I went into the pulpit. I had no intention of playing, the ruins had really depressed me. I only wanted to look down on it all from up there. I’d never been in a pulpit before. When I was a child I always thought that from the pulpit the priest could see everything in people’s heads. Even if someone had a lot of hair, or if the women had winter headscarves on, he could still see everything. So during the sermon I’d hide behind father or mother so he wouldn’t tell me off in front of the whole congregation, saying, See, over there, in that little blond head evil is already lurking, and remember that evil grows as a person grows, brothers and sisters. Because every sermon was always about evil. He’d often call out the first and last names of some man or woman in that regard.
So now it was me standing in the pulpit, looking down from above on the devastation. And after a moment, it was as if some voice whispered to me to start playing. Maybe it was even the ruins themselves. I opened the case, took out my saxophone, put the mouthpiece between my lips. Though I still wasn’t sure. Then all at once my saxophone seemed to start playing on its own. It played and played, and I only seemed to be listening to what my playing sounded like amid the destruction. At that point I see someone making his way across the rubble. Disheveled gray hair, a walking stick raised and being waved in my direction. He was shouting something and straining as if he was trying to rise into flight. But his right leg wouldn’t let him, at every step he sank down on it so low it looked like he’d collapse before he reached me. I had the impression of someone rising up out of the debris. Gasping and sweating, he finally hobbled up to the pulpit and as if with his last breath he shouted:
“Get down from there! Stop making all that noise! Get down, do you hear?” He went under the pulpit and started hammering on it from below with his cane. “Get down! Get down!”
I kept on playing. He came out from underneath, stood still, tipped his head back to look at me, and seemed to start listening. He was evidently unable to keep his head in that position, because he put both hands on his cane and rested his chin on them. He stood motionless and listened. At a certain moment he looked up again.
“What’s that tube you’ve got there?” he asked. “The thing you’re playing?”
“It’s a saxophone.”
“Never heard of it. Do you think God would like it? He used to always listen to the organ. But the organ’s lying under the rubble, like you see. If you gave me a hand we could fish it out. I can’t manage on my own. I’m too old. And when I put my cane aside I can’t keep on my feet. I was the organist here my whole life. That was one fine organ! Over there in the hut they don’t need me. They don’t even have a harmonium. So I stayed here. God stayed with me. He wouldn’t go someplace where they don’t have music.”
He walked up to the debris and tapped on it with his cane.
“See, you hear that? Come down and clear away this piece of wall for me, it’ll be easier to hear.”
“What will be easier to hear?”
“You don’t get it. I sometimes come here, I sit in the ruins and listen. There, you hear that? If you’d only move this piece of wall. Come down. You’re young, you’ll be able to do it.”
I went there almost every Sunday and helped him dig out the organ. That’s to say, he sat by me and I did the digging. Every now and then he’d stand and try to pick some piece up, but the moment he leaned over he’d lose his balance. In the end I told him to stay put, I’d do the clearing myself. He hardly said a word, didn’t ask any questions, maybe he was listening. Because when I moved some bigger piece of rubble he would always repeat:
“Now you can hear more clearly. Dig over there now.”
One day I’d been digging and digging till I’d uncovered the keyboard. I sat down, tired, and he said:
“We’re close now. Listen.”
I swear I couldn’t hear a thing. I asked:
“Close to what?”
“God,” he said, “Close to God. God is music, only after that is He the Almighty.”
One Sunday I came as usual, looked around, I couldn’t see him. He would always be there before me, sitting in the ruins and waiting. The next Sunday I didn’t see him either. Or the next. I cleared away the whole organ. As you can imagine, it was nothing but wreckage. I gathered up the tiniest parts. But he never came back. Maybe he’d had the good fortune to die before I dug out the organ. Because if he’d seen it …
10
What happened after that? After that it snowed. That much you know. How do you know I hid in the potato cellar? I didn’t hide, mother sent me in the morning with a basket to fetch potatoes. The zurek soup was already on the go, she’d put the potatoes in and for sure what was in the pot would have been enough. But she suddenly decided it wouldn’t do. Get the basket and bring a few more, son, I’ll peel them and pop them in. She always liked to make big amounts of everything, because you never knew who might show up hungry. And if not, it would still get eaten.
It took a while for me to fill the basket, then clamber up to the little door of the cellar, the place was deep and I wasn’t that strong, I had to go one step at a time, first lift the basket onto the next step up and only then climb after it. I’d almost reached the door, I had one more step to go, when out of the blue I heard shots. I put my eye to a crack in the door and I saw soldiers running and shouting, pouring something from canisters all around the house and the barn and cattle sheds. I let go of the basket, it crashed back into the cellar. Instead of rushing out and running back to the house, I hunched over till my head touched my knees. I shut my eyes, covered my ears with my hands, and sat there not hearing and not seeing.
Let me tell you, to this day I can’t understand my own behavior. I can’t forgive myself. No, it wasn’t what you think, it wasn’t fear. Fear would have driven me out of the cellar. Fear would have made me hear my heart, but in my case my heart stopped. I couldn’t hear the least murmur through the hands over my ears. I was all numb.
I don’t know how long I sat like that, like I’d frozen for good in that position, hugging my knees, hands pressed to my ears. I don’t even know when I fell asleep. Can you imagine that, I fell asleep. Is that normal? True, I’d never liked getting up early in the morning, I always had a hard time waking up. Even when I could hear mother leaning over me and saying, Come on son, get up, it’s time, even then I could never wake up. So more often than not it would be father who came to wake me up. He’d pull the covers off of me and say loudly, Come on, on your feet or I’ll pour cold water over you! After that I’d walk around still sleepy for the longest time. I’d wash and get dressed in a daze. We’d have breakfast and I’d still be in a daze. They’d have to keep reminding me to eat instead of falling back asleep. I’d still feel sleepy when I went to school. Often, the schoolteacher would finally wake me during the first lesson. Or in vacation time, when I led the cows down to the pasture it was more like they were leading me, and I was following behind, still asleep.
Anyway, when I woke up everything was covered with snow. I’d never seen snow like that before. You have no idea. The trees were a third buried in snow. Nearby in the orchard there was an old beehive that the bees had left. Father had been planning to set up a new bee yard, he kept promising himself. The hive was completely covered in snow. It was coming down in big flakes, it was so dense you could barely see anything at all. And it kept falling. You had to peer through it like you do with fog. We’d not had snow all winter. There’d been frosts, but not a hint of snow. When it had started I couldn’t tell you. But it was only when it stopped that you could see how thick it lay. It came up to more than half the height of the cellar door. Luckily the crack I could see out of was right at the top of the door. The snow shone so brightly it was hard to see through the crack.