NEBOJŠA LAPČEVIĆ

THE STORM BRINGER

He was cold and rather hard, he was a mast. He was disguised as Poseidon, the bringer of storms and earthquakes. While the water waves rage, waves roar through those shaggy chests. On the left side of his thighs, I dug my fingers with sharp overgrown nails firmly into his muscular tissue as into bare clay. I was lying in bed like a nymph, gazing at the pathless heights of the firmament, and waited as long as I had to wait. A mast once raised does not stop being a mast until it is torn down by the one who raised it. I raised it. Stretch out, mast, with your masthead, to the four winds that hold like a wall four sides of the world .

I can hear, listening carefully, the creaking of the front door. Why wasn't it locked? Now already scared, I tried to wake up my husband, the one who was shaking and wildly steering me. I got up a little, and slowly approached the window. Looking at the path, I noticed wet traces of bare feet that led to the end of the yard. But there was no one in sight. I tried again to wake up my husband, he was snoring terribly, but to no avail... I ran to the other window and put my hand on the glass, I watched and listened for a while longer. I checked the key and additionally attached the latch, the door was locked. And the creaking of the door stopped. I tried to get back into bed, turning from my back to my side. My husband's sweaty and boiling body radiated from his side of the bed. His mouth gaped with a long tongue like the open zipper on his "harashovka" pants that he simply adored. Since his military service on Brioni, as he said revelrously: "those pants, or cotton brief underwear, boxer briefs now, the heart of my body fell for them." The moonlight illuminated everything unevenly, his thunderous hair, his wild limbs, including his limp, wounded leg. He never wanted to admit whether he shot himself with the rifle or whether a friend did it, inadvertently or on purpose. That has been never discussed.

I stopped pushing and shaking him, my husband was simply in high heaven. The door creaked again, first in even, quiet intervals and then in unbearably loud and chaotic intervals. I got up and put on a silk jacquard appliqué dressing gown, but when I saw myself in the mirror I realized that it was unnecessary, I threw it resolutely on the floor, I was suddenly encouraged by my radiant, lustful appearance, I’d read somewhere that natural breasts, hair under the armpits and on legs, completely naturist, were now in fashion... Well, I was still satisfied with my "vintage" waxed version of my body, transparently pinkish in color…

Then, the door unlocked itself and opened wide. In the distance I saw an unknown man, we are goig to call him the Unpredictable, who had just left his stable, saddled first a strong black stallion and then a white filly with transparent pink rump. I ran my hands over my smooth breasts, and let my hair down to the wind that was lifting everything. Before I mounted, I wanted to ask him, "Where are we riding?" The Unpredictable said nothing, just ran his hand over his forehead, adjusted his black and red cap better, and looked towards the gust of wind that was lifting everything. But he could have said, "No one knows it... A dream is a vague wasteland... Far, far to the top..." Climbing towards the top, I felt that the distance was my goal.

The leeches of time are crawling around us... I brought a few of these leeches in a primadora water soup in a jar of gherkins as a souvenir on the Unpredictable.

The black stallion that smelled of sea salt jumped on the white filly, wetting the nape of its neck and mane with saliva in the streams. Previously, they had grunted and lapped their tongues over the swollen "fleshy" tools of passion. They snorted and neighed standing on the back legs: We are free horses! The earth echoes! We are free! It bursts under the onslaught of chthonic forces. Filling all the hollows of the dry earth, the streams flooded all the gardens that celebrated love. The black horse with the white mark turned completely white... Did it reach perfection with its whiteness? The clatter of heavy hooves still echoes…

Like a bountiful garden, I felt my bed, I felt the wet blankets, the bedclothes that was used to shameful work. The creaking of the door no longer bothered me. My husband, who had a solid and sticky sleep, didn't bother me either. He just clicked and gritted his teeth as if he wanted to chew tobacco, maybe he was "high" from the aroma of the "Cohiba" Cuban quality.

I decided, let it be, tomorrow I will confess everything to him. I finally want to sleep. I turned to one side, I turned to another side, I turned to the third side. I don't even know where all those leeches on the walls and ceiling came from. My husband, disguised as Poseidon, was the one who had raised the storm. One leech slid towards his mouth. And he swallowed it involuntarily. And the leech itself somehow got stuck in his throat and struggled. And, he was cold and hard, like a mast.

I was lying in bed like a nymph, gazing at the pathless heights of the firmament, and waited as long as I had to wait. TRANSLATED BY:
DANIJELA TRAJKOVIĆ

HANA KORNETI

EXCERPT FROM “HAIR”

There’s a certain kind of chair that, whenever I sit in, it makes me feel like I’m due a cigarette, a meal of my choosing, and last words.
My first encounter with hairdressers was a negative one, a prelude announcing the nature of our future coexistence. I was three years old, and my mother—without consulting me—had decided to chop off her long, beautiful hair, usually tied up in a bun. That evening, without warning, she came home with an entirely short haircut.
“I don’t love you! You’re ugly!” I told her.
What a little beast.
And yet, I’ve seen the photos from that haircut, and honestly? It’s awful. Out of all the possible variations of short hair, her hairdresser had given her the worst one. She looked like a lollipop with tiny needles stuck around it. That’s not how you cut my mother’s thick, coarse hair!
When I was little, I’d leave every hairdresser’s chair in tears. As I got older, I kept switching salons, always hoping I’d find the one—my soulmate-hairdresser—who’d finally give me the perfect haircut I so desperately wanted.
But the road to my hair soulmate was paved with disappointments. No matter how many photos I showed them, how thoroughly I explained, how precisely I drew it out, they always missed the mark. So I started going to the salon armed with chalk. I’d draw directly on my hair, like a seamstress, marking how much to cut, where layers were allowed, and so on. But even with that, I’d leave every salon disfigured.
The last hairdresser, who received clear instructions on exactly how much and where to cut, insisted on adding just a bit of layering—“it’ll fall more nicely”—which once again ruined my hair. I looked like mice had gnawed at it while I was asleep. For three days in a row, I stood naked in the bathroom, so no hair would stick to my clothes, with a mirror in one hand and scissors in the other, trying to salvage the disaster.
But this time, I decided not to let it slide. I decided I wouldn’t be nice again. If you don’t show some teeth, no one knows you can bite. First, I sent the hairdresser the clip from Fleabag where Claire is the victim of a bad haircut and says she looks like a pencil. The hairdresser replied with “hahaha.” Then, in a rage I’d never felt before, I texted:
“You weren’t supposed to layer it.”
“hahaaa ah come on, we’ll even it out once it grows”
“But the whole point was for it to grow a little.”
“…”
“It looks horrible.”
“…”
“sorry, but seriously, you fucked my hair”
“…”
“Ana?”
But my messages were no longer going through. In other words, somewhere around here, Ana blocked me.
I was fuming like a winter chimney from the terrible haircut, but I had also unlocked a new achievement in my life. I had gotten on a hairdresser’s nerves to the point where she blocked my number.
I swore I’d never go to a hair salon ever again. I thought about leaving her a bad review on Google, but I didn’t. I couldn’t be arsed. People like me are the problem, I thought, we’re the reason others suffer.

ELENA ALEKSIEVA

Readers’Group 31, an excerpt

If, having reached page 368, you feel like giving up, you should stop. No, not give up. Just stop. Right there. In the middle of a word, if that’s where the impulse to cast away the damn book has seized you. Or at least, immediately jot down a scathing report on just another presumptuous author. Or submit your resignation this instant, and find yourself something else, something less overwhelming that will not take this monstrous effort day after day.

I always stop without even giving a thought to what exactly has provoked my annoyance or anger. I make myself a cup of tea. I make a few light exercises to improve my blood circulation. Sometimes I might take a sedative pill or two, but I try not to overindulge. I think of the happy days when I will finally retire and never ever be forced to read again. But this won’t be anytime soon.

Of course, there are books I feel like not just throwing away but tearing into pieces. Or ripping them slowly, page by page. I imagine how I wrap in them fresh bloody steaks. I use them to cut veggies on. I flush them down the toilet. Books that never had the right to become books in the first place, as if it means anything these days. There were times when I was so fond of reading that I’d dream of making a living out of it, no matter how impossible it seemed back then. No, not as a critic, scribbling short self-conceited reviews in the press, but just as what I was, a simple reader. Had I known that dreams may also come true, I would have been much more cautious and dream, for example, of becoming a secretary. A most ordinary secretary diligently fulfilling her duties, who in the evening when she comes home is not awaited by a fearful pile of volumes still smelling of paper and wet ink. But no – as I have always been too conscious of my freedom and have, with a far too frivolous passion, advocated for even the smallest intellectual pleasures (having never gone further than that) – lo and behold, I have been punished. I am a reader. A professional full-time reader for Readers Group 31, which, in its turn, is part of the Analytical Reading and Author Control Department with the Ministry of Culture. The pay is modest but ample for my needs. Having always spent mostly on books, now that I get them for free, I can even put something aside which gives me a peaceful, well deserved pleasure. I have a small flat equally distanced both from the city center and the suburbs. I’d say its location is perfect for someone of my mindset. I mention this because the only good thing about my job is that I can do it from home. Sometimes my schedule is so tight that I am unable to go out for weeks. The books are delivered by a courier who, once the deadline for a given batch expires, comes again to take them back to the Ministry together with the folder of reports I have prepared. Sometimes, if the courier is decent, I may ask him to get me something on the way. Nothing heavy, though, because his job requires extreme physical effort: he may have to go from one address to the next with more than a hundred volumes on his back. Which is why I ask of him only very small favours. Such as, for example, to get me a box of matches. Or powder soup. Or a tea package if I have reached page 368 and run out of tea.

Actually, the full name of Group 31 is Readers’ Group for Domestic Literature (novels). According to the numeration used in our department, it is the last one on the list. The last but not the least one, as our director likes to point out whenever he tries awkwardly to motivate us to do more than what we are supposed to in our annual plan. More than is actually needed, I’d say. There is this big, fundamental division between readers’ groups, namely into foreign literature groups and domestic literature groups. Further, foreign literature groups are organized by language, and within each language there are, respectively, a poetry group, a novel group and a short story group. The same is valid for the domestic literature groups. Obviously, no matter how narrow our specialization, sometimes we have to take on some rather uncharacteristic tasks, like the reading of experimental fiction and theatrical plays for which no dedicated groups exist. Such extra work is paid separately based on a fee chart approved by the minister himself. Needless to say, the fees are symbolic. Compared to the good will which is sine qua non in our work, they are a mere nothing. Because a reader’s good will is infinite.

English translation by the author

LIDIJA DIMKOVSKA

PERSONAL IDENTITY NUMBER

(an excerpt)

Perhaps everyday my father thought of his parents and his brother, and of everything that had remained in his house. Maybe about the record player he had bought with his first paycheque as a custodian in the hotel, asking and answering the question simultaneously—his parents and brother surely didn’t take it with them, because it hadn’t seemed like the most important thing in the world. People left money, automobiles, photographs, they left with almost nothing but their underwear and sandals in that hellish heat, certainly not carrying record-players. Surely, he wouldn’t have taken it either, but the recording with the voice of Michalis Violaris, he might have, at that time it might have seemed the most important thing in the world, the record he surely listened to when he returned from work after falling in love with my mother. Or perhaps his family listened to that record on family holidays? I fantasized about that record because my father had only one record, by Michalis Violaris, which he listened to sometimes, several times a year, when he was alone at home. Once, when I came into the apartment and I turned the light on in the hallway, I heard the singer’s voice and I had the feeling that he was singing in our dining room, and not on the record player. As soon as he had noticed that the light in the hallway was on, my father would immediately turn off the record-player, and he did it that time as well. When I entered the dining room, he was just getting ready to go out, muttering, “So, you’re home?”

Sometimes I would put the record on when I was alone, and those moments were the most unbridled moments I can remember: I moved about the apartment in a trance listening to Michalis Violaris as I opened the drawer which held my father’s passports, beneath the bills for electricity, water, and television service. As always, I flipped through the Cypriot one, then I compared it with his Yugoslav and Macedonian passports, each valid for ten years, all with their similarities. But there was one thing that wasn’t in the Cypriot passport: a personal identity number. The same number was in my father’s two Yugoslav passports and in all his Macedonian ones, it was only missing in the Cypriot one. At that time, I didn’t know that only Yugoslavia, and later all the republics that became independent, assigned a personal identity number, and one was included in my father’s passport three years after his arrival when he received his Yugoslav citizenship. And I asked myself why my father didn’t have a personal identity number from Cyprus and whether they had been introduced there as well in the interim, as in Yugoslavia, and how you could exist if you didn’t have a PIN? You had that PIN everywhere, on your school reports, in your health record, on my school i.d., on my father’s driver’s licence, everywhere that you needed to confirm that you were you, and only you. And I said to myself – in Cyprus they didn’t confirm who they were because they didn’t have a personal identity number. And it wasn’t clear to me which was better – to have a PIN or not. To be believed without proof or to constantly have to prove that you were you and only you?

Translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer

JANA BAUER

HEDGEHOG GETS A NEW HOUSE

The next day a strong northerly wind came to blow the last wet leaves from the trees and scatter them around Wicked Wood. Scary Fairy could hardly wait for snow to fall. That from the previous day had already melted.
BOOMF, suddenly crashed through the door. It was Dedgehog. With a suitcase!
“My house,” he began. “Oh, it’s not worth talking about.” He slumped onto the bed with a devious look.
“The floor is rotting, the roof is leaking and it’s draughty,” he said, carefully feeling Dormouse’s bed.
“Soft,” he sighed. “I’ll probably freeze this winter.” “Come on, Hedgehog,” said Dormouse, “it can’t be that
bad.”
“But it is!” insisted Hedgehog. “It’s even worse.” “You family has lived in that hollow for ever.” “Well, doesn’t that tell you something?” whined
Hedgehog. “For instance, that there’s a lot more chance it will collapse on my head.”
Dormouse yawned and put his hat on. “Okay, let’s find you a new home.”
Hedgehog reluctantly got up and put his suitcase next to Dormouse’s wardrobe. Scary Fairy put on her coat.
They walked and walked. Scary Fairy kept searching the sky for snowflakes.
Finally, they found a low hollow in the trunk of an old fallen tree.
“It’s wonderful!” exclaimed Scary Fairy. “Marvellous,” yawned Dormouse.
“Looks damp to me,” grumbled Hedgehog. “And the walls are too gnarled for wallpaper.”
“Wallpaper?” said Dormouse. “But you’ve never had wallpaper!”
“Aha,” said Hedgehog, offended. “And that’s a good enough reason not to have it ever? What use is wall- paper to a hedgehog like me, eh? Who am I to want to improve my home a little?”
They went on. They walked and walked. The wind howled and it was bitterly cold.
Scary Fairy spotted an empty hollow in a beech tree.
She climbed into it.
“This is splendid!” she exclaimed. “It’s warm and the walls are smooth. You’ll be able to hang your wallpaper.”
Hedgehog sighed. “How am I going to drag granddad’s cupboard up there? You’re not expecting me to leave where it is, in that damp place?”
“With ropes,” suggested Dormouse, “we’ll help you.”
“Out of the question,” said Hedgehog, shaking his head. “A rope can snap and then goodbye cupboard. But what do you care, it’s not your granddad’s.”
They went on once again. They walked and walked

EVALD FLISAR

ЕЖОТ ДОБИВА НОВ ДОМ

At the end of the canyon the old man drew my attention to one of the snow bridges that abound in Kashmir. Every winter, snow fills the deep ravines and riverbeds to the brim and freezes over, while underneath water digs a tunnel and flows through it invisible, inaudible except to a trained ear. On top, one can cross the bridge without the fear of crashing through its frozen layer. But in late spring, as the snows start to melt, the water tunnel grows steadily larger and the snow span above it thinner. Finally, a gap appears in the middle. Before it widens, one can leap across it, but towards the end of July this becomes hazardous. At the end of September, before the onset of winter, only a fool would venture on to one of those structures.

“Each of us carries his winter with him,” pronounced my companion. “And his snow bridge. And his gap.”

These were startling words for the old mule driver who had offered to take me to Amarnath Cave for less than half the usual fee. But he was right. All of a sudden I saw my journey as a symbolic attempt to leap across such a gap in my soul, and my recent life as a series of such attempts, of jumps undertaken to reach the other side; of vertiginous falls; of attempts to find a crossing point where the gap was not so wide.

I had always been aware of having a second self. As children we used to be very close, but gradually distrust grew between us. The world took the side of my intellectual “I”, while my instinctive part, repeatedly shamed, withdrew. It settled in a dimension to which my intellectual “I” refused to grant equal rights, for to him it appeared inexplicable, non-scientific, however much it continued to be confirmed by experience.

As the old man and I continued our ride towards Amarnath Cave, I suddenly felt that on the other side of the canyon I could see, astride a Himalayan pony just like mine, and riding in the same direction, my rejected self whose absence had made my life so unbearable. But I had waited too long; the bridges that could have brought us together had melted. Now there was a gap between us that my distrustful intellect couldn’t clear without risking a catastrophic fall into mental illness.