Read I Served the King of England for Free Online Page B

and he would thunder for
     all the restaurant to hear: You evil, stupid, and criminal sons of man! What you need is
     the simple life! His eyes would fill with tears, not tears of anger but of happiness,
     because he saw the beer in his galoshes as a gesture, proof that the town recognized
     him, and if it didn’t exactly honor him, at least it considered him one of its
     own. The worst was when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. The poet would slip into
     them and then try to walk back to his table, and almost fall over. Sometimes the
     galoshes were nailed down so hard that he’d actually fall on his hands, and then
     he’d rant at the customers again and call them evil, stupid, and criminal sons of
     man, but then he’d forgive them right away and offer them a small drawing or a
     book of poems, which he got them to pay for on the spot so he’d have enough to get
     by on. Basically he wasn’t bad. As a matter of fact he hung over the whole town in
     a way, and I often dreamed that just like the angel over the chemist’s shop at the
     White Angel the poet would float above the town, waving his wings, and he had wings, I
     saw them myself, but I was afraid to ask the priest about it. When he took his coat off
     and put it on, and his beautifulface was bent over a quarto of
     paper, because he liked to write poems at our tables, and when he turned his head a
     certain way, I could see his angelic profile and a halo floating above his head, a
     little violet circle of flame like the flame on a Primus stove, as if he had kerosene
     inside his head and that circle glowing and sizzling above it, the kind you find in
     stallkeepers’ lamps. And when he walked around the town square, Tonda Jódl
     the poet would carry his umbrella as no one else could, and no one could wear a topcoat
     tossed over his shoulders quite as casually as he, or wear a floppy fedora the way he
     could, even though he had white balls of cotton sprouting from his ears, and before he
     even crossed the square he’d have taken his coat off his shoulders and put it back
     on again five times, and have doffed his hat ten times. It was as though he was paying
     his respects to someone, yet he never actually greeted anyone except the old women in
     the marketplace, the stallkeepers, to whom he would always bow deeply, for these were
     his people as he searched for the New Man. When it was damp and cold or when it rained,
     he would order a mug of tripe soup and a roll and take it across the square to those
     frail old women, and as he carried it he seemed to be carrying more than just soup,
     because in that mug, as least that’s how I saw it, he was taking those old women a
     piece of his heart, a human heart in tripe soup, or sliced and fried up with onions and
     paprika, the way a priest would carry the monstrance or the host to the last rites, with
     tears in his eyes at the thought of how kind he was to bring the old women soup.
    Back then, when he was spreading copies of his new book on the floor and
     out into the corridor, the cleaningwoman tramped over the white
     covers of
The Life of Jesus Christ
as she was carrying a bucket of water to the
     toilets. But Tonda Jódl didn’t shout at her, You evil, stupid, and criminal
     daughter of man. He left each of her footprints just the way it was, almost like a
     boy’s shoeprint, and he signed those copies and sold
The Life of Jesus
     Christ
with the imprint of a sole for twelve crowns instead of ten. But because
     the book was printed at his own expense, there were only two hundred copies, so he
     arranged for a Catholic house in Prague to publish ten thousand copies, and for days on
     end he would work on his calculations, taking off his coat and putting it on again,
     falling down three times when they nailed his galoshes to the floor. And there’s
     something else I forgot to mention. Every five minutes he’d pour some medicine
     into himself, so he was always spattered with powdered