I Served the King of England

by Bohumil Hrabal

  The salesman must have liked me—perhaps I reminded him of his youth—but whenever he saw me he’d pat my head and laugh, a pleasant laugh, till tears filled his eyes. Sometimes he’d ask to have mineral water brought to his room. Whenever I brought it to him I’d find him already in his pajamas, lying on the carpet, his enormous stomach beside him like a barrel. What I liked about him was that he wasn’t ashamed of his stomach, he carried it proudly before him like a billboard, plowing forward into a world that came halfway to meet him. Sit down, my son, he’d say, and then he’d laugh, and it always felt as though my mother, not my father, was talking to me. Once he told me, You know, I started out when I was just a little guy like you, with Koreff’s, the haberdashers. Ah, my child, I still remember my boss. He always said a good businessman has three things—property, a shop, and some inventory—and if you lose your inventory you’ve still got your shop, and if you lose your shop and your inventory at least you’ve got your property, and no one can take that away from you. Once I was sent out to pick up some combs, beautiful bone combs—eight hundred crowns, those combs cost—and I carried them on a bicycle in two enormous bags—here, have a sweet, go on, try this one, it’s cherries in chocolate—and as I was pushing the bicycle up the hill—by the way, how old did you say you were? I told him fifteen and he nodded and took a sweet and smacked his lips and went on—and as I was carrying those combs up the hill, a peasant woman passed me, she was on a bicycle, too, and she stopped at the top of the hill in the woods, and after I’d caught up to her, she looked at me so intensely that I had to look away, and then she caressed me and said, Let’s see if the raspberries are ripe. And I laid my bicycle with the load of combs down in the ditch, and she put hers—it was a woman’s bike—on top of mine and took me by the hand, and behind the very first bush we came to she pushed me down and undid my fly, and before I knew it she was on top of me. She was the first to have me, but then I remembered my bike and my combs, so I ran back, and her bike was lying on top of mine, and in those days women’s bicycles had a colored netting over the back wheel, like the kind horses sometimes wear over their manes, and I felt for the combs and to my relief they were still there. When the woman ran up and saw that my pedal was tangled in the netting of her bicycle, she said it was a sign that we weren’t to go our separate ways just yet, but I was afraid—here, try this sweet, something they call nougat—so we rode the bicycles off into the wood and she put her hand into my trousers again and, well, I was younger then, and this time I lay on her, just the way we put our bicycles down in the bushes, with hers down first and mine on top, and that’s how we made love, and it was beautiful, and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful. Ah, but go to bed now, you’ve got to be up early, my boy. And he took the bottle and drank the whole thing at once, and I heard the water splashing into his stomach like rainwater down a drainpipe and into a cistern, and when he turned onto his side, you could actually hear the water shifting to find its proper level.

  I never liked the salesmen who sold food and margarine and kitchen utensils. They would bring their own food with them and eat it in their rooms, and some of them even brought little camp stoves that ran on alcohol, and they’d make potato soup in their rooms and throw the peels under the bed and expect us to polish their shoes for nothing, and then when they were checking out they’d give me a company lapel pin for a tip, and for that I had the privilege of carrying a crate of yeast out to the car for them, because they’d bring the yeast from the wholesaler they represented and then try to sell it on their rounds when the occasion arose. Some of the salesmen had so many suitcases with them, it looked as if they’d brought all the goods they expected to sell that week. Others were practically empty-handed. Whenever I saw a traveling salesman arrive with no suitcases, I was curious to find out exactly what he was selling. It always turned out to be something surprising. For example, one of them took orders for wrapping paper and paper bags, and he carried his samples behind his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat. Another one carried only a yo-yo and a top in his briefcase, which never left his side—the order forms were in his pocket—and he’d walk through town playing with the yo-yo or the top and go into a store, still playing with it, and the toy-and-notions merchant would leave the small-goods salesman standing there and walk over as if in a dream and reach out for the yo-yo and the top, or whatever was popular just then, and he’d say, How many dozen, how many gross can you deliver? The salesman would agree to twenty dozen and, if the merchant insisted, add a dozen or so more. Another season it would be a foam-rubber ball, and there’d be a salesman tossing it up and down on the train, on the street, and then in the shops, and the merchant would approach him as if hypnotized, watching the ball go up to the ceiling, back down into his hand, back up, then down, and he’d say, How many dozen, how many gross can you leave me? I never liked these seasonal salesmen, and the maître d’ didn’t either. They were one-shot men, real warm-water salesmen, and we could see from the moment they set foot in the restaurant that they were the kind who would rather eat their fill and then leave through the window without paying, which happened to us a few times. The nicest salesman who ever stayed with us was the Rubber King, the one who supplied the chemist’s shops with those intimate rubber goods that people are ashamed to ask for. He represented the Primeros firm, and he always had some novelty items with him whenever he came. The regulars would invite him to sit at their table, because something would always happen that was unpleasant for one of them but hilarious for the rest, and the salesman would pass around condoms of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Though I was just a busboy, I was surprised and disgusted by our regulars, who seemed so gentlemanly on the street but when they started carrying on at the table they were like kittens, and sometimes as repulsive and ridiculous as monkeys. Whenever the Rubber King was there, they’d slip a Primeros into someone’s food—under the dumplings or some such place—and when the victim turned his dumpling over they’d all roar with laughter, knowing that before the month was out the same thing would happen to them. They all loved playing practical jokes on each other, like Mr. Živnostek, who made false teeth and was always dropping loose teeth or dentures into someone’s beer. Once he slipped his own teeth into his neighbor’s coffee, but the neighbor switched cups on him, and Mr. Živnostek almost choked to death until the vet gave him such a whack on the back that the teeth flew out and dropped under the table. Mr. Živnostek thought they were teeth from his factory and stamped on them, but then realized too late that they were his own custom-made dentures, and then it was the dental technician Mr. Šloser who had the last laugh. He liked doing rush repair jobs because they brought in the most money, which is why his best time of the year was the start of the rabbit-and-pheasant season when the hunters would all get together after the day’s shoot and dine on their kill and get so drunk that many of them would break their teeth on the pellets, and Mr. Šloser would have to work day and night to repair them so their wives and families wouldn’t find out. But the Rubber King had other things with him as well. One day he brought in what he called the Widow’s Consolation, though I never did find out what it was, because he kept it in what looked like a clarinet case. As the Widow’s Consolation was passed around the table each of them would open it a crack, hoot with laughter, and then snap it shut and quickly pass it on, and even though I was serving them beer, I never found out what it was that consoled widows. Once the Rubber King brought an artificial woman made of rubber. It was winter, and the regulars were sitting in the kitchen instead of in the billiards room or by the window, where they sat in summer, divided off from the rest of the room by a curtain, and the Rubber King made a kind of speech to the dummy, and they all laughed, but I didn’t find it funny at all. Everyone at the table got to hold the dummy, but as soon as anyone had it in his hands, he’d suddenly turn serious and blush and quickly pass it on to the one next to him, and the Rubber King lectured them as if they were scho
olboys: This, gentlemen, is the very latest thing, a sexual object to take to bed with you, a puppet made of rubber. Her name is Primavera, and you can have your way with her, she’s practically alive, and she’s approximately the size of a fully grown young woman. She’s exciting, close-fitting and warm and sexy, and there are a million men out there just dying for her, dying to blow her up with their own mouths. This woman, the creature of your own breath, will restore your faith in yourselves and make you potent again and give you longer erections and superb satisfaction. Primavera, gentlemen, is made of special rubber, and between her legs is the queen of rubbers, foam rubber, and her orifice is provided with all the tucks and turns a woman should have. A tiny battery-operated vibrator activates it with a gentle stimulating pulsation so the female organ has a natural action of its own, and everyone can attain climax as he desires, and every man is the master of the situation. To avoid the inconvenience of cleaning out the orifice, you may use a Primeros condom, which comes with a tube of glycerine cream to prevent chafing. Everyone around the table wore himself out blowing up Primavera, and when it was passed on to the next man, the Rubber King would pull out the little plug and the air would go out of her, so that each man would have to blow it up himself and feel her swell under his hands with the breath from his own lungs, while the others clapped and laughed, eager for their turn, and there was great hilarity in the kitchen, and the cashier fidgeted and crossed and recrossed her legs and got very restless, as though each time they blew the dummy up they were inflating and deflating her. They fooled around like that until midnight.

  Another salesman showed up with something similar, but it was more beautiful and more practical. He represented a tailoring firm from Pardubice, and our maître d’, who was always pressed for time, knew about him through an old army connection because he’d been orderly to a lieutenant colonel who recommended this salesman to him. The salesman would stay at the hotel twice a year, and I saw what he did but couldn’t make any sense of it, because first he’d measure the maître d’ for trousers, then he’d have him stand there just as he was, in his vest and white shirt, and he’d place strips of parchment on his chest and back and around his waist and then write measurements on them and cut them to shape while they were still on the maître d’, as though he were making him a coat directly from the strips, except that he had no cloth with him. Then the salesman would number the strips of parchment and carefully put them in a bag and seal the bag and write the maître d’s birthdate on the outside along with his name and surname, and he took a deposit and said that all the maître d’ had to do now was wait for the finished jacket to arrive C.O.D. He wouldn’t have to go for a fitting, which was why he’d had this company tailor his coat in the first place, because the maître d’ was a busy man. It wasn’t until later that I heard what I’d wanted to know at the time but was too shy to ask: What happens next? The salesman answered it himself, in fact, because as he was cramming the deposit money into an overstuffed wallet, he said quietly to the maître d’: You know, this is a revolutionary technique my boss invented, the first in the republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled out, and then they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and lieutenant colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered. All this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

  Once, around midnight, I took some mineral water up to the salesman from van Berkel’s who sold us that pharmacy scale and the machine that sliced Hungarian salami so thin, and I went in without knocking. There he was, sitting on the carpet in his pajamas as he always did after eating his fill. He was sitting there on his haunches and at first I thought he was playing solitaire or telling his fortune with a deck of cards, but he was smiling blissfully like a little child and slowly laying down hundred-crown notes side by side on the carpet, and he had half the carpet covered and it still wasn’t enough, because he pulled another packet of banknotes from his briefcase and laid them out neatly in a row, as precisely as if he’d had lines or columns drawn on the carpet. When he finished a row, and the rows were as exact as a bee’s honeycomb, he looked gleefully at the money, he even clapped his pudgy hands together and stroked his cheeks and held his face in his hands, reveling like a child in those banknotes, and he went on dealing them on the floor, and if a note was the wrong side up or upside down, he turned it so it was like all the others. I stood still, afraid just to cough and leave. He had a fortune there in those notes, like identical tiles, and his enormous delight opened my eyes to what was possible. Although I was just as fond of money, I had never thought of this before, and I saw a picture of myself putting all the money I earned, not into hundred-crown notes just yet, but into twenties, and then laying my twenties out just like that, and I loved watching this fat, childish man in his striped pajamas, knowing that one day I too would shut myself away like this and lay out on the floor a joyful image of my power and my talent. And once I surprised the poet Tonda Jódl that way. He lived in the hotel, and fortunately he could also paint, because instead of giving him a bill the boss would take a painting. Jódl put out a small book of poems in our town, called The Life of Jesus Christ, which he published privately. He took the whole edition to his room and laid the copies out side by side on the floor, and The Life of Jesus Christ made him so nervous he kept taking his coat off and putting it on again, and he covered the whole room like that with the little white books and still had some left over, so he continued along the corridor, laying those volumes down almost to the stairway. Then he took his coat off once more and a while later put it on again. Or, if he was sweating, he’d just throw it over his shoulders, but when the cold got to him he’d put his arms back in the sleeves, and pretty soon he’d be so warm that he’d take it off again, and cotton balls kept falling out of his ears, and he’d take them out or stick them back in again, depending on how much he wante
d to hear the world around him. He preached a return to the simple country life and he never painted anything but country cottages from the Krkonoše region, and he claimed that the role of the poet was to seek the New Man. Our guests didn’t like him, or rather they did, but that didn’t stop them from playing practical jokes on him all the time. It wasn’t just that he was always taking his coat off and putting it on again in the restaurant, he’d also take off his galoshes and put them on, depending on his mood, which would change every five minutes because of this search for the New Man, and when he’d taken them off, the guests would pour beer or coffee into them, and then they’d all watch the poet out of the corner of their eyes, missing their mouths with forks full of food while he put his galoshes back on, and the coffee or the beer would slosh out, and he would thunder for all the restaurant to hear: You evil, stupid, and criminal sons of man! What you need is the simple life! His eyes would fill with tears, not tears of anger but of happiness, because he saw the beer in his galoshes as a gesture, proof that the town recognized him, and if it didn’t exactly honor him, at least it considered him one of its own. The worst was when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. The poet would slip into them and then try to walk back to his table, and almost fall over. Sometimes the galoshes were nailed down so hard that he’d actually fall on his hands, and then he’d rant at the customers again and call them evil, stupid, and criminal sons of man, but then he’d forgive them right away and offer them a small drawing or a book of poems, which he got them to pay for on the spot so he’d have enough to get by on. Basically he wasn’t bad. As a matter of fact he hung over the whole town in a way, and I often dreamed that just like the angel over the chemist’s shop at the White Angel the poet would float above the town, waving his wings, and he had wings, I saw them myself, but I was afraid to ask the priest about it. When he took his coat off and put it on, and his beautiful face was bent over a quarto of paper, because he liked to write poems at our tables, and when he turned his head a certain way, I could see his angelic profile and a halo floating above his head, a little violet circle of flame like the flame on a Primus stove, as if he had kerosene inside his head and that circle glowing and sizzling above it, the kind you find in stallkeepers’ lamps. And when he walked around the town square, Tonda Jódl the poet would carry his umbrella as no one else could, and no one could wear a topcoat tossed over his shoulders quite as casually as he, or wear a floppy fedora the way he could, even though he had white balls of cotton sprouting from his ears, and before he even crossed the square he’d have taken his coat off his shoulders and put it back on again five times, and have doffed his hat ten times. It was as though he was paying his respects to someone, yet he never actually greeted anyone except the old women in the marketplace, the stallkeepers, to whom he would always bow deeply, for these were his people as he searched for the New Man. When it was damp and cold or when it rained, he would order a mug of tripe soup and a roll and take it across the square to those frail old women, and as he carried it he seemed to be carrying more than just soup, because in that mug, as least that’s how I saw it, he was taking those old women a piece of his heart, a human heart in tripe soup, or sliced and fried up with onions and paprika, the way a priest would carry the monstrance or the host to the last rites, with tears in his eyes at the thought of how kind he was to bring the old women soup.