This Translation Tuesday, we feature a story from Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová’s European Union Prize-winning collection of short stories Mothers and Truckers. Told from the perspective of a young woman who brings up memories of her father, this story—translated by our very own editor-at-large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, and Peter Sherwood—employs a first-person voice that is compelling and speaks from the very core of a childhood that is at once stained and sustained by these recollections. Hear from our translators on the themes and connections of the forthcoming collection which opens with this powerful story.
““Father” is the opening story in Mothers and Truckers, a collection of five stories by Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová, set in her hometown of Bratislava, and in Turin, Italy, where she now lives. Each of the stories features a troubled young woman living through, or reliving, a variety of traumatic events and Dobrakovová has given each a distinct voice in which they deliver cascading internal monologues that are intense, searingly honest and often very funny. As Hungarian literature scholar Anna Gács notes in her foreword to the English edition, due from Jantar Publishing on 30 June: “By focusing on the mental processes of her protagonists, sometimes almost in a stream-of-consciousness manner, she offers us five sensitive portraits written with an abundance of empathy, down to the most ironic details.” While four of the protagonists struggle to shake off the influence of dominant mothers and to escape from claustrophobic relationships with neglectful husbands or partners, or seek solace in imaginary relationships, here the author focuses on on the impact on the narrator of her father’s mental decline and descent into alcoholism.”
—Julia and Peter Sherwood
What do I know about my parents’ relationship? The less the better? To be on the safe side? Mum must have seen something in him. But what exactly?
She said that once Dad had told her, in the presence of other people, that she was not only intelligent but also beautiful. It must have been quite a statement, an exceptional compliment for her to cherish the memory of it so much. To want to share it with me. He had always had a drinking problem, which is why, as long as I can remember, I always thought of it as something inseparable from him, a part of him that was meant to be that way. Just like his illness. There’s no point trying to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg, what was the cause and what was the effect: his unstable mental state, the age-old proclivity to drink, the genetic predisposition to both that got all mixed up, reinforcing each other until they came to form his very essence.
Nevertheless, some episodes do stand out.
One night, Mum, at the end of her tether, dragged us out of bed. ‘Girls, get up, go and tell your Apuka that we live one floor higher up’. My sister and I staggered out into the stairwell in our pyjamas, drowsy with sleep. We didn’t understand what was going on. We found Dad one floor below, persistently ringing our neighbour’s doorbell even though the neighbour was standing in his open doorway trying to stop him. With great difficulty, the two of us then helped Mum haul him upstairs and into our flat. I don’t know when exactly this happened. Or how old I was at the time. My sister was still at the same school as me, so I would have been in the third form. One of the first incidents of this kind, to be followed by many more. It felt bizarre. Like a bad dream. Like a night-time escapade foreshadowing my eventful youth.
That stain has remained to this day. In our fancy block of flats. Complete with a garage, fireplace, and a view of Austria. And the stain. In the lift. The lift might be about forty years old now, it has no internal doors. It’s one of those where you can see the floors pass by. One night, Dad was coming home, pissed as a newt, and wanted to lean on the wall. He leaned his head against the floor passing by. He hit his forehead, drawing blood. Leaving a long dark brown stain between the first and second floors.
He started spending more and more of his nights with us in Bratislava. His boozer of choice was Albrecht’s. He’d spend entire afternoons there, just across the street from my classroom window. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of him. Leaning on the windowsill, I would watch as he walked to the pub. Of course, I never said to anyone, ‘hey, look, there’s my dad’. Not even to my sister. Her classroom was on the second floor, but its windows faced the other way. Out in the street though, I ignored him on several occasions. He’d be walking towards me and I’d continue straight ahead, glassy-eyed. Eventually he’d grab me by the shoulders and make me face him. Later on, at home, I overheard him complaining to Mum that I didn’t acknowledge him and was ashamed of him. But that wasn’t the case yet, not back then.
It was around this time that my sister joined him. Actually, it must have been later, after she started secondary school. She didn’t literally join him, just followed in his footsteps. Occasionally she ended up at Albrecht’s but more often she hung out in other dives with her pals. The Albanians. That came as a real blow for Mum. First her husband, and now her daughter, too. One night my sister came home in the small hours, covered in dreadful make-up, purple eyelids and purple lips. Mum started to thrash her, shouting that this must never happen again, but my sister was so good at defending herself, so quick at sticking out her sharp elbows that in the end you couldn’t tell who found the thrashing more painful. I wept as I watched. Apuka slept through it all like a baby.
My sister went from bad to worse. She began running away from home. Without a word, she’d just up and go. Mum and I would then trot down to the police station and ask them to start a missing person search. Oddly enough, I have a very clear memory of these visits, of skipping down Hlboká Street without feeling at all anxious. Even though I must have been old enough to realise the gravity of the situation. Sometimes my sister would disappear for days on end. Once she made it as far as Prague. The police did nothing, my sister would always turn up of her own accord.
* * *
I believe it all started with the goat. One summer’s day, when we came home from the lakes, Dad announced that he was going to buy a goat. Nagymama was no longer alive and as my sister, by then sixteen, had different interests and different problems, so the only one who loved the idea of a goat was me. Me, the child. Mum couldn’t understand: what goat? why a goat? Of course, Dad had a logical justification for it. He was fed up with having to mow the lawn so he thought he’d stick a stake in the grass, tie the goat to it, and lo and behold, the goat would graze, eating all the grass within reach. While I was happily skipping around the kitchen, tears welled up in Mum’s eyes and she slammed the door shut screaming, ‘it’s either me or the goat’.
So that was the end of that story. No goat.
Sometime later it was the turn of a pony. I loved that idea too, but only until Dad revealed his business plan. I was supposed to walk around the garden with the pony, it would be a great draw for other children, a real goldmine. I stared at him in disappointment. I had thought the pony would be mine and mine alone, that he was going to buy it for me. Because he knew how I loved horses. I absolutely rejected the idea of treating it as a way of earning a few pennies. That might have been the first time that I stood up to him.
At this point Dad became rather obsessed with money. He kept telling us how much he was going to make, what was profitable and in what way, what we needed to do and what we ought to invest in, how much we’d get out of it. He was good at maths, we never doubted that, and yet, for some reason, his schemes never worked out. Instead of making money, Dad kept spending and losing it, he’d be in the red more and more often, having to borrow, unable to manage on his salary, making no contribution to the household.
But all along there was also something else. Something I started noticing with greater clarity at that point.
Dad’s stinginess.
This thought came to haunt me later on. I was horrified that one day I’d be as stingy as my dad. Because stinginess is hereditary, you see. It’s a genetic predisposition, I’m quite sure of that. Being stingy is not something you choose to be deliberately. You’re stingy if you automatically quicken your pace when you’re in an underpass and see someone selling Nota bene, the homeless people’s magazine, you’re stingy if you wonder if it’s really necessary to buy all your friends and family a Christmas present. And you can’t help it. Every now and then you make an extravagant gesture. You give someone a present out of the blue. Just like that. As if you simply wanted to make them happy. As if you just happened to think of them. But in fact, you’re trying to fool yourself. So that you can tell yourself, ‘me, stingy? No way, didn’t I once give so and so a present?’. While at the same time you’re drawing up a mental list so that you can tick so and so off, no need to give so and so a present for a good while. Because so and so has had plenty. Who do they think they are?
The seeds were sown a long time ago. ‘You shit through all the loo paper.’ This was the leitmotif of our childhood. Dad used to tell us off for making him buy loo paper all the time. Why couldn’t we make one roll last a week? The fuss he would kick up! ‘We need to save money,’ he’d shout. My sister and I were convinced he did it on purpose. That he picked on loo paper specially to humiliate us. There were other household items that we went through. Soap. Washing powder. Tissues. Deodorants. He wasn’t bothered about any of those. But he went to town on loo paper. Why the hell should he keep buying more loo rolls?
Pocket money was also an issue. We had an agreement. Dad was supposed to give me twenty crowns a week. Except that he always forgot. It was always up to me, to drop a hint on a Monday night. Could he be so kind. Pretty please. And then I’d have to watch Dad get his coat and fumble for his wallet with trembling hands. Watch him as he took out a twenty-crown note with the utmost reluctance. And handed it over to me. In the slowest of motions. As if he hoped I might change my mind. Take pity on him. He’d never look me in the eye. He evidently found the whole situation unbearable. I came to loathe this weekly ritual so much that, after a while, I took to helping myself to twenty-crown notes from his wallet. When Dad was asleep. Hung over. He never noticed.
Even though he did keep detailed accounts. He tried to work out what was better value, walking around town on foot or taking the bus. If you walk everywhere, you save on bus fares. It’s a no-brainer. On the other hand—you wear out the soles of your shoes! More than by standing on a bus holding on to the handrail. And shoes don’t come cheap either. Dad kept track of everything in his notebook. Two years’ worth of research. I forget what earth-shattering conclusion he came to. All I remember is that there was a period when he forced my sister and me traipse around town on foot, ignoring our protests and whining about our sore feet.
It was while he was still living by the lakes that he began rummaging through the rubbish. He would never refer to it that way, of course. What do you mean, rubbish? It was all excellent, usable stuff. A broken computer keyboard. A battered wash basin. Part of a children’s slide. And so on. The heap of junk in the garden kept growing. Waiting for him to fix the stuff up. But it didn’t all come from rubbish bins. He got some of the stuff as a present, or rather, bought at knock-down prices from his drinking pals. The ones who called him Molecule. On account of him being a teacher, a scientist. Obviously. Molecule was a brilliant business partner since his stinginess went hand in hand with a kind of greed. When he saw a special offer, something at a discount, there was no stopping him. And so, one day, he brought home two hundred identical postcards of his village by the lakes, three bidets (presumably to wean my sister and me off loo paper altogether) and twenty rolls of film past their sell-by date. They made wonderful vintage photos.
And then he lost it. Completely. He found a new use for the films. One morning he decided to go to Prievidza. God knows why he picked that town, of all places. I will never know. In a word, destination Prievidza! Dad had no money, but he had his rolls of expired film. He managed to convince the bus driver to accept them in lieu of paying for his ticket. He made it to Prievidza, to the bus station. What happened there we learned later from a police report. And from Dad’s jabbering. Or rather, Mum learned it. I only heard about it from her some time later. Dad had walked to the town centre and gone to a supermarket for a bread roll and salad, cod salad probably. He had sat down by a fountain to eat it. And that’s when he noticed that someone was sending him signals. It was the tobacconist. Opening the shutters of her kiosk, she used the reflections of the sun to send signals to him, my dad, Molecule. He was absolutely sure of that. She was trying to tell him something. Something vital. He finished eating, cleaned out the remains of the salad in the plastic pot with the last bit of his roll, stood up and walked over to the kiosk. And the minute he saw her, it happened. It was love at first sight. And he knew that she was in love with him too, that was what she was trying to indicate by means of the solar reflections. Suddenly everything started to make sense. To Dad, I mean. A surge of energy and happiness engulfed him. That was it. ‘I’m so happy we’ve found each other’, he said to the tobacconist. She didn’t understand, to her it made no sense, but Dad wasn’t fazed by that. Maybe she was just shy. To stop her being shy, he decided to show her that he had long shed all his inhibitions. And he proceeded to shed his clothes. He undressed and jumped into the fountain. Now everything began to make sense to the tobacconist. She called the police. And they took him straight to the loony bin. That’s how Dad landed in hospital for the first time.
My memory of the second time is clearer. I was fifteen. I was at secondary school but I didn’t have a difficult adolescence, I was interested in cinema, in Hitchcock, Truffaut, I was into fantasy and was trying to survive physics and chemistry classes intact. My sister had left by then and Dad was spending more time in our flat than by the lakes. He was slowly climbing out of depression, on long-term sick leave. And then, all of a sudden, he got it into his head that I had to be confirmed. He started going to mass himself, insisting that he’d always been a believer, just like Nagymama, and what a disgrace it was that his fifteen-year-old daughter had not yet been to first communion or confirmation. I made it very clear to him that I had no desire for either. But of course, Dad didn’t care what I thought. He went to the church to sign me up for religion lessons and asked the priest how soon it could be arranged. Luckily, it never happened because one day, during mass, the priest had to order Dad out of church after he stood up in the aisle and started snapping pictures of him. Back home Dad justified his behaviour by saying he was merely documenting religious life in the Church of the Holy Trinity.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Dad came to believe that he was communicating with God. He only confided in me, he didn’t tell Mum. I was at a loss as to what to do with this information. Should I pass it on? Grass on him? In the evenings, Dad would reveal God’s grand designs to me in the kitchen. He started calling himself ‘God’s little finger’. As he uttered these words, he would raise his little finger in the air as if about to take a sip from a teacup. I had never really understood what these God’s designs were all about. Maybe Dad didn’t understand it either, but he seemed to be rather well informed about a number of things. For instance, he once told me how many years I had left to live. He had calculated it exactly, to the day. With God’s help. The day I would die. Then he revealed to me how long my sister had left. And finally, Mum. Never a word about himself. I found he was off the waggon again. Although in a less conspicuous way. He was more secretive about it; he no longer went to Albrecht’s. He drank at home. Like a housewife, a closet alcoholic. Then he started scribbling something in his notebooks. And then he vanished.
We found him in the house by the lakes. There was this strange glint in his eyes. Almost an epiphany. He disclosed his grand plans to us. He had everything carefully written down and
sketched out in his notebooks. He would turn his two-storey house into a big centre. A centre for the people. That’s what he called it. People would come flocking there. Including people from faraway countries. Not just to swim in the lakes as in the old days. He was going to build an aquapark at the back of the garden and there would be a playground instead of the greenhouse.
He had already purchased the slides and some climbing frames; they were piled up under the walnut tree. There would be shops in the big house. And, most importantly, there would
be a nudist beach on the roof, on the house’s flat roof. His eyes gleamed. I will never forget the hospital attendants chasing him around the garden.
* * *
And then, eventually, death; what else. I rarely revisit those months in my mind, so my recollections might not be entirely accurate. I was eighteen, in my first and, as it turned out, also my last year at university, studying French. Dad was living with us. The house and the garden by the lakes were running to seed, nobody ever went there anymore. Dad spent all the time in the bedroom, sprawled on the bed, profoundly depressed. He would get up only when he needed a drink of water. I suppose he must have been eating too, at least a little. But I don’t remember ever seeing him eat anything, only drink water. His trembling hands fishing out a glass from the sink, filling it with tap water and drinking it. While I sat at the kitchen table learning vocab, he would sometimes turn around in the doorway and stand there staring at me. I found it annoying. He would stare for a long time. And then he’d start saying these things. He would take me to task, ‘Svetlana, you must never smoke or drink or take drugs. Do you hear me? It’s important. I wasn’t able to tell your sister, and now she’s turned out like me. I mean, not quite. Because I’m going to die. I will die very soon, I’m sure of that’. I sat there looking at him, with all the cliché responses running through my head—what are you talking about, stop scaring me like that, come on, you’ll live to be a hundred—but I couldn’t bring myself to say any of those things because I knew he was right. He was going to die. You just had to take one look at him. He would die quite soon. He was dying already. He repeated this countless times. For about a month he kept drumming it into my head, with slight variations, night after night, that I mustn’t stray from the path of righteousness, nor give in to temptation, as if it hadn’t been obvious that even without cigarettes, alcohol and drugs I was already crippled for life. Eventually he couldn’t handle it anymore and had himself admitted voluntarily, asking for the hospital to send someone to get him. This time they didn’t need to chase him around the garden. The last time I saw him was as he was loaded into an ambulance in a wheelchair. He died a week later. From a heart attack. He had the heart attack in the evening but instead of doing something about it they let him die slowly in the loony bin. It wasn’t until the early hours that they decided to take him to the university hospital in Mickiewiczova Street, but he died in the ambulance. The way they informed us was quite peculiar. We received a letter telling us to come and collect his clothes. What do you mean, will he no longer be needing his clothes? Is he going to walk around naked from now on? Only the clothes, not a word about Dad. It took exactly six months for me to have a breakdown. I managed to get through the winter in a kind of hibernation, or rather, by force of inertia. I didn’t break down until spring. Until the end of the semester. One day I was supposed to go to university for an exam, but I never went. I just stayed in bed.
Translated from the Slovak by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood
Ivana Dobrakovová is a Slovak writer and translator based in Turin. Her translations from French and Italian into Slovak include books by Valeria Parrella, Emmanuel Carrère, Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Ndiaye, Simona Vinci, Silvia Avallone as well as several works by Elena Ferrante, including her Neapolitan saga. She is the author of several collections of prize-winning short stories and two novels, of which one, Bellevue, was shortlisted for the EBRD Literature Prize and the second, her latest, Pod slnkom Turína (2021, Under the Sun of Turin) is currently on the shortlist for Slovakia’s most prestigious literature prize, the Anasoft Litera. The story “Otec (Father)” opens her collection Matky a kamionisti (Mothers and Truckers), which won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2019 and is due to appear in English translation from Jantar Publications in June 2022.
Julia Sherwood was born and grew up in Bratislava, Slovakia. Since 2008 she has been working as a freelance translator of fiction and non-fiction from Slovak, Czech, Polish, German and Russian. She is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia and lives in London with her husband and co-translator Peter Sherwood, an academic, who until his retirement in 2014 taught in universities in the UK and the USA. He translates fiction and poetry, and occasionally non-fiction, from Hungarian and (jointly with Julia Sherwood) from Slovak and Czech.
*****
Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog: