Uršuľa Kovalyk – Mrs. Agnes's Bathroom

When the Iron Curtain fell, the people of Slovak (Czechoslovakia) thought they were finally able to live their own lives, that their fate and destiny had returned to their hands. They could succeed or fail on their own merits. To that end, Czech and Slovak Prime Ministers Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar negotiated the dissolution of the Federation, and Slovakia was born. Uršuľa Kovalyk's short story, Mrs. Agnes's Bathroom, shows in allegorical form the transformation of the Slovak's from oppressed to free by way of the Mickievičs, a bland, conservative, ordinary couple.

Agnes Mickievičová, and her husband, “Mr. Mickievič”, have, in their middle-age, lived an utterly ordinary existence. They permit no frivolity in their house, and refuse to retain any possession that does not provide a use for the household. They have no children – too noisy – and no pets – too dirty. And no love, though that doesn't matter much either. They have had their natural human emotions and ambitions so thoroughly oppressed that they hardly seem to realise something is missing:

Her life was like the lives of many other women of her age, women who had lived out their youth in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, woman whose best years had been eaten away standing in line for bananas. No high points or low points, no passion, no direction, no emotional scenes or love affairs. It was all the unending knitting of shawls for winter, the everyday washing of dishes and taking out the garbage.

And:

...it never occurred to the Mickievičs to buy something just to please the eye. There were no pictures in the Mickievičs' apartment, no rugs, statues, or flowers.

Kovalyk at one stage refers to them as a “couple of extinct animals”, implying that the Slovaks, through the Mickievičs, had reached an evolutionary terminal point, that their culture had become severed from its history and itself and, like any appendage forcibly removed from its possessor, could now only die.

But then, one night, after another ordinary meal and another ordinary day, Mrs. Mickievičová notices, after her husband has gone to bed, that there is a light on in the bathroom. She is irritated with him, though only mildly – doesn't he know to turn the light off? Of course he does. Old age, then, creeping up on us all. Mrs. Mickievičová gets up to turn the light off:

...her peek into the bathroom's interior absolutely shocked her. The shiny white tiles, the sink, the bath, and the translucent curtain had all vanished, replaced by a rich, green, virgin forest – trees, liana, and lush, wet leaves from a sort of foreign plant that she had seen once in some encyclopedia.

Slam that door shut! Her bathroom, transformed into a forest? Impossible. But there it is, clear as day. Mrs. Mickievičová can't make heads nor tails of it. Nonetheless she keeps this secret to herself, considering perhaps that old age was affecting her, too. The next morning the bathroom is normal, just as it has always been. She does not tell her husband.

Over the next few months, the bathroom occasionally becomes a forest. She never tells her husband, instead electing to spend more and more of her time wandering the lush vegetation. There's something about this place that appeals to her, a sense of potential for another life that stirs feelings she didn't even know were capable of existing in her heart.

Mrs. Mickievičová was no longer Mrs. Mickievičová. She had become Agnes who roamed in the virgin forest and even though her body carried out the bare minimum of automatic movements necessary to respond to Mr. Mickievič's usual requests, a silent film was always playing in her eyes, and it was as though the virgin forest was now growing directly out of her head.

Kovalyk uses Mrs. Mickievičová's name to great effect in telling her story. In the beginning, she is part of the Mickievičs, which is to say, she shares her identity with her husband, and is indeed submerged by the marriage. Over the next eight pages or so, she is referred to as Mrs. Mickievičová, and then finally Agnes. Kovalyk shows us the increased sense of identity our protagonist feels, and through her, we witness the rebirth of the Slovak identity.

Mrs. Agnes's Bathroom is a clever story, but it is sad in its own way. The husband represents the old Slovak, the ones who can't change to meet the challenges of the new nation. For people like Agnes, there's nothing she can do but abandon him – she has moved so far beyond what he can understand that he can hardly see her. Agnes, by contrast, is free for the first time in her life, and the feeling is overwhelming, frightening and exhilarating at the same time. Who could have possibly known there was more to life than wake, eat, knit, sleep? Agnes didn't, but now she does - and now she's gone.

See Also

Other stories from the The Review of Contemporary Fiction Vol. XXX, #2 Slovak Fiction issue include:
---Hochel, Braňo - My Best Story
---Johanides, Ján - Berlin in the Afternoon, at a Quarter to Winter
---Juráňová, Jana - Clips
---Karvaš, Peter - Xerox of a Document about One Half of (the Art of) Life
---Kompaníková, Monika - Slávko
---Rankov, Pavol - The Period in Which We Live
---Šimko, Dušan - Excursion to Dubrovnik

Also of interest:
---Other titles under review from The Dalkey Archive Press
---Index of short stories under review