A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Downstairs, in the dark entrance hall, even during the day you had to press a glowing red button that turned on the feeble lights just long enough to get you to the first landing, where a similar button had to be pressed again, but often I walked up the stairs in the dark, because the constantly glowing little button beckoned to me like a beacon in the night seen from the open sea, and I liked looking at the tiny source of light so much that I preferred not to press the button, so the stairwell remained in darkness, and while I did not know exactly how many steps there were, the creaks proved a reliable guide and the red glow helped me on the landings; I hardly ever missed a step.

  I used to do the same thing in the house on Wörther Platz where Melchior lived, walking up the stairs almost every night, with good old Frau Hübner on the third floor looking through the peephole while sitting, I was told, on a high stool, but since I walked upstairs in the dark she couldn't see me, could only hear footsteps, and so she'd invariably open the door to peek out either too early or too late.

  In the house on Steffelbauerstrasse the hallway lights didn't work properly, staying on only if one kept pushing the button, so if Frau Kühnert happened to be in the kitchen when I was ready to go out for the evening, she'd rush out to make sure I didn't walk downstairs in the dark; I tried hard to leave without being noticed, since I knew that Frau Kühnert faithfully reported my every move to Thea, who was anxious to know everything about Melchior, and after a while I imagined that even Frau Hübner was working for Thea and Frau Kühnert, but I almost never managed to move quietly enough for my landlady: "Hold it, my dear sir, I'm here to light your way," she'd say, and run out of the kitchen to hold her finger on the button until I reached the ground floor; "Thanks," I'd shout back, thinking that Frau Hübner must be waiting in her third-floor apartment, half-expecting me politely to say hello as I passed in the light emanating from her place; but if I happened to come home during the night and there was no light filtering in from the street, I had to feel out each step on my way up or use a match, because in this house on Steffelbauerstrasse even the tiny red filament of the button had burned out and could not guide me, and I was afraid of bumping into something live on the staircase.

  Melchior had never been in this house.

  Come to think of it, he never set foot in the house on Stargarderstrasse either; we were forever hiding or, more precisely, we were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, which was something I was quite adept at, it came easily to me, a sort of behavior that also alluded, unpleasantly, to my past: once, on a Sunday afternoon in front of the building, when Stargarderstrasse was all but deserted, though anyone could have concealed himself behind drawn curtains, on a dull-gray November afternoon when everyone was sitting at home watching TV, drinking coffee, and we both felt we could not say goodbye, we didn't really have to, we could have stayed with each other, except that we'd been together for three days and our protective shell which kept everything and everyone out was getting thicker and thicker and we had to break out of it, we had to part, spend at least one night alone—I wanted to take a bath, and Melchior's flat had no bathroom, you had to use a washbowl or the kitchen sink, I felt dirty, wanted to be alone for the afternoon and evening at least, catch my breath, and then, before midnight, run downstairs and call him from a public phone, hear his voice while leaning against the cold glass of the booth, and perhaps go back to his place—and we agreed that he would walk me to the corner of Dimitroffstrasse, and then he'd buy cigarettes at the tobacco shop under the elevated that stayed open on Sunday, but we couldn't tear ourselves away from each other; first he said he'd walk me only one more block, then I asked him to walk another; we couldn't just shake hands, it would have been ridiculous, awkward, and cowardly, but we had to do something; we avoided looking at each other, and then he held out his hand, if only because we wanted to touch some part of each other, and so we kept holding hands; there was no one on the street, but this was not enough, it was his mouth that I wanted, there, in front of the house, that Sunday afternoon.

  And the house on Chausseestrasse he also saw only from the outside.

  It was a Sunday evening.

  I pointed out the window from the streetcar taking us to the theater; on the empty platform he was telling me about the Berlin uprising, and I told him about the revolt in Budapest, our sentences dovetailing smoothly into one another.

  He looked up at the window, but I could not tell whether he actually saw it; he kept on talking: to me it was very important then that he should at least know the house, if not the room, where I had first stayed and which, without his being aware of it, had become important in his life, too; but Melchior, though not indifferent to my past, distanced himself from it, he could not do otherwise.

  I had been living in the flat on Steffelbauerstrasse for almost two months, was used to it, had even grown to like it, when one morning Frau Kühnert, lighting the fire in the stove, told me that electricians were coming that morning to fix the lights in the staircase, they'd be looking for her, but she couldn't stay home, and I'd be there anyway, wouldn't I? ..."Yes, of course," I replied, still lying in bed while Frau Kühnert knelt in front of the stove and, as she always did when working around the house, quietly hummed to herself; she was right, I spent most of my time at home, except for evenings, and since she was in charge of things concerning the building, she said, the electricians had to see her first, but I should tell them she couldn't stay home, "Who do they think they are, anyway?" and I should explain what the problem was, and whatever happened not let them leave, "the swine," until they fixed the lights.

  I stayed home the whole morning, waiting for Melchior to call—we had only a few more days left—but he didn't call, and the repairmen didn't show up either.

  If only he had called during that cloudless day of sunshine and complete silence; in the morning the Kühnerts heated only the living room and my room, and the nights were cold, occasionally there was even frost on the ground; from the dining room, which opened from the foyer, one could walk into the living room, but my room was at the far end of the apartment, approached like two small bedrooms from a long dark corridor connecting the kitchen and the bathroom; save for the living room and my own room, I left all the doors open to make sure I could run quickly to the phone if it rang, and if Melchior had called, I would have suggested we go to the Müggelsee if I could have talked to him from the Kühnerts' living room; the weather was perfect, I would have said, looking from the warm room into the cold sunlight, but I would have also told him that I wouldn't go with him to his mother's, because the only reason he wanted me along was to make this farewell easier for himself; he had to say goodbye to her, perhaps see her for the last time, without letting her suspect anything, and I could not imagine that he would never again share with me his boyhood bed in his unheated bedroom; it seemed too implausible that everything we had would now irrevocably come to an end.

  "That bed? You really used to sleep in that? and it was standing in the same spot? and that stain on the ceiling, that was there, too?"

  He laughed at my questions, as if he couldn't conceive of anything changing in his world or of anyone being surprised at the absence of change; he was right, things were not that changeable there, and his mother, Helene, named after her mother, who had died in childbirth, made certain that things no longer changed, so she could provide her son with the security of an ultimate haven, but aside from this home situation, Melchior had good reason to feel like that about changes: before he had met me, he told me, not without a small show of male pride, it had mattered very little whom he was with, he simply had no need to feel secure, was not very choosy; in fact, the most casual relationships were those that had often given him the greatest pleasure; and to have something assuredly constant in his desultory existence, he had rigorously developed his taste, honing and refining it, making it ascetically austere; in his inaccessibly hermetic poetry he had forced himself to be self-effacing and uncompromising; and no matter what happened, he could come
back here to his mother's house every weekend, which he did, lugging his dirty laundry in a suitcase, because here everything stayed the same and his mother insisted on doing his laundry, nothing had changed "except for the stain, that got there later," and he laughed, but his laugh never meant very much; he laughed easily, lightheartedly, for no particular reason, and nothing could ever extinguish the cheer in his eyes, except when he thought no one was looking.

  I couldn't imagine that come Sunday morning, when waking to the peal of church bells booming through the tiny windows of his mother's house, I'd be alone, no longer able to inhale in the cold room the fragrance of his skin mingled with the pungent scent of winter apples and the sweet smell of pastry baked to be eaten with freshly brewed Sunday coffee, the apples laid out in neat rows atop the closet, the sugar-coated coffee cake on the marble-topped sideboard waiting as the afternoon snack, and the tiny window always open; yet his face would cloud over and he'd look at my forehead, my mouth, when inadvertently I told him that I loved the smell of his sweat; my nose loved it, my palms, my tongue loved it, and as if my words had pained him, he hugged me; "I can taste and smell and feel you!" he said, emitting an odd sound, and I thought he was laughing, but it was a brief, tearless sob that later, on his creaky bed at Wörther Platz, erupted in whimpering, choking sounds of terror.

  I also pictured the path around the Müggelsee, covered with multicolored leaves, and the tranquillity of the mirror-smooth lake itself, and the sound of our footsteps on the fallen leaves muffled by early-morning mist; actually, there was another reason I would have asked that we go to the Müggelsee: I felt that there I might still win him over, or commit myself unconditionally to him for good, but I knew it was impossible—oh, that incredible autumn!—or we could have gone to the zoo, of course, if he thought the stroll around the Müggelsee too troublesome or far away; if one could believe the colored posters on the S-Bahn—looking at them became my pastime while riding the trains—the zoo was also located in a forest, full of secluded shady paths, and we had never been there even though we often planned to go: but I also pictured myself taking a knife from the Kühnerts' kitchen and during our walk stabbing him to death.

  In this last of my Berlin residences I used to get up late, or rather, I'd wake up two or three times before actually getting out of bed, sometimes close to noon.

  First, it was always the waking with a start at dawn as Dr. Kühnert rattled down the hallway past my door toward the bathroom: I'd pull the pillow over my head so as not to hear what was to follow—his going into the bathroom and first urinating; I had to hear the precise sounds of the short, sharp splashes preceding the long steady stream that stopped abruptly and ended in a gradually weakening trickle, the wall was thin and I could tell he was aiming at the back of the bowl, the hollow that fills up with water even after flushing; as a child I had also tried to do the same, and in a way I found it amazing that someone at the age of fifty, a university professor, should still amuse himself this way—but if the only sounds I heard were a short tap followed by a muffled squirt of urine against the side of the bowl, I knew he was going to defecate, too.

  Elimination was not necessarily indicated by breaking wind; farts sounded quite different when done while urinating, standing up, than when seated, in which position the bowl acted as an amplifier; there was no way to confuse the two noises, and the pillow didn't really help, for the groans, the gentle sighs of relief, the scraping and rustling of the toilet paper could be heard clearly through the wall; the pillow could not possibly help, because I was also listening, as it enjoying it all, as it tormenting myself with the knowledge that I couldn't and wouldn't want to close my ears—one can close one's eyes or mouth but ears can be stopped up only with fingers, ears can't close themselves—and Dr. Kühnert was still far from finished, the noisy flushing was only a brief pause, and if I hadn't known what else was still in store, I might have had enough time simply to roll over and fall back asleep, because during these startled awakenings, at night or early in the morning, one is hardly aware of the transition between sleep and wakefulness, and the fading characters in a dream sometimes aren't intimidated even by a suddenly switched-on light; they have faces and hands, and they recede just far enough to be out of reach, jumping on shelves, among the books, and sometimes the very opposite happened: the features of my room dissolved smoothly into a dream, I'd see the window, but it was already a dream window, and the tree in front of it and the hollow left by the missing brick where sparrows nested were also part of the dream, and suddenly my whole body would stiffen, because this was the moment when Dr. Kühnert would stand in front of the mirror, bend over the sink, right over my head, blow his nose into his hand, and, while the water was still running, begin to snort and hawk, spitting forced-up phlegm into the sink, directly at me.

  At seven o'clock a knock on my door would wake me again, and "Yes, come in," I'd call out in what sounded like a completely strange voice, a sign that I first wanted to say in Hungarian what in the very next instant I had to say in German, whereupon Frau Kühnert would enter and, humming softly to herself, light the fire in the stove; in the evenings I'd walk to the theater over a soggy carpet of fallen leaves and the soles of my patent-leather shoes would always be soaked through.

  But by that time Melchior was gone.

  I was left with Berlin, slushy and gray.

  After the show I went to the flat on Wörther Platz; it was cold, and the lamp's glare made the purple of the curtain look faded, but I didn't feel like lighting the candles.

  It was raining.

  The police could arrive any minute and break down the door.

  The refrigerator was humming peacefully in the kitchen.

  The next day I also left the city.

  In Heiligendamm there was bright sunshine, though what happened to me there I still can't explain.

  If I treated words lightly, I'd say I felt happy there: the sea, the journey, and the events directly preceding it must have contributed to this feeling, not to mention the pretty little place itself, which they call the "white city on the sea," a slight exaggeration, since the whole place consists of only a dozen or so two-story cottages facing the sea, on either side of the attractive spa, but white it was—the shutters, now closed, the benches on the smooth green lawn, the colonnade, the summer musicians' chairs stacked in neat piles, and the houses themselves surrounded by manicured deep-green shrubs and tall black pines—the most attractive feature of the place may have been its deceptively fair weather, and the silence.

  Deceptive I say, because the wind howled here, and the embankment deflected enormous waves, crushed and cleaved them asunder, massive steel-blue waves booming thunderously into white foam; and silence I say, for between two booms one's sense of hearing fell into the trough of the waves, into a rapt anticipation, redeemed by the sounds of force turning into weight, though in the evening, when I set out for a walk, everything had calmed down, a full moon shone low over the open sea.

  I began walking on the embankment toward Nienhagen, a neighboring town, with the rumbling sea and its glimmering crests on one side, silent marshland on the other, and I, the only living soul in the midst of the elements; I had run out of cigarettes earlier in the afternoon, and since Nienhagen, a town protected from the western winds by something called Gespensterwald, or Forest of Ghosts, did not seem that far away—I'd used a broken matchstick to measure the distance on the map and was sure I could reach it, because my eyes, though occasionally blinded by the wind, could pick out the flashes of its light tower—I planned to buy cigarettes there, maybe even have a cup of hot tea before returning; I pictured a friendly tavern with fishermen sitting around a table by candlelight and myself, not one of them, walking in; imagined their faces turning toward me, saw my own face looking at them.

  I could see myself, clearly, transparently, walking in front of me; stepping lightly yet gravely, I followed behind.

  It was as if not I but my body was unable to endure the pain caused by our separa
tion.

  The wind got under my loose-fitting coat, pushing, shoving me forward, and although I had put on all my warm clothes I was cold now, without actually feeling cold, and that frightened me, because even if the usually merciful sensory delusion wasn't functioning perfectly, I knew that I ought to feel cold; at another time I might have turned back, let fear win out, and find no difficulty in explaining away my retreat by saying it was too nasty out, and catching a bad cold would have been too high a price to pay for such a nocturnal outing; but this time I could not delude myself, as if something had splintered the image we so painstakingly create of ourselves and wish to see accepted by others, until this distorted image seems real even to us; there was no room for deception: I was this person walking on the embankment, and though all my familiar conditioned responses were functioning, there was something amiss, a gap, more than one gap, distortions, cracks through which it was possible to glance at a strange creature, another someone.