Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID

the hall was rumbling, thundering, roaring, the coils of smoke were everywhere, ascending, infiltrating the air, forming a thick misty dome, while the Chair, red, raging, as reported in the press, was trying to institute silence, so his colleagues could speak, one of them had Mao’s Little Red Book in his hand, another held Lenin’s tract: put an END to police brutality! END to civilization! SOON, SOON, the flames will materialize THE FUTURE!—and we only wanted to live, we wanted to unlearn everything that we had learned, the green or red or blue or black night, while the mezzanine was gradually emptying out, everyone was descending from the top rows, joining people in the front, coughing, wanting to speak, wanting to piss, the hall too would soon be empty, the footsteps would die out, dust, the smell of cigarettes, soon everything would be in ruins, and so everything is a question of language, of cultural revolution… raising the stipends… until the Pentecost, until the victory of law,

when gasoline opened the way to vacation

and Paris threw off its mask of fear

the rats descended back into the cellars;

a woman was going into the interpreter’s booth, the people in the audience had barely had time to take off their earphones when the light, metallic whisper recommenced, the head of the interpreter kept moving like that of a cow being herded uphill, with stooping shoulders, she was trying to follow the speaker’s rhythm, stopping, waiting for the sentence to end, after which she would start forming the same sentence in a different language;

the woman standing at the podium was holding the pointing stick tightly in her hand in the half shadow, with the other she kept adjusting the projector, searching for the right position; she was coquettish, slightly pale even before reaching the podium,

I have some transparencies… maps,

meaning that after so many long, boring, abstract presentations there would be images, concrete things projected on the screen,

finally!

she was smiling at the Chair, while the technician was fussing with the projector in the back of the stage, going back and forth, trying to operate the machine, checking the electric cords, switching on the light, switching off the auditorium lights; the atmosphere in the room would suddenly become familiar, safe, almost unreal, the classroom slowly descended into the evening darkness, allowing the dream to emerge, like at the beginning of those “sword-and-sandal” films that I used to like so much with hundreds of actors and expensive sets showing military action, wars, easing into the story with a simple pipe melody, history framed by a bucolic setting, as though every detail had its place there, every voice its command, every person his calling and his role, and it was possible to flirt with melancholy then;

her hand kept turning on the overhead projector, as if outlining two invisible intersecting circles, her fingers or, more precisely, the enlarged shadows of her fingers were projected on the screen, turning on one another, weaving into each other, inventing a jostle, a tumult of luster and shadow, a devouring mass, that would suddenly become clear when she removed her hand from the glass surface, leaving the transparency lightly trembling, with various tedious details, which nonetheless would be so important later;

did she cough, clear her throat, smile coyly? but I noticed immediately that her voice was heading toward the distant mountains, on the border of which the flame kept flickering endlessly, there should have been a mountain range in the north, a rough mottle of lines, circles of waves that doubtlessly marked the sides or the planes; her voice oscillated, she couldn’t find the right words, while her left hand moved to join the right hand on the pointing stick, then abandoned it; the mountain range formed the border of a historical province,

yes, an almost impenetrable natural barrier, that’s what all the historians and the travelers had said,

at the same time, the flame followed another invented, winding direction marked by a bold dashed line, as an upward path on the ribs of the mountain, excavating those inaccessible lands, one of the images of which was drawn from memory by someone who had once lived in those places and was fond of that geography and had published it in some book,

that’s that,

the professor would say, a heavy-set man, he would take off his jacket and put it on the chair, roll up his sleeves, light up a cigar, his squint eye would switch from presence to absence in a dialectical shift, with the drive of someone in a continuous monologue with himself—

I think that… we…

he would try to visualize the words, puff out smoke, clear his throat,

we can’t not be part of… the movement, it’s absolutely necessary that the intellectuals… help the workers and unite the students, we need… a general front,

he would place the cigar on the edge of the table,

…our action showed that the people’s… outburst had its place in the social movement…

he was evidently waiting for his words to sink in, expecting perhaps to leave an impression on his audience, but a voice from the back, it could have been any one of us, neutral, arrogant, ironic, almost spelling out each letter—

you’re so well-read…

he was shaking his head in silence, blowing out smoke,

…and such a bad politician,

the man was leaning against the table,

comrades!

get back into your hole… you philistine!

history had turned a page, on the walls, side streets, statues, pedestals in red letters, the crowd kept walking, taking over the alleyways, sidewalks, the square, it would erect barricades, red and black flags, and “The Internationale” thundered along the entire length of the avenue again and again: FREE THE PRISONERS / CHAOS IS THE LAW / GASOLINE IS FREE / WHY DIE, STUPID? KEEP WALKING / FUCK THE PAST / THE OPERA BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE, the banner was hanging on the building’s façade, swelling from the warm spring breeze, bit by bit tearing and draping over the statues of Haydn, Rossini, cursing them… THE MORE YOU PHILANDER, THE MORE YOU REVOLUTIONIZE, THE MORE YOU REVOLUTIONIZE, THE MORE… / YOU WANT TO LOVE / HAPPINESS HERE AND NOW…

here and now… I was at the starting point again, in the same place or almost there, as if it had all returned, I too had come full circle and could watch the marches over and again, in front of a box of old photographs, like mother’s bundle, where all the unnamed were revealed, here and now or nowhere

He was waiting for his wife by a mineral water spring. She was late but that didn’t cause him any aggravation. It had been a few years since he had stopped being aggravated by her late arrivals, her vulgar manners—befitting the common Berliner—and her pragmatic Zionism. He stayed calm even as she dug her enormous teeth into a steak with a succulent chomp. During the last couple of years, acting with a doctor of law’s carefulness and consistency, he’d removed her from himself, installing her in a special room at the far end of the corridor of his life. There she stayed, never sticking so much as her nose outside; his body would occasionally sink into hers with reluctance, but even during those shameful moments his thoughts would remain elsewhere, sometimes at yet another labor litigation committee, sometimes in one of his recent dreams: painful narratives, long and disgusting as worms. True, he respected and valued her: she had, after all, saved his life by making him marry her—he’d been coughing up blood by then—and then curing him, one could say nursing him to health in that magic Swiss sanatorium. Indeed, she had spent six months sitting next to him, holding his hand, on that balcony—he would never forget those tartan plaids and wooden chaise lounges, those ostensibly cheerful voices coming from the consumptive maidens in the dining room, those coffins carried out of the hospital building in secret, under the cover of darkness. Or he might forget them—what does it matter. He had already forgotten many things, including those that had constituted his whole life for years and years; his officious friends; his writing, compulsive, pathetic; even his long-established habits, such as his silent walks to the green hill crowned by a squat copy of the Eiffel Tower. Now there was little left but dreams. They weren’t exactly gone—on the contrary, they would unravel their infinite threads nightly, entangling his mind, which was tormented, half-deaf, half-blind by now, and in the morning he would resurface, exhausted and breathless, in their huge conjugal bed, his wife’s large head resting next to him, birds making a lively noise outside, the maid already rattling crockery in the kitchen, well, time to get up, have tea, go to work. In the office, while dictating a letter to his secretary detailing an industrial accident in Nymburk, he would close his eyes and slip into the images of the most recent dream retained by his memory: there he is, being dragged by some businesslike men through a four-story house in Vinohrady; as they pass the second floor his arms are ripped off; by the time they reach the basement the assailants have only his head in their hands, yet he’s talking to his torturers in an animated manner, even apologizing for splattering their gray suits with his blood. That’s fine, they tell him, we’ve worn our aprons for the occasion. Very well, he says to them, closing his eyes and slipping into the next dream, where he is conscripted into the army and, being the most educated, is made to write letters home for illiterate soldiers. He zealously throws himself into this work but is faced with an insurmountable problem: his battalion consists of Croatians, Hungarians, and Poles, and he doesn’t speak their languages. He offers to write in German and have the letters translated afterward; an elderly lieutenant with a moustache, who looks like the late Emperor Franz Joseph, commends his resourcefulness and appoints him the head of a special correspondence unit. He spends every day composing letters, while several privates sitting next to him diligently translate these into the many languages spoken by the Empire’s subjects; his subordinates work so fast he can’t keep up with them, so instead of writing up his messages he starts simply dictating them. Then he opens his eyes and finds himself in his director’s chair, the office flooded by the spring sun, the secretary drumming away on her typewriter; it’s May 1923, the Empire hasn’t been at war with anyone for fifty-five years, he’s about to finish his dictation and head to a vegetarian restaurant for lunch. Tonight he is going to the opera with his wife.