Free Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, Michael Heim, Adam Thirlwell

gloves, because a swarm of bees is no laughing matter, the bees make these big bumps on a tree and they have to be cut off, which the tree owners don’t like, so you get into fights with your neighbors, anyway, my brother’s boss told me he wanted to teach me and Mr. Haňka how to hang out beehives, but while we were having our first lesson Mr. Haňka tripped and dropped one and off we flew, but little good it did us, they lit into us something awful, Mr. Haňka knelt and begged the bees to stop, he had a wife and children, but they stung him all over, even his private parts, which swelled up to the size of a watering can, I couldn’t go to the bar for three days, and the first thing Bobinka did when she saw me was to play Cemetery, Cemetery on the Victrola, and the next thing was to take me upstairs—because she didn’t think I could see much yet—and strip me naked, then she filled a pitcher with water and said, How about a little marriage training using the Hardy method, but all at once we heard a scream outside the door, well, what had happened was the blacksmith was so drunk they foisted a real hag off on him, but he switched on his flashlight and burst out of the room in his underpants, smashing the railing to smithereens and shouting, Who gave me that old bat? she’s as ugly as an academic portrait painter! well, I threw on my clothes then and there, I was as sensitive as the blacksmith, it wasn’t at all like the time when we initiated the stove fitter into the mysteries of love on the billiard table, he was a little crack-brained to begin with, he’d tiled himself twice into stoves and had to be pried out with a crowbar, which meant redoing the entire stove, even now the daughters of good families bring me roses and wonder how I came by my good manners, but you should have seen what Olánek did when we wished him a happy fiftieth birthday and asked him how his health was holding up, right there in the main square he pulled out his member—he had ten beers in him at the time—and drenched the advertisement for Náchod Mills all the way to the accent over the a while the local notary public passed under the stream and wished us a pleasant day, then there was the long-distance pissing contest at the Terrace Bar, Olánek was sure he’d won when a man who looked like nothing if not a Mariazell beggar piped up and asked if he could have a go at it, and Olánek said all right provided the winner got a liter of French cognac, so that night at midnight there were two bottles of cognac on the table, and the two men stepped out onto the terrace and the other guy undid his fly and in a flash the house across the road was dripping wet, you could hear the piss sloshing into the Elbe, so Olánek backed off and the other guy took his two bottles and disappeared, and Vít, who played drums in the navy band, said to Novák the violinist, How about a round of Violetta, and everybody climbed up on their chairs and I performed The Sultan’s Wedding and Olánek tried to patch up his reputation by doing tableaux vivants on the table and pissing out over the guests, a lady told me later it would serve me right if I got hauled into court for mixing with the likes of him, one day I went to hear Járinek Pospíšil sing at the National Hall and the first thing he did was to ask whether there were any singers in the house, well, the ladies they all shouted, You go! to me, so the famous tenor helped me up onto the stage and told me to take a seat, but I said I couldn’t, and suddenly the audience was all abuzz, so he said, Why not? and I said, Because I only paid for standing room, well, you should have heard the women shriek, I had one-upped the great Pospíšil! and then the piano chimed in and I sang The Painful Farewell and the ladies nearly brought the house down, what they said about Pospíšil was that even though he was divorced he had a voice like