the boarders, especially Marylin, even if I don’t let myself act on it. All night, I’m highly aroused. When I see women walk on the streets of Paris, I find them bland. Not one of them holds my attention. Women for me at this moment in time are Madame Zabée’s boarders, and Marylin is their queen.

Madame Zabée has noticed this attraction. She hasn’t forbidden me from having relations with the boarders, but she does warn me, “Above all, don’t get attached to them, you don’t know where that will lead. I love them all; I wouldn’t rent my rooms to them if I didn’t. But I also know that they’re unbalanced, and that most of them will come to a sad end. My guesthouse is only a way station for them. They stay here for a few months, a year, then they leave, attracted by this or that enticing proposition and by the desire for change. None of them is able to stay put. When I hear news of them, I could cry. But I’m like you, I’m under their spell—I have to endure their appeal. I can’t live without them now. I’ll give you some advice: Make a movie in order to become yourself; if not, you risk losing yourself. Your life so far has hardly been a success. It could finish badly if you don’t take control of it. Nobody can make your film but you. It’s up to you to give yourself the means to do it.”

Madame Zabée spoke openly with me. It was up to me to think about what she said.

The inspector comes once a week. He arrives at eight
P.M.
sharp, when the bells ring eight times at Saint Ursula. He always wears the same outfit, a severe three-piece suit, and everything about his approach is composed, as if none of his gestures were natural and he was afraid to show who he really is. He tries to deceive me. He greets me with a glance, as if I was his accomplice. Accomplice in what? I respond politely but without being friendly. I am instinctively wary of him. As soon as he arrives, the atmosphere in the guesthouse changes, though no one could say exactly how.

He dines with Madame Zabée in her apartment and spends a good deal of time with her. Then he’s received by Marylin, who keeps him in her room until morning, something she never does for anyone else. When he leaves the guesthouse, he looks disheveled and haggard. It makes me uneasy all day. I try to talk about him with Marylin, but her lips are sealed, undoubtedly because the inspector is a client that Madame Zabée referred to her in particular. Marylin doesn’t call me, the nights she spends with him. She doesn’t need anything. There’s no noise from her room. Everything happens in utmost secrecy. The inspector acts like a man obsessed.

I told Marylin what I think of him, at the risk of displeasing her. She shrugged her shoulders and replied, “Soon it will all be over. What good is it to stick your neck out and cause trouble? Take advantage of the time that I’m here, instead of thinking of the inspector.” I don’t know why, but her response saddened me deeply.

One day, at noon, I wake up a little earlier than usual. Without thinking what I’m doing, I knock on Marylin’s door. She had still been sleeping. She opens the door for me, half asleep, and she takes me in her arms without saying a word, leading me over to the bed. I close my eyes and give myself to her as if I were a man in the arms of a woman in the midst of becoming a man while I in turn am metamorphosing into a woman. Marylin, she’s like Cinderella’s glass slipper that I somehow lost. She fits my foot exactly. But unlike Cinderella, I only wear a single shoe.

From then on, I continue going to wake up Marylin and make love with her just before breakfast. She doesn’t give me a lot of time, as though she's on the clock, or as though she just didn’t want me to get too attached to her. She’s happy to give me pleasure, she likes my company, but she certainly isn’t attached to me. For her, I’m only a friendly and kind night watchman, nothing more. She never speaks to me again of her desire to act in my film, as though she no longer believes in my plans. How could a night watchman at Madame Zabée’s guesthouse manage to make a movie? It’s just a dream that he has to help him get through life. I try not to think about anything other than the moment that I spend with her each day. It’s a singular experience, calling everything that I’ve ever been into question.

TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY KATINA ROGERS

[LITHUANIA]

IEVA TOLEIKYTĖ

The Eye of the Maples

It was my parents who brought me to the house of the Davydas brothers. My mother found out about the Davydas brothers from my aunt. It was already well into autumn, in the mornings the fields were flooded with a sticky fog, and the light quietly glided through it to the damp August grass. I had just turned nine—my father, hiding in the kitchen, would cry at night, as they thought I would not live to see autumn. My sister started to be afraid of me, and even avoided touching me. No one knew yet if Clavin’s disease was infectious. I often remember the wet, velvet eyes of my mother—“Our child isn’t going to die, she’s just scaring us.” It wasn’t clear how I’d gotten sick. Clavin’s disease is one of the most mysterious maladies on earth. The blue disease—an old friend of mine. It’s very hard to catch in time, or rather, it’s very hard to convince yourself that you’re sick in the first place. I only realized in January that my neck was turning blue. Slowly. At the beginning it just seemed like a bruise, like blue streams were flowing under the skin. It didn’t hurt at all.

When they brought me to the Davydas brothers, my neck was as blue as an azure stone, as if my it had been soaked with ink. I remember that I was calm, that day. During the trip, Mama let me sit in the front seat, and Vijole· , my sister, was angry because of that. We always fought over the front seat. There the road opened up right in front of your eyes, and you felt almost grown-up.

The house of the Davydas brothers is outside of town. It’s a wooden, three-story house painted yellow, drowning among hundred-year-old, bluish-green larch trees. Next to the walls of the house, the blossoms of huge, reddish hollyhocks swayed, and the grass was mowed. I can still see it: in the windows there were many white, thin children’s faces. I saw that my mother was afraid; after stepping out of car she said cheerily, “It’s really very beautiful here,” but she tried not to look at the windows.

We went inside, and my father was carrying a small suitcase; he didn’t let me carry it. I got angry, I didn’t want anyone in this house to think that I was weak or spoiled. Two graying men met us, Paulius and Matas Davydas. They were dressed simply, in jeans, and at the beginning I thought that they were also someone’s parents, but they introduced themselves to my parents, and I realized that I was mistaken. Inside it smelled of sage and wood, everything caught my eye because it was new, unknown, and I almost didn’t hear what everyone was talking about, until the thinner man said, “Goodness, what a blue little neck,” and shivers ran up my spine when he touched my bluing skin. The Davydas brothers, my mother, father, and even Vijole· smiled. Looking at them I thought that I would certainly die.

Saying good-bye, my father kissed me on the forehead, and I felt ashamed. He’d never behaved like this before. I saw that my mother didn’t want to go, she was afraid to leave me here, but my father took my mother by the hand unequivocally, and they left.

The Davydas brothers were the only ones who treated children with Clavin’s disease in our town. As far as I know, they weren’t doctors. They were herbalists, Paulius and Matas, with dark blue eyes, and black hair going gray. It looked almost silver because of the white strands. The brothers reminded me of shriveled wolves, forever stuck in winter. And then I was unnerved when I found out that the other children called them the Wolves, in private.

Paulius brought me to the attic room. There were two narrow wooden beds, a small table, a lamp, an old and small cabinet that had absorbed the smells of the past, and a small white bookshelf with a few books on it. A soft light flooded through the window. You could hear children playing in the yard. My new roommate was reading a book in bed and acted as if I wasn’t even there.

“Vainius, say hi to your new roommate, Kasparas,” Paulius said happily.

He shut his book, looked at me for maybe half a minute, and I remembered that my mother called those kind of eyes amber—she says, “Look, that child has amber eyes like a bird’s!”—Vainius looked very weak, so thin, pale, but in those eyes were the little flames of a strange insolence. The feet sticking out of his jeans were bright blue.

“Welcome,” he said.

That August there were thirty-nine children being treated in the house of the Davydas brothers: thirty boys and nine girls. All were about the same age. Some of them had spots that were quite small, while others frightened even me with their scars. “My poor little blue children,” Matas would repeat, while rolling a cigarette, but on the first floor, in the room with the window to the apple orchard, there was an eleven year-old girl with blue palms. Blonde, with small bones, with extremely thin wrists, watery eyes, she amazed me with her indifference toward everything. It was as though she didn’t see the blue skin. She hardly talked with anyone, and sometimes the boy they called “the Leader” would make fun of her, but she, Ofelija, simply didn’t react. This fascinated me to no end.

One day I asked her why she wasn’t afraid of anything. She told me:

“I was in the Eye of the Maples, nothing’s scary after that.”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I understood that if I was worth something, I had to get there.

“Maybe you could take me there?” I asked.

“Me? I can’t. The Leader will invite you, when he decides that you can go.” She smiled strangely. “But at that moment you probably won’t want to go there anymore.”

“Of course I’ll want to go there!” I said. I couldn’t let her think that I was a chicken.

“They all say that.”

The children called Saulius, the oldest boy in the house of the Davydas brothers, the Leader. He had just turned fourteen. He was the only one of all the children who was tan and not too thin. Saulius had a single blue spot on his forehead. He looked as though he was the chosen one. The first day, when I had just arrived, Saulius came up to me in the garden and asked with a inquisitive look:

“Your name?”

I looked back at him, confused. “I asked, what’s your name?”

“Kasparas,” I replied suspiciously.

“Hello, Kasparas. I’m the Leader here. You can come to me for everything. You understand?”

“Um, okay,” I said. I didn’t really understand what was going on. He was already turning away, but then he turned back, as if remembering something, and said, almost mockingly:

“Your parents lied to you, you know.”

“What?” Nothing was making sense to me.

“You’ll never leave here. Children are left here at the house of the Davydas brothers to die.”

“No way,” I said.

“I know what I’m talking about.”

And he left. I walked around the garden for a long time afterward and chewed on the juicy white sour apples. I was certain, somehow, that he was telling the truth. I suppose that’s why I respected the Leader from the very first day.

The Eye of the Maples, the yellow one, my old friend,

I remember like it was yesterday. Already on my first night I noticed that something was going on. Around two in the morning I heard thumping steps down below. On the fifth night Vainius went out again. He quietly dressed in the darkness, and afterward, almost without a sound, slipped out of the room and went downstairs.

I didn’t sleep, I was waiting for him to return. It was maybe half past three when he slipped back into our room. The air was filled with a pungent, unfamiliar smell. I opened my eyes for a second and our glances met. A cold eye glowing in the dark. His blond hair wet, Vainius was shivering all over. I don’t know why, but I closed my eyes then and pretended to be asleep, pretended that I hadn’t seen anything, or heard anything—if there was anything to have seen or heard.

In the morning we didn’t even discuss it. He was very happy. His eyes simply glowed with an incomprehensible light. I was itching to ask where he’d gone at night, but I already knew that you didn’t do that sort of thing at the house of the Davydas brothers. I just needed to wait a little longer—the Eye of the Maples would show herself.

We were given strange medicine. Three times a day we had to drink one glass of it. “The brown water,” Ofelija called it. And it was indeed a translucent brown liquid, like tea. I still feel its sweet, acrid taste now.

I had just finished my last glass of the day as the Leader passed by in the cafeteria. He put his hand on my shoulder, looking at nothing in the distance, and whispered in my ear:

“This night you will come with us to the Eye.”

And then he left, as if nothing had happened. Vainius looked at me conspiratorially and said, “It will be interesting.”

And she came,

we woke up at the same time and dressed quietly. Then we left, our steps thumping, we went downstairs, and the Leader took out a key and gently opened the door. It was cold outside, and there was steam coming out of our mouths. It was almost like an autumn night. Someone said, “Faster, faster.” We ran, and my heart was beating as loudly as our steps in the night.

The Leader stopped running, and we slowed down to a walk. No one spoke. There were ten of us, and Ofelija was not there. Only boys. The smell of bonfires wafted from the fields, and we stepped into a fir grove. I was barefoot, and my feet were aching from the dew and sharp fir needles. You could see the Milky Way, and the forest was full of the pale light of the night. However, as we went deeper into the black foliage, there was only one thought running through my mind—“Fool, where are you going?”