Peter Pišťanek - The Wooden Village

A drunk turns up at the lavatory entrance. He gives Eržika money and disappears with Lady into the men’s lavatory.

“That’s the Lady you’ll be having,” says Feri. “All night long. And fifty crowns into the bargain. Agreed?”

Freddy nods. “When does she come?” he asks impatiently.

“As soon as we close, I’ll bring her to you,” Feri promises, winking at Freddy and, pleased with himself, strides over to his Eržika.

Meanwhile Lady is kneeling on the seat of the bowl, holding the cistern with both hands, and the drunk, thrusting hard, is entering her from behind. He wants to get it over as soon as possible. Beer and gin is waiting for him outside.

* * *

The ambulance came all the way to the clay-pit to fetch Freddy’s grandpa, Freddy was told when he got home from school. It was a stroke.

Sunday was visiting day. They all put on their Sunday best and took a dirty train. The train spat them out in the city. Then they took a tram and after a few stops got out at the hospital. While father asked the receptionist where grandpa was, Freddy gazed round the dark, repulsive corridor, which stank of chemicals and death and was full of patients waiting for visitors.

Then they entered a large ward with a row of beds separated from each other only by white screens.

“Keep it short,” the doctor told them.

Grandpa was lying on a bed with his eyes closed; he looked odd.

“Mr Mešťánek, you have visitors,” the nurse told him.

Grandpa opened his eyes, one eye, to be precise. The other stayed closed and, anyway, the whole left side of his body seemed somehow bigger, powerless and odd, horribly odd.

Freddy’s new Sunday shoes pinched him; the pain had started in the train, where they had to stand all the way. It seared his soles and insteps and absorbed all his attention, so that he had little energy for noticing what was around him.

Grandpa was looking at him with his one eye. It was an eye without expression, that was void of any thought, or pain, or fear, or anything: an eye from the other shore.

Freddy touched the old man’s hand, which lay listlessly alongside grandpa’s huge body. He felt a slight pressure, but perhaps he only imagined it. Grandpa tried to say something, but his lips vented just an awkward sigh. Freddy thought that grandpa was trying to sing. He was puzzled. But grandpa fell silent and closed his eye in tired resignation.

After they left grandpa, Freddy’s father and brother, Freddy’s uncle, stopped to talk to the doctor. They quietly discussed grandpa’s condition in the corridor, next to a bin for cigarette ash. Father and uncle were not the kind of people the doctor would invite into his office for a chat. Grandpa was an ordinary brickyard worker, one of many. Famous actors or artists die differently. Their relatives look different, as well.

Freddy, his mother and grandma waited nearby.

Then they took the tram to the railway station.

They had missed the train and waited for an hour for the next one. Freddy was thirsty, but his father wouldn’t buy him a raspberry drink, nice-tasting red water in a plastic bag with a straw.

“We have running water at home, and it’s free,” Freddy was told. “A raspberry drink costs as much as half a brick for the new house.”

In the end, Uncle Alex bought him the raspberry drink. Freddy drank it greedily, but guiltily; he rightly sensed that his father would rather his brother gave him the money instead, to spend on half a brick.

* * *

Later that evening, after eleven, Feri brings an exhausted Lady to Freddy Piggybank. Lady has had it, she just wants to lie down and sleep. She reeks of semen: you can smell it a hundred yards away.

“This isn’t what we agreed,” Piggybank protests, disappointed when he sees Lady sleeping like a log the moment her head hits his pillow.

Proud Feri takes out a pack of Sparta cigarettes and offers one to the fat man. He lights up. Then he gives him a hundred crowns.

“You can screw her any time you want,” he consoles him. “Wake her up early in the morning, if you want, but leave her alone now. She’s had a hard day. You know, our cleaning assistant Lady’s a bit delicate.”

They say nothing for a while, watching the decreasing night traffic by the Hotel Ambassador.

Feri clears his throat. There’s something else he wants to say. Tomorrow is Four-Eyes and his wife’s shift. Freddy knows they do alternate shifts. Feri Bartaloš doesn’t know what to do with Lady. He’d like her to take on clients, but it can’t be done in the lavatory. Could Freddy let him have the use of the trailer? He spends all day outdoors anyway, he only goes in to get new parking tickets. Otherwise Lady will be idle all next day.

Freddy considers. “But this is going to cost more than a hundred,” he says finally.

“Of course,” Feri agrees. “You’ll get twenty crowns for each customer. That’ll make a thousand, judging by today. Agreed?”

They shake hands on it.

Proud Feri Bartaloš goes back to the lavatories. Before she left, Lady cleaned everything and mopped the floor dry. Eržika has now managed to turn the men’s lavatory into a comfortable bedroom. A thick blanket over two soft inflatable mattresses covers the floor. Two sleeping bags are ready to receive Feri’s and Eržika’s bodies into their downy warmth. The bags are rolled up nearby, under the sink.

Feri and Eržika sit on the edge of the mattress and count the money. First the lavatory money, then the money they got for Lady: four hundred for the lavatory and five thousand five hundred for Lady. In total it makes almost six thousand crowns. Feri and Eržika silently look at each other: words fail them.

This would come to forty thousand in two weeks. Eighty thousand a month. And in a year? Feri gulps. The unbelievable income from Lady has completely upset their value system.

“I hope she doesn’t run off tomorrow,” says Eržika, reading Feri’s mind.

“She won’t,” Feri says, “She liked it.”

“We won’t make her do any work,” Eržika decides. “She can do just this.”

Feri agrees. They have to make Lady’s life easier.

Feri takes a hundred as always and goes to the snack bar to see the bastard boss. The bastard boss expects everyone to give him a third of their takings. But he hasn’t the slightest idea how much they make. That’s why everybody cheats him. So do Feri and Eržika. But this time the bastard boss is smiling.

“The usual hundred?” he asks Feri. “I think you did better today.”

Feri doesn’t know what to say, so he chooses to say nothing.

The bastard boss fills his glass with Pilsner. Standing behind the counter makes him look even more like a little jerk. Proud Feri Bartaloš watches, with a mixture of contempt and hatred in his eyes, the manager’s skinny little hands reach for the tap.

“Even the birds on the roof are singing about your new trade,” says the bastard boss casually. “I don’t mind if you want to run a brothel in my snack bar,” he adds in a conciliatory tone.

Feri sighs in relief.

“But you have to pay,” orders the bastard boss. “Give me a thousand, or else you’re out. Four-Eyes can work every day, if it comes to it,” adds the bastard boss threateningly, and then smiles amiably at Feri.

A humiliated Feri goes to the lavatories to fetch a thousand crowns for the bastard boss. His lips mumble wild curses in Hungarian. He goes in noisily.

Eržika is reluctant to hand over money that she now considers to be hers. “Why?” she shouts at Feri, as if he were lying.

Feri gives her a slap. “You making a scene now is the last thing I need,” he chastises her, becoming conciliatory when he sees the imprint of his five fingers on her face, and the tears rolling down her cheeks.