Nothing Ever Happens Here – Filip Jakab
February 19, 2025
Sloanec-Ivroš, East Slovakia, December 13, 1999
Each step I take in this dark hell of a place crunches beneath me. All’s slowed to its minimum. The clots of my fine warm breath seep through the gate of my parted lips out—they create ghosts that reel around and then magically wane. The temperature outside must be very low, perhaps some degrees below zero, because when I look at a thermometer nailed on the brittle wall of our house illuminated with a light bulb, the tip of a red scale’s just down below – 17.
Standing here, I wonder how long it would take for the cold to end me, to turn me into one of those glacial snowmen. Wherever I look, all is iced to its pure holed-up essence—the front yard has turned into one glassy terrain. On pause but close enough to death, the cold takes over in whichever direction I look. It veils the village valley and travels deep into the forest. In such a torpid place in the middle of the mountains, we—the people of the village—ought to sleep before dusk; that is what they call winter boredom here.
The humdrum of our village chews on my childish wits. Out of boredom, I often fantasize about shadows painting walls so dark they remind me of soot. I see what isn’t out there. Tonight, on the day of St. Lucia, shadows lurk throughout the village just before they wane and return deep into the woods.
It’s half past seven, and I’m standing in the front yard glistening with the ungodly—bitter and stiff taste on my tongue. No one’s out in this Siberian-like weather—dry and frigid. I sigh and inhale the icy air. Then I pout the little frost on my lips. Something shifts. I notice the crippled fear growing—the presence of shadows, somewhere too close—disturbing a desired winter sleep, gnawing on my boy guts. My breath speeds up—fear burns me faster. At such a sun-forgotten hour, the cold wins—it stabs and nags you into the corner. To freeze. To give up. It heaves through my chest now.
The yard itself feels soundless. But if I pay enough attention, I can hear my heartbeat and the distant echo of a passing industrial train high above the village on the tracks. The beat of my flesh meets the din of distant steel. It’s the darkest, most soulless place on earth, I’m convinced. Nothing ever happens here.
As I attempt to move through the yard, my weight, carried by the soles of my thick winter boots, wrecks through heaps of snow. When they do, it’s a raspy sound they make. It feels like I’m walking on a carpet of potato chips. It’s my childish joy to step on something so meaningless and destroy its flawless beauty. After enjoying the wreckage of the snow, I look for a frozen puddle in the darkness—I want to break that, too.
During the day, I have a skinny, pathetic body, but now I’m a fat figure wearing two ski jackets on top of each other. My mum made me look this way—a fat boy toy. Outside, I trudge through a crust of hardened snow, breaking and destroying what pleases me. It’s a raw, crunchy noise that I give birth to. It’s a sign of life.
I need to piss. With my right hand, I pull out my cold, limp dick from underneath the layers of pants and underpants and carve piss into the snow. Right after, my left hand grabs the flashlight from my pocket. I turn it on and point it at the stream. It’s a yellowed-forming ditch that my urine etches when it sullies the white. It glistens as it melts, burning layers of frost. I watch as steam rises, hoping to see some drawing in the vapor of the dull night. But it fades quickly, and I stare at a piece of mutilated snow instead.
The rattle of wagons wanes and dies off behind mountains. As I attempt to move, I slog towards a green entryway. Halfway stuck in the snow, I can’t keep the balance and bend to the front. I fall and my small hands sealed in mauve polyester gloves stab through the layers of snow. I curse with forbidden words I heard my mother say—kurva, and others like that. I snigger when I swear. I stay like that for a while. It takes a good deal of work to pull myself back up. I start to sweat underneath the layers of jackets. And when I make it to an entryway, I flash on spirals and goblins—the ornamental ironwork of the gates. I remember someone said it was from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or stuff like that. And I doubt that, and snigger some more, and then I kick once, twice to the old rust just because. I stare at the leftovers of an ancient world and smear a gob of snot under my nose with one gloved hand. Then I twist the rusted handle open with the other, and it creaks. It makes one of those sinister noises I recall from the TV. …
Like a retard, I then slide on an icy road further toward the house on the right. There’s a black-clothed figure standing still. Or is it one of the shadows returning from the woods I imagined earlier? The figure gapes at me from the other side of the road. Its silence and stare twist my stomach until the pitch-black figure—or shadow—abruptly screams:
“Where were you so long? We’re gonna be late now, damn you!” is how my eighty-something grandma, whom I mistook for a demon, rushes me with the Eastern Slovakian slang.
Once a week, I pick my grandma up and escort her to church. It’s become our habit. I’m a good kid on Wednesdays, or at least I pretend to be. I wish everyone would be as grateful as I am on Wednesdays in general. I like its timing in the middle of the week. But there’s no guaranteed way to know if a mass is held solely on Wednesdays. I curse a priest with my innocent smile now and then when a mass is held on any other day than Wednesday. So twisted is my eleven-year-old brain.
My grandma doesn’t fear the darkness—she knows how to handle the otherworldly. But she’s terrified of falling and breaking her hip or cracking her spine or skull open. It’s one of those scenarios for sure. It’s why I walk her through streets robbed of light.
Our walks to the church are slow and last about four to five minutes on average. In the wintry village of Sloanec-Ivroš, there’s nothing else for me to do, so I help her. I do it gladly. It makes me look charming in the eyes of others. It also makes my grandma truly depend on me, and there’s a bunch of cheap Polish candies she rewards me with that I can rot my teeth with. She does that, but I heard my mum saying something about Alzheimers, and that it’s abducting grandma’s brain slowly for good.
“But I’m already here,” I holler into the dark, “I’m coming, grandma.”
“Come on! Hurry up!”—slime scrapes in her throat.
As I approach her close enough, I catch a whiff of some old Communist body lotion cut with some hard liquor tang. And it could be home-distilled slivovitz or apricot brandy, I wonder, or a mix of both. It’s not that she’s wasted or an alcoholic. It’s a well-known thing that here, in the East of the country, old people like her warm themselves up during such Siberian days. Apart from that, they gulp a shot of strong spirits on an empty stomach in the morning as a medicine, just like their mothers taught them. At her age, my grandma is one example that tales like these are true.
I grab my grandma’s arm, clothed in a black Persian fur coat. I bet it’s at least as ancient as she is. She keeps loads of such prehistorical things—furs robbed of their carcasses hanging in her wardrobe closet like in a slaughterhouse, all wrapped in transparent plastic covers, reeking of naphthalene against moths. And on some days, when no one is looking, I jab my right hand between the plastic covers, and a ferocious pulse of excitement and bewilderment passes through me…
It’s a common belief that the women of the Sloanec-Ivroš valley who dress in fur are wealthy or had parents who owned land, farms, and cattle. But I’ve noticed my grandma cheats with her coat because I know she has no land, no farm, and not a single dirty cow to milk. I think all those silver-haired grannies enjoy dressing up for church. It gives some purpose to their slow lives here in this dark valley. It distances them from the approaching scythe of death.
The road crisps under our feet all the way to the church. From the tower hiding in the skies, church bells intensify the eeriness cast over the village. They call out shadows hatching in the coldest nests, from those man-forgotten hideouts of the valley.
…
I hold an old flashlight firmly in my left hand so I won’t slide and fall and break my grandma’s neck—or mine. The beam of light penetrates the dark and illuminates the bleached sidewalk. The dead-white surface appears. It’s the carpet for this season. Occasionally, the flashlight flickers in a random sequence, as if it would have seizures. Then it suddenly stops. And although I keep a slow pace, I hear my gran’s heavy gasps. She doesn’t seem to notice, but random shimmers return again and again. And I start to believe that the flashlight flickers with the language of the possessed. Those shimmers make me wonder if shadows released from the depths of the darkness—the real thickening darkness on this nefarious day of St. Lucia—are beguiling us from the front or the back, or if they are all around my grandma and me. The flashlight in my hand starts to tremble, and I notice that it’s my fear that speaks now. I worry that the shadows are pissed off and have come to get us.
Then a flashlight in my hand lands on the wooden cross. Overgrown and encased in icy moss, just a few meters before the entrance to the church. Our damp steps falter, and I feel a sudden tug from my grandma’s arm. The weight of her Persian sleeve leaves me as she approaches the cross. She pokes through the white of the snow with her stick, and rasp stabs reverberate through the village’s nothingness. Facing the cross, almost touching the frost of moss with her creased lips, she whispers some words I can’t hear, maybe some incantations. And I stare, motionless, illuminating a detail in darkness… just as a sliver of frost covering the cross starts to thaw.
Then she slams her walking stick against a lower part of the wooden cross. A tiny piece of moss falls. The cardboard miniature of Jesus shudders in the shrill of the flashlight. As she strikes the wood, more chunks of snow fall from the cross and land quietly on white heaps. In her final act to protect us against strigoi—or what we called evil forces—on this night of St. Lucia, my grandma spits the garlic clove that she had held in the cave of her mouth.
…
Inside the church, there are two hunchbacked figures on the left and three crippled on the right. They all turn their black-clothed heads back at us as we enter, their necks defying human anatomy—purely elastic, at a 180-degree angle. They eye and measure my grandma and me from head to toe. The most crippled one of them sneers at me. Frightened, I observe the drapes of her grayish skin folding and unfolding, her sagging mouth moving in a repeat of God’s whispers.
I let my grandma dip her right hand in a bowl of consecrated water. She motions around her face as if she is swatting gnats. We walk toward the front without a hint of greeting to the hunchbacked figures. That’s the thing I’ve figured—people of this church never greet one another—they eye and belittle. It’s as if they keep their crass faith to themselves.
Twisted faces dressed in heavy old furs. I see through them although I’m just eleven. They’re all faking Catholic liars. Almost immediately after my grandma and I take our seats on the front left bench, I feel that wan faces rotate back to the center of their gravity, leaving us unharmed, as if we’ve passed one of their ridiculous tests. My grandma bows her head and prayers start to plummet from her mouth. The bench’s wood feels cold beneath me, but there’s this red padded cushioning that will eventually warm me up.
The ancient widows, with saggy skin like turtles, gather early before a mass in the church. Studying them, I’m stunned that they cover the wisdom of their silver hair with embroidered scarves. With heads bowed down as a false sign of humility, nearly all these silver creatures bent forward for a holy prayer. As if to pre-pray for a godly ceremony, they arrive nearly an hour early. Sometimes they pray for the dead. Sometimes for the sick. But mostly, they fake like anyone else here does.
In the cold and sacred, I watch clouds of breath flying out from their pulpy mouths. Like smoke from wintry chimneys, the puffs fade into the holiness of the church. The church’s marble interior feels like a spaceship, with all the sharp corners and edges. It’s lit only by a few candles on the altar and a few lamps under the upper chorus. My grandma, like the rest of the ancient worshippers, holds her beaded rosary in her wrinkly hands. She loops the same old prayers her mother and grandmother must have taught her before. It stuns me that my grandma might be the last of her kind.
…
With a stone face similar to one of the Saints, I nest in my two ski jackets on the oak-carved seats that run in rows up to the back. The icy palace of God—so abstract and minimal—for you to see breaths outlining themselves seconds before they wane.
The cold white interior of the church blends with the death-white snow outside. Only large sheet windows separate two equally lifeless spaces. In contrast, the inside seems impregnated with the tang of myrrh—a relic-kind of smell, smoky and bitter. But then, a rancid odor suddenly begins to itch the tip of my nose. I scratch it and wonder if it’s the red cushioning, or the wood itself, or the tang of one of the turtles’ leaking urine that reeks?
…
Wrinkled lips synchronize in a murmur—it’s a sacred sound they beg with. Gloved hands press tightly together, because their lives truly depend on this. I gather confidence and raise my head to the center of purity: a chunk of a fat wood—a cross—with Jesus’s carved figure nailed to it. Little by little, my mouth opens and a thin thread of drool falls down my jacket. My heart beats real fast, and scared, I want it to stop. I’m cool and warm at once. My mind flashes—impure thoughts, filthy and sodomic even, they would say, as I stare at Jesus’s athletic corpse in wood. The tiny crack of my butthole tightens… But then I swallow the gob of filth back into my mouth and notice I want some more of it. On the outside, my look cheats and lies. I remain shy, wearing the mask of a good boy, and roll my eyes to the right to check if any old turtle saw me drooling for Christ.
Without suspicion, I continue on a rollercoaster of lust while they pray for the holy, for the sick, against war and greed in the world. I think of all of Jesus’s surrendering, agony, and the pain that burns my stomach. That welcoming pain on Jesus’s face, in fact, warms me—I feel touched and licked by flames. Lured by his athletic sensation, my stomach begins to bubble with acids. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t stop it. Flashes of an unknown kind of lust beat from the inside of my skull. They confuse and shame me but they want to get out, they travel down and tingle in my crotch.
Dressed in ramshackle rags around his stiff pelvis, just a few centimeters below the tight muscles of his navel—or is it a wooden knot?—my eleven-year-old brain cooks a fantasy that Jesus must have once been a hot stud. Right before he was crucified, his flesh whipped until it bled, and his palms pierced with rusted nails. An alpha pro, a rare breed like him. Tormented beauty and life stabbed out from the palms of his hands. What a mess. What a pity!
I sigh in a wishful fantasy of Jesus becoming my fallen angel, his oak body miraculously filling with the breath of life: veiny and hard. In the ambience of holy whispers—worshiped by the crippled—I fantasize that Jesus would slide down from the cross. A halo of a white neon light would follow, expelling matter and energy outward. I foolishly expect he would descend and approach me so I could adore his flesh. I would starve for him or trash all the candies if he asked me to, just so he could show me the real faith—to mold me better and madder.
I wait and wait, naïve, in the lisping ambience of grandmas’ final prayers. But the wooden corpse that imitates Christ gives no sign of movement. No hint of the holy. No breath of life. And when they finish with murmurs, my grandma grabs my right arm and disrupts my unhinged fantasies with the Son of God, with my God. As the looping playlist of devotions ceases, the gunky stain dampens where my crotch is, deep under the layers of my pants and underpants, for the first time in my life. I’m ashamed of what my body made and won’t tell anyone.
…
Outside, my grandma pinches into the icy crisp of the night again with her stick as we pass the old cross. And even when the night has grown darker—cinematic and with a tar-like glistening over the front yards we pass—shadows are gone now. Instead, what lingers is my grandma’s naphthalene stench around me. After I escort her back to her house, I open the squeaky gates into our front yard. I don’t use a flashlight and skate down the starless surface.
Then I lean down into the darkness and punch and crack some of the ice. I urgently shove a piece into my mouth, as if the prayers, the holy, the unhinged, have made me parched. With my teeth like daggers, I bite and lick the edges of the icy cracks. It tastes briny, but my tongue keeps suckling at it.
“Thanks to Elliott Papazahariakis for his real-deal edits and unwavering feedback, and to Gitte Hendrikx, a closeted M&M’s-addict for being my first reader, airdrop telepathy and pushing the worst in me.”