I Served the King of England (14 page)

Not only was I fired from the Hotel Paris, but I couldn’t get a job
anywhere, not even as a busboy, because every time I was hired, the management was
informed the following day that I was a German sympathizer and, what was worse, a Sokol
who was going out with a German gym teacher. So I was unemployed for some time, until
the German army finally came and occupied not just Prague but the whole country. About
that time, Lise disappeared on me for two months. I wrote her and her father too, but
got no reply. The second day after the occupation of Prague, I was out for a walk. On
the Old Town Square the German army was cooking tasty soup in big kettles and passing it
out in mess cans to the population. As I stood there watching, who did I see, in a
striped dress with a red badge on her breast and a ladle in her hand, but Lise. I
didn’t say a word to her, just watched for a while as she ladled out the soup and
handed people their mess cans with a smile, until I finally got a grip on myself and
joined the line. When my turn came, she handed me a cup of warm soup. She wasn’t
shocked to see me, but excited and pleased and proud of her military dress of the
front-line Sisters of Mercy or whatever uniform it was. When I told her I’d been
out of work ever since I defended her honor at the Prašná Brána over
those white socks, she got someone else to take her place, put her arm through mine, and
laughed and bubbled over with excitement. I felt, and she did too, that the German army
had occupied Prague because of her white socks and because they had spit on me in the
hotel. As we walked along Pfikopy, soldiers in uniform
greeted
Lise, and I would bow to them each time, and just past the Prašná Brána
we turned and walked by the place where she was down on the sidewalk while they tore off
her white socks three months before, and when we entered the Hotel Paris I pretended to
be a customer looking for a table. The place was full of German officers now, and I
stood there with Lise in her Sister of Mercy uniform, and the waiters and Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek were pale as they waited on the German guests.
I sat down by the window and I ordered coffee in German, a white Viennese coffee with a
small glass of rum on the side, the way we used to serve it, á la Hotel Sacher,
Wiener Kaffe mit bespritzer Nazi
. It was a beautiful feeling when even Mr.
Brandejs came out and bowed, kowtowing with particular politeness to me, and all of a
sudden he began talking about the embarrassing incident that had happened back then and
he apologized for it, but I told him I wouldn’t accept his apology and that we
would have to see. And when I paid the headwaiter, Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, I told him, You may have served the King of England but
it hasn’t done you any good. And I got up and walked among the tables, while the
German officers greeted Lise, and I bowed too, as though they’d included me in
their greetings. That night Lise took me home, but first we went to a military casino of
some kind on Pfikopy, in a brown building, where we drank champagne in honor of the
occupation of Prague. The officers drank toasts with Lise and even with me, and she told
everyone how courageously I’d behaved in defending her German honor against the
Czech jingoes, and they acknowledged me with raised glasses, and I bowed and thanked
them. But I didn’t know that their greetings were meant for Lise alone and
that they were actually ignoring me, barely tolerating me as
someone who went along with Lise. She was a commanding officer in the nurses’
corps, as I learned during the toasts, because they addressed one another by rank. It
felt wonderful to be a part of this occasion, to be among captains and colonels and
young people with eyes as blue and hair as blond as mine, and though my German
wasn’t up to much, I felt German. As we were coming back from celebrating Lise
asked me to look up my family tree, because she was sure I must have some German
ancestry. I could only tell her that my grandfather’s name was spelled Johan Ditie
on his tombstone, that he had been a groom on a large estate, something I’d always
been ashamed of, but when Lise heard that, I seemed to gain stature in her eyes, more
than if I’d been a Czech count, and with this name Ditie, all the fortifications
and walls, thick and thin, that had separated us seemed to collapse, and she was silent
all the way home. She unlocked the big main door to an old tenement house and we walked
up the stairs, and on each landing she gave me a long kiss and fondled the crotch of my
trousers, and when we went into her little room and she turned on the table lamp, she
was all moist, her eyes and her mouth, and a whitish film seemed to have fallen across
her eyes. She pushed me back on the couch and kissed me again, for a long time, running
her tongue over all my teeth, counting them and whimpering and moaning like an ungreased
gate opening and closing in the wind. What came next was bound to happen, and I’d
expected it, but this time it didn’t come from me, as it always had at such times
before, but from her, because it was she who needed me. Slowly she undressed and watched
me as I
undressed, and I thought that since she was in the army
even her underclothes, her panties and her slip, would be part of her uniform, that the
nurses from the military hospital had some kind of. government-issue underwear. But what
she had on was like what the young ladies wore in the Hotel Paris when they came for
their Thursday sessions with the stockbrokers, or like what the women at
Paradise’s wore. And then our naked bodies twined together and everything seemed
liquid, as though we were snails, our moist bodies oozing out of our shells and into
each other’s embrace, and Lise shuddered and trembled violently, and I knew for
the first time that I was both in love and loved in return, and it was so different from
anything before. She didn’t ask me to watch out or be careful, everything that
happened was just right, the movements and the merging and the journey uphill and the
dawning, and the gush of light with the muffled panting and moaning. She wasn’t
afraid of me afterward either, not for a minute, and her belly lifted toward my face and
she wrapped her legs around my head and squeezed me tight without being ashamed. No, it
all belonged, and she raised herself up and let herself be lapped and licked with my
tongue until she arched her back and let me taste and feel with my tongue everything
that was going on in her body. Then, when she lay on her back with her arms folded and
her legs spread apart with that muff of pale hair blazing, brushed up into a crest, my
eyes fell on a table that held a bouquet of spring tulips, a bunch of pussy willows, and
several sprigs of spruce. As in a dream, without thinking, I took the sprigs and pulled
them to pieces and lay them around her vagina, and it was beautiful, her lap strewn with
spruce. She cast
furtive glances at me, and when I bent over and
kissed her through the branches I felt their sharp needles pricking my mouth, and she
took my head tenderly in her hands and arched her back and pushed her lap into my face
so hard that I groaned in pain, and with several powerful thrusts of her belly she
reached such a pitch of passion that she shrieked, collapsed on one side, gasping so
violently that I thought she was dying, but she wasn’t. She leaned over me and
spread her fingers and said she would scratch my eyes out and scratch my face and my
whole body in gratitude and satisfaction, and again she spread her nails above me like
claws and then closed them in a spasm, only to collapse in tears a few moments later.
Gradually her silent weeping turned to faint laughter. Calm and quiet, lying there
wilted, I watched her tear off the rest of those spruce boughs with nimble fingers, the
way hunters do when they’ve killed an animal, and she covered my belly, my wilted
penis, and my whole lap with tiny branches. Then she raised me up slightly and with her
hands she caressed me and kissed my thighs, till slowly I got an erection and the
branches began to rise and my penis pushed its way through, growing larger all the time,
pushing the sprigs aside. But Lise rearranged them around it with her tongue, then
raised her head and plunged my penis into her mouth, all of it, right down into her
throat. I tried to move her off, but she pushed me back down and shoved my hands out of
the way, so I looked up at the ceiling and let her do what she wanted with me. I
hadn’t expected her to be so wanton and rough, and so crude in the way she sucked
me to the marrow, thrashing her head about violently without even pushing the sprigs
aside, so they tore her mouth
till she bled, and I thought this
must be the way the Teutons did it. I was almost afraid of Lise then. Afterward, when
she had crawled her tongue up my belly, leaving a trail of saliva behind her like a
snail, she kissed me, and her mouth was full of semen and spruce needles, and she
didn’t think of it as unclean but rather as a consummation, as part of the Mass:
This is my body and this is my blood and this is my saliva and these are your fluids and
my fluids and this has joined us and will join us forever.

And I Never Found the Head

My new job as a waiter, and then as headwaiter, was in the mountains
above Dé
č
í
n. When I
first arrived at the hotel, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It wasn’t a small
hotel, as I’d been expecting, but a small town or a large village surrounded by
woods, with hot springs in the forest and air so fresh you could have put it in a cup.
All you had to do was turn and face the pleasant breeze and drink it in freely, as fish
breathe through their gills, and you could hear the oxygen mixed with ozone flowing
through your gills, and your lungs and vital parts would gradually pump up, as though
earlier, somewhere down in the valley, long before, you’d got a flat tire, and it
was only now, in this air, that you’d got it automatically pumped back up to a
pressure that was safer and nicer to drive on.

Lise, who brought me here in an army truck, walked
around the place as though she owned it, smiling constantly as she led me down the
main colonnade, a long double line of statues of German kings and emperors wearing
helmets with horns on them, all made of fresh marble or white limestone that glistened
like sugar. The other administrative buildings were the same, built off the main
colonnade like the leaves of a locust tree. Everywhere you went there were more of these
colonnades, and before you entered any building you had to walk past columns of
horn-helmeted statues. All the walls were covered with reliefs showing scenes from the
glorious German past, when they still ran around with hatchets and dressed in animal
skins, like something right out of Jirásek’s
Old Czech Legends
,
except that the outfits they wore were German. When Lise explained what was going on
here, I remembered the porter at the Hotel Tichota who loved to talk about how the
unbelievable came true. Lise told me proudly that this place had the healthiest air in
Central Europe and that the only other place like it was near Prague, above Ouholicky
and Podmofani. She said this was the first breeding station in Europe for a refined race
of humans, that the National Socialist Party had been the first to cross noble-blooded
young German women with pure-blooded soldiers, both from the Heereswaffe and the SS, all
scientifically. And so National Socialist intercourse was taking place here every day,
no-nonsense intercourse, as the old Teutons used to do it. But even more important, the
future mothers, who were carrying the new people of Europe in their bellies, dropped
their litters here too, and a year later the children would be shipped to the Tyrol and
Bavaria and the Black Forest, or to the sea, and the education of the New Man
would begin in the first creches and nursery schools—not
with the mothers, of course, but supervised by experts. Lise showed me beautiful little
houses built to look like country cottages, with flowers spilling out over the
windowsills, terraces, and wooden balconies. The future mothers and those who were
already mothers were all robust, blonde young women who looked as though they were
living in the wrong century, like the peasant girls you find in places such as Humpolec
or Haná, or in villages that are so out of the way you still see women in striped
petticoats and the same sort of blouses the Sokol women wear in our part of the country,
or like the kind Božena wears in the famous painting where she’s doing the
wash and Oldfich rides by on horseback and finds her to his liking. And they all had
nice breasts, and whenever they went for walks—and these young women were always
wandering about—they would stroll up and down the colonnades, staring closely at
the statues of the horned warriors as though this was part of their job, or they would
stand in front of the handsome German kings and emperors, trying to etch in their minds
those famous historical faces and personalities and their life stories. Later, outside a
classroom window, I heard these women listening to lectures about those legendary heroes
and then being tested to see if they knew it all by heart. The women were taught, Lise
said, that the images of those heroes in their heads gradually percolated down through
their bodies, reaching the thing that was just a blob at first, then something like a
pollywog or a tree frog, then a tiny person, a homunculus, a dwarf that grew month by
month until the ninth month, when it became a human being, and all the teaching and all
the staring at the statues
and pictures left an imprint on the new
creature. Lise took me around and showed me everything, and she clung to me, and I
noticed that whenever she glanced at my blond hair it seemed to put joy in her step, and
when she introduced me to her section chief she introduced me as Ditie, the name
inscribed on my grandfather’s grave in Cvikov. I knew that Lise longed to spend
those nine months here and more, so that she could donate a pure-blooded off-spring to
the Reich. But when I thought about it, it seemed to me that everything to do with that
future child would happen the way it did when we put the cow in with the bull, or our
nanny goat in with the village billy goat. When I stared down that row of columns and
statues, I saw nothing but a tiny cloud of an enormous horror swirling around and
enveloping me. And then I thought—and this was what saved me—about how I was
so small that they wouldn’t let me onto a Sokol gymnastics team, though I was as
agile on the parallel bars and the rings as any big fellow, and I remembered the
incident with the gold teaspoon in the Hotel Paris, and finally how they’d all
spit in my face just because I’d fallen in love with a German gym teacher, and now
here was the commander of the socialist breeding camp himself shaking my hand, admiring
my straw-colored hair, and laughing pleasantly, as if he’d just seen a pretty girl
or had a drink of some sweet liqueur or his favorite schnapps, and I stood straight and
tall. I didn’t wear a stiff collar anymore, but I think I felt for the first time
in my life that you didn’t actually have to be big, you just had to feel big. I
looked about me with an easy mind and stopped being a little table boy, a busboy, a
small waiter who was condemned to be small for the rest of his
life
and to put up with being called Pipsqueak and Squirt and Shorty and hear jokes insulting
his family name, Dit
ě
, which means child. Now I was Herr
Ditie, and for the Germans there was no child in my name, and I bet the word reminded
them of something completely different, or maybe they couldn’t connect it to
anything at all in German. So I began to get some respect here, because, as Lise told
me, even the Prussian and Pomeranian nobility would envy a name like Ditie because their
names all have Slavic roots, as mine does, von Ditie, so I became a waiter in section
five, and I had to cover five tables at noon and at supper and serve five pregnant
German girls whenever they rang for milk or cups of cold mountain water or Tyrolean
cakes or plates of cold cuts—anything that was on the menu, in fact.