I Served the King of England Read online

  I walked away with my outstretched glass and drank it. Everything began to burn, I was on fire, I poured myself another cognac and ran out, just as I was, into the night in front of our hotel, my former hotel, because I didn’t want to be in this world any longer. I caught a cab, and the driver asked me, Where to? I told him to take me out to some woods, because I needed the fresh air. As we drove along, everything swept by me to the rear—first lights, a lot of lights, then just a streetlamp here and there, then nothing. The driver stopped by an honest-to-goodness woods. As I paid the fare, he looked at my decoration and the blue sash and said he wasn’t surprised I was so excited, that lots of headwaiters had themselves driven to Stromovka Park or wherever to stretch their legs. I just laughed and told him I wasn’t going to stretch my legs, I was going to hang myself. Seriously? the cab driver said, laughing. With what? He was right, I had nothing to do it with, so I said, My handkerchief. The driver got out of his cab, opened the trunk, rummaged around with a flashlight, then handed me a piece of rope. Still laughing, he made an eye in one end and ran the other end through it to make a noose and showed me the proper way to hang myself. He got back in his cab, rolled down the window, and yelled, Good luck! With that he pulled away, blinking his lights in farewell, and as he drove out of the woods he honked his horn. I walked down a footpath through the woods and sat on a bench. When I’d gone through the whole thing again in my head and come to the conclusion that the headwaiter didn’t like me anymore, I decided I couldn’t go on living. If it had been over a girl I’d have said, There’s more than one flower under the sun, but this was a head-waiter who had served the King of England and who believed I could have stolen the little spoon. True, the spoon was missing, but someone else could have stolen it. I stood up and felt the rope in my fingers, then it got so dark I had to grope my way forward, touching the trees with my hands, thin little trees, and then I came to a clearing, and by the sky I could see that I was walking through a stand of young spruce. Then there were woods again, but all the trees were birch now, tall birch, and I’d have needed a ladder to reach one of the branches. I saw it wasn’t going to be easy. Then I came to a patch of older pines, with branches so close to the ground that I had to crawl under them on my hands and knees, and my medal kept bumping my chin and face, reminding me over and over of the missing gold spoon. I stopped, still on all fours, and turned everything over in my mind again. But I kept coming to the same painful place in my brain and I couldn’t get past it: Mr. Skřivánek wouldn’t be training me anymore, we wouldn’t be laying any more bets about what the different guests would or should order or what nationality they were, and I began to moan like the chief government counselor Konopásek after several bites of that wonderful stuffed camel, and I made up my mind to hang myself. As I knelt there, I felt something touch my head, so I reached up and touched the toes of a pair of boots, and then I groped higher and felt two ankles, then socks covering a pair of cold legs. When I stood up, my nose was right up against the stomach of a hanged man. I was so terrified I started to run, pushing through rough old branches that tore my face and ears, but I made it back to the path, where I collapsed on the ground, and right there with the rope still in my hands I fainted. I was roused by lanterns and human voices, and when I opened my eyes I saw that I was lying in the arms of Mr. Skřivánek, and I kept saying, Over there, over there. And they found the hanged man who had saved my life, because I had been all set to hang myself a little way from him or alongside him. The head-waiter stroked my hair and wiped away the blood, and I cried out, The gold spoon! The headwaiter whispered, Don’t worry, they found it. I said, Where? Very quietly he said, The water wasn’t draining out of the sink, so they took the drain apart and the spoon was right there in the elbow. Forgive me. Everything will be all right, just as before. I said, How did you know where I was? And the headwaiter said, The taxi driver came back to the hotel and asked the waiters if they knew of anyone who might want to hang himself, and just then the plumber brought in the missing spoon. The headwaiter, who had once served the King of England, knew at once that it was me and set out to look for me.

  And that’s how I came to be back in the Hotel Paris, as snug as a pea in a pod, and how Mr. Skřivánek began to trust me with the key to the wine cellars and the liqueurs and cognacs, as if trying to make up for that incident with the gold spoon. But the boss never forgave me for getting the medal and the sash, and he treated me as if I didn’t exist, even though I made enough money to cover my entire floor, and every three months I took a whole floor’s worth of hundred-crown notes to the bank, because I was determined to be a millionaire, to be the equal of everyone else. Then I’d rent or buy a small hotel, a nice cozy little place somewhere in the Bohemian Paradise district, and marry a rich woman, and when we put our money together I would be as respectable as the other hotel owners, and if they didn’t acknowledge me as a man, they would have to acknowledge me as a millionaire, a hotel owner, and a man of property. But then another unpleasant thing happened to me. I went before the recruiting board three times and was turned down three times because I wasn’t tall enough, and even when I tried to bribe the military authorities they wouldn’t take me as a soldier. Everyone in the hotel laughed at me, and Mr. Brandejs himself asked me about it and made fun of my size again. I knew now that I would be small till the day I died, because I had finished my growing. The only way to change that now was to do what I’d been doing all along, wear double-soled shoes and hold my head high, as though the collar of my suit was too small. Something else happened too: I started taking German lessons, going to German movies, and reading German newspapers, and it didn’t bother me that German students began walking about the streets of Prague in white socks and brown shirts. I was practically the only one left in the hotel who would serve German guests, because all the other waiters started pretending they didn’t understand German, and even Mr. Skřivánek would speak only English or French or Czech with Germans. Once, at a movie, I stepped on a woman’s foot and she started speaking German. I apologized to her in German, and I ended up seeing her home. She was attractively dressed, and to get on the good side of her and show her how grateful I was that she spoke German with me I said it was awful what the Czechs were doing to those poor German students, that I’d seen with my own eyes on Národní how they pulled the white socks and brown shirts off two German students. And she told me that I spoke the truth, that Prague was part of the old German Empire and the Germans had an inalienable right to walk about the city dressed according to their own customs. The rest of the world cared nothing for this right, but the hour and the day would come when the Führer would come and liberate all the Germans, from the forests of Sumava to the Carpathian Mountains. When she said this, I was looking straight into her eyes and I noticed that I didn’t have to look up at her the way I did at other women, because it was my bad luck that all the women I’d had in my life were not just bigger than me but giants among women, and whenever we were together I would be looking at their necks or their bosoms, but this woman was as short as I was and her green eyes sparkled, and she was as spattered with freckles as I was, and the brown freckles in her face went so well with her green eyes that she suddenly seemed beautiful to me. I also noticed that she was looking at me in the same way. I was wearing that beautiful white tie with the blue dots again, but it was my hair she was looking at, as blond as straw, and my big blue eyes. Then she told me that Germans from the Reich yearn for Slavic blood, for those vast plains and the Slavic nature, that they’ve tried for a thousand years through good and evil to wed themselves to that blood. She told me confidentially that many Prussian noblemen had Slavic blood in them and that this blood made them more worthy in the eyes of the rest of the nobility, and I agreed. I was surprised at how well she understood my German, because this was not the same as taking a guest’s order for lunch or dinner, I actually had to carry on a real conversation with the young lady whose black shoes I had stepped on, so I spoke a little German and a lot of Czech, bu
t I felt as though I were speaking German all the time, because what I said seemed to me in the German spirit. The young lady told me her name was Lise, that she was from Cheb, that she taught physical education there, that she was a regional swimming champion, and when she opened her coat I saw she was wearing a pin with four F’s arranged in a circle like a four-leaf clover. She smiled at me and kept staring at my hair, which made me uneasy, but my confidence was restored when she said I had the most beautiful hair in the world, and the way she said it made my head spin. I said I was a headwaiter at the Hotel Paris, and I told her this expecting the worst, but she put her hand on my sleeve, and when she touched me her eyes flashed so intensely I was alarmed, and she said her father had a restaurant in Cheb called the City of Amsterdam. So we made a date to see the movie Love in Three-Quarter Time, and she came wearing a Tyrolean hat and something I’ve loved since childhood, a jacket that looked green but was really gray and had a green collar with oak fronds embroidered on it. It was just before Christmas and snow was falling. She came to see me several times in the Hotel Paris, to have lunch or supper, and the first time she came Mr. Skřivánek looked at her and then at me and just like the old times we went into the alcove and I laughed and said, Shall we put a twenty on what the young lady orders? I saw that she was wearing that jacket again and those white socks. I pulled out a twenty and set it down on the sideboard, but Mr. Skřivánek gave me a queer look, like the time I’d tried to drink a toast with him the evening I’d served the Emperor of Ethiopia and the gold teaspoon got lost. My fingers were resting on the twenty-crown note, and he pulled out twenty crowns too and slowly laid it down, as if everything was all right, but then he snatched it away and stuck it back in his wallet, took another look at Lise, waved his hand dismissively, and never said another word. After the shift he took back the keys to the cellars and looked at me as though I wasn’t there, as though he had never served the King of England and I had never served the Emperor of Ethiopia. But I didn’t care now, because I could see that the Czechs were being unjust to the Germans, and I even began to feel ashamed for being a dues-paying member of Sokol, because Mr. Skřivánek was a great supporter of the Sokol movement, and so was Mr. Brandejs. All of them were prejudiced against the Germans and particularly against Lise, who came to the hotel only because of me, but they wouldn’t let me wait on her, since her table belonged to another waiter’s station. I watched how miserably they treated her, how they would give her cold soup and the waiter would put his thumb in it. Once I caught the waiter spitting into her stuffed veal just before he went through the swinging door. I jumped to grab the plate away from him, but he pushed it into my face and then spit at me, and when I wiped the thick gravy out of my eyes he spit into my face again, so I’d see how much he hated me. That was a kind of signal, because everyone from the kitchen ran out, and all the other waiters gathered around and everyone spat in my face. They kept it up until Mr. Brandejs himself came and, as head Sokol for Prague One, he spat on me too and told me I was fired. Covered with spittle and roast-veal sauce, I ran into the restaurant to Lise’s table and pointed to myself with both hands, to show her what these Sokolites, these Czechs, had done to me because of her. She looked at me, wiped my face with a napkin, and said, You can’t, you mustn’t expect anything else from those Czech jingoes, and she said she was fond of me because of what I had put up with on her account. We left the hotel after I changed my clothes so that I could walk Lise home, but right outside the Prašná Brána some Czech roughnecks ran up and gave her such a slap in the face that her Tyrolean hat went flying into the street. I tried to defend her by shouting in Czech, What do you think you’re doing! Is that any way for Czechs to behave? But one of the gang pushed me away while two others grabbed Lise and shoved her to the ground. As two of them held her arms, another pushed up her skirt and ripped her white socks from her suntanned legs. I was still shouting as they were beating me—What the hell do you think you’re doing, you Czech jingoes?—until they finally let us go and carried off Lise’s socks like a white scalp, a white trophy. We went through a passageway to a small square, and Lise was weeping and hissing, You’ll get yours, you pack of Bolsheviks, we’ll teach you not to shame a German school-teacher from Cheb. I felt like a big man as she held me tight. I was so livid, I looked for my Sokol membership card so I could tear it up, but I couldn’t find it. Suddenly she looked at me, her eyes full of tears, and right there on the street she burst out crying again, put her cheek against my face, and pressed herself against me. I knew then that I had to defend her against any Czechs who tried to harm a hair on this sweet little Egerlander’s head, this daughter of the owner of the City of Amsterdam hotel and restaurant in Cheb, which the Germans had annexed as imperial territory last fall, along with the rest of the Sudetenland, taking it back to be a part of the Reich as it had once been many years before. And now, here in the Prague of the Sokols, I could see with my own eyes what was happening to the poor Germans, and it confirmed everything they said about why the Sudetenland had to be taken back and why Prague might end up the same way if the lives and honor of German people were threatened and trodden in the mud. And that’s just what happened.

  Not only was I fired from the Hotel Paris, but I couldn’t get a job anywhere, not even as a busboy, because every time I was hired, the management was informed the following day that I was a German sympathizer and, what was worse, a Sokol who was going out with a German gym teacher. So I was unemployed for some time, until the German army finally came and occupied not just Prague but the whole country. About that time, Lise disappeared on me for two months. I wrote her and her father too, but got no reply. The second day after the occupation of Prague, I was out for a walk. On the Old Town Square the German army was cooking tasty soup in big kettles and passing it out in mess cans to the population. As I stood there watching, who did I see, in a striped dress with a red badge on her breast and a ladle in her hand, but Lise. I didn’t say a word to her, just watched for a while as she ladled out the soup and handed people their mess cans with a smile, until I finally got a grip on myself and joined the line. When my turn came, she handed me a cup of warm soup. She wasn’t shocked to see me, but excited and pleased and proud of her military dress of the front-line Sisters of Mercy or whatever uniform it was. When I told her I’d been out of work ever since I defended her honor at the Prašná Brána over those white socks, she got someone else to take her place, put her arm through mine, and laughed and bubbled over with excitement. I felt, and she did too, that the German army had occupied Prague because of her white socks and because they had spit on me in the hotel. As we walked along Pfikopy, soldiers in uniform greeted Lise, and I would bow to them each time, and just past the Prašná Brána we turned and walked by the place where she was down on the sidewalk while they tore off her white socks three months before, and when we entered the Hotel Paris I pretended to be a customer looking for a table. The place was full of German officers now, and I stood there with Lise in her Sister of Mercy uniform, and the waiters and Mr. Skřivánek were pale as they waited on the German guests. I sat down by the window and I ordered coffee in German, a white Viennese coffee with a small glass of rum on the side, the way we used to serve it, á la Hotel Sacher, Wiener Kaffe mit bespritzer Nazi. It was a beautiful feeling when even Mr. Brandejs came out and bowed, kowtowing with particular politeness to me, and all of a sudden he began talking about the embarrassing incident that had happened back then and he apologized for it, but I told him I wouldn’t accept his apology and that we would have to see. And when I paid the headwaiter, Mr. Skřivánek, I told him, You may have served the King of England but it hasn’t done you any good. And I got up and walked among the tables, while the German officers greeted Lise, and I bowed too, as though they’d included me in their greetings. That night Lise took me home, but first we went to a military casino of some kind on Pfikopy, in a brown building, where we drank champagne in honor of the occupation of Prague. The officers drank toasts with Lise and even with me, a
nd she told everyone how courageously I’d behaved in defending her German honor against the Czech jingoes, and they acknowledged me with raised glasses, and I bowed and thanked them. But I didn’t know that their greetings were meant for Lise alone and that they were actually ignoring me, barely tolerating me as someone who went along with Lise. She was a commanding officer in the nurses’ corps, as I learned during the toasts, because they addressed one another by rank. It felt wonderful to be a part of this occasion, to be among captains and colonels and young people with eyes as blue and hair as blond as mine, and though my German wasn’t up to much, I felt German. As we were coming back from celebrating Lise asked me to look up my family tree, because she was sure I must have some German ancestry. I could only tell her that my grandfather’s name was spelled Johan Ditie on his tombstone, that he had been a groom on a large estate, something I’d always been ashamed of, but when Lise heard that, I seemed to gain stature in her eyes, more than if I’d been a Czech count, and with this name Ditie, all the fortifications and walls, thick and thin, that had separated us seemed to collapse, and she was silent all the way home. She unlocked the big main door to an old tenement house and we walked up the stairs, and on each landing she gave me a long kiss and fondled the crotch of my trousers, and when we went into her little room and she turned on the table lamp, she was all moist, her eyes and her mouth, and a whitish film seemed to have fallen across her eyes. She pushed me back on the couch and kissed me again, for a long time, running her tongue over all my teeth, counting them and whimpering and moaning like an ungreased gate opening and closing in the wind. What came next was bound to happen, and I’d expected it, but this time it didn’t come from me, as it always had at such times before, but from her, because it was she who needed me. Slowly she undressed and watched me as I undressed, and I thought that since she was in the army even her underclothes, her panties and her slip, would be part of her uniform, that the nurses from the military hospital had some kind of. government-issue underwear. But what she had on was like what the young ladies wore in the Hotel Paris when they came for their Thursday sessions with the stockbrokers, or like what the women at Paradise’s wore. And then our naked bodies twined together and everything seemed liquid, as though we were snails, our moist bodies oozing out of our shells and into each other’s embrace, and Lise shuddered and trembled violently, and I knew for the first time that I was both in love and loved in return, and it was so different from anything before. She didn’t ask me to watch out or be careful, everything that happened was just right, the movements and the merging and the journey uphill and the dawning, and the gush of light with the muffled panting and moaning. She wasn’t afraid of me afterward either, not for a minute, and her belly lifted toward my face and she wrapped her legs around my head and squeezed me tight without being ashamed. No, it all belonged, and she raised herself up and let herself be lapped and licked with my tongue until she arched her back and let me taste and feel with my tongue everything that was going on in her body. Then, when she lay on her back with her arms folded and her legs spread apart with that muff of pale hair blazing, brushed up into a crest, my eyes fell on a table that held a bouquet of spring tulips, a bunch of pussy willows, and several sprigs of spruce. As in a dream, without thinking, I took the sprigs and pulled them to pieces and lay them around her vagina, and it was beautiful, her lap strewn with spruce. She cast furtive glances at me, and when I bent over and kissed her through the branches I felt their sharp needles pricking my mouth, and she took my head tenderly in her hands and arched her back and pushed her lap into my face so hard that I groaned in pain, and with several powerful thrusts of her belly she reached such a pitch of passion that she shrieked, collapsed on one side, gasping so violently that I thought she was dying, but she wasn’t. She leaned over me and spread her fingers and said she would scratch my eyes out and scratch my face and my whole body in gratitude and satisfaction, and again she spread her nails above me like claws and then closed them in a spasm, only to collapse in tears a few moments later. Gradually her silent weeping turned to faint laughter. Calm and quiet, lying there wilted, I watched her tear off the rest of those spruce boughs with nimble fingers, the way hunters do when they’ve killed an animal, and she covered my belly, my wilted penis, and my whole lap with tiny branches. Then she raised me up slightly and with her hands she caressed me and kissed my thighs, till slowly I got an erection and the branches began to rise and my penis pushed its way through, growing larger all the time, pushing the sprigs aside. But Lise rearranged them around it with her tongue, then raised her head and plunged my penis into her mouth, all of it, right down into her throat. I tried to move her off, but she pushed me back down and shoved my hands out of the way, so I looked up at the ceiling and let her do what she wanted with me. I hadn’t expected her to be so wanton and rough, and so crude in the way she sucked me to the marrow, thrashing her head about violently without even pushing the sprigs aside, so they tore her mouth till she bled, and I thought this must be the way the Teutons did it. I was almost afraid of Lise then. Afterward, when she had crawled her tongue up my belly, leaving a trail of saliva behind her like a snail, she kissed me, and her mouth was full of semen and spruce needles, and she didn’t think of it as unclean but rather as a consummation, as part of the Mass: This is my body and this is my blood and this is my saliva and these are your fluids and my fluids and this has joined us and will join us forever.