Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

The yard is full of patients waiting their turn in a quiet, orderly queue. Junec heads for the house, knocks and enters the kitchen. Hruškovič’s wife is at the stove cooking something and is startled by his entry.

“Hello, Veruna!” Junec shouts.

“Martin?” Hruškovič’s wife cannot believe it is him and wipes her hands on a towel.

They greet each other. Martin kisses her on both cheeks and gives her a present. Hruškovič’s wife, impressed by American cosmetics, flushes bright red. The Levis 501 jeans for her teenage daughter, who is on a course for prospective models, also please her. “I’ll call Jano right away,” she says. In the hall she pushes an intercom button and says: “Jano, Martin Junec is here.”

Soon, Hruškovič appears in the hall.

The old friends embrace.

“Old man, you old fart!” shouts Hruškovič, grabbing Junec’s cheek with a show of roughness. How Hruškovič has missed his old mate, by God! Ever since Martin telephoned that he was coming to Nová Ves, Hruškovič has been looking out of the window.

“I can see you’re very busy,” Martin comments after giving Hruškovič his present, a three-litre bottle of twelve-year-old Jack Daniels whisky. “You seem to have plenty of patients, don’t you?”

“Actually, they’re only poor suckers who believe in miracles,” says Hruškovič, dismissively waving his hand. He goes out onto the veranda and surveys the crowd obediently waiting in the yard.

“You can go home today,” the healer shouts at them in a stentorian voice. Hruškovič’s energy has just gone. They can come back in a couple of days: tomorrow Hruškovič is concocting his miraculous tinctures.

The crowd begins to disperse humbly and without protesting.

“They’re like sheep,” says Hruškovič indignantly. “They fall for anything.”

Martin smiles. He’s read about Hruškovič in the papers, in the Slovak American papers, in the USA. They say Hruškovič can cure even cancer and aids. They say he has miraculous healing powers.

“What shit!” says Hruškovič says. If it was true, he’d be the first to know about it.

He looks at his wife.

“My old mate and I are going to have a beer,” he tells her.

They cross the veranda and the yard, and enter the old summer kitchen. Martin admires the room’s equipment, the esoteric posters, books, and objects.

Hruškovič takes off his white coat and throws it on the massage table. “It’s all fake,” he says.

He takes from the champagne cooler a five-hundred-crown bill.

“This is the only genuine thing,” he waves the banknote at Junec and puts it in his pocket. “You’ve got to make a living somehow,” he says, as if apologizing to his friend for his profession. “Let’s have a drink!” he looks at Junec. “Shit, we haven’t seen each other for at least fifteen years. We have to celebrate your return.”

“They’ve demolished Vašíček’s ,” Martin notes sadly.

“But we do have plenty of new pubs,” says Hruškovič. They can choose one at the bottom of the hill, at the football stadium, or in the village near the chapel, and Virgo has even opened his own restaurant.

“Virgo… Virgo,” Martin is thinking aloud. Does he mean the one who worked as a waiter in Vienna?

“Sure,” says the healer. “Now he has a Croat restaurant on the road to Devín, near the statue of the Virgin Mary.”

“You don’t say!” Martin is astounded by the enterprise of the Nová Ves villagers.

Finally, they stick to tradition and go to Konzum , the grocer’s. Hruškovič orders two bottles of beer and two shots of vodka.

“Just like old times,” says Hruškovič cheerfully. “Do you still remember, old man?”

Martin nods. “Those were the days,” he agrees. “But perhaps they weren’t.”

“Do you remember Bulgaria?” the healer reminds him. “When we went there the first time? When Žofré got arrested? And a year later, the second time? And then Switzerland! Norway! My God!”

Hruškovič smiles. “We had cash, booze, and a lot of fun,” he says. “You remember when we got the runs after we ate that salad in Bulgaria? Ha, ha, ha! And the girls! Don’t even mention them! They crawled to the hotel after us.”

“That reminds me of Anča Prepichová,” says Martin, “What happened to her? Do you know anything about her?”

“As far as I know,” Hruškovič says, “she made it. First she married a man who worked for the Water Works. He had an accident and died. Anča couldn’t give a toss about her job sewing parachutes and started to going to the petrol station to fuck lorry drivers. They kicked her out of the Water Works housing. Then she worked as a hooker in the Ambassador. I was still playing there at the time. She went out with this little money-changer. That man made it big-time: he even got into parliament. Anča’s now living with him and another girl. Together, in a threesome, you understand.”

“That member of parliament is a polygamist, or what?” asks Junec.

“No, he’s completely sane and normal,” says the healer. “What’s his name… Yes, Urban. He represents the Movement of the Democratic Right. It’s a political party here. He was supposed to be a minister of something… Yes, our loopy Anča certainly has it made!”

“That’s strange,” Martin says. “In the USA, any politician would be finished if they found out that he was living with two women…”

“Get used to it,” says the healer, “nothing’s too odd for Slovakia.”

Martin reverts to his topic again. He’s sure that Hruškovič has made it, too. He’s cured lots of people. He can’t deny he’s got special energy.

Hruškovič laughs. “It’s all in the imagination,” he says. People are so desperate that their auto-suggestion tells them that he’s cured them. Actually, they either cure themselves, or they weren’t ill at all and only imagined they were.

“Fuck off!” Martin says indignantly. Hruškovič needn’t talk bullshit. He can tell an old friend the truth!

“That’s what I’m doing,” says Hruškovič. He wouldn’t tell anyone else: he has no healing ability; he’s a charlatan. A con man, okay? He’s after people’s money, that’s all!

“Oh, come on!” Martin cannot believe it. And what about the woman with advanced breast cancer? And all those childless couples whom Hruškovič helped? And cases when he cured aids? After all, Martin has read all about it. So don’t give that fucking nonsense to his old friend Martin!

But even Hruškovič couldn’t understand it at first, says the healer with a sigh. He thinks it was all coincidence. How could an ex-musician, cure anyone? All the medication that Martin saw in his surgery is just tinted water. And the miraculous anti-cancer ointment is just ordinary Vaseline that Veruna used to get in the brickyard when she still worked there. They still have ten kilos of it left in the cellar… After all, Hruškovič doesn’t even know how to dress a graze on somebody’s hand.

Martin shakes his head in disbelief.

“Why are you cross, old man?” Hruškovič raises his vodka glass in cheers. “Would I fucking lie to you?”

They clink glasses, down the vodka and chase it down with beer.

“Have you been to see the old folk?” the healer asks.

Martin nods in silence.

“Marfa married about five years ago,” says Hruškovič. “She found someone in the singles ads, I gather. They live in Trnava now.”

Junec nods. “She was right. Why stay on her own? And Trnava’s all right.” Martin is sure that his marriage still wouldn’t have broken up if the old people hadn’t kept buggering things up. Martin began to hate Marfa when she became more and more like her mother.