can do anything except teach. Teachers have it the worst. Even when they aren’t at school, they hear a classroom full of kids everywhere: voices, chairs scraping, pencil case zippers, a compass being stabbed into someone’s back.
In the deserted woods, the voices of children on a school trip come to them. They move with them, melding with the burbling of the brook. “Why did they take the kids on a trip to such a deep deserted forest? And why now, at midnight, on New Year’s Eve?” the teachers ask themselves in the desolate wood. “And if we’re asking this, then what for God’s sake are the children asking themselves?”
Rebeka’s grandmother was a teacher once. She talked about some of her students. For example, about a boy who called everyone a loser. His father was a musician who played Dixieland and the kids made fun of him, saying that he played dicksilant. Or about a woodworking teacher who cut off his finger during class and the kids saw him off to the hospital, laughing all the way. He carried his finger in a bucket full of ice. The doctors in the hospital poured it down the toilet and flushed.
Elza took care of the stipends for the Trinity last time. She worked under various pseudonyms in several competing daily newspapers. They were usually influential papers with national coverage and a common management center.
The first place she worked was in television. Under the pseudonym Kaufman, she was public relations manager for a reality show, which took place in the Dachau concentration camp. The blue group lived like imprisoned Jews, and the red group played the role of guards. There were great hopes for the show, especially financial.
The office reminded her of a scouts’ camp or a kids’ school classroom. The people, who worked crowded one on top of the other, ate at their desks, cursed, worked, and commented out loud on everything they were doing. They ran around and played their games.
At work, some tried to attach themselves to others. They looked for protection. Like those lonely beings who cried during the whole time at camp, missing their parents. “I’m never leaving home again,” they said to themselves. And they gathered in pathetic, tight groups. A couple of children crying in their own little circle. The thing that had annoyed her most was the evening sessions where everyone sat around the fire and sang. One song after the other.
Little Elza always sat hidden in the back row, but just in case, she opened her mouth as if she were singing. She didn’t make a sound. But from her moving lips you could read: “We are the children of a freeeee country.”
She did the same now—at work. She moved her lips.
Around her, workers ran about hectically. They cursed, quickly catching their breath, were always behind, hissed and sizzled. They didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. They didn’t eat, didn’t sleep—just whistled while they worked. They were heroes—neurotics running in circles. Their charm lay in their eternal dissatisfaction. (“God, why can’t they let me finish one thing? Not now, I can’t. I don’t have time. I have work to do, I have to make myself a cappuccino!”)
All the women at work called each other by the nickname “hon” and white poisonous spit collected in the corners of their mouths.
Red dots shown in the corner of every eye. Sometimes they switched languages. To a special women’s language, Láadan. After elasháana and husháana, osháana—a word for menstruation—and ásháana, meaning to menstruate joyfully, were the next words which were supposed to guarantee women in Slovakia equality of rights.1
The concentration camp reality show was such a failure that it bankrupted the TV station. The whole network.
At a meeting, Elza’s supervisor shouted that the problem was that viewers weren’t engaged enough. “The war ended a long time ago, today we can’t get any more mileage out of it.”
“Unless we unleashed the war again,” commented one of the special effects guys. The director threw that idea out. He used the argument that everyone would lose money if they did that. “During wartime, money loses value, the world operates on rationing coupons.”
In January, days came when Elza felt like her inner organs had disappeared from her body. Her breathing tubes ended just below the neck. Then she ate and drank. And she was surprised that those pieces of bread, tomatoes, and cookies disappearing into her mouth didn’t immediately show up under her feet. Her breathing was shallow. It moved between her nose and mouth. Forget about asanas!
She remembered her grandfather’s joke about Jánošík2. They hung Jánošík up by his rib, but he just kept hanging and wouldn’t die. He asked the petty officer if he could have a cigarette. The officer said, okay, if it’s your last wish… Jánošík went to the corner store for cigarettes and had a smoke. But the smoke came out of his lungs through the hole under his rib. He didn’t get that true pleasure from smoking. He gave up, tapped the ashes from the butt, and jumped back up onto the hook.
Youth camp for some people started again in old age. Elza’s aunt lived in an old age home in Budapest. On Margaret Island. Elza and her mother visited her once a month. She always wore gloves and smelled of old furniture.
In January, the old woman (gloves and all) jumped out the window. She committed suicide because she couldn’t be in the bathroom for as long as she would have liked. She couldn’t spend as long in the shower or in front of the mirror as she needed. There were always other people waiting at the door. Someone was always breathing down her neck. Knocking.
The old age home was a continuation of youth camp. A common bathroom, too much singing, scheduled meals that someone else chose for you, here and there a party.
On the road home from Budapest a truck blocked their view the whole way. On the back it had a sign for Italy framed by tomatoes and bottles of wine. Elza thought of the sea, Pompeii, and Lagrima Christi wine. She longed for big cities—Lisbon, Rome, Amsterdam, and London. She associated them with a feeling of freedom and abundance.
In a foreign city, she and Ian always made love twice. In the morning and before going to sleep. They formed a pair that had to continually affirm itself—convince itself of its own homogeneity. Its functionality. It grew two new heads with clean tongues. They used them to lick the new country.
No one understood them, their speech became secret and romantic. They thought it up just for themselves. No one ruined it for them or expanded the borders of their world with seeming comprehensibility.
World events ceased to exist. Holding their breath, they scanned the headlines of the local newspaper, which they didn’t understand. To Elza, foreign cities felt free because she had never worked there. She didn’t know the mayors, the city neighborhoods, the offices, the scandals. She didn’t have to chase anyone down in them, or call around. She had no contacts.
Elza. Bratislava. A city that grips you in its clutches. On the way from work to Ian and from Ian to work. Tied up in the rhythm of your own steps. The rhythm of the city. The rhythm of lovemaking, work, parties, earning and spending, gaining and losing. Are you making money? Combining ingredients? Time, men, and money? City, wine, song, and work? Friends, love, and idiots. Pancakes! The Bratislava alchemist.
Bratislava. A city that forces you to pounce on something, just as it has pounced on you.
In the newsroom. “What do you actually do, Elza, in reality? Are you writing a novel? Aha… You’re lucky, I would do the same. If I had the time. If only you knew what I’ve been through. What a book that would be!” The Editor-in-Chief sighed and poured himself some white wine. Oh, little fairy, if only you knew what I’ve been through… He sat down on her desk, put his hands on his hips, and looked into her eyes.
“How are you doing—have you found anything out?”
“You know, I really don’t know now, what’s going on. What’s true in this case. I don’t have a way to confirm, but I’m trying— I’m calling around, asking, waiting.”
Under her boss’s blue-eyed gaze, Elza was flooded with heat. A blue