THE BASS SAXOPHONE Read Online Free PDF

lines from common dance halls, the smart remarks of village Don Juans and small-town wolves; he trotted out the old tricks and clichés that call for an exact phrase, a precise response from a girl — like the Latin dialogue between priest and altar boy — in the eternal sexual ritual of establishing acquaintance, but she didn’t come back with those petrified responses, she was silent and just said Yes (she was Hungarian, she spoke a strange combination of Slovak and Hungarian and some Gypsy or Carpathian dialect) or No, and the schoolteacher soon exhausted his stock of tricksand ploys and fell silent, plucked a blade of grass from the roadside, stuck it in his mouth and walked along chewing on it, defeated and mute with the grass sticking straight out of his mouth. Just then a huge dragonfly flew across the path and I asked the girl whether she knew that there were once dragonflies with a wingspan of two and a half feet. She voiced surprise and wonder that such a thing was possible, and I began to talk about the Mesozoic Age and the Cenozoic Age and about Darwin, about the world’s evolving, the blind and inevitable course of nature where the strong devour the weak and animals are born to seek food, procreate, and die, how there’s no significance to it, significance being a human term and nature a bare causal nexus, not a colorful, meaningful, mystical teleology. And that was when she told me I was mistaken, that nature does have significance, and life too. What significance? I asked, and she said, God. “All right, knock it off now,” said the schoolteacher. “Say, miss, don’t you feel like a beer? It’s hotter than hell today.” But she shook her head and I said, You believe in God? I do, she replied, and I said, There is no God. It would be nice if there were, but there isn’t. You haven’t come that far yet, she explained. You’re still a physical person, you’re still imperfect. But some day you’ll find Him. I, I said, am an atheist. I used to be an atheist too, she replied, until my eyes were opened. I discovered Truth. How did ithappen? I asked sarcastically, because she was slender like a dancer, and I knew dancers do go to church a lot and kneel and make the sign of the cross but they don’t believe in God, they don’t really think about God, they retain God as a superstition, the way they get someone to spit on them before they go on stage, before they don their professional smile and run out into the glow of the spotlights with their tiny little steps. When I got married, she said, and the schoolteacher, who had been walking alongside in silence chewing on a fresh piece of grass, awoke from his dumb stupor and said, “You’re married?” No, she replied. I’m a widow. But when I was married, I learned to believe. Your husband was religious? I asked. She shook her head. No, she said, he was very physical, he had nothing in him of spiritual man. “That makes you a young widow, eh?” said the teacher. “And would you like to get married again?” No, said Emöke (her name was Emöke, she was Hungarian, her father, a postal clerk, had made a career for himself in Slovakia when part of that country was annexed by Hungary before the war: he had been sent there as postmaster and had begun to live like a lord, with a piano, a salon, and a daughter at the lyceum who received private French lessons), I’ll never marry again. Why are you so determined? I asked. Because I have discovered that there can be more elevated aims in life, she replied. Forinstance, you said that the eternal changing of shapes has no significance, that it’s all just cause and effect. That is the way it appears to you. But I see a significance in it that you don’t see yet. What sort of significance? I asked. It is all aimed toward God, she said. Toward becoming one with Him. That is the significance, the meaning of all life.
    Between believers and nonbelievers there is no communication, there is a wall, a steel barrier