I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

was enough, and the boss nodded that it was. I got a three-hundred-crown tip,
     then the general threw his cape over his shoulders, red lining out, picked up his golden
     saber, set a monocle in his eye, and strode out, his riding spurs jangling, and as he
     walked, he managed to kick the saber neatly out of his way with his boot so he
     wouldn’t trip over it.
    Next day the general came back, and he wasn’t alone now but with
     some beautiful young women and a fat poet. This time there was no shooting, but they got
     into such aterrible argument about literature and trends in poetry
     that they were spitting into one another’s faces. I was sure the general was going
     to shoot the poet, but eventually they settled down and began arguing about a woman
     writer, and they kept saying she didn’t know her vagina from an inkwell, and
     anyone who wanted to could dip his pen in her ink. Then for almost two hours they
     gossiped about another writer and the general said that if the fellow would treat his
     own texts the way he treated other people’s vaginas it would be a good thing both
     for the writer and for Czech literature. But the poet disagreed and said the man was a
     real writer and that if Shakespeare was the greatest creator next to God Himself then
     this writer they were talking about was right up there with Shakespeare. As soon as they
     arrived they made the boss send for some musicians, and a band played for them nonstop
     while they and the girls drank formidable amounts. The general cursed every mouthful of
     food and drink, and he smoked a lot, and whenever he lit up he would have a coughing
     fit, take the cigarette out of his mouth, look at it, and shout, What kind of rubbish
     are they putting in these Egyptian fags anyway? But he went on smoking and his cigarette
     glowed in the gloom while the musicians played and drank. Another remarkable thing was
     that the two guests had the girls sitting on their knees while this was going on, and
     every once in a while they would retire to a room upstairs and come back fifteen minutes
     later roaring with laughter. Only each time the general went upstairs, he would slip his
     hand between the girl’s thighs as she walked up ahead of him and mutter, No, sir,
     I’m getting too old for love, and then he’d say, You call these real women?
     But he’dmount the stairs anyway and come back fifteen minutes
     later, and I could see how satisfied and in love the girl was and that she’d been
     given the same treatment as those two bottles of Armagnac the day before and the Heinkel
     Trocken and El Córdoba. Then they’d carry on about the death of poetism and
     the new trend called Surrealism, which was entering its second phase, and about
     committed art and pure art, and by this time they were shouting at each other again.
     Midnight went by, and the girls couldn’t seem to get enough champagne and food,
     they were so ravenous. Then the musicians said it was over, they couldn’t play
     anymore and had to go home, so the poet took a pair of scissors and snipped a gold medal
     off the general’s tunic and tossed it to the musicians, who were gypsies or
     Hungarians, and so they played some more. Again the general went off with one of the
     girls, said on the stairs he was all washed up as a man, and fifteen minutes later came
     back, then the poet went up with the general’s first girl, but before that the
     musicians started packing up to go home, so the poet took the scissors and cut two more
     medals off and threw them on a tray for the musicians, and the general took the scissors
     and cut the rest of his own medals off and threw them on the tray with the others, just
     for those beautiful young women. We said it was the most audacious thing we’d ever
     seen, and Zden ě k whispered to me that the medals were the
     highest English, French, and Russian decorations from the First World War. Now the
     general took off his tunic and began to dance, and he