I Served the King of England (8 page)

Here, in the Hotel Tichota, I also learned that the ones who invented the
notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with
beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children.
I always used to think that the rich were damned, that country cottages and cozy little
parlors and sour soup and potatoes were what gave people a feeling of happiness and
well-being, and that wealth was evil. Now it seemed that all that stuff about happiness
in poor country cottages was invented by these guests of ours, who didn’t
care how much they spent in a night, who threw money to the four
winds and felt good doing it. I had never seen men so happy as those wealthy
industrialists and factory owners and, as I said, they knew how to carouse and enjoy
life like naughty little boys, and they had so much time on their hands that they would
even play tricks and practical jokes on one another, and then, right in the midst of all
the fun, one of them would ask another if he could use a wagonload or two of Hungarian
hogs, or perhaps a whole trainload? Or another would be watching our porter chop wood,
and all these rich fellows thought the porter must be the happiest man in the world, and
they would gaze wistfully at him doing work they had never done themselves, but if
they’d had to chop wood, they would have been miserable. Suddenly one of them
would say, I’ve got a boatload of cowhide from the Congo sitting in Hamburg, any
ideas about what I might do with it? And the other one would say, as if it wasn’t
a boatload but a single hide, What percentage will you give me? The first one would say,
Five, and the second would say, I want eight, there’s always the chance of worms
because the niggers do such a bad job salting them. The first one would hold out his
hand and say, Seven. Then they’d look each other straight in the eye for a few
moments, shake hands, and then go back to the girls, to place those same hands on naked
breasts and slide them down to fondle those neat little mounds of hair under their
bellies, and kiss them with open mouths as if they were eating oysters or sucking boiled
snails from their shells, because from the moment they’d bought or sold trainloads
of pigs and shiploads of hides they seemed twice as young. Some of our guests would buy
and sell whole apartment complexes, and at one point a castle
and two châteaux changed hands, and a factory was bought and sold, and company
directors would arrange shipments of envelopes to the rest of Europe, and negotiate
loans to the tune of half a billion crowns for someplace in the Balkans, and two
trainloads of munitions were sold, and arrangements were made to deliver enough weapons
to arm several Arab divisions. It was always done the same way, with champagne, women,
and French brandy, and a view of the courtyard where the floodlit porter was chopping
wood, or during moonlit walks or games of tag and blindman’s bluff ending up in
the haystacks the boss had put out as part of the landscaping, as ornamentation, like
the wood-chopping porter, and then at the first light of dawn they would come back to
the hotel, their hair and their clothes matted with straw and dried grass, as happy as
if they’d just come from the theater. Then they would hand out hundred-crown notes
to the musicians and me, fistfuls of them, with significant looks as if to say, You
didn’t see or hear a thing, did you? though of course we’d seen and heard
everything, and the boss would bow from his wheelchair, he’d been gliding silently
from room to room on his rubber tires, making sure that everything was just so and every
whim was satisfied. Our boss thought of everything. If someone felt a sudden urge for a
cup of fresh milk or cool cream toward evening, that was available too, and we even had
special devices for vomiting in our tiled washrooms, an individual vomitorium with
strong chromeplated handgrips on each side, and a collective vomitorium that looked like
a long horse trough with a handrail above it, a bar guests would hold on to while they
vomited in a
group, egging one another on. I was ashamed whenever I
vomited, even if no one saw me, but rich people vomited as if it was all part of the
banquet, a sign of good breeding. When they were through, they’d come back, their
eyes full of tears, and soon they’d be eating and drinking with more zest than
ever, like the ancient Slavs.

Zden
ě
k was an honest-to-goodness
headwaiter. He’d apprenticed in Prague, at the Black Eagle, under an old
maître d’ who’d been a personal waiter in a special aristocrats’
casino where the Archduke d’Este himself was a regular. When Zden
ě
k was waiting on tables, he’d work in a kind of
creative fever, and he always behaved just like one of the guests, and was usually
treated like one of them too, and he had a glass at every table that he’d only
take the occasional sip from, but he’d always drink to everyone’s health and
keep moving among the tables, bringing food. There was something dreamlike about the way
he did it, with a kind of swirling movement, so that if anyone had got in his way there
would have been a terrible collision, but he always moved gracefully and elegantly, and
he would never sit down in odd moments, he’d just stand there, and he always knew
what someone wanted and brought it even before the guest asked for it. I sometimes went
drinking with Zdeněk. He had an aristocratic habit of spending practically
everything he earned, and now and then he would treat himself the way our guests did,
but he’d always have so much money left over that toward morning, when we came
back by taxi, he’d arouse the innkeeper of the emptiest inn in the village and
order him to go wake up some musicians to play for him. Then Zden
ě
k would go from door to door and invite the sleepers to
come down to the inn and drink his health, and then the music
played and there was dancing till dawn, and when they’d drained the
innkeeper’s bottles and barrels dry, Zden
ě
k would
wake up the owner of the grocery store, buy a whole basketful of jars, and pass them out
as gifts to all the old women and men. He paid not only for everything they drank in the
pub, but for all the jams and jellies and everything he’d given away. Then, when
he’d finally spent everything, he’d laugh and was satisfied. At that point,
his favorite trick was to pat his pockets looking for matches, then he’d borrow
twenty-hellers from someone, buy matches, and light his cigarette. This was the same
Zden
ě
k who liked to ignite rolled-up ten-crown notes
at the pub stove and light his cigars with them. Then we’d drive off with the
musicians still playing for us, and if there was time, Zden
ě
k would buy up all the flowers in the flower shop and scatter
carnations, roses, and chrysanthemums. The musicians would follow us to the edge of the
village, and the automobile, garlanded with flowers, would take us back to the Hotel
Tichota, because that day, or rather that night, was our day off.

Once, when a guest was announced in advance, the boss was especially
fussy. Ten times, twenty times, he made the rounds of the hotel in his wheelchair, and
each time he found something that wasn’t quite right. We were expecting a party of
three, so the table was set for three, and although only two showed up, all night long
we served the third person too, as if he’d be arriving at any moment, as if the
invisible guest was actually sitting there, walking about, strolling through the garden,
swinging on the swing, and so on. First a big fancy car brought a lady whose
chauffeur spoke to her in French, as did Zden
ě
k. Then, at about nine in the evening, another big fancy car pulled
up, and out stepped the President himself, I recognized him immediately, and the boss
called him Your Excellency. The President dined with the beautiful Frenchwoman, who had
come to Prague by plane. He seemed to change completely and look younger somehow, and he
laughed and talked a lot and drank champagne and then brandy. As his mood became more
animated, they moved to a little room with Biedermeier furniture and flowers, and the
President sat the beautiful woman beside him and kissed her hand, and then her shoulders
and her arms, which were bare because of the kind of gown she was wearing. They were
having a lively conversation about literature when suddenly the President whispered
something in the woman’s ear and she shrieked with laughter, and the President
laughed too and slapped his knee. Then he poured some more champagne, and they held
their glasses out to each other by the stems, and they clinked them together and looked
deep into each other’s eyes and drank slowly. Then the woman gently pushed the
President back against the armrest and kissed him herself, a long, slow kiss, and the
President closed his eyes, and she ran her hands down his sides, and he caressed her as
well, and I could see his diamond ring sparkling as it moved over her thighs. Then it
was as though he had suddenly woken up, and he was leaning over her and looking into her
eyes, and he kissed her, and for a while both of them were motionless in an embrace.
When the embrace was over, the President took a deep breath and sighed, and the lady let
her breath out, and a strand of hair came loose and fell across her forehead. They stood
up, holding both
hands like children when they want to dance
ring-around-the-rosy, and suddenly they ran to the door and went outside, and hopped and
skipped down the path hand in hand, and we could hear the President’s clear,
hearty laughter. He was so different from his portrait on postage stamps or in public
places, and I had always thought that a president didn’t do things like this, that
it wasn’t right for a president to do things like this, and yet here he was, just
like the other rich people, running through the moondrenched garden where that same
afternoon we had put out fresh mounds of dry hay. I could see the woman’s white
gown, and the white starched dickey of the President’s tuxedo, and his
porcelain-white cuffs drawing lines in the air, flitting here and there through the
night, from haystack to haystack, as the President ran ahead of the white gown and then
turned and caught it and lifted it up easily. And I saw the white cuffs lift the white
dress and carry it, and they were strong enough for that, those cuffs that gathered up
the white gown as though they had just fished it out of the river, or like a mother
carrying a child in a white nightshirt to bed, that’s how the President carried
the beautiful woman into the depths of our garden, under the century-old trees. Then he
ran out with her again and set her down on a pile of hay, but the white gown escaped,
with the President in pursuit, and the two of them would fall into a pile of hay, but
the white gown would be up again and running, until finally it tumbled onto a pile of
hay with the President on top of it. Then I saw the gown grow smaller as the white cuffs
turned it over, just as we would turn over poppy petals, and everything in the garden of
the Hotel Tichota fell silent. I stopped looking then, and
so did
the boss, who let the curtains drop, and Zden
ě
k looked at
the floor and the chambermaid, who was standing on the staircase in a black dress, so
that all you could see of her in the dark was her white apron and the white wings of her
serving cap, like a headband around her thick black hair—she looked down at the
floor too. None of us watched but all of us were excited. It was as if we were out there
on that scattered mound of hay with the beautiful woman who’d flown here in an
airplane all the way from Paris just for this scene in the hay. We felt that it was
happening to us and, most of all, that we were the only ones taking part in this
romantic celebration, that fate had been good to us and asked no more in return than the
secrecy you expect of the confessional, of a priest.

After midnight, the boss asked me to take a crystal jug full of cool
cream, a loaf of fresh bread, and a small lump of butter wrapped in vine leaves to the
children’s playhouse in the garden. Carrying it in a basket, I trembled as I
walked past the mounds of hay scattered everywhere, and I bent down and couldn’t
stop myself from picking up a handful of hay to smell it. Then I turned down the path
leading to those three silver spruces, and I could see the small, lighted window. When I
arrived at the playhouse, I saw sitting on a little chair, among the toy drums and jump
ropes and teddy bears and dolls, the President in a white shirt, and opposite him, on a
chair that was just as small, the Frenchwoman, and there they sat, the two lovers, face
to face, gazing into each other’s eyes, their hands resting on a small table
between them. The tiny house was lit by a lantern with a candle inside. When he got up,
the President cast a shadow across the window. He had to crouch to come
outside to take the basket from me. Our President was so tall he had to crouch,
whereas I was standing up and was still small. I gave him the basket and he said, Thank
you, my boy, thank you, and then the white shirt retreated. His white bow tie was
undone, and on my way back I tripped over his evening coat. When dawn came and the sun
was rising, the President came out of the playhouse, and the woman followed, wearing a
petticoat, dragging her wilted gown behind her, and the President carried the lantern,
which had a candle still burning in it, a tiny point of light against the rising sun.
Then the President reached down, took his coat by the sleeve and dragged it behind him
through the dried grass and stubble and hay. The two of them walked dreamily side by
side, smiling happily at each other. As I watched them, I suddenly realized that being a
waiter wasn’t so simple, that there were waiters and waiters, but I was a waiter
who had served the President with discretion, and I had to appreciate that, like
Zdeněk’s famous waiter who lived the rest of his life on the strength of
having served the Archduke Ferdinand d’Este in a casino for aristocrats. Then the
President left in one car, and the lady in another. No one left in the third car, that
invisible third party the banquet had been arranged for and the tables set for, and for
whose uneaten food and unused room the boss had also charged.