Aleksandar Hemon - Best European Fiction 2013

– Soňa, I love you, you’re my only friend. But why did you have to keep this secret from me, of all things?

– I’m telling you: I was hoping it wouldn’t happen to you!

– And what about your parents? At home, when you were growing up… Did they have a problem too? You know what I mean.

– Of course. Nearly every family on our estate had it. I remember the Kropács, they had to move out because of it: it simply pushed them out of their apartment. One morning it was sticking out into the hallway. Can you imagine how delicate the situation was? Actually existing socialism, and you’ve got something sticking out of your apartment door? And you and your children have to sleep on the stairs? Well, my parents took their children in for a few days, the kids stayed in my room, but I didn’t like them, they cried all the time. By the way, it eventually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Kropács: it followed them everywhere; in the end they were staying in a workers’ dormitory in Smíchov, in Prague, but one night, after it caused a scandal by swelling up, making the whole house burst, waking up half the city of a thousand spires, they took a radical step: emigration. Now they have a wonderful life in the West, she’s living in Italy with the kids and he’s somewhere in Switzerland. They split up as soon as they crossed the border. Don’t you get it? It was a question of life and death. But actually, in cases like this, it’s always a question of life and death.

– But why did Mom never even hint at it?

– That’s what women are like: though we can see—right from the beginning, actually—how things happen and how they’re going to end, inevitably, we keep hoping… and making the same mistakes. We just don’t learn our lesson. Typically. Not even seeing the way that our own parents have ended up prevents us from letting the same thing happen to us and our children. From their earliest days we push them toward doing the same thing to their kids when the time comes. It’s like some compulsion, can’t you feel it?

– Soňa! I thought I was going round the bend!

– That’s right. You are going round the bend, but nobody will notice you’re mad. It’s a collective madness. You’re no different from anyone else. How can you diagnose madness if everyone is mad?

Miša had no idea.

For weeks she just moped around the apartment.

She could see it was watching her intently from behind the set. Or rather, not from behind but from underneath the TV, which by now was floating on top of it, swaying from side to side like a vacationer on an air-mattress.

Miša stood on the balcony.

Miša leaned against the stove.

Miša even dreamed of going for a hike in the genuine, unadulterated countryside.

And wherever she happened to be, she wondered what it was that she and Jano actually wanted from one another. Wherever she might be she also wondered how she could get into the closet where she kept her large suitcase from before she was married, because by now it was cluttering up the whole room, blocking the way to the closet. And when it got especially bad, between the thirteenth and fourteenth cigarette, between a wistful stare from the balcony down to the street and at the skyscraper opposite—into the windows of prison cells similar to her own—between calm resignation and quiet horror, in addition to other, more important and essential things, Miša also thought that you need a partner to close the clasp on your necklace, and that you need a necklace to find a partner.

It was a stifling summer outside when suddenly everything stopped. The faces of the little girl and her father went pale; maybe the father was even more terrified than the little girl. She wasn’t able to recognize real fear, nor was she aware of the danger of the situation; she only felt that her father’s grip had suddenly become tighter, and this caused her face too to turn white as a sheet. As for the others: the tall fellow— destined always to experience life from so presumptuous a height—was wobbling to such a degree that he had to lean on the inside wall with his elbow. Actually, he wasn’t so much leaning as bumping against the wooden surface of the wall, taking advantage of its proximity to avoid collapsing onto the floor. The elderly couple were huddling together quietly and moving gradually into the corner, as if trying to conceal themselves. The remaining four—the soldier, the man with the beard, the woman in red, and the man in the suit—were dispersed in all directions; one fell down, the other hit his forehead on the edge of the panel with the buttons, the third tumbled onto the floor, and the fourth pulled at the tall man’s sleeve and stumbled forward.

Out of all of them, the woman in red, with the pierced navel, responded to the event the loudest, letting out an inarticulate sound followed by a salvo of curses, but nobody objected—as they might have done under different circumstances. The man with the beard, who knew precisely what was happening, continued to lie soberly on the ridged, rubber floor, caressing the hairs of his beard with his fingers. The gentleman in the suit—a striped jacket and trousers of indeterminate color—quickly stood up again and looked at his expensive watch, demonstrating to everyone else that he was in a terrible hurry to get somewhere. The soldier was the only one with his fleshy hands on his forehead, in noticeable pain, although he had in no way admitted defeat. After the first wave of shock had passed, the father concluded that the elevator was indeed stuck. The rest of them neither confirmed nor rejected this conclusion. It seemed too soon for them to replace their usual formal head-nodding on stepping into the elevator or stingy salutations when exiting with alarm, sympathy, and unity in a common cause. But it wasn’t long before it seemed that everybody, except the two silent old people, had accepted the reality that they would have to communicate and work together.

The man with the beard suggested pressing the emergency button, but, as was the case with all the other elevators in the town, nobody believed that it would actually work, despite what the law required. Maybe one of them even put his thumb on that big round circle, without the least hope that this would lead to an observable result. Wanting to determine the altitude at which they were stuck—as if that would solve part of the problem—they tried to guess the floor they were on. At first, the digital readout only showed two eights, indicating that the power supply had been interrupted, throwing off its calculation. The soldier smacked the number display and then rapped on it with his knuckles; perhaps we might see these attacks as the expression of some naïve thirst for vengeance on his part? However, not only did the screen still refuse to display their vertical location, it now lost even those few flickers of life it had retained. The passengers began a verbal inquiry; the last person who’d come in, the tall fellow, who was sitting at the rear of the car—he’d gone to the back, since his destination was the top floor—confirmed that he’d entered the elevator on the tenth floor. Now they were all asking each other on which floor they’d joined the party, and where each had planned to exit the elevator, and concluded finally that they must be somewhere between the tenth floor and the fourteenth—the destination of the father and his little daughter.

The father, a doctor, holding the little fingers of his daughter tightly, went up to the soldier after a while and looked at his bruised forehead in the dim elevator light. The doctor examined the head of the man in uniform, and told the soldier that his injury couldn’t be treated in these conditions, and all they could do was try to make him comfortable. They looked for a hard object to bandage against the soldier’s bump, which looked like a small horn growing on a newborn calf. Not having too many other options, the doctor’s daughter pointed to the soldier’s belt where a gun hung in a white holster that would have been more or less level with her head. The soldier reached for his gun slowly and bashfully, checked the safety, and put the handle on his forehead. The sudden coldness surprised him and he dropped the weapon. It bounced off of the door and fell on the floor. Some of the passengers looked at each other silently— keeping their fears to themselves. The woman in red was the first to reach for the gun. But rather than give it back to the frightened and clumsy soldier, she went up to him and pressed the handle to his reddened skin herself. Yet, it didn’t bring him relief; on the contrary, now he was embarrassed as well as in pain.