I Served the King of England

  How I Became a Millionaire

  The little suitcase with the rare stamps brought me good luck, though not right away. When the war was over, I was served with a warrant for collaboration under the small decree, even though I’d turned over the address of the Gestapo commander, the one who had murdered so many people and then gone into hiding in the Tyrolean Mountains. I’d pried his whereabouts out of my father-in-law in Cheb, and Zdeněk got permission from the American officials, and they set off with a car and two soldiers to arrest him. They found him cutting grass in a meadow, disguised in Tyrolean lederhosen and a beard he’d let grow. But even if I had arrested him single-handed, the Prague Sokolites would still have wanted me in jail, not because I married a German woman but because when thousands of Czech patriots were being executed I had stood before the Nazi Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood and let them examine me, a dues-paying member of the Sokol organization, to see whether I was worthy of having sexual intercourse with a Teutonic Aryan woman. For that I was sentenced to half a year in prison.

  When I got out I sold those stamps for so much money that I was able to cover the floor of my room ten times over, and when I got enough to cover it forty times over I bought myself a hotel on the outskirts of Prague, a hotel with forty rooms. But the very first night, I had the feeling that in the highest room, right under the mansard roof, someone was pounding nails into the floor, a nail a minute, with heavy blows from a carpenter’s ax. Each day the sound spread to another room, a second and then a third and then a tenth, until at last it reached the fortieth room, and it was happening in all of them at once. Everywhere, in every one of those rooms my little son was crawling around the floor, forty sons, each one pounding nails into the floor with powerful blows from his hammer. On the fortieth day, deafened by the blows, I asked whether anyone else heard them, but no one did, only me, so I traded the hotel for another one, and this time I purposely chose a place with only thirty rooms, but it started up all over again. So I decided that the money from the stamps was cursed, that it was money taken by force from someone who might have been killed in the process, or maybe the stamps had belonged to a rabbi with miraculous powers, because those nails were really being pounded into my head, and with each blow of the hammer I felt the nail puncturing my skull, and the next blow would drive the nail halfway in, and then all the way in, and I’d end up not being able to swallow, because those long spikes would go right into my throat. But I didn’t lose my mind, because I’d set myself the goal of owning a hotel and being on equal terms with all the other hotel owners, and I couldn’t give up on that, it was the only thing that kept me going, the fact that one day I would make it as far as Mr. Brandejs had. Not that I wanted four hundred sets of gold cutlery like him, a hundred sets would do, as long as there were famous foreigners coming to stay at my place. So I began to build a hotel of my own, one that would be very different from all the other hotels. I bought a huge abandoned quarry near Prague and started adding things to it and sprucing up what was already there, as the Hotel Tichota had done. The basis for the hotel was a large blacksmith’s shop with a dirt floor and two chimneys. I left the four anvils just the way they were, with all the hammers and tongs hanging on the black walls, and I bought leather armchairs and tables. All this was at the suggestion of a mad architect who did things for me that he had been dreaming about, and he was as enthusiastic as I was. Here, in these chimneys and on these forges, the shashlik and the roast pork à la Živan would be grilled right in front of the guests. The same day the conversions in the blacksmith’s shop were finished, I slept there, and the first night I heard hammer blows, but they were faint, because the nails went into the dirt floor like butter, and the feeling inside my head was muffled as well, so I threw myself with more excitement than ever into building the guest rooms inside a long building that looked like a concentration camp barracks, where the workers used to have their cloakrooms and dormitories. I converted these into small rooms, thirty of them, and as an experiment I had the floors made of those rough tiles, the kind they have in Italy and Spain and other places where the weather is hot. The first day I listened carefully, but the tiles were so hard that all I could hear were nails glancing off my head, showering sparks, and then the blows let up altogether and I recovered and began to sleep again the way I used to. Construction proceeded so rapidly that the hotel opened in two months, and I called it the Hotel in the Quarry, because something inside me had been broken and crushed and carted away. It was a first-class hotel, and you could stay overnight only if you had a reservation. It was in the woods, and the rooms were set out in a semicircle above a blue pond at the bottom of the quarry. In the rock, forty meters of granite straight up, I had rock climbers plant alpine flowers and shrubs that grow in places like that. A steel cable was stretched above the pond, with one end anchored at the top of the cliff and the other at the bottom, so the cable went down over the water, and every evening I provided entertainment, I hired an acrobat who had a small, grooved steel wheel with a short grip underneath it, and he’d wait for the right moment, kick off, and come swooping down from the top of the cliff, and when he was right over the pond, with a spotlight on his phosphorescent costume, he’d let go of the wheel, hang for a moment in midair, and then do a jackknife, straighten, and with his hands stretched out in front of him slip into the deep water. Then slowly, easily, in his skintight phosphorescent suit, he would swim to the edge of the pond where the tables and chairs were. I’d had everything painted white, because white was my color now—something like the terrace restaurant at Barrandov, except that this was original, and now I could compete with anyone. The idea of the wheel came from a busboy who was standing on the top of the hill one afternoon, grabbed the wheel, and slid down the cable. When he was halfway down, he let go, and all the guests screamed and stood up or shrank back in their armchairs, which were all in the Ludwigian style, but the busboy straightened and did a flip in midair and then, in his waiter’s tuxedo, slipped headfirst into the water, as though the pond had swallowed him up. I realized at once that this sort of thing had to go on every day, and that in the evening he would have to wear a phosphorescent costume. I couldn’t possibly lose money on it, and even if I did, it wouldn’t matter, because no one else had anything like it, not in Prague, not in all of Bohemia, and maybe not even anywhere in Europe or the rest of the world. One day they told me a writer had come to stay whose name was Steinbeck. He looked like an old sea captain or a highwayman, and he loved it here, loved the blacksmith’s shop turned into a restaurant and the cooks working right in front of the guests, cooking on the open forges so that by the time the shashlik and roast pork à la Živaň were done the guests were as famished as little children. But what the writer liked most were all those granite crushers, the dusty old milling machines with their insides laid bare so you could see how they worked, like an exhibition where cars are sliced in half so you can see inside the motor. The writer was enchanted with these machines. They were in an open field above the quarry, from which you could see out across the countryside, and there the machines stood, abandoned stonecutting machines and lathes, looking as if they’d been invented by mad sculptors. This writer had them bring up his white table and a white lounge chair, and every afternoon he’d drink a bottle of French cognac and every evening he’d have another. Sitting among those machines with the mill down below, he’d gaze off into the countryside, and it was just the dull, ordinary countryside near Velké Popovice, but with the writer there it seemed beautiful and the machines seemed like works of art. The writer told me he’d never seen anything like it before, had never actually stayed in a hotel like this before. In America—this is what he said—only a famous actor like Gary Cooper or Spencer Tracy could have such a place, and the only writer who could afford a hotel like this would be Hemingway. By the way, what did I say I wanted for it? I said two million, so he did some figuring on the table, then called me over, pulled out a checkbook, and said he’d take it and write me a check th
en and there for fifty thousand dollars. I questioned his figures several times, and he went to sixty, then seventy, then eighty thousand dollars, but I realized that I couldn’t sell my hotel even for a million dollars, because the Hotel in the Quarry represented the height of my powers, the pinnacle of my efforts, and I had become the first among hotelkeepers. There were hundreds and thousands of hotels like Mr. Brandejs’s or Mr. Šroubek’s, but I knew that no one else in the world had a hotel like mine.

  One day the biggest Prague hotel owners, including Mr. Brandejs and Mr. Šroubek, came and ordered supper. The maître d’ and the waiters set their table with the utmost care and taste, and just for them I turned on ten spotlights that were hidden under the rhododendrons and aimed so they would light up the whole face of the rock from below, bringing out the highlights, the sharp edges, the fantastic shadows, and the flowers and shrubs. I decided that if these hotel owners were inclined to make peace, to take me among themselves and offer me a membership in the Association of Hotelkeepers, I would let bygones be bygones. But they pretended not to see me, and not only that, they deliberately sat with their backs to all the beauties of my establishment. But I felt I was the winner, because they had turned their backs on the unique features of my enterprise only because they saw and they knew that I had outdone them. And it wasn’t just Steinbeck who stayed here, but Maurice Chevalier too, and a lot of women came to see him, and they stayed near the quarry. Chevalier would receive them in the morning in his pajamas, and they would throw themselves at him, these admirers, and undress him and tear his pajamas to shreds so they’d each have a piece as a souvenir, and if they’d been able to they would have torn Chevalier himself apart and carried away pieces of his body, depending on how their tastes ran. Looking at them, you’d think that most of them would tear out the famous singer’s heart first, and then his penis. Chevalier attracted such a swarm of reporters that pictures of my quarry were carried not only in all the local magazines, but in foreign ones as well, and I had clippings from the Frankfurter Allgemeine and the Zürcher Zeitung and Die Zeit, and in the Herald Tribune, of all places, there was my hotel and Chevalier surrounded by those crazy women in the middle of the field with the machine sculptures, machines surrounded by white tables and chairs with stylized grapevines wound into their backrests. And that was the real reason these hotelkeepers had come, not to bury the hatchet but because they’d heard I’d bought this quarry and everything in it for a song, and when they saw it, what they saw was far stronger and far more beautiful than they’d ever imagined. And they were jealous of me, because I left everything just the way I found it, building the hotel from the inside, so to speak, and anyone who understood anything could see that and give me credit, as though I were an artist. That was the height of my career, that was what made me a man who had not lived in vain. I began to look at my hotel as a work of art, as my own creation, because that was how others saw it, and they opened my eyes, and I understood that those machines were really sculptures, beautiful sculptures that I wouldn’t have given up for anything. One day I began to see that my Hotel in the Quarry was something like the things Holub or Naprstek brought back with them from their travels abroad, and I knew the time would come when every one of those machines, every stone, everything would become a historical site. But those hotel owners could still make me feel humiliated, because I wasn’t one of them, I wasn’t of equal rank, though I was actually above them, and often at night I would regret that the old Austrian Empire was gone, because if there were military maneuvers, say, and if, not the Emperor perhaps, but one of his archdukes were to stay here, I would serve him and prepare his meals so well and make his visit so pleasant that he would give me a title, not a high title, but he’d make me a baronet at least. And so I dreamed on, and when a great heat wave came and the crops dried up in the fields and cracks opened up in the ground and children threw letters into the cracks in the earth, I dreamed of winter, of the snow falling and everything freezing, and I dreamed of sweeping off the surface of the pond and putting two small tables there, with two old Victrolas on them, one horn painted blue and the other pink like two big flowers, and I would buy old gramophone records and play old-fashioned waltzes, and fires would be flickering in the blacksmith’s shop, logs blazing in steel baskets around the edge of the pond, and the guests would go skating on the ice, and I would buy old-fashioned skates or have them made, the kind you fasten on with a key, and the men would get down on their knees and put them on for the ladies, and hot punch would be served. And while I dreamed, the newspapers and the political parties argued about who was going to pay for the drought that had inspired in me such wonderful dreams of winter revels in the quarry. When Parliament and the Cabinet discussed the drought and decided that the millionaires should pay for it, I accepted their verdict with satisfaction, because I was a millionaire now too, and as a millionaire I wanted to see my name in the papers alongside Šroubek’s and Brandejs’s and the others, so I understood that the drought was in fact sent by my lucky star, and that the bad luck would be my good luck and put me right up there where I dreamed of being when I imagined the archduke making me a baronet. Although I was still no taller than when I’d been a busboy, I was big now, I was a millionaire, but months passed and nobody sent me any notification, nobody demanded that I pay the millionaire’s portion. By this time I had bought the two gramophones, and I had a magnificent orchestrion brought in too, along with an old merry-go-round with huge horses, deer, and elk on it. It had once been a German merry-go-round, belonging to some wealthy amusement-park and shooting-gallery owner, and I had the merry-go-round taken apart and the horses and the deer mounted on their original springs on a stone curb around the pond. I put the deer and the horses in twos, side by side, and the guests and their wives would sit on them and talk, as though they were out on a Sunday ride, and the idea really caught on. The horses and the deer were always occupied, and the orchestrion played while the guests rocked back and forth on the wooden animals with their magnificent saddles, bridles, and trappings, and with their beautiful eyes, and everything about them was wonderful.

  Then one day, out of the blue, Zdeněk came to see me. By now he was a big man in the district, maybe even in the region, and he’d changed a lot. He rocked back and forth on one of the horses and looked around, and when I sat down on the horse beside him, he talked to me quietly and then took a folded document out of his pocket and before I could stop him slowly tore it up. This was the document that named me a millionaire and ordered me to pay my millionaire’s share. Zdeněk then jumped down and tossed it in the fire. For me it would have been a wonderful document to have, almost like a letter of appointment. He smiled at me sadly and drank the rest of his mineral water—this was Zdeněk, who never had drunk anything but hard liquor—and walked away with a sad smile on his face. There was a big, fancy black car waiting to take him back where he came from, back to the politics he was busy with and I suppose he believed in, because it kept him going, and it must have been wonderful if it could take the place of those grand, generous gestures of his, the kind he used to spend all his money on, as if the money was too hot for him to hang on to and he had to give it back to the people he thought it properly belonged to. Events began to move very fast now, and just as I had dreamed I would, I gave sensational evenings and afternoons in the quarry with gramophone music, ice skating, and bonfires, in the blacksmith’s shop and around the pond. But the guests who came now were sad, or if they were gay it was not the kind of gaiety I was used to, but a forced gaiety, the kind the Germans had displayed when they celebrated at Košíček, knowing that they were there with their wives or lovers for the last time because afterward they would go straight to the front. And that’s exactly how my guests would leave, they’d shake my hand and wave from their cars as though this were it, as though they’d never be coming back again. If they did come back, it was the same thing all over again, they were melancholy and gloomy. Normally events outside were not felt here, but now everything in pol
itics had turned upside down, it was February 1948 and all my guests knew they were doomed. They’d spent what they could but the joy and the spontaneity had gone out of it. I felt their sadness too and stopped locking myself up every night and pulling the curtains so I could lay the hundredcrown notes from the daily take out on the floor—like playing solitaire or reading my own fortune in the cards—before taking them to the bank the next morning, where I now had a million crowns on deposit. Spring came, and many of my guests, my regulars, stopped coming, and I learned that they had fallen, that they had been arrested and locked up, or that some of them had escaped across the border. Now a different kind of customer started coming, and the daily take was even bigger, but I wondered what had happened to the ones who used to come here every week. One day two of them came and told me that they were millionaires and that they had to be ready tomorrow, with a pair of heavy boots, a blanket, and extra socks and food, because they were going to be taken away to a holding camp somewhere because they were millionaires. I was delighted, because I was a millionaire too, and I brought them my bankbook and showed it to them. One said he was a factory owner who made gym equipment, and the other said he manufactured false teeth. So I went and got my rucksack, heavy lace-up boots, an extra pair of socks, and canned food, because the false-teeth manufacturer told me that all the Prague hotel owners had been sent summonses too. In the morning they drove off, weeping, because they didn’t have the courage to make a run for it across the border. That was too risky, they thought, and anyway America and the United Nations wouldn’t leave things like this, and the millionaires would get everything back and return to their villas and their families. I waited a day, then another, then a week, then I got news from Prague that all the millionaires were already in the camp at a Catholic seminary in Svatý Jan pod Skalou, an enormous monastery and boarding school for future priests who had been moved out. So I made up my mind, and that was on the day they came from the district Party headquarters and broke it to me very gently that the National Committee was going to confiscate the quarry, that I could stay on as a caretaker for the time being, but all the property rights had devolved to the people. I was outraged, and I guessed that Zdeněk had had a hand in this, so I went straight to his office in the district Party headquarters. But he said nothing, he just smiled at me sadly, took a piece of paper off his desk, and tore it up in front of me, then told me that he was tearing up my summons on his own account, because I had once taken his punishment for him, the time when I’d looked at my watch outside the station. I told Zdeněk that this was the last thing I expected of him, that I had thought he was my friend but he was really against me, because I never wanted anything else and never worked for anything else all my life except having my own hotel and being a millionaire. And I walked out.