He takes out of his overalls a twenty-crown coin and gives it to the barman. Then he shows him his thumb.
“Another director’s beer?” the barman asks. His voice is content. He doesn’t want problems with any of Rácz’s people, not even his stoker, but he’d like to draw the soured beer as fast as he can, so he can tap a new barrel.
* * *
Silvia feels like a cigarette, but she suppresses her desire for nicotine. No, she will never again do anything in her life to harm herself.
Instead, she opens a pack of sugar-free gum and puts a piece in her mouth.
The queue of cars at the border crossing moves a little. Someone behind her honks their horn.
“Just take it easy, you fucking arsehole,” says Silvia into her rear-view mirror. “I’m not blind.”
She presses the accelerator and her Passat automatic meekly moves a few yards further.
“Happy now?” asks Silvia, looking in the mirror, but the driver behind her is looking somewhere else.
“Home at last,” Silvia muses. This long-awaited moment has come after four years spent working in Austria. She is returning home richer in experience and with a bit of capital. If she’s clever, she’ll increase her capital. Silvia knows that the best way of making money is by sex. It always was and always will be. Bratislava is full of massage parlours, brothels and prostitutes. At first sight, you might think the market was saturated. But Silvia knows that people usually get quickly sated by ordi-nary things and start to want something unusual, unnatural, strong stimulants. Nobody is interested now in a prostitute you just lie down on and screw. Clients will ask for something special. And here Silvia’s an expert. For over four years she has slaved in a brothel called the Perverts’ Club, and she’s seen things. Nobody can teach her anything.
For three years she was an ordinary sex-worker and then she was promoted. On a small stage attached to the club she performed various unorthodox forms of lovemaking. It was foul, but at least she didn’t have to satisfy six or even ten times a night very bizarre sexual requests from beastly and comically stingy clients who, at the moment when they turned into a piece of quivering ejaculating jelly, were still carefully ensuring that they got everything they’d paid for.
All pluses have their minuses: during that year on the small stage of the Perverts’ Club Silvia copulated in front of an audience with everything except perhaps a child’s corpse or an extra-terrestrial.
* * *
Freddy Piggybank was born and raised in an impoverished brickyard settlement, in a jumble of dilapidated buildings put up some time in the previous century right next to the brickyard. The whole family lived only for the brickyard: his father was a master brick maker, his mother was a cashier, one grandpa helped out in the warehouse and the other grandpa drove a miniature diesel locomotive that brought clay from the clay-pit. Uncle Alex was the manager of the company cafeteria and an aunt was in charge of the company library and the recreation room.
As a little boy, Freddy loved to go down to the clay-pit. He would take grandpa his lunch. The clay-pit was a huge open-pit mine. All around were towering greyish slopes, scraped by excavators moving round them. On one side, the slope was covered in thin acacia scrub. At the bottom of the pit ran a railway track, so narrow it seemed like a toy.
A miniature green diesel engine, blackened by oil and age, pottered along the track: it pulled the tipping mine wagons. Sitting behind the engine, sideways to the track on a perforated metal seat, was a man dressed in overalls. This was Freddy’s grandpa. He would stop the engine and help Freddy up. Then he accelerated and the train sped up along the crooked rails.
“Nice?” asked grandpa.
Little Freddy would blush and nod. He liked his grandpa, but was a bit afraid, too: grandpa occasionally got drunk, and then turned nasty.
“When you grow up,” grandpa told Freddy “I’ll be very old and weak. I’ll stay home with grandma and you’ll take over the engine. What do you say?”
Freddy nodded. His eyes shone.
They rumbled on towards an idle excavator. Grandpa stopped so that the last wagon faced the excavator bucket. He opened the driver’s cabin, sat down and moved the levers and started the electric motor. The cogs began to move. The grey clay dropped into the little wagon. When it was full, grandpa pushed a lever and the excavator moved a few feet along the parallel track. Freddy admired everything: his grandpa who had mastered these mighty machines, the engine that pulled the wagons, the track, and even the clay-pit’s huge grey and seemingly dead expanse.
Grandpa would drive back at full speed. He held the accelerator with one hand and Freddy with the other. The crooked track threw them from side to side and the wind dishevelled their hair. Grandpa’s overalls reeked of sweat and mould.
Grandpa stopped in front of a hut knocked together from boards and covered with tarred paper. Freddy took the lunch-tin and got down from the engine. Men in overalls, Slovaks and gypsies, came out of the hut. Grandpa uncoupled the wagons and signalled to the brickyard, less than two hundred yards away. Soon a steel cable suspended over the wagons began to move. Grandpa, together with other men, would push the wagons along the track. Each wagon had a hook that caught the moving cable pulling them, one after another, up the straight gentle slope. Starting from the pit, they moved through a narrow gap between the two halves of the settlement, and then along a gently rising wooden structure.
Freddy shaded his eyes with his hand, watching the first wagon until it became very small and vanished at the top, where track ended, into the dark brickyard hall. Soon it reappeared empty and, pushed by the cable, came down along a parallel track. Another one followed, then others. The men stopped work.
“Let’s go inside,” said grandpa.
Little Freddy followed his grandpa into the tiny hut covered in tarred paper. Inside was a long, rough table covered in newspaper, and two rough benches which were worn smooth. There was a big cast-iron stove in the corner.
Grandpa found a spoon somewhere and opened the lunch-tin. He started his lunch.
Freddy sat opposite, watching him stuff himself. Around sat men with dark or lighter faces and huge, dirty hands resting on the table. Some unwrapped a snack, others smoked. The hut smelled of tar, diesel, cigarette smoke, onions and sweat.
Freddy didn’t feel good here; his grandpa seemed remote. In this hut he belonged to other people, as well as to Freddy.
The boy blushed as he answered the workmen’s kindly, jocular questions; he stubbornly kept his eyes down, looking under the table.
Finally, grandpa finished lunch. He closed the lunch-tin and handed it to Freddy.
One of the workers took out some grubby cards and made a show of banging them on the table.
“Go now,” grandpa told Freddy gently. “Grandma will be worried if you stay too long.”
Freddy left the hut, but not by the crooked slippery path up from the pit: he went in the opposite direction, round a huge mound of coal dust and then along a path lined by reeds, which led downhill.
The tall reeds, taller than Freddy, opened out, and in front of the boy appeared the surface of a lake that covered the bottom of the pit. Freddy paused for a moment and then ran to the water. His shoes were sinking into the soft clay, but Freddy watched the water with excitement. Near the shore the lake was shallow, less than ten inches deep, and the crystal-clear water revealed all the mysteries hidden beneath the surface. A water spider was building a nest of bubbles, a shoal of fish flashed by just under the surface, and a frog, its head camouflaged by vegetation, was taking a breath of air.