I Served the King of England (4 page)

Another salesman showed up with something similar, but it was more
beautiful and more practical. He represented a tailoring firm from Pardubice, and our
maître d’, who was always pressed for time, knew about him through an old
army connection because he’d been orderly to a
lieutenant
colonel who recommended this salesman to him. The salesman would stay at the hotel twice
a year, and I saw what he did but couldn’t make any sense of it, because first
he’d measure the maître d’ for trousers, then he’d have him stand
there just as he was, in his vest and white shirt, and he’d place strips of
parchment on his chest and back and around his waist and then write measurements on them
and cut them to shape while they were still on the maître d’, as though he
were making him a coat directly from the strips, except that he had no cloth with him.
Then the salesman would number the strips of parchment and carefully put them in a bag
and seal the bag and write the maître d’s birthdate on the outside along with
his name and surname, and he took a deposit and said that all the maître d’
had to do now was wait for the finished jacket to arrive C.O.D. He wouldn’t have
to go for a fitting, which was why he’d had this company tailor his coat in the
first place, because the maître d’ was a busy man. It wasn’t until
later that I heard what I’d wanted to know at the time but was too shy to ask:
What happens next? The salesman answered it himself, in fact, because as he was cramming
the deposit money into an overstuffed wallet, he said quietly to the maître
d’: You know, this is a revolutionary technique my boss invented, the first in the
republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and
actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like
yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they
take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber
bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled
out, and
then they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they
harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to
the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they
do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they
tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn
comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or
whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and
refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since
it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and
we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless
the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again
and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or
let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new
coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred
colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and
profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and
lieutenant colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone
who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string
and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how
someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered. All
this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one
as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and my
mannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one
of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like
that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally, not my torso, was floating up
there by the ceiling of the Pardubice tailoring firm, and sometimes I felt as though I
were floating near the ceiling of the Golden City of Prague restaurant.

Once, around midnight, I took some mineral water up to the salesman from
van Berkel’s who sold us that pharmacy scale and the machine that sliced Hungarian
salami so thin, and I went in without knocking. There he was, sitting on the carpet in
his pajamas as he always did after eating his fill. He was sitting there on his haunches
and at first I thought he was playing solitaire or telling his fortune with a deck of
cards, but he was smiling blissfully like a little child and slowly laying down
hundred-crown notes side by side on the carpet, and he had half the carpet covered and
it still wasn’t enough, because he pulled another packet of banknotes from his
briefcase and laid them out neatly in a row, as precisely as if he’d had lines or
columns drawn on the carpet. When he finished a row, and the rows were as exact as a
bee’s honeycomb, he looked gleefully at the money, he even clapped his pudgy hands
together and stroked his cheeks and held his face in his hands, reveling like a child in
those banknotes, and he went on dealing them on the floor, and if a note was the wrong
side up or upside down, he turned it so it was like all the others. I stood still,
afraid just to cough and leave. He had a fortune there in those notes, like identical
tiles, and his enormous delight opened my eyes to what was possible.
Although I was just as fond of money, I had never thought of this before, and I saw
a picture of myself putting all the money I earned, not into hundred-crown notes just
yet, but into twenties, and then laying my twenties out just like that, and I loved
watching this fat, childish man in his striped pajamas, knowing that one day I too would
shut myself away like this and lay out on the floor a joyful image of my power and my
talent. And once I surprised the poet Tonda Jódl that way. He lived in the hotel,
and fortunately he could also paint, because instead of giving him a bill the boss would
take a painting. Jódl put out a small book of poems in our town, called
The
Life of Jesus Christ
, which he published privately. He took the whole edition
to his room and laid the copies out side by side on the floor, and
The Life of Jesus
Christ
made him so nervous he kept taking his coat off and putting it on again,
and he covered the whole room like that with the little white books and still had some
left over, so he continued along the corridor, laying those volumes down almost to the
stairway. Then he took his coat off once more and a while later put it on again. Or, if
he was sweating, he’d just throw it over his shoulders, but when the cold got to
him he’d put his arms back in the sleeves, and pretty soon he’d be so warm
that he’d take it off again, and cotton balls kept falling out of his ears, and
he’d take them out or stick them back in again, depending on how much he wanted to
hear the world around him. He preached a return to the simple country life and he never
painted anything but country cottages from the Krkonoše region, and he claimed that
the role of the poet was to seek the New Man. Our guests didn’t like him, or
rather they did, but that didn’t stop
them from playing
practical jokes on him all the time. It wasn’t just that he was always taking his
coat off and putting it on again in the restaurant, he’d also take off his
galoshes and put them on, depending on his mood, which would change every five minutes
because of this search for the New Man, and when he’d taken them off, the guests
would pour beer or coffee into them, and then they’d all watch the poet out of the
corner of their eyes, missing their mouths with forks full of food while he put his
galoshes back on, and the coffee or the beer would slosh out, and he would thunder for
all the restaurant to hear: You evil, stupid, and criminal sons of man! What you need is
the simple life! His eyes would fill with tears, not tears of anger but of happiness,
because he saw the beer in his galoshes as a gesture, proof that the town recognized
him, and if it didn’t exactly honor him, at least it considered him one of its
own. The worst was when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. The poet would slip into
them and then try to walk back to his table, and almost fall over. Sometimes the
galoshes were nailed down so hard that he’d actually fall on his hands, and then
he’d rant at the customers again and call them evil, stupid, and criminal sons of
man, but then he’d forgive them right away and offer them a small drawing or a
book of poems, which he got them to pay for on the spot so he’d have enough to get
by on. Basically he wasn’t bad. As a matter of fact he hung over the whole town in
a way, and I often dreamed that just like the angel over the chemist’s shop at the
White Angel the poet would float above the town, waving his wings, and he had wings, I
saw them myself, but I was afraid to ask the priest about it. When he took his coat off
and put it on, and his beautiful
face was bent over a quarto of
paper, because he liked to write poems at our tables, and when he turned his head a
certain way, I could see his angelic profile and a halo floating above his head, a
little violet circle of flame like the flame on a Primus stove, as if he had kerosene
inside his head and that circle glowing and sizzling above it, the kind you find in
stallkeepers’ lamps. And when he walked around the town square, Tonda Jódl
the poet would carry his umbrella as no one else could, and no one could wear a topcoat
tossed over his shoulders quite as casually as he, or wear a floppy fedora the way he
could, even though he had white balls of cotton sprouting from his ears, and before he
even crossed the square he’d have taken his coat off his shoulders and put it back
on again five times, and have doffed his hat ten times. It was as though he was paying
his respects to someone, yet he never actually greeted anyone except the old women in
the marketplace, the stallkeepers, to whom he would always bow deeply, for these were
his people as he searched for the New Man. When it was damp and cold or when it rained,
he would order a mug of tripe soup and a roll and take it across the square to those
frail old women, and as he carried it he seemed to be carrying more than just soup,
because in that mug, as least that’s how I saw it, he was taking those old women a
piece of his heart, a human heart in tripe soup, or sliced and fried up with onions and
paprika, the way a priest would carry the monstrance or the host to the last rites, with
tears in his eyes at the thought of how kind he was to bring the old women soup.

Back then, when he was spreading copies of his new book on the floor and
out into the corridor, the cleaning
woman tramped over the white
covers of
The Life of Jesus Christ
as she was carrying a bucket of water to the
toilets. But Tonda Jódl didn’t shout at her, You evil, stupid, and criminal
daughter of man. He left each of her footprints just the way it was, almost like a
boy’s shoeprint, and he signed those copies and sold
The Life of Jesus
Christ
with the imprint of a sole for twelve crowns instead of ten. But because
the book was printed at his own expense, there were only two hundred copies, so he
arranged for a Catholic house in Prague to publish ten thousand copies, and for days on
end he would work on his calculations, taking off his coat and putting it on again,
falling down three times when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. And there’s
something else I forgot to mention. Every five minutes he’d pour some medicine
into himself, so he was always spattered with powdered medicine like a miller when a bag
of flour rips open and spills over the lapels and knees of his black suit. One of the
medicines, Neurastenin it was called, he drank straight from the bottle, so he had a
kind of yellow ring around his mouth, as though he chewed tobacco. Those medicines he
poured down his throat were what caused him every five minutes to feel hot enough to
sweat and then cold enough to shiver so violently the whole table would shake. And so
the hotel carpenter measured the area covered by
The Life of Jesus Christ
in
the room and the corridor, and then Tonda Jódl worked it out that when the ten
thousand copies were published, there’d be so many books that if you put them on
the ground you could pave the road from
Č
áslav to
He
ř
man
ů
v M
ě
stec, or there’d be enough to cover the entire town
square and all the adjacent streets in the historic part of our town, or if you laid
them
end to end they could form a strip, a white line down the
middle of the road all the way from
Č
áslav to
Jihlava. He got to me with those books. Whenever I walked over the cobblestones of our
town, I felt that I was walking on them, and I knew that it must be wonderful to see
your own name printed on every cobblestone. Tonda Jódl went into debt over those
ten thousand copies of
The Life of Jesus Christ
, with the result that Mrs.
Kadavá, who owned the printing shop, came and confiscated them, and two porters
carried them away in laundry hampers while Mrs. Kadavá said or, rather, shouted,
Jesus Christ
will be in my printshop, and for eight crowns you can have one
Jesus Christ
any time you want. And Tonda Jódl took his coat off and
took a swig of Neurastenin and thundered, Thou evil, stupid, and criminal daughter of
man.

I coughed, but Mr. Walden lay on the floor beside a whole carpet of green
hundred-crown notes. Lying stretched out with one fat arm under his head like a pillow,
he gazed across the field of money. I went back out, closed the door, and knocked. Mr.
Walden asked, Who is it? I replied, It’s me, the busboy, I’m bringing you
your mineral water. Come in, he said, and I entered. He was still lying on his back, and
his head was resting in his hand, and his hair, curly and full of brilliantine, sparkled
almost like the diamonds on his other hand, and he was all smiles again and said, Give
me one and park yourself for a bit. I took a bottle opener from my pocket and removed
the crown cap, and mineral water fizzed away quietly. Mr. Walden drank, and between sips
he pointed to the bills and talked, as quietly and pleasantly as the mineral water, I
know you’ve already been here, but I let you have an eyeful. Just
remember, money opens up the whole world to you. That’s what old Koreff
taught me when I was an apprentice there, and what you see here on the carpet I made in
a week. I sold ten sets of scales, and that’s my commission. Have you ever seen
anything prettier? When I get home I’ll spread it out like this all over the
apartment, my wife and I will spread it out on the tables and on the floor, and
I’ll buy salami, cut it up into chunks, and eat it all evening and I won’t
leave a thing for the next day, because I’d just wake up in the middle of the
night and polish it off anyway. I’m crazy about salami, a whole salami at a time,
and someday I’ll tell you why, when I come again. Then he got up, patted my head,
put his hand under my chin, looked into my eyes, and said, You’re going to make
good someday, remember that. You’ve got it in you, I can tell. You just have to
know how to grab the handle. But how? I asked. And he replied, I saw you selling
frankfurters at the station, and I’m one of the ones who gave you a twenty and you
took so long making change the train pulled away before you could give it back. And now,
said Mr. Walden—and he opened the window and took a handful of change from his
trouser pocket, threw it down into the empty square, and waited, with a finger up, so
I’d listen to the coins jingle and clatter across the cobblestones—now, he
went on, if you can throw small change out the window like that, the C-notes will come
waltzing in through the door, you see? And the wind rose and a breeze swirled into the
room through the window and, as if on command, all the notes came alive, rose up, danced
about, and were swept into the corner of the room like autumn leaves.