Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age Read Free Page B

one with the buck teeth, and the emperor made the man who put up Uncle Albrecht and him during the maneuvers, Kolář his name was, the emperor made him a nobleman for his hospitality, and this Baron Kolář was so grateful he put up a monument to the emperor in front of his house, Mother and me we went out for wood one day, the soldiers were busy with their horses or eating out of cans, and we brought in two wheelbarrows of logs and two of grass for the cow, who was plug-ugly but gave us fifteen calves, the whole street came to us for milk and when that cow died the whole street mourned her, but she’d left behind one last calf and we brought the calf into the house and bottle-fed it, every morning in came the calf to lick our faces, my brother Adolf liked to say it came to shave us, and when the calf grew up into a cow old man Zpurný said he’d never seen so fine an animal in all his born days, the only problem being that she went berserk if she saw a train or even a bicycle, so we had to put blinkers on her, for a thousand years the Church has been squawking at us Czechs to curb our passions, but how can you make a dent in a nation when its every member reacts according to the Batista book about safeguards of marital bliss, which says that shivers run down a man’s spine whenever he sees a beautiful woman and his first thought is how to get her, as Bondy the poet says, from the vertical to the horizontal, and he ought to know, because he may be a poet but he’s pushing two offspring in a baby buggy everywhere he goes, my mother, now, she was a saint, she brought us up all by herself and all on beets, she was what nowadays they call a shockworker, she’d haul water from the stream when the weather was dry, but even though her beets were big as buckets, they couldn’t hold a candle to Haná beets, when those damn Haná farmers left their fields there wasn’t a footprint left, there was a man named Mýtný known for huge harvests, he’d been a corporal in the Uhlans and had a beard like Elijah, in summer he tucked it into his fly, in winter he wore it like a scarf, and how he would slave, first a full day’s work in the woods, then a break for prayer, then chasing women and cows in the fields, egging them on with his example and his whip, what the president wouldn’t give to have two hundred thousand Mýtnýs! oh and his wife ran a pub, but she poured more for herself than she did for the customers, so good Catholic that he was he beat her and beat her until one day he beat her dead, as it says in the Old Testament, and it goes without saying his cows and horses were spotless, his coffers full, and his bankbooks in order, an old woman by the name of Šumplica once used her bare feet to make a pile of the potatoes she’d dug up so she wouldn’t have to bend and carry them, but old man Mýtný caught her at it and whipped the living daylights out of her and then went home and mended his clodhoppers and read a lofty book or two, before he put in his seeds he would soak them in blue vitriol, he got a kick out of slaughtering hogs and would season his soup with an African spice, by the way, young ladies, Javanese cinnamon is better than Ceylonese, cinnamon is good in mulled wine and fruit fillings, but people could be terribly behind the times during the monarchy, a peasant hoeing in the field once took his thumb for a grub and hacked it off, and a teacher by the name of Látal would flog his pupils or beat their heads against the blackboard because they couldn’t get their geometry figures straight, and Zbořil, our priest, would grab boys by the scruff of the neck and shake them like rabbits because they couldn’t get it into their heads that grace is inherent in God’s nature and a gift from on high, he had to pray all the time and ask God to keep his temper in check, otherwise he’d forget the chalice and box the servers’ ears