How Did It Come To This?

The bones of Saint Nicholas sit sopping wet somewhere in a chapel in Italy. You have no idea how this happened, and frankly, you don’t think any amount of money would be enough to get you to drink Saint Nick’s Bone Juice. You also have no idea how this happened, but as you sit in a primary school classroom in Oparany, someplace in Southern Bohemia, you hear the cacophonous tolling of a choir of handbells. You stare out the classroom door into the hallway just in time to watch a parade of preteen boys, faces caked in black makeup, horns sprouting from their scalps, meander past the classroom to the rooms where the younger students learn. Honzik peers into your classroom, calls out your name, comes sprinting up. He marks your forehead with the same black paint that’s on his face, says something to the tune of, “You’re one of us, now” in his thick Czech accent, and rejoins his hellspawn comrades as they terrorize the shitlings of their school.

You have a working knowledge of when the Feast Day of Saint Nicholas is; your Czechoslovak grandfather was born then, and he was named for it. Moving to Bohemia, however, where the Saint Nick mythos expanded far past It’s Grampap’s birthday, let’s decorate the Christmas tree, came as perhaps a reasonable culture shock. Processions of angels and devils wended their ways through the halls of Oparany’s primary school, casting divine judgment on the children who were little angels and little devils the rest of the year. The threat was simple. If the child was good, they would get gifts of oranges and candy and other delicious things. If the little darling was bad, however, they would be thrown into a burlap sack and dragged into Hell with the rabble of devils. You have no fear of these devils, at least, not existentially. The fantasy they peddle to these children is one you live out on the daily as an adult with a backbone that was a mistake of evolution.

Before you ever taught primary school in any capacity, you believed these sorts of fantasies to be cruel, horrifying, a bridge too far in the conditioning of a child into an adult. Perhaps that was your religious trauma speaking: “Trauma” is a strong word, but you were raised Catholic, and that came with its own set of values tied to the idea of cardinal sin that are hard to shake off—and even harder to engage with pragmatically. And yet, after spending time with primary schoolers, you realized that, in some way or another, the fear of Hell had to be conditioned into some of these children, if only playfully. “Don’t be naughty, else the devils will get you,” the parents tell their little darlings, and the children do their best to resist their natural urges to be naughty little shitlings. Results are mixed.

You wonder why you immediately fixate on the demons of the matter; after all, there is a parade of angels as well, and a suspiciously Santa-esque Saint Nicholas in a glorious (albeit fake) long white beard. In front of one of the schools in Tabor, right near your apartment building, they’ve constructed a Heaven’s Gate where the angels reside during the evening festivities. You don’t even think to check it out on Saint Nicholas Day, and instead saunter on down to the Hell’s Mouth that has been constructed on Zizka Square in the Old Town. The spectacle of eternal damnation is much more attractive and much more haunting, you realize, than the reward of virtue. Growing up, there was always the threat of a lump of coal in your stocking for the sins these children are being dragged to Hell for; you consider how weak that is. However, for all its spectacle, why do the children tossed into the mouth of Hell still act like little shitlings?