The Cowards Read Free Page B

‘Bob Cats’. I found it right away, and as I shifted around in my chair to get comfortable I noticed the way Lucie was making eyes at Haryk. She had pretty eyes. The green soda pop in front of her still sparkled like emeralds, and behind her the sky outside was blood red and the windows in the castle glittered. A whole row was lit up on the first floor, where the ballroom named after Piccolomini was, and then two or three windows on the second floor. The big shots were probably starting to panic. A little star twinkled right over the turret of the castle. Fonda rapped four times, Brynych started off on a drum solo. We waited till it was over and then we all came in, Venca with a wonderful, gutty glissando sliding up and down the scale and Lexa’s heartbreaking moan. It was good. We hit it just right. I saw a smile spread over Fonda’s face. Then I started thinking about Benno. It was funny, I knew, but this was something I couldn’t and probably never would understand. Allowing yourself to be roped up and led around and humiliated like that, losing control over yourself that way. I’ve never lost control of myself. I could never get so mad at anybody that I’d really blow my top, and love never made me lose my head either. When I had my arms around some girl and was jabbering away, I had to act as though I was talking like that out of sheer ecstasy and excitement and all that kind of thing. I really could have talked pretty sensibly, only that probably would have made her mad, and so I’d always talk a lot of nonsense. I had to act like I was completely gone on her and that she took my breath away and so on, and at the same time I always had an embarrassing feeling that girls could see right through my act and that they were laughing at me. But none of them ever really saw through it. They asked for it. Probably everybody talks that way in such situations, so it doesn’t seem funny to girls. Only it was hard to imagine a guy really meaning what he said. God knows. Certainly none of the girls ever found out. Probably boys really are smarter than girls. All of a sudden it occurred tome that I ought to be thinking about Irena if I was supposed to be in love with her. So I started thinking about her. At first I couldn’t. I tried to picture her and I couldn’t. So then I remembered how I’d looked down her bosom at the swimming pool recently and then it worked. I thought about how nice it would be to sleep with her and that Zdenek was sleeping with her and I started to be pleasantly jealous and that was fine. Then it was my turn for the tenor solo and I started to gulp away in the middle registers where the tenor sax sounds best and I forgot all about Irena, but she was still there in the back of my mind while I played my big solo from ‘Bob Cats’. My nice big solo and I felt fine. I didn’t even mind that there was probably going to be a revolution and that it wouldn’t be so nice to really get hurt or killed. Instead, it was nice to think about my Last Will and Testament and heroism and things like that. When I finished my solo, I looked up and noticed old Winter sitting behind the tap staring into nowhere with those bloodshot eyes of his. He had dull eyes that wobbled in a watery kind of way and he was daydreaming just like me, except not about Irena but probably about the station restaurant he’d wanted to lease ever since he’d been a kid like us, or about some big hotel with four waiters, or maybe just getting hold of some real good Scotch and selling it to us. He didn’t drink himself, maybe just to be different or something, or maybe he really did have progressive paralysis. His bald head glistened behind the taps and the brass pipes gleamed. Outside the windows the blood-red glow darkened and the stars began to shine. We finished ‘Bob Cats’ by heart, playing it in the dark.
    ‘Helena, turn on the lights over there, will you?’ said Fonda when we’d finished. Helena reached up above her head,