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

number one Doctor Karafiát said, If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times, bland foods only, no meat, no wine, and when a woman who’d just had a baby ate a sausage, he blew his top, Apples not good enough for you? he yelled and gave her husband an enema, because he should have known better than to let a woman in childbed even go near a sausage, when I went to Doctor Karafiát for my tapeworm, he put me on a diet and prescribed milk baths, other doctors would have shown me the door, but Doctor Karafiát said, The minute I saw you I could tell you were supersensitive and not cut out for holy matrimony, and it just happened to be market day and a woman was biting into a liverwurst when all of a sudden the doctor’s dog ran out and tore the liverwurst and her lip away from her and Doctor Karafiát had to buy her another liverwurst and sew her lip back on because she ran bawling to him and men were still gallant in those days, a professor once said to me, We never gave the monarchy its due, he said, We never gave the brothels their due, our men had too much vital force in them, it made them supersensitive, Gruléček would beat his wife with cats or catkins, which is what loggers used to call the chains they tied logs to their carts with, the lawyer who handled the sale of our house, Kir his name was, built a mansion for himself next to the courthouse complete with fountains and palm trees and a marble column topped by a naked Eve with the whole world at her feet and her own rose garden, anyway this lawyer shot himself because his wife threw him over for a poor student, it was like an operetta, rich ladies are always romantic, the offers I used to get would make me break out something awful, of course I’ll make you another pair of shoes, I’ll put on my magnifying glasses, KB-model pumps, white lining, white insoles, number four cut, Derby-Pariser line, one pair of pumps with white toe caps and patent-leather heels, two centimeters high, nickel-plate eyelets, celluloid hooks, brass nails and brass screws to hold the soles in place, and then I’ll make you a spare pair of autumn shoes and a spare pair of winter shoes and line them with red or yellow lamb’s wool, as you prefer, and a pair of walking shoes for hills and a pair of walking shoes for dales with matching red toe caps and white linings or in kidskin with trimming yea high and a green varnish, and I’ll go all the way to Vienna, to Salamander, the mecca of the shoe world, five full floors of shoes, I’ll go all that way for their Maitzen varnishes, varnishes as smooth as a beautiful face, Salamander, the mecca of the shoe world, with a salamander in its trademark, like the monkey in the Mercedes trademark, glass cases of shoes made by magic hands, each floor lit in a different color, Count Zelikowski would sail over the parade ground on his stallion like a fighter plane, his beard fringed with hoarfrost, his horse’s mane too, he was known for his cruelty, was the count, once an old woman stopped and asked me what company her son was in, she’d made some cakes for him, and suddenly up rode Count Zelikowski on his stallion and roared, Who told you you could talk to that hag, you whoreson? and gave me a taste of his crop and leaped clear over the woman on his stallion at twenty degrees below zero, and once I was on guard duty, I was twenty-one at the time and so full of energy I could have lit Prague for a week, why, even now I’m a holy terror when I see that safeguard of marital bliss, a well-developed female body, and back then I was a member of the Sokol Gymnastic Society and had Sokol curls and a Sokol uniform that fit me like the president’s fit him, and there was a whole field full of Sokols and flags waving in the trees, a row of white horses, a row of red horses, and two beauties tearing each other’s blouses to shreds over me, but I had read my Batista, so I knew that if you