Soon after, her husband was killed. After the Communist coup in February 1948 they nationalized his hotel, then his farm, and then they arrested him; he escaped, but they shot him as he tried to swim the Danube to Austria. She got a job in an office and learned bookkeeping, becoming a good bookkeeper; she went to live in Košice with her little girl (her parents were both dead) and she wanted to raise her little girl in the truth that she herself had discovered.
She lent me some of those books. They were bound collections of various parapsychological and theosophical journals; I found an article on the powers of amulets and the effectiveness of copper circlets which, when worn on the naked skin at the perihelion of Mars, will protect the wearer from rheumatism and bleeding, and I asked her whether it didn’t seem strange to her that people who place so much emphasis on the spirit should be so concerned with the body since three quarters of those theosophical formulas concerned protection against disease, and whether she believed it all. She replied that at each stage of one’s existence one must obey the laws that come from God, and the laws of physical existence call for attention to one’s physical well-being. And as for the formulas, she asked how I could admit I had never tried them yet claim I doubted their effectiveness. So you too, she said, are imperfect and reject the truth, everyone rejects the truth, but in the end everyone will discover it, because God is Mercy. And with those words, a curious look came into her eyes, a flash of anxiety, as if she were afraid I wanted to rob her of something, of the certainty she possessed and without which she couldn’t survive, couldn’t bear the burden of her widowhood, the burden of death and of a sad, destroyed life; it was the expression of an ensnared little woodland animal, begging you with its eyes not to torture it and let it go, to release it from your power.
The schoolteacher asked me how I was making out. I knew that I had her, like the little animal in the woods, strangely in my power, the way men sometimes capture women without deserving to and without really trying, by the simple inscrutable effect of attraction and submission, but I didn’t understand it the way I had at other times, or as I did with the ordinary, erotic, and uncomplicated Margit; this time it was as if the invisible nerves that linked us were nourishing some sort of drama, some possible fulfillment that might wipe out the desperate and vicious illusion which had made of that slender body and that lovely face and those delicate dancer’s breasts and that creative force a chimerical existence imprisoned in a vicious circle.
The schoolteacher frowned, growled, and rolled over in bed so hard that the springs creaked.
Two days before our week’s vacation was due to end, it rained, and the vacationers played Ping-Pong or cards or sat around in the dining room, chatting about things, trying for a while to find someone to play the piano; the Cultural Guide awoke from the previous day’s drunkenness and tried to bring the group together with some game he called French Mail, but the only ones he could interest were an old married couple: he, paunchy, with baggy knee-breeches, a former owner of a haberdashery, now manager of a state-owned clothing store in Pardubice, and she, fat, benign, at fifty still emitting the naïve peeps of surprise that she used to emit at eighteen on the merry-go-round: she always revived at lunchtime, not out of gluttony but because food was the only thing she understood, otherwise she moved through life in a mist, guided by the light of secure conventions, maternal admonitions, dancing lessons, nice boys carefully picked by her parents, courtship, marriage, two or three births, and Sunday mass (but if anyone were to ask her about even the most basic theological terms, she wouldn’t know what to say, she simply went to mass, sang the hymns in the hymnal, genuflected, beat her breast, made the sign of the cross with the tips of her fingers moistened in holy water, and had requiem masses served in memory of her late mother); her kitchen too was an island of security where she became an artist, a virtuoso with absolute pitch for tastes and odors, like a violinist can tell a quarter tone and even an eighth, not rationally but intuitively, with a sense that others don’t have and can’t have, something that isn’t the result of the five or seven years of apprenticeship in a mother’s kitchen but a gift of grace, a piece of immortality given to a person in addition to the simple ordinary skills and the sleepy brain with its few stunted thoughts, and a heart submerged in lard, capable of no dishonesty or evil, capable only of an animal love for its young, its spouse, its family, for people, for life, and of resignation to death — the last of those beacons of security that border the path from the first moment of awakening in the mists of life. Then the Cultural Guide also found an old seamstress for the game, an old maid, a worker laureate of the state enterprise called Gentlemen’s Linens, who was spending her first vacation away from her home in Prague’s working-class Žižkov district, and who had spent the entire week so far sitting around, standing around, walking around, not knowing what to do, with nothing to talk about because she didn’t know anyone there and in all her life hadn’t known anything but men’s shirts, had never known a man and love, had lived frozen between the prose of shirts and the primitive poetry of the dreams of old maids. He also got hold of a pimply young hot-shot who had tried in vain the first three days to gain the affections of a pig-tailed Slovak girl, who in turn had given preference to a black-haired technician, a former gunner in the R.A.F., who had a wife and child at home but had learned the art in which the schoolteacher would never be more than a rank amateur and had taken it to the very pinnacle that that limited art could ever reach, and the hot-shot had got riled, retreating to the stubborn solitude of the recreation hall along with his striped socks and his black silk shirt, and now, sulky and defiant, he had been half talked into playing the game of French Mail. And finally the Cultural Guide had rooted out an uncertain, silent man who may have been a foreman in a factory or something but who never said a word to anyone, and with these people — people dominated by both the feeling of being obliged to enjoy themselves for a whole week, for the duration of this cheap if not entirely free vacation, and a feeling of helplessness as to how to go about it since they had all fallen victim to the fallacy that on vacation you can enjoy yourself in a manner different from the one to which you are accustomed, people who knew nothing but work, and for whom work was as essential as air and food, and who had been suddenly called upon to live the life of men and women from a bygone era, men and women unfamiliar with work: wives of wealthy businessmen, of officers, physicians, stockbrokers, sons of rich fathers, or tanned daughters of the sweet bourgeoisie for whom free time was all the time and amusement a vocation that they understood — and now, with these people burdened with the onus of vacationing, the Cultural Guide, with his hangover, and a cup of black coffee in his hand, began a collective game in order to maintain the impression of his productivity, the illusion of having honestly earned the twelve hundred crowns of his monthly pay.
The schoolteacher lolled around the Ping-Pong room, glaring across the green table and through the glass wall into the dark, wood-paneled corner where I was sitting on a bench with Emöke; then he and a bespectacled self-taught Ping-Pong player played a game, the schoolteacher executing pseudo-virtuoso drives and smashes, most of them ending up in the net, but when once in a while he pulled something off after all, he would stab his hungry gaze in Emöke’s direction to see if she was looking, and, taking long shots with the elegance of a life-guard, low and easy, with an expression of bored pity, he beat the pants off the bespectacled enthusiast who played for fun and not for effect but lacked all talent for the game and kept chasing balls under the pool tables into all corners of the room.
I sat with Emöke in the dim light of the wood-paneled corner, drinking a toddy — although Emöke had Chinese tea because one shouldn’t drink alcohol, alcohol debases one to the lowest level of physical being, transforms one back to the animal that one once was — and she talked about medical treatment by Paracelsus’s methods, about trees that take upon themselves the diseases of men, just a small cut on a fingertip, a drop of blood pressed into a cut in the bark of
a tree, and a bond is formed, a fine thread of delicate and invisible matter by means of which the man remains forever joined to the tree, as he remains forever joined to everything that ever left his body, a fallen hair, a breath, a clipped fingernail, and the illness travels along that thread to the tree and the tree fights the illness and overcomes it or sometimes perishes and dries up, but the man regains his health and his strength and lives on. She told about possession by evil spirits, exorcism by means of holy water and prayers, about black magic and evil powers that serve a person if he has the courage to stand in the center of concentric circles inscribed with the secret names of the Supreme One and intone evil prayers from the Satanic psalter, backward, and she told about werewolves, vampires, haunted houses, and witches’ sabbaths and her spirit stumbled in those dangerous worlds that you don’t believe in and you laugh at, but once you have heard of them there is always a tiny drop of horror in you, terror and fear. She forgot about me and I was silent, she talked on and in the gray light of the rain her eyes shone with a sort of feverish, unhealthy, unnatural enthusiasm, and I was silent and watched those eyes and she noticed it and the feverish shine faded and I shook off the strange evil enchantment of that magic rainy moment too, made a sarcastic face and said, You don’t mean to say you want to devote yourself to black magic? Why, it’s the epitome of Evil and you’re striving to attain Goodness. And she dropped her gaze and said, Not any more I don’t want to, but once I did. When? I asked. When I couldn’t stand it any more, she replied, when I began to feel God didn’t hear me, that He’d turned against me. I wanted to ask the Evil One for help, to — to help me get rid of him. And did you? Did you make those concentric circles with consecrated chalk? I asked. No, she said, God was protecting me. I understand now that God is constantly testing man, and many people don’t pass the test. But why does He test them? I asked. To see if man is worthy of the supreme grace of being delivered from everything physical, to see if he’s ready. But man never asked God to create him, I said. By what right does God test him? God has the right to do anything, she said, because God is Love. Is He supremely merciful? I asked. Yes, she said. Then why did He create man? Because He loved him, she said. And why did He create him, then? Why did He send him into this world full of suffering? To test him, to see if he is deserving of His grace, she explained. But isn’t He torturing him that way? I asked. Why didn’t He just leave him alone from the outset, if He loves him? Or, once he created him, why didn’t He go ahead and create him perfect right off? Ready for eternal bliss? Why all the martyrdom of the pilgrimage from Matter to Spirit? Oh, you’re still imperfect, she said. You reject the truth. I don’t reject it, I said, but I want to have proof. And if not proof, then at least logic. Logic is also the work of God, she said. Then why doesn’t God use logic Himself? He doesn’t have to, she said. Some day you will understand. Some day everyone will understand and everyone will be saved. But don’t talk about it any more, please, she said, and her eyes again had the look of a little animal in the woods, afraid of losing that one certainty of forest freedom; so I stopped talking about it and went over to the piano; Emöke came and leaned against the top and I began to play “Riverside Blues,” which she liked, and then I sang “St. James Infirmary,” and the schoolteacher came over from the light and darkness of the Ping-Pong room and stood behind Emöke and I was singing
I went down to Saint James Infirmary
For to see my baby there
Stretched out on a cold white table
So sweet, so cold, so fair.
And the pentatonic melody born of that basic human sorrow that can only end in a convulsive lament — the sorrow of two people who are parting ways forever — slid into Emöke’s heart and she said, That’s a beautiful song. What is it? It’s a Negro blues, I replied, and Emöke said, Yes, I’ve heard that Negro people are very spiritual people, I heard them sing some religious songs on a record, one of the men at the office has records from America. Ah, I said, blacks are lecherous rascals, but they’ve got a great sense of music. It just seems they’re that way, she retorted. They are spiritual people. And I played and sang some more, and when I had finished, the schoolteacher said, “Come on, beef it up a little and put some life into it, a little jive so we can cut a rug, right, miss? This is Dullsville, not a vacation!” So Emöke laughed and told me to give up my place at the piano, and she sat down and started to play with sure, naturally harmonizing fingers, a slow but rhythmical song that held the distant echo of a czardas, the pulse of Hungarian music as unmistakable as the blue notes in Negro blues, and she sang in an alto that sounded like the level tone of a shepherd’s flute, that cannot be modulated, strengthened or weakened, sure and straight and with a primitive beauty; she sang in hard sweet Hungarian a song that was neither sad nor happy but just desperate, her cheeks flushed, and the song wasn’t the chanting of a black magician in concentric chalk circles but the call of a shepherd on the steppe, ignorant of black sabbaths and black masses, living a natural life on sheep’s milk and cheese, sleeping in a wooden shack, aware of a few superstitions but not associating them with God or the Devil, possessed once in his life by such an insurmountable longing that he goes off and sings this desperate, yearning, level, unmodulated loud song in his unmodulated and sweetly hard language and finds a mate and with her conceives new shepherds and lives on, eating cheese and whey by his evening fire, among the smell of hides and charcoal in his shack. And then I realized that that vulgar exhortation of the adulterous schoolteacher had liberated her as if by magic from the spectral world of things spiritual, and that this song sprang from the immense sensuality in her, but I also knew it was just the schoolteacher’s words, not the schoolteacher himself, and suddenly I understood the catharsis toward which her drama was progressing, the fact that the Evil One in her life was that middle-aged owner of the hotel and the farm who had driven her into the realm of dangerous shades, into the unreal but frightening world of specters, so that she was now seeking the Supreme Good, Love, spiritual, nonphysical, divine; but that perhaps it would take very little for all that warped symbolism of obscure parapsychological magazines to be turned upside down by a strange, incomprehensible, and yet entirely comprehensible, flip of the soul, that the Good and the Supreme could perfectly well be me, that maybe that’s what I already was, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself, even if she didn’t realize it yet, that maybe I was there already, in the deep, unknown cellar rooms of her unconscious, or at least getting there and at one stroke I might now be able to change the story, the legend, I might really become the Supreme One, the Creator, and create something human of this beautiful shade retreating slowly and surely into the mists of madness, that this mind was still capable, though not for much longer, of turning from its blind alley of uncertain imagery back onto the firm track of things concrete — but not for much longer, soon it would be lost in the twilight of the fogs that rise from terra firma and, having lost all knowledge of the law of gravity and all corollaries to that law, swoop according to the law of fogs to the abyss of senseless heights, possessing their own truth which is not a lie because it is simply another world and there is no communicating between this world and that one: a girl becomes a woman and a woman a crone, closing herself off in that world, encased in a network of wrinkles, her womb wasted and her soul slowly becoming a mournful litany of cracked old voices in the musty Gothic corridor from this world to the next, of which we know nothing and which perhaps is nothing.
THE BASS SAXOPHONE Page 4