My real name is Čimborazka but I haven’t told anyone. What would be the point? It would be the same as changing your phone number: your friends will remember your new number but they will still use it to ring the same person as before, the same idea of a person. But I don’t want to receive letters addressed to Dear Mr Čimborazka, which would be like addressing a different person each time. Čimborazka is a clean, blank sheet; a reminder that I am a person – not an entity, just a being, albeit a human one. And that every human possibility is therefore still open to me each and every time. It is a silent, secret challenge to honour my name.
Štefan would like this name as it contains two bilabial consonants next to each other, nicely holding hands. If he took the trouble to research it, he might reach the scientific conclusion that my character is fearless and ferocious. Well, tough luck, I am not a native American of the Menominee tribe and I refuse to have a character. I’m just a man. I am Čimborazka.
2.i
Like it or not, a mother leaves an indelible mark on her child. Even after she has gone she continues to be part of us – in my case, part of my shoulder. I’d had a birthmark there since I came into this world, it had just been sitting there quietly and without bothering me. The only person it bothered was Štefan, who called it a beauty spot. He is a linguist but that doesn’t mean he can make assumptions about my birthmark – he is free to call his own whatever he likes. The dictionary doesn’t distinguish between these two expressions, treating them as synonyms but for me a birthmark is linked to giving birth, birth certificate, birthday, practical, tangible things, whereas a beauty spot relates to something more abstract, idealized. Štefan and I got into an argument on this subject. Admittedly, I am just an amateur and he is an expert, though more in the field of bilabial consonants in the Menominee language than on the Slovaks’ relationship to their birth.
The birthmark couldn’t have cared less about our argument, it just did its own thing. All of a sudden it started to grow. It struck me as inappropriate at my age: after all, all of me – from head to toe – had stopped growing at the age of 18, so I assumed the birthmark would come to its senses. But it didn’t, and soon it was jutting out of my shoulder like an aerial. One day, as I anxiously checked on its progress, it started to speak to me out of the blue. ‘You think you’re the only one in the world this has happened to, that nobody before you had a birthmark that started growing?’
That was quite a challenge. To make sure the birthmark didn’t get out of control, I decided to do what other people before me had done. The surgeon to whose care I entrusted myself wasn’t endowed with the delicate, ascetic fingers of a violinist nor was he possessed of an incisive gaze that would, by itself, have removed my worn-out organs like a scalpel. He had the looks of a plump and kindly circus bear that loves the smell of damp sawdust and the little treats that life doles out. My birthmark didn’t frighten him at all and while I was undressing, perhaps partly to dispel my fear of the intervention, he drew me into a conversation about hobbies and pastimes such as football, Czech film comedies and music. He confessed that as a young man he had been a Pink Floyd fan, but that he also loved Ian Anderson.
Someone more clued up than I am might have guessed what was coming but I was genuinely taken by surprise. After the nurse had led me to the adjoining procedure room, made me lie down on the operating table and given me a Mesocain shot, strange sounds rang out from nextdoor and the doctor appeared on the threshold in his white coat holding a flute to his mouth. Before the injection took effect, he managed to play two easy pieces; I recognised the second, the folk song Kamaráti moji, tu ma nenechajte, pod lipku zelenú, pod lipku zelenú, tam ma pochovajte. The lyrics – Hey, my friends, don’t leave me here, under the green linden tree, under the linden tree, that’s where you will bury me – were tailor-made for an outpatients’ surgery.
During the procedure the doctor explained that although he had no ear or talent for music, he had decided to enrich his life by learning to play an instrument for his own delight and that of his patients.
‘Is this musical bandage included in my insurance cover?’ I asked. ‘Or do the patients have to contribute out of their own pocket?’
‘Oh no, it’s all free of charge. On the house.’ And to prove his point, while the nurse bandaged the wound, he gave an encore, El Condor Pasa, a favourite of the native Americans in our market-place. They are not Menominees though, they come from Peru.
Soon I was out of the surgery, minus birthmark. Now I was truly an orphan.
5.c
It took me a long time to realise what was going on. It annoyed me that at some point she developed a kind of verbal tic she had not needed before and took to starting each sentence with ‘Hang on’. On top of that she would often repeat something I had said as if she were hard of hearing – for example, I would tell her that Štefan had had a book published in America and her response would be: ‘Hang on, he had a book published in America?’ What an unpleasant and irritating habit, I thought, where did she pick it up? It seemed to forcibly tighten the reins on a freewheeling conversation, make my thoughts wander off and, disconcerted, I would no longer feel like resuming the conversation.
‘Hang on, so you won’t be home for lunch?’ ‘That’s right, I won’t, but I’ve already told you that, haven’t I?’ What was there to think about? What was there to hang on to? It made no sense to me.
1.k
As for God, another question that comes to mind is whether it’s harder not to believe in one God or not to believe in many. In my view things were easier for polytheists like the ancient Greeks or Romans, since they had a choice – a Greek fisherman could afford not to give a damn about Hermes or Aphrodite, whose services he didn’t need, but that didn’t make him an infidel: he still believed in Zeus and Poseidon. Or did Gods only come bundled in a single package? And if you didn’t believe in one, you believed in none? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
It would seem that it is easier not to believe in just one God – you are done with it in one fell swoop. But we are talking about a single omnipotent God, who is in charge of the entire Universe and every sphere of life, and woe betide us if we have made the mistake of opting to be infidels. It can have far-reaching consequences. However, as I look around, not many people seem too concerned about this particular threat. When we are asked to fill in the box ‘religion’ in a census, we are happy to put down whatever faith we have been baptised in. More conservative or emotionally unstable individuals may attend church from time to time to pay God a visit, only to be disappointed to find Him not at home. Whether it is a majestic ancient cathedral or a friendly modern prayer house that we enter, it’s our job to bring God with us. Like the tailors’ workshops where clothes are made up out of the material the customer brings. We are making a huge mistake if we fool ourselves that God is sitting in the vestry with a glass of communion wine patiently waiting until we deign to enter.
It is not so much that we no longer believe, it’s just that we are too busy to believe. We are running out of time. We are so preoccupied with our bodies, with making sure they are comfortable, that we have no time left for the soul. It is quite natural, of course: the body is visible, it is constantly before our eyes, but has anyone ever managed to point a finger at the soul? We rely on the old adage: a sound mind (as the heathens called the soul) in a sound body; we scrupulously look after our body trusting that it will, somehow, sort out the mind. It never even occurs to us that it might be the other way around, and that a sound mind could beget a sound body. Science has yet to prove this.
‘Just look at yourself, you had the birthmark surgically removed from your shoulder, didn’t you?’ Štefan said to me. ‘But not from your soul.’
‘But you must remember’, I replied, ‘that all my marks are birthmarks by definition. Whether they’re on my body or my soul.’
2.j
I can no longer remember when they stopped issuing platform tickets at Bratislava railway station.