Spring is Coming

By Balla

Translated from Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood

Who is this, the woman thought in the morning, gazing at her husband. She stepped back from the bedside table and went over to the wall without taking her eyes off the figure in the bed, then sighed and looked out of the window.  She registered the dog in the large empty courtyard, another courtyard behind the first one and a house behind that, then another house and a hillock nearby.

A rolling countryside. Groves and vineyards.

Somewhere closer to the distant horizon the woman’s eyes conjured up a forest and celestial birds flying high above it.

Who is this, she wondered later, in town on a Friday afternoon.  She peered out from behind a baguette shop.  As she snooped on her husband she saw him walking towards the Montreal Pub with a couple of shabby individuals, slowly, swinging a briefcase that had once looked smart, happy about the fact that the weekend was about to begin. The pub consisted of two parts, one worse than the other. The threesome headed for the worse part.

The woman began to sneak closer to them. Burning curiosity lent her strength and put a spring in her step.

She followed them into the pub. She found herself a hiding place behind a curtain near the toilets.

—Ďusko, what will you have? — said a short, balding guy, the fatso from the railway station.

— I’ve had two gins already… went out in the lunch break with Gabo … so… I won’t say no to another gin… and a small beer — said her husband, slouching over the table but basking in the pleasant anonymity that his mediocrity normally conferred on him. He was smiling.

Who is this, she couldn’t stop musing.

She leaned against the wall, half closing her eyes.

When she awoke he was gone.

She rushed to the station, hastily bought a train ticket, and having got off at her home station she slipped into Hilárik’s, the dive at the edge of the village. Catching her breath, she watched her husband, his head slumped over a shot of some translucent liquid, and wondered: who is this?

Who is this, she contemplated seriously the next day in the vineyard, observing through twisted vine stumps the carefree, slightly rounded, badly shaven, ruddy face of her husband, muttering something as he fingered the plants with tired, solemn movements that seemed serenely slow.

The woman entered the empty house and started walking from room to room.  She picked up a book by Seyfullina and read: “The earth, waiting to be fertilized, was breathing with an eternal longing for spring. People and cattle, every living creature, observed a primary law of life:  the reason we were born, the reason we are alive is to keep procreating.”  So this was how you were supposed to understand life. As if she didn’t know that! She, too, had procreated, but the children had grown up and long pushed off God knows where. She glanced at the cabinet, then past the cabinet and the kitchen cupboards through the door towards the hallway, past the wallpaper in the hallway, the coat hanger and the little cabinet full of junk, and out of the entrance door, at her husband, and the question popped into her head: who is this?

Who is this, she kept burbling to herself every day, first thing in the morning, before leaving for her badly paid job, whenever she caught sight of her husband’s thin pale legs with their swollen ankles sticking out from under the comforter. Invariably they reminded her of the extremities of an albino spider. Had she married an insect? Why did she do it? Somebody must have forced her! It was they who made her do it! She compressed her lips and moved her jaw, full of anger and bitterness. It’s all their fault!  She glared in the direction of the village.

Not really.

It’s not just their fault.

She slumped onto the footstool in the hallway. It was she who had chosen this trajectory. And this is where she had ended up.

Outside, the chain by the kennel ends in a dog. The dog can’t have been the one that chose its trajectory, someone else must have tied it to the rattling, clanking leash.

She turned around and was horrified to see a mirror emerging from a dark corner. Behind it there was another mirror, reflecting what was reflected before. And behind it there was a third, reflecting nothing. This mirror looked as if it had been printed in large capital letters, as a definitive answer to her question, but it was an answer she could not accept.  Every other object cowered by her feet, tiny italics full of typos, omissions and factual errors. The sofa, covered in tattered pigskin, had been made this way. The conference table, its glass covered in fingerprints, had been made this way. The fingerprints screamed of another past, more affluent and meaningful, when young state officials, her husband’s co-workers, used to gather around this table, wearing their status like some ill-fitting, humiliating overalls.

From the hallway she could see that something was wringing the dog. Whatever it was, it first made the dog bark for a while, only to drop it again, leaving it lying in front of the kennel. But suddenly it came back, whatever it was, and started hurling the dog around the courtyard.

Howling, muffled whining.

Sorrowful, stepped-on-the-neck, horrible-funny living noises.

She stepped back behind the curtain.

But after a while she crept forward again. Did the curtain just brush against her pointy nose or did it also touch her dry lower lip?

Whatever it was, it was dragging the dog behind the kennel, getting its body entangled in the chain and reducing its options. Soon there won’t be any chain to spare to let him yank its four spindly legs.

Somewhere in the wall a pipe started fizzling.

What does God look like just now, while He’s doing all this, she wondered.  Is He tall or short, He who is the archetype of everything? He is the one dragging the dog around the courtyard, and just now He felt like wiping the kennel wall with it. She sees it all because she’s back with her nose in the curtain: the dog’s fur is polishing the wood, forward, backward, forward, backward, is God fat or thin, is He the one who makes the dog raise its head and its eyes gape at the door because the handle has moved, does God have a penis or does he not; the woman peeled herself off the curtain edging towards the entrance door, does God have a vagina?

The dog has turned into a lump of tendons, convulsing and relaxing, and she senses that all this is connected to her. It affects her sharply and directly. She is naked underneath it all. Who is doing all this? Who is this?

The blood-caked hairs on the dog’s tortured body were turning into symbols. With a painful sneer she realized what they meant. She ran towards the dog, brushing through its hair harshly to stop the symbols spotting her, spelling her and articulating her as an incantation.

Then she decided to take a radical step. She went back indoors and with all the concentration she could muster dared to look straight into the mirror in the depth of all the mirrors. Who is this, she felt like asking again.  She kept asking the question, compulsively, over and over. She looked straight ahead, finally whispering:

—Nobody.

Then with a more comprehensive whisper:

—It’s nobody anymore.

She joined her husband in the kitchen. He was eating something, bent over the table, every now and then turning the page of a newspaper. She said to him:

—You are…

—What is it? — he said, startled.

—You are… — she hesitated.

—Yes?

—You are mine and I am yours.

Afterwards Ďusko wondered if it was some totally alien uncertainty or fear quite unknown to him that had made his wife’s voice tremble or if it was because, just by chance, he had forgotten to turn up the heating in the morning. But what was the point? Spring was coming.

 

Vladimir Balla is a Slovak writer. He has published eight collections of short stories and a novella, ‘In the Name of the Father’ (V mene otca, 2011), which won Slovakia’s most prestigious literary prize, the Anasoft litera award, in 2012. His work has been translated into Czech, German, English, Hungarian, Polish, Slovene and Serbian. ‘Spring is Coming’ appeared in the 2008 collection ‘Cudzí’ (Strangers).

Julia Sherwood is a freelance translator. She grew up in Czechoslovakia, has lived in Germany and the UK and is currently based in Chapel Hill, NC. Her book-length translations include ‘Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book’ by Daniela Kapitáňová and Freshta by Petra Procházková. She is Asymptote’s Editor-at-large for Slovakia and chairs the NGO Rights in Russia.

Peter Sherwood is Professor of Hungarian Language and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has translated the novels ‘The Book of Fathers’ by Miklós Vámos and ‘The Finno-Ugrian Vampire’ by Noémi Szécsi as well as stories by Dezső Kosztolányi, Zsigmond Móricz and others, along with works of poetry, drama and philosophy.

‘Spring is Coming’ first appeared in Inventory No. 3, Fall 2012, and is reprinted here with permission from the translator.