Читать книгу Fleeting Snow - Pavel Villikovsky - Страница 15

4.a

Here’s the thing: Štefan is a scholar. He has recently had a book published by a university press somewhere in the northern part of the US. The book is called ‘The Expressive Role of the Acoustic Correlates of Bilabial Consonants in the Language of the Menominee Nation of North America’, or something like that. I forget the exact title, all I can remember are some of the place names.

Štefan is a successful scholar. After all, an American university press wouldn’t publish just anyone. As far as I know, no one in Europe has studied the Menominee language, and in the US, too, there is just one professor at that university who does. He was the one to draw Štefan’s scholarly attention to this topic when he spent six months on a fellowship in the US in the more politically relaxed 1960s.

The university sent Štefan the ten author’s copies promised in the contract but instead of the parcel the postman brought him a summons to the customs office located at the back of Post Office No. 2–3 in Tomášikova Street. The officials wanted to charge him customs duty on the consignment. Štefan tried to explain that it was his author’s copies but they wouldn’t listen. One of the officials saw that on the envelope the price of a copy was given as $15.95 and he calculated the duty based on that figure, on the assumption that Štefan was going to sell the books. Only after Štefan gave him the Slovak translation of the title did he realise that a book on this subject, and written in English at that, would be impossible to sell in Slovakia. So he exempted him from paying the customs duty and Štefan headed for the bus stop with the cardboard box under his arm.