The Cowards (54 page)

We finished eating and started tuning up. The crowd around the bandstand became alert. Benno was in charge today, instead
of the orphaned Fonda, and Venca had his usual troubles with his trombone. Suddenly the people in the square were still. We stood and, like a priest lifting the chalice during mass, we put our horns to our mouths. Into the warm sun rays and into the shadows of the festive square we blew a theme we stole from the Cata Loma Band. We played it staccato and arrogantly, we blared the melody so that the burghers walking near the church turned towards us. I saw them shaking their heads, thinking ‘How can anyone listen to this?’ But those around the bandstand listened. No, not listened – they swallowed it, they absorbed it. Our band caught fire, we were roaring and swinging until we finished the number. When we sat down, we immediately burst into ‘Organ Grinder Swing’. The crowd around the bandstand started to move and in the next moment the plaza was full of jiving couples. I sat there on my chair looking out at the girls’ skirts twirling up and the silhouettes of the zootsuiters with their built-up shoulders swinging in the sunshine. Benno’s horn was aimed out over the dancers’ heads, the sun glinting on it, and Venca’s trombone slid in and out over people’s heads like the wand of the god of jazz and I just poked along modestly under the fast sharp ripples of Benno’s horn and I felt great. The sun was touching the roofs of the houses in the west and we sat there glittering in its rays, flashing our glorious music right back in its face. The sun was with us. Up on the hills the castle loomed, slanting across the blue sky. And the lovely Queen of Württemberg had driven off somewhere in her carriage, sleepy and bundled up in blankets, off and away to somewhere in Germany. I saw Mitzi down in the crowd, dancing with Prdlas, king of the zootsuiters, and Eva Manesova with Vorel, who wrote poetry, and over on the sidewalk I saw Rosta’s blond head and the rosy cheeks of Dagmar Dreslerova and Rosta had his arms around her. And I was all alone, sitting up there on the bandstand with my saxophone in my mouth. And then suddenly I saw Irena down below in a light blue dress and she smiled at me. Her smile pierced right through me and made my heart stop beating. She was dancing beautifully on her lovely legs and keeping Zdenek, who was grinning like an idiot and clumping around like an
elephant, a good arm’s length away. But he was still holding on. And I’d hoped they’d shot him. No such luck. He could go off and leave her a thousand times but he’d always turn up again. He’d always pop back up again like a demon or the devil, with his buckteeth and chapped lips and Irena would always drop everything and run right back to him. No. I was the one who, finally, had only dreamed and imagined how it would be, and he didn’t dream or even need to dream since he had it all right there. Finally, he was the only one who got anywhere with Irena, and she undressed for him and slept with him and loved him, and she was fond of me. Fond of me. That was all and there was nothing to be done about it. All I could do was to be grateful she was at least fond of me. I got up, gravely raised my sax to my lips and sobbed out a melody, an improvisation in honour of victory and the end of the war, in honour of this town and all its pretty girls, and in honour of a great, abysmal, eternal, foolish, lovely love. And I sobbed about everything, about my own life, about the SS men they’d executed and about poor Hrob, about Irena who didn’t understand and who was slowly but surely approaching her own destruction in some sort of marriage, about youth which had ended and about the break-up that had already begun, about our band which wouldn’t even get together like this again, about evenings when we’d played under kerosene lamps and about the world that lay ahead of us, about all the beautiful girls I’d been in love with – and I’d loved a lot of them, probably all of them – and about the sun. And out of the orange and saffron sunset clouds in the west a new and equally pointless life bent towards me, but it was good and I raised my glittering saxophone to face it and sang and spoke to that life out of its gilded throat, telling it that I’d accept it, that I’d accept everything that came my way because that was all I could do, and out of that flood of gold and sunlight, the girl bent towards me again, the girl I had yet to meet, and she caressed my cheek. The zootsuiters were dancing in front of the bandstand, kids I liked and whom I’d be leaving within the next few days since I’d be going away, going somewhere or other again, so I played for them and I thought about the same
things I’d always thought about, about girls and about jazz and about that girl I was going to meet in Prague.

Prague, October 1948 – Karlovy Vary,

September 1949

CZECH LEGION
:
Units of volunteers who fought against the Axis Powers on the Eastern and Western Fronts during the First World War.

P. L. DORUZKA
:
One of the most important writers and historians of jazz in Czechoslovakia; a principal organizer of the annual International Prague Jazz Festival.

ALOIS JIRASEK
(1851–1930):
Author of romantic novels with strong Czech nationalistic tendencies.

DR KRAMAR
:
One of the leading figures, together with Masaryk, in the Czech and Slovak independence movement during World War I. He subsequently became Czechoslovakia’s first prime minister. Kramar represented the interests of the industrial capitalists and later joined the coalition formed by the Agrarian and Social Democratic parties.

EMIL LUDVIK
:
Founder and leader, in 1939, of the first really swinging band in Czechoslovakia; founder and secretary of the Czechoslovak Society for Human Rights (1968–9), dissolved by the Czech Government during the post-Dubcek ‘reforms’.

MORAVEC
:
Minister of Education and Culture in the puppet government formed under the German Protectorate.

BOZENA NEMCOVA
(1820–62):
Novelist and short story writer closely associated with the nineteenth century Czech national renaissance movement. Her most widely read work is
Granny
.

OCTOBER 28TH
:
Czechoslovak independence day, commemorating the establishment of the republic and celebrated as a national holiday prior to February 1948.

SOKOL
:
A nationalistic physical culture organization.

LUDVIK SVAB
:
Guitarist of the Prague Dixieland Band founded in 1948 and still performing.

FRITZ WEISS
:
Jewish trumpet player and arranger for Emil Ludvik’s band incarcerated in Terezin where he formed a jazz band called ‘The Concentration Camp Swingers’. He died there.