I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal Page A

scolded the girl and told her to
     take it easy with him, because his lungs and his ticker weren’t what they used to
     be, and he asked the gypsies for a czardas, and thegypsies started
     to play and the general started to dance. After he’d coughed and cleared his
     throat, he began to dance in earnest, and the girl had to dance faster, and the general
     let go of her and raised one arm up and let the other one drag along the floor like a
     rooster, and he danced faster and faster and seemed to grow younger and the girl
     couldn’t keep up now but the general didn’t slow down and he was dancing and
     kissing her on the throat at the same time and the musicians formed a circle around the
     dancers and you could see admiration and understanding in their eyes, you could see that
     the general was dancing for them and they were all joined together by the music, and
     they played faster or slower according to the dance and the powers of the general, but
     he was still ahead of his partner, who was flushing red and gasping for breath, and the
     fat poet and the girl he’d been in the room with were standing above them, leaning
     on the balustrade. Then the poet took her in his arms, and the first rays of dawn
     appeared, and the poet carried the beautiful girl down the stairs, past the czardas
     dancers and through the open doorway, and he held out this half-naked, drunk girl with a
     torn blouse as an offering to the rising sun.
    In the early morning, as the trains were taking the workers to work, the
     general’s automobile pulled up, a low, open six-seater Hispano-Suiza with
     leather-upholstered seats, and they settled the bill and the poet paid out the entire
     proceeds from his new book, ten thousand copies, like Tonda Jódl’s
The
     Life of Jesus Christ
, but he paid gladly and said it was nothing, he would ask
     for another advance right away and go to Paris and write a better book than the one they
     had just drunk away. The general wasbundled into the back seat, in
     his white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the buttons undone, and fell asleep
     between the girls, while the poet sat in front, a red rose stuck in his lapel. In his
     lap, holding the general’s golden saber and leaning her elbows on the windshield,
     sat the beautiful dancer, wearing the general’s tunic, unbuttoned, its medals cut
     off, and the general’s cap stuck on top of her long flowing hair. She sat so
     erect, with those two enormous breasts, Zden ě k said she
     looked like the statue of the Marseillaise. The group drove down to the station, and as
     the workers were catching the train, the general’s car drove past the platform
     toward Prague, and the girl with her breasts hanging out pulled the saber from its
     scabbard and cried, On to Prague! And so they arrived in Prague and, the way we heard it
     later, it must have been a wonderful sight, the general and the poet and the girls,
     especially the one with her blouse ripped and her two breasts thrusting forward and the
     sword unsheathed, driving down P ř ikopy and
     Národní Třida while policemen saluted and the general slumped in the back
     seat of the Hispano-Suiza sound asleep.
    Here, in the Hotel Tichota, I also learned that the ones who invented the
     notion that work is ennobling were the same ones who drank and ate all night long with
     beautiful women on their knees, the rich ones, who could be as happy as little children.
     I always used to think that the rich were damned, that country cottages and cozy little
     parlors and sour soup and potatoes were what gave people a feeling of happiness and
     well-being, and that wealth was evil. Now it seemed that all that stuff about happiness
     in poor country cottages was invented by these guests of ours, who didn’tcare how much they spent in a night, who threw money to the four
     winds and felt good doing it. I had never seen men so happy as those wealthy
     industrialists and factory owners and, as I said, they knew