Skonilo to U Adama

I wrote this book when I was seventeen shortly after the communists caught me crossing the Czech-Austrian border trying to get away from behind the proverbial Iron Curtain. At the time there was no War on Terror and even if there had been I probably would not have known about it… I was just a child – eager to experience Zephyr’s unbounded joy singing my own Ode wondering at daff odils… though puzzled not by the characters on a Grecian urn but by the rigid stale and spineless “character” of those alive those around me. It is not human hands that build walls but human mind – I concluded then and wrote this book: a brief story about the end of the world. It came to me in a fl ash while I was sitting on a cold stone slab in a communist prison cell. After a strip-down body-cavity search several hours of interrogation staring into the muzzles of two shotguns pointing at me from each corner of a cold room spotlight in my face… it felt like the world had pretty much ended for me. What a disaster – I could have represented “my” country in the Olympics! “Is this how you pay back to your generous motherland for giving you the privilege of the highest degree? – the privilege of being among the few selected best sportsmen and women of this country to enjoy the perks and privileges that working-class people have to work hard every day to earn? – to earn for you? – you live on their backs! – and what? – is this your ‘thank you’?!” the Chief of Bratislava Secret Police spoke to me in a heavy tone in his offi ce. I can still see myself staring out of the window trying to look into the man’s eyes – they were dark full flaring eyes unpredictable Turkish eyes… and I was but a helpless beetle one of Kafka’s caricatures waiting to be squashed… Still I believe the topic of this book – a small boy who is the only person alive (or so he thinks) who survived a nuclear catastrophe travelling through the desert of human civilization desperately trying to cross the mountains to reach the ocean… is a solid allegory which stands on firmer ground than would a simple biblical re-creation.