I Served the King of England (19 page)

How I Became a
Millionaire

The little suitcase with the rare stamps brought me good luck, though
not right away. When the war was over, I was served with a warrant for collaboration
under the small decree, even though I’d turned over the address of the Gestapo
commander, the one who had murdered so many people and then gone into hiding in the
Tyrolean Mountains. I’d pried his whereabouts out of my father-in-law in Cheb, and
Zden
ě
k got permission from the American officials,
and they set off with a car and two soldiers to arrest him. They found him cutting grass
in a meadow, disguised in Tyrolean lederhosen and a beard he’d let grow. But even
if I had arrested him single-handed, the Prague Sokolites would still have wanted me in
jail, not because I married a German woman but because when thousands of Czech patriots
were being executed I had stood before
the Nazi Bureau for the
Defense of German Honor and Blood and let them examine me, a dues-paying member of the
Sokol organization, to see whether I was worthy of having sexual intercourse with a
Teutonic Aryan woman. For that I was sentenced to half a year in prison.

When I got out I sold those stamps for so much money that I was able to
cover the floor of my room ten times over, and when I got enough to cover it forty times
over I bought myself a hotel on the outskirts of Prague, a hotel with forty rooms. But
the very first night, I had the feeling that in the highest room, right under the
mansard roof, someone was pounding nails into the floor, a nail a minute, with heavy
blows from a carpenter’s ax. Each day the sound spread to another room, a second
and then a third and then a tenth, until at last it reached the fortieth room, and it
was happening in all of them at once. Everywhere, in every one of those rooms my little
son was crawling around the floor, forty sons, each one pounding nails into the floor
with powerful blows from his hammer. On the fortieth day, deafened by the blows, I asked
whether anyone else heard them, but no one did, only me, so I traded the hotel for
another one, and this time I purposely chose a place with only thirty rooms, but it
started up all over again. So I decided that the money from the stamps was cursed, that
it was money taken by force from someone who might have been killed in the process, or
maybe the stamps had belonged to a rabbi with miraculous powers, because those nails
were really being pounded into my head, and with each blow of the hammer I felt the nail
puncturing my skull, and the next blow would drive the nail halfway in, and then all the
way in, and I’d end up
not being able to swallow, because
those long spikes would go right into my throat. But I didn’t lose my mind,
because I’d set myself the goal of owning a hotel and being on equal terms with
all the other hotel owners, and I couldn’t give up on that, it was the only thing
that kept me going, the fact that one day I would make it as far as Mr. Brandejs had.
Not that I wanted four hundred sets of gold cutlery like him, a hundred sets would do,
as long as there were famous foreigners coming to stay at my place. So I began to build
a hotel of my own, one that would be very different from all the other hotels. I bought
a huge abandoned quarry near Prague and started adding things to it and sprucing up what
was already there, as the Hotel Tichota had done. The basis for the hotel was a large
blacksmith’s shop with a dirt floor and two chimneys. I left the four anvils just
the way they were, with all the hammers and tongs hanging on the black walls, and I
bought leather armchairs and tables. All this was at the suggestion of a mad architect
who did things for me that he had been dreaming about, and he was as enthusiastic as I
was. Here, in these chimneys and on these forges, the shashlik and the roast pork à
la Živan would be grilled right in front of the guests. The same day the
conversions in the blacksmith’s shop were finished, I slept there, and the first
night I heard hammer blows, but they were faint, because the nails went into the dirt
floor like butter, and the feeling inside my head was muffled as well, so I threw myself
with more excitement than ever into building the guest rooms inside a long building that
looked like a concentration camp barracks, where the workers used to have their
cloakrooms and dormitories. I converted these into small rooms, thirty of them,
and as an experiment I had the floors made of those rough tiles,
the kind they have in Italy and Spain and other places where the weather is hot. The
first day I listened carefully, but the tiles were so hard that all I could hear were
nails glancing off my head, showering sparks, and then the blows let up altogether and I
recovered and began to sleep again the way I used to. Construction proceeded so rapidly
that the hotel opened in two months, and I called it the Hotel in the Quarry, because
something inside me had been broken and crushed and carted away. It was a first-class
hotel, and you could stay overnight only if you had a reservation. It was in the woods,
and the rooms were set out in a semicircle above a blue pond at the bottom of the
quarry. In the rock, forty meters of granite straight up, I had rock climbers plant
alpine flowers and shrubs that grow in places like that. A steel cable was stretched
above the pond, with one end anchored at the top of the cliff and the other at the
bottom, so the cable went down over the water, and every evening I provided
entertainment, I hired an acrobat who had a small, grooved steel wheel with a short grip
underneath it, and he’d wait for the right moment, kick off, and come swooping
down from the top of the cliff, and when he was right over the pond, with a spotlight on
his phosphorescent costume, he’d let go of the wheel, hang for a moment in midair,
and then do a jackknife, straighten, and with his hands stretched out in front of him
slip into the deep water. Then slowly, easily, in his skintight phosphorescent suit, he
would swim to the edge of the pond where the tables and chairs were. I’d had
everything painted white, because white was my color now—something like the
terrace restaurant at Barrandov, except that
this was original, and
now I could compete with anyone. The idea of the wheel came from a busboy who was
standing on the top of the hill one afternoon, grabbed the wheel, and slid down the
cable. When he was halfway down, he let go, and all the guests screamed and stood up or
shrank back in their armchairs, which were all in the Ludwigian style, but the busboy
straightened and did a flip in midair and then, in his waiter’s tuxedo, slipped
headfirst into the water, as though the pond had swallowed him up. I realized at once
that this sort of thing had to go on every day, and that in the evening he would have to
wear a phosphorescent costume. I couldn’t possibly lose money on it, and even if I
did, it wouldn’t matter, because no one else had anything like it, not in Prague,
not in all of Bohemia, and maybe not even anywhere in Europe or the rest of the world.
One day they told me a writer had come to stay whose name was Steinbeck. He looked like
an old sea captain or a highwayman, and he loved it here, loved the blacksmith’s
shop turned into a restaurant and the cooks working right in front of the guests,
cooking on the open forges so that by the time the shashlik and roast pork à la
Živa
ň
were done the guests were as famished as
little children. But what the writer liked most were all those granite crushers, the
dusty old milling machines with their insides laid bare so you could see how they
worked, like an exhibition where cars are sliced in half so you can see inside the
motor. The writer was enchanted with these machines. They were in an open field above
the quarry, from which you could see out across the countryside, and there the machines
stood, abandoned stonecutting machines and lathes, looking as if they’d been
invented by mad sculptors. This writer had
them bring up his white
table and a white lounge chair, and every afternoon he’d drink a bottle of French
cognac and every evening he’d have another. Sitting among those machines with the
mill down below, he’d gaze off into the countryside, and it was just the dull,
ordinary countryside near Velké Popovice, but with the writer there it seemed
beautiful and the machines seemed like works of art. The writer told me he’d never
seen anything like it before, had never actually stayed in a hotel like this before. In
America—this is what he said—only a famous actor like Gary Cooper or Spencer
Tracy could have such a place, and the only writer who could afford a hotel like this
would be Hemingway. By the way, what did I say I wanted for it? I said two million, so
he did some figuring on the table, then called me over, pulled out a checkbook, and said
he’d take it and write me a check then and there for fifty thousand dollars. I
questioned his figures several times, and he went to sixty, then seventy, then eighty
thousand dollars, but I realized that I couldn’t sell my hotel even for a million
dollars, because the Hotel in the Quarry represented the height of my powers, the
pinnacle of my efforts, and I had become the first among hotelkeepers. There were
hundreds and thousands of hotels like Mr. Brandejs’s or Mr. Šroubek’s,
but I knew that no one else in the world had a hotel like mine.

One day the biggest Prague hotel owners, including Mr. Brandejs and Mr.
Šroubek, came and ordered supper. The maître d’ and the waiters set
their table with the utmost care and taste, and just for them I turned on ten spotlights
that were hidden under the rhododendrons and aimed so they would light up the whole face
of the rock from below,
bringing out the highlights, the sharp
edges, the fantastic shadows, and the flowers and shrubs. I decided that if these hotel
owners were inclined to make peace, to take me among themselves and offer me a
membership in the Association of Hotelkeepers, I would let bygones be bygones. But they
pretended not to see me, and not only that, they deliberately sat with their backs to
all the beauties of my establishment. But I felt I was the winner, because they had
turned their backs on the unique features of my enterprise only because they saw and
they knew that I had outdone them. And it wasn’t just Steinbeck who stayed here,
but Maurice Chevalier too, and a lot of women came to see him, and they stayed near the
quarry. Chevalier would receive them in the morning in his pajamas, and they would throw
themselves at him, these admirers, and undress him and tear his pajamas to shreds so
they’d each have a piece as a souvenir, and if they’d been able to they
would have torn Chevalier himself apart and carried away pieces of his body, depending
on how their tastes ran. Looking at them, you’d think that most of them would tear
out the famous singer’s heart first, and then his penis. Chevalier attracted such
a swarm of reporters that pictures of my quarry were carried not only in all the local
magazines, but in foreign ones as well, and I had clippings from the
Frankfurter
Allgemeine
and the
Zürcher Zeitung
and
Die Zeit
, and in
the
Herald Tribune
, of all places, there was my hotel and Chevalier surrounded
by those crazy women in the middle of the field with the machine sculptures, machines
surrounded by white tables and chairs with stylized grapevines wound into their
backrests. And that was the real reason these hotelkeepers had come, not to
bury the hatchet but because they’d heard I’d bought
this quarry and everything in it for a song, and when they saw it, what they saw was far
stronger and far more beautiful than they’d ever imagined. And they were jealous
of me, because I left everything just the way I found it, building the hotel from the
inside, so to speak, and anyone who understood anything could see that and give me
credit, as though I were an artist. That was the height of my career, that was what made
me a man who had not lived in vain. I began to look at my hotel as a work of art, as my
own creation, because that was how others saw it, and they opened my eyes, and I
understood that those machines were really sculptures, beautiful sculptures that I
wouldn’t have given up for anything. One day I began to see that my Hotel in the
Quarry was something like the things Holub or Naprstek brought back with them from their
travels abroad, and I knew the time would come when every one of those machines, every
stone, everything would become a historical site. But those hotel owners could still
make me feel humiliated, because I wasn’t one of them, I wasn’t of equal
rank, though I was actually above them, and often at night I would regret that the old
Austrian Empire was gone, because if there were military maneuvers, say, and if, not the
Emperor perhaps, but one of his archdukes were to stay here, I would serve him and
prepare his meals so well and make his visit so pleasant that he would give me a title,
not a high title, but he’d make me a baronet at least. And so I dreamed on, and
when a great heat wave came and the crops dried up in the fields and cracks opened up in
the ground and children threw letters into the cracks in the earth, I dreamed of winter,
of the snow falling and
everything freezing, and I dreamed of
sweeping off the surface of the pond and putting two small tables there, with two old
Victrolas on them, one horn painted blue and the other pink like two big flowers, and I
would buy old gramophone records and play old-fashioned waltzes, and fires would be
flickering in the blacksmith’s shop, logs blazing in steel baskets around the edge
of the pond, and the guests would go skating on the ice, and I would buy old-fashioned
skates or have them made, the kind you fasten on with a key, and the men would get down
on their knees and put them on for the ladies, and hot punch would be served. And while
I dreamed, the newspapers and the political parties argued about who was going to pay
for the drought that had inspired in me such wonderful dreams of winter revels in the
quarry. When Parliament and the Cabinet discussed the drought and decided that the
millionaires should pay for it, I accepted their verdict with satisfaction, because I
was a millionaire now too, and as a millionaire I wanted to see my name in the papers
alongside Šroubek’s and Brandejs’s and the others, so I understood that
the drought was in fact sent by my lucky star, and that the bad luck would be my good
luck and put me right up there where I dreamed of being when I imagined the archduke
making me a baronet. Although I was still no taller than when I’d been a busboy, I
was big now, I was a millionaire, but months passed and nobody sent me any notification,
nobody demanded that I pay the millionaire’s portion. By this time I had bought
the two gramophones, and I had a magnificent orchestrion brought in too, along with an
old merry-go-round with huge horses, deer, and elk on it. It had once been a German
merry-go-round, belonging to some wealthy amusement-park and
shooting-gallery owner, and I had the merry-go-round taken apart and the horses and the
deer mounted on their original springs on a stone curb around the pond. I put the deer
and the horses in twos, side by side, and the guests and their wives would sit on them
and talk, as though they were out on a Sunday ride, and the idea really caught on. The
horses and the deer were always occupied, and the orchestrion played while the guests
rocked back and forth on the wooden animals with their magnificent saddles, bridles, and
trappings, and with their beautiful eyes, and everything about them was wonderful.