At first I didn’t pay attention to their conversation, gawping at the pictures instead. I assumed that the transfer of a fur coat between two grown-ups – the doctor was about Mother’s age – would be a straightforward affair, a simple handover. But the string on the package got tangled up and they raised their voices. I can’t recall their conversation word for word, but basically the doctor wasn’t asking questions but protesting – what kind of fur coat was it, where did it come from, she knew nothing about any fur coat and what did it have to do with her. Mother, on the other hand – rather like the song whose lyrics go something like ‘the one I love is not around so I might as well fall in love with the one who is’ – insisted she had only taken the fur coat for safekeeping and now, since its owner hadn’t come back to claim it, she wanted to return it to his brother as his next of kin and heir. After all, it was a good quality fur coat and he could surely use it in these difficult times.
Up until that point I had taken no interest in the fur coat. It was too big for me, and since nobody in our family had ever owned one, I had nothing to compare it with. The material on the outside was cloth and the lining on the inside was greyish-beige fur, rabbit or maybe dog. To me it was rather like a dog that had happened to stray into our house and moved on once it warmed up a little. I was happy that the fur coat had brought me to Trenčín and as far as I was concerned that was all there was to it. I couldn’t understand how it could possibly give rise to an argument.
‘How do you know’, the doctor said, ‘that he could use it? You can’t have any idea.’
I was struck by how quiet her voice had suddenly become after the loud protests; I turned my head away from the pictures and pricked up my ears, which is why I remember her exact words. The word definitely in particular, as it sounded sarcastic to me. It is usually things we don’t understand that we remember best.
‘Oh yes, he’ll definitely be happy about his brother’s fur coat’, the doctor said, ‘seeing as he has no idea that he’s got a brother. You can’t imagine what it’s like. He doesn’t even know his own name anymore. He doesn’t know if it’s spring or summer, what month it is, or the day of the week. He might even get the year wrong.’
She paused between sentences, as if wondering if she could bring herself to utter the next one, and if her listener was worth it. Whether she should make the effort on her account.
‘Yes, the fur coat might come in handy in winter, that’s for sure’, she said. ‘It will be a bit too big for him now but never mind. I’m sure it could be taken in. But who cares about winter, he might not live to see the winter anyway.’
‘I am really sorry, Mrs Königová’, Mother said.
‘It’s Mrs Kráľová’, the doctor corrected her. ‘I still remember my own name. But your fur coat really is the last thing on my mind.’
‘I’m sorry, I made a mistake, Mrs Kráľová. I am truly sorry about your husband, I just wanted to do the right thing. The fur coat isn’t mine. I made this trip specially to return it and I can assure you that I’m not taking it back.’
Or words to that effect. Now, after all these years, the doctor’s face has started to emerge from under the mud; it was an ordinary face, pretty in an uremarkable way except for two bitter lines around the mouth, the kind people develop when they have to give bad news regularly. Mother flung the fur coat, half-unwrapped as it was, onto the oilcloth, and made for the door without saying goodbye; I remember saying ‘I kiss your hand’ to the doctor. Yes, I said I kiss your hand, I was only eight or nine years old, later I was too embarrassed to use this old-fashioned greeting.
1.h
When I was a student I took a summer job delivering the post; Mother had pulled some strings to get me to fill in over the holiday season. I liked the work. First thing in the morning at the central post office the mail would be sorted by postal district, and each of us would stuff our pile of letters, parcels and cheques into a holdall (the wheelie shopping bags of today were still a distant dream) and set out on our rounds. It was basically up to us how we organised our time and route.
I used to pre-sort my mail by street and house number so that I wouldn’t need to spend too much time rooting about in the huge holdall. As I stashed the letters in the bag I would read the names on the envelopes and tried to imagine what their owners looked like; it was a kind of private game, an additional bonus of the job. I wasn’t attracted by obvious, down-to-earth names such as Kováč or Medveďová, Mrs Bear, which left little room for the imagination. But it was fascinating to guess what someone called Libaj, Bikšudová, Svačko or Kabuliaková, names that had no obvious meaning, might look like. In those days, many old tenements still lacked letterboxes, and recorded letters, summonses and cheques had to be signed for. And so, in the course of six weeks, I got to meet most of the addressees. I forget what Bikšudová looked like but remember that I had imagined Svačko as a smiling, talkative old man with a twinkle in his eye; I even expected him to let me keep some small change from his pension with a generous wave of the hand. I pictured Libaj as a sturdy man with an upturned Hungarian moustache and a fob watch dangling from his waistcoat, and Kabuliaková as a frowning woman in an apron, with beads of sweat on her brow and smoothly combed grey hair parted in the middle.
On occasion my predictions turned out to be fairly accurate, though not absolutely spot on, but the reason I remember these three people is that they proved me totally wrong: Libaj was a young man with a crew-cut and dressed in vest and shorts; Kabuliaková had bright red fingernails and her perfume filled the entire hallway; and Svačko was a typical boring bureaucrat who reached straight for the pen without giving me a glance.
Not only are our names not unique but, unlike native American names, they don’t tell us anything about their bearers. They are just lottery tickets that a parrot has pulled out of the drum.
The owner of the fur coat, Mr König, wasn’t happy with the parrot’s choice – one minute he was a German king, König, and the next a Slovak one, Kráľ. If I saw these names on an envelope, each one would conjure up a completely different image. But back then I couldn’t imagine that a man might have no qualms about changing his name, yet be unable to recognise it later on.
My name wasn’t picked by a parrot either, I chose it myself. My name is Čimborazka. Except I haven’t told anyone.
2.h
Afterwards Mother and I waited for the train in a park by the station. I expected Mother to be relieved to have the coat literally off her hands and that she would, now unburdened, perhaps take me for a walk around town, but she just sat next to me on the bench without a word, squinting in the sun. Eventually she said: ‘Who does she think she is? Is she the only one in the world who’s had to watch someone dear to her die?’ But her question wasn’t addressed to me. She didn’t even glance at me, she knew I couldn’t answer.
Honestly selfish as children are, they lay claim to their mother in her entirety, without allowing her an independent, separate purpose in life. A mother exists in order to be mother, that’s what she is for. Only years later, when we are much older, do we realise that she is a complete person in her own right, like anyone else, like us, that she exists even when we can’t see her and don’t need her, and we learn to accept that. I had never understood the fur coat story but I hadn’t given it much thought either; I thought we had gone on a day trip and this was just a small chore to be dealt with. Now that we had got it out of the way, I stopped thinking about it and couldn’t understand what Mother was talking about. I didn’t realise that this was the noise generated by the soul-producing factory.
It was a brilliant sunny day, with train engines whistling and puffing beyond the trees, and before we boarded our carriage, Mother bought me some ice cream from a street seller plying his trade from a tricycle. I didn’t even notice that it had started to snow.
1.i
The second of the Ten Commandments says: ‘Thou shalt