I Served the King of England (6 page)

As I sat down and took off my mud-caked shoes and my trousers and opened
my suitcase to hang up my suit, I somehow began to feel homesick for my old hotel, the
Golden Prague, and for Paradise’s, and I kept seeing a town of stone around me and
crowds of people and the teeming square, though all I ever saw of nature in those three
years were the flowers I went for every day, the tiny park, and the petals I used to
garnish the young ladies at Paradise’s. As I took the tuxedo out of my suitcase, I
suddenly wondered who my former boss really was. He was even smaller than I was, and he
believed in money the way I did, and he had beautiful women for money, and not just at
Paradise’s. He’d leave his wife and go after them all the way to Bratislava
or Brno, and they say that he managed to spend several thousand crowns by the time his
wife found him, and that before he set off on his little sprees he would pin enough
money into his vest pocket to cover the trip back plus a tip for the conductor to take
him home, and since he was so small the conductor would usually carry him home from the
station like a child, asleep. The drinking seemed to diminish him, and for a week
he’d be as tiny as a sea horse, but when the week was up, he’d get the itch
again. I remember he loved to drink heavy wines—ports,
Algerian wines, Málaga—and he drank them all with great seriousness and
so slowly he hardly seemed to be drinking, and each sip seemed to make him more
handsome, and he’d roll the wine around in his mouth for a while and then gulp it
as though he were trying to get down a chunk of apple. After each mouthful, he would
quietly declare that the Sahara sun was in that wine. Sometimes he would sit at the
table and get drunk with the regulars, and when he nodded off his friends would call his
wife down to get him, and she would take the elevator from the fourth floor where they
had a whole suite to themselves. She never made a fuss, since it was no discredit to
her—on the contrary, everybody respected her. My boss would be lying under the
table or sitting in his chair asleep and she would pick him up off the floor by the
collar as easily as if he were an empty coat. If he was sitting, she might tip the chair
over backward, but just before it hit the floor she would pick him out of it and swing
him up through the air as if he were nothing at all, and the boss would usually come to
and wave his little hand, as much as he could with his coat pulled so tight around him,
and his wife would fling open the elevator door and toss him inside, and he would
clatter to the floor, and she would get in and push the button. I could see the boss
through the glass door, lying on the elevator floor with his wife standing over him as
they went up to the fourth floor together as if ascending into heaven. The regulars told
stories about how years ago, when my boss first bought the Golden Prague Hotel, his wife
would join them at their table and they used to have a kind of literary salon there. The
only one left from those days by the time I got there was Tonda Jódl, the poet and
painter.
They’d have discussions and read books, and they even
put on plays, but about every two weeks the boss’s wife would get into passionate
arguments with her husband, and they would disagree so violently about romanticism or
realism or Smetana and Janá
č
ek that they would start
pouring wine over each other and hitting each other. The boss had a cocker spaniel and
his wife had a fox terrier, and when the master and mistress started to fight over
literature the dogs would start fighting too, until they drew blood. Then the boss and
his wife would make up and go for a walk by the creek outside town, with bandages on
their faces or slings on their arms, and the battered fox terrier and cocker spaniel
would traipse along behind with sticking plaster on their ears, perhaps, and the blood
still drying on the wounds. Then everyone would make up, but a month later they’d
be at it again. It must have been wonderful, and I wished I had seen it.

So there I was, in front of the mirror in my tuxedo, the new one, and
I’d put on a white starched shirt and a white bow tie, and just as I was slipping
into my pocket a new nickel-plated bottle opener with a knife blade in the handle, I
heard the whistle. When I went out into the courtyard, the shadow of someone jumping the
fence passed quickly over me, and I felt something brush my head, and a waiter in a
cutaway coat landed in front of me, got up, and rushed on, reeled in by the
whistle’s signal while the tails of his coat flew out behind him like
beetle’s wings. When he kicked at the swinging doors, they banged open, then
gradually swung to a stop, and the glass in the door reflected a miniature courtyard,
then me, approaching, enlarging, and going through the door too. In two weeks I finally
figured out who this amazing hotel had been built for. I’d
already made several thousand crowns in tips and wages, and that was my spending money.
But for two weeks, though I lived alone in this little room counting my money whenever I
was off duty, I still felt as though someone always had an eye on me, and Zden
ě
k, the headwaiter who’d been here for two years, had
the same feeling and was always ready to jump over the fence and run to the restaurant
whenever the whistle blew, even though there was practically nothing to do all day long.
When we’d straightened things up in the restaurant, which didn’t take long,
and got the glasses and the cutlery ready, and changed the tablecloths and napkins, and
checked the supplies, I would go with Zden
ě
k, who had a
key to the cellars, to make sure there was enough cooled champagne and Pilsner export
beer, and we took the cognac into the serving room to bring it to room temperature and
then went into the garden, which was really a park, put our aprons on, and raked the
paths. We were always having to replace the haystacks, because every two weeks the old
ones were taken away and bundles of freshly cut grass were brought in, or else we set
out ready-made haystacks exactly where the old ones had been, and then we would rake the
paths, though as a rule I did that myself while Zden
ě
k
was off in one of the nearby villages visiting his wards, as he called them, but I think
they were really his mistresses, either married women who spent the weekdays alone in
their summer homes or someone’s daughters who’d come out from Prague to
study for the state exams. And I would rake the sand and look at our hotel from the
rear, through the trees or from the open meadow. In the daytime it looked
like a boarding school, and I was always expecting a crowd of young
girls to come bursting out of the main entrance, or teenagers carrying book bags, or
young men in knit sweaters followed by servants lugging golf clubs, or perhaps an
industrialist with a servant who would carry out cane chairs and a table, and maids
spreading tablecloths, and then some children running up and wanting to be cuddled by
their father, and then a woman with a parasol arriving, slowly peeling off her gloves,
and pouring coffee when everyone was seated. But no one ever walked through those doors
all day long, and still the chambermaids did the dusting and changed the linen in ten
rooms every day, and in the kitchen preparations were always under way for what looked
like a wedding reception, with more dishes and courses than I had ever seen let alone
heard of, and if I had, then it was only from something the maître d’ of the
Golden Prague Hotel might have told me when he talked about the time he’d been to
sea as a waiter in the first-class section of the
Wilhelmina
, the luxury liner
that had gone down. He had missed that sailing and when the liner sank he was on his way
across Spain to catch the boat at Gibraltar with a beautiful Swedish woman, who was the
reason he’d missed the boat, and from what he told me, the feasts they served in
the first-class dining room of the
Wilhelmina
were something like what we
served here off the beaten track in the Hotel Tichota.

Even though I had every reason to be satisfied, I was often caught off my
guard. For example, I would finish raking the paths and put a deck chair out behind the
trees and settle into it to watch the clouds go by—there were always clouds in the
sky here—and I’d be dozing off when
suddenly the whistle
would blow as if the boss were standing right behind me, and I’d have to take a
shortcut and undo my apron on the run, leap over the fence the way Zden
ě
k did, and go straight into the restaurant to report to
the boss. He would be sitting there in his wheelchair and as usual something was making
him uncomfortable, a rumpled blanket that needed smoothing out, so we would fasten a
belt around his waist, like firemen have, with a ring on it. This was the same kind the
miller Mr. Radimský’s two children used to wear when they played near the
millrace with a Saint Bernard who lay on the point of land where the millrace rejoined
the river, and whenever Hary or Vintí
ř
—those
were their names—toddled toward the millrace, the Saint Bernard would get up, grab
the ring in his mouth, and pull Hary or Vintif back out of danger. That’s exactly
what we did with the boss. We fastened a rope to the ring and hauled him up with a block
and tackle, not all the way to the ceiling but far enough so we could ease the chair out
from under him. Then we would straighten his blanket out or give him a new one or an
extra one and lower him back into his wheelchair, and he looked ridiculous suspended in
the air, angled forward, his whistle dangling straight down from his neck, so you could
tell the angle he was hanging at. Afterward he would zip around the dining room again
and through the alcoves and rooms, arranging the flowers. Our boss was terribly fond of
women’s handiwork, so the rooms in the restaurant were more like rooms in a
middle-class home or a small château, with curtains everywhere and sprigs of
asparagus fern, and freshly cut roses and tulips and whatever happened to be in season.
The boss would make beautiful arrangements
in vases, he’d push
his chair forward to adjust something, then back off and look at it from a distance, not
just at the flowers but at how everything fit together, and he always put a pretty doily
under each vase. When he had amused himself all morning sprucing up the rooms,
he’d start in on the tables. There were usually only two tables, for twelve at the
most. Again, as Zden
ě
k and I silently set the tables with
all the different kinds of plates and forks and knives, the boss, full of quiet
enthusiasm, would put flowers in the center of the tables and check to make sure there
was enough freshly cut asparagus fern for us to put on the table just before the guests
sat down. When the boss was satisfied that he’d managed to make the restaurant
look not like a restaurant, and to bring into his hotel the charm and grace of a
Biedermeier household, he would wheel up to the door our guests would come through, stop
for a few seconds with his back to the dining room, concentrate, then whirl his chair
around and roll forward into the room, looking at everything through the eyes of a
stranger, like a guest who’d never been here before. He’d look about in
wonder, he’d wheel himself from room to room, checking all the details with a
practiced eye, making sure the curtains hung just right and everything was properly lit,
all the lights on—and at that moment the boss was beautiful, as if he’d
completely forgotten that he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds and couldn’t
walk. He’d wheel about and survey it all with a stranger’s eyes, then
discard those eyes and put his own back in again, rub them, and blow his whistle, and it
sounded different again, and I knew that a moment later the two cooks would hurry out of
the kitchen to report on the state of the crabs and
the oysters and
how the stuffing à la Suvaroff had turned out and how the salpicon was this
evening. Once, when I’d been there for three days, the boss knocked the chef down
with his wheelchair when he found out the chef had put caraway seeds in the
médaillon de veau aux champignons
. Then we’d wake up the porter,
a giant of a man who slept all day, and he’d eat everything that was left over
from the evening banquets, stupefying amounts of food, great bowls of salad that neither
we nor the chambermaids could ever have eaten by ourselves, and drink everything left in
the bottles. He was as strong as an ox. He would put on a green apron at night and split
wood in the floodlit courtyard, just split wood with melodic blows of his ax, split what
he’d cut earlier that evening, split wood all night long. But I soon realized, I
could hear it clearly, that he only split wood when someone arrived, and people would
come by car, diplomatic cars, groups of them, late in the evening or at night, and the
porter split wood that smelled sweet, and you could see him from every window, and our
floodlit courtyard with the wood stacked nearly around it made you feel safe, because
here was a six-foot-five fellow splitting wood, a man with an ax, who had once nearly
killed a thief and beaten three others so badly he himself had to take them to the
police station in a wheelbarrow. If any of the cars got a flat tire, the porter would
lift up the front or the rear end with his bare hands and hold it there till the tire
was changed. But his real job was ornamental wood-splitting in the floodlit courtyard so
our guests could see him, just like that waterfall on the Elbe: it would fill up, and
they would wait until the guide brought the tourists around and, when he gave the
signal,
open the sluicegate and the tourists would get a good, long
look at a waterfall.

But—to finish the portrait of our boss—I’d be in the
garden, leaning against a fence, counting my money, when suddenly I’d hear the
whistle, as if the boss were some kind of all-seeing god. Or I’d be with Zden
ě
k, and as soon as we’d sit down or lie back on a
haystack where no one could see us, the whistle would blow, just a single warning blast
to keep us working and not lazing about. We began keeping a rake, a hoe, or a pitchfork
beside us, and when the whistle blew we’d jump up and start hoeing and raking and
carrying forkfuls of loose hay. Then it would get quiet, but we’d no sooner put
the pitchfork down than the whistle would blow again. So we took to lying behind the
haystack and poking out at something with the rake or the fork, so it looked as if the
tools were working by themselves, on invisible strings. Zden
ě
k told me that when the weather was cool like this the boss was like a
fish in water, but during a heat wave he’d practically melt and couldn’t go
wherever he wanted but had to stay in a room with a lower temperature, in a kind of
icebox. Still, he knew everything and saw everything that went on, even things he
couldn’t see, as if he had spies on every branch in every tree, in the corner of
every room, behind every curtain. It’s hereditary, Zden
ě
k told me as he lay back in the deck chair. The boss’s father
had an inn somewhere below the Krkonoše Mountains and he weighed three-fifty too,
and when the weather turned hot he had to move to the basement, where he had a bed and a
keg of beer, otherwise he’d have melted like butter in the summer heat. We got up
and wandered down a path I’d never walked down before, and we thought about
our boss’s father moving into the cellar of his village inn
for the summer so he wouldn’t turn into a pool of butter, and the path took us
among three silver spruce trees, and there I stopped and stared in amazement. Zden
ě
k seemed even more amazed than I was and he grabbed my
sleeve and said, Well, I’ll be . . . There before us was a tiny house, a kind of
gingerbread cottage, just like a stage prop, with a tiny bench in front. The window was
as small as a window in the closet of an old farmhouse, and the door was latched like a
cellar door, and if we’d tried to go in even I would have had to duck, but the
door was locked, so we stopped and stared in the window for five minutes. Then we looked
at each other and began to feel almost alarmed, and I felt goose pimples tingling up and
down my arms because everything inside this little cottage was an exact replica of one
of our hotel rooms, except that everything seemed to be made for children. It had
exactly the same table, only in miniature, the same chairs, even the same curtains and
flower stand, and there was a doll or a teddy bear on every chair, and two shelves along
the walls had all kinds of toys on them, just as in a store, a whole wall full of toys,
tiny drums and skipping ropes, all neatly arranged, as if someone had tidied up just
before we arrived, set everything up just for us, to startle us or touch us. Suddenly we
heard the whistle, not the warning whistle telling us to get to work, to get off our
behinds, but a whistle that meant an emergency, so we set off at a run across the meadow
and, out of breath, took a shortcut and jumped the fence, one after the other.