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.
The 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 sile
nt, 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.
Between believers and nonbelievers there is no communication, there is a wall, a steel barrier against which understanding shatters. I did what I could to explain to her that significance and meaning, and the sense of design which people attribute to the blind activity of nature, are merely human concepts, that that was what I’d been trying to say, that meaning is an anthropomorphic idea born of the awareness that every human activity has “meaning” of one sort or another: we cook so that we may eat, go on vacation to relax, brush our teeth so they won’t decay — and then we carry over this idea of purpose to nature where we feel that it is lacking; but she just smiled at all my logic and my rationale and my helpless fury (it wasn’t an angry fury, just a desperate fury at the fact that I couldn’t convince her of such obvious truths, that there was something in her, an ability or an inability, something beyond logic, that proudly resisted reason) and she replied to it all with a mild, calm, almost sublime smile and the words, You are simply a physical person. You are still imperfect. So I asked her whether she didn’t feel hatred for me or contempt that I was an atheist, and she shook her head and said, I pity you. Why? Because you may have to live many lives before you become perfect. And before you find the truth. Many lives? I asked. Yes, replied Emöke. Because you must become a spiritual person before you see the truth. “You mean you believe in reincarnation, miss?” asked the schoolteacher. It doesn’t matter what it is called, she said. You needn’t even use the name God. Words don’t matter. But you must know the Truth.
We entered the forest valley of Mariatal where the little white pilgrims’ church stood deserted, the broad lane of deserted booths leading up to it, smelling of rotting wood. The plank-top counters where gingerbread hearts were once stacked in piles beside holy pictures and mirrors with pictures of the shrine, and the decaying beams from which black, white, and pink rosaries had hung alongside silver and gold madonnas on chains, miniature fonts for holy water with pictures of the Mother of God, tin crucifixes, wooden ones with tin Christs, carved ones and plain ones, blessings for cottage parlor walls, pictures of the Virgin of Mariatal, pictures of saints and wax figurines, and beside them a booth where a fellow in a white apron with a fez on his head would chop slabs of Turkish honey-nougat into sticky sweet flakes, and a little farther on, a stand with chenille scarves, cotton stockings and glass jewelry, and a stand for sausages and another booth with holy pictures; and peasants in black suits and black hats wiping their sweaty faces with red bandannas, their black, laced boots dusty from the long trek, and little old ladies in white Sunday kerchiefs, and tired children, and weary couples who had come here to say a prayer for the success of their young marriage or the conception that was long in coming, and old people for a happy final hour, the sound of organ music coming from the church, and the sound of singing, the path curving up the hillside through the woods, bordered by little white chapels with wooden altars displaying hand-painted scenes from the lives of the saints, now long faded and peeling, aged by many rains and the hard heat of summer; and the Cultural Guide, his hairy, spindly legs protruding from his shorts, climbed up on to the steps of one of the chapel pavilions (that first evening he would expound on his plans for our recreation, but the second night he got drunk and the third day he was sleeping it off and the last evening at the farewell party he drank himself speechless and rolled under the platform where the musicians tipped the spit out of their saxophones onto him) and began to lecture us about the pilgrimages that used to come here — it was immediately apparent that he was totally ignorant not only of the Catholic Church, its dogma, liturgy, tradition, and catechism, and of Biblical history, but of everything in general; he made a joke about sterile women and impotent men coming here to Mariatal to pray for the restoration of their juices, and then he waxed serious and launched into an expose of religion, a splendid mishmash of the most desperate vulgarization of Engels, science premasticated for narrow minds — presented to us to salve his own conscience for the twelve-hundred-crown salary he was paid each month — not science popularized for the unschooled though spontaneously intelligent mind of the workingman, but rather cheap half-truths and quarter-truths for parasitical leeches who don’t give a damn about truth, not science but pseudo-science, cut-rate science, a derision and an insult to science, not truth but stupidity, a lack of sensitivity, a lack of feeling, a thick-skinned denseness impervious to the arrows of that tragically desperate poetry of a desperate dream that is to come to pass only in the hereafter of the utopian world of future wisdom (in the absence of drunken bums who feel a revulsion for manual labor and make a living by spouting ill-learned phrases memorized from tour-guides to ancient castles), the poetry of sunny pilgrimages with the voice of the organ underscored by the wail of paper whistles, and the smell of evergreens and pine needles mingling with the sweet smell of incense, and little altar boys in red and green collars, their lace-up boots poking out from under their robes, fervently bobbing the smoking censers, and the loveliness of the forest and its light and shadow and the call of the cuckoos parting to the stride of the priest dressed in
gold who lifts the shining monstrance with the glowing white circle (the most perfect plane figure of the ancient Greeks) in its glittering center and holds it suspended over the bowed heads in kerchiefs and the gray hair of old farmers so that it seems to float on wisps of smoke from the burning incense, flooded by the glow of sun and forest light like a symbol of that eternal human longing and hope which will be realized here and on this earth, but which is unattainable, unthinkable without this poetic folk faith in the goodness which rules the world in the long run, faith in love, faith in justice; a faith, hope, and love that had never entered the mind of this drunken, vulgar, dense Cultural Guide.
In our room that night the schoolteacher said to me, “Seems to me you’re not very good at handling women. That’s no way to go after a broad. Religion and dinosaurs? At that rate you’ll never get her to bed within the week, you can bet your life on it.”
Later, Emöke told me about him. The schoolteacher had got up early and prowled around under her window, baring his yellow teeth at her, yelling his wisecracks up to her whenever she appeared at the window to take down the white socks she washed each evening and hung out below on a taut string to dry. The schoolteacher rutted under the window while she gave him a cool and polite good morning, and he made his proposition, “Don’t you want to flush out your lungs, miss, the woods are full of ozone of a morning!” and she shook her head and told him No and he went off by himself and then all day he circled around her, his eyes glowing in his self-indulgent face, his brain chewing the cud of the few ideas at his command, not ideas, conversational stereotypes, and from time to time he would come up to her, pull one out and lay it on her, and having failed go off again, his eyes still glowing, observing her hungrily from a distance, circling around her like a ruffled rooster around an inaccessible hen from another barnyard. She told me her story, her legend. It was like the confidences that prostitutes are said to impart to their clients of girlhoods in aristocratic households, the fall and the poverty and the sorrowful selling of one’s body. She told me how they had stayed in Slovakia after the war, about her Hungarian father, a small-time official and a fascist, who had been a supporter of the Nazis and was destroyed after the war, no pension, no livelihood, too old and sick to take a job digging ditches or cutting down trees, and her mother, broken and loathing physical work, and herself, sixteen, in her sixth year at the Hungarian lyceum that the Slovaks closed down, when along came this man, the owner of a farm, and vineyards, he was rich, forty-five, with a hotel in Bratislava, and she had given in to him to save her family from misery or death by starvation or old age in the poorhouse, he was overbearing, mean, dense, he didn’t believe in anything, God, democracy, human decency, nothing, just himself, and he wanted a son to inherit his farm and hotel and vineyards, but he wasn’t prejudiced, he didn’t mind that she was Hungarian. She bore him a daughter and that day he stormed out and drank himself dumb, he didn’t speak to her for a week and then he began to beat her when he was drunk; that was when a hearty, hard-drinking bunch began to meet at the farm, cars would drive up from Bratislava, from Košice, from Turčanský Svatý Martin, there were meetings in his study and he became a member of a right-wing party, but she didn’t pay any attention and when he came to her at night, his breath stinking like a wine cellar, he would force her to do what for him might still have been pleasure but for her was suffering and shame; as she got to know this man with the bull neck and the heavy breath, she also discovered her Truth: she had met another man, a gardener who had tuberculosis and who later died, and he lent her books about the path to God, the developing of one’s spiritual strength, the spiritual universe and life beyond the grave, and she came to believe that everything here is nothing but one immense process of purging oneself of the stain of evil, and evil is matter and man must purge himself of matter, of the body, of desire, his goal must be the spirit, but not even that, for the spirit is just another stage, a higher stage than the physical one, and the ultimate aim is to reach God, to become one with Him, to dissolve one’s own self in the infinite horizon of bliss that radiates mystical divine Love and Goodness.
THE BASS SAXOPHONE Page 3