Slovakia - To Paradise by Tram

To Paradise by Tram

Flying over the ocean, or any long distance, is connected with unpleasant legacy - jet lag. It is sickness caused by traveling too quickly through too many time zones – in brief, the clock in your head will overturn, especially when you are flying against the clock. Thus, when everyone else has experiences the night, you are still in daytime. The most awful time is afternoon, because everywhere around you daily life goes on, but you desperately need to sleep. In this condition, deeply affected by a too fast change from continent to continent, I went to work the day after my arrival. Everything was all right, but on the way from my laboratory to home I made a short stop at the main office of our scientific Institute. It was timely visit as a colleague was having a small celebration. So we sat for a while, chatted a bit. I had two glasses of wine and then in a good mood I left the party to catch a tram. I got into the right tram with the sign RAČA, which is the last stop and we live three stops before it. I sat close to window, looked out – and everything went black. Just in my head, but completely. Modern biology states that even when we sleep, we have four points in our head, like bulbs always on as an emergency light. I am afraid that even these switched off in that moment or at least some of them. Total darkness and silence like in the grave surrounded me…
I do not know what you believe about life after life. It was never an actual daily topic for me, not even with a something to think about later. Nothing that could be put into a weekly agenda and at the end of week marked off as done. Anyway, these kinds of thoughts are not for me. There is no time for them. So, I was not psychologically ready for my entrance to another world. And thus I was surprised how quickly I was able to adapt to this leap into another condition. It came almost as a matter of course. I was only a bit curious. So, this is the end of all ends? Just imagine, from total emptiness you suddenly open your eyes and do not know where you are. And a strange woman stands over you and says something like:
“This is the end…”
End? End of life? Real end? So soon? And if so, I did not have the image of an angel who looked like this one! In the narrowed vision sight of my scarcely open eyes there were just two beings at this second world – she and me. Well, this should be acceptable, since I always believed that women lead us to Paradise. Some of them I met down on Earth and a trip with them to temporary Paradise was always pleasurable. But this woman was really strange. Certainly not a beauty, official looking rather than angelic. For all these doubts there is only one control question:
“But why? And why so soon?”
Instead of answering me, that weird creature started laughing, or rather guffawing loudly with her mouth wide open, so I could see her definitely un-angel-like imperfect teeth. When she finished guffawing, she said with self-confidence:
“Because we are in Rača.”
This was a solid point. Rača; I know. And this angel. Well, perhaps it was a Slovak Paradise! Low quality without services. I looked around. She was right. It is hard to get to Paradise by tram. Trams have a last stop. Then they turn back, to earthly life. So did I…


Available in E-books:

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/svetje-maly-the-world-is- small/id554103459?mt=11

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/le-monde-est-petit-world- is/id554104733?mt=11

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/the-world-is-small-svet- je-maly/id554101744?mt=11

Slovakia - Sad Story of the Mountaineer

Sad Story of the Mountaineer

In a little country even the high mountains are little. The High Tatra mountains in the north of Slovakia are sometimes described as pocket Himalayas. No matter how small they look on the map, you can still reach places where you don’t have to worry about being greeted by a throng of enthusiastic tourists. Thus our hero set off, alone, to tour one of the highest summits of the Tatras. He was a local. The locals hate masses of tourists – they’re like a bulldozer, laying waste to the countryside, and they fail to respect even the most elementary principles of living with the mountains. That’s why he chose a way less traveled for his solitary communing with Mother Nature.

  But as so often happens in these mountains, the weather swung around violently – and our mountaineer found that solitude isn’t entirely pleasant. Gale force winds came up when he was exposed on the peak. He battled with the rain, wind and cold. When it became apparent that he was lost, he was fighting for his life. Against the air, which froze the skin as it touched it, he fought for every step – not to go somewhere, but only to move and not freeze solid where he stood. He moved very slowly. Then night came. It brought hope. At last he could see lights. Thanks to the darkness, he saw a light coming from a mountain hostel. For long he moved one step at a time, and finally the lights revealed the door of a cozy and warm hostel.

  Awaiting him was the tumult of a group of German tourists. They had been transported there by cable car earlier in the day and immediately hit the bar, where they discovered that the storm had made the trip back down the mountain impossible.

  They received the news with enthusiasm, ordered a new round of notorious “borovička” – the Slovak version of gin – and the evening held out infinite promises for alcoholic adventure.

  The mountaineer couldn’t take in these sensations. With the help of the staff, he was led to a corner where he drank hot tea and then dragged himself to a common sleeping area and, still dressed, fell on the nearest bed. Immediately, he fell asleep, exhausted.

  He didn’t dream for a long time until, from the edge of unconsciousness, he was awakened and saw in the dark an unidentifiable object inexorably collapsing on him. It looked like the moon, better to say like two halves of a moon joined in mirror-like pattern, so horribly close, that our hero was frozen by the feeling that a whole skies are falling on him. Before he could yell out in horror, this object fell on the slim, but athletic body of our little mountaineer. At this moment he lost the ability to breathe under this well-fed mass. Our hero tried to surface, but failed. Every time he tried to catch a breath, he was pressed back on the bed. The object was so gigantic that only our hero’s arms and legs stuck out from under the mass of flesh – like a mouse squashed under the big boot of a mountain man.

  Finally he understood what was happening. On his poor, naturally slim, almost petite body moved two heaps of fat and Jello-like aspic bodies – two humping, passionate, juggernauts of desire fueled by alcohol. It was like an avalanche, but that falls only once. Those two fat bodies were not only suffocating him but also, under the terrible pressure, pushing out what little breath he had in his lungs. The pair of Teutonic revelers connected like a two-ton hammer of love rhythmically and interminably knocked and knocked the breath from our unhappy hero. However hard he tried to yell, every time he opened his mouth, a blow of the love hammer stifled the words.

  Then, in this cruel moment of destiny, our hero, with horror realized that an icy death, alone in the mountains, from weariness, buried under an avalanche, might not be so bad. In the era of a global tourism, it was a new, more horrific way to die. More horrific because it was not heroic, in fact it was unromantic, painfully banal. What can be worse than to die, not in solitude of a sheet of ice, but in the warmth of a mountain hostel under a couple of fat and drunk German tourists who, by mistake, decided to pay homage to the greatest pleasure of life on his exhausted body...

 


Available in E-books:

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/svetje-maly-the-world-is- small/id554103459?mt=11

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/le-monde-est-petit-world- is/id554104733?mt=11

http://itunes.apple.com/sk/ book/the-world-is-small-svet- je-maly/id554101744?mt=11