Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

Urban can’t understand why Slovakia has to be such a bewitched country. Maybe it is because its people are hard working, but stupid. Again and again, they let politicians pull the wool over their eyes. They always fall for it. Urban knows something about it.

He got caught up in politics once, and even became a member of parliament. After his professional and personal break with Rácz, he soon left politics, too. It was an enlightenment, in its way. A former hustler, money-changer and occasional pimp, he was sickened by the things he had to do as a politician. In the porn business he found far purer characters and far straighter people.

Lucky for him, he broke up with Rácz amicably, even though they didn’t stay very close friends. But they’d never been that close anyway. Since he was always straight with Rácz, Rácz was straightforward with him. But Urban realised this only very recently, so he had some anxious moments waiting for Rácz to pay him his share of the holding company.

Rácz guessed that Urban was slowly roasting over the coals of his own doubts, so just for fun he fed those doubts a little. He invited Urban to all kinds of senseless events and Urban, panicking about losing Rácz’s favour now that he really depended on it, assiduously attended these events, even though it affected his family life badly. His two live-in lovers, Wanda and Eva, sensing that the flagship of wealth and luxury was about to founder, made an attempt to detach themselves from him. They didn’t want to walk the streets again, being used to a married lady’s life. So they set up a telephone service and went out servicing clients interested in luxurious erotic offerings. Thus they stopped depending on Urban. He was getting deeper and deeper into his paranoia that Rácz would steal his money and not pay him his share of their prosperous company. He spent very little of his energy on the relationship with his two common-law wives. Moreover, Wanda and Eva had for some time known that they did not need a third person for their erotic life, and the occasional presence in their bed of Video Urban, a hairy, panting intruder who grabbed their tits and other intimate places, invaded these two fragile fairies’ gentle romantic idyll with his disturbing urgency, inconsiderate penetration, gasping tension and messy spray of semen.

That was not the only reason why one fine day they stole all the foreign currency and gold, which he improvidently kept in the flat, and vanished to follow their own destiny.

At the time Urban hit bottom, psychologically speaking; Rácz played a game of cat and mouse with him and Urban told himself that perhaps he did not deserve such treatment for so many years’ loyal behaviour. Of course, he did not say so to Rácz. He went on smiling at him and kept up a pretence of being his good friend. Finally, Rácz was bored with it and Urban was paid all the money due to him from shares in Rácz’s businesses. Without a word Rácz bought his shares at the top price and organized a small company leaving party for some five hundred guests. There he gave him a personal parting gift, a platinum Omega watch. Yes, Rácz could be a model at one and the same time of pettiness and of magnanimity; he was a banal person as much as a tycoon.

For his part, Urban never abused any confidential information he was privy to during his years of close collaboration with Rácz. He knew only too well that he could do something like that only once in his life.

Urban travels round Slovakia and never ceases to be aware that this part of the world is beyond help. This nation will not learn to work properly; it was screwed up by decades of a communist regime. The Czechs are in much the same state; there is no great difference. Czechs may even be a bit lazier and more pensive than Slovaks. But unlike a Slovak, even the stupidest and laziest Czech has a prodigious gift of the gab, so he can verbalise everything and thus sound more viable. Slovaks will just drop everything and not do a thing. Czechs also do nothing, but they keep talking. It makes no real difference, but a Czech gives a superficial and ill-informed westerner an impression of greater dynamism.

Urban has long been toying with the idea of selling his share of Freddy Vision , transferring the money to the Czech Republic and even moving there himself for good. Not because things were progressing so radically, but because the Czech State is nearer the West.

He has shed all his other business acquisitions and real estate in Slovakia. He sold everything at a time when he could still get a good price. Today he couldn’t do that: anyone with real estate in Slovakia is automatically a hostage to that property. He can’t sell it; he can only helplessly watch the price steadily dropping. Like the value of anything else located in Slovakia that can’t be moved to a happier part of the world. Urban is one of the lucky ones with a good nose for disasters both small and great, so he has managed to divest himself of everything at a time when things were looking up, after the election victory of a coalition that portrayed itself ostensibly as rightist. By the time people found out that this was another group of cynics and crooks with right-wing rhetoric, but left-wing hearts, everything was sold and Urban had moved into a modest bachelor flat that he rented temporarily. All his precious things and antiques he smuggled out to Bohemia and packed them into one of the rooms in his cousin Tina’s villa. All his disposable funds were transferred there. He invested them in Tina’s company.

She immediately increased production. She rented or bought new premises and had them optimised . This is what Tina calls the conversions that give her a maximum number of working places for her slaves, who are stuck for whole days at their knitting and sewing machines.

If only Urban could now sell his share of Freddy Vision , he would be completely happy and could move to Bohemia and slam the Slovak door shut for good. There’s no point going on without Freddy. In any case, Urban was never interested in the porn industry, only in the company’s economic results. Conceptual and artistic issues were totally in Freddy’s hands, and Freddy is now most probably dead.

When Freddy left for Junja, Urban thought it was the whim of a millionaire who would soon get over it. For the time being, the company could carry on under its own momentum. However, after Freddy’s disappearance was definite and his death probable, Urban had to take over the running of the company, and that almost makes him break out in a rash. The only solution seems to be to sell his share of the company and move to a more benevolent and promising business environment. As a shareholder in Tina’s company he could start numerous ventures to establish her brand name better in the world, or at least in Europe.

Selling Freddy Vision is no problem: there are plenty of interested parties. The problem is that Urban is not the firm’s sole owner and thus, without Freddy’s agreement, he can do nothing. Not even unload his share. After all, if Freddy were alive, he could buy his share himself. If he were dead, his widow could buy it. And perhaps, together with Sida, Freddy’s heiress, they could sell the whole business and have peace and quiet. There’s no point to it without Freddy’s imagination.

But Freddy is still missing without trace and nobody is in a hurry to pronounce him officially dead.

* * *

But Freddy is not dead at all: quite the contrary. After successfully fleeing the internment camp, he finally refuses Commander Kubeš’s offer: he lands with Geľo’s group on the coast. He’s one of them.

Ever since then he’s felt that now at last he’s really begun to live. What he’s enjoying is just what he longed for in his childhood: to have a group of friends who respect him, and to have adventures with them.