Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

The very same evening, drenched by the rain, she rang the doorbell of her colleague’s cosy bachelor flat and fell into his arms: she had come to stay.

She introduced him to her parents. They were always smiling, youthful and immortal. Her father offered him non-alcoholic beer that he used not to drink, but now had a liking for.

Then there was a wedding.

After the wedding both spouses felt fine. They lived in a nice family house. The young woman left her job and became dull. From then on her only intellectual effort was to drive out to do her shopping and to listen to the advice of older ladies about the quality of detergent. She would use lotion on her face, put on some perfume, and cook, menstruate, and wash. She was always staring in wonderment at something. A dull life and staring improved her eyesight so much that she threw away her glasses. Her husband would go to work dressed in a burgundy suit and carrying an attaché case. Occasionally he would invite his boss home for dinner. The young woman would take a pre-cooked dinner from the freezer, and the boss would eat it, thinking she had cooked it. The next day her husband got a small raise in his salary.

From time to time, they invited friends home. The friends looked just as nice as the young woman and her husband. They sat properly in their armchairs and smiled at each other. They always drank coffee and knew all the brand names. Occasionally, the husband would open a bottle of golden-coloured brandy or whisky. Oddly enough, they always poured from the same bottle, but the level never seemed to go down. The same went for the sweets and biscuits.

* * *

By the time Feri gets back to Eržika, everything has been tidied up. Inflatable mattresses, blankets, and sleeping bags are stowed away in the hut at the back: they’re not needed. Snack bar customers with bursting intestines can use the front hut. It will have to do. The shitters often nervously fidget as they wait in a long queue, but Eržika copes with the crowd without batting an eyelid. If someone takes too long, Eržika gets off her chair and firmly knocks at the door of the cubicle. “Hey, what’s going on?” she shouts. “Get a move on!” she adds. “What’s the hold-up?” Then she returns to her post with dignity. Advanced pregnancy invests her with courage as well as dignity. She wouldn’t have dared before. A shitter once gave her such a punch that she fell under the sink. He didn’t like being charged two crowns for relief. Eržika then ran in tears to get Feri, but he was shopping in the supermarket. She wasn’t pregnant yet. Now she is pregnant and charges five crowns for a shit, and nobody dares to touch her, the Madonna of the Toilets.

As if a magic wand has been waved, the bedroom changes into a men’s lavatory with all its requisites: a burbling flushing system, two urinals and a smell of ammonia permeating the air.

Feri pauses for a while inside and checks the men’s cubicle. Then he goes to check the women’s lavatory. Afterwards, content with Eržika’s work, he goes outside, in front of the snack bar. Meanwhile, Eržika sweeps cigarette butts, discarded paper cups, broken bottles and plastic trays with remnants of yesterday’s mustard from under the tables of the Wooden Village. Her movements are graceful; she is wearing high heels, so high that she has to bend forward when walking.

Freddy Piggybank brought the shoes. Yugoslav women threw them away behind their parked bus when they changed into new shoes they had bought. Feri bought the shoes from the parking attendant; he got the asking price of three hundred crowns down to the equivalent of a can of sausage and beans. The parking attendant bought the can, warmed it up and ate it, and now Eržika walks around in sexy shoes. They’re Yugoslav, Feri reminds himself from time to time, watching her with pleasure.

Feri sits down on a bench and gets immersed in the paper. In the meantime, Eržika carries on sweeping around him. She moves quite awkwardly, like a duck, but for Feri, her walk has a certain charm: the shoes were really cheap.

People show up around seven. They ask the same question every day: “When does the snack bar open?” Every morning Feri gives the same reply: “Eight.” To emphasize his importance, he puts on a white coat. People think he is the manager and he maintains this not unflattering misunderstanding by turning round and shouting peremptory orders at Eržika as she cleans. When he finishes his paper, he puts it into his coat pocket and gets up with a sigh. The working day has begun. Standing in the middle of the Wooden Village, a proud Feri Bartaloš directs Eržika’s activity.

The snack bar staff arrive. They unlock the snack bar and enter. The barmen tap the beer barrels and the kitchen girls switch on the grill.

Soon the bastard boss shows up. He parks his Ford on the pavement, opens the boot and summons Feri with his finger. Without saying a word, he points to the boot, which is full of frozen chickens and a few five-litre jars of sour pickles. Feri nods and starts carrying them into the snack bar. He tries not to show how livid he is: proud Feri Bartaloš has to obey the orders of a midget, instead of the midget following proud Feri Bartaloš’s orders.

The bastard boss is a classic example of the animal species Jerkus normalis , not just because of his crooked behaviour and the way he treats the Wooden Village employees, but because of his unprepossessing appearance. The bastard boss is between thirty and forty years old, about five feet four inches tall, has a fairly big rounded head with extremely blond hair. His blond hair is cut short and parted in the middle like the heroes of the comic strips by Jaroslav Foglár. Over-developed incisors dominate his face. They are so over-developed that the bastard boss can’t close his mouth properly. These incisors arouse in everybody, even strangers, but especially in proud Feri Bartaloš, an almost irresistible desire to knock them out with a powerful, well-aimed blow.

The bastard boss moves quickly in the gait that, on the basis of the most recent archaeological evidence, we ascribe to a dwarf dinosaur of the Compsognathus family. He wears shoes two sizes too large, stuffed with newspaper. The bastard boss manages to take long strides unsuited to his stature by standing on his toes in order give an optical illusion of height. But even this optical illusion fails, and the bastard boss’s efforts have only reinforced his image as a little jerk, which is now his nickname. The bastard boss’s round head is proudly held high. His half-open mouth sucks in air. After qualifying as a cook and waiter and successfully graduating from secondary hotel school, he was still spoken to by people in the street as if he were a boy, so he decided to grow a moustache. Now the bastard boss looks like a child who has glued on a moustache from a fancy-dress hire company.

He is still spoken to by everybody as if he were a small boy.

Feri has unloaded all the goods; the bastard boss gets in his car and vanishes. Lucky for him, thinks a humiliated Feri. Otherwise, Feri Bartaloš would have to give him a couple of whacks…

Soon the first customers show up. They wait. Some of them stand at the counter with a Pilsner, but most of them queue for the crap beer: it’s five crowns cheaper.

Among the first impatient customers is a stoker from the nearby Hotel Ambassador-Rácz, the fat gypsy Šípoš, wearing a torn Hawaiian shirt. He impatiently bangs his hard-working fist on the unresponsive counter. His impatient dark eyes are buried in his fat olive face. They give him his beer free because he has influence. He works nearby.

The beer may have been given to him as a favour, but it was sour. The snack bar barman left an unfinished barrel of the crap beer to oxidize during the night.