Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (7 page)

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you like? and I'd say, Beautiful women, I'd say, and she'd squeal, Oh you devil you, and throw a shoe at me, once I had the honor of riding all the way to the Haubitz barracks on Iduna, the general's mare, a real beauty, a rich brown with a white star on her forehead like a movie star, a star like the hole you shoot through a handkerchief, but as we were sailing along, me and Iduna, we ran into an old woman and she turned such a somersault that I was worried Iduna had done her some harm, I didn't want the general to have to court-martial me, after all, but on we flew across Olomouc, and Iduna leaped through the barracks fence—it's a good thing I kept my head close to her mane, I barely had time to duck—and into the stable, and when I went to the canteen for some raspberry juice, I found a pretty girl working there, Cílka was her name, and she started dancing with me, and her boss got jealous and said Cílka, go and do your work in the kitchen! and pressed up to me herself, mean-while Cílka stood in the doorway polishing knives and showing me behind her boss's back how she would stab her if she could, and her boss said to me, You're really temperamental, you know that, soldier? so I told her that if she dreamed of catching a pheasant then love would soon find a place in her heart, and she slipped a pack of Egypts into my pocket and asked me to go on, and while Cílka showed me more and more new ways of doing her in I told her that a well-heated room means the love of a man for a woman, and when she started squirming I leaned over and whispered, But the most wonderful dream of all is when two oxen butt each other, because that means true bliss in love, and added, for which I paid dearly, I caught an ugly disease and had to go to Brzadín for treatment, and as she made to move away she tried to reach into my pocket for the Egypts, but I said to her, No, you don't, I said, given's as good as gone, which she had to accept, she even gave me a schnapps for the road and thanked me for being so kind as to warn her, because she'd had one of those diseases, once I took a milkmaid to the Urania in the upper square, they were doing this Jewish play about the troubles of a man named Ahasuerus, and the milkmaid kept licking my ear and asking me to marry her, and I said I would, though I hadn't finished my stint in the army yet and had a weak heart and couldn't stop dreaming about canaries in cages, which according to Anna Nováková meant I would always long for freedom, and she whispered, Wow, what a catch you'd make! and her hair smelled of milk and vanilla, but three days later I was off to Dalmatia and the sea, you should have seen the storm that came up, when nature goes wild like that and gets into a man's pants it's enough to turn him into a poet, waves as big as our house, a boat hurled up onto the road, and boulders tumbling down from the cliffs, overturning trains, sweeping men and mules into the sea on their way back from the vineyards, columns of water tall as towers, and near starvation for us soldiers, Mother of God! the rotten fish we ate, morale fell so low we actually went begging, the sign over the barracks read VOJARNA KRALJA JUSUPA, King Joseph's Barracks, all in gold, but a first lieutenant scratched out the corn kettle, a first lieutenant! if General Zelikowski had seen that he'd have pulled out his crop and given it to him, a dandy of a Jew gave me a gulden to shine up his belt and his gun for him, he was going into town to establish some international relations, as he put it, but along came our beast of a Sergeant Brčul, six and a half feet of bad blood, and said, Where's the Jew boy? Went to town, I said, well, the Serge he starts cursing—Jebem ti boga! Kurac na drobno!—because Freiherr von Wucherer had expressly forbidden soldiers from going on rampages in town, so he comes and lies down in the Jew's bed and when the Jew staggers back after midnight, totally beat, Brčul leaps up, knocks him down, kicks him all over the floor in his special uniform, and sends him out on guard duty, and when I went out to relieve him I found him swinging in the wind, hanging from a tree in a corner of the courtyard, strung up by his own hand and shiny belt, nobody appreciates that kind of thing anymore, when I told the story to some truck drivers in Libeň they just laughed, one Saturday afternoon they were racing III's along Breakneck Hill, and while they were on their way down there was this dentist going up, he'd left his umbrella at the office, and just as he was sticking his key into the door one of the III's burst a spring and barreled smack into the office and it lurched away from his key, the whole office, and he was left standing there with his key in the air, it's a good thing Count Zelikowski didn't see that because he was known for his cruelty, while Major Mičoković he always put stones on the money when he counted out our pay so the wind wouldn't get it, he always warned us not to spend it on drink before we'd bought buttons and Vaseline and thread, the countryside was so beautiful, as romantic as Jerusalem, paths going up and up, always in need of repair though, people eating nothing but oat patties, vineyards hard as cement, I once saw a Dalmatian woman tending sheep in a meadow, it might have been a painting except she turned to me and said, Are you single, young man? and I nodded and she came and sat next to me and pointed out who had died in which hut, but I was late for grenade practice, they had these newfangled grenades, young ladies, they looked like pears, but instead of a stem they had this string coming out of them, and the Zugsführer, the platoon leader, would use a dud to show us how to pull the string and count to twenty, but one day some smart aleck put a live one in its place while the platoon leader went to the latrine and when he came back, pow! off flew his hand and out through the window, giving Captain Tonser, who happened to be riding past, a mean slap, the same thing happened to the owner of an outdoor movie theater who had an iron hand, one day he caught some kids sitting in a tree getting a free show so he climbed up on a chair and swatted and swatted with his iron hand until the branches cracked and fell, and when he got home he decided to give his son a clout for good measure, but the iron hand flew off its hinges and out through the window, where it knocked down a policeman who was standing there sharpening his pencil to write a ticket, but what happened to me one day at roll call was they called out my name among the fallen in action, date of birth and all, and when I shouted, Hey, I'm alive! they called me in and gave me two weeks in the can for talking during roll call, Man, one of the fellows said, if it'd been me I'd have packed my things and hightailed it out of there, I'd have gone straight home to bed and when the war was over I'd have just crossed my name off the war memorial, but I liked to gaze at myself in the mirror wearing my uniform, I looked so good in it, I was like the sun coming out for a stroll when I stepped out in my light blue tunic, my black trousers with red piping, my shiny leather belt and nickel bayonet, and my gold-rimmed shako, and I knew that the head under that shako wasn't filled with straw, no, it was jam-packed with the highest-quality gray matter full of whorls and squiggles, just like Edison's, oh Edison, the man who invented the machine that made it possible for us to sit at home in our slippers and enjoy the glories of the concert hall, that is, the man who invented the phonograph, which had never existed before, think of him sitting there for three days, poor man, thinking of nothing but earphones, no, young ladies, not even the most beautiful woman can rival a famous man like that, a woman doctor in Cracow ordered me to take off all my clothes, climbed on top of me, and, pressing her cold ear against my heart, she said, Why is your heart pounding so? so I told her about the European Renaissance and how a real man trembles like a frog about to leap whenever he sees a beautiful woman, which is why art drives so many writers mad, especially when they want to improve on it, their brains turn to sawdust and no one can do a thing about it, a composer by the name of Isvtán once tore a chandelier out of the ceiling in his grief, and when Edison's bride came for him she found him sitting there, thinking away, with a little glass stool under his feet to keep the earth's gravity from disturbing him, yes, that's right, and after his death they opened up his brain and found it jam-packed with the highest-quality gray matter, a fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn't for a tiny black cloud hanging over me I could do great things and not only for my country but for all mankind, then she reached over to me and I fell off the rocking chair and overturned the aquarium, and when I'd told all that to the Polish doctor who was lying on top of me she asked, Where are you going to take me tonight? and I quoted her Anna Nováková, Dreaming of a gold-finch in a cage means your lascivious ways will bring you to a bad end, but the doctor stood up and said, Couldn't you find something better? so I said, Dreaming of an anniversary celebration means unquenchable passion, and she said, A good beginning at least, and she made Turkish eyes at me, because most men's minds go straight to hanky-panky, but I take a different tack, I want to be a hero, when Marion the magician and hypnotist came to town he had to stamp his own documents, the officials were afraid he'd hypnotize them so they flew the coop the minute they saw him, I was on the stage too at the time, in The Balalaika, I wore a guardsman's uniform, the set was all doors with keyholes and I sang Many a Maiden Fair I've Kissed and then a purple spot-light came on and I sang, Sing, balalaika, the sweetest melody on earth, The one that gives me second birth, The song called I Love You, and I was a hero, I hit high C, not like your garden-variety yodelers who low like cows calving, no, I was a real tenor, another Járinek Pospíšil, I could wow the ladies as much as Marion the magician and hypnotist, if you like we can put on the play here and now, we'll cast one of you as the great tsarina, but we'll have to find some falsies, you there, you'll do, not all tsarinas were beautiful, I'll play the high priest, which means I carry a chalice, the chandelier gets shot down in the finale, no, I'd rather play the baron, though how can we get his horse on stage? what if we wind rags around its hoofs, then it won't harm the stairs, but more important, we don't want it shying when the music plays, it might fall into the orchestra, the swine dealer can be played by Ruda Turek, the first lieutenant, he's got a neck like a Swiss steer, I once tried to do splits with a beauty in the Catholic House and gave myself a hernia, which isn't so bad for a man, a man makes anything look good, but when a maiden wears a truss and a lovesick swain comes up against that cold belt, those nickel springs, his ideals start to falter and his desire to flag, Christ our Lord was once invited to a wedding where they were going overboard on the wine so he turned it into water, that was known as the miracle of Cana of Galilee, there was a time when I had the strangest dreams, handling the bones of a corpse means a great joy awaits you, it's interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls, a hunter once told me he couldn't get over how happy an old buck looked wooing a doe, if you dream of a bed of tulips it means you'll fall in love with a lovely girl and she'll never know, a certain poet by the name of Bondy once told me that people have strange ideas about what writing poetry means, they think it's like going for water with a bucket or that poets just lift up their eyes unto the heavens and the heavenly hosts rain down verses upon them, but I told him, Think of Christ our Lord, he had such a head on his shoulders that even today the professors go gaga over him, and he wasn't just God's little Favorite either, no, he was a champ, a muscleman handy with a horsewhip so he could drive those cattle traders out of the temple and tell them he came not to send peace but a sword, a saber, that is, and people still don't understand, but that's because the smart ones die and stupid ones get born in their place, some people clean latrines and others are doctors, some women lie in bed all day reading novels and others go out and do what the novels tell them about, poor Bondy gave his fingers a sniff after changing his offspring in the baby buggy in the pub and said, I sense a deep movement in its early stages, and sure enough within half an hour he was wiping one of the babies with the latest issue of Czech Word and mumbling, Christ! it's enough to get to a Korean hangman, on Corpus Christi, marching triumphant into Przemyśl, we saw a young lady lying in a ditch pointing at herself and calling out, Come and celebrate our glorious victory, but none of the soldiers could bring themselves to take her up on it because she was as ugly as the Turkish night, I never went in for that anyway, I was a different kind of hero, I liked the baronesses in sick bay and later, during the First Republic, pretty Sokol girls and nurses, one of them shaved my stomach to prepare me for an operation because the head physician told me I'd be going under the knife the next day and would I be so kind as to sign a piece of paper in case I stayed under, it was just his way of perking me up, and when my time came he put on his white cap like a pastry chef and the nurses pulled on his gloves for him like he was a baby and he was all set to dig into me when the door flies open and in comes an old lady holding a basket asking which room her husband is in because she's brought him his pork and cabbage, well, he ran up and grabbed her—he was a giant of a man with a real temper on him—and kicked her out and screamed at the janitor, How could you let her past? because he should have been elbow-deep in my blood by then, stitching up my hernia, you can't imagine how good it feels to leave the hospital and look around you, like in the song, It's a beautiful world we live in, A world by God to us given, tra la la, I had a blacksmith in my room, Bernádek his name was, who'd down a stein of beer in one gulp and if a horse put up a fuss and refused to stand for him he'd flip it over and shoe it on its side, but not even he could stop
pneumonia, it spread to his stomach and he was gone before he knew what hit him, I was the only one who came out on top, a pretty nurse served me pheasant and asked me why I wasn't married, why I let so fine a body go to waste, and for an answer I slipped out from under the covers and was about to give her a dancing lesson when they chased me back to bed because after a hernia operation they make you lie there like a corpse, a giant of a girl, but beautiful, once called to me from the Elbe, Come into the water and I'll give you a kiss, so in I went—neck deep, clothes and all—and got my prize, a hero once more, back on land I had to wring out more than my clothes, I'd just picked up my pay in ten-crown notes, and there I stood in my underpants, the women rushing down to the river to have a look at me, the whole town on its feet, yes, there I stood like Montgomery at Tobruk, freethinkers like to taunt the Church by asking, If Christ was God, why did he take up with a fallen woman? well, I say there wasn't anything he could do about it, I can't resist the charms of a beautiful woman, why should Christ? one of the male beauties of his day, like Conar Tolnes, and thirty, in the prime of life, besides, even if Mary Magdalene was nothing more than a barmaid she gained favor in the heavens and worked her way up to sainthood, not only did she refuse to betray Christ, she used her hair to wipe away his blood while the poor man hung there on the cross for preaching social progress and all men are equal, and when his mother fell to pieces and sobbed, who comforted her but Mary Magdalene, think about it, where are all the other beauties of her day? gone and forgotten, but little Mary Magdalene will forever touch the hearts of poets, what a fate for a handsome young man trained in the art of carpentry, of sawing boards and beams, and boom! off he goes to teach the world that loving your neighbor doesn't mean somersaults on the sofa, it means giving help wherever help is needed, for learning my catechism I got a picture of Jesus holding the chalice, catechism was all the rage in those days, as important as political reliability and family background today, who is the Father and who is the Son and who is the Holy Spirit? one priest was taken to court because the Ulman sisters drew a blank when he asked them what the Holy Trinity was, so he sat them barebottomed on a hot stove and they never married, nobody wanted to have anything to do with them because they didn't know what the Holy Trinity is, not that anyone else knew, but people had to make believe they did, so the Ulman sisters started growing sunflowers, there was a wave of murders and robberies at the time, if you lived in the wilds you'd close your shutters at night and keep axes and firearms at hand, once in the dead of night a miller heard a saw making a hole in his door, a hole just big enough for a hand to fit through and undo the bolt, so he stole up to the door with his ax and the minute the hand stuck through, thwack! he chopped it off, the police looked and looked but couldn't find anybody with a missing hand, the priest cursed right and left because he had to bury the hand in the cemetery and buy a little coffin for it, Mother of God! a soldier on sentry duty in Olomouc once spied a fire in the cemetery, so he ran and broke into the mortuary and what did he find but the grave-digger standing next to a cauldron of hands and feet in boiling fat and singing, The little hands and little feet of the little girl I love, or once I took a beauty of mine to a little tavern deep in the Tomašov woods and there were nine white crosses across the road because a fellow once lay in wait there and then chopped up all the members of a wedding party with his ax, I mean, the things that happen, which is reason I have no children, why should I want to see my line continue? who can guarantee my children will take after me? Who's going to shut your eyes when you die? the women keep asking me, but I say, Nobody dies at home anymore, the minute you start to fade, up pulls an ambulance and off you go to die behind a screen, all by yourself, relatives don't care anymore, even money's lost its charm, the best thing would be if people the world over got together and held off making babies for a spell, you trip over them everywhere you go, we could dock people's wages, fifty crowns for one child, a hundred for the second, three hundred for the third, and when they got up to five they'd lose half their salary and be given a good thrashing in the town square, it wouldn't have to go on forever, just until we could take our beauties to the woods and pay tribute to the European Renaissance without having to worry about being stared at by crowds, go camping nowadays and you sleep packed together like graves in a cemetery, a woman friend once asked me to take her dog for a walk, but instead I took it to see my beauties at the bar, where two guests pissed on it by mistake, and when I took the dog back to her she petted it, smelled her hand, and said, Where'd you take the dog anyway? he sure doesn't smell like a day in spring, dogs are all well and good, but only watchdogs, a goldsmith once beat a bulldog by mistake and that bulldog never forgot it, and one day the goldsmith was brushing the dog and it jumped up and bit him in the neck, and with the fangs still in his neck he dragged himself over to his desk and pulled out a gun, but he aimed in the mirror and missed and hit his own ear instead, nearly killed himself, and when he finally did get the dog he had to get its teeth pried open with a crowbar, another man, getting ready for a dance, was trimming his nostril hairs in the mirror and practically cut his nose off, when I cut I cut like a fiddler fiddling, with feeling, you should have seen those Przemyśl recruits off for the front, rich villages, every villager a poacher, what a sight, the mayor escorting the men to the enlistment center, the ribbons, the banners, villages ransacked for miles around, Germans herded into the brewery, the mayor knife in the neck for his pains, one false look and it was curtains, but you couldn't beat it for pomp, the cream of the Moravian nation, giants they were and hot-tempered, with two brass bands; and when they slaughtered their hogs and feasted on them the village was all decked out in flowers and streamers, spick-and-span, and there was always someone carrying their guts off in a bucket, because in the days of the monarchy men were killed right and left in pub brawls or on their way home or they ended up swinging from the rafters because they had so many children, those Przemyśl fellows once laid an ambush for me because I was flirting with one of their girls, but I swung round, pulled out my pistol and pow! pow! let them have it, they fell like flies, those giants, and I was a hero once more, like Tom Mix and his smoking revolver, then there was that uproar over Anežka Hrůzová, our people thought it was that Hilsner fellow who did it because some fool reported seeing Hilsner in the woods nearby, their star witness he was, holding his bike with one hand and doing his business with the other, so poor Hilsner was thrown in jail and Jews had to leave Polná, people even started singing a little ditty that went, Don't buy anything from Jews, Sugar, coffee, flour, Blue-eyed Anežka they killed, In her finest hour, and then Anežka's brother came out with it on his deathbed,