The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [92]
The Stray Dogs took each song apart, dismantling the melody, painstakingly, painfully, sappers dismantling a lie, and then turned each single component around so many times it disintegrated. Then they put it together again from nothing, notes and fragments of notes, bent notes and breaths, squawks on the horns and the reeds' empty lidded beating of keys. By the time the melody reappeared, one was sick with longing for it. “At first,” said Janusz, the cornet, “following Mr. Snow in a piece was like following the tracks of a jackrabbit – I never knew where he'd land. But after a while I could guess where his demented, sentimental mind might take him and one or two times over the years I even beat him there first. You should have seen the grin on his face – as if he'd opened a door and finally found himself home. I think that's the best thing I ever did for a man, taking away that loneliness for a bar or two.”
Paweł (double bass) wore a buttoned-down shirt and a thin houndstooth sportsjacket, Tomasz (trombone) wore a shapeless cardigan that dripped into a pool at his hips; Paweł had long hair, Piotr had no hair. Tadeusz (saxes), who was called Ranger – short for arranger – always wore a plaid flannel shirt, winter and summer. Ranger had been in Canada the longest and had learned his erudite English from a professor of Slavics who considered herself to have had two great insights, first to have married Ranger and then to have divorced him.
The first time Jean heard the Dogs, they were rehearsing at Paweł's café, after hours, a broken-down dirge. It tormented the air with its clockwork irregularity, a mechanical breakdown of stops and starts, notes grinding, grating, surging, limping. It was the music of revellers too old to be staying out all night, too dwindled to walk another step. Impatient and sad. A tonal meagreness. One by one the players dropped away until there was silence. Jean listened, mesmerized, the way one watches a fallen bowl circle round and round on the floor, waiting for the inevitable stillness.
She thought of dangerous rocks cascading intermittently down a slope, of stalled traffic, of conversations that stop and start not lazily, but instead signalling the end of everything.
– At night, said Lucjan, I lay in my melina listening to the stone rain. Pieces of brick or plaster that had been balancing precariously somewhere in the ruined darkness would reach their moment to fall – by wind, gravity, a soldier's boot. Gradually I became accustomed to it, there was no choice except to go mad waiting for the next sound that never came until I was almost asleep and was woken into waiting again. I used to feel how far it was from listening to the rain with my mother in the spring evenings on Freta Street, when I had only the problem of deciding which fairy tale to read before bed, or which dessert to choose that evening, apple cake or poppyseed cake.
– Now I understand, said Jean, what the Stray Dogs play … the stone rain.
The only (erstwhile and unofficial) member of the Stray Dogs who had not known the others from Warsaw was Jan, a Lithuanian from Saskatchewan who, late one summer night on his way home from playing lounge piano in a hotel, had come across Lucjan sitting on a curb contemplating a huge metal bedframe, wondering how he could transport it home. Jan offered to take one end and Lucjan took the other. They sat until daylight in Lucjan's studio drinking iced peppermint tea and vodka. Then Jan took it upon himself to spread green onions on the bottom of a pan and pour Lucjan's last three eggs on top of them. “Thus,” Lucjan told Jean, “are friendships sealed.”
The Stray Dogs met regularly at Lucjan's to settle matters, financial and otherwise. They maintained they met there on the first Thursday of every month, but the day was always changed