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gave me a gulden to shine up his belt and his gun for him, he was going into town to establish some international relations, as he put it, but along came our beast of a Sergeant Brčul, six and a half feet of bad blood, and said, Where’s the Jew boy? Went to town, I said, well, the Serge he starts cursing—Jebem ti boga! Kurac na drobno!—because Freiherr von Wucherer had expressly forbidden soldiers from going on rampages in town, so he comes and lies down in the Jew’s bed and when the Jew staggers back after midnight, totally beat, Brčul leaps up, knocks him down, kicks him all over the floor in his special uniform, and sends him out on guard duty, and when I went out to relieve him I found him swinging in the wind, hanging from a tree in a corner of the courtyard, strung up by his own hand and shiny belt, nobody appreciates that kind of thing anymore, when I told the story to some truck drivers in Libeň they just laughed, one Saturday afternoon they were racing III’s along Breakneck Hill, and while they were on their way down there was this dentist going up, he’d left his umbrella at the office, and just as he was sticking his key into the door one of the III’s burst a spring and barreled smack into the office and it lurched away from his key, the whole office, and he was left standing there with his key in the air, it’s a good thing Count Zelikowski didn’t see that because he was known for his cruelty, while Major Mičoković he always put stones on the money when he counted out our pay so the wind wouldn’t get it, he always warned us not to spend it on drink before we’d bought buttons and Vaseline and thread, the countryside was so beautiful, as romantic as Jerusalem, paths going up and up, always in need of repair though, people eating nothing but oat patties, vineyards hard as cement, I once saw a Dalmatian woman tending sheep in a meadow, it might have been a painting except she turned to me and said, Are you single, young man? and I nodded and she came and sat next to me and pointed out who had died in which hut, but I was late for grenade practice, they had these newfangled grenades, young ladies, they looked like pears, but instead of a stem they had this string coming out of them, and the Zugsführer, the platoon leader, would use a dud to show us how to pull the string and count to twenty, but one day some smart aleck put a live one in its place while the platoon leader went to the latrine and when he came back, pow! off flew his hand and out through the window, giving Captain Tonser, who happened to be riding past, a mean slap, the same thing happened to the owner of an outdoor movie theater who had an iron hand, one day he caught some kids sitting in a tree getting a free show so he climbed up on a chair and swatted and swatted with his iron hand until the branches cracked and fell, and when he got home he decided to give his son a clout for good measure, but the iron hand flew off its hinges and out through the window, where it knocked down a policeman who was standing there sharpening his pencil to write a ticket, but what happened to me one day at roll call was they called out my name among the fallen in action, date of birth and all, and when I shouted, Hey, I’m alive! they called me in and gave me two weeks in the can for talking during roll call, Man, one of the fellows said, if it’d been me I’d have packed my things and hightailed it out of there, I’d have gone straight home to bed and when the war was over I’d have just crossed my name off the war memorial, but I liked to gaze at myself in the mirror wearing my uniform, I looked so good in it, I was like the sun coming out for a stroll when I stepped out in my light blue tunic, my black trousers with red piping, my shiny leather belt and nickel bayonet, and my gold-rimmed shako, and I knew that the head under that shako wasn’t filled with straw, no, it was