THE BASS SAXOPHONE (11 page)

And that is how a story, a legend, comes to pass and no one tells it. And yet, somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle, and the person grows older, is deserted, dies. All that is left is a slab, a name. Maybe not even a slab, not even a name. The story is borne for a few more years by another, and then that person dies too. And other people know nothing, as they never, never, never knew anything. The name is lost. As is the story, the legend. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing
.

But perhaps somewhere at least an impression is left, at least a trace of the tear, the beauty, the loveliness of the person, the legend, Emöke
.

I wonder, I wonder, I wonder
.

T
wilight. Honey and blood. Indifferent to the historical situation of nation and town, it spoke to me, aged eighteen, on the leeshore of a land-locked lea in Europe, where death was less extravagant, more modest. I stood with my back to the
fin de siècle
hotel façade, a product of that time when they exerted their strained imaginations to create something entirely new, something they couldn’t express through classical form and to which they gave instead an expression of ineptitude that is actually beautiful when you get right down to it, being a reflection of man’s image of man rather than an effort to copy God. Anyway, there I stood, my back to that hotel façade with the greenish mosaic around the big windows of the hotel café, windows with flowers etched in the glass, while dusk, a puddle of honey, trickled down the wall.

At first I didn’t even realize that that was what the thing was. Not until the old man in the shabby jacket made of a wartime cellulose ersatz material (it was wartime) dragged it out of the little gray bus, and as he strained to pick it up the clasps
loosened and the big black case opened before it was high enough off the ground for what was inside to fall out; it opened an inch or two above the pavement, so that all that really happened was that the case opened a crack and the light of the honey-colored sun (standing over the tubby tower of the town’s old mansion, blazing in through the windows of the square tower of the town’s new mansion that belonged to Domanín, the millionaire whose daughter I was in love with because she lived in that tower and every night all the points of the compass caught the light of her alabaster lamp shining through the four aquariums, and she was pale, pale, she was ill in that world of purple fish, just another illusion, just a pathological dream of a pathological childhood) glinted on the immense, incredible bell of a bass saxophone, as big around as a washbasin.

I had never actually believed that such things really existed. I only knew they had been mentioned back in the days of Dadaism and Poetism; maybe some time in the ancient history of the republic somebody made a museum piece like that, an advertising gimmick, too expensive really and later stored away in some forgotten back room. And after that nobody made them any more, they were only a dream, a theoretical computation formulated some time in the colorful twenties: all we had were alto saxes and tenor saxes. And way
up in the hills, in Rohelnice, there lived a fellow named Syrovátka, son of a country schoolteacher who led the village brass band, and he was the possessor of a legendary baritone sax; he used to play alto sax with village bands in a sweet uncertain tone; he didn’t swing, he was a country boy, all the way. But he possessed an old baritone sax, an instrument blind with decay and verdigris, stored away in the hills in the loft of a thatch-roofed cottage where the gleam of the ruby sun penetrated through holes in the roof. To this very day, I can see the poisonous turquoise sky above the black smudge of the woods; in it floats that bloodshot eye, a red olive floating in greenish-blue wine — evening in the hills, reminiscent of times Paleozoic and of fern jungles — its light penetrating through cracks in the thatched roof to the muggy silver of the mastodon corpus. In 1940, when the unbelievable became possible (six brasses, a big band, bass, percussion, guitar, piano), Syrovátka came down from the hills and then it was five saxes; in his jacket made of flour sacking, he sat at the very end of the white row, his shoulders like the front of an angular chest of drawers; no, he didn’t swing, but the mythical instrument gave off a dull sheen in the glow of the footlights, and above it the four of us sang, sang for joy that he was with us even though he was striding his own hill and forest paths under our sliding chords. But this thing here, this was
something even more mysterious: a bass saxophone. (Perhaps the significance of things like that is beyond belief — things like a barely used and hardly usable instrument in the eyes of a complex-ridden kid in the middle of Europe, surrounded by names that were to become entries in hell’s own dictionary: Maidanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka. But what are we permitted to choose in this life of ours? Nothing. Everything comes to us willy-nilly.)

It was revealed to me for an instant, a silvery fish in that bubble of honey called Indian summer; I stared at it the way a child stares at its first doll. But it only lasted an instant — the old man in the wood-pulp jacket bent over, his joints creaking aloud with rheumatism, the rheumatism of war begotten from sleeping on benches in railway stations. He bent down and shut the lid; he started to tie the broken lock with a piece of string.

I said, “Good evening.” I asked, “Mister, is that a bass saxophone?” It wasn’t that I didn’t know, but I wanted to be told; I wanted to talk about it; I’d never even heard what it sounded like, only read about it in a finger-marked old book that Benno had, that he’d swiped from one of his playboy Jewish uncles in Prague — and besides, the book was in French, a language I refused to study, so our French teacher had declared me a remarkable anti-talent (for I was secretly using the time to study the language of blues from a cheap little
brochure) — called
Le Jazz Hot
, which the playboy Jewish uncle had bought somewhere in Paris and brought back to Prague, and that’s when Benno stole it to take home to Kostelec, our town. Now, like the Book of Mormon of origin divine, it was shelved in the leather-bound library of Benno’s father in the huge villa by the river in that little provincial town in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the war; like the Book of Mormon written in the language of angels, it spoke to me only in the language of objects (bass saxophone, sarrusophone, cowbells, mellophone) and people (Trixie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Bud Freeman, Johnny St. Cyr) and places (Storyville, Canal Street, Milneburg) and bands (Condon’s Chicagoans, the Wolverines, the Original Dixieland Band), that international language of an innocent cult … Adrian Rollini — only a name, a bass saxophone player from Chicago whom I’d never heard play — I knew only that he was occasionally a member of that good old gang that used to make recordings into acoustic funnels.

The old man straightened up and his joints complained again. The material on his knees sagged. His scalp was crumpled like the shell of a boiled egg that had burst; one eye sat lower than the other, almost down on his cheek, a bluish eye, surrounded by fair whiskers.
“Verstehe nicht tschechisch,”
he said. His other, healthier eye moved,
slid down my checkered jacket to my hand which was clutching a folder with a label on it that said “2nd Ten. Sax.” So I repeated my question in German.
“Ist das ein Bassaxophon, bitte?”
That very act alone removed me from the Czech community, since German was only spoken under duress; at the first sound of German I should have turned on my heel and gone away, bid the bass saxophone goodbye. But some things are simply stronger. So I said
“Ist das ein Bassaxophon, bitte?”
and the eye, not the bluish one, the healthier one, rested on my folder and then slowly, searchingly, with a certain degree of contempt, it rose again, past my checkered jacket, skimmed the black shoestring under my short collar, bounced off the broad brim of my porkpie hat (I was a dandy, oh, yes, I was; it had its political significance too — foppery is always a calling card of the opposition — but not only that: it also had something to do with the myth, the myth of youth, that myth of myths) and looked right at me. It examined me.
“Ja,”
the old man said.
“Das ist es. Du spielst auch Saxophon?”
He used the familiar
“Du”
when he asked me if I could play; it didn’t even appear particularly strange.

“Ja,”
I said. “
Sie auch?
You too?” But the old man didn’t reply. He bent over again. The same creaking, cracking sound as if every move meant a crumbling, a breaking of his skeleton shattered to
little tiny bonelets by some kind of dumdum — but what held him together then? Probably just will power, the will power that is in the ones who survive all the explosions, apparently only to die not long afterward; everything in them is worn away, cracked: liver, lungs, kidneys, and soul. He untied the string with stained fingers. They trembled. The coffin opened, and there it lay, big as a bishop’s staff. And the old man creaked again, and again he looked at me. I was staring at the bass saxophone, at its long incredible body, the high metal loop on top; it was dim and blinded, like the baritone sax in Rohelnice. These instruments were mere vestiges of older, better, happier days and it was a long time since they had manufactured any; all they made now was
Panzerschrecks
, bazookas, simply plates of rolled steel.
“Möchtest du’s spielen?”
asked the old man like the Serpent. Would I like to play it? Yes, because it was the apple and I was Eve; or else he was a miserable, hideous Eve with one bad eye in a golden wreath of whiskers, and I was Adam. I suddenly remembered something about nationality and patriotism, and my humanity was diminished by that something; I heard the voice of reason, that idiotic voice, saying, when all is said and done, it’s only a musical instrument, and this is a Czech town called Kostelec. The child fell silent, the doll closed its eyes; I was eighteen years old, I was grown up. I looked at the old man, at
the ugly Eve, and my glance slipped to one side to the little gray bus. Somewhere, on an ostentatious glass-covered Nazi Party bulletin board, I had happened to see a notice that Lothar Kinze and his Entertainment Orchestra would be coming to town, and that’s what the weatherbeaten letters on the gray bus said:
LOTHAR KINZE MIT SEINEM UNTER
-
HALTUNGSORCHESTER
; and it had said on that glass-covered bulletin board that it would be a
Konzert für die deutsche Gemeinde in Kosteletz
, in other words a concert for the local Nazis, for the ones that had been here all along (Herr Zeeh, Herr Trautner, Herr Pellotza-Nikschitsch) and the Nazi office workers that had migrated here from the Reich in order to recuperate in the safety of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and for the air force radio men from the Ernst Udet Barracks, and also for Mr. Kleinenherr, who didn’t give a damn about nationality either, and kept right on associating with the Czechs and speaking Czech. For Germans only. Czechs prohibited. So I took them up on it, and played the game. Instead of killing with kindness (love your enemies, do good unto those that hate you) I tried responding with hatred. But there was no hatred in me; certainly no hatred toward this old man with his eyes on crooked, not even toward the
Feldwebel
, the sergeant-major (or whatever his rank was) from the Ernst Udet Barracks who used to hang around my sister as
doggedly as a faithful bull terrier when she walked home from work at the brewery office; he would always say hello and she, like the good Czech that she was, would always walk a little faster, and yet that
Feldwebel
had sad, German eyes under the foreign cap with the eagle and the swastika, eyes of yearning in a gaunt, expressionless Prussian countenance, but my sister was a good Czech, and besides, she was afraid of him; more that than anything else — my sister was a good girl; and once I saw him sitting by the weir, the Ledhuje river murmuring, the weeping willows whispering, gray clouds marching toward the black east; he sat there, his boots in the grass, writing something in a blue pocket-notebook; I sneaked up to the weir and through a knothole watched the hand with the pencil, and I read a few German words in a Gothic script:
“Bald kommen Winter stürme mit dem roten Schneen. O Anna, komm zu mir den grausam gelben Pfad! In meinem Kopje kalte Winde wehen.”
I never saw him again after that, his platoon or his company or whatever he belonged to was shipped to the front shortly afterward, but my sister’s name was Anna and on either side of the road from the brewery there were horse chestnut trees that turned yellow at the end of summer, turned orange and finally died, leaving only the black skeletons of the trees behind. But all the same, I shook my head, all the same I turned on my heel. Old Mr. Káňa was
standing in front of the church with the onion-shaped tower, watching me (another time, two years earlier, it had been old Mr. Vladyka who had stood there and he had watched me too as I tried to convince Mr. Katz, the teacher, that it would all turn out all right; there is always a Mr. Káňa or a Mr. Vladyka watching you from somewhere unless you do nothing and are nothing, and perhaps even then; they follow us from the time it’s possible to punish us, or to punish our parents through us, or our acquaintances, or our close friends; maybe we’ll never get rid of those stares, that hell of ours: the others). I started to walk away; I felt the old man’s hand fall on my shoulder. It was like the touch of an iron claw, but gentle, not the hand of the Gestapo, just the hand of a soldier, for there is a gentleness in the hands of the skeletons called to arms under those flags of theirs; particularly when they return defeated, and for those skeletons it can never be anything other than defeat.
“Warte mal,”
I heard his voice, it sounded like two voices, two cracked vocal chords split lengthwise in two. “Can’t you give me a hand? This damned giant saxophone is too heavy for me.” I stopped. Mr. Káňa took a cigarette case out of his pocket, and lit himself a cigarette. The old man’s crippled eyes stared at me as if they were gazing out of some terrible fairy tale; but at his feet, in a black coffin with faded velvet cushioning, rested a bass saxophone. The
child reopened its eyes. The doll spoke. Little suns rested for an instant on the valves of the huge corpus, valves as big as the ornaments on a horse’s trappings.
“Ja, Bassaxophon,”
said the old man. “Have you ever heard it played? It has a voice like a bell.
Sehr traurig
. Very sad.” The creaking of those vocal chords made me think of the
Feldwebel
again, writing poems in a pocket-notebook on the bank of the Ledhuje, of that one-man unit lost in the immensity of the war, like a clumsy tortoise running up against the shield of my sister’s lack of understanding, of that man, undoubtedly alone amongst the men in uniform (it wasn’t an SS barracks, it was just an ordinary German barracks; but even if it had been an SS barracks, who knows? the roads of our lives lead heaven knows where); we will certainly never see him again, neither I nor my sister; I gazed at that sad instrument, and in my mind the unknown Adrian Rollini rose up behind the wire music stand of years past, sad as a bell. The doll fell silent again. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m in a hurry.” And then I turned away again, in order to save myself in the last moment from treason, in the eyes of Mr. Káňa, but the iron hand of the skeleton held me fast. “
Nein
, you can’t go,” said the voice, and his face suddenly assumed a mask; it was only a mask, and from beneath it the uncertain countenance of a problem showed through — what it was, I didn’t know. “You will help me
carry the saxophone!” I wanted to jerk myself free, but just then an immense man in uniform walked out of the door of the hotel, spread his legs and turned his yellow face to the sun; it gleamed like a big puddle of lemon, two gray eyes opened in it, like Nosferatu gazing out of his lemony grave. “No, I can’t, really, let me go,” I said, and moved abruptly so the old man almost lost his footing, but he held fast.
“Herr Leutnant!”
he called; the gray eyes looked at me; I was trying to pull free; from the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Káňa standing at a safe distance and it seemed to me that he nodded in approval; the old man was saying something to the man with a face like Nosferatu. Not voluntarily, then; if they force me though, it’s all right. “Why don’t you want to help him?” asked the lieutenant. “He’s an old man, after all.
Ein alter Mann
.” I looked up at him; he was huge, but sad, just a facsimile of a soldier; the gray eyes rested in his intelligent countenance like the Arnheim eggs. “And you are both musicians,” he said. “Help him with the saxophone.” I picked it up. The iron hand released me. I threw the black coffin onto my shoulder and started out behind the old man. I wondered whether this great big meaty fellow had a notebook too. Possibly, probably. He didn’t shout; he didn’t give any orders. “You are both musicians.”