Peter Pišťanek - The End of Freddy

“The steak can wait,” says Telgarth. “You must see that now that you’re privy to my plans I can’t just let you go, especially not in a Czech military plane. Are you mad? What if they torture you and get information from you about my agreement with Rácz?”

Urban can’t help laughing.

“I can imagine them torturing me,” he says. “And now what? Do I consider myself your prisoner?”

“Prisoner’s too strong a word,” says Telgarth. “In any case, you can go on moving about freely. You remain my adviser. However, since you are a person at risk, I’m assigning you protection. They’re tough experienced men who won’t move an inch away from you. Some of them my be familiar to you from when you worked for Rácz. They’ll patrol in front of your suite and go everywhere you do.”

“So I will be a prisoner, after all,” says Urban.

“This is just a temporary arrangement, believe me,” Telgarth promises. “Scout’s honour: as soon as there’s no reason for a heightened alert, I’ll personally escort you to the airport and, as a goodbye present, give you shares in our oil industry as a reward for what you’ve done here. In the meantime, I’ll keep them as safe as in a Swiss bank. A bank can be robbed, but nobody robs Telgarth.”

Urban is unhappy: he’s been visualising disembarking at Ruzyně airport, taking a taxi to his cousin Tina. At the same time, he’s a weakling. He is unable to resist Telgarth’s will.

He decides to sulk. For a few days he stays in his suite. If he has to be a prisoner, then he will act like one. By the third day he’s tired of it, takes the fishing rod and decides to go fishing. When he comes out into the hall he notices that his guards have already settled in: they’ve brought out a little table and chairs into the hall.

Two of them accompany him to the harbour. Urban sits down and looks at the float, which does not even move. Occasionally, he lifts his gaze and observes the entrance to the bay. He is going to run away from here, that’s certain. Even if it’s in a Czech submarine.

* * *

Is he hungry? Promise him bacon.

Junjan Slovak proverb

Rácz has done as he said. When he returns to the Slovak Archipelago in a few weeks, everything is arranged and paid for. Soon a ship with drilling equipment arrives in the harbour. Presently, an oil field appears in the north of Öggdbardd island, and the purest oil in the world begins to flow through a new pipeline to a terminal near New City.

At the same time, in New Bystrica, Freddy has himself crowned Emperor Telgarth I. The priest will place on his head an emperor’s crown that Rácz ordered in Europe, modelled on the Hungarian crown of St Stephen.

The priest has just returned from the Vatican, where it became apparent that the Junjan Slovak understanding of Christianity was as remote from the Roman Catholic faith as the faith of a tropical African witch doctor. The priest has learned that everything proclaimed by him, and by his forefathers and other priests spread over Junjan Slovak settlements of hunters, fishermen, and herdsmen, was nonsense. What he was told about Jesus Christ clashed sharply with what the priest had known. He could not accept it at any price. It seemed to him that while Slovaks in Junja suffered, cut off from the outside world, the Catholic church had gone off at a strange tangent. Even if the priest spent time in some mountain monastery undergoing re-education, his own flock would throw him down an ice hole for this interpretation of gospels.

It turned out to be impossible to unite with the main body of the Roman Catholic church, or with any other Christian denomination. Instead of Christ the triumphant warrior, all the other so-called Christian religions present him as a weakling who let himself end up caught by his enemies and crucified, instead of fighting like a lion and dying on the battlefield. How could the priest explain to his flock that, according to the Vatican, the cross is the symbol of Christianity not because Jesus punished evildoers by nailing them to a cross, but because he himself let them crucify him, without defending himself? The priest could foresee the objections of simple Christians of his parish. Why did Christ, about to be taken, not fire all his bullets at the Romans and keep the last for himself? And why didn’t the apostles help him? Twelve adult Slovaks could wipe out a whole Roman army. But this lot, on the contrary, not only let the Saviour be crucified, and did nothing to defend him, but let themselves be caught and destroyed one by one in an even more humiliating way. Were these men Christians, Catholics?

In a nutshell, the priest returned from the Vatican disappointed, but confirmed in his own faith. He was convinced that one can rely only on oneself and on God.

Freddy heard the priest out and offered to proclaim him Metropolitan of a True Catholic church that would be the official church of the Slovak Archipelago. It would teach its believers faith and obedience to the emperor. The priest agreed and so it came to pass.

Next, in recompense, the priest, now Archbishop and Metropolitan of all True Catholics, crowns Freddy Emperor. For this he receives a promise that the first oil dollars will be spent on building a huge True Catholic basilica in New Bystrica and a cathedral in New City.

* * *

My patience is at an end, General Tvrdý warns

“Slovak Emperor” Alfréd Mešťánek

Űŕģüllpoļ-New Bystrica (Czech Press Agency CTK). The commander of the Royal Czech Army temporary located in the Junjan Archipelago, Major General Evžen Tvrdý on Saturday warned the self-proclaimed political leader of the Slovak National Front of Liberation (SNFL), the Carpathian Slovak adventurer Alfréd Mešťánek, who recently had himself crowned Emperor “of all Slovaks” Telgarth I, that his “patience is at an end. It’s inconceivable I’d allow in the future ten or fifteen Junjan foreign mercenaries to be lynched even if it puts me in conflict with the SNFL,” said General Tvrdý.

“Our priority is security, but unfortunately we are not able to give ethnic Junjans and defeated members of the former Junjan foreign legion full protection. The hatred is such that we’d need one soldier for each Junjan, and that’s impossible,” he stated. “I will be non-partisan, but I cannot be passive. My aim is to support in the archipelago a multiethnic Slovak state aware of its history, but not tied to its past; one that would become an integral part of the Czech Crown. If we are to be forced to leave the Junjan, now Slovak, archipelago, then we shall be defeated and our help for the Slovaks will have been wasted. In addition, according to our information, certain criminal elements have penetrated here from Carpathian Slovakia, which tremendously complicates an already tense situation,” stressed General Tvrdý, adding that he saw “an encouraging signal” in the return of the moderate Slovak leader, Todor-Lačný-Dolniak, to the former Űŕģüllpoļ, today’s New Bystrica. “Of course, he is residing somewhere secret,” he added.

Václav Fischer, Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke in a similar vein. Talking to the newspaper Word for Today, he said the Royal Czech Army had not stepped on Junjan soil “to give up a global treasury of natural resources to cut-throats of the Slovak Liberation Army and their sponsors from the East European underworld.”

* * *

At some point then Telgarth is visited by his old fellow fighter, in name still a top leader of the SNFL, Geľo Todor-Lačný-Dolniak. Telgarth welcomes him with a brotherly embrace and offers him a drink, while keeping a certain distance. Telgarth has for some time considered Geľo to be a political corpse. He has virtually no powers, any more than his followers Turanec-Štefánik, Čižmár-Turoň and others. Most other veterans are loyal to Telgarth, since he’s succeeded in persuading them that the Slovak Archipelago is in good hands under his leadership. Telgarth is now reaping the fruits of patient and diligent political work.