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“A Czechoslovakist simply cannot hold any high government office in our young state, which is both Slovak and national,” argued Emperor Telgarth I, giving a signal for other personnel purges in the imperial government. Soon the new state, now called the Slovak Empire, asked the Council of Europe for membership of the EU. Despite the fact that the Slovak imperial leadership has openly proclaimed that human rights will not be a political priority on the Slovak Archipelago for a long time, the Eurocrats received the application very positively.

After tragicomic bullying of poor Central European countries like the Czech and Slovak republics with absurd demands for human rights (the EU for example set both countries a quota for proportional representation of their Roma population among university educated citizens, scientists and private businessmen), the EU’s highly welcoming attitude to an application by the Slovak Empire, holder of 80 % of the world’s supply of oil and uranium, seemed all the more paradoxical.

After expulsion from NATO and outright rejection by the EU, the Czechs received a third humiliation on the eve of the new millenium, this time from the Junjan Slovaks. Anti-Czech demonstrations, and the cooling, even rupture of diplomatic relations, made a Czech military presence on the archipelago untenable and it had to end. Any eventual resistance from the large Czech military garrison on the Slovak Archipelago was pre-empted when the Slovak Empire asked the EU for military assistance, which was promptly granted. Some 900 days passed and another Czech dream collapsed: the dream which led the Czech Kingdom to invest unimaginable means in founding its now so unnecessary navy. The Czech people will feel the economic consequences of this risky investment for four or five generations, according to experts. The yearning of a poor, but very sophisticated Czech Kingdom for superpower status and prosperity through Slovak oil and uranium has vanished and turned into an even bigger abyss of economic recession.

There is a Czech fairytale about easily acquired ducats that, with the coming of morning, turn into crocks of clay. The Czech Crown now weeps over the crocks of clay of its imagined future.

Viktor Cheležnikov

Urban stops reading. He doesn’t know why, but he recalls that every spring and early summer Tina’s villa crawled with ants. They sometimes crawled over him at night. Do they crawl over Kubeš, too?

One spring morning, when Urban opened the window of the guest room to air it, he noticed the ants carrying their eggs to the windowsill. He had nothing against ants. Their hard work and organization seemed attractive to him: after all, he was of the generation that spent Sunday mornings watching the puppet Fred the Ant on television. On the other hand, he found crawling ants disgusting. He decided that he’d take the ant eggs and use them as fish food in Tina’s pond. So he placed the beige eggs on a little plate and noticed that the ants tried to escape quickly. It embarrassed him, but he continued. He noticed that some eggs had already hatched, and on the windowsill sat a few freshly hatched winged ants. He took the little plate of eggs and ants trying to save them and swept them into the pond. He watched the lazy red veil-tail fish cautiously sampling them. They’ll never know how much suffering is behind their delicious lunch, he thought. But is it any different to any industrially prepared food?

Once, there used to be a hunter and his prey. Sometimes this was reversed and the hunter became the prey. That’s how it’s meant to be.

At that time, a long ago, Urban went go to bed a bit earlier than usual. He patted his pillow and found a winged ant underneath. He never thought about it: it seems odd to him that he should recall it right now.

He killed that ant without thinking. He perceived nothing then, only now, when he remembers it, he feels a chill round his heart.

The ant must have hidden in the dark for hours under the pillow. It was certainly waiting to be rescued. But no help came from the anthilclass="underline" the ants were totally crazed after absorbing doses of ant-killing powder that Urban gave them.

Only today, after much time and experience, is Urban able to imagine in real terms the horrifying loneliness of the little ant, freshly hatched and immediately abandoned in a strange world, so incomprehensible and horribly foreign.

The little ant then bore his fate stoically. He waited for death passively under Urban’s pillow, having understood that he would die without a chance to taste the gift of life that we each receive only once. He knew that no pleasant company of new friends was waiting for him, that he’d never walk even a centimetre of the corridors of an anthill that was supposed to become in his short ant life a home and fortress. That he would never have the exciting adventures of exploratory expeditions into the depths of a house or a dark garden. He knew he was lost.

That equanimity seemed moving to Urban even then. Yes, he killed him. But it was a mercy killing, done as fast as possible. It was a fraction of a second even in accelerated ant time.

And today something tells him that he was only fulfilling a partial action in some great, thought-out plan. Today he, the former blasphemer and atheist, realises that it is simply impossible for this world to exist without God. Nothing exists just for its own sake; not even Urban, not the lonely and abandoned ant whom he will never ever forget. That is quite a feat for one short ant life. Or could this ant have existed just for Urban? He did as he was supposed to and then vanished irrevocably?

Urban knows: any suffering, even the least comprehensible, in the world has its deep meaning reflected in a larger whole, which, so far, we can’t see for various reasons. The meaning is revealed to us bit by bit. If, by an unimaginable failure in this world’s logic, all backdrops vanished and we glimpsed His image, we’d be burnt to cinders by what we saw.

That is why it’s proper that we get the whole truth in carefully measured doses, Urban believes. Of course, the disadvantage is that some things we perceive out of context, which results in a feeling that this world is meaningless, spoiled, an automated toy abandoned by its creator. And this is a mistake, Urban realises.

Under an awning of logic and materialism, Urban senses discomfiting features of something more and more mysterious and at the same time vertiginously dazzling, pure and liberating.

* * *

After Urban’s departure, Telgarth rages like a man possessed. He has to be given a cold compress to prevent another vein bursting in his brain. He is raging not because Urban could in any way seriously damage him. In a few days the situation in the Slovak Archipelago has got so tense that it is no longer a secret that Junjan Slovaks do not want a common state with the Czechs. He rages because he realises that he meant much less to Urban than Urban did to him. And that has hurt him.

Thank God Rácz is still around! They are linked by many common experiences.

By the way, Rácz has decided to change his life. He sells his property, hotels, factories and even his beloved brewery, ensures his family is well-off, and then moves for some time to the Slovak Archipelago. He decides to act like a man: he’ll start again from scratch. Well, not really from scratch, but still, it’s a courageous decision. He plans to wait in New City until the political situation calms down and then to go up north, to oversee personally the construction of oil fields, a pipeline, and a terminal for big tankers. He’s never done this before, but he’s paying for experts, oilmen from Baku.