I Served the King of England

  He was not a political functionary but a headwaiter back in the Hotel Tichota. On our day off we’d gone for a walk, and in a grove of birches we saw a small man darting among the trees, blowing his whistle, pointing, holding the trees at arm’s length, and shouting, You’ve done it again, Mr. Říha. One more time and you’re out of the game. Then he ran back and forth among the trees again. Zdeněk found this amusing, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That evening Zdeněk told me the man was Mr. Šíba, the soccer referee. At the time, no one wanted to referee a Sparta-Slavia match, because the crowd then always insulted the referee, so Mr. Šíba said that if no one else wanted the job he’d referee the game himself. He went into training for it in this birch grove, running about sowing confusion among the birches, reprimanding and threatening Burger and Braine with expulsion, but mostly yelling at Mr. Říha, One more time and you’re out of the game. That afternoon Zdeněk took a bus full of inmates from an asylum for the mildly lunatic who had permission to go into the village because it was fair time, and they could ride on the merry-go-round and swing on the swings in their striped clothes and bowler hats. Zdeněk went into a pub and bought them a barrel of beer and a spigot, borrowed some half-liter glasses, and took them to the birch grove, where they broached the barrel and drank while Mr. Šíba ran among the birch trees blowing his whistle. The lunatics watched him for a while, then, figuring out what he was doing, they began to shout, cheer, and yell out the names of all the famous players for Sparta and Slavia. They even saw Braine kick Plánicek in the head, and they jeered until Mr. Šíba threw Braine out of the game. Finally, after the referee had warned Říha three times, there was nothing he could do but toss him out of the game for fouling Jezbera. The lunatics cheered, and by the time we’d polished off the barrel of beer they weren’t the only ones shouting, because I too saw the striped uniforms and the red-and-white uniforms instead of birch trees as the tiny referee Mr. Šíba blew his whistle. When it was over, the lunatics carried him off the playing field on their shoulders for doing such a beautiful job of refereeing. A month later Zdeněk showed me an article in the paper about Mr. Šíba, who had thrown Braine and Říha out of a game and thus saved the match with his energetic whistle.

  And so the circle began to close and I started going back to my childhood and youth, and I was a busboy again, and at the same time I stood face to face with myself, forced to look at my life. I remembered how I had waited with my grandmother in her little room by the open window below the toilets of the Charles Baths, where every Thursday and Friday the traveling salesmen would toss out their dirty underwear, which would sometimes spread out against the black of the evening sky—crucified white shirts—and drift down onto the enormous mill wheel, from which my grandmother would fish them in with a gaff so she could launder them, mend them, and sell them to construction workers. Then the news came through that we’d only be interned in the millionaires’ camp another week and then be sent to work somewhere else, and the oldest ones would be able to go home. So we decided to have a last supper, and because we needed as much money as possible, I was given leave to go with the false-teeth manufacturer to his cottage, where he had money stashed away, and that was another unbelievable experience. We didn’t arrive at his cottage until after dark, and by flashlight we put up a ladder and went through a trapdoor in the ceiling. But the manufacturer had forgotten which trunk he’d left his hundred thousand crowns in, so I started opening up the trunks one by one, and when I got to the last one and shone the flashlight inside, I was horrified, though I should have expected as much from a manufacturer of dentures, because the trunk was full of false teeth and gums. The sheer numbers made it terrifying, all those pink palates with white teeth, hundreds of them. There I stood on the ladder, terrified, because the teeth looked like flesh-eating flowers, some clenched tight, others half open, and still others wide open, yawning as though their hinges were out of joint. I began falling backward, and the trunk spilled over me, and I felt the cold kiss of teeth on my arms and face, and as I fell backward I dropped the flashlight, and I ended up on my back on the floor with the teeth spilling over me, but I managed to turn over on my stomach and scuttle out from under them on all fours, like an animal or an insect. At the very bottom of the trunk was all the money, thousands of crowns, and the manufacturer very carefully swept the dentures into a dustpan and put them back in the trunk, tied a rope around it, and hoisted it back up where it had come from. Then we locked the attic and walked back to the station in silence. The millionaires’ last supper was like the wedding banquets we used to have in the Hotel Paris. I stopped at my room in Prague for a new tuxedo, and especially for the medal presented to me by the Emperor of Ethiopia and the sash to go across my chest. We bought flowers and several bunches of asparagus fern, and all afternoon Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs decorated the tables in the priests’ refectory, and Mr. Brandejs said he was sorry he couldn’t provide us with his gold cutlery, and we invited all the militiamen, including the commander of the camp. We’d run into him the evening before in the village and he asked us where we were going, and Mr. Brandejs said, Come along with us, Commander, we’re going to a dance. But the commander merely shook his head and walked off with his gun, which he carried as though it were a fishing rod. He hated that army rifle, and he was already dreaming about getting back to the mines just as soon as he handed over the millionaires’ camp for liquidation. And I became a waiter once more and put on my tuxedo, but it was different from the other times I had put it on—it felt more like a costume now—and I pinned the star to the side of my jacket and stretched the blue sash across my chest, but I didn’t bother standing straight or holding my head high to add a couple of centimeters to my height, because I had no desire anymore to be the equal of the other hotelkeeper millionaires. I saw this banquet from the other side, and I served the food without enthusiasm, even though Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs were with me serving the tables in their tuxedos, and when I thought about my Hotel in the Quarry, I felt no regret that it was no longer mine. All things considered, it was a pretty gloomy meal. Everyone was sad and dignified, as though it was the real Last Supper, which I had seen in pictures, and here in the refectory too there was a picture like that, filling an entire wall, and gradually, as we ate our salpicon and drank South Moravian white wine with it, we raised our eyes to look at the picture of the Last Supper, and we began to resemble those disciples more and more. While we ate our beef Stroganoff we began to feel melancholy, and our banquet turned into something like the wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the more the millionaires drank, the more sober they became. During coffee and cognac there was silence, and even the militiamen, who had their own table—the table where the teachers and the professors at the seminary had eaten—began to be sad too, because they knew that at midnight we’d see each other for the last time. It had been a wonderful time for them too, and some of them were wishing we could have gone on that way until the end of time. Suddenly, from the monastery, where a single lame priest had been allowed to remain out of the original thirty monks, the bell sounded Midnight Mass, which the priest was serving to the Catholic millionaires. There were only a few of them in the chapel, and their suitcases and duffel bags were already packed, but now the limping priest, as he was blessing the believers with the chalice, lay the chalice aside and raised his hand, and the organ thundered and the priest began to sing, Saint Wenceslas, Prince of Bohemia. His voice and the thundering of the organ carried all the way to the refectory, where we were gazing at the painting of the Last Supper of our Lord, and for us, Catholic or not, it all seemed so in tune with the sad and gloomy mood that we stood up, singly at first and then in clusters, and hurried across the courtyard and through the open door and into the chapel, into the golden light of the candles. We didn’t genuflect, we fell to our knees, that is, we were forced to our knees by something stronger than we millionaires were, something stronger than money, something that had been hovering above us, waiting for a thousand years. We
sang, kneeling, Lord, may we live, and those that come hereafter. And some of us fell on our faces. As I knelt there, I saw that the millionaires were different, I wouldn’t have recognized them—there was not a sign of money on a single face. All those faces seemed to have been kindled by something higher, something more beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful thing a person has. The priest didn’t seem to be limping either, his limping seemed to come from carrying heavy wings, because in his white gown he looked like a angel. When we knelt and threw ourselves on our faces, the priest raised the chalice and blessed us. Then he walked between the kneeling men and the golden chalice and strode across the courtyard, and in the darkness his frock shone like the phosphorescent costume of the acrobat who had once slid down the wire and jackknifed into the quarry pond, where the water swallowed him up just as the priest swallowed the Host after first blessing it for us. Twelve o’clock began to strike, and we said our farewells and walked through the open gate, where the militiamen and their commander—they were all miners from the Kladno region—shook hands warmly with everyone. Then we vanished into the darkness and walked to the station, because the camp was now officially closed, and we were urged to go to our homes, regardless of whether we’d been sentenced to ten years or only two, or whether we had ten million or only two.

  All the way I thought of those two hundred pairs of pigeons and how they’d be waiting next day at two o’clock and I wouldn’t come out of the kitchen. So with my head full of pigeons I went home, not to Prague but to the quarry, and I climbed the path, and on the other side of the woods I should have seen the illuminated hotel, but everything was in darkness. When I came to the sculptures and stone-crushers, I saw why. The quarry was closed, the entrance gate shut, and there was a new gate cobbled together from boards and locked with an enormous padlock. I walked around the fence and over a knoll of blooming heather and descended into the heart of the quarry. The place was a mess, the chairs were smeared with dirt and knocked over, and when I grasped the door handle of the blacksmith’s shop, it was open. There was nothing to show that this had ever been a restaurant, everything had been removed, and the only sign of life was a fire smoldering in the forge. All that was left of the cooking utensils were a couple of ordinary coffee cups. With every step I took, I remembered, almost with pleasure, that Steinbeck himself had offered a check for fifty, then sixty, then eighty thousand dollars for this beautiful quarry, but I’d refused, and it was a good thing I had, because if I couldn’t be the hotelkeeper anymore then the hotel should go down with me. They seemed to have turned the hotel into a public swimming pool, because instead of tea towels there were hand towels, and bathing suits hung on a wire stretched from corner to corner. The only thing that hadn’t been here before that I found pretty was a naked female mannequin from a clothing-store window, hanging from the ceiling in a horizontal position. I walked through the corridors, and the carpet was gone, and the small glass lamps that had stood outside every door were gone too. I turned the door handle of one of the little rooms and found it open. I looked in and switched on the light, but the room was empty, and I was relieved to find that it wasn’t just as I’d left it. So it was right that the entire quarry had vanished along with me, because no one would ever have the strength to do it the way I had done it, and all those who had been here, whenever they felt like it or on the whim of a moment, could recall what it used to be like and find a place for my quarry in their daydreams. They could do whatever they wanted in my hotel, meet the most beautiful young women or slide down the cable from seventy meters up and halfway down, right over the pond, let go, hang suspended in the air for a moment, and then plunge headfirst into the water. Or—since anything goes in a daydream—they could hover in the air above the pond and look around like a bird on fluttering wings, the way a skylark does, holding itself aloft on nothing more than a breeze.

  When I arrived in Prague, I was given a choice: either report to Pankrác and begin serving a sentence or join a forest labor brigade, whichever I preferred, on condition that the brigade be in the border regions, what used to be the Sudetenland. That afternoon I went to the labor office and accepted the first job they offered me, and I was happy, and my happiness grew when I found I’d lost the heel of my shoe and the piece of leather I’d hidden the last two stamps under had worn away. So the rest of my fortune was gone, the fortune my wife Lise left me after bringing those stamps from Lemberg, from Lvov, when the ghetto was burned to the ground and the Jews were murdered. When I walked through Prague now, I didn’t wear a tie, I didn’t want to be a bit taller than I was, I no longer tried to decide which of the hotels I walked by on Přikopy or Wenceslas Square I would buy. I was happy with myself in a gloating sort of way, glad that I’d ended up as I had, that the way forward was now my own way, that I wouldn’t have to bow and scrape anymore or be careful to say my good-mornings and good-afternoons and good-evenings and de-lighted-to-see-yous or keep an eye on the staff or, if I was one of the staff myself, make sure that the boss didn’t catch me sitting down or smoking or filching a piece of meat. Tomorrow I would leave for somewhere far away, far from people, though of course I knew there’d be people there too, and I’d always believed, like everyone who works in artificial light, that one day I would get out of the city and into nature, that when I retired I would see what a forest really looked like, what the sun really looked like, the sun that had shone into my face every day of my life, making me shield my eyes with a hat or a shadow. When I was a waiter I used to love it when at least once a day all those doormen and superintendents and stokers would come out of their buildings, turn their faces upward, and from the abyss of the Prague streets gaze at the strip of sky overhead, at the clouds, to see what time it really was, according to nature and not by the clock. And the unbelievable that came true stayed with me, and I believed in the unbelievable, in the star that had followed me through life, and with its gleam constantly before my eyes I began to believe in it more and more, because it had made me a millionaire, and now that I had been brought to my knees I realized that my star was brighter than ever, that only now would I be able to see its true brightness, because my eyes had been weakened by everything I had lived through, weakened so that they could see more and know more.

  When I arrived at Kraslice I had to walk another ten kilometers through the woods, and just as I was about to give up I came to a dilapidated gamekeeper’s lodge, and when I saw it I thought I’d go mad with delight. The lodge had belonged to Germans, and it looked exactly the way someone who’s grown up in a city imagines a gamekeeper’s lodge. I sat down on a bench underneath wild tendrils and vines and leaned back against the wooden wall, and inside I could hear the ticking of a genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock, which I’d never seen in my life before, and I could hear its wooden works and cogwheels and the rattling of its chains and weights, and I looked out at a vista between two hills opening into the countryside beyond, but I couldn’t see any crops. I tried to guess where they grew their potatoes, oats, and rye, but here all the fields were overgrown, reminding me of the villages I had walked through, when I felt as if I was in another world, because everywhere enormous unpruned branches and bushes of ripening black currants were poking out of the crumbling buildings and stone walls, and I was determined to go into some of the buildings, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. All I could do was to stand there in solemn terror, not crossing the threshold of houses where everything had been chopped to pieces, where the furniture was scattered about, the chairs lying as if wrestled to the floor. In one village I came across some cows grazing—it was noon—and the cows seemed to be on their way home, so I followed them as they ambled up a hill between two rows of old lime trees. The tower of a baroque château poked above the trees, then the rows parted, and there stood a beautiful château with large oblong designs scraped with nails into the plaster, probably done back in the Renaissance, and the cows walked through a broken gate into the château and I followed them inside. I thought they might just have been wanderin
g around aimlessly and ended up here, but this was where they had their shed. It was a great knights’ hall that you entered up a wide, gently rising staircase, and the cows were living on the second floor, underneath a crystal chandelier and beautiful frescoes of pastoral scenes, but painted as though the shepherds were living in Greece or farther away than that, in the Promised Land, because everyone was wearing clothes like those worn by Jesus Christ and the people who lived with Him back then, and there were huge mirrors between the windows, and the cows would stand there gazing at themselves, obviously enjoying it. When I left and tiptoed down the stairs, I realized that this was probably going to be another case of where the unbelievable comes true. I also began to think of myself as someone who’d been chosen, because I knew that if anyone except me had been here, he wouldn’t have seen a thing, but I enjoyed what I saw, and was fascinated to see a wasteland that could terrify me, the way people are terrified of crime and shun misfortune, but when a misfortune actually strikes, everyone who can gathers around for a look, and stares at the ax lodged in the skull, at the old woman pinned underneath the streetcar. So I walked along and did not try to run from the place of great misfortune, but was glad of it, and I even found that this misfortune and this suffering and these atrocities were not enough for me, and that I could do with more—not only me but the world as well.