My Life

Ostrava

I was not happy in Opava either, but I started to like playing piano and cello. Eventhough it wasn’t what I felt like doing, I had to start the studies at the Ostrava Conservatory, because it was an order from my mother and also my father’s wholehearted wish. I did not like it there at all. There I went downhill. I started to prefer friends who were much older than me and I got absolutely lost. I did not know where I belonged to or who I was. I had no idea what the hell was I doing there and why was I there. I was desperate.

Brno

My mother made yet another decision. This time we moved to Brno, because my father had to become even better. And so my father joined the Brno Radio Orchestra of Folk Instruments as a musician, later on as an arranger of Moravian, Slovak, Romanian, Hungarian and Roma folk music. I started to study at the Brno Conservatory. I used to run away from home. I was searching for – I did not know what. In Saliby, at my grandma’s I used to hide away and escape in the world of my dreams.

I gave birth to my son and for the first time I started to live and build up my own life. Tomáš’s father did not want me, but then suddenly he wanted to marry me. I did not love him, but I got married to him. I was glad to be away from home at last.

I finished off with music…

Then I rebelled and finished off with everything and took up theater instead. My father begged me to stick to music and go on playing, he was kneeling in front of me, tears running down his face, telling me that music is everything, that it is the language everybody will understand and that if I fulfilled his greatest dream, only then he could die peacefully.

But I finished off with music nevertheless.

The offer from “Theater on a String” saved me. I began to sing, play, create and draw from myself. I was happy. I got divorced and started to seek my own way. At a festival in Denmark I fell in love idly, I was only thinking it was love. I moved to Wales, where I went through the hardest times of my life. However, now I know that they were the most important years for my future life.

Wales

We had no money, I sold my piano, I sold my violoncello, I didn’t speak the language, I knew nobody there, the world was too big. Depression, reality, shock. I gave birth, this time to a girl, depression, confusion, love. I hated everything. Darkness… And in January there came a letter:

Dear Iduška, such is the way of life, children are born and come to this world and then they leave again. Your daddy died in November.

I could not even cry then.

I lived in a marriage, which had nothing to do with love. I was desperate. I gave birth to a daughter, and I knew that I could not stop believing in love and searching for it.

My father loved us all. He had a beautiful Roma heart. After he died I started to give concerts and teach Roma songs I remembered from childhood. Gypsy music was played in our home in Saliby, but I never learned to speak Romany language. Grandma and grandpa forbade my father and his brothers and sisters learn Romany language, because for them it represented something really ugly. I understood that my father’s blood was running through my veins so strongly, that by singing I can at least give back all the love he gave to me and pass on his legacy to other people too.