I Served the King of England (2 page)

The next day I saw the world a lot differently, because my money had
opened the door to Paradise’s and to respect. I forgot to mention that when Mrs.
Paradise saw me toss two hundred crowns away, she reached down eagerly from her wicket
and took my hand. I thought she wanted to know what time it was on the wristwatch I
didn’t have yet, but she kissed my hand. Of course the kiss wasn’t really a
kiss for me, a busboy from the Golden Prague restaurant, it was for those two hundred
crowns and for all my money, because I had another thousand crowns
stashed away in my bed and I could still have maybe not as much as I wanted but as
much as I could earn every day selling hot frankfurters at the station. Anyway, that
morning I was sent with a basket to buy fresh flowers, and on my way back I saw a
pensioner crawling around on his hands and knees looking for some change that had rolled
away from him. It was on this errand, by the way, that I realized that the florist and
also the sausage maker and the butcher and the proprietor of the dairy bar were all
among our regulars. In fact, the same men who supplied us with meat and baked goods got
together at our restaurant, and often the boss would look into the icebox and say, Go
straight to the butcher and tell him to come and remove this poor excuse for a side of
veal right now, and by evening the veal was gone and the butcher would be sitting there
as though nothing had happened. But the pensioner must have had poor eyesight because he
was groping around in the dust with his hands, so I said, What are you looking for, old
man? He said he’d lost twenty-hellers, so I waited till some people walked by,
took a fistful of change, tossed it in the air, then quickly sank my hands into the
carnations, grabbed the basket handles, and walked on. Just before rounding the corner,
I turned and saw several more people on their knees, each one was sure he had dropped
the coins and was yelling at the others to hand over the money and there they were on
their knees, arguing, spitting, and scratching at one another’s eyes like tomcats,
and I had to laugh, because I saw at once what moved people and what they believed in
and what they would do for a handful of change. When I brought the flowers back to the
hotel, I saw a lot of people standing in front of the restaurant, so
I ran upstairs to one of the guest rooms, leaned out the window, and threw down a
fistful of coins, making sure they fell not directly on the people but a few meters
away. Then I ran downstairs, cut back the stems of the carnations, and put two sprigs of
asparagus fern and two carnations into each little vase—all the while looking out
the window at the people crawling around on their hands and knees, picking up money, my
coins, and arguing about who saw which twenty-heller piece first. That night and the
nights after that, I would dream and dream, even during the day—when there was
nothing to do and I had to pretend to be busy, polishing the glasses and holding one up
to the light close to my eye like a kaleidoscope, looking through it across the
splintered square at the sky and the cloudseven during the day I dreamed that I was
flying over towns and cities and villages and that I’d take handfuls of coins from
a huge, bottomless pocket and throw them down on the cobblestones, scattering them like
a sower of wheat, but always behind people’s backs, behind the pedestrians or
bystanders. Almost no one could resist picking up those twenty-heller pieces and
they’d butt one another’s heads like rams and squabble, but I’d fly
on. It made me feel good, and I’d take another fistful of coins from my pocket and
toss them down behind another group, and the money would jangle to the ground and roll
off in all directions, and I could fly like a bee into trains and streetcars and
suddenly strum a fistful of coins to the floor and watch people bend over and bump into
one another trying to pick up the change they pretended had fallen from their pockets
alone. These dreams heartened me because I was small and had to wear a high, stiff
rubber collar, and my neck was
short and narrow, and the collar cut
into it and into my chin as well, and to keep it from hurting me, I would carry my head
high. And because I couldn’t tilt my head forward without pain, I had to bend over
from the waist, so my head was usually tipped back and my eyes half closed and I looked
at the world almost as though I were scorning or mocking it, and the customers thought I
was conceited. I learned to stand and walk that way too, and the soles of my feet were
always as hot as irons, so hot that I’d look to see if I had caught fire and my
shoes were burning. Sometimes I was so desperate for relief I’d pour cold soda
water into my shoes, especially when I was working at the train station, but it only
helped for the moment, and I was always on the verge of taking my shoes off and running
straight into the river, tuxedo and all, and soaking my feet in the water, so I’d
put more soda water into my shoes and sometimes a blob of ice cream as well.
That’s how I came to understand why the maître d’ and the waiters
always wore their oldest, shabbiest shoes to work, the kind you find thrown away on
rubbish heaps, because that was the only kind of shoe you could stand in and walk around
in all day. All of us suffered from sore feet, even the chambermaids and the checkout
girl. Every evening, when I took off my shoes, my legs were covered with dust up to my
knees, as if I’d spent the day wading through coal dust and not walking over
parquet floors and carpets. That was the other side of my tuxedo, the other side of all
waiters and busboys and maître d’s the world over: white starched shirts and
dazzling white rubber collars and legs slowly turning black, like some horrible disease
where people start dying from the feet up.

Each week I managed to save up for another girl, a
different one each time. The second girl in my life was a blonde. When I walked into
Paradise’s and they asked me what I’d like, I said I wanted to have supper
but, I added right away, in a separate room, and when they asked me who with, I pointed
to a blonde, and there I was in love with a beautiful fair-haired woman, and it was even
better than the first time, unforgettable as that had been. And so I tested the power of
pure money and I ordered champagne, but I tasted it first, and the girl had to be served
from the same bottle. I’d had enough of them pouring wine for me and soda pop for
her. As I lay there naked staring at the ceiling, and the girl lay beside me staring at
the ceiling too, I suddenly stood up and took a peony from the vase, stripped the petals
off, and garnished the girl’s lap with them. I was astonished at how splendid it
looked. The girl sat up and looked at her lap, but the peony petals fell off, and I
gently pushed her back and took the mirror from its hook and held it up so she could see
how beautiful she looked with her lap all decorated with peonies and I said, This is
wonderful, if there are flowers here, I’ll decorate your lap every time I come.
And she said that this had never happened to her before, someone appreciating her beauty
like that, and she told me that because of those flowers she had fallen in love in me. I
said it would be wonderful when I picked up some fir boughs at Christmas and arranged
them in her lap, and she said, Mistletoe would be even nicer. But best of all, and she
must arrange it, would be to hang a mirror from the ceiling over the couch so we could
see ourselves lying there, especially her, beautiful and naked with a wreath on her lap,
a wreath that
would change with the seasons, with the flowers that
are typical for each month. How wonderful it would be to garland her body with moon
daisies and virgin’s tears and chrysanthemums and purple loosestrife and autumn
leaves. I stood up and hugged myself, and as I left I gave her two hundred crowns, but
she handed it back, so I put it on the table and left, feeling six feet tall. I even
slipped two hundred crowns to Mrs. Paradise in her wicket as she leaned out and stared
at me through her glasses. I went out into the night, and in the dark, narrow streets
the sky was full of stars, but all I could see were hepatica and wood anemone and
snowdrops and primroses scattered over the blonde girl’s lap. The more I walked,
the more astonished I was at where I’d got the notion to arrange flowers in a
woman’s pretty lap with its mound of hair in the middle, like garnishing a plate
of ham with lettuce. Since I knew flowers, I went on with it and dressed the naked
blonde in cinquefoil and tulip and iris petals, and I decided to plan it all out in
advance, so I could have entertainment all year round. So I learned that money could buy
you not just a beautiful girl, money could buy you poetry too.

Next morning, when we stood on the carpet and the boss walked up and down
to see that our shirts were clean and all our buttons there, and when he’d said,
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, I looked at the laundress and the scullery maid and
found myself staring so piercingly at their little white aprons that the laundress
tweaked my ear, and I realized that neither of them would let her lap, her patch of
hair, be wrapped in daisies or peonies, let alone sprigs of fir or mistletoe, like a
joint of venison. So I polished the glasses, holding them up to the light from the big
windows, and outside, people were walking past, cut off from the
waist down, and I went on thinking about summer flowers, and I took them from their
baskets one by one and lay blossoms or just petals in the lap of the beautiful blonde
from Paradise’s, while she lay on her back with her legs spread apart, and when
the blossoms slipped off I would stick them back with gum arabic or gently tack them in
place with a small nail or a pin. So I did a fine job of polishing the glasses,
something no one else wanted to do, rinsing each glass in water and holding it up to the
window to make sure it was clean, though thinking all the time, through that glass,
about what I would do at Paradise’s, until finally I ran out of garden flowers,
field flowers, and forest flowers, and this made me feel sad, because what would I do in
winter? Then I laughed and was happy, realizing that in winter the flowers would be even
more beautiful, because I could buy cyclamen and magnolias, and I might even go to
Prague for orchids. Or maybe I’d just move to Prague, for there must be restaurant
jobs there too, and I’d have flowers all winter long. Then noontime came, and I
set out the plates and napkins and served beer and raspberry and lemon grenadine, and
right at noon, at the busiest time, the door opened and she stepped in, then turned to
close the door behind her, that beautiful blonde from Paradise’s. She sat down and
opened her purse, pulled out an envelope, and looked around. I knelt down and quickly
tied my shoe, my heart beating against my knee. When the maître d’ came over
and said, Quick, get to your place, all I could do was nod, my heart throbbing so hard
that my knee seemed to merge and change places with it. But then I pulled myself
together, stood up, and holding
my head as high as I could, I threw
a napkin over my arm and asked the girl what she’d like. She said she wanted to
see me again, and a glass of raspberry grenadine. She was wearing a summer dress covered
with peonies, she was surrounded by them, a prisoner of peony beds, and I caught fire
and blushed like a peony, because I hadn’t expected this. My money, my thousand
crowns, was gone, and what I was looking at now was completely free. So I went for a
tray of raspberry grenadine, and when I came back with it the blonde had put the
envelope on the tablecloth and the corners of my two hundred-crown notes were casually
sticking out of it. The way she looked at me set the glasses of grenadine rattling and
the first one slipped to the edge of the tray, slowly tipped over, and spilled into her
lap. The maître d’ was right there, and the boss came running up, and they
apologized, and the boss grabbed me by the ear and twisted it, which he shouldn’t
have done, because the blonde cried out so that everyone in the restaurant could hear
her, How dare you! The boss said, He’s ruined your dress and now I’ll have
to pay for it. She: What business is that of yours? I want nothing from you. Why are you
mistreating this man? The boss, sweetly: He spilled a drink on your dress. Everyone had
stopped eating now, and she said, It’s none of your business and I forbid you to
punish him. Just watch this. She took a glass of grenadine and poured it over her head
and into her hair, and then another glass, and she was covered with raspberry syrup and
soda-water bubbles. The last glass of raspberry grenadine she poured down the inside of
her dress, then she asked for the bill. She walked out with the aroma of raspberries
trailing behind her, out into the street in that silk
dress covered
with peonies, and the bees were already circling her. The boss picked up the envelope on
the table and said, Go after her, she forgot this. When I ran out, I found her standing
in the square surrounded by wasps and bees like a booth selling Turkish honey at a
village fair, but she made no effort to brush them away as they ate the sugary juice
that coated her like an extra skin, like a thin layer of polish or marine varnish rubbed
on furniture. I looked at her dress and handed her the two hundred crowns and she handed
them back and said that I’d forgotten to take them yesterday. Then she asked me to
come to Paradise’s that evening and said she’d bought a beautiful bouquet of
wild poppies. I saw how the sun had dried the raspberry grenadine in her hair and made
it stiff and hard, like a paintbrush when you don’t put it in turpentine, like gum
arabic when it spills, like shellac, and I saw that the sweet grenadine had stuck her
dress so tightly to her body that she’d have to tear it off like an old poster,
like old wallpaper. But all that was nothing to the shock I felt when she spoke to me.
She knew me better than they knew me in the restaurant, she may even have known me
better than I knew myself. That evening, the boss told me they’d be needing my
room on the ground floor for the laundry and I’d have to move my things to the
second floor. I said, Couldn’t we do it tomorrow? But the boss looked right at me,
and I knew that he knew and that I’d have to move at once, and he reminded me that
I had to be in bed by eleven, that he was responsible for me, both to my parents and to
society, and that, if a busboy like me expected to do a full day’s work, he had to
have a full night’s sleep.