Homunculus Read online

  ALEKSANDAR PROKOPIEV

  HOMUNCULUS

  FAIRY TALES FROM THE LEFT POCKET

  Translated from the Macedonian by Will Firth

  English language edition first published by Istros Books, London, United Kingdom www.istrosbooks.com

  First published in Macedonian as Човечулец: бајки од левиот џеб, Magor, Skopje 2011

  The second story, ‘Snakelet’, was first published in Best European Fiction 2015, Dalkey Archive Press, Champaign/Dublin/London, 2014

  © Aleksandar Prokopiev, 2015

  The right of Aleksandar Prokopiev to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  Translation © Will Firth, 2015

  Foreword © Fiona Sampson, 2015

  Edited by S.D. Curtis

  Cover design & typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

  ISBN: 978-1-908236-23-4 (print edition)

  ISBN: 978-1-908236-88-3 (eBook)

  This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

  Foreword

  Aleksandar Prokopiev’s fiction resembles very little that will be familiar to English readers. It has the fantastical darkness of folk material but, like the novels of Angela Carter, it inflects this matter with high cultural allusions. Tom Thumb rubs shoulders with the humanist philosopher Pico della Mirandola; an icon painter with a talking frog. At the same time, and rather more like the Latin American novelist Roberto Bolaño, Prokopiev creates a fictional world that doesn’t differentiate between the invented, the factual and the autobiographical. Much of ‘Once Upon a Prokopiev’, the last story in this volume, for example, is taken from the writer’s own life.

  This mixture is exciting and kaleidoscopic. It makes the stories in Homunculus feel hyper-animated, if not hyperbolic. It also has a serious purpose, which is to destabilize the reader, who will no longer be able to keep “the real world” and “fiction” safely apart. In other words, “true” fiction reminds us that our inner lives are composed not only of daydream but also of memory, and – perhaps more sinisterly – not only of truth but of invention. Prokopiev’s first collection of short stories, published in 1983, appeared to acknow­ledge this with its challenging title, The Young Master of the Game. And he is indeed a game-playing writer, who is not merely playful but uses codes and sophisticated rules to create narratives layered with meanings.

  Some of this playfulness comes directly from folk material, whose dream logic and incompletion literary writers have long found evocative but which this author deploys with real know­ledge. Prokopiev’s doctoral work, undertaken at the University of Belgrade and the Sorbonne, conducted original research into the folk stories of what was then southern Yugoslavia. An early collec­tion of essays is titled Fairy-story On the Road (1996), and he is now the Professor of Comparative Literature at the National University of Ss Cyril and Methodius.

  Nevertheless, Prokopiev would describe himself as a postmo­der­nist, an orientation that other titles among his thirteen collections of fiction and essays suggest. These include …or… (1986), Anti-instructions for Personal Use (2000) and Postmodern Babylon (2000). But there’s nothing po-faced or overly systemic about this engagement with philosophy. Prokopiev is always fun to read. In fact, in his native Macedonia, this former rock star – he was a founder member of the New Wave band Idoli, notorious for their ambiguous anthem ‘I seldom see you with girls’ – is something of a media don, as well as a highly influential cultural critic. In that southernmost state of the old “Southern Slavs” – yugo means south – the rural and the urban, tradition and the contemporary world, are closer neighbours than they are in many northern European countries. An intellectual like Prokopiev, who was born in the capital, Skopje, in 1953, isn’t divorced from the world of Roma music, peasant farming and rural superstition that still surrounds and intermingles with the more globalized culture of university or city bar.

  For much of the year, the people of Skopje and its hinterland lead an outdoor, public life of terraces and cafes. This is also a post-communist culture, and those who grew up here before 1989 – as Prokopiev did – became accustomed to relatively little personal space. This gives the Republic’s culture, like that of its Balkan neighbours an oral vibrancy, which Prokopiev brilliantly and continually captures. One small example: when the swan-girl’s breasts, in ‘The Man with One Wing’, start out ‘orange-shaped’ but soon grow ‘grapefruit-shaped’, our narrator is making a little play on the mounting hyperbole of traditional story-telling.

  For Prokopiev is a storyteller, not a textual mechanic. His contes are full of emotion, and of archetype. They are also full of darkness, as befits a country still sitting on the fault line that produced the wars, which pulled the former Yugoslavia apart at the end of the twentieth century. The war in Macedonia was the last to be formally concluded; nevertheless, this small country of just over two million inhabitants did not allow itself to be torn apart along ethnic or religious grounds. It remains a mixed Orthodox Christian and Muslim country, whose official languages are Macedonian – ­a Slav language closely related to Bulgarian which uses the Cyrillic al­phabe­t

  – and, in municipalities with a local majority population, Albanian, an Indo-European language which has no relatives but uses the Roman alphabet.

  There is tremendous intimacy in writing for a language-­community of roughly one and a half million people. Aleksandar Prokopiev is by turns mischievous – in ‘The Dance of the Coloured Handkerchiefs’, a story to make boys and girls of all ages smile, the protagonist-handkerchief longs for snot – admonitory. ‘Marko’s Little Sister’ reads like a cross between ‘The Boy who Cried Wolf’ and an Awful Warning against self-harm) and is challenging: “The smell of the forest, the smell of gunpowder, and the calm certainty of death. How exciting it is!” ends ‘The Huntsman’. But, however much the intimate raconteur appeals to our inner child, much more is also going on in such fictions. The shadows these bedside stories cast are genuine monsters, as in this volume’s parables about morality, (‘Neverland’, ‘The Huntsman’), history (‘Human, All Too Human’, ‘The Haji, The Shoemaker and the Fool’), and identity (‘A Christmas Tale’, ‘Homunculus’).

  That Prokopiev manages to combine the great and the small, coining archetypes while winking at a local joke over a glass of Skopsko beer, is both astonishing and delightful. Now perhaps the ‘middle-aged master of the game’, he is unique in dedicating his writing life almost completely to the short story form. (As well as his essays, a novel, Peeper, appeared in 2007 – and was the national entry for the Balkanika Prize.) The results can be seen in his influence on many middle-generation Balkan writers, and in the numerous foreign editions, and the awards, his work has received: culminating in the international Balkanika Prize 2010, awarded to Homunculus.

  Often surreal, sometimes inexplicable, Aleksandar Prokopiev is one of the ‘must-reads’. He is a teasing, telling interlocutor who likes to play the naïve; the brilliant Fool who is a figure as recognizable from our traditions as from his own. These shape-shifting stories remain adamantly and radically open for us to interpret. They challenge us to accept, even to embrace, our own confusion: implying, perhaps, that life itself is as confusing as any fable. To read them is to glimpse the wildness at the heart of Europe.

  Fiona Sampson

  Coleshill 24/2/15

  This fairy tale is to be told in the morning while eating a fry-up for breakfast after a night’s heavy dr
inking

  Tom Thumb

  Have you got back together with that fellow who’s the same age as me, Mum? Oh, if only I weren’t your son... It’s not that I’ve got anything against him. He’s a good man, and he paid the 714 euros for my treatment. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for thinking of me and paying for my stay at the sanatorium, although it did look more like some kind of corrective institution than a place where people are cured. You know what I mean. Soon after I got there, during the first week of my stay, I was punished for listening to music during the so-called ‘hours of rest’ between 3 pm and 5.30 pm. How could I have known that the music from my iPad would be a nuisance to anyone? But I was caught. And she – Kyrie the Matron – ordered that I be locked up for two whole days and nights in an empty cellar where a chair riveted to the floor was the only furniture. I was tied to that chair and an unbearably strong spotlight was set up to shine straight in my face. You can imagine how I felt, Mum, with that sharp needle of light piercing the pupils of my eyes and the tight rope cutting into my body. I was so distressed and helpless there in the ‘Damned Cell’, as the kids at the sanatorium called that dreadful cellar with no windows and only a slit in the iron door. Within just a few hours you lose track of whether the sun is shining outside or people are sleeping peacefully in the stillness of the night. After a terribly long time, someone opens the hole in the door and peers at you. You can feel their cold, sneering gaze but can’t see who it is because your eyes feel like they’re covered with blisters of light from the constant aggression of the spotlight. Somewhere out there, beyond that little hole, behind that sarcastic tormentor, there exists a world in which people talk, move about, and sometimes, perhaps, even laugh.

  You start to feel that the unpleasant, restricted world of the sanatorium is beautiful and free compared to the ‘Damned Cell’. Yes, free! But then you’re back in prison with the light stabbing you like an executioner’s knife for a long, long time without end... Until you start yelling and screaming like crazy, and that’s what you’ve become. You scream like a wild thing and howl with frayed vocal chords in a voice you’ve only heard twice before: at your own birth, and that time in the bathroom. They unlock the door. You hear Kyrie the Matron approaching and recognize her step but can’t see her in the murderous light. She comes up to you and you know she’s observing you with disdain. You can imagine she’s wearing black trousers, as usual, and the black coat she always buttons up, neat and orderly, with the blindingly white collar of a freshly ironed shirt showing at the neck. And then you hear her voice.

  Mummy, if anyone has cared for me since my birth, it was you, even though I was such a shock to you! You couldn’t even admit to yourself that I was your baby. And how could you have? Such a little runt, all covered in black hair as a result of the irritation in your belly. I can imagine how hard it must have been to carry me all through pregnancy, and how much harder when you first saw me – like a wet rat straight out of the sewer. Even the honoured gynaecologist who helped with the delivery, with all respect for your unequalled beauty and the splendour of your vagina gazed in horror when he saw me. And all the more so when he first heard me cry! I know that everyone in the maternity ward was shocked by that horrible noise, which did not sound at all like a baby’s voice but much more like the protracted howl of a sick animal. At the time, of course, I was unaware of the terrible effect of my appearance and voice, but ten years later, when puberty took hold of me, I realized I had registered that event in my subconscious, poor me!

  I was in the bathroom again, as usual, looking at my face in the mirror and feeling guilty about its appearance. I hated my big nose with its pus-filled pimples, my fat lips with white scabs in the corners – that whole, huge noggin stuck on top of my puny body, like something out of Punch and Judy. Only my eyes, which were very bright like those of a ginger tomcat, stared back at me, unpleasantly inhuman and cold even when my body was full of seething anger towards myself. Maybe they were like that because all the difficult experiences I had had since I was a baby had left my eyes dry, without a single tear.

  But just when I was standing in front of the mirror facing my ugliness for the umpteenth time, some unknown urge from my rickety chest, some deep sorrow burst out through my carious teeth and escaped as a cry, loud and animal-like, followed by another and yet another, and I began howling there alone in the bathroom, squatting on the floor because I couldn’t bear to look at myself any longer. It’s lucky you weren’t in the flat at the time; you were at a rendezvous with your lover in Café Journal and couldn’t hear my barbaric cries for help.

  Please forgive me, Mummy, for my ugliness! Forgive the worthless­­­ness and putridness of this freak that dares to call itself your son!

  Now in the ‘Damned Cell’, just like in the bathroom, I shed a pool of tears and then started wailing most horribly. Kyrie spoke to me as I was yelling and screaming and blubbering, my face smeared with tears and snot. Her voice was terribly calm: ‘Why are you making such a racket?’

  ‘S... sorry... Miss,’ I answered, still blinded by the sadistic blade of light and unable to see anything but her dark silhouette.

  ‘How dare you call me Miss!’ she interrupted. ‘What am I?’

  ‘You’re the M... Matron,’ I sniffled.

  You can imagine how dejected and miserable I felt, Mummy. I tried hard to stop my tears and not make another noise. But I failed; it just wouldn’t work. So I wailed for all to hear, and inside as well, and when I was finally able to see her eyes scrutinizing me coldly with no feeling in them other than mastery, I felt so wretched and so punished.

  ‘You deserved your punishment, so now put up with it. And stop that pathetic bawling!’ she snarled, as if she could read my mucousy thoughts and was making me feel the full weight of my sentence, now when I was weakest and unable to defend myself.

  It was ghastly, but even in that lowliest of positions I cursed Kyrie, that damn bitch. And when she left the cell, still indifferent and harsh, I swore to myself a hundred times over that I would have my revenge. That is the price that tormented souls exact of their tormentors. What else can a midget do – a Quasimodo like me – in the face of the appalling and endless humiliation those such as Kyrie subjected me to in the ‘Damned Cell’? Whenever I raised my eyes heavenwards to beg for help, the artificial glare of the spotlight whipped me back to earth, and whenever I tried to heave a sigh, as one small way of relieving my pain, the rope cut deeper into my chest. I know, Mum, that even in such harrowing hours you would be able to shake off evil thoughts and vanquish all misfortune with your inner peace. But I am far from possessing your virtues!

  I stuck through the rest of my punishment, the second day and the second night, although I was no longer aware how much time had passed, and when they came in to tell me it was over and untied the blasted rope, I stayed sitting on the chair, withdrawn and dismayed, unable to move a muscle, although the rope had been removed and the door was open. I simply couldn’t move, and for a few minutes it felt as if I was blind and deaf – as if I was dead.

  Then I pulled myself together, got up from the chair, and walked out of the cell, and even managed a smile. From that day on, I behaved like a model patient, ever obedient, although my spiteful mind was working to devise my revenge.

  I will never forget how devotedly you cared for me when I was little – and I must have seemed like a baby for a long time, for I was five times smaller than the other boys my age, more wrinkled and wizened as well, and I didn’t grow any bigger. You were torn between your obligations to me and to your lover, it was a real martyrdom, yet you always managed to strike a balance and never gave up despite all the difficulties.

  That’s why I’m so happy you’ve found a man who suits you, Mum. Young, capable and virile! Although I have to admit that when you first introduced him to me I felt like taking a bite out of his pretty face. I found him unbearably handsome, with the dark, lively eyes of a dandy, with tee
th that shone when he stretched his mouth into a smile, and a charming dimple in his manly chin. I wished I could savage the seductive symmetry of that face – I wanted to bite deep, draw blood, and butcher that victorious young male’s air of superiority. And then his height! That was the end of me, Mother. I had the uncontrollable urge to shorten his long, elegant legs. Not only did I mean him harm but I started plotting straight away how to do it.

  With ugly people like me, the spirit is easily corrupted into hatching hellish plans. Our flat is on the fifth floor of a building with no lift. I knew he had the habit of bolting up the stairs on his way to see you and bolting down again after a good lay, like a self-assured billy goat, and I knew he didn’t really watch his step. And so one day while he was relishing your voluptuous curves for hours on end – after having first ripped off your black lace knickers, a throwaway learnt from watching too many cheap movies – I set my trap. I stretched a piece of grey string across one of the stairs between the fifth and fourth floors, tying it tightly to the banister on one side and tacking it to the wall on the other. I made sure the string was quite low down (my sort of level!) so he wouldn’t notice it.

  I know the unpleasant feeling of losing your balance, of your rootless body flying through the air, with your heart beating like mad in fear of what’s going to happen when you come down. It only lasts a second or so, but in that short space of time I had the great pleasure of seeing fear change his pretty face into a twisted, bewildered, ugly grimace. He swore, waved his arms in the air and came down on the stairs with a crash. There was a loud crack, like the sound of a thick branch being snapped in half. Then complete silence reigned for a moment as he lay sprawled across the steps, his legs in different directions; he groaned, and his face contorted like in a silent movie as he tried to sit up. But his right leg jutted out sideways, the trouser leg was torn at the knee, and his shin bone stuck out through it, pink and unreal. In that moment of astounding silence my chest filled with a lovely warmth, and then he screamed, and you came bolting down the stairs after him as fast as you could. You dabbed the cheek of his swollen, uglified face with a white handkerchief (loverboy was crying!) and knelt beside him like a good fairy, comforting him with gentle, caring words and constantly kissing him as if he was an injured little bird, not a grown man.