THE BASS SAXOPHONE (13 page)

So I can safely say that I recognized the voice of Horst Hermann Kühl. It was easy, in fact; I had never heard him talk — he was either silent or he was yelling. Now he was yelling, behind the wall covered with beige wallpaper with its faded design
of silver doves, and I pressed my ear up against their delicate breasts. What he was yelling was unintelligible. In the passionate beating of his words, like the beating of a dove’s heart, I caught fragments that made no sense: “… 
noch nicht so alt … an der Ostfront gibt’s keine Entschuldigung … jeder Deutsche … heute ein Soldat
.… … not so old yet … on the Eastern Front there are no excuses … every German … today a soldier …” His German was entirely different from that of the mournful
Feldwebel
, inscribed in Gothic script in a blue notebook (but there are two tongues within every language: not class tongues, nor does the difference between them have anything to do with the difference between literate language and vulgar slang — the dividing line cuts somewhere down the middle of both); Kühl had mastered only one tongue, like Werner, the School Inspector, who tore past the hall patrol like a cannonball (Lexa, our fourth tenor sax, had an encounter with him once and was the recipient of unwelcome praise; Werner liked opposition), burst into our classroom and started to yell at the frail consumptive professor of German; the professor listened with his head on one side, calmly, with Christian equanimity, perhaps resigned to fate. Werner shouted, ranted and raved, spewing ugly words like
Kerl
,
Dreck
,
Schwein
, and
Scheisse
; we didn’t understand him but we knew he certainly
wasn’t praising the professor; the professor listened; when the inspector paused to take a breath, he took advantage of the moment and spoke, gently, quietly but clearly, with dignity, almost reverently. “I teach Goethe’s German,
Herr Inspektor
,” he said. “I do not teach pig-German.” Amazingly, no apocalyptic storm arose. The Inspector fell silent, visibly deflated, turned on his heel and disappeared. The only thing that remained of him was a diabolical stink of boot polish.

“I don’t want to hear a word! I’ll be waiting for this evening,” then the voice of Horst Hermann Kühl behind the wall lapsed back into hollering incomprehensibility. Someone (behind the wall) tried to say something, but the whiplash of Kühl’s high voice silenced him. I stepped away from the doves; the dusty golden fingers of early autumn were still climbing the wallpaper, up a wardrobe with cream-colored angels with peeling golden locks, forming a canopy of Stardust over the bass saxophone. The man in the bed was still asleep. His chin jutted up from the pillow like some desperate cliff. It reminded me of the chin of my dead grandfather; his chin had stuck up out of the coffin like that too, with the stubble that outlives a man, as if in derision. But this one was still alive.

And I was at an age when one doesn’t think of death. I approached the bass saxophone again. The main part of the body lay to the left, deep in its
plush bed. Next to it lay the other sections: the long metal pipe with huge valves for the deepest tones, the bent lever and the little leather-covered plate on the octave valve, the conical end with the big mouthpiece.

They attracted me the way the requisites for mass attract a novice. I leaned over and lifted the body out of its plush bed. Then the second part; I put them together, I embraced the body with gentle fingers, the familiar fingering, my little finger on the ribbed G flat, the valves of the bass thunder deep down under the fingers of my right hand; I wiggled my fingers; the mechanism rattled pleasantly; I pressed down valve after valve, from B all the way to C and then B flat to B with my little finger, and in the immense hollow spaces of the bass saxophone the bubbling echo of tiny leather strokes sounded, descending the scale, like the tiny footsteps of a minute priest in a metal sanctuary, or the drumming of little drums in metal frames, a mysterious telegram of tiny tom-toms; I could not resist, I reached for the mouthpiece, attached it, and opened the plush lid of the little compartment in the corner of the coffin; there they were, a bundle of big reeds, like the shovels bakers use to take bread out of the oven; I stuck one of the reeds in its holder, straightened the edge, and putting the mouthpiece in my mouth, moistened the reed. I didn’t play. I just stood there with the mouthpiece
in my mouth, my fingers spread and embracing the immense body of the saxophone, my eyes misty; I pressed the big valves. A bass saxophone.

I had never held one in my hands before; I felt as if I were embracing a mistress (Domanín’s daughter, that mysterious lily among aquariums, or Irene, who didn’t give a damn about me; in fact I couldn’t have been happier if I had been holding Irene, or even that girl of the fish and the moon). I stood there, a little slumped, and I saw myself in the mirror of the dressing table, hunched over with the bass saxophone resting the bend of its corpus on the carpet, immersed in a sea of shimmering particles, the unreal light of a grotesque myth, like a genre painting, though certainly no such painting exists: Young Man with Bass Saxophone. Yes, Young Man with Guitar, Young Man with Pipe, Young Man with Jug, yes, young man with anything at all, but not with bass saxophone on worn carpet, young man in golden haze of afternoon sun penetrating muslin curtains, with a mute bass saxophone, the Disney-like rococo of the wardrobe in the background, and the man with his chin sticking up out of the pillow like a corpse. Just a young man with bass saxophone and sleeping man. Absurd. Yet that was the way it was.

I exhaled lightly. A little harder. I felt the reed quiver. I blew into the mouthpiece, running my fingers down the valves; what emerged from the
bell like a washbasin was a cruel, beautiful, infinitely sad sound.

Maybe that’s the way dying brachiosaurs wailed. The sound filled the beige chamber with a muted desolation. A fuzzy, hybrid tone, an acoustical alloy of some nonexistent bass cello and bass oboe, but more explosive, a nerve-shattering bellow, the voice of a melancholy gorilla; just that one sorrowful tone, sad, like a bell —
traurig wie eine Glocke
; just that one single sound.

It frightened me. I glanced quickly at the man in the bed, but he hadn’t moved, the cliff of his chin still jutting out, motionless, like a warning signal. Silence — I suddenly realized that the detached, dangerous voice behind the wall had stopped sputtering — but someone was in the room besides me, the man in the bed, the fly, and the bass saxophone.

I turned around. A haggard little fat man with a flushed bald head and bags under his eyes was standing in the doorway. His eyes were as sad as the tone of the bass saxophone. It was still dying out, fading down the gilded corridors of the hotel, an afternoon wail that must have wakened the guests dozing in their rooms after lunch (officers on leave with their wives, secret couriers on business of the Reich, a homosexual Spaniard who had been living there for the past half year and no one knew why, or what he was doing there, what he was living on, whom he was spying on); it was still fading down the
brown dusk of the staircase when a woman’s head appeared behind the man’s bald pate, gray, curly-haired, two blue eyes, and a big bulbous nose — a clown’s face, a living caricature of a woman’s face on a bloated woman’s body. “Excuse me,” I said, but the bald man waved his hands.
“Bitte, bitte,”
he said, walking on into the room, and the woman with the sad face of the clown walked in behind him. She wore high laced boots and an ancient woolen skirt, a Scottish plaid, which glowed drunkenly in the baroque ribbing of the sun’s rays in the dust; and behind her came an even more unbelievable figure, almost a midget — no, not almost, he was a midget, he came up to my waist, smaller than the bass saxophone that I was now holding upright, the bend of the corpus resting on the worn carpet (it was only then that I noticed that the carpet bore a woven design of a city emblem, the Czech lion between two towers; someone had tossed a cigar butt on the lion and he was pierced by a black, burned-out hole), but he didn’t have the face of a midget; he looked like Caesar: long, thin, tightly closed lips, a Roman nose, a fair lock of hair falling over an intelligent forehead; and it was not a large head on a shrunken body that had had an evil and malicious joke played on it, it was the normal head of a good-looking man on a normal torso — a Caesar cut down to size, I thought; he walked like a duck, and then I noticed that he
really was cut down, from the knees down; he had no feet, he walked on those knees wrapped in dirty rags. And like a procession of specters, other apparitions entered the room. A blond, very beautiful girl (at first I wondered whether she didn’t just seem beautiful beside the bulbous nose of the other woman, but no, later on I saw her from all angles, her hair falling to her shoulders like broken swan’s wings on either side of a narrow Swedish face with big gray eyes); she looked at me, at the man in the bed, at the bass saxophone, she lowered her eyes, clasped her hands before her, and hung her head, the fair Swedish hair shading the face which looked as if it had never been touched by a smile, as if it had been made of wax, as if she had spent her whole life somewhere in the darkness of an air-raid shelter, in the semidarkness of closed rooms (perhaps she was just a nightchild of Berlin’s Moabit prison, where they had made a candle of her — she shone like Toulouse-Lautrec and burned at both ends); she stood before me with her hands locked in front of her, in a dress that merged with the beige glow, so that all that seemed to be left was her head — a pair of broken, golden-silver swan’s wings, a countenance the color of alabaster, ivory, the keyboard of a long-unused piano, and two gray eyes gazing at the focus of the sunlight reflecting in the valves of the bass saxophone and trembling near the lion’s paw on the carpet. The
parade was not yet over; behind the girl came a hunchback with black glasses on his nose, and with him a one-eyed giant who led him by the hand. The hunchback groped around with his free hand in the rays of sunlight; he disturbed the fly in its dying; it buzzed, flew around the groping hand a couple of times, and, exhausted, sat down on one of the valves of the bass saxophone, waved its legs desperately, slipped off and tumbled into the huge corpus; the bass saxophone resounded with a terrified buzzing; the hunchback, wearing baggy knickerbockers on his skinny legs, looked like a blind owl. An artificial leg protruded from the giant’s trouser leg. The rivets glistened in the sunlight, the semicircle of apparitions stood around me. “Lothar Kinze,” declared the gaunt little plump man with the bald head.
Und sein Unterhaltungsorchester
, added the associative instinct within me and silently, against my will, like a panoramic camera my eyes took in the band: the gray woman with the face of a sorrowful clown and a nose like a carnival mask, the cut-down Caesar, the girl with the Swedish hair, the blind hunchback, and the huge man with the artificial leg, who leaned up against the wardrobe with the angels until it creaked, and one angel swayed over and a tiny scale of gold peeled off its curls and fell into the thinning red hair of the man with the artificial leg, champion of the whole world (it seemed to me) in American free-style
wrestling; the fly in the corpus stopped buzzing too — it was late summer, early autumn, the time of death for all flies, and this one had almost outlived its time (but at least it died in a metal horn resembling a temple, with the sounds of the little priest’s tiny footsteps — most human beings don’t have the privilege of dying that way); silence. It’s only a dream, I tried to tell myself, but then I never believed in apparitions, in hallucinations, in scientifically confirmed parapsychological phenomena, I had never believed in anything beyond the borders of the natural, I was an absolute realist, I had never in all my life had any premonitions; when my aunt was dying — she was a beautiful young woman whom I loved with the intimate love of a relative for a hot-house flower of Prague salons (she died at the age of twenty-seven) — I didn’t sense a thing, no extrasensory telecommunications, no telepathy; nor did I believe in miracles or in mediums, I laughed at it all, even at the miraculous fellow in the neighboring town who owned a wood-carving shop and had helped the police through a medium, though the town had been full of witnesses; I was a person strictly of this world, and my only myth was music; and so I knew that it was no vision, no apparition, no hallucination, that it was the gang, not the golden gang from Chicago, Eddie Condon and his Chicagoans, but
Lothar Kinze mit seinem Unterhaltungsorchester
. Holy cow, I
said to myself, and it was funny all of a sudden, because every deviation from the norm is an impulse to laughter — people are apt to be conventional, and unfeeling toward everything but themselves. But that lasted only a moment; I felt the glance of the girl’s gray eyes, the only one of the lot without a stigma, the only one that was not deformed (not physically), and again I didn’t believe in telepathy but I had the feeling that she guessed my untoward laughter; an awful feeling, unpleasant to begin with and growing swiftly into an unbearable shame, as if I had been telling a dirty joke at a funeral, relying on the chanted words of the priest to drown out my own and he had suddenly fallen silent, and through the silence, over the dry grass, over the tombstones and the freshly dug earth, the wind had borne some obscene, some unbelievably awkward word instead of a prayer (If Thou wert to weigh iniquity, who would pass?); and that decided it too, that and the bass saxophone that I was still holding in my hand like a bishop holding a bejeweled staff. “Would you like to try it?” asked the man with the flushed bald head and I realized what he reminded me of — monkey with a red face, as if his face had been burned with a flamethrower (it had). He smiled; his smile disclosed his teeth, and again it was no hallucination but reality: it was as if he had been in the hands of some Gestapo man with a perverted
sense of humor; half his teeth were missing, but not just the upper or the lower teeth, and not irregularly in either jaw; they were like the keys of a piano, tooth, space, tooth, space, and the upper jaw was the same only inverted (space, tooth, space, tooth) so that when the upper and the lower teeth met they formed an absurd checkerboard (he smiled with his teeth clenched). “Come on,” he said. “We’ll go down to the stage, and you can try it out there. Doesn’t it have a beautiful sound?”
“Ja,”
I answered. “Like a bell. Very sad.
Sehr traurig
.” “Well, come on,” said the man. “Take it along. I’ll carry the case.”