Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Heim, Adam Thirlwell Page A

serving in the most elegant army in the world I told our medical officer, Doctor, I said, I’ve got a weak heart, but all he said was, So have I, boy, and if we had a hundred thousand like you we could conquer the world, and he put me into the highest category, so I was a hero, I walked out of there on cloud nine, but he called me back and said, You’ve got time on your hands, take my wife to the station, she was a beauty, his wife, the spitting image of Mařenka Zieglerová and a giant like Maria Theresa and dressed like a queen too, and the first words out of her mouth were, Are you a bachelor? and when it was over she tried to give me a tip, six kreuzers, but I wouldn’t take it, that’s called chivalry, Havlíček and Christ wouldn’t have taken one either, we had a real thing about appearances back then, I wore a pince-nez and a tie-clip made from a medal a friend of my grandfather’s got for winning the high jump at the Achilles Sport Club in Brno, but the main thing was money, you could get anything for money, beautiful women, you might be a hunchback or getting on in years, but you could buy a real beauty, it’s just how the world turns round the universe, and even though I’ve pledged allegiance to emperors and presidents I’m still a hero, I’ve still got my magic hands, my surgeon’s hands, a shoemaker always has fine hands, and people call me a real professional, Baťa himself wrote me a letter begging me to work for him and put his business back on its feet, and the Baroness Břízová, who used to get her milk from us, would look at me, lower her eyes, and say, You’re one of us, aren’t you? and she was as noble as they come, with a tiny little face like the kittens on the chocolate bars, her daughter married that handsome Judge Just, the one known for throwing the book at all the rowdies and drunks, Tónek Opletalů once boxed his ears because he gave him thirteen months for slitting Říha’s throat during an academic debate, but Christ, healer of nations and mainstay of the poor, knew way back then that man, predisposed as he is to villainy, soon sheds tears, which is why he had the strength to load that girder on his back for us all and lug it the two kilometers to Golgotha, all bloody and bruised, to this day priests go wild at the thought of it, though they prefer telling children about the Holy Trinity and how the Father is His own Son and the Son His Father and They use a messenger pigeon to communicate, it’s enough to make your head spin, as if they didn’t have their share of that stuff in the confessional, stepfathers and sons born out of wedlock, I mean, people don’t like hearing it, because Christ wanted us to love our neighbors, he wanted discipline, not love on the sofa the way some mealy-brained idiots would have it, but I can be proud, I always kept the image of Havlíček before me and as a shoemaker I was always an engineer of human feet, the stitching was always white waxed thread, the nails never scratched the skin, I used only Elbet glue and gum dragon mixed with ground elephant hooves, but public opinion is made by idiots and drunks, I’d like to see them do a handstand on a horse at the age of seventy like our dearly departed President Masaryk, to say nothing of the Tibetan monks who are building a power station to illuminate the living Buddha, the tiny child Buddha, in their monastery, or Professor Einstein, who invented the atomic submarine, or the Russians, who are jetting around the world so fast that they have to put on their brakes the moment they take off and one speed engineer says the time is near when a jet will see its own tail flying around the earth and passengers won’t even have a chance to sit down before arrival, they might as well stay home, but the main thing is not to live in a pigsty and to keep the ladies supplied with flowers, when our priest had trouble doing