Away! Away!. Jana Beňová

morphological lexicon.

      And then they will take their last bites and go up to their rooms.

      Have you ever looked under the cushion of a chair in a hotel room where novelists and poets stayed? You’d find a bleating herd of crumbs.

      Blindness. Black dots everywhere. Birds flying past the window. The window of the bus.

      Son. I thought they were gunk on the window or a flock of birds. Crows. Ravens? How long does it take to accept: they’re inside your eye. They’re flying inside your eye.

      (Oh, birds…)

      Rosa. The second time it happened, they flew into the apartment building. At night. Just that day, Son had bought a book he’d been dying to read his whole life. Since puberty at least, when he’d discovered Albert Camus. The Notebooks—Carnets. He read it in an armchair in a house full of sleeping people. Black flocks began to attack the text. More and more birds, fewer words. Blindness had grown wings.

      Rosa again. Slovakia. This country, these people—no inspiration.

      My friend Gergana was telling me: you should go out more, meet some people…

      Go out and meet people? What PEOPLE?

      Gergana is not a Slovak and her name always reminds me of Gorgon. Medusa.

      You hear yourself, how you’re pronouncing phrases and words that don’t go together. You don’t create them, you just repeat what was said somewhere else, sometime, definitely hanging in the air. Empty, translucent bubbles.

      Like Odysseus. No-body.

      Like when the sea blooms.

      (A sign that somewhere in the vicinity there must be a cuckoo.)

      And there’s only one way to save yourself.

      Pat your pockets in the doorway and mumble: Feet, hands, knife.

      After several eye operations, Son sits in the hospital courtyard in his patient’s pajamas. Today he’s going home. He can hardly see anything at all.

      No-body starts to cry.

      Son. Don’t worry, I won’t burden you.

      Echo. A burden…a burden. A burden

      The retinas are healing. The birds are nowhere to be seen.

      Risk. A trip to Berlin. Son says: the only things I’ve been able to recognize in this room are the big pumpkins with glowing eyes—Halloween.

      They were still lighting up the room from All Saints Day.

      Son is in a café in Berlin—“jednu kááávu prosíím”. He pronounces everything slowly and clearly like a polite foreigner to a person who’s trying to learn his language. As if he thought everyone should understand Slovak if a person speaks clearly, loudly and emphatically.

      After our return, we sit in a Czech pub eating goulash and drinking beer. Lent is coming to an end—it’s the Thursday before Easter. The film is ripping, the black dots in front of his eyes growing bigger. Like hockey pucks on the ice.

      They’re on my face. I must have chosen my seat badly. The worst place. Directly opposite Son.

      We run to the hospital. The doctor and nurses are just leaving for the long Easter weekend. The doctor orders the operating room sterilized again. The anesthesiologist isn’t there anymore, the doctor mixes the drug cocktail himself. When no one’s looking, his colleague leans over to Son and reproachfully whispers: You picked a hell of a time for an operation!

      Jesus caused problems right on Easter, too.

      Rosa returns to the apartment for Son’s pajamas. She lies face down on the carpet. Howling.

      After a few minutes, she rises with renewed strength. This is how it works when you’re twenty-five.

      Evening, Gergana. Even if he went blind, you’d still love him, wouldn’t you?

      And take him out?

      Take him out to meet PEOPLE.

      1At the end of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia fell.

      2All italicized text in this book are quotations or are spoken or sung by someone else.

       ON THE ROAD

      And, if on the way to the hospital or in the forest I should meet a cuckoo. If I’ve already seen her from afar, as she prepares to throw herself at me in friendship, love, and conversation. In an embrace. I beat her to it—in that instant when she pauses to gather her bile—I lunge at her and plant a big kiss on each of her cheeks. Then I push her away and resume my journey.

      It’s such a militant mode of defense. To kiss, embrace and then shove someone as far away as possible.

      That humiliating feeling, when you stand face to face with a cuckoo and you feel yourself adapting. You smile, kiss. You do the cuckoo thing. There’s nothing for it—to face the cuckoos unveiled, that would be to risk exposure to radiation. To risk damage. Explosions, things flying everywhere, saliva, grimaces, teeth.