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

lesser man would have fainted dead away, but I pulled out my Browning and said, Clear off if you value your life, clear off or I’ll shoot! when I went to visit my brother for two weeks and stayed for thirty years he gave me what he called a Mexican, which was a rifle, to protect the driving belts behind the brewery, one night I tore it off the wall and shot it at a passing policeman, you should have heard the bullets whistling and ricocheting off the bridge, I had no time to stop and ask, Who goes there? an Austrain soldier must always shoot first, if he wants to be a hero, that is, another pharmacy had hair lotions in the window, like Cyrano, which showed a water nymph rising out of a lake with roses around her waist and will-o’-the-wisps or maybe tiny stars behind her, a sight for sore eyes! as beautiful as Mozart, once three Picek seamstresses were out rowing while we were working on the brewery well, and one of them, a real beauty, called out to me so I jumped right in, shorts and all, and swam over to their boat, those were our Austrian manners, even ordinary people acted like their lives were being filmed or photographed, once when I was helping a baker deliver his wares in Moravian Slovakia I saw a drunken wedding party in a church trying to pour slivovitz down the saints’ throats, and when the priest got wind of it he stormed in like a fighter plane and kicked and screamed and called them a band of Tartars, Is that how you behave in God’s temple? out, the lot of you, and don’t come back until you’re more sober or at least less drunk! from there I went to Hradisko, where I worked in a brewery, and then I made a triumphant return in a striped suit, white-knobbed cane, and the last word in Parisian boaters, some people are dragged home by the police looking like something the cat’s dragged in, while I came home like a movie star with a hundred gulden in my pocket, enough to pay off all my debts and buy a cow from Ponikve, I had the papers drawn up by old man Tyátr, the one who turned the old theater into a pub and whose wife had eighty cats and did nothing all day but keep their milk bowls full, another pharmacy had a preparation called Kaloderma, and a Karlsruhe firm by the name of Wolf und Sohn kept all Moravia supplied with its skin cream and fine pink face powder, the box showed a dreamy-eyed woman looking out into the distance, her hand resting on her temple and her head wound round with a light veil, everybody was jealous of that cow from Ponikve, a white Swiss, all white, it set me back eighty gulden, but we eventually sold it to the butcher because it was barren, of all the family my uncle went the farthest, and he made it to Zugsführer, platoon leader, he also wrote in a fine hand and was awarded a gold cross by the emperor, he wore gold braiding and a spiked helmet and was six foot tall and when he was a bachelor he could pull a pub to pieces like Římský from Kokory, but he sobered up after taking a wife, he married the head forester’s daughter and built a house in Valašsko and raised turkeys and ended up chief of police, I once bought one of my beauties a lilyscented cream for extra-fair skin, Steckenpferd, from a firm in Radebeule, and for Zdenka, one of the Havrda girls, I bought a discreetly packaged and fully guaranteed gold-medal preparation by the name of Sinulin, and when she asked me what I wanted for it I said I wanted her to go for a walk with me, and she laughed and asked why, and I told her my hygiene manual said that a person suffering from heat prostration—she suffered from heat prostration—should rub lukewarm water directly on the exposed chest, and she said, Oh you men and your one-track minds! the world is a beautiful place, don’t you think? not because it is but because I see it that way, the way Pushkin saw it in that movie, poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his