On the margin of Trnava, in a great modern building that cannot be missed by any perceptive observer, people who started their own business are invested with a superhuman power.

They do not depend on anybody, but are their own masters. A cozy little coffee-house. A spellbound florist. And on the top floor towers a cosmetician salon. This is where Slávka Gajarská reigns.

Gajarská, 34, has a well-kept face that seems permanently graced with a sincere smile. She says she fully appreciates how important a role her customers play in her business. No one can miss how much she cares for her “sheep.”

After huge disappointment in her private life, work represents everything to her. She is always prepared to help everybody with their worries and troubles. “My salon is not only a room,” she says. “It denotes a people who come here regularly. Thanks to them, I live.”

Gajarská was born in the small town of Stará Ľubovňa, on the eastern part of Slovakia. Not long after, her family moved to Skalica. She completed studies that specialized in economy of trade and services in Bratislava, because her parents were convinced the schools in the capital were better, and that it would be a suitable subject for their daughter. From that grew an interest in cosmetics.

Gajarská left her home and got married in Trnava at age 17. She then spent what she describes as 15 long, miserable years in this marriage. Despite efforts to cut herself from her husband, the divorce dragged on for about five years.

“The simple cause of this unpleasant situation was my three children, and the unyielding attitude of my ex-husband, who wanted to get the children at all costs,” she says.

To protect her children – Janko, 16; Klaudia, 14; and Elizabeth, 12 – she says that “for the sake of them, the divorce lasted so long and took all my strength.”

Despite the struggles in her personal life, Gajarská has become a successful businesswoman. She runs the salon herself. Her customer and friend, Eva Kováčová, says Gajarská was inspired by insults from her ex-husband, who called her “terribly useless” and unable to “smarten up.”

“Everything she possesses and has achieved, she managed only with her own two hands,” says Kováčová. “The husband’s words hurt her seriously, so since then she’s been thinking how to prove him wrong. Nonetheless, the more important thing was to prove it to herself.”

Adds her friend, Nikola Jergušová, “She fought on. Step by step, in the times she still lived with us, she became an advisor and a consultant in cosmetics companies Oriflame and Avon. This world enchanted her. She learned more and more, and I am really proud of what she managed, because as long as I remember, she never worked before at all.”

After the unsuccessful marriage and lost battle for her children, she ended up alone and without any support. She does not want to speak, though, about why the court awarded her children to her ex-husband, or why her husband does not allow her children to see their mother – even though they live in the same town.

“We have no right to snoop in her private life, especially when she is not able to tell us,” says her friend, Michaela Bernerová.

Since 2003, when she begun to work this field here in Trnava, the first customers crop up and they required increasingly more services. Therefore, she entered several in-service trainings and persistently trained. Encouraged by reaching the first success stepwise, she began to be interested also in hair cosmetics, skin cosmetics, manicure, pedicure or massages. “I suppose it was a great positive movement in her life and this field surely brought new purpose to her life,” says Bernerová.

Gradually, more and more satisfied customers left her salon and a whisper about the skillful cosmetician and hairstylist floated through Trnava. “I can clearly remember those encouraging moments, when more and more clients came and wanted me to advise same ointment or recommend any type of cure,” recalls Gajarská. “It was really cheering and heart-warming.”

Bernerová says that Gajarská never complains, despite working seven days a week. “She always keeps smiling,” she observes. “She firmly pursues her aims and keeps a tight grip on her dreams. In the beginnings she had to face to many bureaucratic problems joined with opening the salon and she also felt disappointed, because she could not get in touch with her kids.”

After the unfortunate personal events, work became the most important thing in her life. “I can recall the times when she started here,” says a florist from the nearby shop, Linda Krajčíková. “She worked from sun to sun, because she tried to forget her life tragedy and to fill a blank space in her life. She devotes to her occupation all her energies.”

According to Gajarská, only time will tell if she decides to start a new family. Nowadays, she lives with her new partner Peter, 50, who, as she told, seems be different from her ex and their relationship is much healthier. However, she says she still feels vulnerable. Thus, she puts her job first. She cannot put her children first, because they were forced apart from her.

Gajarská has found a new family in her clientèle, whom she now considers close friends. “We form a provisional great family, which tries to help each other, in spite of the members are varied and diverse and come from different parts of Slovakia,” she says. “What’s important is only the facts: we are able to lend our ears one another and to solve our problems communally.”

What is Gajarská’s greatest dream? “I would like to own a grand beauty salon, where me and my colleagues could care for our customers ‘from head to toe.’ It would be a great house for women with cosmetics, hairdresser, visage consulting, dress rental, and so on,” she says.

“After such disappointments in the private life, fortune has at least smiled on her professional life,” says Krajčíková. “Possibly, one day she’ll find family luck and I’ll cross my fingers for her.”

Gajarská, with her charming smile, can only add, “What the future brings, it’s written in the stars.”