I Served the King of England (22 page)

All the way I thought of those two hundred pairs of pigeons and how
they’d be waiting next day at two o’clock and I wouldn’t come out of
the kitchen. So with my head full of pigeons I went home, not to Prague but to the
quarry, and I climbed the path, and on the other side of the woods I should have seen
the illuminated hotel, but everything was in darkness. When I came to the sculptures and
stone-crushers, I saw why. The quarry was closed, the entrance gate shut, and there was
a new gate cobbled together from boards and locked with an enormous padlock. I walked
around the fence and over a knoll of blooming heather and descended into the heart of
the quarry. The place was a mess, the chairs were smeared with dirt and knocked over,
and when I grasped the door handle of the blacksmith’s shop, it was open. There
was nothing to show that this had ever been a restaurant, everything had been removed,
and the only sign of life was a fire smoldering in the forge. All that was left of the
cooking utensils were a couple of ordinary coffee cups. With every step I took, I
remembered, almost with pleasure, that Steinbeck himself had offered a check for fifty,
then sixty, then eighty thousand dollars for
this beautiful quarry,
but I’d refused, and it was a good thing I had, because if I couldn’t be the
hotelkeeper anymore then the hotel should go down with me. They seemed to have turned
the hotel into a public swimming pool, because instead of tea towels there were hand
towels, and bathing suits hung on a wire stretched from corner to corner. The only thing
that hadn’t been here before that I found pretty was a naked female mannequin from
a clothing-store window, hanging from the ceiling in a horizontal position. I walked
through the corridors, and the carpet was gone, and the small glass lamps that had stood
outside every door were gone too. I turned the door handle of one of the little rooms
and found it open. I looked in and switched on the light, but the room was empty, and I
was relieved to find that it wasn’t just as I’d left it. So it was right
that the entire quarry had vanished along with me, because no one would ever have the
strength to do it the way I had done it, and all those who had been here, whenever they
felt like it or on the whim of a moment, could recall what it used to be like and find a
place for my quarry in their daydreams. They could do whatever they wanted in my hotel,
meet the most beautiful young women or slide down the cable from seventy meters up and
halfway down, right over the pond, let go, hang suspended in the air for a moment, and
then plunge headfirst into the water. Or—since anything goes in a
daydream—they could hover in the air above the pond and look around like a bird on
fluttering wings, the way a skylark does, holding itself aloft on nothing more than a
breeze.

When I arrived in Prague, I was given a choice: either report to
Pankrác and begin serving a sentence or join a
forest labor
brigade, whichever I preferred, on condition that the brigade be in the border regions,
what used to be the Sudetenland. That afternoon I went to the labor office and accepted
the first job they offered me, and I was happy, and my happiness grew when I found
I’d lost the heel of my shoe and the piece of leather I’d hidden the last
two stamps under had worn away. So the rest of my fortune was gone, the fortune my wife
Lise left me after bringing those stamps from Lemberg, from Lvov, when the ghetto was
burned to the ground and the Jews were murdered. When I walked through Prague now, I
didn’t wear a tie, I didn’t want to be a bit taller than I was, I no longer
tried to decide which of the hotels I walked by on P
ř
ikopy or Wenceslas Square I would buy. I was happy with myself in a
gloating sort of way, glad that I’d ended up as I had, that the way forward was
now my own way, that I wouldn’t have to bow and scrape anymore or be careful to
say my good-mornings and good-afternoons and good-evenings and de-lighted-to-see-yous or
keep an eye on the staff or, if I was one of the staff myself, make sure that the boss
didn’t catch me sitting down or smoking or filching a piece of meat. Tomorrow I
would leave for somewhere far away, far from people, though of course I knew
there’d be people there too, and I’d always believed, like everyone who
works in artificial light, that one day I would get out of the city and into nature,
that when I retired I would see what a forest really looked like, what the sun really
looked like, the sun that had shone into my face every day of my life, making me shield
my eyes with a hat or a shadow. When I was a waiter I used to love it when at least once
a day all those doormen and superintendents and stokers would come out
of their buildings, turn their faces upward, and from the abyss of the Prague
streets gaze at the strip of sky overhead, at the clouds, to see what time it really
was, according to nature and not by the clock. And the unbelievable that came true
stayed with me, and I believed in the unbelievable, in the star that had followed me
through life, and with its gleam constantly before my eyes I began to believe in it more
and more, because it had made me a millionaire, and now that I had been brought to my
knees I realized that my star was brighter than ever, that only now would I be able to
see its true brightness, because my eyes had been weakened by everything I had lived
through, weakened so that they could see more and know more.

When I arrived at Kraslice I had to walk another ten kilometers through
the woods, and just as I was about to give up I came to a dilapidated gamekeeper’s
lodge, and when I saw it I thought I’d go mad with delight. The lodge had belonged
to Germans, and it looked exactly the way someone who’s grown up in a city
imagines a gamekeeper’s lodge. I sat down on a bench underneath wild tendrils and
vines and leaned back against the wooden wall, and inside I could hear the ticking of a
genuine Black Forest cuckoo clock, which I’d never seen in my life before, and I
could hear its wooden works and cogwheels and the rattling of its chains and weights,
and I looked out at a vista between two hills opening into the countryside beyond, but I
couldn’t see any crops. I tried to guess where they grew their potatoes, oats, and
rye, but here all the fields were overgrown, reminding me of the villages I had walked
through, when I felt as if I was in another world, because everywhere enormous unpruned
branches and bushes of
ripening black currants were poking out of
the crumbling buildings and stone walls, and I was determined to go into some of the
buildings, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. All I could do was to stand there
in solemn terror, not crossing the threshold of houses where everything had been chopped
to pieces, where the furniture was scattered about, the chairs lying as if wrestled to
the floor. In one village I came across some cows grazing—it was noon—and
the cows seemed to be on their way home, so I followed them as they ambled up a hill
between two rows of old lime trees. The tower of a baroque château poked above the
trees, then the rows parted, and there stood a beautiful château with large oblong
designs scraped with nails into the plaster, probably done back in the Renaissance, and
the cows walked through a broken gate into the château and I followed them inside.
I thought they might just have been wandering around aimlessly and ended up here, but
this was where they had their shed. It was a great knights’ hall that you entered
up a wide, gently rising staircase, and the cows were living on the second floor,
underneath a crystal chandelier and beautiful frescoes of pastoral scenes, but painted
as though the shepherds were living in Greece or farther away than that, in the Promised
Land, because everyone was wearing clothes like those worn by Jesus Christ and the
people who lived with Him back then, and there were huge mirrors between the windows,
and the cows would stand there gazing at themselves, obviously enjoying it. When I left
and tiptoed down the stairs, I realized that this was probably going to be another case
of where the unbelievable comes true. I also began to think of myself as someone
who’d been chosen, because I knew
that if anyone except me
had been here, he wouldn’t have seen a thing, but I enjoyed what I saw, and was
fascinated to see a wasteland that could terrify me, the way people are terrified of
crime and shun misfortune, but when a misfortune actually strikes, everyone who can
gathers around for a look, and stares at the ax lodged in the skull, at the old woman
pinned underneath the streetcar. So I walked along and did not try to run from the place
of great misfortune, but was glad of it, and I even found that this misfortune and this
suffering and these atrocities were not enough for me, and that I could do with
more—not only me but the world as well.

As I was sitting in front of the gamekeeper’s lodge, two people
arrived, and I could see that they lived here and that I’d be spending the whole
year with them, maybe more. When I told them who I was and why I’d been sent, the
man, who had a gray beard and one good eye, said or rather gumbled that he was a
professor of French literature. Then he pointed to the other person, a pretty girl, who
I could tell had once been to reform school, or else she was one of those who used to
hang around the Prašná Brána in Prague and would come into the hotel
after the stock market had closed. As a matter of fact, from the way she moved I could
imagine what she looked like naked and what the hair under her arms and in her lap was
like, and I found that I could imagine this redhead awakening in me the desire, after
all these years, to take her clothes off slowly, and I regarded that as a good sign. She
told me she had been sent here for being too fond of dancing at night, that her name was
Marcela and that she’d apprenticed in the Maršner Orion chocolate factory.
She was wearing
men’s trousers covered with pine pitch and
pine needles, and she had pine needles in her hair. The professor wore rubber boots, as
she did, with crude work socks sticking out of them, and he too was covered with pine
and spruce gum. Both of them smelled like a meadow or a stick of firewood. I followed
them into the gamekeeper’s lodge, and never in my life had I seen such a mess, not
even in those broken buildings the Germans left behind, where people had been looting
for valuables with axes and prying open locks on cupboard doors and trunks. The table
was littered with cigarette butts and matches, and the floor was the same. The professor
told me I’d be sleeping upstairs, and he showed me to the room right away. He
opened the door handle with his foot, with the sole of his rubber boot, and I found
myself in a beautiful wood-paneled room that had two little windows framed with branches
and grapevines. I opened another door and stepped out onto a balcony, also made of wood,
which ran all the way around the house, so I had a view in all four directions, while
the wild grapevines tickled my face. I sat down on a box and folded my hands in my lap,
and I felt like shouting for joy. To celebrate what I’d seen and what was to come,
I opened my suitcase and put on the blue sash, pinned the gilded star to the side of my
jacket, and went down into the living room. The professor was sitting there with his
feet on the table, smoking, and the girl was combing her hair and listening to what he
was telling her. He called her Miss, repeating it constantly, until he was trembling all
over from the hidden strength of the word or as if he was trying to persuade her of
something. Because nothing mattered now, everything was precious, and so I walked into
the room
theatrically, my arms raised as though I were parading a
costume at a fashion show, and I showed myself off from all sides. Then I sat down and
asked if I was supposed to join them at work that afternoon. The professor
laughed—he had beautiful eyes—and said, You evil, stupid, criminal son of
man. Then, pretending not to notice my medal, he said we’d be going to work in an
hour, and started talking to the girl again. I wasn’t surprised to hear him
speaking French words to her,
la table, une chaise, la maison
, and she would
repeat the words and pronounce them all wrong. With enormous tenderness he said to her,
You poor stupid Nana, I’ll have to take off my belt and slap your face, not with
the leather part but with the buckle. He repeated the French words very tenderly,
patiently, as though caressing her with his eyes and voice, this girl from the
Maršner Orion chocolate factory. Marcela must have pronounced the words badly
again—she seemed to be sulking and unwilling to learn, knowing the right answer
but pretending not to—so the professor scolded her gently: You evil, stupid,
criminal daughter of man. As I was closing the door behind me, the professor said, Thank
you! I stuck my head back through the doorway and said, I served the Emperor of
Ethiopia, and I ran my hand over the blue sash.

They had to lend me an extra pair of boots, because the country was
extremely damp. In the morning the dew was so thick it tore like a curtain when you
walked through it, and it fell in a kind of rosary on every blade of grass and every
leaf, and if you just brushed against a branch the dew dropped off like pearls from a
broken necklace. My job the very first day was wonderful. We went to a spruce tree, a
beautiful spruce surrounded by cut boughs piled
halfway up the
trunk, and we cut down more boughs and piled them even higher. Finally two workers came
with a cross-cut saw, and the professor told me this was not just an ordinary spruce
tree, but a resonating spruce. As proof, he pulled a tuning fork out of his briefcase,
struck it on the tree, then held it against the trunk and made me put my ear against the
tree and listen. It sounded wonderful, giving off a very light, luminous, heavenly
sound. So we stood there embracing the spruce while the girl sat on a stump smoking and
wearing an expression not of indifference but of boredom and exasperation. Her eyes
turned accusingly to heaven, as if heaven itself were to blame for her boredom here on
earth, while I slid down to my knees and put my arms around the trunk, which was
reverberating louder than a telegraph pole. When the workers knelt to cut it, I climbed
up on the mound of boughs piled up around the tree and listened, and as the saw bit into
the wood a loud wail rose through the spruce, and the graceful sound that I’d been
hearing was overwhelmed by the sound of the saw as the trunk complained that they were
slicing into its body. The professor hollered at me to come down, so I did, and in a
while the spruce tilted, hesitated for a moment, and then with a cry that came from its
very roots began to fall. Its fall was cushioned by the boughs, as though it were
falling into outstretched arms that prevented it, as the professor explained, from
breaking and losing its music. Spruces like this one were rare, and it was up to us now
to trim the branches and then, according to a plan he had with him, carefully saw the
tree into lengths and carry it gently on a feathery bed of boughs to the factory. There
it would be sawed into planks, then into boards, then into
thin
sheets to be used in making violins and cellos. But the main thing was to find the
sheets of wood that still had the music inside them. A month went by, then two, and we
would prepare the bed of branches like a mother making a bed for her baby so that we
could bring down the resonant spruce without destroying the music imprisoned in its
trunk. And every evening I listened to the professor swearing at us, calling us all
sorts of filthy names, me and the girl—idiots and morons and spotted hyenas and
squalling skunks—and then he would teach us French words. While I was cooking
supper at a tiled stove and lighting the kerosene lamps, I would listen to those
beautiful badly pronounced words coming out of the mouth of the girl who’d been
sent here from the chocolate factory because she liked a good time, liked sleeping with
a different fellow each time, she told us. Her confession wasn’t much different
from what I’d heard from other girls like her, girls of the street, except that
this girl liked doing it for nothing, for love, for the pleasure of having someone love
her for a moment, maybe for a whole night, and that was enough to make her happy. But
here she had to work, and on top of that spend her evenings learning French words, not
because she wanted to, but because she was bored and because she didn’t know how
else to kill the long evenings. The second month, the professor began giving us lectures
on the French literature of the twentieth century, and at this point there was a change
that delighted both him and me. Marcela began to show an interest, and the professor
would spend the whole evening telling her about the Surrealists and Robert Desnos and
Alfred Jarry and RibemontDessaignes, about all the beautiful men and women of
Paris, and once he brought out an original edition of something
called
La rose publique
, and every evening he would read and translate a
different poem, and when we were out working we’d analyze it image by image. At
first everything was vague, but when we analyzed it we somehow managed to get through to
the idea. I would listen, and then I too began to read books and difficult poems, which
I’d never really liked before, and sometimes I understood them well enough to
suggest an interpretation, and the professor would say, You jackass, you idiot, how did
you know that? And I would feel like a tomcat when someone scratches him under the chin,
because when the professor insulted you, it felt like a compliment. I suppose he’d
begun to like me, because he would insult me as much as he insulted Marcela, and by now
he’d speak only French with her at work. Once I drove a load of the musical wood
to the factory, and when I delivered it, they gave me our wages to take back, and I
bought food and fuel and a bottle of cognac and a bouquet of carnations as well. Just as
I left the factory it started to rain, so I waited under a tree, then ran into an old
wooden outhouse to get out of the pouring rain. The water drummed on the sheets of wood
that served as the roof of the outhouse, which wasn’t really an outhouse at all
but probably some kind of sentry box. There were holes in the sides of the sentry box
that were covered with sheets of wood as well, to keep the wind out, and as I waited for
the rain to stop, I tapped on those sheets. When it stopped raining, I ran back into the
musical instrument factory, and they threw me out twice before they finally let me see
the manager, and I took him behind the factory, behind the ramshackle warehouse,
and—just as I
thought—there were ten rare pieces of
resonant wood, several decades old, that someone had used to patch the sentry box. How
did you know what they were? asked the astonished manager. I served the Emperor of
Ethiopia, I said. The manager laughed, slapped me on the back, choked with laughter, and
said, That’s a good one. I smiled too, because I had obviously changed so much
that no one could tell by looking at me that I really had served the Emperor of
Ethiopia.