Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Only his sister sees him out; Jano is offended and stays in the living room.

“Take this,” he tells his sister, pressing a few thousand-crown bills into her hand. “Make sure somebody takes care of our parents’ grave. I had a look at it in Lužná. It’s awful. Simply terrible!” he adds in English.

Naďa blushes. She nods and takes the money.

Martin gets into his car, starts, and drives a few hundred yards before parking at a restaurant, Janošík’s Hut . He’ll have dinner here. He orders potato dumplings with sheep’s cheese and fried bacon. He eats eagerly, and with his favourite dish he swallows his bitter disappointment. When he’s eaten, he pays and sets out for Bratislava, driving as night falls.

* * *

One day the bitch from the town council appears in Freddy’s car park, or rather, what’s left of it after all the adjustments and changes. She goes up to him with a victorious smile and puts an official document into his sweaty hand.

“What’s that?” asks the fat car park attendant, studying the document with staring eyes.

“It’s the cancellation of the lease contract,” chirps the bitch from the town council in her sweet voice.

“What?” Piggybank doesn’t understand.

“Your contract for the car park was for half a year, right?” the bitch asks. “And today is June 30th. So, I’m sorry.” The bitch from the town council finds it hard to suppress a malicious smirk.

Clutching the document, Freddy Piggybank collapses into his wicker chair. His fat body, his attendant’s cap, and his sadly puffy cheeks make him look like a little toadstool. The bitch almost feels sorry for him. “It wasn’t my idea,” she says defensively.

Freddy looks at the document. He has nothing except this job to live on, he says in a tearful voice. This happened once before, a few years ago, in winter, because of the Christmas Market. They brought in carp, Christmas trees, gifts, and so on. Overnight they built the Wooden Village and it’s still haunting us. They put up these wooden huts in the middle of a capital city. At the time it made him very ill. He was delirious for a few weeks with fever. He lost weight, a hundred pounds, maybe more. Then they gave him back part of the car park. That was during the first democratic dictatorship. And now they want to take everything he has from him? Is that why he froze, demonstrating against the Communists? Is that why he fought for an independent Slovakia? Well, he didn’t think it would be like this. If he’d known, he’d have voted for the communists. “Yes, the communists. They’re the only ones, I think, supporting private enterprise and the development of capitalism.”

The bitch from the town council clears her throat and looks at her watch. Mr Mešťánek should have reckoned on this, she says. An area like this in the centre of the city can’t be left idle. It can’t be left to service the few drivers who want to park here. An area like this has to generate its own income. In a few years there’ll be a multi-storey McDonald’s here and Mr Mešťánek can come and have a hamburger.

As he sees himself queuing for a hamburger in a multi-storey building erected on his car park, Freddy Piggybank’s eyes start to shed tears.

“It’s unfair!” he shouts. “A man is keen to work, works entire days here, doesn’t even go home, and now this! Where’s the gratitude?”

“Look,” the bitch from the town council says finally. “I’m not going to debate this with you. As of tomorrow, the car park no longer belongs to you. Do you understand? You do. So sign here, and I’ll be off.”

The bitch from the town council waits for the attendant’s childish signature, and then she turns on her heels, vanishing on the busy pavement in front of the hotel Ambassador.

Freddy sits there lifelessly. Only now does he feel the whole impact of his cruel fate. This is the end of Freddy. Life will not be worth living now. Where will he go? What will happen to him? Back to the brickyard? They’re laying off workers there. And his parents? What will his parents say? The vein in his head begins to pound dangerously. Freddy should be taking his medication, but he just sits there. I might as well croak, he thinks, full of self-pity. He imagines big headlines in the daily papers: BANKRUPT CAR PARK ATTENDANT DIES ON HIS LOT!.. HE ONLY WANTED TO LOOK AFTER CARS!.. ANOTHER VELVET REVOLUTION VICTIM? Yes, he’ll probably die here. The bitch from town council will read the paper and her conscience will bother her until she dies. Freddy wallows in his misery and rather pleasant self-pity. His chest heaves mightily a few times and he sighs with sadness. No, Piggybank realizes, his death will not be headline news. Maybe some paper will have a little piece about it in the miscellaneous section: MENTALLY DISTURBED MISER DIES OF STROKE IN CAR PARK. Or something like that.

Freddy makes a decision. He will survive. He won’t allow his tragic death, a number one event for him, to become a source of entertainment for some fool having his morning coffee. No! Freddy will fight. He will have revenge on this fucking government for this humiliation. He will live off crime. He will sink deep into the muck. He will steal and so on, until they catch him and lock him up in jail. And he’ll die in jail. As a sort of silent protest. As an example of what this government did to an honest businessman, Alfred Mešťánek, who only wanted to guard cars until his death and earn a modest living. From now on, no wickedness will be wicked enough for Freddy!

With a pathetic expression on his face, Freddy gets up. He hurls his box of medicine to the ground. The little pills that were supposed to bring his slightly disturbed mind back to this planet at moments of excitement spill all over the car park. Freddy goes into his trailer, takes the money-bag off his neck and empties the money onto the table. He counts it and stuffs it in his pockets. Then he locks the trailer and, whistling, steps out towards the Wooden Village. In the corner of his eye he notices two bad gypsies hovering around a Mercedes with a Bratislava licence plate, but it doesn’t stir him to action. Freddy Piggybank doesn’t give a shit about stupid cars any more.

In the Wooden Village, Freddy stops by proud Feri Bartaloš. He feels a need to talk to someone, to complain. His tragic tone has, in the meantime, vanished; it has been left behind in the car park, together with the money-bag. Freddy’s thoughts and expression now have a euphoric note, a feeling of carefree liberty and free will. He is no longer responsible for anything. He will be bad, he’ll steal and lie, and join the dregs: it’s all the fault of those people over there! They threw him out, but he’s glad. It happened once before, in the first volume of Rivers of Babylon , and how did he cope? With difficulty; he lost his mind and joined some sect. Not a well-known one; Freddy Piggybank invented his own sect. But that won’t happen again. He won’t be that mad. He’s not going to shit himself. Others don’t own a car park, but they survive. They have a hard time, but they survive. And Freddy Piggybank will do the same.

“The gypsies are stealing one of your cars,” Bartaloš interrupts Freddy’s monologue and points behind his back. Freddy instinctively jerks and turns round. Two bad gypsies are now sitting in the Mercedes with Bratislava plates and fiddling with something under the dashboard. “I don’t give a toss about it,” says Freddy. He’s finished with that car park.

“And what are you going to do?” Bartaloš wonders.

“Whatever turns up,” says Freddy in a forced optimistic voice, which is tinged with fierce and tearful self-pity. He’ll thieve. What isn’t welded or chained down, Freddy Piggybank will snatch and sell here, in the Wooden Village. He doesn’t care who sees.