Vyhľadávanie
(Extract)
Being trapped on a rock face and the routine continuation of a hike are two versions of a potential continuation of the universe: Schroedinger’s cat, dead or alive, trapped inside a bag or rather a box or, to put it crudely, a cunt. If, however, we assume that the universe I have inhabited until now is the one and only universe or, more precisely, one among an entire universe of possible universes, it follows that this universe must also include the summer holidays at Grandma’s and Grandpa’s which I used to spend right here, beneath Bear Rock, obviously not in a romantic secluded cottage but on an ordinary provincial town housing estate where, indeed, most of my childhood was spent.
I don’t know what is it that suddenly makes me so uneasy about the fact that this summer my – or rather, our – son Janko, is spending his holidays at his grandma’s. I used to feel very much at home at my Granny’s: if Janko is as happy there as I was, there is absolutely no need to worry. I was also a second-grader just as Janko is now, that is, I had just finished the second form and was about to start the third and, as a result, I could never come up with an unambiguous answer to the usual question asked by nosey ladies in the street or supermarket cashiers:
“So, which year are you in at school?“Or:“Tell me, what form are you in?“My form is the one with a blackboard and white chalk.My best friends were Peťo and Tonko who lived on the sixth floor but there wasn’t much love lost between us and Tonko‘s sister Eva – perhaps because Eva was older and no longer had much understanding for our world. Our gang also included Milan and Peťo, whose dad used to repair lifts and who had to be summoned whenever someone dropped a ball into the lift-shaft. The key thing was that none of us was allowed to use the lift because:
“The lift may be used only by persons over the age of twelve. Persons below the age of twelve may use the lift only when accompanied by a person over the age of twelve.“
They could hardly have come up with a better wording at Transport Chrudim and perhaps, objectively speaking, a better wording was not really possible.
“Tonko and Peťo got stuck in the lift,“ little Iveta shouted to me, her thin voice echoing in the dank hallway. I dashed over to take a look at the boys imprisoned in the cabin, presumably because they had shaken it by jumping up and down.
“We’ll have to fetch Peťo’s dad, “ I mused.“He’ll give us all a thrashing,“ Iveta yelped. I have to point out that the shaft was not walled in and was enclosed merely by some wire mesh that afforded imposing views of the ground floor’s vertiginous depths to everyone who lived in our block of flats or came to visit. I was often haunted by this view in my dreams, in which someone would remove the protective mesh and the hallway floor would suddenly tilt dangerously making me slide down its smooth surface straight into the shaft. No matter how hard I tried to find something to hold on to, I would get closer and closer to the edge of our high-rise abyss.
The cabin in which Tonko and Peťo were stuck suddenly started moving downwards – this was no longer in my dream – quite spontaneously stopping on each floor. Iveta and I ran downstairs. The terrified boys had already landed on the ground floor. All that separated us was the mesh on the door, which would not open.
“I’ll go and get your dad,“ Iveta shouted.“What are you doing here?“ Mr. Krištúfek’s voice suddenly boomed behind us before anyone had a chance to call him. Or would have, as we used to say. “Peter, what have you been up to with that lift? I’ll go and get my screwdriver.... And my belt too. Just you wait till I get you out of there!“
Irritated neighbours started to bang on the door demanding to know what had happened to the lift. A red light inside an aluminium box fitted on each floor was lit up, signalling that something was definitely broken. I ran up the stairs to the fifth floor, to my Granny‘s.
“Don’t be friends with Peter,“ Granny said. “He’s a naughty boy.“
* * *
“Peťo, let’s move over a bit,“ I said to my friend in the shadow of our six-storey block, looking up towards our kitchen window where Granny’s face was bound to be hiding behind the curtain. Granny’s angry expression was only a mask for her affectionate concern for her grandson, who may have fallen in with some dubious gang.
“Granny doesn’t want us to be friends,“ I said honestly.“But why?“ Peťo shrugged his shoulders.“Let’s move over, somewhere she can’t see us,“ I insisted.We walked away from her vantage point at the kitchen windows and to a carpet-beating frame next to some rubbish bins.
“This place is for beating carpets, not for sitting around and things,“ Mrs. Uhláriková shouted at us from the second floor. We ignored her and were soon joined by Ľuba, Jara and Tonko. Only Tonko’s sister Eva kept herself to herself. She was on the threshold of adolescence, although it’s hard to think of worse timing than being on the threshold of adolescence in the mid-seventies. That was the time when stuff like this played on the radio:
“I’m drawing a rose on a bit of paper...“Or:“If I had a sister she would be pretty but not as pretty as you are.“And a girl had to keep an eye out for young men with sideburns wearing terylene trousers who might give her a ride in their Skoda 100, or Embe, as we used to say, and rely on state-produced sanitary pads and state-produced beauty products – that must have been why Eva was always so tense. “What have you got there?“ Ľuba asked and indeed, I had forgotten I had brought something along – my chubby little boy’s hand was clutching a broken old camera I had fished out from the depths of a wardrobe in my grandparents’ bedroom.
“Is it working?“ Tonko asked.“Oh yeah,“ I said, whispering into Peťo’s ear:“This button here, when I press it I can take a moving shot... Do you understand? Just like with a film camera...“
“Let’s try it out,“ said Peťo. We jumped off the carpet-beating rack, everyone else trailing behind.
“What do you think this is, a theatre show?“ snapped Peťo.I pointed the broken old camera at a rotund old bus with a trailer that was struggling to move from the stop. Its metal sign “Bratislava – Zochova chata“ glinted in the summer afternoon sun.
“Take a picture of the Zochova bus!“ Peťo poked me in the ribs.“Let me take a moving shot,“ I whispered and started following the panting bus in a very realistic manner.
“You two keep whispering amongst yourselves,“ said Ľuba. “Every time before you take a picture, you whisper something to Peťo.“
“It’s a secret,“ I retorted returning to the carpet-beating rack.“A friend of mine was walking to Limbach the other day when a chap who drove past offered her a lift...“ Jara was saying in a choked voice. “Who knows what he was going to do to her?“
Strangle her, cut her up, drown her, quarter her.All this immediately came to my mind since I didn’t have a clear idea of other acts grown men might commit upon little girls, or any other things men and women might get up to. Even now I don’t really have a clear idea. In my universe all these things have remained somehow insignificant, unrevealed, shrouded in the same mystery, by the same veil of incomprehensibility as the story of the unknown little girl whom an unknown man was trying to lure with unknown (but certainly evil) intent. Clearly, I must have taken to heart a generalized piece of advice received at school from our form teacher, old Mrs. Chobotova, in a civics class perhaps, or maybe as part of a practical lesson. She used to say, with a meaningful grin on her face:
“If a stranger ever calls you or tries to entice you by promising you things like sweets, you must never follow! You must never even start talking to strangers!“
At that point it was clear that I was in the second form but later, during the holidays, it was no longer that clear. Am I still in the second form? Or am I already in the third? ”Did you know that our block of flats has been shifted? They put it on these rollers and shifted it,“ said the fair-haired Tonko and we all burst out laughing.
“Seriously,“ Tonko got angry. “They did it in northern Bohemia, too, they shifted a whole church. Seriously. They put it on these rollers and moved it further away from the city. Or closer, I can’t remember. Seriously.“
“How can anyone put a church on rollers and shift it?“ said Peťo.“You bet they can!“ shouted Tonko. “My Dad said so.“Dad.... I had no Dad, which was why I lacked this kind of information.“It might be possible,“ I agreed with my friend. “You can do all sorts of things with technology these days.““By 2000 we shall fly to the moon,“ said Peťo.“So there, why shouldn’t it be possible to shift a block of flats?“ Tonko said triumphantly.“I read somewhere that mountains have been shifting too. The Lesser Carpathians. By seven millimetres a year. Or seventenths of a millimetre?“ I said with a scientific air.
“Just look at it,“ Tonko went on. “Just take a look, there, the block next to ours is right by the car park but ours has been shifted half a metre further away. When I was little, they put it on rollers and shifted it aside a bit. I remember them doing it at night. Seriously.“
“Otherwise both blocks are the same... The electrics inside are the same too, I know about those things, my Dad has shown me,“ said Peťo, pulling at my T-shirt. “Let’s go and have a look at the electrics. We’ll take pictures of it.“
Only the two of us ran to the block next door, heading straight for the box with its metal door sporting a picture of a red spark. An electric spark. Electrons with their own energy, their spin, their clearly – or actually not so clearly – defined quantum state.
“It won’t open,“ Peťo rattled the door. “Have you got a crown coin? A crown coin will do the trick...“
“What are you doing here?“ a voice belonging to a badtempered old woman came from above. And there she was, waddling down the stairs, coming straight towards us. “Stop messing about with it! You rascals, you scallywags, you!“
The woman came up to us and slapped both Peťo and me on the face. Red-faced, we ran out and went back to the carpetbeating rack. Our friends were gone. I ran into our shifted block and took the lift, which “only persons over the age of twelve were allowed to use and operate“ up to the fifth floor, to our flat, to Granny, and complained about the injustice I had just suffered.
“That must have been the photographer’s wife,“ Granny said. “The lady photographer.“
Or should I say, Mrs. Photographer?(Or a motorgrapher, if she produced graphic images of motors.)
That surprised me because the photographer was a friend of Grandpa’s and I was sure his wife knew who I was. And I was sure she knew I was a good boy who never messed things up. I may have gone on to mess up my own life and that of my wife’s, as well as my son’s childhood – but surely not electrics?
“She probably did not recognize you,“ said Granny and went on to serve my dinner.
The photographer used to develop photos my Grandpa had taken with his functioning camera, which had one of those accordion-style pullout lenses. The photographer had two protruding front teeth like a rabbit, and a beret with a little antenna. The photos he developed were grey and grainy but with a bit of effort you could tell what was on them. For example, they showed a little Grandpa in front of a huge hotel. Or Grandpa in a garden, tiny as an ant. Or Grandpa standing at an angle and posing with a cannon at Trenčín Castle. Or Grandpa standing upright outside a dangerously leaning winery building against a slanting background. Or Granny, with a street lamp protruding from her head. Or me, looking like a little prick with a big pair of sunglasses and a rucksack on my back. In another universe I would have asked the broken old photographer to develop the non-existent film from my broken old camera – I’m sure he would have done it free of charge to make up for the unfair beating I had suffered at the hands of his hysterical wife. And who knows, perhaps somewhere in the other universe he did develop the film since I can still see those pictures so clearly, so distinctly, in spite of their dubious quality. They move in front of my eyes, like the moving shots I took with the tacit approval of my friend Peťo, while I am hopelessly stuck here in this rock recess, drawing hope from the calculations I really did read in a magazine as a child, and which said that Bear Rock, along with the entire massif of the Lesser Carpathians, was shifting by seven millimetres, or seven-tenths of a millimetre each year, meaning that after a certain amount of time, or a certain amount of time multiplied by ten, with no effort on my part, I would arrive somewhere closer to civilization, in Bratislava or Vienna, in Leipzig or Ljubljana. Depending on the direction in which the Carpathians are actually shifting.
Translated by
Julia and Peter Sherwood
