My mother’s sister, teta Gabi, was an elementary school teacher in Výčapky, and her husband, strýc Štefan, was the principal of the school. Their children were Peter and Danka. The family lived in the same building as the school.

Výčapky was a very small village. There were a lot of fields and only a few houses and farms, and I do not remember any store there.

Jana and I stayed there a number of times. I remember it mostly in the summer or around the summer, but some of the stays went into the school year, since I remember going to school there. I think we stayed there because my mother needed us away from her for a while — maybe when she was going to visit my father in prison, or when she was sick, or when she was simply too busy. That is what I think now. I do not know the reason for any particular stay. I do not remember where we slept in that building.

We went to the school downstairs, and teta Gabi treated us exactly like the other children in the class. We got nothing special from her. Outside of school she was just our aunt again. In the same building there was also a room set up like a small theater, with costumes and some furniture and props for a stage, and we used them and made our own performances.

Peter was about two years older than I was. He was the cousin closest to my age, and probably my favorite cousin. I had a lot of fun with him. He owned an accordion and he was an excellent player, and when he was not around I liked to take it and play around with it myself.

Peter taught me to ride a bicycle. There was no bicycle for a child, so I learned on a full-size man’s bicycle, and since I was too small to pedal it the normal way I rode with one leg underneath the top bar. He also took me to church on that bicycle. The church was in Šurianky, about a mile away, and I rode sometimes on the handlebars and sometimes on the top bar. He taught me the silly bet that I used years later on the bakers in Tvrdošín to get ten crowns out of them.

Every evening the two of us went from the school to a farm to get fresh milk. There was a woman there who liked to tease us and tried to scare us, and I do not remember any more how she did it. Peter was never afraid of her. One night he took me to a neighbor’s house and put a pin, or a small nail, into the window frame. He tied a string to it and we hid, and by making the string vibrate he made a mysterious noise at the window. The neighbor never figured out what it was.

Across the street from the school there was a farm, and on the second floor of it there was some kind of grinding equipment or machinery with gears. I do not remember exactly what it was. I had a Cikán boy about my own age who I used to play with, and he took me up to that machinery and told me to put my finger in between the gears, and I did it. He turned the wheel and my finger was crushed between them. I screamed and cried, and he turned the wheel back and got it out, and I ran home.

Štefan came out and caught the boy and punished him right there in front of the house. He pulled the boy’s pants down and whipped his bare bottom with his belt.

I did not go to a doctor. The whole fingernail came off and the finger was blue for a while, but it healed and there was no permanent damage.

The backyard had a lot of fruit trees in it and Peter and I climbed them. Peter had an air rifle, a BB gun, and we shot it in the backyard. One time he shot in the direction of the Cikán boy who had crushed my finger. I do not think he hit him. He was not trying to injure him, and no grown-ups ever knew about it.

Peter also had a device that he either found or built, and I do not remember which. It was a heavy round piece of metal with a hole drilled into one end, with a string attached to it, and at the other end there was a large metal screw that was the right size to fit into the hole. We scraped the material off match heads and packed it into the hole, and Peter put the screw in and swung the thing so that the screw hit hard, and it went off with a very loud bang. We did that many times. When we were older, Peter gave the device to me.

Štefan was strict, but he was nice. The attic of the building was open under the eaves and a lot of pigeons lived up there, and on special occasions I went up with him and he caught some of the young ones, and we ate them for dinner. I remember pigeon as very tasty. I also loved a dish called tekvica. Peter hated it because they fed tekvica to their pig.

While the family was still living at the school, Štefan started building a house for himself on the outskirts, not far away. Peter did a lot of the heavy work on it, the well and mixing cement and that kind of thing, and sometimes Janko came from Radošina and worked on it too. I was too young and too weak for that work. Sometimes Štefan took Peter out at night with a cart to get building material, and my understanding was that they were basically stealing it from the government.

Danka is the only one of those cousins still living, and I visit her when I go back. In 2025 I stayed two days in the house that Štefan built. It has changed a lot and has running water and modern appliances now, and Danka’s daughter Renata and her husband live there and have built separate quarters for Danka.

The village had a post office, and as far as I remember it was the only place that had a telephone. There was a machine there too. I was inside many times and I remember it — it looked to me like the telegraph equipment I saw later in Western movies, and it made that same clicking sound. I remember the telegrams on long narrow strips of paper.

Once in a while a man came with a drum to the area right in front of the post office. He beat the drum to call people out, and people came out and he read out the news and the official announcements. He did not walk around the village doing it; he did it there. I do not remember how often he came. Maybe once a week, but I am not sure of that.

Peter and I were sent by ourselves to another village to have bread baked. The loaves were already made and shaped at home, and we wrapped them in cloth and put them in what we called a sitovka, a net bag, and carried them over to the bakery and left them there to be baked. Then we had to go back another time to pick up the baked bread. No grown-ups went with us.

Peter and I also traveled between Výčapky and Radošina by ourselves, by train. From Výčapky it was a long walk to the railway stop at Malé Zálužie, and from there we took the line we called the Radošinka. Radošina was the end of the line, and the train stopped very close to teta Manci and strýc Lóňa’s house.