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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.
The purpose of life is to be lived. From a personal point of view this is quite a good purpose especially since, if you want to survive, you have little time left to ponder the purpose of life. But human beings seem to be designed in such a way that as soon as they have a free moment they start wondering about silly things, for example why they came into this world in the first place and what their mission in life is. Native Americans are no exception and as they have plenty of time on their hands and the questions keep haunting them, they keep them at bay with alcohol and drugs; as they are unable to find any answers, they prefer to forget the questions. They could seek advice from their council of elders, provided such a thing still exists on their reservation, but their elders grew up in very different circumstances and their advice would be of little use to the young. And so the native Americans living on reservations remain native Americans for the rest of their lives but they become extinct as human beings, with their health ruined and tormented to death by the void.
Admittedly, all I know about native Americans is what I picked up from trashy Westerns, set in an era when they had not yet been driven onto reservations, or from Štefan, who has never set foot in an Indian reservation. He hasn’t even learned the Menominee language. There would be no point since there is no one he could chat with. He just learned individual words, primarily those containing bilabial consonants, but without understanding their meaning. He didn’t need to learn the language. Based on his study of the phonetics of their language he concluded that the Menominee had once been a particularly fearless and ferocious tribe. But that was a long time ago, before the avalanche.
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The homeless man I met in Heydukova Street could have been living in some suburb of Bratislava, say Trnávka or Karlova Ves, and he may have picked Trenčín out of a hat, on spec, but it certainly was a fortunate choice. He did grab me, not sure if by the heartstrings or by the balls, I didn’t have time to worry about that at first. What is it about Trenčín, as opposed to other Slovak towns such as Piešťany, Púchov or Považská Bystrica? Is it the fact that its name starts with a T rather than a P? I only worked that out later, after the homeless man and I went our separate ways.
There was an older memory of Trenčín lodged in my mind, somewhere deep down, almost completely buried under a layer of mud. I could hardly see it anymore. It went back a long way, to the time immediately after the war; I can’t even remember exactly how old I was, maybe eight or nine. My mother and I had visited Trenčín. We were on a special mission. It had to do with a fur coat.
Before being swept away by the whirlwind of the war, a friend or an acquaintance of Mother’s, who I no longer remember as I was too young at the time, had given her a fur coat for safekeeping. For all I know, it might have been my father or the father of my step-twin, I never asked Mother about it. I don’t know why this person was concerned about the fur coat, perhaps he was Jewish and Jews were prohibited from owning fur coats, or maybe he had an inkling that in those tempestuous times it would be hard to save not just a fur coat but even one’s bare skin; in any case he didn’t come back to claim it after the war. Unless memory fails me, he never came back at all. After a year or two Mother found that the coat was in the way, not so much in her wardrobe as in her soul, which is worse because, although a soul is larger than a body or a wardrobe, a wardrobe is far less troubled by the presence of someone else’s fur coat. She knew that this friend had a brother living in Trenčín; she didn’t know his address but discovered that the wife of this brother worked at the local hospital and decided she would hand over the coat to her. In hindsight, I guess it was a skeleton in the cupboard that she wanted to be rid at all costs, but all she said to me then was that what doesn’t belong to us ought to be handed back.
There are two sides to memory, as to a coin. Heads, the lighter side, tends to leave a deeper mark in a child’s memory. I hadn’t travelled much by train before then. It was a sunny summer’s day, the countryside rolling by in the opposite direction was all new to me, and despite the warnings of Nicht hinauslehnen, Ne pas se pencher en dehors and È pericoloso sporgersi, and despite Mother’s admonitions I kept sticking my head out of the window until a spark from the engine flew into my eye. It didn’t frighten me, I would even say it just enhanced my sense that this was a unique experience, as did the salami sandwich Mother had prepared for the trip. Ever since then, salami sandwiches have been inextricably linked in my mind with journeys, except that now I buy them from a stall at the station and they are called baguettes.
So this was the light, cheerful side of the coin, which included the warm breeze in my hair and the blasts of steam splashing my face. The tails side of the coin was dark – I’m not saying it was menacing or sinister, just incomprehensible to a child’s mind. I can’t remember how we got to the hospital because I was spellbound by the sight of the castle towering above the town like a strict history teacher; all I remember is a consulting room with a bed or bench covered in white oilcloth and colourful pictures of organs of the human body on the walls, which were unlike anything I had ever seen before. I don’t even recall what kind of surgery it was, what illnesses the doctor specialised in, only that,