duty on the consignment. Štefan tried to explain that it was his author’s copies but they wouldn’t listen. One of the officials saw that on the envelope the price of a copy was given as $15.95 and he calculated the duty based on that figure, on the assumption that Štefan was going to sell the books. Only after Štefan gave him the Slovak translation of the title did he realise that a book on this subject, and written in English at that, would be impossible to sell in Slovakia. So he exempted him from paying the customs duty and Štefan headed for the bus stop with the cardboard box under his arm.
2.e
‘By the way’, Štefan said, ‘now that you’ve brought up homeless people, I think that’s a misleading term. They should really be called home-everywhere people. They have no permanent place of abode – their home is wherever they put their plastic bags.’
This was hard to disagree with, so I nodded.
‘But you’re quite a different kettle of fish’, Štefan said. ‘You pretend to be a homeless person in terms of your character but I have worked out why you refuse to be confined to a single one. You fancy yourself as having lots of characters but you are quite wrong. There are no homeless people in terms of character, only people who pass themselves off as such.’
So that was the second, deeper reason he came up with to explain why I refuse to have a character. I would never have thought I would prove such an inspiration to him.
4.b
Štefan’s book was well received in scholarly circles. Well, scholarly circles may be a bit of an exaggeration, there is just one circle, and a very small one at that, but that doesn’t detract from the book’s scholarly value. Either way, the book won’t sell in Slovakia where there are no native North Americans; and even in America it sold only two copies. The buyers were students of Štefan’s professor. As far as I know, neither of them has a Menominee background, and the professor doesn’t either. (He didn’t need to buy a copy since he was the one who had recommended the book for publication and edited it.) You may well ask what significance and impact Štefan’s oeuvre might have on the Menominees’ life and language which, as he informs me, is a member of the Algonquian family.
The Menominee tribe is on the verge of extinction and so is their language. Apparently, the only person still alive with full command of the language is a very old native American woman, who is actually deaf and dumb. Even if she went to the trouble of studying the role of bilabial consonants it wouldn’t be much use to her as she can only communicate in writing.
It is always a great loss when a language becomes extinct; every language is unique. I am sure that if the story of my life were told in the Menominee language it would be a different life. I would like to hear this version of the story but there is nobody to tell it, and I wouldn’t understand it anyway.
To be honest, it is highly unlikely that the Menominee would be interested in my life. They have other things to worry about. An avalanche started rolling towards them a long time ago and now only a single, lone arm is left sticking out of the snow. Petawawa, Maniwaki. Beautiful cries. Cries for help.
‘Congratulations’, I said to Štefan after browsing through his book. ‘Hats off. You might as well stick it up your arse, though you won’t be able to fit all ten copies in there anyway.’
3.b
‘The avalanche has started rolling’, I said to Štefan. ‘Except we can’t see it yet.’
‘You’re imagining things. What you hear is the grass growing.’
‘Absolutely not’, I said. ‘I can hear the first mass of snow pushing its way through the snowdrifts.’
1.f
First names work differently in native American languages. That’s not something I learnt from Štefan’s research but from books on the Wild West. Except that these days the West is no wilder than the East and nobody reads cheap Westerns anymore.
Native Americans have names like Sitting Bull, Cawing Raven, Morning Dawn or maybe Bungler Whose Arrow Missed a Hare – polysynthetic Indian languages such as Menominee don’t need as many words as Slovak to express this, they just stick all the bits together to make one long word. These names are quite picturesque and probably also unique, at least within a single tribe, but there is a problem with them similar to that of character. They tie a person permanently to a single phenomenon, action, or event, depriving them of the chance to change and evolve. Language is an unforgiving manacle.
5.a
Here’s the thing: it all started when I found an old photograph at the bottom of a drawer while cleaning. It was taken on our first date – actually, it wasn’t even a proper date, we weren’t quite sure at that point that it was one. Someone, probably a fellow student, snapped us sitting on a bench, caught in the act and smiling at the camera in embarrassment.
I showed my wife the photo: ‘Look!’ I thought it would make her smile, like it made me, this time not in embarrassment but rather smiling indulgently at those two silly young things. She stared at the photo for a long time; she didn’t know where her glasses were so she held it close up and scrutinized it as if scouring it for fingerprints. In vain, for the only prints on it were mine, and now also hers. Eventually she asked: ‘Who is that with you, some girlfriend of yours?’
‘Of course it is’, I said. I thought she was making a joke; after all, she recognised me without any problem, or at least guessed who I was. But she wasn’t joking, she was simply a stranger to herself. She put the photograph to one side and gave me a questioning look, as if about to say: ‘That’s the first I’ve heard about this.’
‘Yes’, I went on, ‘a girlfriend. This one here’, I said, poking her in the ribs with a finger. She picked up the photo again, looked at it for a while and shook her head in disbelief.
I just laughed it off at the time.
2.f
Although nobody has ever seen the soul, we assume that it exists. At least everyone talks about it as if the term referred to something specific and indisputable, even if it cannot be seen. After all, how many of us have ever seen atoms with our own eyes? Atoms are just a hypothesis, like the soul, and yet scientists speak of them as a proven fact. It is one of the little tricks we humans play: whenever something is beyond us, we invent a name for it, at the very least, or borrow one from some ancient language, and we feel more secure straight away.
The soul can’t be seen because it is hidden inside the body. Strangely enough, we can’t see even our own soul, we just know it’s in there somewhere. What’s even more strange is that all of it fits into our body even though we sense that it’s somehow much bigger. That it transcends the body in every way.
There are several theories of the relationship between the body and the soul. One claims that the soul is inserted into in the body as if into a case, and once the case is battered and worn out, the soul departs and moves on – where to is anyone’s guess. Maybe that Someone who placed the soul in the body to start with takes it back again. According to this theory, the soul does not wear out simultaneously with the body and even if it does, it may be recycled in hell, or purgatory, or heaven, depending on the degree of wear and tear. Another theory presumes that it is the body that produces the soul and once the body ceases to be operational, the soul too is extinguished. The soul factory closes down.
One can only theorise about the soul’s characteristics. Is each of us issued with the same soul to begin with and after that it’s up to us how we treat it and how it evolves? Or is a baby born with a harelip or congenital brain damage supplied with a soul that is different from a healthy one? And what if the soul is given once and for all and never changes, regardless of circumstances?
Be that as it may, the soul is a useful concept, one that is easy to work with. Anyone can