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

wedding where they were going overboard on the wine so he turned it into water, that was known as the miracle of Cana of Galilee, there was a time when I had the strangest dreams, handling the bones of a corpse means a great joy awaits you, it’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls, a hunter once told me he couldn’t get over how happy an old buck looked wooing a doe, if you dream of a bed of tulips it means you’ll fall in love with a lovely girl and she’ll never know, a certain poet by the name of Bondy once told me that people have strange ideas about what writing poetry means, they think it’s like going for water with a bucket or that poets just lift up their eyes unto the heavens and the heavenly hosts rain down verses upon them, but I told him, Think of Christ our Lord, he had such a head on his shoulders that even today the professors go gaga over him, and he wasn’t just God’s little Favorite either, no, he was a champ, a muscleman handy with a horsewhip so he could drive those cattle traders out of the temple and tell them he came not to send peace but a sword, a saber, that is, and people still don’t understand, but that’s because the smart ones die and stupid ones get born in their place, some people clean latrines and others are doctors, some women lie in bed all day reading novels and others go out and do what the novels tell them about, poor Bondy gave his fingers a sniff after changing his offspring in the baby buggy in the pub and said, I sense a deep movement in its early stages, and sure enough within half an hour he was wiping one of the babies with the latest issue of Czech Word and mumbling, Christ! it’s enough to get to a Korean hangman, on Corpus Christi, marching triumphant into Przemyśl, we saw a young lady lying in a ditch pointing at herself and calling out, Come and celebrate our glorious victory, but none of the soldiers could bring themselves to take her up on it because she was as ugly as the Turkish night, I never went in for that anyway, I was a different kind of hero, I liked the baronesses in sick bay and later, during the First Republic, pretty Sokol girls and nurses, one of them shaved my stomach to prepare me for an operation because the head physician told me I’d be going under the knife the next day and would I be so kind as to sign a piece of paper in case I stayed under, it was just his way of perking me up, and when my time came he put on his white cap like a pastry chef and the nurses pulled on his gloves for him like he was a baby and he was all set to dig into me when the door flies open and in comes an old lady holding a basket asking which room her husband is in because she’s brought him his pork and cabbage, well, he ran up and grabbed her—he was a giant of a man with a real temper on him—and kicked her out and screamed at the janitor, How could you let her past? because he should have been elbow-deep in my blood by then, stitching up my hernia, you can’t imagine how good it feels to leave the hospital and look around you, like in the song, It’s a beautiful world we live in, A world by God to us given, tra la la, I had a blacksmith in my room, Bernádek his name was, who’d down a stein of beer in one gulp and if a horse put up a fuss and refused to stand for him he’d flip it over and shoe it on its side, but not even he could stop pneumonia, it spread to his stomach and he was gone before he knew what hit him, I was the only one who came out on top, a pretty nurse served me pheasant and asked me why I wasn’t married, why I let so fine a body go to waste, and for an answer I slipped out from under the covers and was about to give her a dancing lesson when they chased me back to bed because after a hernia operation they make you lie there like a corpse, a giant of a girl, but beautiful, once called to me from the Elbe, Come into the water and