Eva and Thomas are happily married, childless, 30-something professionals. They speak five languages between them, have all the freedom they need and are qualified for jobs they love.
But in a poignant moment that sums up the general condition 10 years after revolution, Eva gestures wistfully towards Martina, a 23-year-old student: "Things will be different for her."
Of course there are success stories in the post-Communist east, but optimism, in the main, is the preserve of the very young. For Eva, the collapse of the old regime seems to have come a few years too late.
Old certainties have vanished and old terrors are making a come-back, and still Eva knows she can never leave. "Our education was different, my thinking is different. I cannot imagine going somewhere else without security. It is our special conditioning - something we have taken from the communists."
Thomas and Eva are teachers who cherish the new freedoms.
Thomas's grandfather died in the gas chambers. They still recall the thrill of 1989, of finding books in the shops they once hid at home, but the new society appals them. For them, the post-1989 government of Vladimir Meciar, ousted only last year, was as threatening as communism ever was. "He was not a democrat," says Eva, "and it was he who oversaw the split in the Czech-Slovak federation. The people were not consulted." Isolationist, populist and not overly concerned with the law, the legacy of Meciarism still bites.
From the start, Meciar fed the "new/old illusions" sharply summarised by Slovak actor/playwright Milan Lasica, in the week ly Domino Forum: "Slovakia will turn into another Switzerland, we don't need foreigners. We won't give up what's ours, we will lead ourselves, in six months we'll be ahead of Austria; we need sovereignty, independence, grandiose plans, we've got what it takes."
A crude nationalism fed the ongoing racist and brutal skinhead attacks on foreigners and Romanies. Though anti-Jewish graffiti and the wearing of racist insignia is common, the public perception is of a blunt unwillingness to tackle it at official level.
In a 1996 court case involving an attack on a young Romany by a Slovak skinhead, the judge ruled that the attack could not be racially motivated, as both the assailant and the victim "are part of the same (Indo-European) race".
Deeply suspicious of academics, Meciar oversaw the degradation of the education system and the humiliation of teachers, which - in a society fast learning to judge people by the money they earn - left them among the lowest paid of state employees.
Eva, who teaches at a university institute gets 8,000 crowns gross (about £160) a month, 3,000 crowns (about £60) below the average industrial wage. A state-employed receptionist gets 12,000 crowns (about £240). Not surprisingly, strikes are in the offing.
It was Meciar, too, who oversaw the privatisation orgy which in its shameless corruption and cronyism may have soured Slovaks on privatisation for good.
A recent article in the Slovak Spectator, a feisty English-language weekly, showed how government politicians had sold valuable state companies to friends at risible prices.
"During the 1994 to 1998 reign of the third Meciar government, for example, the state received only 28.15 per cent of the value of the companies it privatised, cheating the public purse of over 80 billion crowns (over $2 billion at the time)."
A policy of allowing just a select group of domestic businessmen to privatise state properties has meant that in 10 years, only 1.5 per cent of direct foreign investment in the region has come to Slovakia. Hungary by comparison, got 25 per cent.
Worse, the privatisers, far from sweating to build the companies to meet competition, simply tunnelled assets into holding companies they owned and focused on building flashy homes in Bratislava's smarter suburbs.
A former MP and founding father of Meciar's HZDS party, Vlastimil Vicen, is a prime example. Vicen was the force behind one of the first privatisation sales, the Novofrukt fruit cannery, then valued at between 370 and 400 million Slovak crowns (about £18.5-£20 million).
Vicen claims that, through his wife, he paid 80 million crowns (about £4 million) for the company. MESA 10, an economic think-tank, believes the sum was 20 million crowns (about £1 million).
In either event, Vicen is unmoved. "I think that everybody in any government would take advantage of such business possibilities - it's completely natural, it's a human weakness," he told the Spectator. "There was no deceit involved at all."
Meanwhile, for Martina's father, who works in a fast-collapsing crane factory, there is often no pay packet at the end of the month.
While some factory managers run themselves ragged trying to raise standards and productivity, some of the more "entrepreneurial" types have set up their own little factories, hiving off contract work for personal profit, leaving the main factory starved of work.
The banks are in probably the worst state in the region, with 30 per cent of their lending down to bad debts and requiring some $2 billion to tackle the problem.
As a result, fledgling business is stunted - a sector which also has to compete with large-scale organised racketeering. To compound the misery, the country's Bohunice nuclear power station recently featured in Newsweek magazine as one of the six most dangerous plants in and around Europe.
Despondency is widespread. In a year, the price of gas has doubled, rents have doubled, milk has soared from 11 crowns (about 20p) to 20 crowns (36p) but wages have remained static.
Housing is in crisis and the health system so underfunded that patients needing operations may part with up to 10,000 crowns (about £200) to the doctor "to be sure of a good outcome", in the words of one young woman. Unemployment is at 19 per cent, up nearly 4 per cent on last year.
A third of those are 15 to 24-year-olds, with industrial and building workers in the south-east suffering most grievously.
In Bratislava city, on the other hand, many people work two jobs to make ends meet and unemployment benefit - an unheard of entity in the old days, when unemployment officially didn't exist - has become a hot topic, a system seen to be "rewarding" the lazy.
The legacy of communism, with its jobs for everyone, however phoney, has left a workforce expecting jobs to be found for them, says one official. "They think a job will march into their kitchen and say `here I am'." A recent trade union demand that university graduates be guaranteed their first jobs suggests that the concept of a market economy is still elusive for some.
Short memories abound.
A 1997 poll showing that 85 per cent of all Slovaks were "discontented" with Meciar's privatisation policies has been turned on its head.
Recent polls suggest that Meciar's party is once again the most popular party in Slovakia and that the five-party coalition government of Mikulas Dzurinda, in power just a year, has left 82 per cent of the public either "very" or "somewhat" disappointed.
But some have also drawn enormous solace from the European Commission report in October, which recommended that the 15 EU members invite Slovakia to open entry negotiation talks.
The report heaped praise on the "democratic developments" since last year's elections and judged that the country was now "close" to having a market economy.
For Thomas and Eva, the EU is the answer. "The West didn't help us in 1939. It didn't help us after the war, and it didn't help us in 1968. This is how it can help us now. After all, we are in Europe."