THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký Read Free Book Online

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 fallenvictim 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.
    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 fromthe 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