THE BASS SAXOPHONE by Josef Škvorecký Page A

in love, and yet so bound up in the self-indulgent habit of illusory freedom that I was unable to make up my mind. Emöke, I said in the darkness, upward toward that silhouette, that legend that was ending, and I heard her Yes softly and from a great distance. Believe me, please, I called weakly. Emöke! Yes, she said. Goodbye, but it was no longer the call of a lonely animal in the forest wilderness but the voice ofdisappointed and skeptical wisdom, the voice of a woman who is being transformed into the image of time lost, and the engine started to rumble, the train moved, and a slender white arm waved to me out of the window, the arm of that girl, that dream, that madness, that truth, Emöke.
    Overnight, the wine and the wisdom, the awareness or the vacation infatuation or whatever it was, evaporated and I awoke to the cold sober reality of Sunday morning, my imminent departure for Prague, my office, my colleagues, my pitiful affair with Margit and all the rest. The schoolteacher lay snoring on the other bed, his shorts, his shirt, everything carefully hung up to air again. I didn’t say a thing. He disgusted me, for all the hygiene of his clean underwear, because the grime of his soul couldn’t be aired out of his jockey shorts, his trousers or his shirt; he wasn’t even human, just living breathing filth, an egotist, a lecher, an idiot, an enemy.
    I didn’t say a thing to him. He might have even denied it. It wouldn’t have proved anything, and I wouldn’t have achieved anything by an angry confrontation. I was silent. Yet in fact my time was coming, my moment of revenge — the only possible revenge, for it wounded him where he was mostvulnerable, a revenge that he dug for himself like a grave, and into which he lowered himself helplessly.
    But maybe it was Fate, the miller, the avenger, tyrant, friend, and lord who provided the means on that train rolling through the ripe August landscape, in pursuit of the curving track of the eternal sun, eternal within the bounds of human eternity, its shiny, reddening glory lighting up the faces in the compartment like kerosene lamps, transforming them into golden portraits: a childless couple of about thirty (a technical draftsman and his wife, who was a clerk at the State Statistical Agency), the taciturn factory foreman, the hot-shot, the manager of the clothing store, his wife, myself, and the schoolteacher. And the game began. It was the idea of the draftsman and his wife. They often played it; they had no children and they killed time by paying visits to other childless white-collar couples — every Thursday the wife played bridge and he played poker, and since they were members of a Hiking Club they would also go every Sunday in spring to a chalet in Skochovice where they played volleyball with the people from the neighboring chalets, and other games, when it grew dark, such as this familiar parlor game. It has a hundred namesand like chess is played by everyone at some time or another; but this parlor game is more human than the empty and perverted feudal logic of chess which sucks so much energy from the human brain for the sake of the silly movement of bizarre figurines: here one person goes out of the room while the others decide on a certain object, person, animal, the Pope, Mars, the fruit preserves in one of the suitcases, or even the player himself (the one who went out of the room) and then they let him back in and he must eliminate everything, progressively and by using indirect questions requiring affirmative or negative replies, until by logic he arrives at the thing or the animal or person. The draftsman went out, and the clothing-store manager — as often happens with people who once in their lives stumble on something unusual, something which brightens their dull world of daily routine and polite clichés with a ray of wit, and which they’ll then repeat at every possible opportunity — suggested that we choose him, the draftsman himself, as our