THE BASS SAXOPHONE (18 page)

I leaned up against a backdrop; the bass saxophone player inhaled, and then a terrible, somber, prehistoric tone exploded over the stage; it jumped on the mechanical bandwagon of the waltz, drowning out everything, it absorbed the disharmony, its depths dissolved it; the man blew into the big instrument with the immense strength of frantic, desperate lungs and, as he blew, the melody of “The Bear” suddenly slowed down, crumbled, the call of the bass saxophone sounded like breathing, the player’s fingers began to leap wildly along the strong, silver, matte body of the giant hookah, as if searching for something, I couldn’t take my eyes off them, temporizing triplets emerged, the fingers leaped, stopped and leaped again, then grasped the body firmly; I shut my eyes; the drum and the piano sounded the mechanical three-quarter pulse beat, the orchestrionic oom-pahpah; but above it, like a dancing male gorilla, like a hairy bird of legend slowly beating its black wings, the voice of the broad metal throat screamed the bound strength of bamboo vocal chords, the tone of the bass saxophone, not in the three-quarter time but beyond it, in four heavy beats through which it slid with an immense secret yet emotive strength, in septolets, in a beat that went not only against the automatic
oom-pahpah but also against the four intended accents as if it were shaking off not only all the laws of music but also the cramping weight of something even more immense; a polyrhythmical phoenix, black, ominous, tragic, rising to the red sun of that evening from some horrible moment, from all fearful days, the Adrian Rollini of that child’s dream come true, personified, struggling — yes! I opened my eyes: the man was struggling with the bass saxophone; he was not playing, he was overpowering it; it sounded like the wild fight of two cruel, dangerous, and powerful animals roaring at each other; his ditch-digger’s hands (by their size, not their calluses) were squeezing the blinded body that was like the neck of a brontosaurus, and huge sobs poured out of the corpus, roars thousands of millions of years old. I closed my eyes again. But before I submerged in the semilight of the vision, I caught a brief shot of two rows of faces —
Lothar Kinze und sein Unterhaltungsorchester
, and Horst Hermann Kühl and his entourage: in its soft dissolution Kühl’s face suddenly hardened again with amazement; the Bavarian dream evaporated like ether, and the softened features began quickly and obviously to realign themselves into the long mask of the Roman conquistador; in apposition, the spiritual semicircle of the faces in the band glowed with an incandescent joy: the mechanism of the waltz had undergone the squaring of the circle —
but my eyes were closed again by then, by then I saw again that flower on the illuminated stage, in the steamy sunny jungle, and the gorilla’s voice of male (no, human) despair shook the stage as it did then, long ago, as it did now, as it would evermore — the swinging brasses.

It was a premature legend: Charlie Bird did not struggle with a saxophone like that, with music like that, with life like that, until later; this was a band of primordial times, obscured by the fog of another history, the war, by that island of Europe separated from the wide distant world by a narrowing ring of steel and dynamite; just as great, just as painful, but forgotten, an anonymous bass saxophone player under the canvas of a circus tent, which like the canvas-rigged
Santa Virgo Maria de los Angelos
sailed those two, three, four years over the Pacific Ocean of burned-down villages and traces of long-gone front lines; Lothar Kinze and his Side Show; it never found land, it fell apart, disintegrated in the final confusion of nations; an unknown black Schulz-Koehn, the Adrian Rollini of my dream, some great, unknown, unexplainable pain, so sad,
sehr traurig, traurig wie eine Glocke
.

Another hand touched my shoulder, I caught the flash of eyes. I turned around. Horst Hermann Kühl reached for my mustache and pulled it off. “So that’s how it is,” he said. “Scram!” His face was
carefully aligned again into the controlled features of the mask. Dangerous, unpleasant, murderous.

I turned back. The loud mighty roar of the struggling bass saxophone still sounded from the lighted stage. “Scram!” hissed Kühl. I caught a glimpse of the stage manager, the Czech, and for an instant I awoke from the dream and the cold sweat of a chimera did chill me. But they wouldn’t believe it. Not Kostelec. Not even the Kostelec inside me — later I wouldn’t believe it myself, or understand it. The unattainable message of music, forever locked behind the seven locks of that talent, will always be no more than this craving to communicate, to understand, to go all the way to the end with them — the end of what? of the world, heaven, life — possibly of truth.

I fled up the iron staircase in the darkness, and then down the hotel corridor past silent doors with brass numbers, along the beige and cream hall to the door numbered 12A. The call of the bass saxophone somewhere in the distance collapsed with a sob. I opened the door and turned on the light. My jacket was hanging over a chair, my tenor saxophone part still lying on the table. I dressed in a hurry, then I stopped; there was a light on in the bathroom — I saw it through the half-open door — a light I hadn’t turned on. Three steps were enough; I looked in. In the white, perhaps alabaster tub, the surface of the
pink water lay motionless, quiet, like a lake in which a mermaid had bled to death; and across the white tiles and the white bathroom carpet led a trail of blood.

I stared at it, and it was an answer, though veiled, symbolical; it was after all only half an answer, but that is all we ever will get; there are no complete answers in this desperate gore of life — just a trace of blood, a trail of blood, the screaming voice of the struggling bass saxophone, so sad; only deathly pain firmly enclosed in the shell of our loneliness; he at least succeeded in giving a cry, in shaking the complacency of a dark hall somewhere in Europe; others succeed at nothing, disappearing through the anonymous trapdoors of the world, the soul, without even a whisper, without even that voice.

When I walked out of the hotel, under the stars that showed a blatant disrespect for human regulations, I could hear Lothar Kinze’s sentimental music very weakly from behind the hotel, where the theater was. And in it, wrapped in a monotonous mezzoforte, an equally sentimental, equally emotionless alto saxophone.

I walked through the dark streets of the blacked-out town. No one ever found out about it (even though the stage manager recognized me, I’m certain of that) but it wasn’t a dream; nor was it a hallucination, a chimera, nothing like that. True,
the next day there wasn’t a trace of the gray bus in town, and I had no contacts among the German community in Kostelec to confirm or deny it for me (except for Mr. Kleinenherr; I asked him, but he didn’t go to Lothar Kinze’s concert — he avoided the German community affairs whenever he could).

But it was no dream: for that desperate scream of youth is still inside me, the challenge of the bass saxophone. I forget it in the rush of the day, in the rush of life, and I only repeat I love you, I love you, mechanically, because the tears and the callous disinterest of the world have given me this countenance, this thick skin; but there is a memento — an intimate, truthful moment God knows where, God knows when, and because of it I shall always be on the move with Lothar Kinze’s orchestra, a sad musician on the mournful routes of Europe’s periphery, surrounded by storm clouds; and the somber bass saxophone player, the adrian rollini, will time and again remind me of dream, truth, incomprehensibility: the memento of the bass saxophone.

Josef Škvorecký was born in 1924 at Náchod, Bohemia, Czechoslovakia. He has worked as a laborer, a teacher, and an editor, and of his numerous writings four are available in English: the novels,
The Cowards
(1958) and
Miss Silver’s Past
(1969); a book of crime stories,
The Mournful Demeanor of Lt. Boruvka
(1966); and a history of the Czech cinema,
All the Bright Young Men and Women
(1971). After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia he emigrated to Canada, where he is Professor of English and Film at Erindale College in the University of Toronto. He and his wife, the writer Zdena Salivarová, live in Toronto where they run a small emigré publishing house.