Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Read Online Free PDF

glued to the spot where Goethe liked to look before he sat down to write his poems, and I went over and introduced myself and we immediately struck up an intimate conversation, she told me how she could ride a bicycle no hands, which was really revolutionary at the time, and I told her about a policeman who’d dug up a public hygiene regulation and used it as an excuse to go and bathe gypsy girls fifteen and under, he’d order the gypsy elders to heat up the water, then shoo them away, take off his coat, roll up his sleeves, and go to, but one day the police chief peeked through the keyhole as the policeman carried out the public hygiene regulation and the policeman landed in court, after which the police chief took over washing the gypsy girls and the gypsy women couldn’t understand why he didn’t wash them too, anyway, the Jewish beauty sitting and waiting for the first Saturday star to come out blushed bright red and whispered to me, I’m not as pure as I might be either, so I was a hero once more, I went with an embezzler’s daughter too, not many men can claim that, her name was Helenka, the embezzler’s daughter, and we played Diabolo together, and each time she leaned forward to discard I looked down her blouse, she had such beautiful breasts that for years I would stutter and make spelling mistakes at the thought of them, so I followed Christ’s example and kept my illusions, I went with beauties but didn’t let them get too close, thus preserving my freedom, like Doctor Karafiát, who shuddered at the thought of even dreaming about a woman in her underwear, which writers find shocking too and they’re used to all sorts of things, the embezzler father of the beauty in question tried to get me to work for him, but I knew he had two sons, slick dressers both of them, pince-nez and all, one was caught misappropriating funds and, as was the fashion in those days, put a Browning to his head, only the ruling class used Brownings for the purpose, and the other had a wife whose name was Nina, a giant of a woman who wore nothing but satin and drank nothing but rosolio, and one day when she was drawing water from the well she lost her balance and fell in and they didn’t find her for a week because they thought, as was the fashion in those days, that she had been carried off by a student, and by then she was all puffed up and ugly, Mother of God, isn’t life breathtakingly beautiful! another reason I refused to become part of their family was that their uncle was a religious fanatic, the kind that goes around kissing the ground because he so loved God’s hills and dales and tearing down fences because heaven has no fences so why do we need them on earth, he was one of the first to call for boundary strips between farms to be plowed under, he would kneel down in the public square and cry out that love would tear down all fences between people, but people took it the wrong way and ran home and lay down with one another on their sofas, and so the man went and hanged himself on his mother’s cross in the cemetery, and the local priest was furious because he had to reconsecrate the whole place, I was always surprised to read in Anna Nováková’s dream book that hanging yourself in church means you will become a church dignitary because suicides have to be buried at night, hush-hush, off to the side somewhere, like the wife of the army doctor, the notary’s son, she was a jewel she was, just like you, young ladies, when she came to us for milk she’d say to me, How about popping round for a visit? she said I was the spitting image of the late Strauss in his youth, her mother came from a castle just beyond Přemyslovice, it was called Hlochov and it belonged to Bochner, and her father, who was also a notary, rode around in a coach that was drawn by four white horses and had six spotted mastiffs with their tongues out running behind, and the other