I said, “Good evening.” I asked, “Mister, is that a bass saxophone?” It wasn’t that I didn’t know, but I wanted to be told; I wanted to talk about it; I’d never even heard what it sounded like, only read about it in a finger-marked old book that Benno had, that he’d swiped from one of his playboy Jewish uncles in Prague — and besides, the book was in French, a language I refused to study, so our French teacher had declared me a remarkable anti-talent (for I was secretly using the time to study the language of blues from a cheap little brochure) — called Le Jazz Hot, which the playboy Jewish uncle had bought somewhere in Paris and brought back to Prague, and that’s when Benno stole it to take home to Kostelec, our town. Now, like the Book of Mormon of origin divine, it was shelved in the leather-bound library of Benno’s father in the huge villa by the river in that little provincial town in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the war; like the Book of Mormon written in the language of angels, it spoke to me only in the language of objects (bass saxophone, sarrusophone, cowbells, mellophone) and people (Trixie Smith, Bix Beiderbecke, Bud Freeman, Johnny St. Cyr) and places (Storyville, Canal Street, Milneburg) and bands (Condon’s Chicagoans, the Wolverines, the Original Dixieland Band), that international language of an innocent cult … Adrian Rollini — only a name, a bass saxophone player from Chicago whom I’d never heard play — I knew only that he was occasionally a member of that good old gang that used to make recordings into acoustic funnels.
The old man straightened up and his joints complained again. The material on his knees sagged. His scalp was crumpled like the shell of a boiled egg that had burst; one eye sat lower than the other, almost down on his cheek, a bluish eye, surrounded by fair whiskers. “Verstehe nicht tschechisch,” he said. His other, healthier eye moved, slid down my checkered jacket to my hand which was clutching a folder with a label on it that said “2nd Ten. Sax.” So I repeated my question in German. “Ist das ein Bassaxophon, bitte?” That very act alone removed me from the Czech community, since German was only spoken under duress; at the first sound of German I should have turned on my heel and gone away, bid the bass saxophone goodbye. But some things are simply stronger. So I said “Ist das ein Bassaxophon, bitte?” and the eye, not the bluish one, the healthier one, rested on my folder and then slowly, searchingly, with a certain degree of contempt, it rose again, past my checkered jacket, skimmed the black shoestring under my short collar, bounced off the broad brim of my porkpie hat (I was a dandy, oh, yes, I was; it had its political significance too — foppery is always a calling card of the opposition — but not only that: it also had something to do with the myth, the myth of youth, that myth of myths) and looked right at me. It examined me. “Ja,” the old man said. “Das ist es. Du spielst auch Saxophon?” He used the familiar “Du” when he asked me if I could play; it didn’t even appear particularly strange.
“Ja,” I said. “Sie auch? You too?” But the old man didn’t reply. He bent over again. The same creaking, cracking sound as if every move meant a crumbling, a breaking of his skeleton shattered to little tiny bonelets by some kind of dumdum — but what held him together then? Probably just will power, the will power that is in the ones who survive all the explosions, apparently only to die not long afterward; everything in them is worn away, cracked: liver, lungs, kidneys, and soul. He untied the string with stained fingers. They trembled. The coffin opened, and there it lay, big as a bishop’s staff. And the old man creaked again, and again he looked at me. I was staring at the bass saxophone, at its long incredible body, the high metal loop on top; it was dim and blinded, like the baritone sax in Rohelnice. These instruments were mere vestiges of older, better, happier days and it was a long time since they had manufactured any; all they made now was Panzerschrecks, bazookas, simply plates of rolled steel. “Möchtest du’s spielen?” asked the old man like the Serpent. Would I like to play it? Yes, because it was the apple and I was Eve; or else he was a miserable, hideous Eve with one bad eye in a golden wreath of whiskers, and I was Adam. I suddenly remembered something about nationality and patriotism, and my humanity was diminished by that something; I heard the voice of reason, that idiotic voice, saying, when all is said and done, it’s only a musical instrument, and this is a Czech town called Kostelec. The child fell silent, the doll closed its eyes; I was eighteen years old, I was grown up. I looked at the old man, at the ugly Eve, and my glance slipped to one side to the little gray bus. Somewhere, on an ostentatious glass-covered Nazi Party bulletin board, I had happened to see a notice that Lothar Kinze and his Entertainment Orchestra would be coming to town, and that’s what the weatherbeaten letters on the gray bus said: LOTHAR KINZE MIT SEINEM UNTER-HALTUNGSORCHESTER; and it had said on that glass-covered bulletin board that it would be a Konzert für die deutsche Gemeinde in Kosteletz, in other words a concert for the local Nazis, for the ones that had been here all along (Herr Zeeh, Herr Trautner, Herr Pellotza-Nikschitsch) and the Nazi office workers that had migrated here from the Reich in order to recuperate in the safety of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and for the air force radio men from the Ernst Udet Barracks, and also for Mr. Kleinenherr, who didn’t give a damn about nationality either, and kept right on associating with the Czechs and speaking Czech. For Germans only. Czechs prohibited. So I took them up on it, and played the game. Instead of killing with kindness (love your enemies, do good unto those that hate you) I tried responding with hatred. But there was no hatred in me; certainly no hatred toward this old man with his eyes on crooked, not even toward the Feldwebel, the sergeant-major (or whatever his rank was) from the Ernst Udet Barracks who used to hang around my sister as doggedly as a faithful bull terrier when she walked home from work at the brewery office; he would always say hello and she, like the good Czech that she was, would always walk a little faster, and yet that Feldwebel had sad, German eyes under the foreign cap with the eagle and the swastika, eyes of yearning in a gaunt, expressionless Prussian countenance, but my sister was a good Czech, and besides, she was afraid of him; more that than anything else — my sister was a good girl; and once I saw him sitting by the weir, the Ledhuje river murmuring, the weeping willows whispering, gray clouds marching toward the black east; he sat there, his boots in the grass, writing something in a blue pocket-notebook; I sneaked up to the weir and through a knothole watched the hand with the pencil, and I read a few German words in a Gothic script: “Bald kommen Winter stürme mit dem roten Schneen. O Anna, komm zu mir den grausam gelben Pfad! In meinem Kopje kalte Winde wehen.” I never saw him again after that, his platoon or his company or whatever he belonged to was shipped to the front shortly afterward, but my sister’s name was Anna and on either side of the road from the brewery there were horse chestnut trees that turned yellow at the end of summer, turned orange and finally died, leaving only the black skeletons of the trees behind. But all the same, I shook my head, all the same I turned on my heel. Old Mr. Káňa was standing in front of the church with the onion-shaped tower, watching me (another time, two years earlier, it had been old Mr. Vladyka who had stood there and he had watched me too as I tried to convince Mr. Katz, the teacher, that it would all turn out all right; there is always a Mr. Káňa or a Mr. Vladyka watching you from somewhere unless you do nothing and are nothing, and perhaps even then; they follow us from the time it’s possible to punish us, or to punish our parents through us, or our acquaintances, or our close friends; maybe we’ll never get rid of those stares, that hell of ours: the others). I started to walk away; I felt the old man’s hand fall on my shoulder. It was like the touch of an iron claw, but gentle, not the hand of the Gestapo, just the hand of a soldier, for there is a gentleness in the hands of the skeletons called to arms under those flags of theirs; particularly when they return defeated, and for those skeletons it can never be anything other than defeat. “Warte mal,” I heard his voice, it sounded like two voices, two cracked vocal chords split lengthwise in two. “Can’t you give me a hand? This damned giant saxophone is too heavy for me.” I stopped. Mr. Káňa took a cigar
ette case out of his pocket, and lit himself a cigarette. The old man’s crippled eyes stared at me as if they were gazing out of some terrible fairy tale; but at his feet, in a black coffin with faded velvet cushioning, rested a bass saxophone. The child reopened its eyes. The doll spoke. Little suns rested for an instant on the valves of the huge corpus, valves as big as the ornaments on a horse’s trappings. “Ja, Bassaxophon,” said the old man. “Have you ever heard it played? It has a voice like a bell. Sehr traurig. Very sad.” The creaking of those vocal chords made me think of the Feldwebel again, writing poems in a pocket-notebook on the bank of the Ledhuje, of that one-man unit lost in the immensity of the war, like a clumsy tortoise running up against the shield of my sister’s lack of understanding, of that man, undoubtedly alone amongst the men in uniform (it wasn’t an SS barracks, it was just an ordinary German barracks; but even if it had been an SS barracks, who knows? the roads of our lives lead heaven knows where); we will certainly never see him again, neither I nor my sister; I gazed at that sad instrument, and in my mind the unknown Adrian Rollini rose up behind the wire music stand of years past, sad as a bell. The doll fell silent again. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m in a hurry.” And then I turned away again, in order to save myself in the last moment from treason, in the eyes of Mr. Káňa, but the iron hand of the skeleton held me fast. “Nein, you can’t go,” said the voice, and his face suddenly assumed a mask; it was only a mask, and from beneath it the uncertain countenance of a problem showed through — what it was, I didn’t know. “You will help me carry the saxophone!” I wanted to jerk myself free, but just then an immense man in uniform walked out of the door of the hotel, spread his legs and turned his yellow face to the sun; it gleamed like a big puddle of lemon, two gray eyes opened in it, like Nosferatu gazing out of his lemony grave. “No, I can’t, really, let me go,” I said, and moved abruptly so the old man almost lost his footing, but he held fast. “Herr Leutnant!” he called; the gray eyes looked at me; I was trying to pull free; from the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Káňa standing at a safe distance and it seemed to me that he nodded in approval; the old man was saying something to the man with a face like Nosferatu. Not voluntarily, then; if they force me though, it’s all right. “Why don’t you want to help him?” asked the lieutenant. “He’s an old man, after all. Ein alter Mann.” I looked up at him; he was huge, but sad, just a facsimile of a soldier; the gray eyes rested in his intelligent countenance like the Arnheim eggs. “And you are both musicians,” he said. “Help him with the saxophone.” I picked it up. The iron hand released me. I threw the black coffin onto my shoulder and started out behind the old man. I wondered whether this great big meaty fellow had a notebook too. Possibly, probably. He didn’t shout; he didn’t give any orders. “You are both musicians.”
So I carried the bass saxophone through the hotel lobby, which looked very different from the way it had when I was there last. I entered another world. I wasn’t in Kostelec any more: red flags with a white and black picture of an evil sun, the bronze bust of that fellow (after the war, when we smashed it, it turned out not to be of bronze at all, but papier-mâché); a lady in a dirndl at the reception desk; a couple of soldiers. I carried the bass saxophone in its black case past them — it had nothing to do with Germans or non-Germans, it was from the twenties; that fellow was nothing in those days.
Then up the coco-fiber runner to the second floor. A beige corridor, another world again. A small-town dream of luxury. Brass numbers on cream-colored doors, and silence. A sharp German voice sliced into the silence from behind one of the doors.
The old man — I had just noticed that he limped and was dragging what remained of one foot behind him; not that there was a piece of his foot missing, but every time he stepped down on his other, healthy foot, the sick foot didn’t raise itself from the ground but dragged behind, the sole crosswise, scraping along the carpet, sweeping up dust until he put his weight on it again — took hold of the handle of the door labeled 12A (how splendidly secure must have been the era that was afraid to put a brass thirteen on this cream-colored door, afraid that it might lose a customer because the guest, perhaps the owner of a car, certainly a well-to-do fellow if he could use the services of the local hotel, might refuse to sleep behind that unlucky number and instead climb into his car and ride off into the safety of the night, to the competitors in the neighboring town, to another cream-colored room, to another vain, long-since forgotten night, forgotten like all of them have been forgotten; and only the number, 12A, has remained) and opened it. He maneuvered me with the bass saxophone through the door, and I immediately began to wonder. Why here? Why to a boudoir with gilded furniture? This kind of big instrument didn’t belong here, it belonged in dressing rooms behind a stage, somewhere near the auditorium in the rear of the hotel. Then why here? Was this some kind of trick? A trap? But the old man had already closed the door, and that was when I saw the man on the gilded bed, or rather, his head; he was lying under the blue and white hotel blanket, breathing soundlessly through his open mouth, his eyes shut. The room shone like a yellow-gold lantern, the sun of early autumn reaching its yellow rays through the curtains. It was something like the old engravings: a baroque sun glinting on the amazed witnesses to a vision (the only thing missing was a naïve madonna and a falling housepainter saved by the madonna invoked at the right moment); but it was no vision, if you don’t count the fossil instrument hidden in the immense case, it was just a man on a gilded bed, a head with an open mouth, the breath gently rattling through a throat recently scorched by the icy winds of the Eastern Front and the sands of El Alamein, and other towns deep in the desert with names that might have been invented by the Poetist poets, with structures of bleached bones and sand-smoothed helmets that some new Hieronymus Bosch will use to weave the frames for neo-baroque paintings in the forthcoming dark age; and behind the gentlest of all rattles was the afternoon silence of the siesta, the light from the round brass lamps on the night table that didn’t match the bed, and a pink painting of a pink girl holding a pink cherub that could have been meant to be Jesus Christ, and silence; and in that silence another, distant, brittle but dangerous, spitting voice. I turned to the old man; the fellow on the bed didn’t move; one of the old man’s eyes was staring at me, but it was the blind one, the one on his cheek, the other was listening to the sound of the distant voice; and then I realized that it wasn’t distant, that it was only behind the wall and that it was indeed menacingly close. Once again I looked at the old man, at his other eye; it supported my impression of the danger of that voice. Not fright, just apprehension; the old man (a survivor of Armageddon) was beyond all fear, he had seen too much of death, he was indifferent to it, and what else is there to be afraid of if not death or pain (and he had experienced pain greater than the proximity of death)? So it could only be a look of apprehension, a sort of anxiety. “Well, goodbye,” I said, and turned to go; the old man stretched out a hand that looked like a root. “Wait!” he snapped, and kept on listening, he hadn’t for a moment stopped listening, to that mad midget voice behind the wall. Ten seconds passed, thirty seconds; perhaps a minute. “I have to …” But the rootlike hand waved, impatiently, angrily. I looked at the case holding the bass saxophone. It too bore traces of old age; it had decorative metalwork on the corners, like the plush-bound family chronicle that my grandmother used to have.
“You may take a look at it,” croaked the split vocal chords — the old man’s not the fellow’s behind the wall, whose vocal chords were just fine (their owner lived off his vocal chords; if he were to lose them, get tumors on them or find them occupied by colonies of TB germs, it would be the end, he wouldn’t survive his voice, for the voice an sich was his livelihood, his social position; only the voice was important, not the brain in which the voice had its center; such voices are not controlled by the brain, such voices control themselves and their centers). The old man’s voice said, “You may take a look at it. Or even try it out, if you want to.” I looked at him. His eye wa
s no longer listening to the voice. It was looking at me, almost kindly, “Ja,” I said, “I’d like to, but …” and I looked at the metalwork decorations, I opened the case. The baroque rays of light caressed the corpus, the washbasin full of verdigris and the dried spit of bar musicians. “Ja,” I said, “das ist sensationell.” I translated my supreme recognition verbatim. I reached inside the case and raised it the way I would help a sick friend to sit up. And it rose in front of me. A mechanism of strong, silver-plated wires, the gears, the levers, like the mechanism of some huge and absolutely nonsensical apparatus, the fantasy of some crazy mixed-up inventor. It stood in my hand like the tower of Babel, a conical shape, the valves reflecting my face full of respect, hope, and love — and faith (it was ridiculous, I know, but love is always ridiculous, like faith: the mechanism interested me more than any philosophy ever had, and I admired it more than any Venus possible — certainly more than the Venuses of Kostelec’s town square, and certainly more than any other, say the Venus de Milo; a rarely used and almost unusable instrument, a nightmare of any instrument maker, a curious jest of some man long since dead, possessed by the idea of piston trumpets and metal clarinets); it sounds ridiculous, absurd, monstrous, but the thing was beautiful. It stood like a blind silver tower, submerged in a golden sea, in a beige and gold room in a town hotel, touched by timid fingers, and behind it Rollini’s ghost at the other end of the world in Chicago.
I looked around; I suddenly felt I was alone (except for the fellow in the bed, but he was asleep), and I was. I lowered the bass saxophone carefully into its plush bed, stepped over to the door and put my hand on the doorknob; it was still warm from the recent touch of a feverish hand; it was a brass hand itself, holding a horizontal stick with a ball on the end. I turned it, but the door didn’t open. I was locked in the room that shone like a beige and gold lantern.
THE BASS SAXOPHONE Page 9