Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Then the healer slept like a log.

In the middle of the night he woke up thirsty. He lay there and felt as if he were riddled with holes, like a sieve. Through all those holes energy flowed into him from some dark place under the bed. Hruškovič had an uncomfortable feeling, despite being half asleep, as if he had forced his way into a room where something was going on that he was not meant to know about. He dared not move and fell asleep, still thirsty.

In the morning, of course, he remembered nothing. He quickly choked down a brioche and drank milky coffee, incredulously watching the meek crowd of patients that took up the entire pavement.

“People are fucking idiots!” he told his wife and sighed. He was disgusted with himself.

He swallowed the brioche, chased it down with the coffee and, whistling a tune went out into the yard to continue his fraudulent healing.

On Monday, Hruškovič officially disbanded the Hurytan trio and decided to devote himself to healing and psychic work.

He was going to become a famous man, much sought after, loved, feared, and wealthy.

* * *

Every time Martin Junec meets Silvia in the Ambassador bar, he is aware that he is a successful, wealthy man in his prime and that he hasn’t slept with a woman for quite some time. Edna is stuck somewhere in the jungle in New Guinea, scientifically studying copulating Papuans, while Junec is assailed more and more insistently by importunate visions.

Whenever Martin recalls making love with Edna, he always gets excited. Edna always liked him ejaculating into her mouth and her sensitive lips noting his member’s rapid abrupt spasms which foretold the unstoppable emission of sperm. She jokingly dubbed this “plumbing noises.”

She adored it when she could feel Martin’s testicles hardening in her hand and almost receding inside at the height of passion.

Junec, too, liked servicing Edna with his mouth. He used to dream of doing this when he lived with his former wife, but she would vehemently refuse him: she considered even a man taking a woman from behind, or touching her genitals, or leaving the light on during intercourse, and so on, to be perversions.

Dr Gershwitz helped Martin make up for it: she loved being roused by his tongue. Martin liked to run his tongue over her passionately welcoming vulva which, after he once shyly asked her, she gladly and regularly shaved. He liked to toy with her erect clitoris that courageously crawled from its bed and provocatively offered its sensitive rosy tip to his gourmand’s tongue. Martin liked to dip his tongue as deep as he could into Edna’s vagina: he was always excited by the awareness that, a few seconds before, his member had preceded him. He always lingered over the apparently chastely closed entry to Edna’s rectum, which was also one of the gates of their shared pleasure, but only from time to time, when its owner was in the mood.

Junec loved Edna’s moaning at the moment of climax, he loved the geometry of her open crotch suddenly altering completely, and most of all Edna’s inability then to retain her urine, so that a thin stream would spray straight into Martin’s obliging mouth.

Martin often wondered what they had in common. They came from two different worlds: she was a Jewish American intellectual and he an immigrant electrician from Eastern Europe.

Although, when you thought about it, Edna’s roots in the United States weren’t that deep; one day she admitted to him that her great grandfather had come on a boat from Tsarist Russia in the nineteenth century.

They didn’t discuss abstract topics much; Martin’s knowledge of English was improving, but when Edna occasionally got talking about her opinions, her work and interests, he had to concentrate devilishly hard to understand it all. So they were most at ease in bed, with long hours of shared silence.

And so the electrician Martin Junec and the university professor Edna Gershwitz became intimate friends. The fact was that when Edna wasn’t doing research for new scholarly publications, when she wasn’t lecturing, or travelling to meet her savages, she was in bed with Junec.

Martin preferred not to enquire how Edna researched the sexual rituals of Amazon Indians in the field. It suited him to see Edna only now and again; he didn’t have the time for an intense daily relationship. He owned a little workshop with two electricians and two assistants and he devoted his time to it.

One of the assistants happened to be Žofré. Although he was almost constantly marinated in alcohol and his work contribution was pretty well zero, Martin put up with him for personal reasons and out of compassion and didn’t sack him. He regularly tried to make him return home, to Czechoslovakia, but had no success; Žofré liked it in America where he didn’t have to do anything, since Junec looked after him. Besides, he was also afraid that the Communists would punish him.

That was when Martin started to develop his entrepreneurial idea. In the long evenings, when he sat watching television, waiting for a call from a customer, he took up an old hobby that had absorbed him a long time ago, when he still worked in Czechoslovakia, in the Water Works: making lamps out of plywood. He would do a drawing, buy plywood and set to work with a jigsaw. He used these lamps to decorated the humble flat and workshop that he shared with Žofré. The entrepreneurial idea came from a neighbour who dropped in to make a phone call and was moved to tears when Martin gave him one of his lamps. Two days later, the man was back, asking Junec to sell him four lamps: for his brother in New York, his parents, in-laws and a brother-in-law. He offered Martin fifty dollars a lamp. He left two hundred dollars poorer, but happily clutching to his chest four carved, decoratively burnished, stained and varnished little lanterns. Martin sat down, opened a can of beer, got paper and a pencil and started calculating.

Edna was leaving soon for Brazil. Martin drove her to the airport in his Mustang banger. When she returned, two months later, he met her in the arrivals hall and helped her with her luggage. In the car park he opened the door of a brand new Mercedes: the first batch of plywood lamps had been sold in two days to the mail order department store Sears & Roebuck and by the time Edna arrived, there were two hundred employees of Korean origin operating their jigsaws in hastily rented production halls to Martin’s designs, burnishing, staining and varnishing hundreds of lamps.

The Americans couldn’t get enough plywood table lamps and night lamps, lanterns and chandeliers with the label HAND-MADE QUALITY by ARTISANIA LAMPS. They were a hit, and were so popular that they pushed even the famous Tiffany lamps out of the market.

The Mercedes was on hire purchase, but was good to drive. Martin drove Edna home and then they spent hours making love. Edna was aroused, and not just sexually; she had never believed stories about the American self-made man but suddenly she actually had a role in one.

This newly minted Great Gatsby was taking her unusually roughly, almost cruelly. His once shy and hesitant love was now overlaid by the arrogant decisiveness of a successful man, a winner.

Edna accepted that. She was a feminist, but not in bed. With a woman like that at one’s side, a man could even become the President of the United States, Martin bragged; he had plenty of time to work at his career. But he didn’t become President of America: he was satisfied with being president of Artisania Lamps, of which he was the founder.

And then Žofré died. He was hit by a car when drunk and passed away in hospital. He was fully conscious by then, having completely sobered up. Although Žofré hated Dr Gershwitz and called her a “Yid” (“that Yid woman of yours”) to Martin’s face, she was the only one with him when he died: Martin had an important business meeting and didn’t get the news of Žofré’s fatal accident. Edna was holding Žofré’s hand and weeping silently. She accepted this permanently sozzled fat slob as an inalienable part of Martin Junec, a part of his personality, one of the two inseparable Marx Brothers: she still remembered their first visit to her house. She knew very well that in all America she was the only close person Martin would now have. She wasn’t quite sure she could play that part. She never found out about the hatred that Žofré felt for her: Žofré was a typical hypocritical Slovak and never let on that he was allergic to her. She, as an American, was used to consistently face-to-face relationships, so she didn’t notice anything.