Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 11

2.c

A person‘s character is like the soul, no one has ever seen it. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Anyone who wants one can have one. But I refuse. I resent being squeezed into a straitjacket, I want to stay fluid. I want to foam, churn and leak through the cracks.

I think what people mean by character is always behaving in the same way in the same situation; it’s a formula that helps others work us out. And that’s what I reject, I won’t let any formula work me out. Take the homeless people who accost me in the street asking for small change so they can buy soup or a sandwich. Most of the time I ignore them and don’t even felt guilty about it, but the other day in Heydukova Street, just as I was coming from the dentist’s, a young man in a suit approached me saying he was short of money for his train fare to Trenčín. Other people before him had been short of money for a train fare and I felt no sympathy for them (after all, soup or a sandwich are more urgent needs) but he was the first to mention Trenčín specifically, and it was this that made me stop and listen to his story, of an unemployed man whose wife had thrown him out for being a layabout. He had come to Bratislava to look for a job and managed to find one, but it wasn’t due to start for a couple of weeks, and he had now spent all his money, so he had to go back to Trenčín because you can claim unemployment benefit only in your permanent place of residence.

I don’t know why it was he, of all people, who made me cave in. I didn’t believe a word he said but I was impressed that he had gone to the trouble of making up a story; in his shoes, I doubt I would have had such presence of mind. As he talked, the man watched me bright-eyed and once he noticed that my defences were beginning to crumble he piled on more detail, coming up with a mother-in-law who was needling his wife about having to feed a layabout. Now on a roll, he was also, he continued, behind with his rent and he even outlined his prospective job in very concrete terms: he was joining the train-cleaning crew at the railway station. But I think it was the mention of Trenčín, right at the beginning, that did the trick, plus the fact that he kept smiling as he listed the various calamities that had befallen him. To cut a long story short, I gave him five euros and didn’t even mind if he took me for a credulous fool.