THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  “Sure it is,” said the hot-shot.

  “How come?” demanded the fat lady.

  “Sure it is. Like there are people in the world as would eat it too.”

  “Yes, but we can’t use that,” said the draftsman’s wife, “because it isn’t customary here.”

  “So what?” said the hot-shot. “So what if we don’t eat it here. He asked is it something to eat and I say it is, like if they can eat it in Borneo, it’s something to eat, isn’t it?”

  I observed the schoolteacher. His gaze was flitting from face to face, in complete confusion. His cheeks seemed to have swollen with rage. The dispute between the hot-shot and the draftsman’s wife continued. The schoolteacher squirmed and said, “I give up, then.”

  “Oh, but you can’t do that!” squealed the fat lady.

  “Why not?” said the schoolteacher. “You don’t even know if it’s something to eat or not.”

  “That’s ’cause we never tasted it, right?” said the hot-shot. “Maybe it’s tough, or maybe it tastes awful and you might get sick to your stomach.” I noticed his voice held something more than its usual sing-song intonation; it seemed to contain hatred for the schoolteacher, probably the legacy of years of being derided by some similar member of the teaching profession for his ostentatious adherence to brightly colored clothing, and total self-indulgence as the only possible way of life (whereas his teacher — kindred to this one, paunchy, with soft hands, and a covert lecherousness of mind — would naturally have preached the importance of the work ethic).

  “It’s like this,” the factory foreman interjected (until then he had been silent; in his youth he probably hadn’t assimilated much of that negligible store of information that the schoolteacher peddled for a decent month’s salary, perhaps he hadn’t even finished school and had had to work all his life to make a living, but every day in his few free hours he found time to think, perhaps he read — books of nonfiction, nature, travel; a slow man without too much of a sense of humor but capable of honest logical thought and lacking only in words). “It’s like this, sir,” he said. “Where we live, it is not eaten, but there are countries of the world where some people might eat it. That’s how it is.”

  The schoolteacher focused his baleful gaze on this new enemy who spoke to him with respect, a respect for the teaching profession and for a teacher’s erudition, wisdom, and justice that he had acquired from his elderly parents in his childhood and had passed on to his own children. But the schoolteacher was disdainful.

  “I give up,” he said again, wearily.

  “Don’t do that,” said the draftsman’s wife. “It isn’t hard at all.”

  “No, I give up. It doesn’t make sense for me to guess if you think up things that you don’t even know if they’re something to eat,” said the schoolteacher. Once more they tried to persuade him. The fat lady was close to weeping in her impatient pleasure in the game. The schoolteacher, almost black with rage by now, finally gave in and immersed himself again in fruitless thought. It had the external form of something almost Aristotelian, but it was nothing but the gray, impotent pounding of a sledgehammer on an empty anvil.

  “Is it … a car?” he finally came up with.

  The hot-shot broke into a rude laugh. “Are you stupid or something?” Everything that he felt for the schoolteacher burst out of him, openly and directly, without restraint, with the supreme honesty that is perhaps the sole virtue of young hot-shots such as he, apart from a strong fidelity to an ideal. “You ever hear of anybody eating a car, for cripes’ sake?”

  “Watch your language, you!” the schoolteacher snapped at him.*

  “C’mon,” said the hot-shot, “you don’t have to be so touchy. I didn’t say anything all that bad, did I?”

  “I’m not playing,” said the schoolteacher, indignantly making it clear that he was offended. “I don’t have to let myself be insulted.”

  Supported by a new wave of protest, I entered the fray. “Look,” I said, “it’s just a matter of thinking your questions over, logically, understand?”

  The schoolteacher stabbed me with his eyes. “I said I’m not playing,” he repeated.

  “But that would be a shame,” squealed the manager’s wife. “You wouldn’t want a disgrace like that!” She had characterized the situation precisely, she was still a little child who couldn’t see the Emperor’s new clothes.

  “Let our friend here explain it to you,” said the draftsman’s wife, indicating me. “You don’t want to be a spoilsport.”

  The schoolteacher muttered something under his breath.

  “You have to start from general terms,” I said, “and get increasingly specific as your questions give you more information, understand?”

  The schoolteacher didn’t say anything.

  “Do you see?” I said sweetly. “Start out with something very general, the best is to localize the subject, and then get more and more specific until you determine, shall I say, the exact coordinates.” I glanced at him. He didn’t understand at all. “The best of all is to find out at the very outset whether it is abstract or concrete.”

  The schoolteacher was silent.

  “So try it. Pose an initial inquiry,” I babbled, “and try to localize the subject.”

  The schoolteacher moved his lips in hatred. “Is … is it black?” he said.

  The hot-shot guffawed, laughed so hard his spidery legs lifted off the floor and nearly kicked the schoolteacher in the nose.

  “That is a very specific premise,” I prattled affably, “and it cannot tell you anything about the localization. Localize, localize!” I kept on.

  “Is it …” said the teacher dully, “is it a train carriage?”

  “Ah, no, it’s not.” I raised my eyebrows. “And that doesn’t tell you anything about the localization either.”

  The hot-shot whinnied. “Dammit, so ask where it is already!”

  The schoolteacher glared at him. “I asked already.”

  “Yeah, but how! You can’t ask ‘Is it here or there?” ’ he mimicked — very successfully — the inane melody of the schoolteacher’s questions. “You have to say ‘Is it here?’ or ‘Is it … is it …” ’ he searched his mind quickly for something clever. The only thing that occurred to him was what to his comrades, and many others, is the epitome of all humor. “Is it up your ass, maybe?”

  “But Mr. P.!” giggled the wife of the clothing-store manager.

  “I’m not playing,” said the schoolteacher. “I don’t play with people who don’t know anything about polite behavior,” he declared virtuously.

  But he did play. They forced him to, and it lasted all the way to Pardubice, where he and the manager of the clothing store got off. It was the greatest fun that this parlor game had ever given me or the hot-shot or the wife of the draftsman, because it wasn’t fun, it was the mill of God grinding him between its stone wheels. Slowly, with an immense series of silly questions that finally lost all semblance of system, he got himself into the mental state known in boxing circles as “punch-drunk.” With questions like “Does it stink?” he elicited a remarkable and copious flow of sarcasm from the soul of the hot-shot, whose brightly colored socks rose more and more frequently like fireworks toward the ceiling. With the question “Is it anything at all?” he gave me food for thought, because I truly didn’t know what it was, this schoolteacher, lifelong proclaimer of a morality that was founded on no law whatsoever, not Christ’s, not Marx’s, and himself living without morality, without even the morality of a human animal which recognizes the ageless law of the herd — don’t do things you don’t want people to do to you — living a life without meaning or content, a mere system of bowels and reflexes, more pitiful than a silky little hamster caught in a cage, trying in vain with its pink claws to dig its way out through the metal cage floor, to the only thing of value — sweet freedom. This creature here didn’t need freedom, which is certainly of supreme value in our life but cannot be achieved except in the wisdom that understa
nds our necessity, even though he often spouted the word “freedom” at Party meetings; he didn’t need the freedom that we need to remain sane if we are human beings, because he wasn’t human. Naturally there is no such thing as a superman, but it always seemed to me that there is such a thing as a subman. He exists, he is among us for all the days of the world, like Jesus’s poor, except that the submen aren’t poor. Small or large, fat or skinny mammals unfamiliar with love, fidelity, honesty, altruism — all those virtues and attributes that make up a human being and justify the survival of the species of animals and men (conscious in humans, unconscious in animals, in armadillos, or white mice that in their natural state would never in all their short lives think of killing each other) — who with no qualms assert the absolute priority of their bellies, their imagined (but to them indisputable) rights, and broadcast their own inanity in speeches about their infallibility, always ready to judge others, to condemn others, not for an instant doubting their own perfection, not for a moment contemplating the meaning of their own existence, deriding Christianity and morality as outdated but in the depths of their souls hating Communism, which robs them of the freedom to be parasites, although some occasionally even win out over that because they find they can sponge off it equally well, and they never realize that they are simply a terrible emptiness bounded by skin and bone, leaving in their wake traces of lesser or greater pain, ruined lives, wrecked existences, jobs spoiled, tasks undone, wretched divorces, crimes, and dull and sordid cynicism. They are the ones for whom hell and eternal punishment must exist, at least the punishment of human memory, if everything in the world is not to become one immense injustice, because perhaps not even the entire future of Communism-come-to-pass can make up for the oceans of suffering they have precipitated upon the world in the eight or nine thousand years of their existence, for the subhumans have always succeeded in accommodating themselves while others suffered, have always been quick to advocate Truths, for they are indifferent to truth, insidiously forging pain in the hearts of betrayed friends, mauled wives, deserted mistresses, battered children, destroyed competitors who stood in their way, victims of their mean hatred which needs no motive, only blood, only revenge cruel and direct or dressed in the juridical verdict of a juridical society. Yes, they are among us still, more so than Jesus’s poor, like an evil reproach and a derision of our pretty words, like a memento of our conceit, a warning to the peace of our self-satisfaction.

  Finally the factory foreman took pity on the schoolteacher, and using his ordinary common sense and patient simplicity led him to the humiliating mark: to the recognition that the object of his quest was himself, that it was his own person that was the inane answer to the collection of idiotic questions he had posed and that cost him the greatest humiliation of his life, or whatever it was he lived. He got off at Pardubice, and didn’t even say goodbye to me.

  That was my revenge. But then, when I arrived in Prague and strode with the crowd down the underground corridor of the railway station toward the exit where clusters of girls’ faces awaited me, powdered and delicate, beautiful Prague faces, and when the motley, somber streets took me into their noisy gullets, brightened by the colorful bells of full-skirted summer dresses and hemmed in by the racket of everyday disagreements, when I met again, furtively, with Margit in her blue-and-white striped dress at a discreet booth-table at Myšák’s Café, Margit, who lived on crème caramel and turned to me with tender amorous eyes, when I began again to take part in that great game of petty cruelties, artifices, pretenses and lies born of a longing for a paradise lost, for a different, more perfect Man who might once have been and may once again be but is perhaps only just being born by the great and difficult Caesarean section of socialism (or maybe he is toddling around in diapers already in the wake of the factory foreman, but I don’t know, I can’t tell, I couldn’t say), then Emöke was only a dream again, only a legend that perhaps never was, a distant echo of an alien destiny, and soon I had almost ceased to believe in her existence. I didn’t write to her, I didn’t send her the books I had planned to — philosophy, a short private course in the history of thought from Socrates to Engels — I never went to Košice.

  And in time, very quickly, I was permeated with an indifference toward the legend, the indifference that allows us to live in a world where creatures of our own blood are dying every day of tuberculosis and cancer, in prisons and concentration camps, in distant tropics and on the cruel and insane battlefields of an Old World drunk on blood, in the lunacy of disappointed love, under the burden of ludicrously negligible worries, that indifference that is our mother, our salvation, our ruin.

  And that is how a story, a legend, comes to pass and no one tells it. And yet, somewhere, someone lives on, afternoons are hot and idle, and the person grows older, is deserted, dies. All that is left is a slab, a name. Maybe not even a slab, not even a name. The story is borne for a few more years by another, and then that person dies too. And other people know nothing, as they never, never, never knew anything. The name is lost. As is the story, the legend. Neither a name nor a memory nor even an empty space is left. Nothing.

  But perhaps somewhere at least an impression is left, at least a trace of the tear, the beauty, the loveliness of the person, the legend, Emöke.

  I wonder, I wonder, I wonder.

  * The hot-shot has used a Czech synonym for “eat” that in polite language refers only to animals.

  T O J O E M E D J U C K

  A Friend

  Kreischend zögen die Geier Kreise.

  Die riesigen Städte stünden leer.

  Die Menschheit läg in den Kordilleren.

  Das wüsste dann aber keiner mehr.

  ERICH KÄSTNER

  Twilight. Honey and blood. Indifferent to the historical situation of nation and town, it spoke to me, aged eighteen, on the leeshore of a land-locked lea in Europe, where death was less extravagant, more modest. I stood with my back to the fin de siècle hotel façade, a product of that time when they exerted their strained imaginations to create something entirely new, something they couldn’t express through classical form and to which they gave instead an expression of ineptitude that is actually beautiful when you get right down to it, being a reflection of man’s image of man rather than an effort to copy God. Anyway, there I stood, my back to that hotel façade with the greenish mosaic around the big windows of the hotel café, windows with flowers etched in the glass, while dusk, a puddle of honey, trickled down the wall.

  At first I didn’t even realize that that was what the thing was. Not until the old man in the shabby jacket made of a wartime cellulose ersatz material (it was wartime) dragged it out of the little gray bus, and as he strained to pick it up the clasps loosened and the big black case opened before it was high enough off the ground for what was inside to fall out; it opened an inch or two above the pavement, so that all that really happened was that the case opened a crack and the light of the honey-colored sun (standing over the tubby tower of the town’s old mansion, blazing in through the windows of the square tower of the town’s new mansion that belonged to Domanín, the millionaire whose daughter I was in love with because she lived in that tower and every night all the points of the compass caught the light of her alabaster lamp shining through the four aquariums, and she was pale, pale, she was ill in that world of purple fish, just another illusion, just a pathological dream of a pathological childhood) glinted on the immense, incredible bell of a bass saxophone, as big around as a washbasin.

  I had never actually believed that such things really existed. I only knew they had been mentioned back in the days of Dadaism and Poetism; maybe some time in the ancient history of the republic somebody made a museum piece like that, an advertising gimmick, too expensive really and later stored away in some forgotten back room. And after that nobody made them any more, they were only a dream, a theoretical computation formulated some time in the colorful twenties: all we had were alto saxes and tenor saxes. And way up in the hills, in Rohelnice, t
here lived a fellow named Syrovátka, son of a country schoolteacher who led the village brass band, and he was the possessor of a legendary baritone sax; he used to play alto sax with village bands in a sweet uncertain tone; he didn’t swing, he was a country boy, all the way. But he possessed an old baritone sax, an instrument blind with decay and verdigris, stored away in the hills in the loft of a thatch-roofed cottage where the gleam of the ruby sun penetrated through holes in the roof. To this very day, I can see the poisonous turquoise sky above the black smudge of the woods; in it floats that bloodshot eye, a red olive floating in greenish-blue wine — evening in the hills, reminiscent of times Paleozoic and of fern jungles — its light penetrating through cracks in the thatched roof to the muggy silver of the mastodon corpus. In 1940, when the unbelievable became possible (six brasses, a big band, bass, percussion, guitar, piano), Syrovátka came down from the hills and then it was five saxes; in his jacket made of flour sacking, he sat at the very end of the white row, his shoulders like the front of an angular chest of drawers; no, he didn’t swing, but the mythical instrument gave off a dull sheen in the glow of the footlights, and above it the four of us sang, sang for joy that he was with us even though he was striding his own hill and forest paths under our sliding chords. But this thing here, this was something even more mysterious: a bass saxophone. (Perhaps the significance of things like that is beyond belief — things like a barely used and hardly usable instrument in the eyes of a complex-ridden kid in the middle of Europe, surrounded by names that were to become entries in hell’s own dictionary: Maidanek, Auschwitz, Treblinka. But what are we permitted to choose in this life of ours? Nothing. Everything comes to us willy-nilly.)

  It was revealed to me for an instant, a silvery fish in that bubble of honey called Indian summer; I stared at it the way a child stares at its first doll. But it only lasted an instant — the old man in the wood-pulp jacket bent over, his joints creaking aloud with rheumatism, the rheumatism of war begotten from sleeping on benches in railway stations. He bent down and shut the lid; he started to tie the broken lock with a piece of string.