I Served the King of England Read Online Free PDF Page A

his figures and said, If you sell ten
     kilos of Hungarian salami a week, this scale will save you a hundred times two point
     five grams, that’s almost half a salami. And he made fists of his hands and leaned
     his knuckles on the table, crossing one foot over the other so the toe touched the
     ground and the heel was in the air, and he smiled triumphantly. The boss said, Everybody
     leave, we’re going to talk business. I’ll buy all of this as is. Pointing at
     the porter, the salesman said, These are my samples. For a whole week we’ve been
     lugging them from chalet to chalet up in the Krkonoše Mountains, and in every
     decent chalet we’ve sold the salami slicer and a scale, and together they’re
     a package I call a tax saver.
    The salesman must have liked me—perhaps I reminded him of his
     youth—but whenever he saw me he’d pat my head and laugh, a pleasant laugh,
     till tears filled his eyes. Sometimes he’d ask to have mineral water brought to
     his room. Whenever I brought it to him I’d find him already in his pajamas, lying
     on the carpet, his enormous stomachbeside him like a barrel. What I
     liked about him was that he wasn’t ashamed of his stomach, he carried it proudly
     before him like a billboard, plowing forward into a world that came halfway to meet him.
     Sit down, my son, he’d say, and then he’d laugh, and it always felt as
     though my mother, not my father, was talking to me. Once he told me, You know, I started
     out when I was just a little guy like you, with Koreff’s, the haberdashers. Ah, my
     child, I still remember my boss. He always said a good businessman has three
     things—property, a shop, and some inventory—and if you lose your inventory
     you’ve still got your shop, and if you lose your shop and your inventory at least
     you’ve got your property, and no one can take that away from you. Once I was sent
     out to pick up some combs, beautiful bone combs—eight hundred crowns, those combs
     cost—and I carried them on a bicycle in two enormous bags—here, have a
     sweet, go on, try this one, it’s cherries in chocolate—and as I was pushing
     the bicycle up the hill—by the way, how old did you say you were? I told him
     fifteen and he nodded and took a sweet and smacked his lips and went on—and as I
     was carrying those combs up the hill, a peasant woman passed me, she was on a bicycle,
     too, and she stopped at the top of the hill in the woods, and after I’d caught up
     to her, she looked at me so intensely that I had to look away, and then she caressed me
     and said, Let’s see if the raspberries are ripe. And I laid my bicycle with the
     load of combs down in the ditch, and she put hers—it was a woman’s
     bike—on top of mine and took me by the hand, and behind the very first bush we
     came to she pushed me down and undid my fly, and before I knew it she was on top of me.
     She was the first to haveme, but then I remembered my bike and my
     combs, so I ran back, and her bike was lying on top of mine, and in those days
     women’s bicycles had a colored netting over the back wheel, like the kind horses
     sometimes wear over their manes, and I felt for the combs and to my relief they were
     still there. When the woman ran up and saw that my pedal was tangled in the netting of
     her bicycle, she said it was a sign that we weren’t to go our separate ways just
     yet, but I was afraid—here, try this sweet, something they call nougat—so we
     rode the bicycles off into the wood and she put her hand into my trousers again and,
     well, I was younger then, and this time I lay on her, just the way we put our bicycles
     down in the bushes, with hers down first and mine on top, and that’s how we made
     love, and it was beautiful, and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit
     in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful. Ah, but go to bed now, you’ve
     got to be up early, my boy. And he took the bottle and drank the whole thing