Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

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

Book: Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Heim, Adam Thirlwell Read Free Book Online
Authors: Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Heim, Adam Thirlwell
I’ll give you a kiss, so in I went—neck deep, clothes and all—and got my prize, a hero once more, back on land I had to wring out more than my clothes, I’d just picked up my pay in ten-crown notes, and there I stood in my underpants, the women rushing down to the river to have a look at me, the whole town on its feet, yes, there I stood like Montgomery at Tobruk, freethinkers like to taunt the Church by asking, If Christ was God, why did he take up with a fallen woman? well, I say there wasn’t anything he could do about it, I can’t resist the charms of a beautiful woman, why should Christ? one of the male beauties of his day, like Conar Tolnes, and thirty, in the prime of life, besides, even if Mary Magdalene was nothing more than a barmaid she gained favor in the heavens and worked her way up to sainthood, not only did she refuse to betray Christ, she used her hair to wipe away his blood while the poor man hung there on the cross for preaching social progress and all men are equal, and when his mother fell to pieces and sobbed, who comforted her but Mary Magdalene, think about it, where are all the other beauties of her day? gone and forgotten, but little Mary Magdalene will forever touch the hearts of poets, what a fate for a handsome young man trained in the art of carpentry, of sawing boards and beams, and boom! off he goes to teach the world that loving your neighbor doesn’t mean somersaults on the sofa, it means giving help wherever help is needed, for learning my catechism I got a picture of Jesus holding the chalice, catechism was all the rage in those days, as important as political reliability and family background today, who is the Father and who is the Son and who is the Holy Spirit? one priest was taken to court because the Ulman sisters drew a blank when he asked them what the Holy Trinity was, so he sat them barebottomed on a hot stove and they never married, nobody wanted to have anything to do with them because they didn’t know what the Holy Trinity is, not that anyone else knew, but people had to make believe they did, so the Ulman sisters started growing sunflowers, there was a wave of murders and robberies at the time, if you lived in the wilds you’d close your shutters at night and keep axes and firearms at hand, once in the dead of night a miller heard a saw making a hole in his door, a hole just big enough for a hand to fit through and undo the bolt, so he stole up to the door with his ax and the minute the hand stuck through, thwack! he chopped it off, the police looked and looked but couldn’t find anybody with a missing hand, the priest cursed right and left because he had to bury the hand in the cemetery and buy a little coffin for it, Mother of God! a soldier on sentry duty in Olomouc once spied a fire in the cemetery, so he ran and broke into the mortuary and what did he find but the grave-digger standing next to a cauldron of hands and feet in boiling fat and singing, The little hands and little feet of the little girl I love, or once I took a beauty of mine to a little tavern deep in the Tomašov woods and there were nine white crosses across the road because a fellow once lay in wait there and then chopped up all the members of a wedding party with his ax, I mean, the things that happen, which is reason I have no children, why should I want to see my line continue? who can guarantee my children will take after me? Who’s going to shut your eyes when you die? the women keep asking me, but I say, Nobody dies at home anymore, the minute you start to fade, up pulls an ambulance and off you go to die behind a screen, all by yourself, relatives don’t care anymore, even money’s lost its charm, the best thing would be if people the world over got together and held off making babies for a spell, you trip over them everywhere you go, we could dock people’s wages, fifty crowns for one child, a hundred for the second, three hundred for

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