Propuestas Iniciales de IEEE: CurrícuIa77 y 83

Mv new job as a waiter, and then as headwaiter, was in the mountains above Dean. When I first arrived at the hotel, I nearly jumped out of my skin. It wasn't a small hotel, as I'd been expecting, but a small town or a large village surrounded by woods, with hot springs in the forest and air so fresh you could have put it in a cup. All you had to do was turn and face the pleasant breeze and drink it in freely, as fish breathe through their gills, and you could hear the oxygen mixed with ozone flowing through your gills, and your lungs and vital parts would gradually pump up, as though earlier, somewhere down in the valley, long before, you'd got a flat tire, and it was only now, in this air, that you'd got it automatically pumped back up to a pressure that was safer and nicer to drive on.

Lise, who brought me here in an army truck, walked

around the place as though she owned it, smiling constantly as she led me down the main colonnade, a long double line of statues of German kings and emperors wearing helmets with horns on them, all made of fresh marble or white limestone that glistened like sugar. The other ad-ministrative buildings were the same, built off the main colonnade like the leaves of a locust tree. Everywhere you went there were more of these colonnades, and before you entered any building you had to walk past columns of horn-helmeted statues. All the walls were covered with reliefs showing scenes from the glorious German past, when they still ran around with hatchets and dressed in animal skins, like something right out of Jirasek's Old Czech Legends, except that the outfits they wore were German. When Lise explained what was going on here, I remembered the porter at the Hotel Tichota who loved to talk about how the unbelievable came true. Lise told me proudly that this place had the healthiest air in Central Europe and that the only other place like it was near Prague, above Ouholicky and Podmofani. She said this was the first breeding station in Europe for a refined race of humans, that the National Socialist Party had been the first to cross noble-blooded young German women with pure-blooded soldiers, both from the Heereswaffe and the SS, all scientifically. And so National Socialist intercourse was taking place here every day, no-nonsense intercourse, as the old Teutons used to do it. But even more important, the future mothers, who were carrying the new people of Europe in their bellies, dropped their litters here too, and a year later the children would be shipped to the Tyrol and Bavaria and the Black Forest, or to the sea, and the education of the New Man

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would begin in the first creches and nursery schools—not with the mothers, of course, but supervised by experts. Lise showed me beautiful little houses built to look like country cottages, with flowers spilling out over the windowsills, terraces, and wooden balconies. The future mothers and those who were already mothers were all robust, blonde young women who looked as though they were living in the wrong century, like the peasant girls you find in places such as Humpolec or Hanâ, or in villages that are so out of the way you still see women in striped petticoats and the same sort of blouses the Sokol women wear in our part of the country, or like the kind Bozena wears in the famous painting where she's doing the wash and Oldfich rides by on horseback and finds her to his liking. And they all had nice breasts, and whenever they went for walks—and these young women were always wandering about—they would stroll up and down the colonnades, staring closely at the statues of the horned warriors as though this was part of their job, or they would stand in front of the handsome German kings and emperors, trying to etch in their minds those famous historical faces and personalities and their life stories. Later, outside a classroom window, I heard these women listening to lectures about those legendary heroes and then being tested to see if they knew it all by heart. The women were taught, Lise said, that the images of those heroes in their heads gradually percolated down through their bodies, reaching the thing that was just a blob at first, then something like a pollywog or a tree frog, then a tiny person, a homunculus, a dwarf that grew month by month until the ninth month, when it became a human being, and all the teaching and all the staring at the statues

and pictures left an imprint on the new creature. Lise took me around and showed me everything, and she clung to me, and I noticed that whenever she glanced at my blond hair it seemed to put joy in her step, and when she intro-duced me to her section chief she introintro-duced me as Ditie, the name inscribed on my grandfather's grave in Cvikov.

I knew that Lise longed to spend those nine months here and more, so that she could donate a pure-blooded off-spring to the Reich. But when I thought about it, it seemed to me that everything to do with that future child would happen the way it did when we put the cow in with the bull, or our nanny goat in with the village billy goat. When I stared down that row of columns and statues, I saw nothing but a tiny cloud of an enormous horror swirling around and enveloping me. And then I thought—and this was what saved me—about how I was so small that they wouldn't let me onto a Sokol gymnastics team, though I was as agile on the parallel bars and the rings as any big fellow, and I remembered the incident with the gold tea-spoon in the Hotel Paris, and finally how they'd all spit in my face just because I'd fallen in love with a German gym teacher, and now here was the commander of the socialist breeding camp himself shaking my hand, admiring my straw-colored hair, and laughing pleasantly, as if he'd just seen a pretty girl or had a drink of some sweet liqueur or his favorite schnapps, and I stood straight and tall. I didn't wear a stiff collar anymore, but I think I felt for the first time in my life that you didn't actually have to be big, you just had to feel big. I looked about me with an easy mind and stopped being a little table boy, a busboy, a small waiter who was condemned to be small for the rest of his

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life and to put up with being called Pipsqueak and Squirt and Shorty and hear jokes insulting his family name, Dite, which means child. Now I was Herr Ditie, and for the Germans there was no child in my name, and I bet the word reminded them of something completely different, or maybe they couldn't connect it to anything at all in Ger-man. So I began to get some respect here, because, as Lise told me, even the Prussian and Pomeranian nobility would envy a name like Ditie because their names all have Slavic roots, as mine does, von Ditie, so I became a waiter in section five, and I had to cover five tables at noon and at supper and serve five pregnant German girls whenever they rang for milk or cups of cold mountain water or Tyrolean cakes or plates of cold cuts—anything that was on the menu, in fact.

It was here that I first felt myself really blossoming.

Though I was good at waiting on tables at Tichota's or