THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  And so I took the bass saxophone in my arms and walked toward the door. This isn’t by force any more, said a cold patriotic voice in my head. So what? I replied rebelliously. A lone Feldwebel on the bank of the Ledhuje — and who forced my sister to turn him down? Maybe he could have been the good husband for the short marriage in her life (she never found that marriage, my poor sister, she died of cancer before she turned thirty); at least he wrote poems in a blue notebook, and which one of my sister’s local tennis-playing admirers had ever even read a poem? But he probably never came back anyway: it was the winter before Stalingrad; the blue notebook fell into the snow somewhere along the banks of the Volga, and when spring came, and the burned, peeling tanks of Tolbukhin’s army chased the Germans through the burned steppe to the west and the last vestiges of the nonsensical, murderous, heroic crew staggered back to the east, the safety zone along the tragic river slowly expanded (and the portentous servants of a new enemy began to rule there), the snow thawed, the blue notebook sank through it to the earth, slipped into the river, the river carried it to the sea, it dissolved there, turned into nothing, all that was left of it was the rhyme that stuck in my head: in meinem Kopfe kalte Winde wehen, that echo of Rilke (it’s possible that the Feldwebel didn’t even know it). And so I said “What the heck!” and strode through the brown half-light of the hotel corridor with the bass saxophone in my arms like an overgrown child, on one side of me the man with the checkerboard smile, on the other side the woman with the face of a sorrowful clown, and in front of us once again the old man in the wooden suit, dragging his lame leg crosswise along the runner. As for me, grown up again, I was weaving warp and woof of my defense.

  I was eighteen, full of complexes, an unhappy kid, no genius. I only felt, I didn’t know; concepts like collective guilt didn’t even exist yet. But then, I never believed in anything like that anyway (and my God, how could I have, when I never even believed in individual guilt? How can that square with Christianity? Or with Marxism? For a person isn’t given freedom, but nonfreedom. It would have been enough if my mother, on one of those excursions to Bad Kudowa, had broken up with my father — they were still only engaged then — and married the restaurant proprietor who fell in love with her there and who for a long time after her wedding, until he himself got married, sent her, and later even me, gingerbread teddy bears; I would have been born a German, and since I’m male, healthy, strong, well-grown, I could easily have become a member of the SS), I only knew that on autumn evenings two soldiers used to come to the Port Arthur bar, and they’d sit in the corner under the portrait of President Hácha and listen; we would play Ellington, Basie, Lunceford’s arrangements, we would swing as if the devil possessed us, the Port Arthur reverberating like an immense Victrola into the blacked-out protectorate night in the town, and we would stare past our saxophones at those two men in the uniform of the Nazi Luftwaffe; after the war, a German officer in occupied Paris named Schulz-Koehn became a legend — he had concealed an escaped black POW in his apartment, who along with Charles Delaunay, in the shadow of the German High Command, put together Hot Discography; but Schulz-Koehn was not alone — those two soldiers also came out in the open one day, they pulled some sheet music out from under their military blouses, Dixieland arrangements of “Liza Likes Nobody” and “Dark-town Strutters’ Ball” (they had picked them up in Holland in exchange for some arrangements by Henderson that a band in Athens had allowed them to copy) and they let us copy them in exchange for our Ellingtons. Then they disappeared too, apparently to the eastern steppes: they didn’t have the luck of Schulz-Koehn; but before that they had been crossing Europe like a pair of missionaries possessed of a faith without ideology, indeed a faith which cancels ideologies, like two modern scribes from some sort of migrant monastery, a monastery on the march, reproducing secret manuscripts (at their Offizierschule — it seemed incredible, and yet there’s little that seems incredible now after all that has happened — they had had a band; one of them was a captain, the other a first lieutenant, and they’d played Chick Webb, they’d played swing, not for the public — they had rehearsed Kreuder for the public — but for themselves, imagine, German cadets in a Nazi Offizierschule imitating a hunchbacked black drummer. So it was not just in concentration camps, not just in the Jewish town of Terezín, but in the Offizierschule too, it was simply everywhere, that sweet sickness, it would have eventually infected everyone, and perhaps if the war had turned out badly it would have finally infected the victors, ultimately — even though it might have taken many years, maybe centuries — transforming them into people); those two played along with us once, one on piano, the other on drums, and just before they were shipped to the East, they did something awful (everything could, can, be a crime) — Lexa never did explain it so that in the end people spoke badly of him instead of feeling sorry for him (I mean our people, people who called themselves our people): during the reprisals after the Heydrich assassination, the Nazis killed his father, shot him to death, and the day after his name had appeared in the papers (“for approving of the assassination of Deputy Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the following persons were shot: …”) those two German officers met Lexa in the town square — where Mr. Káňa had watched me, and where Mr. Vladyka had watched me on another occasion — and a bit awkwardly expressed their sympathy, and shook his hand; he never explained that away (his father not cold in the grave yet and here he goes chitchatting with Germans, in public, just because they listen to his crazy caterwauling); no, Lexa never did live that down.

  I walked down the back staircase to the hotel auditorium with the bass saxophone in my arms. The brown twilight was transformed into the murky dusk of dim electric lights. Our procession descended the spiral iron staircase with difficulty. The gray walls of the stairwell formed the background for the procession of shadows that accompanied us, a persiflage of a Disney film, not Lothar Kinze but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (the woman with the face of a tragic clown was Sneezy; her incredible nose, a half-pound turnip nose, was multiplied by the shadow to fantastic dimensions. Snow White was equally fantastic in her slenderness and with her two screens of hair, in the shadow picture more hauntingly than ever like the broken wings of a swan, a black shadow swan). And the procession marched on silently, accompanied only by the sounds of disparity, of sickness, of ill-health, the wooden harmony of war: the creaking of artificial limbs and rheumatic joints, the rattle of bronchial passages that had survived a climate to which nature has adapted the metabolism of arctic foxes and penguins, not people. Yet people can bear almost everything, although almost everything leaves its mark on them, almost everything brings them closer to death. We took our beat from the leg of the woodclad old man as it thudded uncontrolled against the stairs, like a tom-tom, and our Turkish drum was the giant’s artificial leg. Between the ropes a dark space appeared, within it a bright semicircle frightened out of the darkness of the stage by a dusty cone of light, and in the semicircle around a piano were five music stands, glittering with circus paint and mock jewels forming the big, decorative golden initials LK. Lothar Kinze mit seinem Unterhaltungsorchester. We walked out onto the stage, and I stopped with the bass saxophone in my arms directly under the cool spotlight which glared from somewhere overhead in the flies.

  They gathered around me. The last to arrive was the cut-down Caesar; the girl with the Swedish hair smiled, and Lothar Kinze, with his flushed pate and checkerboard teeth, looked at me. I realized it was the same look as the old man in the wooden suit had given me in front of the hotel — the look of an unsolved problem. But what problem? Why? What was all this about? The blind hunchback in the swollen knickerbockers raised his white face to the dusty light in the flies; it was a mask of long intimacy with suffering, no longer torture but the permanent pressure of existence deprived of almost all joy, entirely void of all meaning; in the white face the black lenses stared like coal pits; why? What for?

  “Ja,” I said, and stood the bass saxophone on the plank floor of the st
age. The absolute darkness of the stage hung around the cone of light; God knows who could have been watching us from the darkness; a full house (perfectly behaved and silent, and perhaps we were a vaudeville sketch, neither reality nor hallucination, a prehistoric Spike Jones in a humorless world, an exhibit from a live waxworks), or a single spy, Mr. Káňa or his personal agent who would tell all in the broad daylight of Kostelec, except this time Mr. Káňa wouldn’t succeed, because Kostelec wouldn’t believe this; they honor common sense in Kostelec, not hallucination; they have a saying there, a sort of trademark of the sensible: “… in Kostelec. They didn’t like it in Kostelec, they don’t believe it in Kostelec, they had no patience with it in Kostelec”; with that, you can take care of the opinion of all the world and anybody (I still hear it from the lips of my aunt — on a concert of the Chamber Harmony Ensemble, on an exhibition of abstract painters, on Allen Ginsberg — and even back then the expression was already as old as the hills); it is a town of sensible people; it respects fame, but in all respectfulness tacitly considers its bearers to be nuts, that’s to say, somewhat inferior people, even if on a national level they do have a certain useful function to fulfill with respect to Kostelec, the center of the world (adding polish to the concerts of the Kostelec Society for Chamber Music, or symbolizing the cultural level of the state and hence of Kostelec, for the state naturally exists only on account of Kostelec). Here in Kostelec, sensible people do not apply themselves to foolishnesses like Surrealism or inferiority complexes, incomprehensible (comprehensible only to nuts) problems like assonance, the inner organization of a painting as compared to the organization of external reality. Everything exists on account of this oasis of sensibility, on account of this gilded belly-button of the world, but above all in order that Kostelec have something to talk about: actresses’ divorces, poets’ scandals, getting drunk in bars — “it isn’t done in Kostelec” — and so I could relax; even if Mr. Káňa had sent a little spy, Lothar Kinze und sein Unterhaltungsorchester, this baroque, Brueghelesque detail from the Inferno, was altogether unclassifiable in the categories of Kostelec, as was the bass saxophone (Auntie: “What good is an instrument like that anyhow? Bedřich Smetana has such nice compositions, and he didn’t need any bass saxophone”); and then of course so was I, in the embrace of Lothar Kinze. But I didn’t need to make any apologies for Lothar Kinze.

  What was their problem, then? Lothar Kinze hurriedly walked up to one of the music stands; from behind, his clothes hung loosely on him as if they had been made for someone almost twice as fat or as if he were a clown whose overcoat is actually his frockcoat; then he turned to me and smiled. “Kommen Sie hier. Here is the sheet music. Play.” I raised the bass saxophone; it glowed like a rainbow in the white dusty light; it seemed to me that they all sighed, as if they had seen something sacred, and then I understood: it too was blind, etched by time, spittle, verdigris, bad handling, it resembled (in the texture of its metal surface, in its silverwhite, matte texture) an incense burner that an old rural priest in some atheist country might use for the funeral ritual and which in the yellow light of the poor candles also has that matte glow, that etched sparkle (but because Thou art merciful, abundant is Thy forgiveness). Lothar Kinze handed me the sheet of music. It was the bass saxophone part of a composition originally called “The Bear,” ein Charakterstück für Bassaxophon und Orchester, but someone’s hand had crossed out the title in a faded brown ersatz wartime ink, and had written instead Der Elefant. My eyes followed the notes; it was a waltz in A minor, a very simple affair, based on the effect of deep notes, certainly not what I yearned to play on this saxophone — it was no Rollini — although it was exactly what I was capable of playing from sheet music. But again, why?

  “You mean, ein Jam Session?” I asked. Lothar Kinze looked at me; I could see no comprehension in his eyes; he turned to his orchestra, but they stood in silence, the old man in the wooden suit, with one eye down on his cheek somewhere near the place where his Eustachian tube ended, the woman with the face of a sad clown, yes, the entire catalogue of sadness, of ruins, the giant with the artificial leg, the blind hunchback, the girl with the broken wings of a white swan (our shadows had shrunk to black puddles under our feet), the cut-down Caesar. And he was the one to catch on. “Ja,” he said, “if you wish. But do you read music?” He spoke clearly; his voice was completely intelligent, calm, normal too (all the more pain must have been contained in the soul of that cut-down body that it was complete, not limited by debility or at least a diminished intelligence, nor equipped with the thick skin of a poor memory that must be a property of the souls of achondroplastic midgets). “Ja, I can read music.” I said. “But I’ve never played a bass saxophone. The … the …” The touch, I wanted to say, but my German left me. But Lothar Kinze nodded. I looked again at the bass saxophone, placed the fingers of my left hand on the valves. I sat down, and the Brueghelesque detail suddenly came oddly to life: Lothar Kinze pulled a violin from out of nowhere (not from out of nowhere, it had been lying on top of the piano), the cut-down Caesar adroitly pulled himself up into a chair and a trumpet glistened in his hands; the giant led the blind hunchback to the vicinity of the drums and the little fellow in the knickerbockers seemed to sense them, seemed to smell the leather skins, his hand reached for the gray cowbells, the expression of painful stress on the white face was replaced by something that was almost happiness; as if he could see, he slipped between the cymbals, and the ballooning knickerbockers disappeared behind the big drum, flexible nervous fingers found the sticks, and he was ready; the giant’s demistep sounded, he walked over to the far stand where there was a bandoneon and a button accordion, and put it on (we had begun to look down our noses at the accordion. Kamil Běhounek played swing on one but we had never heard of a black who did — neither Ellington, nor Lunceford, nor Kirk, nor Basie had an accordion); the big woman with the half-pound nose sat down behind the piano, and on that proboscis of hers she put real pince-nez on a black cord (all the more pre-Spike Jones ur-Spike Jones it became, all the less would anyone believe it; I quit worrying about preparing a defense of my musical collaboration), the ends of which she fastened behind her ear; now she looked as if she had one of those immense papier-mâché party noses with glasses attached, the kind that is held in place by a rubber band around your head; I moistened the reed and they all fell silent again; I gave the instrument a trial blow — the massive painful yell that emerged surprised even me; it spread through the empty auditorium beyond the borders of the light, that labyrinth of wood and plush, of dust and hungry mice and undiscriminating, sated fleas full to bursting with Czech and German blood; yes, the voice of a dying gorilla, a male who had fought and won and had to die. I played a scale, up, down; the tones connected poorly but the touch wasn’t too difficult; yet those sobbing ill-breathed inter-tones seemed to have in them something of the character of the Chicago school (perhaps something of that character was also caused by imperfect control of the old, antiquated instruments on the part of the young musicians, who probably wore knee-breeches like the blind drummer). “Good,” I said firmly, Lothar Kinze tapped his bow on his violin, placed it under his chin, from his waist up made a rolling, typical waltz motion, the symbol of three-quarter time, and we cut loose. Maybe it was a delusion after all, a vision, an acoustic chimera; if time were made up of transparent cubes like a cosmic set of children’s blocks, I would have said that someone had removed a cube from that calm, unsurprising image of Kostelec — some mastermind, some oversoul — and irreverently replaced it with a small transparent aquarium containing Spike Jones’s band, for indeed, that’s what it was. In the twelve-measure introductory interval I had time enough to observe the Unterhaltungsorchester of Lothar Kinze at work in the half-dozen round mirrors on the bass saxophone. Besides, I have ears. The hunchback (he looked as if he were smelling nectar or pork roast with apples or whatever stands for nectar in Bavaria; maybe sweet beer) beat the drum like a machine; perhaps he was wound up with a key, like a completely mec
hanical drumming apparatus, because he tapped the snare drum with no originality, with no imagination whatsoever, irrevocably, with no gradation, oom-pahpah, oom-pahpah; he didn’t move, his bony hands seemed to be attached to the body of a plastic mannequin with an expression of almost optimistic happiness on its frozen face; only the bony hands moved (and the foot in the knickerbockers’ leg on the pedal of the big drum, but I couldn’t see it: oom—, oom—), the little hands —pahpah, —pahpah (once, either in a dream or when I was very young, I saw an orchestrion, with a mechanical angel that handled a complete, real percussion system with the same amount of musical intelligence); and under the raised black wing of the piano was the woman with the face of a mournful clown, her nose jerking each measure of the clumsy rhythm of the mechanical waltz forward with a downward and upward movement of her head, the eyes on either side of the carnival-gag nose intently following the fingers of her right, then her left hand; like a third-rate piano teacher in some sub-Alpine Gotham, never a wrong note, never a bit of imagination. To hear such a performance, such a style, is to be stripped of the enchantment of an unrealized and completely foolish dream: a romance of the conservatory, where in twelve practice rooms twelve pianos filling the air with Czerny’s Études bring to blossom twelve dreams (foolish like all dreams since no one ever remembers that dreams really die when they come true, and reality really isn’t a dream), dreams of Steinways, Richter dreams, Van Cliburn dreams; and then the trip (once it had meant hunting for a job, now they allot you a placement slip at school) to one Kostelec or another; and there, first a big success with the local philharmonic or student orchestra, a Moonlight Sonata or two, a few Slavonic Dances, and then year begins to follow year, and the years consist of months and weeks and lessons every day to four or five little girls from good families (and here and there a little boy from a good family) that have realized the social merits of a musical education: four or five hours a day watching fingers that have trouble hitting the right keys, listening to chords in which there are strange, fantastic tones (when a finger accidentally strikes two keys at once), thirty years of watching and listening; the dream petrifies, as does the flexible movement of the spirit and the nerves and the attractive bare arms of twenty-four-year-olds, the flowing of notes through fingers to brain and ears and back to the keys and the strings which finally pour forth the music, make it live, ring, and sing; all that is left is watching and listening to fingers, the precise mechanical oom-pahpah, oom-pahpah of the left hand and the metallic, impersonal melody of the right, the perfect, depersonalized performance of the perfect idealized pupil, a pupil who in turn will eventually become embodied in the teacher, with thirty years of watching and listening to fingers herself; and that’s the other, less pleasant, more probable outcome of most dreams: they end up unfulfilled, submerged in the awful rurality of provincial towns where time slowly extracts the softness from young bodies and a shell of resignation grows around their souls, where in the end they conform to Kostelec, accept its universal position, never again to try for that one desperate (and vain) recourse of man: to protest at least, to make provocations at least, if victory is impossible (and impossible it is, don’t let the poets fool you; it’s all just waiting for the slaughter, the butchery, not the battle). That was the way she played too, forte, without feeling, with pedantic accuracy, every bass tone was right, but it hurt; and the nose pushed each measure ahead, while in the measures the cut-down Caesar quivered with an uncontrollable vibrato, with a circuslike sentimentality, only just on key, and the fierce frowning giant played the accordion so that it sounded like a barrel organ (heaven knows how he achieved that sound — he seemed to squeeze the instrument with immense strength, his big fingers exerting obvious effort to avoid pressing the wrong buttons). Lothar Kinze played facing the orchestra, in the white light from the flies I could see the resin pouring off the strings, and as the rolling motion of his torso disturbed the air, the resin danced off into the darkness in barely visible, shallow waves; like the others, he played forte, in supremely senti- mental chords — all that was missing was an old woman with a harp, and the clink of coins on a courtyard pavement (yet even that was there: the hunchback clinked the triangle); I closed my eyes. It all sounded exactly like a paranoid orchestrion — not only the drums, not only the piano, but the whole unit: Spike-Jonesier than Spike Jones; and then the twelfth measure, and maybe it was the hypnotic effect of the unbelievable mélange of those five dervishes (the girl with the Swedish hair wasn’t playing any instrument, and I found out later that she was the singer; the old man in the wooden suit was the errand boy) but when I blew on the saxophone again, it sounded like a caricature too, as if somebody had created a gigantic controllable old automobile horn; I had no trouble with the music, it was ridiculously easy (we were all well-trained on the syncopations in Lunceford’s Sax Tutti), but I did have trouble with my laughter: a laughing elephant. It really was more like an elephant than a bear (at dinner later, Lothar Kinze told me that the change in the title of the piece was not a result of a re-evaluation of the tonal nature of the instrument, it was an ideological change; it had been renamed after the defeat at Moscow). And still it was a pleasure; soon I forgot to laugh: if you haven’t got too much talent and aren’t equipped with absolute pitch, playing is always a pleasure, particularly when you’re not playing alone — even if it’s a piano duet and all the more so in a band. I was playing a bass saxophone for the first time in my life (and for the last — then they disappeared forever, they really no longer exist); it had a touch entirely different from my tenor sax, but as soon as I felt I could make the immense chrome-plated leverwork obey me, could squeeze a melody out of that mammoth hookah, a simple melody but a recognizable one, that the thunderous tone of a contrabass cello would obey the movement of my fingers and the blow of my breath, I was happy. The senseless happiness of music engulfed me like a golden bath; it’s a happiness that never depends on the objective, only the subjective, and perhaps it has a more profound link with the humanness of things because it’s altogether senseless: the strenuous production of certain nonsensical sounds — that are no good for anything — for no explicable, reasonable purpose (Auntie: “He was one of those vagabonds, a musician, he played in bars and at dances. Even at home he banged on the piano for days on end. In Kostelec no decent person stopped to pass the time of day with him”). And so I played with Lothar Kinze and his Unterhaltungsorchester, just as off-key, with just as sentimental a vibrato, a component of the creaky human orchestrion whose performance suggested a loud protest against the waltz, against music in general (it moaned, how dreadfully the orchestra moaned — but that was before I understood that disharmony, the vibrato trembling almost to derailment), until Der Elefant was over. “Sehr gut!” cried Lothar Kinze, glancing uncertainly at the woman behind the piano and the girl with the Swedish hair. “And now, if you please,” he looked at me, “there’s an alto sax on the stand next to you. If you would be so kind … we’ll try ‘Gib mir dein Herz, O Maria!’ Bitte.” I reached automatically for the alto, and carefully placed the bass saxophone on the floor. As I was bending down, I again wondered Why? Why this private concert by twilight in an empty theater? Did Lothar Kinze simply have a yen to make music for nothing? And not just he, but the whole ensemble? I postponed worrying about it. We played the tango. Again Lothar Kinze succeeded in giving the whole thing the incomparable sound of a village band, the wailing call that spills out of taverns of a Saturday midnight and together with the murky light pours out over the manure-smelling village green, that insistent throaty weeping and wailing of trumpet and clarinet; my adaptation this time was even more complete, because I knew the alto saxophone better. Only my pleasure was lessened. It was not the bass saxophone, and it didn’t drown out the growing mystery. I’m not crazy, I have to ask, I can’t just sit here for an hour, for five hours, maybe till morning, adding an alto or bass voice to this squealing disharmonic monstrosity of Lothar Kinze’s and then go drown myself in the Ledhuje river in the morning (
like my uncle who eluded life in the eleventh grade over an equation; he worked on it all day, all night, my mother thought he was asleep but they found him in the morning, he had hanged himself over the unsolved equation; and there had been no history of suicide in our family, but presumably somebody had to start and to do it in a way that isn’t done in Kostelec). So I finally had to ask the question.