MOMENT MUSICAL

Sometimes, he thought, the fingers did it all on their own. They certainly didn't get any help from the coffee. What was it made from this week? Acorns? Dandelion roots? Barley? The officer at the table behind him was obviously getting the real stuff, black as his uniform, strong as the Reich, sweet as - well, the comparisons aren't always there to be made. He leant into the arpeggio forcefully, then swayed away from the keyboard to do the downward run with a contemptuous backward sweep of his left hand. The three closing chords he played with the delicate precision of a shot at billiards.

Automatically, his hand swept up for the coffee cup, but it was empty. However, Andrzej, the head-waiter in the café, was of the old school - he had trained as a Piccolo at the Café Kosciusko in Cracow when it was still part of Austria - and knew it was his duty to provide guests with fresh glasses of water every half-hour, even if he also knew they hadn't the money to buy another cup of coffee; after all, you could never tell which one of them was going to write the smash-hit play/novel/opera and get the café's name in the papers, and they had to do the writing somewhere.

It wasn't water in the glass this time though, as Witold realised a swallow too late. He wondered where Andrzej had found the vodka, with the rationing and the occupation. His special brand too, 'flavoured with the favourite herb of the European bison', as it had said on the label, when there were labels, when there were bottles for the labels to be on. Lucky old bison didn't have to play piano in the Café Mickiewicz, beg your pardon, Café Goethe, in Warsaw, with German officers for audience. Lucky old bison could just get legless in the forest and dream about the twenty years of Polish independence.

Andrzej was at his shoulder. By his breath, he too had been emulating the bison. The concert interval was evidently over.

'The captain would like something a little more modern,' said Andrzej.

'Szymanowsky?' suggested Witold, cracking his knuckles and raising an eyebrow.

Andrzej pursed his lips disapprovingly, while he replaced the empty water-glass with a full one.

'He's only a lieutenant,' muttered Witold out of the side of his mouth as he raised his hands for the first chord.

'True. But he speaks a little Polish. Which is probably why he's the only officer in charge of the Ghetto at the moment. There's a big staff meeting, he says.'

As he played, Witold watched in the mirror the officer's expression of irritation change to one of indifference, contentment, even pleasure. All the walls of the Café Mickiewicz were covered with plate mirrors, in the best coffee-house tradition. Partly it was to make the poky little dump look three times as big as it was; partly it was to give the numerically inadequate staff eyes in the back of their heads. If you raised your hand to pay, you never had to wait more than twenty seconds. There were other advantages, too: wherever you sat, you could see the Gestapo coming, and sometimes the reflections confused them long enough for you to get into the Gents, out the window, along the alleyway, through three courtyards, down the coal-hole into the cellar and come out in the Ghetto. When a sausage jumps out of the frying-pan, nobody looks for it in the fire.

Witold was enjoying himself; so was the officer. Did performer and public really sum up their relationship? He was easier to please than some audiences Witold had had. But then the Poles were fussy. Who did they have as their first President? Paderewski. A world-famous concert pianist. George Washington hadn't even been able to tinkle out a tune on his china dentures to amuse his guests of a winter evening. On the other hand, he could win wars.

The fingers were syncopating. Or was his left hand just being lazy, and having to catch up in skips and hops? He'd have to be careful: jazz was officially degenerate music. Invented by negroes. Racially inferior. But it didn't mean they didn't like it. Tiger Rag was banned; instead there was a German ersatz, called Der wilde Panther. It was a bit like the coffee.

The lieutenant was smoking now. He had unbuttoned the fearfully stiff uniform collar that set his head on his shoulders like a ventriloquist's dummy, and his hand was waving a small glass in surreptitious time to the music. Witold did some sinuous one-hand stuff in the bass while he grabbed his own glass, but it was only water. Andrzej obviously had reasons for diverting the bison. The lieutenant actually seemed to be smiling, and it couldn't just be the music.

Witold chose not to know what went on in Café Mickiewicz. He thought of himself as one of the rag-time pianists who made their living playing in brothels, but never asked about what happened upstairs. If the man and the woman came back a little hot and flushed and smiling, then they must have liked the tune so much they'd been dancing to it - certainly it had sounded as though they were jumping up and down. And who wouldn't, to that beat? It was real catchy.

It was easy to lose yourself in music: your own scurrying fingers hypnotised you. There were chords to fill and cadences to close and bar-lines to obey. So many rules, that it seemed silly to import any more from outside to apply to it. But that's what they'd done. Not just the degenerate stuff - 'music by slaves is music for slaves' - not just the anti-twelve-tone - they'd actually banned Mendelssohn! What did they do at weddings? Simple answer: they played Lohengrin.

When, in fact, didn't they play Wagner? wondered Witold. And he wondered it so deeply, that he stopped playing. But a flickering movement in the mirror caught his eye. With a friendly little gesture, the officer was urging him to carry on. How nice! Music, the international language. The only other thing which made its point so immediately everywhere in the world was a gun.

Was it just a coincidence that the German officers were so fond of music? One had heard tales of camps where people were sent to concentrate their minds, and the commandants of these camps spent half the day listening to screams and the other half practising Bach violin partitas. Some people said it was just the conductor, with his right hand giving that distinctive up-beat, and that the orchestra was all right really. But Witold knew that the fingers can do it all on their own.

With a shock, he realised they were doing it. He had just started into the famous Polonaise, the one they played on Free Polish Radio. He shifted gear and began syncopating. A quick glance in the rear-view mirror told him that the European bison was winning. He relaxed a little, and became mischievous. In between the widely-spaced chords, he began inserting fragments of melody.

'You want Wagner?' he said under his breath. 'Okay, you're gonna get Wagner. Not Johann Strauss, because he's a quarter Jewish, but they haven't dared to tell you that. Here you are, Overture to The Masterkillers of Nuremberg. Swing, baby, swing.'

It swung. Black music. Black market music. Strictly verboten. Witold and some friends of his had hatched a scheme way back, whereby they made their own jazz records, passed them off as smuggled American, and sold them to the Germans for hard currency which they could use to bribe guards and get people out of the camp transports. The drummer and bassist were picked up a month later on the say-so of a camp commandant who had a first-rate Jewish jazz pianist and wanted his own combo. That's how music can ruin your life. Witold would have been engaged as well, but the Café Mickiewicz was the head of the Gestapo's local.

'And now,' said Witold, ' for a pot-pourri of themes from the Thousand-Year-Opera, beginning with the Magic Fire Music as played by Fats Waller.' He found himself raising his voice, because the joint was jumping.

The joint was really jumping. The mirrors rattled. The door of the gents slammed to, and the breaking of the alleyway window was echoed by the suicide of a shelf of water-glasses. A series of dull thuds, so irregularly spaced that even Witold could not accommodate them rhythmically, pulsed through the building. Andrzej was at his shoulder, replacing the water-glass. There were coal-black smudges on his hands and face. The new glass smelt of bison.

'They've started fighting in the Ghetto,' said Andrzej.

The three last chords Witold played with as much delicacy and precision as if they were mortar-bursts. Maybe it was them, or maybe it was the three real mortar-bursts that followed that wouldn't let the sleeping bison lie.

'Well played,' said the officer, in a brief moment of consciousness, as he applauded Witold's image in quite the wrong mirror. 'Very well played.' And he fell asleep, still tapping his foot.

Mike Rogers 8 a.m. to 12.50 a.m. 15th/16th July 1989