Aleksandar Hemon: Best European Fiction 2013

They only moved when the doors opened in front of them, but only to close their eyes, or cover them with whatever was at hand. An emergency team jumped right in, making sure everyone was okay. The passengers clung to the elevator’s walls as if caught on fish hooks and grabbed onto each other’s arms, making it difficult for the emergency team to coax them out onto stretchers. Even as they were exiting one by one, the paramedics couldn’t help but notice that the members of the now disbanded group were all trying to reach out to each other, perhaps waving weakly, as though hoping to schedule their next meeting as they passed each other in the hallway. Indeed, the presence of all these newcomers evoked a look of fear, uncertainty, and suspicion in the passengers’ eyes, as if the emergency crew had been sent with the express purpose of separating their little band from whatever invisible and mysterious feeling that their captivity had created, and which was now likely to be taken away from them.

When there was no one left in the elevator, and the ambulance sirens could no longer be heard, a lady with various soaps and detergents, a rag, a scrub brush, and a bucket full of water walked into the empty car. With her wet rag, she started to wipe away the thick, full lines of the drawings that covered the interior of the elevator like unobtrusive armor. Once she saw how tenacious the pencil marks were going to be, she tried to scrub them with her thick brush and some whitish powder. While bending over to rinse off her brush, she saw an old pair of glasses in the corner, seemingly abandoned, but she didn’t make any effort to pick them up.

Winter in a seaside town like Budva has one advantage that makes all its shortcomings look ridiculous and insignificant—winter reduces people, things, and events to their true proportions, brings everything to light and makes it a topic of conversation. I know people who don’t like the winter, who are bored; but they don’t do anything to give meaning to their lives and instead wait for someone else to do it for them. Since that doesn’t happen, their time becomes hungry, and the emptiness in their lives grows until nothing can fill it anymore. Those people feel winter is merciless: in summer they manage to hide away, but in winter that becomes impossible, and they show themselves just the way they are—unfit for life.

In winter the men of Budva fish, booze and play cards, work on their houses, discuss politics, renovate bars and cafés, lend money and charge extortionate interest, seduce other men’s wives, and worry that their own might cuckold them… When you think about it, the “metropolis of Montenegrin tourism” only lives, in its own unique way, in winter. Whoever doesn’t fit into the rhythm of the town is condemned to vegetate on its margins—same as they would be anywhere else. But in order to fit in they first have to master a parlor game that people are very fond of in Budva: gossiping. They’re obliged to discover the attractive side of this sport and participate without worrying about the outcome. Petty souls see gossiping as something bad and unworthy, while connoisseurs of human values consider it an activity that brings people together and makes the town a more agreeable place to live. One local theoretician of winter social life, the freethinking Sniper, saw gossip as an inseparable part of the media landscape:

“Winter is a time when the men of Budva realize the ideal of direct democracy: everyone has a voice and the right to shape the sphere of public discourse through participation. And when they open the town television station everyone will get their own few minutes of fame on the screen,” he stated categorically.

Waiting for those promised few minutes, one harsh December evening I found myself in Budva’s best-known underground restaurant, Kod tužnog Tulipana (The Melancholic Tulip). Together with a few other card lovers I was playing round after exhausting round of Lora, drinking red wine, and waiting for the famous specialty of the house—Octopus Risotto in Mist. (Mists are actually extremely rare and short-lived in Budva, so this mist had nothing to do with the meteorological phenomenon; rather, it referred to the whitish film that covers people’s eyes when they get mindlessly drunk and pass out.) Malicious tongues claimed that the culinary skill of Tulip, the restaurateur, began and ended with this dish, and there was nothing apart from the mysterious name to distinguish it from any other risotto—but no one ever complained. On the contrary, since Tulip only prepared this dish once a year, it was a question of prestige for the people of Budva to be seen in his restaurant on the occasion.

All the tables were occupied that evening. I saw many familiar faces—the cream of local government, business, and the culture scene; there were also some people I didn’t know, ugly mugs who gave me a bad gut feeling. According to an established custom, dinner was served after midnight. As we ate we chatted casually, listened to the blues, and enjoyed the intimate, almost familial atmosphere of the restaurant—all up until one idiot (who Tulip then asked unambiguously to leave the premises) called on Gonzales to tell us all what happened to Geiger and why he died so suddenly.

As much as we adored gossiping about one another, there are some stories that one just does not tell: any inquiry about them is interpreted as an indecency, and the pryer loses his place in society and is branded untrustworthy. The story about what happened to Geiger had topped the town’s list of forbidden topics for several years. A fellow I know confided in me while we were fishing for mackerel off Sveti Nikola Island that he’d heard the tale from Gonzales, but he wouldn’t repeat it for me, even when I insisted. He said I wouldn’t believe him, and he couldn’t tell it well enough because he didn’t understand everything. And again, I know several people who got a fistful of salt in the ass for having hassled Gonzales; he kept a sawnoff double-barreled shotgun without a buttstock under the seat of his wheelchair (which was the basis of the morbid joke behind his nickname—he was anything but Speedy). One barrel of the shotgun had a buckshot cartridge and the other was loaded with coarsely ground salt: just which barrel he discharged depended on the type of idiot who was giving him a hard time.

The question about Geiger made Gonzales flinch in his wheelchair; he hissed several curses to himself and in the direction of the overly curious fool, but when he saw Tulip give the fellow his marching orders he acted as if he hadn’t heard and kept eating.

The evening went nicely, and when people were starting to go home, satisfied with Tulip’s risotto, Gonzales asked Tulip and me to help him to the toilet. He was an athlete at drinking but disabled when it came to negotiating the urinal. When he’d finished and wheeled himself back to the table, he ordered a bottle of wine and invited me to join him. Tulip was busy clearing away the cutlery, a drunk was snoring at the lowest point of the restaurant with his head on the table, and Gonzales filled our glasses and took a deep breath.

“Fucking jerks! As if they were really interested in what happened to Geiger—they don’t even deserve to hear his name!” Then he tilted his head to the side a little, gave me a probing glance through half-closed eyelids, as if he’d never seen me before, and asked:

“Does your brother stay in touch?”

“More or less,” I replied, realizing it would be best not to show how much I disliked talking about my brother.

“How long has he got left now?”