Jancsi and the Legend of the Air Beast

I meet Jancsi every Thursdays at ten in the admin office on the ground floor to borrow the cart to deliver food to Parkdale Foodbank clients in the building. He is a big guy (at least 300 lbs.) of an age difficult to guess (I'd say thirty something to fifty something) with masses of dark hair covering his face and head. He also has remarkably small feet. His English is grammatically excellent and he has a perplexingly rich vocabulary all spoiled by his atrocious Hungarian accent. We say ”Hi!” and load the boxes from the trunk of my car onto the cart and go to the elevator. I used to start at the top floor working my way down but when I was paired with Jancsi he insisted we deliver in ascending order, I am easy, so this is how we do it: unit 103 first and 909, on the ninth floor,  last. Then we take the empty cart to the elevator, punch the down button and wait. Inevitably we end up looking at the dirty sign: ”EXIT AIR BEAST”. Jancsi jokes (I cannot tell if is German, Hungarian, English or his combination of the three) so I nod and smile to get the few seconds I need to untangle the words from his messy pronunciation. He usually quotes Schiller's Fiesco's Conspiracy at Genoa: ”The Moor has done his work—the Moor may go" He says: disappear, exit like us, the Air Beasts. We take the cart back to the office and say ”So long, until next week, yeah?”. Yesterday Jancsi stared at the so familiar sign for a long time and then started scratching the lower left-hand corner of the cardboard with his fingernail. In time, the grimy paper peeled off to reveal the surprising full original text: ”EXIT STAIR B EAST --->” Janci grabbed his heart and cried out: ”Jaj, Istenem!” and we laughed all the way to the office

Murad et Grand-père

This young man approached me to ask where to dispose of his banana peel, I showed him the nearby rubbish bin and asked his name, he was Murad Piez, severely myopic refusing to wear glasses as he thought to see the world as God intended him to see it. His voice was unusually high and melodious reminding of the Barry Gibb falsetto. When I asked if he is the singer of "The Ziegenzwischenwirtshaft" he was astonished to be recognized and by my so correct pronunciation.

We had coffee and he told me his story going back to his grandfather Zbigniew Piez: in the south-central Polish village Kraśnica of his birth, rumors started that Zbigniew was a wizard who poisons the water in wells (and should be burnt at stake - is how Catholics were known to fix this). His friend, the dentist, told him that they actually just want to take his goats. The following week when Zbigniew took his fourteen goats to the fair, he couldn't find buyers even at very lowest of prices. That night he killed the goats, threw their carcasses into as many wells he could and walked to near city of Konin where he jumped a freight train to Gdansk. He signed up on a ship to work for his fare anywhere. He landed in Halifax, Canada where he found work loading beer barrels at a brewery. In time, married the brewer's daughter, bought a house and a few goats (never more than fourteen); he had a son he called Murad who also had a son who was also called Murad. Murad (père) studied economics and ran the brewery he inherited very successfully. Zbigniew, on his deathbed, gave Murad (fils), a piece of paper saying "this is the secret of my life". It contained only one word: Ziegenzwischenwirtschaft. So Murad just had fun, wrote songs and used that word to name the alt-rock band he founded. They played along the Eastern Seaboard and had a small but dedicated fan-base. When I told Murad what the word actually meant, he stopped smiling, turned and walked away without a word.

About six months later I saw Murad on Letterman talking about signing with a major label, his band's number on hit and about his book (#1 NYT list) based on the life of his grandfather.