Away!
“There was once a preserved restless stone in Kyz yl, which served as an anchor for Argonauts. It ran away so often they had to pour molten lead over it”
The boy named Son—like the common suffix on Nordic surnames—doesn’t like strangers’ homes or large groups of people. And what scares him most are large groups of people at strangers’ homes. He lingers in the doorway and turns around, escaping through his parents’ legs.
“Away! Away!” he says, pressing their knees apart.
Rosa is a child of the Main Station. Directly behind the fence of the house where she was born begins the Great Chinese Wall of the railroad. The cross-ties pulse, rails accelerate to a gallop. Regular collisions. All the couchettes in the sleeping car point north.
A Prague knight once wrote about his little sister. In childhood, they were brought up together in a German boarding school and visited Princess Thurn und Taxis. When she asked what they wished for, the little sister refused, saying it wasn’t polite. Very rude. It begins with a ‘W’.
The Princess insisted.
Little girl: Weg! Weg!
Rosa, a child of the Main Station, is forty years old. She crossed the tracks daily all those many years, first on her way to school and then to work. On her way to the city buses, she passed the trains. All manner of public transport and city roads begin beyond the tunnel. The trains sit on the platforms right behind her house. All you have to do is start running andddddd / jump.
Switch cities (like) masks.
Choose distance instead of access.
Roads and pubs.
Rosa. Downtown, there’s a blinking display of the date, time and current temperature. Underneath it, my life grows subtly shorter. Flows away. The clock is a warning: a harvester of wasted days, months, degrees Celsius.
The foundation of a creative life is skipping out. Adventure. Rosa remembers that as a child she couldn’t understand why kids skipped. She liked school, it was her first performance space, she had friends there. And she was attached to the teachers.
Her elementary school was in town, but for high school Rosa ended up on the outskirts—on the edge of town, in a depressing neighborhood with such big, wide transport arteries that a pedestrian never knew where to cross. It was a place for machines, cars and buses, covered in black snow and dust, no obstacles or residents to slow them down. No genuine life. Just speed. Wind. Away! Away! An empty, speechless landscape without nature, without people, without architecture. Completely different students, too. While it was mainly city children who went to the elementary school, this high school was full of kids from the Provinces.
The Provinces and Lapa. The worst neighborhood in the city.
Provincial children failed to see the difference between themselves and grown-ups. Upon graduating, Rosa’s classmate, who is now a police detective, considered the biggest victory of her high school career to be smoking on school grounds in front of teachers. This didn’t appeal to Rosa, who preferred to smoke alone in the evenings while strolling through the empty city. (Young lady, don’t smoke while you walk on the street like some kind of slut, light up properly, inside a coffee shop, an older man said once, approaching her on the street.) The teachers were of the same generation as Rosa’s parents, so she lumped them into the same group—patrician. If only because they were adults. It was too much for them. They needed respect. Protection.
The first few days of high school, she cried often. It particularly got to her in the cafeteria. Ever since she was a kid, she couldn’t stand eating in a group. The spaces, sounds and smells of the cafeteria depressed her. Even after finishing class, you have to remain in your group to eat, rushed by the teachers, with just one meal choice, and no say over portion size. The oversight and discipline never stop. As she ate, she longed to be a free person, a real human being—not a student. She wanted to be part of the big world, not the collective.
Rosa. It was somewhere here that my yearning for independence began, after being so limited: instead of lunches in the school cafeteria, as a kid I started going to the department store for egg salad sandwiches and Coke. (Freedom & Anarchy!) There was a tiny little self-service snack bar there, right behind the toy department. There, all of us eaters were independent and grown up. Equality & brotherhood & freedom.
She began skipping in the second year of high school. In 1990. (If you know what I mean!)1 After she met Son. They sat in a café every evening and talked. Laughed, mourned. She started smoking. High time to start, really—sixteen years old!
Rosa. I’ve loved red wine for some time now. After those evenings, it was impossible to go to school in the morning. You couldn’t get on the bus and take off for the outskirts. Leaving the city and yourself behind. I remember how I bought, by myself at the station, three cigarettes and a glass of mulled wine, put on my Walkman and slowly, so that the wine didn’t spill, walked toward town. The surface of the liquid, breath and gate in sync. The tree-lined alley to the Main Station, the crowns of the trees entangled with each other above my head, the cigarette smoke, the smell of cloves—in a word, Paris.
And in the mornings, I would pack my bag and leave the house at the usual time. Away! Away! I thought about how I used to stay home sick as a kid, how I was surprised at the house itself. It was suddenly different—without my brother and parents in the rooms, secret and scary—all there just for me.
My world at sixteen felt similar, my lack of freedom was confined to one space, and from eight o’ clock on, it spun away from me. In my free time, I ran in the other direction with a light step, to a place with no buses, only streetcar bells and the whirr of trolleybuses. Clutching the book I was reading, I walked through the streets of the old town, past the cafés. I read almost all of Kafka’s Castle at the foot of Castle Hill. How pathetic.. Like puberty…
Or Paris. You find it within yourself at sixteen years old—just like that, from one day to the next, especially at dusk—in your own city, or it’s forever lost to you.
Then, it’s forever wiped out from the world, sometime around eighteen years old, boom, it gets swallowed up by the Earth.
And you can say good-bye to it, erase it from your head forever.
The advantage was that she had predictable parents—she knew where they worked and what routes they took from home to work or to go shopping. Bratislava is a city with closed-off neighborhoods, like remote continents. In Lapa, Rosa doesn’t meet anyone from her family or from work. In the old town, the same people have been circulating for years, slowly aging in the cafés of her childhood.
Rosa. Despite my sense of security, it was clear that eventually they would figure out I was skipping. But this only gave that time a certain cachet. The cachet of treasure. Stolen time that you should enjoy: I definitely started writing poetry.
Today, she almost didn’t make it to work. Like it used to be in high school. She got up in the morning, left the house, but then just kept walking as she passed by that unpleasant building with her desk and the monitor in front of her face. Without blinking, she continued farther through the wintry city and wandered into a shop, where she put a bag of oranges, rolls, cheese and peppers in her basket—as if for an outing. A person with a history of crossing borders (into drugs, alcohol, food, lying, skipping out, unfaithfulness) easily backslides straight to the peak of their worst impulses—and their rock bottom.