Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

”I thought it was Mäodna’s people,” Geľo explains, as if apologizing for the noisy awakening.

“And what if it were the Ökötöm-kökötom , the snow monster?” asked Turanec-Štefánik.

The men grow silent with horror.

“What would he do here, on the coast?” Geľo dismisses the idea with a wave of his hand. “Nobody’s ever seen him so far from the taiga.”

“Let us thank God for a nice breakfast,” the priest crosses himself and presses the safety catch on his gun.

Soon the bear’s paws, tongue and carefully chosen pieces of rump are roasting over the fire, spreading, with a crackling sound, their seductive aroma all round.

“By God,” Geľo nods, impatiently trying the roast meat. “Don’t we have it good? Who has it better?”

The men sit around the fire, casually clean their weapons and salivate in expectation.

The blizzard intensifies.

When the meat is cooked, the fighters eat. Then they quietly sit and watch each other. What can you do? The igloo is small and low, you can’t even practise close combat here. The ice and snow walls would be kicked down. So, to while away the time, they tattoo each other: beautiful, colourful tattoos on their arms, legs, chests and faces. The more tattoos a Junjan Slovak has, the more respected a hunter and fighter he is.

“Men, why don’t you tell us what it was like in the world, in Prague?” Čižmár-Turoň suggests.

“But we’ve told you the story over ten times ten before…” mumbles Frolo, as they tattoo his back with a giant bear and a red sun above it.

“So?” Čižmár-Turoň won’t accept this. “When will we ever travel so far? So shut up and tell us!”

Sirovec-Molnár, his forehead propped on his arms, pretends to sleep.

Geľo sighs and starts the tale. How they travelled there and how they were fed, given clothes and housing; how they negotiated with high-ranking gentlemen in uniforms who talked to them as equals. And how these gentlemen enquired about the slightest details of the mineral grease that oozes from under the ground in the north.

“Yes, the Czechs will help us,” Geľo insisted. “They’re genuine friends. I liked them right away. They’re almost the same as us.”

That is how their days pass: they are standing by, but alert.

* * *

Freddy awakes and gets up. His feet grope for his slippers. He does it all completely automatically in the dark, so as not to wake up his wife, Sida. It takes him time to realise that Sida is making a film in Bojnice.

He goes to the bathroom. After urinating, he stands over the bowl, waiting patiently for the last drop. Like all fat men, he has a wet spot on his underpants because he doesn’t shake his member enough. He turns on the bathroom light. He looks in the mirror. He’s quite proud of himself. His complexes have receded into the past for ever. He started at zero, so to speak. First he had to work hard as a car park attendant, then the car park was closed down and he had no idea what he would do without it. But he found a way out. Changing into an assistant executioner’s leather and latex outfit, he helped out his current wife, who made her living as a dominatrix in a sado-masochistic salon of a perverts’ club called Justina . He didn’t make much from it, since he had a slave’s inferior status, and his only sweet rewards were kicks and blows he got from the mistress he idolized. Later he progressed and began to write and produce one-act pieces in a little theatre, part of the club, for perverted dramatic shows. Subsequently, he studied film at the Academy of Arts, supporting himself by writing porn film scripts. He was born for pornography; he had a wild imagination and a rare talent for particularly disgusting detail. After getting his bachelor’s degree, he threw himself into directing and gradually became to be successful. When he met his old friend Urban at a video trade show in Prague, they decided to set up a joint firm to produce porn films and successfully compete with foreign producers of smut.

Though Freddy hates Prague, he nevertheless likes to recall his trip there, some three years ago, when at a trade show of video distributors in Prague-Holešovice, he met Urban. Freddy came there as a guest of a Danish production company Sex-O-Rama. They paid him poorly, but one of the perks was being invited to places. Board, lodging and drinks were free and this was enough to give Freddy a feeling of importance and an illusion of belonging to the alluring world of porn business.

Freddy loved looking round the trade show exhibits. His pleasure was all the greater for not having to do anything. All he had to do was to represent the company. He had already done his job, he thought. Now let the others work. The ones whose job is to sell the result of his work: the young and ambitious German- and English-speaking managers. Yes, as far as Freddy was concerned, the skies were blue. Wearing a well-cut fashionable lilac jacket, a glass of sparkling wine in his hand, he would stand by the Sex-O-Rama stand and look about. Occasionally, he looked at other stands. Other firms’ young, slender, dynamic female employees, dressed, perhaps deliberately, in identical outfits to stress their role as successful working women: that was something he’d always liked. He could imagine some of them in his power, in his greedy hands. Tears of shame, despair and pain would furrow those beautiful proud faces, masks of a belief in their personal importance, attractiveness and independence. Beautiful, unattainable artificial faces, made up every morning over simple country faces, would melt like icing on a cake, and the underlying unhappy grimaces, snot flowing from their noses and pale lips, would be revealed. Freddy titivated himself, guessing by their walk which of them was wearing tights, or stockings with garters, or old-fashioned stockings with a suspender belt. In fact, fetishists see the whole world through stockings and underwear. Alas, all the pleasure of this game was spoiled by the impossibility of verifying his observations there and then with his eager, damp hand. And he only needed just one lightning-fast touch. Unfortunately, that touch would be his last. He’d certainly be thrown out, official representative or not. The certainty that he’d never know the truth filled him with despair: he headed for the bar to fortify himself with his favourite drink. He was a fetishist; he liked stockings. The actresses in his films never fucked without them. Even if completely naked during shooting, they had to keep their stockings on.

Freddy was already thinking up a new script. The film would take place in this kind of erotic trade show. A man who’d just joined the firm would inspect his female boss, this same kind of severe, well-dressed beauty. She would notice and start to humiliate him with absurd orders. Finally, he’d get her on her own in a room behind the show stands, lock the door and give her a very rough seeing-to. They’d have wild intercourse while, a few feet from them, behind the show’s flimsy fibreboard walls, hundreds of visitors would pass by, not suspecting the perversities going on under their noses. Her shouts and suppressed moans would merge completely with the background noise of a big erotic trade show, where dozens of porn films played simultaneously on the video screens.

A multinational crowd sat and stood at the bar. Czech, Slovak, German, English, Hungarian, and Italian could be heard. The Slovak and Czech representatives stood out in their loud garish jackets and white socks, while the foreigners were dressed in subfusc. Behind the bar two women darted to and fro, as if competing with each other.

“Freddy!” came a shout behind Piggybank. “Freddy Piggybank!”

Intrigued, Freddy turned round; a long time had passed since he’d last been addressed by the nickname he had when he worked at the car park by the Hotel Ambassador.