I Served the King of England (15 page)

It was here that I first felt myself really blossoming. Though I was good
at waiting on tables at Tichota’s or the Hotel Paris, here I became the darling of
the pregnant German girls. True, I had been the darling of the bar girls at the Hotel
Paris every Thursday, when the stockbrokers came to the private chambers, but these
German women, like Lise, all looked fondly at my hair, my tuxedo, and my blue sash with
the medal, which Lise arranged for me to wear when I served meals on Sundays or
holidays—a splash of gold radiating from a red stone in the middle, with the
inscription Viribus Unibus. In this small mountain town, evening after evening soldiers
from all the forces fortified themselves with good meals and fired their spirits with
special Rhine and Mosel wines while the girls drank only cups of milk, and night after
night the men were let in to them and were under strict scientific supervision right up
to the very last moment. I was known as the waiter who had
served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and I enjoyed the same standing as the headwaiter at the
Hotel Paris, Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, who had served the King
of England. I had a younger table boy under me and I taught him, just as Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek had taught me, how to recognize what region a
soldier came from and what he was likely to order. We’d ante up ten marks each and
put them on a sideboard, and I’d almost always win. I learned that feeling
victorious makes you victorious, and that once you lose heart or let yourself be
discouraged the feeling of defeat will stay with you for the rest of your life, and
you’ll never get back on your feet again, especially in your own country and your
own surroundings, where you’re considered a runt, an eternal busboy. That’s
what would have happened if I’d stayed at home, but here the Germans treated me
with respect. Every afternoon when the sun was out, I took cups of milk or ice cream or
sometimes cups of warm milk or tea to the blue swimming pools where the beautiful
pregnant German girls would swim naked with their hair down. They treated me as if I was
one of the doctors, and I could watch their bright bodies ripple in the water as they
spread their arms and legs, and after each swinging, rhythmic stroke their bodies would
stretch out and glide, and their arms and legs would go on making those beautiful
swimming motions. But it wasn’t the bodies that attracted me so much now, because
I fell in love—and this was a shock to me—I fell in love with that floating
hair, the hair that swayed and flowed behind those bodies like pale smoke from burning
straw, hair that went straight to full length with each powerful thrust of their arms
and legs and then
seemed to hang still for a moment, rippling
slightly at the ends, like the corrugated metal in a shopfront shutter. And there would
be the wonderful sunshine, and the background of blue or green tiles shimmering with
broken reflections of sun and waves on the undulating water, syrupy drops of light and
shadow, and the movement of bodies along the walls and the blue floor of the pool. When
they were done swimming they pulled their legs under them and stood up, their breasts
and bellies shedding rivulets of water like water nymphs, and I would hand them the
cups, and they would drink from them slowly, then slip back into the water, clasping
their hands in front of them as if praying, pushing the water aside with their first
kicks, and swimming off again, not for themselves but for those future children. Several
months later, in the indoor pools now, there were little babies in the water swimming
along with the mothers, three-month-old tads who were already swimming with the women
like cubs with female bears, or seals who can swim the day they’re born, or
ducklings who swim almost as soon as they hatch. But already I saw that these women
thought of me as a flunky, as less than a flunky, in fact, despite my tuxedo. It was as
if I wasn’t there at all, as if I meant no more to them than a clothes horse. They
felt no shame in front of me, because I was someone who served them, the way queens used
to have jesters or midgets. Whenever they stepped out of the water they were always
making sure no one was looking at them through the board fence, and once they were
surprised by a drunken SS man, and they all shrieked, clapped their towels over their
laps, covered their breasts with their arms, and ran into the changing booths. But when
I brought them their
cups on a tray, they would just stand there
nonchalantly, naked, chatting to each other, leaning with one arm against the towel rack
and casually drying their golden-haired laps with the other in unhurried, careful
movements, wiping their crotches thoroughly and then each half of their backsides. And I
would stand there while they took their cups from the tray, drank a little, and put them
back, as if I was a serving table, and they would go on wiping their crotches with their
towels, and then they would lift their arms and wipe dry each fold and crease of their
breasts. Once an airplane swooped in low over the pool, and they ran into their changing
booths for cover, shrieking with laughter, and returned a few moments later and took up
the same positions as before, and all the while I was standing there holding the tray
with the cooling cups.

In my free time I wrote long letters to Lise. She had an address somewhere
near Warsaw, which they’d conquered by now. Then it was letters to Paris. And
then, perhaps because of those victories, things became more relaxed, and they built a
cyclorama just outside the town, and a shooting gallery and a merry-go-round and swings
and everything, just like the Carnival of Saint Matthias in Prague, full of attractions
of all sorts. Just as the gables of our cottages in the countryside used to be covered
with murals of nymphs and sirens and allegorical women and animals, here regiments of
German warriors wearing horned helmets filled the shooting galleries and the canopy on
the merry-go-round and the panels on the sides of the swings, and I learned German
national history from those pictures. All year long, whenever I had some free time, I
would wander around looking at them and I’d ask the
cultural
instructor about them. He was delighted to explain it all to me, and he addressed me as
Mein lieber Herr Ditie
, pronouncing the Ditie so nicely that I asked him
again and again to teach me about the glorious German past from those pictures and
reliefs, so that I too might one day father a German child, just as Lise and I had
agreed. When she came back all full of the victory over France, she told me she wanted
to marry me but I would have to ask permission from her father, who owned the City of
Amsterdam restaurant in Cheb. And so the unbelievable came true, because in Cheb I had
to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in
which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa
Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respectfully
requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papánek. According to the laws of the
Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether
I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to
have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impregnate her. And so
while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the
death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a
cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then
he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and
bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor
said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn’t understand, though
I got the gist well enough—when some
stupid Czech turd wants
to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the
lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of
phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as
an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was
standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans
were executing Czechs, and so I couldn’t get an erection and offer the doctor a
few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his
hand, and he’d probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to
me affably,
Herr Ditie, was ist den los?
And he patted me on the shoulder,
handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at
pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I’d had this kind of picture
in my hands before I’d always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at
them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that
so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of
them every day, new ones, innocent ones. And here I was standing with my penis in my
hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I
still couldn’t manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in
and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn’t have to think
about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and
half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of inseminating an Aryan
vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau
for the Defense of German
Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood. With a
mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots,
with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.

The marriage took place in Cheb, in a hall painted red, with red swastika
flags everywhere and officials in brown uniforms with red straps over their shoulders
and swastikas on the straps. I wore a morning suit and the blue sash across my chest
bearing the Emperor of Ethiopia’s medal, and Lise, the bride, wore her
gamekeeper’s outfit, a jacket embroidered with oak leaves and a swastika on a red
background in her lapel. It was more like a state military ceremony than a wedding
because all they talked about was blood and honor and duty. Finally the mayor of the
city, who was also wearing a uniform, riding boots and a brown shirt, asked us, the
betrothed, to approach a makeshift altar. Hanging behind the altar was a long flag with
a swastika, and on the altar was a bust of Adolf Hitler scowling as the light from below
cast shadows across his face. The mayor took my hand and the bride’s hand and
wrapped them in the flag and held our hands through the cloth, looking solemn. Now came
the moment of betrothal. The mayor told us that from now on we belonged to each other
and it was our duty to think only of the National Socialist Party and to conceive
children who must also be raised in the spirit of that Party. Then, with tears welling
up in his eyes, the mayor told us not to fret that we couldn’t both die in the
struggle for the New Europe, because they, the soldiers and Party members, would keep up
the struggle
for us until the final victory. And then they played a
gramophone record of “Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht geschlossen,” and
everyone sang along with the record, including Lise, and I remembered how I used to sing
patriotic songs like “On the Strahov Ramparts” and “Where Is My
Homeland,” and that memory made me sing under my breath, until Lise nudged me
gently with her elbow and gave me a nasty look, so I sang along with the others, and I
found myself singing with feeling, as though I were a real German. When I looked around
to see who was there, I saw army colonels and all the top Party brass from Cheb, and I
knew that if I’d been married back home, it would have been as though nothing had
happened, but here in Cheb it was practically a historical event, because Lise was well
known here. When the ceremony was over, I stood with my hand ready, waiting to be
congratulated, but then I began to sweat, because the Wehrmacht and SS officers
didn’t shake it. I was still just a runty little busboy as far as they were
concerned, a Czech pipsqueak, a pygmy. But they practically flung themselves on Lise and
congratulated her, while I stood there alone. When the mayor tapped me on the shoulder,
I held out my hand, but he didn’t take it either. So there I stood, my whole body
stiff from holding my hand out, until the mayor put his arm around my shoulder and led
me into his office to sign the register and pay the fee. Here I tried again and put an
extra hundred marks on the table, but one of the clerks told me in a broken Czech that
tips were not given here because this wasn’t a restaurant or a canteen or a bar or
a pub, but a bureau of the creators of the New Europe, where blood and honor were the
deciding factors, not—as in Prague—
terror and bribery
and other capitalist and Bolshevik practices. The wedding supper was held in the City of
Amsterdam restaurant, and again I saw that although everyone seemed to be including me
in the toasts, Lise was the center of attention, and that they put up with me as an
Aryan but still considered me a dumb Bohemian despite my bright-yellow hair, the blue
sash across my chest, and on the hip of my suit the medal shaped like a sunburst of
gold. But I didn’t let on how I felt or that I saw what was going on. Instead, I
smiled and even managed to enjoy being the husband of a woman so famous that all the
officers, who must have been single, would have loved to try for her hand, but not one
of them had succeeded, because it was I who had enchanted her. These officers had their
heads full of notions of defending honor and blood, and were probably incapable of doing
anything more than jumping on a woman in bed with their riding boots on, not realizing
that in bed you needed love and playfulness. That was my way of doing it, a way I had
discovered a long time before, at Paradise’s, when I’d spread ox-eye daisies
and cyclamen petals over the laps of naked girls and finally, two years ago, on the lap
of this political-minded young German, this commander in the nursing corps, this
high-ranking Party member. While she was being congratulated, no one could have imagined
her the way I had seen her, naked on her back as I garnished her lap with green spruce,
which perhaps for her was even a greater honor than when the mayor pressed both our
hands through the red flag and said how sorry he was that we couldn’t both fall in
the struggle for the New Europe and the new National Socialist man. When she saw my
smile and realized that I’d decided
to play the game
I’d been condemned to play by the Bureau for Racial Purity, Lise picked up her
glass and looked at me, and everyone fell silent, expecting a ceremony. I stood up,
making myself taller, and we faced each other, holding our glasses in our fingers, and
the officers watched us carefully, as if this was some kind of interrogation, and Lise
laughed the way she laughed when we were in bed together, when I’d be gallant in
the French manner. We looked at each other as though we were both naked, and again that
white film came over her eyes, the kind of look women get when they are ready to cast
aside the last shred of inhibition and let themselves be treated any way that seems
right at the moment, when a different world opens up, a world of love games and
wantonness. She gave me a long, slow kiss in front of everyone, and I closed my eyes,
and as we kissed, our champagne glasses tilted in our fingers and the wine slowly
spilled onto the tablecloth, and all the guests were silent. After that, everyone seemed
abashed and looked at me with respect and curiosity, realizing that German blood has a
lot more fun with Slavic blood than it does with other German blood. So though I was
still an alien, I became an alien everyone respected with a touch of envy or maybe even
hatred. The women looked at me as if they were trying to imagine what sorts of things I
might do in bed. They must have thought I was up to some rather special games, and maybe
even rough behavior, because they sighed sweetly, looked up at the ceiling, and talked
with me, even though I mixed up
der, die
, and
das
when I spoke. These
women talked to me slowly in their atrocious German, articulating the way you would in a
nursery school, and they loved my answers and found the mistakes I made in
conversational German charming and funny, and besides it gave them
a taste of the magic of the Slavic plains and birch trees and meadows. But all the
soldiers from the Heereswaffe and the SS glared at me because they could see only too
well that I had won the affections of the beautiful, blonde Lise, that she had chosen a
beautiful, animal love over German honor and blood, and that there was nothing they
could do about it, even though their chests were plastered with medals and decorations
from the campaigns against Poland and France.