I Served the King of England (23 page)

But it meant something quite different to me now. When I mentioned serving
the Emperor of Ethiopia, it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent
now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the
end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would
be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk
more and more. It may also have been because of everything I learned from the professor,
who outdid himself in insults, because no coachman cursed his horses the way this
professor of French literature and aesthetics cursed us. But he would lecture us on all
the things he was interested in, every evening he would start lecturing, start while I
was still opening the door, and he’d continue right up until he fell asleep, until
we fell asleep, and he would tell us all about aesthetics and ethics and philosophy and
philosophers. He’d say that all philosophers, Jesus Christ not excepted, were
nothing but a bunch of con men, sons of bitches, murderers, and good-for-nothings, and
if they’d never existed mankind would have been better off, but mankind was an
evil, stupid, criminal lot. So perhaps the professor confirmed my feelings that it
was best to be alone, that although the stars were visible at
night, at noon you could see them only from the bottom of a deep well. So I made up my
mind, and one day I got up and shook hands with everyone, thanked them for everything,
and went back to Prague, because I’d already extended my stay in the forest by
half a year. By now the professor and his girl spoke only French together, and they
always had something to talk about, and wherever they went, the professor would think up
fresh ways to browbeat the girl, who by now was really beautiful, and fresh ways to
surprise her with facts, because I could see that he was in love with her in this
wilderness, in love with her for life and for death. And because once upon a time I had
served the Emperor of Ethiopia, I could see that the girl would be his fate, that one
day she’d walk out on him, when she knew everything he knew, learning against her
will though it had sanctified her and made her beautiful. One time, she repeated
something that the professor had told her, a quotation from Aristotle: when Aristotle
was criticized for plagiarizing Plato, he replied that after a colt has sucked his
mother dry, he gives her a kick. And I was right, because when I had settled the last
formalities for my last job, or what I thought would be my last job—and I expect
it will be my last job, because I have served the Emperor of Ethiopia and I know
myself—I was walking past the railroad station one day and there coming toward me
was Marcela. She had a thoughtful expression on her face and her hair was pulled back in
a braid, a pigtail tied with a violet ribbon, and she was walking along absorbed in her
own thoughts. I looked at her, but she walked absently right past me, and other
passersby stopped to look at her too,
and she had a book under her
arm, the girl who had once worked at the Maršner Orion chocolate factory. Even with
my head twisted around, I could read the title of the book she was carrying,
L’Histoire de la surréalisme
, and as she walked past I laughed
and cheerfully went on my way, because I had seen that rebellious and vulgar girl who
talked to the professor just the way she had talked in Koší
ř
e, and the good professor had taught her everything a well-educated
young lady should know, and now she walked past me as if I were a barbarian. I knew for
certain that this girl could never be happy, but that her life would be sadly beautiful,
and that life with her would be both an agony and a fulfillment for a man. Afterward,
many times, I thought about that book under her arm and wondered what had spilled over
from its pages into her thoughtful and rebellious head, and what I saw was just the head
with those beautiful eyes, eyes that had not been beautiful a year before, and it was
all the professor’s doing, he had turned this girl into a beauty with a book. I
could see her fingers piously opening the covers and turning the pages, one after
another, like the Eucharist, because I saw that before these hands picked up a book,
they would wash themselves first, and the way she carried the book was striking in its
devoutness. I adorned the memory of my chocolate girl with peony petals and flowers,
crowned her head with fronds of spruce and pine and mistletoe—I who had looked at
women only from the waist down, their legs and their laps, but with this girl I turned
my gaze and my longing upward, to her beautiful forehead and her beautiful hands opening
the book, to her eyes radiating everything wonderful that she’d gained through her
transformation.
This transformation filled her young face, it was
in the way she narrowed her eyes, in her easy smile and how she rubbed her nose from
left to right with a charming index finger. Her face was a face humanized by French
words, French sentences, French conversation, and finally by difficult but beautiful
verses written by beautiful young men, poets who had discovered the miraculous in the
human.

On the train I thought about the girl, I smiled, I became her, and I
posted her portrait in every station and on all the moving sides of trains passing or
standing on adjacent tracks. I would even hold my own hand, take myself under the arm,
and put my arm around myself, as though it was her I was holding. I looked at the faces
of my fellow travelers, and no one could see what I was doing with myself and in myself,
no one could see from my face what I was carrying inside. When I got out at the last
station, I continued by bus through a beautiful countryside that resembled the
countryside where I had felled the resonant spruce after first surrounding their trunks
with feathery pine boughs neatly stacked to a good height. I went on thinking and
completed my portrait of the girl from the Maršner Orion chocolate factory, and I
pictured her as her boy-friends were making a fuss over her, welcoming her back,
behaving the way they had before she’d been sent away to work, and how they would
try to lure her into talking with them the way she used to, talking with her belly and
her legs, with the lower half of her marked off by the elastic band in her underwear,
and no one would understand that she was now favoring the half above the elastic. I got
off the bus at Srní, asked where the roads department was, and reported to them,
telling them I was the one who would
be mending the roads all year
round, somewhere far away, practically in the mountains, sections of road where no one
wanted to be. That afternoon I was issued a small horse and a wagon, and they suggested
I buy a goat too, which I did, and they made me a present of a German shepherd, so I set
off with the horse, my baggage on the cart, and the goat tethered behind the cart. The
German shepherd took to me right away, and I bought him some salami, then we drove along
a road that gradually led upward as the country opened out into a region of stately
spruce and tall pines. Every once in a while we came to a patch of young trees and
aftergrowth surrounded by lattice fences that were crumbling like gingerbread, gradually
rotting and changing back into humus from which wild raspberries and ravenous
blackberries grew like seaweed, and I walked beside the little horse’s nodding
head. It was the kind of horse they have in mines—he must have worked underground
somewhere because his eyes were so beautiful, the kind I would see in stokers and people
who worked in artificial light all day or in the light of safety lamps and emerged from
the pit or the furnace room to look up at the beautiful sky, because to such eyes all
skies are beautiful. As the countryside became bleaker and more forlorn, I drove past
little cottages in the woods that used to belong to German forest workers who had left
the country, and at each cottage I would stop and stand on the doorstep, up to my chest
in nettles and wild raspberries, and look through the vines into kitchens that were
filling up with grass, and into tiny living rooms. Almost every one of these dwellings
had electricity, and I would follow the wires down to a brook where I would find the
remnants of a
small generating plant driven by a miniature turbine
put there by the hands of workers who had cleared the woods but then had to leave when
the war was over, were forced to leave, transported from the country. They had been
treated no differently from the rich Germans who had been political leaders and who
carried out the policies I had come to know so well, the arrogant, loutish, vain, crude
Germans full of pride, which in the end had brought them down. That I understood, but I
didn’t understand why these workers’ hands had to go away, leaving no one to
continue their work. It was a terrible loss—these people who had had nothing but
hard work in the forest and on the meadows and hillsides, workers who had had no time
for arrogance or pride, who must have been humble because they were taught humility by
the kind of life I’d had a glimpse of and was now approaching myself. Then I got
an idea, and I opened my trunk and I pulled out the case with the golden star in it,
slung the pale-blue sash across my corduroy coat, and set out once again with the star
sparkling at my side. I walked to the rhythm of the nodding head of the little horse,
who kept turning around to look at my sash and whinnying, while the goat bleated and the
German shepherd barked happily at me and tried to catch my sash. I stopped again and
after untying the goat went to look at another building, which had been a kind of inn in
the woods. It had an enormous hall, which was dry, oddly enough, and tiny windows.
Everything was just as the people had left it, right down to the dusty beer mugs on the
shelves and a keg with a spigot and a mallet to broach it with. As I was leaving, I felt
a pair of eyes on me—it was a cat, and I called to her and she meowed, and
I went to get some salami and bent down and tried to coax her to
come to me. I could tell she wanted me to pat her, but she was so lonely and so
unaccustomed to the human smell that she kept scooting away, so I put the salami down
and she ate it hungrily. I held out my hand, but she jumped away again, bristling and
hissing at me, so I went back out into the light and found the goat drinking from the
brook, and I took a bucket and filled it with water for the little horse. When
he’d drunk his fill, we set off again, and at a bend in the road, where I turned
back to see what the landscape looked like from the other direction—as though
I’d let a beautiful woman go by and then turned to watch her walk away—I saw
that the cat was following us. This was a good omen, so I cracked the whip and gave a
shout and felt joy bursting in my chest and began to sing for no reason at
all—timidly, because I had never sung in my life before. In all those decades it
had never crossed my mind that I might want to sing and now here I was singing,
inventing words and sentences to fill in the places I didn’t know, and the German
shepherd began to howl, then sat down and let out a long wail, so I gave him a piece of
salami and he rubbed against my legs, but I went on singing as if through the
singing—not through the song, because all I could produce now were squawks—I
was emptying out of myself drawers and boxes full of old bills and useless letters and
postcards, as if fragments of tattered posters were blowing out of my mouth, posters
pasted one on top of the other, so that when you rip them away you create nonsense
signs, where soccer matches blend into concerts or where art exhibits get mixed up with
brass-band tattoos—everything that had accumulated inside me, like tar
and nicotine in a smoker’s lungs. And so I sang, and I felt
as if I was hacking up and spitting out phlegm from clogged lungs, and I felt like the
beer pipes the innkeeper cleans with a strong jet of water, like a room with all the
wallpaper torn off, several layers of it, a room where a family had lived for
generations.

I drove on through the countryside, and no one could hear me, and all I
could see from the hilltops was forest, because what was left of man and his works was
slowly and surely being swallowed up again by the trees. The small fields were
disappearing beneath rocks and grass, and bushy undergrowth had moved into the
buildings, and black elder branches were prying up cement floors and tiles, rolling them
over, spreading leaves and tangled branches above them, because a black elder has more
power in it than a lever, than a hydraulic lift or press. Following piles of gravel and
ballast, I arrived at a large building. I walked around it and realized that I would
feel good here, beside this road. Although I’d been told that my job was to mend
the road and maintain it, so far no one was using it, and no one was likely to, because
the road was maintained only in case of emergency and for carrying out logs in the
summer. Suddenly I heard something that sounded like a human lament, the music of a
violin and then a lilting cry, so I walked along the road toward the voice without
noticing that my little horse, whom I’d unhitched, attaching the reins to his
harness collar, and the goat and the German shepherd were all following me, and I came
upon a group of three people. They were gypsies, the people I was supposed to replace,
and what I saw was miraculous, the unbelievable come true. An old gypsy woman was
squatting
by a small fire like all nomads, stirring a pot that
rested by its handles on two stones, and as she stirred it with one hand, she leaned her
other elbow on her knee and held her forehead in her hand. An old gypsy sat in the road,
his legs apart, pounding neatly piled stones into the roadbed with powerful blows of his
mallet. A young man in boots and black trousers that fitted tightly around the hips and
with cuffs that flared out in a bell was leaning over him, playing a passionate and
elegiac melody on the violin, a gypsy song. The music must have made something in the
old man’s life seem more intense, because he wailed and complained in a long
melancholy cry and, moved by the music, tore fistfuls of his hair out and threw them
into the fire. Then he went back to pounding the stones while his son, or maybe it was
his nephew, played the violin, and the old woman went on cooking her food. And I saw
before me what I could expect, that I would be here alone, with no one to cook or play
the violin for me, with no one but the little horse, the goat, the dog, and the cat, who
was still keeping a respectful distance behind us. I coughed, and the old woman turned
around and looked at me as though she were staring straight at the sun, and the old man
stopped his pounding, and the young man put his violin down and bowed to me. I said I
was here to start work, but the old man and woman stood up, bowed, shook hands with me,
and said they were all ready, and I could see now that they had in the bushes a light
gypsy cart with large rear wheels. They said I was the first person they’d seen in
a month, and I said, Is that so? But I didn’t believe them. The young man took an
instrument case from the cart, opened it up, and like putting a baby in its cradle he
very carefully laid
the violin inside, then covered it even more
carefully with a small piece of velvet cloth embroidered with initials and notes and the
words to a song. Then he looked at the violin and stroked the velvet cloth lovingly,
closed the case, jumped up onto the cart, and took hold of the reins while the old road
mender sat down. They put the old woman between them and drove off the partly mended
road to the house from which they carried out blankets and eiderdowns and several pots
and a kettle. I tried to persuade them to stay for another night, but they were in a
hurry and could hardly wait, they said, to see another human being, to see other people.
I asked them what the winter was like here.
Ai ai ai ai
, wailed the old gypsy,
very bad. We ate our goat, our dog, and our cat. He raised his hand and held up three
fingers in the sign of an oath and said, Three months there hasn’t been a soul
here, and snowed in we were, sir. The old woman cried and repeated, And snowed in we
were. Then they both began to cry, while the young man took out his violin again and
played a melancholy song and the old gypsy shook the reins and the little horse leaned
into his traces while the young man played standing up, his legs wide apart, with
powerful motions, the languid expression of gypsy romance in his face. The old woman and
the old man wept and quietly said,
Ai ai ai
, nodding to me, their faces full of
suffering and wrinkles, letting me know with a gesture that they felt sorry for me and
rejected me at the same time, because they shooed me away with both hands, not from
themselves, but from life, as if they were digging my grave with those hands and laying
me in it. When they reached the top of the hill the old man stood up and pulled out
another
clump of hair, then the wagon disappeared over the brow of
the hill, and all I could see was a hand tossing the hair away, perhaps as a sign of the
great despair and pity he felt for me. I went into the large hall of the abandoned inn
to look at where I’d be living, and as I walked through the building and around
the stables, the woodshed, and the hayloft to the pump for water to wash myself, the
horse, the goat, the German shepherd, and the cat walked gravely behind me. I turned and
looked at them, and they looked at me, and I saw that they were afraid I might abandon
them, and I laughed and patted each one of them on the head in turn, except the cat, who
wanted me to pat her too but the power of her own shyness made her scoot away.