I Served the King of England (13 page)

to the floor. A second epicure, a retired general,
stared at the ceiling and let out a long ecstatic moan that rose in cadences with each
mouthful, and after he took a drink of Zernoseky Riesling he rose and whimpered so that
even the black cooks understood, and they cried out happily, Yes, yes, samba, yes! The
mood became so exalted that the Prime Minister shook hands with the Emperor and the
photographers ran up and took pictures of everything, their bright flashguns popping,
and in the light of that fireworks the representatives of our country and Ethiopia shook
hands.

When Haile Selassie left, bowing, all the guests bowed too, the generals
of both armies exchanged medals, and the government counselors pinned on the stars
they’d been given by the Emperor and they draped the sashes across their chests.
And I, the smallest one there, was suddenly taken by the hand and led to the Ethiopian
Chancellor, who pressed my hand and pinned a medal with a blue sash on me—the
lowest in degree, of course, but the largest in size—for exemplary service
rendered to the throne of the Emperor of Ethiopia. When the medal had been pinned to the
lapel of my tuxedo, and the blue sash draped across my breast, I lowered my eyes.
Everyone envied me, most of all the headwaiter of the Hotel Šroubek, who was
supposed to have got the medal. I saw in his eyes that I should let him have it: he had
only a couple of years to go before he retired, and had probably been waiting for
something like this to come along, because with a medal like that he could open a hotel
somewhere in the foothills of the Krkonoše Mountains of the Bohemian Paradise
district and call it the Hotel of the Order of the Ethiopian Empire. But the
journalists and reporters had already taken down my name and
snapped my picture, so I walked around with the medal and the blue sash as we cleared
the tables and took the plates and the cutlery into the kitchen and worked far into the
night. When the women, supervised by the detectives disguised as cooks and waiters, had
washed and dried three hundred sets of gold cutlery, our headwaiter Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek counted them, assisted by the headwaiter from
the Hotel Šroubek. They counted them a second time and a third time, and then the
boss counted the small coffee spoons himself. When he was done, he turned pale—one
spoon was missing—and they counted again, and talked it over, and I saw the
headwaiter from the Hotel Šroubek whispering something to the boss, and they looked
surprised. The waiters who were on loan cleaned up, and then they all went into the
serving room, because there was so much food left over. The cooks and the waitresses all
came too—not to finish the food, but to taste it at their leisure, and watch our
cooks, who were analyzing it and guessing what spices went into which sauces and what
methods were used to produce dishes so exquisite that the government counselor
Konopásek, who used to be the official taster at the Prague Castle, had been moved
to yell in ecstasy. But I’d lost my appetite, because the boss wouldn’t look
at me, and I could see that he took no joy in my unfortunate decoration. The headwaiter
from the Hotel Šroubek was still talking quietly with our headwaiter, Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, and suddenly I realized they were talking
about the missing gold spoon and were thinking that I had stolen it. So I poured myself
a glass of the cognac that was reserved for us and took a drink, then poured another and
walked up
to my headwaiter, the one who had served the King of
England, to see if he was angry with me. I told him that I thought I’d been given
the medal in error, and that the headwaiter from the Hotel Šroubek should have got
it, or he himself, or our boss. But no one paid any attention to me, and I could see
that even Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek was staring at my bow tie
with the same intense look he’d given me a few days before when he stared at the
white tie with the blue dots, as blue as the spots on a swallowtail butterfly’s
wings—the tie I had borrowed without permission. I could see in his eyes that he
was thinking that if I’d taken the tie without permission I could have taken the
gold spoon too. And in fact it was the last thing I’d cleared from the
Emperor’s table, I’d taken it and put it right in the sink. I felt covered
with shame as I stood there, my glass held out, waiting to drink a toast with a
headwaiter I thought the world of, more than the Emperor himself or the President, and
he raised his glass too, but hesitated, and I was desperate for him to toast that
miserable medal with me, but though he always knew everything, this time he did not
know, and he clinked his glass with the headwaiter from the Hotel Šroubek, who was
the same age as he, then turned away from me.

I walked away with my outstretched glass and drank it. Everything began to
burn, I was on fire, I poured myself another cognac and ran out, just as I was, into the
night in front of our hotel, my former hotel, because I didn’t want to be in this
world any longer. I caught a cab, and the driver asked me, Where to? I told him to take
me out to some woods, because I needed the fresh air. As we drove along, everything
swept by me to the rear—first lights, a
lot of lights, then
just a streetlamp here and there, then nothing. The driver stopped by an
honest-to-goodness woods. As I paid the fare, he looked at my decoration and the blue
sash and said he wasn’t surprised I was so excited, that lots of headwaiters had
themselves driven to Stromovka Park or wherever to stretch their legs. I just laughed
and told him I wasn’t going to stretch my legs, I was going to hang myself.
Seriously? the cab driver said, laughing. With what? He was right, I had nothing to do
it with, so I said, My handkerchief. The driver got out of his cab, opened the trunk,
rummaged around with a flashlight, then handed me a piece of rope. Still laughing, he
made an eye in one end and ran the other end through it to make a noose and showed me
the proper way to hang myself. He got back in his cab, rolled down the window, and
yelled, Good luck! With that he pulled away, blinking his lights in farewell, and as he
drove out of the woods he honked his horn. I walked down a footpath through the woods
and sat on a bench. When I’d gone through the whole thing again in my head and
come to the conclusion that the headwaiter didn’t like me anymore, I decided I
couldn’t go on living. If it had been over a girl I’d have said,
There’s more than one flower under the sun, but this was a head-waiter who had
served the King of England and who believed I could have stolen the little spoon. True,
the spoon was missing, but someone else could have stolen it. I stood up and felt the
rope in my fingers, then it got so dark I had to grope my way forward, touching the
trees with my hands, thin little trees, and then I came to a clearing, and by the sky I
could see that I was walking through a stand of young spruce. Then there were woods
again, but all the
trees were birch now, tall birch, and I’d
have needed a ladder to reach one of the branches. I saw it wasn’t going to be
easy. Then I came to a patch of older pines, with branches so close to the ground that I
had to crawl under them on my hands and knees, and my medal kept bumping my chin and
face, reminding me over and over of the missing gold spoon. I stopped, still on all
fours, and turned everything over in my mind again. But I kept coming to the same
painful place in my brain and I couldn’t get past it: Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek wouldn’t be training me anymore, we wouldn’t
be laying any more bets about what the different guests would or should order or what
nationality they were, and I began to moan like the chief government counselor
Konopásek after several bites of that wonderful stuffed camel, and I made up my
mind to hang myself. As I knelt there, I felt something touch my head, so I reached up
and touched the toes of a pair of boots, and then I groped higher and felt two ankles,
then socks covering a pair of cold legs. When I stood up, my nose was right up against
the stomach of a hanged man. I was so terrified I started to run, pushing through rough
old branches that tore my face and ears, but I made it back to the path, where I
collapsed on the ground, and right there with the rope still in my hands I fainted. I
was roused by lanterns and human voices, and when I opened my eyes I saw that I was
lying in the arms of Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, and I kept
saying, Over there, over there. And they found the hanged man who had saved my life,
because I had been all set to hang myself a little way from him or alongside him. The
head-waiter stroked my hair and wiped away the blood, and I cried out, The gold spoon!
The headwaiter whispered,
Don’t worry, they found it. I said,
Where? Very quietly he said, The water wasn’t draining out of the sink, so they
took the drain apart and the spoon was right there in the elbow. Forgive me. Everything
will be all right, just as before. I said, How did you know where I was? And the
headwaiter said, The taxi driver came back to the hotel and asked the waiters if they
knew of anyone who might want to hang himself, and just then the plumber brought in the
missing spoon. The headwaiter, who had once served the King of England, knew at once
that it was me and set out to look for me.

And that’s how I came to be back in the Hotel Paris, as snug as a
pea in a pod, and how Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek began to trust
me with the key to the wine cellars and the liqueurs and cognacs, as if trying to make
up for that incident with the gold spoon. But the boss never forgave me for getting the
medal and the sash, and he treated me as if I didn’t exist, even though I made
enough money to cover my entire floor, and every three months I took a whole
floor’s worth of hundred-crown notes to the bank, because I was determined to be a
millionaire, to be the equal of everyone else. Then I’d rent or buy a small hotel,
a nice cozy little place somewhere in the Bohemian Paradise district, and marry a rich
woman, and when we put our money together I would be as respectable as the other hotel
owners, and if they didn’t acknowledge me as a man, they would have to acknowledge
me as a millionaire, a hotel owner, and a man of property. But then another unpleasant
thing happened to me. I went before the recruiting board three times and was turned down
three times because I wasn’t tall enough, and even when I tried to bribe the
military authorities they
wouldn’t take me as a soldier.
Everyone in the hotel laughed at me, and Mr. Brandejs himself asked me about it and made
fun of my size again. I knew now that I would be small till the day I died, because I
had finished my growing. The only way to change that now was to do what I’d been
doing all along, wear double-soled shoes and hold my head high, as though the collar of
my suit was too small. Something else happened too: I started taking German lessons,
going to German movies, and reading German newspapers, and it didn’t bother me
that German students began walking about the streets of Prague in white socks and brown
shirts. I was practically the only one left in the hotel who would serve German guests,
because all the other waiters started pretending they didn’t understand German,
and even Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek would speak only English or
French or Czech with Germans. Once, at a movie, I stepped on a woman’s foot and
she started speaking German. I apologized to her in German, and I ended up seeing her
home. She was attractively dressed, and to get on the good side of her and show her how
grateful I was that she spoke German with me I said it was awful what the Czechs were
doing to those poor German students, that I’d seen with my own eyes on
Národní how they pulled the white socks and brown shirts off two German
students. And she told me that I spoke the truth, that Prague was part of the old German
Empire and the Germans had an inalienable right to walk about the city dressed according
to their own customs. The rest of the world cared nothing for this right, but the hour
and the day would come when the Führer would come and liberate all the Germans,
from the forests of Sumava to the Carpathian Mountains. When she said
this, I was looking straight into her eyes and I noticed that I didn’t have
to look up at her the way I did at other women, because it was my bad luck that all the
women I’d had in my life were not just bigger than me but giants among women, and
whenever we were together I would be looking at their necks or their bosoms, but this
woman was as short as I was and her green eyes sparkled, and she was as spattered with
freckles as I was, and the brown freckles in her face went so well with her green eyes
that she suddenly seemed beautiful to me. I also noticed that she was looking at me in
the same way. I was wearing that beautiful white tie with the blue dots again, but it
was my hair she was looking at, as blond as straw, and my big blue eyes. Then she told
me that Germans from the Reich yearn for Slavic blood, for those vast plains and the
Slavic nature, that they’ve tried for a thousand years through good and evil to
wed themselves to that blood. She told me confidentially that many Prussian noblemen had
Slavic blood in them and that this blood made them more worthy in the eyes of the rest
of the nobility, and I agreed. I was surprised at how well she understood my German,
because this was not the same as taking a guest’s order for lunch or dinner, I
actually had to carry on a real conversation with the young lady whose black shoes I had
stepped on, so I spoke a little German and a lot of Czech, but I felt as though I were
speaking German all the time, because what I said seemed to me in the German spirit. The
young lady told me her name was Lise, that she was from Cheb, that she taught physical
education there, that she was a regional swimming champion, and when she opened her coat
I saw she was wearing a pin with four F’s arranged in a circle
like a four-leaf clover. She smiled at me and kept staring at my hair, which made
me uneasy, but my confidence was restored when she said I had the most beautiful hair in
the world, and the way she said it made my head spin. I said I was a headwaiter at the
Hotel Paris, and I told her this expecting the worst, but she put her hand on my sleeve,
and when she touched me her eyes flashed so intensely I was alarmed, and she said her
father had a restaurant in Cheb called the City of Amsterdam. So we made a date to see
the movie
Love in Three-Quarter Time
, and she came wearing a Tyrolean hat and
something I’ve loved since childhood, a jacket that looked green but was really
gray and had a green collar with oak fronds embroidered on it. It was just before
Christmas and snow was falling. She came to see me several times in the Hotel Paris, to
have lunch or supper, and the first time she came Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek looked at her and then at me and just like the old times we
went into the alcove and I laughed and said, Shall we put a twenty on what the young
lady orders? I saw that she was wearing that jacket again and those white socks. I
pulled out a twenty and set it down on the sideboard, but Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek gave me a queer look, like the time I’d tried to
drink a toast with him the evening I’d served the Emperor of Ethiopia and the gold
teaspoon got lost. My fingers were resting on the twenty-crown note, and he pulled out
twenty crowns too and slowly laid it down, as if everything was all right, but then he
snatched it away and stuck it back in his wallet, took another look at Lise, waved his
hand dismissively, and never said another word. After the shift he took back the keys to
the cellars and looked at me as though I wasn’t there, as though he had
never served the King of England and I had never served the
Emperor of Ethiopia. But I didn’t care now, because I could see that the Czechs
were being unjust to the Germans, and I even began to feel ashamed for being a
dues-paying member of Sokol, because Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek
was a great supporter of the Sokol movement, and so was Mr. Brandejs. All of them were
prejudiced against the Germans and particularly against Lise, who came to the hotel only
because of me, but they wouldn’t let me wait on her, since her table belonged to
another waiter’s station. I watched how miserably they treated her, how they would
give her cold soup and the waiter would put his thumb in it. Once I caught the waiter
spitting into her stuffed veal just before he went through the swinging door. I jumped
to grab the plate away from him, but he pushed it into my face and then spit at me, and
when I wiped the thick gravy out of my eyes he spit into my face again, so I’d see
how much he hated me. That was a kind of signal, because everyone from the kitchen ran
out, and all the other waiters gathered around and everyone spat in my face. They kept
it up until Mr. Brandejs himself came and, as head Sokol for Prague One, he spat on me
too and told me I was fired. Covered with spittle and roast-veal sauce, I ran into the
restaurant to Lise’s table and pointed to myself with both hands, to show her what
these Sokolites, these Czechs, had done to me because of her. She looked at me, wiped my
face with a napkin, and said, You can’t, you mustn’t expect anything else
from those Czech jingoes, and she said she was fond of me because of what I had put up
with on her account. We left the hotel after I changed my clothes so that I could walk
Lise home, but right outside the Prašná Brána some Czech
roughnecks ran up and gave her such a slap in the face that her Tyrolean hat went
flying into the street. I tried to defend her by shouting in Czech, What do you think
you’re doing! Is that any way for Czechs to behave? But one of the gang pushed me
away while two others grabbed Lise and shoved her to the ground. As two of them held her
arms, another pushed up her skirt and ripped her white socks from her suntanned legs. I
was still shouting as they were beating me—What the hell do you think you’re
doing, you Czech jingoes?—until they finally let us go and carried off
Lise’s socks like a white scalp, a white trophy. We went through a passageway to a
small square, and Lise was weeping and hissing, You’ll get yours, you pack of
Bolsheviks, we’ll teach you not to shame a German school-teacher from Cheb. I felt
like a big man as she held me tight. I was so livid, I looked for my Sokol membership
card so I could tear it up, but I couldn’t find it. Suddenly she looked at me, her
eyes full of tears, and right there on the street she burst out crying again, put her
cheek against my face, and pressed herself against me. I knew then that I had to defend
her against any Czechs who tried to harm a hair on this sweet little Egerlander’s
head, this daughter of the owner of the City of Amsterdam hotel and restaurant in Cheb,
which the Germans had annexed as imperial territory last fall, along with the rest of
the Sudetenland, taking it back to be a part of the Reich as it had once been many years
before. And now, here in the Prague of the Sokols, I could see with my own eyes what was
happening to the poor Germans, and it confirmed everything they said about why the
Sudetenland had to be taken back and why Prague might end up the same way if the lives
and honor
of German people were threatened and trodden in the mud.
And that’s just what happened.