Daniela Fischerová

Deformatory

2014 | Mladá fronta

The Will-O’-The-Wisp’s Story about the Idiot Cruelhead

(Marginal note: This is how the tale entered Moiris’s memory, and because of all the reading he does, Moiris’s memory is rather bookish. Wanda didn’t say “pain in the posterior”, because nobody would actually say that, but “pain in the butt”, “spaced-out expression” and so on. So here we present the account from Moiris’s memory.)

I mooched around the town, but it was a pain in the posterior, because I was bored stiff. As if to spite me, nobody went astray – even the foreigners zoomed along as if they were on rails, and that’s a nuisance for a will-o’-the-wisp. Night fell and there was no-one to be seen, just dense darkness.

I was ready to call it a night when King Cruelhead stumbled out of a bar. He was wearing his crown all lopsided. The gleaming royal wheels were parked outside. Surely that fool didn’t intend to drive? I was horrified. Of course he did, even though he’d had a skinful. I know that look very well, because it’s exactly the one people get when they step on a stray root. They get that dazed expression and start tripping up over their own feet.

Enough! I exclaimed in my head, and perhaps even out loud, but the king was oblivious to me. He staggered over to the golden car, took the golden keys out of his golden pocket and… Whack! I struck him across the hand. His head didn’t register what had happened. He shouted Ow! and dropped the keys into the gutter. Plop!

There was a taxi on the corner and its lovely driver, Jarda, was having fifty winks with his head resting on the steering wheel. Incidentally, Jarda is really great, and if I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

Cruelhead fell into the taxi like a sack of coal into a cellar. Jarda woke up and the king roared: “Libeň, and quickly!” In case you don’t know, Libeň is a city district. Cruelhead has a sister in Libeň, old Roundworm Cruelhead, and he wanted to stay over at her place, since he didn’t have his car keys. But Jarda was still half asleep, and instead of “Libeň, and quickly!” he heard “Lean in and kiss me!” He had no desire to give that drunkard a kiss, but he was afraid to disobey the king. So he leaned over and gave him a tiny little peck somewhere on the ear. Now, if I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

The king got such a fright that the crown slipped off his head. “How dare you, you gammy caterpillar, you grubby worm? I am the king and I will have you drawn and quartered!”

Jarda turned pale. I’d had enough. I gave Cruelhead such a slap that he rolled out head first. I am invisible only to humans, and Cruelhead is a Fiend. But he was so befuddled by the drink that he wouldn’t have seen me if I had bitten him on the nose. I whispered to Jarda: “Go!” He had no idea who had said it – he probably believed that it was his own idea – but he stepped on the gas and was gone.

I went up behind the king and whispered: “Go to the corner, then turn left… There’s a lamp-post there, bump right into it!” (Wanda said this in a muttering, mumbling voice like a sat nav.) I led him towards a stray skip. Just so you know, in the woods I have stray rocks and stray roots and in towns stray skips and forgetting benches. Whoever touches the skip has to return to it three times, and whoever sits on the bench immediately forgets where he wanted to go. Cruelhead almost lost his mind – no matter where he went, he found himself back at the skip again. He banged his head against it in his fury. Towards morning I took pity on him. I took him to a forgetting bench, and he stretched out and slept.

At eight o’clock the police woke him up and wanted to see his ID card. They thought he was a homeless person, because he had lost his crown and he hadn’t the faintest idea what his name was. Yup, the forgetting bench really does work wonders. The policeman took him down to the station. There Cruelhead finally remembered that he was a king. He shouted: “I’ll have you drawn and quartered!” That is, he wanted to say “drawn and quartered”, but he tripped over his tongue and ended up shouting something like: “Drrrnaw! Qrrtuard!” The policeman tapped their foreheads and this sent the king into a terrible rage.

Then Roundworm came to get him, and apparently she gave him a spanking right there in the police station, because she was the only one who wasn’t afraid of Cruelhead. She had looked after him when he was young, and she is also a Fiend, which means that the king couldn’t have her drawn and quartered. Oh yes, and Jarda turned the golden crown in to the police. It didn’t even occur to him to prise at least one ruby off it. Have I already mentioned that Jarda is great? Oh, I have. If I weren’t a will-o’-the-wisp but an ordinary girl… Oh, well.

Wanda Puts a Spell on a Chair

Moiris said: “That was a nice story!” But the will-o’-the-wisp stuck her tongue out at him and turned away.

The twins looked this way and that and didn’t know what to say. Murdalotte (a soft-hearted whimperer) whimpered soft-heartedly at the idea of her dear father banging his head on the skip, but deep within her belly there was a teensy little place where she silently giggled at it. Morvenge (a scaredy-cat with charitable tendencies) was afraid that his daddy would appear, perhaps fall down from the ceiling or crawl out of the wall, and have them both drawn and quartered. One of the dwarfs shrieked with laughter and covered his mouth with his hat.

“Wanda, do you know where we are?” asked Moiris.

Wanda slapped herself on the forehead to make it clear to him what a stupid question it was. The penny dropped and Moiris blushed a little. “Yeah, if you don’t even get lost at the North Pole, then you probably know.”

“Hey,” said Baby Yaga, “do those stray thingamajigs come into being by themselves, or do you make them?”

“The ones in the woods were made by other will-o’-the-wisps long ago and the ones in town are made by me. I can also make a stray chair or a forgetting mattress.”

“Show us! Show us!” begged the dwarfs.

“Yes, please, show us!” joined in Moiris.

“Go to hell, you know-it-all!” said Wanda, pulling a face. Then she changed her mind: “All right then. But everybody has to close their eyes. It’s my trade secret and I don’t want anybody watching me at work.”

“It won’t do any good with me,” said Baby Yaga. “We witches can see even with our eyes closed. But I’ll look up at the ceiling.”

(Translated by Graeme Dibble)