Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

Freddy longed to have his own water creatures, he badly wanted an aquarium like his friend Edo’s: Edo also lived in the workers’ settlement. Freddy’s aquarium was a one-gallon pickling jar.

Freddy opened the lunch tin, took out one of the pots, rinsed grandpa’s tomato sauce out; then he took his shoes off, rolled up his trousers and got into the water. Soon he had a few black tadpoles in the bottom of the pot. Freddy took them home and poured them into the gallon jar. He could watch the black creatures for hours.

A few days later, all the tadpoles were dead. Father took the jar and poured its contents down the lavatory. He didn’t notice that some live water snails perished with the dead tadpoles.

Freddy felt sorry for the snails. His eyes full of burning hot tears, he cried so loudly that his usually passive and eternally tired mother gave him a few smacks.

Some time later Freddy visited his friend Edo and, when nobody was watching, he poured into his aquarium a phial of grandpa’s lighter fuel.

* * *

The young woman is shopping. She feels like having an iced cola. She puts her shopping in the boot of a small car that only she drives, looks around and heads for the snack bar. Freddy Piggybank watches her admiringly. His X-ray eyes can see through her clothing and he knows she is wearing expensive lace underwear regularly advertised on television. “Wow!” thinks Freddy.

The young woman goes up the snack bar. She takes a look at the stinking down-and-outs surrounding Majerník; she thinks they look picturesque. Whenever the young woman is bewildered, she smiles. As she does now. Her inner light lights up her wretched surroundings.

“Have you got cola?” she asks the bartender with a radiant smile.

“Yeah,” the bartender nods.

“Is it chilled?” the young woman enquires.

The bartender spreads his arms apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I don’t get time to chill things.”

He gives her one from the fridge, but adds that it hasn’t been there long.

The young woman gives up her dream of ice-cold refreshment straight from a bucket of crushed ice: she drinks the warm slop. She’s never had warm cola before. Her body reacts to it in an odd way. Something stirs inside her belly. The pretty woman puts the empty bottle on the zinc counter and, barely concealing her haste, heads round the corner, guided by the radiant liberating sign: WC.

Eržika is already waiting there with a two-inch length of toilet paper and a bowl for five-crown coins that she eagerly holds out.

“Both ladies’ cubicles are occupied,” she says. “You’ll have to use the men’s. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure nobody bothers you.”

The young woman, holding the piece of toilet paper, enters a narrow cubicle with a constant stream of burbling water and a penetrating stench of male urine. She has never smelled that odour; all the lavatories in her life have been clean and fresh-smelling. Her head spins for a while, but then she sits on the lavatory. The smell of ammonia gets up her nose, her ears, and all her other orifices. The outside door opens. She instinctively grabs the door handle, even though she has locked herself in. She hears steps. A man approaches a urinal, opens his fly and urinates with a sigh of relief. The young woman imagines a mighty stream pouring from the man’s big veined member and feels a thrill running through her body. Never in her life has she felt such a strong thrill, if we discount the excitement of drinking chilled cola, or trying a new soap powder or washing-up detergent. Her long, carefully manicured fingers unwittingly make for the place where she sometimes introduces good quality tampons. Her crotch has a delicious sharp spasm.

The man stops urinating, farts, shakes his member and leaves the lavatory.

Soon the pretty woman also leaves the men’s lavatory. She stumbles like a drunk and her eyes burns with passion that hasn’t been even one-tenth satisfied. The smell of urine has awakened a demon in her. She looks around. Dirty, uncouth beer drinkers stand at the counters, drinking the Bratislava crap beer, smoking cheap cigarettes. The stinking and eternally drunk tramp Majerník, who eats other people’s leftovers, sits on his own; he has in front of him a glass he has filled with beer from others’ unfinished glasses, and he’s singing a Russian ballad.

The beer-sozzled eyes of the rough-looking, evil-smelling drunks radiate an innate magical charm which rivets the pretty woman’s attention. If she were to lie down here and now and they all urinated on her while she rubbed her crotch…

The young woman knows that she is not going to go home to her technicolor husband. This Wooden Village and, above all, its lavatory will be her world from now on.

She goes up the snack bar and the barman asks her if she wants another cola.

No, says the young woman. She needs Dutch courage. “A whisky,” she says.

The bartender laughs and replies, “We don’t stock it.”

“Cognac, then,” says the pretty woman. She instantly remembers the brand she usually drinks with her husband by the blazing fireplace.

“Hennessy.”

The barman shakes his head. “Rum, vodka, gin,” he says impatiently; the young woman is holding up a queue of eager beer drinkers clutching the sweaty ten-crown coins in their palms.

“Rum, then,” says the young woman. “And another cola.”

She takes her rum and cola to the table. She takes a sip. The taste of rum takes her by surprise. All the alcoholic drinks that she has so far tried with her husband have had the bland taste of expensive products. The rum is strong and has an acrid, vulgar smell. She chases it down with a cola and feels a pleasantly mangy warmth rising up from her belly, and her muscles and bones feel a sweet prickliness. Some of this warmth descends to her crotch and makes it eager and ready to be penetrated by big, solid flesh.

The pretty woman goes to talk to Eržika. Eržika is sitting on a chair in front of the lavatories; her hands rest in a dignified pose on her big belly. She is resting. On the chair next to her is the bowl full of five-crown coins.

“What is it, ma’am,” Eržika asks seeing the pretty woman standing next to her, looking embarrassed.

“Tell me,” says the pretty woman, “you wouldn’t need an assistant, would you?”

Eržika ponders. She takes the young woman to be some busybody of a journalist, or a bored, petulant married woman out to make trouble.

“Well, if you think this is a gold mine, you can start right away,” she says aggressively.

The young woman’s face lights up with a smile. She has fine perfect teeth cared for by toothpaste recommended by the dentists’ association.

“Right away?” she asks.

Eržika now realises that the madam really means it.

“FERI!” she shouts at Bartaloš.

The proud Feri comes from outside the snack bar. He looks dignified and busy in his white coat. He assesses the situation in a flash. Trouble. He puts on a threatening and harsh expression.

But Eržika calms him with a wave of her hand. “There’s no problem. The lady here would like to work for us,” she says.

Feri looks at the lady. He noticed her earlier, when she was having her rum. Women like her have always frustrated him; they are out of his league. He looks at the lady’s long legs.

“If you think that we’re raking it in here, you’re wrong,” he says cautiously.

“I don’t care about money,” says the young woman.

Feri exchanges glances with Eržika. The woman is mad.

“And what would you like to do here?” Feri asks.

The pretty woman shrugs.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what there is to do. Cleaning?”

This is Eržika’s chance. “There’s a lot of work here. You have to clean the urinals and bowls all the time. People are pigs.” Eržika is pregnant. She’s now seven months gone. She feels sick all the time. She breathes in fumes from the cleaning fluids and that makes her sick all day. If madam would like to do this, she’s welcome.