I Served the King of England

  As I was sitting in front of the gamekeeper’s lodge, two people arrived, and I could see that they lived here and that I’d be spending the whole year with them, maybe more. When I told them who I was and why I’d been sent, the man, who had a gray beard and one good eye, said or rather gumbled that he was a professor of French literature. Then he pointed to the other person, a pretty girl, who I could tell had once been to reform school, or else she was one of those who used to hang around the Prašná Brána in Prague and would come into the hotel after the stock market had closed. As a matter of fact, from the way she moved I could imagine what she looked like naked and what the hair under her arms and in her lap was like, and I found that I could imagine this redhead awakening in me the desire, after all these years, to take her clothes off slowly, and I regarded that as a good sign. She told me she had been sent here for being too fond of dancing at night, that her name was Marcela and that she’d apprenticed in the Maršner Orion chocolate factory. She was wearing men’s trousers covered with pine pitch and pine needles, and she had pine needles in her hair. The professor wore rubber boots, as she did, with crude work socks sticking out of them, and he too was covered with pine and spruce gum. Both of them smelled like a meadow or a stick of firewood. I followed them into the gamekeeper’s lodge, and never in my life had I seen such a mess, not even in those broken buildings the Germans left behind, where people had been looting for valuables with axes and prying open locks on cupboard doors and trunks. The table was littered with cigarette butts and matches, and the floor was the same. The professor told me I’d be sleeping upstairs, and he showed me to the room right away. He opened the door handle with his foot, with the sole of his rubber boot, and I found myself in a beautiful wood-paneled room that had two little windows framed with branches and grapevines. I opened another door and stepped out onto a balcony, also made of wood, which ran all the way around the house, so I had a view in all four directions, while the wild grapevines tickled my face. I sat down on a box and folded my hands in my lap, and I felt like shouting for joy. To celebrate what I’d seen and what was to come, I opened my suitcase and put on the blue sash, pinned the gilded star to the side of my jacket, and went down into the living room. The professor was sitting there with his feet on the table, smoking, and the girl was combing her hair and listening to what he was telling her. He called her Miss, repeating it constantly, until he was trembling all over from the hidden strength of the word or as if he was trying to persuade her of something. Because nothing mattered now, everything was precious, and so I walked into the room theatrically, my arms raised as though I were parading a costume at a fashion show, and I showed myself off from all sides. Then I sat down and asked if I was supposed to join them at work that afternoon. The professor laughed—he had beautiful eyes—and said, You evil, stupid, criminal son of man. Then, pretending not to notice my medal, he said we’d be going to work in an hour, and started talking to the girl again. I wasn’t surprised to hear him speaking French words to her, la table, une chaise, la maison, and she would repeat the words and pronounce them all wrong. With enormous tenderness he said to her, You poor stupid Nana, I’ll have to take off my belt and slap your face, not with the leather part but with the buckle. He repeated the French words very tenderly, patiently, as though caressing her with his eyes and voice, this girl from the Maršner Orion chocolate factory. Marcela must have pronounced the words badly again—she seemed to be sulking and unwilling to learn, knowing the right answer but pretending not to—so the professor scolded her gently: You evil, stupid, criminal daughter of man. As I was closing the door behind me, the professor said, Thank you! I stuck my head back through the doorway and said, I served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and I ran my hand over the blue sash.

  They had to lend me an extra pair of boots, because the country was extremely damp. In the morning the dew was so thick it tore like a curtain when you walked through it, and it fell in a kind of rosary on every blade of grass and every leaf, and if you just brushed against a branch the dew dropped off like pearls from a broken necklace. My job the very first day was wonderful. We went to a spruce tree, a beautiful spruce surrounded by cut boughs piled halfway up the trunk, and we cut down more boughs and piled them even higher. Finally two workers came with a cross-cut saw, and the professor told me this was not just an ordinary spruce tree, but a resonating spruce. As proof, he pulled a tuning fork out of his briefcase, struck it on the tree, then held it against the trunk and made me put my ear against the tree and listen. It sounded wonderful, giving off a very light, luminous, heavenly sound. So we stood there embracing the spruce while the girl sat on a stump smoking and wearing an expression not of indifference but of boredom and exasperation. Her eyes turned accusingly to heaven, as if heaven itself were to blame for her boredom here on earth, while I slid down to my knees and put my arms around the trunk, which was reverberating louder than a telegraph pole. When the workers knelt to cut it, I climbed up on the mound of boughs piled up around the tree and listened, and as the saw bit into the wood a loud wail rose through the spruce, and the graceful sound that I’d been hearing was overwhelmed by the sound of the saw as the trunk complained that they were slicing into its body. The professor hollered at me to come down, so I did, and in a while the spruce tilted, hesitated for a moment, and then with a cry that came from its very roots began to fall. Its fall was cushioned by the boughs, as though it were falling into outstretched arms that prevented it, as the professor explained, from breaking and losing its music. Spruces like this one were rare, and it was up to us now to trim the branches and then, according to a plan he had with him, carefully saw the tree into lengths and carry it gently on a feathery bed of boughs to the factory. There it would be sawed into planks, then into boards, then into thin sheets to be used in making violins and cellos. But the main thing was to find the sheets of wood that still had the music inside them. A month went by, then two, and we would prepare the bed of branches like a mother making a bed for her baby so that we could bring down the resonant spruce without destroying the music imprisoned in its trunk. And every evening I listened to the professor swearing at us, calling us all sorts of filthy names, me and the girl—idiots and morons and spotted hyenas and squalling skunks—and then he would teach us French words. While I was cooking supper at a tiled stove and lighting the kerosene lamps, I would listen to those beautiful badly pronounced words coming out of the mouth of the girl who’d been sent here from the chocolate factory because she liked a good time, liked sleeping with a different fellow each time, she told us. Her confession wasn’t much different from what I’d heard from other girls like her, girls of the street, except that this girl liked doing it for nothing, for love, for the pleasure of having someone love her for a moment, maybe for a whole night, and that was enough to make her happy. But here she had to work, and on top of that spend her evenings learning French words, not because she wanted to, but because she was bored and because she didn’t know how else to kill the long evenings. The second month, the professor began giving us lectures on the French literature of the twentieth century, and at this point there was a change that delighted both him and me. Marcela began to show an interest, and the professor would spend the whole evening telling her about the Surrealists and Robert Desnos and Alfred Jarry and RibemontDessaignes, about all the beautiful men and women of Paris, and once he brought out an original edition of something called La rose publique, and every evening he would read and translate a different poem, and when we were out working we’d analyze it image by image. At first everything was vague, but when we analyzed it we somehow managed to get through to the idea. I would listen, and then I too began to read books and difficult poems, which I’d never really liked before, and sometimes I understood them well enough to suggest an interpretation, and the professor would say, You jackass, you idiot, how did you know that? And I would feel like a tomcat when someone scratches him under the chin, because when the professor insulted you, it felt like a compliment. I suppose he’
d begun to like me, because he would insult me as much as he insulted Marcela, and by now he’d speak only French with her at work. Once I drove a load of the musical wood to the factory, and when I delivered it, they gave me our wages to take back, and I bought food and fuel and a bottle of cognac and a bouquet of carnations as well. Just as I left the factory it started to rain, so I waited under a tree, then ran into an old wooden outhouse to get out of the pouring rain. The water drummed on the sheets of wood that served as the roof of the outhouse, which wasn’t really an outhouse at all but probably some kind of sentry box. There were holes in the sides of the sentry box that were covered with sheets of wood as well, to keep the wind out, and as I waited for the rain to stop, I tapped on those sheets. When it stopped raining, I ran back into the musical instrument factory, and they threw me out twice before they finally let me see the manager, and I took him behind the factory, behind the ramshackle warehouse, and—just as I thought—there were ten rare pieces of resonant wood, several decades old, that someone had used to patch the sentry box. How did you know what they were? asked the astonished manager. I served the Emperor of Ethiopia, I said. The manager laughed, slapped me on the back, choked with laughter, and said, That’s a good one. I smiled too, because I had obviously changed so much that no one could tell by looking at me that I really had served the Emperor of Ethiopia.

  But it meant something quite different to me now. When I mentioned serving the Emperor of Ethiopia, it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more. It may also have been because of everything I learned from the professor, who outdid himself in insults, because no coachman cursed his horses the way this professor of French literature and aesthetics cursed us. But he would lecture us on all the things he was interested in, every evening he would start lecturing, start while I was still opening the door, and he’d continue right up until he fell asleep, until we fell asleep, and he would tell us all about aesthetics and ethics and philosophy and philosophers. He’d say that all philosophers, Jesus Christ not excepted, were nothing but a bunch of con men, sons of bitches, murderers, and good-for-nothings, and if they’d never existed mankind would have been better off, but mankind was an evil, stupid, criminal lot. So perhaps the professor confirmed my feelings that it was best to be alone, that although the stars were visible at night, at noon you could see them only from the bottom of a deep well. So I made up my mind, and one day I got up and shook hands with everyone, thanked them for everything, and went back to Prague, because I’d already extended my stay in the forest by half a year. By now the professor and his girl spoke only French together, and they always had something to talk about, and wherever they went, the professor would think up fresh ways to browbeat the girl, who by now was really beautiful, and fresh ways to surprise her with facts, because I could see that he was in love with her in this wilderness, in love with her for life and for death. And because once upon a time I had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, I could see that the girl would be his fate, that one day she’d walk out on him, when she knew everything he knew, learning against her will though it had sanctified her and made her beautiful. One time, she repeated something that the professor had told her, a quotation from Aristotle: when Aristotle was criticized for plagiarizing Plato, he replied that after a colt has sucked his mother dry, he gives her a kick. And I was right, because when I had settled the last formalities for my last job, or what I thought would be my last job—and I expect it will be my last job, because I have served the Emperor of Ethiopia and I know myself—I was walking past the railroad station one day and there coming toward me was Marcela. She had a thoughtful expression on her face and her hair was pulled back in a braid, a pigtail tied with a violet ribbon, and she was walking along absorbed in her own thoughts. I looked at her, but she walked absently right past me, and other passersby stopped to look at her too, and she had a book under her arm, the girl who had once worked at the Maršner Orion chocolate factory. Even with my head twisted around, I could read the title of the book she was carrying, L’Histoire de la surréalisme, and as she walked past I laughed and cheerfully went on my way, because I had seen that rebellious and vulgar girl who talked to the professor just the way she had talked in Košíře, and the good professor had taught her everything a well-educated young lady should know, and now she walked past me as if I were a barbarian. I knew for certain that this girl could never be happy, but that her life would be sadly beautiful, and that life with her would be both an agony and a fulfillment for a man. Afterward, many times, I thought about that book under her arm and wondered what had spilled over from its pages into her thoughtful and rebellious head, and what I saw was just the head with those beautiful eyes, eyes that had not been beautiful a year before, and it was all the professor’s doing, he had turned this girl into a beauty with a book. I could see her fingers piously opening the covers and turning the pages, one after another, like the Eucharist, because I saw that before these hands picked up a book, they would wash themselves first, and the way she carried the book was striking in its devoutness. I adorned the memory of my chocolate girl with peony petals and flowers, crowned her head with fronds of spruce and pine and mistletoe—I who had looked at women only from the waist down, their legs and their laps, but with this girl I turned my gaze and my longing upward, to her beautiful forehead and her beautiful hands opening the book, to her eyes radiating everything wonderful that she’d gained through her transformation. This transformation filled her young face, it was in the way she narrowed her eyes, in her easy smile and how she rubbed her nose from left to right with a charming index finger. Her face was a face humanized by French words, French sentences, French conversation, and finally by difficult but beautiful verses written by beautiful young men, poets who had discovered the miraculous in the human.

  On the train I thought about the girl, I smiled, I became her, and I posted her portrait in every station and on all the moving sides of trains passing or standing on adjacent tracks. I would even hold my own hand, take myself under the arm, and put my arm around myself, as though it was her I was holding. I looked at the faces of my fellow travelers, and no one could see what I was doing with myself and in myself, no one could see from my face what I was carrying inside. When I got out at the last station, I continued by bus through a beautiful countryside that resembled the countryside where I had felled the resonant spruce after first surrounding their trunks with feathery pine boughs neatly stacked to a good height. I went on thinking and completed my portrait of the girl from the Maršner Orion chocolate factory, and I pictured her as her boy-friends were making a fuss over her, welcoming her back, behaving the way they had before she’d been sent away to work, and how they would try to lure her into talking with them the way she used to, talking with her belly and her legs, with the lower half of her marked off by the elastic band in her underwear, and no one would understand that she was now favoring the half above the elastic. I got off the bus at Srní, asked where the roads department was, and reported to them, telling them I was the one who would be mending the roads all year round, somewhere far away, practically in the mountains, sections of road where no one wanted to be. That afternoon I was issued a small horse and a wagon, and they suggested I buy a goat too, which I did, and they made me a present of a German shepherd, so I set off with the horse, my baggage on the cart, and the goat tethered behind the cart. The German shepherd took to me right away, and I bought him some salami, then we drove along a road that gradually led upward as the country opened out into a region of stately spruce and tall pines. Every once in a while we came to a patch of young trees and aftergrowth surrounded by lattice fences that were crumbling like gingerbread, gradually rotting and changing back into humus from which wild raspberries and ravenous blackberries
grew like seaweed, and I walked beside the little horse’s nodding head. It was the kind of horse they have in mines—he must have worked underground somewhere because his eyes were so beautiful, the kind I would see in stokers and people who worked in artificial light all day or in the light of safety lamps and emerged from the pit or the furnace room to look up at the beautiful sky, because to such eyes all skies are beautiful. As the countryside became bleaker and more forlorn, I drove past little cottages in the woods that used to belong to German forest workers who had left the country, and at each cottage I would stop and stand on the doorstep, up to my chest in nettles and wild raspberries, and look through the vines into kitchens that were filling up with grass, and into tiny living rooms. Almost every one of these dwellings had electricity, and I would follow the wires down to a brook where I would find the remnants of a small generating plant driven by a miniature turbine put there by the hands of workers who had cleared the woods but then had to leave when the war was over, were forced to leave, transported from the country. They had been treated no differently from the rich Germans who had been political leaders and who carried out the policies I had come to know so well, the arrogant, loutish, vain, crude Germans full of pride, which in the end had brought them down. That I understood, but I didn’t understand why these workers’ hands had to go away, leaving no one to continue their work. It was a terrible loss—these people who had had nothing but hard work in the forest and on the meadows and hillsides, workers who had had no time for arrogance or pride, who must have been humble because they were taught humility by the kind of life I’d had a glimpse of and was now approaching myself. Then I got an idea, and I opened my trunk and I pulled out the case with the golden star in it, slung the pale-blue sash across my corduroy coat, and set out once again with the star sparkling at my side. I walked to the rhythm of the nodding head of the little horse, who kept turning around to look at my sash and whinnying, while the goat bleated and the German shepherd barked happily at me and tried to catch my sash. I stopped again and after untying the goat went to look at another building, which had been a kind of inn in the woods. It had an enormous hall, which was dry, oddly enough, and tiny windows. Everything was just as the people had left it, right down to the dusty beer mugs on the shelves and a keg with a spigot and a mallet to broach it with. As I was leaving, I felt a pair of eyes on me—it was a cat, and I called to her and she meowed, and I went to get some salami and bent down and tried to coax her to come to me. I could tell she wanted me to pat her, but she was so lonely and so unaccustomed to the human smell that she kept scooting away, so I put the salami down and she ate it hungrily. I held out my hand, but she jumped away again, bristling and hissing at me, so I went back out into the light and found the goat drinking from the brook, and I took a bucket and filled it with water for the little horse. When he’d drunk his fill, we set off again, and at a bend in the road, where I turned back to see what the landscape looked like from the other direction—as though I’d let a beautiful woman go by and then turned to watch her walk away—I saw that the cat was following us. This was a good omen, so I cracked the whip and gave a shout and felt joy bursting in my chest and began to sing for no reason at all—timidly, because I had never sung in my life before. In all those decades it had never crossed my mind that I might want to sing and now here I was singing, inventing words and sentences to fill in the places I didn’t know, and the German shepherd began to howl, then sat down and let out a long wail, so I gave him a piece of salami and he rubbed against my legs, but I went on singing as if through the singing—not through the song, because all I could produce now were squawks—I was emptying out of myself drawers and boxes full of old bills and useless letters and postcards, as if fragments of tattered posters were blowing out of my mouth, posters pasted one on top of the other, so that when you rip them away you create nonsense signs, where soccer matches blend into concerts or where art exhibits get mixed up with brass-band tattoos—everything that had accumulated inside me, like tar and nicotine in a smoker’s lungs. And so I sang, and I felt as if I was hacking up and spitting out phlegm from clogged lungs, and I felt like the beer pipes the innkeeper cleans with a strong jet of water, like a room with all the wallpaper torn off, several layers of it, a room where a family had lived for generations.