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I wrote this book when I was seventeen, shortly after the communists caught me crossing the Czech-Austrian border, trying to get away from behind the proverbial Iron Curtain. At the time, there was no War on Terror, and even if there had been, I probably would not have known about it¿ I was just a child ¿ eager to experience Zephyr¿s unbounded joy, singing my own Ode, wondering at daff odils¿ though puzzled not by the characters on a Grecian urn but by the rigid, stale, and spineless ¿character¿ of those alive, those around me. It is not human hands that build walls, but human mind ¿ I concluded then, and wrote this book: a brief story about the end of the world. It came to me in a fl ash while I was sitting on a cold stone slab in a communist prison cell. After a strip-down body-cavity search, several hours of interrogation, staring into the muzzles of two shotguns pointing at me from each corner of a cold room, spotlight in my face¿ it felt like the world had pretty much ended for me. What a disaster ¿ I could have represented ¿my¿ country in the Olympics! ¿Is this how you pay back to your generous motherland for giving you the privilege of the highest degree? ¿ the privilege of being among the few selected, best sportsmen and women of this country, to enjoy the perks and privileges that working-class people have to work hard every day to earn? ¿ to earn for you? ¿ you live on their backs! ¿ and what? ¿ is this your ¿thank yoü?!¿ the Chief of Bratislava Secret Police spoke to me in a heavy tone in his offi ce. I can still see myself staring out of the window, trying to look into the man¿s eyes ¿ they were dark, full, flaring eyes, unpredictable Turkish eyes¿ and I was but a helpless beetle, one of Kafkäs caricatures, waiting to be squashed¿
Still, I believe, the topic of this book ¿ a small boy who is the only person alive (or so he thinks) who survived a nuclear catastrophe, travelling through the desert of human civilization, desperately trying to cross the mountains to reach the ocean¿ is a solid allegory, which stands on firmer ground than would a simple biblical re-creation.
