Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Soon a sweaty Feri, a toothpick in his mouth, takes a break, while Eržika sets out to the boiler room with food for madam. Lady eats sparingly; she would throw up with all that shaking about.

* * *

One day policemen turn up in the car park, open Lady’s car, search it and discover a rotting bag of shopping in the boot. Then one of the policemen, wearing civilian clothes, goes up to Piggybank, who has been watching them from a distance. He shows him his police ID and asks how long the Fiat has been parked there.

“About a week,” says Freddy truthfully.

Does he know where the lady driver went, enquires the policeman.

Freddy laughs. Freddy has a thousand cars in the car park every day. How could he remember one person?

The policeman shows him a picture of the lady. Freddy takes a look. Lady looks very good in it. She has a confident smile on her face and her eyes and lips are beautifully made up. She doesn’t looks so perfect now, Freddy is aware, but she’s still quite good-looking. Although, ever since one of the beer drinkers broke her nose, Bartaloš has had to lower the price for intercourse.

“No, I don’t recall her,” says Freddy firmly. He might be a swine, but he’s not a snitch, he thinks.

* * *

Junec’s lamps were a huge hit in the United States and soon he was getting orders from Europe as well. Martin had to take on more employees and was, at first, overwhelmed. Soon Europe was taking a third of Artisania Lamps’ production. Though transportation by ship was relatively cheap, it still had a negative impact on the price of Junec’s lamps in the European market, and a solution had to be found. Martin realised that if he could free himself of shipping costs, he could sell his lamps cheaper and brush the competition aside.

That was when a political revolution happened in Martin’s old country, sweeping away the Bolsheviks. Martin followed events taking place on the other side of the world attentively and was often glued to the television for hours, watching CNN news. “Good God!” he said, pinching himself. So Martin Junec had lived to see the day, after all!

Edna understood his excitement and held his hand.

“I wonder if the Slovaks will benefit, too,” Martin worried. “Let’s hope the Czechs don’t screw us again!”

“What do you have against the Czechs?” Edna asked. “After all, Havel is a Czech. And you’re a Czech, too.”

“No, darling!” Martin retorted. “I’m Slovak. Slovak, for God’s sake!”

“I understand,” said Edna. “Catalans, Castilians, Basques, and Galicians all live in Spain and they’re all Spaniards, aren’t they?”

“But I’m not a Czech,” Martin explained. “I’m Slovak. I’m from Czechoslovakia, not Bohemia. Do you see? From Czecho… Slovakia!”

“I see,” Edna said. “That means you are Czechoslovak.”

“I’m not a Czechoslovak,” Martin said. “I’m Slovak.”

“I see,” said Edna.

* * *

Siegfried Heilig is about forty and lives in East Germany. It’s not surprising: he’s an East German. He is a former member of the SED party, a district agent. It couldn’t be proved that he was a Stasi informer, as the documents, including his letters denouncing people in his workshop, were burnt. He’s still a foreman in a dilapidated factory making pollutants, but soon he’ll be unemployed. It’s all thanks to Gastarbeiter and asylum seekers.

After the dissolution of the GDR, Siegfried Heilig quickly changed politics; he became a right-wing sympathizer: foreigners, especially Russians, are to blame for everything. Only now has Siegfried Heilig begun to understand how demeaning it was for him to have to put up with being vomited over all his life and being compelled to put on a happy smile. Humiliation is the worst thing in the world when it is felt after the event; it gives rise to indomitable hatred of everyone around one: the humiliators and the humiliated, too.

Luckily, Siegfried Heilig was always too cowardly to express his hatred other than by loud talk and German Nationalist posing. He even helped burn down shelters for asylum seekers, if only indirectly, by watching it on television, even though these frantic evenings of arson were happening in his own small town, a few streets away.

In a pompous gesture of disowning his past, Siegfried Heilig even burned his wedding picture: the couple had got married wearing Communist Youth League uniform.

To settle the score with the former Soviet Union after the unification of Germany, Siegfried Heilig, together with his neighbours, big, blond, red-faced men with moustaches and similar psychiatric problems, lurked behind rubbish skips and ambushed Russian soldiers who, when they wangled a permit to leave their base, came to scavenge from the skips (just as dozens of other Russian soldiers scavenged from dozens of other skips). When the starving, frozen soldiers in huge peaked caps and stinking boots put their hands into the rubbish to retrieve leftovers of food, clothing, and other goods, Siegfried Heilig, or one of his compatriots, jumped from behind the skip and slammed the lid down on the Russians’ dirty hands. This painful piano-lid effect always scared the Russians so much that, as soon as they freed their mangled limbs from the skip, they ran off, howling with pain, to the loud laughter of those nice merry Germans. Siegfried Heilig always went back to his wife, warmed up by caraway schnapps and a sweet feeling of satisfaction of contributing to a Greater Germany and the coming of a New World Order.

Siegfried Heilig is a big man with a red face. His upper lip bears a blond moustache, not the kind Hitler wore, but the kind every other fat German tourist wears. Siegfried Heilig is a fat German tourist, too. His wife complements him perfectly: she is a dry blonde stick with bleached eyelashes, male facial features and cold light-blue eyes. They used to drive their Wartburg regularly to Lake Balaton and sometimes even to Bulgaria. After the reunification of Germany, they swapped their useless GDR money for hard Deutschmarks, one to one, and in summer, with another friendly family, indistinguishable from them, they went to Spain. For entire two weeks in Lloret del Mar, the former East Germans had to wrestle with their deep-rooted inferiority complex vis-à-vis their compatriots who had the luck to be born further West or South. The men dealt with it by getting drunk, singing choral songs, shouting “Heil!” every night, and pissing through the balcony railings of the hotel Frigola. Their wives did it by bitterly keeping their mouths closed, ostentatiously wiping the cutlery and glasses with their napkins before lunch and dinner and querulously bullying the stupid, dirty, conceited and thoroughly inferior Spanish waiters. The waiters secretly found this entertaining: they could unerringly tell an East German from a West German at first sight. He didn’t even have to open his mouth.

After the Spanish episode, Siegfried Heilig and his wife decided to take their holidays in Hungary and Bulgaria. They could feel more like lords there than in Spain, where their West German compatriots ruled. In Eastern Europe the East Germans still felt good. Everyone bowed down to the almighty Deutschmark. And when they substituted their farting Wartburg for a Volkswagen Golf with a catalytic converter and changed their licence plates from GDR to FRG, their self-esteem had no limits.

Siegfried Heilig and his wife are childless. A few abortions in her youth mean that Heilig’s wife has no chance of conceiving and carrying a baby to full term. Often, but especially now that the grim wrinkles round her mouth have deepened, she reproaches Siegfried Heilig for this, although he is responsible only for the last three abortions. (There was one he doesn’t even know about: the result of friendly extramarital relations with a negro from Zimbabwe at the 1973 International Festival of Youth in Berlin. The newly married Heiligs could then easily have had a mulatto, but the embryo ended in the sink, cut up into black pulp.)