Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Two armed security men appear in the hall.

One of them gets a polite but determined hold on the enraged Eržika and leads her out. Eržika fends him off wildly, but it’s no use. Feri gets the same treatment; the other sheriff in black grabs him.

On the pavement Eržika yells even louder. All her despair gushes out in an uninterrupted flow of tears, words, and inarticulate screams.

She has nothing! This bloody city has robbed her of everything. If she’d married Rácz, she could have been lounging in a big villa overlooking the city. But she was stupid: she married that idiot Feri Bartaloš instead, and this is how she’s ended up.

The passers-by pause near this odd couple, listen for a while and then, fully entertained, hurry off.

She has lost everything, Eržika continues. First, they were mugged by the masked robber and now by the bank. They had about a million; now they have nothing. The bank claims that the account is empty. Eržika will show them “empty”. She will complain. She will write to the President of the Republic. She will write to the Prime Minister, too; he, at least, is on the side of the poor. Everyone will see what she can do.

Feri drags Eržika away, but she wriggles frees of him and hammers the smoked glass entrance to the bank with her fists. Feri tries to pull her away from the building. The two sheriffs in black run out and push her away from the glass. Feri gets a blow from a truncheon as well.

Eržika runs round the pavement and tugs at the sleeves of passers-by. Did you see that? She’s been robbed by this society. She has nothing left; she’s reached the bottom. And she was once almost a millionaire!

Feri, too, begins to rage. The truncheon blow on his back hurts, even though he’s wearing a thick jacket. He shouts something about injustice, fascism, and communism. A brickbat that he picked up off the pavement is suddenly in his hand. He swings his arm a few times, and soon a giant pane of smoked glass on the bank’s façade shatters with a roar.

The sheriffs in black run out of the bank again, but by now Feri and Eržika are round the corner on the other side of the street.

After running for a while, Feri and Eržika get tired and slow to a walk. Eržika is whimpering and wiping away her tears. Her voice is faltering. Feri puts a hand round her shoulders. He, too, feels like crying. He feels he is the lowest treacherous swine on the planet. Feri Bartaloš is responsible for everything that has happened.

Pangs of conscience bother him and eat him up. He presses Eržika to himself even tighter and silently swears to give her back everything a thousand-fold, even a million-fold!

* * *

When Sida gets bored waiting for a client, or is in a bad mood, she commands her slave Piggybank to entertain her. He has to sing her happy songs in his mooing voice, or make silly faces, or she simply orders him to wank in front of her. The faces that he pulls while he does it are always certain to make her laugh.

That’s how it is now; Sida has a headache, she is in a foul temper and wants to torment someone. Freddy is handy and utterly defenceless.

“What kind of a man are you, Freddy?” she goes for her slave. “You never get a decent erection. Show me! See, you can’t get it up. I want you to get it up. I give you three minutes. Get on with it! If you don’t get it up by then, I’ll torture you with my lighter.”

Sida lights up, sets the lighter to produce the longest possible flame and measures it against Freddy.

“I’ll scorch you like a hog,” she says lubriciously.

Freddy tries to do as his mistress demands.

Sida watches him. When she notices that his breathing has quickened, she firmly grabs his moving hand with a torturer’s smile on her thickly painted face.

“Enough!” she says. “You’re my slave and you’ll come when I want you to. Right?”

“Right,” says Freddy and takes his hand off his engorged member. He feels his genitals jerk two or three times like an engine running out of petrol. Coming like this is unpleasant, but a job is a job.

Sida takes a whip from a stand and tries it for quality on Piggybank’s fat back.

“Sit!” she shouts at the fat wretch. For mysterious reasons, Sida shouts her monosyllabic and disyllabic commands in Czech. Even now. “Good boy!” she says and scratches Piggybank under his chin.

She inserts her finger-tip into her crotch and lets him lick it. That is the sweet she rewards him with. Then she puts a pear-shaped wooden gag in his mouth and fixes it to his head with leather straps. Now Freddy can produce, instead of words, only a variety of slavish screeches.

“Let’s see if anyone is interested in our services,” Sida says, takes the leash and attaches it to Piggybank’s collar. “Let’s go!” she commands in a low voice and gives Freddy’s behind, almost bare in his special leather underpants, a lash with a whip.

Freddy moans with gratitude. He obeys his mistress’s every word. He is glad to serve. If he had a tail, he would wag it madly.

When they enter the bar, Sida orders a can of beer. Freddy stands next to her, but he cannot drink: he has a wooden pear in his mouth. He would endure anything, even thirst, for his mistress. He knows that when their shift ends, to reward his suffering, his mistress will have quenched a thirst that even a thousand cans of beer wouldn’t have quenched.

The club members slowly assemble. Some already know Freddy and greet him with familiarity. Freddy politely bows and, mumbling as best he can, returns their greetings. He is happy to be among his peers. He is happy to serve.

The working evening in the Private Club Justine is beginning.

* * *

For along time Silvia has been plotting revenge on Rácz for what he did to her, an emancipated and reserved young lady.

It is clear as day that there’s no sense reporting Rácz to the police. Rácz has the police in his pocket: they’d laugh about it.

Then Silvia considers having him beaten up, or even killed by the underworld, but realises right away that this wouldn’t work: Rácz has at his service a numerous and well armed security squad that accompanies him everywhere and patrols outside his villa even at night. Besides, Silvia doesn’t actually know anyone in the underworld.

Burning with hatred, Silvia considers the possibility of kidnapping Rácz’s wife, drugging her, smuggling her to Austria and selling her to a brothel. Finally, she decides against it: she realises, first of all, that an innocent person would suffer; secondly, this wouldn’t provide tangible evidence of her suffering that she could send Rácz to make him suffer.

The idea of tangible evidence surfaces again later on, when she recovers from the unpleasant memories of violent coitus with the savage hotelier and when all the negative emotions in her mind are displaced by her cold desire for a sophisticated revenge.

It begins one morning when a courier brings to Silvia’s freshly renovated villa below the railway station a giant bouquet of a hundred orchids. In the bouquet, Silvia finds Rácz’s business card. On the back is the following note: “Rácz remembers times spent together and hopes for more. Best wishes, Your Rácz.”

Silvia is almost felled. She goes momentarily blind, and when she remembers Rácz’s enormous sexual organ wildly moving inside her, she feels like vomiting. She re-reads a few times the brazen note written in Rácz’s hand, so energetic but as crude as a schoolboy’s. She cannot believe her eyes. The arrogance!

A desire for revenge begins to quicken again. Silvia lies down on the sofa and gets up only when she has thought up a plan. She puts on her most seductive dress and then goes down to the ground floor, the Perverts’ Club . From her office there she takes some up-to-date technical equipment and puts it all in her bag, to make her revenge perfect. Then she calls for a taxi and drives to the Hotel Ambassador.