Fleeting Snow Read online

  Table of Contents

  Imprint

  Contents

  1.a

  1.b

  1.c

  1.d

  2.a

  2.b

  2.c

  2.d

  3.a

  1.e

  4.a

  2.e

  4.b

  3.b

  1.f

  5.a

  2.f

  1.g

  2.g

  1.h

  2.h

  1.i

  5.b

  1.j

  2.i

  5.c

  1.k

  2.j

  3.c

  1.l

  5.d

  4.c

  5.e

  4.d

  2.k

  5.f

  3.d

  4.e

  2.l

  1.m

  2.m

  5.g

  3.e

  4.f

  2.n

  5.h

  1.n

  4.g

  2.o

  5.i

  2.p

  3.f

  4.h

  2.q

  1.o

  5.j

  2.r

  5.k

  4.i

  1.p

  2.s

  5.l

  4.j

  5.m

  3.g

  5.n

  2.t

  5.o

  1.q

  4.k

  5.p

  4.l

  2.u

  5.q

  1.r, 2.v, 3.h, 4.m, 5.r

  Interview with the Author

  The Author

  The Translators

  Pavel Vilikovský

  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 Letmý sneh, SLOVART 2014

  Copyright © Pavel Vilikovský, 2018

  The right of Pavel Vilikovský, 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

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  2

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  S

  T

  U

  V

  3

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  4

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  5

  A

  B

  C

  D

  E

  F

  G

  H

  I

  J

  K

  L

  M

  N

  O

  P

  Q

  R

  Interview with the Author

  The Author

  The Translators

  1.a

  Here’s 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 don’t they leave him alone? And what’s 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 don’t. All sorts of people can go by the same name, but I’ve got fed up with dancing to just any tune that might pop into someone’s head.

  I know what the person they have in mind looks like but I don’t 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 doesn’t work like that. What is unique about, say, Štefan Kováč, 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 Kováč to boot, you’ve had it: you’ll end up being known as Kováč Up the Valley, or Kováč the son of Lipták, or Kováč the Potter, as opposed to Kováč the Shepherd. Slovak is a garrulous language, we don’t 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 Štefan, what unique information do we glean from that? The familiar form ‘Števo’ 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, ‘Pišta’, would be a swarthy cunning prankster, maybe with a moustache, who will go far. Not to mention ‘Kováč’ 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 one’s own way. Official bodies are not interested in beauty, all they want is to keep an accurate record of us. They don’t see us as unique beings, only as numbers.

  1.d

  My name is not Štefan Kováč. My name is Čimborazka. I am a self-declared Čimborazka.

  2.a

  Here’s 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 wouldn’t 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, wouldn’t hold it against her. Such things do happen. You get engrosse
d in conversation, mental juices end up being exchanged, and so what are the bodies to do? They, too, become friendly, that’s what bodies are like. Unless you are a clairvoyant, you can’t predict what might happen in the course of a single day. And even if you could, you couldn’t stop it happening.

  Such things do happen. They have happened to me, too. It may have been – let’s put it this way – a matter of social courtesy: you don’t 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 x’s and y’s.

  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 didn’t 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 doesn’t resemble me. When we look in the mirror we unquestionably share our basic features but it’s 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 that’s what terrifies me.

  2.c

  A person‘s character is like the soul, no one has ever seen it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t 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; it’s a formula that helps others work us out. And that’s what I reject, I won’t 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 don’t even felt guilty about it, but the other day in Heydukova Street, just as I was coming from the dentist’s, a young man in a suit approached me saying he was short of money for his train fare to Trenčín. 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 Trenčín 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 wasn’t due to start for a couple of weeks, and he had now spent all his money, so he had to go back to Trenčín because you can claim unemployment benefit only in your permanent place of residence.

  I don’t know why it was he, of all people, who made me cave in. I didn’t believe a word he said but I was impressed that he had gone to the trouble of making up a story; in his shoes, I doubt I would have had such presence of mind. As he talked, the man watched me bright-eyed and once he noticed that my defences were beginning to crumble he piled on more detail, coming up with a mother-in-law who was needling his wife about having to feed a layabout. Now on a roll, he was also, he continued, behind with his rent and he even outlined his prospective job in very concrete terms: he was joining the train-cleaning crew at the railway station. But I think it was the mention of Trenčín, right at the beginning, that did the trick, plus the fact that he kept smiling as he listed the various calamities that had befallen him. To cut a long story short, I gave him five euros and didn’t even mind if he took me for a credulous fool.

  2.d

  When I told this story to Štefan (I will use this official, neutral form of his name because neither Števo nor Pišta really suits him), he said: ‘It’s obvious what made you give in, you’d just been to the dentist’s. You were relieved it was over and wanted to share your joy with someone.’

  I didn’t argue the point. I just wanted to show what a mistake it would be to draw far-reaching conclusions from my behaviour. To nail me to the cross of a character, metaphorically speaking. Can you tell if I am generous or kind from a single episode? And does the fact that for the rest of the year I haven’t helped any other homeless unfortunate buy soup make me an insensitive scrooge? What about that bearded Rom I bumped into in front of the Dunaj department store only yesterday, on whom I bestowed a couple of coins to help him pay 25 euros for a room in the hostel where he lives with his small son (if you don’t believe his story you can go and check it out for yourself; personally, I can’t be bothered).

  ‘I don’t have a character’, I said to Štefan, ‘I refuse to have one. I have only moods, a different one every minute, that’s all. I have not yet turned to stone. Accept me as being alive.’

  Štefan said: ‘I know why you refuse to admit to having a character. You’re afraid it might be a formula based purely on the nature of your mistakes and failures.’

  3.a

  Here’s the thing: the avalanche has begun to roll. It can’t yet be seen, it is still a long way off, but I can hear the first mass of snow pushing its way down the slope, rumbling quietly.

  1.e

  I love native American place names like Mississauga, Petawawa, Maniwaki, Oshawa, Saginaw, Pukaskwa, Cheektowaga. These are English transcriptions of the original words but it makes no difference. To me they are unique; like brand names, they don’t carry any other meaning, they mean only what they designate. My brand name is Čimborazka. It is the Slovak transcription of an original word that doesn’t exist in any language.

  Štefan would say that its English transcription might be something like Cheemborazkah, with the main stress on the first syllable and a secondary stress on the first element of ‘razkah’. It would make quite a nice native American place name, with its two bilabial consonants back to back.

  Štefan’s surname doesn’t need an English transcription although the pronunciation would be different, ‘Kovack’, instead of how we say it, ‘Kovach’. Though it would be even easier to just translate it as Smith. In English, too, it is one of the most frequent, most ordinary names. The one people use when they wish to remain anonymous.

  4.a

  Here’s the thing: Štefan is a scholar. He has recently had a book published by a university press somewhere in the northern part of the US. The book is called ‘The Expressive Role of the Acoustic Correlates of Bilabial Consonants in the Language of the Menominee Nation of North America’, or something like that. I forget the exact title, all I can remember are some of the place names.

  Štefan is a successful scholar. After all, an American university press wouldn’t publish just anyone. As far as I know, no one in Europe has studied the Menominee language, and in the US, too, there is just one professor at that university who does. He was the one to draw Štefan’s scholarly attention to this topic when he spent six months on a fellowship in the US in the more politically relaxed 1960s.

  The university sent Štefan the ten author’s copies promised in the contract but instead of the parcel the postman brought him a summons to the customs office located at the back of Post Office No. 2–3 in Tomášikova Street. The officials wanted to charge him customs duty on the consignment. Štefan tried to explain that it was his author’s copies but they wouldn’t listen. One of the officials saw that on the envelope the price of a copy was given as $15.95 and he calculated the duty based on that figure, on the assu
mption that Štefan was going to sell the books. Only after Štefan gave him the Slovak translation of the title did he realise that a book on this subject, and written in English at that, would be impossible to sell in Slovakia. So he exempted him from paying the customs duty and Štefan headed for the bus stop with the cardboard box under his arm.

  2.e

  ‘By the way’, Štefan said, ‘now that you’ve brought up homeless people, I think that’s a misleading term. They should really be called home-everywhere people. They have no permanent place of abode – their home is wherever they put their plastic bags.’

  This was hard to disagree with, so I nodded.

  ‘But you’re quite a different kettle of fish’, Štefan said. ‘You pretend to be a homeless person in terms of your character but I have worked out why you refuse to be confined to a single one. You fancy yourself as having lots of characters but you are quite wrong. There are no homeless people in terms of character, only people who pass themselves off as such.’

  So that was the second, deeper reason he came up with to explain why I refuse to have a character. I would never have thought I would prove such an inspiration to him.

  4.b

  Štefan’s book was well received in scholarly circles. Well, scholarly circles may be a bit of an exaggeration, there is just one circle, and a very small one at that, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s scholarly value. Either way, the book won’t sell in Slovakia where there are no native North Americans; and even in America it sold only two copies. The buyers were students of Štefan’s professor. As far as I know, neither of them has a Menominee background, and the professor doesn’t either. (He didn’t need to buy a copy since he was the one who had recommended the book for publication and edited it.) You may well ask what significance and impact Štefan’s oeuvre might have on the Menominees’ life and language which, as he informs me, is a member of the Algonquian family.