Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

“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.

“I don’t think she was really that naïve,” speculated the presenter, who wrote novels himself. “She must have been a bit strange… a bit crazy.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but then I started to question that. There was something really unique about her. I’ve never come across a reader as gullible as her before… She was as trusting as a newborn baby.”

I spent almost the entire show trying to convince him how naïve my teenage reader really had been. Yes, I was laughing along with him, but if I’m honest I was angry: first she wouldn’t believe that Bakar didn’t exist, and now he wouldn’t believe such a naive reader did exist…

I really don’t understand how it could be so difficult to believe in the nonexistence of one or to entertain the notion of the other.

“That could only happen with someone who’s never read a book in their life,” one caller argued (there was a phone-in as part of the show). “It sounds like your novel was the first book she’d ever read.”

Well yes, it’s not impossible. But so what?

“Or maybe she was actually the ideal reader?” one woman argued. “Maybe that’s how people read the world’s very first books? So here is a pure, untarnished reader, a virgin reader if you like, and we sit here with our erudite skepticism, drunk on our own intellect, and assume she has psychiatric problems…”

And so this real-life event dragged me into a discussion about the education—or lack of education—of society at large. But regardless of how naïve or insane Bakar’s admirer was, we all agreed on one thing: there was no way you could describe this girl as a “quality reader”—we all felt it was completely impossible for a book to have an impact like that on a reader with any level of competence.

“You should write a novel about it, you know,” the presenter said to me after the show had finished.

A novel? I don’t think so.

I’d say it was more suited to a short story.

And if I do write it, I’ll finish it like this:

I see the girl again (in a crowded place, like a station, or at a demonstration, or the airport, or a sports stadium), but this time I just watch her; she doesn’t see me. Standing next to her—or is he sitting?—there’s a young man. He has black hair, a tattoo on the back of his hand, and the yellowed face of someone with hepatitis C. I can’t believe it: it’s Bakar Tukhareli. The Thief, the one and only. Exactly as I described him in my novel.

This evening a play was performed at a little theater in suburban Brussels, one of those curious productions in which the actors mix so intimately with the audience that the latter wind up believing they’re part of the cast. Before the performance began, extras had been installed in the auditorium, scattered here and there among the seats. When the audience began to enter, usherettes dressed up in black conducted them with great ceremony to their assigned places, while around them the extras sat hunched and immobile in heavy fur coats covered with snow, or a sort of white powder that imitated it precisely. Surprised, certain members of the audience couldn’t prevent themselves from emitting a few sotto voce comments:

– See that? They look like they’re frozen.

– Like cadavers, almost.

– They keep it horribly cold in this theater.

– It’s scandalous, they could warm it up a bit.

– Look, look at that one, there’s a little icicle hanging from his nose!