translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood

Reprinted with permission of Parthian Books.

When I was small I was convinced that the wardrobe on the first floor concealed a passage into another house. A house identical to ours, only much more mysterious. It might even have been its mirror image. You would open the wardrobe door, push the clothes aside and you’d find another door. You wouldn’t need a key, as it wasn’t locked. All you had to do was push down the handle and. On the other side there would be similar clothes that would likewise have to be pushed aside, and behind them an identical room…

This is the first thing that crosses my mind as, after a long absence, I enter this house located in what used to be a quiet street in the small town of Brežany. Years ago the town, too, used to be small. It has gradually swollen and grown, turning into a happy, dirty city, indistinguishable from many others in this country.

The house originally belonged to my grandparents, then my parents, and now it stands empty. After a while you might begin to doubt that anyone could ever have lived here. But apparently someone has. Everything points in that direction.

All you need to do is feel your way to the fuse-box, guided by memory, and turn the power on &mdash amazingly, it still works &mdash avoid the dangling cobwebs, exhale to get rid of your anxiety, draw the broken blinds and throw open the windows. Let some fresh air into the place.

I have tonight and all day tomorrow to sort everything out. The following morning a lorry will come and the removal men will load up everything that is still of any value.

The house used to be filled with the scent of vanilla. Actually, it was just me who believed it was vanilla (because my mother used to keep a vanilla pod in the sugar bowl) and it wasn’t until I picked up a particular brand of eau de cologne at the chemist’s and took a sniff that I realized this was what my father had used as aftershave. Combined with the cigarette smoke in his room this was what gave the house its unique atmosphere. Faux vanilla.

A great many things have vanished. What remains is wallpaper hanging down from the walls, cobwebs, a straight line dividing beige from white, orange from green, dating back to the times Father didn’t feel like moving away the furniture every time he redecorated the walls. Now all that’s left are these useless lines, like a high tidemark of my childhood. And the wardrobe. The upstairs wardrobe at the top of the spiral wooden staircase leading to the attic. It was Father who came up with the idea of the other door and the other house, a mirror image of ours, and whenever he mentioned it everyone in the family nodded and smiled mysteriously.

I sit down on the stairs and inhale the air thick with the smell of damp plaster and musty clothes. I close my eyes a little to sharpen my senses. My heart is pounding with excitement.

I never dared open the wardrobe door. I suspected it contained nothing apart from a pile of clothes full of mothballs. I wanted to spare myself any disappointment.

My father spent all his life making things up — albeit in a graceful and charming way — and that is why everyone believed him. He would get away with things no one else could. He was a superman, as my grandson Samko would say. Few people believed that he had been gravely ill for many years, or even that he died. Indeed, even today people in the street ask me how he is.

“How is the good doctor?”

It seems that some people are immortal.

Here, on this staircase, is where Vojto liked to sit, my friend Vojto. Perhaps my closest friend, my second self — although a mirror-image kind of self. He used to come to this place even when nobody was at home. He liked it here. Once he crept in and caught my father secretly lighting up after lunch — the same man who had strictly forbidden tobacco to his patients and would never tire of telling them off for the habit.

“You're a smoker, doctor?”

From a dark corner my father turned towards the voice:

“One cigarette won’t do you any harm, my friend. But you have to be careful not to inhale too deep, just exhale from the corner of your mouth, like this, see…!”

I stand up and climb the rickety wooden stairs. One day, when you’ve reached a certain age, you’ll understand that some things are easier said than done. But once I force my old knees to cooperate they do move. Tina’s crazy daughter Jenny, who knew all our childhood stories, once emptied the mysterious wardrobe of ours, unscrewed its back panel and pushed it towards the attic door. You had to go through the wardrobe to enter. So I open the wardrobe and walk in.

If a house possesses a subconscious, it will definitely be located in the attic, together with all the junk people no longer have any use for but dare not throw out.

Dust particles are floating in the air. In the light filtering through the cracks in the old roof they look as if they were made of gold. They remind me of those old Bols bottles with a dancing ballerina inside. Mother used to keep one in the wardrobe, the little flakes of gold suspended, as if frozen in time, in the thick liquid that had gradually evaporated over the years.

I’ve always had difficulty breathing in the attic.

Asthma bronchiale — Father used to say. My bronchial membranes would get irritated by the clouds of smoke from his cigarettes, which he would light up in secret hoping that no one, including himself, would notice. A doctor at the allergy clinic patiently explained that the composition of dust varies from house to house, making it virtually impossible to devise an effective vaccine that would help the system to adapt to all the microscopic particles of dead skin, animal fur and other bits and pieces to be found in a particular household. The dust here has always made my eyes sting and my throat itch. Perhaps tiny particles of my father also float around hereabouts. He lived in the house longer than anyone else, eventually becoming its sole inhabitant.

I trip over a pile of dusty stuff. I pull out a photograph with a huge head stuck on it, and an old banknote comes to light. Exercise books and shrivelled folders, faded soft toys, Father’s medical records.

A notebook. On the back a label with the word Diseases scrawled in an ungainly hand. A faded orange endpaper stamped Alfonz Trnovský, MD, and Father’s signature that he endlessly practised on blotting paper. Next to it a BAYER diary, the year 1937 printed on the spine. I recognise it: it’s the one I used for my jottings when I was little.

Under it the 1943 Medical Yearbook. On page 127 the List of Physicians in Slovakia registered with the Chamber of Medicine as of 31 May 1939, in compliance with Article 3 of Law 56/1939 features Trnovský Alfonz, of the Rom. Cath. Faith, D.o.b. 30.VII.1912, graduated 29.VI.1935, Bratislava, general practitioner, Brežany.

There is an old chess set in a wooden box (the pieces disappeared one by one, like characters in every good story) and inside it a forgotten round stamp with a circular brown head, ending in metal letters A.T. MD., back to front. And another, oblong stamp, bearing the name Dr. Trnovský Alfonz, Brežany with a figure “1” on the right-hand side.

A few photos of Father’s old consulting room showing various instruments. An X-ray machine, a medicine cabinet, a sunlamp.

So he really was here once, this is proof positive!

When Ötzi the ice man was found in an Alpine glacier there was still some undigested food in his stomach and some kind of mushroom in his pocket, with each newly-discovered detail spawning a new version of his imaginary prehistoric life.

Imagination is a great thing. It’s the Achilles heel of the human brain.

But the body of evidence continues to grow.

Septichen inject… Sepsis post partum et post abortum. Pneumonia, ulcus cruris… REMED Prague. I request a shipment of specimens…

Then there’s a pile of albums with family photographs, each picture with Father’s detailed caption. This is a key family trait — we don’t rely on our own memory. Moreover, someone later added comments in felt-tip and ballpoint, in an unsightly spidery scrawl, unwittingly creating two versions of history. I’m not one to point any fingers but I think Mother is to blame, after my parents' relations got sort of complicated. She was an impulsive, restless person, though not always able to channel her energies in the right direction.

Sunday lunches, family celebrations, group photographs of people smiling at the camera. Mother in a photographer’s studio, in a white dress and sandals, framed by roses. Mother sitting next to a radio receiver, wearing a hat — obviously listening to some popular song she would later play on the piano… (1951). Mother and Father in the car. The first head leaning out of the back window is that of Polino the dog… (1940) Mother with some girlfriends at a lido… (1936) Our new car (1940) … Me tuning the radio (1944) … My school form — children looking at the camera, a teacher standing behind them by a map of Europe, next to her a stove and further down coats on hangers and a drawing of a human skeleton…

I recognise myself in the third row.

At the bottom of an old box I find a simple funeral card with a black border:

It is with the deepest sorrow that we inform you that our dear husband, beloved father, brother, brother-in-law and uncle, reserve lieutenant colonel Vojtech Roško, passed away on 2 May 1965 after a brief illness in Brežany, where his remains were cremated. His wife Natália… His son Vojto…

Vojto’s father.

A postcard has somehow got attached to the back of the funeral card with something sticky — presumably the wonderful, deliciously sweet cough syrup from Father’s medicine cabinet that Vojto and I used to sip from in secret. The postcard shows a statue of Lenin sitting on a pedestal in Moscow’s Kremlin. He is staring pensively into the distance, as if everything had suddenly dawned on him. Had he been misunderstood? Had his words been misinterpreted? All he wanted to do was proclaim equality for all. Happiness. Peace. Love. Didn’t comrade Jesus want to do the same?

The film on the 1960s postcard makes the statue appear as it were floating in space. Comrade Lenin, aloft in the characteristic hue of East German ORWO film that turned all the browns a shade of blue. I know it intimately from the kilometres of film that have passed through my hands as film director in the editing studios of the state TV.

I could go on like this for a long time but my legs are becoming stiff and I’m getting short of breath. Absent-mindedly I stuff an empty box of Luminal into my pocket as a trophy, along with Father’s medical diary, and grab a well-thumbed book on Goya with many reproductions in colour.

As I climb down gingerly I recall a summer’s day, many years ago. My older brother Peter and I took Father for a swim in lake Senec, one of those rare occasions when the three of us went on an outing together — it may even have been the last. My father slipped on the slime-covered steps, hit his head and lost consciousness. Carefully we laid him down in the grass and tried to resuscitate him. After a while he opened his eyes, slowly sat up, looked around and said, feeling the swelling bump on his head.

“Oh my, I’ve regained my memory! ”