I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Author:Bohumil Hrabal
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2007-05-31T00:00:00+00:00

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

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