Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (8 page)

he'd
killed her and for the money, a policeman on patrol once stopped at a pub for a schnitzel and liked it so much he ordered a second, and after waiting and waiting for the waitress to come back he went to look for her and where did he find her but in the cellar, hacking away at her daughter, who was hanging naked on a hook, Mother of God, so he handcuffed her and booked her on the spot, that's the kind of story people liked to tell when they made their own radio and television for one another, but what I liked even better was to stroll through town in my English suit and one of those floppy-brimmed hats, oh what fun it was to window-shop, I loved the pharmacy in Olomouc with the violet-scented toilet soaps, the Lila Blanc and Violeta de Nice glycerine soaps, the extra-fine Rosa de Shiraz, once I was held up by a dragoon behind the Maria-Schnee-Kaserne, Your money or your life! he cried, a lesser man would have fainted dead away, but I pulled out my Browning and said, Clear off if you value your life, clear off or I'll shoot! when I went to visit my brother for two weeks and stayed for thirty years he gave me what he called a Mexican, which was a rifle, to protect the driving belts behind the brewery, one night I tore it off the wall and shot it at a passing policeman, you should have heard the bullets whistling and ricocheting off the bridge, I had no time to stop and ask, Who goes there? an Austrain soldier must always shoot first, if he wants to be a hero, that is, another pharmacy had hair lotions in the window, like Cyrano, which showed a water nymph rising out of a lake with roses around her waist and will-o'-the-wisps or maybe tiny stars behind her, a sight for sore eyes! as beautiful as Mozart, once three Picek seamstresses were out rowing while we were working on the brewery well, and one of them, a real beauty, called out to me so I jumped right in, shorts and all, and swam over to their boat, those were our Austrian manners, even ordinary people acted like their lives were being filmed or photographed, once when I was helping a baker deliver his wares in Moravian Slovakia I saw a drunken wedding party in a church trying to pour slivovitz down the saints' throats, and when the priest got wind of it he stormed in like a fighter plane and kicked and screamed and called them a band of Tartars, Is that how you behave in God's temple? out, the lot of you, and don't come back until you're more sober or at least less drunk! from there I went to Hradisko, where I worked in a brewery, and then I made a triumphant return in a striped suit, white-knobbed cane, and the last word in Parisian boaters, some people are dragged home by the police looking like something the cat's dragged in, while I came home like a movie star with a hundred gulden in my pocket, enough to pay off all my debts and buy a cow from Ponikve, I had the papers drawn up by old man Tyátr, the one who turned the old theater into a pub and whose wife had eighty cats and did nothing all day but keep their milk bowls full, another pharmacy had a preparation called Kaloderma, and a Karlsruhe firm by the name of Wolf und Sohn kept all Moravia supplied with its skin cream and fine pink face powder, the box showed a dreamy-eyed woman looking out into the distance, her hand resting on her temple and her head wound round with a light veil, everybody was jealous of that cow from Ponikve, a white Swiss, all white, it set me back eighty gulden, but we eventually sold it to the butcher because it was barren, of all the family my uncle went the farthest, and he made it to Zugsführer, platoon leader, he also wrote in a fine hand and was awarded a gold cross by the emperor, he wore gold braiding and a spiked helmet and was six foot tall and when he was a bachelor he could pull a pub to pieces like Římský from Kokory, but he sobered up after taking a wife, he married the head forester's daughter and built a house in Valašsko and raised turkeys and ended up chief of police, I once bought one of my beauties a lilyscented cream for extra-fair skin, Steckenpferd, from a firm in Radebeule, and for Zdenka, one of the Havrda girls, I bought a discreetly packaged and fully guaranteed gold-medal preparation by the name of Sinulin, and when she asked me what I wanted for it I said I wanted her to go for a walk with me, and she laughed and asked why, and I told her my hygiene manual said that a person suffering from heat prostration—she suffered from heat prostration—should rub lukewarm water directly on the exposed chest, and she said, Oh you men and your one-track minds! the world is a beautiful place, don't you think? not because it is but because I see it that way, the way Pushkin saw it in that movie, poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his head, I could tell from the picture that
he
admired the European Renaissance too, he had fantastic muttonchops, you know, the whiskers our own Franz Joseph wore, and Strauss the composer, I was walking along the river one day when Libuška rode up to me on her bicycle—practically knocked me over, in fact—and said, When are you going to bring me another bunch of roses, another bouquet? and for an answer I upped and kissed her, just like Hans Albers in the steamship scene, and she screamed, My God! and I laughed and said, Not your God but your man, which made
her
laugh and practically knock me over again and opened the way to another adventure, which I was man enough to take advantage of, and in another pharmacy I saw a whole row of bottles of Peru Tanin, which promised to make your hair grow long and thick and showed the two daughters of the inventor with hair down to their ankles, though in the days of the monarchy long hair was less important than big busts, there were women who had to wear rucksacks filled with bricks to keep from toppling over, they were really something those bosoms, from morning till night the monarchy thought of nothing but bosoms, the bra stuffing that went on! having a daughter with breasts smaller than beer bottles was a family tragedy, it's making a comeback now, by the way, you're starting to see the build you saw then, when I watched the Spartakiad on television I saw a pack of giants in shorts and halters hurtling across the screen, as fully packed as Maria Theresa, our girls all of them, the men were beat after a day of watching them on parade in such numbers, that night I stole into a garden and picked some roses, then I climbed the fence into Libuška's garden and left the roses on her windowsill like the Mexicans and the Spaniards, and they do nothing but ride horses and serenade their señoritas with guitars, and I was so diplomatic that the next day Libuška called to me through the curtains to come and see her, so I looked on while she slipped out of her shoes and peeled off her stockings, draped herself over the ottoman and asked if she sent shivers up my spine, threw herself on the couch and sniffed the roses I'd given her, and then, sitting up and making eyes at me, she undid her blouse and cut into her skin with a razor blade and said, Come and bind it, quick, before I get blood poisoning, and while I pulled the bandage tight she said, You don't like me as much as you like the bar ladies, do you? and I, ever the cavalier, put her mind at ease, You have other charms, dear lady, I said, You are slender, you have shapely legs, and she revived at once, so we took the wash out to the mangle, and the old women were green with envy, Wouldn't lift a finger for
us
now, would he! and I quoted Anna Nováková's dream book to her, Putting laundry through a mangle means you will soon be privy to deep secrets, and she told me how she planned to celebrate her twenty-first birthday and that she'd be scared to go to the island with me at midnight, there was something in my eyes, but I said, You'll get over it, Libuška, you're wild now, but eventually you'll be snapped up by a widower and then you'll need every trick in the book, you can't be too careful, Keep a low profile, a young wife once told me, and we'll make for the woods after dark, another of the Havrda girls, Vlasta—the one who played the piano and spoke German and did handstands on the billiard table and her skirt flopped like a poppy—Vlasta would say to me, You know what makes you so exciting? the way you ignore me, while Navrátilová whispered in my ear in the midst of one of our eccentric dances at the Catholic House, Look, all eyes are upon us, so I tried the step Fuksa-Koštálová is known for, but eccentric force landed us under a table, Jarmilka once tried to do at the Slávia what she'd seen at the Ziegfeld Follies, but she misjudged the lunge and sailed over my head and rammed her glasses so deep into an eyebrow you can still see the scar, Vlasta of the Havrda girls was my favorite though, she was madly in love with me, once when I was carrying her around a nightclub on my shoulders she laughed so hard she wet both herself and me and the whole place went into an uproar, people say she died in a car accident with a bunch of soldiers, but Havrda says it's not true, she's still alive, too much alive, and working as a nurse, in any case she was so temperamental she belonged in a convent, I'd bought a nose straightener at the time, you wore it on your nose the way women wear curlers in their hair, you screwed it on according to the kind of nose you had in mind, I wanted one like Rudolph Valentino's, Havrda used to play cards with an old man named Švec, God's Blessings was their game, and as Švec was walking past a church near the end of his life he said to himself, I wonder what they do in there, he'd never set foot in a church before, and seeing all the pomp he said, A pity no one ever told me, and decided to stay on as a sacristan, that was about the time when Vlasta threw the handsome miller's ring back in his face, I never bought her anything, I just took her a rose now and then, that disarms a woman, the minute I entered the pub she'd come and sit next to me, I'd make believe I was reading the paper and she'd say, What are you doing sitting there like a toadstool? and I'd press her against a pillar and the waiter would run to her rescue and I'd kick him away like a football and lean over her like a hero and give her a kiss, and the pub would go wild, some pharmacies sold Fountain of Youth steambath facials, another gold-medal winner and as elegant as they come, with the head of a pretty woman on the box-top, she was under a kind of brooding basket connected by a nickel tube to a bronze machine and had on a Brussels lace blouse with EVER YOUNG crocheted across the breast, one night one of my beauties came up to me behind the record player on Žofín Island and whispered, What do you say we get out of here, the two of us, I'll just give my face a scrub and put on some fresh underwear, you wouldn't believe how jealous those vamps were, they even tried to poison my coffee, it was about the time me and old man Řepa were delivering beer with a team of oxen, and one day the oxen lay down on the tracks and the gatekeeper couldn't lower the barrier, so the train just stood there and the engine drivers jumped down and the conductors tried pulling the beasts by their tails, but they just lay there, and soon the train was ten minutes behind schedule and all the conductor could do was count each extra minute on his pocket watch, the stationmaster's assistant waved a rug-beater in front of them, but they kept chewing their cud, then a milkman remembered the thing to do was squirt water in their ears, and that did it, up came their tails and off they bolted at such a pace that we lost a few kegs in the curves and the boss threw a fit and said, Here, take my bike and get me a pack of Egypts, so I took the bike and pushed it all the way to the shop and back, and when I gave him the cigarettes he yelled, Where have you been so long? and I said, I don't know how to ride a bike, and who should show up just then but Zdenka, all decked out like the pope and desirous of a private audience with me, so off we went to the workers' dormitory, all the men from the brewery thought I'd knocked her up and I just wanted her to see the picture over my bunk showing a man by the name of Othello murdering his beloved, but Zdenka stretched a blanket across the window, so the boss ordered two men to lean a ladder against the wall and he climbed up, I could see his face over the blanket and a rain cloud, black as pitch in the middle, with a golden border, and sitting there on my bunk I told Zdenka the story of how Kaluža and Kalíř arrested Lecián and how when Lecián was up there on the gallows he said to Wohlschleger, his hangman, Get on with it, your hands are cold, and Zdenka said, Married life with you would be bliss, but I talked her out of it, I told her I lacked the criminal instincts for matrimony, because when children start coming you're really in for it, then even the emperor jumps out of bed at night, which is why Schumann the composer waded into cold water and said to his wife in the movie, People are puppets, that's where inspiration comes from, but when your piece is ready you can go for a schnapps or a stroll, and when Zdenka tried to get me on my back by saying a hundred crowns would do the trick, I told her Mr. Batista's book said a virgin is always best and kissing distance is bliss and not even us soldiers were in the habit of climbing through windows and raping innocent girls, at least that's what Colonel Zawada taught us, and he had eight horses and thirty-six infantry battalions shot out from under him, when I told that to a young woman she giggled and said it was no wonder we'd lost on all fronts, we were a degenerate army, Colonel Zawada had a German shepherd and two batteries of cannons, the enemy was all over the woods, trees were going up like matches, but Colonel Zawada studied his maps and put machine guns in all the hot places, he wore a gold collar with a big star on it and kept having us practice enemy attacks, he would take me by the chin and make sure I was well shaven and only then inspect my weapons, at three in the morning we'd get coffee and at five we'd go and relieve the front line, first the bugler, next the drummer, and lastly the officers flying all over the place, by then it had stopped raining, Zdenka sat there drawing pictures on the floor with her umbrella and the boss stood there shading his eyes and peeking in on us, but Zdenka told me to come and see her that evening, she wanted to show me her striped featherbed and play me her new records, The Silver Fern and a characteristic intermezzo called The Black Forest Mill, and as she walked down the path the brewers drooled like Saint Bernards to see so firm and fully packed a toy of nature and the boss stared after her through his telescope and I swung a shovel over my shoulder and went out to turn the barley, thinking of Smetana, who was more slave than master and when he died they used his music for wrapping sausages, two cases full, that's what you get for helping your people to enjoy their leisure time, which is what Dvořák was after too, and he was a butcher's apprentice, but no, all people want to do is drink and listen to Humoresque, when the police came for Havlíček his wife Juliánka thought she'd go out of her mind or her heart would break, the head that man Havlíček had on him, the epigrams he wrote, the epistles, Bondy the poet once went to see my nephew, with his two babies in their baby buggy and because the pub closed after they'd drunk only three buckets of beer they took one home for the night and poured it into the washbasin and went on with their academic debate till they fell asleep, and my nephew woke up thinking a pipe had burst, but it was only poor Bondy pissing his two buckets onto the rug, after which he tumbled back into bed and didn't get up until morning when the babies began to bawl, and he looked around and shouted Eureka! out of the blue and started cheering and jumping up and down on the piss-soaked rug and shouting, Listen, everybody, not only people who aren't with us are with us, no, even people who are against us are with us, because you can't cut yourself off from your times, there you have it, ladies, now you see why poets love to drink and meditate, and just when things are looking grim the heavens open up and out comes a thought making its way to the light, I kept turning the raging malt I'd plowed up and thinking, Socrates and Christ they never wrote a line yet their teachings are still valid, while others are less read the more books they publish, history's revenge you might call it, I once challenged a soapmaker to a diving contest from a billiard table and won, though my head was full of bumps and bruises afterwards, one day we reenacted King Farouk's triumphant march, all the bar beauties took part even though it was engineered by that bastard Olánek who sold second-hand furniture and paintings and who once took a painting and made a hole in it just where the Virgin Mary's eye was and put an eye from a carp in the hole and made it stick with a piece of adhesive on the back, and the Hungarians he sold it to hung it next to the stove and one day they ran out and told everybody they'd been praying to the Virgin Mary and she'd started shedding tears over them when all that really happened was the carp's eye had burst, anyway, that bastard Olánek brought a donkey into the Tunnel Bar and the bar beauties undressed me and pulled a kind of slip over me, wound a turban round my head, smeared my face with enamel paint, and took me from pub to pub on the donkey—the Grand was the only one we got kicked out of—and then that bastard Olánek gave the donkey pepper to smell and it threw me, but I was still a hero, I went to the zoo dressed in a fine suit I'd inherited from a man whose legs were so crooked he had to have his trousers made to measure, but otherwise they fit as if made for a dollar Venus, so anyway there I was standing in front of the lion's cage and all at once the lion lets loose and psss! I get this beer-glass worth of lion piss brilliantine in my hair, he managed to hit two Slovenes too, I had to use perfume for a week the stink was so bad, and the City Bar beauties kept sniffing me and asking if I hadn't been hanging around their competition, there wasn't any television or even radio at the time so people had to do everything for themselves, and they lived one on top of the other, poor people never let their beds cool down, they took turns sleeping in them, the man on night shift in a hotel would climb into a warm bed when the man on day shift went off to work, once a group of rabbit breeders invited me to demonstrate my vocal art and I decided to perform The Nightingale Trills on the Shore for their enjoyment, but that bastard Olánek told the band to play something else, so it was me and my Nightingale against them and their Joyful Youth, well, the rabbit breeders were hopping mad and threw the bowl with the lottery tickets at me and a Wiener schnitzel too, but I was still a hero, I was sorting potatoes one day for my brother, the one I went to visit for two weeks, and his boss saw me and said, What's this maltster doing lying fallow? and he shoved a shovel into my hands and soon I was demonstrating the high-quality techniques I'd learned at the Benešov brewery of Oliverius & Šarlinger, which really floored him, so then he asked me how I was at unloading coal, and I grabbed another shovel and before you could blink an eye the coal was rolling at his feet and by the time he shouted, Hey, man, watch what you're doing, he was up to his knees in it, but I just kept going and in only three quarters of an hour I was through, You don't waste any time, do you? his beauty of a bookkeeper said to me, and I said, You mean this? this is child's play, I got my training from Římský, the strongman of Kokory, who kicked a young lady's wooden leg to bits during a brawl, after which four policemen died in their hospital beds, it's a real talent going straight for the jugular or smashing an Adam's apple or placing the wrench between the eyes, and my brother's boss said, Your reward will be to go beeing with me, and he put on his bee veil and gloves, because a swarm of bees is no laughing matter, the bees make these big bumps on a tree and they have to be cut off, which the tree owners don't like, so you get into fights with your neighbors, anyway, my brother's boss told me he wanted to teach me and Mr. Haňka how to hang out beehives, but while we were having our first lesson Mr. Haňka tripped and dropped one and off we flew, but little good it did us, they lit into us something awful, Mr. Haňka knelt and begged the bees to stop, he had a wife and children, but they stung him all over, even his private parts, which swelled up to the size of a watering can, I couldn't go to the bar for three days, and the first thing Bobinka did when she saw me was to play Cemetery, Cemetery on the Victrola, and the next thing was to take me upstairs—because she didn't think I could see much yet—and strip me naked, then she filled a pitcher with water and said, How about a little marriage training using the Hardy method, but all at once we heard a scream outside the door, well, what had happened was the blacksmith was so drunk they foisted a real hag off on him, but he switched on his flashlight and burst out of the room in his underpants, smashing the railing to smithereens and shouting, Who gave me that old bat? she's as ugly as an academic portrait painter! well, I threw on my clothes then and there, I was as sensitive as the blacksmith, it wasn't at all like the time when we initiated the stove fitter into the mysteries of love on the billiard table, he was a little crack-brained to begin with, he'd tiled himself twice into stoves and had to be pried out with a crowbar, which meant redoing the entire stove, even now the daughters of good families bring me roses and