Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

* * *

The night was silent and still. The moon shone brightly. Old Todor-Lačný-Dolniak walked home from the men’s house. He was a bit high: the effect of the herbs and fungi had not quite worn off. He saw everything in weird colours and the trek made his mouth dry.

He stopped on the coast, near a viewing point. From the pocket of his fur coat he took a bottle and had a sip. He watched the ice field for a while. Beyond it was a dark ribbon of unfrozen sea. Over that ribbon was a dark sky.

On the other side, where the mountains rose up, the entire firmament was sown with clear stars. From time to time one of them fell with a swoosh and was immediately extinguished.

The old man took a pipe and tobacco from his inside pocket. He filled his pipe and lit it.

Lights began to play over the sky. The Sandy River that crossed the whole sky shone brightly. From zenith to polar star, long bands of light ranged, like walrus-leather ropes tied from yurt to yurt. Various shades of colour played on the sky, all burned and inflamed by ribbons of flame.

“The ancestors are having a big holiday. They’ve lit a lot of fires,” said the old man.

The heavenly fires did not last long, though. They went out and soon the moon, surrounded by radiant stars, shone in the sky. Small stars kept falling down. One of them whistled nearby, above old Todor. It flew by and went out somewhere in the south, in the tundra.

“It’s the ancestors throwing old lamps they don’t need any more out of the yurts,” said the old man.

The old man smoked; clouds of smoke rose to the freezing heavens.

Suddenly, out of the darkness, three figures ran out. One hit him on the head with a wooden pole, so that he lost consciousness.

When he came to, he was lying, almost frozen, in the snow. He tried to get up, but was so badly beaten that he could hardly move. He crawled with his last strength to the lower end of the settlement, to the yurts. He dragged one of his legs behind him. At the first yurt, he banged at the frozen skin at the entrance and again fell into unconsciousness.

When he came to for the second time, a neighbour, Sirovcová-Molnárová was nursing him. Her husband Frolo, the same age as Geľo, was looking on, giving the old man something to drink.

“Who did that to you?” asked Sirovec-Molnár, concerned.

“I don’t know,” the old man could barely speak. “There were three of them. I got the first,” he lied. “The other two got me.”

“Who’d want to do such a thing?” said Frolo, bewildered.

“Were they Junjans, perhaps?” asked Sirovec-Molnár’s father, a short one-eyed old man. He was sitting in the corner and, together with his old wife, enthusiastically chewing a skin.

“Keep out of it, father,” Sirovec-Molnár turned on him. “Just chew faster, or you’ll both go to bed with no supper.” Sirovec senior felt embarrassed in front of Todor-Lačný-Dolniak, since he knew that the latter still wielded power with a firm hand in his own clan.

“Stop it, son!” he retorted, offended.

Sirovec-Molnár paid him no more attention. In a firm voice, he gave orders to all the members of the clan:

“Andrej and Fraňo, go to the Todors quickly and tell them to fetch the old man. Matej can make a splint: it looks as if he’s broken his leg.”

From his bed of fur the old man watched. He felt odd, even though he had no pain. He was caught out by his own helplessness.

Geľo came straight back with Samo and Adam.

“What happened, father?” Geľo asked him. “Who attacked you?”

“It must have been Junjans,” said Samo.

“Did you see them?” asked Adam, avoiding his gaze.

“I did, but I couldn’t recognize them,” said old Todor-Lačný-Dolniak. “They had sun masks on. And they clubbed me to the ground.”

“You said you hit the first one and he fell,” said Sirovec-Molnár.

“Yes,” the old man agreed, and blushed. “I just hit him like this and he fell… the two of them carried him off and ran away.”

“Oh, you are strong!” Sirovec Molnár’s wife cried out in admiration and then suddenly fell silent.

“I’m sure it was Junjans,” said Samo. “They found Ötögögonn and Özgett and came to take revenge.”

“Whatever happened,” said Sirovec-Molnár, “If you hadn’t been gallivanting outside, to and fro, but stayed at home, in the warm, like all the other old people, you’d have come to no harm. What business is it of yours to go the men’s house at your age? You should have handed power over the clan to him, to Geľo.” Geľo lowered his eyes and blushed. Frolo Sirovec-Molnár spoke from the heart, but it still shocked him. The naked truth revealed seemed to pinpoint him as the perpetrator of the nasty act.

The old man was quiet. He drank moonshine and closed his eyes.

Carrying him to the Todor yurt raised howls of pain from the old man, no matter how careful his sons were.

In the yurt, a high bed made up with the softest of furs was waiting for him. The women cooked a pot of the tenderest reindeer meat.

“Will you have a drink, father?” Geľo asked.

The old man’s eyes were shut; he didn’t answer.

* * *

Nobody ever found out who had attacked old Todor-Lačný-Dolniak.

The old man got back on his legs, but now he could walk only with a stick. His back was slightly bent, his leg had healed crooked. He bore his fate stoically, even though he sometimes mumbled in his corner. He had an inkling who was guilty, but dared not shout out about it. He valued above all the food ration that he would otherwise have lost.

Public opinion in Habovka settlement was on the side of the Todor-Lačný-Dolniak brothers. No matter how the beating occurred, the old man should have handed the clan leadership to Geľo long ago.

As if naturally and by the whole settlement’s unanimous agreement, Geľo became head of his clan. A week after the old man’s beating, the Todor-Lačný-Dolniak brothers put on their best clothes and precious hand-embroidered boots and set off to the men’s house for the first time.

They were expected. Men welcomed them with laughter. There was no end of backslapping. Everyone knew what Geľo had had to put up with and do to make things happen in the traditional customary way. The clan leaders made space for the newcomers. Nobody said a word about old Todor-Lačný-Dolniak. The men had even organized a small welcoming ceremony for the brothers. Soon came the moment for gifts. Every one of the men wanted to honour their new friends in the men’s house and had brought a small present. One brought a fishing hook, another a pack of tobacco. But most men gave the brothers plastic bags. “Rubber pockets” (as the Junjan Slovaks called them) were a precious gift. In the life of the inhabitants of the Junjan archipelago these bags played an important part because of their many uses. You could wrap food in them before storing it in an ice larder, or wrap your feet to keep them dry in your boots. Junjans also used them to send their very old relatives to the People Above, as it was much more tasteful to use bags than to strangle them with a leather strap. Of course, this was something Slovaks would never consider doing. Junjan Slovaks had great respect for their elders. If someone could no longer take care of himself, the worst they would do was to take him, lightly dressed, out of the yurt into the freezing cold, to die on his own. The priest was against even this, but he didn’t have any helpless old man or woman to take care of. His father, the former priest, was murdered by the Bolshevik Yasin, the permanently drunken political commissar of the hunters’ collective Üngütür ököltott (Morning Glory), in the campaign to eradicate superstition and the occult.