Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

We find lodgings for the night. The only functioning hotel in Űŕģüllpoļ-New Bystrica is filled with journalists. They tell us to go to the bar next door and ask for lodgings. In a smoky room there are about eight men. They’re all Slovak. When we ask about lodgings, one gets up and indicates that we should follow him. He gets into a luxury SUV with a broken window and the engine running, so he does not have to connect any wires under the instrument panel, and motions to us to get in. He evidently comes from Carpathian Slovakia and he came to Junja looking for adventure and big money. When he found out that we had talked to Telgarth himself, he can’t believe it. At the hotel it takes him some time to find the keys to his room. He vainly searches for a light switch. In the end he can’t find the main power switch, so we spend the evening in his new hotel in the dark. But the room is free. Karol, as the new hotelier introduced himself, would not take money from Telgarth’s friends.

The morning plane is packed. Passengers stand in the aisles between the seats. On the flight we find that we have left Junja just in time. The aircraft’s Russian crew has decided to stay in Russia with the plane and not to return to Űŕģüllpoļ-New Bystrica. Right in the cockpit they organize a little party to celebrate their final home trip. One pilot then comes out to molest the female passengers. A female journalist, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, takes his fancy so much that he invites her into the cockpit while over the ocean, to witness the landing manœuvre. The naïve American agrees. What happens behind the closed cockpit door we can only guess. We get into a tailspin a few times, but all ends well. At noon our An-24’s wheels touch down on Polyarny airport runway.

Two days after we landed in Polyarny, Slovak guerrillas commanded by Telgarth moved by rail to the other end of the island and attacked Ćmirçăpoļ. They mortared the airport and adjacent buildings. Mercenary units repelled them from the city and forced them to take refuge in the inhospitable tundra. Another chapter of the Junjan conflict is over.

What will the future bring?

Urban is completely stunned. For a fraction of a second it seems to him that this evil Telgarth, the uncompromising avenging angel, cannot possibly be Freddy Piggybank, “his” Freddy. He studies the photograph closely for a long time: Freddy, or Telgarth, sits there at his desk, his bleary single eye looking at the camera. That single eye perplexes Urban. Freddy never had any eye trouble. And Telgarth’s figure, stocky but not fat, is very different from Freddy’s. On the other hand, Telgarth’s facial features and his rather theatrical speech suggest Freddy. Finally, Urban overcomes all his doubts and is certain: Telgarth is Freddy!

He nervously gets up from the desk: he needs a drink. In Freddy’s shabby globe bar only the half-empty bottle of Cointreau takes his fancy. Urban is glad. He opens the fridge in the hall to see if there’s any ice. There is. He reads the article again and again, and downs the contents of the bottle of tasty distillate in three swigs.

If all this is true, then what is there to stop Urban, except for his unadventurous nature, from flying to Junja and explaining to Freddy the situation he’s in and either persuading him to agree in writing to the sale of Urban’s share of Freddy Vision , or even to buy it, possibly?

* * *

The road to Junja leads, alas, through Russia. There’s not much to describe. We all know what it looks like. When Video-Urban arrives in Polyarny in northern Russia, he finds his assumptions were far too optimistic. The Junjan archipelago is as good as cut off from the rest of the world: there’s no scheduled connection. Only Russian polar pilots sometimes risk their necks to make money taking food and alcohol to Junja. The profits are big, but on landing in Űŕģüllpoļ, there’s a serious danger of one side confusing them with the enemy and shooting them down.

“I don’t give a fuck,” a Russian in a pilot’s cap waves his hand, after Urban starts talking to him in the airport bar, housed in a derelict trailer, where you can only get charcoal-filtered vodka or stale Petersburg beer. “Who’d want to live for ever? Either I live and get rich, or I go to the devil’s mother, fuck it all.”

Urban buys him a few vodkas and a bottle of coke for himself. It’s a glass bottle, something he hasn’t seen for years. The metal cap is rusty, but the coke is still all right.

“Hey, you, Czech brother,” smiles Kostya. “I’ll take you to Junja and you’ll travel like an American president with me. You’ll sit alone in the cabin, drink vodka, and look out of the window. Everyone knows Kostya and his aeroplane. They won’t shoot Kostya down, not the Junjans, or the Slovaks.”

“And how much do you want for that?” Urban enquires.

“So you’re one of those?” Kostya squints at him sternly through his pilot’s goggles. “A man offers you his heart on a plate, wants to help you and you ask how much? So, this is what Czechs are like: always the same. They measure everything in money. They don’t even talk to you, they don’t kiss you twice properly, and they only ask ‘how much’. What can I say? Give me a thousand bucks and wait for me here at ten.”

Kostya points out of the window.

“That’s our plane,” he says. “Oh my dear little grey dove, how many flights we’ve flown together over the taiga.”

The old An-2 biplane is dark green, but Urban gladly overlooks Kostya’s vagueness. He is more shocked by the price. In the end he gets it down from a thousand to seven hundred dollars.

“But cash in advance,” Kostya says hastily, and his eyes rest hungrily on the rough greenish bottles of vodka above the bar.

“I’m used to paying only at pay time,” Urban objects.

“And what about airport fees?” Kostya rounds on him. “And fuel? If you want to fly tomorrow, I have to get the aircraft ready right away, so nothing goes wrong. It’s a question of trust, Urban Urbanovich.”

Urban Urbanovich sighs, opens his wallet and counts into Kostya’s proffered hand seven one hundred-dollar notes.

“So, tomorrow at ten,” he takes leave of the pilot and goes to get some sleep in the caravan site hotel Zarya .

The next day he packs what little he’s brought and at ten he is at the airport. Some men are lurking round Kostya’s plane, loading something into it. Urban looks closer: mailbags.

He approaches the plane and clears his throat.

“What is it, mate?” asks one of the loaders. “What are you looking at?”

“Excuse me, please,” Urban hesitates. “But do you know where Kostya is? We were supposed to meet here at ten.”

“What Kostya?” a man with a stern moustached face seems puzzled. He looks like Stalin’s grandson.

“Well, Kostya,” says Urban. “The pilot of this plane.”

“I happen to be the pilot of this plane,” says the man and jumps down from the ladder. “I don’t know any pilot named Kostya.”

Urban turns pale.

“Yesterday, over there, in the bar, I met a pilot,” he says with a lump in his throat. “He asked seven hundred dollars to take me to Űŕģüllpoļ in this plane. I paid him and now I’m waiting for him.”

The pilot looks at his colleague and shakes his head.

“You fell for it, mate,” he laughs. “Oh, how you fell for it! But how could you be so stupid?”

“Don’t you have eyes to see?” asked the second man.

“This plane is too small; how could it fly to Junja? It would crash in the middle of the ocean without fuel. God, you’re stupid, brother!”

“And what did that Kostya look like?” asks Stalin’s grandson.