my life with you like the emperor with that Schratt lady, promising you red leather pumps like the ones I once made for Doctor Karafiátâs sister, who was a beauty, but had one glass eye, which is a problem, because you never know what itâs going to do next, a hatter from ProstÄjov once told me he took a woman with a glass eye to the pictures and she sneezed and it flew out and during the break they had to go crawling under the seats for it, but she found it and wiped it off, pulled up her eyelid, and pop! in it went, by the way, baking is as much of an art as shoemaking, my brother Adolf was a trained baker, you slide the shovel into the oven like itâs a billiard cue, and if the inspector catches you licking your fingers when youâre making rolls youâll get a bop on the beezer, and every time a baker does number one heâs got to wash his hands, while a shoemaker can pick his nose all day if he likes, a butcher has to watch himself as well, we had one in our platoon by the name of Kocourek, Miroslav Kocourek, and this Kocourek had a bandaged finger, and one day he was stuffing liverwursts and the bandage disappeared into one of them, and because chances were an enlisted man would get the one with the bandage he forgot about it, but guess what, young ladies, it was the doctor! thatâs right, he was on his third liverwurst, and the minute he cut into it he recognized his handiwork and puked and Kocourek was sent to the front, but did he die there? no, he turned hero and won all kinds of medals, I spent some time pushing goats tied together in a wheelbarrow to the butcherâs, and one day two little kids gamboled along next to me and the goats kept licking my hands, and when I stopped in a field to rest, the kids started licking my hands, and I wept bitter tears, what was I doing with a butcher? me, an admirer of the European Renaissance, besides, my stomach was all tied up in knots and it was a miracle I hadnât ripped myself open with the paring knife, so I switched from shoemaking to brewing and trained as a maltster and set off on a tour of Hungary, oh what a brewery they have in Sopron! bright red with white trimming and green windows, Tyrol style, nothing but white tile inside, and nice little ladders at every window so in case of fire the firemen can climb up and down like the monkeys in Dresden, and Budapest! what a place! one street all white with red windows, the next all green with yellow windows, blue streets and gold streets and speckled streets, all through the war they had bread white as buns, their Admiral Horthy ordered the sailors led by MatouÅ¡ek to be executed, he had the poor men blindfolded, thereâd been an uprising, or mutiny, as itâs called for beer, dear ladies, the barley must be nice and clean, you donât want it sprouting too soon now, do you, then you soak it in lukewarm water and it goes to the malting floor, where itâs turned over and over with a wooden shovel and starts putting out shoots, and from there it goes to the kiln to dry in the fire, then into drums, where the maltâthere are Munich malts for dark beer and Pilsen malts for light beerâis separated from the flower, the blossoms, that is, which make excellent cattle feed, and after the malt has cooked for several hours in the brewing room, itâs mashed three times to maximize the sugar content, and in go the hops, which give it that bitter flavor, and then it all goes into vats in a special fermentation room where the yeast is added, ordinary beer takes a month to ferment, lager three months, some memory Iâve got, eh? you wonât find many more like it, the yeast forms foamy ripples on lager, and before the beer is barreled or bottled the foam is scooped up in a tin pot and poured in small quantities into each receptacle to give it that spark, that sparkle, Munich beers can take up to six months, and when the time comes to broach a barrel the president