Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

(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?”