I Served the King of England

by Bohumil Hrabal

  Each week I managed to save up for another girl, a different one each time. The second girl in my life was a blonde. When I walked into Paradise’s and they asked me what I’d like, I said I wanted to have supper but, I added right away, in a separate room, and when they asked me who with, I pointed to a blonde, and there I was in love with a beautiful fair-haired woman, and it was even better than the first time, unforgettable as that had been. And so I tested the power of pure money and I ordered champagne, but I tasted it first, and the girl had to be served from the same bottle. I’d had enough of them pouring wine for me and soda pop for her. As I lay there naked staring at the ceiling, and the girl lay beside me staring at the ceiling too, I suddenly stood up and took a peony from the vase, stripped the petals off, and garnished the girl’s lap with them. I was astonished at how splendid it looked. The girl sat up and looked at her lap, but the peony petals fell off, and I gently pushed her back and took the mirror from its hook and held it up so she could see how beautiful she looked with her lap all decorated with peonies and I said, This is wonderful, if there are flowers here, I’ll decorate your lap every time I come. And she said that this had never happened to her before, someone appreciating her beauty like that, and she told me that because of those flowers she had fallen in love in me. I said it would be wonderful when I picked up some fir boughs at Christmas and arranged them in her lap, and she said, Mistletoe would be even nicer. But best of all, and she must arrange it, would be to hang a mirror from the ceiling over the couch so we could see ourselves lying there, especially her, beautiful and naked with a wreath on her lap, a wreath that would change with the seasons, with the flowers that are typical for each month. How wonderful it would be to garland her body with moon daisies and virgin’s tears and chrysanthemums and purple loosestrife and autumn leaves. I stood up and hugged myself, and as I left I gave her two hundred crowns, but she handed it back, so I put it on the table and left, feeling six feet tall. I even slipped two hundred crowns to Mrs. Paradise in her wicket as she leaned out and stared at me through her glasses. I went out into the night, and in the dark, narrow streets the sky was full of stars, but all I could see were hepatica and wood anemone and snowdrops and primroses scattered over the blonde girl’s lap. The more I walked, the more astonished I was at where I’d got the notion to arrange flowers in a woman’s pretty lap with its mound of hair in the middle, like garnishing a plate of ham with lettuce. Since I knew flowers, I went on with it and dressed the naked blonde in cinquefoil and tulip and iris petals, and I decided to plan it all out in advance, so I could have entertainment all year round. So I learned that money could buy you not just a beautiful girl, money could buy you poetry too.

  Next morning, when we stood on the carpet and the boss walked up and down to see that our shirts were clean and all our buttons there, and when he’d said, Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, I looked at the laundress and the scullery maid and found myself staring so piercingly at their little white aprons that the laundress tweaked my ear, and I realized that neither of them would let her lap, her patch of hair, be wrapped in daisies or peonies, let alone sprigs of fir or mistletoe, like a joint of venison. So I polished the glasses, holding them up to the light from the big windows, and outside, people were walking past, cut off from the waist down, and I went on thinking about summer flowers, and I took them from their baskets one by one and lay blossoms or just petals in the lap of the beautiful blonde from Paradise’s, while she lay on her back with her legs spread apart, and when the blossoms slipped off I would stick them back with gum arabic or gently tack them in place with a small nail or a pin. So I did a fine job of polishing the glasses, something no one else wanted to do, rinsing each glass in water and holding it up to the window to make sure it was clean, though thinking all the time, through that glass, about what I would do at Paradise’s, until finally I ran out of garden flowers, field flowers, and forest flowers, and this made me feel sad, because what would I do in winter? Then I laughed and was happy, realizing that in winter the flowers would be even more beautiful, because I could buy cyclamen and magnolias, and I might even go to Prague for orchids. Or maybe I’d just move to Prague, for there must be restaurant jobs there too, and I’d have flowers all winter long. Then noontime came, and I set out the plates and napkins and served beer and raspberry and lemon grenadine, and right at noon, at the busiest time, the door opened and she stepped in, then turned to close the door behind her, that beautiful blonde from Paradise’s. She sat down and opened her purse, pulled out an envelope, and looked around. I knelt down and quickly tied my shoe, my heart beating against my knee. When the maître d’ came over and said, Quick, get to your place, all I could do was nod, my heart throbbing so hard that my knee seemed to merge and change places with it. But then I pulled myself together, stood up, and holding my head as high as I could, I threw a napkin over my arm and asked the girl what she’d like. She said she wanted to see me again, and a glass of raspberry grenadine. She was wearing a summer dress covered with peonies, she was surrounded by them, a prisoner of peony beds, and I caught fire and blushed like a peony, because I hadn’t expected this. My money, my thousand crowns, was gone, and what I was looking at now was completely free. So I went for a tray of raspberry grenadine, and when I came back with it the blonde had put the envelope on the tablecloth and the corners of my two hundred-crown notes were casually sticking out of it. The way she looked at me set the glasses of grenadine rattling and the first one slipped to the edge of the tray, slowly tipped over, and spilled into her lap. The maître d’ was right there, and the boss came running up, and they apologized, and the boss grabbed me by the ear and twisted it, which he shouldn’t have done, because the blonde cried out so that everyone in the restaurant could hear her, How dare you! The boss said, He’s ruined your dress and now I’ll have to pay for it. She: What business is that of yours? I want nothing from you. Why are you mistreating this man? The boss, sweetly: He spilled a drink on your dress. Everyone had stopped eating now, and she said, It’s none of your business and I forbid you to punish him. Just watch this. She took a glass of grenadine and poured it over her head and into her hair, and then another glass, and she was covered with raspberry syrup and soda-water bubbles. The last glass of raspberry grenadine she poured down the inside of her dress, then she asked for the bill. She walked out with the aroma of raspberries trailing behind her, out into the street in that silk dress covered with peonies, and the bees were already circling her. The boss picked up the envelope on the table and said, Go after her, she forgot this. When I ran out, I found her standing in the square surrounded by wasps and bees like a booth selling Turkish honey at a village fair, but she made no effort to brush them away as they ate the sugary juice that coated her like an extra skin, like a thin layer of polish or marine varnish rubbed on furniture. I looked at her dress and handed her the two hundred crowns and she handed them back and said that I’d forgotten to take them yesterday. Then she asked me to come to Paradise’s that evening and said she’d bought a beautiful bouquet of wild poppies. I saw how the sun had dried the raspberry grenadine in her hair and made it stiff and hard, like a paintbrush when you don’t put it in turpentine, like gum arabic when it spills, like shellac, and I saw that the sweet grenadine had stuck her dress so tightly to her body that she’d have to tear it off like an old poster, like old wallpaper. But all that was nothing to the shock I felt when she spoke to me. She knew me better than they knew me in the restaurant, she may even have known me better than I knew myself. That evening, the boss told me they’d be needing my room on the ground floor for the laundry and I’d have to move my things to the second floor. I said, Couldn’t we do it tomorrow? But the boss looked right at me, and I knew that he knew and that I’d have to move at once, and he reminded me that I had to be in bed by eleven, that he was responsible for me, both to my parents and to society, and that, if a busboy like me expected to do a full day’s work, he had to have a full night’s sleep.

  The nicest guests in
our establishment were always the traveling salesmen. Not all of them, of course, because some traded in goods that were worthless or didn’t sell—warm-water salesmen, we called them. My favorite was the fat salesman. The first time he came I ran for the boss, who was alarmed when he saw me and said, What’s the matter? Sir, I said breathlessly, some big shot’s just arrived. He went to take a look, and sure enough, we’d never had anyone this fat before. The boss praised me and chose a room that this salesman always stayed in afterward, with a bed that the porter reinforced with four cinder blocks and two planks. The salesman made a wonderful entrance. He had a helper with him who looked like a porter at the station and was carrying a heavy pack on his back, something with straps around it, like a heavy typewriter. In the evening, when the salesman sat down to supper, he would take the menu and look at it as though there was nothing on it he liked, and then he’d say: Leaving aside the lungs in sour sauce, bring me every entrée on the menu, one by one, and when I’m finishing the first, bring me the next, until I tell you I’ve had enough. And he’d always polish off ten main dishes before he’d eaten his fill, and then he’d get a dreamy look on his face and say he’d like a little something to nibble on. The first night he asked for a hundred grams of Hungarian salami. When the boss brought it out to him, the salesman looked at the plate, then took a handful of coins, opened the door, and tossed them out into the street. After he’d eaten a couple of slices of salami, he appeared to get angry again, took another handful of change, and tossed it out into the street again. Then he sat down again, frowning, while the regulars looked at one another and at the boss. All the boss could do was get up, walk over, bow, and ask, Just out of curiosity, sir, why are you throwing your money away? The salesman answered, Why shouldn’t I when you’re the owner of this establishment and you throw away ten-crown notes every day, exactly the same way? The boss went back to the table and reported all this to the regulars, but that really got them going, so he went back to the fat man’s table and said, Just out of curiosity, sir . . . of course you’re entitled to throw away as much money as you like, but I don’t see what that has to do with my ten crowns. The fat man stood up and said, Allow me to explain. May I go into your kitchen? And the boss bowed and motioned him toward the kitchen door. When the salesman came into the kitchen, I heard him introduce himself: My name is Walden and I represent the firm of van Berkel. Now, would you mind slicing me a hundred grams of Hungarian salami? So the boss’s wife sliced the salami, weighed it, and put it on a plate. Suddenly we were all afraid he might be an inspector, but the salesman clapped and his helper came into the kitchen carrying the thing with a cover over it, which now looked like a spinning wheel, and set it on the table. The salesman swept off the cover, and there stood a beautiful red device—a thin, round, shiny circular blade that turned on a shaft, at the end of which was a crank and a handle and a dial. The fat man beamed at the machine and said, Now, the largest firm in the world is the Catholic church, and it trades in something that no man has ever seen, no man has ever touched, and no man has ever encountered since the world began, and that something is called God. The second-largest firm in the world is International, and you’ve got that represented here too, by a device now in use all around the world called a cash register. If you press the right buttons throughout the day, then instead of having to figure out the daily receipts yourself in the evening, the cash register will do it for you. The third-largest is the firm I represent, van Berkel, which manufactures scales used to weigh things with equal precision the world over, whether you’re at the Equator or the North Pole, and in addition we manufacture a full range of meat-and-salami slicers. The beauty of our machine is this, if you’ll allow me to demonstrate. And, after asking permission, he stripped the skin off a roll of Hungarian salami, put the skin on the scales, and then, turning the crank with one hand, pushed the salami against the circular blade with the other. The slices of salami piled up on the little platform till it seemed that he had sliced the entire piece, though not much of it had disappeared. The salesman stopped and asked how much salami we thought he’d sliced. The boss said a hundred and fifty grams, the maître d’ a hundred and ten. How about you, squirt? the man asked me. I said eighty grams, and the boss grabbed me by the ear and twisted it and apologized to the salesman saying, His mother dropped him on his head on a tile floor when he was an infant. But the salesman patted my head and smiled at me nicely and said, The boy came closest. He threw the sliced salami on the scales, and the scales showed seventy grams. We all looked at one another, and then gathered around the miraculous little machine, because everyone could see there was profit in it. When we stood back, the salesman took a handful of coins and tossed them into the coal box and clapped, and his porter brought another package, and in its wrapping it looked like the glass bell my grandmother used to keep the Virgin Mary under, but when he unwrapped it, there stood a set of scales, like the kind you see in chemist’s shops, with a slender needle that only showed up to a kilogram. The salesman said, Now, this scale is so precise that when I breathe on it, it will measure the weight of my breath. And he breathed and, sure enough, the needle moved, and then he took the sliced salami from our scale and threw it onto his, and the scale showed that the salami weighed exactly sixty-seven and a half grams. It was obvious that our scales had robbed the boss of two point five grams and the salesman worked it out on the table. That gives us . . . and then he drew a line under his figures and said, If you sell ten kilos of Hungarian salami a week, this scale will save you a hundred times two point five grams, that’s almost half a salami. And he made fists of his hands and leaned his knuckles on the table, crossing one foot over the other so the toe touched the ground and the heel was in the air, and he smiled triumphantly. The boss said, Everybody leave, we’re going to talk business. I’ll buy all of this as is. Pointing at the porter, the salesman said, These are my samples. For a whole week we’ve been lugging them from chalet to chalet up in the Krkonoše Mountains, and in every decent chalet we’ve sold the salami slicer and a scale, and together they’re a package I call a tax saver.