I Served the King of England

by Bohumil Hrabal

  I kept the rare stamps in an ordinary-looking little suitcase made of cardboard, inside an old vulcanite trunk, because when I checked on the value of some of the stamps in Zumstein’s catalogue I knew right away that I wouldn’t have to tile my room with green hundred-crown bills anymore, because even if I covered the walls with them and glued them on the ceiling and in the hallway and the toilet and the kitchen, this could never equal the sum of money I would one day rake in, since according to Zumstein four of the stamps alone would make me a millionaire. And then I thought about coming back one day after the war, because the Germans were losing and the war would be over before we knew it. Whenever I saw a high-ranking officer I could read the whole situation in his face. Faces were my newspapers and my dispatches from the front, and even if they wore flashing monocles or dark glasses or pulled their helmets down like black masks, I could still see how things stood on the battlefield from the way people walked and held themselves and behaved. And once more the unbelievable came true. By this time I had left Košíček, and like those soldiers I too said my farewells, waved until the carriage slipped over the hill, wept, and then took the train to my new place of work. As I walked up and down the railroad platform it occurred to me to look at myself in a mirror that was fastened to the station wall, and when I did I suddenly saw myself as a stranger, like those Germans from all the regions and districts with their different professions and interests and states of health that I’d been able to guess correctly because I had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, because I’d been schooled by the headwaiter Mr. Skřivánek, who in his turn had served the King of England. So I took a penetrating look at myself from that angle and saw myself as I never had before, as a member of Sokol who when the Germans were executing Czech patriots had allowed Nazi doctors to examine him to determine if he could have sexual intercourse with a German gym teacher, and while the Germans were provoking a war with Russia he was gettng married and singing “Die Reihen dicht geschlossen,” and while people at home were suffering, he was sitting pretty in German hotels and inns, serving the German army and the SS-Waffe. With the war coming to an end, I knew I could never go back to Prague, and I could see myself, not being lynched exactly, but hanging myself on the first lamppost, or at the very least sentencing myself to ten years and maybe more. So I stood there in the early morning at the railroad station, which was empty, looking at myself as a guest who was coming toward me, and I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia was condemned to face the truth, because just as I had been curious about the suffering and indiscretions of other people, so now, using exactly the same method, I looked at myself, and the sight made me sick, especially since I had a dream of becoming a millionaire and showing Prague and all those hotel owners that I was one of them, and perhaps even better than they were. It was entirely up to me now what I would do, go back home and buy the biggest hotel and be equal to Mr. Šroubek and Mr. Brandejs and all those Sokol people who looked down their noses at me, people you could only talk to from a position of strength, and use my little suitcase containing those four stamps that Lise had plundered in Warsaw or somewhere in Lemberg to buy me a hotel, the Hotel Ditie—or instead should I buy something in Austria or Switzerland? And as I deliberated like this with my own image in the mirror, behind me, silently, a train pulled into the station, an express train, a military-hospital train from the front, in fact, and when it stopped I could see in the mirror that the blinds on all the windows were down. Then one blind went up, the hand holding the cord let go, and I saw a woman in a nightgown lying on the berth. She yawned so widely she almost put her jaw out of joint, then rubbed her eyes and when she had finished rubbing them she looked out the window to see where the train had stopped. I looked at her and she looked at me and it was Lise my wife. I saw her jump up and before I knew it she was out of the train just as she was and hanging around my neck and kissing me the way she did before we were married, and I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia saw that she had changed, just as all the officers who had gone to the front after a pleasant week at Košíček with their wives or their mistresses had changed. Lise, like them, must have seen and lived through unbelievable things that had come true. She was escorting a military transport of crippled men to the place where I was going, to Chomutov, to a military hospital by a lake. So I simply got on the train with my little suitcase, and when the train pulled out of the station I went into the compartment with Lise and drew the curtains and locked the door, and when I took off her nightgown she trembled the way she used to before we were married, because the war must have made her free and humble again. And then she undressed me and we lay naked in each other’s arms and she let me kiss her lap and do everything to her in the rhythm of the ride, moving and touching like the bumpers between the cars.

  At the station in Chomutov, ambulances, cars, and buses, mobile hospitals on six wheels, were already waiting. I didn’t obey Lise but stood at the end of the platform, which had been cleared of people, and they let me stay there only because I’d got off the train with Lise, who reported to the stationmaster, and then they unloaded a fresh batch of transportable cripples from the front, all those who couldn’t walk, who had one or both legs amputated—a platform full of cripples—and loaded them all into the cars and buses. Though I didn’t recognize anyone in particular, I knew these were the same ones who’d been on stud duty in that little town above Děčín and who’d said their last farewells at Košíček. And this was the final scene in their comedy, their play, their movie. I went off with the first busload to the place I’d been assigned to, a canteen in the military hospital, and I kept my little suitcase on my lap and tossed my leather suitcase on the roof rack among the military duffel and kit bags. That day I walked through the countryside and the camp, which was laid out along the edge of a hill, in an orchard of sweet and sour cherry trees that went right down to the bank of a small lake in a quarry. The lake resembled the Sea of Galilee or the sacred River Ganges, because attendants would bring out the cripples with gangrenous amputation wounds and carry them down long wooden jetties branching into the lake. There wasn’t a single insect or a single fish in the water, because everything had died and nothing would grow as long as water flowed into the lake from the stone quarry. The cripples whose wounds were already slightly healed would lie in the water or paddle gently about. Some were missing one leg or both legs below the knees, and others had no legs at all, just stumps. They moved their arms in the water like frogs, with their heads poking out of the blue lake, and they were handsome young men again, but when they swam to the edge, they would pull themselves out with their arms and crawl up the bank like turtles to lie on the shore, waiting for the attendants to wrap them in bathrobes and warm blankets and carry them, hundreds of them, back across the jetties and to the main patio in front of the restaurant, where an all-woman orchestra was playing and meals were being served. I was most moved by the ward for men with severed spinal cords, who dragged their whole lower bodies after them on dry land, and in the water they looked like mermaids. Then there were the legless ones who loved playing ping-pong, and some had small chrome-plated folding carts that allowed them to move about quickly enough to play soccer, except that they would use their hands instead of their feet. As soon as they’d recovered a little—the one-legged and armless ones, and those with badly burned heads—they developed a tremendous appetite for life, and they would play soccer and ping-pong and handball until dark, and I would call them to supper by playing a tattoo on a trumpet. When they approached in their carts or hobbled up on crutches, they radiated health. I was working in the rehabilitation department, but in the three other departments the doctors were still putting the wounded back together with operations and then electrical and iontophoresis treatments. And sometimes I’d have an opposite vision of those cripples and see only the arms and legs they’d lost, the missing arms and legs and not the real ones that were there. I’d put my finger to my forehead and ask myself, Why are you seeing things that way? Because you served th
e Emperor of Ethiopia, because you were trained by one who served the King of England.

  Once a week, Lise and I went to see our son in Cheb, at the City of Amsterdam Hotel. Lise had now gone back to her swimming and she was in her element, always splashing about in the lake. The swimming had made her so taut and beautiful, like a bronze statue, that I could hardly wait until we were together again. She’d bought a book by some imperial German athlete named Fouré or Fuké or something, about the cult of the naked body, and because Lise had a beautiful body she became a nudist, though without actually joining a club. In the morning she’d serve me coffee wearing nothing but a skirt, or sometimes we’d pull the curtains and she’d walk around the house completely naked, and when she looked at me, she would nod contentedly and smile, because she could see in my eyes that she pleased me and was beautiful. But our little son Siegfried caused us a lot of worry. Everything he picked up he threw down again, until one day, when he was crawling around the floor of the City of Amsterdam, he picked up a hammer. His old grandfather gave him a nail, just for fun, and the boy set the nail up and drove it into the floor with one blow. From then on, while other little boys were playing with rattles and teddy bears and running around, Siegfried would lie on the floor and throw a tantrum until he got his hammer and nails, which you could only get for coupons or on the black market. He didn’t talk, he didn’t even recognize his mother or me, and as long as he was awake the City of Amsterdam would tremble with the blows from his hammer, and the floor was full of the nails he’d driven into it. I found our weekly visits unbearable, and each blow would drive me to distraction, because I could see right away that this child, this guest who was my own son, was a cretin and would always be a cretin. When other children his age were going to school, Siegfried would just be starting to walk, and when others were graduating, Siegfried would barely be learning how to read, and when others were getting married, Siegfried would still be learning how to tell the time and fetch the newspaper. But there was more to it than a little boy obsessed with pounding nails into the floor. Whenever the air-raid siren went off and everyone else rushed into the shelter, Siegfried got excited and glowed with pleasure. And while other kids were messing their pants out of fear, Siegfried would clap his little hands, laugh, and pound nail after nail into the board they’d brought into the cellar for him, and suddenly he was beautiful, as though the convulsions he had suffered as a baby and the defect in his cerebral cortex had vanished. And I, who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, was pleased that my son, though he was feeble-minded, could prophesy the future of all the German cities, because I knew that most of them would end up exactly like the floors of the City of Amsterdam hotel. I bought three kilos of nails, and in a single morning Siegfried drove them all into the kitchen floor. In the afternoon, as he was driving nails into the rooms upstairs, I would carefully pull the nails out of the kitchen floor, rejoicing secretly as the carpet bombing of Marshal Tedder drove bombs into the earth in exactly the same way, precisely according to plan, because my boy would drive nails in along straight lines and at right angles. Slavic blood had triumphed once again, and I was proud of the boy, because although he hadn’t spoken a word yet, he was already like Bivoj, a hammer in his strong right hand.

  Now I began to see pictures, images from long ago that I’d forgotten about, and suddenly they were right before me, so fresh and clear that I would stand there by the quarry with my tray of mineral water, thunderstruck. I saw Zdeněk, the headwaiter at the Hotel Tichota, who enjoyed having a good time so much when he was off work that to get it he’d spend all the money he had with him, which was always several thousand. Then I saw his uncle, a military bandmaster now retired, who split wood on his little plot of land in the forest where he had a cottage overgrown with flowers and wild vines. This uncle had been a bandmaster at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still wore his uniform when he split wood, because he had written two polkas and several waltzes that still got played all the time, although no one remembered who the composer was and everyone thought he’d died a long time ago. Zdeněk and I, as we were riding along in a rented buggy on one of our days off, heard the sound of a military brass band playing one of his uncle’s waltzes, and Zdeněk stood up and signaled the driver to stop, then went over to the band and had a little talk with the bandmaster. He offered to give him all the money he had, four thousand crowns, for the soldiers to buy themselves beer, if they would do what he asked. Buses were waiting, and the whole band was getting ready to climb aboard to go to a band tattoo, so we left the buggy there and got on the first bus with them. After an hour’s drive we stopped in a forest, and soon a hundred and twenty uniformed musicians with their shiny instruments were advancing slowly down a road through the woods. Then they turned onto a footpath lined with thick bushes and pine trees that towered overhead, and Zdeněk signaled them to stop and slipped through some loose planks in a fence, disappeared into the bushes for a few moments, then came back and told them his plan. When he gave the sign, the soldiers climbed one by one through the hole in the fence into the bushes while Zdeněk, like a soldier at the front, directed them to take positions around the tiny house. They could hear the sound of an ax striking wood, and the entire band silently surrounded the chopping block and an old man in an ancient Austrian bandleader’s uniform. When Zdeněk gave the signal, the bandmaster flung his golden ceremonial baton in the air, gave a loud command, and out of the bushes rose a glistening array of brass instruments and the band began to play a clamorous polka by Zdeněk’s uncle. The old bandleader stood transfixed over the piece of wood he had just split, while the band moved forward a couple of steps, still up to their waists in pine and oak shrubs. Only the bandmaster stood in the greenery up to his knees, swinging his golden baton while the band played the polka and their instruments flashed in the sunlight. The old bandleader slowly looked around with a heavenly expression on his face, and when they finished the polka the band started right in on one of his concert waltzes, and the old bandleader sat down, put his ax across his knees, and began to cry. The bandmaster came up and touched his shoulder, the old man looked up, and the bandmaster handed him the golden baton. Now the old man got to his feet and, as he told us afterward, he thought he’d died and gone to heaven with a military band all around him, and he thought they must play military music in heaven and that God Himself was conducting the band and was now turning His own baton over to him. So the old man conducted his own pieces, and when he’d finished, Zdeněk stepped out of the bushes, shook hands with his uncle, and wished him good health. Half an hour later the band climbed back into their buses and as they were driving away they played Zdeněk a farewell ceremonial fanfare. Zdeněk stood there filled with emotion and bowed and thanked them, and finally the buses, and with them the fanfares, faded down the road through the woods, lashed by beech branches and shrubs.

  As a matter of fact, there was something of the angel in Zdeněk. Once he financed a wedding for a stonecutter’s daughter, and another time we went to a clothing store and bought some white sailor’s uniforms for all the boys at an orphanage. During a fair he would pay the expenses of all the merry-go-round and swing operators so everyone could ride for nothing all day. On one of our days off we bought jars of jelly and the most beautiful bouquets we could find in Prague and went from one public toilet to another, congratulating all the old women attendants on name days they didn’t have and birthdays that had come and gone, though Zdeněk always managed to strike it lucky with at least one of them. One day I decided to go to Prague, take a taxi out to the Hotel Tichota, and ask if Zdeněk was still there and if not where I could find him, and I also planned to visit the mill by the Charles Baths where I once lived with Grandma, to see if the little room was still there where the shirts and underwear flew past the window. While I was standing at the station in Prague I pulled my sleeve back to see what time it was, and when I looked up I saw Zdeněk over by a newsstand, and I stiffened, because here it was again: the unbelievable was coming true.
I stood frozen in that position, with one hand holding up the other sleeve, and I saw Zdeněk looking around as though he had been waiting a long time for someone, then he raised his arm and was just about to look at his watch too when three men in long leather coats stepped up and grabbed me by the arm. I saw Zdeněk staring at me as though he couldn’t believe his eyes. He was pale and just stood staring as the Germans bundled me into a car and drove off, and I wondered where on earth they were taking me and why. They drove to Pankrác prison, the gates opened, and they led me in like a criminal and threw me into a cell. I was dazzled by what had happened to me, I rejoiced, hoping against hope they wouldn’t let me out right away. What I really wanted, since the war was coming to an end anyway, was to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and now it seemed my lucky star was shining. The cell door opened and I was led off to interrogation, and after I had given them all my particulars and my reason for coming to Prague, the investigating officer grew serious and asked me who I had been waiting for. I said, Nobody. The door opened and two men in civilian clothes rushed in, punched me in the nose, knocked two of my teeth out, and I fell back to the floor. They leaned over me and asked me again who I was waiting for and who I was supposed to pass the message to, and when I said I’d just come to Prague for a visit, one of them brought his face down close to mine, lifted my head up, grabbed me by the hair, and pounded my head on the floor while the interrogating officer screamed that glancing at my watch had been a prearranged signal and that I was connected with the underground Bolshevik movement. When they tossed me back in the cell the SS men shouted, You Bolshevik swine! And the words were sweet and tender music to my ears, because I was beginning to see that this could be my return ticket to Prague, an eraser that would wipe away what I’d got myself into when I married a German and had to stand before the Nazi doctor in Cheb, who examined my penis to see if I was worthy of having sexual intercourse with a Teutonic Aryan, and I laughed and laughed, because somehow I hadn’t felt the beating or the wounds, and because now my battered face was a passport that would allow me one day to return to Prague as an anti-Nazi fighter. The main thing was that I’d be able to show all those Šroubeks and Brandejses and all the hotel owners that I was one of them, because if I survived this I would buy a big hotel, not in Prague perhaps, but certainly somewhere else, because with the stamps in that little suitcase, as Lise had intended, I’d be able to buy two hotels and have my choice of Austria or Switzerland. In the eyes of those Austrian and Swiss hotelkeepers I’d be a complete stranger, with no need to prove to them that there was nothing in my past. If I had a hotel in Prague, on the other hand, and was a member of the Association of Prague Hotelkeepers, and worked my way up to executive secretary for all the Prague hotels, they’d have to respect me—not love me, perhaps, but at least respect me, and that was really all I wanted.