I Served the King of England (11 page)

So there I was in Karel’s place. I thought of Zden
ě
k, the headwaiter who liked waking up a whole village and spending all
his money like a bankrupt aristocrat, and then I thought, for the first time in a long
time, of the maître d’ from the Golden City of Prague, my first maître
d’, Malek was his name. He was incredibly stingy and no one knew where he kept his
money, though everyone knew he had a lot of it and was saving up for a little hotel of
his own,
and that when he retired he would buy or rent a hotel
somewhere in the Bohemian Paradise district. But the truth was quite different, because
once we got drunk at a wedding and he grew very sentimental and confessed that eighteen
years ago his wife had sent him with a message for a friend of hers, and when he rang
the doorbell and the door opened, there stood a beautiful woman who blushed, and so did
he as they both stood there in the doorway thunderstruck. She was holding some
embroidery, and he went in and didn’t say a word but put his arms around her while
she went on embroidering, and then she slipped down onto the couch and went on
embroidering behind his back while he took her like a man—those were his words.
From then on he was in love and saved his money, a hundred thousand crowns in eighteen
years, so that when he left his family, his wife and children, they would have some
security. He would buy them a little house and then, though his hair was gray, go find
happiness with his gray-haired beauty. After he told me all this, he unlocked his
writing desk and showed me the hundred-crown notes he had stashed away to buy his
happiness with, and looking at him I never would have guessed it, because one of his
trouser legs was hiked up and he was wearing old-fashioned long underwear that came down
to his ankle and was tied there with white lace sewed inside the cuff of his trouser
leg. It was underwear straight out of my childhood, when I lived with my grandmother in
the mill where the traveling salesmen would fling their underwear out of the window of
the Charles Bath, the very same kind of long underwear that had once hung for a moment
in the air. So each of the headwaiters was different, and Malek from the Golden City of
Prague suddenly
appeared to me, alongside the headwaiter of the
Hotel Paris, like a saint of some kind, like the painter and poet Tonda Jódl who
sold
The Life of Jesus Christ
and was forever putting his jacket on and taking
it off again, covered with powder from his medicine, and with his mouth stained yellow
from drinking Neurastenin. And I wondered what kind of headwaiter I would make. Now it
was I who served the brokers every Thursday, because Karel never came back. Like all
rich people, the brokers were as cheerful and playful as puppies, and when they closed a
deal they would throw their money around like butchers who’d won at cards. Of
course, butchers who played cards would occasionally lose their shirts and get home
three days later minus their buggy, minus their horses, minus the livestock they’d
bought, with nothing left but a whip. Sometimes these brokers would lose everything too,
and then they’d sit in the private chambers looking at the world like Jeremiah
watching Jerusalem burn. Gradually I gained the confidence of the young ladies who
waited in the café until the exchange closed and then went down to the private
chambers, and it didn’t matter whether it was eleven in the morning or late
afternoon or dusk or late at night, because at the Hotel Paris the lights were always
on, like a chandelier you’ve forgotten to switch off. Best of all I liked the
private chambers the young ladies called the Clinic, or Diagnostics 100, or the
Department of Internal Medicine. The brokers who were still at the height of their
virility would try to get the women tipsy as fast as possible, then slowly remove their
blouses and skirts until they were rolling around with them on the upholstered couches
and chairs as naked as God made them,
and the brokers would end up
completely worn out, so exhausted from making love in unusual positions that they looked
as if they’d just suffered a heart attack. But in the Department of Internal
Medicine or Diagnostics 100 things were merrier. Entertaining the older gentlemen was
the most popular job, because this was where the girls raked in the most. The older
brokers would laugh and make jokes and treat the undressing of a young woman as a
collective game of strip poker, removing her clothes little by little, right on the
table, while they sipped their drinks from their crystal champagne glasses and savored
the bouquet. The girl would then lie back on the table, and the old brokers would gather
around her with their glasses and plates of caviar and lettuce and sliced Hungarian
salami, and they’d put on their spectacles and study every fold and curve of her
beautiful female body, and then, as if they were at a fashion show or a life-study class
in some academy of art, they’d ask the girl to sit, or stand up, or kneel, or let
her legs dangle from the table and swing back and forth as though she were washing them
in a stream. These brokers would never worry or argue among themselves about who had
what part of her body closest to them, but their animation was like the animation of a
painter transferring what excites him in a landscape to his canvas, and so these old men
would peer through their glasses at the crook of an elbow, a strand of loose hair, an
instep, an ankle, a lap, and one would gently part the two beautiful cheeks of her
behind and gaze with childish admiration at what was revealed, and another would shriek
in delight and roll his eyes to the ceiling, as if thanking the Lord Himself for the
privilege of peering between the open thighs of a young
woman and
touching whatever pleased him most with his fingers or his lips. This private chamber
was always filled with light, not only with the strong light from the ceiling funneling
down through a parchment lampshade but also with the glitter of wineglasses and four
pairs of spectacle lenses moving back and forth like tiny veiled fish in an illuminated
aquarium. When they had had their fill of looking, the brokers would call it quits and
pour the young woman some champagne, and she would sit on the table and drink toasts
with them, and they would call her by her first name, and she could help herself to
anything she wanted from the table. The older men made jokes and were courteous to her,
while from the other chambers you could hear raucous laughter, sometimes suddenly
silenced, and I often felt the urge to barge in there, certain I’d find a dead
body or a dying broker lying on the floor. Then my old men would dress the young woman,
like running a movie backward, and dress her just the way they had undressed her, with
none of the apathy that comes afterward, none of the indifference, but with the same
courtesy they had shown her from the start. When they left, one of them would always pay
the whole bill, they would tip the head-waiter, and I always got a hundred crowns, and
they would leave, glowing and at peace with themselves, full of beautiful images that
would last them a week. By next Monday they would be looking forward to examining a
different woman on Thursday, because they never had the same woman twice, perhaps in
order to spread their reputation among the Prague prostitutes. At the end of each
session, the young woman they had just examined would hang around the private chamber,
waiting, breathing heavily,
eyeing me greedily as if I was a movie
actor, because she was so aroused she couldn’t bring herself to leave. So after I
finished clearing the table and put away the last piece of cutlery, I’d have to
finish what the old men began. The women would throw themselves on me with such passion
and eagerness, it was as if they were doing it for the first time, and for those few
minutes I felt tall and handsome and curly-haired, and I knew that I was king for those
beautiful young women, though it was only because their bodies had been so tickled by
eyes, hands, and tongues that they could scarcely walk. Not until I felt them climaxing
once, twice, would they come to life again, their eyes would return, the glassy absent
stare of passion would disappear, and they would see things normally again. Once more I
became a tiny waiter, standing in for someone strong and handsome, performing on command
every Thursday with increasing appetite and skill. This had been the specialty of Karel
my predecessor, who had the aptitude and the capacity and the love for it, though I had
that too. And I must have been good in other ways as well, because all the young women
would greet me when they met me, in the hotel or on the street, and if they were a long
way off they’d bob or wave their hankies or their purses, and if they had nothing
in their hands, they’d at least give me a friendly wave, and I’d bow or
acknowledge them with a wide sweep of my hat, then stand straight again and raise my
chin, feeling taller than my double-soled shoes could make me.

And so I started setting more store by myself than I should have. When I
had time off, I would dress up, and I fell in love with neckties, the kind of ties that
really make
the clothes, which in turn make the man. I bought
myself the same kind of ties our guests had, but that wasn’t enough for me,
because in my mind I kept opening the door to the hotel closet hung with clothes and
things that guests had left behind. I had never seen anything, anywhere, like the ties
in that closet, ties with small name tags attached to them by thin thread, one belonging
to Alfred Karniol, a wholesaler from Damascus, another to Salamon Pihovaty, the director
of a company from Los Angeles, a third to Jonathan Shapliner, who owned spinning mills
in Lvov, and a fourth and a fifth, and there were dozens of ties, and I longed to have
one of that class and wear it someday, and it was all I could think of. I had it
narrowed down to two, a metallic blue one and a dark red one made of the same kind of
material as the blue one. They both shimmered like the wings of rare beetles or
butterflies, and with a summer jacket, one or two buttons undone, one hand in my pocket
and a fine tie hanging from my neck to my waist, I would be admired by everyone. When I
tried the red tie on in front of a mirror, I could see myself walking down Wenceslaus
Square and along Národní, and the other pedestrians, most of them elegantly
dressed, stopped in their tracks, startled by my beautiful tie, and I strolled by with
my jacket unbuttoned so all the connoisseurs could see it. So I was standing before the
mirror in the attic of the Hotel Paris, slowly undoing the shiny red Bordeaux necktie,
when another one caught my eye, one I’d never noticed before. There was my tie! It
was white and seemed to be made of an unusual rough fabric covered with small blue dots,
light blue, like forget-me-nots, and though those dots were part of the weave, they
looked as if they’d been
stuck on and glittered like sparks
struck from an anvil. A tiny tag hung from the thread, which said the tie had been left
behind by Prince Hohenlohe. When I put it on and saw myself in the mirror, I felt some
of Prince Hohenlohe flow from his tie to me, and I put a little powder on my nose and on
my freshly shaved chin, walked out of the restaurant, and paraded up and down Pfikopy,
looking into the shopwindows. And it turned out just the way I’d seen it in the
attic mirror. But it wasn’t the money, because almost everyone who wore a special
tie and beautifully tailored clothes and suede shoes and carried an umbrella like an
English lord had money, but no one had a tie like mine. I entered a men’s
haberdashery, and the minute I walked in the door I was the center of attention, or
rather the tie was. I asked to see several pairs of muslin shirts, which I examined
carefully, and then to add some polish to my appearance I asked the saleswoman to choose
for me one out of their dozen white handkerchiefs and arrange it in my breast pocket the
way it was supposed to be worn those days. She laughed and said, You can’t be
serious, you tie your necktie so beautifully. And she took a handkerchief—and I
finally saw how it was done, because I had never been able to get it right—and
spread it on the table and picked it up lightly in the middle with three fingers as if
taking a pinch of salt from a saltcellar, and she shook it gently to make beautiful
pleats, then drew the pleats through her other hand, folded the bottom under, tucked it
into my breast pocket, and teased the corners into place. I thanked her, paid the bill,
and was given two parcels, a beautiful shirt and five handkerchiefs, both tied with
golden cord. Next I went into a shop selling men’s suit
fabrics, and my white necktie with its blue dots and my white handkerchief with its
cone-shaped folds and corners as sharp as the points of a curled linden leaf drew the
attention not only of the salesmen but also of two well-dressed gentlemen, who were
staggered when they saw me, because their confidence in their own ties and handkerchiefs
was shaken. Then I looked at some material for a suit, though I didn’t have the
money for it with me, and I chose an Esterházy, an English cloth, and asked them to
take it outside so I could examine it in sunlight. They saw at once that I was a
customer who knew his fabrics, and the salesman carried the whole bolt outside for me
and flipped back the corner so I could judge for myself how my future suit would look in
the city streets. I thanked him and then hesitated awkwardly, but the salesman reassured
me that it was quite all right to take my time deciding, tomorrow was another day, I
could buy this material any time, and the firm of Heinrich Pisko was assured of my
business since it was the only one in Prague that carried this material. I thanked them
and walked out and crossed the street, cocking my head slightly and furrowing my brow to
make myself look distinguished and thoughtful. Then something happened that convinced me
the necktie had changed me a lot, because along came Véra, who’d been in the
Department of Internal Medicine only last Thursday. She saw me, and I could tell she was
about to give me a friendly wave with her purse and white gloves, but suddenly she
stopped, as if she wasn’t quite sure now that it was me, the one who’d had
to give himself to her so she could leave the hotel and go home after the old men had
got her so excited. So I pretended I was someone else, and
she
turned to look back at me and then walked on, certain she’d made a mistake, and it
was all because of the necktie and handkerchief. At Prašná Brána I
crossed the street again, so I could walk back along Pfikopy, and just as I was
congratulating myself on my outfit, who should I see coming toward me, his hair like a
white lambskin cap, but the headwaiter Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, but he wasn’t looking at me though I knew he’d
seen me. As he walked past, I stopped as if he’d greeted me, and turned to look
after him, and Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek stopped too, turned
around, and walked back to me. When he looked into my eyes, I realized that all he had
seen of me was a white tie walking down Pfikopy, and the headwaiter, who knew
everything, looked at me as if to say he knew where I’d got the tie, that
I’d borrowed it without permission. And as he looked at me, I said silently to
myself, How did you know all this? And he laughed and replied out loud, How do I know? I
served the King of England. And he went on walking down P
ř
ikopy. The sun was shining, but now it seemed to turn dark, and I felt
like a lamp whose wick the headwaiter had turned down, or an inflated tire whose valve
he had loosened. I could hear the air hissing out of me as I walked along, and I felt
that I was no longer lighting my own way, and that the tie and the handkerchief had
wilted like me and were limp, as if I had just run through the rain.