THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký Read Free Book Online Page B

music as unmistakable as the bluenotes 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-agedowner 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 andthere 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