Away! Away! Read online

  PRAISE FOR JANA BEŇOVÁ’S

  SEEING PEOPLE OFF

  *Winner of the European Union Prize for Literature.

  “‘Seeing People Off is a fascinating novel. Fans of inward-looking postmodernists like Clarice Lispector will find much to admire here.”

  —NPR

  “Stunning… [Beňová] has created that unique and uniquely satisfying phenomenon of a page-turner that must yet be read slowly and precisely.”

  —Necessary Fiction

  “[Beňová] is in the first generation of post-Soviet writers for whom scarcity and censorship is a recent memory, and the political is always lurking just behind the breezy Aimee Bender—like prose.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “These stories explore death and other kinds of leaving in wry, fresh ways. The end of childhood, the end of an affair, the end of sanity—when I arrived at the end of this book, I found myself returning to the beginning. This is a merry-go-round one can hold on to.”

  —Kenyon Review

  “Beňová’s short, fast novels are a revolution against normality. Unlike so many others, her novels not only claim to be a revolution but actually achieve this feat through their minimalist narratives that go against all conventions; in fact, Beňová manages to subtly and intelligently poke fun at conventional categorizations.”

  —Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, ORF

  Away! Away!

  JANA BEŇOVÁ

  Translated by Janet Livingstone

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  Printed on Rolland Enviro, which contains 100% post-consumer fiber, is ECOLOGO, Processed Chlorine Free, Ancient Forest Friendly and FSC® certified and is manufactured using renewable biogas energy.

  Printed in Canada

  All Rights Reserved

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY JANA BEŇOVÁ

  ISBN 9781937512736

  TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT © 2018 BY JANET LIVINGSTONE.

  Library of Congress Control Number available upon request.

  SOME RECOMMENDED LOCATIONS FOR READING AWAY! AWAY!:

  Elevated places—tops of hills, vineyards. Cafés and wine bars with high spirits. Double-decker buses, planes, hot air balloons, and trees.

  Or, pretty much anywhere because books are portable and the perfect technology!

  ANYTHING ELSE? Unfortunately, yes. Do not copy this book—with the exception of quotes used in critical essays and reviews—without the written permission of the publisher. WE MUST ALSO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s lively imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, with the exception of Gerda, Kai, and the reindeer from the fairytale The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.

  THIS BOOK HAS RECEIVED A SUBSIDY FROM SLOLIA Committee, the Centre for Information on Literature in Bratislava, Slovakia.

  CONTENTS

  AWAY!

  ON THE ROAD

  MAGNUM

  DOGWALKERS

  IN PARIS

  ROME, ROTHKO

  KREMS, NOW

  GABRIEL

  TWO DAYS LATER, BRATISLAVA

  IMMER DA

  THE INFINITY SIGN

  IN TOW

  AWAY!

  CHOOOOOBOOOOOOOH

  WITH PIERRE (ON THE ROAD)

  MY ROAD TO PORNOGRAPHY AND BACK

  CHINA (CUPS)

  CHRISTMAS

  CHRISTMAS

  CHRISTMAS

  NEW YEAR’S

  NEW YEAR’S

  NORA

  AFTER THE NEW (YEAR)

  THE KING

  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. To the exposed nerve emitting heat. Like a moth/nightmare.

  It’s raining and snowing on and off and she feels like she’s never felt such hüzün before. But it’s not true, she had the same thing last January. Every January. Only a meeting with Klaus Chapter one winter revived her. The old writer was sitting in the middle of a café full of people, glowing. He was laughing, talking, eyes shining—a firecracker of energy. She felt as if he had thrown a coat or rain jacket over her—a blanket full of fireflies. Nothing ethereal, just a heavy, thick covering—or maybe actually a physical body. Of a strong old man. A body full of light, joy, energy. Babbling with life!

  Rosa. My scratched-up head hurts, the wounds are throbbing. Yesterday I wrote to Son telling him that over my lunch breaks I escape from work at 1:00pm just as they’re opening the night bar, and I drink. I knock down one margarita after another.

  She discovered tequila.

  One could say.

  Like when the sculptor discovered a skull—he took it under his arm and didn’t come out of his atelier for a year.

  Rosa. I’m trapped. I want to lie in bed next to Son, but instead, I’m sitting at work, a cramp personified. A trapped, bare, blood-soaked winter bone.

  Her head, exactly in the spots where her hair & unconsciousness begin, is scratched bloody. It’s piling up under her nails. Odd that anyone who talks to her for an extended period of time starts scratching their head, too—people around her, colleagues, the cuckoo birds.

  Rosa. Reflection in the mirror. My face has gotten thicker. Like a person who goes to work. High time to return to life.

  I feel how work—any kind of disciplined work with rules and colleagues—exhausts me. It sucks out the marrow and the innards. Picks them out to make soup.

  The Great One remembers how when he started school as a child, he was excited to meet friends, but at the same time felt he wasn’t himself around other kids.

  Rosa feels it when she’s alone with Son for a long time and then has to go back to work. Among the cuckoos.

  Rosa. We have fun together, eating, drinking, talking trash, yelling—but then when I’m alone again, I realize it was utter chaos. Of another world. A flaming comet with long wild hair. Apparently tied in a ponytail. And I’m surprised that our silliness, that debauchery and revelry, which I admittedly initiated myself, didn’t cause any accidents. Or tragedy.

  The odd school of life2. Merriment as neurosis. Humor as war.

  And, all the while, as if I were a swimmer, it’s clear to me that there’s nothing more dangerous than having a laughing fit when you’re in the water. You have trouble keeping your head above water. Waves wash over your face.

  Today I read that they found the dead body of a Japanese tourist in the Danube. He jumped from Novy Most into the river. His Japanese friends said he jumped for fun.

  Who knows how many twists and turns of the river it lasted…a Japanese animé joke.

  My grandmother, before going to sleep, before turning off the light, terrified, but with joy: So we’ll survive, won’t we? Then we’ll survive after all…

  When she was in a good mood, Rosa’s first boss called her employees little cuckoos. “How are you today, my little cuckoos?”

  Rosa. Cuckoos, what a phenomenon—women who fill every day of my world. Uninvited guests. The bottomless stamina of cuckooness. They’ve always got something to say, to shout, to prattle about.

  (Work, children, family, money, music, family, children, work, food, cognac, sex, plastic surgery, political theories, cellulite on the walls, food, cognac, work, money, sex, cellulite.)

  At wit’s end, writes Camus.

  I escape from work. On the dark street, I run into Son. After a long drought, we suddenly kiss on the sidewalk.

  Tequila is so powerful, it outshines life.

  Like the stars—

  It throws into the air

  All the crumbs.

  We have coffee. The wintery city grips us like a steel trap. Hüzün. We get on the train to Vienna. Just to be inside something that’s MOVING.

  It moves farther and farther away. Weg! Weg!

  So we’ll survive, won’t we? We’ll survive after all.

  Rosa’s first boss, the little captain, always acted distracted.
It was supposed to draw attention away from her purposeful deeds. She was always losing her knife, so she could pat her pockets and mumble, got my knife, got my knife. Got my wallet, got my mobile, got my keys, got my knife.

  The little captain was the archetype of a cuckoo. She devoured the space with her overflowing energy, all around her a kind of shivering gelatin spread, muddying the air. She made things opaque.

  She was forever clutching a small animal under her arm. She always dressed him differently, so sometimes it was a dog, other times a wolf, a raven, a mouse, a reindeer, a dolphin or a pangasius.

  It was her sweetie. It threw up under other people’s desks and peed on their backpacks, purses, feet. The little captain placed it on the table during meals and it ate from plates and nibbled at crumbs. Everyone thought it was funny, it was so cute, such a sweetie. And the little captain would shout: Is it bothering you? Oh, I’m so glad it’s OK with you!

  The animal was extremely loved.

  Just as ogres’ hearts are found in the golden eggs laid by geese, the little captain’s heart was in her pet. The other cuckoos nicknamed her clown beast.

  The clown beast’s smile and roaring laughter wafting through the forest: that was what held Rosa prisoner. She didn’t want to run away from a laughing person. From a cackling cuckoo.

  In reality, the laughter made her legs turn to wood. Her calves and wrists quivered. In reality, Rosa was immobilized. She couldn’t even lie down, she was so completely frozen.