I Served the King of England Read online

  And I Never Found the Head

  My new job as a waiter, and then as headwaiter, was in the mountains above Déčín. When I first arrived at the hotel, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It wasn’t a small hotel, as I’d been expecting, but a small town or a large village surrounded by woods, with hot springs in the forest and air so fresh you could have put it in a cup. All you had to do was turn and face the pleasant breeze and drink it in freely, as fish breathe through their gills, and you could hear the oxygen mixed with ozone flowing through your gills, and your lungs and vital parts would gradually pump up, as though earlier, somewhere down in the valley, long before, you’d got a flat tire, and it was only now, in this air, that you’d got it automatically pumped back up to a pressure that was safer and nicer to drive on.

  Lise, who brought me here in an army truck, walked around the place as though she owned it, smiling constantly as she led me down the main colonnade, a long double line of statues of German kings and emperors wearing helmets with horns on them, all made of fresh marble or white limestone that glistened like sugar. The other administrative buildings were the same, built off the main colonnade like the leaves of a locust tree. Everywhere you went there were more of these colonnades, and before you entered any building you had to walk past columns of horn-helmeted statues. All the walls were covered with reliefs showing scenes from the glorious German past, when they still ran around with hatchets and dressed in animal skins, like something right out of Jirásek’s Old Czech Legends, except that the outfits they wore were German. When Lise explained what was going on here, I remembered the porter at the Hotel Tichota who loved to talk about how the unbelievable came true. Lise told me proudly that this place had the healthiest air in Central Europe and that the only other place like it was near Prague, above Ouholicky and Podmofani. She said this was the first breeding station in Europe for a refined race of humans, that the National Socialist Party had been the first to cross noble-blooded young German women with pure-blooded soldiers, both from the Heereswaffe and the SS, all scientifically. And so National Socialist intercourse was taking place here every day, no-nonsense intercourse, as the old Teutons used to do it. But even more important, the future mothers, who were carrying the new people of Europe in their bellies, dropped their litters here too, and a year later the children would be shipped to the Tyrol and Bavaria and the Black Forest, or to the sea, and the education of the New Man would begin in the first creches and nursery schools—not with the mothers, of course, but supervised by experts. Lise showed me beautiful little houses built to look like country cottages, with flowers spilling out over the windowsills, terraces, and wooden balconies. The future mothers and those who were already mothers were all robust, blonde young women who looked as though they were living in the wrong century, like the peasant girls you find in places such as Humpolec or Haná, or in villages that are so out of the way you still see women in striped petticoats and the same sort of blouses the Sokol women wear in our part of the country, or like the kind Božena wears in the famous painting where she’s doing the wash and Oldfich rides by on horseback and finds her to his liking. And they all had nice breasts, and whenever they went for walks—and these young women were always wandering about—they would stroll up and down the colonnades, staring closely at the statues of the horned warriors as though this was part of their job, or they would stand in front of the handsome German kings and emperors, trying to etch in their minds those famous historical faces and personalities and their life stories. Later, outside a classroom window, I heard these women listening to lectures about those legendary heroes and then being tested to see if they knew it all by heart. The women were taught, Lise said, that the images of those heroes in their heads gradually percolated down through their bodies, reaching the thing that was just a blob at first, then something like a pollywog or a tree frog, then a tiny person, a homunculus, a dwarf that grew month by month until the ninth month, when it became a human being, and all the teaching and all the staring at the statues and pictures left an imprint on the new creature. Lise took me around and showed me everything, and she clung to me, and I noticed that whenever she glanced at my blond hair it seemed to put joy in her step, and when she introduced me to her section chief she introduced me as Ditie, the name inscribed on my grandfather’s grave in Cvikov. I knew that Lise longed to spend those nine months here and more, so that she could donate a pure-blooded off-spring to the Reich. But when I thought about it, it seemed to me that everything to do with that future child would happen the way it did when we put the cow in with the bull, or our nanny goat in with the village billy goat. When I stared down that row of columns and statues, I saw nothing but a tiny cloud of an enormous horror swirling around and enveloping me. And then I thought—and this was what saved me—about how I was so small that they wouldn’t let me onto a Sokol gymnastics team, though I was as agile on the parallel bars and the rings as any big fellow, and I remembered the incident with the gold teaspoon in the Hotel Paris, and finally how they’d all spit in my face just because I’d fallen in love with a German gym teacher, and now here was the commander of the socialist breeding camp himself shaking my hand, admiring my straw-colored hair, and laughing pleasantly, as if he’d just seen a pretty girl or had a drink of some sweet liqueur or his favorite schnapps, and I stood straight and tall. I didn’t wear a stiff collar anymore, but I think I felt for the first time in my life that you didn’t actually have to be big, you just had to feel big. I looked about me with an easy mind and stopped being a little table boy, a busboy, a small waiter who was condemned to be small for the rest of his life and to put up with being called Pipsqueak and Squirt and Shorty and hear jokes insulting his family name, Ditě, which means child. Now I was Herr Ditie, and for the Germans there was no child in my name, and I bet the word reminded them of something completely different, or maybe they couldn’t connect it to anything at all in German. So I began to get some respect here, because, as Lise told me, even the Prussian and Pomeranian nobility would envy a name like Ditie because their names all have Slavic roots, as mine does, von Ditie, so I became a waiter in section five, and I had to cover five tables at noon and at supper and serve five pregnant German girls whenever they rang for milk or cups of cold mountain water or Tyrolean cakes or plates of cold cuts—anything that was on the menu, in fact.

  It was here that I first felt myself really blossoming. Though I was good at waiting on tables at Tichota’s or the Hotel Paris, here I became the darling of the pregnant German girls. True, I had been the darling of the bar girls at the Hotel Paris every Thursday, when the stockbrokers came to the private chambers, but these German women, like Lise, all looked fondly at my hair, my tuxedo, and my blue sash with the medal, which Lise arranged for me to wear when I served meals on Sundays or holidays—a splash of gold radiating from a red stone in the middle, with the inscription Viribus Unibus. In this small mountain town, evening after evening soldiers from all the forces fortified themselves with good meals and fired their spirits with special Rhine and Mosel wines while the girls drank only cups of milk, and night after night the men were let in to them and were under strict scientific supervision right up to the very last moment. I was known as the waiter who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and I enjoyed the same standing as the headwaiter at the Hotel Paris, Mr. Skřivánek, who had served the King of England. I had a younger table boy under me and I taught him, just as Mr. Skřivánek had taught me, how to recognize what region a soldier came from and what he was likely to order. We’d ante up ten marks each and put them on a sideboard, and I’d almost always win. I learned that feeling victorious makes you victorious, and that once you lose heart or let yourself be discouraged the feeling of defeat will stay with you for the rest of your life, and you’ll never get back on your feet again, especially in your own country and your own surroundings, where you’re considered a runt, an eternal busboy. That’s what would have happened if I’d stayed at home, but here the Germans treated me with respect. Every after
noon when the sun was out, I took cups of milk or ice cream or sometimes cups of warm milk or tea to the blue swimming pools where the beautiful pregnant German girls would swim naked with their hair down. They treated me as if I was one of the doctors, and I could watch their bright bodies ripple in the water as they spread their arms and legs, and after each swinging, rhythmic stroke their bodies would stretch out and glide, and their arms and legs would go on making those beautiful swimming motions. But it wasn’t the bodies that attracted me so much now, because I fell in love—and this was a shock to me—I fell in love with that floating hair, the hair that swayed and flowed behind those bodies like pale smoke from burning straw, hair that went straight to full length with each powerful thrust of their arms and legs and then seemed to hang still for a moment, rippling slightly at the ends, like the corrugated metal in a shopfront shutter. And there would be the wonderful sunshine, and the background of blue or green tiles shimmering with broken reflections of sun and waves on the undulating water, syrupy drops of light and shadow, and the movement of bodies along the walls and the blue floor of the pool. When they were done swimming they pulled their legs under them and stood up, their breasts and bellies shedding rivulets of water like water nymphs, and I would hand them the cups, and they would drink from them slowly, then slip back into the water, clasping their hands in front of them as if praying, pushing the water aside with their first kicks, and swimming off again, not for themselves but for those future children. Several months later, in the indoor pools now, there were little babies in the water swimming along with the mothers, three-month-old tads who were already swimming with the women like cubs with female bears, or seals who can swim the day they’re born, or ducklings who swim almost as soon as they hatch. But already I saw that these women thought of me as a flunky, as less than a flunky, in fact, despite my tuxedo. It was as if I wasn’t there at all, as if I meant no more to them than a clothes horse. They felt no shame in front of me, because I was someone who served them, the way queens used to have jesters or midgets. Whenever they stepped out of the water they were always making sure no one was looking at them through the board fence, and once they were surprised by a drunken SS man, and they all shrieked, clapped their towels over their laps, covered their breasts with their arms, and ran into the changing booths. But when I brought them their cups on a tray, they would just stand there nonchalantly, naked, chatting to each other, leaning with one arm against the towel rack and casually drying their golden-haired laps with the other in unhurried, careful movements, wiping their crotches thoroughly and then each half of their backsides. And I would stand there while they took their cups from the tray, drank a little, and put them back, as if I was a serving table, and they would go on wiping their crotches with their towels, and then they would lift their arms and wipe dry each fold and crease of their breasts. Once an airplane swooped in low over the pool, and they ran into their changing booths for cover, shrieking with laughter, and returned a few moments later and took up the same positions as before, and all the while I was standing there holding the tray with the cooling cups.

  In my free time I wrote long letters to Lise. She had an address somewhere near Warsaw, which they’d conquered by now. Then it was letters to Paris. And then, perhaps because of those victories, things became more relaxed, and they built a cyclorama just outside the town, and a shooting gallery and a merry-go-round and swings and everything, just like the Carnival of Saint Matthias in Prague, full of attractions of all sorts. Just as the gables of our cottages in the countryside used to be covered with murals of nymphs and sirens and allegorical women and animals, here regiments of German warriors wearing horned helmets filled the shooting galleries and the canopy on the merry-go-round and the panels on the sides of the swings, and I learned German national history from those pictures. All year long, whenever I had some free time, I would wander around looking at them and I’d ask the cultural instructor about them. He was delighted to explain it all to me, and he addressed me as Mein lieber Herr Ditie, pronouncing the Ditie so nicely that I asked him again and again to teach me about the glorious German past from those pictures and reliefs, so that I too might one day father a German child, just as Lise and I had agreed. When she came back all full of the victory over France, she told me she wanted to marry me but I would have to ask permission from her father, who owned the City of Amsterdam restaurant in Cheb. And so the unbelievable came true, because in Cheb I had to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respectfully requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papánek. According to the laws of the Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impregnate her. And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted my scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn’t understand, though I got the gist well enough—when some stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn’t get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his hand, and he’d probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to me affably, Herr Ditie, was ist den los? And he patted me on the shoulder, handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I’d had this kind of picture in my hands before I’d always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of them every day, new ones, innocent ones. And here I was standing with my penis in my hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I still couldn’t manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn’t have to think about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of inseminating an Aryan vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood. With a mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots, with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.