Fleeting Snow E-Book

Pavel Vilikovský

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 233

Beschreibung

Pavel Vilikovský's novella Fleeting Snow (Letmý sneh, 2014), depicts the gradual loss of memory of the narrator's wife. The narrator reminisces about his past life with his wife and muses on issues ranging from human nature and the soul, to names and the phonetics of Slovak and indigenous American Indian languages, in an informal, humorous style whose lightness of touch belies the seriousness of his themes.The book's title refers to its recurring central motif, an avalanche whose inexorable descent cannot be stopped once the critical mass of snow has begun to roll, echoing the unstoppable process of memory loss. Five themes or storylines, intertwined in passages of varying lengths, are labelled with letters of the alphabet and numbers in a playful allusion to scholarly works and musical compositions.

Leseprobe

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 engrossed 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 assumption 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.

The Menominee tribe is on the verge of extinction and so is their language. Apparently, the only person still alive with full command of the language is a very old native American woman, who is actually deaf and dumb. Even if she went to the trouble of studying the role of bilabial consonants it wouldn’t be much use to her as she can only communicate in writing.

It is always a great loss when a language becomes extinct; every language is unique. I am sure that if the story of my life were told in the Menominee language it would be a different life. I would like to hear this version of the story but there is nobody to tell it, and I wouldn’t understand it anyway.

To be honest, it is highly unlikely that the Menominee would be interested in my life. They have other things to worry about. An avalanche started rolling towards them a long time ago and now only a single, lone arm is left sticking out of the snow. Petawawa, Maniwaki. Beautiful cries. Cries for help.

‘Congratulations’, I said to Štefan after browsing through his book. ‘Hats off. You might as well stick it up your arse, though you won’t be able to fit all ten copies in there anyway.’

3.b

‘The avalanche has started rolling’, I said to Štefan. ‘Except we can’t see it yet.’

‘You’re imagining things. What you hear is the grass growing.’

‘Absolutely not’, I said. ‘I can hear the first mass of snow pushing its way through the snowdrifts.’

1.f

First names work differently in native American languages. That’s not something I learnt from Štefan’s research but from books on the Wild West. Except that these days the West is no wilder than the East and nobody reads cheap Westerns anymore.

Native Americans have names like Sitting Bull, Cawing Raven, Morning Dawn or maybe Bungler Whose Arrow Missed a Hare – polysynthetic Indian languages such as Menominee don’t need as many words as Slovak to express this, they just stick all the bits together to make one long word. These names are quite picturesque and probably also unique, at least within a single tribe, but there is a problem with them similar to that of character. They tie a person permanently to a single phenomenon, action, or event, depriving them of the chance to change and evolve. Language is an unforgiving manacle.

5.a

Here’s the thing: it all started when I found an old photograph at the bottom of a drawer while cleaning. It was taken on our first date – actually, it wasn’t even a proper date, we weren’t quite sure at that point that it was one. Someone, probably a fellow student, snapped us sitting on a bench, caught in the act and smiling at the camera in embarrassment.

I showed my wife the photo: ‘Look!’ I thought it would make her smile, like it made me, this time not in embarrassment but rather smiling indulgently at those two silly young things. She stared at the photo for a long time; she didn’t know where her glasses were so she held it close up and scrutinized it as if scouring it for fingerprints. In vain, for the only prints on it were mine, and now also hers. Eventually she asked: ‘Who is that with you, some girlfriend of yours?’

‘Of course it is’, I said. I thought she was making a joke; after all, she recognised me without any problem, or at least guessed who I was. But she wasn’t joking, she was simply a stranger to herself. She put the photograph to one side and gave me a questioning look, as if about to say: ‘That’s the first I’ve heard about this.’

‘Yes’, I went on, ‘a girlfriend. This one here’, I said, poking her in the ribs with a finger. She picked up the photo again, looked at it for a while and shook her head in disbelief.

I just laughed it off at the time.

2.f

Although nobody has ever seen the soul, we assume that it exists. At least everyone talks about it as if the term referred to something specific and indisputable, even if it cannot be seen. After all, how many of us have ever seen atoms with our own eyes? Atoms are just a hypothesis, like the soul, and yet scientists speak of them as a proven fact. It is one of the little tricks we humans play: whenever something is beyond us, we invent a name for it, at the very least, or borrow one from some ancient language, and we feel more secure straight away.

The soul can’t be seen because it is hidden inside the body. Strangely enough, we can’t see even our own soul, we just know it’s in there somewhere. What’s even more strange is that all of it fits into our body even though we sense that it’s somehow much bigger. That it transcends the body in every way.

There are several theories of the relationship between the body and the soul. One claims that the soul is inserted into in the body as if into a case, and once the case is battered and worn out, the soul departs and moves on – where to is anyone’s guess. Maybe that Someone who placed the soul in the body to start with takes it back again. According to this theory, the soul does not wear out simultaneously with the body and even if it does, it may be recycled in hell, or purgatory, or heaven, depending on the degree of wear and tear. Another theory presumes that it is the body that produces the soul and once the body ceases to be operational, the soul too is extinguished. The soul factory closes down.

One can only theorise about the soul’s characteristics. Is each of us issued with the same soul to begin with and after that it’s up to us how we treat it and how it evolves? Or is a baby born with a harelip or congenital brain damage supplied with a soul that is different from a healthy one? And what if the soul is given once and for all and never changes, regardless of circumstances?

Be that as it may, the soul is a useful concept, one that is easy to work with. Anyone can project anything they like onto it.

1.g

The Menominee are becoming extinct both as native Americans and as human beings. In their capacity as native Americans they become extinct when they leave their reservations and join the ranks of other American or Canadian citizens. They get an education, learn a trade, start a business or get a job, becoming car mechanics, lawyers, doctors, actors or social workers. The legendary jazz musician Jack Teagarden, for example, was a native American, but if you didn’t know you would never have guessed. Sometimes he would perform with Louis Armstrong, a black man playing with a native American, but of course everyone could tell that Armstrong was black.

Štefan told me about this successful property developer in the US who was also a native American. Štefan couldn’t remember his full name and referred to him as Jeff. He read in the paper that the man had been charged with the murder of his second wife, with whom he had been embroiled in a lawsuit over their million-dollar fortune and custody of their two sons, although that is irrelevant in our context. Jeff was only half native American because his father was of Scottish extraction; this kind of mixing of blood also contributes to the extinction of native Americans in their capacity as native Americans. His parents had divorced because his mother had allegedly taken to drink and was said to have been predisposed to other native American vices, so Jeff, who had not got on well with his mother, went to live with his father, while his sisters stayed with their mother. For many years he had not acknowledged his native American heritage but he suddenly remembered it when the court was about to seize his assets, and he hid some expensive building equipment on his tribe’s reservation. The native Americans from his mother’s tribe welcomed him in their midst like a prodigal son and bestowed an Indian name on him – Withered Branch, say, or Stray Caribou – as well as some property he was entitled to as a member of the tribe. (Incidentally, Stray Caribou was not a Menominee, his mother had been a Shawnee.) But once the immediate danger passed, Jeff left the reservation and turned his back on his heritage, dying for the second time in his capacity as a native American. As a human being he might still be alive, but one day he will also die as a human being, like everyone else.

Native Americans who live on reservations could be said to be professional native Americans. This is not a demanding job, as they have received generous government subsidies in compensation for their lost territories and hunting grounds. Still, it is hard to be a native American if you can’t behave like one. The life of present-day native Americans bears no resemblance to that of their ancestors. They no longer hunt animals for food or fur to keep out the cold; in fact there are no wild animals left on the reservations and even if there were, they would be scared off by the roar of the motorbikes as the natives race through the woods. When they feel hungry they buy their meat – deboned and pre-carved – in a supermarket or, what’s even simpler, grab a hamburger in the nearest fast food joint. And as for fur coats or thick quilted jackets, they can choose anything they fancy from a department store. The women no longer harvest crops for nourishment, nor do they sew clothes from leather, except as souvenirs for tourists if they feel like it. It is a comfortable way of life but as time goes by many realise that something is missing. They might use a different term for this void. We call it meaning or purpose.