Vit Babenco's Reviews > Proleterka

A bitterly disenchanted in life woman recalls her distant past… Soon after the war an adolescent girl and her old estranged father take a sea voyage on the charted ship Proleterka…

Father and daughter stand before the ship. She looks like a naval vessel. The red star glitters on the funnel. I look immediately at the lettering Proleterka. Blackened, patches of rust, forgotten. Sovereign lettering. The dusk is falling. The ship is large, she hides the sun that is about to sink into the water. She is darkness, pitch, and mystery. A privateer built like a fortress, she has survived stormy weather and shipwreck. We go up the gangplank. The officers are waiting for us. We are the last.

During the cruise, the sad and unhappy girl contemplates her earlier childhood… Her runaway and indifferent mother… Her solitude… Her despondent and empty days in her grandmother’s house…

Before leaving, I had thought that the destination was unimportant to me. The journey to Greece was a part of my education. It is our first voyage and it looks like the last. Johannes, improbably, is a stranger to me. My father. No intimacy. But a bond that precedes our existences. Acquaintances amid complete extraneousness.

There is a secret life on the ship and the girl partakes in this clandestine activity…

She feels pleasure in the disgust. I don’t like it, I don’t like it, she thinks. Yet she does it all the same. She no longer has much time. The Proleterka is the locus of experience. By the time the voyage is over, she must know everything.

On being unhappy, one tends to assign unhappiness to the entire world.