Sokal's Story (Part VII)

Now we were almost approaching the station. 

Sokal began to abridge himself. 

After a few days spent at the bordello he made it to Udine to buy some clothing. This was, as everything else after all, quite risky, because the roving about karabiner patrols often checked the documents of suspicious looking people, but he itched to go. 

When he happily returned, it was already night and he did not want to wander around with a suitcase, which he also bought, so he left it in the station checkroom, so that at some normal hour he could bring it back to his place with less risk. 

When the next day he went with the luggage he picked up from the check room, he decided on the way that the suitcase was decidedly heavier than the previous day and that it even looked different. There was nothing to do. 

When he hauled it to his place and opened it, he confirmed he was right. The suitcase did not belong to him, no clothing which he bought yesterday in Udine was in it, instead it was filled with phonograph records, all American and all on the then designated seventy eight revolutions. 

On each record there was, in large letters, BENNY GOODMAN. 

Sokal had no idea who this was… In Vienna they played only Austrian waltzes, maybe sometimes the Radetzky march or something from Mozart. The records there were more than forty, brand new I would say naively, and on each… Benny Goodman, Benny Goodman, Benny Goodman, Benny Goodman. 

Angry because of this mistake, out of curiosity he borrowed for a moment a phonograph from one of the older paying guests. He played the first record from the pile, the track had the title STOMPIN’ AT THE SAVOY, and he simply went crazy. 

After a week he already had his own, especially brought in from Venice, the most expensive on the market at that time, gramophone and a clarinet of the brand HENRY SELMER – PARIS. 

The clarinet he learned to play when he was a boy still in Krakow, from his two older cousins, who clamored a bit. From the first time he heard Benny Goodman, everything else ceased for him to exist. 

In the underground chamber he spent almost twenty hours daily. When it was cold or damp, he lit the fireplace, and the whole time played record after record, trying to play exactly the same as Benny Goodman played. Like this he spent more than two and a half years. 

Every month someone arrived, or even Nina herself, whose maternal feelings towards Sokal did not die out at all. 

She did not know at all his passion connected to Benny Goodman, but she knew well where he was, which was why she suspected the worse, seeing him pale and thin, she always rubbed his head and with disarming honesty said in Slovenian: “My poor little Jew, these whores here will finally screw you to death…” 

This was the last sentence that Sokal managed to say to me, when already almost running I jumped onto the moving train. 

I was returning home.