Once upon a time, I sat on a bench in the park at Charles Square with the dearly departed Mestek.

Mestek, then the proprietor of a flea circus, was in a very despondent mood, for he had come to the realization that fleas were no longer suited for the purposes of training. A catastrophe had recently befallen his circus. Some drunken fellow, driven by the crazed conviction that the entire thing was a sham, had entered his booth and—without even so much as attempting to verify his assumption—struck with his cane the carton containing the circus. The trained fleas were delivered in this way from the yoke of their microscopically small paper carts, winning their freedom. Even the peep show with the magnifying glass was demolished. On the floor of the carton remained sprawled the corpse of a little flea man—a virtuoso who had been the soul of the circus. Mestek had referred to him endearingly as “Little František”.  The corpse of the artist was identified under the magnifying glass; he could be recognized only because he was missing a leg.

It numbered among the secrets of such circuses that a leg was removed from the performers, so they would not jump around in too unruly a manner and disturb the ceremonious procession.

Only one flea, with broken legs and an overturned little cart, had endured amongst the dead. “I thought,” Mestek said with a sigh, “that I could revive her, but my efforts were in vain. Our Pepina languished, so finally I squashed her.”

Mestek spoke for a while of the love between Pepina and Little František and of how the tiny flea dame had gazed adoringly upon the tiny flea gent while he danced.

“Never again in my life will I ever meet so clever a creature,” Mestek said. “The fleas of today have fallen into degeneracy. They are not what they once were. They’ve become dimwitted. Perhaps a new species of flea is upon us. I recently purchased a full bottle of fleas from the custodian of the old town asylum, but not one of them was worth a thing. I had fleas from the police station, from various orphanages; fleas from the boarding school they call ‘Happy Home’, from Eliška Krásnohorská’s boarding school, fleas from the penitentiaries, from the barracks, from the pawnshops, fleas from several hotels, from the Karolinum and Clementinum building complexes, fleas from the girls’ finishing school and from the manufacturers’ association, from the Emmaus Monastery and from elsewhere, and all of these fleas were entirely incompetent. Of course, I found two or three that one might have described as talented, but they were devoid of any ambition. The career did not entice them. They ran off without considering what grand and illustrious fame awaited them. The new, younger generation of fleas will never boast of a Pepina or a Little František. Their quality cannot be articulated in plain language—only in silence can we honor and pay homage to them…”

We were overcome by a sense of melancholy as we relived in our minds the triumphal procession of the flea circus through Bohemia, Moravia, and—on one brief tour—through Hungary, where the Hungarian gendarmes escorted us back to the border, since they regarded our flea circus as a covert form of pan-Slavic propaganda.

In some parts of Moravia, we were obstructed by the clergy.

As I familiarized the priest of Helštýn with the concept of our circus, he explained to me: “I could not suggest your enterprise to the faithful of my parish, for it cannot endear them to God. The training of fleas is in contradiction with the nature of man. As told to us by Abbot Anselmus, the fleas of the Middle Ages induced the monks of the monasteries—through incessant biting that prevented them from getting any rest—to appeal to God day and night.”

“So you regard fleas as sacred creatures?” I asked. “Then I can assure you that we have fleas in our circus descended from those who once bedeviled the baby Jesus in the manger at Bethlehem.”

At this, he turned violent, so I knocked him out cold, but in the end we were forced to retreat to the mountains with the flea circus, for the priest had incited the entire region as far as Walachia against us.

Mestek interrupted our spell of contemplative brooding: “If one is patient and enterprising, he will triumph over the stupidity of mankind. One need only go about things in a clever manner. It doesn’t matter if one paints a duck; what matters is convincing the spectator that it’s not a duck but rather a jaguar. Should that business prove unsuccessful, a second or a third such business will undoubtedly succeed.”

“Human beings are jackasses,” he said, elaborating on his philosophy. “The greater the nonsense, the more people will dig into their pockets to witness it. The people are in need of new astonishments. What do you think?”

“I am of the view,” I replied, “that there are very few free-thinking people. Those with definite, idiosyncratic views don’t usually come to us. Our performances are always attended by audiences convinced they will see all that we have advertised, and that it will all be worth seeing. Recall the bat we captured at Bohdalec, on the outskirts of Prague, that we promoted as a flying lizard from Australia! And everyone paid the requested sum to behold it. Or think back on how people fought for tickets to see the offspring of the king snake that strangled the English viceroy of India? Yet it was just a baby grass snake. And do you remember how many people were in attendance when Pepíček Vanek from Košíre pretended to be an orangutan from the island of Borneo?”

“What a swindler,” Mestek responded. “How could I forget? Before the final performance, he demanded twenty crowns from us because he thought fifteen plus meals was insufficient for playing the part of an orangutan. And besides, the fellow earned a pretty penny from the fruit and other goodies people threw into his cage. He always stashed that stuff in the corner, selling it to the peddler woman across the street when we closed the booth for the evening. So I refused to pay him more. That caused him to go ape, and, in the middle of a performance, he began to sing “On Radlitzer Street” as an orangutan. And what a panic it caused! Then we were thrown out of Tábor. We had far more success with the mummy of the English King Richard III, notwithstanding that the mummy was nothing more than a bundle of ram’s hide. Only after half a year had passed were we found out. You spoke brilliantly in front of that ram’s hide: ‘Here you shall see a representation of the greatest and most terrible monstrosity that ever sat upon a royal throne. This royal villain, whom a degeneration of the body transformed into a monster and an ogre, who waded in the blood of countless misdeeds and astonished even Shakespeare with his perfidious thirst for blood, this royal ogre has dried up, and we are very pleased to present him to you, the esteemed public, in the form of a mummy—a husk…’”

“Then a district official confiscated Richard III,” I added.

“However, from this one may deduce,” Mestek philosophized further, “that everything is possible in this world. I would bet that more than half the Earth’s population earns a living from one form of fraud or another. Now it’s only a matter of us thinking up something new to present to the audience. One must inspire a bit of wonder in them. It should make such an impression that all those taken in will spread the word for us. We will show them something.”

“Hang on a minute with the ‘show them something’,” I interrupted, drawing with my walking stick in the sand. “Why this ‘something’? Let’s go one step further. Do you get me? Show the audience nothing!”

“At least a pebble,” pled Mestek, “I have always shown something.”

“Not even so much as a pebble,” I maintained, “something is rubbish—old school. I tell you that we shall show the audience nothing at all. And that is precisely the surprise. You say: ‘at least a pebble’, as was often done in the past. One says: ‘This pebble is from Mars.’ The audience members go home with the impression that they have seen something and were not surprised. But when the audience sees absolutely nothing at all, then they will be completely astonished. Just look!”

I sketched in the sand with my walking stick. “Our booth will be round, spacious, windowless, and without any opening in the ceiling. It must be completely dark. Two doorways will be covered with curtains: through one, in the front, the audience will enter, and the other will serve as an exit. That one is in the rear. A giant sign: ‘The greatest surprise in the world! A surprise you will never forget. Admission for adult males only. Women and children not permitted. Half-price admission for soldiers!’ The audience will be admitted individually at short intervals. I will stand outside, serving as the promoter and cashier. You’re in the dark booth, and, as soon as someone turns up, you grab them by the trousers and shirt collar and throw them back out through the rear exit, without a word. A small, modest entrance fee, and you’ll see—no one will regret it. I assure you that people only desire the worst for one another, that they will even publicize it and encourage others to have a look. A giant surprise, a marvelous thing. Our business will be built on a foundation of psychology.”

Mestek dithered for a while, not because he had a principled objection to this new enterprise of amusement, but only on account of wanting to bring it to perfection.

“Would it not be good,” he submitted for consideration, after some deliberation, “to strike each person with a cane in the process? That would make the surprise all the greater.”

I was decidedly against this. “We would only delay ourselves thereby. The entire procedure must unfold as quickly as possible. One enters the darkness and is suddenly back outside. He shall scarcely have enough time to get his bearings. Therein resides the truly authentic surprise. The business is completely legitimate! We promise nothing which we cannot deliver. We promise a surprise, and we keep our word. No one may accuse us of being scammers.”

Our legitimate business enjoyed enormous interest. We first pitched our tent in Benešov, where all the optimal conditions were to be found: the military and an inquisitive audience. I had placards printed that matched the sign on our booth:

! Titillating !

! Only for adult males !

! Huge surprise !

! Our establishment is one you’ll never forget !

! No nonsense—satisfaction guaranteed !

The placards, the reasonable 20-heller admission fee, and the enigma of a piquant and mysterious surprise for adult males attracted a vast host of men—soldiers and civilians—to our booth.

In the crowd could be seen sixteen-year-old lads who were ready to tell me they were forty or fifty just to be admitted.

We began at six o’clock. The first patron was a husky man who had been waiting since five o’clock and flew fast as lightning through our booth, ending up back in the fresh air on the other side.

 I listened as he remarked to the audience: “That’s phenomenal; you must have a look at it too.”

I was not mistaken concerning the psychology of the masses. Those whom we tossed out did much for our publicity. Within an hour and a half, a few hundred adult men passed through the muscular arms of Mestek. Some even had themselves thrown out two or three times, returning to the booth and falling once more into Mestek’s powerful hands. Every face shone with delight and satisfaction. I observed that many of them brought along acquaintances, wholeheartedly extolling the “huge surprise.”

Where the devil can’t go himself, he sends a district official. One arrived shortly after half-past seven. “Do you have a license?” he asked me at the entrance. “Please go right in,” I replied. A brief struggle broke out between him and Mestek in the darkness of the booth. The official, conscious of the dignity of his office, defended himself desperately against the big surprise, but, in the end, he too went flying out the rear exit into the jubilant crowd.

Then the gendarmes arrived, shut down our booth, and hauled us off to court, on account of affronting a local official and resisting arrest.

“For the rest of my days I shall never again establish a legitimate business,” Mestek assured me, as we made ourselves at home on our plank bed. “From this day forth, I shall live by fraud alone.”

1921

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‘A Legitimate Business’ appears in The Man Without A Transit Pass & Other Tales available now from Paradise Editions (you can order a copy here). It is part of a relay translation project adapting Hašek‘s more obscure short stories and tales into English from Czech via German. All of the material in the collection is previously untranslated into English.

Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, and journalist. He was beloved—and infamous—for his bohemian lifestyle, practical jokes, and radical politics. During his short life he wrote copiously and traveled on foot throughout Central and Eastern Europe, frequently landing in trouble with the authorities. He is best known for The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished comic novel set during the First World War. 

Dustin Stalnaker discovered Hašek’s lesser-known short stories in Germany, while researching the history of European antifascism. He grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania. He now runs the translation blog Tales from Jaroslav. Twitter: @jaro_hasek

Paradise Editions is a publishing organ founded in 2023 by Matthew Spencer. It seeks to revive obsolete and formerly popular forms of literature. Website: https://paradiseeditions.net/ Twitter: @editio3paradise