Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

The girl is silent. Maybe she’d prefer Kubeš to express as much passion for her, but he doesn’t. She loves him, yet she isn’t quite sure if the reverse is true. She likes being with him and doesn’t want to lose him.

“Isn’t it because you had a girl in each port?” she asks coquettishly.

“Oh yes, the ports,” smiles Kubeš. “Valparaiso, Rio de Janeiro, Aden, yes. But I was too stupid to appreciate it. Sometimes when we got to a port I’d even volunteer for on-board duty and didn’t even go ashore.

“Valparaiso, Rio,” sighs the girl. “I know them only from geography lessons. I might like to visit them some day, too.”

“Most of the time we had only the sea around us,” says Kubeš. “We were always staring at water. The biggest thrill was passing another ship.”

“So, actually, it must have been pretty boring,” says the girl. “You really don’t know even now if you liked it or not. That’s why you booze.”

“I don’t,” says Kubeš. “A few beers after work aren’t worth mentioning. I bump into my mates on the river all day long, we honk at each other, and we pass each other, all of us skippering boats loaded with Krauts. And it all happens under the shitty, tacky panorama of Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge. So we have to get together in the evening and have a chat, don’t we? I sailed with Honza Libáň on the Banská Bystrica . And I hear that crooked bugger Viktor Kožený’s sold the ship to the Chinese. But you can’t say there’s any heavy boozing.”

“Every day you smell like a beer barrel. And yesterday, too, you came home pissed.”

“Well, we were celebrating,” admits Kubeš. “It’s been three years since we were laid off by the Czech merchant navy. Some blokes are even worse off than me. And that says something.”

“Look here,” the girl says angrily. “Why are you always complaining? Have you got a job? You have. Are you on a boat? You are. You’re even a captain. So why do you complain all the time?”

“A boat!” Kubeš laughs sarcastically. “A boat? Calling Mayor Pfitzner a boat is like calling a pontoon a cruiser!”

“It’s all the same to me,” says the girl. “They are all boats as far as I’m concerned. In fact, I’ve seen a real boat only in a film. Titanic .”

“Well, that was a ship,” says Kubeš. “A real ship, but a stupid film.”

“I happened to like it,” says the girl. “Look, have you ever been drowning? I mean, when a ship sinks?”

“No,” says Kubeš. “But once it came very close.”

He swallows several times in the dry air.

“And what did you do when you were at sea so long?” the girl asks.

“Always the same,” says Kubeš. “We looked after the ship, the cargo, the engines. We fixed problems. There’s always something broken on a ship. I was in charge of navigation.”

“What’s that?”

“Ensuring the ship goes in the right direction. I was navigating officer.”

“And in your free time?”

“There wasn’t much of that. We watched videos, read, played games. I had my computer, so I played computer games: Wolf, Doom, and so on.”

“And what about sex?” the girl asks. “Did you masturbate a lot?”

“Sometimes,” Kubeš admits.

“What do you mean by sometimes?”

“Well, once every three or four days,” Kubeš says.

“And what did you think about when you did it?” the girl asks.

“Different things,” Kubeš says. “I imagined I was sleeping with the girls I saw in porn magazines I browsed.”

“And did you imagine real girls, too?” asked the girl. “I mean someone you knew?”

“I did,” Kubeš says. “Yes, of course.”

“And since we’ve met, have you thought of me, too?” asks the girl with silent hope in her voice.

“Well, of course,” says Kubeš and kisses her. “In my imagination I did things with you that you’ll never find out about.”

“Go on, tell me,” says the girl. “Just for once, tell me, to see if I could handle it.”

“Why should I?” Kubeš smiles.

“Go on, tell me,” says the girl. “You tell me and then I‘ll tell you if you could do it to me for real.”

Well, here we can leave Captain Kubeš and his girlfriend to my dear readers’ imagination. We now know, roughly, that Kubeš was a Czech merchant navy officer, and after its demise and the sell-off of the entire fleet, he returned to Prague where he had a number of jobs before he found work with a private company running sightseeing cruises along the Vltava in Prague and its immediate vicinity. After a few hard months selling tickets and working as a deck hand, he finally became captain of the sightseeing boat Mayor Pfitzner , and his existence seems secure. That is, as long as crowds of tourists keep flooding Prague.

* * *

Cousin Tina is awoken by the sound of Urban’s car. While Urban unlocks the gate, cousin Tina dabs perfume on her temples, neck and décolleté.

Tina moved to Prague from Slovakia with her parents when she was still a child. The father was a diplomat. At least, so Tina thought until the magazine Reflex published a short table of the Secret Police command structure. Her father was quite a bigwig there. By now, Tina was an independent fashion designer, trying, with a fellow student of the College of Applied Arts, to get into business under the new conditions after the Velvet Revolution.

Her first husband was an administrator of the Pragokoncert, a real swine. He stole whenever he could and took bribes. After the revolution he was kicked out, and never got over it. He constantly drank, his breath stank of beer, and he was extremely stingy. He started beating her and once he almost drowned her in the bathtub, when she was having a bath. Since then cousin Tina has only used the shower. She can’t recall if she ever loved him.

She admits that she too has changed a lot. “Before the revolution I must have been a screwed up little twat,” she once told Urban. “I can’t understand how I could have liked the things I used to like. And the people? Don’t even ask!”

Her first husband left her with a spoiled brat of a daughter whom she locked up at the onset of puberty in a luxurious boarding school in Switzerland. Luckily, she has the money to afford it; unfortunately, she has no choice: her work tempo and lifestyle really threatened to let her daughter end up a slut. At least she can use her money to bring her up.

After her divorce, cousin Tina was at first really on the rocks. She rented a modest room in the south of the city and knitted avant-garde sweaters. She offered them to people she knew in art galleries. Oddly enough, cousin Tina’s production sold well, and soon she bought a knitting machine and increased output. Then she joined a former fellow-student from college, started a limited company and hired first two, then four knitters. She and her friend failed to get on, and went their separate ways. Determined to go into business on her own in future, she set up a new limited company. She gradually moved her firm and herself closer to the centre. Once she was in the Vinohrady quarter and could see Wenceslas Square in the distance, she realised that she’d won. To celebrate her success, she remarried. Her second husband was a friend, a successful theatre director. The marriage lasted less than a year. As a pretext for divorce, Tina named her husband’s uncontrollable predilection for alcohol and women. Since the marriage was childless, the court gave them an instant divorce.

Cousin Tina made up for failure in private life by professional success. After Vinohrady, she might have moved to the city centre. Surprisingly, she rejected the centre, even though she was offered a superb location in Rytířská Street. Instead, she bought spacious basement rooms in Letná, near the Hotel Belveder, and equipped her permanent workshop there.