THE BASS SAXOPHONE (4 page)

My story is drawing to a close. “
Das Spiel ist ganz und gar verloren. Und dennoch wird es weitergehen
.…” The game is totally lost. And yet it will go on. The old music is dying, although it has so many offspring, vigorous and vital, that will, naturally, be hated. Still, for me, Duke is gone,
Satchmo is gone, Count Basie has just barely survived a heart attack, Little Jimmy Rushing has gone the way of all flesh.…

Such is the epitaph of the little Five-by-Five. Such is the epitaph I would wish for my books.

J.Š.

Toronto, 1977

A story happens and fades and no one tells it. And yet somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle and Christmases come, that person dies and there is a new slab with a name on it in the graveyard. Two or three people, a husband, a brother, a mother, still bear the light, the legend, in their heads for a few more years and then they die too. For the children it remains only like an old film, the out-of-focus aura of a vague face. The grandchildren know nothing. And other people forget. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing
.

But a certain building, a recreation center — once a hotel maybe, a rural inn or a boarding house — still hides the story of two people and their folly, and perhaps the shades of its characters may still be glimpsed in the social hall or in the Ping-Pong room, like the materialized images of werewolves in deserted old houses, trapped in the dead thoughts of human beings, unable to leave for a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, perhaps forever
.

T
he room’s ceiling slanted downward. It was a garret, the window high off the floor — you couldn’t see out unless you pushed the table over to the wall and climbed up on it. And the very first night there (it was a hot night, August, the susurrus of ash and linden under the window like the distant rush of diluvial seas, the window open to let in the night’s sounds and fragrances of grass and grasshoppers and crickets and cicadas and linden blossoms and cigarettes and from the nearby town the music of a Gypsy band playing Glenn Miller’s old “In the Mood,” but in an undulating Gypsy rhythm, and then “Dinah,” and then “St. Louis Blues,” but they were Gypsies — two fiddles, a bass, a dulcimer — and the beat wasn’t boogie but rather the weaving pulse of the Gypsy, the leader embellishing on the blue tones in a swaying Gypsy rhythm), the schoolteacher began to talk about women. He talked in the dark, in bed, in a hoarse voice trying to get me to tell him how it was with me and women. What I told him was that I was getting married before Christmas, that I was marrying a widow called Irene, but all the while I was
thinking about Margit and about her husband who had let it be known that he would beat me senseless if ever I showed my face in the district of Libeň again, and about the carnival in Libeň and about Margit with her nose red from crying, red like the nose of the painted clay dwarf down in the desolate, funereal garden behind the hotel, the inn, that recreation center or whatever it was. Then he began to talk about women himself; words full of salacious images, vulgar, raunchy, came pouring from his craw, from his rabbit brain, evoking in me a profound depression. It was as if the hand of Death were reaching out to me from the barren life of that country schoolteacher, fifty years old with a wife and three children, teaching at a five-grade school and shooting off his mouth here about women, about sex with young teachers whose work placement card had forced them to leave their mothers and move, with just a couple of worn suitcases, far away to God knows where in the Sudeten mountains, to a village near the border, where there wasn’t even a movie house, just a tavern, just a few lumberjacks, a few Gypsies, a few locals transplanted here by all sorts of plans and desires and dreams and bad consciences, and just a deserted manse and the chairman of the local National Committee — before the revolution a day-laborer on the estate of the lords of Schwarzenberg, in his blood the congenital defiance of forefathers who had sweated over soil they
never owned, he had been driven here afterward by that very defiance, that hunger for land; now he had his land, and he sweated over it like all his sinewy and unshaven forefathers had done except that now the soil was his — and then the teacher, the only one in the whole village who knew how to play the violin and who could drop words like Karel Čapek, Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, words that embodied the magic of virginal patriotic ideals and the spirit of the Teachers College where young women were prepared for that most beautiful of professions; and when he first arrived there at the age of forty he already had a wife and (at that time) two children, but he told the young teacher he loved her, in heavy calligraphy he wrote love letters and poems that seemed almost familiar to her (he had an old handbook of love letters and love poems by anonymous poets that he would adapt to his particular needs), and of a morning she would find a bunch of primroses on her desk, or a sprig of edelweiss or a bachelor’s button or a spray of lily of the valley, and she used to listen to him, go to meet him beyond the village in the shrubbery, in the underbrush of the pine woods where the wind of late summer blew over the bald hills and the town stood below, cold with the church spire pointing up to heaven, dingy, yellowish, half-deserted under the steel-gray moss of autumn clouds, and then she said Yes and took him to her room and
now he was telling me about it “… she said the light was too bright, that she was embarrassed, but all she had was a lightbulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling, no lampshade, nothing, so I pulled the panties off her, blue jersey flimsies they were, and hung ’em over the lightbulb, and right away it was like it used to be in the streetcars during the war, in the blackouts, and then I did it to her.…” He was a man entirely in the sway of death, and I swayed under the bleakness of that life of his, more desolate than the life of a mouse or a sparrow, or the caged armadillo at the zoo that just stamps its feet on the steel floor and snorts greedily and rhythmically and then eats and then copulates and snorts and stamps and runs around and sleeps because it’s an armadillo, a comical beast that lives an optimum life according to armadillo law; but he was a human being, until recently principal of a five-grade school and member of the local National Committee although he had now been downgraded to the two-room school on the frontier (“The inspector had it in for me, a Party man, you know, he was jealous because he couldn’t make time with a young teacher like I could”), heir to that ancient tradition of schoolmasters who in days of old brought books and music and beauty and philosophy into mountain cottages and to little villages like that village, husband to a wife who had to stay behind alone and was receiving a bonus for having
to maintain a separate household, father by this time to three children, and here he was, living according to the laws of white mice and armadillos.

The girl (not the young teacher, but the one that sat next to us that first evening in the dining room listening to the social director, who called himself our Cultural Guide, unfolding an extensive and substantial program of organized activity for our group) was built like a dancer, slender as a street lantern, with boyish hips and delicate sloping shoulders, and breasts like the breasts of stylized statues, that did not disturb the slender young symmetry of the jersey-clad body. And almond eyes, gazelle’s eyes, dark as the charred core of a charcoal pile, and hair like a Gypsy’s but brushed to the flat sheen of black marble. We had walked beside her the whole day on an excursion to Mariatal, a place of pilgrimage to which believers used to come from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire and perhaps from all over Europe (now it was a deserted and desolate forest valley) and I felt timid by her side, and most conversation topics seemed trivial and irrelevant. It was impossible to talk with her about the usual things, to have the sort of conversation where the words mean nothing or no more than the crowing of a rooster or the hooting of an owl calling to his mate from the crown of a pine tree. It seemed to me that with her one could only talk about ideas. She wasn’t the kind of girl you approach at a dance
and say, May I have this dance, miss? and then something about how good the band is and that’s a pretty dress she has on and what’s her phone number, and then you call that number and she either comes or she doesn’t, and if she comes you go dancing again, and then you don’t have to say much of anything any more, it’s just a matter of whether you have an apartment or a studio or even just a furnished room with a close-mouthed landlady, or if you have none of these, at least enough money for two rooms in a hotel. No, this girl was profound, a philosophy of life rested somewhere in the depth of her soul, and you had to talk about that philosophy — it was the only way you could get to her, there was no other way. Of course, the schoolteacher didn’t see that and he persisted with his noises, his vulgar expressions, crude conversational lines from common dance halls, the smart remarks of village Don Juans and small-town wolves; he trotted out the old tricks and clichés that call for an exact phrase, a precise response from a girl — like the Latin dialogue between priest and altar boy — in the eternal sexual ritual of establishing acquaintance, but she didn’t come back with those petrified responses, she was silent and just said Yes (she was Hungarian, she spoke a strange combination of Slovak and Hungarian and some Gypsy or Carpathian dialect) or No, and the schoolteacher soon exhausted his stock of tricks
and ploys and fell silent, plucked a blade of grass from the roadside, stuck it in his mouth and walked along chewing on it, defeated and mute with the grass sticking straight out of his mouth. Just then a huge dragonfly flew across the path and I asked the girl whether she knew that there were once dragonflies with a wingspan of two and a half feet. She voiced surprise and wonder that such a thing was possible, and I began to talk about the Mesozoic Age and the Cenozoic Age and about Darwin, about the world’s evolving, the blind and inevitable course of nature where the strong devour the weak and animals are born to seek food, procreate, and die, how there’s no significance to it, significance being a human term and nature a bare causal nexus, not a colorful, meaningful, mystical teleology. And that was when she told me I was mistaken, that nature does have significance, and life too. What significance? I asked, and she said, God. “All right, knock it off now,” said the schoolteacher. “Say, miss, don’t you feel like a beer? It’s hotter than hell today.” But she shook her head and I said, You believe in God? I do, she replied, and I said, There is no God. It would be nice if there were, but there isn’t. You haven’t come that far yet, she explained. You’re still a physical person, you’re still imperfect. But some day you’ll find Him. I, I said, am an atheist. I used to be an atheist too, she replied, until my eyes were opened. I discovered Truth. How did it
happen? I asked sarcastically, because she was slender like a dancer, and I knew dancers do go to church a lot and kneel and make the sign of the cross but they don’t believe in God, they don’t really think about God, they retain God as a superstition, the way they get someone to spit on them before they go on stage, before they don their professional smile and run out into the glow of the spotlights with their tiny little steps. When I got married, she said, and the schoolteacher, who had been walking alongside in silence chewing on a fresh piece of grass, awoke from his dumb stupor and said, “You’re married?” No, she replied. I’m a widow. But when I was married, I learned to believe. Your husband was religious? I asked. She shook her head. No, she said, he was very physical, he had nothing in him of spiritual man. “That makes you a young widow, eh?” said the teacher. “And would you like to get married again?” No, said Emöke (her name was Emöke, she was Hungarian, her father, a postal clerk, had made a career for himself in Slovakia when part of that country was annexed by Hungary before the war: he had been sent there as postmaster and had begun to live like a lord, with a piano, a salon, and a daughter at the lyceum who received private French lessons), I’ll never marry again. Why are you so determined? I asked. Because I have discovered that there can be more elevated aims in life, she replied. For
instance, you said that the eternal changing of shapes has no significance, that it’s all just cause and effect. That is the way it appears to you. But I see a significance in it that you don’t see yet. What sort of significance? I asked. It is all aimed toward God, she said. Toward becoming one with Him. That is the significance, the meaning of all life.