Best European Fiction 2013

[LIECHTENSTEIN] DANIEL BATLINER Malcontent’s Monologue

In a little country there is a little town, and the townspeople are few in number, and know each other well. They work, go to market, and pause to greet each other on the little square at the center of town. Children play on the square. Small towns are still places where one can feel at home, preserves of identity and character. While not sealed off completely from the other towns in this country, this town is left more or less in peace. The people too. They go about their jobs at the bank, the insurance agency, the town hall, and they wander, dignified and daydreaming, through their little village lives.

One day, the lawyer Joachim Kaiser crosses to the middle of the village square. He is wearing an impeccably tailored business suit and tie. In his right hand he holds a plastic cup from a well-known fast-food chain, and takes, now and then, a self-satisfied sip. A young boy, not more than eight years old, is torn from his game with his fire engine. Having abandoned it now, he frets about the townspeople: that they will fall victim to the very fire his engine should have doused. Joachim bends down to the little boy.

“My name is Joachim. Joachim Kaiser. I’m a lawyer. Twenty-eight years old. My whole life I’ve been perfectly average. I was trained to be that way by society. Always eager to do what was asked of me. Just don’t stand out, that was the accepted slogan, and we all did our best to live up to it.”

For a few seconds all is quiet. The boy looks, concentrating, somewhat perplexed, at Joachim. The lawyer, on the other hand, sees before him a long looked-for and understanding interlocutor. In answer to his nonverbal question, the boy motions for Joachim to sit.

“Have you made the acquaintance of Society, my little friend?”

The boy gives the question some thought, but finds no apparent sense in it. The grown-up, though, is undeterred.

“Actually, it’s really very charming. I got to know it as a child. Society guided my family. It showed me what morals are, and ethics. I was perfectly average… and not just me, but my whole generation… we were educated by Society. Very few missed out on the pleasure of that education. And they’re the ones we build prisons for. Jail. It’s not permissible, in a civil society, to let certain individuals go on opposing the views of the majority. Do you understand?”

He does not. How could he. No one understands it. He doesn’t normally talk like this, Joachim Kaiser, but no one understands him today. In the meantime a small throng has accumulated around the boy and the lawyer, who face each other, still cross-legged. At every pause the boy takes up his game with the fire engine again, firstly because the talking has gone on so long, and secondly, it really is about time he saved those people from the burning house. Lawyers aren’t necessary, but fire trucks… well. Joachim notices, or maybe not; in any case he doesn’t lose his footing.

“‘What’s the meaning of life,’ I asked Society once. It answered with speed and certainty: ‘The meaning of life is to be a good student, to earn your diploma, find yourself a well-respected position, earn money, and start a family.’ Naïve as I was, I believed it back then. I could hardly wait to get to university.”

Now Joachim rises and turns, so he can address himself not just to the boy, but to the curious onlookers all around him.

“Naturally it was out of the question that I study theater, philosophy, or any of the humanities. I could improve Society’s opinion of me only in business or law or medicine, with their practical qualifications. So I studied law, and now I have a job at a well-respected firm. Such a career demands that I give my all, and use all of my knowledge, each and every day. I have Society to thank for my understanding of law and morality.”

Joachim loosens his tie. His cup is empty, so he tosses it into the nearby trash can, which draws some murmurs from the crowd, but nothing more. All stand at attention, waiting for him to go on.

“Yes—yes, justice and morals. I had nothing else in my life. I had no need for anything else. Society lays out the rules for us to follow. Rules for how to act. Rules we grow up with but never speak aloud, just like we don’t chat at the urinal. Anyone who does so might as well be drunk; certainly they’re annoying. And we wouldn’t want to be annoying, would we?”

This whole scenario on the little square has begun to evolve slowly toward further absurdity: the lawyer Joachim Kaiser stands there like a preacher at the center, tense and interested listeners all around him, and now he’s talking about urinals. A few grin, but wherefore? Because of the scene? Have they really understood it? Or was it just the bathroom analogy?

“Society doesn’t want us to annoy. Such unspoken rules crop up all the time. People who take the bus every day, they know these rules of conduct well. What happens, for example, when a person gets on who you recognize. He comes on through the front door of the bus, you know him only by sight, that’s all. Then he comes right up to you. What should you do? Should you stare vacantly out the window, like you haven’t even noticed him? Ridiculous, since you’ve already made eye contact. In which case you’re practically obliged to say ‘Hello.’ And then… what if you do and he gives you the cold shoulder? You look like a dope. So you wait, see what he does, do the same. That’s how it works in Society. Mostly we hesitate—too late!—and ignore each other. Why didn’t he say hello? What a jerk! You didn’t say hello, but you were ready to if he did, but he didn’t, so neither did you, but you would have, in his position.”

The crowd on the little square is larger now, and quieter. Some feel moved, though without quite knowing why. But hardly anyone knows in what spirit to take these words. Glances shift from right to left and back again with increasing haste. Just to monitor how the others might be taking it all.

“Society is a mother to almost all the children of my generation. According to the moral system I grew up with, then, you’d have to call it a whore. That’s it—Society is a whore.”

A few now suffer a loss of confidence, but nobody speaks, since it remains to be seen whether this heretic might indeed be right. But Joachim is sure. He knows that he’s right, though he gains nothing by it. Being right is nothing more than a status symbol; it can’t be shared.

“Law and morals. Together they fashion man to fit the dictatorship to which Society subjects the individual. Did I say dictatorship? Yes, that’s just the word. Society is a dictatorship over unsuspecting men, it tells them how to act and how to live. Man has, as it were, only two options: either he accepts the drug called ‘Society’ as though all he desires is exactly what Society has to offer him; or he takes the other option, he rejects the drug and accepts a life on the margins of Society, which will censure and even sentence him for his decision. Justice, and also religion, founded the dictatorship. Justice, because laws make social mores into general rules. That’s how the views of Society bind everyone, whether or not they’re a part of it. Those individuals blessed with views or talents that don’t accord with Society are held in contempt. Religion, too, must be held accountable. Not for tempting Society to eat from the tree of false knowledge, but because in her naïveté she fell victim to abuse by institutions like the Church. So that the Church has managed to keep the morals of Society rigid, right down to the present day.”

Joachim Kaiser now has the undivided attention of this small town’s citizens. From time to time, a head shakes in the crowd, indicating disagreement, but then again it’s likely that more agree than don’t. Joachim is enjoying the performance, his big day. Enjoying his consternation, which he throws off like a mountain shedding sheets of snow in an avalanche. He removes his jacket, his shoes, socks, and trousers, and throws them, to the astonishment of all present, on the ground. He no longer cares to wear them. Plenty of people look terrible without their trousers, socks, shoes, and jacket on, wearing, in other words, only their shirt, tie, and underpants. Joachim Kaiser does, too. But he doesn’t mind, since he now thinks that only idiots would mind. The boy, still sitting there, watching the show, suddenly giggles out loud. It is not the giggling of ridicule, but the innocent giggling of a child pleased by a prank that had been successful beyond his expectations.

“We must strip off the ties by which Society binds us. That’s an order, ladies and gentlemen! You may think to yourself, oh but Society is a swell thing. Why free yourself when we all stand to benefit? Intoxicants, it just so happens, have the effect of increasing one’s momentary sense of well-being. And why, may I ask, has this ‘swell Society’ banned drugs?”

He himself can’t really say. Well, drugs are bad. They wreak havoc upon body and mind. That’s why they’re illegal. This is confirmed by several voices.

“You might argue, and rightly, that such substances are addictive, they are harmful, both psychologically and physically. But Society? Who among you could claim not to be addicted to Society and its morals? Hobbled, even, by its social mores! I wouldn’t believe anyone here who says he’s remained untouched. Because in that case you wouldn’t stand around here conforming. You’d be like me, half-naked, on this little square, in this little town, in this little country, running around and saying just whatever came into your head without thinking. But I know I can’t ask that of you. Because if you did something like that, what would everyone think?”

He pulls off his tie and shirt and throws them into the garbage can. Now he has nothing on but his underwear. He touches the cotton fabric and thinks a moment. No, he won’t do it. He doesn’t quite dare. The bystanders know their own minds, but no matter, they want to see what he does, and above all, if he’ll really do it.

“Starting now I will call myself a refugee. I’d like to live. Really to lead the life I would have had without Society: run to India barefoot, dance naked on the Champs-Élysées, tear up train tracks, smoke weed on an airplane, be Napoleon.”

He laughs and enumerates the other feats he’d like to carry off. Now a man steps forward from the fifth or sixth row, where he’d been listening. It’s Julius. Joachim’s colleague in the small town’s well-respected law firm and beyond.

“Joachim? What are you doing here? We’ve been getting worried about you. Shouldn’t you have been back at work hours ago?”

“Leave me alone, Julius. I’m not coming back.”

“What’s that, Joachim? Why don’t we forget the whole thing and you come along with me.”

“Don’t you see that you’re one of them?”

Julius thinks about it. Joachim wants to tell him something, apparently, but Julius doesn’t understand what he means.

“One of who? Joachim, what are you talking about? And why are you practically naked?”

“Because I don’t care anymore what your sort thinks of me. I’ve spent long enough in your little club and I’ve played along with your game. But now I want to do what I want with my life, whatever I feel like.”

“Joachim, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t, because you haven’t perceived the game.”

“What game?”

“You’re a puppet of Society. Can’t you see that?”

“Cut this out. There’s no such thing as ‘being a puppet of society.’ Society is nothing but a social construct that eases the task of collective living.”

“Society is a cult. Yes, that’s right. And you’re one of them.”

“Don’t make a complete fool of yourself, Joachim.”

Julius stands very close to Joachim and tries to placate him. Joachim, though, goes dancing around Julius, and mimics him, and won’t be reasoned with. He laughs, apes Joachim’s movements, and produces indefinable noises.

“You’re one of them. You’re so good about doing your job. You’ve got a wife, and a family, and on Sunday you go off to Church, just like you should. Now tell me: Why do you do all that? Because you really want to? Or because Society has you completely conditioned?”

Julius is at a loss. He’s lost his connection to Joachim. And Joachim, in turn, has lost his connection to Reality.

“What are you getting at, Joachim? Of course there are days when I don’t feel like going to work. But all things considered, I’m satisfied with my life.”

“That’s not what I mean. Is the content of your life what you want it to be?”

“Yes, I think it is.”

“Wrong!”

“Wrong?”

“Wrong! You only think it’s what you want it to be, but really you have no free will at all. Your actions and your will are determined by Society. The only escape is to break free altogether.”

“We’re born into society. It’s not something you can just undo.”

“Not just like that, maybe, but it’s possible.”

Julius doesn’t know exactly how to handle this talk with Joachim. You can’t force someone to understand. It’s just not that simple.

“I don’t believe in the predetermination of my life by society. I feel like I’m a free individual.”

Joachim laughs. Julius has stepped into a trap he seems not to have recognized.

“Because Society wants you to feel that way. Everyone feels like a free individual, but tell me—really—is that so unique?”

Joachim pulls off his underpants and throws them in the trash, cheered by the looks on the bystanders’ faces. A few think it’s funny. Others are outraged. Julius most of all, because it’s up to him to deal with Joachim. What’s more, he is now visibly uncomfortable in his role, and wishes he’d never gotten involved. But it’s too late for that.

“Joachim! Pull yourself together. You can’t do this, just running around naked.”

“Oh yes I can. I can and Society can kiss my ass. Not my ass with powder and pants on it, but my bare-naked ass, shitty and hairy and tooting at all of you.”

“Joachim, I’m sorry—I can’t condone this.”

Julius goes running off. A middle-aged woman fights her way through the crowd and pulls the boy from the circle that’s formed there. Disappointed, he allows himself to be dragged off. For him it was an outstanding show, a rare sight on the little square, in the little town. Joachim, visibly moved by the departure of his former friend Julius, turns naked to the crowd and begins his victory speech.

“Julius can’t take it: he can’t take freedom. Hardly anyone can. But even if they come and get me, even if they lock me up, even then I’ll still be freer than all of you.”

Joachim runs in a circle, whoops, giggles, enjoys the attention of the embarrassed onlookers, whose interest has yielded to disgust. Who should be the one to pull the plug? More and more embarrassed glances cast about for the hero who has yet to arrive. No one wants to be the hero. But the catastrophe is stopped midstream by Julius, returning in the company of two policemen. Julius indicates Joachim, still shrieking, spewing more testimony in favor of freedom. The policemen take hold of him and lead him away. Julius turns and faces the throng.

“His name was Joachim. Joachim Kaiser. He was a lawyer. Twenty-eight years old. His whole life he was perfectly average. He was trained to be that way by society. Always eager to do what was asked of him. Just don’t stand out, that was the accepted slogan, something to live up to.”

At the pauses in his speech he gathers the items of Joachim’s clothing scattered on the ground.

“Joachim never understood that one can be happy and know society is a cult. Even conscious of that fact—one can enjoy the advantages of society. Do I believe society has predetermined my desires? Perhaps, but as long as it’s possible to call oneself free, I don’t really care.”

Mumbled agreement. Still, this scene with its average lawyer has made an impression. The people have been made to think. Even Julius is no longer so certain. He tosses a lit match, and the pile of clothing springs up into cheerful flames.

The next morning, the front page of the small town’s small-time newspaper carries the story of a little boy who used his toy truck to rescue imaginary people from the blaze of an imaginary house fire.

[SPAIN: BASQUE] BERNARDO ATXAGA Pirpo and Chanberlán, Murderers

Neither of them knew what “carte blanche” meant, but if, during the Spanish Civil War, someone had bothered to explain it to them, they would both have replied in unison: “That’s us! That’s what we’ve been given!” And they wouldn’t have been far wrong. These two friends— famous for their robberies and for the raids they used to make on village fiestas, picking up villagers in a truck and carrying them off to the city’s brothels—were capable of killing a person purely on the say-so of some Don or Doña. In fact, they killed as many people as they could, because they were murderers and because there was always someone to give them a good reason for murdering.

Pirpo had the slender build of a dancer. Chanberlán looked more like a lion-tamer. Whenever they chanced upon some hapless clown, the three of them formed a charming circus act, whose motto was: “One performance only. See it and never live to tell the tale.” It was said that among those who had attended such a performance were Portaburu, a farm-worker from Obaba kidnapped in San Sebastián, and Goena Senior and Junior, killed in Obaba itself, near the house where they lived. It was also said that when Chanberlán shot them in the head, Pirpo had been only a few feet away practicing the steps of a waltz.

However, after 1940, it suited the Dons and the Doñas to act with more discretion. By then, Pirpo and Chanberlán’s circus had become old hat; they had put on one performance too many, and, besides, their act, it seemed, did not go down very well in other countries. “We’ve had enough of dances and tricks with lions,” said the Dons and the Doñas. “Now it’s the turn of the courts; mind you, they put on a pretty good show as well.” From then onward, Pirpo and Chanberlán’s situation changed considerably, and they began to feel rather worried, as if they had lost something. “We’ve lost our carte blanche,” Pirpo tried to say to Chanberlán one day, but, since he did not know the expression, he had to keep quiet, and the worm—that sense of unease—remained inside him. For a while, he even lost the desire to dance.

Pirpo loved champagne and dining on lobster and crayfish and on seafood in general at tables adorned with linen cloths; Chanberlán, on the other hand, spent most of his money in dimly lit clubs and brothels. Women did not, as they did with Pirpo, succumb to him because of his pretty face. Because there was nothing pretty about it.

In this new situation, a shortage of funds soon became a serious problem. They had no talent for business, whether underhand or aboveboard; they had no training or experience, and so could not take up respectable posts in government enterprises; they found it hard to imagine themselves working in a tobacconist’s or driving a taxi and unhesitatingly rejected the offer of such employment from one of their former sponsors.

They resumed their circus act and took up smuggling Portuguese emigrants into France. They would collect ten or twelve of them on the Spanish-Portuguese border, usually in the Salamanca region, and having stowed them away in a truck and driven them as far as the Pyrenees, would drop them off while they were still on the Spanish side, in the valleys of Ansó or Hecho. “This is France,” they would tell them. “Just follow that road and in a couple of hours you’ll reach the town of Tarbes.” Two hours later, the Portuguese would find themselves instead in a Spanish police station, and three days later, they would be back in Portugal, in Trás-os-Montes or the Alentejo. Back where they started, but minus their money.

Occasionally, there would be some hitches in the performance, and the Portuguese emigrants would give voice to doubts, would protest or else demand proof that they really were in France. Pirpo— for he was the more communicative of the two—protested as much or more than they did and bemoaned their lack of trust. Then he would turn to Chanberlán. “If you don’t believe me, ask him,” he would tell the emigrants. And when they saw the gun in the hand of that man who looked like a lion-tamer, not only would they stop complaining, they would lower their eyes and apologize.

Time passed and 1944 arrived, and Pirpo began to grow bored and to miss the old days when, without any need for all this hassle, fortune had smiled on them, and they had enjoyed comfort and wealth and the freedom to do as they pleased—“carte blanche,” he would have said, had he known the expression. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life travelling from Portugal to the Pyrenees and from the Pyrenees to Portugal. They had to do something. Otherwise, they would have no option but to close the circus down. But if they did that, how would they pay for the champagne, the crayfish, and the lobster? How would Chanberlán pay for the love of women?

Then, out of the blue, one of the Dons or Doñas sent them a message. An elderly couple in France, in Lourdes to be precise, were in need of a guide. They wanted to cross the Pyrenees into Spain as soon as possible and would pay handsomely for any help they were given. As soon as he got this message, Pirpo began to dance: he had a good feeling about this new job. A day and a half later, when he went to Lourdes and learned more details, he not only danced, he skipped and sang. If he could, he would have leapt into the air and flown.

In the dingy hotel at which they were staying in the holy city, he set out the details to Chanberlán: “Do you know what they call this old man who wants to cross into Spain? Le Roi du Champagne! The King of Champagne! And he’s loaded. If what his maid told me is true, they’ll be traveling with a suitcase stuffed with jewels and money…”

Chanberlán did not like to be rushed. “If he’s so rich, why does he want to escape from France?” he asked. Pirpo explained that France was now in the hands of a general called De Gaulle, and that the King of Champagne had collaborated with the Nazis and with Pétain, De Gaulle’s enemy, and that his collaboration could now mean him facing either the gallows or a firing squad. “And how come the maid told you about the suitcase?” Chanberlán wanted to know. “Because she liked my face,” replied Pirpo, executing a few waltz steps. Chanberlán shrugged. It was always the same with women. Him they asked for money, but they happily gave it to Pirpo or else told him where to find it. “Oh, great! It’s snowing!” exclaimed Pirpo, looking out of the window. “What do you expect, it’s the end of November!” said Chanberlán grumpily. “But you do see what good news it is, don’t you?” Pirpo said. “Of course I do. We take the suitcase off them and then we kill them.” They had worked together in their circus for a long time and knew each other intimately.

Pirpo thought deeply and that night—the night before they were due to set off—he was worried. They had to take the suitcase from the old couple and kill them, but how? He was aware of the situation they were in: it wasn’t 1936 or 1937, it wasn’t even 1938, 1939 or 1940, and they lacked something that had been most useful to them during the war, something he could not quite define. Anyway, the fact was that they could not kill as they had in the old days. Still less someone as important as the King of Champagne.

When it grew light, he got out of bed and went over to the window. It was still snowing. And the snow was getting heavier and heavier. All the paths in the Pyrenees would be blocked, impassable. He suddenly launched into a very merry dance and went bounding over to the room where Chanberlán was sleeping. “Eureka!” he would have cried had he known the expression, but, as with “carte blanche,” he did not, and so had to make do with ordinary words. “I’ve got a plan!” he said to his companion. Chanberlán was still half-asleep and didn’t want to waste his time on silly stories. “So have I!” he retorted angrily. “We whack them over the head with a stone and that will be that!” “Listen to me, you idiot!” said Pirpo, grabbing his arm and shaking him. “Don’t push your luck, Pirpo!” warned Chanberlán, opening his eyes, and Pirpo immediately apologized for calling him an idiot. He and Chanberlán may have worked for years together in their circus, but Chanberlán’s eyes still frightened him.

Pirpo’s idea was an excellent one and very easy to carry out. They would set off into the snowy mountains and would lead the King of Champagne and his wife along the wrong path. “Oh, sorry, this isn’t the right way,” they would say after a couple of hours, when they had already walked a fair distance. “It’s easy to get lost in weather like this. We’ll have to turn back.” And so they would turn back and take another path. And once more: “We’ve got lost again.” And off along another path and another few hours in the snow, uphill. Frozen and drenched. And once more: “Oh, no, this is the third time we’ve gone wrong!” “I’ve seen them, Chanberlán,” explained Pirpo. “They must be getting on for seventy. Eight or ten hours of walking in the snow will do our work for us. They’ll die of exhaustion.” “But why the big performance? Why don’t we just bump ’em off as soon as we’re out of Lourdes?” insisted Chanberlán. “They’re French. They’ve got money. If we kill them ourselves, someone might come asking questions. And in France we have no protection.” He didn’t use the expression “carte blanche,” but he came very close.

Two months later, toward the end of January 1945, the two friends, quite untroubled, were making the journey to Paris. They were accompanied by the police, but this fact did not bother them. Chanberlán was annoyed—“right fools we were, fancy not killing the maid first”—but he wasn’t worried. And Pirpo could see no reason to feel alarmed either. “We didn’t do anything,” he said. “It was the cold and the mountains that did it.” Later, when the jury found that the slow, calculated way in which they had killed the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been particularly cruel, and sentenced Pirpo and Chanberlán to life imprisonment, the two friends were most surprised, especially Pirpo. “I don’t know why you find it so odd,” the judge said to him. “Did you think you had carte blanche to murder?” Pirpo said nothing, but, along with his anxiety about the sentence passed down, he felt a kind of relief. He had finally found the expression he had been looking for all this time. He would never forget it.

Chanberlán died four years later in a Martinique jail during a brawl among prisoners. It was another fourteen years before Pirpo could rejoin his circle of friends. Some Dons and Doñas did not hesitate to welcome him back into the family, since, after all, despite certain shared political sensibilities, the Roi du Champagne and his wife had been foreigners, not Spaniards. Besides, these were difficult times, and it was always good to have a loyal servant like Pirpo on hand. Strikes were becoming ever more frequent and the enemies of the political regime ever bolder. Pirpo, however, had grown wary. He would not commit himself so easily again. He had learned his lesson. Before doing anything, he would demand to be given the carte blanche that had saved him so much bother in 1936 and in the three or four years that followed.

TRANSLATED FROM BASQUE BY MARGARET JULL COSTA, IN COLLABORATION WITH THE AUTHOR

[SERBIA] BORIVOJE ADAŠEVIĆ For a Foreign Master

One morning the postman brought me an unusual letter. Mutatis mutandis, this was it:

Dear friend, don’t be angry with me for addressing you like this even though we have hardly ever spoken, I am obliged to do so for the sake of the truth. Here, in Sent Andreja, I am holding your book again, having read it the dear lord knows how many times, and I can’t get over my astonishment that you should still be there, looking for heaven knows what in that crazy country! What sort of trouble drives you to stay sitting in a town that does not know you, nor will it ever know you, writing for a country that isn’t even sure it can look without envy at the most ordinary scribbler, let alone a serious man and writer of conscience! That’s Serbia, my friend, Serbia, and it has always lured the devil, and the devil never refuses to come for its own kind. From the moment I took your book in my hands—it was given to me by my friend Kaplan Refika, an Albanian from Belgrade who lives with his family in a Budapest B&B—from that moment I knew that I would always consider you a friend, no matter how hard it would be for you to bear that. My name is Milan Almaši. I’m exactly four years older than you, and when I decided to leave Serbia for good, I had behind me a university degree, a first, second, and third war, and a good fifteen months of work experience as a teacher in school, I left all that behind me, I don’t myself know how. Those years of hunger in Belgrade, when I was a student, that poverty which shackled me like ancient prison chains, then arrests, demonstrations, call-up papers, someone knocking the barrel of a pistol on my door in the small hours—all that comes back to me now in nightmares, persecuting me, the evil stamp of the past, like a darkness that wants to gnaw through my eye. You think it’s happening to someone else, surely it’s all happening at a great remove, people like you have always distanced themselves from everyone. That comes from sensitivity, a person simply has to protect himself, to protect his jangled nerves, and I understand that. But I tell you, when it comes to people like you and me, we all share one destiny. The only differences are in the paths that lead to the crushing realizations that drive us mercilessly to something like this, drive us into exile. For years before I fled, I hadn’t wanted to hear about so much as setting foot out of my town, not even out of my street, I’d never even allowed anyone to embark on any story of any length on that topic, but in the end I fled headlong, running as fast as my legs would carry me, tripping over the splinters of our lives. Now, when I look back, I see only the very end of the string that was long ago wound into a ball and which I intend to unwind, but not now, now I will dwell only on some of the main events of my life, which I have enough courage to call appalling. You have to measure the depth of a person’s experience not only by the sum of whatever’s been survived, but also by the degree of sensitivity possessed by the survivor…

But I don’t want to drag things out unnecessarily. I left Serbia two months after the end of the 1999 war. It was August, it was terribly hot. I was taking my wife and children, Stefan and Sofija, on a rather risky journey, but it was our journey and we accepted it, wholeheartedly, as such. Had our departure been like the departures of others at that time, I would be very happy, and now I’d be able to write to you about anything other than that, and I’d be more cheerful for sure—but it was not. Our departure was preceded by certain events, which affected you too, as well as all other honorable people in our country, but there were also events that affected only my family and myself, and which were in fact the straw that broke the camel’s back, such as it was. At the beginning of everything, like an epic preamble, stands an honorable obelisk erected in all our names to the memory of Lazar and Kosovo—much abused, and therefore now tilting, but propped up by the threadbare platitudes of many stale national bards. Throughout the country, joy in honor of the bloodletting grew, students in Belgrade and other university centers were arrested, laws were routinely repealed. Then came the beginning of mobilization—real fear began to rise in people, first a little timidly, but later with increasing ferocity. Then came March and with it war, and on the second day my call-up papers arrived. What could I do? I went. Mother—and this is where she solemnly enters the story—wept. She burned my father’s shirt, as she was ironing it, while he and I said good-bye outside the front door.

I left late in the evening and reported for duty. The men around me were stressed, half-drunk, singing nonsense while snot poured into their mouths. On the radio an announcer was holding forth about the courage of the Serbian army, and one of us shat himself with fright when we heard rumbling over our heads. I made my way through the crowd to a telephone to call a relative who lived near the airport. He said: “They hit damn close last night, I was rigid with shock for ten minutes.” I could see at once where it was all headed. I didn’t know how long the demon would hang on and how many of us he would push into the abyss before his final end.

The process I want to tell you about began to develop in me roughly a week and a half after the beginning of our campaign. All of a sudden I began to feel hatred toward everyone. Or more exactly, hatred and disgust. A kind of muffled nausea, revulsion at all those creatures, that whole heap of rotten human material around me. I should say that, despite my degree from the Arts Faculty in Belgrade, I’ve always been hostile to our so-called elitists, and I still am today. Elitism in our country always taking the form of a not-particularly-modern version of snobbery and racism combined. But for a long time that hostility made me foster a kind of sympathy for the common people in our country, who seemed to me to have been almost entirely innocent in all the tragedies that we had experienced throughout our history, everything that pulled us apart as a people and scattered us around the world. Indeed, I cultivated a kind of contempt and even a mild sneer of revulsion toward the Serbian intelligentsia, xenophobic philistines, conceited and bigoted from the outset—the kind of sneer one cultivates toward the particularly stupid and vain. I thought—rightly, I believed—that the ordinary person on the one hand and the pseudointellectual on the other were unbridgeably dissimilar, as though they hadn’t sprung from the same roots but had perhaps, one or other of them, landed on our soil from somewhere else, was entirely alien to it. But, some time around my induction, I realized that I had been seriously mistaken. Not only had both parties sprung from the same roots, they were the same people, in no way different—except, perhaps, in the number of years they had spent at school, but even there the disparity was often minimal. Something fundamentally at variance, a complete rift had now been established between them and me, and there was no longer any prospect of reconciliation. Now I looked at these people, ordinary, conceited, and uncontrollable, realizing at a certain moment that everything—the story I listened to every day on the radio or television and the one I listened to in the streets and the suburbs, dressed in my army uniform—had merged, to form one picture, one single, ugly figure. Our whole multicolored country was becoming for me a kind of Ireland in the eyes of an Irishman leaving it forever, it was becoming the old sow that eats her farrow and which had opened its hideous jaws, determined no doubt to finish us off. But enough of that. What’s important is what was happening in me, that definitive rupture with the Fatherland, however painful I found it. And when a person steps into the next stage of his destiny, there is no way back to the last.

When a person finds himself in a state such as mine, everything around him takes on a different aspect: people seem to laugh differently, walk differently, react to you differently, and you, for that matter, react differently to them. In a word, the world and the people who walk in it appear hostile to you. I would like it not to be so, but that’s how it is and now I don’t know what I can do about it, apart from describe it. Somehow, I say, everything changes, which means that even the landscape around you seems to change as well. In keeping with all that hatred and that disgust, my life had in store for me an event that would contribute to the further development of those fundamentally negative feelings, which are more a reflection of a man’s inherent weakness than the consequence of any repressive social system. Here, with the aforementioned event, I am already nearing the end of my story, because after it things moved quickly, leading right to our exile. Briefly, this is what happened:

The machinery of war had not really gotten going yet when about ten soldiers moved into my parents’ house. It had become the custom at that time for the army to take shelter in private houses, while their owners put up with this honor without a word. Well, those ten of ours were the most utterly vile individuals imaginable, and drunkards to boot, so the house resounded with banging and crashing all day long. None of my family had ever been particularly quick to anger— they were always mild people. My father, but particularly my mother, put up with various insults at first—admittedly, still on the edge of the tolerable, but eventually developing into something really unpleasant. Up until the moment that I’m about to describe to you, right up to that moment—or, more exactly, right up to the third day after it—I knew almost nothing about what was going on in that house. I too had been mobilized and billeted in someone else’s house, and I considered it my duty to endure that burden silently as well, although the knowledge that soldiers were occupying my parental home was never far from my thoughts… (I even carried the key to the locked room in which I still kept most of my books and other personal effects, with me, just in case some stranger found his way in there.) It turned out that those soldiers did whatever they liked. They turned the house into a real pigsty. A certain Brekalović particularly excelled at this—a true alcoholic with a pale, drawn, ghostly face. Only the thin, blue veins on his nose disturbed the eerie pallor of it. He was particularly talented, I say. And he had several serious quarrels with my folks. You can imagine, I suppose, that they were about politics. He didn’t fail to mention, during every argument— for he had presumably heard me talking during one of my visits home—that their son, despite being in the army, was a traitor to his nation. Brekalović wanted, also, in the name of said nation, for my room to be unlocked so that he could personally see what I was hiding in it and what kind of books, if you please, the philosopher reads. Mother demanded that Brekalović leave the house. God only knows all the things she’d already learned about Brekalović—but, in any case, she didn’t dare share any of this with father and me. One evening, finally, that loathsome figure from our nightmare life broke down the locked door of my room and found himself among my things, among the books and papers of my philosophical work and essay-writing. He stood, the obscurantist, in the middle of the room with Kadare’s The Castle in his hands, God knows how he managed to hit on that, of all things, among all the works by Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, or Hegel… The author’s name was probably just what he was looking for—Albanian—for, at the height of the war and its atrocities, he was looking for a straw to cling to, and then… do what he did. Seeing him there, my mother screamed, and my father wasn’t at home just then, and I don’t think that I’ll ever forgive him for that. “Bitch, you spawned one treacherous bastard!” hissed Brekalović before he set about raping my forty-nine-year-old mother, who, apart from anything else in her life, had married her very first boyfriend, I mean the man who later became my father.

I stopped by three days after Brekalović’s crime and found the house in silence. The soldiers had left, and my mother was sitting hunched up on her bed with a pillow clutched to her stomach. My father, broken. He was crouching in the corner of the room. Silent. Hardly fifteen minutes passed from the moment I heard what had happened till I found Brekalović in front of a nearby bar, led straight to him by some animal instinct. I beat him senseless. His injuries were severe enough that he will never be able to walk normally again, and the four months he spent in hospital are a testament to what happened that afternoon. I admit, I was wholly out of control, there was no voice of reason left in my consciousness then to point out the barbarity of my action. I’m writing this to you today, God help me, to report that a sentence kept resounding in me that day, as in an empty church, a simple, harsh sentence, as though read in some cheap novelette: “So you thought you could fuck an old woman and not pay for it, did you? Well, guess again!” And, over and over again, that sentence filled me, completely, with hatred. I had avenged my mother, and remained just aware enough not to take my action to its ultimate end. I left Brekalović alive and later I told the police and the judge the truth, down to the last word. What happened then, however, simply confirmed some of the attitudes I’ve already expressed over the course of this letter, I mean about our people and our country. It turned out that Brekalović was related to the dean of the school where I taught. There followed pressure, telephone calls. Soon I was summoned to have a “talk” with my superior. Briefly, I was told that if I did not withdraw my accusation of rape, I would lose my job. Which would be fatal for my family and myself—or so I was told. After all, I no longer lived in my parents’ house, which meant that I could hardly know what went on there in every detail. If I retracted my claim, they would, they said, for their part, do what they could. (In the office at that moment, I should say, in addition to the dean and myself, was Brekalović’s lawyer.) I repeat, they would, for their part, do what they could. As though it was I who had raped Brekalović’s mother, as though my mother had not been so viciously, cruelly humiliated! We did not withdraw the accusation. But now, thanks to you won’t believe what pressures, here we are, my wife, my children, and I, in Szentendre, outside that country—although, I have to say, not far enough away from those people there. At a certain moment my mother demanded that we go, because the threats and blackmail could no longer be borne. The judicial process is still going on and will continue to go on, no doubt, for a while longer yet. As long as it takes, I hope, for Brekalović to see the inside of a prison. And then, of course, I know that one day he will get out of jail. As though nothing had happened, he’ll stroll along to the first bar for a double brandy, he’ll knock it back, maybe pinch the waitress’s behind, or tell some drunk that he’d done time just because he humped some traitor’s mother. That his beloved country had punished an innocent man; that it was he, in fact, who was the victim and not that stinking old whore who could have given him a nasty disease. But there we are! Everyone gets what he deserves. He’ll go to prison, while I’m already in exile. Voluntary or not—that’s a different question. Besides, I am not myself blameless as regards the country in which I spent virtually all my life up to now.

Incidentally, it’s nice here. This “little bit of Serbia” is extraordinarily good for my nerves, and it seems to me that, although there aren’t many of them, the Serbs here live quite differently from those there. Or perhaps I should say “you there”?

Tomorrow we’ll be getting money from Stockholm: a relative is sending us German marks to buy supplies for the coming three months, which I believe is as long as it will take for us to get Swedish immigrant visas for my family and myself. Refika brought me your collection of stories and one dreadfully bad volume of poems, translated into Serbian, by one of his countrymen, which I intend to throw in the trash. He laughs, the bum, and says, pointing at the book of poems: “Read one every night, before you go to sleep.” “All right,” I say, putting it aside. And he falls onto the bed, roaring with laughter. He told me I was a “Serbian cultural racist.” Once in a while, I do feel better. We were right to leave Serbia, because of the children, because of my wife, because of my mother. That’s how it is in a foreign land, my friend. Here, my hand writes of its own accord: “Waging war, shedding blood for a foreign master…”