Seeing People Off. Jana Beňová

       I

       PETRŽALKA The Galapagos

       PETRŽALKA The Shadow of My Smile

       PETRŽALKA My Own Style

       PETRŽALKA The Sound of My Heart

       PETRŽALKA Always on My Mind

      The neighbor living next to Ian and Elza is an older man. For years he’s been thinking that Elza is Ian’s son. He greets her genially with “Hi there,” or sometimes a friendly thump on the chest.

      The neighbor can’t stand firecrackers. When the children start setting them off, he runs out onto the balcony and yells: “You motherfucker!” Over and over again. This is how the new year begins in Petržalka. Youmotherfuckeryoumothefuckeryou!

      The neighbor’s not a person—he’s basically a peculiar firecracker. A bullet. The next night, Elza makes a pilgrimage to his door so that she doesn’t have to listen to TV shows through his wall. She asks him to turn it down. His eyes are shining: a combination of alcohol and tears.

      “I’m not sure,” he says aloofly, full of positive energy. “It’s a program to support the Tatra Mountains, so I thought everyone, everybody…” whimpers the neighbor.

      Elza leaves, enters her apartment, the television isn’t blaring through the wall anymore. Now the neighbor is blaring: “Hungarian whores!” Over and over. Elza is lying in bed, tears rolling down her face. Over and over. To support Petržalka.

      Petržalka is a place where time plays no role. There are creatures here that the rest of the planet thinks are extinct, died out. Good and bad. The faces of cockroaches remind us of dinosaurs, and the neighbor’s voice doesn’t come from his throat, but from the eye teeth of a wildcat.

      Elza runs out onto the balcony, takes a bottle from the waste basket, and leans over onto the neighbor’s side. By the wall stands an empty aquarium. She throws the bottle into the middle of it, runs back in, and hides in bed. She hears the neighbor go outside, and it’s quiet for a moment. Elza is shaking.

      “Pinot noir,” reads the surprised neighbor from the shards after a moment. Then peace settles over the land.

      In Petržalka apartments, all the walls play music and talk. You’ll be reminded here of songs you thought the world had long forgotten. Time stands still. Radios are tuned to the same station for years. The needle showing the stations has sunken into the bowels of the machine. To the bottom of the theme park. Elza found out that they still play the show Birthday Music. She remembered it from childhood. During socialism they played it in every hair salon.

      Elza asks the neighbor not to listen to songs and birthday wishes so loud. The neighbor stands in the doorway in his underwear, barefoot. Weeping. While listening to the brass band, he was reminded of his dead mother.

      His two sons visit him: “Get a hold of yourself, Dad! You’re losing it! What’s wrong with you? You call me on the Czech mobile network when I’m in Austria! I pay for all that. Look at yourself! Jeez! Get a hold of yourself! I tell you something and two weeks later you’ve forgotten.”

      “Don’t talk to me about details! I don’t want details,” the father beseeches.

      Elza decides to wait in the street outside their house to catch them and ask them not to broadcast their family affairs so loudly until three in the morning. After standing in front of the entrance half the day, she finds that she can’t tell the neighbor’s sons from other young Petržalka men. They’re all tall and beefy with shaved heads, and their faces look like pancakes.

      Elza. In my childhood, the land on the other side of the river seemed dangerous. My parents and I lived in the Old Town. The Old Bridge is the beginning of an unpredictable road— the walkway on the left side is suspended over an abyss with a brown river rushing below. This is the border, where a Sunday stroll changes to a fight for one’s life. That’s why only adults over eighteen should walk along it.

      From the city side of the river I often look at the Luna Park— the gateway to Petržalka. I try to avoid the scorching eyes of the sphinx. They guard the entrance while feigning playfulness. Horses, ducks, and swans of monstrous proportions and colors turn in a closed, airtight circle. Twirling in a devilishly defined track. Above them, jumping, screaming children whirl around. The relentless turning movement absorbs the landscape.

      There’s no escape—the circle can’t be breached. A few children have chosen badly—now they’re clutching the necks of the plastic horses and crying.

      “This is what I call life,” says the man running the merry-go-round, and lifting his face to the sky, he turns up the speed.

      Some days the Luna Park looks like it’s closed and broken. Only a couple of merry-go-rounds and a shooting range are operating. The guys who run it wander around the muddy complex. Their tragic figures remind me of England in times when they used children as chimney sweeps.

      Driving a blue car in the bumper car arena, I crash into a red one and get the wind knocked out of me. Whenever the subject of merry-go-rounds arises, my father always talks about the swan that came off while two little kids were on it.

      My grandmother accompanies me into the hall of mirrors and when we can’t get out—no way, no doors, the mirrors aren’t windows, nothing, just me and Grandma, Grandma and I, and our faces in the mirrors getting paler and paler—after a half hour we begin to yell for the man who sold us the tickets to lead us out. To show us the way.

      A few years later Mama and Grandma get lost in Petržalka. They get on the right bus, but going the wrong way. Instead of downtown, it ferries them deeper and deeper into the high-rise housing blocks.

      When they get off, terrified, it’s already dark and snowing. They’ll never get home, never find their way out. “Miss! Miss! Excuse me, how can we get to Bratislava?” Mama blurts to a young woman at the stop. “But you already are… You are in Bratislava,” says the woman, surprised.

      Mama smiles helplessly. “I mean to the city. To the city of Bratislava!” When they finally get across the bridge, Mama asks Grandma if she noticed what an odd face that girl had. Like a pancake.

      When Ian and I want to make love for the first time, he tells me that he lives in Petržalka. I don’t even shudder. (I realize that I still haven’t shuddered.)

      The bridge is dangerous, especially if you cross it on foot. The river is too close. The boundary between the water and the air calls you. I’m afraid I’ll just suddenly jump. Without warning, without one sad thought, without saying shoop, no drama or decisions—regular steps along the bridge will just be replaced by a jump.

      The strongest urge to jump I have in winter. In those layers of warm clothes, a person feels impenetrable and inviolable. And longs for a change. Like a nomad longing for a change of scene—in winter I long for a change of state. Instead of unsure, sluggish steps along the icy surface of the bridge, a jump would be flight. Then the moment of transition. Prolonged for a little while when I’m already lying in the water but it hasn’t yet soaked through the layers of clothing to my body. It gets through slowly, heavy, green like a menthol candy—it fills the pockets, gets into the shoes.

      The pancake got on the bus. He shoved his fat tattooed shoulder in my face. I closed my eyes. So I wouldn’t have to look at those figures writhing in flames, or the pancake’s face framed by a moonlit landscape outside the window. I let myself be driven and jostled with closed eyes.

      Perhaps it was because of these Petržalka scenes that Ian went blind for a time a few years ago.