I Served the King of England (17 page)

At the station in Chomutov, ambulances, cars, and buses, mobile hospitals
on six wheels, were already waiting. I didn’t obey Lise but stood at the end of
the platform, which had been cleared of people, and they let me stay there only because
I’d got off the train with Lise, who reported to the stationmaster, and then they
unloaded a fresh batch of transportable cripples from the front, all those who
couldn’t walk, who had one or both legs amputated—a platform full of
cripples—and loaded them all into the cars and buses. Though I didn’t
recognize anyone in particular, I knew these were the same ones who’d been on stud
duty in that little town above D
ě
č
ín and who’d said their last farewells at
Koší
č
ek. And this was the final scene in
their comedy, their play, their movie. I went off
with the first
busload to the place I’d been assigned to, a canteen in the military hospital, and
I kept my little suitcase on my lap and tossed my leather suitcase on the roof rack
among the military duffel and kit bags. That day I walked through the countryside and
the camp, which was laid out along the edge of a hill, in an orchard of sweet and sour
cherry trees that went right down to the bank of a small lake in a quarry. The lake
resembled the Sea of Galilee or the sacred River Ganges, because attendants would bring
out the cripples with gangrenous amputation wounds and carry them down long wooden
jetties branching into the lake. There wasn’t a single insect or a single fish in
the water, because everything had died and nothing would grow as long as water flowed
into the lake from the stone quarry. The cripples whose wounds were already slightly
healed would lie in the water or paddle gently about. Some were missing one leg or both
legs below the knees, and others had no legs at all, just stumps. They moved their arms
in the water like frogs, with their heads poking out of the blue lake, and they were
handsome young men again, but when they swam to the edge, they would pull themselves out
with their arms and crawl up the bank like turtles to lie on the shore, waiting for the
attendants to wrap them in bathrobes and warm blankets and carry them, hundreds of them,
back across the jetties and to the main patio in front of the restaurant, where an
all-woman orchestra was playing and meals were being served. I was most moved by the
ward for men with severed spinal cords, who dragged their whole lower bodies after them
on dry land, and in the water they looked like mermaids. Then there were the legless
ones who loved playing ping-pong, and
some had small chrome-plated
folding carts that allowed them to move about quickly enough to play soccer, except that
they would use their hands instead of their feet. As soon as they’d recovered a
little—the one-legged and armless ones, and those with badly burned
heads—they developed a tremendous appetite for life, and they would play soccer
and ping-pong and handball until dark, and I would call them to supper by playing a
tattoo on a trumpet. When they approached in their carts or hobbled up on crutches, they
radiated health. I was working in the rehabilitation department, but in the three other
departments the doctors were still putting the wounded back together with operations and
then electrical and iontophoresis treatments. And sometimes I’d have an opposite
vision of those cripples and see only the arms and legs they’d lost, the missing
arms and legs and not the real ones that were there. I’d put my finger to my
forehead and ask myself, Why are you seeing things that way? Because you served the
Emperor of Ethiopia, because you were trained by one who served the King of England.

Once a week, Lise and I went to see our son in Cheb, at the City of
Amsterdam Hotel. Lise had now gone back to her swimming and she was in her element,
always splashing about in the lake. The swimming had made her so taut and beautiful,
like a bronze statue, that I could hardly wait until we were together again. She’d
bought a book by some imperial German athlete named Fouré or Fuké or
something, about the cult of the naked body, and because Lise had a beautiful body she
became a nudist, though without actually joining a club. In the morning she’d
serve me coffee wearing nothing but a skirt, or sometimes we’d pull the
curtains and she’d walk around the house completely naked,
and when she looked at me, she would nod contentedly and smile, because she could see in
my eyes that she pleased me and was beautiful. But our little son Siegfried caused us a
lot of worry. Everything he picked up he threw down again, until one day, when he was
crawling around the floor of the City of Amsterdam, he picked up a hammer. His old
grandfather gave him a nail, just for fun, and the boy set the nail up and drove it into
the floor with one blow. From then on, while other little boys were playing with rattles
and teddy bears and running around, Siegfried would lie on the floor and throw a tantrum
until he got his hammer and nails, which you could only get for coupons or on the black
market. He didn’t talk, he didn’t even recognize his mother or me, and as
long as he was awake the City of Amsterdam would tremble with the blows from his hammer,
and the floor was full of the nails he’d driven into it. I found our weekly visits
unbearable, and each blow would drive me to distraction, because I could see right away
that this child, this guest who was my own son, was a cretin and would always be a
cretin. When other children his age were going to school, Siegfried would just be
starting to walk, and when others were graduating, Siegfried would barely be learning
how to read, and when others were getting married, Siegfried would still be learning how
to tell the time and fetch the newspaper. But there was more to it than a little boy
obsessed with pounding nails into the floor. Whenever the air-raid siren went off and
everyone else rushed into the shelter, Siegfried got excited and glowed with pleasure.
And while other kids were messing their pants out of fear, Siegfried would clap his
little
hands, laugh, and pound nail after nail into the board
they’d brought into the cellar for him, and suddenly he was beautiful, as though
the convulsions he had suffered as a baby and the defect in his cerebral cortex had
vanished. And I, who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, was pleased that my son, though
he was feeble-minded, could prophesy the future of all the German cities, because I knew
that most of them would end up exactly like the floors of the City of Amsterdam hotel. I
bought three kilos of nails, and in a single morning Siegfried drove them all into the
kitchen floor. In the afternoon, as he was driving nails into the rooms upstairs, I
would carefully pull the nails out of the kitchen floor, rejoicing secretly as the
carpet bombing of Marshal Tedder drove bombs into the earth in exactly the same way,
precisely according to plan, because my boy would drive nails in along straight lines
and at right angles. Slavic blood had triumphed once again, and I was proud of the boy,
because although he hadn’t spoken a word yet, he was already like Bivoj, a hammer
in his strong right hand.

Now I began to see pictures, images from long ago that I’d forgotten
about, and suddenly they were right before me, so fresh and clear that I would stand
there by the quarry with my tray of mineral water, thunderstruck. I saw Zden
ě
k, the headwaiter at the Hotel Tichota, who enjoyed having
a good time so much when he was off work that to get it he’d spend all the money
he had with him, which was always several thousand. Then I saw his uncle, a military
bandmaster now retired, who split wood on his little plot of land in the forest where he
had a cottage overgrown with flowers and wild vines. This uncle had been a bandmaster
at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still wore his
uniform when he split wood, because he had written two polkas and several waltzes that
still got played all the time, although no one remembered who the composer was and
everyone thought he’d died a long time ago. Zden
ě
k
and I, as we were riding along in a rented buggy on one of our days off, heard the sound
of a military brass band playing one of his uncle’s waltzes, and Zden
ě
k stood up and signaled the driver to stop, then went over
to the band and had a little talk with the bandmaster. He offered to give him all the
money he had, four thousand crowns, for the soldiers to buy themselves beer, if they
would do what he asked. Buses were waiting, and the whole band was getting ready to
climb aboard to go to a band tattoo, so we left the buggy there and got on the first bus
with them. After an hour’s drive we stopped in a forest, and soon a hundred and
twenty uniformed musicians with their shiny instruments were advancing slowly down a
road through the woods. Then they turned onto a footpath lined with thick bushes and
pine trees that towered overhead, and Zden
ě
k signaled
them to stop and slipped through some loose planks in a fence, disappeared into the
bushes for a few moments, then came back and told them his plan. When he gave the sign,
the soldiers climbed one by one through the hole in the fence into the bushes while
Zden
ě
k, like a soldier at the front, directed them to
take positions around the tiny house. They could hear the sound of an ax striking wood,
and the entire band silently surrounded the chopping block and an old man in an ancient
Austrian bandleader’s uniform. When Zden
ě
k gave the
signal, the bandmaster flung his golden ceremonial baton in the air,
gave a loud command, and out of the bushes rose a glistening array of brass
instruments and the band began to play a clamorous polka by Zden
ě
k’s uncle. The old bandleader stood transfixed over the piece of
wood he had just split, while the band moved forward a couple of steps, still up to
their waists in pine and oak shrubs. Only the bandmaster stood in the greenery up to his
knees, swinging his golden baton while the band played the polka and their instruments
flashed in the sunlight. The old bandleader slowly looked around with a heavenly
expression on his face, and when they finished the polka the band started right in on
one of his concert waltzes, and the old bandleader sat down, put his ax across his
knees, and began to cry. The bandmaster came up and touched his shoulder, the old man
looked up, and the bandmaster handed him the golden baton. Now the old man got to his
feet and, as he told us afterward, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven with a
military band all around him, and he thought they must play military music in heaven and
that God Himself was conducting the band and was now turning His own baton over to him.
So the old man conducted his own pieces, and when he’d finished, Zden
ě
k stepped out of the bushes, shook hands with his uncle,
and wished him good health. Half an hour later the band climbed back into their buses
and as they were driving away they played Zden
ě
k a
farewell ceremonial fanfare. Zden
ě
k stood there filled
with emotion and bowed and thanked them, and finally the buses, and with them the
fanfares, faded down the road through the woods, lashed by beech branches and
shrubs.

As a matter of fact, there was something of the angel in
Zden
ě
k. Once he financed a wedding for a
stonecutter’s daughter, and another time we went to a clothing store and bought
some white sailor’s uniforms for all the boys at an orphanage. During a fair he
would pay the expenses of all the merry-go-round and swing operators so everyone could
ride for nothing all day. On one of our days off we bought jars of jelly and the most
beautiful bouquets we could find in Prague and went from one public toilet to another,
congratulating all the old women attendants on name days they didn’t have and
birthdays that had come and gone, though Zden
ě
k always
managed to strike it lucky with at least one of them. One day I decided to go to Prague,
take a taxi out to the Hotel Tichota, and ask if Zden
ě
k
was still there and if not where I could find him, and I also planned to visit the mill
by the Charles Baths where I once lived with Grandma, to see if the little room was
still there where the shirts and underwear flew past the window. While I was standing at
the station in Prague I pulled my sleeve back to see what time it was, and when I looked
up I saw Zden
ě
k over by a newsstand, and I stiffened,
because here it was again: the unbelievable was coming true. I stood frozen in that
position, with one hand holding up the other sleeve, and I saw Zden
ě
k looking around as though he had been waiting a long time for
someone, then he raised his arm and was just about to look at his watch too when three
men in long leather coats stepped up and grabbed me by the arm. I saw Zden
ě
k staring at me as though he couldn’t believe his
eyes. He was pale and just stood staring as the Germans bundled me into a car and drove
off, and I wondered where on earth they were taking me and why. They drove to
Pankrác prison, the gates opened, and they
led me in like a
criminal and threw me into a cell. I was dazzled by what had happened to me, I rejoiced,
hoping against hope they wouldn’t let me out right away. What I really wanted,
since the war was coming to an end anyway, was to be arrested and sent to a
concentration camp, and now it seemed my lucky star was shining. The cell door opened
and I was led off to interrogation, and after I had given them all my particulars and my
reason for coming to Prague, the investigating officer grew serious and asked me who I
had been waiting for. I said, Nobody. The door opened and two men in civilian clothes
rushed in, punched me in the nose, knocked two of my teeth out, and I fell back to the
floor. They leaned over me and asked me again who I was waiting for and who I was
supposed to pass the message to, and when I said I’d just come to Prague for a
visit, one of them brought his face down close to mine, lifted my head up, grabbed me by
the hair, and pounded my head on the floor while the interrogating officer screamed that
glancing at my watch had been a prearranged signal and that I was connected with the
underground Bolshevik movement. When they tossed me back in the cell the SS men shouted,
You Bolshevik swine! And the words were sweet and tender music to my ears, because I was
beginning to see that this could be my return ticket to Prague, an eraser that would
wipe away what I’d got myself into when I married a German and had to stand before
the Nazi doctor in Cheb, who examined my penis to see if I was worthy of having sexual
intercourse with a Teutonic Aryan, and I laughed and laughed, because somehow I
hadn’t felt the beating or the wounds, and because now my battered face was a
passport that would allow me
one day to return to Prague as an
anti-Nazi fighter. The main thing was that I’d be able to show all those
Šroubeks and Brandejses and all the hotel owners that I was one of them, because if
I survived this I would buy a big hotel, not in Prague perhaps, but certainly somewhere
else, because with the stamps in that little suitcase, as Lise had intended, I’d
be able to buy two hotels and have my choice of Austria or Switzerland. In the eyes of
those Austrian and Swiss hotelkeepers I’d be a complete stranger, with no need to
prove to them that there was nothing in my past. If I had a hotel in Prague, on the
other hand, and was a member of the Association of Prague Hotelkeepers, and worked my
way up to executive secretary for all the Prague hotels, they’d have to respect
me—not love me, perhaps, but at least respect me, and that was really all I
wanted.