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off free of charge, so I was a hero once more, because I went at it like the officers, Men, Lieutenant Hovorka used to say, you’ve got to go about it with kid gloves, think of it more like sharpening a pencil than thrusting a bayonet, so I never said much, I just watched to see what little vices my beauties might have and they would out by themselves, I like cigarettes and wine, she’d say, and I’d say, Well, I don’t, and she’d say, And what do you like? and I’d say, Beautiful women, I’d say, and she’d squeal, Oh you devil you, and throw a shoe at me, once I had the honor of riding all the way to the Haubitz barracks on Iduna, the general’s mare, a real beauty, a rich brown with a white star on her forehead like a movie star, a star like the hole you shoot through a handkerchief, but as we were sailing along, me and Iduna, we ran into an old woman and she turned such a somersault that I was worried Iduna had done her some harm, I didn’t want the general to have to court-martial me, after all, but on we flew across Olomouc, and Iduna leaped through the barracks fence—it’s a good thing I kept my head close to her mane, I barely had time to duck—and into the stable, and when I went to the canteen for some raspberry juice, I found a pretty girl working there, Cílka was her name, and she started dancing with me, and her boss got jealous and said Cílka, go and do your work in the kitchen! and pressed up to me herself, mean-while Cílka stood in the doorway polishing knives and showing me behind her boss’s back how she would stab her if she could, and her boss said to me, You’re really temperamental, you know that, soldier? so I told her that if she dreamed of catching a pheasant then love would soon find a place in her heart, and she slipped a pack of Egypts into my pocket and asked me to go on, and while Cílka showed me more and more new ways of doing her in I told her that a well-heated room means the love of a man for a woman, and when she started squirming I leaned over and whispered, But the most wonderful dream of all is when two oxen butt each other, because that means true bliss in love, and added, for which I paid dearly, I caught an ugly disease and had to go to Brzadín for treatment, and as she made to move away she tried to reach into my pocket for the Egypts, but I said to her, No, you don’t, I said, given’s as good as gone, which she had to accept, she even gave me a schnapps for the road and thanked me for being so kind as to warn her, because she’d had one of those diseases, once I took a milkmaid to the Urania in the upper square, they were doing this Jewish play about the troubles of a man named Ahasuerus, and the milkmaid kept licking my ear and asking me to marry her, and I said I would, though I hadn’t finished my stint in the army yet and had a weak heart and couldn’t stop dreaming about canaries in cages, which according to Anna Nováková meant I would always long for freedom, and she whispered, Wow, what a catch you’d make! and her hair smelled of milk and vanilla, but three days later I was off to Dalmatia and the sea, you should have seen the storm that came up, when nature goes wild like that and gets into a man’s pants it’s enough to turn him into a poet, waves as big as our house, a boat hurled up onto the road, and boulders tumbling down from the cliffs, overturning trains, sweeping men and mules into the sea on their way back from the vineyards, columns of water tall as towers, and near starvation for us soldiers, Mother of God! the rotten fish we ate, morale fell so low we actually went begging, the sign over the barracks read VOJARNA KRALJA JUSUPA, King Joseph’s Barracks, all in gold, but a first lieutenant scratched out the corn kettle, a first lieutenant! if General Zelikowski had seen that he’d have pulled out his crop and given it to him, a dandy of a Jew