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