The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [91]
All the Dogs remembered the days of the Crocodile Club, the Quid Pro Quo, the Czarny Kot – the Black Cat – and the Perskie Oko – the Persian Eye. They still dreamed of the queen of popular song, Hanka Ordonówna, and referred to her long affair with “that old man” Juliusz “My little Quail has Flown” Osterwafor with disdain and jealousy. The Stray Dogs were united in age, in inexpressible misfortune, in exile that defined them so completely it was difficult to imagine for them any other destiny, nor in their synchronized swim of chordal progressions and bent sound. Uniting them too was the knowledge that one's life is never remembered in its vicissitudes and variety but only as a distillation, a reduction of sixty or seventy years into one or two moments, a couple of images. Or as Hors Forzwer – the emcee at Warsaw's Round Club – might have said, from juice to jus. For each of them, the concepts of “music” and “women” were inseparable, as inseparable as “music” and “loneliness.” As ideas, “music” and “women” could not be disentangled, and in fact made an irreducible whole, like a molecule that is defined by its components and, if altered, changes into something unrecognizable. Just as “death” and “life” are meaningless one without the other, so “music,” “women,” “loneliness.” All this was evident in a single note gnarled beyond recognition, in a single chord heavy as a woman's thigh flung across a man's chest in the night. They played a cellarful of abandonment, the guilty look in an offguard moment, the coffee ring hardened into enamel at the bottom of the cup, the nub of a candle burnt down to the china saucer. And yet, there was a kind of solace too, the solace of emerging from the ruins to find that at least you no longer had any hair left to catch fire or that, for the moment, your prosthesis was not aching. “We want our music,” explained Mr. Snow, “to make people long to go home, and,” he boasted, “if the place is even half-cleared out by the time we've finished one set, we're overjoyed. Because for once it will seem better to be home alone in all one's misery than to be out listening to us. That's the kind of happiness we're capable of provoking!”
The Stray Dogs – a.k.a. the Hooligans, the Troublemakers, the Bandits, the Carbon Club (the latter a reference to the final days of the uprising, when Home Army Second Lieutenant Kazimierz Marczewski, who happened also to be an architect and town planner, had stood in the middle of Warsaw while firebombs fell and mines exploded around him, famously sketching plans for the reconstruction of the city on carbon paper) – indulged themselves with strange musical obsessions including Broadway musicals that they mangled into something agonizing, precisely heartbreaking, taking all the sweet hope and earnestness and extracting betrayal and despair with what Lucjan called “emotional acupuncture.” And they played Laura Nyro's “Stoned Soul Picnic” and “Kamienny Koniec” – “Stoney End” – because Nyro resembled – was in fact an exact physical replica of – Beata in her youth, whom they all remembered with great feeling. How beautiful she'd been – Jakże była piękna.
“I was born from love – Jestem dzieckiem miłośći” Mr. Snow growled, his voice singeing Jean's ears. “And my poor mother worked the mines – A moja biedna matka pracowała w kopalni … I never wanted to go down the stoney end – do kamiennego końca … Mama, let me start all over, Cradle me again.”
There were of course the zakazane piosenki, the “forbidden songs,” all the classics of the Chmielna Street Orchestra: “A Heart in a Rucksack,” “Autumn Rain,” “Air Raid,” “In the Black Market You'll Survive,” and “I Can't Come to You Today.” And, needless to say, Hanka Ordonówna's signature “Love Forgives Everything,” which Mr. Snow sang with a voice of such rancid sarcasm Jean wanted to stop up her ears before her heart shrivelled. “He is the only person alive,” said Lucjan, “who looks even at a kitten with disapproval.” Mr. Snow sang, “Miłość Ci wszystko