Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Eržika is snivelling; pregnancy makes her very sensitive. She reaches into her bra. She mumbles unhappily. The bastard boss can come here, if he thinks it’s so easy. People are pigs, they shit and piss and vomit all over the place. And she has to go and clean up after them. Is it dirty now? Feri must say: is it dirty now? “No,” she replies when she gets no answer.

Feri mutters something under his breath, takes the thousand and goes back.

The thousand warms the bastard boss’s heart. “You know,” he explains, as if to make amends, “I’m responsible for everything here. If anything goes wrong, I’ll get you out of trouble. But why should I do it for nothing? I have a wife and children. What use will I be if I end up in prison because of you?” He gives Feri Bartaloš a comradely slap on the shoulder: “You’ll soon find out what it means to have children.”

Demeaned, proud Feri Bartaloš goes back to the lavatory, and a sense of injustice gnaws at his soul. He couldn’t give a shit for the bastard boss, get it? Nor for his effing children. He should go to the men’s lavatory and spread his legs all day long to see what life’s like. A feeling of social empathy awakens in Feri’s heart.

Eržika is asleep by now. Her pregnant belly sticks up happily. Feri gets into his sleeping bag. He is pissed off and doesn’t even kiss Eržika good night. But the bedding’s sleep-inducing warmth calms him down. If nothing else, tomorrow at least he can afford to eat and drink as much as his heart desires.

* * *

Freddy’s grandma survived her husband by less than half a year. Losing grandpa deprived her life of all its meaning. She caught a fever. Her mind went, and she saw parrots and palm trees everywhere. This was something she had secretly dreamed of all her life in the bleak workers’ settlement, just as others long for a fireplace, or a good record player. Grandma Mešťánek’s dream came true and she left this world with a smile on her lips, surrounded by the rustle of palm trees and the screeching of parrots.

Grandma’s death didn’t affect Freddy as deeply as grandpa’s. He loved his grandma, but, because he admired grandpa, he despised her a little for being so meek and gentle.

All the brickyard workers were puzzled at grandma Mešťánek loving her useless husband so much that she followed him into the grave. There were times when he binge-drank, times when he had mistresses, and times when he beat her. Sometimes all three things coincided. When he got back from the front, he went too far and was sent to prison for a few months: he’d almost killed someone in a pub near the station. In his youth, grandpa Mešťánek was a dangerous and unpredictable drinker and troublemaker. His wife was a saint for putting up with him all her life.

Freddy learned all this after his grandparents’ death from what he happened to hear adults saying in his presence.

A new employee with a family soon moved into the grandparents’ old flat, and the fairytale was over. Freddy didn’t like the new tenant; he had an egg-shaped head, he was bald and wore glasses. His children had egg-shaped heads, too and his helpful, cheery wife, who wanted to be friends with everyone, was annoying. Her desperate efforts to fit in with the brickyard community made everyone avoid her. Freddy looked at the newcomers as enemies: people who had taken away his grandparents.

That was when Freddy was about seven or eight years old. During his lonely walks in the brickyard neighbourhood he met a woman who worked in the brick-drying hall. Her name was Tera Sziládyiová; she was about thirty years older than Freddy and lived in the workers’ wooden houses, right inside the brickyard area. She had the answers to all Freddy’s questions and never made him feel that she had no time for him. She liked this lonely boy with an adult’s thoughtful gaze.

Freddy’s parents didn’t mind Tera looking after him sometimes. Nobody forced her. At least they could get on with building their house.

Freddy loved it best when she took him in the evening to the showers in the community block that was next to the brick-making hangars. The huge room with lots of showers on one side and washbasins on the other was always overheated and the hot steam in the air took their breath away. The women’s showers smelled different to the men’s showers where he used to go with his father.

At first, Freddy was shy of undressing completely in front of Tera, but soon he got used to it. Tera undressed in front of him. She had a firm muscular body and powerful breasts with large aureoles around her nipples. The bruises and scars all over her body were proof that her life was tough. She had a prison tattoo on her buttocks. She locked the shower-room with a key she took from the porter’s lodge and turned on the hot water.

Freddy felt hot steam all over his body and he found it very pleasant.

Tera took him under the shower and then soaped him. Freddy never understood why she spent so much time on scrubbing his genitals so carefully and with so much love. Then he used the soap on her. Tera showed him where cleanliness was most important: between her muscular thighs. She showed him how to wash that spot with a soapy sponge and then slowly and precisely rub it with his fingers. After a while, she closed her eyes and sighed. Then she smiled. She took Freddy’s soapy tail in her hand and massaged it. Freddy soon had a special feeling of relief. It was like someone, after prolonged hesitation and denial, finally having a drink of water, or urinating, but much nicer.

“Nice, wasn’t it?” Tera asked, took him under the shower and thoroughly washed the rest of soap off him. “When I’m not here any more, you can do it yourself any time you want. All men do it. Girls, too. But promise to keep it our secret!”

“Scout’s honour!” Freddy promised, as he was taught at school.

Then they dried themselves with towels and went home. Tera turned off to the singles’ dormitory, a wooden building. Freddy went on to the porter’s lodge, gave back the key and, his head wrapped in a towel, ran into the first apartment building opposite the porter’s lodge. He had to cross a dark section between the lamp over the lodge and the illuminated entrance to the building. Freddy always tried to get across this section as fast as he could, with bated breath and eyes opened wide. In the darkness around him were hidden mysterious creatures, madmen, Dracula, and aliens from UFOs. He clearly felt them poking out their cold bony monstrous fingers. He managed the stone stairs, worn smooth by a century of use, three steps at a time, and he breathed with relief only when he reached the kitchen, at home, filled with his father’s suffocating cigarette smoke. His heart beat with anxiety; the excitement of the frightening journey home was stronger than the indefinable bliss under the hot shower.

“When I grow up, I’m going to marry aunt Tera,” he said one day in a solemn voice at some family celebration at his maternal grandpa’s house.

His declaration caused great hilarity. They all knew Tera and they knew about her wild love life. They laughed so hard they had to hold their aching bellies.

Freddy’s father, however, had never had a sense of humour.

“Tera Sziládyiová is a tart,” he said. “A loose woman. Mentally retarded. Starting next week, you’re going to the school cafeteria. And no more communal showers. You’re a big boy now. Boys don’t go to women’s showers. From now on, you’ll come with me, or with Uncle Alex, to the men’s showers.”

And that’s what happened.

Tera Sziládyiová soon vanished somewhere else, another factory, another single worker’s dormitory, driven by her hot blood to corrupt other little boys.

New experiences erased the memory of Tera from Freddy’s mind. No wonder: he never attached any importance to the peculiar manipulation of his member in the women’s showers.