Rácz is alone. He puts on a CD. The room fills with the sound of Italian opera. Rácz stretches out on his sofa and lights a Havana. All sorts of ideas run through his mind. The cut on his skin begins to hurt. A plan is ripening in his mind.
Well, that’s enough of Mr Rácz for now. This book is not about him, so we shan’t meet him all that often. But occasionally we won’t be able to do without him. After all, part of the book will take place in his territorial waters. In any case, the reader must be wondering what is going to happen to the Junjan mafia.
At other times, however, we shall be blundering deep into waters and lands so distant as to surpass even our wildest imagination.
Oh well, off we go again.
* * *
Video Urban suddenly jerks awake. At first he was pondering about himself, his midlife crisis, and so on. He has spent his whole life waiting for something. Everything in his life seemed to him only a prelude for something bright and gloriously wonderful yet to come. And then, one day, in a magical bright moment of honest perception, he realised that the time for waiting was long past. He was horrified by the fact that his life was simply what he was experiencing at the moment. Only then did he get on with things, completely change his ways and finally begin to be content with himself. On this thought he calmly fell asleep, and when he woke up he found to his astonishment that he was sitting at the wheel of a souped-up five-litre BMW, hurtling down the empty motorway at night, heading for Prague at two hundred and thirty kilometres an hour.
Bathed in cold sweat, his eyes goggling, he cried out in fear. The micro-sleep hadn’t lasted long, far less than virtual dream time, a few seconds at most. But the left wheels of Urban’s heavy limousine were now ploughing into the first few yards of the dusty verge of the motorway. A dream’s silky fastenings had lightly touched him, and it had flown off somewhere. Urban remembers only an intense and deliciously painful feeling of love and gratitude wafting over him. That is how he always imagined God. He tries in vain to track it down a few times; the feeling has gone, just like an unknown and pleasant aroma vanishing.
Urban slows down. He turns on the radio and tunes it to a Czech station. News. Politics. Urban steers with one hand and uses the other to search for music. He’s fed up with politics. He was even mixed up in them. But that was a long time ago. It was way back in Rivers of Babylon. It’s in the past now. It didn’t suit him. Sitting in parliament with those idiots bored him, so he got out at the first opportunity. He parted on good terms with his employer, the big businessman and hotelier Rácz. For some time he’d longed to be his own man. So he bought a few failing video stores, renamed them under his nickname Video Urban and in no time turned them round. But it was hard work. Luckily, he understood the business. He loved films.
When the Czechoslovak republic was about to split in two, he began to foresee that all the video distributors working out of Prague would need a Slovak representative. Slovakia would become a foreign country for Czechs and all the big firms would have to open Slovak branches. Everything used to be done in Prague, but now that wouldn’t work. If you take the broad view, separation wasn’t such a bad idea, Urban thought with relish. Idealists can pine for federation, or found “spiritual parliaments” and other idiocies. People with their feet on the ground, like Urban, have to act.
Without delay, he went to Prague and began to lobby. His cousin Tina, who lived in Prague, helped him a lot. She knew almost anyone who was anybody in the film business there. Urban came back to Bratislava as the representative of a leading distributor, Classic Home Video Entertainment. The Video-Urban hire-shop network and distributorship for Classic Home Video Entertainment sufficed to make him happy and reasonably well-off.
But then his business ran out of steam. Satellite TV got cheaper and then a new TV channel NOVA began to broadcast. What’s more, there was cable TV, too. Cash flow went down. And the director of Classic Home Video kept his margins down. But Video Urban wouldn’t be Video Urban if he hadn’t thought of a dodge. He bought a few hi-fi video machines, a mixing deck and began to make illegal copies. He photocopied the video packaging in colour. A videocassette made by Urban was indistinguishable from the original. But this didn’t work for long, either. Producers began to use coding and hologram stickers. Urban was back where he started.
But then he met Freddy in Prague: this was the conclusive inducement he needed to begin a venture which he had long ago decided on.
Usually, video films produced in Slovakia are made for the Czech market, too, and are dubbed into Czech. Slovaks tolerate Czech, but Czechs can’t understand Slovak. This applies equally to porn videos made by Freddy Vision. Freddy uses Slovak actors for his films. Then Urban goes to Prague, rents a studio and dubs them with Czech actors and actresses. He uses the opportunity to make English-language versions, not with these actors, but with young Americans living in Prague. They’ll happily do anything for money. Among them are a lot of drug addicts, male and female, and they’d have flesh cut off their bodies in front of the camera for money. “Actually, that’s worth knowing,” says Freddy when he hears about it.
So Urban, once again, now has working copies of new films in his car boot. He’s booked a studio; he’ll start dubbing tomorrow. There isn’t much dialogue in Freddy’s films, but what there is, is very juicy. Some actresses blush when dubbing. These are lesser known actresses, usually students of the Prague Academy of Dramatic Arts. Sometimes they also use a provincial theatre actress. Urban chooses the voices carefully: it has to be a deep, exciting voice with a rasp to it, like Eliška Balzerová’s, or his cousin Tina’s.
Finally, Urban gives up surfing the radio. He holds the steering wheel with one hand and uses the other to insert a cassette, the first that comes to hand in the dark. A new album by the Rebels fills the car’s quiet upholstered space.
Video Urban rolls down the window and breathes in. He presents his face to the powerful cold wind that blows the scent of dusty, hoary dried hay overlaid by fresh night rain from the meadows round the motorway.
The motorway glistens. Through a veil of rain, the lights of a petrol station flash in the darkness. At last. On the left he sees the motel Střechov. Now Prague is just a stone’s throw away. Relieved, Urban indicates and turns off to the service area.
* * *
It snowed again that night. It’s pitch dark. The moon’s invisible. A blizzard is raging. The igloos on the coast are snowbound. The anchor cables of the boats shriek in pain.
Geľo Todor-Lačný-Dolniak, a member of the Slovak national resistance, can’t sleep any longer. The snowstorm has been raging for days now. In his nervous half-sleep Geľo turns and tosses. Every bit of his body hurts. He uses the back of his hand to wipe away the spittle dripping from the left corner of his mouth and wetting the reindeer-skin pillow. The strong, hard-working hands of this former hunter, now a resistance fighter, can’t help opening and clenching under the bedcovers. He’d rather be somewhere deep in the tundra, catching arctic foxes. Or waiting by a hole in ice for a walrus or seal to come out, or setting traps, counting the fur hides and, after a successful hunting trip, resting contentedly in his heated reindeer yurt among his close family, with warm food in his belly. But Geľo and his men have to freeze, fight, attack transport convoys, destroy Junjans’ dwellings, kill Junjan mercenaries, and wage a guerrilla war. Slovaks have many enemies. They have to be thoroughly and mercilessly exterminated. But even that can’t be done now. They have to wait for the blizzard to end, and then, back to work!