I Served the King of England (21 page)

It was my job to look after the pigeons, two hundred pairs of carrier
pigeons that had stayed behind after the priests left. The commander assigned me to
clean the dovecote and give them water and scraps from the kitchen. Every day after
lunch I took them a little cart full of leftovers. The commander got so tired of eating
meat that he began longing for potato pancakes and blini filled with plum jam and grated
cheese and drenched in sour cream. The millionaire couturier Barta was having a visit
from his family, and he mentioned to the commander that his wife was from good peasant
stock, so why not try her out as a pastry cook? That was how the first woman appeared in
camp. Since we were all tired of eating meat, three more wives
came into the prison, three millionairesses, with Mrs. Bartová the chief pastry
cook. When the millionaires who could prove they had Austrian or French citizenship were
released and there were ten empty cells, the millionaires came up with the idea of
renting those cells to their wives, who might come to visit them once a week, because it
was inhuman for a married man to be denied access to his lawful spouse. And so beautiful
women began showing up, ten at a time, and I discovered later that they weren’t
wives at all, because I recognized two women, getting on in years but still beautiful,
who used to come to the Hotel Paris for the Department of Internal Medicine on Thursdays
when the stockbrokers showed up. But I was growing fond of my pigeons, all two hundred
pairs of them. They were so punctual that exactly at two o’clock they would perch
on the crest of the monastery roof, where they could see right into the kitchen, and I
would come out of the kitchen with my little cart loaded with two bags of
scraps—leftover vegetables and things like that—and I who had served the
Emperor of Ethiopia would feed the pigeons, something no one else wanted to do, because
it was no work for the delicate hands of a millionaire. I had to come out of the kitchen
on the stroke of two, and if for some reason the clock didn’t strike but the sun
was out, I would go by the sundial on the wall of the church, and when I emerged, all
four hundred pigeons would swoop down from the roof and fly straight at me, and a shadow
flew with them, and the rustling of feathers and wings was like flour or salt being
poured out of a bag. The pigeons would land on the cart, and if they couldn’t find
a place they would sit on
my shoulders and fly around my head and
beat their wings against my ears, blotting out the world, as though I were tangled up in
a huge bridal train stretching in front of me and behind me, a veil of moving wings and
eight hundred beautiful blueberry eyes. The millionaires almost died laughing when they
saw me covered with pigeons as I pulled the cart to the courtyard, where the pigeons
started devouring the food, pecking away until the two sacks were empty and the pots
looked as though they’d been scoured clean. Once I was late, because the commander
was busy tasting the minestrone soup with Parmesan cheese and I was waiting for the pot.
I heard the clock strike two, and before I knew it the pigeons flew through an open
window and into the kitchen, all four hundred of them, and they swirled around everyone,
knocking the spoon out of the camp commander’s hand. I rushed out of the kitchen,
and on the doorstep the pigeons flocked around me and pecked me with their gentle beaks,
and I covered my face and head with my hands and ran across the yard with pigeons
swirling around me and swarming over me, because for them I was a god of life. And I
looked back on my life and saw myself now, surrounded by these divine messengers, these
pigeons, as though I were a saint, and meanwhile I could hear the laughter and the
shouts and snide remarks of the millionaires, and suddenly the message of the pigeons
hit me, and the unbelievable came true again, because even if I’d had ten million
crowns and three hotels it wouldn’t have mattered, no, this kissing of tiny beaks
was sent by heaven itself, just as I’d seen on the altar panels and the stations
of the cross that we walked past to get to our cells. And even though I had seen nothing
and heard nothing,
wanting to be what I had never been able to be,
a millionaire, despite my two million, I became a millionaire, a multimillionaire, only
now, when I saw for the first time that these pigeons were my friends, that they were
the parable of a mission I had yet to accomplish, and that what was happening to me now
was what happened to Saul when he fell off his horse and God appeared to him. I swept
aside the beating of eight hundred wings and stepped out of the surging mass of
feathers, as if stepping out from under the branches of a weeping willow, and pulled the
cart with two sacks of scraps and the pots with the leftover vegetables from the
kitchen, and the pigeons perched on me again, and surrounded by a cloud of pigeons
beating their wings I had another vision, in which I saw Zden
ě
k.

He was not a political functionary but a headwaiter back in the Hotel
Tichota. On our day off we’d gone for a walk, and in a grove of birches we saw a
small man darting among the trees, blowing his whistle, pointing, holding the trees at
arm’s length, and shouting, You’ve done it again, Mr.
Ř
íha. One more time and you’re out of the game. Then he ran
back and forth among the trees again. Zden
ě
k found this
amusing, but I couldn’t figure out what was going on. That evening Zden
ě
k told me the man was Mr. Šíba, the soccer
referee. At the time, no one wanted to referee a Sparta-Slavia match, because the crowd
then always insulted the referee, so Mr. Šíba said that if no one else wanted
the job he’d referee the game himself. He went into training for it in this birch
grove, running about sowing confusion among the birches, reprimanding and threatening
Burger and Braine with expulsion, but mostly yelling at Mr.
Ř
íha, One more time and you’re out of the game.
That afternoon Zden
ě
k took a bus
full of inmates from an asylum for the mildly lunatic who had permission to go into the
village because it was fair time, and they could ride on the merry-go-round and swing on
the swings in their striped clothes and bowler hats. Zden
ě
k went into a pub and bought them a barrel of beer and a spigot,
borrowed some half-liter glasses, and took them to the birch grove, where they broached
the barrel and drank while Mr. Šíba ran among the birch trees blowing his
whistle. The lunatics watched him for a while, then, figuring out what he was doing,
they began to shout, cheer, and yell out the names of all the famous players for Sparta
and Slavia. They even saw Braine kick Plánicek in the head, and they jeered until
Mr. Šíba threw Braine out of the game. Finally, after the referee had warned
Ř
íha three times, there was nothing he could do
but toss him out of the game for fouling Jezbera. The lunatics cheered, and by the time
we’d polished off the barrel of beer they weren’t the only ones shouting,
because I too saw the striped uniforms and the red-and-white uniforms instead of birch
trees as the tiny referee Mr. Šíba blew his whistle. When it was over, the
lunatics carried him off the playing field on their shoulders for doing such a beautiful
job of refereeing. A month later Zden
ě
k showed me an
article in the paper about Mr. Šíba, who had thrown Braine and
Ř
íha out of a game and thus saved the match with his
energetic whistle.

And so the circle began to close and I started going back to my childhood
and youth, and I was a busboy again, and at the same time I stood face to face with
myself, forced to look at my life. I remembered how I had waited with my grandmother in
her little room by the open window
below the toilets of the Charles
Baths, where every Thursday and Friday the traveling salesmen would toss out their dirty
underwear, which would sometimes spread out against the black of the evening
sky—crucified white shirts—and drift down onto the enormous mill wheel, from
which my grandmother would fish them in with a gaff so she could launder them, mend
them, and sell them to construction workers. Then the news came through that we’d
only be interned in the millionaires’ camp another week and then be sent to work
somewhere else, and the oldest ones would be able to go home. So we decided to have a
last supper, and because we needed as much money as possible, I was given leave to go
with the false-teeth manufacturer to his cottage, where he had money stashed away, and
that was another unbelievable experience. We didn’t arrive at his cottage until
after dark, and by flashlight we put up a ladder and went through a trapdoor in the
ceiling. But the manufacturer had forgotten which trunk he’d left his hundred
thousand crowns in, so I started opening up the trunks one by one, and when I got to the
last one and shone the flashlight inside, I was horrified, though I should have expected
as much from a manufacturer of dentures, because the trunk was full of false teeth and
gums. The sheer numbers made it terrifying, all those pink palates with white teeth,
hundreds of them. There I stood on the ladder, terrified, because the teeth looked like
flesh-eating flowers, some clenched tight, others half open, and still others wide open,
yawning as though their hinges were out of joint. I began falling backward, and the
trunk spilled over me, and I felt the cold kiss of teeth on my arms and face, and as I
fell backward I dropped the flashlight, and
I ended up on my back
on the floor with the teeth spilling over me, but I managed to turn over on my stomach
and scuttle out from under them on all fours, like an animal or an insect. At the very
bottom of the trunk was all the money, thousands of crowns, and the manufacturer very
carefully swept the dentures into a dustpan and put them back in the trunk, tied a rope
around it, and hoisted it back up where it had come from. Then we locked the attic and
walked back to the station in silence. The millionaires’ last supper was like the
wedding banquets we used to have in the Hotel Paris. I stopped at my room in Prague for
a new tuxedo, and especially for the medal presented to me by the Emperor of Ethiopia
and the sash to go across my chest. We bought flowers and several bunches of asparagus
fern, and all afternoon Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs decorated the tables in the
priests’ refectory, and Mr. Brandejs said he was sorry he couldn’t provide
us with his gold cutlery, and we invited all the militiamen, including the commander of
the camp. We’d run into him the evening before in the village and he asked us
where we were going, and Mr. Brandejs said, Come along with us, Commander, we’re
going to a dance. But the commander merely shook his head and walked off with his gun,
which he carried as though it were a fishing rod. He hated that army rifle, and he was
already dreaming about getting back to the mines just as soon as he handed over the
millionaires’ camp for liquidation. And I became a waiter once more and put on my
tuxedo, but it was different from the other times I had put it on—it felt more
like a costume now—and I pinned the star to the side of my jacket and stretched
the blue sash across my chest, but I didn’t bother standing straight or
holding my head high to add a couple of centimeters to my height,
because I had no desire anymore to be the equal of the other hotelkeeper millionaires. I
saw this banquet from the other side, and I served the food without enthusiasm, even
though Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs were with me serving the tables in their
tuxedos, and when I thought about my Hotel in the Quarry, I felt no regret that it was
no longer mine. All things considered, it was a pretty gloomy meal. Everyone was sad and
dignified, as though it was the real Last Supper, which I had seen in pictures, and here
in the refectory too there was a picture like that, filling an entire wall, and
gradually, as we ate our salpicon and drank South Moravian white wine with it, we raised
our eyes to look at the picture of the Last Supper, and we began to resemble those
disciples more and more. While we ate our beef Stroganoff we began to feel melancholy,
and our banquet turned into something like the wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the more
the millionaires drank, the more sober they became. During coffee and cognac there was
silence, and even the militiamen, who had their own table—the table where the
teachers and the professors at the seminary had eaten—began to be sad too, because
they knew that at midnight we’d see each other for the last time. It had been a
wonderful time for them too, and some of them were wishing we could have gone on that
way until the end of time. Suddenly, from the monastery, where a single lame priest had
been allowed to remain out of the original thirty monks, the bell sounded Midnight Mass,
which the priest was serving to the Catholic millionaires. There were only a few of them
in the chapel, and their suitcases and duffel bags were already packed, but now the
limping priest, as he was blessing the believers with the chalice,
lay the chalice aside and raised his hand, and the organ thundered and the priest began
to sing, Saint Wenceslas, Prince of Bohemia. His voice and the thundering of the organ
carried all the way to the refectory, where we were gazing at the painting of the Last
Supper of our Lord, and for us, Catholic or not, it all seemed so in tune with the sad
and gloomy mood that we stood up, singly at first and then in clusters, and hurried
across the courtyard and through the open door and into the chapel, into the golden
light of the candles. We didn’t genuflect, we fell to our knees, that is, we were
forced to our knees by something stronger than we millionaires were, something stronger
than money, something that had been hovering above us, waiting for a thousand years. We
sang, kneeling, Lord, may we live, and those that come hereafter. And some of us fell on
our faces. As I knelt there, I saw that the millionaires were different, I
wouldn’t have recognized them—there was not a sign of money on a single
face. All those faces seemed to have been kindled by something higher, something more
beautiful, perhaps the most beautiful thing a person has. The priest didn’t seem
to be limping either, his limping seemed to come from carrying heavy wings, because in
his white gown he looked like a angel. When we knelt and threw ourselves on our faces,
the priest raised the chalice and blessed us. Then he walked between the kneeling men
and the golden chalice and strode across the courtyard, and in the darkness his frock
shone like the phosphorescent costume of the acrobat who had once slid down the wire and
jackknifed into the quarry pond, where the water swallowed him up just as the priest
swallowed
the Host after first blessing it for us. Twelve
o’clock began to strike, and we said our farewells and walked through the open
gate, where the militiamen and their commander—they were all miners from the
Kladno region—shook hands warmly with everyone. Then we vanished into the darkness
and walked to the station, because the camp was now officially closed, and we were urged
to go to our homes, regardless of whether we’d been sentenced to ten years or only
two, or whether we had ten million or only two.