Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

“I must say,” says Molnár, “it’s not a very nice feeling to go into combat carrying nothing but pistols and a few machine guns.”

“That’s all we’ll need,” says Kubeš. “We shall avoid contact with the enemy. In the worst case, we’ll use our speed under water.”

“As far as speed’s concerned, I wouldn’t be so optimistic,” Molnár says. “Firstly, the specifications are fifty years old, and secondly, this machine is a an old banger. I’m not saying they haven’t spruced it up, but still: even a complete refit can’t make it younger. Metal fatigue.”

“I’m quite sure we won’t have to use maximum speed,” says Kubeš, “and that everything will run like clockwork.”

“I believe so, too,” says Molnár. “Well gentlemen, let me invite all the officers to our officers’ mess for a little celebration. According to the operative plan, you set sail at one in the morning. So your crew can start by loading the goods. And now to dinner, gentlemen!”

It’s a magnificent banquet. Captain Molnár personally serves the reticent submariners. He offers dry sparkling wine. Despite his excellent mood, Kubeš constantly runs off to check on the progress of loading.

An hour after midnight, fully loaded, the submarine Kamýk , manœuvring neatly, disengages from the Carabella . It is heading north.

* * *

As we said, cousin Tina is a slave driver by vocation. Naturally, she considers fashion design to be her life’s major achievement. She sees herself as an artist and never mentions the existence of her underground slave factory, not to kith and kin, not in press, radio, or television interviews. If urged to say something about the source of her income, which obsesses journalists, then she euphemistically says she is “financially independent”. She owns three brand-name shops in Prague, one in Brno, one in Karlovy Vary and two on the Catalan coast. Her products fly off the hangers. Of course, no one cares where these lovely things come from. Perhaps they all think she knits and sews her creations personally in the evenings.

Tina is romantically inclined and has little interest in her slaves’ appalling living conditions. Her extreme, pathetic and false altruism finds other objects. She can easily give a tramp in the underground a thousand crowns to start a new life, or spend twenty thousand on a shelter for homeless animals, but she counts every penny spent on her knitters, and, in principle, any request for a rise is met by dismissal.

“If anyone’s not satisfied,” she says, “then they never will be. She can go back to Ukraine; twenty more are outside the door waiting for a job.”

Cousin Tina has a cohort of males who are in love with her, desire her, and would do anything in the world for her. She cynically keeps them in this sorry state and exploits it. She deliberately doses them with drops of hope and despair, as required, to keep them always at hand and hot with expectation. If she sees someone’s enchantment and love waning, she gives him a hint that in the near future there’s a chance… Briefly, cousin Tina knows how to deal with each one, and plays them all like an organ.

She styles herself as a fragile beauty disillusioned by life, one who has for a long time not wanted to have dealings with anyone, but who is now eager for a powerful new force: a relationship with someone who is the world’s finest man. Such a man will inherit paradise on earth. She would show him that she was not only a being with an unfathomably deep soul, but also an uninhibited and inventive lover. The problem is that every man considers himself to be the world’s finest man.

Cousin Tina is fair. She gives each of her fans the feeling that he is the one nearest to becoming her chosen one.

No, he doesn’t have to be a slim intellectual: she has a weakness for solidly built and rather simple men, or so she tells the dull, big man who will then be able to rearrange in one day all the furniture in her villa, satisfying Tina’s unquenchable desire for constant change.

The right man needs no muscles, he just has to be a thinker, or so she tells an economist with a hen’s chest and pebble-lens glasses who does her accounts and tax returns out of pure altruism and in hope of sweet rewards.

A highly placed City Hall official has an interesting hobby which impresses her. Yes, Tina is also totally obsessed with collecting beer labels. Nor will she fail to emphasize that of all the men she knows he has the highest rating, tactfully omitting that this is due to commercial premises on National Avenue, ideal for a designer fabrics boutique.

But another highly placed man, a police officer, is certain that he’s the man closest to Tina’s heart, and thus to her driver’s licence, which she lost after a trivial crash on the highway.

Tina has done her sums. She knows that she wields absolute power over her fan club only as long as she stays an immaculate solitary saint, a slender and beautiful promise on legs. Occasionally, she makes an obscene comment to prove to an admirer that for all her spiritual asceticism, she is a sexual being, too. She realises that nobody can combust spontaneously for long. So, if she senses that a man of great importance to her plans could be lost, she softens up and offers him everything, including full intercourse. But to offers of a long-term relationship, naturally, she reacts hypersensitively: there’s nothing she craves more than to have a long-term relationship with the man in question, but she has to sort things out in her head. She needs time. But they can stay good friends for now.

Oddly enough, few people are as calculating as cousin Tina, yet no one has seen through her play-acting as a scatter-brained beauty torn by her emotions. Her fan club is still convinced that she has been sleeping alone for years on principle, that she has no intimate relationship, that she is saving herself for her future lover. Nothing will soften her resolve on this point, not even blackmailing declarations of love with every conceivable stupidity dictated by the despair of an infatuated man: from offering to murder his wife and children, to suicide from despair.

“A dry whore,” a thwarted Urban sometimes mutters, but then rebukes himself for ingratitude. He has less cause than anyone to complain of his beautiful cousin: if he is not rejected, and he seldom is, then it’s worth it.

Urban realises that if the cohort even suspected that everything cousin Tina so coyly refuses them, she actually grants to him, a blood relative, they would all take offence and drop her. She might even make new enemies. There is no worse enemy than an aggrieved potential lover, fed for a long time on copious doses of hope and understanding, who is suddenly shunted aside by an apparent outsider. Such humiliation always calls for revenge.

Worse, if there were no fan club, Urban would have to move the furniture, mend the roof, cut the hedge, mow the lawn, clean the pond, mend the carburettor, file tax returns and recover the confiscated driver’s licence.

So he prefers to bite his tongue and put up with his beautiful cousin’s moods. He still gets more from her than the unhappy admirers who will never be able to have their own happy end.

* * *

Kubeš lies on his bunk, dressed, thinking. The Kamýk is just a few hundred miles from its destination, but everything threatens to be ruined by a stupid mechanical problem. Rajter and his mechanics are doing all they can to fix it. Kubeš can see Admiral Sosna’s stony face: the thought of turning back seems unendurable to him. He kicks his feet off the bunk and gets up again. Mindlessly, he runs his left hand over thirty days’ growth of beard on his face, picks up his cap and puts it on. He passes through the command centre and looks at the four men on duty. Then he turns round and goes to the rear section of the submarine, to the engine room. Even though it is ventilated, the room is very hot. His worried look settles on the right-hand engine: it has died.