THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  “That was swell, miss!” said the schoolteacher when she stopped singing, and he started to applaud. “Now how about a czardas, what do you say?” She laughed and really began to play a czardas, emphasizing the beat with her entire body, her eyes glowing but not with the shiny feverish glow that they had had earlier in the wood-paneled corner. The schoolteacher stepped away from the piano and, yelping, performed a clumsy mock czardas (missing the beat entirely, and stamping his feet out of rhythm too) and as he wriggled ludicrously in front of the piano, Emöke began to sing again. Her singing attracted the group that had been playing French Mail and the athletic young girls and boys from the Ping-Pong room, and soon people began to enjoy themselves; I had to sit down at the piano again and play popular hits and some of the girls and boys and the schoolteacher and Emöke began to dance. Emöke had changed, like a bright butterfly’s wing slipping out of a gray and mysterious cocoon, and this was she, not a legend but the real Emöke, for the primitive and unconscious schoolteacher had primitively and unconsciously found the right way to her buried heart and her path to the future; but I knew that path and future weren’t destined to be his, because he wasn’t interested in her future, just in the brief present of the week’s vacation, in a lecherous thrill and a lewd memory. I was the one who could follow that path, but I’d gone too far along the path of my own life to be able to throw myself into the future without stopping to think it over. The yellow piano keys didn’t want to return to their original position and I pounded them to produce song after song, watching her, and all of a sudden, like the schoolteacher, I began to desire that body, that slender, firm body, those breasts that didn’t disturb its symmetry. Yet I realized it was all very, very complicated; I knew that there’s a prescription for such fevers (and the schoolteacher would certainly prescribe it: sleep with her — it’ll solve everything) that is, by and large, an effective prescription, but I also knew that in Emöke’s case this particular goal, the physical act, would have to be preceded by something far finer and more complex than the schoolteacher’s technique, and that it wasn’t really a matter of the act at all but of the commitment that it represents, the act being merely a confirmation, a confirmation of the union that people conclude against life and against death, just the stigma of the act of creation which, if I wanted to, I might perhaps bring off; yet it wasn’t that act of confirmation I yearned for (it would mean years and years of my life and one knows that every enchantment finally dissipates over the landscapes of the past and all that remains is the present, everyday reality) but rather the body, the pleasant, unusual vacation adventure, the womanly secret between the girlish thighs; but that way, of course, if I didn’t take upon myself her whole life I would destroy her, and so as Emöke danced with the schoolteacher, I began to hate him with all my heart, this specimen who was not a man but a mere sum total of screws, and as for her, I was mad at her, a primitive masculine anger that she was dancing with him and so wasn’t what she had appeared to be until a while ago; although I didn’t agree with that world of hers created of desperate wishes, I still preferred it to the world of the schoolteacher.

  So that when we met on the stairs on the way to dinner, I asked her sarcastically why she showed so much interest in the schoolteacher since he was obviously a basely physical person; and she said innocently, I know, he is a physical man, I felt sorry for him. We must feel compassion for people as unfortunate as he, and I asked her whether she didn’t feel any compassion for me, after all I was physical too. Not entirely, she said. You at least have an interest in things spiritual, he doesn’t; suddenly she was again entirely different from the way she had been with the schoolteacher, that cloud from another world obscured her face, she sat down at the table with a monastic absence of mind, and the schoolteacher’s hungry glances went unnoticed as did the stares of the hot-shot, who was beginning to weaken although he still clung to his role of offended lover of solitude.

  The Cultural Guide announced that after dinner, at half past eight, there would be movies. Emöke went to her room and I went outside to the garden. It was damp, moldy, neglected. I sat down on a rotting bench wet through by the rain. Across from me stood the painted dwarf, his face rain-smudged, the tip of his nose knocked off, with a pipe between his teeth like the one my grandpa used to smoke; Grandpa used to have a dwarf like that in his garden too, with a pipe like that, and a white castle with lots of carved turrets and towers and real glass in the windows, and every spring he would paint the tin roof of the castle with red paint because at seventy-odd years the old man was still thrilled by the ideas that thrilled me when I was small, and thrilled me again at that moment when I remembered my grandfather’s little castle: I believed that the castle was real — small maybe, but real — and that perhaps sometimes the half-inch steps were climbed by a royal procession of people two inches tall, like Lilliputians, that there were chambers behind the real glass windows, and salons and banquet halls just as realistic as the castle itself; and then there was the fairy tale of Tom Thumb: I dreamed of being Tom Thumb, riding around in a car wound-up with a key, or sailing the bathtub in a little boat that when you poured some chemical into the stern sailed silently and regularly around the miniature ocean of the enameled bathtub. I stared at the ruddy, lecherous, beat-up ice of the clay dwarf and in a way it was me, myself, thirty years old, still single, mixed up in the affair with Margit, a married woman, a guy who didn’t believe in anything any more or take anything very seriously, who knew what the world was all about, life, politics, fame and happiness and everything, who was alone, not from incapacity but of necessity, quite successful, with a good salary and reasonable health, for whom life held no surprises and with nothing left to learn that I didn’t already know, at an age when the first minor physical problems begin to herald the passing of time, at an age when people get married at the last moment so as still to be able to have children and watch them grow up only to find out equally fast exactly what life’s all about, and she, pretty and still young, with a child, Hungarian and hence a fairly novel being, relatively unfamiliar, but then again old enough at twenty-eight, but with a child which I supposed would mean an entirely different lifestyle, and a foreigner, Hungarian, not too intelligent, slightly warped by that parapsychological madness, out to proselytize, but heaven knows how holy, the ideal object for a vacation adventure, nothing more than that, and yet with that terrible look of a little animal of the woods, with that immense self-destructive defense mechanism against the world, in a fog of mystical superstition. For her it was a matter of life and death, not a matter of a hot evening, a meadow soft enough to lie in comfortably, a few tried-and-tested words, a well-chosen moment when the desire of summer and the mood of the week’s vacation blend to form a favorable constellation of discarded inhibitions and the will to risk and to surrender; it was in fact a matter of a lifetime of love and self-sacrifice, or of death in the mist of mysticism, in the lunacy of midnight circles that meet around round tables and summon the spirits of their visions to come to earth, circles of faded middle-aged people, misfits, psychopaths, in this twentieth century still believing in goblins and the power of frog hair over cancer, recopying Satanic psalters and speaking backward the terrible black prayers of men who had sold their souls to the Prince of Darkness — men who didn’t die a natural death but were torn asunder by the Devil, their souls ripped out from the shreds of their bodies and the tatters of bone and flesh, broken ribs, gouged eyes, flayed skins, ripped out and carried off to the eternal fire in the rotting guts of hell — or praying piously and not eating meat and treating ailments resulting from the constant immobility of praying by placing copper circlets against their bare skin and kissing pictures of saints, although death should be desirable, since death is presumably the gateway to a more perfect plane of life, closer to the Divine and eternal Bliss; that’s what it was a matter of, not a matter of a single night but of all nights over many years, and not a matter of nights at all but of days and mutual care, marital love and good and evil unt
il death do you part. That’s what it was a matter of with that girl, that girl, that girl Emöke.

  But later, sitting in the darkened auditorium where the Cultural Guide was showing a film (after several vain attempts to make the projector work, and only after the silent fellow, who was perhaps a factory foreman, had taken over, adjusting a screw here and there, and the projector had rattled to a start), a film that was precisely calculated for the maximum possible nonentertainment (and yet the people were entertained, because it was a movie and the projector was rattling away behind their backs and they were here to spend a week enjoying themselves), and as the room vanished in the smoky dusk I took Emöke’s hand, warm and soft, and because tomorrow was the last day of our stay at the recreation center and I had to do something — or at any rate I succumbed to instinct or to that social obligation to seduce young women on vacation, single, married, or widowed — I asked her to come outside for a stroll. She acquiesced, I got up, she got up too and in the flickering of the projector I glimpsed the schoolteacher’s gaze following her as she left the room by my side and went out into the night light of the August evening outside the building.

  We walked through the night, along the white road between the fields, bordered by cherry trees and white milestones, the sweet smell of the blossoms and the countless voices of tiny creatures in the grass and the trees. I took Emöke’s hand, she didn’t object, I wanted to talk but I couldn’t think of anything to talk about. There was nothing I might say, since my conscience kept me from opening the dam that held back my usual August evening rhetoric (irresistible to any lone woman on vacation providing the speaker is sufficiently young and not overly ugly) because I once again realized that it was a matter of life and death and that she was different, deeper, more inaccessible than other girls. I merely stopped and said Emöke, she stopped too, and said Yes? and then I took her in my arms or I moved as if to take her in my arms, but she slipped out of the incomplete embrace. I tried again, I put my arm around her slender, very firm waist and drew her toward me but she disengaged herself, turned and walked quickly away. I hurried after her, took her hand and again she didn’t object, and I said Emöke, don’t be angry. She shook her head and said, I’m not angry. But really, I insisted. Really, she said. It’s just that I’m disappointed. Disappointed? I asked. That’s right, replied Emöke. I’d begun to think you were different after all, but you aren’t, you’re just a prisoner of your body like all men. Don’t be angry at me for it, Emöke, I said. I’m not angry, she answered, I know that men are usually like that. It’s not your fault. You’re still imperfect. I thought you were on the way, but you aren’t, not yet. Not quite. And what about you, Emöke, I said, have you entirely given up everything physical already? Yes, replied Emöke. But you’re so young, I said. Don’t you want to marry again? She shook her head. Men are all the same, she said. I thought that I might find someone, some friend that I could live with, but just as a friend, you know, nothing physical, it disgusts me — no, I don’t feel contempt for it, I know that physical people need it, there’s nothing essentially bad about it, but it’s derived from badness, from imperfection, from the body, from matter, and man progresses only by reaching toward the spirit. But now I’ve stopped believing that I’ll ever be able to find a friend like that, so I’d rather be alone, with my little girl. She spoke, and her face was like milk, lovely in the light of the stars and the moon and the August night. I said, You won’t find a friend like that. Not you. Not unless it’s someone like that consumptive gardener of yours, the one who used to lend you those books because he wasn’t capable of anything else — Don’t talk about him like that, she interrupted me, don’t be like that, please. But Emöke, really, I said, don’t you ever long for someone — I mean the way girls do when they’re as young as you and as pretty? Do you honestly think you could find a friend who wouldn’t want that of you unless he were a poor wretch, somehow disabled or crippled? Oh, but it’s not a matter of longing, Emöke replied. Everyone has temptation, but one must overcome it. But why? I said. What for? Longing needn’t be exclusively and solely physical. It can be an expression of love, a yearning for oneness. Longing is at the very source of existence, insofar as people are born of love. You love your little daughter, don’t you? And don’t you want to have any more children? You could have them, I’m sure of that. Do you want to give all that up, voluntarily? Emöke echoed, Give it up? Everything is the will of God, she said. But is God standing in your way? I asked. He gave you so much, more than other women. You are young, pretty, healthy, all men aren’t like that first husband of yours, not all marriages are based on reasons like yours. There are men who love their wives for more than just the physical side of marriage, even though that too is a part of love — But it’s not a part of true love, she exclaimed. True love is love of the soul. But how would you have children then? I asked. Or are you against children? Oh, no, she said, children are innocent and need love. But they’re burdened with sin, and woman must suffer for that sin when she brings them into the world. That doesn’t answer my question, I said, and besides, childbirth can be painless nowadays. But are you in favor of children being born at all? Wouldn’t it be better just to give it up and not keep bringing new objects of sin or whatever into the world, new beings burdened by matter and physicality, because that’s what most people are. Wouldn’t it be better to let people die out? No, she retorted quickly. It’s God’s will that they live. In His infinite goodness, God wants all people to find salvation. And all of them will, one day. But what do you mean by “all”? I said. And when will they all find salvation? Wouldn’t it be better to stop now, so that “all” would be “all those now living in the world”? No, no, no, she said. No, you don’t understand. You’re the one that doesn’t understand, I replied. You don’t understand your own self, you’re full of inconsistencies. You haven’t resolved a single thing for yourself, let alone thought about the logical flaws in your mystical system. Oh, what’s logic! she said. Just a subject in school. No, it’s everything, I answered. It’s your appealing to me terribly, it’s … my liking you a lot, and it’s my … Don’t say it, she whispered, ridding me of the need to pronounce that fatal set of words which in her case could not be taken back, which would carry its full meaning and not be just a vague promise to be broken or simply forgotten, because it was she, Emöke, that story, that legend, that poem, the past, the future.

  We were standing in front of the illuminated entrance to the recreation center. She stared at the dark shadows of the trees against the night, and the expression in her eyes was no longer that of a forest animal but of a woman fighting off the primal damnation that is the root of her feelings of inferiority and the source of her life-giving force, and that can in one red flash blind thought and reason although it may end up in — well, in all that painful business and possibly the shame of being an unwed mother and the worry and the risk of getting fat and losing one’s charms and one’s life and everything. But that damnation overcomes a woman all the same, and she gives in the way she’s always given in and always will give in, and it’s of this damnation that a new human being is born. Good night, said Emöke, reaching out to shake my hand. Emöke, I said, think about it. Good night, she said and disappeared inside the hotel. I caught a glimpse of her slender legs on the stairway and then nothing. For a while I stood in front of the hotel and at last I went upstairs to my room.

  The schoolteacher was lying in bed, his pants, shirt, shorts, socks, everything neatly hung up to air along the back of the chair and the foot of the bed. He was awake and he measured me with a mean look. “Well?” he said. I didn’t answer him, I sat down on my bed and began to undress. The schoolteacher watched me with eyes like two dried-up black figs. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said, “don’t tell me you’re going to sleep with a hard-on!” Aw, nuts, I said, turned off the light and lay down in bed. For a while there was silence. Then the schoolteacher said, “Seems to me that you’re a dud. That you don’t know how to handle women. Admit it!�
� Good night, I said. Beyond the window a rooster crowed, aroused from his night’s sleep by a bad dream.

  At the farewell party, I drank red wine and watched Emöke who was wearing a close-fitting summer dress with a white collar, her arms bare, dressed like any other attractive girl of her age. When the vacationers saw I was just sitting there drinking, they gradually grew bolder and asked her to dance (they hadn’t dared before, because according to the rules of vacationers she and I comprised a couple, and such a couple is a holy thing to these one- or two-week collectives), and so Emöke was constantly on the dance floor, one time with the Cultural Guide, who was only half sober, once with the hot-shot, who had given up sulking but hadn’t quite given up hope of living it up in what was left of his vacation (specifically with one of the four or five available girls in the group), once with the paunchy manager of the clothing store, whose pudgy wife observed her with the loving gaze of matrons who would never think of being jealous but who view young girls full of erotic charm as sort of mystical sisters in the delusive destiny of womankind, once with the leader of the jazz band, who didn’t dance or even put down his fiddle at any other time during the evening, and with several others, and I sat over my third glass of red wine, for I was possessed by the strange indecisiveness of a man who feels a sense of responsibility but is still too much a man of his times not to have to fight off indifference, frivolity, irresponsibility. Emöke, the wine rose slowly to my head, Emöke on the dance floor looked altogether different from the five or six other girls on the dance floor; she was the most graceful, youthful yet ripe, without the imperfection of the seventeen-year-old face that hasn’t yet made up its mind whether to trade in the loveliness of childhood for the shallow and uninteresting beauty of adulthood or for the charm of youth, the female charm of the age of courtship and the first natural swell of fertility; she laughed like they did, but hers was a deep alto laugh, and she danced with the natural assurance of women who know how to dance the way birds know how to sing or bees to make a honeycomb, the body of a dancer curving under the thin summer fabric of her August dress; I looked at her and a wave of longing and fondness for that desperate soul and, fortified by the wine, a longing for the body and the breasts swelled inside me until finally the wine which man substitutes for woman’s damnation (risking fatherhood, matrimony, his career, his whole life for the deception of a brief moment) released me from all bonds of reason and wisdom, and when I saw the schoolteacher, his eyes lit up like those of a witch’s torn cat, emerge from somewhere in the dark recesses of the hall and ask Emöke to dance and saw him dance with her, pressing close to her body, half a head shorter than she, a satyr with a satyr’s lecherous face but none of the mythic poetry, I rose and broke onto the dance floor with a drunkard’s energetic gait and cut in and took Emöke away from the schoolteacher. I hadn’t seen her since morning. I had spent the whole day in my room; the schoolteacher had taken off but I had stayed in, dozing and thinking about that girl, about all the possibilities and my own insecurity and indecisiveness, but now I was with her, holding her around the waist as I had last night only she wasn’t pulling away from me this time, and I had the wine in my head and her eyes had lost their mystical mildness, the cloistered resignation of anaesthetized passions, and they were the eyes of a Hungarian girl, like stars over the puszta, and the inner rhythm that yesterday had made the keys of the old piano tremble now flowed through her slender legs and was transformed at her hips into the circular motion of a prelude to love.