THE BASS SAXOPHONE

by Josef Skvorecky

  I was suddenly obsessed with the mad feeling that this was all a trick, that afterward that crowd of gentlemen in boots like leather mirrors would take Lothar Kinze, smear him with tar and cover him with feathers, tie him to a post and then with a vengeful roar carry him past the Nazi Party secretariat to the Ledhuje river. I turned around. Lothar Kinze stood there in the green and purple jacket, his red pate in the cool light of the spot like a cockeyed strawberry forgotten in a wine glass of opalescent crystal. He was leaning against the piano, silent. Behind him, over the much-fingered keyboard of the piano, the face of the woman who looked like a sad clown; she had on a black dress with green lace at its neck; the pince-nez were already in place at the root of the indescribable schnozzola; and the hunchback, the cut-down Caesar, and the giant, shiny, purple, and Kelly-green, were immersed in gloomy silence; they were waiting, once again, humbly; something of the humility of the evening was also in what was expected of the performance — the sad funeral gang back from a long journey somewhere in Europe, possible only in wartime, dragging its weepy and incomprehensible message from the glories of one ornate municipal hall to the next, in distant towns on the periphery of big battlefields; the blind man’s face was still twisted in an expression of suffering; the golden girl in purple brocade was sitting on a chair next to the piano with her head bent; behind the scenes the Czech stage manager, who knew me (but who hadn’t recognized me, at least I hoped he hadn’t), was standing ready at the control panel with switches and rheostats; he too was gloomy, but because he had to serve the Germans. I looked through the peephole again. Another side show: Horst Hermann Kühl had just arrived, gaunt, an unbelievably perfect German in the black uniform of the SS, and the concert could begin.

  I hurried back to my chair. Lothar Kinze made a signal with his head, perhaps it was meant as encouragement, picked up his bow, applied the resin to it spiritedly. Another microscopic storm broke over the stage. The bass saxophone was no longer on the floor beside me; it was in a stand that somebody (apparently the wooden old man) had set up, and now it resembled the beautiful neck of a silvery water monster. The woman with the face of a mournful clown was ready, her hands on the keys, every finger on the right key of the introductory chord, her faded little eyes fixed on Lothar Kinze. The sticks in the bony hands of the blind hunchback rested lightly on the skin of the snare drum. The cut-down Caesar moistened his lips, the giant held his little bandoneon. We were waiting, like the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall under the baton of a purple Toscanini with a pate like a baboon’s bottom.

  The rustling in front of the curtain quieted down. Lothar Kinze raised his hand with the bow, the girl with the hair like a swan’s broken wings got up and walked over to the microphone. There was a rattle and a flurry, the curtain separated at the middle, and an expanding slit of dark hall glared back at us; the stage manager turned up all the spots. Lothar Kinze tapped the belly of his violin four times and lit into the strings: its sad voice clambered up to a touching height; I joined in on the alto sax; to my left the bandoneon wept and the trumpet with its dull mute sobbed. And the girl, with no introduction, with no theme (or was that a theme?) started in: her voice surprised me; it sounded like a burst bell, a deep alto, so sad, I thought, like a bell.

  Kreischend ziehen die Geier Kreise.

  Die riesigen Städte stehen leer.…

  We took that beautiful voice of hers (it must have been beautiful once, before the war; so the times and their evil powers had even destroyed something in her; it was a cracked, broken, tattered voice, a hoarse voice, it wasn’t until years later that something similar came into style but then the fashion was sweet singing, soprano, like grand opera, very dignified; there is often humor in a hoarse voice, but not there: only the sadness of a burst bell, of strings that are no longer flexible; a beautiful, once-dark and resounding alto as full of static as an old gramophone record, night over a burned forest, no longer the rustle of dried branches but the creaking, the charcoal crackling of skeleton trees all over the immense plain of Europe sick and razed with fire and boils wherever Lothar Kinze jounced his little gray bus, along paths bordered by columns of smoke touching the sky like huge poplars) and we surrounded her voice with that medley — this time mezzoforte — with the immobile creaky pulse of derision, with a shameless brassiness; and in the middle of it all, one half of her voice, the alto half, was in tune while the other half, flageolets of her scarred vocal chords, joined our distonal catcalling — like rolling voices in a synagogue, each complaining for itself yet, in a choir of many voices, complaining about a common fate, incapable of common song, only of separate, merging, disharmonically complementary off-key chants: the loud mechanical rhythm of the woman with the huge nose, the voices of trumpet and bandoneon (in unison in the arrangement but slightly out of tune, which lent their whine a flavor of piano blues) and even my saccharine voice, with Lothar Kinze trying desperately to add some embellishment; that same odd contrast, beauty and ugliness, the girl’s looks and ours, the beauty of half that deep and absolutely musical alto voice and the picturesque brass of the six clowns’ circus sentimentality:

  Die Menschheit liegt in den Kordilleren,

  Das weiss da aber keiner mehr.…

  And before me, on the waves of distonality, the world of Horst Hermann Kühl, his discipline, and his fertile German women bloated by the loud sentimentality of garden restaurants in Berlin Pankow, melted in that weepy abandonment like the Führer’s bust made of chocolate (in the neighboring town, a Sudeten-German town, master baker Düsele, whose shop was on the town square, had made the bust to celebrate the day that the Sudeten region was annexed by the Reich — the skin of almond paste, the mustache and hair of dark chocolate, it was a faithful image of the Führer; but Düsele’s display window faced south, and the day of annexation was welcomed by the sun; the swastika symbols hanging all over town did not cast enough shade. Shortly after lunch, the Führer began to collapse, the sugar white of one eye came loose and slowly slid down the melting almond cheek until it fell to the floor of the display window, among the sour candy sticks with red roses through their centers, among the lollipops and chewy penny-crocodiles. About two o’clock in the afternoon the Führer’s nose started to get longer and longer, then it melted and his whole face began to stretch; it acquired a bitter, supernaturally sad expression, chocolate tears began to flow down his cheeks like drops of wax from a black sabbath candle and by evening the pastrymaker’s beautiful sculpture had been transformed to an approximation of its shape, to a horrible, chewed-up, sad outline, a protean putrefying corpse of a head; in the cool of the evening it hardened, and when the master baker returned from the garden party on that glorious day of annexation he was met by the Gestapo, and the display window was chastely painted over. What they did with the bust I don’t know, perhaps they destroyed it, or ate it, or maybe the master baker’s successor made almond-paste pigs out of it — such is sometimes the fate of statesmen); song after song, and the strict countenance of that Teutonic tribal chief on enemy territory, Horst Hermann Kühl, softened into a crooked distant smile, a blissful dream that was reflected on the faces of the German women around him; Lothar Kinze, a water goblin in purple satin, leaned with immense sadistic energy into his muddy chords; the giant held on to the bandoneon like the proverbial child to its mother’s apron, and the cut-down Caesar, as though in love with the mute, kept up with the accordion player. But the more horrible it all was and the more it seemed to me that a rotten egg or apple core must soon come flying out from behind the iron crosses and the full maternal bosoms in the first row, the more real was the dream that settled in Kühl’s eyes; the shell of self-assurance slipped away, the typical stance of conquerors who are great, brutal, masterful men everywhere but at home, that almost insolent, imperious Romanus sum; it slipped away, and our ramshackle expression of bliss became the backdrop for a tiny, weary craving for some Bavarian or Prussian town, for Lederhosen, for the warm world of an insignificant home where he wouldn’t have to live in
a five-room suite in an apartment house on the main street, with the Führer on an altar, but where he could be the way he was before the order of ruthlessness and German greatness, an order that he had embraced on a money-grubbing impulse or perhaps merely out of stupidity; the distonal harmony, the cracked voice, the illegible, precise but deadened basses of the piano — the more dreadful it all was, the sweeter it sounded to the ear of his soul (or whatever it was he possessed) and in the ears of those plump German marketwomen and public servants who had made their fortunes from petty assortments of villainy transported here to this gilded art nouveau hall from marketplaces and guard booths by an idea born in a beer hall. The Kostelec String Quartet used to play here in better days — two professors from the classical lyceum, the head surgeon from the hospital, and the bookseller; and then there was the Czech Nonet, the Philharmonic, that held subscription concerts for the local islands of culture and civilization and for local snobs; now the concert was for this assembly in stolen diamonds and it was Lothar Kinze mit seinem Unterhaltungsorchester that was playing.

  And once an orchid had flowered here (when they raised the curtain, it was as if a blue rose of new realization had blossomed on the light-flooded stage): the R. A. Dvorský jazz band; who knows, I thought, it’s one of those funny things: the band with only a few drops of jazz … heaven knows what the rest was, but then each of us gets trapped on his own absurd flypaper — something that his particular Kostelec, even those broader Kostelecs of our world, will never understand: it is that treacherous moment when the gate to life appears to open, yet onto a life that is unfortunately outside this world and outside the things praised by this world — not the gate to art, but to sensation, to euphoria, perhaps to an optical, acoustical illusion but certainly the gate to that being’s essence, that creature who is childish, naïve, superficial, lacking profundity or exalted emotion, primitive, helpless, like being human is being helpless, who may even be ignorant of the magic word that opens the gate to a better life; but that moment is what determines one’s life, once and for all; the diamond of that experience (maybe a glass one, but not a stolen one) is set into the memory: how the curtain went up, how the fortissimo of the brasses shook the hall in syncopated rhythm, how the saxophones blazed honey-sweet, and the decision was made, for a lifetime; the old, mythical illusion of something that will ultimately destroy us, because it is the anchor of youth, the bond to infantilism, because it becomes an illusion that lasts too long, and you can’t start all over again then, by then it may be too late for everything. I played; the strength of that musical weakness squeezed me into the ridiculous ranks of Kinze’s show; I wailed like a musical clown on a borrowed alto sax, tears ran down my cheeks, I didn’t know why, one never knows — sorrow perhaps that one has to die just when one is beginning, that age-old Alpha-Omega. I didn’t even see Horst Hermann Kühl; Lothar Kinze’s purple back wheeled in front of me, bordered by the wildly flying, wildly fallible bow of his violin, the girl from Moabit sang in a cracked voice, Es geht alles vorüber, Es geht alles vorbei. Like a rolling ship in a trough of time, like a wedge of feverish delirium inserted between a normal afternoon that had ended beside a gray bus and a night that undoubtedly would be normal too (I didn’t believe in supernatural phenomena) on a bed, under a window with a starry sky, no, Kostelec would not believe this — and suddenly I saw myself among those specters, how terrible it all was; a sharp, pointed, cruel instant of realization: how I had been led into this stuffy, inhuman failure of a world, a soft baby woven of a dream; how the dream kept breaking through, but not a grandiose dream at all, a pathological dream of helplessness and incapacity, marked by illness, girls’ derisive, pointed laughter, lack of talent, lonely afternoons at the movies, nightmares, night fears; how it will all end some day, how it will all collapse; a baby touched from its first pastel perambulator by death, by the fear of eyes, of ears, of contact, the foolishness of those who do not understand, a lonely bad job of a baby — I played, and the immense bass saxophone bent over me like the frame of a somber painting. I suddenly felt, knew, that I always had and always would belong to Lothar Kinze, that I had made that entire migration of failure with him and would always be on the move with him, to the bitter end, with him and the sadness of that shabby band in the shadow of the bass saxophone as if it were a gallows, behind the girl with the broken voice like a burst bell. The faces of the German community in the audience rose, fell, intermingled. Lothar Kinze’s bony fingers danced with them on two strings; individual vision, chapters, hits, tangos, and shallow foxtrots were separated by another disharmony: applause; and into it rolled the sound of the big drum from behind, to support the audience’s approval with a leathery tenebrous thundering; the hunchback’s glasses were raised to the spotlit fore-stage, and under the glasses the blue lips were released from the spasm of depression and unceasing anxiety by an almost joyful curve brought on by the distorted music that resembled him; but Horst Hermann Kühl seemed not to understand — he applauded; then a new dose of that weeping call of approximation, of imperfection: new applause; in the middle of it, a hand was placed on my shoulder; I looked at it; a white, soft hand, not a worker’s hand but that of someone who earns his bread differently. The wrist disappeared into a close-fitting dazzling white cuff of a gauzy material, perhaps several layers of lace wrapped around the wrist, and above it a different, looser cuff with a black button. And a voice: “Come here. Backstage.” A low voice, a loud, hoarse whisper. I looked up the length of the hand, up the arm, but the man’s face (the hand was heavy, a large man’s hand) was hidden behind the bend of the bass saxophone, so I got up as if I had been blinded (the applause was still sounding, the girl was bowing, the broken swan’s wings flapping helplessly on either side of the tragic face), and felt the hand drag me backstage, firmly, almost roughly; it was only then that I saw him: he was a wild, hulking man, maybe forty. His hair was black, intertwined with what seemed like a leaden crown of thorns of gray hair, his eyes were wild, all black; a black mustache, a face that was almost Sicilian; he was insane, or normal at that insane moment; I recognized him; the pointed bluish chin with the crop of stubble jutted out over the white collar as it had stuck up out of the white hotel pillow earlier: it was the last stranger, the sleeping one whose place in Lothar Kinze’s orchestra I had involuntarily taken; the mysterious one. “Give it here,” he said roughly and almost ripped the green and purple jacket off me. Like the Swedish girl, he showed no sign of any deformation, no wound, no red flame of once-burnt flesh like the bald head of Lothar Kinze, and certainly no artificial limb or hump or hypertrophic nose, no blind eyes; he tore the alto sax out of my hand, yanked the strap over my head — the other hand was bound in a double white cuff as well; he growled; turning around, he walked out onto the stage and sat down, ramming the alto sax into the stand. Lothar Kinze’s eyes caught a Kelly-green movement behind him, and as he bowed they slipped under his arm to the man’s face; they were frightened; Lothar Kinze stayed bent over. The stranger (to me) reached roughly for the bass saxophone; he leaned it toward himself, he embraced it. The cut-down Caesar looked at him and grinned; the accordion player saw him too, but he only nodded; the pince-nez tumbled down the front of the gigantic nose and stayed hanging from their cord; she smiled; the man shoved the mouthpiece of the bass saxophone into his mouth, and at the same time the applause began to subside; each of the thawed, no longer quite Teutonic faces in the hall tilted toward a shoulder, and dream-filled eyes focused on the newcomer. Worriedly, nervously, Lothar Kinze squinted at the bass saxophone player, nodding slightly, questioningly; the bass saxophone player nodded too, but forcefully as if rejecting all attention. Lothar Kinze raised his bow; once again he rolled his torso in that waltz movement, he leaned his bow on the two strings and the insistent off-key introduction sounded, creeping through twelve miserable measures.