I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal Page B

the
Bambino
standing on the
     pavement, and just then the Bolivian delegation came rushing up and grabbed the
     suitcase. After they hefted it, they breathed sighs of relief, opened it up and saw that
     it was the real
Bambino
. Then they rushed back to the airplane to take off for
     Paris and, from there, back to their own country with the
Bambino
, who
     according to the South American Indian legend had gone to school in Prague, and Prague,
     according to the same legend, is the oldest city in the world.

I Served the King of England
    I was always lucky in my bad luck. I left the Hotel Tichota in tears,
     because the boss thought I’d deliberately caused the mixup between the real
Bambino di Praga
and the counterfeit one, that I’d set the whole
     thing up just to get my hands on six kilos of gold, though it hadn’t been me at
     all, and so another waiter showed up with a suitcase, and off I went to Prague, but
     right there in the station I had the good luck to run into Mr. Walden. He was setting
     off to cover his territory, and his assistant was with him, the sad man who carried the
     scale and the salami slicer in a bundle on his back, and Mr. Walden wrote me a letter of
     recommendation to the Hotel Paris. He must have been fond of me because as I said
     good-bye to him again he patted me on the head and kept saying, Poor little fellow, just
     stick to it. You’re small so you’ve got to try hard tomake something of yourself, poor lad. I’ll look you up. By this time he was
     shouting, and I stood there waving until the train was long out of sight. So there I
     was, on the threshold of another adventure. As a matter of fact the Hotel Tichota had
     begun to scare me. It started when I noticed that the porter had a cat that would hang
     around, waiting for him to come back from his night labors, or she would sit in the
     courtyard and watch him split wood, and that cat meant the world to him, he even slept
     with her, but then a tomcat started coming around and she went off with the tomcat and
     didn’t come home. The porter became thin and pale and he looked everywhere for his
     beloved cat, until finally she came home again. The porter had a habit of talking to
     himself. Whenever I walked past him, I could hear how the unbelievable came true,
     because from these soliloquies of his I learned that he’d been in jail, that
     he’d chopped up a gendarme who was having an affair with his wife and given the
     wife such a thrashing with a rope they had to take her to the hospital, and so he got
     five years. One of his cellmates was a thug from Žižkov who’d sent his
     little girl for beer and when the kid lost the change from a fifty he got so mad he took
     his daughter’s arm, laid it across a block of wood, and chopped her hand off. That
     was the first time the unbelievable came true. His other cellmate was someone who had
     caught his wife with a traveling salesman and killed her with an ax, then cut out her
     vagina and told the salesman to eat it or else be killed with the ax, but the salesman
     died from the sheer horror of it anyway, and the murderer turned himself in, and so the
     unbelievable came true again. The third time the unbelievable came true was the
     porter’s own case, becausehe’d trusted his wife, but
     when he saw her with the gendarme he split the gendarme’s shoulder open with an
     ax, and the gendarme shot him in the leg and our porter got five years. Anyway, one time
     the tomcat came right up to the porter’s cat, and the porter held the tomcat
     against the wall with a brick and chopped through its spine with his ax. His cat began
     to mourn, but the porter squeezed the tomcat into kind of a screened-in grilled window
     and left it there dying for two days, then he threw his cat out. The cat paced up and
     down by the wall, but he wouldn’t let her come home, and finally she disappeared.
     I suspect the porter killed her too. He was a gentle and sensitive soul, and therefore