Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (9 page)

wonder how I came by my good manners, but you should have seen what Olánek did when we wished him a happy fiftieth birthday and asked him how his health was holding up, right there in the main square he pulled out his member—he had ten beers in him at the time—and drenched the advertisement for Náchod Mills all the way to the accent over the
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while the local notary public passed under the stream and wished us a pleasant day, then there was the long-distance pissing contest at the Terrace Bar, Olánek was sure he'd won when a man who looked like nothing if not a Mariazell beggar piped up and asked if he could have a go at it, and Olánek said all right provided the winner got a liter of French cognac, so that night at midnight there were two bottles of cognac on the table, and the two men stepped out onto the terrace and the other guy undid his fly and in a flash the house across the road was dripping wet, you could hear the piss sloshing into the Elbe, so Olánek backed off and the other guy took his two bottles and disappeared, and Vít, who played drums in the navy band, said to Novák the violinist, How about a round of Violetta, and everybody climbed up on their chairs and I performed The Sultan's Wedding and Olánek tried to patch up his reputation by doing tableaux vivants on the table and pissing out over the guests, a lady told me later it would serve me right if I got hauled into court for mixing with the likes of him, one day I went to hear Járinek Pospíšil sing at the National Hall and the first thing he did was to ask whether there were any singers in the house, well, the ladies they all shouted, You go! to me, so the famous tenor helped me up onto the stage and told me to take a seat, but I said I couldn't, and suddenly the audience was all abuzz, so he said, Why not? and I said, Because I only paid for standing room, well, you should have heard the women shriek, I had one-upped the great Pospíšil! and then the piano chimed in and I sang The Painful Farewell and the ladies nearly brought the house down, what they said about Pospíšil was that even though he was divorced he had a voice like a nightingale and people like him shouldn't serve in the army because it would be a great loss to the nation if they were killed in a war, which I understood very well, because in the days of the monarchy I carried Captain Tonser's saber, I even had the good fortune to see the Generals von Manteuffel and von Rosenegg sitting together in a car wearing their gold helmets that looked liked chamber pots topped with the spikes they used to use for sprucing up china cupboards, I was also present when the two marshals with their pince-nez, Auffenberg and Dankl, launched the first offensive, and I had the honor of holding Conrad von Hötzendorf's bridle or, rather, his horse's bridle, an old man he was, but straight as a young lady, his son died in the marshes at the Battle of Gorodenka, if they'd only stayed put, what were they doing gallivanting around anyway? Conrad von Hötzendorf was a member of the emperor's family, an archduke, so he wore a little sheep around his neck like the emperor, only the emperor's held its head up and Conrad von Hötzendorf's held its head down, I've had quite a few dreams about monkeys, which according to Anna Nováková means you're going to be either seriously ill or lucky in love, but I've also dreamed of a dagger plunged into a chest, which means love requited, one day during Mass our priest turned and looked for the sexton, where was he? why wasn't he serving? why was he ruining the Mass? well, the sexton had slipped off to the pub for a quick nip instead of pouring the three teaspoons of incense into the censer so the priest could wave it through the church, incense is a resin that comes all the way from Africa, myrrh and aloe, anyway, the sexton comes back a little tipsy from his crème de menthe and the priest, taking the chalice out of the tabernacle, asks him, Where have you been? and the sexton says, I had to go to the toilet, and the priest puts down the chalice and bam! gives him a swift kick and shouts, Hasn't anybody ever told you that during the divine liturgy you are my right-hand man and that you don't pop out for a crème de menthe? and after a few more kicks and some punches in the nose for good measure he picks up the chalice and goes on with the service, and the women all sat there wondering about the new ritual they'd witnessed, and you know what, ladies? the sexton stopped going to the church after that and turned into a model social democrat, people used to be awfully nervous, if you dreamed someone was pouring cucumbers over your head from a plate it meant ardent love, or if you dreamed of a hag it meant marriage would stay away from your door, my brother was apprenticed to a baker from Valašsko, a man by the name of Benda, and once when he didn't catch something this Benda had said he said, What? and the next thing he knew he was flat on the ground, and when he came to this Benda said to him he said, Where I come from we say, I beg your pardon, but eventually he went to the dogs, he inherited some money from his mother and started drinking and ended up freezing to death somewhere, not a pretty story, it was like giving a child a knife to play with, our priest had the misfortune of finding a boy going at it with a girl one night right next to the church, at first he was afraid it was a parish priest, but it wasn't, anyway, he reported it, and soon we had a visit from four football players, at least that's what the missionaries sent to inspect local morals looked like in their cassocks and string belts, and they improved the local morals to such an extent that the police had to be called in, because the social democrats asked them very disturbing questions about man coming from the ape, and the freethinkers started arguing with them over which came first, the chicken or the egg, and on they went for two hours—where does the chicken come from? the egg, and where does the egg come from? the chicken—until somebody shouted, And where does the first egg come from? and the freethinkers yelled, From nature! and the missionaries yelled, Which God created! and before long they were knocking each other's blocks off and the church ladies ran and got the cops and said those godless atheists were insulting the sons of God, and then the ladies started throwing stones at the free-thinkers but hit two cops, because you can't close God up in a box, can you? now I remember, if you dream of plowing it means a wedding is in the offing, if you dream of striking matches it means you're in love, Mr. Batista's book says a twenty-year-old beauty gives any healthy young man a charge though she's no more use to an old man than an overcoat is to a corpse, our major was sitting on his stallion one day, surveying the most beautiful army in the world, and what does he see but a soldier in an overcoat covered with blood, so he calls him out of formation and bawls out the man's sergeant for having such filthy troops, in the days of the monarchy barons put up mirrors in their horses' stalls but let their grooms and servant girls sleep in the lofts, day laborers lived worse than cattle, yet somehow people sang more, maybe to make the work go faster, people don't sing anymore when they work, my friend Římský had a quick temper and a quick fist, when he went into a pub people's hearts sank into their boots, one day Římský fidgeted a little after the command Habt acht! and the lieutenant ran over to him and gave him a punch in the stomach, well, that was his chance, he grabbed the lieutenant's sword and broke it over his knee, then gave him an uppercut to the jaw and laid him out flat, the officers made a run for it, but the men were tickled pink, Prince Liechtenstein had a hundred estates, but to keep from paying taxes and raising his own army he merged them into ninety-nine, on the other hand, the doctors had to amputate his member and insert a silver tube in its place, so you see, young ladies, you can have all the riches in the world and still lack what matters most, which is why you need to take Mr. Batista's words into account and never buy a pig in a poke, you never know how things will turn out, one man takes up with a tramp and gets off scot-free, another takes all the proper precautions and gets a disease, one woman jumps off a ladder but still can't get rid of her baby, another blows her nose too hard and loses it, then there's the courting game, a clever girl puts an ad in the paper, seeking a man of sterling character, and, say, I respond, but just to make certain she checks up on me, asks around, he's not a skirtchaser, is he? she even goes to a detective agency for more information, really now! when I was in the army some dummy filled a bottle with pitralon thinking it was hypermangan, and one of the men coming back from the ladies washed himself off with what he thought was hypermangan but what was actually pitralon, well, you should have seen him race through the barracks lowing like a cow that needed milking, the same thing happened to our grandmother with a tonic the doctor had made up for her, a brown liquid she kept in a bottle next to the mirror, but our Great Dane was having trouble with its leg at the time and it had a brown salve in a bottle next to the mirror, well, one day Grandma drank the dog's salve with a blissful smile on her face because her tonic was part raspberry juice, and the minute she swallowed it we had to run for the doctor and then for the priest, a beauty once asked me very discreetly to take her urine to the doctor, but the doctor jumped down my throat and said she had to bring it on her own, though people tend to like me, Don't go yet, they tell me, we don't yet know why you're here, I was especially popular at church fairs, Make sure you come now, they'd say, We need somebody to clobber, they were just joking of course, I remember standing on a bridge holding hands with a beauty, looking down at the waves and up at the brown sky, and telling her that our town has thirty-two pubs, twenty-eight of which come with ladies, and is theater-crazy enough to have five theaters, the best plays were done at the Catholic Hall by a traveling company called the Přemysl Players, their biggest hit was El Tigro, a Mexican operetta starring a farmhand by the name of Kopecký who so strained himself harvesting clover that they had to stretch him out on a ladder and walk up and down him before each performance, then everything was fine except he had trouble standing after going down on his knees to declare his love, still he never failed to sing the role with great passion, and once he sang with such passion that his fly split open, which caused a real sensation, the ladies talked of nothing else all week, a group of tinkers and lock-smiths put on plays at the National Hall, plays about aristocrats mostly, Lady Wantoch's Fan or Lady Winter's Fan or something like that, anyway the lord was played by a sign painter, and when he knelt the striped trousers that went with the frock coat slid up and you could see his long johns underneath, and when he came out for his bows he was hit in the head by the lead weight that brought the curtain up and down, the ladies went wild when they saw him lying there, they thought it was part of the play, and at a performance of The Pearls of the Maiden Serafina in Hálek the director peeked through a hole in the curtain to see if people had taken their seats and then signaled to the stage manager to raise the curtain, but because the stage manager had been weaned on the foamy brew he raised the director together with the curtain, and when the director fell into the orchestra pit the audience applauded what they thought was the opening scene, and when they put on Raduz and Mahulena, which begins in the dark, the stage manager pulled up the curtain too soon and Raduz didn't realize it was up and asked, Where are you, Mahulena? and she called out from her branch, Up shit creek, and the audience was tickled pink again, they figured they were in for something racy from life, but when the stage manager saw what he'd done he gave the cord a jerk and the curtain came whizzing down and practically chopped Raduz's head off and the stage manager switched the house lights on and stuck his head through the curtain and shouted, The cord snapped! oh that was a fine show that was! but the best show of all was the Catholic Hall production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Přemysl Players, who all had their heads shaved for the occasion and one of the fairies got sciatica because it was winter, they counted all their jumps and used flashlights for lighting, but the character who wears the ass's head fell into the orchestra pit and started shouting Die, die! and the audience burst into applause, a standard bearer in our regiment, a man as strong as the Bauer who lifted cows over his head for fun and beat Frištenský, asked me to be his enemy on the parade ground one day when we were practicing Parade rechts and Parade links and single combat with fixed bayonets, so we got into position and I lunged then and there and pow! whacked him on the chin with my bayonet, which had this little ball on the end of it, and he did a backward somersault and had to be given artificial respiration by the Bosnians, You could have killed him, the lieutenants yelled at me, but I said, He asked me to be his enemy, but the lieutenants said, You should have done Parade rechts and Parade links first and only then gone into the einfacher Stoss, but I said, Really now, you don't expect me to do Parade rechts and Parade links with my enemy! of course I went straight to the einfacher Stoss, that was what made me a hero, there was a woman in our town by the name of Kača Rypová, a giant she was and a terrific dancer and when it came to beer she could drink anybody under the table, but one day this joker spiked her beer with mercury and then asked her to dance, it was a horrible sight, let me tell you, her daughter was a strange one though, her and her husband they'd go at it on the floor with their kids watching, I saw them too because I once made a delivery there and looked in through the window, but what I liked more than anything was the Mohammedan heaven with beauties on every floor, Mohammedans have something to look forward to, while Catholics must wonder what it's all for, when they get to their heaven all they seem to do is stare at the sun, Jesus! said Bondy the poet when one of his kids fell out of the baby buggy as we were leaving the pub, Jesus H. Christ! why is it some people buy prime pork for a song and I pay five hundred for a slice of bread? the slow train out of Steinbruck wasn't running one day so they put me on the fast train and it had this conductor who immediately caught my eye, a real looker, the Sýkorová type, well, before I knew it I was in first