As the daily grim statistics recorded a growing global death toll from COVID-19, one small country in Central Europe prided itself on having one of the lowest, if not the lowest, mortality rates from the disease. Slovakia has attributed its success in fighting the pandemic to introducing a strict lockdown soon after the first cases were detected. At the time when the UK government was advising people to merely avoid going to pubs, all of Slovakia’s bars, cafés, and restaurants were ordered to close or switch to take-out service. However, this highly beneficial public health measure had at least one unintended consequence: it deprived an acclaimed Slovak writer (and past Asymptote contributor) of his favourite places to write. Balla, the author of a dozen collections of short stories and two short novels has often been compared to Franz Kafka, though Asymptote assistant editor Andreea Scridon has argued that he “might more reasonably be called a nihilistic Etgar Keret, given the thoroughly ironic, often absurdly amusing, take on contemporary life that characterises his work.” While this is certainly an apt definition of his writing, another reason why Kafka’s name keeps cropping up is the fact that Balla has never given up his day job in the audit department of the council office in his home town of Nové Zámky where he continues to live, drawing inspiration from the humdrum life of the people around him as well as his own. What makes the absurd stories of petty bureaucrats, blinkered nationalists, frustrated wives, neglectful husbands, and bullying fathers, as well as dishevelled publishers and burned-out writers so true to life is Balla’s uncanny ability to capture their voices, overheard in cafés and pubs. Balla’s translator and Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Slovakia, Julia Sherwood, wondered how he coped with being cut off from his source of inspiration and asked him to describe his life in the time of COVID-19 for this column. Balla obliged in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, blending fact and fiction. (N.B. since the time of writing, cafés in Slovakia have reopened.)
On the pandemic
by Balla
1.
Since the start of the pandemic I’ve been to the woods twice. I wanted to take a solitary walk among the trees. With my face mask on. But there were people everywhere. Our woods are small. And everyone has the same goal, a solitary walk among the trees. So here we all are, walking around, except we’re wearing face masks and we’re not solitary. After a while I start suffocating under my mask. I venture deeper into the woods. It’s muddy and smelly. I’m approaching the sewer where wastewater from the city pipes is discharged. This is where I spent my childhood. This kind of place is a source of amazement for a child. My mother warned me to stay away from the sewage-filled drain. Here I’m finally alone. I take a bottle of whisky out of my bag, take a drink and realise again that it’s not alcohol that I’ve been missing, it’s a café, complete with people, conversations, bad music, the tinkling of spoons, glasses, cups, and saucers.
I put the bottle away in disgust.
Obviously, only after I’ve emptied it: whisky is whisky after all.
But what about the trees?
The bushes?
The sewage?
I’m not interested in any of them.
I’ve seen these trees, these bushes and this sewage at least a thousand times before. The woods at the edge of town are small. They seem to be getting smaller and smaller. This is an objective fact: the woods are full of cottages, rubbish dumps, paths, clearings; there’s even a tiny pseudo-zoo, where I love the boar because of its positive relationship to the mud. But what I really love is the din of streets, cars, motorbikes, and pubs, roaring rock, blues, ferocious free jazz. The holiday destination of my dreams is a smog-bound city further west. Staying on the first floor of a boarding house in the city centre, on a noisy boulevard and with a pub on the ground floor that has nonstop live music. That’s where I would like to relax, write, reflect; these are the ideal conditions for me.
The woods are an alien, dangerous place.
Birds gawp at you from the branches and don’t understand you.
I’m standing under a tree watching a bumblebee as it climbs up its trunk, wondering when it will decide to climb on top of me, and thinking about ordinary people. Things are not that difficult for ordinary people at the moment, they’ve always lived like this. From work they head straight back to their flats or houses with the same flatmates, husbands, wives, children, do the same house chores, followed by TV, then go to sleep in the same bed with the same occupants. They live a life in permanent quarantine and state of emergency. Provided, of course, they haven’t lost their job because of the pandemic. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Some say that everything will have to change once the pandemic is over, we shouldn’t go back to the old world as it used to be.
I see their point.
2.
On Monday morning the porter didn’t let me into my office building.
I wasn’t wearing a face mask.
Who would have thought that one day I’d end up having to force my way in there?
Actually, I don’t mind face masks. All my life I’ve felt self-conscious about my face, my huge nose, my chaotically uneven teeth: now there’s finally a chance to cover up this handicap. I have plenty of those. For people like me the best thing would be for the state to order all men to wear male burkas. But the state has failed to provide the citizens with face masks, just told us to wear them, so it’s unlikely we would ever be issued with burkas. My girlfriend has sewn some face masks for me, but she’s stuck in another town and is justifiably scared of travelling so she’s sent them by post.
But you’re not allowed to go to the post office without a face mask.
I’m stuck right in the middle of an absurd drama.
This is my preferred kind of literature. It’s the only kind that still manages to capture some of what’s going on here.
3.
But Monday wasn’t half as bad as last Friday.
Friday the thirteenth.
That’s when it all began.
In the café we were informed at eight o’clock that the place was about to close and wouldn’t reopen on Saturday. It left me feeling homeless. For years I’ve been writing in cafés. In fact, it’s the only place I write. At home everything militates against writing. There are all those books there, for one thing, so I read. There’s a record player and an amplifier and speakers, so I listen. There’s a DVD player, so I watch. The one thing I can’t do is think, because to do that I need other people’s conversations. I need to be distracted by the clatter and the racket and bad music coming from bad radios, a reflection of young waitresses’ musical taste. I never join in the conversations. No matter what the subject might be, I’d always end up saying the same thing. Then there are some things I would never say. All I need is to listen to what’s being talked about at other tables. People are quite seriously discussing things that I would never think of discussing, even in jest. They keep validating my sense of being an alien element, a different race, an exotic insect.
I keep myself to myself.
That’s why I don’t mind compulsory social distancing.
Keep two metres’ distance?
That’s nowhere enough.
4.
A friend who lives around the corner has solved my problem of not being able to write at home. She has set up a fictitious pub on the terrace of her house. She has produced a big sign, typed up a drinks list and drummed up a fictitious chance customer, whom she seated at another table, directing me to one by the socket for charging my notebook. She pinned a waitress’s nametag on her clothes and on the toilet door she has stuck the notice “For paying customers only.” And so I was able to sit down and write to my heart’s content, occasionally raising my glass to the chance customer; time went by and we forgot all about the virus. In the front garden of the house next door an elderly gentleman was shouting at an old lady, telling her that he hated her and that he would kill her. We didn’t call the police as my friend just shrugged it off as an everyday occurrence.
I liked that.
It was the epitome of marriage stripped naked.
Two people imprisoned with each other.
Without a chance to escape with their lives.
Genuine quarantine.
5.
Since the start of the pandemic I haven’t written a single word about it in my diary. I’m in denial. That enabled me the other day to set out for work without a worry in the world, but after taking a few steps I noticed that a woman was staring at me. I was pleased that someone finally spotted my fabulous T-shirt with the Bauhaus logo.
Except that I was wearing a leather jacket on top of the T-shirt.
The jacket had a zip.
It was zipped up to my neck.
I touched my mouth—a shocking return to the virus-filled reality—I’d forgotten to don a face mask! The woman was outraged by the sight of an exposed human face, something that in a Slovak street these days is tantamount to pornography.
6.
After many decades I am once again standing in a queue outside a shop.
Spine-chilling memories come flooding back. I welcome them.
I got too used to well-stocked shops and easy shopping. Now we’ve found ourselves back in the loathsome reality of the socialism we got rid of in 1989, complete with queues, imminent shortages, closed borders, the arbitrary treatment of citizens by the state, decrees, prohibitions, surveillance. A taster for the new generation that tends to believe left-wing populists, semi-fascist, semi-ignorant hoaxers, retrospective optimists and their lies about how great things were under socialism.
Bullshit.
7.
The purpose of a pandemic is to make you stop shaving, combing your hair, and going out, and instead to make you read and be creative. Provided you think that’s necessary. The way I see it, life in the time of a pandemic is essentially the same as it was before and as it will be when the pandemic is over.
The question remains: what is essential?
Don’t come asking me.
During these days, weeks, even months, I don’t cry or rejoice. I’ve felt the virus brush my cheek a few times.
But it was just sweat making my face itchy under the face mask.
Translated from the Slovak by Julia and Peter Sherwood
Balla (1967), who goes only by his surname, is an award-winning Slovak writer, author of thirteen books, mostly of short fiction. He lives in Nové Zámky, a provincial town in southern Slovakia. Two of his books are available in English translations by Julia and Peter Sherwood: In the Name of the Father (2017) and Big Love (2019), both from Jantar Publishing.
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 based in London and is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for Slovakia.
Peter Sherwood is 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 (with his wife Julia Sherwood) from Slovak and Czech. He is based in London.
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