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The Unwritten Review
The holidays came and Augustín strolled seemingly aimlessly through Bratislava, although in fact he was doing a lot of invisible work. That work was taking place inside him, in his noddle, his cranial cavity. He was composing music for his new album, which in his never published or created discography held (and still holds) a place of honour, because it was the first album presenting his own special style of music, which he had developed step by step and which in fact he then adhered to for the rest of his life. And which no one understood, because no one except Augustín himself had ever heard it.
His first unpublished album, which Augustín at the age of eighteen had gradually put together – that is, he always like to arrange his songs in largish groups, or even monothematic programmes, as he had seen with, for example, the group Progress 2 – brought to a close his searching and maturing, and that not only in the composition of music.
Augustín felt clearly on track and mature, freed of the past, of the sudden twists and turns of his adolescent years, as well as of his student loves, although it should be said that his walks often took him through Prachárenská Street, the home of Veronika, a grammar school classmate, who had at one time been the object of his unfulfilled desires.
Up to this point Augustín had not known any desires other than unfulfilled ones. Nor in fact for a long time afterwards. Although in the third year of grammar school he had gone out with a girl from the vocational school – he had always had a soft spot for shop assistants and waitresses – he had never got further than a couple of kisses and squeezing her tiny breasts.
He had managed a similarly fleeting and partial fulfilment of his dreams in the musical sphere during the brief career of his grammar school group composed of piano (Augustín Nevoľný), double bass (Ďuro Líška) and percussion (Peťo Kmeť). The band didn’t even have time to invent a name. That was because its members had got together when they were in the last year and after the school-leaving exams, shortly before the holidays began, they played their third and last concert at a party in the school gymnasium.
By the way, that was the best of their public performances. Some of the compositions that resounded loudly and freely through the school gymnasium in the summer twilight really were almost how Augustín had shaped them in his mind and how he wanted to hear them. Even the audience reacted enthusiastically, especially to the composition with the working title of “from C” (it was in the C minor scale and really did have nothing to do with Michal David’s C-shaped plastic chain links).
All three of them agreed to meet at the very beginning of the holidays in the fallout shelter where they usually practised. Peťo Kmeť was to bring a high-quality tape recorder to record their performance. However, Augustín was the only one to turn up in the shelter, not counting the tipsy school caretaker, who kept his private bar here hidden from his wife. So, with some disappointment Augustín played on the school drums and then left to walk through the streets of Bratislava – once more continuing to perfect his musical repertoire only in his head, as he was used to doing.
He sensed rather than realized that it would be some time before another of his musical ideas could materialize because he would no longer have a group and even for quite a few years to come any keyboard instrument – not counting the out-of-tune piano handed down to him from his sister. The amateur synth he played in the band didn’t belong to him. It had been lent to him by their drummer Peťo Kmeť.
Night was falling on Bratislava’s hot streets, accompanied by the intensive whistling of swifts, a flock of them chasing each other across the darkening sky, sometimes really high up, other times flying with loud cries over the roofs of the old blocks of flats. Their regular loud swooping, together with the rhythmic booming of the trains passing not far off created a strange melody that blended into a concrete musical motif in Augustin’s head.
Without knowing how, he found himself once more in the vicinity of Prachárenská Street with the secret, but nevertheless to a certain extent identified and admitted idea that he would meet Veronika and in the state of his freshly acquired maturity he would communicate with her in a somehow different manner, more grown up than in his adolescent years, when he had composed songs for her that she didn’t want to hear and tried to give her a kiss, which she had refused to accept.
In order to give the unexpected coincidence a rather more realistic chance, he walked up and down the street a couple more times, pretending he was watching the birds. However, instead of Veronika he met a former classmate, Miška Aladárová, who he had also been in love with, but when he was still only in the eighth grade, at a time when she had looked more like a girl than a man, while now the opposite was true, but even so, out of something like pity for her unfortunate transformation, or a feeling of affection for the whole world, he wanted at least to share with her his latest experiences, the pleasure his band and its recent concert had given him, but also his disappointment that the group had not managed to get together for the agreed recording session in the shelter.
Miška, however, was in a hurry to get somewhere; she just smiled, waved to him and said he could tell her next time. Even this tiny signal he considered to be an encouraging sign and improvement (therefore progress)! She had spoken to him! Even that was success compared to the time when he used to pursue her with love letters in a sweaty hand and she had asked her classmates to tell him she must study and she didn’t have time to collect any post.
However, the main reason why that evening in the holidays the world appeared to him in pleasant summer hues was his album. The euphoria he felt was so strong that he yielded to the temptation to buy cigarettes and light up as he strolled along the purple summer pavements. He had never belonged to the group of smokers in his class; he did not go to the park to smoke and certainly not to the toilets, but now his status of school-leaver or practically university undergraduate and author of a groundbreaking musical project gave the cigarette in his hand the appropriate legitimacy.
Ah, what reviews there would be if that first unpublished album of Augustín’s had not remained only in his head...
“The first album of the group Augustus, the creative spirit of which is Augustín Nevoľný, reflects the maturing of the author, who after a longish period of searching has arrived at his own original mode of musical expression. Here he synthesises his early rock period, influenced by Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Supertramp and other bands his classmates with beggar’s satchels and hair parted in the middle used to listen to, with the later electronic era, which he resisted for a long time. However, other classmates with side partings and tapering trousers lent him so many records by groups such as Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode and OMD that these two styles eventually symbiotized to become Augustín’s mature musical style and the whole of his successful debut is in this spirit. It is worth noting that it was the Brno group Progres 2’s project Zmĕna (Change) that provided the final inspiration for Augustín. This blended elements of the art rock that the group had played before with electronic music. And so, as Augustín himself has said, he realized then for the first time that the two genres can be synthesised.”
It would be such a beautiful review, he would have boasted about it today to the station waitress in Papiernička, who had clearly taken a bit of a fancy to him, but in such cases it is impossible to tell whether the source of her fondness was just the takings coming from a bottomless drinker, or whether the public house employee really did accept the gigantic spiritual dimension of his personality.
His spiritual elephantiasis, it could be said.
“Go on, jus’ one fuckin’ more,” the waitress said to him with a smile in her mischievous eyes, waving a glass of cognac under his nose. Everything here was as it had been years ago, only the advertisements had multiplied.
STAN offers you breakfasts, announced a cheerful slogan from a faded poster above the waitress’s head. The poster showed a young, dynamic man pouring alcohol from a bottle labelled STAN into a young lady with painted lips and striking breasts squashed into a red tank top.
This poster had it sequels. STAN keeps you fit. A guy is bending a heavily made-up young lady over his knee and spanking her turbulent round bottom with his manly hand, while she pours spirits from a bottle of STAN into his manly lips.
STAN offers you sex. A woman holding a bottle between her black-stockinged legs in an obscene gesture.
STAN offers you the world. An azure sea made up of bottles of STAN.
Can you offer anyone the world? This thought flashed through Augustín’s mind, and under the influence of the advertisement and the waitress he knocked back “another fuckin’ ” cognac, or in fact two, and on the way home, or wherever he should have been going, travelled not only by train, but also in the parallel outer space of his soul. He travelled in all possible directions, in all possible dimensions and at the same time filled so many little pages of an even smaller notebook! These are not only the small, but also the bright sides of his existence that is otherwise immersed in gloom.
