One late afternoon, when I was walking up the hill to the well for water,
thinking, I first sensed and then saw, at the edge of the woods, leaning against a tree,
Zden
ě
k, and he was looking straight at me. I had
served the Emperor of Ethiopia, so I knew he’d come on purpose, just to see how I
was doing, and it seemed not that he didn’t want to talk to me but that he
didn’t need to, that all he wanted was to see how I had taken to this isolated
life. Zden
ě
k was now a big man in the political world,
surrounded by a lot of people, yet I knew he was probably just as alone as I was.
Pumping the water while the animals watched me work, I felt Zden
ě
k following my every move, so I took great care to pump as though I
hadn’t seen him, though I knew that Zdenék knew that I knew he was standing
there in the woods. Then slowly I bent over and grabbed the handles of the wooden
buckets, allowing Zden
ě
k time to move a little, because
at a distance of several hundred meters I could hear every movement and every sound, so
I asked Zden
ě
k if there was something he wanted to tell
me. But he didn’t need to tell me anything, it was enough to have seen me and
confirm that I was in the world, and to let me know that he missed me, just as I missed
him. I lifted the two buckets and walked down to the inn, and behind me walked the
little horse, and behind the horse the goat, and then the cat, and though I trod
carefully, the water splashed out of the buckets onto my rubber boots,
and I knew that when I put the buckets down on the stoop and turned around,
Zden
ě
k would no longer be there, that he would go
away satisfied, back to the government car waiting somewhere on the other side of the
woods to take him back to his work, which was certainly more difficult than my escape
into solitude. I thought about how the professor of French literature had told Marcela
that the only true man of the world was one who could become anonymous, who could shed
himself. And when I put down the buckets and turned around, Zden
ě
k was gone. Later that day it began to snow, with flakes as large as
postage stamps, a peaceful snowfall that by evening became a blizzard. In the cellar a
stream of clear, cold water flowed constantly into a trough cut in stone. The stable was
in a corridor next to the kitchen, and the horse manure, which I had left in the stable
on the advice of the villagers, was warm enough to heat the kitchen as though it were
central heating. For three days I watched the moving snow, which hissed like tiny
butterflies, like mayflies, like small flowers falling from the sky. My road was
gradually buried, and on the third day the snow was so deep that the road blended in
with its surroundings and no one could have guessed anymore where it went. On that day,
however, I pulled out an old sleigh and found a set of bells, and I shook them and
laughed, because jingling the bells gave me the idea of hitching the little horse to the
sleigh and driving along above my road, floating above it, separated from it by this
pillow of snow, this feather bed, this thick white carpet, this billowy white that
blanketed the countryside. So I repaired the sleigh, and the snow now reached the
windowsills, and then it climbed higher, halfway up the windows.
The moment I looked out and saw, to my surprise, how high the snow had reached, I saw my
cottage with the animals in it suspended on a chain hung from heaven itself, a cottage
banished from the world and yet full to the brim, just like those mirrors with their
buried and forgotten images, images that could be summoned up as easily as the images I
put in the mirrors, as the images I littered and lined my road with, covered now by the
snow of the past, so that memory could find it only by touch, the way an experienced
hand feels the pulse under the skin, to determine where life has flowed, flows, and will
flow. And at that moment I began to be afraid, because if I died, all the unbelievable
things that had come true would vanish, and I remembered that the professor of
aesthetics and French literature had said that the better person was the one who
expressed himself better. And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so
others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been
strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that
I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the
falling snow that had half buried the cottage. And so every evening, when I sat in front
of the mirror with the cat behind me on the bar, butting her little head against my
image in the mirror as though the image were really me, I looked at my hands while the
blizzard roared outside like a swollen river, and the longer I looked at my
hands—and I would hold them up as though I were surrendering to myself—the
more I saw winter ahead of me, and snow. I saw that I would shovel the snow, throwing it
aside,
searching for the road, and go on, every day, searching for
the road to the village, and perhaps they would be looking for a way to get to me too.
And I said to myself that during the day I would look for the road to the village, but
in the evening I would write, looking for the road back, and then walk back along it and
shovel aside the snow that had covered my past, and so try, by writing, to ask myself
about myself.
On Christmas Eve the snow fell again and covered the road I had worked so
hard all month to find and keep open. It was a wall of snow, a trench that came up to my
chest. The snow sparkled in the evening like glitter on a wall calendar, and I decorated
a tree and baked some Christmas cookies. I lit the candles on the tree and brought the
little horse and the goat in from the stable. The cat sat on the tin countertop beside
the stove. I got out my old waiter’s outfit and put it on, but the buttons kept
slipping out of my callused fingers and my hands were so stiff from work that I
couldn’t tie my white bow properly. I took the oxfords out of my trunk and
polished them, the ones I’d bought when I was a waiter at the Hotel Tichota. When
I put the blue sash over my shoulder and pinned the star to my side, the star shone
brighter than the tree, and the horse and the goat stared at me and grew so alarmed I
had to calm them down. Then I got supper ready, canned goulash with potatoes, and I made
a Christmas present for the goat by slicing an apple into his mush, and the same for the
horse, who ate with me as he did every Sunday, standing by the long oak table, taking
apples from a bowl and munching on them. The horse followed me wherever I went, because
he had a fixed notion that I was going to
go away and leave him
here. The goat, who was used to having the horse around, followed him, and the cat, who
depended on the goat for milk, followed the goat’s udder, and wherever the goat
went the cat went too. We’d go to and from work that way. In the fall, when I went
to cut the second growth of hay, they all followed me, and even when I went to the
bathroom, there were the animals, making sure I wouldn’t run off on them. The only
time I had actually left them was in my first week on the job, when the girl from the
Maršner Orion chocolate factory appeared to me and I wanted to see her, wanted to
know if she was going to work in the chocolate factory with books under her arm, and I
missed her so badly that I packed a few things and before the sun came up set out for
the village to wait for the bus. When the bus drove up and I was just putting my foot on
the first step to board it, I saw the horse galloping toward me from my road, and the
dog behind him, and then the goat hobbled into view, and they made straight for me,
those animals, and stared at me, silently pleading with me not to leave them, and when
they had formed a circle around me, the cat showed up and jumped up on the platform
where they put the milk cans. So I let the bus go without me and went back with my
animals, who from that time on never let me out of their sight. They tried to cheer me
up, though, and the cat would leap and scramble about like a kitten, and the goat would
try to play the ram and for a joke he would dance about with me, trying to butt heads
with me. The little horse was the only one who had nothing he could do, so he would take
my hand in his soft lips and look at me, his eyes alive with fear. Every day after
supper the horse would
curl up by the stove and sigh happily, the
goat would lie down beside him, and I’d go on writing out my pictures. At first
the pictures were unclear and I even wrote out some that had no point to them, but then
suddenly the writing began to flow, and I covered page after page while the pictures in
front of my eyes went by faster than I could write, and this gap between the pictures
and the writing kept me awake at night. I no longer noticed whether there was a blizzard
outside or whether the moon was shining or whether it was so cold the windowpanes
cracked. Day after day I would shovel snow off the road and think of the journey
I’d be taking that evening when I set the nib in the pen and began to write, and
each day I had it worked out in advance, so that by evening all I had to do was write
down what I’d been thinking about as I worked on the road. The animals looked
forward to the evenings as well, because animals like peace and quiet, and they would
sigh happily, and I sighed too and wrote on, and put another stump in the stove, and the
flames purred quietly, and the wind sighed in the chimney and crept in under the door.
At midnight on Christmas Eve lights appeared under the window. I put my pen down, and
the unbelievable came true. I went outside, and there on a sleigh outfitted with a plow
were the villagers—they had pushed their way through to me from the other side,
those same wretches who sat around in the pub missing me so much they’d shot my
German shepherd—and now here they were with a snowplow and a sleigh. I invited
them into the inn, and when they looked at me, I saw they were alarmed. Where did you
get that? Who gave it to you? How come you’re dressed up like that? And I said,
Sit down, gentlemen, now
that you’re my guests. I used to be
a waiter. As though regretting they had come, they asked, What’s that sash and
that medal all about? I said, I was given them many years ago, because I served the
Emperor of Ethiopia. And who are you serving now? they asked, still uneasy. My guests,
as you can see, I answered, and pointed to the horse and the goat, who had stood up and
wanted out, butting their heads against the door. I opened it for them, and they filed
out and walked down the corridor to their stable. But my tuxedo and the sparkling medal
and the blue sash upset the villagers so much that they just stood there. Then they
wished me a happy holiday and invited me to come for dinner on the Feast of Stephen, and
left. I saw their backs in the mirrors, and when the lights of the lanterns had
retreated into the distance beyond the windowpanes, and the jingling of the bells had
faded, and the plow had fallen silent, I stood in front of the mirror alone and looked
at myself, and the more I looked at myself, the more alarmed I became, as though I were
with a stranger, with someone who’d gone mad. I breathed on myself until I was
kissing myself in the cool glass, and then I raised my arm and wiped the fog from myself
with the sleeve of my tuxedo, until I stood once more in the mirror holding out a
burning lamp like a glass raised for a toast. Behind me a door quietly opened, and I
stiffened, but it was just the little horse coming in, and behind him the goat, and the
cat leaped up on the tin countertop by the stove, and I was glad the villagers had come
all that way through the snow to see me, glad they’d been alarmed by me, because I
must be something rare, a true student of the headwaiter Mr. Sk
ř
ivánek,
who served the King of England, and
I had the honor to serve the Emperor of Ethiopia, who decorated me for all time with
this medal, and the medal gave me strength to write this story out for readers, this
story of how the unbelievable came true.
Bohumil Hrabal’s work, Czechs say, is untranslatable. This book is my response to that challenge.
Josef Škvorecký, Antonín Vodsedálek, Jana P
ř
evratská, and Vratislav Brabenec guided me through some of the more puzzling intricacies of “Hrabalovština”—Hrabal’s special way of using Czech—and Bert and Eva Jarsch of the Two Goblets Restaurant in Waterloo, Ontario, helped with the terminology of catering. I wish to thank Jan and Ivana Pavelka for their generous hospitality and, as always, my wife Helena, my daily lifeline to the Czech language.
To my mother and father I dedicate this translation.
Paul Wilson
Toronto, 1989
Copyright © 1971 by Bohumil Hrabal Estate,
Zürich, Switzerland
English translation copyright © 1989 by Paul Wilson
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper,
magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or
by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
Publisher.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: New Directions wishes to thank Drenka Willen
for her
assistance in the publication of this edition.
First published in hardcover by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in
1989
First published paperbound by Vintage International in 1990
First
published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1067) in 2007
Published simultaneously
in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Date to come
Hrabal, Bohumil, 1914-1997.
[Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále. English]
I served the King of England / Bohumil Hrabal ;
translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson.
p. cm. — (A New Directions classic)
eISBN: 978-0-8112-2008-8