Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

“Grab him!” the Moravian girl shouts. “It’s that so-called Phantom! He tried to shag me! He was touching me up!”

A bold and agile Moravian man heads past the seats towards Freddy. Perhaps he thinks the redhead will give him points for bravery.

Freddy has a feeling that he won’t be able to survive this much pain. But he won’t let himself be captured. The shame and disgrace!

He retreats to the carriage platform and makes for the door. Someone tries to block his path but, aghast at the sight of Freddy, backs off. Freddy spots his face reflected in the door’s glass panel. One of his eyes is popping; all that is left of the other one is a big pink fleshy hole. Freddy grabs the handle and yanks the door open. The train is rushing along the embankment towards Patrónka. Freddy’s pursuers run onto the carriage platform. Freddy closes his good eye and jumps in the direction the train is travelling. He tumbles down an embankment, it seems, forever, and finally he is lying at the bottom. The carriages hurtle somewhere a long way above him. Fortunately, nobody has pulled the emergency cord. Soon the noise of the last carriage dies away. Freddy falls into merciful unconsciousness.

When he comes to, he has no idea what time it is. He is blind. He uses his hands to feel where he is. He wipes his eyes. The right hand runs into a lump of unnaturally swollen flesh protruding from an empty eye socket. Freddy’s left hand wipes off a layer of congealed blood that had oozed down his face while he was unconscious.

It is night. Somewhere to his left he hears cars rushing down the road to Malacky. Along the embankment an endless freight train thunders.

Freddy feels the passage of each goods wagon separately in his skull. Each wagon gives him a stab of pain. Rubbing his tongue round his dry mouth gives no relief. He has a fever.

That Moravian cow has gouged his eye out: he realises the whole naked truth with sudden dread. How is he going to live now? She must have reported him. They’ll be looking for him. They’ll find him from witnesses’ descriptions. All the quicker, now he has an eye gouged out.

Freddy gets up. He takes out a handkerchief and covers the empty socket with it. He starts to stagger along the railway track.

After a good hour and a half, he finally reaches the gates of his house and, with shaking hands, gropes for his keys.

If only Freddy could fall asleep now and in the morning wake up to find that it was all just a bad dream; he makes this pious wish as he falls half-undressed into a bed whose sheets, ever since Sida had left him, he has been unable to change. He breathes in all Sida’s pampered body fragrances, not yet evaporated from the bed, and falls into oblivion.

In the morning his nose detects an additional smell: putrefaction. He moves his head and terrible pain sweeps through his brain. Clinging to the headboard, he gets up. He remembers everything. It wasn’t a dream. He walks round the room, searching for the source of the rotten smell. He can’t find it. He staggers round the whole ground floor and still finds nothing. He heads for the bathroom. He looks with his good eye in the mirror and freezes in terror. His empty eye socket is full of congealed blood. He gently touches the gelatinous substance and sniffs it. The rotting smell is emanating from his eye, or, to be precise, from the thing on his face that had replaced it.

He sits down helplessly on the edge of the bath but soon leaps up in panic. He urgently needs to relieve himself. He sits on the lavatory, afraid to push. Every push of his bowels is punished by a hammer blow right in the middle of his brain. He waits for the stool to fall by itself. It takes an awfully long time. He suffers like an animal during the ordeal.

He takes a little mirror and looks into the hole in his head. After the congealed blood is removed, the hole seems to go all the way into the brain. Freddy is terrified. He decides to call an ambulance, but as soon as he picks up his mobile phone, he changes his mind. They’re sure to be looking for him and he’d fall into their hands. He remembers Rácz. Rácz would certainly help. But the disgrace! The disgrace and the unpleasant consequences! Rácz would be horribly furious if he found out that Freddy had been operating off his own bat. But it’s not just the initiative, but also the fact that Freddy is a pervert. He admits it to himself. He’s a pervert. He’d never have admitted that to Rácz. When Rácz is around he tries his hardest to look like a completely normal man. And he is, too.

Rácz has helped him a lot. Thanks to him, Freddy has more confidence than any psychotherapist, even the most expensive one, could give him. Thanks to him, Freddy would even be able to kill next time. How could he now look the hotelier in the eye? But Rácz has two eyes; it’s Freddy who only has one left. Oh, God! One eye! He’s one-eyed!

In his horror, Freddy dusts his socket with some thirty-year old medicinal powder that burns him terribly: he found it in the first-aid box he inherited from his parents. He ties a white handkerchief round his head. Weak from dread, his knees buckling, he crawls back into bed. Utterly devastated, with one wide-open eye he looks at the ceiling. He picks up the mobile phone and dials the office.

“Anka,” he tells his assistant, attempting as unemotional a tone as he can. “I’ve got some sort of illness. Everything hurts. Yes, I think it might be flu. I’m sure, my head aches, too. Listen, I have to stay in bed. My mobile will be off, so that nobody disturbs me. Everyone knows what they have to do. Are you taking this down? Tell Kurnáč to edit Madness in Handcuffs , and when Kulíš shows up, tell him to re-edit the ending of Naked, Wet, and Crucified , as we agreed. He knows how. No, no additional shooting. No more spare shots. He can go to the editing room and work. Valco is shooting the exteriors in Monte Carlo, so he won’t be back before the end of the month. If Video Urban asks about me, tell him that he can… no, just tell him I’ve left town. In the country, somewhere; for Christ’s sake, for the salary I’m paying you, you could think of something, couldn’t you? I have to think something over. That’s it!”

The conversation had so enfeebled Freddy that he fell asleep there and then with the phone in his hand.

When he woke up, he was hungry again. He opened the freezer and took out a pizza. Before the microwave oven bell rang, he carefully took off his bandage. The socket had turned black, but the swelling had gone down. The pain, too, had abated.

Freddy eats his fill. To wash down the pizza he opens another bottle of sparkling wine left by Sida. He likes the sweet, cold sparkling wine so much that he drinks the whole bottle. The alcohol cheers him up. He takes the last glass with him to watch television. He feels restored and quite calm. The pain of losing an eye passed faster than he’d been ready to believe. So what, he reflected: who in history was one-eyed? Jan Žižka, Ľubomír Feldek, Moshe Dayan, Admiral Nelson, Josef Lada, and look what they achieved! Maybe Freddy, too, won’t miss his lost eye so very much. Life is beautiful, he thinks.

All too soon, however this state of pleasant anticipation of what life has in store for a one-eyed man reverts to an abyss of despair and hopelessness and the awareness that he has irretrievably lost something vital. Oh, what bad advice Rácz gave him then! What meaning does Freddy’s life have now, without Sida?

As the television warms up, it’s time for the evening news on the Markíza channel. It takes him a while to realise that the news is about him. That is, about someone they don’t know and whom only Freddy knows about. They’re looking for the Train Phantom, who assaults women travelling on the evening train from Bratislava. They show an identikit picture and Freddy feels insulted. They’ve gone too far, Freddy doesn’t look like that at all. He’s not that bad a monster! In conclusion, the newsreader puts on a stern expression and says that, according to the latest reports, the Phantom has a scarred face and is probably missing an eye. For that reason all casualty doctors are asked to report any similar persons who have sought treatment.