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

the third, and when they got up to five they’d lose half their salary and be given a good thrashing in the town square, it wouldn’t have to go on forever, just until we could take our beauties to the woods and pay tribute to the European Renaissance without having to worry about being stared at by crowds, go camping nowadays and you sleep packed together like graves in a cemetery, a woman friend once asked me to take her dog for a walk, but instead I took it to see my beauties at the bar, where two guests pissed on it by mistake, and when I took the dog back to her she petted it, smelled her hand, and said, Where’d you take the dog anyway? he sure doesn’t smell like a day in spring, dogs are all well and good, but only watchdogs, a goldsmith once beat a bulldog by mistake and that bulldog never forgot it, and one day the goldsmith was brushing the dog and it jumped up and bit him in the neck, and with the fangs still in his neck he dragged himself over to his desk and pulled out a gun, but he aimed in the mirror and missed and hit his own ear instead, nearly killed himself, and when he finally did get the dog he had to get its teeth pried open with a crowbar, another man, getting ready for a dance, was trimming his nostril hairs in the mirror and practically cut his nose off, when I cut I cut like a fiddler fiddling, with feeling, you should have seen those Przemyśl recruits off for the front, rich villages, every villager a poacher, what a sight, the mayor escorting the men to the enlistment center, the ribbons, the banners, villages ransacked for miles around, Germans herded into the brewery, the mayor knife in the neck for his pains, one false look and it was curtains, but you couldn’t beat it for pomp, the cream of the Moravian nation, giants they were and hot-tempered, with two brass bands; and when they slaughtered their hogs and feasted on them the village was all decked out in flowers and streamers, spick-and-span, and there was always someone carrying their guts off in a bucket, because in the days of the monarchy men were killed right and left in pub brawls or on their way home or they ended up swinging from the rafters because they had so many children, those Przemyśl fellows once laid an ambush for me because I was flirting with one of their girls, but I swung round, pulled out my pistol and pow! pow! let them have it, they fell like flies, those giants, and I was a hero once more, like Tom Mix and his smoking revolver, then there was that uproar over Anežka Hrůzová, our people thought it was that Hilsner fellow who did it because some fool reported seeing Hilsner in the woods nearby, their star witness he was, holding his bike with one hand and doing his business with the other, so poor Hilsner was thrown in jail and Jews had to leave Polná, people even started singing a little ditty that went, Don’t buy anything from Jews, Sugar, coffee, flour, Blue-eyed Anežka they killed, In her finest hour, and then Anežka’s brother came out with it on his deathbed, he’d killed her and for the money, a policeman on patrol once stopped at a pub for a schnitzel and liked it so much he ordered a second, and after waiting and waiting for the waitress to come back he went to look for her and where did he find her but in the cellar, hacking away at her daughter, who was hanging naked on a hook, Mother of God, so he handcuffed her and booked her on the spot, that’s the kind of story people liked to tell when they made their own radio and television for one another, but what I liked even better was to stroll through town in my English suit and one of those floppy-brimmed hats, oh what fun it was to window-shop, I loved the pharmacy in Olomouc with the violet-scented toilet soaps, the Lila Blanc and Violeta de Nice glycerine soaps, the extra-fine Rosa de Shiraz, once I was held up by a dragoon behind the Maria-Schnee-Kaserne, Your money or your life! he cried, a