Schnabl The Masterpiece

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-912545-90-2
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

The golden 1980s in the Socialist Yugoslavia were a curious time, a time when the country undoubtedly already began its descent into disintegration, but when the bloody years that would follow still seemed inconceivable. A time of unprecedented freedom of thought and travel; a time of dissident movements and heady music and literary scenes. And yet it was also a time when the state still had a tight grip on the lives of its citizens, not least through its security services and its web of informants. We enter the story in 1985, and meet Adam, a professor of literature at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana who is trying his hand at writing again. Ana is the editor who receives his manuscript, 'The Masterpiece'. The protagonists soon cross the lines of their professional relationship and become entangled in an intense, adulterous affair. But Adam moves in dissident circles and Ana owes her position as the youngest editor in the history of the biggest state publishing house to her cooperation with the dark side of the government.

Ana Schnabl (1985) is a writer, journalist and literary critic. A doctoral student of philosophy since 2016, her research focuses on the female autobiography and confession and women in psychoanalysis. She has written for the literary journal Literatura and the online literary magazine AirBeletrina, has collaborated with the daily Dnevnik and is the first editor of the European Review of Poetry, Books and Culture. In 2014, her story MDMA was the winner of Air Beletrina's short fiction contest. Her book debut, themshort story collection Disentangling (Razvezani), was published inm2017 and among numerous other laurels received the Best DebutmAward of the Slovenian Book Fair.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schnabl, Ana

Leseproben

19 September 1985

She awoke before dawn. Whenever she drank, she could not get to sleep properly because of the adrenaline. She rolled onto her hip to more easily control her nausea. She could smell Boris’s congested bad breath. As always, he was sleeping with his mouth open and gently snoring. As usual, he had crept unheard into the bed in the middle of the night and curled up beside her as soft as a millipede. He never clung to Sergej, but always her. Although when awake father and son were in complete harmony, Boris avoided his father’s touch. Maybe it was just your average boy’s discomfiture, a sense of awkwardness beside a larger, wider and expressively masculine body, but sometimes she thought that Boris, like her, was intimidated by their similarity. As a rule, children are an echo of childish versions of their parents, but even at the age of seven Boris was simply a smaller version of the grown up Sergej: dark, wiry hair that was impossible to comb or shape; light blue, at times scarily sterile eyes; a sharp curve between nose and top lip; rigid shoulders, which lengthened a torso of average height, but strong. Boris had even inherited Sergej’s walk, together with all its bizarre details. A comic swaying whenever he hurried and ungainly shuffling when he wore slip-ons in summer. Probably, she thought, excessive familiarity did not evoke trust in Boris. Although still a child, he still wanted to be an original.

She was sure that Sergej did not delve into such doubts, that he deliberately did not think about it, but when he was compelled to, his interpretation could never be so gloomy. And she herself was succumbing to them more in order to seal the real reasons for her anxiety. It wasn’t only the birthday alcohol that was lodged in her stomach and gnawing behind her eyes.

She rested against the bed head. The millipede, still asleep, moved and put its head in her lap. Vulnerable as she was in the morning, the contrast between the warmth released into her body and the scheming that would mark her day hurt her.

“Ana, is something the matter?” Sergej’s voice was dreamily husky, but he sat up on the bed as if on parade.

“Oh, but you’re awake. That’s not like you.” She was trying to be witty. She was always trying to be witty: the worse things were, the more wound-up were her jokes. Through humour, loud or fleeting, she built up the layers between herself and others so that it was impossible to get close to her. But Sergej, who had been penetrating these layers for a number of years, could not be deterred.

“Ana, you look as if you’re going to cry. What is it?” He gingerly reached across Boris and stroked her thigh. This brief contact was enough to set the tears running down her cheeks.

“I want to get out, you know?” The quiet words were spoken into her hands, which were trying to stop new teardrops. “I’ve got myself terribly tangled up and I don’t want to do it anymore. It’s not right. It was never right.”

His mother’s sobbing woke Boris, who leant upwards between his parents and rubbed his eyes. He did not register her tension. He never registered the burdens of others; his focus did not apply to other people. He would grow up into a capricious and domineering person, she not infrequently thought.

“Do I have to go to school already, mum?”

“Yes, my little dormouse, you do,” she glanced at the clock on the bedside cabinet in order to avoid her son’s eyes. She didn’t want him to see so early her careworn face, even though it might not bother him. “Go and get washed and get your bag ready, I’ll come soon to make breakfast.”

The boy unwound himself lithely, no longer like a millipede, but like a fox. He ran towards the bathroom and as soon as he had carelessly slammed the door behind him the air became sharply, heavily dense.

“Dissociation of the subject,” she gave a grotesque grimace. She was anticipating that in a few moments the common-sense Sergej would say something; he placed his sense of responsibility for his actions above what for him were vapid and ephemeral feelings. Sergej, who when faced with weakness could turn to stone; Sergej, the sometimes-cruel affirmer of life; Sergej, an explosion of ambitions and forces. She wanted to suppress that Sergej before it could grow, for him to finally understand that his theorising about what should be done was never comforting. She prepared another gloomy comment, but —

“Come here.” She slid onto his chest. Between the hairs his stale sweat smelt like kerosene. She asked herself why precisely on that cloudy morning he was adjusting his manner: could he sense the scale of her despair? Was he disturbed by her birthday? Did he himself feel the same?

Even if he was, he would never admit it.

“Look, we both know that the country is weakening. It’s just a question of time when it will fall apart. It won’t last much longer, I promise you that.” With an unusual gesture he slid his fingertips down her face, from her forehead across her eyelashes to her lips and chin. That was his special gentle gesture, clumsy but genuine, which he usually employed in joyous moments. It bothered her and she moved her head somewhat lower, to his stomach, so that he couldn’t reach it with his hand.

“But what will happen to us then? They won’t just forget about us. For we are…” she burst out crying and swallowed the word which she had years before placed in a vice and then cunningly, at first quietly and then ever louder, crushed. However roughly she bolted it down, the word remained irrevocable. At each of its hasty pushes Sergej also swayed. The man and his wife, holding each other close, symbiotically waited for the prick of awareness to subside.

The word was monsters. We are monsters, I am a monster, she had wanted to say.

She rose with her body large and bitter, and went to the window to open the curtains. Behind them was developing exactly the same kind of day as eight years ago. The sky was a perfect azure, the result of long rain, there was not even a sliver of cloud anywhere, not a line of darkness, merely magnificent hope. What nauseatingly perfect irony. Or perhaps not, she thought, for then the day had also promised a clear, magnificent life.

It had been a Sunday and, like every year before, her parents had arranged a birthday lunch at home. Over the years, the tradition had taken on new features, with the candled birthday cake replaced by champagne and the strictly forbidden smoking had dissolved into an uncomfortable, hunched puffing beneath the extractor fan, and from teenage celebrations onwards the invitation had also extended to what her mother and father discreetly called Ana’s latest friend. They also sometimes attracted to lunch some person or other from the League of Communists of Slovenia, of which they were members; not because they wanted to indoctrinate their daughter into the Party, which the young found it hard to believe in, but because they were shamelessly pragmatic – just as, whether it was lamentable or not, all real grown-ups were. Social capital could also contribute to a better quality of life; in fact, at the start of one’s professional path it was obligatory, they believed. And, of course, they were not mistaken.

Perhaps her twenty-fifth birthday, eight years ago now, would have had a different epilogue – or would, like most of our days, have remained without one – if Sergej had been able to come, she thought, leaning against the window frame. But her friend had fallen ill, of course, and left her on her own: naive, wrathful, greedy and impatient. She looked angrily at her husband who, behind her, was slipping back into sleep. She wanted to lay the blame on him, to believe at least for a moment that a person can be protected from herself also by another person. The benign lie did not work and her stomach succumbed to a feeling of isolated responsibility. An unbearable weight.

Perhaps, she eventually corrected herself, that day would have had a different epilogue if her existential paranoia had not tightened round her throat. She was barely entering her twenty-sixth year, it was true, but at the same time prematurely approaching that crucial interval in life that all try to resist, but are all thwarted by. The years when a person is first overtaken by her decisions. When the days cease to build up into lost time. When the present – the present job, the present relationship, the present state of health – most accurately predicts the future. Even if this interval was fictitious, an expression of folk custom to do with fate, it had an immense power over her. To get stuck in mediocrity, to become replaceable and expendable, to fade and become grey, all these were frightening thoughts. Although she strung together a sequence of academic successes, adorned herself with a Masters in Comparative Literature, even as a student appeared at conferences and symposia, she broke through – barely, barely, she sang – to administrative work. Her job involved preparing contracts for the country’s largest publishing house. Not even preparing – merely sending, tracking, keeping records, ensuring that authors were paid for their work. She was carrying out tasks that were for her not only inappropriate, but also humiliating. At least she could be a proof reader and at best an editor, she kept repeating to whoever was listening and with every day of barren administrative work – paper in, paper out, signature here, signature there, stamp at the top, stamp at the bottom – the oppressive feeling of an end strengthened. So, is this it for me? In her over-ambition – sick, spoilt said her interlocutors...