Read I Served the King of England for Free Online

because he’d been orderly to alieutenant
     colonel who recommended this salesman to him. The salesman would stay at the hotel twice
     a year, and I saw what he did but couldn’t make any sense of it, because first
     he’d measure the maître d’ for trousers, then he’d have him stand
     there just as he was, in his vest and white shirt, and he’d place strips of
     parchment on his chest and back and around his waist and then write measurements on them
     and cut them to shape while they were still on the maître d’, as though he
     were making him a coat directly from the strips, except that he had no cloth with him.
     Then the salesman would number the strips of parchment and carefully put them in a bag
     and seal the bag and write the maître d’s birthdate on the outside along with
     his name and surname, and he took a deposit and said that all the maître d’
     had to do now was wait for the finished jacket to arrive C.O.D. He wouldn’t have
     to go for a fitting, which was why he’d had this company tailor his coat in the
     first place, because the maître d’ was a busy man. It wasn’t until
     later that I heard what I’d wanted to know at the time but was too shy to ask:
     What happens next? The salesman answered it himself, in fact, because as he was cramming
     the deposit money into an overstuffed wallet, he said quietly to the maître
     d’: You know, this is a revolutionary technique my boss invented, the first in the
     republic, maybe even in Europe and the whole world, and it’s for officers and
     actors and the kind of person who doesn’t have a lot of time on his hands, like
     yourself, sir. I just measure them and send the measurements to the workshop, where they
     take those strips and sew them together on a kind of tailor’s dummy with a rubber
     bladder inside it that’s gradually pumped up until the parchment strips are filled
     out, andthen they’re covered with fast-drying glue so they
     harden in the shape of your torso. When they remove the bladder, your torso floats up to
     the ceiling of the room, permanently inflated, and they tie a cord to it, the way they
     do to babies in the maternity wards so they won’t get mixed up, or the way they
     tag the toes of corpses in the morgues of the big Prague hospitals. Then when your turn
     comes, they pull your torso down and try the dresses, the uniforms, the suit coats, or
     whatever’s been ordered, on those mannequins, and they sew and refit, sew and
     refit, unstitching the seams and sewing them again, without a single live fitting. Since
     it’s all done on this inflated stand-in, of course the coat fits like a glove, and
     we can mail it out postage-free or C.O.D. with confidence, and it always fits, unless
     the client gains or loses weight. If that happens, the salesman can simply come again
     and measure how much you’ve lost or gained, and then the mannequin is taken in or
     let out at the appropriate places, and the clothes are altered accordingly, or a new
     coat or tunic is made. And a client’s mannequin is up there among several hundred
     colorful torsos, until he dies. You can find what you’re looking for by rank and
     profession, because the firm has divided everything into sections—for generals and
     lieutenant colonels and colonels and captains and lieutenants and headwaiters and anyone
     who wears formal dress—and all you have to do is come and pull on the right string
     and the mannequin comes down like a child’s balloon and you can see exactly how
     someone looked when he last had a jacket or a tuxedo made to measure or altered. All
     this made me long for a new tuxedo made by that company, and I was determined to buy one
     as soon as I got my waiter’s papers, so that I and mymannequin could float near the ceiling of a company that was certainly the only one
     of its kind in the world, since no one but a Czech could have come up with an idea like
     that. After that I often dreamed about how I personally,