Free I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

I’d hear the
     whistle, as if the boss were some kind of all-seeing god. Or I’d be with Zden ě k, and as soon as we’d sit down or lie back on a
     haystack where no one could see us, the whistle would blow, just a single warning blast
     to keep us working and not lazing about. We began keeping a rake, a hoe, or a pitchfork
     beside us, and when the whistle blew we’d jump up and start hoeing and raking and
     carrying forkfuls of loose hay. Then it would get quiet, but we’d no sooner put
     the pitchfork down than the whistle would blow again. So we took to lying behind the
     haystack and poking out at something with the rake or the fork, so it looked as if the
     tools were working by themselves, on invisible strings. Zden ě k told me that when the weather was cool like this the boss was like a
     fish in water, but during a heat wave he’d practically melt and couldn’t go
     wherever he wanted but had to stay in a room with a lower temperature, in a kind of
     icebox. Still, he knew everything and saw everything that went on, even things he
     couldn’t see, as if he had spies on every branch in every tree, in the corner of
     every room, behind every curtain. It’s hereditary, Zden ě k told me as he lay back in the deck chair. The boss’s father
     had an inn somewhere below the Krkonoše Mountains and he weighed three-fifty too,
     and when the weather turned hot he had to move to the basement, where he had a bed and a
     keg of beer, otherwise he’d have melted like butter in the summer heat. We got up
     and wandered down a path I’d never walked down before, and we thought aboutour boss’s father moving into the cellar of his village inn
     for the summer so he wouldn’t turn into a pool of butter, and the path took us
     among three silver spruce trees, and there I stopped and stared in amazement. Zden ě k seemed even more amazed than I was and he grabbed my
     sleeve and said, Well, I’ll be . . . There before us was a tiny house, a kind of
     gingerbread cottage, just like a stage prop, with a tiny bench in front. The window was
     as small as a window in the closet of an old farmhouse, and the door was latched like a
     cellar door, and if we’d tried to go in even I would have had to duck, but the
     door was locked, so we stopped and stared in the window for five minutes. Then we looked
     at each other and began to feel almost alarmed, and I felt goose pimples tingling up and
     down my arms because everything inside this little cottage was an exact replica of one
     of our hotel rooms, except that everything seemed to be made for children. It had
     exactly the same table, only in miniature, the same chairs, even the same curtains and
     flower stand, and there was a doll or a teddy bear on every chair, and two shelves along
     the walls had all kinds of toys on them, just as in a store, a whole wall full of toys,
     tiny drums and skipping ropes, all neatly arranged, as if someone had tidied up just
     before we arrived, set everything up just for us, to startle us or touch us. Suddenly we
     heard the whistle, not the warning whistle telling us to get to work, to get off our
     behinds, but a whistle that meant an emergency, so we set off at a run across the meadow
     and, out of breath, took a shortcut and jumped the fence, one after the other.
    Every night the Hotel Tichota was pregnant with expectation. No one came,
     no car drove up, but the entirehotel was ready to go, like a music
     box that starts playing when you drop a crown into it, or like a band: the
     conductor’s baton is raised, all the musicians are ready, expectant, but the baton
     hasn’t given the downbeat yet. We weren’t allowed to sit down or relax, we
     had to keep busy, straightening things out or leaning gently against the station table,
     and even the porter in the spotlit courtyard was waiting, bent at the waist over the
     chopping block with an ax in one hand and a log in the other, waiting for the sign to
     set his ax melodically in