Best European Fiction 2013

[ICELAND] GYRÐIR ELÍASSON The Music Shop

I visited a most unusual music shop the other day. Actually, it wasn’t “day”; it was night and I was sound asleep during my visit. Yet in my dream I was wide-awake and walking down Vesturgata on a sunny spring evening. The air was perfectly still and all the gardens were a fresh new green. I walked almost to the end of the road, then turned off, only to find myself in a small side street. Not only had I never been down there before, as far as I knew, but I hadn’t even been aware it existed.

There was a tall, blue building ahead with a flat roof and a shop on the ground floor. The sign over the door said aladdin’s music store. I couldn’t quite see what Aladdin had to do with music but it had been so long since I’d read the story that I didn’t give it another thought.

I’m constitutionally incapable of walking past a music shop without taking a look inside, and this time was no exception, so I climbed the low flight of steps and went in. A jangling at the door announced my entrance and a young girl emerged from a back room and said good evening.

“I just wanted to take a look at your music.”

“Go right ahead,” she replied. She had a lovely voice; dark hair, dark eyes.

“You’re open late,” I said.

“We’re always open.”

I walked over to the racks of CDs. For its size, the shop boasted an extraordinarily wide selection. I flicked quickly through the racks. Beethoven’s Eleventh Symphony: I was pretty sure he’d never composed it, yet here it was, in a very fine German edition. It was the same with Satie’s Military March for 203 Pianofortes: I knew this piece had never been performed. When Satie died, three hundred and fifty-four dirty shirts were discovered behind his piano—perhaps because he’d sweated so much when composing this work.

I moved over to the Blues section and before long found a CD by Mississippi John Hurt that got me excited; he was playing the electric guitar and singing songs by Neil Young. The evening sun shone in through the large window at the front of the shop and there was a bluish radiance inside, though no lights were on. The girl was still standing by the counter, gazing absentmindedly into the evening light.

“I’d like to listen to this one.”

“Of course.”

She went round the back and re-emerged with a machine that I took at first for some kind of vacuum cleaner. It reminded me rather of one of the old cylindrical Hoovers; silver like them, with a long, gray, concertinaed windpipe.

She put the CD in the machine and handed me a pair of headphones: “You’re welcome to go outside in the sunshine and listen there. Just drag the windpipe with you and carry the machine in your hand.”

I thanked her and opened the door, with the machine in one hand and the earphones on my head. The door closed gently on the windpipe, which stretched across the threshold as I went out.

I met no resistance when I pulled on the windpipe; it yielded every time. The weather was so glorious that I decided to walk a little farther, down to the corner at the western end of the street, where I could sit on a bench bathed in evening sunshine. I listened, blown away by the sound of Mississippi John performing songs by Neil Young, although I knew perfectly well that he had never played those songs, and that Neil Young had probably never even composed them—at least not to my knowledge.

Shortly afterward another customer came out of the shop bearing the same kind of machine as me. He dragged the windpipe after him like a fireman wielding his hose and for a moment I was afraid he was going to extinguish the blazing sun.

But he just took a seat on the bench beside me, plainly absorbed in his listening. I didn’t want to disturb him so we just nodded at one another, with those gray metal cylinders lying between us and the windpipes trailing back up the street, gleaming in the fading light. I never see anything without being reminded of something else, so my thoughts strayed to divers’ breathing tubes. It was such a short distance down to the shore in this western part of town, and the sun was about to sink into the sea.

The man took off his headphones, staring into the middle distance. Behind us the shadows of the houses were deepening. I turned off the CD player and removed my headphones as well.

“What were you listening to?” I asked.

“Oscar Peterson on the recorder,” he replied.

At first I thought he was joking but then I noticed the CD case on the bench beside him and there was no mistake: Oscar Peterson, solo recorder recital, recorded New York, 1967. The man was middle-aged, graying at the temples, and a little overweight, in a green shirt, with a large pair of sunglasses in the breast pocket. After a moment or two he took out the sunglasses, put them on and now seemed to be gazing straight into the fiery-red sun.

“It’s a good shop,” I said.

He nodded in agreement, then, putting his headphones back on, he picked up the CD case, gripped the player in one hand, and stood up. As he made his way slowly back toward the shop, the windpipe swayed and coiled behind him like a snake dancing to a fakir’s pipe.

I got to my feet as well. A cool breath of wind had begun to blow in from the sea and everything had taken on a twilight hue. Walking back I didn’t listen to anything except the low hissing of the machine’s windpipe as it dragged over the tarmac. I returned the music apparatus to the shop and told the girl behind the counter that I would be back later to buy the CD. Could she reserve it for me?

She said she was afraid she couldn’t do that.

I left the shop, heading back the way I had originally come; walked all the way home, got into bed and fell asleep and didn’t wake up until the dream was over. I haven’t managed to go back to the shop to buy Mississippi John Hurt in spite of repeated efforts every night to return.

I hope it won’t go out of business.

[NORWAY] ARI BEHN Thunder Snow AND When a Dollar Was a Big Deal

It was days before we talked to each other. We slept one on each side of the scruffy room we had been allotted by Madame Rosa in the guesthouse in Tangier. We were two Norwegians who, independently of each other, had decided to explore North Africa. I wasn’t at all shy in those days and spoke to anyone, which is precisely why I avoided my fellow countryman. I hadn’t come here to hang out with Norwegians.

One evening he was standing on the terrace speaking in a low voice to Madame Rosa. He was wearing a shirt and waistcoat, had long hair and a hat. There was a tangle of beads around his neck and on his feet he wore pointed boots that must have been much too hot. He was a tall, handsome man who called himself Thunder Snow. I was short and sloppily dressed in jeans and a T-shirt with Ramones printed on it over a faded picture of four guys lacking any charisma. A few months earlier I had cashed in my student grant and dropped out of university. Madame Rosa beckoned to me, I went over reluctantly to join her and my fellow countryman.

“Madame says you know Paul Bowles,” said Thunder Snow and shook my hand. His grip was strong, and he held on.

“You mustn’t believe everything she says,” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “Then I’m certain you know him.”

Next morning we ate breakfast at the Café Metropole and a few hours later went down to the beach to bathe. In the evening we visited Paul Bowles. He served us tea and offered us thin, hand-rolled cigarettes. They were in a small metal case. This was the first time Thunder Snow had smoked kif. He sat wide-eyed in the American writer’s tiny bedroom and spoke dreamily of travelling to Timbuktu. This fabled desert town was the one place in the world he wanted to see more than any other. Bowles laughed genially.

“I’ve never been to Timbuktu,” he said.

A few days later we said good-bye to Madame Rosa and took the train to Casablanca. From there we travelled on by bus to West Sahara. At Laâyoune we decided to join a convoy that was heading to Nouakchott in Mauritania. Several times over the course of this drive we saw caravans. The Tuaregs pass freely back and forth across borders in the world’s biggest desert, they trade with people of different nationalities, it’s a clever way of moving goods and traffic around in the Sahara.

“The Tuaregs will take us to Timbuktu,” said Thunder Snow. He was clearly entranced by all the tales of the desert town. “I’ve always known that the Sahara is my home. Here in the desert is where I belong. I’ll spend the rest of my life in Timbuktu.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I was thinking just the same thing.”

“You’re kidding, right?” He looked at me, happy and surprised.

“No,” I said. “ Why else would I go along with this ridiculous idea of yours to go to Timbuktu?”

It took us over a month, by car, bus, truck, and in the end camel, to get from Nouakchott to Timbuktu. Both of us came down with dysentery on the way, and when we finally reached the remote little town in the depths of the Sahara we were so exhausted that neither of us had the energy to celebrate. We booked in at Le Bouctou and slept for twenty-four hours straight.

When we woke it was evening and we were served soup in the almost deserted restaurant. Afterward we had a beer in the bar. It was full of tourists from France, Germany, and America.

“I never thought there’d be Americans and Germans here,” said Thunder Snow.

Next morning we woke early. Sand blown in under the doorway had gathered in a fine-grained pile on the floor. It was like the snow in the mountains back home in Norway. Thunder Snow and I got dressed and went out to take a closer look at the town.

Timbuktu is a con. It’s just a bunch of houses on a desolate rise in the middle of an endless ocean of sand. There was nothing to be gotten from that town.

“This place stinks,” I said. “What the hell are we going to do in a place like this?”

“Nothing,” said Thunder Snow. “That’s why it’s perfect.”

I had been tricked, that was what it felt like, without ever quite knowing what it was I had actually been expecting. I was restless and ready for adventure, that was about it. To be there, hidden away in an enormous desert with a bunch of scruffy tourists and a weird guy like Thunder Snow, that didn’t suit me at all.

“I’m off,” I said. “I can’t stay here, that’s for sure.”

“Don’t you realize that Timbuktu is just as much a place that’s inside of you?” Thunder Snow seemed genuinely moved. “The town is a dream and an idea. Every kid growing up has heard of Timbuktu as the most remote place on earth. Now we’re here, you and me. We made a big effort to get here. You mustn’t be disappointed that the streets aren’t paved with gold or that there’s no university bursting with infinite wisdom. Because that’s what the first explorers thought they would find in Timbuktu. They were just as disappointed as you when they finally got here.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “You sound like a tourist guide.”

Thunder Snow hummed to himself, strolled along the dusty streets with his hat at an angle, had himself photographed with tourists, and clearly fancied himself one of the attractions. It made me even more depressed. Timbuktu was absolutely no kind of a place to stick around.

I packed my rucksack and bought a ticket for a seat on an old propeller plane that flew to Mopti twice a week. My plan was to travel on to Bamako, the capital of Mali.

I left without saying good-bye.

I’ve been back to Timbuktu twice to look for him, and failed both times. When I meet people who’ve been there I ask whether they have seen an enigmatic and inscrutable Norwegian wearing a hat, beads, and a waistcoat. The answer is always no. People who know Timbuktu say that no Norwegian has ever lived there. Now I’ve more or less come to terms with the fact that I must have invented him.

He let his beard grow and travelled to America, read Arthur Rimbaud, and wrote poems. On the bus from New York to Los Angeles he met a girl who was on the run. The girl said the childcare people were after her. Her mother was a junkie and her stepfather hit her. He stroked her crotch. When she got off next morning in Knoxville she gave him her father’s address. He stayed on the bus until late the next morning holding that little note in his hand. He flew home from Los Angeles after losing all his travel money in Las Vegas and hitchhiking across the Mojave Desert. Back in Norway he sent a letter to the girl who had got off the bus in Tennessee. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me,” he wrote. “Maybe we belong together…?” Three weeks later the letter came back. ADDRESS UNKNOWN was printed in capital letters across the envelope. The American postal service paid the return postage. This too was written in capital letters. As though a dollar was such a big deal.