Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (5 page)

sprouting too soon now, do you, then you soak it in lukewarm water and it goes to the malting floor, where it's turned over and over with a wooden shovel and starts putting out shoots, and from there it goes to the kiln to dry in the fire, then into drums, where the malt—there are Munich malts for dark beer and Pilsen malts for light beer—is separated from the flower, the blossoms, that is, which make excellent cattle feed, and after the malt has cooked for several hours in the brewing room, it's mashed three times to maximize the sugar content, and in go the hops, which give it that bitter flavor, and then it all goes into vats in a special fermentation room where the yeast is added, ordinary beer takes a month to ferment, lager three months, some memory I've got, eh? you won't find many more like it, the yeast forms foamy ripples on lager, and before the beer is barreled or bottled the foam is scooped up in a tin pot and poured in small quantities into each receptacle to give it that spark, that sparkle, Munich beers can take up to six months, and when the time comes to broach a barrel the president himself puts in an appearance, I once knew a seamstress named Husáková, I gave her lessons, sexual hygiene and art, and I told her the main thing is to fill in the chinks, and she tried to get me to run into the woods and fill hers, but I said anyone can do that, what counts is doing something that didn't exist before, but women bring everything back to the here and now, one day the owner of a restaurant complained to me that his customers would erase the marks he made on the coaster to keep track of how many beers they'd ordered, and the beautiful woman at my side said, I've got a mark no one can erase, gentlemen, though of course lagers spend a full six months in the barrel, sweet Pardubice Porter has an 18 percent alcohol content just like our Nusle Senator, Brno Dragon has 14 percent like Bráník Special and Budějovice Crystal, oh dear ladies, that heady sparkle, those bitter Pilsners, the Cardinals and semisweet brews they serve at U Fleků and U Tomáše's, why will no one see that progress may be good for making people people, but for bread and butter and beer it's the plague, they've got to slow down their damn technology, in the good old breweries they made a log fire under a copper kettle and the flame traveled up through the copper and caramelized the beer—what a memory I have! a true joy—and the rye they made bread out of would rest in the barns until November came and the whole ear went into the grain and only then did they thresh it, that was some bread, let me tell you, God's gift to man, you could smell it being baked for miles around, the older the better, which is why the emperor liked his landau more than his motorcar, liked his wine too and died on the toilet, and you should have seen him do the European Renaissance with the Schratt lady, I was on guard duty in Meidling and I saw it all, the Schratt lady standing on a ladder picking plums and the emperor holding the ladder for her and peeking up her skirt like Goethe, which goes to show how right Batista was when he said that the best safeguard of marital bliss is a well-developed body, the emperor liked to wear a Kaiserrock, a kaiser coat, this long, dark frock coat buttoned all the way up the front, a noble family if there ever was one, the emperor's, but they had the same troubles all families have, his son, the crown prince, was forced to marry Princess Stephanie of Belgium, but he was wild for Vetsera's body, she had these gigantic breasts and eyes, and it ended in a gigantic shooting match, Dáša, who works in the pharmacy and has problems with sexual hygiene, Dáša said to me when I told her about the emperor's family tragedy she said, Listen, if you and I were a couple and you started running after that slut I'd have shot you dead too, yes, tragedy rules the world and writers always have something to write about, one day I was walking along the tracks and a railway man came riding up on his bike and when he saw me he jumped down and said, Tell me the truth, Jirka, they didn't make that goal yesterday, did they? and I said, No, they didn't, and then he put one foot on the pedal and just before swinging the other one over he turned and called, Thank you, thank you, the truth prevails, I always knew you were a man of character! people keep mixing me up with referees and film stars and I've never played soccer in my life, well, only for fun, Mozart and Goethe they never played soccer either, or the emperor for that matter, no, he went chamois hunting in Ischl and wore lederhosen, you know, the little-boy shorts with the drawbridge in front, he liked people and pork, he made only one currency reform during his entire regime, and he had Šlosarek and Hugo Schenk strung up and gave my mother a twenty-five-gulden bonus, whenever she stamped cabbage, my mother, she wore white socks, we were on maneuvers with the emperor's Uncle Albrecht, the one with the buck teeth, and the emperor made the man who put up Uncle Albrecht and him during the maneuvers, Kolář his name was, the emperor made him a nobleman for his hospitality, and this Baron Kolář was so grateful he put up a monument to the emperor in front of his house, Mother and me we went out for wood one day, the soldiers were busy with their horses or eating out of cans, and we brought in two wheelbarrows of logs and two of grass for the cow, who was plug-ugly but gave us fifteen calves, the whole street came to us for milk and when that cow died the whole street mourned her, but she'd left behind one last calf and we brought the calf into the house and bottle-fed it, every morning in came the calf to lick our faces, my brother Adolf liked to say it came to shave us, and when the calf grew up into a cow old man Zpurný said he'd never seen so fine an animal in all his born days, the only problem being that she went berserk if she saw a train or even a bicycle, so we had to put blinkers on her, for a thousand years the Church has been squawking at us Czechs to curb our passions, but how can you make a dent in a nation when its every member reacts according to the Batista book about safeguards of marital bliss, which says that shivers run down a man's spine whenever he sees a beautiful woman and his first thought is how to get her, as Bondy the poet says, from the vertical to the horizontal, and he ought to know, because he may be a poet but he's pushing two offspring in a baby buggy everywhere he goes, my mother, now, she was a saint, she brought us up all by herself and all on beets, she was what nowadays they call a shockworker, she'd haul water from the stream when the weather was dry, but even though her beets were big as buckets, they couldn't hold a candle to Haná beets, when those damn Haná farmers left their fields there wasn't a footprint left, there was a man named Mýtný known for huge harvests, he'd been a corporal in the Uhlans and had a beard like Elijah, in summer he tucked it into his fly, in winter he wore it like a scarf, and how he would slave, first a full day's work in the woods, then a break for prayer, then chasing women and cows in the fields, egging them on with his example and his whip, what the president wouldn't give to have two hundred thousand Mýtnýs! oh and his wife ran a pub, but she poured more for herself than she did for the customers, so good Catholic that he was he beat her and beat her until one day he beat her dead, as it says in the Old Testament, and it goes without saying his cows and horses were spotless, his coffers full, and his bankbooks in order, an old woman by the name of Šumplica once used her bare feet to make a pile of the potatoes she'd dug up so she wouldn't have to bend and carry them, but old man Mýtný caught her at it and whipped the living daylights out of her and then went home and mended his clodhoppers and read a lofty book or two, before he put in his seeds he would soak them in blue vitriol, he got a kick out of slaughtering hogs and would season his soup with an African spice, by the way, young ladies, Javanese cinnamon is better than Ceylonese, cinnamon is good in mulled wine and fruit fillings, but people could be terribly behind the times during the monarchy, a peasant hoeing in the field once took his thumb for a grub and hacked it off, and a teacher by the name of Látal would flog his pupils or beat their heads against the blackboard because they couldn't get their geometry figures straight, and Zbořil, our priest, would grab boys by the scruff of the neck and shake them like rabbits because they couldn't get it into their heads that grace is inherent in God's nature and a gift from on high, he had to pray all the time and ask God to keep his temper in check, otherwise he'd forget the chalice and box the servers' ears and that was the end of the Mass, that was your Austrian discipline, all pomp and circumstance, the archbishop wore a purple biretta and purple cloak, and General Lukas had a gold collar and three stars on a field of red silk, and all a soldier had to say was I've had enough of this damn war! and he'd hang from the nearest tree, you could buy the Son of Man for thirty gulden, while a sultan paid a hundred thousand and more for his beauties, a celebrity like Saint Peter would hang upside down on the cross, while the pope, his successor, has free rein of the Lateran and Vatican, which have so many rooms he needs a guide-book to keep from getting lost, and don't think he talks to his cardinals about the benefits of brotherly love, no, it's all currencies and Catholic charities, what I'm giving you now, young ladies, are like windows on the world, points, goals, scores, the principle the late Strauss applied to his heavenly melodies, sending them out into the world to refine the emotions, like the European Renaissance, for which Themistocles and Miltiades and Socrates and Goethe and Mozart did so much and which has made it impossible for us to say to a beauty we're tired of, Get lost, or even Adieu, because our refined emotions require us to compose a farewell melody or poem to be dispatched with a bouquet of roses, why, even the dreams of the romantic swain are refined, if he dreams of the trots, say, it means success in society, and if he dreams of his wife's death it means a secret wish fulfilled, a stove fitter apprentice once burst into tears when he was apprenticed to a young lady on the billiard table, but another time the bar ladies were a great help, there was this boy who wasn't quite all there and the first time he felt the urge he cried out, Mama, Mama, what's happening to me! and his mother grabbed a hundred-crown note and ran for a bar beauty, but the boy kept falling off her so his mother had to stick around, and she barely had time to take a breather before he started shouting, Mama, Mama, what's happening to me! again, but I always kept in shape like Conar Tolnes and saved my magic hands for what we called contessa shoes, shoes for princesses, actresses, and great beauties, wooden heels and brass tacks, clean work, God's own work, silver kid and yellow kid, canary yellow, and gum dragon to make the soles white, in the days of the monarchy shoemaking was more chemistry than craft, today it's all conveyor belts, I was a shoemaker, but I wore a pince-nez and carried a stick with a silver mounting because back then everyone wanted to look like a composer or a poet, today it's the other way round, writers have their pictures taken to look like tramps, I once saw an American writer, a monster, dear lady, another Count Zelikowski, who was known for his cruelty, then there's that man who painted the dove of peace, look at him, a regular Mariazell beggar, your artists today they all brush their hair into their eyes like the inmates of the monarchy's poorhouses or a peasant sent out to pasture, when I was young if you had two years of schooling you had your hair permed and combed out like a girl's so the ladies would think you wrote poetry, and if you had three you didn't go out in the sun any more than you had to, whereas now even presidents tan, back in the monarchy workers had their pictures taken with one elbow perched on a table and eyes gazing into the distance like Edison, whereas now they have them taken chopping wood, and star anise, which comes from a Chinese tree, was all the rage and terrific in liqueurs and cakes, there were plenty of beggars but plenty of style, Hungarian flour the color of sand had three red hearts on its sacks, American pastry flour had three crossed ears of grain and a Canadian with a scythe in his hand, the Archbishop Prince Eugen, commander of the Deutschmeister and member of the Apostolic Order, was the biggest swine of all the Habsburgs, he was over seven foot tall, and when his adjutant brought him his greatcoat he had to drag it on the ground, old man Gruléček read love stories as he mended sacks, and Zbořil, our priest, read the pastoral letter concerning immoral books and periodicals from the pulpit, and old man Grepl, who delivered fabrics to Olomouc, put his legs in cold water to keep from falling asleep because he had no alarm clock, in winter he went out foraging for firewood with the devil's own chains over his shoulder, he'd bang his wife's head against a beam to knock some sense into her, and she'd pray all night for God to come and empty a cartload of wood on top of him, which must be why Bondy the poet says that real poetry must hurt, as if you'd forgotten you wrapped a razor blade in your handkerchief and you blow your nose, no book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out, of course in the days of the monarchy a man was responsible for his wife's soul before God, so when Tónek Opletalů stuck a knife into Ferdoška's head during an argument they were having over which of them would go to heaven he said to his wife, You vowed at the altar to obey me, and slapped her a few times as a down payment on slaps to come, my master was a good man, but he did like the bottle, and when he could afford it he'd knock back a liter of brandy in the morning and another in the afternoon and another at night, nowadays people would go crazy or rise up in arms if they had to work till midnight the way they did in the days of the monarchy, Why do you always stop me, you whore? he'd say to the wife at night, I don't stop you from smoking your china
dragoon pipe, do I? and whack! he'd smack her with his last, though you can't deny it, people found time for fun back then too, one day my father met a man as lazy as himself, Trávníček was his name, and off they went to Fidler's for a bottle of rye, schnapps came in bottles the shape of lamp cylinders back then, anyway, my dad and this Trávníček fellow climbed the cemetery wall and since they'd read their Havlíček and their illustrated weeklies they were so upset about the world situation that they didn't go to work and just sat there talking subversive talk about social injustice, and soon they were tipsy and singing Walking through the Woods to the Meadow One Day and the priest flew out of the church holding a handkerchief as big as a table napkin and shouting, Damn you, Trávníček! you're ruining my Mass, go into the woods or I'll have you arrested, but Papa and Trávníček kept up their singing and before they knew it there was a cop with a feather in his cap who told them to disperse in the name of the law, so they did, and Papa went and bought one of those all-day suckers to cover up his breath, but Mama smelled it anyway and took a rope and beat the living daylights out of him, if you're going to hit the bottle you need to lay in a reserve or you'll go off your rocker, though Loja Továrků he went off his on account of the cobblestones in the town square or maybe on account of his son's trial-run children with the town girls, in any case he kept banging his head against the wall and singing Oh My God Joseph, Oh My God Joseph, and when his brain fever started soaring he switched to All the Devils Are Set Free, All Are Exorcizèd, after a while people noticed something was wrong and put him into an asylum, but otherwise he was a decent fellow, he served on the town council with Bechyně and headed the local Sokol group, it was just those cobblestones that got to him, or maybe his daughter too, who once gave a man the greatest proof of love and when the consequences started to show blew her brains out with the gun that hung on their wall, so you see, young ladies, people are still unenlightened and inclined to tragedy, and if they tell the truth they seem to be lying, the truth will out, all right, but always too late, a beautiful girl with a classical education once married this stinking rich man because she'd read The Foundry Owner, but she kept a locksmith's son on the side, and one day her husband came home and found her in the tub with the locksmith's son and boxed his ears so hard he never heard another word, which is why Batista's book on sexual hygiene warns men against giving in to their passions, no more than three times an afternoon or four times for Catholics, to prevent sinful thoughts from taking shape, you never know where they might lead, they get into your blood, sultans are particularly susceptible and always come to grief, sometimes even popes and kings have their problems and it's all over before you know it, a kingdom on its head over a beautiful woman, yes, but it's no use crying over spilled milk, Mama was the one who told me, Mama was the one who warned me, women react only to feelings so you've got to lie, the wedding, the fun and games, that's the easy part, but a whole life? a butcher once told me, he said, Marriage is like dragging a cow hide along a sheet of thin ice, there are days when a wife says to her husband, You know what you need, Papa? you need a good smack in the kisser and he says to her, Mama, you dirty bitch, if you get plastered once more I'll tear your mouth open with a cramp iron, and then, young ladies, ideals start to crumble, even Goethe had his troubles, to say nothing of Mozart, oh, it's nice enough when two young people rush up to each other and clasp hands and whatever else there is to clasp, though that kind of thing is more exciting to clothed nations, naked nations are less lecherous, there's less pickpocketing too no matter how the priests go on about them, Charles IV went through four beauties and if he hadn't caught pneumonia and died he'd certainly have gone for a fifth, he had a real eye for the ladies, you've got to be able to tell true passion from passing fancy, the way Batista describes them in his book, one woman has twenty-two children and another can have a brewery chimney fall on her and no go, the man's got to have a regulation sexual organ, it's right there in the dream book, dreaming of a large organ means dignity, like Šoupal in our town, him and his wife would drink and pull each other's hair on the stairs, but the minute they hit the street they were proper as could be, at home he'd scream and yell, Let me smell your breath, you reek of alcohol, and she'd kneel down and plead, But all I had was a rum chocolate, and he'd give her a few good slaps, people have it better nowadays, but when it comes to this kind of thing it's still the same old story, sometimes