Best European Fiction 2014 Page 3

  And now there was the man in the yellow parka.

  That the same extra, in the same loud jacket, had ambled through two episodes of a single series was already unusual. Was the production really that broke? But when I saw him again the next week, I really thought I was losing it. Still, there he was, sitting on a bench in the background of a public square, bringing a bottle in a brown paper bag to his lips. What did it mean?

  The shot had only lasted a few seconds, just long enough to establish the setting. The POV was already tightening—in medium shot—on Detective Atkinson, deep in discreet conversation with a stoolie. Truth be told, their exchange barely held my interest, and I watched the rest of the episode distractedly, my mind on the man in the yellow parka. What could his furtive presence signify? Nothing seemed to justify it. He had no part in the action, and the main characters didn’t even seem to notice him. Burns hadn’t spared him a glance the week before, no more than Atkinson did now. Was he a minor character whose entrance the writers were readying on the sly, a pawn surreptitiously advanced on a narrative chessboard? Why not? Except that his appearances were so subliminal that this seemed especially unlikely. Or perhaps his presence was an in-joke among the directors, like in Chabrol’s heyday, when you were sure to catch Attal and Zardi in small roles or hear a henchman humming “Fascination”? Or even—but, frankly, this seemed pretty doubtful—a constraint gratuitously imposed by a nutcase producer who loved Oulipo? Was it possible the man in the parka figured in every episode of Simple Cops?

  While waiting for the next episode, I set about some basic research in my books and online. Which led to the discovery that Simple Cops hadn’t exactly left an enduring impression in the memories of telephiles. Martin Winkler and Christophe Petit made no mention of it in their useful dictionary of TV shows. A single lukewarm review on IMDb, which criticized the series for being a drab carbon copy of NYPD Blue—a not completely misguided point of view. Specialized American websites listed it among a hundred other such shows with full credits and a brief blurb more or less recycled from one site to the next, with few variations. The “Anecdotes,” “Trivia,” or “Production Secrets” sections, where one might hope to find some mention of the man in the parka, were empty. Information was sparse all around. Still, I learned in passing that the show had only had a very brief life. It had been canceled in the middle of its second season, no doubt because of low ratings. For that same reason, it hadn’t been released on DVD—or I would have rushed to order it. All the same, sifting stubbornly through the several pages of links the search engine had disgorged so undiscerningly, I finally found a more complete source of information on an Australian site, including an episode guide with short synopses. This codex would prove useful in finding my footing, since the series, relegated to nightly spackle for programming gaps on a local affiliate, was clearly being broadcast all out of order.

  From that point on, I systematically recorded the episodes while continuing to watch them as they were broadcast. I’d come to enjoy my Tuesday date in the silence of the night: feeling the city asleep around me strengthened my privileged connection to Cleveland’s cops. Notebook in hand, I also began watching the series with a new eye, no longer caring at all about following the cases (rather repetitive in the long run), or finding out if Burns would reconcile with his delinquent son; if Atkinson would wed the adorable Marion Sanders, whom he hit on with touching awkwardness; if Morales would beat his cancer and Resnick divorce his wife who cheated on him left and right. Instead, I attentively scrutinized the edges of each shot, keeping an eye out for the mysterious extra’s next appearance. And, to my great astonishment, my wildest hypothesis was confirmed. The man in the yellow parka figured in each and every episode—at least in the dozen I saw, since I’d started midseason. He never left the background, played no role in the plot. And yet, as I fit the puzzle pieces together, a certain coherence eventually emerged from his successive appearances. They seemed to trace a parallel story, as though in dotted outline: the career of a poor guy going to seed.

  • In Season 1, Episode 3 (the earliest one I caught), he was crossing the street with a halting step, casting worried looks all around.

  • In S01E05, you can see him coming out of the store next door to where Sanders and Colson are investigating an armed robbery, and, almost immediately, entering the next store down.

  • In S01E06, he’s going through the revolving door to the courthouse while Bauer gets told off by the DA in the foreground, on the front steps.

  • S01E07 was the one where I noticed him for the first time, trying to enter an abandoned house.

  • In S01E09, he feeds pigeons in a park.

  • In S01E10, he emerges at the end of a hallway in the precinct and makes a beeline for a locked closet door, rattling it violently (the guy seems really obsessed with doors).

  • S01E12 is the one where he’s boozing it up at the far end of the square where Atkinson is meeting with the stoolie.

  • For the first and only time, he makes two appearances in a single episode: S01E13. First we see him panhandling on a sidewalk, while Colson and Thaddeus proceed to arrest a dealer in the foreground. A bit later on, he slips between two loose slats in a fence around a construction site.

  • In S02E01, he’s negotiating on a doorstep with a retiree who then slams the door in his face.

  • I almost missed him in S02E02 . . . yet there he was, lying around with other homeless people in an industrial squat that Burns and Morales visit in search of a vanished witness.

  • It’s in S02E05 that we get the best look at him. Bauer and Resnick are on a stakeout in a van under an overpass. Bums warm themselves around a fire in an oil drum. Among them is the man in the yellow parka (not that yellow anymore; in fact, more dirty gray)—poorly shaven, features gaunt, gaze vacant.

  It’s strange to watch a film or series while focusing on the backgrounds and edges of the frame. You develop a curious attentional walleye, and realize that most of the time you don’t really watch movies. On one hand, you keep following the unfolding plot despite yourself. You register names, facts; you sense a twist coming up; you figure out who’s guilty. On the other, you find that even the most conventional fiction is full of bizarre, surprising, incongruous, or simply poignant details, sometimes deliberately arranged by the director—whose reasons aren’t always clear—sometimes recorded unbeknownst to him by the camera, like the short-haired girl in Intimidation: fleeting, fragile moments, gestures all the more precious for being involuntary, forever imprisoned in the frame . . . Aren’t these, at heart, our most secret reason for loving movies? I noticed several such details in Simple Cops. Monica, the pretty precinct receptionist, had an inexhaustible collection of sweaters. She wore a new one every episode. Thaddeus, Bauer, and Mentell were all left-handed—three southpaws on the same show? And what to make of the excessive proliferation of watches, wall clocks, clock radios, sometimes shot in close-up, if called for to ratchet up suspense, but more often in the background or the edges of the frame, like the sign of a furtive, barely hinted-at obsession? And how to take all that graffiti in the form of cries for help—“Help!” “Get me out of this!”—which showed up at regular intervals in exterior shots, spray-painted on walls or scribbled hastily in phone booths?

  This wild goose chase lasted three months. One Tuesday, I settled into the sofa, remote in hand, ready to start recording. At 2:33, after the gauntlet of commercials, two uniformed strangers suddenly appeared instead of the familiar titles—a beanpole of a blonde and a well-built black man, getting out of a NYPD car. Goddammit! They’d stopped showing Simple Cops without warning! And replaced it with another old stopgap of a show. I was furious.

  Over the next few days, I met with another disappointment. Trying to re-watch the episodes, I found out that—unbeknownst to me—my old VCR was on its last legs (like most everyone I knew who still had VCRs, I recorded lots of things only to set them aside till months later). The picture was warped, snowy, unwatchable. It wa
s impossible to see a thing in that soup. I’d taped a whole bunch of movies during the same period, and they were unwatchable too. I thought of my old friend Bernard, a fanatical cinephile who always checked to see that the film he’d set the VCR to tape the night before had been properly recorded. He was right to be so uptight about it. I could’ve kicked myself.

  Simple Cops had come to occupy such a place in my aimless life that I might’ve sunken into very real doldrums just then, if I hadn’t gotten a call two days later about a job with a cultural delegation to Germany that I’d applied for but never really thought I’d get. I was one of four people who made it to the final round. The interview was held a few days later and went unbelievably well, maybe because I hadn’t entertained any false hopes. My German came back all on its own, so easily it amazed me. A week later, they called to say that despite my having been a very competitive candidate—blah blah blah—they’d decided to go with someone else. But a second job that needed urgent filling had unexpectedly opened up in Berlin, and they’d thought of me. Of course the responsibilities weren’t the same, and the salary was lower as a result. Perhaps I might even be overqualified for the posting? The man on the other end of the line seemed apologetic. I pretended to think for a moment before accepting, not letting on that no solution could have suited me more. I’ve never liked having, as he put it, “responsibilities.” I had to pack, fill out a pile of paperwork, find a subletter. My days were suddenly very full.

  I liked Berlin right from the start. I felt like I’d just emerged from a long hibernation. There was a great deal of work; office hours often spilled over into evenings and weekends, but it didn’t bother me. From time to time, I remembered the man in the yellow parka. I even brought him up with a few close coworkers, but none of them knew the series and my comments were met with polite, skeptical silence. This was a bit before TV’s big boom in popularity: most people who worked in the culture sector just weren’t interested in those kinds of stories, which they condescendingly considered by-products of mass culture, and so beneath them. Since I was already thought of as the department joker, I didn’t insist, and steered the conversation toward a book or an exhibit.

  The first six months went by like a dream. Then, one fall morning, checking the movie listings in the paper, I saw an ad for a new American release, The Cleveland Ultimatum. I didn’t recognize the director’s name but, remembering all the hours I’d spent in that city in the company of Detective Burns and his teammates, I went to see the movie the next Saturday afternoon. It was a big, fairly leaden thriller with endless shoot-outs, a conspiracy whose mastermind was of course some CIA bigwig, and the insufferable kind of editing one can’t seem to escape, these days, where the angles change every three seconds to give the film the illusion of rhythm and mask the fact that the director doesn’t know where to put the camera. If it hadn’t taken place in Cleveland, I’d have left after twenty minutes. But I was happy to catch a glimpse, however briefly, of the Terminal Tower again, and Erie Harbor, and the arches of the Detroit-Superior Bridge.

  The shot went by so fast I thought I was seeing things. But that little yellow spot in the background—wasn’t that the man in the yellow parka? Valiantly I endured the avalanche of inept incidents till the end of the film and stayed for the next showing. When the sequence in question came up again, I had no more doubts. Many years had gone by between Simple Cops and the shooting of The Cleveland Ultimatum. His beard had grayed. His hair had thinned. But it was him, in his old yellow parka, that I saw on a street corner, with two other vagrants. I was flabbergasted.

  On my way out of the theatre, I was assailed by all manner of thoughts. Quite banal ones, really. I thought that while my life had just taken a turn for the better, other lives had remained inexorably stuck at an impasse. A bit like when you go back to the neighborhood where you grew up and find the same lady at the bakery’s still there behind the counter. The man in the yellow parka was just like her. While the world turned, he’d continued his nomadic existence for all these years without being able to leave Cleveland; or—the phrase took shape of its own accord in my mind, and so quickly I was dumbfounded at myself—without being able to leave the image of Cleveland.

  Sometimes chance moves things along in strange ways. The next week I was sent on an assignment to Cologne. At the evening’s end, I went back to my hotel exhausted, collapsed on the bed, turned on the TV while noisily kicking my shoes off, and started channel surfing. I stopped on Eurosport, where there was a game of snooker underway that I watched till the end, trying to remember the rules, a red ball then a colored ball—I’ve always been fascinated by that game. After which I started surfing again, flipping quickly through five or six channels, then back: I’d just spotted big ol’ Burns. It was an episode of Simple Cops, one I’d never seen before. I turned up the sound. Naturally, the series was dubbed in German, which highlighted the strangeness of stumbling across it by chance here, of all places, in a hotel room, although still late at night. The plot also proceeded at a different pace, with something awkward about it, as if the writers hadn’t found their rhythm yet. It seemed to be endless exposition where the characters were introduced in turn, and several storylines whose resolutions I already knew were being set up. After fifteen minutes, I realized I was watching the pilot.

  So I waited, hoping the appearance of the man in the parka—his first appearance—hadn’t gone by yet. And soon I saw him, lying on a park bench around which various people were walking about, among them loving couples, mothers with strollers, and finally Burns and Atkinson crossing the frame to sit down a bit farther off. The two cops weren’t on duty or discussing the current case, but rather their personal problems. The sequence ended as it had begun, with a long shot of the park. The man in the parka was still sleeping on his bench.

  And as the episode went on and sleep overtook me, I caught a glimpse of what had happened that day, as they were shooting Simple Cops. It was a scene with lots of extras, a ballet of passersby that must have taken a lot of rehearsal to get right. The second AD had asked the extra in the yellow parka to just lie down on a bench and play a sleeping homeless man. They’d rehearsed, fine-tuned a few details—you, lady with the stroller, walk faster; loving couple, you go slower—done five or six takes. Lying in the sun, the man in the parka had wound up falling asleep for real. When the director was satisfied, the AD had sent the extras home while the crew packed up. They’d paid no further mind to the man in yellow lying on his bench. When he’d woken up an hour later, the park was empty.

  How had he realized that he’d slipped into another plane of reality? Quite naturally, he must’ve wanted to go home to his wife and kids, but that was no longer possible, since his house hadn’t been filmed. So he’d spent days and even weeks going around in circles through a virtual Cleveland that expanded as the production of Simple Cops consumed new locations. When he ran out of money, he’d started begging to get by, sleeping where he could, making friends with other homeless people. Maybe sometimes he let loose and told his story to his comrades in misery. The guys would laugh without malice, taking him for a harmless, sweet-natured nutcase, and pass him the bottle again. And all the while, he’d be looking desperately for an exit, a way back to the other side, the right side of the set. He’d go everywhere, try every door, but utterly in vain. In a warehouse where he’d squatted, he found old cans of spray-paint he used to graffiti SOS on the wall. One day—who knew?—someone might notice his presence? But ten years later, when The Cleveland Ultimatum was shot, he was still a prisoner of that strange parallel world, only visible to cameras. Perhaps at this very moment he is wandering from street to street, door to door, in hopes of someday finding a way out of the screen.

  TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH BY EDWARD GAUVIN

  [BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA]

  ELVIS HADZIC

  The Curious Case of Benjamin Zec

  Once upon a time, not long ago, in the mountainous Balkans, a land of peasants, lived a boy. His name was Benjamin Zec and,
some would say, he was just an ordinary boy.

  Benjamin swung through the branches of chestnut trees like Tarzan. There was no tree around his little town that he hadn’t climbed. He was the best marble-shooter on his street and an excellent second in the school’s kilometer dash. The other boys in class respected him, as he was the best goal scorer on the soccer field, but the girls kept their eye on him, giggling, because Benjamin did not hesitate to pinch bottoms or stick out his hand, as if yawning, to grab a barely formed breast. Perhaps this is why he often bore proud bruises under his big green eyes.

  Benjamin, the little devil, used to return from recess cradling to his chest a T-shirt full of early cherries. Then he would eat them during class and throw pits at the teacher’s pets sitting up front. He never liked school much, nor what they taught him there. Benjamin loved the smell of the woods and the earthy primrose buds more than any science lesson. Once, he even challenged the physics teacher with the extremely rude and bold statement that Newton had in fact been defecating under that famous tree, and that no apple had fallen on his head, but that he, Newton, was actually inspired by seeing his own shit succumb to the force of gravity! Benjamin went on saying that the legend about the apple tree was an obvious fabrication anyhow: apples don’t just fall off trees like that. Besides, he added, the best ideas always come from relieving oneself in nature! The whole class laughed, and Benjamin, of course, got a D in physics.