Chamillova's Tatranka

And we lived by her fierce dictum: “Fitting in is death. Remember that.

You want to stand apart from your peers. Always."

When I came home one day of March of 1969 with the happy news that I
was accepted to dance at a folkloring group 'Tatranka,' Krushchev was
in power, Martin Luther King was assassinated, Laika, the first dog,
aboard Sputnik was dead, Juraj Gagarin was still alive and Neil
Armstrong had not yet walked on the moon. Juraj Janosik from Terchova,
Slavic edition of Robin Hood from Sherwood, the key figure in every
folkloric dancing school was dead for 300 years. I considered joining
Tatranka to be amongst these momentous events. Have you ever been so
happy that you wanted to throw your shoes up over your school building?
That is precisely how I felt.

You know of the disease in Central Europe called dancing sickness....
There also exists a dancing happiness of the soul. Its most dangerous
aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be
careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of happiness, the
moment you become aware of the gain of a certain naughtiness, of
enthusiasm and zest, take it as a warning. You should realize that your
soul rejoys if you start practicing folklore steps on the way to
school.

I had grown up watching older sister Aga pirouetting, tapping,
tumbling, whirling, and twisting to Slovak folk music, while she was
immersed in colours of embroided cotton, laces, and tassels. Aga's dark
gold hair swam, almost like autumn leaves, timing each fall. I was
fascinated by Aga's friends some of whom could leap through the air
like Kamziks (Tatra's wild goats) and whirl like dervishes; others
lumbered and flopped about like beached whales, with big toothy grins
on their faces.

As a eleven years old rebel, I would have been happy never to have set
foot in Vrbov state school again. I once got a badge of honour for
reciting a Russian poem ten full verses in one breath, or was it ten
words in broken English, in any event, although I had to be trown out
from the classroom after the class roared with laughter it was my
crowning achievement.

Tatranka would save me from my usual visits to the director's office.
While my eyes were staring down Mr Zemba form one end of the room, my
head was turned in the opposite direction towards the window. Those
visits one doesn't easily forget. Squeezing out tears and pleading with
the director, "Please, sir, please don't tell my Tato (father) that I
broke the school desk. Please, sir, he will belt me!" I pulled the kind
of face you would pull if someone told you that a bomb was about to
explode in your head. I couldn't believe that the director had
swallowed my fib about Tato's spanking. I might have been handful. I
didn't always say the right thing. But, Tato rarely shouted at
me.

In my schoold days, no personality was as colourful as the architect of
the dancing group Tatranka, Miss Marta Chamillova. No one could tell
folkloric stories as Chamillova did. I loved the way Chamillova talked
about Juraj Janosik, the Robin Hood of the Slovak legend. Janosik is
our tragic hero, our Richard III, our Oedipus, our Lear. Time has given
him depth. He was this sort of open, outdoorsy creature, very
gutsy.

Chamillova helped me see the extraordinary in ordinary songs, steps,
springs. Janosik or gural dance steps had come to occupy a special
place in the collective Slovak folkloric psyche. They symbolise much
that has been lost to communism - wild jumping, self-sufficiency and a
sense of unabridged freedom. Slovaks, like Janosik, identify with the
underdog. Janosik is so many Slovak stories all at once, he consumes so
much of our culture: the poor kid who cared for poor; the clever kid
who got caught in the injustice of slavery; the momma's boy denied to
see his father's funeral; the loser who won; the winner who lost; the
kid who never fit in the Hungarian idea of slavery. He cared nothing
for Hungarian politics; he cared for nothing but politics and
justice.

As a teacher, Chamillova understood that children needed confidence and
that this confidence could be mastered through bodily discipline and
practice. For Chamillova, confidence was much more important than
talent. The most important thing was the experience of enjoying one's
physicality for its own sake and sharing the joy through performance
with one another and for an audience of doting parents. When asked once
why she had no children of her own, Marta Chamillova proudly announced,
without feeling foolish, that 'these are my children.' Like all
mothers, she shouted, 'Keep your backs straight!' 'The boy that can't
dance says the band can't play.'

True, there was a story circulating about how close to matrimony
Chamillova once came. With her slim figure, wavy hair, expressive eyes
and Slav cheekbones, she certainly was not unattractive. To Czech Karol
Plicka, a famous photographer, she seemed quite a likely prospect. And
children looked upon Plicka as father who knew how to tell amazing
stories. When Plicka was ten years old, he started to be interested in
photography and constructed a photographic instrument out of an old
cigar box. His photographs looked back to a simpler, idealized rustic
past. His quotes about Slovakia were memorable: "This was a country
very poor for the gifts of land and rich in songs, full of mysterious
contrasts between the songs and crying." There was a heartbreaking
simplicity about Plicka's photographs. There was however nothing simple
about taking a photograph of Marta Chamillova. It took breathtaking
bravery to capture in black and white film this simple folkloring
flower Marta: a daisy who had a bee in her bonnet. Plicka took
photographs as a kind of folkloric testimony before the traditions melt
away, like snow under the sun. Like truth under communism.

One powerful photo featuring my sister who is wearing the wreath she
had made from greenery and daisies. This photograph is the most
priceless things I own.

More than anything else Chamillova and Plicka most loved was that of
the Golem myth, a monster made of clay and soil by Prague's chief
rabbi, to save the Jews from persecution. To give the beast life, the
rabbi placed a slip of parchment under its tongue, on which was written
the unknowable, unspeakable name of God.

Tatranka children needed to believe in the possibility of super powers
other than the Soviet Union. No matter what culture we are from, we
rise from myth. Myths fill a need, a longing, a hope for salvation;
they are our dreams and our nightmares. They are answers to all things
mysterious. Myth is magic.

Before Frankenstein's monster was created from spare parts and the mind
of Mary Shelley, a huge clay creature called a Golem held the
imagination of our greatgrandparents-children. Magic words could bring
the sculpture to life in the feudalistic 16th century as it could in
the communist 20th century. In 21st century my children recognise the
name of one of their Pokeman characters: Golem.

The person who found or fashioned the image, knew the magic words, or
stumbled upon them, would gain power. Power so desperately needed by a
child, a victim, a helpless soul. The Golem could or would do simple
tasks, follow orders, and protect its creator from harm. Using clay,
the elements of fire, air, and water, the number seven, and the
unspoken name of God, a rabbi constructed a Golem to save his people
from harm. That the Golem goes out of control, due to a mistake or a
miscalculation should not surprise anyone familiar with what happens to
people who try to play God.

Myths and legends have a life of their own, because we need to believe
in the possibilities they offer. They don't die. Slovak view of the
world includes miracles and angels, beast-men and women of unearthly
beauty, gods walking among us and ceremonies that can end a drought.
All of these things are as ordinary to you as tractors, mountain
streams, and ice in the tropics. At the same time, the whole world is
enchanted, mysterious. Cars, mountian streams, and ice are all as
astonishing as angels. Slovak flokloric ceremonies are not unlike magic
painted by Leslie Marmon Silko in his novel Ceremony. There is a scene
in which a abandoned woman is dancing very angrily. Miles away, the man
who betrayed her is checking the commotion his cattle are making in the
night. Descriptions of the woman's heels stamping the floor are
alternated with descriptions of the cattle trampling the man to death,
back and forth from one to the other. No assertion of causality is
made, but the dancer's heels and the animals' hooves become linked so
powerfully that the reader doesn't just "get it." What's conveyed is
not a symbol or a metaphor, but the reality that a woman can be so
angry that when she dances, her lover dies.

The reference from Psalms 139:16 grew into a full blown Mittleuropean
magical tale as rich as any Greek epic. Chamillova carried on her
teaching tasks as a kind of modern version of the Golem. But it was not
only the God under Golem's tongue that she had faith in. It was the
word: the unknowable word for which we search, for which we exhaust
dictionaries, for which we write and erase and write again, the word
whose existence we believe in without any proof, the next word we will
learn, which we pray will come closer to expressing our desired
meaning.

As an expression of Slovak culture, some superstitious practices had a
deeper meaning. The whole neighborhood was monoplolised with local
tales about haunted spots. The breaking of the glass at the conclusion
of the wedding has many explanations. Marriage is not always as joyous
as the wedding itself. The bad times, when our hearts break, are
symbolized by the shattered glass. A couple that enters marriage,
believing that their married life will always be as blissful as
courtship, is in denial and doomed to failure. Breaking the glass
symbolizes a realistic approach. It may even be said to scare off the
real evil demon, which is denial.

Marta Chamillova, also more cheekily nicknamed 'Stara' (old wise woman)
in her early fifties, whetted our appetite for oral history. We were
trim and firm as Chamillova. She used to say, "Show me a fat teacher
and I show you a lazy class." All teachers and students play the cat
and mouse. Our day was filled with tested excuses and the finest word
in Slovak language, "Pretoze," Because. But did we ever outsmart
Chamillova? Hardly! She made the gawky children of Vrbov hungry for the
oral history of our Slavic past. A folklorist, capable of flashes of
baroque wit, Chamillova was described as Shakespeare in a skirt. She
made us starving for tricky Slovak steps and we were deceived into
living exclusively on ancient poems and balads. We leaped into air to
catch the invisible branches of trees, then found ourselves sweaty
sitting on a parquetry floor gazing across the shoulders of the High
Tatra Mountains. To be ten and in a distance Chamillova's breath was to
feel that touch of wonder at the unexplained and come home after two
hours of hard dancing and singing with stardust in your eyes at the
possibilities of Slavic magic.

A camp fire that inexplicably turns itself on and off.
A dog who wakes his owner by pulling his shirt when he has fallen
asleep at the camp fire and the wolves are beginning to encircle
him.
A child who announces, "Grandpa's in heaven..." just before the doctor
walks through the garden gate.

Almost everyone has little stories of unexplained occurrences. In that
sense, 'magic' is among us all of the time. If it was not for magic and
storytelling Slovaks would not survive. When there was no food, the
story fed something, it fed the spirit, the imagination. That is why
music was so important, stories in songs connect us, heart to heart.
Where most cultures tell history from the top down, Slovak songs chose
to tell it from the bottom up. One songs told me something once and for
a long time I could not get it out of my mind. A man needs something
that's bigger than life, something he'd die for. I had been thinking
about that all night. I did not go to sleep until Tato helped me with
some of the Chamillova's riddles.

Here on Earth it's always true,
that a day follows a day.
But there is a place where yesterday (zajtra)
always follows today (dnes)!
(Dictionary)

The fact that Slovak folklore music lives on in the High Tatra region
today is largely due to the revival of interest in Slovak culture
achieved by Chamillova. There are songs which can only be learned in
the mountains. No art can teach them; no rules of voice can make them
perfectly sung. Their music is in the heart. They are songs of memory,
of personal experience our forebears lived through. They bring out
their burden from the shadow of the past. Music which took my
grandparents from the first luulaby to the last lament. Slovaks express
their deepest truths in a spirit of music. To attain wisdom one must
learn to sing. She believed that peasants actually had twelve senses -
the accepted five plus thought, language, warmth, balance, movement,
life, and the individuality of the other. Slovak folk stories were like
jazz; if you played every note according to a set score, you were doing
something wrong. Slavic folkloric music unlike the rock-n-roll does not
beat out tunes for animals to dance to, it drums out a tune to move
stars and hearts with pitty. Slavic songs celebrate the ordinary deeds
of daily life translated so neatly by Marge Piercy:

To Be of Use
I want to be with people
Who submerge in the task,
Who go into the fields to harvest
And work in a row
And pass the bags along,
Who stand in the line
And haul in their places,
Who are not parlor generals
And field deserters
But move in a common rhythm
When the food must come in
Or the fire be put out.

Chamillova was like a huge flower opening more each year. She was like
a mother hen herding her chicks on stage and saying, "Look! Aren't they
remarkable?!" For months I feel flame rise in my cheeks when I faced
hundreds of faces in the audience. To Chamillova the most basic impulse
of any child was a talent for dancing, however, stage freight was
certainly my basic impulse. Her gift for Spis accents was a definite
asset in collecting oral history, pointing at our roots ... 'Look, this
is where you have come from.' Our ancestors' "Good Day" sounded like
"Gin Dobry." The greeting flowed as gently as the reflective creek that
bisected Vrbov's heart. There was a medical alcohol within a greeting.
We became peasant history buffs. We learnt that Spis was a region that
was almost wiped out by Tartar raids in the thirteen century and that
Hungarian kings encouraged Germans to colonise the area. With the whiff
of valuable ore deposits in the air, families from Saxony (to whom the
area was known as Zips) came in ever greater numbers, eventually
establishing a federation of 24 Zips towns which were granted special
trading privileges.

Our regular field visits to Zdiar, Stara Lubovna, or Lendak helped us
embarked on a quest of (self) discovery as we focused on the life and
times of village traditions. Hours of audiotaping biographical extracts
became fruitful sources of knowledge for our young learning minds. We
used to sit on the sidewalk opposite the post office in Zdiar with a
pencil and paper in our hands while Chamillova urged us to describe the
wrinkly horse shoe at that sidewalk, also the wooden fences around the
old challets, or the doorway where Janosik used to walk through.

My first painting classes began not in 1960s, but with Juraj Janosik
and Golem in the16th century. My Mamka liked Juraj Janosik. Looking
back on it, that is probably where it all began. The folksy smile,
rancher's heckerchief and plaid shirts on a tall man standing next to a
large horse on her old school project was all I needed to know about
Slavic country music and dancing. Before I could even spell 'Juraj' I
had Juraj in my mind.

Like socialism, Christianity or freedom of speech, folk stories about
Janosik mean different things to different people and even different
things to the same person in the course of one conversation.

Hungarians destroyed Slovaks without mercy like someone who steps upon
a painting, forgets it, then sees the footstep of fresh paint and
tramps upon it a second time. Being Slovak in 16th century was so awful
that even being Jewish was better. Slovak bitterness was fired by being
excluded from schools, land ownership and work for government.

"We don't let Slovak here."

Even while he was alive, Juraj Janosik was perceived by many as a kind
of saint. Since his death, he had been further mythologised. Slovak
slaves needed someone they could unreservedly admire, to express in
Slavic idiom that jaunty pride and hope that has been the hallmark of
the invaded nation where a Hungarian lash (of up to 700) was freely
used. His saint-robber career beg