Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (10 page)

class, anyone else she would have thrown out or given a whack on the nose with her ticket punch but me she offered an Egypt, and when this unshaven worker type with a pipe hanging out of his mouth came into the compartment, she said, Beat it, buster, you're in third class, and chased him out, but I said, I'm in third class too, and she rubbed her knee against mine and whispered in my ear, What do you say we paint the town pink you and me when we get to Vienna, women can be so forward and Polish women take the cake, one of them just wouldn't get off my hospital bed, the doctor called her a slut and a whore, her name was Jadwiga and she liked men better than food, when I told my stories at the pub the police would take off their holsters and belts, You've got the charm of a marriage swindler, they told me, and I'd grab one of their bayonets and sharpen the waitress's pencil with it just like Chaplin, and I wouldn't go back to the brewery till I'd made the rounds of the pubs, nobody ever said a word because I'd have sailed back over the wall and made the rounds again, once a group of businessmen came and ordered wine and liqueurs and a soldier climbed up on the billiard table and did tableaux vivants including dangling a bucket of water from his member, a genuine virtuoso in other words, the ladies remember it to this day, one of the businessmen bought me a cigar that made me sick and I collapsed and the policemen carted me back to the brewery like a roll of linoleum, Konůpek, the engine driver who played the helicon—a helicon's an instrument with a mouthpiece like a chamber pot—anyway, Konůpek used to say that serious music takes a lot of muscle and he had a neck like a bull, one day his grandfather was coming out of the woods on his way home from a church fair where he'd been playing the helicon when a gust of wind twisted the helicon on its strap and he choked to death, and one day Dubovský the goldsmith started wondering what his daughter was doing with her fiancé when he was out, so he told her he was going to the pictures but crawled under the couch instead and heard her come in with him and saw his boots and felt the springs come down on his stomach as they sat on the couch, and then he saw some clothes fall and some underclothes and the boots swing up, but more Dubovský the goldsmith did not see, because one of the couch springs rammed into his neck, and shout as he might they heard not a word because they were shouting too, and not until much later did they roll away the couch and pull the spring out of Dubovský the goldsmith, who wished to remove the veil from the European Renaissance, when Bondy the poet came back pushing the baby buggy with his two off-spring he told me in great confidence that he wrote poetry only in the toilet with a pastry board on his knees and a notebook on the pastry board, but now the babies have started walking and pounding on the door, it's enough to bring down a Goethe and he could put up with anything, so anyway, ladies, there I was, sitting on my Minimax fire extinguisher case, while six beauties lolling in the sun listened to my stories and the dean of the church standing on his watering can with one arm over the fence stared at me like I was an apparition while in fact I was only a loyal reader of the illustrated weeklies and Havlíček and Mr. Batista's book on sexual hygiene

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1964 Bohumil Hrabal

Translation copyright © 1995 by Harcourt Brace & Company

Introduction copyright © 2011 by Adam Thirlwell

All rights reserved.

First published in Czech as
Taneční hodiny prostarší a pokročilé

Translation published by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Cover photograph: Miroslav Tichy, MT Inv. no. 1-43; courtesy Foundation Tichy Ocean

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Hrabal, Bohumil, 1914–1997.

[Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé. English]

Dancing lessons for the advanced in age / by Bohumil Hrabal; introduction by Adam Thirlwell; translated by Michael Henry Heim.

    p.cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-377-0 (alk. paper)

1. Reminiscing in old age—Fiction. 2. Shoemakers—Fiction. 3. Conduct of life—Fiction. 4. Czechoslovakia—Fiction. I. Heim, Michael Henry.II. Title.

PG5039.18.R2T313 2011

891.8'635—dc22

2010036715

eISBN 978-1-59017-556-9
v1.0

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