THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký

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 legendbut 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 ofthe 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; suddenlyshe 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