A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  She wasn't beautiful, a statement that needs immediate clarification, for with mixed shame and regret I had to admit this even to myself while, however, she did seem beautiful to me, and once she disappeared in the bend of the street I almost felt I had to be ashamed in front of certain people that the girl I had fallen in love with was not beautiful, was ugly, or, however charitably we'd want to put it, not very beautiful; in any case, the doubt, the inexplicable shame was strong, and since I spent so many days in agonized waiting, I couldn't protest, couldn't prevaricate, in the end had to admit to myself and to say out loud, to shout it to the world— in the hope of regaining my freedom I screamed into the air that I was in love, was in love with her, but only the shouting itself made me happy; when I was through, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that now I would have to start waiting again, and go on waiting until two-thirty, and when she finally did come, I'd have to wait for her to be gone so that I could wait for her the next day, and that really seemed perverse and even more senseless than trying to avoid meeting Krisztián only to lessen the pain of seeing him.

  But if things had to be this way, if I had to see her, then why couldn't she be beautiful at least, that's what I would have wished, for if she were beautiful, then her beauty would have lingered in me even after she was gone and I wouldn't have to be ashamed about my feelings: her beauty in some way would absolve me, I thought; as it was, I was forever entangled in the same agony—today I would call it the agony of longing for beauty, an agony so dark and dismal it must be hidden from the eyes of strangers, just as I had to conceal my love for Krisztián—for different reasons, of course—and still he managed to humiliate me, because my silent love for him made me memorize his quick gestures, his awkward smiles, and his wild laughter, his untouchable sadness, the transparent flash of his green eyes and the nervous twitch of his muscles, and not only did I absorb all this but I made it my own, so that he could surface in me anytime, in the most unexpected situations, as if replacing my body with his and pretending I was he; thus, with a single imagined gesture, look, or smile he could destroy anything that might be very important to me but also help me with problems I would have found hard to solve on my own, so that his constant presence was two-faced, benevolent, or hostile, but always unpredictable; he never left me, he was my crutch, my secret model, almost as if I no longer existed or did only as his shadow: and he was here now, hanging about me, drifting in and out, shrugging, grinning, pretending slyly not to notice me yet watching me all the same; I may have found this girl terribly exciting, her very sight may have swept away my fatuous doubts, but I was not alone, not the only one looking at her, and even if strictly speaking I was, I couldn't form a clear opinion based strictly on my own feelings but was of two minds, influenced by a critical faculty that, in matters of beauty, I found eminently competent; in truth, whose judgment could I trust more than his?

  In the meantime, it was still I who was watching her—who else could it be?—I who was waiting for her, happy when she showed up, and I who have seen no more profoundly exciting face and body since, or, to be more precise, ever since and in every woman who appeals to me, I seem to be looking always for what I finally got from her—nothing she actually gave me, but this nothing was painfully real, and later I tried to fill it without even knowing it; today I know that it was beauty, her own unique perfection, which every day she revealed to me, and only me, if only for a few moments, for what is beauty if not the involuntary giving away of what is hidden even from ourselves? and if in spite of this I still couldn't consider her beautiful, then strangely enough it was only because, despite all appearances, I couldn't ever be alone with her, not even for a moment; there were always others standing with me in the bushes who interfered, held down my arms, gave me goose pimples, warned me not to yield to my feelings—maybe they did the right thing, I say philosophically today, mindful of the pain that teaches us what we can and cannot do; and he wasn't the only one who argued against her—absurdly enough, I even experienced the jealousy my phantom Krisztián would have felt, had he loved me, about the real Livia, and strangely, very strangely, there were several of us inside me who were watching her—I, who would have loved to love this girl, wasn't alone, and even if I wasn't fully conscious of this at the time, the other boys were there, too, disturbing me, standing behind me, watching the same girl, and they didn't think she was beautiful, didn't even think she was ugly—because I believe that besides me no one had ever even noticed her before.

  I was the first and only one, and this couldn't but make an impression on her.

  I knew she also was ashamed of her ugliness; everything about her spoke of this: her walk, her skin, her compulsively clean dresses, her shy cautiousness, her bashfulness; yet this did not make her weak, but, on the contrary, perhaps made her beautiful, and she let me understand with an earnestness bordering on defiance that, though she might think herself the ugliest of girls she must still come by my spot—and let's add that her defenselessness was made even more emphatic, almost absurd, by the stoic dignity of the poor; all the same, a curious shiver of excitement ran through me when I thought of the cellar where she lived.

  She was small, slight of build, fragile, and almost always kept her head lowered, so that her great brown eyes were forever looking up at things, unblinking, and—I think the best word to use here would be deeply— and her short-cropped chestnut hair was held together with two clips, two white butterflies, to keep it from falling into her eyes, which definitely made her look awkward and little-girlish, but I liked her like that; her nicely rounded forehead was visible, testifying to the care her parents must have given her, the concern that she look neat and well-groomed; I could see how her father, while sitting in his porter's cubicle, drew her between his knees and with a handkerchief moistened with spittle wiped something off her face—her father was the school janitor and also the sexton of a nearby church, a skinny, blond-haired man with a little mustache and artificially curled hair, and they lived in the basement of the school; somebody told me that her mother, whom I saw a couple of times emerging from the dark basement loaded down with pots and bags, was helping people out with leftovers from the school lunchroom, and she also fed her own family from there—-she was said to be a Gypsy, and she had the kind of shiny rosy brown skin which the summer sun turns just a shade darker, though its winter paleness may be even lovelier.

  The snow was almost gone when all this started between us, on a day notable for another reason: the thaw had come late that year after a hard winter; what the sun melted during the day froze over again in the cold of the night, and only gradually, slowly, was it becoming clear that the thaw was finally setting in, that spring was here; first to melt were the cushions of snow on the rooftops and the snowcaps on chimneys, along with the fluffy white strips on the tree branches which wind had hardened into crystals; long icicles sprouting from the eaves during the night dripped during the day, and the cool water made the snow cover around the houses sag; you could break off and lick the fine, cold icicles, specially flavored by rotting leaves in the drainpipes and the rust of the pipes themselves—we loved them; a thin armor of ice hardened on the ground at night, ideal for walking and sliding—it snapped and cracked under our feet, and we could leave footprints in it until, after a few mild days, everything came to life and began dripping, snapping, drying, crackling, trickling, flowing, and the birds began to sing; so the day was one of those wonderfully drippy, mild, clear days with a perfectly cloudless blue sky, and in the long morning recess we all, class after class, had to march down to the gym, line up, and stand in silence, looking straight ahead, not moving, not turning our heads; but impressive as the solemnity of the ostentatious memorial ceremony may have been, you still managed to see the soothing blue expanse beyond the tall narrow windows—without turning your head, of course—from the corner of your eyes, standing in a silence alive with stifled unrest; on the gym stage, its red curtain drawn, all the teachers stood—silent, of course, and motionless.
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br />   This was the hour of Stalin's funeral, when the embalmed body was being taken from the marble hall where he had lain in state to the mausoleum.

  I imagined it to be a vast hall, enormous and almost completely dark, so huge in fact that it might better be called an indoor arena, a marble hall, yes, I savored the name, but no ordinary huge hall, like a railroad terminal, for instance, but one in which marble columns stand like trees in a dense forest, reaching to the heights, and up there in the heights, it is also dark, the space so immense that the coffered ceiling cannot be seen; no footsteps are heard here, no one may enter and no one dare enter, lest the loud echoes of his steps disturb the silence; and there, at the far end of the hall or arena, he is lying on his bier—I pictured a simple black platform, a bed actually, which one presumes is there but can't really see because not enough light comes through the narrow doorway to illuminate the place; only the marble glimmers softly here and there, the grayish-brown, delicately veined marble, the mirror-smooth columns, the floor, there are no candles, no lights; the image was so vivid in my mind that I can easily recall it even today, with no subsequent, perhaps ironic embellishments; I had the feeling that the whole world partook in the silence, even animals, sensing the ominous human stillness, falling silent in astonishment, for his death was not a passing away but the ultimate, absolute crescendo of solemnity, the outcry of respect, joy, longing, and love that could not be expressed before with such force—only now, in this breathtaking death; and the vision I had was not the least bit altered by the fact that in the gym we could hear the happy chirping of sparrows fluttering around in the eaves and the indifferent cawing of crows; and then I tried to imagine this vast dense silence as the stillness of all the world's humans and animals congealed into one enormous, terrifying silence, tried to gauge it, find some appropriate unit of measurement for it, since we knew of course that at this hour nothing must stir outside either; all traffic came to a halt, cars and trams and trains between stations stopped, people cleared off the streets, and if anyone happened to be out when the sirens began to wail they had to freeze, remain rooted to the spot; and just as different kinds of noises can blend, as the noise of a whole city from a distance can be perceived as a coherent, uniform hum, the different silences had somehow to blend into one, so that in the end it could be heard even in that dark marble hall, the knowledge that the whole world fell silent must penetrate even that vast interior, though he could no longer hear, not even this silence; and what must it be like, I wondered, when one can no longer hear even silence, to be dead? at which point my neat mental picture became rather confused, because I knew he wasn't just dead, not just dead like anybody else, lowered into the grave to rot away, but was different—a secret ointment would preserve and consecrate him, though the whole embalming business seemed so murky and incomprehensible that it was better not to think about it at all; hard as I tried to get my mind to leave this forbidden territory, it obsessed me more than his death, and I had to think about it all the time, about the mysterious embalming process administered only to the greatest of the great, the pharaohs of Egypt; when finally I asked Grandfather about it—perhaps I thought he knew everything because he was so tight-lipped—and also wanted to know why only the pharaohs and Stalin, what possible connection there may have been between their greatness and his, I felt a little guilty because I suspected his answer would be biting and sarcastic, he talked like that about everything; and I was right; rather than allaying my moral uneasiness about embalming, his answer made it even more acute: "Oh, that's a splendid invention!" he exclaimed with a sudden laugh, and, as always when he began to speak, whipped off his glasses: "Well, it's like this, you see, first they take out all the internal organs that decompose easily, like the liver, the lungs, the kidneys, the heart, the intestines, the spleen, the bile duct, let's see what else, oh yes, the brain from the skull, if there was any to begin with, they take it all out; but first they pump the blood out of all the veins, provided it hasn't clotted, because blood is also a perishable item, and when there are no soft parts left, I think they even take the eyeballs out of the sockets, so only the skin, the flesh, and the bones are left, the empty shell of the man, then they treat the body with some sort of chemical, inside and out, but don't ask me what, because I don't know, and after that all they have to do is stuff it and sew it up, carefully, as your grandmother does when she stuffs the chicken for Sunday dinner; well, that's about it," all of which Grandfather said without wondering why I asked the question or who I had in mind, and if he did wonder, he didn't seem very interested, for he said no more, mitigated his brief monologue with not a single word or gesture but simply fell silent, the smile vanishing from his lips and again becoming as glum and matter-of-fact as he had been on the day of Stalin's death, when I had been looking for some black material suitable for draping the school bulletin board and the only thing I could find was one of my grandmother's old-fashioned silk slips, which I proceeded to cut up, unstitching the lace trimming and the straps; seeing me do this, Grandfather remarked, "While you're at it, why don't you take along one of her undies, too?" and as if his next gesture was meant to indicate he was returning to the silent world where he spent most of his days, he shoved his glasses back onto his nose and turned away, taking with him the glance that only a moment ago had seemed interested and cheerful.

  But how could anyone in his right mind even conceive of such an answer—it sounded so blasphemous, not just the part about cutting open the great man's stomach and taking out his organs but also the way Grandfather talked about it, so flippantly and irreverently!—surely if there was no way to preserve the body, then it would be best to keep quiet about the whole outrageous procedure, pretend it wasn't true, pretend it never happened, yes, we should have all kept quiet about it, just as I had to keep quiet about, not admit even to myself, what Krisztián had said when we were told of the unexpected, fatal illness, as though the mere fact that I overheard the statement was in itself a grave offense.

  My overhearing Krisztián was indeed accidental, merely accidental, and I clung to the word as if for a good reason; yes, of course, that's what it was, an accident to be quickly forgotten, along with so much else, because if I hadn't happened to be the monitor that day and hadn't had to go to the bathroom to dampen the sponge, or if I had left the classroom just a few minutes earlier or later—but that's exactly what made it an accident!—then I wouldn't have heard what he said, he could have said it and I wouldn't have known about it, after all, many things had been said that, fortunately, I knew nothing about, but it did happen, and I did hear it, and almost as if looking for a pretext to avoid it, I kept reenacting the scene in my mind, obsessively, for days, hoping it could be forgotten like everything else, but I couldn't forget it and I didn't find an acceptable pretext either; on the contrary, the episode reminded me of my responsibilities; it seemed irrevocable, not an accident at all but something done willfully, like a retaliation; but then I could take my own revenge, although that was also a trap, because taking revenge would also expose me, my lies, and my futile attempts to ignore everything that had to do with Krisztián, to treat him like air, less even than air, as if he were nothing! to wish him out of my life, as if I had killed him.

  And the idea of killing him wasn't a passing fancy but one I thought about, toyed with, worked out the details of: I planned to steal Father's pistol because he had once taught me how to load it and how to handle it, I felt very confident about the technical details of the planned murder: I planned to steal the pistol, which he kept in his desk drawer and once a month cleaned with a rag dipped in kerosene, which blackened his slender fingers, so if he wanted to look up while explaining something to me, he could use only the back of his hand to sweep the hair out of his eyes—it was his cool blue eyes, the penetrating smell of kerosene, and the rather simple rules about handling the pistol that one Sunday afternoon paved the way to my murderous impulse, which I could respond to quite rationally, since I thought the only thing left to be worked
out was how to cover up the traces; but now this stupid accident, which I had tried so hard to ignore, frustrated all my designs, exposed my murderous fantasies, revealing to me that I was far too weak and cowardly to become Krisztián's murderer, for I even lacked the courage to report him, for God's sake, after he had inadvertently given me the perfect opportunity, and though the possibility of turning him in did occur to me, of course, I rejected it as soon as I thought of it, for I knew that that would make me unacceptable to myself, that I'd surely feel like a lousy little stool pigeon.

  I did feel like a stool pigeon even though I didn't do anything, dreaded even to think about doing anything, wouldn't even tell my mother about it, though I'd have loved to unburden myself, feared being unable to follow the advice she'd give me about how to resolve my quandary; I decided to say nothing, but she must have sensed something and even asked if anything was wrong; no, nothing, I said, since I was also afraid that I might get Grandfather into trouble, because the two reactions, his and Krisztián's, were closely connected in my mind, one as if preconditioned by the other—if Grandfather hadn't prepared the ground, then Krisztián's comment wouldn't have seemed so remarkable, but I knew that when the boys—the friends!—were by themselves they talked of things they'd never mention in front of me; a whole range of opinions and judgments, a tight circle of confidences was and always had been permanently closed to me, and Grandfather's views also belonged to that circle, which I accidentally, unwittingly penetrated and I was now aware of and therefore couldn't simply block out, if only because of my smoldering, tormenting jealousy: this being so, the unwanted knowledge alone, the secret knowledge of what to me were unacceptable judgments, was enough to make me a stool pigeon.