I Served the King of England

by Bohumil Hrabal

  Back then, when he was spreading copies of his new book on the floor and out into the corridor, the cleaning woman tramped over the white covers of The Life of Jesus Christ as she was carrying a bucket of water to the toilets. But Tonda Jódl didn’t shout at her, You evil, stupid, and criminal daughter of man. He left each of her footprints just the way it was, almost like a boy’s shoeprint, and he signed those copies and sold The Life of Jesus Christ with the imprint of a sole for twelve crowns instead of ten. But because the book was printed at his own expense, there were only two hundred copies, so he arranged for a Catholic house in Prague to publish ten thousand copies, and for days on end he would work on his calculations, taking off his coat and putting it on again, falling down three times when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. And there’s something else I forgot to mention. Every five minutes he’d pour some medicine into himself, so he was always spattered with powdered medicine like a miller when a bag of flour rips open and spills over the lapels and knees of his black suit. One of the medicines, Neurastenin it was called, he drank straight from the bottle, so he had a kind of yellow ring around his mouth, as though he chewed tobacco. Those medicines he poured down his throat were what caused him every five minutes to feel hot enough to sweat and then cold enough to shiver so violently the whole table would shake. And so the hotel carpenter measured the area covered by The Life of Jesus Christ in the room and the corridor, and then Tonda Jódl worked it out that when the ten thousand copies were published, there’d be so many books that if you put them on the ground you could pave the road from Čáslav to Heřmanův Městec, or there’d be enough to cover the entire town square and all the adjacent streets in the historic part of our town, or if you laid them end to end they could form a strip, a white line down the middle of the road all the way from Čáslav to Jihlava. He got to me with those books. Whenever I walked over the cobblestones of our town, I felt that I was walking on them, and I knew that it must be wonderful to see your own name printed on every cobblestone. Tonda Jódl went into debt over those ten thousand copies of The Life of Jesus Christ, with the result that Mrs. Kadavá, who owned the printing shop, came and confiscated them, and two porters carried them away in laundry hampers while Mrs. Kadavá said or, rather, shouted, Jesus Christ will be in my printshop, and for eight crowns you can have one Jesus Christ any time you want. And Tonda Jódl took his coat off and took a swig of Neurastenin and thundered, Thou evil, stupid, and criminal daughter of man.

  I coughed, but Mr. Walden lay on the floor beside a whole carpet of green hundred-crown notes. Lying stretched out with one fat arm under his head like a pillow, he gazed across the field of money. I went back out, closed the door, and knocked. Mr. Walden asked, Who is it? I replied, It’s me, the busboy, I’m bringing you your mineral water. Come in, he said, and I entered. He was still lying on his back, and his head was resting in his hand, and his hair, curly and full of brilliantine, sparkled almost like the diamonds on his other hand, and he was all smiles again and said, Give me one and park yourself for a bit. I took a bottle opener from my pocket and removed the crown cap, and mineral water fizzed away quietly. Mr. Walden drank, and between sips he pointed to the bills and talked, as quietly and pleasantly as the mineral water, I know you’ve already been here, but I let you have an eyeful. Just remember, money opens up the whole world to you. That’s what old Koreff taught me when I was an apprentice there, and what you see here on the carpet I made in a week. I sold ten sets of scales, and that’s my commission. Have you ever seen anything prettier? When I get home I’ll spread it out like this all over the apartment, my wife and I will spread it out on the tables and on the floor, and I’ll buy salami, cut it up into chunks, and eat it all evening and I won’t leave a thing for the next day, because I’d just wake up in the middle of the night and polish it off anyway. I’m crazy about salami, a whole salami at a time, and someday I’ll tell you why, when I come again. Then he got up, patted my head, put his hand under my chin, looked into my eyes, and said, You’re going to make good someday, remember that. You’ve got it in you, I can tell. You just have to know how to grab the handle. But how? I asked. And he replied, I saw you selling frankfurters at the station, and I’m one of the ones who gave you a twenty and you took so long making change the train pulled away before you could give it back. And now, said Mr. Walden—and he opened the window and took a handful of change from his trouser pocket, threw it down into the empty square, and waited, with a finger up, so I’d listen to the coins jingle and clatter across the cobblestones—now, he went on, if you can throw small change out the window like that, the C-notes will come waltzing in through the door, you see? And the wind rose and a breeze swirled into the room through the window and, as if on command, all the notes came alive, rose up, danced about, and were swept into the corner of the room like autumn leaves.

  I looked at Mr. Walden the way I looked at all salesmen, because whenever I looked at them enough, I’d find myself wondering what kind of underwear they had on, and what kind of shirts they wore. And I’d imagine that they all had dirty underpants with yellow crotches, and dirty shirt collars and filthy socks, and that if they hadn’t been staying with us they’d have thrown those socks and underwear and shirts out the window, the way they used to in the Charles Baths, where I was sent to live for three years with my grandmother. My grandmother had a little room in the old mill, almost like a closet, where the sun never shone and where it couldn’t have shone anyway, because the window looked north and besides it was right next to the mill wheel, which was so big that it entered the water at the first-floor level and reached the third floor at the top of its arc. My grandmother took me in because my mother had me when she was single and turned me over to her mother, that is, my grandmother, who lived right next to the baths. This little room that she sublet in the mill was her entire fortune in life and she praised the Lord for hearing her prayer and giving her this little room next to the baths, because when Thursday and Friday came around and the traveling salesmen and people with no fixed address came for a bath, my grandmother would be on the alert from ten in the morning on. I looked forward to those days, and to the other days as well, although underwear didn’t come flying out of the bathhouse windows as often then. As we watched out of our window, every once in a while one of the traveling salesmen would fling his dirty underpants out of the window, they would hover for a moment in the air, displaying themselves, then continue their fall. Some of them fell into the water, and Grandma would have to lean down and fish them out with a hook and I had to hang on to her legs to keep her from falling out. Sometimes shirts that got thrown out would suddenly spread their arms like a traffic cop at an intersection, or like Christ, and the shirts would be crucified in midair for a moment, and then plunge headlong onto the rim or blades of the mill wheel. The wheel would keep turning, and the adventure of it was, depending on the situation, either to leave the shirt or the underwear on the wheel until the wheel brought it around again on its rim, around and up to Grandma’s window, when all she had to do was reach out and pick it off, or to use a hook to unwind it from the axle. In this case it would be flopping about as the wheel turned, but Grandma would manage to rescue it even so, pulling it through the window into the kitchen on her hook. She’d toss it all into tubs, and that evening she’d wash the dirty underwear and shirts and socks, then throw the water right back into the millrace as it surged under the paddle of the mill wheel. Later in the evening, it was wonderful to see white underwear suddenly fly out of the bathroom window in the Charles Baths and flutter down through the darkness, a white shirt against the black abyss of the current, flashing for an instant outside our window, and Grandma would hook it right out of the air before it could float down into the depths to land on the gleaming wet blades. Sometimes, in the evening or at night, a breeze would blow up from the water, bringing a fine mist with it, and the water and the rain would whip Grandma’s face so hard that she would have to wrestle the wind for possession of the shirt. Still, Grandma
looked forward to each day, and especially Thursdays and Fridays, when the traveling salesmen changed their shirts and underwear because they’d made some money and bought new socks, underwear, and shirts, and then tossed the old ones out the window of the Charles Baths, where Grandma was lying in wait with her hook. Then she’d wash them, mend them, put them neatly in the sideboard, and eventually take them around to the building sites, to sell them to the masons and the day laborers. She lived modestly but well enough to be able to buy rolls for the two of us, and milk for her coffee. It was probably the most wonderful time in my life. I can still see Grandma waiting at night by the open window, which wasn’t easy in the fall and winter, and I can still see that rejected shirt caught in an updraft, hovering for a moment outside our window and spreading its arms. Grandma deftly pulled it in, because in another second the shirt would fall akimbo, like a white bird shot out of the sky, down into the black gurgling waters, to reappear like a tortured thing on the rack of the mill wheel, without a human body inside it, rising in a wet arc and then coming back down the other side, and slip off the wheel and fall into the rushing black waters, to be swept down the millrace under the black blades and far away from the mill.

  Hotel Tichota

  I bought a new vulcanite suitcase and into the suitcase I folded away the new tuxedo made to measure for me by the tailor from Pardubice. The salesman had certainly been telling the truth. He had measured my chest, wrapped strips of parchment around me, jotted everything down, put it all into an envelope, and taken my deposit. When I went to pick up the suit in Pardubice, it fit like a glove, but what I really wanted to know was where my inflated figurine, my torso, was. The boss of the place was as short as I was, and seemed to understand that I wanted to be taller, and how important being up there among the other torsos near the storeroom ceiling was for me, so he took me there to see it. It was a magnificent sight. Up near the ceiling hung the torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors. Hans Albers himself had his suits made here, so he was up there too. A draft from an open window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in the breeze, like fish on a line. The boss pointed at a tag with my name and address on it, so I pulled it down. It looked so small, my torso. I almost wept to see a major general’s torso beside mine, and Mr. Beránek the hotelkeeper’s, but when I thought of the company I was in I laughed and felt better. The boss pulled on another string and said, I’m making a suit for this one here, the Minister of Education, and the smaller one here is the Minister of National Defense. I got such a lift from all this, I gave him two hundred crowns extra, a small gesture from a small waiter who was leaving the Golden Prague Hotel and going to work in the Hotel Tichota, somewhere in Strančice, where the salesman from the third-largest firm in the world, van Berkel’s, had recommended me. I said my farewells and set off for Prague.

  When I got out at Strančice with my suitcase, it was afternoon and still pouring rain. It must have been raining for several days, because the road was covered with sand and mud, and a brimming torrent the color of café au lait had flattened the nettles and oraches and burdocks beside the road, and I trudged up the hill through the mud, following the arrows that said Hotel Tichota. As I was walking past several large houses with trees in front of them broken by the storm, in one of the gardens some people were tying up a tree that was split down the middle. It was loaded with ripening apricots, and the owner, a bald fellow, was trying to tie the crown of the tree back up with a wire while two women, one on each side, were holding it steady for him. But a sudden gust of wind snapped the wire, the women lost their grip, and the crown split apart again and toppled over on the man, knocking him off his ladder and pinning him to the ground in a cage of branches where he lay with his head scratched and bleeding from the sharp twigs. I was standing by the fence. When the women saw their man so tangled up in the branches that he seemed nailed to the ground, crucified by the thick limbs, they burst into gales of laughter. The man’s eyes blazed and he shouted, You goddamn whores, you bitches, just wait till I get out of here, I’ll pound you into the ground like pegs. The women may have been his daughters, or his wife and daughter, so I doffed my hat and said, Excuse me, is this the way to the Hotel Tichota? The man told me to go to hell, then he thrashed about but couldn’t get up, and it was beautiful, him trapped under a canopy of ripe apricots and the two women laughing their heads off. Finally they lifted the tree so the man could get up, and he struggled to his knees and then to his feet. The first thing he did was set his beret, the kind with the little stem on top, squarely on his bald head, so I thought it best to walk on up the road, which was an asphalt road with a gutter made of square granite cobblestones. I kicked the mud and yellow clay off my shoes, and as I came up to the top of the hill, my feet were slipping and sliding. Once I stumbled and fell on my knees, and the dark clouds blew over and the sky turned as blue as the chicory blossoms flattened by the water rushing down the ditch. Then, at the top of the hill, I saw the hotel.

  It was beautiful, straight out of a fairy tale, or from China, or the kind of villa a moneybags might build in the Tyrol or on the Riviera. It was all white with a roof that rose in waves of red tile and green louvered shutters on all three floors, and each story was narrower than the one below, but the top story resembled a pretty little summer-house with a tiny structure made of iron shutters on the roof, like an observation post or a weather station with instruments inside and barometers outside. On top of it all, at the very peak, a red weathercock turned in the wind. Every window on every floor had a balcony you walked onto through a set of French doors with louvers, like the ones on the shutters. There wasn’t a soul in sight, on the road, in the windows, or on the balconies, it was completely silent, and the only sound in the air was the wind, which smelled so sweet you could almost eat it with a spoon, like ice cream, like invisible meringue. I imagined myself dipping into the air with a bun or a slice of bread, as though it were milk, and nibbling at it. I walked through the gate. The pathways were covered with sand partly washed away by the rain, and the thick grass was cut and stacked in haycocks. As I walked through the pine trees, I caught glimpses of meadows stretching away, and the grass was thick and freshly cut with a scythe. To enter the Hotel Tichota you had to walk over an arching bridge and through a set of glass doors with fancy wrought-iron gates opened back against a white wall. The bridge had white railings on each side, and below it was a rock garden with alpine flowers. I began to wonder if I was in the right place, and, if I was, whether they would hire me, and whether Mr. Walden had arranged everything, whether I, a tiny waiter, would be the right person for Mr. Tichota. Suddenly I was afraid. There was no one anywhere, not a voice to be heard, so I turned, and was running back through the garden when I heard a piercing whistle, so urgent I had to stop. It blew three times as if it were saying, Tut tut tut, then gave a long blast that made me turn around, and a short blast that made me feel a line or a rope was reeling me in, pulling me back to the glass doors. No sooner had I walked through them than I was practically run down by a fat man in a wheelchair who had a whistle stuck in his mouth. As he grabbed the rims of the wheels firmly in both hands, the wheelchair came to a halt so abruptly that he practically shot out of his chair and his black wig, more like a toupee, slid over his forehead, and he had to shove it back in place. I introduced myself to Mr. Tichota and he introduced himself to me. When I told him how Mr. Walden, the salesman who was a big shot with van Berkel’s, had recommended me to the Hotel Tichota, Mr. Tichota said he’d been expecting me since morning but had given up hope because of the rainstorm. He said I should go get some rest and then present myself to him in my tuxedo and he’d tell me what he expected of me. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that huge body in the wheelchair. Everything about him was so fat, like the ad for Michelin tires, but Mr. Tichota, to whom the body belonged, seemed full of good spirits and he w
hizzed back and forth through the foyer, which had racks of antlers on the walls, as though he were playing in a meadow, and he could maneuver himself in his wheelchair almost better than if he’d been able to walk. Mr. Tichota blew the whistle again, but it sounded different this time, as if in a different key, and a chambermaid in a white apron and black dress ran down the stairs. Mr. Tichota said, Wanda, this is our number-two waiter, take him to his room. Wanda turned around, and I could see each half of her beautiful bottom, and with every step she took, the buttock opposite the leg she was moving forward would plump out. Her hair was combed up and twisted into a black bun on top that made me seem even smaller, so I decided that for this chambermaid I would save my money and make her mine, and garnish her breasts and her bottom with flowers, and the thought of money gave me strength, which I had always felt drain away in the presence of a beautiful woman. Instead of taking me upstairs, she led me out onto a kind of mezzanine and then down some steps into a courtyard and then past the kitchen, where I could see two white chefs’ hats, and hear the knives working, and laughter. Then two greasy faces with large eyes swam up to the window, then there was more laughter, which faded as I hurried on, carrying my suitcase as high as I could to make up for my size. My double-soled shoes were no help at all, the only thing that helped was holding my head up to make my neck longer. We walked across the courtyard to a small structure that disappointed me, because in the Golden Prague Hotel I had lived like one of the guests, but here I would be living in a porter’s lodge. Wanda showed me the closet, turned on the tap so that water flowed into the sink, and pulled back the bedspread to show me that the bed had been freshly made, then she smiled down at me and left. As she was walking back across the courtyard, I saw through the window that she couldn’t take a single step that was not observed, she couldn’t even allow herself the pleasure of scratching or picking her nose. Wherever she went, she was on stage, like in a big shopwindow, and I remembered once when I was on my way back to the Golden Prague with the flowers and I saw two girls putting a new display in Katz’s shopwindow, tacking some fabric in place with nails. As they worked along on their hands and knees, one behind the other, the one in front used a hammer to nail the cheviot and corduroy down in pleats, and when she ran out of nails she would reach back and take another nail out of the mouth of the girl behind her and tack down another pleat. They seemed to be having fun, and I stood there on the street with a basket of gladioli in my hands and a basket of marguerites on the ground, watching those young window dressers crawling about on their hands and knees. It was noon. The girls must have forgotten where they were, because every so often they would reach back and scratch their behinds, or somewhere down there, and then crawl forward on all fours, right up to the glass, wearing cloth slippers, and they would laugh till the tears came, and then one of them sputtered, the nails popped out of her mouth, and they giggled and snarled at each other in sheer girlish exuberance, like two puppies. Their blouses were loose, and you could see their breasts swinging back and forth as the laughter shook them. By now a crowd had gathered and was staring at those four breasts swinging like bells in a church tower, but when one of them looked up and saw all those people staring at them, she covered her breasts with her arm and blushed. The second girl swam out of her tears of laughter and saw the first one pointing at the crowd in front of Katz’s. She was so surprised that as she clapped her arms to her breasts she fell back on her behind and her legs flew apart and you could see the whole works, even though it was covered by lacy modern underwear. People were laughing, but when they saw this they sobered up and some walked away while others stood there staring long after the window dressers had gone to lunch at the Golden City of Prague restaurant and the shop assistant had pulled down the shutters. That’s how strongly the beauty of a young girl’s body can affect some people.