Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Children his age were smoking their first Mars cigarettes, drinking beer illegally in Vašíček’s pub and riding down the village road with their heads turned aside on newish, polluting Pioneer and Jawa 21 motorbikes, which they had bought by doing odd jobs in the brickyard. Freddy didn’t feel like working, he was as lazy as a dog. Besides, he had realised that he could never catch up with his contemporaries. He threw the bike on the rubbish tip, getting a beating from his father who didn’t like his son’s lack of respect for things.

With no bicycle and no motorbike, Freddy was tied to the brickyard settlement and its immediate surroundings. So he made friends with children who hadn’t started to cycle yet, and he declared himself their leader. They were the younger siblings of his former friends. They were all five to six years younger than Freddy. This didn’t bother him at all; he felt at ease with them. They respected him. He initiated them into all the mysterious adventures that he had experienced with his contemporaries. The younger boys and girls liked him: when they had an older boy with them, they weren’t afraid of gypsies or children from hostile parts of the village beating them up.

After a time the company of children of a younger age group stopped amusing him: bored, he began to torment them. For example, he took children on a long trip into the fields behind the clay-pit and then ran away from them. The children came home crying, hungry and tired by the long trek over the fields. Another time, Freddy took his gang deep into the acacia forest, and then ran away from the group with two girls. He took the girls into a bunker made of straw bales left in the field after the harvest. By the light of his pocket torch, the girls had to show him all sorts of things. If they didn’t, Freddy threatened them, he would set fire to them and the straw. The girls didn’t mind. They thought it was fun. They knew Freddy’s threats weren’t serious. He ended up showing them all kinds of things of the sort Tera Sziládyiová had taught him.

Freddy demanded unconditional obedience from his children’s gang, but despite his severity he was much liked. He constantly kept inventing new combat situations. They all acted as characters in the East German Wild West movies based on Karl May, starring Gojko Mitič, or in the Romanian-French film series The Leather Stocking , or a series about four tank drivers and a dog, or a war film Liberation . In combat situations they communicated only in Czech, to preserve the magic atmosphere of their favourite films, which the cinemas then showed dubbed into Czech.

Sometimes the boys in the gang couldn’t understand the somewhat secretive and conspiratorial relationship between Captain Freddy and the girls in the gang, but since they were very young, it didn’t bother them.

One day Freddy and a few girls ran away again from the rest of the gang. They went to a forest near the railway between Nová Ves and Devín Lake, north-west of the clay-pit. There he showed them what his former woman friend taught him. The little girls gladly let him massage them in places he chose; it gave them a pleasant dizzy sensation. Freddy pulled down his underpants and let the girls stimulate his genitals.

While they were engaged in this pleasant activity, they were caught by Mr Forgách, a pensioner, out cycling, intending to cut grass for his rabbits. The girls screamed, pulled up their knickers and ran away. Freddy got his underpants twisted and was bemused and paralysed by the last throbs of his bliss.

Pensioner Forgách broke off a willow branch and whipped him like a horse. Then he grabbed his ear and marched him back to the brickyard.

The whipping from pensioner Forgách was just a friendly rebuke compared to what awaited Freddy Piggybank at home. His mother broke her wooden laundry paddle on him and his father broke the carpet beater. They both clutched their chests and assured each other that it wasn’t their fault; they were after all busy building their family house, their new future, their new life. They had no time to deal with their pervert of a son. It was all Sziládyiová’s fault.

Pensioner Forgách lived in the workers’ settlement, too. He knew everyone who lived there. He didn’t keep anything to himself. The result was a general beating, followed by a gynæcological check on all the girls in Freddy’s gang. Luckily for Freddy, the result was negative; all the girl gang members were still virgins.

In any case, Freddy was fifteen when this happened and had just been accepted into the Brick-making Technical school in Hodonín. He went there right after the summer vacation so he saw no more of the members of the children’s gang whose captain he used to be, nor of their furious parents.

“They’ll show him what’s what in boarding school,” Freddy’s parents consoled each other.

* * *

Feri Bartaloš crosses the car park, which is packed chaotically with cars blocking each other’s exit. Other cars forcing a way into the car park from outside contribute to the chaos and stop the cars trying to leave from getting out. Freddy Piggybank is not there.

Proud Feri Bartaloš bangs on the fibreboard wall of the attendant’s trailer. From inside comes the noise of wheezing and squeaking. Feri bangs again. The trailer door opens and through a narrow crack Piggybank’s moon-like face appears.

“Give it a break, will you?” Feri insists, “It’s broad daylight!”

“Shut your stinking trap,” a disgusted Freddy tells Feri through the crack in the door.

Proud Feri Bartaloš laughs. It’s Piggybank’s mouth that stinks, not his. Freddy must have bad digestion: he must be constipated from arse to mouth, that’s the only explanation Feri Bartaloš can think of. Piggybank shouldn’t hoard up so much and should occasionally wash the stench down with gin or vodka, Feri helpfully suggests through the crack.

The crack widens and the parking attendant’s corpulent figure fills the doorway. He feels like a man. He woke Lady up around four in the morning; but he hadn’t closed an eye all night, gazing on this creature’s sweet repose and sexy curves; his jaw had dropped with excitement and he had to use all his will-power to fight down the temptation to masturbate. By early morning he could take no more: he woke her up and tried to have sex with her. Lady woke up, but soon afterwards went back to sleep, uneasily, but asleep all the time, even when Piggybank was moaning loudly. Piggybank was so excited that he couldn’t get it up. He tried to introduce his useless, flaccid piece of flesh into Lady’s tired crotch. Freddy Piggybank’s superhuman effort to get at least some tumescence made the veins on the forehead swell and turn blue, but this resulted only in a sudden eruption of semen that sprayed the sleeping Lady, the bed, the floor and the opposite fibreboard wall. So all he could do was to lie down on the other bunk and fall asleep.

With a look of an experienced debauchee, from the height of his doorway, fat Freddy sizes up Feri Bartaloš.

Feri peeks under Piggybank’s hand which is holding the trailer door open.

“Come out, Lady,” he tells the woman, who is sitting on the bed and looking haggard. “You need breakfast,” he adds.

He looks at the attendant.

“We’ve got an agreement, right?” Feri reminds him.

The attendant nods. He is looking for his clothes and hat.

Lady comes out unsteady on her feet and follows proud Feri. The day and night that she has been through has somewhat raddled her carefully nurtured beauty, but she still arouses male interest among the beer drinkers clustering round their tables. Today they all know what’s in store, so they express their passion and impatience in restless muttering and occasional eager shouts.