flopuestas Conjuntas de ACM e IEEE: Currícula 89 y 9I

German girls. True, I had been the darling of the bar girls at the Hotel Paris every Thursday, when the stockbrokers came to the private chambers, but these German women, like Lise, all looked fondly at my hair, my tuxedo, and my blue sash with the medal, which Lise arranged for me to wear when I served meals on Sundays or holidays—a splash of gold radiating from a red stone in the middle, with the inscription Viribus Unibus. In this small mountain town, evening after evening soldiers from all the forces fortified themselves with good meals and fired their spirits with special Rhine and Mosel wines while the girls drank only cups of milk, and night after night the men were let in to them and were under strict scientific supervision right up

to the very last moment. I was known as the waiter who had served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and I enjoyed the same standing as the headwaiter at the Hotel Paris, Mr. Skfi-vânek, who had served the King of England. I had a younger table boy under me and I taught him, just as Mr.

Skfivanek had taught me, how to recognize what region a soldier came from and what he was likely to order. We'd ante up ten marks each and put them on a sideboard, and Fd almost always win. I learned that feeling victorious makes you victorious, and that once you lose heart or let yourself be discouraged the feeling of defeat will stay with you for the rest of your life, and you'll never get back on your feet again, especially in your own country and your own surroundings, where you're considered a runt, an eternal busboy. That's what would have happened if I'd stayed at home, but here the Germans treated me with respect. Every afternoon when the sun was out, I took cups of milk or ice cream or sometimes cups of warm milk or tea to the blue swimming pools where the beautiful preg-nant German girls would swim naked with their hair down.

They treated me as if I was one of the doctors, and I could watch their bright bodies ripple in the water as they spread their arms and legs, and after each swinging, rhythmic stroke their bodies would stretch out and glide, and their arms and legs would go on making those beautiful swim-ming motions. But it wasn't the bodies that attracted me so much now, because I fell in love—and this was a shock to me—I fell in love with that floating hair, the hair that swayed and flowed behind those bodies like pale smoke from burning straw, hair that went straight to full length with each powerful thrust of their arms and legs and then

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seemed to hang still for a moment, rippling slightly at the ends, like the corrugated metal in a shopfront shutter. And there would be the wonderful sunshine, and the back-ground of blue or green tiles shimmering with broken re-flections of sun and waves on the undulating water, syrupy drops of light and shadow, and the movement of bodies along the walls and the blue floor of the pool. When they were done swimming they pulled their legs under them and stood up, their breasts and bellies shedding rivulets of water like water nymphs, and I would hand them the cups, and they would drink from them slowly, then slip back into the water, clasping their hands in front of them as if pray-ing, pushing the water aside with their first kicks, and swimming off again, not for themselves but for those future children. Several months later, in the indoor pools now, there were little babies in the water swimming along with the mothers, three-month-old tads who were already swim-ming with the women like cubs with female bears, or seals who can swim the day they're born, or ducklings who swim almost as soon as they hatch. But already I saw that these women thought of me as a flunky, as less than a flunky, in fact, despite my tuxedo. It was as if I wasn't there at all, as if I meant no more to them than a clothes horse.

They felt no shame in front of me, because I was someone who served them, the way queens used to have jesters or midgets. Whenever they stepped out of the water they were always making sure no one was looking at them through the board fence, and once they were surprised by a drunken SS man, and they all shrieked, clapped their towels over their laps, covered their breasts with their arms, and ran into the changing booths. But when I brought them their

cups on a tray, they would just stand there nonchalantly, naked, chatting to each other, leaning with one arm against the towel rack and casually drying their golden-haired laps with the other in unhurried, careful movements, wiping their crotches thoroughly and then each half of their back-sides. And I would stand there while they took their cups from the tray, drank a little, and put them back, as if I was a serving table, and they would go on wiping their crotches with their towels, and then they would lift their arms and wipe dry each fold and crease of their breasts.

Once an airplane swooped in low over the pool, and they ran into their changing booths for cover, shrieking with laughter, and returned a few moments later and took up the same positions as before, and all the while I was stand-ing there holdstand-ing the tray with the coolstand-ing cups.

In my free time I wrote long letters to Lise. She had an address somewhere near Warsaw, which they'd conquered by now. Then it was letters to Paris. And then, perhaps because of those victories, things became more relaxed, and they built a cyclorama just outside the town, and a shooting gallery and a merry-go-round and swings and everything, just like the Carnival of Saint Matthias in Prague, full of attractions of all sorts. Just as the gables of our cottages in the countryside used to be covered with murals of nymphs and sirens and allegorical women and animals, here regiments of German warriors wearing horned helmets filled the shooting galleries and the canopy on the merry-go-round and the panels on the sides of the swings, and I learned German national history from those pictures. All year long, whenever I had some free time, I would wander around looking at them and I'd ask the

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cultural instructor about them. He was delighted to explain it all to me, and he addressed me as Mein lieber Herr Ditie, pronouncing the Ditie so nicely that I asked him again and again to teach me about the glorious German past from those pictures and reliefs, so that I too might one day father a German child, just as Lise and I had agreed. When she came back all full of the victory over France, she told me she wanted to marry me but I would have to ask permission from her father, who owned the City of Amsterdam res-taurant in Cheb. And so the unbelievable came true, be-cause in Cheb I had to undergo an examination by a Supreme Court judge and I submitted a written request in which I listed my entire family, going back beyond that cemetery in Cvikov where Grandpa Johan Ditie lay, and with reference to his Aryan and Teutonic origins I respect-fully requested permission to marry Elisabeth Papânek.

According to the laws of the Reich, I also had to request a physical examination by an SS doctor to determine whether I, being of a different nationality, was eligible under the Nuremberg Laws not merely to have sex with someone of Aryan Teutonic blood but actually to impreg-nate her. And so while execution squads in Prague and Brno and other jurisdictions were carrying out the death sentence, I had to stand naked in front of a doctor who lifted my penis with a cane and then made me turn around while he used the cane to look into my anus, and then he hefted piy scrotum and dictated in a loud voice. Next he asked me to masturbate and bring him a little semen so they could examine it scientifically because, as the doctor said in his atrocious Egerlander German—which I couldn't understand, though 1 got the gist well enough—when some

stupid Czech turd wants to marry a German woman his jism had better be at least twice as good as the jism of the lowliest stoker in the lowliest hotel in the city of Cheb. He added that the gob of phlegm a German woman would spit between my eyes would be as much a disgrace to her as an honor to me. And I knew from reading the papers that on the very same day that I was standing here with my penis in my hand to prove myself worthy to marry a German, Germans were executing Czechs, and so I couldn't get an erection and offer the doctor a few drops of my sperm. Then the door opened and the doctor came in with my papers in his hand, and he'd probably just read them and realized who I was, because he said to me affably, Herr Ditte, was ist den los? And he patted me on the shoulder, handed me some photographs, and turned on the light. I found myself looking at pornographic snapshots of naked people, and whenever I'd had this kind of picture in my hands before I'd always turn stiff right away, but now the more I looked at them the more I saw those headlines and the stories in the papers announcing that so-and-so and four others had been sentenced to death and shot, and there were more of them every day, new ones, innocent ones.

And here I was standing with my penis in my hand and pornographic snapshots in the other, so I put them down on the table, because I still couldn't manage to do what I was asked. Finally a young nurse had to come in and after a few deft strokes of her hand, during which I didn't have to think about anything anymore, she carried off two beads of my sperm on a piece of paper, and half an hour later they were pronounced first-class and worthy of insemi-nating an Aryan vagina with dignity. And so the Bureau

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for the Defense of German Honor and Blood could find no objection to my marrying an Aryan of German blood.

With a mighty thumping of rubber stamps I was given a marriage license, while Czech patriots, with the same thumping of the same rubber stamps, were sentenced to death.

The marriage took place in Cheb, in a hall painted red, with red swastika flags everywhere and officials in brown uniforms with red straps over their shoulders and swastikas on the straps. I wore a morning suit and the blue sash across my chest bearing the Emperor of Ethiopia's medal, and Lise, the bride, wore her gamekeeper's outfit, a jacket embroidered with oak leaves and a swastika on a red back-ground in her lapel. It was more like a state military cer-emony than a wedding because all they talked about was blood and honor and duty. Finally the mayor of the city, who was also wearing a uniform, riding boots and a brown shirt, asked us, the betrothed, to approach a makeshift altar. Hanging behind the altar was a long flag with a swastika, and on the altar was a bust of Adolf Hitler scowl-ing as the light from below cast shadows across his face.

The mayor took my hand and the bride's hand and wrapped them in the flag and held our hands through the cloth, looking solemn. Now came the moment of betrothal.

The mayor told us that from now on we belonged to each other and it was our duty to think only of the National Socialist Party and to conceive children who must also be raised in the spirit of that Party. Then, with tears welling up in his eyes, the mayor told us not to fret that we couldn't both die in the struggle for the New Europe, because they, the soldiers and Party members, would keep up the struggle

for us until the final victory. And then they played a gramo-phone record of "Die Fahne hoch, die Reihen dicht ge-schlossen," and everyone sang along with the record, including Lise, and I remembered how I used to sing pa-triotic songs like "On the Strahov Ramparts" and "Where Is My Homeland," and that memory made me sing under my breath, until Lise nudged me gently with her elbow and gave me a nasty look, so I sang along with the others, and I found myself singing with feeling, as though I were a real German. When I looked around to see who was there, I saw army colonels and all the top Party brass from Cheb, and I knew that if I'd been married back home, it would have been as though nothing had happened, but here in Cheb it was practically a historical event, because Lise was well known here. When the ceremony was over, I stood with my hand ready, waiting to be congratulated, but then I began to sweat, because the Wehrmacht and SS officers didn't shake it. I was still just a runty little busboy as far as they were concerned, a Czech pipsqueak, a pygmy. But they practically flung themselves on Lise and congratulated her, while I stood there alone. When the mayor tapped me on the shoulder, I held out my hand, but he didn't take it either. So there I stood, my whole body stiff from holding my hand out, until the mayor put his arm around my shoulder and led me into his office to sign the register and pay the fee. Here I tried again and put an extra hundred marks on the table, but one of the clerks told me in a broken Czech that tips were not given here because this wasn't a restaurant or a canteen or a bar or a pub, but a bureau of the creators of the New Europe, where blood and honor were the deciding factors, not—as in Prague—

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terror and bribery and other capitalist and Bolshevik prac-tices. The wedding supper was held in the City of Am-sterdam restaurant, and again I saw that although everyone seemed to be including me in the toasts, Lise was the center of attention, and that they put up with me as an Aryan but still considered me a dumb Bohemian despite my bright-yellow hair, the blue sash across my chest, and on the hip of my suit the medal shaped like a sunburst of gold.

But I didn't let on how I felt or that I saw what was going