Best European Fiction 2013

[SLOVENIA] MIRANA LIKAR BAJŽELJ Nada’s Tablecloth

Fucking complicated, you think to yourself, as you walk along the smooth, slippery, shining surface and beneath your thin leather soles feel every joint between the paving stones. You’re afraid that you will get tangled up in this dress, to which you are not accustomed. If you do, that will be a sign, and if you do not, likewise; the whole street is somehow bulging, because of fear, rainwater, or time, certainly because of something. A few months ago you would have described this moment with the word paradoxical; now that word, along with several others, is stuck somewhere behind you, somewhere in time. Tell me which words you use and I’ll tell you with whom you spend time and what you are. You can still change your mind, in spite of the fact that the world has been speeding up from month to month, from week to week, from day to day; today it’s speeding up from hour to hour, and that’s all you can think of, that there’s no time left, and of how everything is so fucking complicated.

In front of you is the red, white, and blue flag with the checkerboard, probably there’s also one somewhere at the back, not to mention those left behind in the parked cars; around the flag are hired musicians who sing of the beauties of our homeland and about the beautiful Dalmatia that they will defend with their last drop of blood; everyone is singing along, Goran is walking beside you and behind you are a whole lot of people. All your folk from back home are here and you know exactly what they’re thinking, that this isn’t our kind of climate, it’s too hot. They’re mixed in with Goran’s people, brown, green, and washed-out pastel shades among black, blue, and colorful modern; your folk aren’t used to being away from home, the most elegant colors for them are brown and moss green, they’re not made for these hot white stones on this hot Saturday afternoon, but for you they’d do anything and what our Nuša does is always right. You don’t even know that at the pub your father is known as OurNuša because he begins every sentence with your name. OurNuša, he says, adjusting his glasses. Goran’s people are also dressed up. The men in elegant suits, on their feet sharp Italian shoes but no socks. This is another reason for that pain in your diaphragm. What kind of world is it where men dressed for a special occasion are not wearing socks? What’s wrong with them?

You go along the seafront, there’s a smell of salt in the air, mixed with a smell of oil and, come on, let’s admit it, a smell of sewage. On your right yachts are moored, flags hang in the still air like limp rags: the foreigners on deck watch and size you up. A small man on an Italian yacht stretches to take a picture of the men. You are somehow floating but you notice all this, your eyes take in all this confusion. You see yourself walking on the centuries-old stones, you know you’re hot, you’re afraid that something isn’t quite right, you also see the camera in the Italian’s small brown hand. It’s possible that as early as the autumn some male models with icy, imbecilic looks will be stalking down the catwalk without socks, a nice trick, skin against skin, he’ll be dreaming about these tall Dalmatian men, flags, this scene. In memory of this summer day he’ll dress the models in shorts and raincoats, he’ll put a flag in their hands, your wedding will be frozen in the bizarre images of an upside-down world. Damn queers, Goran will say one day sitting in front of the television, and change the channel. But where will you be then?

Even last year you yourself would also have said they were good looking, these Dalmatian men, and they sing nationalist marches at weddings, interesting, and they have flags with them, which isn’t all that strange when you think how those madmen from the hills bombarded them… But last year is last year, while this year is this year and this is no longer just a bit of exotica for you to photograph and keep for a rainy day. Now those flags are above and below you, and the questions have only increased, they’re multiplying and getting under your feet, and it’s not the best time for questions to which you don’t have answers, although in reality you do, otherwise you wouldn’t feel so bad. Over a couple of days a whole arsenal of images has appeared, each bad in its own way, while the moment is approaching when all the questions will be combined into one and there will be only one answer.

Suddenly, for instance, you noticed Nada’s tablecloth, Nada and the kind of things she said… Goran wasn’t at home. Two days before the wedding and he hadn’t been home all night. He had said he was just popping out, that he’d be right back, and that right back had stretched until morning. His mobile phone stayed at home, you see, that’s what life with him is really like, and you sat with Nada in the kitchen waiting for him, quiet more than anything, strangers. You noticed that her tablecloth was plastic and worn and, come on, admit it, also dirty. It wasn’t as if you had never seen a plastic tablecloth before, it wasn’t that. It was that you would be living with Nada, Goran has already told you. And will you rip the tablecloth that has suited her all these years right off the table? That’s what your home will be like. Will such a home help make you a new homeland?

Nada was looking at you in despair; through the cigarette smoke you heard those words that threw a new light on everything. What can I say, she said, you know where he came from, and with disgust she gestured somewhere between her legs. Now you’re asking yourself if this is hereditary. From mother to son. Forever. Can it be fixed? What do you do with despair?

The most frightening thing about your own mother’s reaction was the hint in the words look here, plus the same desperate look, plus the same silence. Look here, she said to you, when you told her. Look here. Is this what you studied for? Is this what you worked so hard for? Your father won’t be able to bear it. He used to get up at night just to check that you were still breathing. Who’s going to give you a job there? And you hadn’t even told her the half of it. Now your mother and father are somewhere at the back asking themselves whether this is really happening, and what’s going to happen next.

Your mother is so afraid. Last year she showed you a holiday photo in which there were some female refuse collectors. Female refuse collectors seemed a safe and neutral theme; there are donkeys here, a cathedral damaged by shelling, but women on a garbage truck, yes, it’s terrible that in Dalmatia they have women refuse collectors. It seemed good that in your world at least that wasn’t the case. Nor was it the case that men came home in the morning, saying give me a glass of mineral water, dear, I drank a bit too much, and went to bed without another word, and you weren’t even allowed to ask them any questions because the answer was always the same. That’s what I’m like, you know what I’m like, so what now? Is the first pain not better than the last?

You told him immediately that you were pregnant; you could have waited and made your own decision, but you went charging in there regardless. Bam. Did you think he’d make the decision for you, or what? You know what his outlook on life is. What happens happens. It’s all the same to him. If you decide you should get married, then you will; if you decide differently, then you won’t. But if that’s what you decide, then you’ll live here with him and Nada, he’s not moving anywhere. He’s not exchanging a weekend lover for a weekend wife.

Very soon now you will enter the church, it’s still full of holes outside, they haven’t repaired that; you’re increasingly afraid, the nave is decorated with white tulle and white flowers, while you experience moments in which you’ve decided and moments in which you’ve changed your mind. Your life is now made up of these moments; quite a few of them have already built up, creating something that could even be called fate. Are you thinking of that architect? When you met him he had just gotten divorced. I knew, he told you, I knew it would end badly, even when I went to get married at the town hall. But I didn’t have the strength to stop the wedding, everyone dressed up to the nines, the presents bought, the apartment furnished. Everything would have been better if I’d followed my instincts. When you heard that you thought you would never let yourself be dragged that far, that you and your inner voice were one, and now look at you.

Even a year ago… The upper floor at your parents’ house to begin with, some colleague from the legal world who would be transformed overnight into an ideal lover and wonderful husband; on Saturdays you’d leave the kids with mother and go off on your own: skiing in the winter, Egypt in the summer; a billable hour of a lawyer’s time costs such and such and each day has so many working hours, multiplied by two… That’s why you went sailing with colleagues from work. To try to draw from the drabness of office life some kind of color picture, some kind of opportunity… which became null and void in that moment when, after seven days, somewhere in the middle of your intellectual love games, Goran crawled across your bed toward the space where the autopilot was kept. When it broke down you didn’t know that it was there in your cabin, at the end of the bed, behind a small door. The only one in the town who might be able to fix it is Nada’s Goran, they said in the marina when you told them how your holiday had been spoiled. But he’s hard to get, at this time of year he’s always at the Kornati Islands. Without any real hope you took the phone number.

You’ve got no instructions, you’ve got no circuit diagram, you’ve got no idea, he noted and swam across your sheets to look at the autopilot which had gone crazy so that the yacht went its own way regardless of what the men up on deck typed on their screen. They should have steered manually, but how can you do that and drink beer at the same time? Fucking useless, he decided, electronics are always fucking useless, without a diagram there’s only logic and give me a screwdriver. After two hours the sheets were wet with his sweat but he had fixed it. Logic won the day. So where has that day gone? And what about now? You have no instructions for yourself, you have no circuit diagram, you’re no longer thinking logically.

You gladly offered him a beer. He drank it without any particular enthusiasm for you all or for himself among you. He said he was heading for the Kornati, to sleep a bit in the shade, swim a bit, and maybe grill a fish, that’s all he was interested in. He played with the golden cigarette lighter over which your eyes first met and because of which you thought Leo, he’s a Leo. You should have fled then, but you couldn’t because after that look his tone of voice changed almost imperceptibly. When I was still going to maritime college small boats didn’t have these things, he told you, but two years ago I was sailing a boat for some rich guy where the system was even more complicated, but with logic you can sort everything out. When he was still a kid he had used logic to dismantle his moped and put it back together again. There were just two parts left which he didn’t know what to do with, but the moped went faster.

Rich guy, boat, logic… You were all eyes and ears. Yes, you all know the name of the famous person Goran was working for, so he won’t tell you who it was, only that it was really hard-earned dough, not that it was physically demanding, but the atmosphere was terrible because to that sort you’re always, regardless of what they pay you, just a second-class citizen. It’s hard to take if you have even an ounce of self-esteem and Goran, after all he’s experienced, has a great deal of self-esteem. What’s more, he had been responsible for the entire crew. When one day on Malta he was instructed to tell them to clean the grooves in the white soles of the shoes of the boss’s guests, which the ordinary sailors polished every morning in any case, he simply packed his bag and left. He doesn’t give a damn about money, when he can’t take something anymore he’s off. He’s a free man and no one is going to take that freedom away.

At that point you wanted only one thing, to lie with him on the Kornati Islands, just as freely. And now, at this moment? How much freedom do you still have? And you simply can’t tell anyone that the very same day you really did lay with him there. And after that there was no going back, not to the yacht, not to your old, nothing-special story, not to your life. When you lay with Goran you had to immediately take on the whole of him. He told you there and then that he would never do much more in his life than lie around like this, and now and then fix this or that fucked-up thing and get well fucking paid for it. He told you then, but it’s only these last few days that you’ve understood what he was actually telling you. That he had already seen all there was to see and that there was nothing more to see than what he was looking at now. He had volunteered to fight in the war and no rich faggot was going to tell him about life. He was in an outfit that hadn’t been mentioned in any military documents, there was nothing in his service record to show that he had fought in the war for his homeland. Officially, he had never had any contact with the Croatian army. They reported directly to the minister of the interior and the minister only passed on to his detachment a general order about what they should do and how. And they did. They did everything right. Every time. They thought that the homeland would be grateful, but the homeland had lost all their papers, if there had ever been any, and so it was that Goran and his comrades in arms preferred to look at the Kornati Islands and the calm sea, and so it was that little else interested them. A nonexistent unit, he said. When you asked him what they had done, he said everything. They’d done everything. Everything they believed they had to do. While other, ordinary folk had been refugees dependent on foreign aid, burning parquet flooring in the dark, Goran and his comrades from the detachment that didn’t exist had stayed in the most protected building around, with their own generator, their own fuel, good food, whisky, cigarettes, and everything else in abundance, as well as the most up-to-date weapons that had ever come to Croatia. Every comfort for those who did everything. Last year you still thought that Goran had piloted a Black Hawk in the Platoon that saved Private Ryan, you were in love, but now, girl, now you know what he meant by everything and what he meant by detachment, because you looked online, where it clearly states: a detachment is a special military unit or formation of indeterminate size made up of squads and companies set up to perform a specific task. In this case, everything. And now you somehow know that he didn’t charge around against a background of sound and light effects, he operated more in the dark, in silence. Since he cries out in his sleep it could be that above all else he crawled. But what did he have in his hands, then? They don’t make films about Goran’s everything. Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, you know that it isn’t all over yet, that the year he spent on a fishing boat immediately after the war to erase everything and then live normally erased nothing, because it can never be erased. Is this what you wanted? To spend your life with a man who drags with him something that cannot be erased? Who has no illusions? Who has already seen everything?

In front of the altar the priest awaits you. He’s learned some Slovenian words for the occasion, but who cares, you’re not marrying the priest, if you marry at all. You come back down to earth; now beneath your shoes there’s red coconut matting, the ceiling is high, that’s what cathedrals are for, to make people yearn for the heights, for the heavens. They are playing the wedding march and you’re still weighing your options. You stand on the right; on the benches behind you are your people and on the benches behind Goran, his, and they all know what’s going to happen, everyone does, apart from you. Near the ceiling a bird flies silently; the windows in the cupola, which seems to be sinking beneath the evening light, are open, and the bird too is seeking a way out. If you wrote that down somewhere no one would believe it, what a stale metaphor they would say, but the bird really is there and it really is seeking a way out. If it finds one, you think, if it finds one that will be a sign and you will say no, and try to salvage what can be salvaged. If it doesn’t, you’ll say yes and all the mothers in the church will cry, moved, and all the men outside the church will then shout she’s ours…

The priest is saying something, Goran is swaying almost imperceptibly, people are clearing their throats, flashes are flashing. When the priest asks you, Nuša, do you take… you forget to look at the bird and you say…

[DENMARK] CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT Camilla and the Horse

First we go into an expensive Italian restaurant across from the strip club and drink a bottle of wine to kill time, it soon becomes clear that the waiter is attracted to my husband, who’s getting older but is still hot-blooded. The waiter’s getting older too, he’s been photographed with both Sophia Loren and Helmut Kohl in this restaurant, and that arouses my husband’s interest. By now it must be nine o’clock, and we cut across the intersection to the opposite corner. We go in. I start by asking whether it’s okay for me to be there even though I’m a woman. I do that to ingratiate myself and make contact. It’s perfectly okay, and we’re also the only guests. The girl behind the bar is from Romania and strong with short hair. My husband thinks I’m good at making contact and taking things easy. You have to be careful not to praise me too much, because it really gets me going, and then I can cross the line and become totally unstoppable. There are so many hookers I can’t even tell you how many; we’re the only guests and weren’t planning on buying sex, I tell the bartender this several times. That’s perfectly okay too, we can just drink, three drinks are included in the price of admission, I take the strongest one and down it fast. Up on stage the show begins, a mulatto girl makes the expected movements and gestures with and around a pole until she’s naked. I think about the circus and great fatigue, wearying routines, because I’d rather not say “like a tired circus animal.” As soon as she’s leaving the stage she gets self-conscious, she bows her head and presses her costume against her stomach.

Meanwhile, at the bar: a woman has taken the stool beside me, another Romanian (from here on I’ll refer to her as my darling), I ask her if she’s familiar with Herta Müller, she asks for titles, I mention The Fox Was then Ahead of the Hunter, it’s not an easy title in German, not for me, with my German; her German isn’t so great either, she’s taking courses and claims she speaks German that’s 85% correct. I don’t know how to respond, “the modal auxiliaries, you know,” she says. Those I know. But then I realize that I’ve completely forgotten how articles and nouns are declined, and that nothing I’ve said has meant a thing. In effect I’ve spoken German that is 0% correct, so I switch to English. I’m sitting with my back to my husband, he’s very interested in hearing what we’re talking about, and once in a while I turn around and give him a summary. Then he nods and puts some additional questions. I ask my darling if she sends money home to her elderly parents, because you always read about that, but no, they didn’t help her, so why should she help them. “Is that a bit harsh?” my darling asks. It seems harsh to me. It seems that way even to my darling. Each time we slip my husband into the conversation, she treats him with great respect, he gets all the time he wants. This makes me jealous, I really want her full attention.

“Do you want to buy him,” I ask, “for 300 euros?”

She looks at him to see if he’s amused, and he is.

“Oh, that’s expensive, that’s expensive,” she says.

“He’s a little old, but he’s good,” I say, “he fucks like a stallion.”

“Ah, a stud-boy,” she says.

“Some boy,” I say.

“Prince Charles,” she says to him, and he likes that.

My husband leans back on his bar stool and laughs, my darling laughs, I laugh. It occurs to me that I’m using her time and I ask if she wants to be paid for talking to me.

“Nah, Camilla,” she says to me, “money, money, money isn’t everything.”

I make to hand her a bill and can clearly see she doesn’t think 50 euros is a whole lot, but the bill disappears into her clothing. She’s dark and could easily be a gypsy. Now my husband starts getting bored, he gets up and saunters over to a group of girls at a table, among them the Romanian bartender, who’s studying mathematics, she’s the one he’d like to chat with. He takes an interest in Romania’s standard of living, differences and similarities before and after Ceausescu. It makes me a bit insecure that my husband talks to other women; “Nun, mein Schatz,” says my darling, “let him do it anyway, that’s how it goes now and then, everyone needs to.” “Mmm.” Then I ask her if she has a boyfriend. Yes, but she doesn’t sound enthusiastic. I ask whether it’s hard to have a love relationship when you’re a prostitute. She takes a deep breath and says something about orgasms, she’s about to deliver a lecture on various types of orgasms, or the absence of orgasms, when some clients arrive, three short Chinese, and she has to run. I feel abandoned. She wraps herself around them. I get up and go over to my husband and the women at the round table.

“This’ll cost,” I say to him. “This is an expensive conversation you’re having.”

“No,” he says, “this is the staff table. And I’m talking to the bartender.”

“Trust me,” I say, “it’s going to cost. It’s like riding in four taxis at once.”

“Bull,” he says, “we’re talking about Romania.”

“Bull,” say the girls.

“Then we’re agreed,” I say, “we’re agreed that I’m paranoid.”

I join the little circle, which consists of:

1. The mulatto girl, 24 and skeptical

2. A fair-haired woman who introduces herself as an alcoholic

3. One with short hair and a small face that she’s just had lifted

4. The bartender

“Mein Schatz,” my darling says when she catches sight of me (the Chinese are about to leave) and climbs onto a stool behind me and flings her arms around me. “Camilla and the horse,” she says to the others, pointing at my husband and me. Then she wags a finger in the air in front of her nose and corrects herself: “Prince Charles,” she says, pointing at my husband.

I pay a suitable compliment to the mulatto girl’s performance and then ask her: “Would you like to buy him? He’s a little old, but he’s good.”

She hasn’t yet managed to reply when the alcoholic leans across the table and introduces herself again as an alcoholic. I tell her that she is highly talented and very beautiful and encourage her to stop drinking and feel good about herself. I show her how I pat myself on the shoulder every day, unfortunately I can’t remember what this maneuver is called, but it works (with each passing day I am more and more at peace with myself), I got it from an article in Reader’s Digest. I make her promise not to go back to drinking the next morning, I start seeing myself as a sort of barfoot doctor, walking from bar to bar, I order champagne for the whole table to celebrate the alcoholic’s decision, and my darling kisses me, her tongue is very pointy, mine is very dry, this will be expensive, and I tell them that my love life with my husband is like a looong German porno film, he is a stud-boy, he’s cracking up, I’m totally cracking up too, one of my darling’s breasts has fallen out of her blouse and her skirt has twisted halfway around, she’s on the verge of cracking up too but she strokes me and strokes me, now she wants to go home, so I slap her but not really hard.

“She hit me,” my darling says, astonished.

“It’s on account of love,” says the one with the small face, “I prefer men, but once in a while I have a woman.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I say, it’s dawn and I ask what it would cost for her to stay just one more hour, oh please-please-pretty-please but she lives faaar out in the suburbs. I picture my darling alone in the subway, alone on the suburban train. I want to buy more champagne for her, for everyone.

We have to leave now, the club is closing, it’s seven o’clock, I have a husband who fucks like a stallion, I weep, and “Oooh,” they coo at the sight of the tears: “It’s true love,” I give the alcoholic a final admonition, now she’s got to manage without her coach, because now Camilla and the horse are leaving, “No no wait: Prince Charles,” my horse is my crutch on this piercingly bright morning; it’s suddenly the last summer ever.

I wish I were Žižek. Žižek can get everything to hang together, if I were Žižek then right now I would be lying in a Punic bordello and having a fucking match with Houellebecq, the hookers wouldn’t be trafficked, merely glob-al-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors—can’t you hear that as sung by Gregorian monks, or maybe a castrato: global-ized neigh-bors at sex-u-al la-bors.

Aaah, that very human, that all too Žižekian urge toward coherence where there is none. What is it that I can’t get to hang together? My memory? My love life? We’ll have to examine all this more closely.

I miss my Romanian darling. I never found out her name. My husband says: if you want to see her again you’d better hurry back there, these people move around a lot. By which he means that she may already be working at a different club, in a different city; or that so many people have glided through her hands that she’s forgotten me, or stands a good chance of soon doing so.

“These people move around a lot”: the statement surprised me. As if he were in possession of experience I didn’t know about—and now he was lifting a corner of the curtain.

At first I couldn’t remember her either. I mean: I couldn’t picture her. And I couldn’t really remember what had happened.

First of all, when I woke up a little later that day after only a couple of hours’ sleep (we left the club at seven o’clock and stepped out into a morning whose light was like a needle, I weeping over my lost love, over parting as such, over life’s brevity) and with a terrible hangover, or sooner, still drunk perhaps—first of all I found in my purse her address and phone number, which I’d forced out of her and which she’d handed me with a shrug (maybe they were fake), and I quickly tore the note into tiny shreds and flushed them down the toilet so as not to be tempted to contact her. A memory arrives, on Platform Cortex, as somber as a freight train. One loss hauls the thought of another along with it. One loss opens the door for another that opens the tear ducts. Even as a child I always feared the worst. I was secretly in love with a boy in my class and wrote him love letters that weren’t intended for his eyes, never never, my love was hopeless, I wrote the letters (well, they weren’t exactly Shakespeare, were they) because he felt closer and closer as I wrote them, while I was communicating, while I put his name and mine together inside a heart. Out of fear that these letters might nonetheless fall into his hands, or into anyone’s hands, for that matter, immediately after writing them I tore them into shreds and threw them into the toilet. No sooner had I flushed them down than the nightmare began. I imagined him coming into his bathroom many kilometers away from mine, only to find, backed up into his toilet—my ripped-up letters, which he would immediately fish out of the water, dry out, and paste together. After which he would throw his head back and laugh, and I would switch schools. A fatal flaw in the sewage system was to blame for this horror: his pipes and mine were connected! The next time I burned my love letter. The breeze caught a few scorched flakes and blew them out the window. After that I took to daydreaming and in this way avoided leaving any evidence. Now the memory is departing from Platform Cortex, do not cross the tracks. And take care to secure your valuables.

We found ourselves on the twenty-fifth floor of a hotel on Alexanderplatz, at the same height as the restaurant on the TV Tower. I could draw the curtains and make the small hotel room darker, even more enclosed, or I could provide a clear view of my misery. Not that I believed anyone could peer into our hotel room from the restaurant on the TV Tower; that would require binoculars. Not that I believed anyone would think of doing that. No, it was just that the TV Tower itself seemed observant, a stout observer with blinking red eyes right outside the window.

The toilet and shower were located inside a glass room with walls of green mottled glass in the hotel room—a shower cabinet with toilet. I threw up for a long time, disgustingly, inside this small cage where it was hard to get on your knees and where the sounds you made were in no way blocked from reaching the surrounding room (I hoped that Charles was deep asleep). Who could puke without a sound, like silent rain. Like the expression, “the life running out of you.” As if life were a little stream. I did it in convulsive jerks, kneeling, in the most humiliating position, arms flung around the white bowl, embracing it (how much more I would have preferred to be kneeling among sheep at a stream and drinking; among sheep).

Come to that, I have always imagined that my death would play out in a bathroom, a very clean bathroom, an almost antiseptic death, I’d be leaning against white enamel, a foretaste of the coffin’s white tranquillity, but I hope my death bathroom will be larger than the cabinet in the hotel room on Alexanderplatz, with a bit more space, a bit more Totesraum, if you please. After I’d thrown up I lay down in my bed with closed eyes and tried to remember. Beside me was the snoring of Prince Charles.

The first thing Charles did when he woke was to squeeze my hand. A little squeeze that means: we belong together, we two, even though other people captured our interest last night. Or it could also mean: I didn’t hear you throwing up. Very reassuring, very loving. I squeezed back. After that he leapt up and started rooting around in his pockets and pulling out all the receipts from the night’s party. His credit card had been swiped quite a few times. We hadn’t been able to use the card in the club, they wanted cold cash, and the bartender had offered to have Charles driven to an ATM in the club’s white six-door Cadillac with tinted windows, the kind that looks like an oversized hearse (if I could choose my own death, I would be run over by a hearse, Death is as close as a wife / the hollow-cheeked attendant of my life, tra-la-la, it sounds like one of my friend Alma’s limping, foot-dragging verses, the undertaker would pick me up from the street and put my bruised body on top of a coffin, skip the hospital and the funeral parlor too, straight to the point, right into the grave), or more precisely, at least in this instance, like a bordello on wheels. Charles had declined. He was quite capable of walking. And that’s what he had done—a good many times—back and forth between the club and the ATM, and here was the evidence of all his promenades, a mound of crumpled receipts.

“Uh-oh,” he said, “it was an expensive night.”

“Let’s just see how much cash we have lying around in our pockets,” I said optimistically.

But there wasn’t much.

“We spent 9,000 last night.”

“Euros?”

“Kroner.”

“How much is that in euros?”

“Why do you want it in euros?”

“How much is it in yen?”

He looked at me. And I knew we were thinking the same thing. He had claimed it was gratis, free and clear, to talk to the girls at the staff table about Romania’s standard of living etcetera, etcetera, and I had known it would be expensive, we would end up paying for all their drinks as long as the conversation continued. I didn’t say anything. I thereby doubled my pleasure: not only had I been right, but now I could show my magnanimity by not saying anything. I smiled at him. And raked in my chips. After that we started discussing whether there was any possible way to deduct the expense. Charles is a food reviewer. But even though we’d sat in the club and dipped nachos into avocado dip (from a can), the place could hardly be called a restaurant. I felt sick again and said, “Dear, sweet Charles, would you mind going out for a good long while?”

“Out into the corridor?”

I nodded: “Yes, but hurry.”

He quickly pulled on pants and a shirt and opened the door to the corridor. As I squeezed into the cabinet he said, “You know, don’t you, that a party carried all the way to its conclusion is a suicide.”

The Balcony. Genet.

“Yes,” I answered, “we should have chosen the boring lilies of the field.”

“Genet,” he said and closed the door.

We’ve just read The Balcony. We read aloud to each other before we go to sleep. I read novels, poems, plays aloud to Charles. And Charles reads recipes to me. In the preface to one of his cookbooks it says that there’s nothing to prevent people from living to the age of 140. That’s the book we cook from. When he’s done reading aloud, we’re terrifically hungry. We run out to the kitchen, and that’s why we’ve grown a little—just a little—too heavy. As long as we travel together down the heaping highway of life, where your spare tire is mine and my spare tire is yours.

My only keepsake of her is her lighter. Charles found it in his jacket pocket and gave it to me. It’s black. With palm trees. And a couple in evening dress, dancing. You can make out a bungalow behind them. Slim and elegant, they dance away the bottomless tropical night. He in a tuxedo, she in a white cocktail dress. He with one hand on her back, which arches alluringly, the hand placed precisely there, in the arching small of it. She with a hand on one of his shoulders, broad in the tailor-made jacket. A waiter holding a tray is about to cross the bungalow’s patio. Bungalow from bangla, a one-storeyed house for Europeans in India. It’s another era. All in all, I gather, very colonial (it’s as if the only thing missing is some pillars, there should have been a house with colonial columns), very hot, the ocean isn’t very far away, and there are snakes in the grass. It happens that a snake gets into the bungalow. Then the servants start screaming, and the woman in the white dress screams even louder. Small underdeveloped men wearing kurtas, men as spindly as crickets, come running in from the garden with sharp instruments and make short work of it. The chauffeur is leaning against the large car, bored, he’s lit one of his master’s cigars and has to smoke it furtively, hidden in his hand, if that’s possible with cigars. The couple are in an early phase of their marriage. It still occurs to them to dance out on the patio at night.

I keep the lighter. It’s a memento. At one point I drew her onto the dance floor—I danced out onto it first and, deeply intoxicated as I was, spread my arms like a figure skater and cried, “I’m an architect!” Though I’m not.

Charles and the little gathering at the staff table, consisting of the alcoholic, the mulatto girl, the bartender, and the short-haired woman who’d recently had a facelift and whose small face reminded me of a taut raisin, observed us, cooing. I had an awful lot of clothing on. A calf-length skirt, flat-heeled boots, and a thick black sweater. She was more suitably dressed—more lightly. I probably resembled an aging, somewhat overly plump panther. Still possessed of a certain litheness. But. By that time she was already longing to get home. When we sat down the bartender said, pointing at Charles: “He has children.”

“He got them in Hamburg,” said the alcoholic.

“Uh, a person shouldn’t go to Hamburg.”

“No, avoid going to Hamburg.”

“I’ve never been to Hamburg,” Charles said and stuck his wallet into his pocket. Obviously he’d shown them pictures of his grown sons. Two enterprising men in their twenties. Business, that slightly fishy word. The younger one earned his first million when he was seventeen. A happy story. He isn’t my son. But I too have expectations of him.

Charles fell back in his chair laughing and looked at me, shaking his head: we had landed among surrealists. (I thought of Gulliver and what he’d been subjected to, how surprised he was. As a kid I could never look long enough at the illustration in which the giant Gulliver wakes up among the Lilliputians and finds himself tethered to the ground by countless thin threads, while on and around his body there swarm an army of miniature humans, as industrious as ants, all of them carrying some useful object or other in their hands, on their way to carrying out useful tasks.)

“He’s a stallion.”

“Unnnh, a stud-boy,” my darling said, pulling a chair up behind mine and embracing me.

“You devil,” she said.

It was a short while later that she took my head in her hands and kissed me. And I started to believe that she was falling in love with me. Our acquaintance lasted from about nine o’clock, when we arrived at the club and she sat down on a chair next to me, to seven A.M., when we left the place, unwillingly (I, in any case, was unwilling).

Every single time she left me in the course of the ten hours, for example to be with the short Chinese, I felt like I was missing something. As if my existence were a clutching at empty air (which it quite possibly is). That’s exactly how it was when, over fifteen years ago, I met Charles. Empty, lonely, hollow, all wrong—if he wasn’t close by.

[ROMANIA] DAN LUNGU 7 P.M. Wife

He left the tinted-glass high-rise building without looking back. Not once. He was walking with resolute, unhurried steps, his eyes trained on the impeccably shined toecaps of his Timberland shoes. He hadn’t even bothered to reply to the doorman who had probably wished him well, smiling like someone in a dental-floss ad. He’d had enough of smiling and talking nicely. Being polite. Not being able to afford to lose his temper. That was what he did all day long. “Hell’s fuckin’ bells,” he hissed in spite of himself. He jumped into his car and took off his jacket and tie. Meaning it was Friday. On regular weekdays he’d only loosen his tie.

He nosed into the traffic instinctively, his mind void of all plans. He drove with the flow.

It was Friday after all.

The images around circled his brain like so many soap bubbles around a fan.

He reached the outskirts of the city and pulled over. He didn’t want to go anywhere. Well, he did, sort of, but not all that badly. Some other time.

He got out of the car to look at the hills.

Everything was so beautiful. Nothing was ever beautiful.

Still two hours to go until seven.

How long till seven? He glanced at his watch again. Two hours.

Sometimes he’d ask himself something and forget what it was.

Alternately, he’d answer his own questions and forget the answer.

“Hell’s fuckin’ bells” echoed through his mind.

His own voice. Or the memory of his own voice.

His temples were throbbing. The weekend headache. Nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was under control. Sales were doing well. What sales? He started. The memory of his boss’s voice.

He went into a bar and ordered a double shot of brandy. Closest bar to where he’d parked.

He eavesdropped on the patrons’ conversation, but their words circled his brain like so many soap bubbles around a fan. He liked the thick smoke. He liked the squalor in there. He liked the people—ugly, toothless, unshaven. Come to think of it, it was a good thing sales were doing so well. What sales? Installment sales, what else…

“Hell’s fuckin’ bells,” his voice snapped back at the memory of his boss’s voice.

A tumble with Carolina, a tumble with Carolina, kept ringing through his head.

One hour to go till seven.

It would have been nice if it had started raining out of the heavy smoke. A downpour of beer into the mugs of the toothless. Let the losers have a field day. Let ’em dance in the rain.

As for him, Carolina was going to save him. She was going to suck all the headache out of his head.

It was Friday after all.

How long till seven?

He drained his brandy and called her, though she was expecting him. No one answered. He left no message. Could be she was with another one of her johns.

“Hell’s fuckin’ bells.”

7 P.M. was booked exclusively for him; no one could take that away. He was paying for it. He was a faithful customer. He didn’t take anything on credit.

A tumble with Carolina, a tumble with Carolina.

He was a paying customer, wasn’t he? No one could take his hour away from him.

Frantically pressing the keys of his cell phone, he finished a second glass of brandy. Carolina wouldn’t answer. He panicked. It was the first time anything like this had happened to him. As a rule, Carolina was always waiting for him. There, in her rented flat.

He felt cheated.

Without fail, at the beginning of the weekend, he’d come to Carolina. She’d be waiting for him in lingerie he’d bought her himself. Sand-colored. 7 P.M. was his hour. He didn’t care about anything else.

He felt double-crossed. It just wasn’t fair. He had never ever barged his way in at any other hour. He didn’t care who she was screwing the rest of the time. But at 7 P.M. she was supposed to be at home for him. At 7 P.M. she was as good as his wife.

Carolina knew him well. Knew all his whims.

After a tumble with Carolina, he was back on his feet.

His temples throbbed.

Everything is under control. Nothing is ever under control.

Carolina had been unfaithful to him.

Like the cheapest whore.

Carolina was screwing another guy at his hour. She didn’t give a fuck about his headache. About his tiredness. About his having to go back to work on Monday. Having to talk nicely and keep smiling. Not losing his temper. Boosting sales.

“Hell’s fuckin’ bells…”

Carolina is a bitch in heat, he chalked on an imaginary wall.

He made up his mind to call Renata. She was a friend of hers, sort of. Well, to the extent two women working in that profession could be friends. She used to talk to him frequently enough about Renata, whom she had kind of adopted. Taught her the tricks of the trade. She’d given him her phone number the moment they started seeing each other. If you can’t reach me, you should try Renata, she’d told him back then. There’d never been any need to.

Renata answered the phone.

He didn’t have to go into any details about who he was before she said: oh, right, the 7 P.M. customer, aren’t you? No, she knew nothing about Carolina. Nothing whatsoever. They hadn’t seen each other in days. But she was available herself. Sure, right away.

He jumped into his car and drove back to the city.

A tumble with Renata, a tumble with Renata, kept ringing through his head.

It was getting dark.

On his way, he drove past Carolina’s block. All the lights were off. Totally off. He groped his way around the neighborhood till he found the right address.

Renata was waiting for him in a satin gown. Her curves hinted she was naked underneath. She was medium height, plump, and she looked somehow mischievous.

“While you undress, I’ll go to the bathroom,” she said.

He listened to her peeing for a long time.

The flat was dingy—two adjoining rooms. Probably rented. Sparsely furnished with odd pieces. A country rug for a bedspread. He lowered himself into a loose-springed armchair and started undressing listlessly. The atmosphere of impoverished improvisation depressed him. Not an ounce of warmth, not an ounce of imagination. Not one flower. At Carolina’s place everything had been shipshape.

He listened to Renata washing her hands and spraying herself. He didn’t hear her flush the toilet, though.

He watched her enter, brisk and roly-poly, crotch shaved. She’d left her gown in the bathroom.

“What’s up? Are we feeling a bit grumpy today?”

He nodded his assent. She started undressing him expertly.

“We can’t afford to be grumpy,” she grumbled.

She stood him on his feet as for some kind of physical and moved into gear. She started by nibbling at his nipples with her teeth, then little by little glided down towards his pubis. She was giving off a strong odor of cheap deodorant. Yet he had to admit she was adroit at using her tongue, she was almost as good as Carolina. When performing the act of fellatio, Carolina had once explained, unless you can make good use of your tongue, you’ll just botch the whole thing. Ever since, he’d been always alert to that particular skill. He felt his member beginning to get stiff and his tiredness seemed to disperse. While getting on with her business, Renata watched him with her big blue eyes and attempted to smile at him, which made her face look rather sinister: like a snarling dog fiercely defending its bone.

“Now, that’s more like it… Who’s a pretty-pretty baby? Let’s put a nice hat on, so we don’t catch cold.” She went on talking to his sex while completely ignoring the rest of him.

She pulled one of the chest drawers open and produced a condom. She ripped the package open with her teeth. She caught its tip between her lips, dropped to her knees, and before unrolling it down his penis, she started chomping on it the way babies do a pacifier— imitating a baby’s gurgling cries all the while: ngwa-aa! ngwa-aa! ngwa-aa! He found it quite funny. He smiled.

“You liked my toy, didn’t you?”

He nodded his assent.

“Let’s get down to business and chase all your troubles away,” she said, bursting with optimism and cheerfulness, as if it’d been ages since she’d last done it.

He positioned himself behind her. Her back was broad and powerful.

“You’re from Transylvania?” he asked, panting slightly.

“How did you know?” she replied with another question, her voice muffled by a pillow.

“I could tell by your accent,” he went on, a barely audible tremor in his voice.

“If you don’t like it this way, we can change position…”

“Nah, this suits me fine… we can talk while we’re at it…”

Her groin, not quite recently shaven, prickled him a bit. He found she had rough skin in that area, somewhat leathery. Professionally calloused, flashed through his mind.

“You from somewhere in the country?” he asked, no hint of disdain in his voice.

“Yea, a village not far from Cloo-oojj… but how’d you figure that out?” she queried him earnestly, her voice seeming to rise from the bottom of a well.

“Well… it was that rug… gave me the clue,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Yup, it’s from Mom. It’s very precious to me. I take it along wherever I go working…”

Then they both gave up talking as things were moving to a crescendo.

When he was spent, he eased himself onto his back in satisfaction, eyes closed. His headache was beginning to let up. Renata sprang to her feet to walk off her accumulated stiffness.

“What about having another go?” she asked him cheerfully.

He signaled to her with his finger: he wasn’t game.

“Maybe next Friday,” he added a moment later, forcing the words out.

“I didn’t want to tell you right away, but since you’re bound to find out anyway… looks like Carolina might have found herself someone. She might leave the profession… At least that’s what people say…” she said, ill at ease.

He said nothing. She joined him in his silence.

A few moments later he heard her going to the bathroom again. A series of obscene plops, this time followed by the sound of a flush.

He rose heavily and started getting into his clothes.

He left her money on the table and cleared out while he could still hear the shower.

Back home he jumped into bed with his clothes on, a glass of brandy in his hand.

Eyes boring into the ceiling.

All that remained in his head was the echo of that prolonged piss, followed by obscene plops.