I Served the King of England

by Bohumil Hrabal

  That night I stood outside the gate of the seminary. The lights were on, and a militiaman with an army rifle stood at the gate, and I told him that I was a millionaire, the owner of the Hotel in the Quarry, and that I wanted to speak to the commanding officer about an important matter. The militiaman picked up a telephone, and pretty soon I was let through the gate and shown to an office where another militiaman, this time without a rifle, was sitting at a desk covered with lists and papers. He kept drinking from a bottle of beer, and when he’d emptied it he’d reach under the table and pull another bottle out of a case, open it, and drink thirstily, as though it were his first. I asked him if he wasn’t short a millionaire and told him I hadn’t got a summons even though I was a millionaire too. He ran down a list with his pen, name by name, and then told me I wasn’t a millionaire and could go right back home if I wanted. I said, There must be some mistake, because I am a millionaire. He took me by the shoulder and walked me to the gate, then started pushing me and shouting, You’re not on my list so you’re not a millionaire! I pulled out my bankbook and showed him I had one million one hundred crowns and ten hellers in the bank. What do you call that? I said triumphantly. He looked at the bankbook. Surely you’re not going to throw me out? I said. And he took pity on me, pulled me back into the seminary, declared me officially interned, and took down all my particulars. This boarding school for theological students actually looked like a jail, or a military barracks, or a residence for poor university students, except that in every bend in the corridors and between the windows there were crucifixes along with scenes from the lives of the saints. Almost every picture showed some kind of torture, horrible scenes rendered by the painter with such loving detail that the idea of four hundred millionaires living in the seminary, four and sometimes six to a cell, seemed like a joke. I’d been expecting a reign of terror and malice here, like the halfyear I’d spent in jail after the war, but life in the seminary of Svatý Jan was more like a movie comedy. They set up a court of sorts in the refectory, and the militiamen appeared with army rifles on red slings over their shoulders, but the slings kept slipping off. The uniforms weren’t made to measure and seemed deliberately too big for the small men, and too small for the big men, so they all went around with their buttons undone. The way they ran the trial, every millionaire got a year for each million he had, so I got two years because I had over a million, and the gym equipment manufacturer got four years because he had four million, and Šroubek the hotelkeeper got the heaviest sentence, ten years, because he had ten million. The biggest problem the militiamen had was finding the right column to enter the sentences and our particulars. Roll call every evening was a terrible problem too, because someone was always missing. The reason was that we would take watering cans and go to the nearest village for beer, and another reason was that our guards, who were always drinking, had a hard time counting us, even if they started in the afternoon. So they tried counting us by tens instead, and one of the guards would clap, and another guard would drop a pebble, and after they’d counted the last man they would tally up the pebbles, add a zero to the result, and then tack on the remainder, the ones that didn’t go into ten. Some days there’d be more of us, some days fewer, even though we were all there. Every once in a while the sum of interned millionaires would actually come out right and be duly entered into the record, and everyone would be relieved, but just then four millionaires would walk in carrying cases and jugs of beer, and so to keep the books straight the guards would enter them as new arrivals and give each of them another sentence on top of his original one, depending on how many millions he had. It may have been a seminary, but there was no fence around it. The militiamen would sit at the gate, and the millionaires would go out for walks and come back through the garden, but then they had to walk around and come through the gate, because the militiamen would unlock it each time and then lock it again, even though there was no fence and no wall around the place. The militiamen themselves would take shortcuts through the garden, but then their consciences would bother them and they’d go back to the gate, take the key from the inside, go around and unlock the gate from the outside, walk through it, lock it again, and go into the seminary. The worst thing was the food, but even that problem was solved because the commander and the militiamen started eating with the millionaires, and they would give the food they brought with them from the militia barracks to the pigs that one of the millionaires, the false-teeth manufacturer, had bought. First there were ten pigs, then twenty, and everyone looked forward to the slaughter, because there were some wholesale butchers among us who promised culinary delights that had the militiamen licking their lips. Then the militiamen started suggesting pork specialties of their own, and after that the cuisine here was not the kind you’d normally find in a seminary, but more the way they used to cook in the rich monasteries—the way the Crusaders cooked, for instance. Whenever a millionaire ran out of money, the commander would send him home for more, and at first a militiaman disguised as a civilian would go with him, but later a promise to come back was enough. The internee would drive to Prague for the money and take it out of the million or millions in his account, because the commander had given him an authorization saying the money was to be spent in the public interest. And so they cooked their own meals in the seminary, drew up their own menu, then gave it to the militia commander for approval, asking him to kindly pass along any suggestions, because the millionaires thought of the militiamen as their guests, and we would all eat together in the dining hall.

  Once, one of the millionaires, Tejnora, got permission to drive into Prague to hire a Schrammel-quartet that played dinner music. When he brought the musicians back in a taxi—taking a taxi to Prague became part of the fun—they walked around the locked gate into the millionaires’ camp and woke up the guards, since it was already past midnight, then they went back out and around to the front of the gate and waited. But the guards were so groggy they couldn’t get the gate open, so Tejnora walked through the garden, took the key from the guards, went around again, and unlocked the gate from the front. But there was something wrong with the key and he couldn’t lock the gate again, so he went around to the other side and locked it from there, then handed over the key. I kept thinking it was too bad Zdeněk wasn’t a millionaire, he’d be right in his element here, because besides his own money he could spend money for the ones who didn’t have the imagination to do anything interesting with it. Within a month, all the millionaires were tanned, because we would sunbathe on the hillsides, while the militiamen stayed pale, because all they ever did was stand outside the gate or make out reports and sit around in the cells. They couldn’t even put together a proper list of prisoners: some names, like Novák and Nový, came up three times. They had to carry their weapons at all times, and they were forever dropping their rifles and cartridge pouches, and rubbing things out and rewriting their reports, so the millionaire hotelkeepers ended up doing it for them, because it was no more difficult than drawing up a menu. There was a farm attached to the Catholic seminary with ten cows, but the milk from those udders was not enough for our morning coffee, which was café au lait made from real ground coffee and spiked with a shot of rum, a touch introduced by Mr. Šroubek, just the way they used to do it in the Café Sacher in Vienna. So the poster-paint manufacturer bought five more cows, and then there was enough milk, but since some of the prisoners couldn’t stand café au lait, they had only a glass of rum for breakfast, drinking it straight from the coffee cup. The monthly family visits were wonderful too. The commander bought some white clothesline and hung it up to make an imaginary wall, and when the rope ran out he scraped a line in the ground with his heel to separate the internees from the world outside. The wives and children would show up with rucksacks and bags full of food—Hungarian salami and foreign canned goods. Although we tried to look careworn, the fact is we were suntanned and well fed, and a passerby who didn’t know the real situation could easily have taken the visitors for the prisoners, becau
se the internment of the millionaires was obviously far harder on their families than it was on the millionaires themselves. There was no way we could eat everything the wives brought us, so we shared what we had with the militiamen, who enjoyed the food so much they got the commander to agree to two visits a month, a visit every other week. And whenever cash was needed, thirty or fifty thousand crowns, the commander would let the experts go through the monastery library and pick out rare books, to be taken to Prague by car and sold in the secondhand bookstores. Then the militiamen discovered they could sell the sheets, pillowcases, nightwear, and vestments belonging to the future priests at Svatý Jan pod Skalou, where we sunned ourselves on the slopes and took naps after lunch. But by that time it was almost too late, because the millionaires had figured this out long ago and taken the best of the sheets and the long nightshirts made of cloth handwoven on mountain looms, and beautiful towels by the gross, and they’d carried them all off in suitcases. Later the millionaires started taking holidays, which showed how much the militiamen trusted us, because they knew we wouldn’t run away. Even when we did, and this happened twice, we brought another millionaire back with us, a good friend who wanted a vacation from his family. Eventually the militiamen started taking their uniforms off and wearing civilian clothes, and we would put on their uniforms and guard ourselves, and when we got Sunday duty or the watch from Saturday to Sunday, we all looked forward to it, because it was real comedy, beyond Chaplin’s wildest imagination. All afternoon we would pretend we were going to close down the millionaires’ camp, and the commander of the gate, who was the millionaire Tejnora in a militiaman’s uniform, declared the camp officially closed and told the millionaires they could go home, but the millionaires would go back to their cells. Then millionaires dressed up as militiamen would try to persuade them to change their minds, telling them how wonderful it was outside in the world of freedom, how they’d no longer have to suffer under the scourge of the militia, how they’d live the life of a millionaire again. But the millionaires wouldn’t have any of it, and so Tejnora, in militia uniform and commanding the other millionaires in militia uniforms on guard duty at the gate, ordered the camp to be closed by force. We dragged the millionaires out of their cells, those who had eight and ten million and therefore eight and ten years ahead of them. At first the militiamillionaires couldn’t find the key to the gate, and when they found it they couldn’t get the lock to work, so they ran around and unlocked it from outside, then ran around it again, and we all watched and roared with laughter as the millionaires were dragged outside by the militia-millionaires and the gate was locked behind them. The millionaires walked up to the top of the hill, took one look around, changed their minds, and came back down, pounded on the jailhouse door, got down on their knees, and begged the militia-millionaires to take them in again. I laughed too, but I wasn’t really laughing at all, because although I was with the millionaires, I hadn’t really become one of them, even though I slept in the same cell as Mr. Šroubek. He was so cold to me, he wouldn’t even let me hand him back a spoon when it fell on the floor in the refectory, though I picked it up and stood there holding the spoon out, just as I’d done years before when I held up my glass and no one wanted to drink a toast with me. The hotelkeeper would get another spoon and eat with that one, squeamishly taking a napkin and pushing away the one I’d put down beside his plate, until it fell back on the floor and he kicked it under the table where the vestments were kept. So I laughed, but my heart wasn’t in it. Whenever I’d start talking about my million crowns and my Hotel in the Quarry, all the millionaires would clam up and turn away, refusing to recognize my million, my two million, and I saw that they thought I wasn’t worthy of them, because they had got their millions a long time ago, long before the war, whereas I was a war profiteer. They couldn’t bring themselves to accept me, because I wasn’t of their rank, and it probably would have been the same in my dream if the Archduke had made me a baronet, because I still wouldn’t have been a real baronet, the rest of the nobility wouldn’t have accepted me, just as the millionaires now were not accepting me. A year before, when I was still free, I dreamt that they might accept me one day, and was convinced that as owner of the Hotel in the Quarry I was as good as they were, because some of them shook hands with me and talked nicely to me, but it was all for show, the way every rich man tries to be on good terms with the maître d’ in a hotel or restaurant, and he’ll even ask the maître d’ to bring an extra glass and drink a toast with him, but if the rich man meets the maître d’ on the street, he won’t stop and pass the time of day with him. I also saw how their millions got accumulated, how Mr. Brandejs had always served potato croquettes to his help and saved on small details, and here too he had been the first to see those beautiful sheets and towels and figure a way to get his hands on them, sneak them through the gate in a suitcase, and smuggle them home—not because he needed them, but because his millionaire’s spirit wouldn’t let him pass up an opportunity to acquire, gratis, those beautiful things from the wardrobes of future priests.

  It was my job to look after the pigeons, two hundred pairs of carrier pigeons that had stayed behind after the priests left. The commander assigned me to clean the dovecote and give them water and scraps from the kitchen. Every day after lunch I took them a little cart full of leftovers. The commander got so tired of eating meat that he began longing for potato pancakes and blini filled with plum jam and grated cheese and drenched in sour cream. The millionaire couturier Barta was having a visit from his family, and he mentioned to the commander that his wife was from good peasant stock, so why not try her out as a pastry cook? That was how the first woman appeared in camp. Since we were all tired of eating meat, three more wives came into the prison, three millionairesses, with Mrs. Bartová the chief pastry cook. When the millionaires who could prove they had Austrian or French citizenship were released and there were ten empty cells, the millionaires came up with the idea of renting those cells to their wives, who might come to visit them once a week, because it was inhuman for a married man to be denied access to his lawful spouse. And so beautiful women began showing up, ten at a time, and I discovered later that they weren’t wives at all, because I recognized two women, getting on in years but still beautiful, who used to come to the Hotel Paris for the Department of Internal Medicine on Thursdays when the stockbrokers showed up. But I was growing fond of my pigeons, all two hundred pairs of them. They were so punctual that exactly at two o’clock they would perch on the crest of the monastery roof, where they could see right into the kitchen, and I would come out of the kitchen with my little cart loaded with two bags of scraps—leftover vegetables and things like that—and I who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia would feed the pigeons, something no one else wanted to do, because it was no work for the delicate hands of a millionaire. I had to come out of the kitchen on the stroke of two, and if for some reason the clock didn’t strike but the sun was out, I would go by the sundial on the wall of the church, and when I emerged, all four hundred pigeons would swoop down from the roof and fly straight at me, and a shadow flew with them, and the rustling of feathers and wings was like flour or salt being poured out of a bag. The pigeons would land on the cart, and if they couldn’t find a place they would sit on my shoulders and fly around my head and beat their wings against my ears, blotting out the world, as though I were tangled up in a huge bridal train stretching in front of me and behind me, a veil of moving wings and eight hundred beautiful blueberry eyes. The millionaires almost died laughing when they saw me covered with pigeons as I pulled the cart to the courtyard, where the pigeons started devouring the food, pecking away until the two sacks were empty and the pots looked as though they’d been scoured clean. Once I was late, because the commander was busy tasting the minestrone soup with Parmesan cheese and I was waiting for the pot. I heard the clock strike two, and before I knew it the pigeons flew through an open window and into the kitchen, all four hundred of them, and they swirled around everyone, knocking the
spoon out of the camp commander’s hand. I rushed out of the kitchen, and on the doorstep the pigeons flocked around me and pecked me with their gentle beaks, and I covered my face and head with my hands and ran across the yard with pigeons swirling around me and swarming over me, because for them I was a god of life. And I looked back on my life and saw myself now, surrounded by these divine messengers, these pigeons, as though I were a saint, and meanwhile I could hear the laughter and the shouts and snide remarks of the millionaires, and suddenly the message of the pigeons hit me, and the unbelievable came true again, because even if I’d had ten million crowns and three hotels it wouldn’t have mattered, no, this kissing of tiny beaks was sent by heaven itself, just as I’d seen on the altar panels and the stations of the cross that we walked past to get to our cells. And even though I had seen nothing and heard nothing, wanting to be what I had never been able to be, a millionaire, despite my two million, I became a millionaire, a multimillionaire, only now, when I saw for the first time that these pigeons were my friends, that they were the parable of a mission I had yet to accomplish, and that what was happening to me now was what happened to Saul when he fell off his horse and God appeared to him. I swept aside the beating of eight hundred wings and stepped out of the surging mass of feathers, as if stepping out from under the branches of a weeping willow, and pulled the cart with two sacks of scraps and the pots with the leftover vegetables from the kitchen, and the pigeons perched on me again, and surrounded by a cloud of pigeons beating their wings I had another vision, in which I saw Zdeněk.