Vyhľadávanie
Let’s call him Dušan. Or Jonáš. His mum used to call him Duško, his father Dušan. Surname: Jonáš. After his father. The son is the bearer of the father’s surname, as we all know. His father was Michal, after Archangel Michael. His mother Mária, maiden name Bučková. It didn’t matter what they’d called him, after all, at a certain stage in his life he’d been a Buddhist; he’d believed in karma and reincarnation, although apparently he was christened a Lutheran. At least, that’s what he’d been told. Of course, he couldn’t be expected to remember that; after all, he’d only been eight days old.
The only thing he could remember was his first emotion: FEAR.
Yes, in the beginning was fear.
He spent his time in a cot with a metal frame that was painted white and had bars on either side made of rope, like the net in a football goal. It is a cage, but he is still small, weak and ailing; he can’t reach up to pull the side bars down and he can’t climb out, even though the cage is open at the top. He can’t fly out! He is only little and even if he managed to stand up and climb out of the cage, he couldn’t leave the house! From his cot he can see the windows and there are bars on the windows, too; iron bars close together. When he was born this was a pub, but his grandfather got wind of nationalization. At first he wanted to burn it down, but others persuaded him not to. So he sold off the furnishings and converted the pub into a flat. They lived there with Aunt Anna and Uncle Emil.
Jonáš is alone and he knows that he has been locked in and someone is watching him. From time to time he notices an eye looking through the keyhole; a cold, blue eye that doesn’t move. Maybe it is made of glass, is artificial or dead, because it never blinks. Mummy is already at work; she’s a sales assistant in a nearby shop for miscellaneous goods called BUDÚCNOSŤ– THE FUTURE – and Granddad has gone to mow the meadow. He’s all alone here and uncomfortable – he’s wet himself again, but he must put up with it till lunchtime; he knows his mum will come and free him then and change his nappy. Yes, he must bear it in silence, because that eye is watching him and if he began to yell, to cry and beg for help, that dead eye would come to life, the door would open and Agitator would begin to make fun of him: “You’ve wet yourself again! You can’t even last out till lunchtime, you load of shit, are you never going to grow up to be a man?”
Their tenant – yes, they had a tenant and he said his name was NERO; they never discovered what his real name was… He was young, about twenty, I suppose, and he’d come with an agitprop group of equally young and enthusiastic benefactors, who had tried to persuade the backward villagers that a happy future awaited them in a cooperative farm, which is why among themselves they called him Agitator, but officially they addressed him as Comrade Nero, because that’s how he liked it. All the other agitators had left the village, as most of the stupid villagers were not yet ready for the future and refused to sign the application form, but Nero had stayed on. They had had to take him in as a tenant, even though he didn’t pay anything; they’d been ordered to by the Local National Committee, where Comrade Nero had his own office. When they asked him what he actually did, he replied good-naturedly: “I’m helping people on the road to Paradise.” And he did help them. Especially Jonáš’s uncle, but also his father, in fact. In 1938 his father was on the western border of the Czech Republic and to the day he died he claimed we shouldn’t have retreated. He was convinced the Germans wouldn’t have broken through the line; he said the bunkers were impenetrable and the vast majority of the soldiers defending them had been willing to die, but the Western Powers had betrayed them, claiming it was the lesser of two evils. Later, many years later, his son explained to him that it had not only been the Western Powers that betrayed them, but Stalin as well, because he’d signed a secret treaty with Hitler; but his father wouldn’t believe that. He kept recollecting how they’d vacated the bunkers, left the border and returned home to Slovakia deeply humiliated and in tears. He said he’d served for a while at Bratislava Castle, where there was a stable for horses, but they’d then transferred him to the Signals. Jonáš couldn’t imagine horses in stables at the castle - he remembered that later, in the 1960’s, there’d been restaurants and wine bars for communists. Once they’d wanted to have a meal there after a preview of an exhibition and a couple of glasses of wine with friends, but the stable keeper had called the police to throw them out. It was in those golden sixties, when the windows to the world had been opened for a while, causing a moderate draught and, naïve as they were and full of hope and daring, even joie de vivre, they’d wanted to show their love for the “stable keepers” and drink a toast with them to “vechnuyu pamyat”. They got such a beating up from the police that it took another twenty years for the injuries and wounds to their souls to heal.
On that occasion Jonáš had said to himself, “I won’t forget, you’ll pay dearly for that.” However, he didn’t keep it to himself; there were other friends there – good fellows who believed in Dubček’s Prague Spring – some of them even believed in the utopia of a communist system that could be reformed from within even after the 21st August 1968. At that time Jonáš had wanted to leave college – he was in his second year of studies at the Academy of Performing Arts, but his tutor, Peter Balna dissuaded him: “Dušan, don’t be silly, there’s no point. We must fight against them from inside! Peter was forced to abandon the struggle less than a year later, when he was thrown out of the department and a couple of months later he died of a heart attack.
What were we talking about? Aha, about his father.
In 1944 his father, along with two east-Slovakian divisions, were said to have been prepared to participate in the Slovak National Uprising, but by some oversight they were disarmed by the Germans even before it began, and so he found himself in a German concentration camp. To prove he wasn’t lying, he showed Jonáš a metal strip with some numbers stamped on it, although his son did not doubt for a minute that his father was telling the truth. He felt sorry, sensing that his father was ashamed of that (of what?) and who knows why he wanted to excuse himself to anyone. His father mentioned that when they were liberated by the Americans, he’d at least managed to participate in the Czech National Uprising in Prague on 5th May. He loved the Czechs, regarding them as his own brothers; before the war he had done an apprenticeship as a tailor somewhere in the south of the Czech Republic and he claimed these were the best years of his life. He’d also been a member of the Sokol gymnastic society and he would proudly show his photos: the horizontal and parallel bars were his favourites. After 1945 he became a member of the Democratic Party, founded a tailoring workshop and began to “do business”. He had three assistants and he fared well. Much later he explained to Jonáš: “If the communists hadn’t come, you’d now be studying in Paris”. Jonáš believed him, although he found it rather hard to understand why his father was now a member of the Communist Party. Apparently, he’d joined so that he, Dušan, could at least study at the Secondary Grammar School in Nové Mesto. Jonáš believed his father’s version of the story, but according to Agitator, it was far from the truth. According to Agitator, his father had disobeyed orders and had not returned to his homeland, Slovakia, but had deserted with a number of “heroes”, gone over to the other side and during the war had been in the foreign resistance, flying English planes and fighting against the Slovak state on the side of the communists. Agitator was still quite young and inexperienced. Coming from a deeply religious Catholic family, it was no wonder he was slow to find his bearings in the political situation and confused Jonáš’s father with his brother-in-law, Uncle Emil. Dušan couldn’t tell communism from fascism – he was only four years old – but he was proud of his uncle, infinitely proud that he had flown in fighter planes and loved playing with miniature copies of them. However, the radio began to broadcast hearings from trials of some kind and kept announcing how many betrayers of the people had been executed, and it was then that Agitator offered to help Jonáš’s uncle - he’d get him across the border, but they’d have to travel to the River Morava. He himself was from the nearby village of Devínska Nová Ves; he knew every inch of ground there and had “excellent contacts”. He didn’t even want any money for it, saying money wasn’t worth anything, that’s why just some gold and jewels would do. He knew very well that Jonáš’s grandfather was of the same mind; he’d exchanged the money he’d saved as a publican during the war, together with what he’d got from the sale of the furnishings, for gold, precious stones and various brooches, rings, necklaces and earrings. Agitator wanted it all, but Granddad was no fool; he gave him only part of it, saying he’d get the rest only after the plan proved a success. Agitator was furious and hurled threats at him, but Granddad only laughed, “I’m an old Russian legionnaire - I’ve wrung the necks of brats like you with my bare hands!” There was nothing the Agitator could do but agree, and so one day he and Uncle set out for Devínska Nová Ves. The plan seemed to have succeeded, because Uncle did not come back. But neither did Agitator. Maybe they’ve escaped together, Granddad comforted Aunt Anna, Uncle Emil’s wife; he was a crook, that gold of mine would give him a very good start “over the hills and far away”. And maybe they’ve caught both of them – Aunt Anna was much more sceptical. We’ll see, we must wait patiently, that’s what we must do.
They waited. For Uncle’s letter – as agreed. And they didn’t have to wait long. Instead of a letter, two different Agitators in long black leather coats arrived and asked Aunt Anna, “Where’s your husband?”
“I don’t know. He left for work and he didn’t come back.”
They showed her a photograph and asked, “Is this your husband?” Auntie stared at the photograph and then shook her head, “No, that’s not my husband, my husband is alive.”
“Only if he’s risen from the dead,” guffawed the fat goon and showed Jonáš the photo. “Is this your uncle, sonny?” Jonáš took the blurred photo in both hands; there was a man lying on a river bank who looked like all uncles and over him stood a man who looked like all Agitators.
“Is this your uncle, boy?” the second Agitator said, gently stroking his head. “Admit it and we’ll have done with it.” Dušan used to sit in that barred cot of his and try in vain to fly out of it and speak up, but all he could do was to stammer and no one could understand him, but the moment he caught sight of that photograph, something happened: he stretched out his hand towards the Agitator and uttered his first word: “Gimme.”
His mother burst into tears, clearly from happiness.
She hugged him and lifted him out of his cage, kissed his forehead, the back of the neck and eyes, “He’s alive. Do you hear? Duško’s alive.”
“How do you know?”
“He can speak.”
“Even monkeys can say “Gimme”.”
“Dušanko, my little son, why haven’t you said anything before?” his mother asked.
And Jonáš replied clearly, in a whole sentence, “There wasn’t anything to say.”
The first Agitator smiled, “What a dear little boy.” The second Agitator spat: “Idiot”. Dušan nodded in agreement, “Idiot. Gimme, give, idiot.”
“Who are you calling an idiot, you little brat? D’ye want me to clobber you one?”
“Leave off, you can see he’s a harmless idiot,” the second Agitator tried to calm him down.
“Idiot or not, he’s making a fucking fool of me.”
Jonáš clapped his hands in delight, “Fucking fool, fucking fool, gimme fucking fool.”
It seemed the Agitators had quite forgotten why they had come.
“What did we come for?” they asked each other, almost simultaneously.
“The photo.”
“Aha, fuck it, I’d almost forgotten.” He grabbed Dušan by his blond hair and thrust the photograph at him.
“Do you know him?”
“Gimme.”
The Agitator was a trifle confused, “What do you fucking want, what do you want, what do you want me to give you?”
“Daddy.”
The Agitator breathed a sigh of relief, at last they’d got it over, the brat had confessed.
“So that’s your daddy?”
“Gimme.”
The first said to the second, “Write that down. He confessed. He recognised his daddy.”
Dušan shook his head, “Not daddy. Gimme.”
They understood. He wanted to have a closer look at his uncle, in short, he wanted to identify him. It was already late afternoon, they were hungry and they could do with a drink, they didn’t want to hang around. So they handed Jonáš the photo – only lent it to him in fact – and they asked, “Is that your uncle?”
Dušan didn’t bother with a verbal confession; he stuffed the photo into his mouth and chewed it with relish. Before they could rescue it – poking their stinking filthy fingers into his mouth and pulling out scraps of paper – his mother and aunt had laughed themselves to tears. The Agitators slapped their faces, “Don’t laugh, you bitches, we haven’t got another copy. Spit it out, you blighter,” they begged Jonáš, who was beating his chest with his fist like a young orang-utan, declaring “DADDY HERE!”
“Shit, he’s swallowed it. The brat has swallowed his own uncle... Who said he’s an idiot?”
“Idiot, idiot,” Dušan smiled with satisfaction.
Translated by Heather Trebatická
