Peter Pišt'anek - Rivers of Babylon

“I love you!” he shouts, his voice choked and rasping with excitement. He is impatient; the hooks and little buttons resist him. Rácz tears her clothes off. Buttons fly in all directions like sparks from New Year’s Eve fireworks.

Lenka does not shout, she merely weeps and vainly tries to cover herself with the longer bits of her blouse and skirt. “Don’t! Don’t!” she begs, sobbing.

Rácz tears off his jacket and shirt and hurls them into a corner. Then he takes off his trousers and underpants. His violet-coloured member has swollen to inhuman size and pulsates wildly. He throws himself at Lenka with insatiable mouth, eyes, hands, tongue, ears, and teeth. “I love you!” he shouts and starts to force himself into the virginal Lenka. “Good thing I got her drunk,” thinks Rácz. “If she hadn’t drunk so much Chinese fruit juice, she wouldn’t have been so easy to get into.” Laughing, Rácz overcomes the resistance of her slender arms pushing against his hairy muscular chest and squeezes her tight, body to body. “It had to come to this one day,” he thinks. He moves violently, like a steam-driven ram. He mutters excitedly and rhythmically. Lenka has now surrendered. She lies there with her eyes closed.

The wedding will be in March, Rácz decides, as his insides begin to contract in a mighty and liberating gush.

* * *

Every day a vehicle leaves the yard of the Hotel Ambassador with a load of cooking pots and boxes of bread and rolls. These are leftovers from the kitchen. The cooks give them to Ďula, thinking he uses them to feed a pig or two. They don’t care. They’re glad to get rid of the leftovers. They know that Ďula is Rácz’s man and who’d want to argue with Rácz?

The loaded Renault leaves the hotel yard, drives down the street, turns right after the lights and, passing the plethora of side-streets, turns uphill to climb above the city, to the villa quarter.

Ďula stops in front of a luxury villa, gets out and rings the bell. Tupý or Šolik look out of the window, depending which of Ščepán’s men is on duty at the time. Soon the secret policeman comes to the gate to the gravel path leading to the villa. He clears his throat, spitting and jingling the keys. Together they move the pots and boxes from the van to the villa.

The prisoners locked in the cells in the basement of the safe house know they are getting food. They shout nervously and bang their spoons on their mess pots. They are hungry. They don’t like being in jug.

“How many are there?” asks Ďula.

“Šolik stops to think. “Twenty-eight,” he says finally. “Twenty-one gypsies and seven Albanians,” he adds.

“And the lawyer?” Ďula asks.

“I didn’t count the lawyer,” says the ex-secret policeman. “He’s in solitary. He makes twenty-nine. If you like, you can take a look at him.”

They go down to the basement to a corridor with cells. It’s cold and dark here. The ex-secret policeman unlocks the door to the lawyer’s cell.

“Come out!” he shouts at the lawyer.

The lawyer comes out into the corridor. He’s unshaven and his clothes are dirty. His eyes blink uncertainly. His face twitches.

“Here are the food pots and here are the boxes of bread,” Šolik orders. “Distribute the food to the prisoners!”

Šolik reaches into his pocket and takes out cigarettes. He offers one to Ďula and then lights them both. As they smoke, they watch the lawyer open hatches on the doors of the individual cells, take the mess pots the prisoners poke out at him and, after ladling out food, return them with bread. Šolik stubs out his cigarette and shivers with cold.

“Listen,” he tells the lawyer. “When you’ve finished with the food, wash the pots and the ladle, understand?”

The lawyer looks like a broken man. He nods humbly. “How much longer will you let me live?” he asks, full of hope.

Šolik smiles contentedly. He hasn’t yet forgiven the lawyer for the torn shirtsleeve. “We’ll see about that,” he says. “If you do your duties as you’ve done so far, you might live a few days longer. Understand?” From the cells comes the noise of slurping and quick chomping. The scraping of spoons against mess pots is almost unbearable.

“It’s a bore,” Šolik admits. “I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when it’s Tupý’s turn to be on duty and I take the hotel shift. Do you know how long Rácz plans to keep them here?” he asks Ďula.

Ďula shrugs. The boss doesn’t confide in anyone about his plans. That includes Ďula. Despite Ďula being the closest to him, he stresses. He’s been Rácz’s right-hand man from the start. Ďula could tell you things.

They both go back to the ground floor. The ex-secret policeman helps Ďula load the pots and boxes into the Renault and then goes back to the villa and locks himself in. Ďula starts the minibus and drives down the steep little streets to the city hidden under a cover of low grey fog.

* * *

Rácz has a new toy. A beautiful white Volvo 940. He bought it from Khunt and is very satisfied with it. It’s just the kind of car Rácz needed. He’s driven it a few times, but only around the hotel in a small circuit: from the Hotel Ambassador straight, then right, near the Hotel Forum right again, near the Cafe Olympia right again, then round the petrol station near the Blumenthal church, then right again, and back to the Ambassador. The car runs like clockwork.

At first Lenka’s crotch hurt, but that passed after a few days. Now she’s happy and up to her ears in love with Rácz, giving herself to him at every possible opportunity. Her university girlfriends envy her. Which of them wouldn’t trade places with her? What do they expect from life? Rácz comes from a world where he need not move without a car, where nothing seems to be a problem, where he can afford to blow in one evening as much money as a family of four’s monthly budget, and so on. All the girls envy and hate her. But Lenka won’t give up her Rácz. She loves him, and her parents love him even more.

Video Urban does what he can. He devotes all his time to the paperwork for the hotel. Wanda and Eva still live with him. After an exhausting day spent running around the offices, he falls into bed, and they are both with him, massaging him with their sensitive hands. He doesn’t even ask them why they’re at home instead of the Ambassador bar. They keep him going. They love him. They want to be absolutely faithful to him. Urban wouldn’t mind if they were occasionally unfaithful to him with some wealthy customer so he didn’t have to support them all by himself, but he says nothing. He daren’t say anything, knowing that any insensitive remark might cause weeping and gnashing of teeth. Finally, after a trying day full of senseless negotiations and wrestling with stupid bureaucracy, Urban needs relaxation to put him back on his feet. So Urban keeps quiet and doesn’t send them out to work. He doesn’t know what he’d do without them.

The prisoners in the safe house don’t know who’s had them locked up, but they guess that the stoker may have something to do with it. They were brought to prison in a deep sleep caused by the injection. They don’t know where they are. They want to smoke and drink. They’re cold. Luckily, they are crowded in their small cells. That keeps them warm.

* * *

And then comes a day when Urban rings the bell of the safe house. Behind him stands Rácz’s Volvo and in it sits Rácz. Ščepán runs round the big car to open the door so that Rácz can leave the car with dignity.

Tupý opens the gate. This time, Šolik is on duty in the hotel. Tupý is quite beside himself. What a visitor! He’s overcome by humility and servility. He doesn’t know to whom he should be more servile: his superior Ščepán, or his ultimate and final boss, Rácz.