THE BASS SAXOPHONE (5 page)

Between believers and nonbelievers there is no communication, there is a wall, a steel barrier against which understanding shatters. I did what I could to explain to her that significance and meaning, and the sense of design which people attribute to the blind activity of nature, are merely human concepts, that that was what I’d been trying to say, that meaning is an anthropomorphic idea born of the awareness that every human activity has “meaning” of one sort or another: we cook so that we may eat, go on vacation to relax, brush our teeth so they won’t decay — and then we carry over this idea of purpose to nature where we feel that it is lacking; but she just smiled at all my logic and my rationale and my helpless fury (it wasn’t an angry fury, just a desperate fury at the fact that I couldn’t convince her of such obvious truths, that there was something in her, an ability or an inability, something beyond logic, that proudly resisted reason) and she replied to it all with a mild, calm, almost sublime smile and the words, You are simply a physical person. You are still imperfect. So I
asked her whether she didn’t feel hatred for me or contempt that I was an atheist, and she shook her head and said, I pity you. Why? Because you may have to live many lives before you become perfect. And before you find the truth. Many lives? I asked. Yes, replied Emöke. Because you must become a spiritual person before you see the truth. “You mean you believe in reincarnation, miss?” asked the schoolteacher. It doesn’t matter what it is called, she said. You needn’t even use the name God. Words don’t matter. But you must know the Truth.

We entered the forest valley of Mariatal where the little white pilgrims’ church stood deserted, the broad lane of deserted booths leading up to it, smelling of rotting wood. The plank-top counters where gingerbread hearts were once stacked in piles beside holy pictures and mirrors with pictures of the shrine, and the decaying beams from which black, white, and pink rosaries had hung alongside silver and gold madonnas on chains, miniature fonts for holy water with pictures of the Mother of God, tin crucifixes, wooden ones with tin Christs, carved ones and plain ones, blessings for cottage parlor walls, pictures of the Virgin of Mariatal, pictures of saints and wax figurines, and beside them a booth where a fellow in a white apron with a fez on his head would chop slabs of Turkish honey-nougat into sticky sweet flakes, and a little farther on, a stand with chenille scarves, cotton
stockings and glass jewelry, and a stand for sausages and another booth with holy pictures; and peasants in black suits and black hats wiping their sweaty faces with red bandannas, their black, laced boots dusty from the long trek, and little old ladies in white Sunday kerchiefs, and tired children, and weary couples who had come here to say a prayer for the success of their young marriage or the conception that was long in coming, and old people for a happy final hour, the sound of organ music coming from the church, and the sound of singing, the path curving up the hillside through the woods, bordered by little white chapels with wooden altars displaying hand-painted scenes from the lives of the saints, now long faded and peeling, aged by many rains and the hard heat of summer; and the Cultural Guide, his hairy, spindly legs protruding from his shorts, climbed up on to the steps of one of the chapel pavilions (that first evening he would expound on his plans for our recreation, but the second night he got drunk and the third day he was sleeping it off and the last evening at the farewell party he drank himself speechless and rolled under the platform where the musicians tipped the spit out of their saxophones onto him) and began to lecture us about the pilgrimages that used to come here — it was immediately apparent that he was totally ignorant not only of the Catholic Church, its dogma, liturgy, tradition, and catechism, and of Biblical
history, but of everything in general; he made a joke about sterile women and impotent men coming here to Mariatal to pray for the restoration of their juices, and then he waxed serious and launched into an expose of religion, a splendid mishmash of the most desperate vulgarization of Engels, science premasticated for narrow minds — presented to us to salve his own conscience for the twelve-hundred-crown salary he was paid each month — not science popularized for the unschooled though spontaneously intelligent mind of the workingman, but rather cheap half-truths and quarter-truths for parasitical leeches who don’t give a damn about truth, not science but pseudo-science, cut-rate science, a derision and an insult to science, not truth but stupidity, a lack of sensitivity, a lack of feeling, a thick-skinned denseness impervious to the arrows of that tragically desperate poetry of a desperate dream that is to come to pass only in the hereafter of the utopian world of future wisdom (in the absence of drunken bums who feel a revulsion for manual labor and make a living by spouting ill-learned phrases memorized from tour-guides to ancient castles), the poetry of sunny pilgrimages with the voice of the organ underscored by the wail of paper whistles, and the smell of evergreens and pine needles mingling with the sweet smell of incense, and little altar boys in red and green collars, their lace-up boots poking out from under their robes,
fervently bobbing the smoking censers, and the loveliness of the forest and its light and shadow and the call of the cuckoos parting to the stride of the priest dressed in gold who lifts the shining monstrance with the glowing white circle (the most perfect plane figure of the ancient Greeks) in its glittering center and holds it suspended over the bowed heads in kerchiefs and the gray hair of old farmers so that it seems to float on wisps of smoke from the burning incense, flooded by the glow of sun and forest light like a symbol of that eternal human longing and hope which will be realized here and on this earth, but which is unattainable, unthinkable without this poetic folk faith in the goodness which rules the world in the long run, faith in love, faith in justice; a faith, hope, and love that had never entered the mind of this drunken, vulgar, dense Cultural Guide.

In our room that night the schoolteacher said to me, “Seems to me you’re not very good at handling women. That’s no way to go after a broad. Religion and dinosaurs? At that rate you’ll never get her to bed within the week, you can bet your life on it.”

Later, Emöke told me about him. The schoolteacher had got up early and prowled around under her window, baring his yellow teeth at her, yelling his wisecracks up to her whenever she appeared at
the window to take down the white socks she washed each evening and hung out below on a taut string to dry. The schoolteacher rutted under the window while she gave him a cool and polite good morning, and he made his proposition, “Don’t you want to flush out your lungs, miss, the woods are full of ozone of a morning!” and she shook her head and told him No and he went off by himself and then all day he circled around her, his eyes glowing in his self-indulgent face, his brain chewing the cud of the few ideas at his command, not ideas, conversational stereotypes, and from time to time he would come up to her, pull one out and lay it on her, and having failed go off again, his eyes still glowing, observing her hungrily from a distance, circling around her like a ruffled rooster around an inaccessible hen from another barnyard. She told me her story, her legend. It was like the confidences that prostitutes are said to impart to their clients of girlhoods in aristocratic households, the fall and the poverty and the sorrowful selling of one’s body. She told me how they had stayed in Slovakia after the war, about her Hungarian father, a small-time official and a fascist, who had been a supporter of the Nazis and was destroyed after the war, no pension, no livelihood, too old and sick to take a job digging ditches or cutting down trees, and her mother, broken and loathing physical work, and herself, sixteen, in her sixth year at the Hungarian lyceum
that the Slovaks closed down, when along came this man, the owner of a farm, and vineyards, he was rich, forty-five, with a hotel in Bratislava, and she had given in to him to save her family from misery or death by starvation or old age in the poorhouse, he was overbearing, mean, dense, he didn’t believe in anything, God, democracy, human decency, nothing, just himself, and he wanted a son to inherit his farm and hotel and vineyards, but he wasn’t prejudiced, he didn’t mind that she was Hungarian. She bore him a daughter and that day he stormed out and drank himself dumb, he didn’t speak to her for a week and then he began to beat her when he was drunk; that was when a hearty, hard-drinking bunch began to meet at the farm, cars would drive up from Bratislava, from Košice, from Turčanský Svatý Martin, there were meetings in his study and he became a member of a right-wing party, but she didn’t pay any attention and when he came to her at night, his breath stinking like a wine cellar, he would force her to do what for him might still have been pleasure but for her was suffering and shame; as she got to know this man with the bull neck and the heavy breath, she also discovered her Truth: she had met another man, a gardener who had tuberculosis and who later died, and he lent her books about the path to God, the developing of one’s spiritual strength, the spiritual universe and life beyond the grave, and she came to
believe that everything here is nothing but one immense process of purging oneself of the stain of evil, and evil is matter and man must purge himself of matter, of the body, of desire, his goal must be the spirit, but not even that, for the spirit is just another stage, a higher stage than the physical one, and the ultimate aim is to reach God, to become one with Him, to dissolve one’s own self in the infinite horizon of bliss that radiates mystical divine Love and Goodness.

Soon after, her husband was killed. After the Communist coup in February 1948 they nationalized his hotel, then his farm, and then they arrested him; he escaped, but they shot him as he tried to swim the Danube to Austria. She got a job in an office and learned bookkeeping, becoming a good bookkeeper; she went to live in Košice with her little girl (her parents were both dead) and she wanted to raise her little girl in the truth that she herself had discovered.

She lent me some of those books. They were bound collections of various parapsychological and theosophical journals; I found an article on the powers of amulets and the effectiveness of copper circlets which, when worn on the naked skin at the perihelion of Mars, will protect the wearer from rheumatism and bleeding, and I asked her whether it didn’t seem strange to her that people who place so much emphasis on the spirit should be so concerned
with the body since three quarters of those theosophical formulas concerned protection against disease, and whether she believed it all. She replied that at each stage of one’s existence one must obey the laws that come from God, and the laws of physical existence call for attention to one’s physical well-being. And as for the formulas, she asked how I could admit I had never tried them yet claim I doubted their effectiveness. So you too, she said, are imperfect and reject the truth, everyone rejects the truth, but in the end everyone will discover it, because God is Mercy. And with those words, a curious look came into her eyes, a flash of anxiety, as if she were afraid I wanted to rob her of something, of the certainty she possessed and without which she couldn’t survive, couldn’t bear the burden of her widowhood, the burden of death and of a sad, destroyed life; it was the expression of an ensnared little woodland animal, begging you with its eyes not to torture it and let it go, to release it from your power.

The schoolteacher asked me how I was making out. I knew that I had her, like the little animal in the woods, strangely in my power, the way men sometimes capture women without deserving to and without really trying, by the simple inscrutable effect of attraction and submission, but I didn’t understand it the way I had at other times, or as I did with the ordinary, erotic, and uncomplicated
Margit; this time it was as if the invisible nerves that linked us were nourishing some sort of drama, some possible fulfillment that might wipe out the desperate and vicious illusion which had made of that slender body and that lovely face and those delicate dancer’s breasts and that creative force a chimerical existence imprisoned in a vicious circle.

The schoolteacher frowned, growled, and rolled over in bed so hard that the springs creaked.

Two days before our week’s vacation was due to end, it rained, and the vacationers played Ping-Pong or cards or sat around in the dining room, chatting about things, trying for a while to find someone to play the piano; the Cultural Guide awoke from the previous day’s drunkenness and tried to bring the group together with some game he called French Mail, but the only ones he could interest were an old married couple: he, paunchy, with baggy knee-breeches, a former owner of a haberdashery, now manager of a state-owned clothing store in Pardubice, and she, fat, benign, at fifty still emitting the naïve peeps of surprise that she used to emit at eighteen on the merry-go-round: she always revived at lunchtime, not out of gluttony but because food was the only thing she understood, otherwise she moved through life in a mist, guided by the light of secure conventions, maternal admonitions, dancing lessons, nice boys carefully picked by her parents,
courtship, marriage, two or three births, and Sunday mass (but if anyone were to ask her about even the most basic theological terms, she wouldn’t know what to say, she simply went to mass, sang the hymns in the hymnal, genuflected, beat her breast, made the sign of the cross with the tips of her fingers moistened in holy water, and had requiem masses served in memory of her late mother); her kitchen too was an island of security where she became an artist, a virtuoso with absolute pitch for tastes and odors, like a violinist can tell a quarter tone and even an eighth, not rationally but intuitively, with a sense that others don’t have and can’t have, something that isn’t the result of the five or seven years of apprenticeship in a mother’s kitchen but a gift of grace, a piece of immortality given to a person in addition to the simple ordinary skills and the sleepy brain with its few stunted thoughts, and a heart submerged in lard, capable of no dishonesty or evil, capable only of an animal love for its young, its spouse, its family, for people, for life, and of resignation to death — the last of those beacons of security that border the path from the first moment of awakening in the mists of life. Then the Cultural Guide also found an old seamstress for the game, an old maid, a worker laureate of the state enterprise called Gentlemen’s Linens, who was spending her first vacation away from her home in Prague’s working-class
Žižkov district, and who had spent the entire week so far sitting around, standing around, walking around, not knowing what to do, with nothing to talk about because she didn’t know anyone there and in all her life hadn’t known anything but men’s shirts, had never known a man and love, had lived frozen between the prose of shirts and the primitive poetry of the dreams of old maids. He also got hold of a pimply young hot-shot who had tried in vain the first three days to gain the affections of a pig-tailed Slovak girl, who in turn had given preference to a black-haired technician, a former gunner in the R.A.F., who had a wife and child at home but had learned the art in which the schoolteacher would never be more than a rank amateur and had taken it to the very pinnacle that that limited art could ever reach, and the hot-shot had got riled, retreating to the stubborn solitude of the recreation hall along with his striped socks and his black silk shirt, and now, sulky and defiant, he had been half talked into playing the game of French Mail. And finally the Cultural Guide had rooted out an uncertain, silent man who may have been a foreman in a factory or something but who never said a word to anyone, and with these people — people dominated by both the feeling of being obliged to enjoy themselves for a whole week, for the duration of this cheap if not entirely free vacation, and a feeling of helplessness as to how to go about it since they had all fallen
victim to the fallacy that on vacation you can enjoy yourself in a manner different from the one to which you are accustomed, people who knew nothing but work, and for whom work was as essential as air and food, and who had been suddenly called upon to live the life of men and women from a bygone era, men and women unfamiliar with work: wives of wealthy businessmen, of officers, physicians, stockbrokers, sons of rich fathers, or tanned daughters of the sweet bourgeoisie for whom free time was all the time and amusement a vocation that they understood — and now, with these people burdened with the onus of vacationing, the Cultural Guide, with his hangover, and a cup of black coffee in his hand, began a collective game in order to maintain the impression of his productivity, the illusion of having honestly earned the twelve hundred crowns of his monthly pay.