Daniela Kapitánová - Samko Tále's Cemetery Book

After he and Darinka Gunárová got divorced, he married Valent Anka’s sister whose name was Anka Anková. So now the fat slob Manica is my relative, because we’re related now. But I never say hello to him and he doesn’t say hello to me either, so why should I say hello to him? After all, he was the first to start shouting at me like this:

‘Everybody thinks

Samko Tále stinks.’

But I don’t stink at all and it’s out of the question that I should stink because I’m very hygienic and whatever. I hate Manica because afterwards other people also started shouting at me like that so then I started shouting at Manica like this:

‘Manica the slob

Couldn’t find his knob.’

Actually, I have no idea if he could find it or not because I’m not a queer, but it was very funny and Manica was embarrassed about not finding his knob. Meaning you know what. His penis.

And it serves him right.

Now he works in this office regarding people who are unemployed and get paid for not working.

I work every day even though I have a disability pension, but some people don’t work at all even though they attended all sorts of schools and they get paid for not working.

The only thing I don’t get is why they get paid when they’re not working. When we still had the Communist Party nobody got paid for not working and everybody went to work. And nobody was paid due to unemployment back then.

I was never paid due to unemployment either.

Not everyone in my family has worked but that wasn’t due to unemployment, that was due to disability. My Mum was disabled due to her bad back, Uncle Otto was disabled due to the lightning, and I was disabled due to kidneys, but all of us have always worked because we’re very hard-working. Except for Uncle Otto who didn’t work, but that was because he had a Mission, but at least he went gathering mushrooms. My Mum used to work regarding giving lessons to children and the children used to pay her twenty Czechoslovak crowns per lesson because that was when we still had Czechoslovakia so the money was called Czechoslovak crowns. But then Grandaddy said that it wasn’t allowed and that we could get into big trouble because my Mum had a disability pension and she got paid twenty Czechoslovak crowns per lesson, so he told my Mum to ask the children to bring eggs, vegetables or fruit and whatever per lesson. So my Mum asked them to.

But then this girl who used to come to my Mum for piano lessons and whose name was Eva-Mária Kisstóthová came to her lesson with a handcart and she brought an old chair that had only three legs and she said that’s what her parents had sent. My Mum got really worked up and she started to cry and sent Eva-Mária Kisstóthová home with the chair.

And after that she told the children to bring twenty Czechoslovak crowns per lesson.

But the one thing I don’t get is why she got so worked up, because my Dad was really clever regarding woodworking and he could easily have fixed that chair and then we would have had another chair and that would have been very handy. Because we only had five chairs, because there were five of us, and when Margita got married to Valent Anka it wasn’t handy any more, because we were always having to bring another chair from another room.

And that wasn’t handy at all.

I have three chairs in my kitchen because there isn’t room for more and that’s very handy, too.

I don’t often have many visitors because I don’t have time for silly things like that, and that’s why three chairs are just right for my kitchen.

Alf Névéry never came to visit me very often because it was always me who used to go and visit him when I felt like visiting him. And he used to give me Karlsbad Wafers because he didn’t support Slovak wafers. But he never ate them himself because he never ate, he just drank alcoholic drinks.

Once I found him writing something so I asked if he was going to become a writer again and he said that he would never be a writer again because he had figured it all out.

But he never told me what it was that he had figured out, so I don’t have any idea what it was he had figured out, but I still think that it’s very weird because it should go without saying that if he’d figured it all out, that’s exactly why he should have become a writer, right?

Right.

For example, I became a writer because I figured out that I had to take my handcart to Ján Boš-Mojš’s workshop. But I still have no idea what it was that he had figured out, because he never told me. Sometimes I keep wondering all the time what he meant. Because it’s very weird and I don’t know why he never wanted to become a writer after he’d figured it all out.

It’s very weird.

Once Ivana came to see me, except that she didn’t come to see me, she came to see Alf Névéry, but I was there as well because you never know what might happen and what’s what and why and how, so you have to be very careful, and that’s why I am always very careful, and then he said that if he ever wrote anything it would have a title that would go like this:

The Mortuary

A Life of Vain Glory

I had a good laugh because it was humorous when he said: ‘The Mortuary, A Life of Vain Glory’ but Ivana didn’t laugh and Alf Névéry didn’t laugh either. But I don’t get it because what is the point of making up humorous sentences if you’re not going to laugh at them?

So then I didn’t laugh either.

Because if nobody is laughing it can’t really be humorous, right?

Right.

Because the way I can always tell that something is humorous is because it makes people laugh. Ivana can never tell and she doesn’t care if other people are laughing or not even though she attended all sorts of schools and keeps pushing herself onto TV.

At least Margita doesn’t push herself onto TV because her job is just regarding sending children to children’s homes. I don’t know if Valent Anka is pushing himself or not, because he was on TV only once and he talked about how suppressed we are by the Hungarians because we live in the South of Slovakia.

But the most important thing was that when they showed the names of all the people that had been on TV that night they put Valent Anča instead of Valent Anka and then all the people in the Docks started calling him Anča and he has been insulted and injured ever since because Anka sounds like you’re being nice to a girl called Anka, but Anča sounds like you’re being nasty to her. Later he said that the people on TV did it on purpose because he dared to criticize Hungarians and there are Hungarians everywhere, even on TV and in Bratislava.

Because Hungarians are everywhere. Especially in Komárno, even though I have no idea why they are here, nobody told me anything about it so how should I know? There are also lots of Hungarians in Hungary and nobody minds that. But what people really mind is that they are in Komárno too and that we are all very suppressed due to them.

I am very suppressed due to them, too.

And another person who is very suppressed due to them is Valent Anka because they insulted and injured him regarding making fun of his name and calling him Anča on TV.

Once there was this man in Komárno but he wasn’t from Komárno, he was from Marhaň which is a village, except I don’t know where it is. His name was Daniel Gaby and he did his Military Service in Komárno because we have Military Service, too And all the other soldiers made fun of him because his name Gaby sounded like he was a woman called Gaby. Except that he wasn’t a woman, he just had a surname that was like a woman’s first name.

At first he thought it was funny too and he didn’t let on that it bothered him that people spoke to him as if he was a woman. Because what they kept saying to him were things like this: