THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free Page B

trapped in the dead thoughts of human beings, unable to leave for a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years, perhaps forever
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    T he room’s ceiling slanted downward. It was a garret, the window high off the floor — you couldn’t see out unless you pushed the table over to the wall and climbed up on it. And the very first night there (it was a hot night, August, the susurrus of ash and linden under the window like the distant rush of diluvial seas, the window open to let in the night’s sounds and fragrances of grass and grasshoppers and crickets and cicadas and linden blossoms and cigarettes and from the nearby town the music of a Gypsy band playing Glenn Miller’s old “In the Mood,” but in an undulating Gypsy rhythm, and then “Dinah,” and then “St. Louis Blues,” but they were Gypsies — two fiddles, a bass, a dulcimer — and the beat wasn’t boogie but rather the weaving pulse of the Gypsy, the leader embellishing on the blue tones in a swaying Gypsy rhythm), the schoolteacher began to talk about women. He talked in the dark, in bed, in a hoarse voice trying to get me to tell him how it was with me and women. What I told him was that I was getting married before Christmas, that I was marrying a widow called Irene, but all the while I wasthinking about Margit and about her husband who had let it be known that he would beat me senseless if ever I showed my face in the district of Libeň again, and about the carnival in Libeň and about Margit with her nose red from crying, red like the nose of the painted clay dwarf down in the desolate, funereal garden behind the hotel, the inn, that recreation center or whatever it was. Then he began to talk about women himself; words full of salacious images, vulgar, raunchy, came pouring from his craw, from his rabbit brain, evoking in me a profound depression. It was as if the hand of Death were reaching out to me from the barren life of that country schoolteacher, fifty years old with a wife and three children, teaching at a five-grade school and shooting off his mouth here about women, about sex with young teachers whose work placement card had forced them to leave their mothers and move, with just a couple of worn suitcases, far away to God knows where in the Sudeten mountains, to a village near the border, where there wasn’t even a movie house, just a tavern, just a few lumberjacks, a few Gypsies, a few locals transplanted here by all sorts of plans and desires and dreams and bad consciences, and just a deserted manse and the chairman of the local National Committee — before the revolution a day-laborer on the estate of the lords of Schwarzenberg, in his blood the congenital defiance of forefathers who had sweated over soil theynever owned, he had been driven here afterward by that very defiance, that hunger for land; now he had his land, and he sweated over it like all his sinewy and unshaven forefathers had done except that now the soil was his — and then the teacher, the only one in the whole village who knew how to play the violin and who could drop words like Karel Čapek, Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, words that embodied the magic of virginal patriotic ideals and the spirit of the Teachers College where young women were prepared for that most beautiful of professions; and when he first arrived there at the age of forty he already had a wife and (at that time) two children, but he told the young teacher he loved her, in heavy calligraphy he wrote love letters and poems that seemed almost familiar to her (he had an old handbook of love letters and love poems by anonymous poets that he would adapt to his particular needs), and of a morning she would find a bunch of primroses on her desk, or a sprig of edelweiss or a bachelor’s button or a spray of lily of the valley, and she used to listen to him, go to meet him beyond the village in the shrubbery, in the underbrush of the pine woods where the wind of late summer blew over the bald hills and the