THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  “And we had the very same church there,” she said, pointing at the pudgy towers that looked like colored ice cream ornaments on a well-settled pudding. “At my confirmation, we stood around the church,” she related, looking at me fixedly from both sides of that surprising nose. “We had beautiful dresses, silk, white, ja, all white,” she said, “each of us had a prayer book in her hand and a wax candle with a green wreath, and his Excellency Bishop Stroffenski went from one to the next, giving us the Holy Sacrament. And he gave each of us a holy picture, oh, it was so wonderful. Each of us put her picture in her prayer book. People had much more respect for holy pictures then, my dear departed mama had a couple of hundred, from all over Europe. Even from Lourdes. Ja, ja” she said. “Bishop Stroffenski was a lovely man, so big and fat, his chasuble was all ironed, as if he had been born into it, not a single fold, not a wrinkle. Everything brand new. That was before the war. Ja. And as he went from one to the next he prayed in such a beautiful voice in Latin, and gave out those holy pictures, and out from behind where all of us little girls were standing came my father with two apprentices and Mother, the apprentices carrying a big pot full of hot sausages and Mother a loaf of bread and a knife, and behind her came a third apprentice with a basket full of bread, and every time the Bishop said a prayer and made a benediction and gave another holy picture, the girl crossed herself and turned to my father and he pulled a pair of hot sausages out of the pot with a hook he had, and Mother cut a slice of bread from the loaf, and the girl got her refreshments there and then. Ja, Ja. That’s how it was before the war. All that’s over with.”

  Industrialist Řivnáč’s shiny car drove past across the square, and the woman saddened. “Ja,” said the cut-down Caesar, “before the war. I used to play chess. That’s all I was interested in, just chess. All I did was solve problems. Check and mate in the third move, Indian system and so on. I remember all the times we played all day and all night, we didn’t even go to school sometimes, we risked everything for a game of chess. I wasn’t even interested in girls. Weren’t they interested though. Take Ursula Brumney, for instance. The town apothecary’s daughter. But I was blind, only chess, nothing but chess. And so one day she got an idea. Female. She got herself a checkered dress, it looked like a chessboard. She had to go all the way to Munich to get that material, she told me about it later. Chessboard after chessboard, one next to the other, with printed chessmen, a different problem on each of them. It was only then that I began to be interested in her. But that was the way I was. We were sitting out beyond the town in a beautiful meadow, it smelled pretty as if somebody had spilled perfume on it, but it was only hay, and with a moon in the sky like that clock on the church tower but without the face, yellow as a cat’s eye, and we weren’t even talking, we were whispering, she was all feverish, I put my arms around her, she lay back in the hay, and then that damned dress, the moon shone on it and I saw the problem on her skirt, a strange problem, a difficult one, and that was the end of that.”

  The cut-down Caesar laughed. “All I could see was that problem. I thought I’d be done with it in a hurry — what could you expect from some textile designer? — but it was probably copied from some grand master’s book or something. Well, I thought I’d solve the problem on the spot and then finish the work of love. Ja, but the thing took me two months, two months with almost no sleep at all and not going to work at all until I mated black in the seventh move.” “And Ursula?” asked the girl with the Swedish hair. “Her?” said the cut-down Caesar. “She married a master locksmith. Now he’s a political leader in Oberzweikirchen.” The girl bent her head. The door of Mr. Řivnáč’s limousine opened and out stepped his daughter Blanka into Mr. Lewit’s house; she was going to her ballet lessons, her slippers hung over her shoulder by their satin ribbons. The limousine started off again.

  “Ja, ja,” said the giant with the artificial leg, “before the war, I used to drink beer. And how! I was the champion of Schwaben. And it was a woman that kept me from winning the title of champion of Hessen,” he declared, “that time we were drinking in Lutze’s brewery, me against Meyer from Hessen. He had fifty double steins in him already, and me, forty-nine, he gave up at the fifty-first, he couldn’t keep it down any more, he threw it up. And me, I took a double stein and tossed it down as if it was my first that night. But what happened! It stayed in my gullet, a column of beer in my gullet, you see? From my stomach up my gullet to my mouth. I was all full of beer. I had to lean back so it wouldn’t spill out, and I felt I couldn’t keep it down for long. But we had a rule, whatever goes over the threshold counts as drunk. So I got up and walked over to the door. Slow and easy, my head back so it wouldn’t spill out, and I was at the door, almost over the threshold, and then — where the devil don’t dare, he sends a woman. Lotti, old Lutze’s daughter, a giggling kid, bounces through the door with an armload of double steins, not looking where she’s going, bumps into me, and I tell you the beer came squirting out of me like an Iceland geyser. I didn’t keep it down over the threshold, so I didn’t beat that Meyer fellow who was champion of Hessen.” The man with the artificial leg sighed. “Ja, that’s how it was before the war,” he added, and began to stuff himself with the turnip stew.

  One after another they emerged from dream into the reality of speech, of anecdotes. They were no longer a vision, a fantasy, it was rather the sticky-sweet panorama of the town square that was unreal, that honey-sweet canvas with the pink-yellow church like a settled pudding, the beautiful Blanka, almost as lovely as the princess of the aquariums (all those rich girls were beautiful as far as I was concerned; I admired rich people, they had rooms paneled with wood, fragrant cigars, all the booty of that luxurious past of our mass-produced times, lives less like life than a dream). I closed my eyes, I opened them. They were still there: the half-pound carnival gag, now without the pince-nez, the intelligent countenance of the cut-down Caesar, the wooden old man with the burnt-out eye in the middle of his cheek, the white face of the hunchback which had lost its expression of happiness and now reflected again the ceaseless pain of existence, Lothar Kinze, red as a baboon’s bottom, absent-minded, nervous. But the shining picture of the colorful square and the sunny evening had fallen over them, and it was no longer a funeral march down an iron staircase; and the Swedish girl with the broken swan’s wings said, “And I told him, if you kiss me, I’ll leave,” her silver-gold head against the pink-and-blue striped background like the head of a preclassical Greek statuette: golden hair, ivory complexion, opal eyes, “and so he never kissed me. He was a mathematician. He didn’t have the slightest bit of a sense of humor, a sense of playing the game, a sense for foolishness. Well, it wasn’t really a matter of a sense of humor, but rather of the game, girls have to talk like that, after all, they can’t just say, ‘Come with me, boy, I like you! Kiss me! Come to me! Put your arms around me!’ and so on.” The first smile appeared between the broken wings, but it was a sad, sad smile. “Usually, the girl has to say No, if you do so and so, I’ll go away. But all he knew were the laws of mathematics, not the rules of the game, the little foolishnesses. I said No and he didn’t understand. And so nothing came of it. Later,” she grimaced (yes, that’s right, that’s just what she did, she grimaced), “I stopped saying No on account of him. And that was a mistake too.” “To him?” asked the hunchback. “No, to others of course,” answered the girl. “And what became of him?” asked the blind man. “Don’t know,” she said. “He’s probably a soldier now.” “He may well be,” said the blind man. “That is unless he …” He didn’t finish his sentence. “But for that he needn’t be a soldier,” he added.

  And once again they fell back into the dream, like stones into a mosaic. The pumpkin stew (or the turnip stew or whatever it was, the Eintopf) in the dish was disappearing. The older woman leaned over the bed, pulled out a suitcase, opened it; a pile of objects wrapped in paper appeared. She placed two on the table. One was a small loaf of black bread, the other was something yellow in a white container. S
he opened it. “Dessert,” she said. The girl cut the loaf into eight slices, the woman spread the yellow stuff on the bread. It melted sweet and bitterish on the tongue, and it burned a little. “Ach, honey,” said Lothar Kinze. “When I was a little boy, before the war,” he said, and I suddenly realized what it was — synthetic honey, ersatz honey, a horrible mess produced by German industry, we had it at home too, once in a while. “The Count had three hundred beehives,” Lothar Kinze went on dreamily, “three hundred hives. Hundreds of thousands of bees. Oh, and in the spring, when they were flying home from the fields, their full little behinds smelled so sweetly that all Bienenweide smelled of honey. And the Count!” He waved a hand, a piece of ersatz honey fell in the turnip bowl. But he didn’t notice it. “Such a good man! And the Countess! People like that don’t exist nowadays. Every year on the Countess’s birthday we used to go to congratulate her, all the children from the entire Bienenweide estates. There were so many children, four maybe five hundred or more. We stood in a line down the corridors, down the castle stairs, through the park to the park gate and sometimes even farther. But we weren’t bored. The Count had the castle band come and march from the castle gate to the park gate and back, playing for us children. Ja, uns Kindern. And when our turn came we walked into the Countess’s parlor, she sat in an armchair by the window and she was beautiful, oh how beautiful she was. Women just aren’t that beautiful any more. And we each of us kissed her hand, and she smiled at each of us, and with her other hand she reached inside a bundle that she had ready there and gave each child an imperial ducat. They were good people, ja, ja,” said Lothar Kinze, “before the war. No, sir. There just aren’t any good people like that any more. And in the evening, they had fireworks in the park, and the bells in the village rang out.” As if in reply, Gabriel and Michael in their little red belfry chapels across the street began to peal. “Seven o’clock,” Lothar Kinze came back to earth. “We are going to have to start getting —” He looked at me. “And you — if you’re sure — we’ll have to disguise you a little, won’t we?”

  “Ja,” I said quickly. “Absolutely.”

  And now into another room, a third room, in the hotel. It belonged to Lothar Kinze, little red spiders clambered over pea-green wallpaper. And there in a dirty mirror I was transformed into one of them. Lothar Kinze pulled a box of makeup out of a suitcase (I had guessed right, they must have recently been traveling with a circus, there was a collection of clown’s noses, bald wigs with a wreath of red curls, and all sorts of beards); he pasted a big black mustache under my nose, a mustache that curled up at the ends, and big black eyebrows. I looked a little like Groucho Marx, unrecognizable (not like the time I was sitting in for sax player Heřmánek, the barber, at the Slavia night club, and they pasted a Gable mustache under my nose; everybody recognized me and the next evening I didn’t play there), a fitting part of the Spike Jones picture. And then back to the first hotel room: the chin still jutting up from the pillow, still the same weak, rattling breathing. But it was beginning to get dark, a green shadow fell over the room (a reflection from the moss on the church towers). I took off my jacket, hung it over a chair. From the closet, Lothar Kinze handed me the bass saxophone player’s uniform: yes, it fitted the picture. Kelly-green jacket with purple satin facings, a white shirt and an orange bow tie. When we came out into the hall, the others were there waiting, the hunchback and the one-legged giant clad in the same splendor, looking like colorful chewing-gum wrappers (obviously a fourth-rate one-ring side show of a circus). The girl had a dress of dark purple brocade, closely fitted to her body (she really was beautiful, and not just in comparison with Lothar Kinze’s mandragoras); by then I knew whom she reminded me of: Mitzi, the beautiful prostitute from the Castle House, whom I loved (I was seventeen, eighteen) as much as I loved Domanín’s daughter (but for different reasons, the opposite feelings, other associations); the only way we ever saw Mitzi was when she hurried across the promenade, pale, platinum blond, immensely pretty and attractive, and then one day Ulrych and I set out to see her, we saved up for it out of our allowances; but in the lobby of the Castle House (it was very gloomy, not the least bit luxurious) we got cold feet and we cut out, we only glimpsed her at her door, in a negligee with a plunging neckline (we spent the money saved for that beautiful prostitute getting drunk on cheap taproom liquor; they had to call a doctor for Ulrych). And after that we only saw her occasionally in the afternoons, in the street, for a brief moment; she was the property of her myth — under her thick fair mane, in a tight skirt with the lovely lines of her behind curving under it, on terribly sad beautiful legs, as unapproachable and as mysterious, but differently, as Blanka Řivnáč, who also occasionally crossed town proudly (on foot!) in her chinchilla coat, smelling of gasoline: a myth too of the town, of the promenade, of the street. When the war was over, a textile worker married Mitzi, and later, for some political or black-market reason, they locked them both up in jail. After that she was a blotchy old woman, but for that matter even the myth of the town disappeared, the myth of the promenade, there was no promenade any more, everything disappears, becomes extinct, fades, dies. Lothar Kinze joined us in the same Kelly-green and purple uniform, and for the second time that day we started the march to the depths of the hotel. No sooner had we left the section where there was natural lighting than shadows began to flicker on the walls; we were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs again, except I was one of them now. And again the wooden harmony of war. They had dropped the curtain on the stage. The somber (now lighted) space of the auditorium was separated from us by a wall of velvet, and we sat down in a semicircle behind the music stands.

  I walked over to the curtain. That stage had been hallowed by the names of splendid bands of days past. Emil Ludvík, Elite Club, Karel Vlach. They used to pull a black backdrop up behind them, and behind it, leaning against a pile of auxiliary curtains and backdrops I used to crouch and listen to that heavenly music; and I heard Milada Pilátová, Gypsy — they called her Gypsy — and from behind the backdrop I overheard them talking during the intermission, and saw her through a hole too. Later, they were said to have run her out of Zlín for drunkenness and prostitution: the young women from the Bata factories led her out of the Grand Hotel in Zlín; that’s the way it always is, they always arouse so much hatred, they are always thrown out, run out, prohibited, perhaps they hit too close to the soul, and the ones that don’t have any soul can’t stand that language, that testimony, that Idea in the cavities where their soul ought to be; but before it happened, she sang (for about three weeks; great historical epochs have often been very short, but their greatness is remembered, and in legend they seem to expand) in the clubs on Zlín’s Basin Street, between the Grand Hotel and the movie house, where from behind the blackout curtains in the windows of coffee houses and wine shops the glimmering riffs carried through the wartime protectorate night; Gustav Vicherek and his band (all of them in white jackets, shoulders like moving men, Django Reinhardt mustaches, the light swinging syncopation of strings through the amplifier) and across the street Honza Číž — like the erstwhile duels of bands in old New Orleans, quite friendly — and down the street a-ways Bobek Bryen with Inka Zemánková, whose coarse voice woke Bata’s young men from their sleep and drove them en masse to the cold showers; everything — the wartime night, the lights glimmering through the blackout curtains, young people who made the difficult wartime hitch-hiking trek all the way from Prague simply for the music, the dressed-up protectorate movie-makers, students in knee-breeches with hungry eyes swallowing breaks like the word of the Lord, soldiers who wanted to forget the glory of death, night owls, sheep, burnt-out candles — everything was swinging and diving on that Perdido Street of our imagination from the Grand Hotel to the movie house, on that tin-pan alley, swinging and diving in the semiprohibited Milneburg joys of the wartime renaissance of swing, and Gypsy was Queen of Jazz here, the briefest but most dazzling reign in the history of monarchies, the mythical era of Gypsy. Then they locked Vicher
ek up for “the public performance of eccentric Negroid music,” the coffee houses fell silent, Honza Číž took off on tour and died in an icy ditch, Inka Zemánková began vegetating in the Vltava Café, the cold winds of police intervention blew down Perdido Street; now it’s nothing but a legend, too; you can’t distinguish between what happened and what is a dream; so swiftly gone; but that is the way it should be. I stood there at the curtain, a glass-covered peephole glittered and I put my eye to it; I was overcome with sadness. Honza Číž was already dead, Gypsy had disappeared somewhere in Brno. Fritz Weiss was in Terezín, that concentration camp of a ghetto. I was an adult, I ought to have been taking up serious things and not foolishness. Somewhere, everywhere, little groups like us (I mean us, not Lothar Kinze) played that sad, beautiful music called swing, also doomed to extinction. I looked through the peephole. Right in front of me sat Frau Pellotza-Nikschitsch with a diamond necklace around her neck (or something that looked like a diamond necklace, although that’s probably exactly what it was: I think it used to belong to Mrs. Kollitschoner, just like the Pellotza-Nik-schitsches’ apartment), dressed in red silk. Herr Pellotza-Nikschitsch sat beside her, in the brown shirt of the SA, grim-faced, with a crew cut. Now a German, before that an Italian, before that a Serbian, before that, heaven knows what. Almost impressive in all these metamorphoses; how did he actually feel and what actually was he? His son was a drunk and a brute. He came to a violent end. And next to him Herr Zeeh, also in uniform, black this time, maybe SS or NSDAP or OT or another of those cold abbreviations, an earnest shop assistant in Benno’s grandfather’s shop, now an earnest member of the Party, and his wife, with a big antique gold brooch, a brooch that I had also seen somewhere else (I had the feeling, I was almost sure), on the dress of someone presumably dead by now (all of it was stolen; the splendor based on exploitation was transformed into a splendor of simple robbery and murder). A velvet gown; and behind it other satined and brocaded German ladies with a mobile jewelry exhibition, the origin of which could not have been reliably proven in a more strictly legalistic society, little shining stories ending in death; and black, brown, and gray uniforms; a panorama of iron crosses. They gathered here as on a painting by the modern Hieronymus Bosch, arranged in a gray-brown impression, to listen to Lothar Kinze mit seinem Unterhaltungsorchester.