Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

And why not take a piece of rope and go somewhere far into the woods, away from all the paths, and hang oneself? Is death by hanging really so terrible? Maybe not, if your neck breaks immediately. But what if a man just hangs there, jerking his legs, slowly, really slowly suffocating? He makes a hissing sound, his tearful eyes survey the world that he’s leaving, and his suffering can last for minutes. His lungs would fight to the end for a last breath of oxygen. Oh no, this is a terrible thought!

Freddy picks up the remote control. He meant to turn the television off, but the news is followed by a discussion. A Czech foreign affairs expert is explaining how it happened that a long time ago Slovaks settled Junja beyond the Arctic Circle. In the nineteenth century many Slovaks left to find work in America. A Junja Khan took advantage of this by chartering a ship in Hamburg onto which he lured Slovaks by charging only half price for a ticket to America. Once on the open sea, the ship turned out to be a slave trader taking them to Junja. The Khan repeated this trick several times and thus managed to transport several thousand Slovak men and women to Junja. He sold them all to the Junjans and they used them for slave labour. Gradually, generation after generation, more and more Slovaks escaped to the far north. Here they lived, or rather eked out an existence, as free people. In time their status was legalised. Junjans realised that if they gave Slovaks freedom, and let them do what their typical Slovak industriousness and inventiveness leads them to do, they would get more profit from them. So the Slovaks became superb hunters, reindeer breeders, and fishermen. Slovaks did not rebel against high taxes, they were content with very little. They faithfully nurtured Slovak traditions handed down from their grandparents, prayed to Christ, made love and multiplied: the more people in a yurt, the warmer it is. A few generations later, Slovaks no longer wanted to leave Junja: they had got used to it. Since they multiplied at breakneck speed, they became an ethnic majority, unlike the degenerate Junjans who spent generations lolling about on fur, too lazy even to copulate, exploiting hardworking Slovaks.

In the nineteen-thirties Russian communists got to Junja. They set up a puppet Soviet government that requisitioned the Slovak herds, fishing boats and founded reindeer, fishing, and hunting cooperatives. Ethnic Junjans, who were lazy and thus understandably charmed by communist ideas, headed these cooperatives. After the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, the Russians left Junja. Since then the two main ethnic groups have been at daggers drawn. There are many more Slovaks, who thus have an indisputable right to govern.

Freddy is engrossed by the debate. The expert lecturer is followed by a debate among fashionable Czech thinkers who theorize about the situation. Some defend the ethnic Junjans and the official government and say that the Slovaks are merely terrorists. Only God knows what to think, since there is so little information about recent developments.

What is certain is that the civil war between Slovaks and Junjans is getting fiercer. Reports from the battlefield talk of dozens of dead combatants daily, on both sides. The fighting spares no one, including accredited journalists in the war zone. The number of journalists killed in action is considerable.

Freddy reflects on it. Death from a bullet sounds good. It is the only dignified kind of death for a man. If well aimed, death by a bullet is clean and fast. A man dies and this kind of death gives him a sort of charisma, and a whiff of heroism.

“He died in battle,” or “perished on active service.” That sounds completely different from “he hanged himself in his flat,” or “he jumped from the twelfth floor.” The former is how men die; the latter how servant girls and frustrated female pensioners die.

And so Freddy, after long abstinence, takes a bath, shaves, combs his hair and puts on sunglasses. He calls a taxi and visits the bank. He takes cash from all his current accounts and buys a ticket for the next flight to St Petersburg. At night, he goes to the office, takes the best digital camera and tripod, with a full bag of cassettes, and leaves on the desk a mysterious note for Video Urban:

URBAN, I’VE LEFT FOR JUNJA. THERE ARE OTHER THINGS IN LIFE. FREDDY

He doesn’t have to say goodbye to anyone and is too cowardly even to call Rácz. It’s better that way.

The next day he packs a few essentials, clothes and toiletries and takes a taxi to the airport. He checks in his camera, which is packed in a crate, and is soon in his seat in an aircraft taking him to Russia.

Only in St Petersburg does he remove his sunglasses and cover his eye with a black patch he made from black velvet and elastic ribbon. At first, he feels that everyone is looking at him, but soon gets used to it. He goes to the Aeroflot counter, buys a ticket to Murmansk and flies off.

In Murmansk, however, he finds that it is not so easy to get to Junja. There is no regular connection.

“But it’s easy,” says a watchman in the port when Freddy offers a fat bribe and asks to be shown a ship sailing for Junja.

The man points to the railway wagons loaded with fifty-kilogram bags of potatoes. “Look, stick with those potatoes,” he says. “They’re meant for Ćmirçăpoļ. And when the potatoes get there, you do, too!”

The potatoes are loaded on a rusty old ship with a wooden superstructure. Freddy does a deal with the ship’s captain and for a large wad of money they give him a poky cabin behind the steersman’s.

The cabin smells of a good forty years’ smoking, the window won’t open and the bed is covered in stains, but for Freddy this is like being on the deck of a luxury yacht.

Once the potatoes are loaded, the ship puts to sea and heads north.

Freddy stands on the deck, looking at the land vanishing in the mist.

He is not sure if Murmansk is still Europe, but if it is, this is the last time that he will see Europe.

One ability that Freddy definitely has is to be moved to tears by his own fate: ever since he left his native home, city, and country, he has been repeatedly moved to tears of self-pity. Analysis of his own sentiments tells him that he is leaving as a broken and abandoned man. The whole world has turned against him and forced him out of his country, out of life itself. No eye will shed a tear when Freddy’s eye closes.

If any of Freddy’s possessions were lost, broken, or damaged back home in Slovakia, he would be out of his mind for days and be unable to eat or sleep. But Junja changes all your priorities. Ever since he and the potatoes landed in Ćmirçăpoļ, his main priorities have been to preserve his life and health, to keep out the cold and to lay hands on food. As for material possessions, the most important were those that immediately helped him survive and find food: clothes, shoes and work tool, in this case his camera. And, if need be, a weapon and ammunition.

A large compact group of journalists and photo reporters had come to Junja from all over the world. Freddy quickly got in with them. Slovak and Czech reporters helped him find accommodation and gave him leads for interesting stories. When Freddy admits to them that he hasn’t been sent out by any television station, but is a freelance amateur working off his own bat, they’re quite baffled. When they see him moving about on the battlefield, at first they think he’s mad. But when they see his battlefield shots on television in the hotel in the evening, they begin to admire him. You can’t shoot that sort of thing without risking your own neck.