Sherwood Julia - Fleeting Snow

Table of Contents

Pavel Vilikovsk

FLEETING SNOW

Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood

First published in 2018 by Istros Books

London, United Kingdom wwaw.istrosbooks.com

This book was first published in Slovakia as Letm sneh , SLOVART 2014

Copyright Pavel Vilikovsk, 2018

The right of Pavel Vilikovsk, to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation Peter and Julia Sherwood, 2018

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak, www.frontispis.hr

ISBN: 978-1-908236-37-1 (print edition)

ISBN: 978-1-912545-07-0 (MOBI)

ISBN: 978-1-912545-08-7 (ePub)

This book was published with a financial support from SLOLIA, Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava.

Contents

The sections in this book are marked by numbers and letters of the alphabet. It is intended as a helpful gesture towards the reader, suggesting a number of musical motives that flow together towards a finale.

1.a

Heres the thing: my name has lost its meaning for me. It has palled on me. Every time I empty my postbox and see my name on an envelope I think to myself: someone is writing to this person again! Why dont they leave him alone? And whats he to me anyway, why should I read his letters? Do the writers of these letters have any idea who they are addressing? Well, maybe they do, but I dont. All sorts of people can go by the same name, but Ive got fed up with dancing to just any tune that might pop into someones head.

I know what the person they have in mind looks like but I dont identify with him. If I caught sight of him in the street I would cross over to the other side.

1.b

If, as the saying goes, every person is unique, their name ought to be unique too. Except that it doesnt work like that. What is unique about, say, tefan Kov, whose name is about as common as Stephen Smith is in English? In this country, no first name can ever be truly unique the Church and the clerks at the register office have seen to that and if your surname happens to be Kov to boot, youve had it: youll end up being known as Kov Up the Valley, or Kov the son of Liptk, or Kov the Potter, as opposed to Kov the Shepherd. Slovak is a garrulous language, we dont mind throwing in an extra word here and there, but even with that additional piece of information, does a name convey anything unique about a person? And even if we domesticate tefan, what unique information do we glean from that? The familiar form tevo conjures up the image of a blond, pink-cheeked softie, always willing to chop wood for the old lady next door, while someone known by another common form of the name, Pita, would be a swarthy cunning prankster, maybe with a moustache, who will go far. Not to mention Kov who I will always imagine forging his own lucky horseshoe. There would be no point looking for anything unique in such images.

The purpose of a name is to help us pigeonhole a person. It makes life easier.

1.c

If we ever came to truly understand someone, to know them completely as a unique person, a unique name for them might just occur to us of its own accord. But who would be prepared to make this kind of effort nowadays? It would be easier to give people numbers instead of names. There are official bodies that do exactly that, though for their particular reasons.

To be unique means to be beautiful in ones own way. Official bodies are not interested in beauty, all they want is to keep an accurate record of us. They dont see us as unique beings, only as numbers.

1.d

My name is not tefan Kov. My name is imborazka. I am a self-declared imborazka.

2.a

Heres the thing: whenever I look in the mirror while shaving, I recognise some feature of some distant relative in my face. A cousin, say. Or an uncle or, even more likely, my grandmother. Or perhaps I am my own step-twin the same mother, two different fathers. Technically speaking it is just about conceivable, even though it wouldnt show our mother in the best possible light. But then again, amid the sheer unpredictability, the sheer randomness of life, what difference would a single, more or less unpredictable, random moment make? I, for one, wouldnt hold it against her. Such things do happen. You get engrossed in conversation, mental juices end up being exchanged, and so what are the bodies to do? They, too, become friendly, thats what bodies are like. Unless you are a clairvoyant, you cant predict what might happen in the course of a single day. And even if you could, you couldnt stop it happening.

Such things do happen. They have happened to me, too. It may have been lets put it this way a matter of social courtesy: you dont really want to talk to someone, so you make small talk instead. Or it may be just absent-mindedness, as if you were trying to solve an equation with three unknowns and suddenly bumped into an acquaintance in the street. Lost in thought, you say hello to him in passing but your acquaintance stops and you realise that a conversation is unavoidable. So you accommodate him, just to get it over with as quickly as possible so you can get back to your xs and ys.

Or, in a unique moment, someone might be revealed to you in their uniqueness. Things like that do happen. It happened to me, too, except that I didnt get pregnant in the process.

2.b

Step-twins can look alike they might be the spitting image of each other. Or they might turn out completely different, like night and day; it all depends on the physiological circumstances, a topic on which I am no expert. But then again, night and day also make up a single unit of 24 hours.

My twin both does and doesnt resemble me. When we look in the mirror we unquestionably share our basic features but its as if life had moulded one of us with its right hand and the other with its left. When I see this face, I feel like a step-me. The sight sends a slight shiver down my spine, not because of our differences but because of our similarities. My eyes tell me that it takes so little, you just subtract a little here and add a little there, and lo and behold a new version of the same model appears on the same chassis, with a different on-road performance. It is as if those skewed features in the mirror were the expression of a different, skewed character, and thats what terrifies me.

2.c

A persons character is like the soul, no one has ever seen it. But that doesnt mean it doesnt exist. Anyone who wants one can have one. But I refuse. I resent being squeezed into a straitjacket, I want to stay fluid. I want to foam, churn and leak through the cracks.

I think what people mean by character is always behaving in the same way in the same situation; its a formula that helps others work us out. And thats what I reject, I wont let any formula work me out. Take the homeless people who accost me in the street asking for small change so they can buy soup or a sandwich. Most of the time I ignore them and dont even felt guilty about it, but the other day in Heydukova Street, just as I was coming from the dentists, a young man in a suit approached me saying he was short of money for his train fare to Trenn. Other people before him had been short of money for a train fare and I felt no sympathy for them (after all, soup or a sandwich are more urgent needs) but he was the first to mention Trenn specifically, and it was this that made me stop and listen to his story, of an unemployed man whose wife had thrown him out for being a layabout. He had come to Bratislava to look for a job and managed to find one, but it wasnt due to start for a couple of weeks, and he had now spent all his money, so he had to go back to Trenn because you can claim unemployment benefit only in your permanent place of residence.