Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (4 page)

21.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 44.

22.
Ibid., 71.

23.
Leszek Kolakowski,
Main Currents of Marxism
, translated by P.S. Falla (New York: Norton, 2005), 822.

24.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 38.

25.
Quoted in Hrabal,
Total Fears
, 113.

26.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 44.

27.
Ladislav Klíma, “My Autobiography,” in
The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch
, translated by Carleton Bulkin (Prague: Twisted Spoon, 2008), 226.

28.
Ibid., 228.

29.
Ibid., 236.

30.
Milan Kundera,
The Art of the Novel
(London: Faber, 1988), 4–5.

31.
Hrabal,
Pirouettes
, 72.

32.
Hrabal,
In-House Weddings
, 78.

33.
Maxim Gorky,
Recollections of Anton Tchekhov
, quoted in “Reminiscences of Anton Tchekhov” by Alexander Kuprin, in
Anton Tchekhov: Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences
, translated and edited by S.S. Koteliansky (London: Routledge, 1927), 84.

JUST LIKE I COME HERE TO SEE YOU, young ladies, I used to go to church to see my beauties, well, not exactly to church, I'm not much of a churchgoer, but to a small shop next to the parish house, a tiny little place, where a man by the name of Altman sold secondhand sewing machines, dual-spring Victrolas from America, and Minimax fire extinguishers, and this Altman he had a sideline delivering beauties to pubs and bars all over the district, and the young ladies would sleep in Altman's back room, or when summer came they set up tents in the garden and the dean of the church would take his constitutional along the fence and those show-offs would put a Victrola out there and sing and smoke and tan themselves in their bathing suits, a sight for sore eyes it was, a heavenly sight, Eden on earth, which is why the dean took all those inspection tours along the fence, that and the rotten luck he had with his priests, one ran off to Canada with his cousin, another converted to the Czechoslovak Church, and a third defied his ban and climbed the fence, fell in love with one of the beauties, and shot himself out of unrequited love, revolver or Browning, it always gets you in the end, we borrowed one when we were boys and shot at the fence like Conar Tolnes, but then my brother took it apart and we couldn't put it back together, we were so desperate we wanted to shoot ourselves, but we couldn't because we couldn't put it back together, a good thing too or I wouldn't have been able to go to church to see the ladies, I was always dressed to kill, striped trousers like a bank clerk, and sat on a Minimax case like a diplomat, the sun beating down, the ladies lolling in bathing suits on blankets like a sun worshipers' society, six of them flat on their backs, cradling their heads—wigs and all—in their hands, gazing up into the clouds, delivering their bodies to men's eyes, and because I was as sensitive as Mozart and an admirer of the European Renaissance I stared at them like a crocodile, one eye on the dean, the other on their crossed legs and dangling ankles, the shivers that ran down my spine, how many people get to see so many beauties in one place? only emperors or sultans, anyway, I'd tell the ladies my dreams, like the one where the baker puts his loaf into the oven, which means winning the lottery, a pity I had no ticket, dreaming of a bakery means nocturnal revels, though what good is that? neither Havlíček nor Christ ever laughed, if anything they wept, because when you stand for a great idea you can't horse around, Havlíček had a brain like a diamond, the professors went gaga over him, they tried to make him a bishop, but no, he chose justice, a little coffee, a little wine, and a life for the people, stamping out illiteracy, only perverse people dream of rolling in manure (better days ahead) or of chamber pots (your future is assured) because the thing is, dear ladies, you've got to rely on yourselves, take Manouch, who thought he had it made because his father was a jailer and all he did was drink and pick up bad habits, which leads to fights like the quarrel in the days of the monarchy between the social democrats and the freethinkers and clerics over whether the world comes from a monkey or God slapped Adam together out of mud and fashioned Eve from his insides, now He could have made her out of mud too, it would have been cheaper, though nobody really knows what went on, the world was as deserted as a star, but people twitter away like magpies and don't really care, I could set my sights on a charmer, a prime minister's daughter, but what's not to be is not to be and could even take a bad turn, Mother of God! the crown prince had syphilis and that Vetsera woman shot him, but then
she
got shot by the coachman, though any young lady will tell you you might as well be buried alive if the man in your life has a faulty fandangle, when I was serving in the most elegant army in the world I told our medical officer, Doctor, I said, I've got a weak heart, but all he said was, So have I, boy, and if we had a hundred thousand like you we could conquer the world, and he put me into the highest category, so I was a hero, I walked out of there on cloud nine, but he called me back and said, You've got time on your hands, take my wife to the station, she was a beauty, his wife, the spitting image of Mařenka Zieglerová and a giant like Maria Theresa and dressed like a queen too, and the first words out of her mouth were, Are you a bachelor? and when it was over she tried to give me a tip, six kreuzers, but I wouldn't take it, that's called chivalry, Havlíček and Christ wouldn't have taken one either, we had a real thing about appearances back then, I wore a pince-nez and a tie-clip made from a medal a friend of my grandfather's got for winning the high jump at the Achilles Sport Club in Brno, but the main thing was money, you could get anything for money, beautiful women, you might be a hunchback or getting on in years, but you could buy a real beauty, it's just how the world turns round the universe, and even though I've pledged allegiance to emperors and presidents I'm still a hero, I've still got my magic hands, my surgeon's hands, a shoemaker always has fine hands, and people call me a real professional, Baťa himself wrote me a letter begging me to work for him and put his business back on its feet, and the Baroness Břízová, who used to get her milk from us, would look at me, lower her eyes, and say, You're one of us, aren't you? and she was as noble as they come, with a tiny little face like the kittens on the chocolate bars, her daughter married that handsome Judge Just, the one known for throwing the book at all the rowdies and drunks, Tónek Opletalů once boxed his ears because he gave him thirteen months for slitting Říha's throat during an academic debate, but Christ, healer of nations and mainstay of the poor, knew way back then that man, predisposed as he is to villainy, soon sheds tears, which is why he had the strength to load that girder on his back for us all and lug it the two kilometers to Golgotha, all bloody and bruised, to this day priests go wild at the thought of it, though they prefer telling children about the Holy Trinity and how the Father is His own Son and the Son His Father and They use a messenger pigeon to communicate, it's enough to make your head spin, as if they didn't have their share of that stuff in the confessional, stepfathers and sons born out of wedlock, I mean, people don't like hearing it, because Christ wanted us to love our neighbors, he wanted discipline, not love on the sofa the way some mealy-brained idiots would have it, but I can be proud, I always kept the image of Havlíček before me and as a shoemaker I was always an engineer of human feet, the stitching was always white waxed thread, the nails never scratched the skin, I used only Elbet glue and gum dragon mixed with ground elephant hooves, but public opinion is made by idiots and drunks, I'd like to see them do a handstand on a horse at the age of seventy like our dearly departed President Masaryk, to say nothing of the Tibetan monks who are building a power station to illuminate the living Buddha, the tiny child Buddha, in their monastery, or Professor Einstein, who invented the atomic submarine, or the Russians, who are jetting around the world so fast that they have to put on their brakes the moment they take off and one speed engineer says the time is near when a jet will see its own tail flying around the earth and passengers won't even have a chance to sit down before arrival, they might as well stay home, but the main thing is not to live in a pigsty and to keep the ladies supplied with flowers, when our priest had trouble doing number one Doctor Karafiát said, If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times, bland foods only, no meat, no wine, and when a woman who'd just had a baby ate a sausage, he blew his top, Apples not good enough for you? he yelled and gave her husband an enema, because he should have known better than to let a woman in childbed even go near a sausage, when I went to Doctor Karafiát for my tapeworm, he put me on a diet and prescribed milk baths, other doctors would have shown me the door, but Doctor Karafiát said, The minute I saw you I could tell you were supersensitive and not cut out for holy matrimony, and it just happened to be market day and a woman was biting into a liverwurst when all of a sudden the doctor's dog ran out and tore the liverwurst and her lip away from her and Doctor Karafiát had to buy her another liverwurst and sew her lip back on because she ran bawling to him and men were still gallant in those days, a professor once said to me, We never gave the monarchy its due, he said, We never gave the brothels their due, our men had too much vital force in them, it made them supersensitive, Gruléček would beat his wife with cats or catkins, which is what loggers used to call the chains they tied logs to their carts with, the lawyer who handled the sale of our house, Kir his name was, built a mansion for himself next to the courthouse complete with fountains and palm trees and a marble column topped by a naked Eve with the whole world at her feet and her own rose garden, anyway this lawyer shot himself because his wife threw him over for a poor student, it was like an operetta, rich ladies are always romantic, the offers I used to get would make me break out something awful, of course I'll make you another pair of shoes, I'll put on my magnifying glasses, KB-model pumps, white lining, white insoles, number four cut, Derby-Pariser line, one pair of pumps with white toe caps and patent-leather heels, two centimeters high, nickel-plate eyelets, celluloid hooks, brass nails and brass screws to hold the soles in place, and then I'll make you a spare pair of autumn shoes and a spare pair of winter shoes and line them with red or yellow lamb's wool, as you prefer, and a pair of walking shoes for hills and a pair of walking shoes for dales with matching red toe caps and white linings or in kidskin with trimming yea high and a green varnish, and I'll go all the way to Vienna, to Salamander, the mecca of the shoe world, five full floors of shoes, I'll go all that way for their Maitzen varnishes, varnishes as smooth as a beautiful face, Salamander, the mecca of the shoe world, with a salamander in its trademark, like the monkey in the Mercedes trademark, glass cases of shoes made by magic hands, each floor lit in a different color, Count Zelikowski would sail over the parade ground on his stallion like a fighter plane, his beard fringed with hoarfrost, his horse's mane too, he was known for his cruelty, was the count, once an old woman stopped and asked me what company her son was in, she'd made some cakes for him, and suddenly up rode Count Zelikowski on his stallion and roared, Who told you you could talk to that hag, you whoreson? and gave me a taste of his crop and leaped clear over the woman on his stallion at twenty degrees below zero, and once I was on guard duty, I was twenty-one at the time and so full of energy I could have lit Prague for a week, why, even now I'm a holy terror when I see that safeguard of marital bliss, a well-developed female body, and back then I was a member of the Sokol Gymnastic Society and had Sokol curls and a Sokol uniform that fit me like the president's fit him, and there was a whole field full of Sokols and flags waving in the trees, a row of white horses, a row of red horses, and two beauties tearing each other's blouses to shreds over me, but I had read my Batista, so I knew that if you hold nothing sacred you are open to sin and there are women who fall for love and women who fall for money and women who fall for both, there are women who indulge in debauchery and women who indulge in fads and women who indulge in artists, but marriage is meant to be what Master Jan Hus said it was, don't show leg, girls, until you know who the boy really is, though the best thing is to keep your word, which is why the Hindus have bulls in their temples and bow down to them, the sibyl who prophesied Christ's death was afraid to walk the footbridge over the Jordan and bowed down to the cedar it came from, and when her friends asked her, Why won't you go? she said that one day the bridge would be made into a cross and she would rather wade across the river, skirt in hand, she could see the cross embedded in the bridge and she knew that Christ would come and teach people that they are one another's brothers, yes, she was a wise one, as wise as our own Saint Wenceslas who so loved his vineyards and rode a white horse in a white robe and gave to the poor like a welfare state, now the Chinese they believe in a god of strength and love, which is why their god wears a gold ring in his nose, has a mouth like a shark, and is so big and fat he scares the bejesus out of you, whereas the Africans are more poetic, they believe in what they can eat and they leap and shout while their king sits naked on the throne with a pitchfork in his hand and their queen wears only a strip of cloth to keep the flies off her biomass, and when one of them dies they bury half the body and dig into the other, so Holub the travel photographer hopped on his bicycle lickety-split, and the Butacutos and the Arabelis and the Matabelis of Tierra del Fuego ran after him shouting, Man on a snake! but even with their strong lungs they couldn't catch him, and the cyclists pressed on to Warsaw, with Krula coming in first at only twenty-two, the age I was when I stood in Prostějov before the spread-eagle sign of Weinlich & Sons, Purveyor to the Court, Weinlich, a Jew with a gold pince-nez, impeccably dressed and scented, a book under his arm and a Havana between his lips, it was like entering a university, his sales representatives Fogl and Vertsberger had an academic aura about them too, and I stood before them with a pair of shoes in my hands as if I were in court, Did you make those shoes yourself? Weinlich asked, How many dozen can you make in a week? and I said, Two dozen, and they ran up to congratulate me and ran to get me my kidskin and box calf and told me to run and catch my train, and I left the way the triumphant yet modest Montgomery left Tobruk, the honor of being employed by a purveyor to the court, it's like working with a man who has the Order of Labor, a purveyor to the court had medals and a spread eagle on his sign, Kafka and Dvořák made the emperor's clothes and shoes, the archduke's too, and Vymětal and Popelka were his master butchers, the hams they had in their windows and spruce boughs and asparagus, a friend of mine was known for his fine frock coats, and once I invited his brother for a rest in our country air, but he got so drunk on slivovitz that he would have died if we hadn't wrapped him in curd cheese compresses, anyway he worked for the Court Purveyor Kafka who had green trousers and gold medals on his sign, and once General von Wucherer had Kafka make him a light blue coat for Corpus Christi, but the gold collar didn't fit, and his wife, the Frau Generalin, a beast like Maria Theresa, went to complain, but old man Kafka, who had the nerves of a composer, grabbed her and swept out the entrance hall with her, yelling, If it fit thousands before him, it'll fit your Freiherr too, now you know why I make so many trips to the cemetery, and what do I see but young men dozing among the tombstones instead of doing their jobs, and here I am pushing seventy and having the time of my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady, promising you red leather pumps like the ones I once made for Doctor Karafiát's sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what it's going to do next, a hatter from Prostějov once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it and wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went, by the way, baking is as much of an art as shoemaking, my brother Adolf was a trained baker, you slide the shovel into the oven like it's a billiard cue, and if the inspector catches you licking your fingers when you're making rolls you'll get a bop on the beezer, and every time a baker does number one he's got to wash his hands, while a shoemaker can pick his nose all day if he likes, a butcher has to watch himself as well, we had one in our platoon by the name of Kocourek, Miroslav Kocourek, and this Kocourek had a bandaged finger, and one day he was stuffing liverwursts and the bandage disappeared into one of them, and because chances were an enlisted man would get the one with the bandage he forgot about it, but guess what, young ladies, it was the doctor! that's right, he was on his third liverwurst, and the minute he cut into it he recognized his handiwork and puked and Kocourek was sent to the front, but did he die there? no, he turned hero and won all kinds of medals, I spent some time pushing goats tied together in a wheelbarrow to the butcher's, and one day two little kids gamboled along next to me and the goats kept licking my hands, and when I stopped in a field to rest, the kids started licking my hands, and I wept bitter tears, what was I doing with a butcher? me, an admirer of the European Renaissance, besides, my stomach was all tied up in knots and it was a miracle I hadn't ripped myself open with the paring knife, so I switched from shoemaking to brewing and trained as a maltster and set off on a tour of Hungary, oh what a brewery they have in Sopron! bright red with white trimming and green windows, Tyrol style, nothing but white tile inside, and nice little ladders at every window so in case of fire the firemen can climb up and down like the monkeys in Dresden, and Budapest! what a place! one street all white with red windows, the next all green with yellow windows, blue streets and gold streets and speckled streets, all through the war they had bread white as buns, their Admiral Horthy ordered the sailors led by Matoušek to be executed, he had the poor men blindfolded, there'd been an uprising, or mutiny, as it's called for beer, dear ladies, the barley must be nice and clean, you don't want it