BLF: Andrej Blatnik's Superlative Short Stories

"Andrej Blatnik was born in 1963 in Ljubljana" is how all of his English-language biographies start. The prolific Slovenian is more than the playwright, essayist and novelist that these pen pictures suggest. He is a storyteller – and a teller of short stories at that.

As huge fans of the challenge and reward offered by short stories, we were delighted when Andrej allowed us to excerpt some from his translated You Do Understand collection. Below, we've presenting a couple of his favorites – "Cracks" and "Sunday Dinners" – to get you excited about his visit to the Bookworm Literary Festival next month. He'll be speaking on two panels: Very Short Stories (Mar 22) and Sex on the Page (Mar 22).

Sunday Dinners
A long time ago, before the war, generals, good friends of my grandfather’s, used to attend my grandmother’s dinners, she remembers. Those days are over; a lot of time has passed. The generals of today couldn’t care less about congenial Sunday dinners; they sit in their offices, clicking on screens, they don’t seem to care about my grandmother and her famous stuffed duck. Understandably, these days, my grandmother can’t just sit around waiting for the next war. Frantically she hoards the ingredients for stuffed duck in her cellar, her deep freezer is full of headless bodies in plastic wrap, she’s bought an oil generator because it’s common knowledge that electricity is one of the first things to go in wartime, and the oil should last for a few Sunday dinners at least. On Sundays, my grandmother calls up her grandchildren, one by one. “Will you come when the war starts?” she asks. “Will you come?” We explain that there could be complications, there could be roadblocks, there could be shooting, someone might even be drafted. “I’m not eating my duck by myself,” grandmother sobs into the receiver on her end, “not all by myself, dinners like that make no sense. I hate war, I hate wars like this, wars used to be decent in the old days, they didn’t interfere with my stuffed duck.” Those days are over, Grandma, we explain patiently, it’s all mixed up now, no one knows what it will be like when it happens. Grandmother’s whimpers slowly subside, we put down the receivers and go over to our closets, concerned, wanting to make sure that everything is in place, the weapons all loaded and the safeties all off, ready, we must be ready now, nobody knows when it will happen, when it happens.

Cracks
Many stories have happened. This is one of them. You have a wife, you have some kids, you have a job, you have a car, you have a house in the suburbs. It looks like you’ll die happy, your children will cry at your funeral, and your neighbors will be sorry you’re gone. Then one night as you’re driving home in the last evaporating tendrils of light, going no faster than usual, there’s a thump, you hit something. You haven’t seen anything, there was just this thud against your car. You stop, you get out to see what’s happened. There’s a child lying under your car, seven, eight years old, you’ve got one just like him waiting for you at home, he could’ve been yours. He doesn’t move. A pool of blood is forming under his head.

You cry out, bend down, feel for his pulse, find nothing. You look around, there’s no one there, the street is deserted. You drive along this street every day without knowing anyone, a housing development, gray and disheveled. There’s no one watching, all the lights are out.

What now? What do you do when something like this happens to you? You know: If the child were to moan a little, it would all be simple. You’d load him in your car and rush him to the hospital. Or call for an ambulance. But you can see there’s nothing to save. When you calm down a little you see the streetlights haven’t even come on yet. You see there are no cars in the street. You turn and look around to see if anyone’s coming, if anyone’s lurking behind the dumpsters, watching. But there’s no one anywhere.

You’d like to call someone, but whom? Besides, your phone battery has suddenly run out and you realize that nobody would answer even if it did still work. You look at the child again. He seems to have been lying there for hours, his face has grown colorless, the blood under his head has dried. You look around again and the buildings along the street seem to be crumbling, the asphalt crackling, huge fissures appearing in the night sky, through which the void will begin to seep in at any moment. You’re still holding your car keys, you look at them, you look at your car, and you know it will never move again. You drop the keys, they fall slowly into the dark beneath you and you’re not even surprised when you don’t hear the metal strike the asphalt. There’s no sound left anywhere. No dogs barking, no televisions buzzing, no phones ringing. Again you bend over the child. He’s getting tinier and tinier and more and more dried out, you look at your hands and wait for the cracks to appear on them too. You think: I had a wife, I had kids, it seemed I would die happy. Now things will happen differently. Many stories don’t have happy endings. This is one of them.

You Do Understand (2010) is published by the Dalkey Archive Press. It was translated by Tamara Soban.

Photo: BLF 2013