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.
