in a concert given by the winners, at which attendance, as a sign of the hosts’ hospitality, was obligatory.
The reality surpassed our worst expectations. This was owing principally to our singing instructor, the terror of the school. Known as ‘the Eunuch’ because of his reedy voice (a ‘Heldentenor’, by his own description) and his old-bachelor ways, he was a classic neurotic, with a tendency toward excessive enthusiasm and an unswerving conviction that singing – classical singing, naturally – was the most glorious thing on earth. He was the object of endless jokes and ridicule, but he was also a figure of fear. When something had enraged him beyond the limits of his endurance he was capable, at the height of his fury, of lashing out and doing us physical harm. Worst of all, he could utter threats so macabre that, although we knew from experience they would not be carried out, the very sound of them made the world go dark before our eyes. The one he resorted to most often went like this: ‘I’ll rot in prison for the rest of my days, but in a moment, with the aid of this instrument’ – whereupon he would take a penknife out of his pocket and flick it open to reveal the blade – ‘with the aid of this blunt instrument here, I’ll hack off someone’s ears!’
And this maniac, this raving lunatic, to put it mildly, was to be in charge of the festival. What this meant in practice may easily be imagined. For the duration of the affair he became the most important figure in the school. This was his festival; these were the days of his triumph. They were also, for him, as the person responsible for the whole thing, days of great stress. He prowled the corridors in a state of feverish excitement, observing everything, poking his nose into everything, wanting to choreograph our every move; after classes he proceeded, with relish, to torment the choir with hours of practice. Everyone was thoroughly sick of him and we longed for the day when this purgatory would come to a blessed end.
By the last day of the festival most of the students were showing symptoms of profound depression and went about in an almost catatonic stupor. The permanent, oppressive presence of the demented Eunuch, the constant flow of new decisions, the endless chopping and changing, the whole accompanied, for hours on end, by the dreadful howling of choirs in full flow – all this tried our endurance to its limit. At last, however, the blessed end arrived. The last notes of some exalted song performed by the winners of this year’s Nightingale resounded and died away; the honourable members of the jury made a grand exit in stately procession; and the students, left to their own devices, with just the chairs to be put away and the stage to be swept, gave way to uncontrollable euphoria.
I had been about to close the piano lid when for some reason I began instead to sound out, rhythmically, four descending notes in a minor key, a simple arrangement that was the typical introduction to many jazz classics, among them Ray Charles’s famous ‘Hit the Road Jack’. My unthinking, barely conscious, repeated action had a spectacular and quite unexpected effect. The crowd of students milling about cleaning up the room immediately took up the rhythm; people started to clap and stamp their feet. After that, events took their unstoppable course. The three other members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, feeling the call of blood, launched themselves upon their instruments. The double bass was the first, plucking out the same four notes, eight quavers in quadruple time. Next on stage was the percussionist; with lightning speed he threw the covers off his instruments, flung himself at his drums and, after a few energetic drumrolls and strikes on his cymbals as an entrée, began, in an attitude of great concentration, his head to one side, to pound out a four-four basso continuo. Then – at first distantly, still from within the instrument cupboard – the trumpet came in, joining us in several repeats of those first four electrifying notes; and when the trumpeter at last appeared on stage, to screams of ecstasy and whoops of joy, he sounded the first bars of the theme.
Everyone went berserk. People began to sway, twitch, twist and contort themselves to the music. And then someone else, a boy who had been looking after the technical side of things, leapt up onto the stage. He pulled up a chair for me (thus far I’d been playing standing up), stuck a pair of sunglasses on my nose to suggest a resemblance to Ray Charles, pushed a microphone up to my lips and said in a passionate whisper, ‘Let’s have some vocal! Come on, don’t be shy!’
Who could resist such an enticement, a plea so eloquent with yearning, brimming with the will of an inflamed crowd? Its urgency was stronger than the choking shame in my throat. I squeezed my eyes shut, took a breath and rasped out into the microphone:
Hit the road Jack,
And don’t you come back no more . . .
And the frenzied, dancing crowd came in with perfect timing. Like a well-rehearsed ensemble they took up the words, endowing them with new meaning and determination:
No more no more no more!
English was not our school’s strong point, and hardly anyone understood what the song was about, but the force of those two words, that ‘no more’ so sweet to the Polish ear, advancing rhythmically up the rungs of a minor scale in a row of inverted triads at the fourth and the sixth, was clear to all. And the crowd took up the chant fully aware of its significance.
No more! Enough! Never, never again! No more howling; no more having to sit and listen. Down with the festival of choirs and vocal groups! To hell with them all! Damn the Golden Nightingale, damn the Exotic Trio, may they vanish from the face of the earth! Damn the Eunuch, may he rot in hell! Don’t let him come back no more . . .
No more no more no more!
And as the crowd was chanting these words for the umpteenth time, in an unrestrained, ecstatic frenzy of hope and relief, there burst into the room, like a ballistic missile, our singing instructor – puce with rage and squawking in his reedy voice, ‘What the bloody hell is going on here?!’
And then a miracle happened – one of those miracles that usually occur only in our imaginations or in a well-directed film, one of those rare things that happen perhaps once in a lifetime.
As anyone who remembers Ray Charles’s hit knows, at the last bar of the main thematic phrase (its second half, to be precise), on the three syncopated sounds, the blind black singer, in a dramatic, theatrically breaking and swooping voice, asks his vocal partner, a woman throwing him out of the house, the intriguingly ambiguous question, ‘What you say?’ This question-exclamation, most likely because it ends on the dominant, is a kind of musical punchline, one of those magic moments in music for which we unconsciously wait and which, when it comes, evokes a shiver of singular bliss.
Now it so happened that the Eunuch’s blood-curdling scream fell precisely at the end of the penultimate bar. I had less than a second to make up my mind. I hit the first two notes of the last bar (another repeat of the famous introduction) and, twisting my face into the mocking, exaggerated grimace assumed by people pretending not to have heard what was said, crowed out with that characteristic rising lilt, in the general direction of the Eunuch, standing now in the middle of a stunned and silent room, ‘What you say?!’
It was perfect. A roar of laughter and a shiver of cathartic joy went through the room. For the Eunuch it was the last straw. With one bound he was at the piano and had launched himself at me. He kicked me roughly off my chair, banged shut the piano lid and hissed out one of his horrifying threats: ‘You’ll pay dearly for this, you little snot! We’ll see who has the last laugh! You’ll be squealing like a stuck pig by the time I’m finished with you. In the meantime, I’ll tell you right now that you’ve just earned yourself an F in singing, and I really don’t see how you can change that before the end of the year.’
That was the last performance of the Modern Jazz Quartet. The following day it was officially dissolved by the school authorities, while I, as an additional reward for my brilliant solo (and it was brilliant, whatever
