Three Stories

Aleš Šteger and Translated by Brian Henry

HOTEL

I live among voices that only I hear. Others don’t hear them, though they aren’t deaf. Whoever claims to hear them is mistaken. Why doesn’t anyone stay in the hotel for more than one night? If a bus of tourists accidentally arrives in our small town, they leave the hotel after one night, even if they have reservations for two nights, sometimes more. Some foreign businessman or  representative from one of the many foreign organizations that govern our country needs only to cross the threshold of the otherwise neat and bright lobby to become inexplicably anxious. Sander, the Dutch owner of the hotel, has already hired two marketing firms from the capital to produce a branding strategy for the hotel, special programs for guests, and other stupidities. I know that this is in vain. I know that he also knows that all this is in vain. Sander knows about the voices, but unlike me, he doesn’t hear them. He was here during the war, as a lieutenant of the blue helmets. After the war, he returned as the director of a foreign company, which bought the hotel he had lived in for a while during the war. The hotel is from Austro-Hungarian times. Its façade and interior were beautifully renovated with European funds, although it was open without interruption throughout the war and was the only building in the area that made it through without a single piece of shrapnel. The war, those were golden times. So says Marko, the receptionist and part of the hotel’s inventory. Marko was working at the reception desk at the end of the 1960s when Tito once spent the night here. Sander knows why he kept him on, though Marko is old and everything but a paragon of helpfulness and friendliness. A lot of rumors about Sander, Marko, and the hotel circulate around town. Maybe this is the only thing left for us after the war: rumors. It doesn’t matter whether someone believes them or not. In our country, we know that everything is true, what anyone says or thinks. That’s why we all remain silent. We are silent and we go on living. My grandmother wasn’t silent. When I told her that I would become a maid at the hotel, her eyes filled with tears. Don’t go there, my child, she said. Then she rolled over to the other side of her old bed and died a month later. She was all I had. She raised me, gave me a home and human warmth in impossible times. My mother died in childbirth. My grandmother and I were best friends. Now all I have left is my hotel. Soon after I started to work there, I heard voices. At first faint, then more and more clear. I noticed that no one but me heard them. Female voices in empty hotel rooms. Only one voice in some of the rooms on the first floor. In other rooms, dozens. How can I explain? It is vocalization without a voice. And without words. Only voices, muffled as if someone were covering their mouths and they were still trying to mumble some childish melody. Every year, there are more voices in the rooms. As if moving here from the unknown, back to the place that was fatal to them. We are all one big family of women. In my three years working here, we have become inseparable. They’re sad if I’m not here. They wail. That’s why most days after work I stay in the empty hotel and listen to them. My presence calms them. If someone heard what I hear, they would immediately run away. I walk from room to room. Eventually, I go to room 17. The voice of my mother is there. I sit on the floor beside the freshly made bed, cover my eyes, and listen. As if the beginning and the end of the world were howling. This makes us both happy and calm. With time, I begin to recognize single syllables. She wants to tell me something. Something about the room we’re in, something about her and me. I don’t know if my presence and my listening teach her to speak or if her vocalization teaches me to understand more and more. Just a little longer, and we’ll be able to talk, as parents and children do.

LABYRINTH

The war had ended. I was sent with my units to annex the city Sala to the newly formed state. Sala was far from every important road, economically and strategically worthless. The inhabitants were known for being stubborn, capricious, and hostile toward strangers. They never moved, spoke an incomprehensible dialect, and married exclusively among themselves. Under Ottoman rule, the city was enclosed by a mighty wall, which they called the second Wall of China, its ruins still visible today from a distance, a testimony to the age-old wish of the city’s inhabitants to be as separate as possible from the outside world. The rulers that followed, whether imperial or communist, could not change the willful nature of the inhabitants of Sala. At the outbreak of the last war, the inhabitants chose a most unusual course, different from the others across the country, where people took sides in the conflict. They laid a dense minefield, crisscrossed with barbed wire fences and other military traps, around the ruins of the mighty wall, cut off all communication with the outside world, and confined themselves to their own city. For over four years, while a brutal war of brothers against brothers raged all around, Sala remained a world in itself. During this time, no one came into the city or left it. Now with our arrival, the end of the inhabitants’ willfulness finally arrived. Communication with the rest of the country would be reestablished, along with military and legal order.

For days, my men cleared the main avenue leading straight to the center of the city, removing explosives and all kinds of insidious traps. It was a miracle no one was blown up during this dangerous job. All this time, no people were seen inside the city. During this stressful period, anxiety slowly overcame my men. I had to be with them constantly to make sure their morale didn’t fall too low. After six days, the avenue was finally free of mines. I ordered them to move into the city in full combat gear and with the highest level of caution since I didn’t know what surprises might await us behind the city walls. My units advanced slowly and carefully. We searched every building along the avenue, secured strategic positions, and checked for additional traps while looking for the inhabitants of the city. The city was completely dead. We found no traces of unrest, combat, or relocation. All the houses were in a livable condition but without people, as if left by someone who went to work in the morning and never returned. We saw cutlery arranged on tables, open books on sofas covered with a thick layer of dust, the slow spinning of mobiles over empty cribs, and so on. It was eerie and unlike anything I’d experienced in four years in the military. And I’d experienced many things.

In late afternoon, we advanced to the main square with its three working fountains. We entered the abandoned town hall and searched it top to bottom. I ordered that the flag of the new state be raised on the pole. I stepped out onto the square, took off my helmet, and lit a cigarette. My men, tired from the tension and their heavy gear, sat down beside the fountains. While smoking, I noticed something strange. The avenue by which we arrived, and which I was certain led from the city in a completely straight line, now ended in the far distance with a turn and a row of buildings that weren’t there a few hours before. I immediately ordered my men to investigate. Two hours later, they returned deeply unnerved. They still could not find any people, but they also could no longer find the way we entered the city. The avenue split into a labyrinth of lanes and increasingly smaller streets that led nowhere or back to the starting point. I inspected my men up close, every single one, wanting to be sure they weren’t making a fool out of me or weren’t under the influence of some kind of substance. But the only thing I could find in their eyes was fear. This fear grew alongside the fact that our navigation instruments had stopped working. I looked around. Darkness was falling over the city. It seemed to me like the streets around us were imperceptibly moving and squeezing us tighter and tighter. With a couple of my men, I set off to inspect. When we returned to the main square, it was already dark. Even though it seemed unbelievable, I started to believe that the city of Sala, this remote little city of Sala with all of us in the middle, had transformed into a complicated maze with no apparent exit. I looked up at the balcony of city hall where our flag waved in the light of the rising moon. The war wasn’t over yet. For us, the war continued. Not on battlefields, in trenches at the front, or in various military ambushes, but here, in the screaming solitude of a dead city.

THE ROCK

All I know in life is a mountain of gravel, our village, and the rock. They say that the mountain of gravel has been growing for centuries. It is so imposing that its shadow in the evenings and the mornings covers even the farthest places, and its mighty slopes can be seen from every point in the kingdom. Several thousand of the huts in my village stand at its base. Everyone who lives here is a slave on their own land. We are not allowed to leave nor live in peace. Our masters change every few years or decades, but our fate remains unchanged. The rock is on the other side of the village. It’s not possible to describe the rock because it always appears differently to each person. The only sure thing is that the rock is small, much smaller than the mountain of gravel, which is a peculiar paradox since the mountain of gravel grew entirely from the material we dug out of the rock, thus the rock should cease to exist. But the rock withstands our sweat and effort, remaining the same size for centuries. Every morning our masters drive us through a narrow tunnel into the interior of the rock. We never know what awaits us there. One time, its entire interior was painted with frescoes of Saint Mother Mary and Orthodox saints, the next time with Muslim ornaments, another time with frescoes of Catholic saints and the crucifixion. Our task is always the same. We use picks and other tools to remove the images from the inner sandy walls, to erase everything that appears there, transform it into dust, and take the remains from the cave to the mountain of gravel. I remember when I entered the tunnel for the first time as a nine-year-old and stopped, petrified by the beauty of its interior. I could not understand who had created something so beautiful and even less the will of my masters to destroy all this beauty.  After decades of hard digging, I grew almost entirely indifferent. Without inner doubts or reservations, I swing my pick under the hazy glare of torches, likewise splitting the faces of saints, Hindu goddesses, Confucius’ smile, and the most beautiful Islamic ornaments. My fate is the fate of a destroyer. My soul is equal to the soul of every slave. My hut at the foot of the mountain of gravel is as cold as all the huts in our village. In spite of this, I didn’t stop wondering, Where do all these images, all this beauty in the cave, come from? Who tirelessly creates them, as if in mockery of those who day after day tear them down from the inner vaults of the rock? Who is ruining our existence? I was born a slave, and I believe that soon I will die a slave. Someday, we will manage to remove the last image, destroy the last ornament, expunge the last figure, name, or fleeting sign of any kind of savior, break through the thin walls of the rock, reach daylight. My fate is determined, but a day will come when my descendants will breach the wall and forever erase the rock from the face of the Earth.