Best European Fiction 2013 (22 page)

TRANSLATED FROM PORTUGUESE BY RHETT MCNEIL

[LATVIA]

GUNDEGA REPŠE

How Important Is It to Be Ernest?

Spring, summer, and now autumn have passed, but Ernest is still living in the cabin in the woods. They had agreed that they would live apart for a while.

“You’re not thinking straight,” Maije had said to Ernest almost every day. For several years. Three years. Day by day he grew more and more miserable, and finally he calmly agreed, yes—okay, let’s live apart for a while. Who knows, maybe Ernest would learn to think straight and everything would change. Maije says that everything, absolutely everything is determined by one’s thoughts. Even the illness that will cause one’s departure from this world.

Now here he is. And he doesn’t even know if he thinks at all.

He has put away sufficient firewood, piled it up in lovely decorative rows to last him all winter. Because who knows if Maije will ever come back. And he thinks—he hasn’t even given her a thought. The house is like any house. It’s not important. Why do people bother to erect these walls around themselves only to suffer from isolation in the end? Everyone needs a home; everyone needs a home—so preached not only Ernest’s grandma, but also his mama, his first wife, and Maije too. Perhaps you really do need one. But then you shouldn’t complain that you need so many other things besides. Day after day. On and on. Endlessly. More and more. Yes, long, long ago he just happened to buy this cabin, but he’d neither longed nor hungered for it, he simply liked it. The spruce forest, the cowberry patch that he’d since turned into a javelin throw and track, the smell of the nearby bog, and the people who for some unknown reason had decided to live a life or part of a life together. Maybe children had once been born there. Yes, that’s how it usually happened. Though children also liked little houses, toy blocks, and towers. Ernest’s children were born in the city, because Annette, his first wife, had found the country terribly depressing, and even he himself had only come here to escape, until now. Now it is different. Ernest doesn’t pour new wine into old wineskins.

Nature, nature. To hell with nature. For Ernest it’s no cataclysm, no book of revelations, he doesn’t need to get close to it, or keep his distance from it either; he doesn’t need to race to the sea to be energized by the force of the wind, or cry out against self-destruction while sitting among the moss. He himself is nature. On occasion. No need to salivate for it. Yes, rabbits, dormice; yes, cranes, whose call makes you want to take off for hell-knows-where; yes, red clusters of cranberries and a spider’s macramé; yes, copper sunrises on the silken trunks of birch trees, fine, fine. Titmice chirp chirp in November’s unrelenting dampness, clamminess, fire—in place of a woman. No, nothing like that, none of the predictable reasons for living in the forest, no special desire to commune with nature. In any case, nothing extraordinary, nothing that would be worth mentioning. In general, there are very few things that Ernest wants to discuss. Well okay, maybe there was that one time when lame Juris brought back the liver he’d cut out of some beast he hunted down. Juris had fired up the wood stove, hopping on one webbed foot like a ballerina, flipping over that bit of game, fat crackling, his face as happy as a Catholic’s at Easter, but it was only liver, after all. Fine, he’d eat it, had to eat it, but why all this bullshit talk about peppering, tenderizing, how a stag’s differs from a wild boar’s. Lame Juris, of course, knows all about it—so let it be. Then the two of them drank reddish-black wine as thick as motor oil, and soon thereafter you couldn’t shut Juris up. He launched right in on the subject of art. A potter, he was. That’s it. Now, Ernest likes his neighbor, and he likes pots, and he likes wine and a full stomach as well, but all his life, all his short thirty-nine-year-long life, Ernest has known that life is much more beautiful than it seems to be for Juris, Maije, Annette, Mama, and Grandma—more than for the majority of people, or so it seems. Then why so much angst about it? Why?

Because you don’t think straight.

Ernest, grumbling, had spent the entire autumn creating a clearing in the woods to set up a little javelin throw and track there. For Maije. If she should come back and want to practice. Maije is a javelin thrower. That, you see, is really something. And the fact that he now likes his women with muscular legs, women who can run faster than he does—that really is a miracle. Before Maije he had only liked fluffy, soft, small sugared cupcakes of women, the kind you want to take in hand and protect from the pitfalls of the world, but—look who he ended up with! Maije.

Eating that liver had offended Ernest’s imagination. Despite the fact that he wasn’t picky. He could survive on pea soup, fried eggs, and stale bread for days, but as he and lame Juris ate, the thought hit him that the two of them were dining on Prometheus’s liver. Who knew what his neighbor was really feeding him—or out of what sort of animal the liver had come. Ernest suddenly felt so sick to his stomach that he chased lame Juris home. Another year, another winter. Yes, yes. Go with God, go with God, the one and only. It was good that Juris listened to him. Ernest cleared the table, flung open both the door and the windows to air the house, but he still couldn’t rid himself of thoughts about eating. About Maije. No matter how much he liked her, no matter how much he liked everything that made up Maije, Ernest couldn’t stand how the woman talked with her mouth full. For example, he remembered how he couldn’t take his eyes off the red tomato slice rolling around on her likewise red tongue, slithery slop being bitten into by small, sharp teeth, but through which, incredibly, flowed the twittering streams of Maije’s voice. As if the voice was an independent phenomenon, as if it had no connection to the gluttonous human being through whom it flowed. It was incomprehensible. The sucking of chicken bones, the chewing of eelpout skin amid laughter and happy chatter. A human voice in a beast. That was Maije.

Now, out of nowhere, thoughts of sex popped into his head. How blushingly lovely and alluring were Maije’s curves, her peaks and valleys … how wisely and well she had been created in the most perfect proportions. And what a symphony of fragrance, by God! All this despite the fact that, when making love, Ernest felt totally alone, felt himself being rough-hewn into a merciless, solitary concreteness. Nothing to complain about, he liked it, it was good, glory be, but Maije had filled his ears full of nonsense about how it was supposed to be some kind of cosmic flight, with myriad explosions of light within light, and it had occurred to him that she was enjoying it more than he was. Was that so? No, it wasn’t true. Ernest hadn’t been thinking straight. About the warm flesh in brothels, about the sense of fucking. But now there was nothing. Neither the valleys nor the cosmos. He wanted his Maije dreadfully.

Spattering raindrops, the wet autumn hobgoblins were now creeping in a gray mass across the windowsills, so the windows had to be shut. Before he latched the door, Ernest heard an angry snarling in front of the cabin. Having turned on the outside lights he went to see what was up.

It was like this. A few steps from the door there was a dog with his paws clamped firmly into the ground, chest thrust aggressively forward. An irregularly shaped head, with prominent cheekbones and round, sulfur-yellow eyes. Ernest knew for a fact that the dog’s ancestors were Asiatic mastiffs: it was purebred—a Turkmenistan Alabai. Lame Juris had often told tall tales about a cutthroat dog who now and then was seen roaming the neighborhood hunting for rabbits and other fresh meat. He had bitten or frightened or something the child of some distant forest resident. Such foolishness. The dog was like any other dog. It was just the animal’s bad luck to have had an irresponsible master, and now he was all alone in the world. The same as Ernest.

“Hello Pavlov!”

The dog lowered his ears and, straightening his forelegs, stretched slightly forward. His cropped tail twisted into a letter shape. A low growl.

“Don’t bother putting on a show! When you’re in a stranger’s yard, you ought to keep your mouth shut!”

Annoyed, Ernest went back inside, latched the door, and sat down by his woodstove. A drop more of the oily wine, and the day would be done. Was this one of those days that Ernest had every so often, when he felt like his body was the body of the entire Universe, not just one discrete form in a cabin in the woods, the body of someone who had been separated from his loved one? Probably not. But on those days he felt happy. And he knew what the feeling meant. That not one of his cells would disintegrate into dust, that he was himself but at the same time the Universe, which included not only Africa but Russia too, not only wars and starvation but also stars and nebulae, and what humanity knew as “existence.” But he had made the mistake of telling Maije about this feeling from the start. And what did the woman say? Well, what could the woman say? She laughed and accused Ernest of being enormously conceited.

“Oh, is that how it works? And on what part of your cosmic body is my own little microbe existence to be found, oh Father of the Universe?”

Maije was being coquettish, which wasn’t at all becoming. All that was missing was for her to throw herself into Ernest’s lap and begin to fool around.

When she left him, Maije had scoffed, since Ernest was the Universe, he could neither lack anything nor need anyone—he was already everything, so how could anyone abandon him? That’s how it was and how it had remained.

Yes, Ernest had always known that at any moment something decisive and significant might happen. He learned to be vigilant and patient, and he’d had some successes, but he couldn’t, even by force, be made to feel at peace. This constant waiting for a revelation got on his nerves, and he would short circuit from time to time, hissing like a bouquet of sizzling snakes, until the tablecloth, the table, and finally the whole house caught on fire … well, in his imagination, anyway.

“Please take me to the Mediterranean!” she had begged. “Please? Please! Please.”

That too. So they went, they went.

“Brooding, Ernest, is a sin. You’ll never become a yogi if you’re always so sullen.”

Ernest shrugged this off. “I’ve never wanted to be a yogi!”

Two weeks in the scorching sun completely killed his desire, but this brought with it the fear that he was hurting Maije’s feelings. Ernest bought her a handful of pearls, telling himself off for being a tourist all the while, but Maije really did seem to relax, become calmer, more tender toward him.

“When you give me gifts, I feel important. Like you’re investing in me.”

Ernest shrugged once more.

“Do you really expect to win me over with this sort of attitude?” Maije asked again, as they were flying home.

“Win? What would I win?”

“Stop answering my questions with questions! What’s wrong with you, anyway?”

“I was just asking myself the same thing.”

Ernest thought—if it could be called a thought—that it wasn’t right to live to the fullest, all systems go, just for one’s own pleasure, just to feel good about oneself. Scratching and poking around inside him, there was some ancient—even sacral, it seemed to him—beast, some sort of ermine that kept reminding him that Ernest wasn’t the most important thing in this world. There are bread trees and baobabs, tigers and queens, incarnations of Buddha, clairvoyants, thinkers, women giving birth—just like there are leaves fallen by the side of the road, hops, and marsh tea.

“You’re not thinking straight! You can’t accomplish anything, precisely because you aren’t the most important thing to yourself! Believe that you’re magnificent, and then you’ll be magnificent!”

“Idiot,” he had said aloud. How dreadful.

But one could make just about anything seem real, if one could get a certain number of other people to attest to it. Even better if they were influential people. What would Ernest do within such a reality? But then, isn’t he already living in one?

Ernest pulls the remains of the fried liver out of the garbage and throws it out into the clearing in front of the cabin. Pavlov immediately pounces on it. Like Maije, Ernest thinks. He feels a sharp pain. The cosmos shouldn’t feel pain.

He conjures up apple blossom season and a light breeze. And Maije, almost nude, starting to run through what had once been the cowberry patch. Maije’s javelin soars and soars and they both can’t wait for it to touch ground. Splendid.

It’s her javelin that now pierces his chest.

“Pavlov, come and have a drink.”

In the nighttime light the dog’s cautious and vigilant eyes flash; he licks his own nose with a long, rosy tongue, and then enters the kitchen, shaking his thick, shiny coat. For a brief moment the two hesitate. Ernest and Pavlov. Then Ernest folds up a blanket for the dog and places it in front of the door.

“Good boy. Here we are—us two. Both alone in this world.”

Ernest reaches out and scratches Pavlov behind his ear. The dog tenses up, but Ernest sees a tiny movement at the end of his tail. Friends.

Before falling asleep, Ernest thinks about his aversion to so many things. And he feels guilty about that, guilty with all his heart and soul. But what can he do about it? He avoids shifty men and superficial women, he’s always given all the things that he finds repulsive a wide berth, because he doesn’t want to collect stones in his heart, but now look at him, he’s arrived at his cabin in the woods. He, alone with a bloodhound.

“You’ve consolidated all your assets in this one little cabin. Everyone else is going crazy about property.”

He falls asleep with Maije’s words sounding in his head.

The morning lies on Ernest with a dog’s weight. Pavlov is licking his face.

Snow is sprinkling outside, the titmice are chirping, everything is as it was before, but Ernest now senses that something has changed. It’s true that he wasn’t awake when the decisive moment arrived, but it had arrived nonetheless. From where? And how? Through his nostrils? Perhaps his mouth had fallen open while he was sleeping?