Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

About twenty patients gathered in the street. Hruškovič was stunned; he wasn’t expecting that. Some patients came from afar, arriving in cars with licence plates from various towns: Dunajská Streda, Topoľčany, Trnava, Trenčín, and even Žilina. They parked in the main street, leaving only a narrow passage for traffic. Hruškovič was apprehensive, but he pulled himself together in time. After all, he knew how to handle people: as a bandleader, he often had to get the guests into the mood for dancing at the beginning of the night, or, later on, defuse a potential massacre on the dance floor. His patients were a bent mass of moaning and expectorating wretches whose hopeful faces were focused on him, Hruškovič. He used his strong voice to establish order among the waiting patients, called in the first one, showed him into his summer kitchen and began treatment.

Hruškovič’s first patient was a man in his fifties with a displaced lumbar vertebra. Hruškovič was no fool and that was something he diagnosed immediately. He ran a hand down the patient’s back and made knowledgeable grunts. He took two home-made wire objects out of the cabinet. They were shaped like something between a children’s wire puzzle and a complex astronomical instrument.

“What are you going to do to me, doctor?” asked the man.

Hruškovič, flattered by the title, placed one of the objects on the man’s neck and the other on his hips.

“Your spinal cord is blocked, I think,” he said. “Have your legs ever gone numb?” he asked.

“No,” the man said.

“That’s strange,” said Hruškovič. “Your thought conception current has been interrupted between the Chutney and the Özall points,” he explained helpfully. “If you’d come a few days later, your lower extremities would have been paralysed.”

The man was visibly horrified. “Does that mean I’d have been a wheelchair case?”

“Absolutely,” Hruškovič confirmed.

“What now, then?” the patient asked in despair.

“You leave that to me,” Hruškovič said brusquely and placed on his head a wire helmet that he had assembled himself. A decorative ball from his Christmas tree glittered on the helmet’s peak.

“For heaven’s sake, what are you going to do?” moaned the patient, terrified by the idea that he really might become paralysed.

“I’ll try using this patent mental energy amplifier to disperse the negative Salam energy,” said Hruškovič. “Between these two hyper-altruistic receptors an emission of invisible polyrhythmic Övegesh particles will flow and it will charge your spinal cord with positive Khotsmah energy. Do you understand? You don’t! Now be quiet! You may feel a lot of heat, but that’s fine.”

The patient lay there helpless. Hruškovič stood over him and put on an expression of devilish concentration. He was thinking how long it would take him to see to such a large number of patients. Suddenly, he realised that he was in charge. If he didn’t feel like it, he could announce that his energy had gone and tell them to come back tomorrow. Once he realised that, his mood improved.

“I can feel that heat already,” said the patient after a while.

“Like hell you can,” thought Hruškovič. “That’s normal,” he said. “Energy is flowing. Negative Salam vibrations are being cancelled out.”

His sensitive nose caught the aroma of stewed pork and sauerkraut that his wife was cooking for his lunch. He would have to send her to the shop for beer, it occurred to him.

“Well,” Hruškovič said after a while, “that should do.” He took the wire objects off his patient’s back and put them back into the cabinet together with his helmet. “Now we have to disperse the depolarized remnants of negative Salam energy,” he added, putting a bit of camphor ointment on his hand (it was in a porcelain dish with a sign saying CHILLI EMULSION that he had inscribed in Gothic script) and began to massage the patient’s back. With a practised movement, he pressed the backbone and the displaced vertebra obediently snapped into place.

“Just lie there for a while and let the Chilli emulsion work,” he ordered the man.

The patient lay on his belly without moving.

“I’m certain that your bed is positioned over a geopantogenetic zone,” Hruškovič said, wiping his hand on a paper towel. “When did you experience the back pain? I’m sure it must have been in the morning, when you got out of bed.”

The man shook his head. “No,” he said, “It started hurting when I unloaded the eighth bag of cement from my car.”

“Quite,” said Hruškovič in a voice that brooked no contradiction. “All the same, your spine was weakened by the pantogenetic zone. Radiation comes up from the earth, weakens the good vibrations, and turns them into bad ones. My job is to reverse that. You can get up now.”

The patient carefully got off the table, sighing. His face gradually expressed first fear, then mistrust, then surprise, joy and, finally, profound relief.

“Well?” Hruškovič asked, lit his cigarette lighter and theatrically passed the flame under both his palms. “Does it hurt?”

“It doesn’t!” said the astounded patient and made a few cautious movements. “It doesn’t hurt!”

“There you are, then,” said Hruškovič.

“And what about that… zone you mentioned, doctor?” asked the happy patient.

“Well, it would be best if I came and measured it myself,” said Hruškovič, “but there’s no chance of that in the foreseeable future: too many patients. Take this,” he said and gave the patient a one-litre bottle with a label that said AQUA OROASŒUR. This is water that has passed through forty transcription falsettos. Do you have a watering-can with a sprinkler at home? No? Then buy one and fill it with this water. Then sprinkle the floor of your bedroom evenly. Under your bed, too. This water will safely shield the whole bedroom from the geopantogenetic zone. But watch out!” Hruškovič raised his finger. “Before you begin sprinkling, you have to say the word Aehieh.”

“Come again?” asked the patient.

Hruškovič wrote “Aehieh” on a piece of paper and gave it to the patient. “Don’t lose it,” he reminded him. “This word will put you in long-distance contact with me, and with my mental energy I’ll influence the creation of the impermeable energy subdominant-conceptual shield,” he explained.

The patient nodded. “Thank you, doctor,” he said cordially and tried to shake his hand.

Hruškovič stepped back and raised both hands in a gesture of refusal.

“You know,” he said, “I don’t shake hands. Don’t take it badly; seriously, I’m only protecting you by refusing. You see, my hands are powerful energy irradiators,” he explained, holding his palms out to him.

The patient couldn’t help taking a step back.

“And how much do I owe you, doctor?” he asked.

“For the bottle of Aqua Oroasoeur give me three hundred crowns,” said Hruškovič. “As for treatment, I don’t take money for it. My abilities are a gift from God that can’t be sold, they can only be given to others. However, if you like, you can donate a sum of your choice. Over there.”

Hruškovič pointed to a little table under the window with a champagne cooler enthroned on it. In the morning he put in a few five hundred and one thousand crown notes. This was a psychological trick: no patient would dare to put in less.

Hruškovič’s first patient was no Scrooge, either: he added a crisp new thousand-crown note.

And that’s how it went all morning. Patient followed patient. Hruškovič tried out all his home-made instruments, sold dozens of bottles and phials of his concoctions. All the patients went off home satisfied. Hruškovič was amazed how stupid people could be.