“Maybe we could try without the circles. People are making fun of me on the site. What do circles have to do with playing music?”
“They matter. One day you’ll figure out why,” he said. “Just keep standing there. Get used to it. You think you’ll have more space? Life isn’t lived sideways, it’s lived going down deeper. Likewise, you don’t play sideways, you play deep.”
He’d say that if I’d played the accordion I could have sat down, or the cello, a few other instruments. But not the saxophone. The sax was played from the legs, all the way up above the head. In that way the air flows into the instrument by itself, you don’t have to blow so much. You don’t have to puff your cheeks out and tense your jaw. You, you’re still all tense. You need to make the shape of the sounds with your lips, pass your tongue over them. Then the saxophone will become as tender as pain. Between you and it there ought to be pain. Otherwise you’ll remain strangers to one another. It’s a saxophone. But who are you?
You know, he became a lot gentler. He didn’t correct me so often, he listened more. At times I finished and he seemed to still be listening. It was only as I was leaving that he’d sometimes say I needed to improve this or that, work on one thing or another.
It’s also true that I was trying like never before. I was filled with a kind of doggedness, a hunger for playing. He’d say, That’s enough for today, and I’d ask him to listen to just one more thing or another, I’ll play it differently, just listen. He’d close his one good eye, you might have thought he was sleeping. Then suddenly he opened it wide:
“Play that again, I missed something the first time.”
Sometimes the watchmen would come in and tell us to wrap it up, because the warehouse couldn’t be open so long. They had to put the seals on. As it was they were turning a blind eye. When I left it would be nighttime, the site was so quiet I could scarcely believe it was the same place as during the day.
Each Sunday he’d give me the saxophone so I could practice when I got back from Mass. No, he never asked if I’d been. He only asked, So, did you manage to practice? At the rooming house I never could. From morning they’d be playing cards and drinking vodka there. Even when someone went to church, they’d come home and immediately go back to their vodka and cards.
When the weather was good I’d go into the fields or on the meadow. On Sundays no one was out in the fields, and on the meadows at most there were cows. Empty fields aren’t a good place to play. You play, but it’s like your music melts away. The meadows were a bit better. In the meadows I’d go out among the cows. And let me tell you, the saxophone took on a sound that it never did afterwards in other places, not just the warehouse, but in any night club, not even in a concert hall. You won’t believe it, but the cows would stop tearing up the grass, they’d lift their heads, stand still, and listen.
I tried playing in various locations to see how the sound changed depending on where I was. I don’t know how it would be here on the lake, in the woods, or when the Rutka still came through this way, in the village when there was still a village here. I really learned a lot from that. Same saxophone, same mouthpiece, same reed, and of course I was the same, but each place was different from other places. For example when I stood by a river, it was different where the current ran fast than where it flowed slowly.
It was worse when it rained, or in wintertime. What was I to do then? I’d go to the building site and stand under the roof of an open shelter. The watchmen would let me in. I’d slip one or another of them something from time to time. Once the construction had a roof things were a little easier. I’d go into one of the shops. Though in winter, especially when there was a severe frost, you couldn’t practice for long. I had these gloves where I’d cut off the fingertips, down to about here, so only the ends of my fingers would show. But I still had to breathe on them every so often, because they’d go numb.
I don’t know where that determination of mine came from. I’m not going to claim that I knew he was going to die soon. Maybe the saxophone had moved something in me, the fact that it was mine. And without needing to scrimp and save, without having to go to huge lengths. One day he said to me:
“I often thought to myself, why am I keeping the saxophone? I don’t play, it just sits there in its case. I’ve got a grandson, but he’s in the slammer. When he comes out he’s only going to sell it for a song when I die. He’s your age. Go on, go stand in your circle.”
I went and stood where he told me to. He sat in his circle. His eyes were closed, he was listening to me play. All of a sudden one eye opened, the blind one. I could have sworn he could see me with that eye. It even glinted, and I stopped playing.
“Come to Mass with me on Sunday, ask the priest. The church is empty most of the week, maybe he’ll let you practice there. The truth is, this warehouse is useless. You really should have a proper space. What else is there around here? The firehouse? That’s even worse.”
He died, the construction was finished, I moved to another site then another one after that. We were building a cable factory, I remember. One day I went to the store to get a loaf of bread, and I heard someone talking about a ruined church in the neighborhood, it had been like that since the war. They held their services in a hut somewhere else. After the war they’d taken prefab panels from camps and barracks that were being torn down, and in the areas with a lot of war damage they used them to put up apartment buildings, barns, cattle sheds, government offices, community centers, schools. They’d built the church building out of those kinds of panels. It stood at one end of the village, while the ruined church was at the other end.
One day I went to have a look, and on the off chance I took my saxophone in its case. The place wasn’t completely ruined, that is, not to its foundations. But the war had left its mark. The steeple was gone. Half the roof was missing. The other half was riddled with bullet holes. There were big gaps in the walls. Not a single window had survived, though once there must have been stained glass windows, you could still see the remains of colored glass at the edges. The main doors had been torn off. A bomb must have hit the organ loft. You went in over rubble, with bits of the smashed organ poking out from among the debris. I accidentally stepped on something and it let out a moan that gave me quite a scare. But there wasn’t any way in except through the rubble. There wasn’t a single pew, no sign of confessionals, and where the main altar and side altars had been there were just empty spaces. On the floor were the remains of campfires. Soldiers must have burned the pews and confessionals and altars to cook food or keep warm. The walls looked like they’d been shot up by machine gun fire, the figures of the saints were all smashed. Here there was part of a head, over there an elbow or a foot in a funny-looking sandal. I picked up a hand, it was missing the thumb right here. I started to look around, see if I couldn’t find it someplace. I found another hand, it had all its fingers and it was clutching part of a rosary. But it turned out not to be a match for the first hand, even though one was a left hand and the other a right. I won’t say any more about the other fragments, I’m sure you can imagine. You had to watch where you stepped. In a word, there was debris and wreckage everywhere. On top of that, the rain had been pouring in for all those years since the war, snow had blown in, there’d been hard frosts, and there was no indication that anyone had tried to protect the place from further ruin.
The only thing still in any kind of shape were the Stations of the Cross. Though they were shot up and blackened, some of them had lost almost all their paint, so you couldn’t tell if Christ was carrying his cross or if the cross was moving along on its own. That and the pulpit. It was mighty strange that that survived, let me tell you. It was also peppered with bullet holes. But there wasn’t even one step missing. Yes, it was made of wood. Maybe they made speeches from there to keep the soldiers’ spirits up. Or maybe there’d been some anniversary. Holidays are celebrated just the same during wartime.