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IvaPekarkova: Pera a peru (Truck Stop Rainbows)
Our heroine/narrator is Viola Jourova, though she is known to most people as Fial/Fialka, which is the Czech name for the plant whose Latin name is Viola. At the start of this book, she is twenty-five and studying psychology. This was not Freud and Co. We had our own socialist psychology, which apparently towered head and shoulders above world, of reactionary, psychology..
Her parents and her sister had been killed in a car crash. She will learn only later that the accident was not due to her father’s drinking, as she was told, which he never did, but for another reason which the authoritiesarly want to keep hidden. She now lives in what is by Czech communist standards a relatively large flat with her grandmother. Her grandfather was also dead so it was just the two of them andFialka was not too happy living with her grandmother. She bought her a television and the grandmother spent most of the day watching it to her granddaughter’s annoyance.
She had to work before going to university, so she tends to be older than her fellow students and therefore does not make friends with them.
She does have a close friend – Patrik – who is just a friend and definitely not a boyfriend. He is a plumber by profession. He lives in a smaller flat with his mother who keeps close tabs on his behaviour as regards keeping the fflat clean. The two friends seem to share a lot. hHe tells her about his ambition to have sex with every eligible woman on their large estate. He goes round knocking on every door offering plumbing services for which is given a large tip and when he can scout out the eligible women. Like a lot of his projects, he abandons it soon after it has started.
He is a poet, a photographer, a painter and a womaniser. He does not publish his poetry or show his paintings. With his photography. he ahas had many run-ins with the police.
Like most people, they are very cynical about Czech communism. Nobody had any rosy visions of the socialist tomorrow anymore and the future didn’t lure Patrik and me with its spell. We didn’t want to get anywhere, attain anything, patiently wait in line for prosperity. We wanted to live, live for the instant.
Their vision of modern day Czechoslovakia is:the chemical wastes and toxic runoffs from the fields. The sickly forests are turning into naked clearings, the mountains are quietly dying beneath gray deposits of fly ash and floods of acid rain. And the people live in reinforced-concrete bunkers,.
Patrik has a fourteen -year-old girlfriend, but he has a problem with her – he is impotent.
And their life?
We all had our own drugs. Our own methods of survival.
Grandmother had the Church and that television.
Patrik had his camera, Kryl, and women.
And I had hitchhiking.
Yes, her hobby is hitchhiking and she has hitch-hiked all over the country meeting many interesting people, occasionally sleeping with them, and seen very interesting places. She only feels really happy when she is on the road.
Unlike her fellow female students, she doesn’t suddenly feel the need, after three years at university, to find herself a husband. Many of her other fellow students endeavour to make a mad dash to any man before they finish university.
She does, however develop a new hobby – photography. This is not the sort of photography thatPatrik and others indulge in who photograph what is going on in the country and often get arrested for it. Her interests are in nature photography. Initially it is just the beauties of nature but then she changes somewhat and goes after the monsters of nature. Her explorations show that fields near factories, wood mills a and the like which all often have mutated plants. For example, there was a field where she and her sister eagerly sought out relatively rare four leafed clovers. Now, in the same field she finds that three leafed clovers are rare, but there are many more leaves e up to seven or eight. She becomes an environmentalist. However, photography does help her as she is able to sell the pphotos to publishers who want nature photos.
But then it all goes wrongPatrik, to her surprise and horror, comes on to her and it seems apparent that he wants help with his impotence. She naturally refuses. However, not long after she hears the awful news that he has multiple sclerosis. We follow the many problems, Patrik has to endure in getting medical help. For example he is a approved for a wheelchair but it probably will not be available for another ten years.
Fialka is determined to help but cannot find one available in the country even though she approaches various individuals using them. She soon realises that she will have to raise the money herself and sheknows how she could do that. She has slept with various lorry drivers in her travels and she is also aware that some women do this professionally so she takes up the profession but, of course she has to be very careful. Meanwhile, she meets.Erik, a Swedish lorry driver and they become close, very close.
Fialka is something of a lost soul, not at all sure what she does want and relatively sure of what she does not want. iIt is so comfortable to be quietly disgusted by everything. To be quietly disgusted by the world you know and to refuse to look for other worlds. and ur success and happiness are determined by our limitations and she recognises that she has many limitations.
This is an excellent book, giving a very detailed portrait of a young woman who at time was very living in a society she despises and essentially having just the one friend, and apparently no female friends. By the end of the book nothing is settled. All she knows what to do is get out on the road and hitchhike.
Publishing history
First published in 1989 by Sixty-Eight Publishers,
First published in1992 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux