I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal Page B

how to carouse and enjoy
     life like naughty little boys, and they had so much time on their hands that they would
     even play tricks and practical jokes on one another, and then, right in the midst of all
     the fun, one of them would ask another if he could use a wagonload or two of Hungarian
     hogs, or perhaps a whole trainload? Or another would be watching our porter chop wood,
     and all these rich fellows thought the porter must be the happiest man in the world, and
     they would gaze wistfully at him doing work they had never done themselves, but if
     they’d had to chop wood, they would have been miserable. Suddenly one of them
     would say, I’ve got a boatload of cowhide from the Congo sitting in Hamburg, any
     ideas about what I might do with it? And the other one would say, as if it wasn’t
     a boatload but a single hide, What percentage will you give me? The first one would say,
     Five, and the second would say, I want eight, there’s always the chance of worms
     because the niggers do such a bad job salting them. The first one would hold out his
     hand and say, Seven. Then they’d look each other straight in the eye for a few
     moments, shake hands, and then go back to the girls, to place those same hands on naked
     breasts and slide them down to fondle those neat little mounds of hair under their
     bellies, and kiss them with open mouths as if they were eating oysters or sucking boiled
     snails from their shells, because from the moment they’d bought or sold trainloads
     of pigs and shiploads of hides they seemed twice as young. Some of our guests would buyand sell whole apartment complexes, and at one point a castle
     and two châteaux changed hands, and a factory was bought and sold, and company
     directors would arrange shipments of envelopes to the rest of Europe, and negotiate
     loans to the tune of half a billion crowns for someplace in the Balkans, and two
     trainloads of munitions were sold, and arrangements were made to deliver enough weapons
     to arm several Arab divisions. It was always done the same way, with champagne, women,
     and French brandy, and a view of the courtyard where the floodlit porter was chopping
     wood, or during moonlit walks or games of tag and blindman’s bluff ending up in
     the haystacks the boss had put out as part of the landscaping, as ornamentation, like
     the wood-chopping porter, and then at the first light of dawn they would come back to
     the hotel, their hair and their clothes matted with straw and dried grass, as happy as
     if they’d just come from the theater. Then they would hand out hundred-crown notes
     to the musicians and me, fistfuls of them, with significant looks as if to say, You
     didn’t see or hear a thing, did you? though of course we’d seen and heard
     everything, and the boss would bow from his wheelchair, he’d been gliding silently
     from room to room on his rubber tires, making sure that everything was just so and every
     whim was satisfied. Our boss thought of everything. If someone felt a sudden urge for a
     cup of fresh milk or cool cream toward evening, that was available too, and we even had
     special devices for vomiting in our tiled washrooms, an individual vomitorium with
     strong chromeplated handgrips on each side, and a collective vomitorium that looked like
     a long horse trough with a handrail above it, a bar guests would hold on to while they
     vomited in agroup, egging one another on. I was ashamed whenever I
     vomited, even if no one saw me, but rich people vomited as if it was all part of the
     banquet, a sign of good breeding. When they were through, they’d come back, their
     eyes full of tears, and soon they’d be eating and drinking with more zest than
     ever, like the ancient Slavs.
    Zden ě k was an honest-to-goodness
     headwaiter. He’d apprenticed in Prague, at the Black Eagle, under an old
     maître d’ who’d been a personal waiter in a special aristocrats’
     casino where the Archduke d’Este himself was