Sokal (Part II)

Up the oak stairs, which took up at least a third of the house, and not at all because the house was small, but simply the stairs in Sokal’s house were the size at least of the stairs at the Reichstag, we made our way. 

There on the left side there was a corridor leading to three or four rooms, a bathroom and somewhere else. On the right, however, there were only one set of doors. Sokal opened them and we found ourselves in a very large angular room. 

It was ridiculously irregular, apparently the architect directed himself mainly with the appearance of the exterior of the structure, not caring especially about the appearance of the interior. It was all the fault of the Old German tower, attached to the building, which after all gave the whole of it from afar an ominous and sinister impression. 

In the room stood a concert fortepiano, a large post-German bureau, a couple of these armchairs and a kind of display cabinet. Through its crystal windows you could see that inside were mounted shelves and that on them stood several clarinets of different brand. One of the walls was taken up by a gigantic, reaching the ceiling, bookcase. 

There were many different Polish, German, French, English and American pre-war editions of Western European literature, mainly French, English and American, and several number of German books, so avidly and spontaneously burned at the stake in their time by the Hitlerites. 

The main wall, also from the floor to the ceiling, was taken up by the indisputably greatest pride of the man of the house. It was a work, and actually an artwork of a local electronics genius. 

In this time transistors were as yet unknown, and at least they had not yet made it to popular use, and in radio receivers were so called radio lamps. 

The average radio receiver had between three and eight such tubes. The more lamps, the better the radio—it had more power, it was more accurate and more immune to different kinds of static and to a certain type of censor deafening. 

Sokal’s radio device, taking up the whole wall, had no less, no more, than a hundred and eight lamps. It also included two modern adapters for 33, 45 and 78 records, several speakers built in in different places, even though then no one had yet heard of any stereo. 

Instead of a magical eye, often included in normal radio receivers, here there were several clock gauges to regulate reception, and to this also an important micrometric knob, which together with the gauges, and of course with the radio receiver ear, allowed a super precise and exact tuning of the desired radio station. Indeed this radio, though it emitted pretty good heat from all directions, actually caught everything. 

In the course of the half-hour demonstration of this very complicated device we listened to capriciously caught, from some provincial, very weak Scandinavian, German, Dutch, and Danish stations, such contemporary super hits, like: LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, I CAN’T GIVE YOU ANYTHING BUT LOVE, Billie Holiday with Lester Young or SWEET SUE as rendered by Errol Garner. 

Proud of his very costly toys Sokal constantly jumped between hundreds of waves and caught what we liked the most. 

“Mr. Doctor, Mr. Doctor,” suddenly arrived from below the yelling of the house servant, “dinner on the table.” 

Sokal turned everything off precisely and we went downstairs.