THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  Overnight, the wine and the wisdom, the awareness or the vacation infatuation or whatever it was, evaporated and I awoke to the cold sober reality of Sunday morning, my imminent departure for Prague, my office, my colleagues, my pitiful affair with Margit and all the rest. The schoolteacher lay snoring on the other bed, his shorts, his shirt, everything carefully hung up to air again. I didn’t say a thing. He disgusted me, for all the hygiene of his clean underwear, because the grime of his soul couldn’t be aired out of his jockey shorts, his trousers or his shirt; he wasn’t even human, just living breathing filth, an egotist, a lecher, an idiot, an enemy.

  I didn’t say a thing to him. He might have even denied it. It wouldn’t have proved anything, and I wouldn’t have achieved anything by an angry confrontation. I was silent. Yet in fact my time was coming, my moment of revenge — the only possible revenge, for it wounded him where he was most vulnerable, a revenge that he dug for himself like a grave, and into which he lowered himself helplessly.

  But maybe it was Fate, the miller, the avenger, tyrant, friend, and lord who provided the means on that train rolling through the ripe August landscape, in pursuit of the curving track of the eternal sun, eternal within the bounds of human eternity, its shiny, reddening glory lighting up the faces in the compartment like kerosene lamps, transforming them into golden portraits: a childless couple of about thirty (a technical draftsman and his wife, who was a clerk at the State Statistical Agency), the taciturn factory foreman, the hot-shot, the manager of the clothing store, his wife, myself, and the schoolteacher. And the game began. It was the idea of the draftsman and his wife. They often played it; they had no children and they killed time by paying visits to other childless white-collar couples — every Thursday the wife played bridge and he played poker, and since they were members of a Hiking Club they would also go every Sunday in spring to a chalet in Skochovice where they played volleyball with the people from the neighboring chalets, and other games, when it grew dark, such as this familiar parlor game. It has a hundred names and like chess is played by everyone at some time or another; but this parlor game is more human than the empty and perverted feudal logic of chess which sucks so much energy from the human brain for the sake of the silly movement of bizarre figurines: here one person goes out of the room while the others decide on a certain object, person, animal, the Pope, Mars, the fruit preserves in one of the suitcases, or even the player himself (the one who went out of the room) and then they let him back in and he must eliminate everything, progressively and by using indirect questions requiring affirmative or negative replies, until by logic he arrives at the thing or the animal or person. The draftsman went out, and the clothing-store manager — as often happens with people who once in their lives stumble on something unusual, something which brightens their dull world of daily routine and polite clichés with a ray of wit, and which they’ll then repeat at every possible opportunity — suggested that we choose him, the draftsman himself, as our subject, but the hot-shot, with little consideration for the man’s feelings, declared that everybody does that and any fool would guess it right off; his own suggestion was that we take the Pope’s left shoe as the subject. But the draftsman’s wife decided that too few attributes of the object were known, such as the material, the shape, the color, and so forth. “No,” she said. “We have to use something easier, so the ones who’ve never played the game will see how it’s done.” The schoolteacher and the wife of the clothing-store manager had declared they didn’t know the game. The manager’s wife was probably telling the truth, but not so the schoolteacher. I looked at him; he had the expression of a fat man forced to be It in a game of tag, totally at the mercy of slimmer players and destined to plod heavy and wheezing among human bodies tauntingly flitting past until someone takes pity on his helplessness and allows himself to be caught. He was lying. Obviously and visibly. He knew how to play the game. But he probably didn’t like to play it. I knew why some people didn’t like to play it. Not fat people, people who are slow in other ways. He was nervous. Then he noticed I was looking at him and suggested his suitcase, to keep up appearances.

  “No,” said the draftsman’s wife, “that would be too easy. How about the Ping-Pong table in the recreation center?”

  The draftsman was called in and he started with a query as to the concrete or abstract nature of the object.

  “It’s concrete,” said his wife. A second later, the schoolteacher nodded. The wife of the clothing-store manager looked at the draftsman’s wife with an uncertain questioning smile. Her eyes showed as much intelligence as those of the schoolteacher, but they lacked the nervousness. She displayed only wondering ignorance.

  “Is it in Czechoslovakia?” asked the draftsman.

  “It is,” replied the schoolteacher, the manager’s wife, and the hot-shot in unison.

  “Is it in Prague?” asked the draftsman.

  “No,” replied the chorus, this time without the schoolteacher.

  “Is it in K.?” asked the draftsman. (K. was the place we had just left, where the recreation center was.)

  “No,” replied the schoolteacher quickly.

  “Oh, but it is!” the wife of the clothing-store manager corrected him with wondering reproof. “We said it’s the —”

  “Shhh, Mrs. M.!” exclaimed the draftsman’s wife. “Yes, it’s in K.,” she told her husband.

  “Then why did you say it wasn’t?” the manager’s wife asked, in the petulant voice of the naïve. “When it really is?”

  “I just wanted to mix him up a bit,” said the schoolteacher.

  “But that’s against the rules,” said the draftsman’s wife. “It wouldn’t work that way.”

  “That’s just what makes it exciting,” he replied.

  “Oh, no,” said the draftsman’s wife. “The point of the game is in having to answer truthfully, but in not being able to ask directly. So it’s up to the person to show how smart he is at asking indirect questions.”

  “But if he gets a little mixed up it would be much more fun,” said the schoolteacher.

  “And then how would you want him to guess what it is, smartaleck?” asked the hot-shot. “You just wait till you’re the one asking questions.”

  “All right, let’s go on,” said the draftsman’s wife.

  “Is it in the recreation center building?” continued the draftsman, and then with several practiced questions he determined what the object was. To someone new at the game it looked almost like clairvoyance, but it was simply the result of logic and experienced instinct. All the same, some were surprised.

  “You really are clever, Mr. N.!” exclaimed the store manager’s wife.

  “It’s not cleverness,” the draftsman replied modestly, “you just have to ask the right questions, from the general down to the specific, and in a little while you’ve got it.”

  Then it was the hot-shot’s turn. I suggested as a subject Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. Some voices were raised in opposition — the store manager’s wife because she didn’t know who Armstrong was, and the schoolteacher who didn’t know either — but my suggestion was accepted in the end all the same. I had to answer most of the questions myself. The road to success was not an easy one for the hot-shot’s foggy mind, but once he had determined the approximate size of the object and had ingeniously asked whether you could use it for something, and then thought of asking if it was in Czechoslovakia and then if it was on the earth, and after the third question in this series (Was it in America? since in addition to Czechoslovakia, where he was obliged to live, and the earth, where we are all obliged to live, he knew and loved and was interested in just one other place in the world) he was suddenly inspired or perhaps the focus of his interests suggested the question and he asked if it was used to play on. As soon as he was told that it was, he was home free. By precise reasoning, resulting from his scale of values and his devotion to this love that was, apart from himself, his sole raison d’être, he determined that it was a brass instrument, that
this instrument was the property of an outstanding jazz musician, that this musician was black, and then victoriously but also piously he pronounced the name, the whole name, as if he were pronouncing a long and awe-inspiring royal title: Louis Satchmo Dippermouth Armstrong.

  I looked at the schoolteacher. He glanced at his watch and was silent. When the hot-shot made his guess, the schoolteacher suggested hoarsely that we play something else.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” said the hot-shot insolently. “Not until everybody gets a turn!”

  “Yes,” said the wife of the clothing-store manager.

  “And how about your taking a turn now, Mrs. M.?” said the draftsman’s wife.

  “Who, me?” asked the wife of the store manager.

  “Well?”

  “But I don’t know how!” exclaimed the fat lady.

  “But it’s easy,” said the draftsman’s wife. “You’ll catch on.”

  “Oh, golly, I’ll never get it!” said the fat lady and raised her hands to her lips. “Oh, gosh, I don’t know how!” She shook her head in the panic of simple women, inexorably convinced they are dumb, ignorant of the wisdom of life that is in them. Everyone started to persuade her. The fat lady kept shaking her head, until finally she began to thaw. “But I don’t know,” she kept saying, “I won’t know what to ask.”

  “Oh, go on, lady,” the hot-shot urged. “We’re each as stupid as the next one here, right?” He turned to me.

  I laughed and looked at the schoolteacher. He had not joined in the persuading. “Oh, go ahead, Mrs. M.,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen to you.”

  “Well, if you say so,” said the store manager’s wife rising with difficulty, and with difficulty pressed her way between the knees in the compartment and went outside. Through the glass door, you could see her broad, benign and sweetly simple face puckered in an effort to catch something of the conversation inside.

  The group in the compartment decided on a sack of coffee that the lady’s husband told us she had in her suitcase. The manager’s wife was let in, she giggled, sat down heavily, and opened her mouth.

  After much visible effort, she asked, “Wha — what is it?”

  “You can’t ask like that, Mrs. M. You have to ask questions like my husband did, or Mr. P. here,” said the draftsman’s wife, nodding toward the hot-shot.

  “But I don’t know how, like that,” implored the fat lady.

  “Come on. Try it. Slowly,” the draftsman’s wife soothed her. The fat lady concentrated. Beads of sweat formed on her oily skin and ran down her round cheeks, and after a long moment of intense effort, she blurted out, “Is it here?”

  “See how easy it is,” said the draftsman’s wife. “Yes, it’s here in the compartment.”

  The fat lady looked around. Her little eyes, half lost in the simple face, so simple that the simplicity was almost a decoration, drifted from object to object, from person to person, rested on the hot-shot’s yellow-and-black leather suitcase, the portable radio of the draftsman’s wife, the introverted face of the factory foreman, my nylon socks, and finally on the pale face of the schoolteacher, who glared back venomously.

  “Is it — is it something to eat?”

  “Yes!” exclaimed the chorus. The manager’s wife smiled happily.

  “So I guessed it!” she said.

  “Yes,” said the draftsman’s wife, “but you still have to keep on guessing.”

  “How come?” wondered the fat lady.

  “So far, you’ve only guessed the nature of the thing, but you still don’t know what it is.”

  “What nature?” said the manager’s wife, bewildered.

  “Like you know it’s something to eat, but like you don’t know what it is,” explained the hot-shot.

  “Ah,” said the lady and looked around again. “But there isn’t anything to eat here.”

  “It doesn’t have to be something you can see, does it?” said the draftsman. “It can be put away somewhere.”

  “But how am I supposed to guess it if it’s put away somewhere?” asked the fat lady.

  “That’s why you’ve got to ask questions,” said the draftsman’s wife.

  “Questions?”

  “That’s right. You have to find out exactly where in the compartment it is.”

  “Exactly?” The wife of the clothing-store manager looked pleadingly at the draftsman’s wife.

  “Well, you have to find out if it’s on the floor or on the seat or in the luggage rack —”

  “Is it in a suitcase?” the manager’s wife interrupted her.

  “It is!” came the chorus.

  “So it’s doughnuts!” exclaimed the fat lady delightedly. Whereupon she was shattered to discover that she was mistaken. Then she named the edible contents of her suitcase item by item, disregarding protests that you can’t ask direct questions, until she guessed it. She glowed with pride. “I guessed it,” she said blissfully, and cast her ingenuous smile on the entire company.

  “You see!” said the draftsman’s wife. The fat lady clasped her husband’s arm and said, “Goodness, this game is fun!”

  My moment had come. It was as if I could feel Emöke’s presence, somewhere in another train compartment and yet almost here, sitting terribly alone, surrounded and harassed again by the spirits of chalk circles, returning to the world of her past, to the fearful solitude of that Hungarian ultima Thule, condemned there forever to the superstitions of the consumptive gardener and to nightmares of the owner of the hotel and farm. I said, “And now the schoolteacher here could take his turn.”

  The schoolteacher winced. He objected. He said he had never played the game. He even said he wasn’t interested but that turned everyone against him. Finally he had to leave, grumbling, and wait behind the glass with his vacant face and his out-thrust lower lip, his dull mean eyes. We agreed on him as the subject. An old trick, easy to guess. This time no one protested. We nodded to him. The schoolteacher came inside.

  “Well, what is it?” he said, trying to evoke an impression of jocularity.

  “Come on, just ask questions the way you’re supposed to,” said the store manager’s wife.

  The schoolteacher sat down. I could sense the gears grinding in his brain accustomed to processing ready-made bits of information and to the endless, fruitless contemplation of ways and means of achieving physical satisfaction. He was incapable of anything. Incapable of the simplest logic. I knew it.

  “Is it … a house?” he squeezed out of himself. The others, not as well acquainted with him as I, were embarrassed. They didn’t know if the schoolteacher was still joking. I knew he was stupid.

  “Quit kidding and play it right,” the hot-shot said after a pause.

  The schoolteacher began to sweat. His black pupils mirrored an inner effort that was more than the organism was used to.

  “Is it …” he said slowly, “or … is it a train?”

  “Come on, mister,” the hot-shot was irritated, “what d’you think you’re doing? Ask right, will you?”

  The schoolteacher flushed with fury.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” he said, and his eyes flashed with the yearning to be able to exert his schoolroom authority over this conceited puppy in striped socks who was scarcely older than the particular breed of human beings he was used to having in his absolute power.

  “You’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing,” said the hot-shot. “You’re asking stupid questions. You can’t ask plain out, like is it a dumbbell or is it a crumb-bun. You have to ask is it like this or that, is it here or there, and like that, don’t you see?”

  “Is it here or there?” the schoolteacher asked quickly.

  “For cripes’ —” the hot-shot began, but the draftsman’s wife interrupted him.

  “It’s like this. You can only ask questions that we can answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to, do you understand?”

  “Naturally,” said the schoolteacher. Everyone fell silent. The silence dragged on. The schoolte
acher was floundering in embarrassment.

  “Come on!” exclaimed the store manager’s wife anxious to get on with the game in which she had been so successful.

  The schoolteacher rolled his eyes. “Is it something to eat?” he said.

  Everyone burst out laughing and the schoolteacher flushed again. This time it was apparent that he was offended.

  “No!” exclaimed the two women.