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III
The female body stirred and moved to the left side of the chair. Maybe twenty or twenty-five seconds later its hand stretched out and in slow motion placed a sweater on top of a bra. The bra looked very dark in that light: it was probably black, but an unknown reader cannot say that for sure, he is just a boy from the countryside.
Then the hand suddenly moved, prior to which it grabbed the bra in her fingers, but unfortunately, goddamit!, the bra snagged on the sweater by the hook and the hand simultaneously lifted the bra and the foreign-made sweater, which was sticking out and touching the armrest with its entire weight. The woman’s body turned around to see what caused this horrible insolence that prevented moving the bra. When the body noticed that the bra was caught by a hook on the sweater, it dropped it on the floor and turned towards the mirror, which hung in front of the body like a hanged man. The body raised its arms and wrung them: now what? How do you unwring wrung hands? However the clever body came up with a solution. From the front you could see that it wedged its hands in between its legs. That’s better than keeping them wrung in the air. It straightened up and the shoulder blades ruffled the skin on the back. It stood upright opposite the shiny mirror, which was joyously absorbing it. Then it shivered and nervously looked around the room as if someone was watching it. Of course, there was a writer watching it through the peephole, but that doesn’t count until they translate his works into German.
To be more precise the writer – maybe it was Kaval, registered under code name Minister – right in this moment, maybe four minutes earlier, walked into the Danube Bar, shortly hesitating under the curious glances of some guests, which we won’t name for now, and darted over to the cashier. He liked bar cashiers, the prosperous cashiers, regal, submerged into a dream interrupted as coitus interruptus by handing out crowns. Looking tired and without a smile she handed him a phone card, because he had forgotten his portable phone in the car. It was almost 4 a.m. and he felt guilty, a fashionable feeling back then. He didn’t love the woman’s body, that was the worst thing about it, but he wanted to know what she was doing, and this thought bothered him all day long. The phone made a chicken-like sound and right after you could hear the voice of the dialed body:
“Who is it?”
The frightened writer froze, afraid that the body would know it was him, afraid that he would get caught, just like he wanted to catch it. It was a horrible moment. Then he took out a green box of Csarda cigarettes from his pocket and hung up. With his right hand he turned on the ignition of his white Mercedes and hurried to hide out at the Club, presently again on 2 Laurinska Street. For a short while he hesitated under the glances of a few national artists, laureates of ministerial honors, which need not to be named. They were playing Blackjack and Bavarian tarot with coppers.2
The entire woman’s body felt like it is far away from all sorts of evil, not even worrying about what kind of effect can the evil have on it. But now it understood that in the core of its being it collected so much evil, that its only responsibility after the fall of Communism was to decrease the amount of evil to the lowest possible level, that maybe it will even give a hundred crowns to the Catholic Church, or possibly give a few bucks to save the Stoka Theater. The body wasn’t afraid that it would succumb to some bodily instinct but it did not want to remind itself doing the thing that overwhelmed it not too long ago.
The writer doesn’t know, but the readers probably know what it is. They told the woman’s body about some fault that the author supposedly committed; the body did not understand the meaning of the words, it could not imagine his fault, for a while it connected her with the evening when it felt pleasure for the first time, as her colleagues at the Ministry of Interior used to talk about it, it thought that he is guilty by signing on to cooperate, that he enriched his body, that he revealed knowledge to it that the body did not know before, it thought that it made him guilty in its womb, it just did not understand how the others could have known about it.
In moments like this even the author’s guilty feelings returned and kept flooding him until he started resisting it. In the beginning he didn’t care if that feeling of guilt exists inside him because he masturbates, or because he admitted his guilt from the times of normalization and socialist realism. All those nights with his arms folded under his head, if he was not in the Writers’ Club, he dissected his case in detail. His eyes, blood shot from the lack of sleep, swelled up.
“You can’t do it?”
“No, not at all, and if I am in a state like this, it is unlikely that it will happen at all. The important thing is what will show up later. To write means to have a personal computer and possibly, if it cannot be done any other way, at least some thought for the beginning. If you don’t know anything, just write. If I only knew what that Hungarian tarot is!”
It’s night, and like a spring, a dare desire stems from me. I desire not to be silent.
He started his novel again: ‘I felt lonely, so I decided to make some tea. Besides, it makes me feel warmer.’ He felt the sentence sounded right. Right, and unnecessary. But it was perched up on top of the page, actually the first paragraph. The author probably wanted to start differently. But he couldn’t. He wanted to get to the point right away. But what point and what was the notion of the point?
Instead he began to read the directions and examined the piston applicator. He was even interested in the makeup of the birth control agent. It was made up of hydrargyrum phenyloboricum, acidum boricum in the background of hydrophilic methylcellulose gel, a hundred gram content. He read it and at the same time looking at the pictures, imagined the application method. He got a little sad and put the package away into the bottom drawer. He got a headache, thinking it must have been from the writing. In the hope of forgetting about his headache, he lit a cigarette, but it got even worse after about three pulls. In the regular cigarette box on the table he found, god knows why, a stick of sugar-free Wrigley’s Orbit gum. He unwrapped a piece, put it in his mouth and put out the cigarette in an ashtray made of cut crystal which was placed in the right hand corner of his desk. The table was made from massive walnut wood with soft marquetry. He stole it from the Ethnographic museum in Martin, from the centre of national culture and municipal knowledge. He realized that smoking was no longer fashionable in the United States, what a shame. The smoke irritated his nostrils so he opened the window to air out the room. The fresh air from Dimitrovka chemical plant refreshed him and while leaning out of the window and watching the well lit and clean streets, and the glowing faces of his countrymen, he figured he would write something tomorrow, or go fishing in the morning so he and the woman’s body could cook some fish in the evening: he knew that the body liked fish, especially fresh fish, ungutted, from fresh mountain creeks, that foam like a light pasteurized lager beer, cooled from Banská Bystrica near Zvolen. And he got scared a little that he won’t catch anything, only if…
“I am happy that we are friends,” the woman’s body said dreamily.
He kissed its palm.
“You know,” the woman’s body continued, “in the joint stock company where I work, and which I like very much because it is my kind of an environment, the majority of people, I’m not saying they’re cynical, but more like without a childhood or youth, but you are young, you have to remain like that.”
“I’ll try. I’ll even dye my bald spot.”
The body spoke with a lovely seriousness. The author felt really young then: his cheeks were hot and he pressed his lips to the woman’s delicate wrist, interwoven with small blue veins.
The writer wanted to describe all this, to write it by hand, as a handwritten, guaranteed, warranted, unique work as opposed to the quality ready-made non-uniqueness…
But the feminist body said all of a sudden:
“Leave me alone, let me be. It doesn’t have to be. I trust you, you know that.”
If he was a few years older and all gray, he would have insisted. But he wasn’t, and that saved him. He got up almost apologizing and walked to the door: it was once manufactured in Smrecina Pukanec, that is Exanuco Ltd, or Inc.; he almost made a mistake, when he was entering it, but it ended well. The body was alone with a boring and dreamless night ahead of it.
Almost the entire woman’s body was convinced that it was worthless. The work it did, seemed to it as a wild hankering and its own actions seemed senseless to it. First thing in the morning when it was getting up, the body understood that the change it and the dissidents wanted, had not come. The body grabbed its underwear and threw them into a wicker basket made from a birch tree, and right after that took out a fresh pair from the closet – the body changed its underwear everyday, unless it forgot, of course – and it put them on in two quick movements, the first movement went up to its knees and the second one, after a short one minute pause, all the way up to the crotch. This is how it did it every morning before it washed itself, had some breakfast, if there was any; the body usually had some milk or tea with a bun, a hot dog, a hamburger from McDonald’s on SNP Square, just about anything, and on top of that a croissant with butter and strawberry jam or any jam, and then it cleaned its teeth, almost all of them.
But even so, it had a feeling of guilt, darker and more mysterious, which it did not understand and from which no one, not even the author blamed it, but nevertheless the body felt guilty and shallow, disgusting and revolting and dirty. Luckily, there was enough universal washing detergent without phosphate, excitement and soaking, and for a reasonable price.
But the author did not go mushroom picking as he had planned. He had to take part at a political meeting. He didn’t understand where he was, he only realized that his body, legs and arms were intertwining with the legs and arms of other men and women, and in the commotion he managed to notice the terrifying picture of a group intercourse. After a short while – we can’t specify it more precisely – he was sticky from the secretions of surrounding bodies; collective sperm, in our language “seeds”, glued up his eyes, nose and ears, and thrown to the ground he jerked in general ecstasy, which was, he didn’t know exactly, as always, either accentuated or muffled by the mounting stench until he couldn’t take it any longer and passed out. When he woke up he noticed that just like him others have also passed out and many had died. He got scared and he didn’t know whether they died from the Siberian winter, fear, not thinking and faithfulness or from the draining ecstasy which joyfully took over them.
In a desperate attempt at self-preservation he searched for a recollection from childhood, at least genetically uncertain, but his memory failed him.
Fathers did not write so they would remember. They wrote because they remembered.
“I didn’t have a childhood and maybe not even any ancestors. Oy, if only I could convince any theatre or a literary magazine.”
Even the woman’s body gained by marriage disappeared in the mist of his native valleys, that is in his eyes’ mist. According to the instructions, he watched its faint shadow on the fence of trees in front of him, he even tried to imitate its walk, lithe, very short and economic, absorbing it into himself, extracting it from the mist, but the body was walking faster than he was, visibly getting further from him, disappearing, and he stopped following it. Where did it go? Which way did it go and where was he walking now?
The writer, thank god, doesn’t know: but the reader possibly suspects what is going on today.
Even Y does not know about all this. He was just mushroom-picking in the oak coppice in the part of the village called Where the Cow Limped, wringing his hands and desperately calling in the dark forest:
“Show up, please, show up!”
And suddenly he was surrounded by a flock of small golden chaterelles 3, as if
they were hungry, sad or cold. He leaned down in front of them, unwrung his hands and placed the tiny bodies gently into the wicker basket. They will make a chaterelle goulash or paprikash.
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1 Writer Svetozár Hurban Vajanský once joked, when he walked down the street in Turčiansky Svätý Martin, with a parted gray Russian beard, in a jacket and with a cane, and stopped by At the Brtáň’s for a game of tarot and a glass of Martinian beer:
“Oh, I could really use some apparatus to get in touch with my colleagues in St. Petersburg, Ljublana and Prague faster!”
So he went to the royal district post-office headquarters, where a nice looking lady courteously explained to him, that the invention is being worked on abroad, he will just have to patiently wait a couple of years.
“Of course,” said the writer, “maybe in a hundred years life will be easier for people, what’s the rush, there’s time enough,” and he looked at the big chronometric watch on a thick chain with a smile. It was a gift from a thankful nation. For all the riches he had and gave away: a watch. Of course, Vajanský with his watch or without it, remains through his work – unlike the offices – and will last, until there is culture in the world and until there is culture and love, attention and honor to our own man.
The writer in Pukanec joked once when he returned home almost blind from a complicated eye surgery:
“Oy, I could really use a phone, so I could talk to my friends in Vienna, Munich and Prague, and so I could continue working in a profession and on a mission, since my communication ability has been decreased like this!”
And he sent his wife to the committee of self-governing telecommunications and connections with a request to which he attached serious reasons, because of which he would like to promptly rent and pay for expensive and poor quality services. And her highness The Office Clerk said: Does anyone think we live in a civilized and humane society, where you can install a phone line precipitately and extraordinarily, when a real , a straight up citizen-idiot waits several years until the almighty Bureaucracy takes pity on him?
The writer laughed uncontrollably at the bureaucratic cynicism and sent the request to the Ministry of communications of Zimbabwe: Would they be so kind and lend him a well-preserved tam-tam from the museum, so he could continue his work for the nation and its culture, which includes attention and respect, if not at the very least to a person, than at least a responsibility towards the paying customer.
2. Bavarian Tarot is only played with a deck of 36 cards, as well as Tapp Tarot, or Sans prendre. There are several more types of tarot: the Austrian deck has 7 cards in each color from the French deck (king, queen, jack – boy – garcon, four cards with numbers), add to that four horsemen (also cavaliers, knight or picture card, in between a queen and a picture card), 21 of your tarots and skyz = 54 cards. Big tarot encompassed the whole French game (52 cards), 21 own Tarots, skysa (skysa, harlequin) and four cavaliers – hence 78 cards. That is also how many cards the Venetian deck has, Tarocco Bolognese (and ancient Italian name of tarocchi) had 62 cards and Tarot Florence had 97 cards. (Vojtech Omasta – Slavomir Ravik: Players, cards, card games, 1969.)
3. You can read about chaterelles in detail and devotion in Das eigene Horrorskop (Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt 1995) on pages 110 and 111: ‘Funf Uhr Sonnenmorgen im Wald, Im Birkenheim…’
Translated by Viridiana Carleo
