Best European Fiction 2013

[UNITED KINGDOM: ENGLAND] A. S. BYATT Dolls’ Eyes

Her name was Felicity; she had called herself Fliss as a small child, and it had stuck. The children in her reception class at Holly Grove School called her Miss Fliss, affectionately. She had been a pretty child and was a pretty woman, with tightly curling golden hair and pale blue eyes. Her classroom was full of invention, knitted dinosaurs, an embroidered snake coiling round three walls. She loved the children—almost all of them—and they loved her. They gave her things—a hedgehog, newts, tadpoles in a jar, bunches of daffodils. She did not love them as though they were her own children: she loved them because they were not. She taught bush-haired boys to do cross-stitch, and shy girls to splash out with big paintbrushes and tubs of vivid reds and blues and yellows.

She wondered often if she was odd, though she did not know what she meant by “odd.” One thing that was odd, perhaps, was that she had reached the age of thirty without having loved, or felt close, to anyone in particular. She made friends carefully—people must have friends, she knew—and went to the cinema, or cooked suppers, and could hear them saying how nice she was. She knew she was nice, but she also knew she was pretending to be nice. She lived alone in a little red brick terraced house she had inherited from an aunt. She had two spare rooms, one of which she let out, from time to time, to new teachers who were looking for something more permanent, or to passing students. The house was not at all odd, except for the dolls.

She did not collect dolls. She had over a hundred, sitting in cosy groups on sofas, perching on shelves, stretched and sleeping on the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Rag dolls, china dolls, rubber dolls, celluloid dolls. Old dolls, new dolls, twin dolls (one pair conjoined). Black dolls, blonde dolls, baby dolls, chubby little boys, ethereal fairy dolls. Dolls with painted surprised eyes, dolls with eyes that clicked open and closed, dolls with pretty china teeth, between pretty parted lips. Pouting dolls, grinning dolls. Even dolls with trembling tongues.

The nucleus of the group had been inherited from her mother and grandmother, both of whom had loved and cared for them. There were four: a tall ladylike doll in a magenta velvet cloak, a tiny china doll in a frilly dress with forgetmenot painted eyes, a realistic baby doll with a cream silk bonnet, closing eyes, and articulated joints, and a stiff wooden doll, rigid and unsmiling in a black stuff gown.

Because she had those dolls—who sat in state in a basket chair— other dolls accumulated. People gave her their old dolls—“we know you’ll care for her.” Friends thinking of Christmas or birthday presents found unusual dolls in jumble sales or antique shops.

The ladylike doll was Miss Martha. The tiny china doll was Arabel. The baby doll was Polly. The rigid doll was Sarah Jane. She had an apron over her gown and might once have been a domestic servant doll.

Selected children, invited to tea and cake, asked if she played with the dolls. She did not, she replied, though she moved them round the house, giving them new seats and different company.

It would have been odd to have played with the dolls. She made them clothes, sometimes, or took one or two to school for the children to tell stories about.

She knew, but never said, that some of them were alive in some way, and some of them were only cloth and stuffing and moulded heads. You could even distinguish, two with identical heads under different wigs and bonnets, of whom one might be alive—Penelope with black pigtails—and one inert, though she had a name, Camilla, out of fairness.

There was a new teacher, that autumn, a late appointment because Miss Bury had had a leg amputated as a result of an infection caught on a boating holiday on an African river. The new teacher was Miss Coley. Carole Coley. The head teacher asked Fliss if she could put her up for a few weeks, and Fliss said she would gladly do so. They were introduced to each other at a teaparty for incoming teachers.

Carole Coley had strange eyes; this was the first thing Fliss noticed. They were large and rounded, dark and gleaming like black treacle. She had very black hair and very black eyelashes. She wore the hair, which was long, looped upward in the nape of her neck, under a black hairslide. She wore lipstick and nail varnish in a rich plum colour. She had a trim but female body and wore a trouser suit, also plum. And glittering glass rings, quite large, on slender fingers. Fliss was intimidated, but also intrigued. She offered hospitality—the big attic bedroom, shared bath and kitchen. Carole Coley said she might prove to be an impossible guest. She had two things which always came with her:

“My own big bed with my support mattress. And Cross-Patch.”

Fliss considered. The bed would be a problem but one that could be solved. Who was Cross-Patch?

Cross-Patch turned out to be a young Border collie, with a rackety eye-patch in black on a white face. Fliss had no pets, though she occasionally housed the classroom mice and tortoises in the holidays. Carole Coley said in a take it or leave it voice, that Cross-Patch was very well trained.

“I’m sure she is,” said Fliss, and so it was settled. She did not feel it necessary to warn Carole about the dolls. They were inanimate, if numerous.

Carole arrived with Cross-Patch, who was sleek and slinky. They stood with Fliss in the little sitting room whilst the removal men took Fliss’s spare bed into storage, and mounted with Carole’s much larger one. Carole was startled by the dolls. She went from cluster to cluster, picking them up, looking at their faces, putting them back precisely where they came from. Cross-Patch clung to her shapely calves and made a low throaty sound.

“I wouldn’t have put you down as a collector.”

“I’m not. They just seem to find their way here. I haven’t bought a single one. I get given them, and people see them, and give me more.”

“They’re a bit alarming. So much staring. So still.”

“I know. I’m used to them. Sometimes I move them round.”

Cross-Patch made a growly attempt to advance on the sofa. Carole raised a firm finger. “No, Cross-Patch. Sit. Stay. These are not your toys.”

Cross-Patch, it turned out, had her own stuffed toys—a bunny rabbit, a hedgehog—with which she played snarly, shaking games in the evenings. Fliss was impressed by Carole’s authority over the animal. She herself was afraid of it, and knew that it sensed her fear.

Carole was a good lodger. She was helpful and unobtrusive. Everything interested her—Fliss’s embroidery silks, her saved children’s books from when she was young, her mother’s receipts, a bizarre Clarice Cliffe tea-set with a conical sugar-shaker. She made Fliss feel that she was interesting—a feeling Fliss almost never had, and would have said she didn’t want to have. It was odd being looked at, appreciatively, for long moments. Carole asked her questions, but she could not think up any questions to ask in return. A few facts about Carole’s life did come to light. She had travelled and worked in India. She had been very ill and nearly died. She went to evening classes on classical Greece and asked Fliss to come too, but Fliss said no. When Carole went out, Fliss sat and watched the television, and Cross-Patch lay watchfully in a corner, guarding her toys. When Carole returned, the dog leaped up to embrace her as though she was going for her throat. She slept upstairs with her owner in the big bed. Their six feet went past Fliss’s bedroom door, pattering, dancing.

Carole said the dolls were beginning to fascinate her. So many different characters, so much love had gone into their making and clothing. “Almost loved to bits, some of them,” said Carole, her treacle eyes glittering. Fliss heard herself offer to lend a few of them, and was immediately horrified. What on earth would Carole want to borrow dolls for? The offer was odd. But Carole smiled widely and said she would love to have one or two to sit on the end of her big bed, or on the chest of drawers. Fliss was overcome with nervous anxiety, then, in case Cross-Patch might take against the selected dolls, or think they were toys. She looked sidelong at Cross-Patch, and Cross-Patch looked sidelong at her, and wrinkled her lip in a collie grin. Carole said

“You needn’t worry about her, my dear. She is completely well-trained. She hasn’t offered to touch any doll. Has she?”

“No,” said Fliss, still troubled by whether the dog would see matters differently in the bedroom.

When they went to bed they said goodnight on the first floor landing and Carole went up to the next floor. She borrowed a big rag doll with long blonde woollen plaits and a Swiss sort of apron. This doll was called Priddy, and was not, as far as Fliss knew, alive. She also borrowed—surprisingly—the rigid Sarah Jane, who certainly was alive. I love her disapproving expression, said Carole. She’s seen a thing or two, in her time. She had painted eyes, that didn’t close.

Other dolls took turns to go up the stairs. Fliss noticed, without formulating the idea, that they were always grown-up or big girl dolls, and they never had sleeping eyes.

Little noises came down the stairs. A cut-off laugh, an excited whisper, a creak of springs. Also a red light spread from the door over the sage-green staircarpet.

One night, when she couldn’t sleep, Fliss went down to the kitchen and made Horlicks for herself. She then took it into her head to go up the stairs to the spare room; she saw the pool of red light and knew Carole was not asleep. She meant to offer her Horlicks.

The door was half open. “Come in,” called Carole, before Fliss could tap. She had put squares of crimson silk, weighted down with china beads, over the bedside lamps. She sat on the middle of her big bed, in a pleated sea-green nightdress, with sleeves and a high neck. Her long hair was down, and brushed into a fan, prickling with an electric life of its own. Cross-Patch was curled at the foot of the bed.

“Come and sit down,” said Carole. Fliss was wearing a baby-blue nightie in a fine jersey fabric, under a fawn woolly dressing-gown. “Take that off, make yourself comfortable.”

“I was—I was going to—I couldn’t sleep…”

“Come here,” said Carole. “You’re all tense. I’ll massage your neck.”

They sat in the centre of the white quilt, made ruddy by light, and Carole pushed long fingers into all the sensitive bits of Fliss’s neck and shoulders, and released the nerves and muscles. Fliss began to cry.

“Shall I stop?”

“Oh no, don’t stop, don’t stop. I—

“This is terrible. Terrible. I love you.”

“And what’s terrible about that?” asked Carole, and put her arms around Fliss, and kissed her on the mouth.

Fliss was about to explain that she had never felt love and didn’t exactly like it, when they were distracted by fierce snarling from Cross-Patch.

“Now then, bitch,” said Carole. “Get out. If you’re going to be like that, get out.”

And Cross-Patch slid off the bed, and slunk out of the door. Carole kissed Fliss again, and pushed her gently down on the pillows and held her close. Fliss knew for the first time that terror that all lovers know, that the thing now begun must have an ending. Carole said “My dear, my darling.” No one had said that to her.

They sat side by side at breakfast, touching hands, from time to time. Cross-Patch uttered petulant low growls and then padded away, her nails rattling on the lino. Carole said they would tell each other everything, they would know each other. Fliss said with a light little laugh that there was nothing to know about her. But nevertheless she did more of the talking, described her childhood in a village, her estranged sister, her dead mother, the grandmother who had given them the dolls.

Cross-Patch burst back into the room. She was carrying something, worrying it, shaking it from side to side, making a chuckling noise, tossing it, as she would have tossed a rabbit to break its neck. It was the baby doll, Polly, in her frilled silk bonnet and trailing embroidered gown. Her feet in their knitted bootees protruded at angles. She rattled.

Carole rose up in splendid wrath. In a rich firm voice she ordered the dog to put the doll down, and Cross-Patch spat out the silky creature, slimed with saliva, and cowered whimpering on the ground, her ears flat to her head. Masterfully Carole took her by the collar and hit her face, from side to side, with the flat of her hands. “Bad dog,” she said, “bad dog,” and beat her. And beat her.

The rattling noise was Polly’s eyes, which had been shaken free of their weighted mechanism, and were rolling round inside her bisque skull. Where they had been were black holes. She had a rather severe little face, like some real babies. Eyeless it was ghastly.

“My darling, I am so sorry,” said Carole. “Can I have a look?”

Fliss did not want to relinquish the doll. But did. Carole shook her vigorously. The invisible eyes rolled.

“We could take her apart and try to fit them back.”

She began to pull at Polly’s neck.

“No, don’t, don’t. We can take her to the dolls’ hospital at the Ouse Bridge. There’s a man in there—Mr Copple—who can mend almost anything.”

“Her pretty dress is torn. There’s a toothmark on her face.”

“You’ll be surprised what Mr Copple can fix,” said Fliss, without complete certainty. Carole kissed her and said she was a generous creature.

Mr Copple’s shop was old and narrow-fronted, and its back jutted out over the river. It had old window-panes, with leaded lights, and was a tiny cavern inside, lit with strings of fairy-lights, all different colours. From the ceiling, like sausages in a butcher’s shop, hung arms, legs, torsos, wigs, the cages of crinolines. On his glass counter were bowls of eyeballs, blue, black, brown, green, paperweight eyes, eyes without whites, all iris. And there were other bowls and boxes with all sorts of little wire joints and couplings, useful elastics and squeaking voice boxes.

Mr Copple had, of course, large tortoiseshell glasses, wispy white hair and a bad, greyish skin. His fingers were yellow with tobacco.

“Ah,” he said, “Miss Weekes, always a pleasure. Who is it this time?”

Carole replied. “It was my very bad dog. She shook her. She has never done anything like this before.”

The two teachers had tied Polly up into a brown paper parcel. They did not want to see her vacant stare. Fliss handed it over. Mr Copple cut the string.

“Ah,” he said again. “Excuse me.”

He produced a kind of prodding screwdriver, skilfully decapitated Polly, and shook her eyes out into his hand.

“She needs a new juncture, a new balance. Not very difficult.”

“There’s a bite mark,” said Carole gloomily.

“When you come back for her, you won’t know where it was. And I’ll put a stitch or two into these pretty clothes and wash them out in soapsuds. She’s a Million Dollar Baby. A Bye-Lo Baby. Designed by an American, made in Germany. In the 1920s.”

“Valuable?” asked Carole casually.

“Not so very. There were a large number of them. This one has the original clothes and real human hair. That puts her price up. She is meant to look like a real newborn baby.”

“You can see that,” said Carole.

He put the pieces of Polly into a silky blue bag and attached a label on a string. Miss Weekes’s Polly.

They collected her the next week and Mr Copple had been as good as his word. Polly was Polly again, only fresher and smarter. She rolled her eyes at them again, and they laughed, and when they got her home, kissed her and each other.

Fliss thought day and night about what she would do when Carole left. How it would happen. How she would bear it. Although, perhaps because, she was a novice in love, she knew that the fiercer the passion, the swifter and the harsher the ending. There was no way they two would settle into elderly domestic comfort. She became jealous and made desperate attempts not to show it. It was horrible when Carole went out for the evening. It was despicable to think of listening in to Carole’s private calls, though she thought Carole listened to her own, which were of no real interest. The school year went on, and Carole began to receive glossy brochures in the post, with pictures of golden sands and shining white temples. She sat looking at them in the evenings, across the hearth from Fliss, surrounded by dolls. Fliss wanted to say “Shall we go together?” and was given no breath of space to do so. Fliss had always spent her holidays in Bath, making excursions into the countryside. She made no arrangements. Great rifts and gaps of silence spread into the texture of their lives together. Then Carole said

“I am going away for a month or so. On Sunday. I’ll arrange for the rent to be paid while I’m away.”

“Where,” said Fliss. “Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure. I always do go away.”

Can I come? could not be said. So Fliss said

“Will you come back?”

“Why shouldn’t I? Everyone needs a bit of space and time to herself, now and then. I’ve always found that. I shall miss the dolls.”

“Would you like to take one?” Fliss heard herself say. “I’ve never given one away, never. But you can take one—”

Carole kissed her and held her close.

“Then we shall both want to come back—to the charmed circle. Which doll are you letting me have?”

“Any of them,” cried Fliss, full of love and grief. “Take anyone at all. I want you to have the one you want.”

She did not expect, she thought later, that Carole would take one of the original four. Still less, that of those four, she would choose Polly, the baby, since her taste had always been for grown girls. But Carole chose Polly, and watched Fliss try to put a brave face on it, with an enigmatic smile. Then she packed and left, without saying where she was going.

Before she left, in secret, Fliss kissed Polly and told her “Come back.

Bring her back.”

Cross-Patch went with them. The big empty bed remained, a hostage of a sort.

Fliss did not go to Bath. She sat at home, in what turned out to be a dismal summer, and watched the television. She watched the Antiques Roadshow, and its younger offshoot, Flog It!, in which people brought things they did not want to be valued by experts and auctioned in front of the cameras. Fliss and Carole had watched it together. They both admitted to a secret love for the presenter, the beautiful Paul Martin, whose energy never flagged. Nor, Fliss thought, did his kindness and courtesy, no matter what human oddities presented themselves. She loved him because he was reliable, which beautiful people, usually, were not.

And so it came about that Fliss, looking up idly at the screen from the tray of soup and salad on her knee, saw Polly staring out at her in close-up, sitting on the Flog It! valuing table. It must be a complete lookalike, Fliss thought. The bisque face, with its narrow eyes and tight mouth appeared to her to have a desperate or enraged expression. One of the most interesting things about Polly was that her look was sometimes composed and babylike, but, in some lights, from some angles, could appear angry.

The valuer, a woman in her forties, sweetly blonde but sharp-eyed, picked up Polly and declared she was one of the most exciting finds she had met on Flog It!. She was, said the purring lady, a real Bye-Lo Baby, and dressed in her original clothes. “May I look?” she asked sweetly, and upended Polly, throwing her silk robe over her head, exposing her woollen bootees, her sweet silk panties, the German stamps on her chubby back, to millions of viewers. Her fingernails were pointed, and painted scarlet. She pulled down the panties and ran her nails round Polly’s hip-joints. Bye-Lo Babies were rarer, and earlier, if they had jointed composition bodies than if they had cloth ones, with celluloid hands sewn on. She took off Polly’s frilled ivory silk bonnet, and exclaimed over her hair—“which, I must tell you, I am 90% sure is real human hair, which adds to her value.” She pushed the hair over Polly’s suspended head and said “Ah, yes, as though we needed to see it.” The camera closed in on the nape of Polly’s neck. “Copr. By Grace S. Putnam // MADE IN GERMANY.”

“Do you know the story of Grace S. Putnam and the baby doll?” scarlet-nails asked the hopeful seller and there was Carole, in a smart Art Deco summer shirt in black and white, smiling politely and following the movements of the scarlet nails with her own smooth mulberry ones.

“No,” said Carole into Fliss’s sitting room, “I don’t know much about dolls.”

Her face was briefly screen-size. Her lipstick shone, her teeth glistened. Fliss’s knees began to knock, and she put down her tray on the floor.

Grace Story Putnam, the valuing lady said, had wanted to make a real baby doll, a doll that looked like a real baby, perhaps three days old. Not like a Disney puppet. So this formidable person had haunted maternity wards, sketching, painting, analysing. And never could she find the perfect face with all the requisite qualities.

She leaned forward, her blonde hair brushing Carole’s raven folds.

“I don’t know if I should tell you this.”

“Well, now you’ve started, I think you should,” said Carole, always Carole.

“It is rumoured that in the end she saw the perfect child being carried past, wrapped in a shawl. And she said, wait, this is the one. But that baby had just died. Nevertheless, the story goes, the determined Mrs Putnam drew the little face, and this is what we have here.”

“Ghoulish,” said Carole, with gusto. The camera went back to Polly’s face, which looked distinctly malevolent. Fliss knew her expression must be unchanging, but it did not seem like that. Her stare was fixed. Fliss said “Oh, Polly—”

“And is this your own dolly?” asked the TV lady. “Inherited perhaps from your mother or grandmother. Won’t you find it very hard to part with her?”

“I didn’t inherit her. She’s nothing to do with me, personally. A friend gave her to me, a friend with a lot of dolls.”

“But maybe she didn’t know how valuable this little gift was? The Bye-Los were made in great numbers—even millions—but early ones like this, and with all their clothes, and real human hair, can be expected to fetch anywhere between £800 and well over £1,000— even well over, if two or more collectors are in the room. And of course she may have her photo in the catalogue or on the website…”

“That does surprise me,” said Carole, but not as though it really did.

“And do you think your friend will be happy for you to sell her doll?”

“I’m sure she would. She is very fond of me, and very generous-hearted.”

“And what will you do with the money if we sell Dolly, as I am sure we shall—”

“I have booked a holiday on a rather luxurious cruise in the Greek islands. I am interested in classical temples. This sort of money will really help.”

There is always a gap between the valuation of an item and the showing of its auction. Fliss stared unseeing at the valuation of a hideous green pottery dog, a group of World War I medals, an album of naughty seaside postcards. Then came Polly’s moment. The auctioneer held her aloft, his gentlemanly hand tight round her pudgy waist, her woolly feet protruding. Briefly, briefly, Fliss looked for the last time at Polly’s sweet face, now, she was quite sure, both baleful and miserable.

“Polly,” she said aloud. “Get her. Get her.”

She did not know what she wanted Polly to do. But she saw Polly as capable of doing something. And they were—as they had always been—on the same side, she and Polly.

She thought, as the bidding flew along, a numbered card flying up, a head nodding, a row of concentrated listeners with mobile phones, waiting, and then raising peremptory fingers, that she herself had betrayed Polly, but that she had done so out of love and goodwill. “Oh, Polly,” she said, “Get her,” as Carole might have said to Cross-Patch.

Carole was standing, composed and beautiful, next to Paul Martin, as the tens turned into hundreds and the hundreds to thousands. He liked sellers to show excitement or amazement, and Carole—Fliss understood her—showed just enough of both to keep the cameras happy, but was actually rigid inside, like a stone pillar of willpower and certainty. Polly went for £2,000, but it was not customary to show the sold object again, only the happy face of the seller, so, for Fliss, there was no moment of good-bye. And you were not told where sold objects were going.

All the other dolls were staring, as usual. She turned them over, or laid them to sleep, murmuring madly, get her, get her.

She did not suppose Carole would come back, and wondered if she should get rid of the bed. The headmistress at the school was slightly surprised when Fliss asked her if Carole was coming back—“Do you know something I don’t?” Then she showed Fliss a postcard from Crete, and one from Lemnos. “I go off on my own with my beach towel and a book and lie on the silver sand by the wine-dark sea, and feel perfectly happy.” Fliss asked the headmistress if she knew where Cross-Patch was, and the headmistress said she had assumed Fliss was in charge of her, but if not, presumably, she must be in kennels.

A week later, the head told Fliss that Carole was in hospital. She had had a kind of accident. She had been unconscious for some time, but it was clear, from the state of her nervous system, and from filaments and threads found on her swimsuit and in her hair, that she had swum, or floated, into a swarm of minute stinging jellyfish—there are millions out there, this summer, people are warned, but she liked to go off on her own.

Fliss didn’t ask for more news, but got told anyway. Carole’s eyes were permanently damaged. She would probably never see again; at best, vestigially.

She would not, naturally, be coming back.

The headmistress looked at Fliss, to see how she took this. Fliss contrived an expression of conventional, distant shock, and said several times, how awful, how very awful.

The headmistress said “That dog of hers. Do you think anyone knows where it is? Do you think we should get it out of the kennels? Would you yourself like to have it, perhaps—you all became so close?”

“No,” said Fliss. “I’m afraid I never liked it really. I did my best as I hope I always shall. I’m sure someone can be found. It has a very uncertain temper.”

She went home and told the dolls what had happened. She thought of Polly’s closed, absent little face. The dolls made an inaudible rustling, like distant birds settling. They knew, Fliss thought, and then unthought that thought, which could be said to be odd.

[ESTONIA] KRISTIINA EHIN The Surrealist’s Daughter

The first time I went to visit the Surrealist’s daughter, I was bitten by the Surrealist’s dog. He bit me in the thigh through the mesh gate. “A really surrealistic wound,” I thought, feeling my leg. It didn’t really hurt, but it was great to see how the Surrealist’s daughter and her mother came running with adhesive plasters and a bottle of iodine, how they knelt down in front of me to treat my wound. The Surrealist’s daughter looked at me with big, startled, slightly guilty eyes. I smiled at her but she didn’t smile back.

The next time we met was several years later. It happened to be St. George’s Night and it was the first time that I saw the Surrealist’s daughter completely naked. She stepped in suddenly through the door of the smoke sauna and in the darkness I didn’t immediately realize who this woman was. She sat down next to me on the sooty bench and we didn’t look at each other. Only later, when I saw one of her strange confirmation dresses and her patterned stockings hanging over a beam in the sauna’s front room, did I realize who I’d been having a sauna with.

The third time I met the Surrealist’s daughter, I talked all sorts of nonsense. I told her that I had been dreaming of a woman just like her, all my life. I smiled at her again and repeated her name several times. In all seriousness. But the Surrealist’s daughter turned into a black stork and sat instead on the shoulder of one of my friends. She rubbed her long neck against my friend’s cheek. I saw my friend straining not to turn into a frog and he finally managed it, turning into a punk rocker instead. The punk rocker took the Surrealist’s daughter, who was still a black stork, as his driver. “I’d like to go to Hiiumaa Island now,” the punk rocker said and the black stork sat down behind the wheel right away. I watched for some time as they were driving away. Then I went off to send some e-mails and went to bed. That night I dreamed that I was flying to who knows where in the dark of night on the back of a black stork that was croaking sadly. My friend later told me that in Hiiumaa he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation and had gone behind a lilac bush with a blonde, blue-eyed punk rocker to drink beer. At the same time the black stork was supposed to fill the tank and get some synthetic motor oil, mosquito repellent, and something to eat. But when the punk rocker went back to the black stork in the hotel room, none of this had been done. The stork had meanwhile turned back into the Surrealist’s daughter. She lay in her thin white dress on the red carpet and wept.

My friend said he didn’t know from that moment on whether to take it or leave it. He thrashed around for a long time in some sort of confused and nameless identity crisis and finally decided that the stork was all right, as far as it goes—but the weeping Surrealist’s daughter was just too much.

The fourth time I saw the Surrealist’s daughter, she was sitting on a tree and combing her long, silky hair. I looked up at her and said that she was so beautiful. I smiled and she smiled back at me. I said that to my mind she was very, very beautiful. I added quite loudly, to be sure that she heard me, that I had always wanted just her sort of woman. I thought about what else I might be able to say. I said that of course I had wanted just such a mother for my children as well. I got quite carried away. When I looked back up at her in the tree, she wasn’t there anymore. She had fallen down and broken her rib. When I drove her to the emergency room, she wept inconsolably and said, “Please don’t say such things to me. It’s more than I can bear.” And yet, right after that, she begged, with tears in her eyes, “Say some more, please.”

I continued saying just such things to her the entire time. I gave my fantasy free rein. Although I saw that she was barely able to prepare a meal, that she drops plates, uses too much salt, burns the potatoes, I told her that I would like her to be the mistress of my farm, that I admire her ability to look after things and create beauty all around her. I smiled, for from the corner of my eye I saw the Surrealist’s daughter’s dusty bookshelves, unwashed windows, and other such things. Thereupon she kissed me, as if incidentally, yet more passionately than I had ever been kissed by any woman before that, and then she just as suddenly asked me to go away. She said she needed to get up in the middle of the night and perform.

Perform… the Surrealist’s daughter knew how to do that. After all, she worked in a cabaret. Her job was frying the hearts and other body parts of her male audience over a low flame. She did that with her dancing and of course with her ability to transform herself. She was a woman of many faces and many bodies.

Next time I told the Surrealist’s daughter about my other women. I told her about them as if incidentally, while we were driving around Egypt in a rented jeep. I had invited her on the trip with me. I wanted to completely entangle her mind in tales of my former and present women and then propose marriage to her. It was so good with her, I thought, why shouldn’t we go even further.

But entangling the mind of the Surrealist’s daughter had very different and more serious consequences than I could have imagined. Between a sphinx and a pyramid in the desert, the Surrealist’s daughter turned into a fire-breathing dragon that had wound itself around a trembling maiden dressed in white. The maiden looked exactly like the Surrealist’s daughter, but half her age. The dragon sent caustic tongues of fire in my direction and they were very painful to me. The maiden looked on with an anguished air and I wondered with a feeling of revulsion why I should even bother fussing with this Surrealist’s daughter and all her conjurings. Of course I left her. And then I left her again. But our paths kept crossing, for in the course of time we had become friends.

One warm, bright night when she had just come from performing and her body was hot and smelled of frying hearts, we met by chance on the street and went up the hill to look at the moon. I just couldn’t help myself and again brought up marriage while at the same time making her jealous with stories of my other women. “Yes, I’ve had innumerable lovers, in the first years I tried to keep count, but now it’s all hopelessly muddled,” I said as if incidentally. “But you’re different, with you I almost want to… Yes, with you and only you.” I called her by her name again, several times. In all seriousness. “And yet I’m afraid of that,” I continued. “Sometimes panic overcomes me when I think that I might have to be with someone for the rest of my life and be faithful to her.”

I should have known I was playing with fire. Again the dragon was standing before me and the maiden was still watching me with her beautiful, trembling eyes. First the dragon bit a chunk out of my thigh. Then it ripped out one of my ribs and bit it in half. The maiden was still watching me gravely and beseechingly, and neither the full moon nor she, nor even the black stork that had suddenly landed on a blossoming white lilac bush, were of any help to me. Behind the maiden stood the cabaret dancer rolling her hips and stroking her breasts. It fried my heart and not only that. Then the dragon turned its seven heads toward me and got ready to tear me apart once and for all and then set me alight.

For some reason I wasn’t able to run away, for the maiden’s innocent, beseeching gaze and the cabaret dancer’s rolling hips rooted me to the spot. Blood flowed from my thigh and my side and the dragon mocked me haughtily. I thought it would be good to fall asleep at that very moment, for death wouldn’t be so terrible in sleep. I closed my eyes. But in doing so I had freed myself from the spell cast by the cabaret dancer and the eyes of that grave young maiden. I turned into St. George on his white horse, and a sword as long as a ship’s mast grew in my hand. I hewed into the dragon. Or did I hew the Surrealist’s daughter? In any case, when every last one of its heads had been cut off, we were all dripping with blood. Me, the maiden, the white horse, the black stork, the cabaret dancer, the lilac bush and even the moon—we were all blood red. And so that there would be an end to all this hocus-pocus I rode home to my farm with them, washed them clean, and put them to bed. When the Surrealist’s daughter woke in the morning, she was again all of a piece, she still had the moon in her arms, and she smelt of lilac. She told me that she had become pregnant from the blood of her own dragon and we would immediately be having two pairs of three-headed twins who would all look exactly like me.

[POLAND] SYLWIA CHUTNIK It’s All Up to You

I’m sitting in an office chair, propelling myself forward, backward, in a circle, with my feet. The girl in front of me is hot, is a babe, and I think she’s younger than me, but she looks older, with her French manicure.

You can tell she double-majored and speaks four languages. Plus she’s thin, nicely thin, dressed in H&M, but tastefully. Unpretentiously. An element of surprise: dangling felt earrings, handmade. Her teeth shine, her eyes shine, her skin—you’ll never guess—shines, like it’s printed on coated paper.

Men in bars like babes like this, when it’s nighttime. You might just go after work and relax, hang out, have a drink. Girls like this go so well with beer, like nuts or chips. They’re happy. Even if they’re not happy, they’re about to show you that they are happy. Carefree. They bubble over in endless laughter. They laugh with their whole selves, with their whole being, here and now and for all eternity. They just always find something amusing—they’re still giggling long after somebody’s told a joke. And their shoulder strap slips down, and their svelte shoulders are playing peek-a-boo—sometimes they pull it back up, but not most of the time. Oh my gosh, my shoulder strap slipped off! I guess I’m having that kind of day! Let me just run to the bathroom for a second.

And the lovely body retreats, the men looking it up and down as it goes, saying nothing. Silence at the table.

And at the bathroom mirror a smack of lip-gloss. Her long, pretty hair—which fits her symmetrical facial features like a glove—is as sensational as tv hair. You look her over like you look through a women’s magazine, with all its formulas, its mantras of “radiant hair” and “glowing skin.” I mean, my God, sometimes they even use the word “taille,” instead of just “waist.” But the babe has a skinny everything, after all, that’s her thing. us scientists and the kgb both have proven that skinny people are fabulous.

Beer isn’t full of empty calories when consumed by babes. Sometimes babes actually eat chocolate, but even then, nothing. Other girls have a single sandwich and blow up like blimps, but not a babe.

And she wears thongs. Because her you-know-what is shaved. Because she never really has anything poking out down there, so she can safely wear whatever lingerie she wants. She’s so perfect you might even think she’s not real, you might think someone had cut her out of one of those magazines, but she lives and breathes, and this poses a problem for me.

She goes back to the table, and people sigh with relief. Everything’s fun again. Sheesh, gosh, you know what happened to me in the bathroom? I’m just looking for the bathroom, and I don’t know where to go, I forgot if the women’s room had the circle on it or the triangle. Which one means women’s? So I go in through the first doors I come to, and there’s a guy just standing there, peeing. Peeing! Oh my God, I just turn right around and just say, “Sorry!” But I wanted to laugh so bad, God, like, I was in shock. What an idiot!

The babe knows her own worth—she’s not an idiot, after all, she double-majored. So why does she say that, does she just not take herself too seriously? She’s well read, she’s not a nitwit, she knows her way through the bulk of the literary canon, as it pertains to the conversations she might have. She goes to exhibitions, she has friends of the intellectual persuasion. She listens to music, and she cultivates radiance. She has a normal job, which she doesn’t like, because of course you’re not supposed to like your job.

I’m sitting opposite her, and we’re not at some fun club, not at all, we’re in a box in an office building. It just about causes me physical pain to look at her. Envy and regret. That she’s not just a stupid girl. She’s too cool and pretty.

Do I feel threatened? I get chills just thinking I might be thinking that way. If she was just a dumb Barbie doll, then I could just lump her in with all the other imbeciles and rest assured of my own intellectual superiority—at least I would have that. If, on the other hand, she’s actually smarter than me (she does have a job, and I don’t)… And if she’s prettier and cooler than me… What if? What would that mean? I’d rather not look at her. I’d rather nothing.

I try and laugh like her, at the same times. I can’t pull it off, I realize only afterward that I’m supposed to, and then all that comes out is a noiseless and imbecilic grimace. Plus I feel like I didn’t dress appropriately. I have several skirts, I don’t know why I wore my jeans. Ah, it’s cold out. Right, the babe has a car, she can come to work wearing ballet slippers all winter. I could have a car, too, but it just so happens that I don’t. Basically I’m afraid of getting killed in a car crash. I have nightmares where my entrails are everywhere. Old ladies drive, nuns drive, but I don’t drive, because I’m afraid. Obviously she’s not afraid, because she’s already had two little fender benders, but she was fine, and when she went to the garage the guy told her he’d touch up her paint for free. And she held out her slender hand with her glorious-smelling wrist with its literally as-thin-as-possible gold bracelet. She has air-freshener in her car, plus a teddy bear, but an “alternative” teddy bear that she got off some American website. It’s missing one leg, and it has red dots instead of eyes. What a sweet little bear, that’s fantastic. Even her toys are awesome, and people like her never sweat, and they don’t ever have any problems with their digestive systems. And they don’t go into the pharmacy and ask for Lactovaginal in a hushed voice.

“What?”

“Lactovaginal.”

“Vaginal discharge?” shrieks the lady at the counter.

God, yes, vaginal discharge.

The babe is looking over my cv and my statement of purpose. “I would like to work in your office because I am interested in advertising.” I sneak a peek at it in her hands and try to think how high my fever must have been to come up with that crap. Had I written it in primary school? Had that been my homework back in the first grade? Why hadn’t I taken any professional enhancement courses, why hadn’t I bought that book Your Career Will Make You a Hero? I’m lazy, I don’t know how to do anything, and meanwhile the babe is noting something down on a piece of paper. She’s already taken her course on how to conduct interviews, which was connected with her Reiki II foot massage and her advanced German classes. She knows what to say. And if ever she doesn’t know, she laughs. I don’t know anything, and I’m traveling around the carpeting by chair.

Weee’ll letyouknow.

Great. Another job I’m not getting.

I turn and look back at the babe through the glass that separates the swells from the plebs, enclosed in their plastic boxes. I feel a terrible hatred, I feel the injustice of it, I feel the shame of it. A woman in a dress suit walks past me and gives my shoulder a friendly clap. “Don’t cry, they might still take you as a cleaning lady—they’re holding the next interviews in a week.”

I exit the office building and go off to buy myself something to drink. The salesguy at the grocery is in the middle of receiving goods. He’s got opened-up boxes of fruit everywhere and is setting some of it on the shelves. Oh, to be a salesgirl in a little kiosk by a bus stop. To weigh, to count, to bag.

I ask if I can have an apple.

“That’s up to you,” says the salesguy, without looking up at me.

So that’s how it is. It’s up to me.

A wave of near-erotic excitement overtakes me. The voice he said it in. And what was he referring to? “That” meaning what?

The longer I stand there astonished, the less I know what to do. Suddenly the little store turns into a vast stage, where each of us must pass naked before a crowd of people. Of men, women, maybe even our own house pets. A disco ball drops from out of the wooden ceiling, and the lights are glaring, and a guy in an Afro wig coos the same refrain into a microphone repeatedly: “That’s, oh yeah, up to you.” A little choir of older ladies waiting behind me in line begins to fidget. Yes, it’s up to you, child, but buy something already, and let us buy our things too.

Women march down the catwalk. Frenzied music comes out of the speakers, and you have to adjust your gait to fit it. Walk to its rhythm, defer to its rhythm. And I’m enchanted by it, I’ve never walked like that, under other people’s gazes, to their rhythm. In rejecting foreign myths about beauty, I let myself fall into the trap of the ugly bitch. Which is great, after all, there are so many of us around, and really we’re all terribly attractive after all, we’ve got that certain something. If we’re at all unattractive, it’s just what the man on the speakers calls a “unique brand” of beauty. Original beauty, an interesting and expressive face. A body that keeps its secrets.

I want to be like the ones that have known this music for years. They can sing it to themselves when it’s not even playing, and contort to it appropriately—at any moment at any point in their lives.

I ask myself excitedly why I haven’t really ever hung out with anybody; I’m in last place, with my hair looking terrible, and only even snuggling up to hairy-pitted minor deities in pants from two seasons ago.

“That’s up to you”—like a spell. With one sentence I had been liberated from lackluster evenings alone at the movies, three-cheese pizzas ordered over the phone, pads instead of tampons.

Meaning I might become like the babe at the office? I would paint my nails and laugh at everything. Use lip-gloss and shine in high society. It’s up to me, I can choose me. Sporty me, elegant me, domestic me. Like a doll. Have a simple life, lustrous in its ordinariness—the straight and narrow. Straight teeth. Stop listening to hard rock and start listening to smooth jazz. Quit thinking so much. Not bite my nails till my cuticles bleed.

I’d rather live like that, I really would!

Do you want the apples or not? Did you decide?

I had decided. I would go straight to the salon to get anything and everything that had ever poked out from under my underwear and that had roots waxed right off. I would get some clothes that were on sale that would show off my tattoos.

I would stop sleeping in an old T-shirt, I would invest in lace. Everything would change, I would get a job. Never again would I go up to the cash register with my cart and be told, “Hmm, transaction declined.” Never again would I take my card from the cashier and pretend that, wow, there must be some mix-up, I mean I definitely have money in my account, oh well, I guess I’ll just have to get some cash out of the atm. And she’s thinking, sure, I have money, right. I have nothing, and I thought nothing would be enough to get groceries. Actual humiliation, degradation, trying to go on a shopping spree before putting one’s plastic in order.

No, I don’t want the apples, so nothing. I exit the store brimming with my vital resolutions. It’s as if the sun is shining brighter, the world is smiling—the wind flares up, snatching at my old jacket.

If this had been a Bollywood film, I would have already been dancing in my pretty sari in the middle of the street. It was more, however, in the style of the American drama, with an accident at the climax.

I basically just wanted to get to my tram as quickly as possible. I didn’t notice that there was a street there, a street with cars, one of which was speeding toward me. All I knew was that something had hit me, and that my cigarette had flown out of my hand. And that I tried to get away from the paramedics. I mean I didn’t have health insurance—it wasn’t like I could go to the hospital and then not pay. Shortly before I passed out (I had every right, my leg had been shattered), it flashed through my mind that this might be a just punishment for thinking ill of the babe, for not feeling feminine solidarity, for only feeling jealous. For planning on fixing myself up, when really I’d never deserved any improvements. That terrible Christian saying about the wages of sin now paralyzed my brain.

Nothing is up to me, Mr. Grocer. As soon as somebody puts together even the outline of their screenplay, they get their leg ripped off, a steamroller rolls right over them, a plane bombards them. They steal your head right off your shoulders and then dunk it in the toilet to boot.

Nothing is up to us, everything takes place in a thick bell jar. Some people are born pretty, some homely. You can bend over backward, go to a plastic surgeon, and all the ugliness will only come to the surface. The great revolt of the hideous against Beauty is always doomed to fail from the very start, because before the ugly people leave their houses, powdering those broken blood vessels of theirs, the pretty people will long since have been laughing their pearly laughs over their glasses of water. Still water. Not sparkling. No calories, no preservatives, no artificial anything.

I wouldn’t forget again, now. Making resolutions regarding myself, revamping things, improving things—it just doesn’t work for me. I was programmed before birth to be a doormat. Where’d you get that face, was it on clearance, was it on Ebay, did you get it off an old homeless guy? And where’d you find that shaggy body, did you get it in some lake off a drowned guy, did it come from that movie, La Grande Bouffe, did it come from that book, Fat Swine?

Covering the bathroom mirror and keeping the lights turned off isn’t lying. Lying is when some babe says you look so great. I don’t believe in looking great, but I have to work, which is why I’m standing here with my legs torn off at an intersection handing out flyers for cosmetic dermatology. Lymphatic drainage massage, whole-body amputation. My hands are rotting, my ashen face winces in pain at the thought of coming into contact with myself. I stink, although I bathe; I howl, although I smile toothlessly at the girl who’s walking by now as I hand her her flyer. She, trying not to look at me, throws the flyer into the trash, because it’s not like she needs beauty treatments. Then she comes up to me, spits, kicks, snorts, and leaves.

You might well fight the system, you’ll get plenty of support. Be opposed, fight, protest. But your worst enemy is always the pretty girl, the hot babe, the working woman with her car. But then it’s like I’m protesting Beauty itself, like I’m an enemy to myself above all else. Blinded by embarrassment, ashamed of my own thoughts.

Caught in the trap of my own desires, I bitch about my butt-ugly life. God, but I’d rather not.