pimp’s wife Jarmila7 and later his mother and aunts learn German and Hungarian as befits Slovak whores. Brechár’s two aunts love reading another Czech, Quido Maria Vyskočil (1881–1969), a writer of trite, cliché-riddled verse and prose that was only rarely of more literary interest than the verse. Poldo’s father eventually dies of liver failure, a rather Slovak death, one that Johanides’s own son would, exhibiting considerable self-sacrifice, endeavour to prevent his father meeting. I do not know whether the following is – was – a common practice; when Poldo’s father dies, slices of bacon had been placed around his thighs, arms and belly to diminish the stench of decomposition. That is narrated in a combination of verisimilitude and comedy that makes for earthy morbidity – especially since it took three kg of lemons, a none too common fruit in Communist Slovakia. This history of Slovakia is told largely in a series of monologues, which conceptually does look forward to But Crime Does Punish. Like Vilikovský, Johanides does in Najsmutnejšia oravská balada break the bounds of Communist respectability – of which a passage on the physical and psychological growth of Communist bureaucrats in the 1960s and 1970s and their children’s relationship to them represent a statement on contemporaneous hypocrisy: ‘The young showed respect for their fathers and were proud of them, even though they were secretly ashamed of them’ (p. 61). The corruption of party bosses also forms a theme – but that we have already seen in the father of Slovak party-critical high literature, Alfonz Bednár (1914–1989). Johanides goes a little further in that he makes a collective farm boss not only a former member of the Hlinka Guard, but also the aryaniser of a three-storey draper’s shop, and a secret policeman who has been dismissed from the service for punching Roman Catholic priests in Ružomberok prison. Poldo is far more interested in the writings of Johannes Reuchlin, a neo-Platonist of the Cabalist mode (1455–1522) than he is in the politics of his own age. Poldo, however, considers the Renaissance a vulgar age, an age vulgarised by decorativeness – 7 Name perhaps an ironic allusion to the bandit’s beloved of the Czech K.H. Mácha’s narrative poem, who had been introduced to coitus by her beloved’s father, whom his beloved consequently kills.
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and where the majority of the population ‘longed for fairgrounds and chewing gum’ (p. 144). The novel ends in blood when one of the narrator Poldo’s boyhood friends, Filip, is stabbed by a thug with a cheap flick-knife; if anyone were to be stabbed, Poldo maintains, it should have been Poldo himself. But Filip had to be killed because, when in gaol, he had stolen blankets from fellow-prisoners. In the year the Red Army left the Czecho-Slovak Federal Republic and the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, Johanides’s first work published in post-Communist Slovakia was Previesť cez most. Rúcha veleby pre chvíle tiesne (Taking Across the Bridge. Grand Robes for Moments of Distress, 1991). The initial part of the title refers to Kristína who gives the narrator Ján Stefanides a lift to the town of Levice; when he is getting out, Kristína thanks him for taking her across the bridge over a precipice, that is, between non-being and being. Stefanides comes close to being something of a double of the author: he is an art historian. His wife Milica is stable, kind and practical like Johanides’s wife but does not have asthma like her (hence their living in the pre-fab panel block in a town outside Bratislava). Stefanides has an essential quality of previous characters in Johanides’s works; his father had been a prisoner in Mauthausen. Previesť cez most concerns various states of consciousness, in particular that state of non-being created by severe mental sickness. The setting appears to be 1979 and the framework action concerns two aspects of Stefanides’s life. First, the elderly former Baťa leather expert, and art collector, Dušnic’s telephone calls to and meetings with Stefanides; Dušnic, an anchor for Stefanides, shows sincere gratitude when Stefanides cancels his trip to Italy, partly to see his noble former mistress Fiducia Maria Gloria ze Šternberka. Secondly, two other characters, Lojzo and Pusina visit Stefanides in order to borrow a large sum of money; Stefanides agrees to it, but practical Milica is furious. On the way back to Levice Pusina suddenly goes out of her mind and smashes up a station restaurant. She is taken to a mental hospital, locally referred to as Mefistopolis and Lojzo rings Stefanides to ask him to come to the hospital to try to settle Pusina down with the help of a consultant, but he finds her entirely mad, apparently incurably so. This is only one of several episodes centered on ( 99 )
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confinement in Mefistopolis or another mental hospital, which serves as a parallel to, if not a straight metaphor of, the theme of disintegration, social and ‘national’ that in the course of the novel is most clearly noted during the Second World War and the post1969 Normalization. In all periods the name Stefanides unites the Czechs with the Slovaks. A wartime German officer tells the young Stefanides that he is a noble, which he is not, and that he knows his name reveals that his family had come as Protestant exiles to Upper Hungary (= more or less today’s Slovakia) from Bohemia after the Roman Catholic army had defeated the Protestant at the Battle of the White Mountain (1620). Not only because Stefanides is an art dealer (and Johanides an aesthetician and art historian), may one call Preniesť cez most an aesthetic novel. One day, in a room many miles away from a factory the Germans are bombing, a Stradivarius cracks. A thing of true beauty has a sensitivity that is almost supernatural: that is the most evident testimony to that fact, and is the clearest of the points in which we understand that, subtly, Johanides has written a novel mainly about beauty – and the destruction of beauty. Greed, Nazism, Soviet-style socialism, and the drunken states of most of the characters, at least on frequent occasions, destroys beauty. Another example is the morbid bureaucratization of cremation that Johanides satirizes in one of his pieces on Normalization; the ashes of all those cremated will be poured into plastic envelopes and appended to their personal files; the following is spoken by the official elogist: The crematorium will give the ashes-filled envelopes to individual employee departments, where the ashes of the dead will be allotted a file number and attached to their quondam personnel file and listed together with the personnel file as an inseparable component of the notional basic stock of employees. In a particular paragraph of her speech the elogist pointed out to the deceased’s family that they would be permitted to borrow the ashes from the firm or institution on confirmation that they are for a family memorial celebration after completing a form, on which must first be entered the date of the memorial act, agreed by the leadership of the firm. ( 100 )
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