In reality, Rosa was immobilized. She couldn’t even lie down, she was so completely frozen.
Everything became more dramatic on the day before Christmas. The little captain walked into the room. Under her arm, the animal was dressed as a boy. Just like Son.
Rosa took it into her arms, squeezed it and threw it out the window.
Standing in the doorway, she patted her pockets and mumbled: Got my feet—got my hands. Got my knife.
We can go.
In January, taking a walk is useless. You start to feel—enveloped in the gray and grief of lifeless nature—as if you were in a grave. Among the frozen, naked trees, under a nonexistent sky, surrounded by icy earth mimicking the dirty footprints of people—a grave. Except the corpse is missing. There’s just a rock, a rock under the ground.
All that’s left is how to choose the most aesthetic suicide: marriage + 9 to 5 office job, or a revolver. Camus develops this further.
Rosa gets scared that she won’t be able to keep walking. Her useless steps freeze. A tiny heart attack. In the middle of the road. She pulls out her telephone and calls her brother. Her legs hear a new, but familiar voice. The voice of a child. The eternal conversation of an older brother and younger sister. The legs continue thoughtlessly on. Swinging on the sides of trotting reindeer.
Rosa. The bridge. Weariness. If somebody pushed me, I’d fall over like a heavy sack. Right onto the sidewalk. The sack would come undone. Its contents tumbling into the water.
The tunnel. Dripping with icicles. They reach from above toward the hot crown of the head.
Oh, let me, let me, let me freeze again.
“Prose talks about something; poetry makes it happen with the help of words.”
People are divided into two groups, poets and prose writers. Into Sons and Rosas.
That’s why the first question strangers ask at the breakfast table is: And do you write poetry or prose? Anywhere in the world. At any literary festival.
And then there’s a sea of nodding heads and pops of small tubs of butter, jam and honey opening.
And the conclusion is always that prose is fine, but the best, of course, is poetry.
Prose writers will fight for this with their entire morphological lexicon.
And then they will take their last bites and go up to their rooms.
Have you ever looked under the cushion of a chair in a hotel room where novelists and poets stayed? You’d find a bleating herd of crumbs.
Blindness. Black dots everywhere. Birds flying past the window. The window of the bus.
Son. I thought they were gunk on the window or a flock of birds. Crows. Ravens? How long does it take to accept: they’re inside your eye. They’re flying inside your eye.
(Oh, birds…)
Rosa. The second time it happened, they flew into the apartment building. At night. Just that day, Son had bought a book he’d been dying to read his whole life. Since puberty at least, when he’d discovered Albert Camus. The Notebooks—Carnets. He read it in an armchair in a house full of sleeping people. Black flocks began to attack the text. More and more birds, fewer words. Blindness had grown wings.
Rosa again. Slovakia. This country, these people—no inspiration.
My friend Gergana was telling me: you should go out more, meet some people…
Go out and meet people? What PEOPLE?
Gergana is not a Slovak and her name always reminds me of Gorgon. Medusa.
You hear yourself, how you’re pronouncing phrases and words that don’t go together. You don’t create them, you just repeat what was said somewhere else, sometime, definitely hanging in the air. Empty, translucent bubbles.
Like Odysseus. No-body.
Like when the sea blooms.
(A sign that somewhere in the vicinity there must be a cuckoo.)
And there’s only one way to save yourself.
Pat your pockets in the doorway and mumble: Feet, hands, knife.
After several eye operations, Son sits in the hospital courtyard in his patient’s pajamas. Today he’s going home. He can hardly see anything at all.
No-body starts to cry.
Son. Don’t worry, I won’t burden you.
Echo. A burden…a burden. A burden
The retinas are healing. The birds are nowhere to be seen.
Risk. A trip to Berlin. Son says: the only things I’ve been able to recognize in this room are the big pumpkins with glowing eyes—Halloween.
They were still lighting up the room from All Saints Day.
Son is in a café in Berlin—“jednu kááávu prosíím”. He pronounces everything slowly and clearly like a polite foreigner to a person who’s trying to learn his language. As if he thought everyone should understand Slovak if a person speaks clearly, loudly and emphatically.
After our return, we sit in a Czech pub eating goulash and drinking beer. Lent is coming to an end—it’s the Thursday before Easter. The film is ripping, the black dots in front of his eyes growing bigger. Like hockey pucks on the ice.
They’re on my face. I must have chosen my seat badly. The worst place. Directly opposite Son.
We run to the hospital. The doctor and nurses are just leaving for the long Easter weekend. The doctor orders the operating room sterilized again. The anesthesiologist isn’t there anymore, the doctor mixes the drug cocktail himself. When no one’s looking, his colleague leans over to Son and reproachfully whispers: You picked a hell of a time for an operation!
Jesus caused problems right on Easter, too.
Rosa returns to the apartment for Son’s pajamas. She lies face down on the carpet. Howling.
After a few minutes, she rises with renewed strength. This is how it works when you’re twenty-five.
Evening, Gergana. Even if he went blind, you’d still love him, wouldn’t you?
And take him out?
Take him out to meet PEOPLE.
1At the end of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia fell.
2All italicized text in this book are quotations or are spoken or sung by someone else.
ON THE ROAD
And, if on the way to the hospital or in the forest I should meet a cuckoo. If I’ve already seen her from afar, as she prepares to
