I Served the King of England (5 page)

I looked at Mr. Walden the way I looked at all salesmen,
because whenever I looked at them enough, I’d find myself wondering what kind
of underwear they had on, and what kind of shirts they wore. And I’d imagine that
they all had dirty underpants with yellow crotches, and dirty shirt collars and filthy
socks, and that if they hadn’t been staying with us they’d have thrown those
socks and underwear and shirts out the window, the way they used to in the Charles
Baths, where I was sent to live for three years with my grandmother. My grandmother had
a little room in the old mill, almost like a closet, where the sun never shone and where
it couldn’t have shone anyway, because the window looked north and besides it was
right next to the mill wheel, which was so big that it entered the water at the
first-floor level and reached the third floor at the top of its arc. My grandmother took
me in because my mother had me when she was single and turned me over to her mother,
that is, my grandmother, who lived right next to the baths. This little room that she
sublet in the mill was her entire fortune in life and she praised the Lord for hearing
her prayer and giving her this little room next to the baths, because when Thursday and
Friday came around and the traveling salesmen and people with no fixed address came for
a bath, my grandmother would be on the alert from ten in the morning on. I looked
forward to those days, and to the other days as well, although underwear didn’t
come flying out of the bathhouse windows as often then. As we watched out of our window,
every once in a while one of the traveling salesmen would fling his dirty underpants out
of the window, they would hover for a moment in the air, displaying themselves, then
continue their fall. Some of them fell into the water, and Grandma
would have to lean down and fish them out with a hook and I had to hang on to her
legs to keep her from falling out. Sometimes shirts that got thrown out would suddenly
spread their arms like a traffic cop at an intersection, or like Christ, and the shirts
would be crucified in midair for a moment, and then plunge headlong onto the rim or
blades of the mill wheel. The wheel would keep turning, and the adventure of it was,
depending on the situation, either to leave the shirt or the underwear on the wheel
until the wheel brought it around again on its rim, around and up to Grandma’s
window, when all she had to do was reach out and pick it off, or to use a hook to unwind
it from the axle. In this case it would be flopping about as the wheel turned, but
Grandma would manage to rescue it even so, pulling it through the window into the
kitchen on her hook. She’d toss it all into tubs, and that evening she’d
wash the dirty underwear and shirts and socks, then throw the water right back into the
millrace as it surged under the paddle of the mill wheel. Later in the evening, it was
wonderful to see white underwear suddenly fly out of the bathroom window in the Charles
Baths and flutter down through the darkness, a white shirt against the black abyss of
the current, flashing for an instant outside our window, and Grandma would hook it right
out of the air before it could float down into the depths to land on the gleaming wet
blades. Sometimes, in the evening or at night, a breeze would blow up from the water,
bringing a fine mist with it, and the water and the rain would whip Grandma’s face
so hard that she would have to wrestle the wind for possession of the shirt. Still,
Grandma looked forward to each day, and especially Thursdays and Fridays, when the
traveling
salesmen changed their shirts and underwear because
they’d made some money and bought new socks, underwear, and shirts, and then
tossed the old ones out the window of the Charles Baths, where Grandma was lying in wait
with her hook. Then she’d wash them, mend them, put them neatly in the sideboard,
and eventually take them around to the building sites, to sell them to the masons and
the day laborers. She lived modestly but well enough to be able to buy rolls for the two
of us, and milk for her coffee. It was probably the most wonderful time in my life. I
can still see Grandma waiting at night by the open window, which wasn’t easy in
the fall and winter, and I can still see that rejected shirt caught in an updraft,
hovering for a moment outside our window and spreading its arms. Grandma deftly pulled
it in, because in another second the shirt would fall akimbo, like a white bird shot out
of the sky, down into the black gurgling waters, to reappear like a tortured thing on
the rack of the mill wheel, without a human body inside it, rising in a wet arc and then
coming back down the other side, and slip off the wheel and fall into the rushing black
waters, to be swept down the millrace under the black blades and far away from the
mill.

Hotel Tichota

I bought a new vulcanite suitcase and into the suitcase I folded away
the new tuxedo made to measure for me by the tailor from Pardubice. The salesman had
certainly been telling the truth. He had measured my chest, wrapped strips of parchment
around me, jotted everything down, put it all into an envelope, and taken my deposit.
When I went to pick up the suit in Pardubice, it fit like a glove, but what I really
wanted to know was where my inflated figurine, my torso, was. The boss of the place was
as short as I was, and seemed to understand that I wanted to be taller, and how
important being up there among the other torsos near the storeroom ceiling was for me,
so he took me there to see it. It was a magnificent sight. Up near the ceiling hung the
torsos of generals and regimental commanders and famous actors. Hans Albers himself had
his suits made
here, so he was up there too. A draft from an open
window made the torsos move about like little fleecy clouds in an autumn wind. A thin
thread bearing a name tag dangled down from every torso, and the tags danced gaily in
the breeze, like fish on a line. The boss pointed at a tag with my name and address on
it, so I pulled it down. It looked so small, my torso. I almost wept to see a major
general’s torso beside mine, and Mr. Beránek the hotelkeeper’s, but
when I thought of the company I was in I laughed and felt better. The boss pulled on
another string and said, I’m making a suit for this one here, the Minister of
Education, and the smaller one here is the Minister of National Defense. I got such a
lift from all this, I gave him two hundred crowns extra, a small gesture from a small
waiter who was leaving the Golden Prague Hotel and going to work in the Hotel Tichota,
somewhere in Stran
č
ice, where the salesman from the
third-largest firm in the world, van Berkel’s, had recommended me. I said my
farewells and set off for Prague.

When I got out at Stran
č
ice with my
suitcase, it was afternoon and still pouring rain. It must have been raining for several
days, because the road was covered with sand and mud, and a brimming torrent the color
of café au lait had flattened the nettles and oraches and burdocks beside the road,
and I trudged up the hill through the mud, following the arrows that said Hotel Tichota.
As I was walking past several large houses with trees in front of them broken by the
storm, in one of the gardens some people were tying up a tree that was split down the
middle. It was loaded with ripening apricots, and the owner, a bald fellow, was trying
to tie the crown of the tree back up with a wire
while two women,
one on each side, were holding it steady for him. But a sudden gust of wind snapped the
wire, the women lost their grip, and the crown split apart again and toppled over on the
man, knocking him off his ladder and pinning him to the ground in a cage of branches
where he lay with his head scratched and bleeding from the sharp twigs. I was standing
by the fence. When the women saw their man so tangled up in the branches that he seemed
nailed to the ground, crucified by the thick limbs, they burst into gales of laughter.
The man’s eyes blazed and he shouted, You goddamn whores, you bitches, just wait
till I get out of here, I’ll pound you into the ground like pegs. The women may
have been his daughters, or his wife and daughter, so I doffed my hat and said, Excuse
me, is this the way to the Hotel Tichota? The man told me to go to hell, then he
thrashed about but couldn’t get up, and it was beautiful, him trapped under a
canopy of ripe apricots and the two women laughing their heads off. Finally they lifted
the tree so the man could get up, and he struggled to his knees and then to his feet.
The first thing he did was set his beret, the kind with the little stem on top, squarely
on his bald head, so I thought it best to walk on up the road, which was an asphalt road
with a gutter made of square granite cobblestones. I kicked the mud and yellow clay off
my shoes, and as I came up to the top of the hill, my feet were slipping and sliding.
Once I stumbled and fell on my knees, and the dark clouds blew over and the sky turned
as blue as the chicory blossoms flattened by the water rushing down the ditch. Then, at
the top of the hill, I saw the hotel.

It was beautiful, straight out of a fairy tale, or from
China, or the kind of villa a moneybags might build in the Tyrol or on the Riviera.
It was all white with a roof that rose in waves of red tile and green louvered shutters
on all three floors, and each story was narrower than the one below, but the top story
resembled a pretty little summer-house with a tiny structure made of iron shutters on
the roof, like an observation post or a weather station with instruments inside and
barometers outside. On top of it all, at the very peak, a red weathercock turned in the
wind. Every window on every floor had a balcony you walked onto through a set of French
doors with louvers, like the ones on the shutters. There wasn’t a soul in sight,
on the road, in the windows, or on the balconies, it was completely silent, and the only
sound in the air was the wind, which smelled so sweet you could almost eat it with a
spoon, like ice cream, like invisible meringue. I imagined myself dipping into the air
with a bun or a slice of bread, as though it were milk, and nibbling at it. I walked
through the gate. The pathways were covered with sand partly washed away by the rain,
and the thick grass was cut and stacked in haycocks. As I walked through the pine trees,
I caught glimpses of meadows stretching away, and the grass was thick and freshly cut
with a scythe. To enter the Hotel Tichota you had to walk over an arching bridge and
through a set of glass doors with fancy wrought-iron gates opened back against a white
wall. The bridge had white railings on each side, and below it was a rock garden with
alpine flowers. I began to wonder if I was in the right place, and, if I was, whether
they would hire me, and whether Mr. Walden had arranged everything, whether I, a tiny
waiter, would be the right person for Mr. Tichota. Suddenly
I was
afraid. There was no one anywhere, not a voice to be heard, so I turned, and was running
back through the garden when I heard a piercing whistle, so urgent I had to stop. It
blew three times as if it were saying, Tut tut tut, then gave a long blast that made me
turn around, and a short blast that made me feel a line or a rope was reeling me in,
pulling me back to the glass doors. No sooner had I walked through them than I was
practically run down by a fat man in a wheelchair who had a whistle stuck in his mouth.
As he grabbed the rims of the wheels firmly in both hands, the wheelchair came to a halt
so abruptly that he practically shot out of his chair and his black wig, more like a
toupee, slid over his forehead, and he had to shove it back in place. I introduced
myself to Mr. Tichota and he introduced himself to me. When I told him how Mr. Walden,
the salesman who was a big shot with van Berkel’s, had recommended me to the Hotel
Tichota, Mr. Tichota said he’d been expecting me since morning but had given up
hope because of the rainstorm. He said I should go get some rest and then present myself
to him in my tuxedo and he’d tell me what he expected of me. I tried not to stare,
but I couldn’t take my eyes off that huge body in the wheelchair. Everything about
him was so fat, like the ad for Michelin tires, but Mr. Tichota, to whom the body
belonged, seemed full of good spirits and he whizzed back and forth through the foyer,
which had racks of antlers on the walls, as though he were playing in a meadow, and he
could maneuver himself in his wheelchair almost better than if he’d been able to
walk. Mr. Tichota blew the whistle again, but it sounded different this time, as if in a
different key, and a chambermaid in a white apron and black dress
ran down the stairs. Mr. Tichota said, Wanda, this is our number-two waiter, take
him to his room. Wanda turned around, and I could see each half of her beautiful bottom,
and with every step she took, the buttock opposite the leg she was moving forward would
plump out. Her hair was combed up and twisted into a black bun on top that made me seem
even smaller, so I decided that for this chambermaid I would save my money and make her
mine, and garnish her breasts and her bottom with flowers, and the thought of money gave
me strength, which I had always felt drain away in the presence of a beautiful woman.
Instead of taking me upstairs, she led me out onto a kind of mezzanine and then down
some steps into a courtyard and then past the kitchen, where I could see two white
chefs’ hats, and hear the knives working, and laughter. Then two greasy faces with
large eyes swam up to the window, then there was more laughter, which faded as I hurried
on, carrying my suitcase as high as I could to make up for my size. My double-soled
shoes were no help at all, the only thing that helped was holding my head up to make my
neck longer. We walked across the courtyard to a small structure that disappointed me,
because in the Golden Prague Hotel I had lived like one of the guests, but here I would
be living in a porter’s lodge. Wanda showed me the closet, turned on the tap so
that water flowed into the sink, and pulled back the bedspread to show me that the bed
had been freshly made, then she smiled down at me and left. As she was walking back
across the courtyard, I saw through the window that she couldn’t take a single
step that was not observed, she couldn’t even allow herself the pleasure of
scratching or picking her nose. Wherever she
went, she was on stage,
like in a big shopwindow, and I remembered once when I was on my way back to the Golden
Prague with the flowers and I saw two girls putting a new display in Katz’s
shopwindow, tacking some fabric in place with nails. As they worked along on their hands
and knees, one behind the other, the one in front used a hammer to nail the cheviot and
corduroy down in pleats, and when she ran out of nails she would reach back and take
another nail out of the mouth of the girl behind her and tack down another pleat. They
seemed to be having fun, and I stood there on the street with a basket of gladioli in my
hands and a basket of marguerites on the ground, watching those young window dressers
crawling about on their hands and knees. It was noon. The girls must have forgotten
where they were, because every so often they would reach back and scratch their behinds,
or somewhere down there, and then crawl forward on all fours, right up to the glass,
wearing cloth slippers, and they would laugh till the tears came, and then one of them
sputtered, the nails popped out of her mouth, and they giggled and snarled at each other
in sheer girlish exuberance, like two puppies. Their blouses were loose, and you could
see their breasts swinging back and forth as the laughter shook them. By now a crowd had
gathered and was staring at those four breasts swinging like bells in a church tower,
but when one of them looked up and saw all those people staring at them, she covered her
breasts with her arm and blushed. The second girl swam out of her tears of laughter and
saw the first one pointing at the crowd in front of Katz’s. She was so surprised
that as she clapped her arms to her breasts she fell back on her behind and her legs
flew
apart and you could see the whole works, even though it was
covered by lacy modern underwear. People were laughing, but when they saw this they
sobered up and some walked away while others stood there staring long after the window
dressers had gone to lunch at the Golden City of Prague restaurant and the shop
assistant had pulled down the shutters. That’s how strongly the beauty of a young
girl’s body can affect some people.