I Served the King of England (3 page)

The nicest guests in our establishment were always the
traveling salesmen. Not all of them, of course, because some traded in goods that
were worthless or didn’t sell—warm-water salesmen, we called them. My
favorite was the fat salesman. The first time he came I ran for the boss, who was
alarmed when he saw me and said, What’s the matter? Sir, I said breathlessly, some
big shot’s just arrived. He went to take a look, and sure enough, we’d never
had anyone this fat before. The boss praised me and chose a room that this salesman
always stayed in afterward, with a bed that the porter reinforced with four cinder
blocks and two planks. The salesman made a wonderful entrance. He had a helper with him
who looked like a porter at the station and was carrying a heavy pack on his back,
something with straps around it, like a heavy typewriter. In the evening, when the
salesman sat down to supper, he would take the menu and look at it as though there was
nothing on it he liked, and then he’d say: Leaving aside the lungs in sour sauce,
bring me every entrée on the menu, one by one, and when I’m finishing the
first, bring me the next, until I tell you I’ve had enough. And he’d always
polish off ten main dishes before he’d eaten his fill, and then he’d get a
dreamy look on his face and say he’d like a little something to nibble on. The
first night he asked for a hundred grams of Hungarian salami. When the boss brought it
out to him, the salesman looked at the plate, then took a handful of coins, opened the
door, and tossed them out into the street. After he’d eaten a couple of slices of
salami, he appeared to get angry again, took another handful of change, and tossed it
out into the street again. Then he sat down again, frowning, while the regulars looked
at one another and at the boss. All the boss could
do was get up,
walk over, bow, and ask, Just out of curiosity, sir, why are you throwing your money
away? The salesman answered, Why shouldn’t I when you’re the owner of this
establishment and you throw away ten-crown notes every day, exactly the same way? The
boss went back to the table and reported all this to the regulars, but that really got
them going, so he went back to the fat man’s table and said, Just out of
curiosity, sir . . . of course you’re entitled to throw away as much money as you
like, but I don’t see what that has to do with my ten crowns. The fat man stood up
and said, Allow me to explain. May I go into your kitchen? And the boss bowed and
motioned him toward the kitchen door. When the salesman came into the kitchen, I heard
him introduce himself: My name is Walden and I represent the firm of van Berkel. Now,
would you mind slicing me a hundred grams of Hungarian salami? So the boss’s wife
sliced the salami, weighed it, and put it on a plate. Suddenly we were all afraid he
might be an inspector, but the salesman clapped and his helper came into the kitchen
carrying the thing with a cover over it, which now looked like a spinning wheel, and set
it on the table. The salesman swept off the cover, and there stood a beautiful red
device—a thin, round, shiny circular blade that turned on a shaft, at the end of
which was a crank and a handle and a dial. The fat man beamed at the machine and said,
Now, the largest firm in the world is the Catholic church, and it trades in something
that no man has ever seen, no man has ever touched, and no man has ever encountered
since the world began, and that something is called God. The second-largest firm in the
world is International, and you’ve got that represented here too, by a
device now in use all around the world called a cash register. If
you press the right buttons throughout the day, then instead of having to figure out the
daily receipts yourself in the evening, the cash register will do it for you. The
third-largest is the firm I represent, van Berkel, which manufactures scales used to
weigh things with equal precision the world over, whether you’re at the Equator or
the North Pole, and in addition we manufacture a full range of meat-and-salami slicers.
The beauty of our machine is this, if you’ll allow me to demonstrate. And, after
asking permission, he stripped the skin off a roll of Hungarian salami, put the skin on
the scales, and then, turning the crank with one hand, pushed the salami against the
circular blade with the other. The slices of salami piled up on the little platform till
it seemed that he had sliced the entire piece, though not much of it had disappeared.
The salesman stopped and asked how much salami we thought he’d sliced. The boss
said a hundred and fifty grams, the maître d’ a hundred and ten. How about
you, squirt? the man asked me. I said eighty grams, and the boss grabbed me by the ear
and twisted it and apologized to the salesman saying, His mother dropped him on his head
on a tile floor when he was an infant. But the salesman patted my head and smiled at me
nicely and said, The boy came closest. He threw the sliced salami on the scales, and the
scales showed seventy grams. We all looked at one another, and then gathered around the
miraculous little machine, because everyone could see there was profit in it. When we
stood back, the salesman took a handful of coins and tossed them into the coal box and
clapped, and his porter brought another package, and in its wrapping it looked like the
glass bell my
grandmother used to keep the Virgin Mary under, but
when he unwrapped it, there stood a set of scales, like the kind you see in
chemist’s shops, with a slender needle that only showed up to a kilogram. The
salesman said, Now, this scale is so precise that when I breathe on it, it will measure
the weight of my breath. And he breathed and, sure enough, the needle moved, and then he
took the sliced salami from our scale and threw it onto his, and the scale showed that
the salami weighed exactly sixty-seven and a half grams. It was obvious that our scales
had robbed the boss of two point five grams and the salesman worked it out on the table.
That gives us . . . and then he drew a line under his figures and said, If you sell ten
kilos of Hungarian salami a week, this scale will save you a hundred times two point
five grams, that’s almost half a salami. And he made fists of his hands and leaned
his knuckles on the table, crossing one foot over the other so the toe touched the
ground and the heel was in the air, and he smiled triumphantly. The boss said, Everybody
leave, we’re going to talk business. I’ll buy all of this as is. Pointing at
the porter, the salesman said, These are my samples. For a whole week we’ve been
lugging them from chalet to chalet up in the Krkonoše Mountains, and in every
decent chalet we’ve sold the salami slicer and a scale, and together they’re
a package I call a tax saver.

The salesman must have liked me—perhaps I reminded him of his
youth—but whenever he saw me he’d pat my head and laugh, a pleasant laugh,
till tears filled his eyes. Sometimes he’d ask to have mineral water brought to
his room. Whenever I brought it to him I’d find him already in his pajamas, lying
on the carpet, his enormous stomach
beside him like a barrel. What I
liked about him was that he wasn’t ashamed of his stomach, he carried it proudly
before him like a billboard, plowing forward into a world that came halfway to meet him.
Sit down, my son, he’d say, and then he’d laugh, and it always felt as
though my mother, not my father, was talking to me. Once he told me, You know, I started
out when I was just a little guy like you, with Koreff’s, the haberdashers. Ah, my
child, I still remember my boss. He always said a good businessman has three
things—property, a shop, and some inventory—and if you lose your inventory
you’ve still got your shop, and if you lose your shop and your inventory at least
you’ve got your property, and no one can take that away from you. Once I was sent
out to pick up some combs, beautiful bone combs—eight hundred crowns, those combs
cost—and I carried them on a bicycle in two enormous bags—here, have a
sweet, go on, try this one, it’s cherries in chocolate—and as I was pushing
the bicycle up the hill—by the way, how old did you say you were? I told him
fifteen and he nodded and took a sweet and smacked his lips and went on—and as I
was carrying those combs up the hill, a peasant woman passed me, she was on a bicycle,
too, and she stopped at the top of the hill in the woods, and after I’d caught up
to her, she looked at me so intensely that I had to look away, and then she caressed me
and said, Let’s see if the raspberries are ripe. And I laid my bicycle with the
load of combs down in the ditch, and she put hers—it was a woman’s
bike—on top of mine and took me by the hand, and behind the very first bush we
came to she pushed me down and undid my fly, and before I knew it she was on top of me.
She was the first to have
me, but then I remembered my bike and my
combs, so I ran back, and her bike was lying on top of mine, and in those days
women’s bicycles had a colored netting over the back wheel, like the kind horses
sometimes wear over their manes, and I felt for the combs and to my relief they were
still there. When the woman ran up and saw that my pedal was tangled in the netting of
her bicycle, she said it was a sign that we weren’t to go our separate ways just
yet, but I was afraid—here, try this sweet, something they call nougat—so we
rode the bicycles off into the wood and she put her hand into my trousers again and,
well, I was younger then, and this time I lay on her, just the way we put our bicycles
down in the bushes, with hers down first and mine on top, and that’s how we made
love, and it was beautiful, and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit
in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful. Ah, but go to bed now, you’ve
got to be up early, my boy. And he took the bottle and drank the whole thing at once,
and I heard the water splashing into his stomach like rainwater down a drainpipe and
into a cistern, and when he turned onto his side, you could actually hear the water
shifting to find its proper level.

I never liked the salesmen who sold food and margarine and kitchen
utensils. They would bring their own food with them and eat it in their rooms, and some
of them even brought little camp stoves that ran on alcohol, and they’d make
potato soup in their rooms and throw the peels under the bed and expect us to polish
their shoes for nothing, and then when they were checking out they’d give me a
company lapel pin for a tip, and for that I had the privilege of carrying a crate of
yeast out to the car for them, because
they’d bring the yeast
from the wholesaler they represented and then try to sell it on their rounds when the
occasion arose. Some of the salesmen had so many suitcases with them, it looked as if
they’d brought all the goods they expected to sell that week. Others were
practically empty-handed. Whenever I saw a traveling salesman arrive with no suitcases,
I was curious to find out exactly what he was selling. It always turned out to be
something surprising. For example, one of them took orders for wrapping paper and paper
bags, and he carried his samples behind his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his
coat. Another one carried only a yo-yo and a top in his briefcase, which never left his
side—the order forms were in his pocket—and he’d walk through town
playing with the yo-yo or the top and go into a store, still playing with it, and the
toy-and-notions merchant would leave the small-goods salesman standing there and walk
over as if in a dream and reach out for the yo-yo and the top, or whatever was popular
just then, and he’d say, How many dozen, how many gross can you deliver? The
salesman would agree to twenty dozen and, if the merchant insisted, add a dozen or so
more. Another season it would be a foam-rubber ball, and there’d be a salesman
tossing it up and down on the train, on the street, and then in the shops, and the
merchant would approach him as if hypnotized, watching the ball go up to the ceiling,
back down into his hand, back up, then down, and he’d say, How many dozen, how
many gross can you leave me? I never liked these seasonal salesmen, and the maître
d’ didn’t either. They were one-shot men, real warm-water salesmen, and we
could see from the moment they set foot in the restaurant that they were the kind who
would rather
eat their fill and then leave through the window
without paying, which happened to us a few times. The nicest salesman who ever stayed
with us was the Rubber King, the one who supplied the chemist’s shops with those
intimate rubber goods that people are ashamed to ask for. He represented the Primeros
firm, and he always had some novelty items with him whenever he came. The regulars would
invite him to sit at their table, because something would always happen that was
unpleasant for one of them but hilarious for the rest, and the salesman would pass
around condoms of all colors, shapes, and sizes. Though I was just a busboy, I was
surprised and disgusted by our regulars, who seemed so gentlemanly on the street but
when they started carrying on at the table they were like kittens, and sometimes as
repulsive and ridiculous as monkeys. Whenever the Rubber King was there, they’d
slip a Primeros into someone’s food—under the dumplings or some such
place—and when the victim turned his dumpling over they’d all roar with
laughter, knowing that before the month was out the same thing would happen to them.
They all loved playing practical jokes on each other, like Mr. Živnostek, who made
false teeth and was always dropping loose teeth or dentures into someone’s beer.
Once he slipped his own teeth into his neighbor’s coffee, but the neighbor
switched cups on him, and Mr. Živnostek almost choked to death until the vet gave
him such a whack on the back that the teeth flew out and dropped under the table. Mr.
Živnostek thought they were teeth from his factory and stamped on them, but then
realized too late that they were his own custom-made dentures, and then it was the
dental technician Mr. Šloser who had the last
laugh. He liked
doing rush repair jobs because they brought in the most money, which is why his best
time of the year was the start of the rabbit-and-pheasant season when the hunters would
all get together after the day’s shoot and dine on their kill and get so drunk
that many of them would break their teeth on the pellets, and Mr. Šloser would have
to work day and night to repair them so their wives and families wouldn’t find
out. But the Rubber King had other things with him as well. One day he brought in what
he called the Widow’s Consolation, though I never did find out what it was,
because he kept it in what looked like a clarinet case. As the Widow’s Consolation
was passed around the table each of them would open it a crack, hoot with laughter, and
then snap it shut and quickly pass it on, and even though I was serving them beer, I
never found out what it was that consoled widows. Once the Rubber King brought an
artificial woman made of rubber. It was winter, and the regulars were sitting in the
kitchen instead of in the billiards room or by the window, where they sat in summer,
divided off from the rest of the room by a curtain, and the Rubber King made a kind of
speech to the dummy, and they all laughed, but I didn’t find it funny at all.
Everyone at the table got to hold the dummy, but as soon as anyone had it in his hands,
he’d suddenly turn serious and blush and quickly pass it on to the one next to
him, and the Rubber King lectured them as if they were schoolboys: This, gentlemen, is
the very latest thing, a sexual object to take to bed with you, a puppet made of rubber.
Her name is Primavera, and you can have your way with her, she’s practically
alive, and she’s approximately the size of a fully grown young woman. She’s
exciting, close-fitting
and warm and sexy, and there are a million
men out there just dying for her, dying to blow her up with their own mouths. This
woman, the creature of your own breath, will restore your faith in yourselves and make
you potent again and give you longer erections and superb satisfaction. Primavera,
gentlemen, is made of special rubber, and between her legs is the queen of rubbers, foam
rubber, and her orifice is provided with all the tucks and turns a woman should have. A
tiny battery-operated vibrator activates it with a gentle stimulating pulsation so the
female organ has a natural action of its own, and everyone can attain climax as he
desires, and every man is the master of the situation. To avoid the inconvenience of
cleaning out the orifice, you may use a Primeros condom, which comes with a tube of
glycerine cream to prevent chafing. Everyone around the table wore himself out blowing
up Primavera, and when it was passed on to the next man, the Rubber King would pull out
the little plug and the air would go out of her, so that each man would have to blow it
up himself and feel her swell under his hands with the breath from his own lungs, while
the others clapped and laughed, eager for their turn, and there was great hilarity in
the kitchen, and the cashier fidgeted and crossed and recrossed her legs and got very
restless, as though each time they blew the dummy up they were inflating and deflating
her. They fooled around like that until midnight.