THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  “It’s been very nice,” I said. “Danke.” “Bitte,” said Lothar Kinze. “Actually, what I wanted …” I paused. The problem was staring out of his eyes. The answer to my question. “But now I really have to go.” “Wohin?” blurted out Lothar Kinze. “Home. They’ll be expecting me by now.” “Couldn’t you phone?” “I guess I could,” I said. “I could phone the neighbors.” “Do it then. Bitte.” There was a plea in Lothar Kinze’s voice.

  And then I asked, “Why?” and it seemed to me that Lothar Kinze’s red bald spot filmed over with sweat. He glanced almost unhappily at the giant with the accordion and then at the cut-down Caesar, but there was no help forthcoming there. The blind man he omitted. He glanced at the girl, at the woman with the nose. She was the one who cleared her throat, turned it (the nose) and the faded eyes at its root around to face me, cleared her throat again and said (in a voice like squeaking shoes): “Wir brauchen Sie.” We need you.

  Either the silence that followed really was funereal or else she gave me such an urgent answer in those three words — not an articulated answer, a deeper one, the one that lies in the intonation (the true meanings of words are always down in the intonation) — that the words expanded in the darkness behind the cone of light. WIR BRAUCHEN SIE! Desperately, earnestly, as if she were begging me — and yet she said it softly, without raising her voice, an involuntary SOS of the soul, against which there may be no objection — sadly, urgently; that is the way the voices called from Pandora’s box, and when she obeyed and opened it all the ills of the world flew out. Wir brauchen Sie. I turned to Lothar Kinze; he was scratching his leg with the violin bow. “Ja,” he said, “we need you. For this evening.” “But!” I exclaimed, loudly, quickly, because it — nonsense. Nonsense. Here, now, all right. Kostelec won’t believe this, a twilight jam session in a side show in an empty theater, but not in the evening. No, not then. In the evening Herr Zeeh will be here, Herr Pellotza-Nikschitsch, heaven only knows what Czech-German ladies, maybe even Mr. Veselý, Wessely the quisling, and maybe even a few of Mr. Káňa’s little agents, no, no, no — the doll shut its eyes, the voice of reason braced itself for a mighty roar: NO! “Wir brauchen Sie …” again, just like the woman with the face of a mournful clown had said it, except this time it was in another tone, a mezzo-soprano voice in a more attractive, flutelike tone; I looked up. It was the girl with hair like the broken wings of a swan. “We need you,” she repeated. “If you don’t play this evening, then …” and there was that same intonation, that pause so empty that it encompasses the meaning of entire sentences and long explanations. And the same desperate plea in her gray, Moabit eyes. I didn’t ask “Why” again. I was seventeen, eighteen, later on in my life I wasn’t as noble, I pretended not to hear intonations. But this time I accepted and I didn’t question; they had a reason. Was it connected — I didn’t ask, but the association unfolded inside my head — with the man upstairs in the beige room, with that unshaven cliff of a chin? He was undoubtedly the bass saxophone player. But why the tragic tone? They could play without a saxophonist. Or else they could postpone the concert. These things happen, after all, particularly in a war: vis maior. God knows what war wound, what illness knocked that bearded mountain down onto the beige bed. “But I might be recognized,” I told Lothar Kinze. “People know me here, and if they saw me …” If it got around that I had played with a German band, for Germans — but something stopped my tongue, perhaps it was shame or perhaps they were the ones that disarmed me, that they so naturally wanted me to play with them, Germans, and it must have been more dangerous for them than for me, contact with a lower race — or was it only sexual contact that was meant? Certainly that, at any rate. (No, no danger. Whole crowds of Czechs played in German bands — Chrpa, the trombone player, he died there.) But the fact that they asked me, that the old dame from the Bavarian hills put it in the form of a plea, We need you! that they didn’t force me, that they didn’t simply order me — it would have shamed me to say that I was afraid to play with a German band because I was known there, something as natural as that (but what is natural, after all? Would anybody have thought, in the years of that war, when concentration camps were tolerantly devouring Jewish industrialists and Communists, pot-bellied functionaries of the patriotic Sokol physical culture organization along with consumptive weavers from the Mautner mill, and when people lowered their voices because Der Feind hört mit — the Enemy is listening — and a joke could mean the firing squad, would anyone have thought that only a few years would pass and pot-bellied Sokol functionaries and Jewish industrialists would be wielding picks and shovels again, this time mining uranium, although there would be no Feind, no Enemy in the land; what in the world is natural, what is certain, absolute?), so I didn’t finish my sentence. Lothar Kinze might even have been uninformed, perhaps he had been traveling with his grotesque band through the Old Reich, and this was his first performance in a Protectorate of the Third Reich because he said, “By whom don’t you want to be recognized?” “By Herr Kühl.” I said the first, most dangerous name to pop into my head. “He has no liking for me.”

  I needn’t have added that. They exchanged glances again, and the woman behind the piano cleared her throat. Horst Hermann Kühl: the name mentally slotted itself into place too, and along with it sounded the mad, threatening voice behind the wallpaper. Was that why? But if so, why? “We could,” said the woman with the face of a mournful clown, clearing her throat, “we could disguise you somehow.” “Ja,” said Lothar Kinze, “we could, we have the things to do it with.” He looked at me. “If you are willing …” A pause, and in it the anxiety of a problem that must be solved, or else. “Please,” came the voice from Moabit, “please, we truly need you,” said the girl with the Swedish hair. I looked around. They were all looking at me — even the blind man’s dark glasses mirrored the saxophone that I was still holding in my hand. In the corpus of the bass saxophone on the floor, the dying fly gave a last sob. I could smell the old, weak, desperate smell of resin in my nose.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go and make a phone call.”

  I thought up some excuse or other on the phone. Then I came back. In an hour we had worked through Lothar Kinze’s entire repertoire: a miserable medley of waltzes, tangos, and foxtrots, indiscernible from polkas or schottisches or any composition with an even number of beats per measure; no problems; it was extraordinary (or perhaps it was part of the chimera, of the Fata Morgana) that this bundle of worn-out hackneyed songs, melodies played and replayed so often that you no longer perceive them, harmonies as similar one to another as one cliché is to another, extraordinary that this set of songs, like their style without a single bit of originality or inspiration, without imagination, was Lothar Kinze’s stock-in-trade for (judging by the stickers on the accordion case) almost all Europe; perhaps they used to travel with a hard-luck circus that finally burned down one day somewhere near the front line or after a partisan attack, or else the one and only lion ate up the one and only dancing bear or the one and only bareback rider and there was nothing left to show even the most grateful and undemanding wartime audience; and so they gained their independence, except for the inherited repertoire (there was even Die schöne Zigeunerin, “Oh, play to me gypsy …” and a sad, beautiful hit from the time when my mother was young: “I’m forever blowing bubbles, Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, Almost to the sky” — our band used to play it too, but in swing), and they traveled from town to town, through villages, along the sidelines of the war, cheering up the German communities in distant and peripheral countries of the occupation; perhaps it was also a form of beggary, maybe the band really did belong in courtyards, but the German communities had at their disposal the best art nouveau halls in all Serbian, Polish, Macedonian, and Ukrainian towns, just like ours in Kostelec (with lunettes from the original design by Master Mikoláš Aleš), and so the ensemble of Lothar Kinze also had at its disposal the best halls in town theaters; from the patched tent of some flop of a warti
me circus to the gilded splendor of twisted iron balustrades and plump alabaster breasts of caryatids that looked as if Mucha had painted them — that was the good fortune of all that was fourth-rate in the Third Reich and in all other fourth-rate empires. The girl didn’t sing, we did not have time for that. I was only proving that I could handle it; so after an hour we sat down in a room of the hotel (not the room where the bass saxophone player was lying chin up, another one) to eat supper. They brought it up from the hotel kitchen in a big, beaten-up stoneware dish — it was a sort of Eintopf, turnip ambrosia; everyone got a spoon and so did I, we piled it on plates, we ate; it was a supper like Lothar Kinze’s repertoire, but they ate humbly, silently, very modestly; a kind of ritual: I could almost see the interior of some circus trailer, the dirty hands of some skinny cook; for that matter, the room itself might have been a circus trailer, the wallpaper striped pink and baby blue (broad, art nouveau stripes and on the stripes, faded gold butterflies — the entire hotel was like a zoo from the mad dream of an infantile paper hanger), the furniture made of square brass bars, with faded silk cushioning between the bars at the head and foot of the bed. We were sitting around a marble table on brass legs which they had dragged to the middle of the room. “What about the man next door?” I asked Lothar Kinze. “Is he your saxophone player?” “Ja,” nodded Lothar Kinze, his hand shaking. A piece of turnip stew fell back into his plate, made a splashing noise, and Kinze did not finish his sentence. “Isn’t that pretty?” said the woman with the big nose. She nodded out of the window, and cleared her throat. Through the round window, Kostelec offered Lothar Kinze and his orchestra a view of its square. It was almost seven o’clock in the evening and a cheerful procession of workers involuntarily transferred to the Messerschmitt airplane factory were going past, on their way from the factory after a twelve-hour shift; but that wasn’t what was beautiful — what she meant was the church, golden pink, old Gothic, spread out on the square, broader than it was high, settled into breadth like a stone pudding by almost ten centuries of existence, with the wooden shapes of two pudgy moss-covered towers shining green as a forest meadow and above them two red-painted belfries, like two chapels of Our Lady on two green meadow-covered hills, all this rooted in the drop of honey that was the town square, surrounded by lava in the honey and raspberry evening. “Like where I come from in Spiessgürtelheide,” sighed the woman. “Mein Voter” — she turned to her companions who were silently transferring turnips from plate to mouth — “My father had a butcher shop there, and sausages, a beautiful store on the square.” She sighed. “It was all pale green tiles, ja ja, das war vor dem Krieg, before the war, a long time ago. I was a young girl then.” She sighed.