I Served the King of England (16 page)

When we came back from our honeymoon to that small town above D
ě
c
í
n where I was a waiter,
Lise wanted us to have children. But like any true Slav, I was a creature of moods. I
could do anything in the emotion of the moment, but when Lise told me to get ready
because that night she was set to conceive the New Man, the founder of the New Europe, I
felt exactly the way I had when the
Reichsdoktor
, acting on the Nuremberg Laws,
asked me to bring him a bit of my sperm on a piece of white paper. For a week
she’d been playing Wagner on the record player,
Lohengrin
and
Siegfried
, and she’d already decided that if it was a boy she’d
call it Siegfried Ditie, and all week long she’d walked around gazing at those
scenes in relief along the covered walkways and colonnades. She would stand there in the
late afternoons with German kings and emperors and Teutonic heroes and demigods rising
against the blue sky, while my only thought was how I would strew her lap with flowers
and how we’d start by playing like little children, especially since our name was
Ditie. That evening Lise appeared in a long gown, her eyes full of duty and blood and
honor, and she put her hand in
mine, babbled something in German,
and rolled her eyes upward, as though all the denizens of the Teutonic heaven were
gazing down on us from the ceiling, through the ceiling—all the Nibelungs, and
even Wagner himself, whom Lise invoked for help in becoming pregnant the way she wished,
in harmony with the new Teutonic sense of honor, so that her womb would be graced by the
New Man, who would establish and live in the New Order of the New Blood and the New
Thinking and the New Honor. When I heard all this, I felt everything that makes a man a
man drain out of me, and I just lay there staring at the ceiling, dreaming about a lost
paradise, about how wonderful everything had been before we were married, about how I
had slept with all women the way a mongrel dog would, whereas now I had a job to do,
like a purebred sire with a purebred bitch. I’d seen the trouble and bother dog
breeders went to, waiting for days on end for the right moment, and one breeder brought
a bitch to our town from the far end of the republic and had to turn around and go all
the way back because a prize-winning fox terrier wouldn’t have anything to do with
her. The next time they came, they put the bitch over a wooden bucket in the stable and,
wearing a glove on her hand, the lady guided the dog’s sex organ to its place, and
the dog impregnated the bitch with a whip over his head. But the bitch would have
surrendered herself just as happily to any old mongrel. Or there was the major who had a
Saint Bernard and spent the whole afternoon with a bitch all the way from Šumava,
but couldn’t get them together because the bitch was bigger, and finally Engineer
Marzin took them to a slope in the garden where he dug out a kind of depression. They
spent an hour landscaping the terrain, getting ready for that
Saint Bernardian wedding, and by evening they were all worn out, but at last the slope
was ready, and they stood the bitch under the step in the hillside so that the male was
now the same height as she was, and union took place, but by compulsion, while left to
their own devices a German shepherd will eagerly join with a dachshund bitch, or an
Irish setter bitch with a stable-bred terrier. And I was in exactly the same position.
So the unbelievable came true, because a month later I had to go for some potency
injections, and each time needles as blunt as nails were poked into my buttock to
strengthen my vigor, and one night, after I’d been through the routine ten times,
I managed to impregnate Lise in the regulation manner. Now that she had conceived, it
was she who had to go for the injections, because the doctors were afraid she might not
carry the New Man to term. And so of all our love nothing remained, and all that was
left was an act of National Socialist intercourse, and Lise wouldn’t even touch my
penis, and I was only admitted to her bed according to regulations and the order of the
New European, which did me no good. Both our behinds were so punctured by those dull
needles that we spent most of our time tending the wounds, mine especially, which kept
running. And all this so I could beget a beautiful New Child.

About the same time, an unpleasant thing happened to me. Several times I
noticed that you could hear lessons in Russian coming from the classrooms where they
usually gave lectures on the glorious past of the old Teutons. Now that the soldiers had
fulfilled their duties as studs and impregnated the beautiful blonde girls, they were
learning
basic Russian as well. Once, when I was listening to these
Russian courses under the window, a captain asked me what I thought of it. I said it
looked as if there was going to be a war with Russia. At this he started yelling at me,
accusing me of inciting the public, and I replied that there was no public here, just
the two of us, and he yelled back that we had a pact with Russia and what I’d said
was sedition and the spreading of a false rumor. It was then I realized that he was the
same captain who had been Lise’s witness at the wedding, who not only had refused
to shake hands and congratulate me but had been trying to win Lise’s favor before
me, and I had beat him to it. Now he was trying to get back at me, and so he lodged a
complaint, and I found myself before the commandant of the town that served as a
breeding station for the New Europe. Just as the commandant yelled that I was a Czech
chauvinist and they would have me court-martialed, the alert was sounded in the camp,
and when the commandant picked up the telephone he turned pale, because it was war, just
as I had predicted. In the corridor all the commandant said to me was, How did you
guess? And I replied modestly, I served the Emperor of Ethiopia. The next day, a son was
born to us, and Lise had him christened Siegfried, because the walls of those covered
walkways and Wagner’s music had inspired her to have a son. But I was fired all
the same and given a new position in a restaurant called Koší
č
ek in the Bohemian Paradise district. The restaurant and
hotel were at the very bottom of a rocky canyon, in a kind of natural basket submerged
in the morning mists below the clear air. It was a small hotel for people in love,
couples who would go on dreamy walks along the cliffs and lookouts
and return hand in hand to their lunches and their suppers. Every movement they
made was relaxed and unhurried, because although Koší
č
ek was also meant for the Heereswaffe and the SS-Waffe the officers
would meet their wives and mistresses here for the last time before going off to the
Eastern front. Just about everything in Koší
č
ek
was poles apart from the small town that was incubating the New Race, where the soldiers
were stud horses or purebred boars who were expected, the same day they arrived or at
least within a couple of days, to impregnate German females scientifically with Teutonic
sperm. But here it was different and more to my taste. There was not much gaiety, there
was instead a melancholy sadness, a kind of dreaminess I had never expected to see in
soldiers. Almost all our guests were like poets before they begin writing a
poem—not because they were that kind of person, no, they were just as crude and
vulgar and arrogant as other Germans, always drunk with their victory over France, even
though a third of the officers from the Grossdeutschland division had fallen in the
Gallician campaign. It was because these officers were preparing for a different journey
altogether, a different mission, a different battle: they were going to the Russian
front, which was quite another kettle of fish. By November, the Germans had driven a
wedge right up to the outskirts of Moscow but no farther, so the armies coming up from
the rear just kept spreading to Voronezh and on to the Caucasus. And then there was the
vast distance, and the bad news from the front—that is, from this side of
it—that partisans were harassing the troops so badly that the front had become a
rear guard, as Lise told me when she came back from there herself, very upset about
how the Russian campaign was going. Lise also brought me a tiny
suitcase. At first I didn’t realize how valuable the contents were because it was
full of postage stamps, and I wondered how Lise had come by them. It turned out that
while she was in Poland she had ransacked Jewish apartments for stamps, and when they
were searching deported Jews in Warsaw she had confiscated these stamps. She told me
that after the war they would be worth a fortune, enough to buy us any hotel we
wanted.

My little son, who stayed with me, was a strange child. I couldn’t
see any of my own features in him, not a single sign that he took after either me or
Lise, certainly nothing of what was promised by those Valhalla surroundings, and not a
trace in him of Wagner’s music. He was a nervous little child who suffered from
convulsions in the third month of his life. Meanwhile, I served guests from all the
regions of Germany, and I could now guess correctly whether a German soldier was from
Pomerania, Bavaria, or the Rhineland. I could also tell the difference between a soldier
from the coast and one from inland, and whether he had been a worker or a farmer, and
that was my only entertainment as I waited on tables with no break or free time from
morning till evening and into the night. I waited not just on men but also on women, who
were here on a secret mission, but that mission was sadness and a kind of ceremonial
anxiety. I never again, as long I lived, saw married couples and lovers who were so
gentle, kind, and considerate to each other, or who had so much wistfulness in their
eyes and tenderness, like the girls back home who used to sing “Dark Eyes”
or “The Mountains Resounded.” In the countryside around Koší
č
ek, no matter what the
weather, there
would always be couples out for walks, always a young officer in uniform and a young
woman, quiet and absorbed in each other. I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia had
never experienced this and couldn’t put myself in their place. Only now have I got
to the core of it, that what made these people beautiful was knowing that they might
never see each other again. The New Man was not the victor, loud-mouthed and vain, but
the man who was humble and solemn, with the beautiful eyes of a terrified animal. And so
through the eyes of these lovers—because even married couples became lovers again
with the danger of the front hanging over them—I learned to see the countryside,
the flowers on the tables, the children at play, and to see that every hour is a
sacrament. The day and the night before the departure for the front, the lovers
didn’t sleep, but they weren’t necessarily in bed either, because there was
something more here than bed: there were eyes and a special feeling, like seeing a sad,
romantic play or movie in a large theater or movie house. I also learned that the
closest that one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a
quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or
sometimes a military
britzska
, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet,
gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the
britzska
, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the
hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief. And then the carriage
gradually slipping like the sun behind the hill, until there is nothing more to be seen,
only a figure standing in front of the hotel, a woman, a German, a person in tears,
still waving, moving her fingers,
while a tiny handkerchief
flutters to the ground. Then she turns and in a fit of weeping rushes up the stairs to
her room, where like a Barnabite nun who has seen a man in the cloister she falls on her
face in the eiderdown and sinks into the bed for a long, invigorating cry. The next day,
their eyes still red, these mistresses would drive off to the station, and the same
carriage or
britzska
or automobile would bring other lovers from all
directions, from all the garrisons in all the towns and villages, for a final rendezvous
before the men went to the front. Despite the armies’ rapid advance, the news from
the front was so bad that Lise became increasingly worried, worried about the
blitzkrieg, worried that she wouldn’t be able to stand it here. So she decided to
take Siegfried to Cheb, to the City of Amsterdam restaurant, and go to the front
herself, where she would feel less tense.

I kept the rare stamps in an ordinary-looking little suitcase made of
cardboard, inside an old vulcanite trunk, because when I checked on the value of some of
the stamps in Zumstein’s catalogue I knew right away that I wouldn’t have to
tile my room with green hundred-crown bills anymore, because even if I covered the walls
with them and glued them on the ceiling and in the hallway and the toilet and the
kitchen, this could never equal the sum of money I would one day rake in, since
according to Zumstein four of the stamps alone would make me a millionaire. And then I
thought about coming back one day after the war, because the Germans were losing and the
war would be over before we knew it. Whenever I saw a high-ranking officer I could read
the whole situation in his face. Faces were my newspapers and my dispatches from the
front,
and even if they wore flashing monocles or dark glasses or
pulled their helmets down like black masks, I could still see how things stood on the
battlefield from the way people walked and held themselves and behaved. And once more
the unbelievable came true. By this time I had left Koší
č
ek, and like those soldiers I too said my farewells, waved until the
carriage slipped over the hill, wept, and then took the train to my new place of work.
As I walked up and down the railroad platform it occurred to me to look at myself in a
mirror that was fastened to the station wall, and when I did I suddenly saw myself as a
stranger, like those Germans from all the regions and districts with their different
professions and interests and states of health that I’d been able to guess
correctly because I had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, because I’d been schooled
by the headwaiter Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek, who in his turn had
served the King of England. So I took a penetrating look at myself from that angle and
saw myself as I never had before, as a member of Sokol who when the Germans were
executing Czech patriots had allowed Nazi doctors to examine him to determine if he
could have sexual intercourse with a German gym teacher, and while the Germans were
provoking a war with Russia he was gettng married and singing “Die Reihen dicht
geschlossen,” and while people at home were suffering, he was sitting pretty in
German hotels and inns, serving the German army and the SS-Waffe. With the war coming to
an end, I knew I could never go back to Prague, and I could see myself, not being
lynched exactly, but hanging myself on the first lamppost, or at the very least
sentencing myself to ten years and maybe more. So I stood there in the early morning at
the railroad station, which was empty,
looking at myself as a guest
who was coming toward me, and I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia was condemned to
face the truth, because just as I had been curious about the suffering and indiscretions
of other people, so now, using exactly the same method, I looked at myself, and the
sight made me sick, especially since I had a dream of becoming a millionaire and showing
Prague and all those hotel owners that I was one of them, and perhaps even better than
they were. It was entirely up to me now what I would do, go back home and buy the
biggest hotel and be equal to Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs and all those Sokol
people who looked down their noses at me, people you could only talk to from a position
of strength, and use my little suitcase containing those four stamps that Lise had
plundered in Warsaw or somewhere in Lemberg to buy me a hotel, the Hotel Ditie—or
instead should I buy something in Austria or Switzerland? And as I deliberated like this
with my own image in the mirror, behind me, silently, a train pulled into the station,
an express train, a military-hospital train from the front, in fact, and when it stopped
I could see in the mirror that the blinds on all the windows were down. Then one blind
went up, the hand holding the cord let go, and I saw a woman in a nightgown lying on the
berth. She yawned so widely she almost put her jaw out of joint, then rubbed her eyes
and when she had finished rubbing them she looked out the window to see where the train
had stopped. I looked at her and she looked at me and it was Lise my wife. I saw her
jump up and before I knew it she was out of the train just as she was and hanging around
my neck and kissing me the way she did before we were married, and I who had served the
Emperor of Ethiopia saw that she had changed, just as all the
officers who had gone to the front after a pleasant week at Koší
č
ek with their wives or their mistresses had changed. Lise,
like them, must have seen and lived through unbelievable things that had come true. She
was escorting a military transport of crippled men to the place where I was going, to
Chomutov, to a military hospital by a lake. So I simply got on the train with my little
suitcase, and when the train pulled out of the station I went into the compartment with
Lise and drew the curtains and locked the door, and when I took off her nightgown she
trembled the way she used to before we were married, because the war must have made her
free and humble again. And then she undressed me and we lay naked in each other’s
arms and she let me kiss her lap and do everything to her in the rhythm of the ride,
moving and touching like the bumpers between the cars.