THE BASS SAXOPHONE (6 page)

The schoolteacher lolled around the Ping-Pong room, glaring across the green table and through the glass wall into the dark, wood-paneled corner where I was sitting on a bench with Emöke; then he and a bespectacled self-taught Ping-Pong player played a game, the schoolteacher executing pseudo-virtuoso drives and smashes, most of them ending up in the net, but when once in a while he pulled something off after all, he would stab his hungry gaze in Emöke’s direction to see if she was looking, and, taking long shots with the elegance of a life-guard,
low and easy, with an expression of bored pity, he beat the pants off the bespectacled enthusiast who played for fun and not for effect but lacked all talent for the game and kept chasing balls under the pool tables into all corners of the room.

I sat with Emöke in the dim light of the wood-paneled corner, drinking a toddy — although Emöke had Chinese tea because one shouldn’t drink alcohol, alcohol debases one to the lowest level of physical being, transforms one back to the animal that one once was — and she talked about medical treatment by Paracelsus’s methods, about trees that take upon themselves the diseases of men, just a small cut on a fingertip, a drop of blood pressed into a cut in the bark of a tree, and a bond is formed, a fine thread of delicate and invisible matter by means of which the man remains forever joined to the tree, as he remains forever joined to everything that ever left his body, a fallen hair, a breath, a clipped fingernail, and the illness travels along that thread to the tree and the tree fights the illness and overcomes it or sometimes perishes and dries up, but the man regains his health and his strength and lives on. She told about possession by evil spirits, exorcism by means of holy water and prayers, about black magic and evil powers that serve a person if he has the courage to stand in the center of concentric circles inscribed with the secret names of the Supreme One and intone evil prayers from
the Satanic psalter, backward, and she told about werewolves, vampires, haunted houses, and witches’ sabbaths and her spirit stumbled in those dangerous worlds that you don’t believe in and you laugh at, but once you have heard of them there is always a tiny drop of horror in you, terror and fear. She forgot about me and I was silent, she talked on and in the gray light of the rain her eyes shone with a sort of feverish, unhealthy, unnatural enthusiasm, and I was silent and watched those eyes and she noticed it and the feverish shine faded and I shook off the strange evil enchantment of that magic rainy moment too, made a sarcastic face and said, You don’t mean to say you want to devote yourself to black magic? Why, it’s the epitome of Evil and you’re striving to attain Goodness. And she dropped her gaze and said, Not any more I don’t want to, but once I did. When? I asked. When I couldn’t stand it any more, she replied, when I began to feel God didn’t hear me, that He’d turned against me. I wanted to ask the Evil One for help, to — to help me get rid of him. And did you? Did you make those concentric circles with consecrated chalk? I asked. No, she said, God was protecting me. I understand now that God is constantly testing man, and many people don’t pass the test. But why does He test them? I asked. To see if man is worthy of the supreme grace of being delivered from everything physical, to see if he’s
ready. But man never asked God to create him, I said. By what right does God test him? God has the right to do anything, she said, because God is Love. Is He supremely merciful? I asked. Yes, she said. Then why did He create man? Because He loved him, she said. And why did He create him, then? Why did He send him into this world full of suffering? To test him, to see if he is deserving of His grace, she explained. But isn’t He torturing him that way? I asked. Why didn’t He just leave him alone from the outset, if He loves him? Or, once he created him, why didn’t He go ahead and create him perfect right off? Ready for eternal bliss? Why all the martyrdom of the pilgrimage from Matter to Spirit? Oh, you’re still imperfect, she said. You reject the truth. I don’t reject it, I said, but I want to have proof. And if not proof, then at least logic. Logic is also the work of God, she said. Then why doesn’t God use logic Himself? He doesn’t have to, she said. Some day you will understand. Some day everyone will understand and everyone will be saved. But don’t talk about it any more, please, she said, and her eyes again had the look of a little animal in the woods, afraid of losing that one certainty of forest freedom; so I stopped talking about it and went over to the piano; Emöke came and leaned against the top and I began to play “Riverside Blues,” which she liked, and then I sang “St. James Infirmary,” and the schoolteacher came over
from the light and darkness of the Ping-Pong room and stood behind Emöke and I was singing

And the pentatonic melody born of that basic human sorrow that can only end in a convulsive lament — the sorrow of two people who are parting ways forever — slid into Emöke’s heart and she said, That’s a beautiful song. What is it? It’s a Negro blues, I replied, and Emöke said, Yes, I’ve heard that Negro people are very spiritual people, I heard them sing some religious songs on a record, one of the men at the office has records from America. Ah, I said, blacks are lecherous rascals, but they’ve got a great sense of music. It just seems they’re that way, she retorted. They are spiritual people. And I played and sang some more, and when I had finished, the schoolteacher said, “Come on, beef it up a little and put some life into it, a little jive so we can cut a rug, right, miss? This is Dullsville, not a vacation!” So Emöke laughed and told me to give up my place at the piano, and she sat down and started to play with sure, naturally harmonizing fingers, a slow but rhythmical song that held the distant echo of a czardas, the pulse of Hungarian music as unmistakable as the blue
notes in Negro blues, and she sang in an alto that sounded like the level tone of a shepherd’s flute, that cannot be modulated, strengthened or weakened, sure and straight and with a primitive beauty; she sang in hard sweet Hungarian a song that was neither sad nor happy but just desperate, her cheeks flushed, and the song wasn’t the chanting of a black magician in concentric chalk circles but the call of a shepherd on the steppe, ignorant of black sabbaths and black masses, living a natural life on sheep’s milk and cheese, sleeping in a wooden shack, aware of a few superstitions but not associating them with God or the Devil, possessed once in his life by such an insurmountable longing that he goes off and sings this desperate, yearning, level, unmodulated loud song in his unmodulated and sweetly hard language and finds a mate and with her conceives new shepherds and lives on, eating cheese and whey by his evening fire, among the smell of hides and charcoal in his shack. And then I realized that that vulgar exhortation of the adulterous schoolteacher had liberated her as if by magic from the spectral world of things spiritual, and that this song sprang from the immense sensuality in her, but I also knew it was just the schoolteacher’s words, not the schoolteacher himself, and suddenly I understood the catharsis toward which her drama was progressing, the fact that the Evil One in her life was that middle-aged
owner of the hotel and the farm who had driven her into the realm of dangerous shades, into the unreal but frightening world of specters, so that she was now seeking the Supreme Good, Love, spiritual, nonphysical, divine; but that perhaps it would take very little for all that warped symbolism of obscure parapsychological magazines to be turned upside down by a strange, incomprehensible, and yet entirely comprehensible, flip of the soul, that the Good and the Supreme could perfectly well be me, that maybe that’s what I already was, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself, even if she didn’t realize it yet, that maybe I was there already, in the deep, unknown cellar rooms of her unconscious, or at least getting there and at one stroke I might now be able to change the story, the legend, I might really become the Supreme One, the Creator, and create something human of this beautiful shade retreating slowly and surely into the mists of madness, that this mind was still capable, though not for much longer, of turning from its blind alley of uncertain imagery back onto the firm track of things concrete — but not for much longer, soon it would be lost in the twilight of the fogs that rise from
terra firma
and, having lost all knowledge of the law of gravity and all corollaries to that law, swoop according to the law of fogs to the abyss of senseless heights, possessing their own truth which is not a lie because it is simply another world and
there is no communicating between this world and that one: a girl becomes a woman and a woman a crone, closing herself off in that world, encased in a network of wrinkles, her womb wasted and her soul slowly becoming a mournful litany of cracked old voices in the musty Gothic corridor from this world to the next, of which we know nothing and which perhaps is nothing.

“That was swell, miss!” said the schoolteacher when she stopped singing, and he started to applaud. “Now how about a czardas, what do you say?” She laughed and really began to play a czardas, emphasizing the beat with her entire body, her eyes glowing but not with the shiny feverish glow that they had had earlier in the wood-paneled corner. The schoolteacher stepped away from the piano and, yelping, performed a clumsy mock czardas (missing the beat entirely, and stamping his feet out of rhythm too) and as he wriggled ludicrously in front of the piano, Emöke began to sing again. Her singing attracted the group that had been playing French Mail and the athletic young girls and boys from the Ping-Pong room, and soon people began to enjoy themselves; I had to sit down at the piano again and play popular hits and some of the girls and boys and the schoolteacher and Emöke began to dance. Emöke had changed, like a bright butterfly’s wing slipping out of a gray and mysterious cocoon, and this was she, not a legend
but the real Emöke, for the primitive and unconscious schoolteacher had primitively and unconsciously found the right way to her buried heart and her path to the future; but I knew that path and future weren’t destined to be his, because he wasn’t interested in her future, just in the brief present of the week’s vacation, in a lecherous thrill and a lewd memory. I was the one who could follow that path, but I’d gone too far along the path of my own life to be able to throw myself into the future without stopping to think it over. The yellow piano keys didn’t want to return to their original position and I pounded them to produce song after song, watching her, and all of a sudden, like the schoolteacher, I began to desire that body, that slender, firm body, those breasts that didn’t disturb its symmetry. Yet I realized it was all very, very complicated; I knew that there’s a prescription for such fevers (and the schoolteacher would certainly prescribe it: sleep with her — it’ll solve everything) that is, by and large, an effective prescription, but I also knew that in Emöke’s case this particular goal, the physical act, would have to be preceded by something far finer and more complex than the schoolteacher’s technique, and that it wasn’t really a matter of the act at all but of the commitment that it represents, the act being merely a confirmation, a confirmation of the union that people conclude against life and against death, just the stigma of
the act of creation which, if I wanted to, I might perhaps bring off; yet it wasn’t that act of confirmation I yearned for (it would mean years and years of my life and one knows that every enchantment finally dissipates over the landscapes of the past and all that remains is the present, everyday reality) but rather the body, the pleasant, unusual vacation adventure, the womanly secret between the girlish thighs; but that way, of course, if I didn’t take upon myself her whole life I would destroy her, and so as Emöke danced with the schoolteacher, I began to hate him with all my heart, this specimen who was not a man but a mere sum total of screws, and as for her, I was mad at her, a primitive masculine anger that she was dancing with him and so wasn’t what she had appeared to be until a while ago; although I didn’t agree with that world of hers created of desperate wishes, I still preferred it to the world of the schoolteacher.

So that when we met on the stairs on the way to dinner, I asked her sarcastically why she showed so much interest in the schoolteacher since he was obviously a basely physical person; and she said innocently, I know, he is a physical man, I felt sorry for him. We must feel compassion for people as unfortunate as he, and I asked her whether she didn’t feel any compassion for me, after all I was physical too. Not entirely, she said. You at least have an interest in things spiritual, he doesn’t; suddenly
she was again entirely different from the way she had been with the schoolteacher, that cloud from another world obscured her face, she sat down at the table with a monastic absence of mind, and the schoolteacher’s hungry glances went unnoticed as did the stares of the hot-shot, who was beginning to weaken although he still clung to his role of offended lover of solitude.

The Cultural Guide announced that after dinner, at half past eight, there would be movies. Emöke went to her room and I went outside to the garden. It was damp, moldy, neglected. I sat down on a rotting bench wet through by the rain. Across from me stood the painted dwarf, his face rain-smudged, the tip of his nose knocked off, with a pipe between his teeth like the one my grandpa used to smoke; Grandpa used to have a dwarf like that in his garden too, with a pipe like that, and a white castle with lots of carved turrets and towers and real glass in the windows, and every spring he would paint the tin roof of the castle with red paint because at seventy-odd years the old man was still thrilled by the ideas that thrilled me when I was small, and thrilled me again at that moment when I remembered my grandfather’s little castle: I believed that the castle was real — small maybe, but real — and that perhaps sometimes the half-inch steps were climbed by a royal procession of people two inches tall, like Lilliputians, that there were chambers
behind the real glass windows, and salons and banquet halls just as realistic as the castle itself; and then there was the fairy tale of Tom Thumb: I dreamed of being Tom Thumb, riding around in a car wound-up with a key, or sailing the bathtub in a little boat that when you poured some chemical into the stern sailed silently and regularly around the miniature ocean of the enameled bathtub. I stared at the ruddy, lecherous, beat-up ice of the clay dwarf and in a way it was me, myself, thirty years old, still single, mixed up in the affair with Margit, a married woman, a guy who didn’t believe in anything any more or take anything very seriously, who knew what the world was all about, life, politics, fame and happiness and everything, who was alone, not from incapacity but of necessity, quite successful, with a good salary and reasonable health, for whom life held no surprises and with nothing left to learn that I didn’t already know, at an age when the first minor physical problems begin to herald the passing of time, at an age when people get married at the last moment so as still to be able to have children and watch them grow up only to find out equally fast exactly what life’s all about, and she, pretty and still young, with a child, Hungarian and hence a fairly novel being, relatively unfamiliar, but then again old enough at twenty-eight, but with a child which I supposed would mean an entirely different lifestyle, and a
foreigner, Hungarian, not too intelligent, slightly warped by that parapsychological madness, out to proselytize, but heaven knows how holy, the ideal object for a vacation adventure, nothing more than that, and yet with that terrible look of a little animal of the woods, with that immense self-destructive defense mechanism against the world, in a fog of mystical superstition. For her it was a matter of life and death, not a matter of a hot evening, a meadow soft enough to lie in comfortably, a few tried-and-tested words, a well-chosen moment when the desire of summer and the mood of the week’s vacation blend to form a favorable constellation of discarded inhibitions and the will to risk and to surrender; it was in fact a matter of a lifetime of love and self-sacrifice, or of death in the mist of mysticism, in the lunacy of midnight circles that meet around round tables and summon the spirits of their visions to come to earth, circles of faded middle-aged people, misfits, psychopaths, in this twentieth century still believing in goblins and the power of frog hair over cancer, recopying Satanic psalters and speaking backward the terrible black prayers of men who had sold their souls to the Prince of Darkness — men who didn’t die a natural death but were torn asunder by the Devil, their souls ripped out from the shreds of their bodies and the tatters of bone and flesh, broken ribs, gouged eyes, flayed skins, ripped out and carried
off to the eternal fire in the rotting guts of hell — or praying piously and not eating meat and treating ailments resulting from the constant immobility of praying by placing copper circlets against their bare skin and kissing pictures of saints, although death should be desirable, since death is presumably the gateway to a more perfect plane of life, closer to the Divine and eternal Bliss; that’s what it was a matter of, not a matter of a single night but of all nights over many years, and not a matter of nights at all but of days and mutual care, marital love and good and evil until death do you part. That’s what it was a matter of with that girl, that girl, that girl Emöke.