Sometimes, things are so clear in your mind that you remember everything: images, parts of strangers’ faces, empty rooms, sounds and words, someone’s voice. But the thing you remember most of all are the falls.
One Christmas, you are standing on tiptoe in the middle of the room, wearing pyjamas, with fairy lights wrapped around you. Gran and Mum are somewhere off to the side – they can’t take their eyes off you and are both laughing. You try to reach the top of the tree, but each time you trip and fall to the floor.
“We’ll have to make the tree come to you then,” says Mum, lifting you into the air.
You remember the frozen Lagoon on Christmas Eve. Snow covering the ice, the three little islands, the bare tree branches. You stumble about on borrowed ice skates that are too big for you, holding onto Mum with one hand and Grandad with the other. The whole time, he’s been smoking a cigarette, impatiently turning his head towards the pub behind you. You move carefully; it’s more likely they have to push you along. Mum and Grandad release you at one point and you skate on. You can see an island ahead of you and head towards it. You move your leg.
And you’re lying on the ground. You get up. And fall.
But each fall represents something new. You get back on your feet. One leads to another, and you lay them out before you. The falls attract each another. You line them up so close together that they collide and you skate over the small pieces to the island.
Later that evening, it was already dark outside. Mum even let Grandad stay for dinner for the first time. She sat you beside him at the table and poured you both Kofola in crystal glasses, while she and Gran had a small glass of wine. The lines etched in the glass cast broken reflections and spots of coloured light onto the table. You couldn’t keep your eyes off them and tried to cut your meat without looking. And then, when you knocked over one of the glasses with your elbow, Grandad reached out to you, misjudged his strength and, in an instant, you and shards of glass lay under the chair, dripping with Kofola and blood.
You delve even deeper into the history of your falls. You couldn’t have been more than five when Mum used to tell you the story of a cuddly toy squirrel every evening – the same bedside story Gran used to tell Mum, albeit featuring a different favourite cuddly toy. As a young girl, she also fell asleep night after night, curled up in a ball, letting herself be carried away by the story. You sat up against the headboard of Mum’s bed with your chin resting on your knees. She closed her eyes and you hung on her every word. Habička – that was the squirrel’s name – spent entire days hopping around among the trees, travelling across the world, and yet always returning home in the evening so that, through your mother, she could tell you all about her adventures.
In one of the stories, the squirrel travelled to a foreign land full of strange animals, tall castles and, above all, magic: a world where nothing looked the same as at home. Mum was able to describe everything vividly and in such colourful detail that you wanted to live there and never return to your cramped flat, to the shabby furniture in your room, beyond whose windows you could only see a factory and the walls of tower blocks lined up in a row. Maybe to bring that world even closer to you, at night you began to project different scenes from Habička’s life in your mind. In your dreams, you flew across the branches with her, jumped from a tree –
And landed back in bed each time.
You thought other people would understand these dreams and that dreams were the only thing that really mattered. You talked about them constantly. Sometimes, you’d wake up at night on a soaked mattress, sweating from fear. If you occasionally misjudged your step and fell into the water, you’d wake up screaming.
Maybe that was why, one evening, Mum just turned out the light and left the room.
“Not today. I’m too tired.”
You called after her, kicked off the duvet and ran into the hall.
“And you’re too big for stories now anyway.” You were so angry you could barely move and, in order to calm you down, she made you kneel in the corner of the dark hall long into the night.
The scene repeated itself the next day except, this time, Mum took the wooden spoon to you. You tried to escape, tripped and put your knee through the glass panel in the door. But nothing could stop you – not the blood, not Mum shouting, not the wounds, which she rubbed with a pungent green liquid. In order to get rid of the pain, you escaped into the squirrel’s adventures, muttering them to yourself for days on end. They comforted you, even though all you really wanted was to hear at least some of them again and know you weren’t alone in your imaginary world. You were constantly mumbling about the squirrel in your sleep, while eating or watching TV, until Mum finally lost all patience. One night, she set about Habička, angrily gripped her torso in her left hand and its head in her right, and with one single tug, ripped the squirrel in half right in front of you.
If I were to tell you now that all of this happened in a dream, you probably wouldn’t believe me. The torso and head, two pieces of the same body; one without the other doesn’t make sense. They fall separately to the ground and don’t touch again until the morning. You talk and make things up until even a dream becomes a memory. At least, that’s how it seems to you. In the morning, you shouted at Mum and she didn’t understand why – after all, she’d found Habička lying under the bed. Why should she feel guilty about something she did in a dream?
Ever since Mum harmed the squirrel, you’ve been afraid to sleep. You toss and turn for hours on end. At night, you lie with your arms stretched out behind your head, boring holes into the ceiling through which you could escape, far from this tiny room, from the ever-shrinking walls of your flat. It’s a pity that, in place of hope, only a penetrating dark colour flows through the crack in the ceiling into the room.
It was about a year after the scene with the squirrel that Martin first spent the night at yours. It was then that you discovered shadows in the corner of the room, along with strange sighs and shapes above Mum’s bed. You thought they’d come to swallow her and Martin up, and you were afraid to move that night. But then a spasm ran through your body and you fell out of bed.
In the morning, there were no scars to be seen on anyone, nothing to confirm the existence of the shadows. However, by the afternoon, a battered rattan screen stood in front of your mum’s bed. She’d brought it up from the cellar herself and, during the day, you poked holes in it with your finger so that at night you would be able to see if the shadows returned.
You remember each fall vividly and precisely.
You’re six years old and Gran’s invited you all to spend a few nights in Troják in the mountains during the summer holidays. There’s only one bunk bed in the wooden chalet. You let Mum sleep in the bottom one, while you and Gran are on the top. You remember the darkness, the smell of smoke from a nearby camp, and the closed shutters that prevented even a chink of light from entering the room. You can’t hear any of the sounds of the countryside inside the chalet. It takes you ages to fall asleep and you’re hanging over the edge of the bed while Gran is sprawled on her back, snoring and grinding her teeth. You dream you’re falling. You open your eyes and in front of you is real blackness. You’re flying through the darkness and then you’re winded from the fall.
Or a year later at the spa in Luhačovice – a building with a sign saying Radun, a room with a balcony, but they’re afraid to let you out onto it. In the morning, you run down the stairs and fall. You run towards Mum and you fall. Halfway through the holiday, you catch scarlet fever and lie in a hospital bed next to a red-haired boy with an ice pack. Throughout the night, you suffer from coughing fits, and the sharp, harsh sounds waken everyone around you. By some miracle, the redhead manages to wriggle free from his ice pack, throws you out of the bed onto the floor and starts to smother you with a pillow.
When Mum started bringing Martin home, he bragged about the first time he’d shot something when he was in the army, no doubt hoping to impress you both.
“You can’t say you’re a man till you’ve fired a real gun,” he said, winking at you from the kitchen door, before continuing, “Maybe I’ll shoot you Daněks. You’re just asking for it.”
Mum burst out laughing by the sink in the kitchen.
“Don’t say that to him. He’ll be scared of you.”
But you weren’t afraid of him. Not even when, sometime in autumn, he brought some venison wrapped in a blue plastic bag. He placed the bag on the table, took the meat out, put it on his palm and held out his hand to you.
“Look,” he said as he dug his finger into it, “it’s still bloody.” He squeezed the whole piece of meat, turned to Mum and added with a smile: “This is young meat, but you can put it in the freezer. It keeps a long time and it’ll definitely be good for something.”
It wasn’t good for anything – it lay there for a few hours in the bag where Martin had left it, and as soon as he was gone, Mum chucked the meat in the bin.
That memory merges with another one. Something else ended up in that same bin. About a year after Martin began sleeping at the flat regularly, Grandad got you a gerbil for your birthday. Mum was angry to begin with – who was going to look after it and clean it? But that didn’t worry you. You just put the plastic box on the table and stared lovingly at the animal all day long. The gerbil woke you at night. The first night, you secretly took him out of the box, pulled the duvet over you both and fell asleep. In the morning, Mum found it under the table, shivering from cold and fear.
“Did you know mice can swim?”
Martin came up to you just as you were getting out of the bath. There was still some water left as you never drained it completely till everyone had had a bath. He dashed off and came back carrying the gerbil.
“Let’s see.” The animal tried to wriggle out of his grasp. “What do you think? Will this one be able to as well?” He shook his hands as if holding a dice and threw the gerbil into the water. He stood over it, forcing you to watch the desperate animal – not yet, wait a minute – as it tried to scramble up the slippery sides of the bath. It couldn’t. There was nothing to hold onto and it slid down each time. Finally, you couldn’t bear to watch any longer, so you pushed Martin away, fished the gerbil out the bathtub, cradled it to your chest and ran down the hall.
But – just like that time at the Lagoon – suddenly, no-one was holding you. Your wet feet slipped on the floor. You tripped and crushed the animal beneath you.
A few days later, Grandad appeared at the flat and you tearfully told him everything.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He stood in the hall and slowly took off his cap. He bent down and put his hand on your shoulder, while wiping away your tears with a nicotine-stained thumb.
“Everything ends that way one day, Marek,” he whispered, carefully seating you on his lap. “Nothing’s here forever, not even us. You have to remember that, because what is up here –” he tapped you on the forehead, “– is the only thing that will stay with you in the end.”
It took you a long time to understand. It seemed to you there were too many similar falls. Every one of them grows within you, opening a rift, and you’re afraid they’ll gradually replace you and, one day, you’ll wake up and all that will be left of you will be an empty body, and finally even this hollow shell will collapse inwards.
Time after time, you sink into your recollections. You tumble into your memory. Each recollection is an abyss with a meaning all of its own. You lay it out before you and try to see what lies at the very bottom.
“You just have to learn how to fall.”
It’s spring and daisies are growing between the carpet hangers. You’re sitting on your bike and can’t even touch the ground with your tiptoes. Gran’s at the side, holding onto the handlebars.
“It’s normal to fall. You take something away from each fall and, next time, you’ll do it better.”
As soon as you learned to read, you discovered this from one of the few books Mum had on her shelf: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Early in the summer of 2007, you’re standing at the door to Marián’s flat. You’ve never gone further than the musty staircase before, so you’re surprised when he lifts your bike by the handlebars, carries it to the entrance, blocks the door with it and gestures for you to go inside.
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From Memory Burn by Marek Torčík, translated by Graeme and Suzanne Dibble. Used with permission of the publisher, CEEOL Press. Copyright © 2025 by Marek Torčík. Translation copyright © 2025 by Graeme and Suzanne Dibble.
