Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

Zongora puts his hand on her crotch from behind.

“I said no!” Sida gets angry.

“Why not?” Zongora insists in low voice. “We’ll do it once more and then I’ll go.”

“No,” says Sida. “We’re doing cum shots today and if you come now, you’ll be dry on location. Freddy will fire you. Is that what you want? What kind of a pro are you?”

Zongora pulls back. He can’t argue with that. If he came now, his ejaculations would have less power and range in front of the camera, and his dream career of a porn star would be over.

“The production team will be up soon,” Sida reminds Zongora. “Better clear off to your room. If they find out you were here, you’re finished in this business. Make do with what you’ve got, and do as I say.”

Sida utters the last sentence in a conciliatory voice, and as a sign of her favour she massages Zongora’s erect and eager penis a few times. Zongora sighs, puts on his dressing-gown and carefully opens the door, checking the corridor. Then he slips into his room like a snake.

As soon as he falls asleep, the phone wakes him up.

“Good morning, this is reception,” he hears. “You asked to be called at half past five?”

“Yes,” says a sleepy Zongora.

“Well, get a move on,” says the voice briskly, “it’s six twenty.”

Shooting starts at seven, so that the rooms can be tidied and opened for tourists. No tourist will suspect, from looking at the mediæval torture chamber, what kind of scenes were shot there just a few hours ago.

If Zongora wants to make it, he only has less than an hour to wash and have breakfast.

He puts on a tee shirt. He looks at himself in a foxed mirror hung on the inside of the wardrobe door. He flexes his biceps and smiles with satisfaction: the build-up of muscle mass continues as before. He locks his door and goes down to the dining room.

It’s a typical socialist-era hotel dining room with a thick, worn carpet, yellowed tablecloths and an omnipresent smell of kitchen, beer, stale cigarette smoke and mould.

Zongora takes a plate and serves himself from the buffet: cheese, butter, eggs, and rolls. Then he joins the two actresses with whom he is going to shoot today. They’re drinking tea. His ten hard-boiled eggs on a plate make them giggle.

“How’s it going, girls,” Zongora asks jocularly. “All had a bath?”

The porn stars give him a haughty look.

“What is it?” Zongora asks. “Not hungry?”

The girls curl their lips. Zongora decides that they’re still young and inexperienced chicks. Compared to them, he’s an old porn pro.

“At least have a yoghurt,” he suggests.

“Are you mad?” one of them says. “We’re shooting anal today… you think I want to shit on location?”

“Okay then,” Zongora shrugs. “I’ll give you a food supplement. You just have to be good at catching. Ha, ha, ha!”

He throws a radish in the air and instantly catches it with his mouth.

The girls finish their tea and, grimacing with scorn, leave the table.

The director appears in the dining room. He’s a stocky greying forty-something, whose teeth shine white against the beard he’s dyed charcoal black. He joins Zongora. He looks tired, but perhaps only to emphasize his boredom with routine.

“Good morning,” he says and smiles when he sees what Zongora is eating. “So, today we shoot scenes eight and ten. Read the script?”

“Of course,” mumbles Zongora.

“So you know what to do,” says the director. “It’s the interrogation and torture scene.”

The director looks into the papers he’s holding.

“The action takes place in the gloomy atmosphere of a mediæval torture chamber,” he reads. “Siedah has assistants: they are beautiful, but terribly cruel. Their role is to find out if the young man is really in league with the devil. They find out by exciting him sexually in different ways. The man being interrogated is a magician, which he proves with his conspicuously developed sexual organ and expressive virility…”

The director sighs. “When I think that my graduation film at the Film Academy was an adaptation of Kafka!”

Zongora is unimpressed. He has no idea what kafka is. He is stuffing his face with hardboiled eggs, certain that they’ll increase his potency.

“Look, let’s not complicate things,” the director suggests. “We’ll shoot it in two or three hours, and we’re done. Let’s switch scenes. First we do the anal, and then the cum shot.”

Zongora shrugs.

“I don’t care,” he says with his mouth full.

“Well,” the director laughs. “You should. I’d like to know how you’d get it up to do an anal after a cum shot.”

“Any time,” says Zongora with confidence. “Any time.”

The film location in the castle torture chamber is suggestively lit. Sida is with the make-up girl. She has dark shadows and demonic lines painted round her eyes. Then the make-up artist uses darker tints to add colour to the nipple aureoles.

Sida’s helpers are already made up. They’ve withdrawn into a corner, warming each other up anally by using a vibrator lubricated with lotion, to make the sphincter muscles stretch well for the camera. It saves the girls pain and Zongora, alias Luigi Longo, and the director time.

“Oh, well,” sighs Luigi and starts to change into a leather harness. “Another working day ahead of us!”

* * *

Kubeš shouts and then jerks his body on the bed, listening for a while. There is no ripple of the sea, no sound of the engines a few metal decks below, and no humming of air conditioning.

The girl next to him wakes up.

Outside the window it’s early morning and the cars on Palacký Bridge rush one after the other, pooling their efforts to create once again a typical Prague morning rush-hour traffic jam.

“What’s happened?” she asks sleepily.

“I dreamt I was back at the sea,” says Kubeš.

He gets up and opens the window.

“You and your sea,” says the girl, as if she resented his not dreaming about her.

“Our boat fished out a container,” says Kubeš, closes the window and climbs back under the covers. “There was a bad spirit, demon, or something. He took over the whole crew. Only strong people could resist him.”

“Could you?” asked the girl.

“Yes,” says Kubeš. “He followed me into the street, we were in port by then, but I managed to get away from him.”

“Are you a strong person?” the girl asked.

“I suppose so,” says Kubeš.

The girl cuddles up to him.

“But it does eff-all for me now,” says Kubeš.

“What is it you don’t like?” the girl wonders. “This way we can be together every day.”

“When I applied to Naval Academy,” says Kubeš, “I thought I had an unusual, exciting life ahead of me. I really enjoyed it. Now, less than five years later, it’s all up the spout. They abolished the Czech merchant navy and sold the ships. And now I have a thrilling life, working a sightseeing boat. And I should be glad I got the chance to do that. What bloody luck!”

“But it can be quite nice to take tourists on the Vltava,” retorts the girl. “And you’re home every evening.”

“It’s awfully nice,” says Kubeš. “Always the same thing, always the same itinerary. I’m tied to Prague on a chain, like a dog to its kennel.”

“Don’t give me that,” says the girl. “I know you love Prague. After all, you seduced me with your talk about Magic Prague, Mysterious Prague.”

“Well, Prague is beautiful,” Kubeš admits. “But not when you have to sail round Kampa and Charles Bridge again and again, carrying five loads of Krauts a day. Sometimes I feel like pissing on those smart tourists and sailing, just like that, down the Vltava and Elbe to the sea. I love the sea.”