Peter Pišt'anek - Rivers of Babylon

Rácz spends most of his day in the hotel. He often sits in an armchair in the lobby, pretending to sleep. That’s an illusion: despite his almost closed eyelids, he keeps a watchful eye on his surroundings. Nothing escapes him. The new guests report to him. They agree a price on the spot. Rácz’s calculation of the price depends on how a guest is dressed. The better they’re dressed, the higher the price. If a guest refuses to pay, Rácz goes down to the boiler-room and turns off the heating. The non-payer pays up after the other guests, who’ve paid, force him to. The guests are dismayed, but they can’t do anything about it. They know nothing about life in this country. They don’t know if it’s normal or not. But nobody complains. They fear Rácz’s revenge.

Rácz spends his evenings in the Ambassador cabaret bar. He sits at the bar and drinks cocktails that he has taken a liking to, or, when in company, he takes a table close to the stage. In that case Silvia, Edita, and sometimes their friend, Wanda the Trucker, keep him company. Ďula, his sidekick, is always there, as he loves to drink and eat for free. His mouth full, he laughs with gratitude at Rácz’s rough and clumsy attempts at jokes. Rácz sometimes forces him to do tricks; for example, he might ask him to drink a litre of cold water in one gulp, or to climb under the table with a schnitzel in his mouth. Ďula obediently does as he is told, and the stoker applauds by strumming his fingers on Ďula’s ears, a sign of praise among senior conscripts in the army, or so Rácz solemnly says.

All of this time, Rácz never forgets his duties. In the middle of all the fun he gets up, takes Ďula along and they vanish somewhere for half an hour. Anyone who followed them through the dark passage into the boiler-room courtyard, would see them move barrels of ash and empty them onto a big heap. Rácz could never let the gypsies do this job. He’d be afraid that they’d make a run for it. So while this job is being done, both Berki and Šípoš are locked in the cubbyhole.

Rácz urinates onto the ashes and remembers times past. The gloomy courtyard and the scarcity of public toilets always tempted passers-by who were bursting to relieve themselves then and there. Donáth used to battle against them, he hated them. He divided them into two groups: The pissers and the shitters. For the old man the pissers were a socially less objectionable group than the shitters. The urine usually evaporated and only a pervasive smell remained. It couldn’t be detected down in the boiler-room. The shitters left behind a tangible and often very substantial artefact, and that drove Donáth into a frenzy. Spying through the keyhole, Donáth and Rácz would often keep a lookout from the boiler-room metal door. They waited for the moment when the shitter dropped his trousers, about to do his business. The moment the artefact seemed to be ready, Rácz, armed with a pickaxe handle, would fly through the door, followed by Donáth. The offender would have to deposit the still warm artefact into a skip with his bare hands and then use his shirt or other piece of clothing to wipe where he’d deposited it. “No, we don’t have any water,” the old man would answer the inevitable question from offenders who’d been caught and taught a lesson.

Women, often decently dressed and of educated appearance, who usually entered the dark courtyard quietly, formed a quite distinct group. They would carefully look around and in a flash would get rid of a sanitary towel often right in front of the boiler-room. They’d often use the occasion to have a loud pee. “Madam! You’ve forgotten something!” Donáth would call out after a woman hurrying out of the courtyard, waving a sanitary towel skewered on a poker at her.

Donáth also had a trick he played on desperate lovers who couldn’t wait and, misled by the remoteness and apparent peacefulness, decided to do it in the dark courtyard. When their audible moans betrayed them at the height of their passion, the old man would turn on all the lights and, coughing his dry cough, would come out into the courtyard lit by blinding neon lights. “Couldn’t you screw somewhere else? Who’s supposed to listen to this? People like to sleep here!”

Only the vomiters didn’t bother him that much. After every night, but mostly on Fridays, in the area around the Hotel Ambassador, including the courtyard, a few sizeable dried up star-like objects, a mixture of alcohol, food, and gastric juices, appeared, but Donáth just shrugged. “Can’t be helped,” he used to say. “People throw up because they have to. It’s no problem. A little bit of rain will wash it away.”

Rácz finishes pissing and reminiscing. It’s gone. It was a long time ago. He shakes his member and zips up his trousers. “Let’s go,” he tells Ďula. “Let’s go down to the bar. It’s cold here.” Donáth was a nobody. Not like Rácz. Rácz lives life to the full. He doesn’t ask for much, but he’s fussy. He’s successful. He’s capable.

He sits down in the cabaret bar and everybody comes to see him. The small-time currency dealers want to unload their foreign currency. They buy at eighteen and sell at twenty crowns. Sometimes it’s two hundred deutschmarks, sometimes five hundred. Westerners change at most two hundred. In any case they’re not in the market to buy a wind surfer or a huge camping tent. The small timers let Rácz make two hundred crowns on a hundred deutschmarks. Rácz buys everything and piles it up. Then he sells at twenty-one. That’s enough for him. Daily he turns over ten, maybe fifteen thousand deutschmarks. That’s enough to live on. Add the money for turning the heating off and on. Rácz can’t complain. The Albanians give him hostile looks, because he’s infringing their monopoly. Rácz doesn’t worry about them. They greet each other with a perfunctory nod. This implies: “I am aware of you.” They more or less respect each other. Rácz unconsciously learns from them how to behave, dress, and walk like a black-market currency dealer — a preoccupied, fast mincing gait, with the toes of the shoes pointing outwards, the torso inclined forward a bit, and the head to one side. The Albanians try to make him out. They can’t help seeing that he behaves as if he owns the entire hotel. They see the cabaret dancers blatantly toadying to him and foreign guests frantically buying him rounds. Ďula keeps watch like a bodyguard. They finally come to terms. They’ve decided that it’s better to have Rácz on their side. Business takes off. The labour is distributed. The Albanians do deals outside the hotel; they’re all mobile, they drive rickety used cars: old Mercedes, Fords, Opels and various battered cars with Austrian, German, and Dutch licence plates. Rácz doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t leave the hotel. He holds all the strings. At first he wants nothing to do with stolen goods, but when he does his sums at night in his suite and sees how much it would bring in, he agrees. For jobs outside the hotel he uses Ďula. He has the use of the hotel Renault minibus. He can do anything. They managed to move a wagon-load of stolen cement. It went in a day. Private builders almost fought to get at it. Rácz made three hundred thousand crowns and he never saw a bag of cement. He didn’t have to lift a finger. He just did the deal and took the cash. Even Ďula got a share. He was so shattered that he kissed Rácz’s hand. Rácz accepts with dignity, his lips clenched, as if this was natural. Then he adds a few thousand on top. It’s good to have a faithful and reliable servant. Out of sheer joy, Ďula downs two litres of cold water without stopping and, with a schnitzel in his teeth, he crawls under all the tables in the cabaret. Then he painfully vomits for a long time in the toilet. But this doesn’t spoil his joy.