THE BASS SAXOPHONE (12 page)

So I carried the bass saxophone through the
hotel lobby, which looked very different from the way it had when I was there last. I entered another world. I wasn’t in Kostelec any more: red flags with a white and black picture of an evil sun, the bronze bust of
that
fellow (after the war, when we smashed it, it turned out not to be of bronze at all, but papier-mâché); a lady in a dirndl at the reception desk; a couple of soldiers. I carried the bass saxophone in its black case past them — it had nothing to do with Germans or non-Germans, it was from the twenties;
that
fellow was nothing in those days.

Then up the coco-fiber runner to the second floor. A beige corridor, another world again. A small-town dream of luxury. Brass numbers on cream-colored doors, and silence. A sharp German voice sliced into the silence from behind one of the doors.

The old man — I had just noticed that he limped and was dragging what remained of one foot behind him; not that there was a piece of his foot missing, but every time he stepped down on his other, healthy foot, the sick foot didn’t raise itself from the ground but dragged behind, the sole crosswise, scraping along the carpet, sweeping up dust until he put his weight on it again — took hold of the handle of the door labeled 12A (how splendidly secure must have been the era that was afraid to put a brass thirteen on this cream-colored door, afraid that it might lose a customer because the
guest, perhaps the owner of a car, certainly a well-to-do fellow if he could use the services of the local hotel, might refuse to sleep behind that unlucky number and instead climb into his car and ride off into the safety of the night, to the competitors in the neighboring town, to another cream-colored room, to another vain, long-since forgotten night, forgotten like all of them have been forgotten; and only the number, 12A, has remained) and opened it. He maneuvered me with the bass saxophone through the door, and I immediately began to wonder. Why here? Why to a boudoir with gilded furniture? This kind of big instrument didn’t belong here, it belonged in dressing rooms behind a stage, somewhere near the auditorium in the rear of the hotel. Then why here? Was this some kind of trick? A trap? But the old man had already closed the door, and that was when I saw the man on the gilded bed, or rather, his head; he was lying under the blue and white hotel blanket, breathing soundlessly through his open mouth, his eyes shut. The room shone like a yellow-gold lantern, the sun of early autumn reaching its yellow rays through the curtains. It was something like the old engravings: a baroque sun glinting on the amazed witnesses to a vision (the only thing missing was a naïve madonna and a falling housepainter saved by the madonna invoked at the right moment); but it was no vision, if you don’t count the fossil instrument hidden in the immense
case, it was just a man on a gilded bed, a head with an open mouth, the breath gently rattling through a throat recently scorched by the icy winds of the Eastern Front and the sands of El Alamein, and other towns deep in the desert with names that might have been invented by the Poetist poets, with structures of bleached bones and sand-smoothed helmets that some new Hieronymus Bosch will use to weave the frames for neo-baroque paintings in the forthcoming dark age; and behind the gentlest of all rattles was the afternoon silence of the siesta, the light from the round brass lamps on the night table that didn’t match the bed, and a pink painting of a pink girl holding a pink cherub that could have been meant to be Jesus Christ, and silence; and in that silence another, distant, brittle but dangerous, spitting voice. I turned to the old man; the fellow on the bed didn’t move; one of the old man’s eyes was staring at me, but it was the blind one, the one on his cheek, the other was listening to the sound of the distant voice; and then I realized that it wasn’t distant, that it was only behind the wall and that it was indeed menacingly close. Once again I looked at the old man, at his other eye; it supported my impression of the danger of that voice. Not fright, just apprehension; the old man (a survivor of Armageddon) was beyond all fear, he had seen too much of death, he was indifferent to it, and what else is there to be afraid of if not death or pain (and
he had experienced pain greater than the proximity of death)? So it could only be a look of apprehension, a sort of anxiety. “Well, goodbye,” I said, and turned to go; the old man stretched out a hand that looked like a root. “Wait!” he snapped, and kept on listening, he hadn’t for a moment stopped listening, to that mad midget voice behind the wall. Ten seconds passed, thirty seconds; perhaps a minute. “I have to …” But the rootlike hand waved, impatiently, angrily. I looked at the case holding the bass saxophone. It too bore traces of old age; it had decorative metalwork on the corners, like the plush-bound family chronicle that my grandmother used to have.

“You may take a look at it,” croaked the split vocal chords — the old man’s not the fellow’s behind the wall, whose vocal chords were just fine (their owner lived off his vocal chords; if he were to lose them, get tumors on them or find them occupied by colonies of TB germs, it would be the end, he wouldn’t survive his voice, for the voice
an sich
was his livelihood, his social position; only the voice was important, not the brain in which the voice had its center; such voices are not controlled by the brain, such voices control themselves and their centers). The old man’s voice said, “You may take a look at it. Or even try it out, if you want to.” I looked at him. His eye was no longer listening to
the voice. It was looking at me, almost kindly,
“Ja,”
I said, “I’d like to, but …” and I looked at the metalwork decorations, I opened the case. The baroque rays of light caressed the corpus, the washbasin full of verdigris and the dried spit of bar musicians.
“Ja,”
I said,
“das ist sensationell.”
I translated my supreme recognition verbatim. I reached inside the case and raised it the way I would help a sick friend to sit up. And it rose in front of me. A mechanism of strong, silver-plated wires, the gears, the levers, like the mechanism of some huge and absolutely nonsensical apparatus, the fantasy of some crazy mixed-up inventor. It stood in my hand like the tower of Babel, a conical shape, the valves reflecting my face full of respect, hope, and love — and faith (it was ridiculous, I know, but love is always ridiculous, like faith: the mechanism interested me more than any philosophy ever had, and I admired it more than any Venus possible — certainly more than the Venuses of Kostelec’s town square, and certainly more than any other, say the Venus de Milo; a rarely used and almost unusable instrument, a nightmare of any instrument maker, a curious jest of some man long since dead, possessed by the idea of piston trumpets and metal clarinets); it sounds ridiculous, absurd, monstrous, but the thing was beautiful. It stood like a blind silver tower, submerged in a golden sea, in
a beige and gold room in a town hotel, touched by timid fingers, and behind it Rollini’s ghost at the other end of the world in Chicago.

I looked around; I suddenly felt I was alone (except for the fellow in the bed, but he was asleep), and I was. I lowered the bass saxophone carefully into its plush bed, stepped over to the door and put my hand on the doorknob; it was still warm from the recent touch of a feverish hand; it was a brass hand itself, holding a horizontal stick with a ball on the end. I turned it, but the door didn’t open. I was locked in the room that shone like a beige and gold lantern.

I turned back toward all that light. A sleepy autumn fly was circling over the blind, silver torso in the plush coffin. It was humming. It was flying through the cosmic rain of glowing dust particles in the baroque fascia of sunlight; I stepped toward the wall.

The wallpaper was old and stained, but faded pictures of doves still showed against the beige background. I put my ear to their delicate breasts. The voice came close; it was repeating a nasty, unintelligible litany of anger and irritation, of imperious, spit-polished, boot-shod hysterics. I recognized it. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I knew who it was talking behind the gentle doves in the next, equally beige hotel room: it was Horst Hermann Kühl; it was the same voice that screeching
along ahead of him had penetrated all the way up the iron staircase to the roof of the Sokol Hall, where you had to climb down another iron staircase to reach the projection booth of the movie house (I wasn’t there at the time, but Mack, who operated the projector, told me about it). A pair of black boots had appeared on the iron rungs, the voice lashing in ahead of them. “What is this supposed to mean?” he had rasped like a poisonous firecracker. “This is a provocation!” Such was the terrific power of that dark voice (not the voice of Horst Hermann Kühl, but the black singer’s — they even said it was Ella Fitzgerald, I didn’t know, they were old records, Brunswick, before the era of stars, and the label said nothing but “Chick Webb and his Orchestra with Vocal Chorus”; there was a short sobbing saxophone solo — they said that was Coleman Hawkins — and they said the other was Ella Fitzgerald, that voice) it had forced Horst Hermann Kühl, omnipotent within the wartime world of Kostelec, to leave the seat in which he was enjoying the intermission between the newsreel and the film starring Christine Söderbaum or maybe it was Heidemarie Hathayer; when he heard black Ella (“I’ve got a guy, He don’t dress me in sable, He looks nothing like Gable, But he’s mine”) he flew out of his comfortable seat and squealing like a rutting male mouse (it all took on the dimensions of the microworld of Kostelec) he tore down the
aisle between the seats to the lobby and up the steps and up the iron staircase to the roof and down the iron ladder (more ladder than staircase) to the projection booth and, still squealing, confiscated the record and took it away with him. Mack told on me; yes, he did; what was he supposed to do? He could have said he didn’t know where the Chick Webb record came from, he could have played stupid, that tried and tested Czech prescription; sometimes they fell for it; they almost loved stupid Schweiks — in contrast, they themselves glowed with vociferous wisdom. But it didn’t occur to Mack, so he told on me.

I had committed a crime; it seems unbelievable today what could (can) be a crime: a Beatles haircut in Indonesia (that’s today, and that kind of power is always a festering effusion of weakness) — our ducktail haircuts were also once a crime, just like the locks on the heads of youths that shock syphilitic waiters so much today; and the fact that my father had been seen conversing with Mr. Kollitschoner; and the conviction that
Drosophila
flies are suitable for biological experiments; the use of slang; a joke about the president’s wife; faith in the miraculous power of paintings and statues; a lack of faith in the miraculous power of paintings and statues; and everywhere the eyes, the spying eyes of the Káňas and the Vladykas; and the ears; and the little reports; and the file cards, keypunched,
cybernetic, apparently the first things of all to be cyberneticized. I used to draw advertising slides for the movie house; I would carry them down the iron ladder to the projection booth and because beauty-inspired joy, pleasure-inspired pleasure is diminished by solitude, it had occurred to me: I had those rare records at home, I always used to listen to them before I went to sleep, on an old wind-up phonograph next to my bed: “Doctor Blues,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Blues in the Dark,” “Sweet Sue,” the Boswell Sisters, “Mood Indigo,” “Jump, Jack, Jump”; and so one day in the projection booth when the electric phonograph was spinning and amplifying a native polka called “Hey, Ma, Who Are You Saving Your Daughter For?” the idea had possessed me: I made my decision. In spite of the fact that they were so rare, I had brought them to the booth (I had labeled the vocal pieces with paper tape so Mack wouldn’t make a mistake and put one on by accident) and while
Herr Regierungskommissar
and the others were awaiting the beginning of the film
“Quax, der Bruchpilot,”
I was awaiting the first beats of Webb’s drum in the foxtrot “Congo” — the annunciation, the sending down of beauty on the heads in the movie house; and when it finally came, that bliss, that splendor, I looked down through the little window and I couldn’t understand why no heads were turned, no eyes opened in amazement, that
they were not suddenly quiet and that the jaws cracking wartime sour candy did not pause in their effort; the crowd murmured on in their trite crowd conversation; and then, that once, Mack made a mistake (he explained later that the label had come unstuck on that side of the record); the crowd murmured on, ignoring the smeared swinging of Chick’s saxes, and murmured on when Ella came in with her nasal twang (“I’ve got a guy, and he’s tough, He’s just a gem in the rough, But when I polish him up, I swear …”); only Horst Hermann Kühl stopped talking, pricked up his ears, took notice, and then cut loose with a roar (hate is unfortunately always much more observant than love, and more observant even than an insufficiency of love).

I never got that record back; I never found out what happened to it. It disappeared into his five-room apartment, which was built around an altar (yes, an altar) with a life-size portrait of
that
fellow on it; after the war, when we broke in there with a number of other armed musicians, the record wasn’t anywhere to be found — only the deserted man in the portrait, and someone who had got there before us had drawn a pince-nez on him and a full beard to go with the mustache, and, along with it, a ridiculously long penis hanging out of his military fly; Horst Hermann Kühl had left town in time, with all his property. Maybe he even took
her with him, black Ella, maybe he broke her in a fit of anger, threw her into the ash can. Nothing happened to me; my father set the cogs on the wheels of contacts moving, influence, intercession, advocates, middlemen for bribes, and Kühl simmered down. We belonged among the important people in town (although later, toward the end of the war, they locked my father up for that very reason; in fact he was locked up a number of times for that reason, a position like that is always relative: it can often save you and apparently equally often destroy you, you are always an object of hate, always in the public eye, you can get away with what the populace can’t and you can’t get away with what the populace can); that’s why nothing happened to me and the provocation (arousing public indignation with black Ella’s singing in English, while the German citizens of Kostelec were waiting for the romance of Christine Söderbaum) was forgotten. Kühl was silent about it, a silence apparently bought with a bottle of Meinl’s rum or something similar (the way payment used to be made in antiquity with cattle, so it is made in the modern world with alcohol:
pecunia — alcunia
).