In preparation for our appearance the management got us new suits, dark, with a pinstripe, new shirts and ties, they even thought about having us wear bow ties, opinions were divided. This time everyone got black shoes, black socks, and a handkerchief. We heard they’d wanted to buy us matching overcoats as well, since it was autumn, but they ran out of funds. You have no idea how much we were looking forward to that ball. We were counting down the days. The night before they were going to pick us up I barely slept at all.
It was a Saturday. They sent a truck covered with a tarpaulin, but with benches along the sides. When we got in they told us not to look out from under the tarpaulin. In fact there were holes in it, but since we’d been told not to look, no one even dared so much as to peep through the holes. Besides, there were two soldiers sitting at the back watching us the whole time. They’d lowered the tarpaulin the moment we set off, and it was like riding in a dark box.
They told us it would take about two hours. It couldn’t have been all that far, but the road went up hill and down dale, we bounced in our seats, the benches kept sliding into the middle of the truck, and we had to keep a tight grip on our instruments. So when we got there it was already completely dark. I don’t know what kind of building it was. It was a big sprawling place, and it was in the woods, maybe a park. You couldn’t see any more. Besides, after we got out of the truck they didn’t let us look around. They hurried us to a kind of corridor in the left-hand wing, then from the corridor into a small hall. Here one of the soldiers who’d brought us reported to another soldier with two stars on his epaulette that the band had arrived and was ready to play. The second soldier told us to take off our overcoats and hats and hang them on pegs. I had a beret instead of a hat. I’d intended to buy a hat, and in fact I did. With those first wages, like I said, on the first building site I’d worked on after the electrification of the villages. But now I was working on maybe my fourth site, and I wore a beret.
We took off our hats and coats like he asked. Right away two civilians came through from the next room, one of them carrying a list. The one with the list checked our ID cards and marked them off on the list. The other guy went over to our hats and coats and he started feeling them, looking inside every hat, squeezing my beret in his hands. Then they patted us down to check we didn’t have anything. Exactly what I don’t know, they didn’t say. But the clarinetist had a pocket knife, a regular pocket knife. You know what a pocket knife looks like. It’s not a real knife, you can fit the whole thing in the palm of your hand. Two folding blades, one longer, one shorter, a folding corkscrew, a can opener, maybe a nail file, though I don’t recall whether pocket knives had nail files back then. They told him to leave the pocket knife, that he’d get it back after the ball.
Then my heart nearly stopped, because one of the civilians asked the other:
“Was there supposed to be a saxophone?”
The other one immediately went through into the next room. He stayed there for a really long time, or so it seemed to me. True, when it’s fear measuring time instead of a clock, even a moment can drag on forever. He came back and nodded, but I didn’t feel the slightest relief, I was bathed in sweat. They examined all the instruments closely. They shook the violin to see if anything rattled inside it, tapped on the drums to make sure the sound was clean, looked into the bell of my saxophone. Then they asked if we’d brought a list of the tunes we were going to play. Of course we had, since beforehand they’d required us to bring a list. We gave it to them. Had we brought the music to go with the tunes? Did any of it have words? We hadn’t been told that anyone would be singing, so we were taken aback. They explained that that wasn’t what they meant. Of course we had the music with us, though we knew by heart all the pieces we played regularly. We always had the sheet music with us anyway, since it looks more serious when a band plays from sheet music.
They spent more time on the sheet music than on anything else. One of them went through it all, then handed it over to another guy. The other guy, it looked like he knew music because he studied each page in turn, and from his eyes you could tell he was reading everything from top to bottom. He even took out two or three pages and held them between his fingers, after which he went into the next room again and stayed there for a long while. This time it really was long. We thought there must be something they didn’t like, though we’d only chosen tunes that we’d played before at all kinds of parties and functions.
Finally he came back. He handed the music over. He said, It’s fine. It turned out he hadn’t held on to any of the tunes. But when we checked to make sure he hadn’t put things in the wrong order, we saw that at the top of every page there was a handwritten note saying, Approved, and an illegible signature.
The soldier with the stars said, Let’s go. He led us down one corridor then another one, to the ballroom. At the doors he told us to wait, while he went in first. I don’t know why. Perhaps he had to report to someone that the band was at the doors. They were reporting to each other at every step. You couldn’t move unless one of them reported to another one that you were there.
When we’d been getting in the truck to go there, one of the soldiers that later sat in the back to watch over us had first made us line up, after which he reported to another soldier sitting in the cab next to the driver that the band was ready for departure. Only after that did he drop the tailgate and tell us to climb in.
The one that had gone into the ballroom came out again and arranged us in a line according to our instruments, violin, viola, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, percussion, and me, saxophone. I didn’t know if it was because I was the youngest, or because of the saxophone.
We were supposed to play something as we entered, then only after that make our way to the place for the band. Imagine walking into a huge, brightly lit room, there are streamers, balloons, but you don’t see any people, there’s nothing but masks. Someone called out:
“Bravo, the band is here!”
There were a few more bravos, and someone added a double one:
“Bravo! Bravo!”
It came out that we were late. Though not through any fault of our own, of course. Let me tell you, I didn’t know what to think of it all. Here the people who were supposed to be enjoying themselves were waiting for us, while the other guys were checking us over like they didn’t give a hoot about the first lot. I thought to myself, could it be that the second ones are more important than the first ones? It was because of the second ones we were late, they’d kept us back for such a long time. Maybe that was why they weren’t wearing masks, while the first lot had masks on.
The ball was nothing special. It wouldn’t have been any different from a regular dance if it hadn’t been for the masks. Some people were dancing, others were going through to an adjoining room where there must have been food and drink. We couldn’t actually see, there was a civilian standing by the door and he closed it every time someone went through. But when they came back, virtually every one of them was unsteady on their legs. They alternately danced and went out. Whether they kept their masks on to eat and drink, that I couldn’t tell you. They didn’t even let us through there for supper. They took us to a different room where again they reported that we’d come for supper, seven count. And they brought seven portions.