I Served the King of England

  Zdeněk was an honest-to-goodness headwaiter. He’d apprenticed in Prague, at the Black Eagle, under an old maître d’ who’d been a personal waiter in a special aristocrats’ casino where the Archduke d’Este himself was a regular. When Zdeněk was waiting on tables, he’d work in a kind of creative fever, and he always behaved just like one of the guests, and was usually treated like one of them too, and he had a glass at every table that he’d only take the occasional sip from, but he’d always drink to everyone’s health and keep moving among the tables, bringing food. There was something dreamlike about the way he did it, with a kind of swirling movement, so that if anyone had got in his way there would have been a terrible collision, but he always moved gracefully and elegantly, and he would never sit down in odd moments, he’d just stand there, and he always knew what someone wanted and brought it even before the guest asked for it. I sometimes went drinking with Zdeněk. He had an aristocratic habit of spending practically everything he earned, and now and then he would treat himself the way our guests did, but he’d always have so much money left over that toward morning, when we came back by taxi, he’d arouse the innkeeper of the emptiest inn in the village and order him to go wake up some musicians to play for him. Then Zdeněk would go from door to door and invite the sleepers to come down to the inn and drink his health, and then the music played and there was dancing till dawn, and when they’d drained the innkeeper’s bottles and barrels dry, Zdeněk would wake up the owner of the grocery store, buy a whole basketful of jars, and pass them out as gifts to all the old women and men. He paid not only for everything they drank in the pub, but for all the jams and jellies and everything he’d given away. Then, when he’d finally spent everything, he’d laugh and was satisfied. At that point, his favorite trick was to pat his pockets looking for matches, then he’d borrow twenty-hellers from someone, buy matches, and light his cigarette. This was the same Zdeněk who liked to ignite rolled-up ten-crown notes at the pub stove and light his cigars with them. Then we’d drive off with the musicians still playing for us, and if there was time, Zdeněk would buy up all the flowers in the flower shop and scatter carnations, roses, and chrysanthemums. The musicians would follow us to the edge of the village, and the automobile, garlanded with flowers, would take us back to the Hotel Tichota, because that day, or rather that night, was our day off.

  Once, when a guest was announced in advance, the boss was especially fussy. Ten times, twenty times, he made the rounds of the hotel in his wheelchair, and each time he found something that wasn’t quite right. We were expecting a party of three, so the table was set for three, and although only two showed up, all night long we served the third person too, as if he’d be arriving at any moment, as if the invisible guest was actually sitting there, walking about, strolling through the garden, swinging on the swing, and so on. First a big fancy car brought a lady whose chauffeur spoke to her in French, as did Zdeněk. Then, at about nine in the evening, another big fancy car pulled up, and out stepped the President himself, I recognized him immediately, and the boss called him Your Excellency. The President dined with the beautiful Frenchwoman, who had come to Prague by plane. He seemed to change completely and look younger somehow, and he laughed and talked a lot and drank champagne and then brandy. As his mood became more animated, they moved to a little room with Biedermeier furniture and flowers, and the President sat the beautiful woman beside him and kissed her hand, and then her shoulders and her arms, which were bare because of the kind of gown she was wearing. They were having a lively conversation about literature when suddenly the President whispered something in the woman’s ear and she shrieked with laughter, and the President laughed too and slapped his knee. Then he poured some more champagne, and they held their glasses out to each other by the stems, and they clinked them together and looked deep into each other’s eyes and drank slowly. Then the woman gently pushed the President back against the armrest and kissed him herself, a long, slow kiss, and the President closed his eyes, and she ran her hands down his sides, and he caressed her as well, and I could see his diamond ring sparkling as it moved over her thighs. Then it was as though he had suddenly woken up, and he was leaning over her and looking into her eyes, and he kissed her, and for a while both of them were motionless in an embrace. When the embrace was over, the President took a deep breath and sighed, and the lady let her breath out, and a strand of hair came loose and fell across her forehead. They stood up, holding both hands like children when they want to dance ring-around-the-rosy, and suddenly they ran to the door and went outside, and hopped and skipped down the path hand in hand, and we could hear the President’s clear, hearty laughter. He was so different from his portrait on postage stamps or in public places, and I had always thought that a president didn’t do things like this, that it wasn’t right for a president to do things like this, and yet here he was, just like the other rich people, running through the moondrenched garden where that same afternoon we had put out fresh mounds of dry hay. I could see the woman’s white gown, and the white starched dickey of the President’s tuxedo, and his porcelain-white cuffs drawing lines in the air, flitting here and there through the night, from haystack to haystack, as the President ran ahead of the white gown and then turned and caught it and lifted it up easily. And I saw the white cuffs lift the white dress and carry it, and they were strong enough for that, those cuffs that gathered up the white gown as though they had just fished it out of the river, or like a mother carrying a child in a white nightshirt to bed, that’s how the President carried the beautiful woman into the depths of our garden, under the century-old trees. Then he ran out with her again and set her down on a pile of hay, but the white gown escaped, with the President in pursuit, and the two of them would fall into a pile of hay, but the white gown would be up again and running, until finally it tumbled onto a pile of hay with the President on top of it. Then I saw the gown grow smaller as the white cuffs turned it over, just as we would turn over poppy petals, and everything in the garden of the Hotel Tichota fell silent. I stopped looking then, and so did the boss, who let the curtains drop, and Zdeněk looked at the floor and the chambermaid, who was standing on the staircase in a black dress, so that all you could see of her in the dark was her white apron and the white wings of her serving cap, like a headband around her thick black hair—she looked down at the floor too. None of us watched but all of us were excited. It was as if we were out there on that scattered mound of hay with the beautiful woman who’d flown here in an airplane all the way from Paris just for this scene in the hay. We felt that it was happening to us and, most of all, that we were the only ones taking part in this romantic celebration, that fate had been good to us and asked no more in return than the secrecy you expect of the confessional, of a priest.

  After midnight, the boss asked me to take a crystal jug full of cool cream, a loaf of fresh bread, and a small lump of butter wrapped in vine leaves to the children’s playhouse in the garden. Carrying it in a basket, I trembled as I walked past the mounds of hay scattered everywhere, and I bent down and couldn’t stop myself from picking up a handful of hay to smell it. Then I turned down the path leading to those three silver spruces, and I could see the small, lighted window. When I arrived at the playhouse, I saw sitting on a little chair, among the toy drums and jump ropes and teddy bears and dolls, the President in a white shirt, and opposite him, on a chair that was just as small, the Frenchwoman, and there they sat, the two lovers, face to face, gazing into each other’s eyes, their hands resting on a small table between them. The tiny house was lit by a lantern with a candle inside. When he got up, the President cast a shadow across the window. He had to crouch to come outside to take the basket from me. Our President was so tall he had to crouch, whereas I was standing up and was still small. I gave him the basket and he said, Thank you, my boy, thank you, and then the white shirt retreated. His white bow tie was undone, and on my way back I tripped over his evening coat. When dawn came and the sun was rising, the President came out of the p
layhouse, and the woman followed, wearing a petticoat, dragging her wilted gown behind her, and the President carried the lantern, which had a candle still burning in it, a tiny point of light against the rising sun. Then the President reached down, took his coat by the sleeve and dragged it behind him through the dried grass and stubble and hay. The two of them walked dreamily side by side, smiling happily at each other. As I watched them, I suddenly realized that being a waiter wasn’t so simple, that there were waiters and waiters, but I was a waiter who had served the President with discretion, and I had to appreciate that, like Zdeněk’s famous waiter who lived the rest of his life on the strength of having served the Archduke Ferdinand d’Este in a casino for aristocrats. Then the President left in one car, and the lady in another. No one left in the third car, that invisible third party the banquet had been arranged for and the tables set for, and for whose uneaten food and unused room the boss had also charged.

  When the July heat wave came, the boss stopped wheeling around through the rooms, alcoves, and dining rooms and stayed in his quarters, in a kind of icebox where the temperature had to be kept below sixty-eight degrees. But though he no longer wheeled himself along the garden paths, he still seemed able to see us and be all-powerful. He attended to things and issued commands and prohibitions and interdictions with his whistle till it seemed to me that he could say more with his whistle than by talking. About that time, four foreigners came to live with us, all the way from Bolivia. With them they had a mysterious suitcase, which they watched like hawks and even took to bed with them. They all wore black suits and black hats, and droopy black mustaches, and they even wore black gloves. The suitcase they were keeping such a close watch on was black too and looked like a small coffin. Now the free-spending gaiety and debauchery of our nights became a thing of the past. But the foreigners must have paid well if our boss took them in. One of his peculiarities, and a peculiarity of the house, was that anyone who stayed here paid as much for garlic soup and potato pancakes and a glass of sour milk as he would have for oyster and crab washed down with Heinkel Trocken. And it was the same with the accommodations: even if a guest snoozed till morning downstairs on the couch, he still had to pay for a whole suite upstairs. That was one of the glories of our house, the Hotel Tichota. I kept wondering what they had in that suitcase until one day the leader of the group in black returned—he was a Jew, a Mr. Salamon—and Zdeněk told me that Mr. Salamon had connections in Prague with the Archbishop himself and that he was requesting the Archbishop, through diplomatic channels, to consecrate a small gold statue called the Bambino di Praga, the Infant Jesus of Prague, which was supposed to be tremendously popular in South America, so popular, in fact, that millions of South American Indians wore replicas of it on chains around their necks and had a legend that Prague was the most beautiful city in the world and that the Infant Jesus had gone to school there. This is why they wanted the Archbishop of Prague himself to bless the Prague Bambino, who weighed six kilograms and was made of pure gold. From then on we all lived for the glorious moment when the statue would be consecrated. But it wasn’t easy. Next day, the Prague police showed up, and the division head himself informed the Bolivians that the Prague underworld already knew about their Bambino and that a mob had come all the way from Poland to steal it. After talking things over, they decided it would be best to keep the real Bambino hidden until the very last moment, and to have another Bambino made of gilded cast iron, at the Republic of Bolivia’s expense, and they could carry that around with them until the consecration. The very next day, they brought to the hotel a suitcase that was just as black as the first one, and when they opened it up, what they saw was so beautiful the boss himself came out of his specially cooled room just to look at it, to pay his respects to the Bambino di Praga. Then Mr. Salamon began negotiating with the Archbishop’s consistory, but the Archbishop didn’t want to consecrate the Bambino, because the real Bambino was already in Prague, and if he consecrated this one, there would be two of them. I found all this out from Zdenék, who understood Spanish and German. Zdenék was terribly upset, it was the first time I’d ever seen him so shaken. On the third day, Mr. Salamon drove up, and you could see all the way from the station that he was bringing good news because he was standing up in the car, smiling and waving his hands above his head. He said he’d been given a good tip. Apparently the Archbishop was fond of having his picture taken, so Mr. Salamon proposed that the entire ceremony be filmed as a Gaumont Newsreel special and then the ceremony could be seen around the world. Wherever there was a movie house, people would see not just the Archbishop but the Bambino and Saint Vitus’s Cathedral as well and therefore, as Mr. Salamon rightly pointed out, the church would gain in popularity and its renown would spread to the ends of the earth. On the day of the ceremonial consecration, the police gave Zdeněk and me the job of taking the real Bambino to the cathedral. The idea was that the Bolivians, along with the chief of police in formal attire, would carry the imitation Bambino di Praga, and Zdenék and I and three detectives disguised as industrialists would follow inconspicuously behind. The leader of the Bolivian Catholic group decided I should carry the real Bambino on my lap, and so we drove off from the Hotel Tichota. The detectives turned out to be very jovial fellows. They told us that when the royal treasury and crown jewels were put on display to the public they’d dressed up as deacons, wandered around by the side altars, and pretended to be praying. All the time they were packing revolvers in shoulder holsters like Al Capone, and when there was a break they had their pictures taken twice with the crown jewels, disguised as prelates. They couldn’t stop laughing as they told us about it. I had to show them the Bambino di Praga, and eventually we said why not stop and have Zdeněk take our pictures behind a fence, all in a group with the Bambino, using a camera belonging to the plainclothes cops. Before we arrived, they also told us that whenever there was a state funeral that members of the government attended, they had to make sure no unauthorized persons were allowed in and that no one put a bomb in the flowers, and they had a special probe which they stuck into all the bouquets and wreaths before the funeral. They had their pictures taken there too, and they showed us snapshots of themselves on their knees around a catafalque, leaning on the probe they used to test the wreaths for hidden bombs. Now they were industrialists in morning suits, and they were going to kneel and work their way slowly toward the act of consecration so that they could observe it from three angles, to make sure nothing happened to the Bambino di Praga. We drove through Prague, and when we arrived at the Castle, the Bolivians were waiting for us, and Mr. Salamon took the suitcase and carried it into the cathedral, and everything was splendid, just like a wedding. The organ thundered and the prelates in their insignia of office bowed, and Mr. Salamon carried the Bambino down the aisle, and the camera whirred away and captured it all. The ceremony was like a High Mass, and Mr. Salamon knelt most devoutly of all, and we slowly approached the altar on our knees, and everything was alive with flowers and gold leaf and the choir sang the Missa Solemnis, and at the very climax the cameraman gave the sign, the Bambino was consecrated, and an ordinary object became a devotional article, because it was blessed by the Archbishop and now radiated supernatural power and could bestow grace. When the Mass was over and the Archbishop had retired to the sacristy, the vicar of the chapter led Mr. Salamon in after him. Mr. Salamon was just slipping his wallet back into his coat as he came back out, so he must have donated a large check in the name of the Bolivian government for repairs to the church, or perhaps there had also been a fee for the consecration. Then I saw the ambassador of the Bolivian Republic carrying the Bambino back up the aisle of the cathedral while the organ played and the choir sang. Again the cars arrived and the Bambino was put away, but this time we didn’t take anything with us, and everyone, including the ambassador and the whole entourage, drove off to the Hotel Steiner, while we went home to get everything ready for the farewell banquet that night. When the Bolivians arrived at ten o’clock, it was the f
irst time they could really relax, and they began to drink champagne and brandy and eat oysters and chicken, and at midnight three cars arrived with some dancers from the operetta, and we had more work and more people that night than we ever had before. The Chief of Police, who knew all about our place, left the counterfeit Bambino on the mantelpiece of the men’s room, and he secretly took the real Bambino, the consecrated Bambino, away to the playhouse, where he casually placed it among the dolls, puppets, jump ropes, and toy drums. Then they all drank, and the naked dancers danced around the counterfeit Bambino until dawn, when it was time for the ambassador to go back to his residence and the representatives of Bolivia to go to the airport and head home. The Chief of Police brought the real Bambino back to the hotel, but luckily Mr. Salamon looked into the suitcase, because in all the fun and confusion the Chief of Police had put a beautiful doll in a Moravian Slovak folk costume in the suitcase by mistake. They all ran back to the playhouse, and there lay the Bambino among the toy drums and three other dolls, so they snatched up the consecrated Bambino, put back the doll, and drove off to Prague. Three days later, we heard that the Bolivians had to delay their flight. To mislead thieves, they left the counterfeit Bambino outside the entrance to the airport. At first a cleaning lady stuck it among some box trees, but when the members of the delegation, led by Mr. Salamon, were safely on board the plane, they opened the suitcase and discovered that what they had with them was not the real golden Bambino blessed by the Archbishop but the gilded cast-iron one. They rushed out to look for the real Bambino just as a porter was asking people whose suitcase this was. When no one claimed it, he left the Bambino standing on the pavement, and just then the Bolivian delegation came rushing up and grabbed the suitcase. After they hefted it, they breathed sighs of relief, opened it up and saw that it was the real Bambino. Then they rushed back to the airplane to take off for Paris and, from there, back to their own country with the Bambino, who according to the South American Indian legend had gone to school in Prague, and Prague, according to the same legend, is the oldest city in the world.