I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

  I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND

  BOHUMIL HRABAL

  TRANSLATED FROM THE CZECH BY

  PAUL WILSON

  A NEW DIRECTIONS CLASSIC

  CONTENTS

  A Glass of Grenadine

  Hotel Tichota

  I Served the King of England

  And I Never Found the Head

  How I Became a Millionaire

  A Glass of Grenadine

  When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You’re a busboy here, so remember, you don’t see anything and you don’t hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn’t see anything and I wouldn’t hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by my right ear and said, But remember too that you’ve got to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything. That’s how I began. Every morning at six, when the hotelkeeper walked in, we were lined up like an army on parade, with the maître d’, the waiters, and me, a tiny busboy, along one side of the carpet, and along the other side the cooks, the chambermaids, the laundress, and the scullery maid. The hotelkeeper walked up and down to see that our dickeys were clean and our collars and jackets spotless, that no buttons were missing, and that our shoes were polished. He’d lean over and sniff to make sure our feet were washed, and then he’d say, Good morning, gentlemen, good morning, ladies, and after that we weren’t allowed to talk to anyone.

  The waiters taught me the proper way to wrap the knives and forks in napkins, and every day I emptied the ashtrays and polished the metal caddy for the hot frankfurters I sold at the station, something I learned from the busboy who was no longer a busboy because he had started waiting on tables, and you should have heard him beg and plead to be allowed to go on selling frankfurters, a strange thing to want to do, I thought at first, but I quickly saw why, and soon it was all I wanted to do too, walk up and down the platform several times a day selling hot frankfurters for one crown eighty apiece. Sometimes the passenger would only have a twenty-crown note, sometimes a fifty, and I’d never have the change, so I’d pocket his note and go on selling until finally the customer got on the train, worked his way to a window, and reached out his hand. Then I’d put down the caddy of hot frankfurters and fumble about in my pocket for the change, and the fellow would yell at me to forget the coins and just give him the notes. Very slowly I’d start patting my pockets, and the dispatcher would blow his whistle, and very slowly I’d ease the notes out of my pocket, and the train would start moving, and I’d trot alongside it, and when the train had picked up speed I’d reach out so that the notes would just barely brush the tips of the fellow’s fingers, and sometimes he’d be leaning out so far that someone inside would have to hang on to his legs, and one of my customers even beaned himself on a signal post. But then the fingers would be out of reach and I’d stand there panting, the money still in my outstretched hand, and it was all mine. They almost never came back for their change, and that’s how I started having money of my own, a couple of hundred a month, and once I even got handed a thousand-crown note.

  Every morning at six and again in the evening before bedtime the boss would come around, checking to make sure I’d washed my feet, and I had to be in bed by twelve. So I began to keep my ears open and not hear anything and keep my eyes open and not see anything. I saw how neat and orderly everything was, and how the boss didn’t like us to be too friendly with one another, I mean, if the checkout girl went to the movies with the waiter, they’d both be fired on the spot. I also got to know the regular customers who drank at a table in the kitchen, and every day I had to polish their glasses. Each of the regulars had his own number and his own special insignia, a glass with a stag and a glass with violets and a glass with the picture of a town, rectangular glasses and round bulbous glasses and an earthenware stein all the way from Munich with HB stamped on it. Every evening this select group would show up—the notary public and the stationmaster and the vet and the director of the music school and a factory owner named Jína—and I’d help them all out of their coats, and when I served them beer, the proper glass had to go into the proper hand, and I was amazed at how rich people could sit around for a whole evening talking about how just outside the town there was a footbridge and right beside the footbridge, thirty years back, there was a poplar tree, and then they’d really get going. One of them would say there was no footbridge there at all, just a poplar tree, and another would say there was no poplar tree and not even a proper footbridge, just a plank with a handrail. They’d keep this up, drinking their beer and talking about it and jeering and shouting insults at one another, but it was all a show, because soon they’d be on their feet yelling across the table that the footbridge had been there but not the poplar tree, and the other side would yell back that the poplar tree damn well was there and the footbridge damn well wasn’t. Then they’d sit down again and everything was all right, and you could see they’d only been yelling at one another like that to make the beer taste better. Or they’d start arguing about which of the local Bohemian beers was the best, and one swore by the beer from Protivín and another by the beer from Vodňany and a third by the beer from Plzeň and a fourth by the beer from Nymburk and Krušovice, and pretty soon they were at it again. But they all liked one another and only shouted like that to make the evening eventful, to help kill the time. Or when I was handing him his beer, the stationmaster would lean back and whisper that the vet had been seen at Paradise’s, with Jaruška, in a private room. Then the principal of the municipal school would whisper that he’d been there all right, but on Wednesday not Thursday, the vet, I mean, and with Vlasta not Jaruška, and then they’d talk about the girls at Paradise’s for the rest of the evening, and who’d been there and who hadn’t, and I lost all interest in whether there was a poplar tree and a footbridge on the outskirts of town or just a footbridge without the poplar tree, or the poplar tree alone, or whether the beer from Braník was better than the beer from Protivín. All I wanted to hear was what it was like at Paradise’s. I worked out how much I would need and then sold those hot frankfurters so I could make enough money to go to Paradise’s, and I even learned how to cry real tears at the station, and the customers would wave their hands and tell me to keep the change because they thought I was an orphan. And a plan took shape in my mind that one night, after eleven, after I’d washed my feet, I’d sneak out the window of my tiny room and pay a visit to Paradise’s.

  On the day I picked, things got off to a wild start at the Golden City of Prague restaurant. During the morning a group of well-heeled, well-dressed gypsies walked in, tinkers they were, and sat down at a table. Everything they ordered was the best, and each time they ordered something else they made sure we knew they had money. The director of the music school was sitting by the window, but the gypsies were shouting so loud that he moved back into the middle of the restaurant, still reading his book, which must have been pretty good because he kept his nose buried in it when he got up to move three tables over, and he was still reading when he sat down again, feeling around behind him for the chair. I was polishing the regulars’ beer mugs, holding them up to the light, and we were still serving breakfast, just soups and goulashes to a handful of customers, and of course all the waiters were supposed to keep busy even if there was nothing to do, which is why I was polishing the glasses so carefully and the maître d’ was standing by the sideboard straightening the forks and the waiter was rearranging the cutlery all over again. Anyway, as I was looking through a Golden Prague mug, I saw some angry gypsies run past the window, and the next thing I knew they had burst into the restaurant, and I suppose they must have pul
led their knives out in the hallway, and then something awful happened. They rushed up to the tinker gypsies, but the tinker gypsies apparently were waiting for them because they jumped to their feet and backed off, dragging the tables, keeping the tables between themselves and the gypsies with the knives, which didn’t help because two of them ended up on the floor with knives sticking out of their backs anyway, and the ones with the knives hacked and stabbed away, and soon the tables were covered with blood, but the director of the music school, with a smile on his face, went right on reading while the gypsy storm whirled around him, and they bled over his head and his book, and twice they stuck their knives into his table, but the director went on reading. I was under a table myself and crawled into the kitchen on my hands and knees while the gypsies screamed, and the knives flashed and reflections of sunlight flew around the Golden Prague like golden flies, then the gypsies backed out of the restaurant leaving an unpaid bill and blood all over the tables, two men on the floor and on one of the tables two severed fingers, an ear, and a chunk of flesh. When the doctor came to see the wounded, he said the chunk of flesh on the table was a slice of muscle from someone’s arm, near the shoulder. The director simply put his head in his hands, his elbows resting on the table, and went on reading his book. All the other tables were jammed together at the entrance in a barricade to cover the tinker gypsies’ escape, and the boss could think of nothing else but to put on a white vest with a honeybee print, post himself outside the restaurant, hold up his hands, and tell the customers that there’d been an unfortunate incident and we wouldn’t be open till the next day. It was my job to deal with the tablecloths covered with bloody handprints and fingerprints. I had to carry everything into the courtyard and fire up the large boiler in the laundry, and the laundress and the scullery maid had to soak everything and then boil it. I was supposed to hang the tablecloths out to dry, but I was too short to reach the clothesline, so the laundress did it while I handed her the wet, wrung-out tablecloths. I only came up to her breasts, and she laughed and used the chance to make fun of me by pushing her breasts into my face as if it were an accident—first one breast, then the other, right into my eyes until the world went dark and everything was scented. When she leaned over to take a tablecloth out of the hamper, I could see down between her swinging breasts, and when she stood up and the breasts went horizontal again, she and the scullery maid laughed and asked me, How old are you? Have you turned fourteen yet, sweetheart? And when will that be? Then it was early evening, and a breeze came up, and the sheets in the courtyard made a screen, the kind we’d put up for weddings or private parties, and I had everything in the restaurant ready and spanking clean again, with carnations everywhere—they brought in a whole basket of flowers each day, depending on the season—and I went to bed. When it was quiet and I could hear the tablecloths flapping in the courtyard as if they were talking to one another till the yard was full of rustling muslin conversation, I opened the window, climbed out and slipped between the tablecloths past the windows to the gate, then I swung myself over and walked down the narrow street, edging along from lamppost to lamppost. If anyone approached, I would wait in the shadows until he was gone, and then from a distance I saw the green sign saying Paradise’s.

  For a while I just stood outside and waited, listening to the faint jangling of a mechanical music box coming from deep inside the building, then I mustered my courage and went in. There was a wicket in the hallway that was so high I had to pull myself up by my fingers, and Mrs. Paradise herself was sitting there and she said, What can I do for you, my little man? I said I’d come to be entertained, and she opened the door and I went in and there was a young woman with jet-black hair combed out sitting and smoking a cigarette. She asked me what I’d like. I said I’d like to have dinner and she asked, Would you like it here or in the bar? I blushed and said no, I wanted it in a separate room, and she stared at me, let out a long whistle, and then, already knowing the answer, she said, With anyone in particular? I pointed at her and said, With you. Shaking her head, she took me by the hand, led me along a dark corridor lit with soft red lamps, and opened a door. There I saw a small couch, a table and two plush chairs, and a light coming from somewhere behind a valance swept across the ceiling and down the walls like the branches of a weeping willow. I sat down, and after I’d patted my money I felt braver and said, Would you have dinner with me? And what will you drink? She said champagne, so I nodded, and she clapped, and a waiter arrived with a bottle, opened it, carried it over to an alcove, and filled two glasses, and when I drank it the bubbles tickled my nose and made me sneeze. The young woman drank one glass after another, then introduced herself, Jaruška, and said she was hungry and I said, Fine, bring on the best, and she said she loved oysters and they were fresh today, so we ate oysters and had another bottle of champagne and then another. She started stroking my hair and she asked me where I was from, and I told her from a village so small I’d never seen real coal until last year, and she thought that was funny and asked me to make myself at home. I was feeling hot, so I took off my jacket, and she said she felt hot too, and would I mind if she took off her dress? So I helped her out of it and folded her dress neatly across the chair, and then she unbuttoned my fly, and that was when I knew that at Paradise’s it was not just nice or wonderful, but like paradise, and she took my head in her hands and pressed it between her breasts, and her breasts smelled sweet, and I closed my eyes and practically fell asleep, so intoxicating was her smell and her shape and the softness of her skin, and she pushed my head lower and lower, and I could smell her lap, and she sighed. It was all so wonderful and forbidden that I wanted nothing more in this world, and I resolved to save eight hundred and more a week selling hot frankfurters, because at last I’d found a beautiful and noble aim. My father used to say that if I had an aim in life I’d be all right because then I’d have a reason for living. But that was only half of it. Jaruška quietly slipped off my trousers, pulled down my underpants, and kissed the inside of my thighs, and suddenly I was so distracted by the thought of what went on in Paradise’s that I began to tremble and I curled up into a ball and I said, Jaruška, what are you doing? And she stopped, but when she saw me she couldn’t help herself and took me into her mouth, and I tried to push her away, but she seemed possessed and held me in her mouth and moved her head faster and faster till I stopped trying to push her away but instead stretched out to my full length and held her by the ears and felt myself gushing out, remembering how different it was from the times I used to do it to myself, because the girl with the beautiful hair drank the last drop from me, her eyes closed—drank what I had always tossed away with disgust into the coal bin in the cellar or a handkerchief in bed. When she got up, she said in a sleepy voice, And now for love. I was too shaken up and too limp, and I said, But I’m hungry, aren’t you? I was thirsty too, so I took Jaruška’s glass, and she rushed at me but couldn’t stop me from drinking, and I put the glass down, disappointed, because what was in it was not champagne but some kind of pale fizz. She’d been drinking it from the start and I’d been paying for champagne. I laughed and ordered another bottle, and when the waiter brought it I opened it myself and filled our glasses. Then we ate again, and the music box tinkled away in the bar, and after we’d finished the bottle I felt tipsy and went down on my knees again and put my head in her lap and began to poke about with my tongue in that lovely muff of hair. But because I was light, the girl took me under my arms and lifted me onto herself and spread her legs. As smooth as butter, I slipped into a woman for the first time in my life, the very thing I’d been wanting and here it was. She held me tightly against herself and whispered, Hold back, take as long as you can, but I only moved twice, and the third time I gushed into her warm flesh, and she arched her back so that she was touching the couch with just her hair and the soles of her feet, with me on the bridge of her body right to the very end, before I got soft, and stayed there between her legs until finally I unwound and lay down beside her. She took
a deep breath, fell back on the couch, and began to stroke and caress my body as if she knew it by heart. Then came the time for getting dressed, and the time for saying good-bye, and the time for paying, and the waiter added up this and that and handed me a bill for seven hundred and twenty crowns, and as I left I took out another two hundred crowns and gave it to Jaruška, and when I left Paradise’s, I leaned against the first wall I came to and just stood there, leaning against the wall in the dark, dreaming, because now I knew what went on in those marvelous places where the young women are, and I said to myself, That was your lesson, now you’ll come right back here tomorrow and be the gentleman all over again. I’d impressed them all, I’d come as a busboy who sells hot frankfurters at the station, but when I left I was bigger than any of the gentlemen who sat at the regulars’ table at the Golden Prague, where only the rich, the upper crust of the town, are allowed.

  The next day I saw the world a lot differently, because my money had opened the door to Paradise’s and to respect. I forgot to mention that when Mrs. Paradise saw me toss two hundred crowns away, she reached down eagerly from her wicket and took my hand. I thought she wanted to know what time it was on the wristwatch I didn’t have yet, but she kissed my hand. Of course the kiss wasn’t really a kiss for me, a busboy from the Golden Prague restaurant, it was for those two hundred crowns and for all my money, because I had another thousand crowns stashed away in my bed and I could still have maybe not as much as I wanted but as much as I could earn every day selling hot frankfurters at the station. Anyway, that morning I was sent with a basket to buy fresh flowers, and on my way back I saw a pensioner crawling around on his hands and knees looking for some change that had rolled away from him. It was on this errand, by the way, that I realized that the florist and also the sausage maker and the butcher and the proprietor of the dairy bar were all among our regulars. In fact, the same men who supplied us with meat and baked goods got together at our restaurant, and often the boss would look into the icebox and say, Go straight to the butcher and tell him to come and remove this poor excuse for a side of veal right now, and by evening the veal was gone and the butcher would be sitting there as though nothing had happened. But the pensioner must have had poor eyesight because he was groping around in the dust with his hands, so I said, What are you looking for, old man? He said he’d lost twenty-hellers, so I waited till some people walked by, took a fistful of change, tossed it in the air, then quickly sank my hands into the carnations, grabbed the basket handles, and walked on. Just before rounding the corner, I turned and saw several more people on their knees, each one was sure he had dropped the coins and was yelling at the others to hand over the money and there they were on their knees, arguing, spitting, and scratching at one another’s eyes like tomcats, and I had to laugh, because I saw at once what moved people and what they believed in and what they would do for a handful of change. When I brought the flowers back to the hotel, I saw a lot of people standing in front of the restaurant, so I ran upstairs to one of the guest rooms, leaned out the window, and threw down a fistful of coins, making sure they fell not directly on the people but a few meters away. Then I ran downstairs, cut back the stems of the carnations, and put two sprigs of asparagus fern and two carnations into each little vase—all the while looking out the window at the people crawling around on their hands and knees, picking up money, my coins, and arguing about who saw which twenty-heller piece first. That night and the nights after that, I would dream and dream, even during the day—when there was nothing to do and I had to pretend to be busy, polishing the glasses and holding one up to the light close to my eye like a kaleidoscope, looking through it across the splintered square at the sky and the cloudseven during the day I dreamed that I was flying over towns and cities and villages and that I’d take handfuls of coins from a huge, bottomless pocket and throw them down on the cobblestones, scattering them like a sower of wheat, but always behind people’s backs, behind the pedestrians or bystanders. Almost no one could resist picking up those twenty-heller pieces and they’d butt one another’s heads like rams and squabble, but I’d fly on. It made me feel good, and I’d take another fistful of coins from my pocket and toss them down behind another group, and the money would jangle to the ground and roll off in all directions, and I could fly like a bee into trains and streetcars and suddenly strum a fistful of coins to the floor and watch people bend over and bump into one another trying to pick up the change they pretended had fallen from their pockets alone. These dreams heartened me because I was small and had to wear a high, stiff rubber collar, and my neck was short and narrow, and the collar cut into it and into my chin as well, and to keep it from hurting me, I would carry my head high. And because I couldn’t tilt my head forward without pain, I had to bend over from the waist, so my head was usually tipped back and my eyes half closed and I looked at the world almost as though I were scorning or mocking it, and the customers thought I was conceited. I learned to stand and walk that way too, and the soles of my feet were always as hot as irons, so hot that I’d look to see if I had caught fire and my shoes were burning. Sometimes I was so desperate for relief I’d pour cold soda water into my shoes, especially when I was working at the train station, but it only helped for the moment, and I was always on the verge of taking my shoes off and running straight into the river, tuxedo and all, and soaking my feet in the water, so I’d put more soda water into my shoes and sometimes a blob of ice cream as well. That’s how I came to understand why the maître d’ and the waiters always wore their oldest, shabbiest shoes to work, the kind you find thrown away on rubbish heaps, because that was the only kind of shoe you could stand in and walk around in all day. All of us suffered from sore feet, even the chambermaids and the checkout girl. Every evening, when I took off my shoes, my legs were covered with dust up to my knees, as if I’d spent the day wading through coal dust and not walking over parquet floors and carpets. That was the other side of my tuxedo, the other side of all waiters and busboys and maître d’s the world over: white starched shirts and dazzling white rubber collars and legs slowly turning black, like some horrible disease where people start dying from the feet up.