I Served the King of England

  The marriage took place in Cheb, in a hall painted red, with red swastika flags everywhere and officials in brown uniforms with red straps over their shoulders and swastikas on the straps. I wore a morning suit and the blue sash across my chest bearing the Emperor of Ethiopia’s medal, and Lise, the bride, wore her gamekeeper’s outfit, a jacket embroidered with oak leaves and a swastika on a red background in her lapel. It was more like a state military ceremony than a wedding because all they talked about was blood and honor and duty. Finally the mayor of the city, who was also wearing a uniform, riding boots and a brown shirt, asked us, the betrothed, to approach a makeshift altar. Hanging behind the altar was a long flag with a swastika, and on the altar was a bust of Adolf Hitler scowling as the light from below cast shadows across his face. The mayor took my hand and the bride’s hand and wrapped them in the flag and held our hands through the cloth, looking solemn. Now came the moment of betrothal. The mayor told us that from now on we belonged to each other and it was our duty to think only of the National Socialist Party and to conceive children who must also be raised in the spirit of that Party. Then, with tears welling up in his eyes, the mayor told us not to fret that we couldn’t both die in the struggle for the New Europe, because they, the soldiers and Party members, would keep up the struggle for us until the final victory. And then they played a gramophone record of “Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht geschlossen,” and everyone sang along with the record, including Lise, and I remembered how I used to sing patriotic songs like “On the Strahov Ramparts” and “Where Is My Homeland,” and that memory made me sing under my breath, until Lise nudged me gently with her elbow and gave me a nasty look, so I sang along with the others, and I found myself singing with feeling, as though I were a real German. When I looked around to see who was there, I saw army colonels and all the top Party brass from Cheb, and I knew that if I’d been married back home, it would have been as though nothing had happened, but here in Cheb it was practically a historical event, because Lise was well known here. When the ceremony was over, I stood with my hand ready, waiting to be congratulated, but then I began to sweat, because the Wehrmacht and SS officers didn’t shake it. I was still just a runty little busboy as far as they were concerned, a Czech pipsqueak, a pygmy. But they practically flung themselves on Lise and congratulated her, while I stood there alone. When the mayor tapped me on the shoulder, I held out my hand, but he didn’t take it either. So there I stood, my whole body stiff from holding my hand out, until the mayor put his arm around my shoulder and led me into his office to sign the register and pay the fee. Here I tried again and put an extra hundred marks on the table, but one of the clerks told me in a broken Czech that tips were not given here because this wasn’t a restaurant or a canteen or a bar or a pub, but a bureau of the creators of the New Europe, where blood and honor were the deciding factors, not—as in Prague—terror and bribery and other capitalist and Bolshevik practices. The wedding supper was held in the City of Amsterdam restaurant, and again I saw that although everyone seemed to be including me in the toasts, Lise was the center of attention, and that they put up with me as an Aryan but still considered me a dumb Bohemian despite my bright-yellow hair, the blue sash across my chest, and on the hip of my suit the medal shaped like a sunburst of gold. But I didn’t let on how I felt or that I saw what was going on. Instead, I smiled and even managed to enjoy being the husband of a woman so famous that all the officers, who must have been single, would have loved to try for her hand, but not one of them had succeeded, because it was I who had enchanted her. These officers had their heads full of notions of defending honor and blood, and were probably incapable of doing anything more than jumping on a woman in bed with their riding boots on, not realizing that in bed you needed love and playfulness. That was my way of doing it, a way I had discovered a long time before, at Paradise’s, when I’d spread ox-eye daisies and cyclamen petals over the laps of naked girls and finally, two years ago, on the lap of this political-minded young German, this commander in the nursing corps, this high-ranking Party member. While she was being congratulated, no one could have imagined her the way I had seen her, naked on her back as I garnished her lap with green spruce, which perhaps for her was even a greater honor than when the mayor pressed both our hands through the red flag and said how sorry he was that we couldn’t both fall in the struggle for the New Europe and the new National Socialist man. When she saw my smile and realized that I’d decided to play the game I’d been condemned to play by the Bureau for Racial Purity, Lise picked up her glass and looked at me, and everyone fell silent, expecting a ceremony. I stood up, making myself taller, and we faced each other, holding our glasses in our fingers, and the officers watched us carefully, as if this was some kind of interrogation, and Lise laughed the way she laughed when we were in bed together, when I’d be gallant in the French manner. We looked at each other as though we were both naked, and again that white film came over her eyes, the kind of look women get when they are ready to cast aside the last shred of inhibition and let themselves be treated any way that seems right at the moment, when a different world opens up, a world of love games and wantonness. She gave me a long, slow kiss in front of everyone, and I closed my eyes, and as we kissed, our champagne glasses tilted in our fingers and the wine slowly spilled onto the tablecloth, and all the guests were silent. After that, everyone seemed abashed and looked at me with respect and curiosity, realizing that German blood has a lot more fun with Slavic blood than it does with other German blood. So though I was still an alien, I became an alien everyone respected with a touch of envy or maybe even hatred. The women looked at me as if they were trying to imagine what sorts of things I might do in bed. They must have thought I was up to some rather special games, and maybe even rough behavior, because they sighed sweetly, looked up at the ceiling, and talked with me, even though I mixed up der, die, and das when I spoke. These women talked to me slowly in their atrocious German, articulating the way you would in a nursery school, and they loved my answers and found the mistakes I made in conversational German charming and funny, and besides it gave them a taste of the magic of the Slavic plains and birch trees and meadows. But all the soldiers from the Heereswaffe and the SS glared at me because they could see only too well that I had won the affections of the beautiful, blonde Lise, that she had chosen a beautiful, animal love over German honor and blood, and that there was nothing they could do about it, even though their chests were plastered with medals and decorations from the campaigns against Poland and France.

  When we came back from our honeymoon to that small town above Děcín where I was a waiter, Lise wanted us to have children. But like any true Slav, I was a creature of moods. I could do anything in the emotion of the moment, but when Lise told me to get ready because that night she was set to conceive the New Man, the founder of the New Europe, I felt exactly the way I had when the Reichsdoktor, acting on the Nuremberg Laws, asked me to bring him a bit of my sperm on a piece of white paper. For a week she’d been playing Wagner on the record player, Lohengrin and Siegfried, and she’d already decided that if it was a boy she’d call it Siegfried Ditie, and all week long she’d walked around gazing at those scenes in relief along the covered walkways and colonnades. She would stand there in the late afternoons with German kings and emperors and Teutonic heroes and demigods rising against the blue sky, while my only thought was how I would strew her lap with flowers and how we’d start by playing like little children, especially since our name was Ditie. That evening Lise appeared in a long gown, her eyes full of duty and blood and honor, and she put her hand in mine, babbled something in German, and rolled her eyes upward, as though all the denizens of the Teutonic heaven were gazing down on us from the ceiling, through the ceiling—all the Nibelungs, and even Wagner himself, whom Lise invoked for help in becoming pregnant the way she wished, in harmony with the new Teutonic sense of honor, so that her womb would be graced by the New Man, who would establish and live in the New Order of the New Blood and the
New Thinking and the New Honor. When I heard all this, I felt everything that makes a man a man drain out of me, and I just lay there staring at the ceiling, dreaming about a lost paradise, about how wonderful everything had been before we were married, about how I had slept with all women the way a mongrel dog would, whereas now I had a job to do, like a purebred sire with a purebred bitch. I’d seen the trouble and bother dog breeders went to, waiting for days on end for the right moment, and one breeder brought a bitch to our town from the far end of the republic and had to turn around and go all the way back because a prize-winning fox terrier wouldn’t have anything to do with her. The next time they came, they put the bitch over a wooden bucket in the stable and, wearing a glove on her hand, the lady guided the dog’s sex organ to its place, and the dog impregnated the bitch with a whip over his head. But the bitch would have surrendered herself just as happily to any old mongrel. Or there was the major who had a Saint Bernard and spent the whole afternoon with a bitch all the way from Šumava, but couldn’t get them together because the bitch was bigger, and finally Engineer Marzin took them to a slope in the garden where he dug out a kind of depression. They spent an hour landscaping the terrain, getting ready for that Saint Bernardian wedding, and by evening they were all worn out, but at last the slope was ready, and they stood the bitch under the step in the hillside so that the male was now the same height as she was, and union took place, but by compulsion, while left to their own devices a German shepherd will eagerly join with a dachshund bitch, or an Irish setter bitch with a stable-bred terrier. And I was in exactly the same position. So the unbelievable came true, because a month later I had to go for some potency injections, and each time needles as blunt as nails were poked into my buttock to strengthen my vigor, and one night, after I’d been through the routine ten times, I managed to impregnate Lise in the regulation manner. Now that she had conceived, it was she who had to go for the injections, because the doctors were afraid she might not carry the New Man to term. And so of all our love nothing remained, and all that was left was an act of National Socialist intercourse, and Lise wouldn’t even touch my penis, and I was only admitted to her bed according to regulations and the order of the New European, which did me no good. Both our behinds were so punctured by those dull needles that we spent most of our time tending the wounds, mine especially, which kept running. And all this so I could beget a beautiful New Child.

  About the same time, an unpleasant thing happened to me. Several times I noticed that you could hear lessons in Russian coming from the classrooms where they usually gave lectures on the glorious past of the old Teutons. Now that the soldiers had fulfilled their duties as studs and impregnated the beautiful blonde girls, they were learning basic Russian as well. Once, when I was listening to these Russian courses under the window, a captain asked me what I thought of it. I said it looked as if there was going to be a war with Russia. At this he started yelling at me, accusing me of inciting the public, and I replied that there was no public here, just the two of us, and he yelled back that we had a pact with Russia and what I’d said was sedition and the spreading of a false rumor. It was then I realized that he was the same captain who had been Lise’s witness at the wedding, who not only had refused to shake hands and congratulate me but had been trying to win Lise’s favor before me, and I had beat him to it. Now he was trying to get back at me, and so he lodged a complaint, and I found myself before the commandant of the town that served as a breeding station for the New Europe. Just as the commandant yelled that I was a Czech chauvinist and they would have me court-martialed, the alert was sounded in the camp, and when the commandant picked up the telephone he turned pale, because it was war, just as I had predicted. In the corridor all the commandant said to me was, How did you guess? And I replied modestly, I served the Emperor of Ethiopia. The next day, a son was born to us, and Lise had him christened Siegfried, because the walls of those covered walkways and Wagner’s music had inspired her to have a son. But I was fired all the same and given a new position in a restaurant called Košíček in the Bohemian Paradise district. The restaurant and hotel were at the very bottom of a rocky canyon, in a kind of natural basket submerged in the morning mists below the clear air. It was a small hotel for people in love, couples who would go on dreamy walks along the cliffs and lookouts and return hand in hand to their lunches and their suppers. Every movement they made was relaxed and unhurried, because although Košíček was also meant for the Heereswaffe and the SS-Waffe the officers would meet their wives and mistresses here for the last time before going off to the Eastern front. Just about everything in Košíček was poles apart from the small town that was incubating the New Race, where the soldiers were stud horses or purebred boars who were expected, the same day they arrived or at least within a couple of days, to impregnate German females scientifically with Teutonic sperm. But here it was different and more to my taste. There was not much gaiety, there was instead a melancholy sadness, a kind of dreaminess I had never expected to see in soldiers. Almost all our guests were like poets before they begin writing a poem—not because they were that kind of person, no, they were just as crude and vulgar and arrogant as other Germans, always drunk with their victory over France, even though a third of the officers from the Grossdeutschland division had fallen in the Gallician campaign. It was because these officers were preparing for a different journey altogether, a different mission, a different battle: they were going to the Russian front, which was quite another kettle of fish. By November, the Germans had driven a wedge right up to the outskirts of Moscow but no farther, so the armies coming up from the rear just kept spreading to Voronezh and on to the Caucasus. And then there was the vast distance, and the bad news from the front—that is, from this side of it—that partisans were harassing the troops so badly that the front had become a rear guard, as Lise told me when she came back from there herself, very upset about how the Russian campaign was going. Lise also brought me a tiny suitcase. At first I didn’t realize how valuable the contents were because it was full of postage stamps, and I wondered how Lise had come by them. It turned out that while she was in Poland she had ransacked Jewish apartments for stamps, and when they were searching deported Jews in Warsaw she had confiscated these stamps. She told me that after the war they would be worth a fortune, enough to buy us any hotel we wanted.

  My little son, who stayed with me, was a strange child. I couldn’t see any of my own features in him, not a single sign that he took after either me or Lise, certainly nothing of what was promised by those Valhalla surroundings, and not a trace in him of Wagner’s music. He was a nervous little child who suffered from convulsions in the third month of his life. Meanwhile, I served guests from all the regions of Germany, and I could now guess correctly whether a German soldier was from Pomerania, Bavaria, or the Rhineland. I could also tell the difference between a soldier from the coast and one from inland, and whether he had been a worker or a farmer, and that was my only entertainment as I waited on tables with no break or free time from morning till evening and into the night. I waited not just on men but also on women, who were here on a secret mission, but that mission was sadness and a kind of ceremonial anxiety. I never again, as long I lived, saw married couples and lovers who were so gentle, kind, and considerate to each other, or who had so much wistfulness in their eyes and tenderness, like the girls back home who used to sing “Dark Eyes” or “The Mountains Resounded.” In the countryside around Košíček, no matter what the weather, there would always be couples out for walks, always a young officer in uniform and a young woman, quiet and absorbed in each other. I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia had never experienced this and couldn’t put myself in their place. Only now have I got to the core of it, that what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so through the eyes of these lovers—because even married cou
ples became lovers again with the danger of the front hanging over them—I learned to see the countryside, the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a sacrament. The day and the night before the departure for the front, the lovers didn’t sleep, but they weren’t necessarily in bed either, because there was something more here than bed: there were eyes and a special feeling, like seeing a sad, romantic play or movie in a large theater or movie house. I also learned that the closest that one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief. And then the carriage gradually slipping like the sun behind the hill, until there is nothing more to be seen, only a figure standing in front of the hotel, a woman, a German, a person in tears, still waving, moving her fingers, while a tiny handkerchief flutters to the ground. Then she turns and in a fit of weeping rushes up the stairs to her room, where like a Barnabite nun who has seen a man in the cloister she falls on her face in the eiderdown and sinks into the bed for a long, invigorating cry. The next day, their eyes still red, these mistresses would drive off to the station, and the same carriage or britzska or automobile would bring other lovers from all directions, from all the garrisons in all the towns and villages, for a final rendezvous before the men went to the front. Despite the armies’ rapid advance, the news from the front was so bad that Lise became increasingly worried, worried about the blitzkrieg, worried that she wouldn’t be able to stand it here. So she decided to take Siegfried to Cheb, to the City of Amsterdam restaurant, and go to the front herself, where she would feel less tense.