I Served the King of England (20 page)

Then one day, out of the blue, Zden
ě
k came
to see me. By now he was a big man in the district, maybe even in the region, and
he’d changed a lot. He rocked back and forth on one of the horses and looked
around, and when I sat down on the horse beside him, he talked to me quietly and then
took a folded document out of his pocket and before I could stop him slowly tore it up.
This was the document that named me a millionaire and ordered me to pay my
millionaire’s share. Zden
ě
k then jumped down and
tossed it in the fire. For me it would have been a wonderful document to have, almost
like a letter of appointment. He smiled at me sadly and drank the rest of his mineral
water—this was Zden
ě
k, who never had drunk anything
but hard liquor—and walked away with a sad smile on his face. There was a big,
fancy black car waiting to take him back where he came from, back to the politics he was
busy with and I suppose he believed in, because it kept him going, and it must have been
wonderful if it could take the place of those grand, generous gestures of his, the kind
he used
to spend all his money on, as if the money was too hot for
him to hang on to and he had to give it back to the people he thought it properly
belonged to. Events began to move very fast now, and just as I had dreamed I would, I
gave sensational evenings and afternoons in the quarry with gramophone music, ice
skating, and bonfires, in the blacksmith’s shop and around the pond. But the
guests who came now were sad, or if they were gay it was not the kind of gaiety I was
used to, but a forced gaiety, the kind the Germans had displayed when they celebrated at
Koší
č
ek, knowing that they were there with
their wives or lovers for the last time because afterward they would go straight to the
front. And that’s exactly how my guests would leave, they’d shake my hand
and wave from their cars as though this were it, as though they’d never be coming
back again. If they did come back, it was the same thing all over again, they were
melancholy and gloomy. Normally events outside were not felt here, but now everything in
politics had turned upside down, it was February 1948 and all my guests knew they were
doomed. They’d spent what they could but the joy and the spontaneity had gone out
of it. I felt their sadness too and stopped locking myself up every night and pulling
the curtains so I could lay the hundredcrown notes from the daily take out on the
floor—like playing solitaire or reading my own fortune in the cards—before
taking them to the bank the next morning, where I now had a million crowns on deposit.
Spring came, and many of my guests, my regulars, stopped coming, and I learned that they
had fallen, that they had been arrested and locked up, or that some of them had escaped
across the border. Now a different kind of customer started
coming,
and the daily take was even bigger, but I wondered what had happened to the ones who
used to come here every week. One day two of them came and told me that they were
millionaires and that they had to be ready tomorrow, with a pair of heavy boots, a
blanket, and extra socks and food, because they were going to be taken away to a holding
camp somewhere because they were millionaires. I was delighted, because I was a
millionaire too, and I brought them my bankbook and showed it to them. One said he was a
factory owner who made gym equipment, and the other said he manufactured false teeth. So
I went and got my rucksack, heavy lace-up boots, an extra pair of socks, and canned
food, because the false-teeth manufacturer told me that all the Prague hotel owners had
been sent summonses too. In the morning they drove off, weeping, because they
didn’t have the courage to make a run for it across the border. That was too
risky, they thought, and anyway America and the United Nations wouldn’t leave
things like this, and the millionaires would get everything back and return to their
villas and their families. I waited a day, then another, then a week, then I got news
from Prague that all the millionaires were already in the camp at a Catholic seminary in
Svatý Jan pod Skalou, an enormous monastery and boarding school for future priests
who had been moved out. So I made up my mind, and that was on the day they came from the
district Party headquarters and broke it to me very gently that the National Committee
was going to confiscate the quarry, that I could stay on as a caretaker for the time
being, but all the property rights had devolved to the people. I was outraged, and I
guessed that Zden
ě
k had had a hand in this,
so I went straight to his office in the district Party
headquarters. But he said nothing, he just smiled at me sadly, took a piece of paper off
his desk, and tore it up in front of me, then told me that he was tearing up my summons
on his own account, because I had once taken his punishment for him, the time when
I’d looked at my watch outside the station. I told Zden
ě
k that this was the last thing I expected of him, that I had thought
he was my friend but he was really against me, because I never wanted anything else and
never worked for anything else all my life except having my own hotel and being a
millionaire. And I walked out.

That night I stood outside the gate of the seminary. The lights were on,
and a militiaman with an army rifle stood at the gate, and I told him that I was a
millionaire, the owner of the Hotel in the Quarry, and that I wanted to speak to the
commanding officer about an important matter. The militiaman picked up a telephone, and
pretty soon I was let through the gate and shown to an office where another militiaman,
this time without a rifle, was sitting at a desk covered with lists and papers. He kept
drinking from a bottle of beer, and when he’d emptied it he’d reach under
the table and pull another bottle out of a case, open it, and drink thirstily, as though
it were his first. I asked him if he wasn’t short a millionaire and told him I
hadn’t got a summons even though I was a millionaire too. He ran down a list with
his pen, name by name, and then told me I wasn’t a millionaire and could go right
back home if I wanted. I said, There must be some mistake, because I am a millionaire.
He took me by the shoulder and walked me to the gate, then started pushing me and
shouting,
You’re not on my list so you’re not a
millionaire! I pulled out my bankbook and showed him I had one million one hundred
crowns and ten hellers in the bank. What do you call that? I said triumphantly. He
looked at the bankbook. Surely you’re not going to throw me out? I said. And he
took pity on me, pulled me back into the seminary, declared me officially interned, and
took down all my particulars. This boarding school for theological students actually
looked like a jail, or a military barracks, or a residence for poor university students,
except that in every bend in the corridors and between the windows there were crucifixes
along with scenes from the lives of the saints. Almost every picture showed some kind of
torture, horrible scenes rendered by the painter with such loving detail that the idea
of four hundred millionaires living in the seminary, four and sometimes six to a cell,
seemed like a joke. I’d been expecting a reign of terror and malice here, like the
halfyear I’d spent in jail after the war, but life in the seminary of Svatý
Jan was more like a movie comedy. They set up a court of sorts in the refectory, and the
militiamen appeared with army rifles on red slings over their shoulders, but the slings
kept slipping off. The uniforms weren’t made to measure and seemed deliberately
too big for the small men, and too small for the big men, so they all went around with
their buttons undone. The way they ran the trial, every millionaire got a year for each
million he had, so I got two years because I had over a million, and the gym equipment
manufacturer got four years because he had four million, and Šroubek the
hotelkeeper got the heaviest sentence, ten years, because he had ten million. The
biggest problem the militiamen had was finding the right column to enter the
sentences and our particulars. Roll call every evening was a
terrible problem too, because someone was always missing. The reason was that we would
take watering cans and go to the nearest village for beer, and another reason was that
our guards, who were always drinking, had a hard time counting us, even if they started
in the afternoon. So they tried counting us by tens instead, and one of the guards would
clap, and another guard would drop a pebble, and after they’d counted the last man
they would tally up the pebbles, add a zero to the result, and then tack on the
remainder, the ones that didn’t go into ten. Some days there’d be more of
us, some days fewer, even though we were all there. Every once in a while the sum of
interned millionaires would actually come out right and be duly entered into the record,
and everyone would be relieved, but just then four millionaires would walk in carrying
cases and jugs of beer, and so to keep the books straight the guards would enter them as
new arrivals and give each of them another sentence on top of his original one,
depending on how many millions he had. It may have been a seminary, but there was no
fence around it. The militiamen would sit at the gate, and the millionaires would go out
for walks and come back through the garden, but then they had to walk around and come
through the gate, because the militiamen would unlock it each time and then lock it
again, even though there was no fence and no wall around the place. The militiamen
themselves would take shortcuts through the garden, but then their consciences would
bother them and they’d go back to the gate, take the key from the inside, go
around and unlock the gate from the outside, walk through it, lock it again, and go into
the
seminary. The worst thing was the food, but even that problem
was solved because the commander and the militiamen started eating with the
millionaires, and they would give the food they brought with them from the militia
barracks to the pigs that one of the millionaires, the false-teeth manufacturer, had
bought. First there were ten pigs, then twenty, and everyone looked forward to the
slaughter, because there were some wholesale butchers among us who promised culinary
delights that had the militiamen licking their lips. Then the militiamen started
suggesting pork specialties of their own, and after that the cuisine here was not the
kind you’d normally find in a seminary, but more the way they used to cook in the
rich monasteries—the way the Crusaders cooked, for instance. Whenever a
millionaire ran out of money, the commander would send him home for more, and at first a
militiaman disguised as a civilian would go with him, but later a promise to come back
was enough. The internee would drive to Prague for the money and take it out of the
million or millions in his account, because the commander had given him an authorization
saying the money was to be spent in the public interest. And so they cooked their own
meals in the seminary, drew up their own menu, then gave it to the militia commander for
approval, asking him to kindly pass along any suggestions, because the millionaires
thought of the militiamen as their guests, and we would all eat together in the dining
hall.

Once, one of the millionaires, Tejnora, got permission to drive into
Prague to hire a Schrammel-quartet that played dinner music. When he brought the
musicians back in a taxi—taking a taxi to Prague became part of the fun—
they walked around the locked gate into the millionaires’
camp and woke up the guards, since it was already past midnight, then they went back out
and around to the front of the gate and waited. But the guards were so groggy they
couldn’t get the gate open, so Tejnora walked through the garden, took the key
from the guards, went around again, and unlocked the gate from the front. But there was
something wrong with the key and he couldn’t lock the gate again, so he went
around to the other side and locked it from there, then handed over the key. I kept
thinking it was too bad Zden
ě
k wasn’t a
millionaire, he’d be right in his element here, because besides his own money he
could spend money for the ones who didn’t have the imagination to do anything
interesting with it. Within a month, all the millionaires were tanned, because we would
sunbathe on the hillsides, while the militiamen stayed pale, because all they ever did
was stand outside the gate or make out reports and sit around in the cells. They
couldn’t even put together a proper list of prisoners: some names, like Novák
and Nový, came up three times. They had to carry their weapons at all times, and
they were forever dropping their rifles and cartridge pouches, and rubbing things out
and rewriting their reports, so the millionaire hotelkeepers ended up doing it for them,
because it was no more difficult than drawing up a menu. There was a farm attached to
the Catholic seminary with ten cows, but the milk from those udders was not enough for
our morning coffee, which was café au lait made from real ground coffee and spiked
with a shot of rum, a touch introduced by Mr. Šroubek, just the way they used to do
it in the Café Sacher in Vienna. So the poster-paint manufacturer bought five more
cows,
and then there was enough milk, but since some of the
prisoners couldn’t stand café au lait, they had only a glass of rum for
breakfast, drinking it straight from the coffee cup. The monthly family visits were
wonderful too. The commander bought some white clothesline and hung it up to make an
imaginary wall, and when the rope ran out he scraped a line in the ground with his heel
to separate the internees from the world outside. The wives and children would show up
with rucksacks and bags full of food—Hungarian salami and foreign canned goods.
Although we tried to look careworn, the fact is we were suntanned and well fed, and a
passerby who didn’t know the real situation could easily have taken the visitors
for the prisoners, because the internment of the millionaires was obviously far harder
on their families than it was on the millionaires themselves. There was no way we could
eat everything the wives brought us, so we shared what we had with the militiamen, who
enjoyed the food so much they got the commander to agree to two visits a month, a visit
every other week. And whenever cash was needed, thirty or fifty thousand crowns, the
commander would let the experts go through the monastery library and pick out rare
books, to be taken to Prague by car and sold in the secondhand bookstores. Then the
militiamen discovered they could sell the sheets, pillowcases, nightwear, and vestments
belonging to the future priests at Svatý Jan pod Skalou, where we sunned ourselves
on the slopes and took naps after lunch. But by that time it was almost too late,
because the millionaires had figured this out long ago and taken the best of the sheets
and the long nightshirts made of cloth handwoven on mountain looms, and beautiful towels
by
the gross, and they’d carried them all off in suitcases.
Later the millionaires started taking holidays, which showed how much the militiamen
trusted us, because they knew we wouldn’t run away. Even when we did, and this
happened twice, we brought another millionaire back with us, a good friend who wanted a
vacation from his family. Eventually the militiamen started taking their uniforms off
and wearing civilian clothes, and we would put on their uniforms and guard ourselves,
and when we got Sunday duty or the watch from Saturday to Sunday, we all looked forward
to it, because it was real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination. All
afternoon we would pretend we were going to close down the millionaires’ camp, and
the commander of the gate, who was the millionaire Tejnora in a militiaman’s
uniform, declared the camp officially closed and told the millionaires they could go
home, but the millionaires would go back to their cells. Then millionaires dressed up as
militiamen would try to persuade them to change their minds, telling them how wonderful
it was outside in the world of freedom, how they’d no longer have to suffer under
the scourge of the militia, how they’d live the life of a millionaire again. But
the millionaires wouldn’t have any of it, and so Tejnora, in militia uniform and
commanding the other millionaires in militia uniforms on guard duty at the gate, ordered
the camp to be closed by force. We dragged the millionaires out of their cells, those
who had eight and ten million and therefore eight and ten years ahead of them. At first
the militiamillionaires couldn’t find the key to the gate, and when they found it
they couldn’t get the lock to work, so they ran around and unlocked it from
outside, then ran around it again, and we
all watched and roared
with laughter as the millionaires were dragged outside by the militia-millionaires and
the gate was locked behind them. The millionaires walked up to the top of the hill, took
one look around, changed their minds, and came back down, pounded on the jailhouse door,
got down on their knees, and begged the militia-millionaires to take them in again. I
laughed too, but I wasn’t really laughing at all, because although I was with the
millionaires, I hadn’t really become one of them, even though I slept in the same
cell as Mr. Šroubek. He was so cold to me, he wouldn’t even let me hand him
back a spoon when it fell on the floor in the refectory, though I picked it up and stood
there holding the spoon out, just as I’d done years before when I held up my glass
and no one wanted to drink a toast with me. The hotelkeeper would get another spoon and
eat with that one, squeamishly taking a napkin and pushing away the one I’d put
down beside his plate, until it fell back on the floor and he kicked it under the table
where the vestments were kept. So I laughed, but my heart wasn’t in it. Whenever
I’d start talking about my million crowns and my Hotel in the Quarry, all the
millionaires would clam up and turn away, refusing to recognize my million, my two
million, and I saw that they thought I wasn’t worthy of them, because they had got
their millions a long time ago, long before the war, whereas I was a war profiteer. They
couldn’t bring themselves to accept me, because I wasn’t of their rank, and
it probably would have been the same in my dream if the Archduke had made me a baronet,
because I still wouldn’t have been a real baronet, the rest of the nobility
wouldn’t have accepted me, just as the millionaires now
were
not accepting me. A year before, when I was still free, I dreamt that they might accept
me one day, and was convinced that as owner of the Hotel in the Quarry I was as good as
they were, because some of them shook hands with me and talked nicely to me, but it was
all for show, the way every rich man tries to be on good terms with the maître
d’ in a hotel or restaurant, and he’ll even ask the maître d’ to
bring an extra glass and drink a toast with him, but if the rich man meets the
maître d’ on the street, he won’t stop and pass the time of day with
him. I also saw how their millions got accumulated, how Mr. Brandejs had always served
potato croquettes to his help and saved on small details, and here too he had been the
first to see those beautiful sheets and towels and figure a way to get his hands on
them, sneak them through the gate in a suitcase, and smuggle them home—not because
he needed them, but because his millionaire’s spirit wouldn’t let him pass
up an opportunity to acquire, gratis, those beautiful things from the wardrobes of
future priests.