A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Her eyes were in my eyes, my face penetrated hers, and my neck felt her neck and was keenly aware of the danger, the risk she took by turning around to me, and as if blinking might interrupt the continuity of our shared gaze, we seemed not to have closed our eyes, not even once, and our gaze seemed endless.

  We are trying to stare each other down, I thought then, but today, delving into my memories, I find this interpretation derisory; our inner monologues are but feeble rationalizations, deceptions, or, at best, mistakes compared to the dialogues conducted by eyes and faces; of course we weren't trying to stare each other down.

  Yet we shouldn't be surprised if strong emotions demand immediate verbal expression, since the mechanism that operates on early conditioning, what we call personality, is compelled to defend itself most vigorously precisely when in its devotion to another it loses its conditioned habits.

  I simply didn't know what to make of it all.

  I couldn't comprehend what had happened, was happening, or was yet to happen to me, and I didn't know where it would lead us, this powerful, uncontrollable, ultimately unfounded happiness, the ease with which our gaze possessed our emotions, and I began to be afraid again—of her, and of Prém, who might choose this moment, now that I'd found some security with her, to turn around and quick as lightning hit me across the mouth; if he did that so that she saw it, I'd have to hit him back, and that, I felt, given the likely complications, should be avoided at all cost; and I didn't understand why she did this here, why now? since plenty of opportunities for this, or something like this, arose at other times and in other places—it was not, after all, some inexplicable miracle that brought her face so close to mine, and it would be a deceptive exaggeration to claim it was sheer force of emotion that shortened the physical distance between us; no, I had known her well enough to sense her closeness from afar, even with the heads and shoulders between us; this wasn't the first time I'd seen her—although at this moment she really did seem like a stranger we might pick out of a huge crowd simply because we felt lost and in some undefinable way this person struck us as friendly and familiar, as though we'd met and even talked to each other before—so I did know her, and her body, her face, her gestures were all familiar to me, I just wasn't sufficiently conscious of this knowledge or that it might be important to me; I've no idea why, I just hadn't noticed her, though I should have; for six years we'd been attending the same classes in the same school. My senses no doubt had registered her every feature, but impassively, with no emotional resonance; come to think of it, there was no aspect of her quietly modest being that could have been unfamiliar, since during all those years of such close proximity we had to communicate on many levels, and quite intimately, too, because she was on confidential terms with two girls, Hédi Szán and Maja Prihoda, with whom I had an unusual and for me typical relationship—ambiguous but very warm, less than love but far more than friendship; she was rather like a lady-in-waiting to them, a quiet shadow cast on their beauty, a mediator between two rivals, and, in their meaner moments, their maid and servant, a position which, with the dignity of her innate wisdom and sense of justice, she did not seem to resent, being as neutral then as she was whenever the two, with exaggerated solicitude, chose to treat and love her as an equal.

  That hot summer afternoon when she stepped onto the main road from the forest path, the soles of her red sandals crunched a few more times and only then did her searching glance stand out in the quivering silence, a moment before meeting my eyes; and I was standing by the fence, among the bushes, as I did every day, hoping for and being terrified of something, not knowing what but feeling that something was going to happen, something had to happen, but also knowing that as soon as she appeared, my fantasies, however innocent, could not be realized; I had barely swallowed the last bite of my bread, and holding the fence with one hand I was about to wipe my other hand on my thigh, smearing the lard, but then our searching eyes met and couldn't part, we kept staring for a long time, without stirring, endlessly, like that time in the gym, except then, without acknowledging it, we were protected by both distance and the crowd, whereas here we were utterly defenseless, at the mercy of our deepening emotions; yet the present moment was as inexplicably accidental as that encounter in the gym, for on many other occasions our eyes, our faces, and our gestures could have been this close, but it never happened, not once after that first time, though we kept looking at each other all the time, kept looking for the chance to gaze at each other from afar and near, though cautiously, stealthily, and as soon as we had the chance, we ruined it almost on purpose, looked away, fled, then quickly looked back to see if the other still felt the same desire, the same pain; once, she ran away and looked back while still running, then tripped and fell but quickly jumped up and continued running; her compulsion to flee made her so graceful and nimble that I couldn't even laugh at her as I would have wished; that early spring morning began to haunt me again, though much had changed since then, if only because without either of us talking about our relationship it could not remain a secret; after a few weeks passed, the word was out that Livia Stili was in love with me.

  Actually, it was not so hard to tell, we had given ourselves away already in the gym; after Livia turned discreetly away, her gaze was still with me though she was no longer looking at me, so she was the one who put an end to the moment whose beginning I couldn't exactly recall: first, she simply unfixed her stare, as though it had been a mistake and she'd been looking at not me but Prém, and there was something undeniably flirtatious in how she withdrew her glance; then she turned her head, thoughtfully, seriously, but that, too, for all the subtlety of the motion, was blatantly theatrical! she could stand there, calm and dutiful, ostensibly meeting all the requirements of the silent ritual, as if nothing had happened, as if it had been an accident, an error, yet by turning away she in fact reinforced the effect produced by her glance—what could I do? ashamed of being so vulnerable, I, too, turned away, yet still I felt that I should look back, that something important was being taken away from me—-just how important I hadn't even realized until then—though what was truly important was not that I got something from her but that it could be taken away so easily, every minute without her looking at me now seemed wasted, empty, unbearable, a time in which I did not exist; mostly those eyes stayed with me, but her mouth and forehead, too, and I had to have them in front of me, no amount of fantasizing would do, without their visible presence everything would recede to an oppressive, faraway dimness; but for all that, I didn't look back, which took a lot of effort: my face, neck, shoulders, even my arm grew numb, but I didn't want to look, and making yourself not do something is always a struggle, you stretch it until the effort becomes unnatural; the longer I stood there, abandoned, the stronger and more painful my awareness of this altogether impossible sensation, almost as if my body had swelled and swallowed another, my distended skin was covering more than my own body and my brain was beginning to think another's thoughts; the more agonizing this state became, the more offended and angry I got, desperate in need of relief, for the real state of affairs, the true balance of power, seemed perfectly clear: I weighed the opportunities afforded by each passing moment but had to concede, and it wasn't easy, that I didn't have the upper hand; it was she who had both provoked my attention and then abandoned me; therefore, in no circumstance should I look back now, for if I did, it would be clear that she was winning, was the stronger, and it would mean that once again somebody had subdued me, triumphed over me, this servant, this ugly girl, just a girl, a maid, this angry conclusion being not totally unfounded, since she seemed to play the same role around Hédi and Maja that Prém did around Krisztián and Kálmán Csúzdi, so my feelings about the two servants neatly merged, and just for that I vowed that even if she stared at me for the rest of her life, I'd never so much as cast another glance at her, she'd never be able to do this to me again! let her turn blue in the face, let her admire me to her heart's content, let there be someone who follows
me and only me with her eyes—and let me pretend it means absolutely nothing to me; but when I finally did look back—I couldn't help it, her burning face made me—I could feel nothing stronger than again that look, that face, looking at me; and if she kept looking, then after a while I could let go, just for a moment, look and then quickly look away, to make her look even harder, feel more painfully my absence, let her know how serious it can be when I take my eyes off her; but it wasn't she looking at me—I was deceived again!—it was Hédi Szán, standing a few rows over, in a perfect position to observe both of us, and no doubt she did, because ever so sweetly, softly, albeit with a hint of malice, she made a face.

  Our last class was canceled, we were sent home at noon.

  And as we lined up for dismissal, we heard church bells, first only four peals breaking the bright blue silence outside, then the great bell tolling, answered by a clanging smaller one, and then both boomed and pealed as though nothing had happened and it was simply noontime on an ordinary day, no different from any other.

  I didn't want to walk home with anyone, get into a conversation, so on the staircase I fell out of line before the others thundered down the steps, unruly and irrepressible, shouting, a pent-up herd squeezing through the narrow doorway out into the open, where one could finally catch one's breath as if breathing for the first time in one's life and where the teachers' hysterical yells no longer made a difference, and I headed for the third floor, which is why Krisztián may have thought I was going to the teachers' room to report him, but in an unguarded moment and very cautiously, lest I be seen, I continued on; past the third-floor landing the staircase became narrow and dusty—since then I've often dreamed of myself ascending those dusty, untraveled stairs, which they obviously seldom cleaned, I am the only one ever to climb these stairs and in my dream this has special significance, for I am doing something forbidden, I shouldn't be here, thick, soft dust rises with every step and is slow to settle, so when I look back I see I've left no footprints, I prick my ears but nothing stirs, it's all quiet, I feel safe, though I know I could get caught, and no matter how alert I am and certain that no one saw me, I still have the feeling somebody is watching, and perhaps I am that somebody, unable to hide my little secrets from myself; anxiously I reach the attic door, which of course is locked; the black iron door was always locked and yet I always tried it anyway, in case someone might have left it unlocked by mistake.

  This was my last refuge, the sort of hideaway one instinctively seeks out; I had such a place in our garden, too, also dark, but where the light was blocked by the foliage of a chestnut tree and honeysuckle crawling up the high bushes—it was interesting to watch the struggle of the two, with the bushes letting out new shoots and the honeysuckle, as if waiting in ambush, creeping after them, by autumn covering all the new shoots; here, by the attic, I had a pile of old desks, file cabinets, chairs, blackboards, crumbling old wooden platforms, and the neutral silence of discarded furniture; there, in the garden, my solitary daydreams and a lingering memory of secret games with Kálmán, which I believed to be sinful; moving in the neutral silence of discarded furniture, now bending down, now creeping sideways, I tried to avoid the hard edges and sudden protrusions, and when a bunch of old things began to shift and creak and seemed about to topple, I froze and instinctively covered my head, but kept inching toward the inner sanctum—nothing more than an up-ended old leather couch pushed against the wall with just enough room to slip behind, where I let myself be pressed against the wall by the overhanging cushions, which I clung to and which clung to me; the darkness was total and the leather, as always, cold, until I warmed it with my body.

  I closed my eyes, and I thought that now I must kill myself.

  I had no other thought.

  It wasn't so bad to think about it; no, it was rather nice.

  I'll go home, pry open my father's desk, sneak out into the garden, to my private place, and simply do it.

  I saw the gesture, saw myself doing it.

  I put the barrel of the revolver into my mouth, pulled the trigger.

  And the thought that nothing would follow this act for me illuminated, harshly yet benevolently, everything that did follow.

  So that I could see it.

  As if for the first time I could see, simply and free of any weakening emotions, what my life was really like.

  Everything hurt, in my chest and in my neck, there were moments when the top of my head hurt so much it was as if someone had pulled a round hat of pain over it; I shivered, I quaked; this was nothing like the pleasurable pain of self-pity but every part of the body hurting at once with a pain independent of the body, moving around, each stab stronger than the one before, each one making the previous seem like child's play; I wanted to scream and scream and keep on screaming, but I didn't dare, and that's also why I couldn't endure it anymore.

  There was nothing new in the thought that I might not be normal, that I was just as sick as my sister, though in a different way, and that she may have been the only person with whom, in our sickness, I had something in common; what was new was the realization that I could once and for all put an end to the pain of trying to be like other people, to these completely futile attempts, since I could never resemble anyone strongly enough to be just like them and there was always a difference, and ultimately I always found myself alone; no one, myself included, ever wanted this difference or whatever it was; and though I may have hated myself for it, with every effort to identify with someone and at the same time lure him into my orbit, I only called attention to this difference, to my illness, to the very thing I wanted to annihilate; with my enticements I only revealed what I wanted hidden; and the realization that this unbridgeable gulf within me could be done away with by simply killing my body first occurred to me then and there.

  She didn't look at me after that.

  Yet it seemed to me that only her look might still save me.

  If only it could be made to last, if only time wouldn't pass without it, because that look of hers, that ultimate self-revelation, and the way she gazed, the way we looked at each other, might clear up the confusion within me, explain my unfulfilled yearnings, my sins, committed yet irredeemable, my endless lies—for I had to lie all the time to protect myself, which was petty and humiliating, and I was terrified, too, of being found out; I was suffering and saw no way to be free of suffering, because it wasn't only that I had to lie, deny myself everything that could give me pleasure, no, none of this: I could never have what I liked, and I had to live as if carrying a heavy, burdensome stranger with me, hiding my real self under this dead weight; in my infinite desperation I did try to share some of my pain with my mother, but so much had accumulated I couldn't possibly tell her everything, wouldn't even know where to begin, and anyway, I couldn't be that open with her, since she had plenty of complaints about me having to do with the very secrets I was hiding from the world, mainly out of consideration for her, a consideration I felt was justified because despite her irritation, her anger, complaints, and even disgust with me, she wished to see in me some unattainable perfection and for this reason was even stricter with me, at times more cruel, than with anyone else; the only thing that relieved the harshness and made it acceptable was that I had my private language with Mother, just as with my little sister, in which we could avoid words we judged irrelevant or meaningless, a language of touching, at times touching with our very tongues, the language of our warm skin, of our bodies; if I earlier mentioned a sickness of mine, I might risk another guess: that perhaps it was her sickness, and my sister's, which in some mysterious way penetrated and permeated my own being; these two disparate yet to me closely related illnesses might have been the consequence of the pervasive imbalance and uncertainty in my immediate surroundings, the physical manifestation of the fact that everyone was sick, which for a long time didn't bother me, which I accepted as the inevitable condition of my life, indeed finding my mother's illness rather beautiful and loving it; she must have infected me wit
h that sense of grandeur one finds in illness while I was holding her hand or gently sliding my own over her bare arm, when I'd sit on the floor by her bed, put my head on her lap, or simply rest it on the sheet and breathe in the smell, the mixture of febrile warmth, sweat, and medicine emanating from her body, from her silken nightgown, a smell that was always there no matter how frequently the room was aired, and listen to her breathing, letting her hover between sleep and wakefulness, until my own breathing took over her strange, soft, fluttering rhythm, the rapid rises and slow falls; I got used to the smell to the point of no longer finding it repellent; sometimes she would speak to me softly, opening her eyes just a little, then closing them again: "You are beautiful," she would say, and I was always as astonished by this phenomenon in the bed as she must have thought my presence most pleasing; there was her white face sunk deep in the white pillows, her thick auburn hair neatly spread out, with strands of gray flashing through around the temples, and her smoothly rounded forehead, fine nose, and, above all, the heavy eyelids with long lashes which she would lift lazily as if in a daze, so that for a fraction of a second her crystalline green eyes appeared, looking at me so brightly and intently that her illness seemed a mistake, an illusion, a game, but when the lashes were lowered and the green eyes were once again covered by the blue-veined flesh of the eyelids, their color an ever-darkening brown, something, I don't know what, seemed to make her sick again, though the gaze remained on her sick face, along with a wan smile on her lips, which was meant for me, a mere hint of a smile, and "Tell me," she'd say at moments like this, "tell me what's been happening," and if I didn't reply, because I couldn't or didn't want to, she would continue by herself: "Should I tell you what I've been thinking about just now? did your sister eat her dinner all right? at least I didn't hear your grandmother yell; I'd rather you didn't stay long today, I feel weak, maybe that's why I thought of the meadow again, I wasn't asleep, I was standing in a great big beautiful meadow and wondering why it looked so familiar, I distinctly remembered having seen it before, and that's when you walked in," and she would stop, take a quick breath, as I watched the blanket on her breast rising and falling; "I probably would never have thought about it otherwise, because when you live, new images take the place of old ones all the time, but for some time now I've had the feeling that nothing's ever happened to me, never, though of course lots of things have, and you know I've told you much of it already, still, it's almost as if they didn't happen to me, they're only so many pictures, and while I'm in the pictures, somehow it's more important, or it says more about me, or it's more like me that I lie here in this bed, that this picture doesn't change, I lie here the same way, and if I look out the window I see the same things, now it's getting dark, now it's getting light, always the same picture, and in the meantime I can traipse around in my old pictures because there are no new pictures to disturb the old ones," sighing deeply, the rising air breaking the rhythm of her words: "I don't even know why I'm telling you all this; you should be able to understand it, still I feel a little guilty telling such things to a child, I'm philosophizing, I guess, which is kind of ridiculous, but I don't think there's anything sad or tragic or serious that should be kept from you, it's simply natural, and I never denied myself anything I thought was natural and I should do it"; laughing at this and opening her eyes for a moment, she would take my hand as if telling me to go ahead and do everything I felt to be natural: "Let's just stay like this now, quiet, all right? I'm tired, and I can't get that picture out of my mind, the one I wanted to tell you about but couldn't, just as you don't tell me much, either, though I always ask you, beg you to tell me things, and I understand perfectly when you'd like to tell me this or that but feel you must keep quiet, I even know what those things are that you keep quiet about, because all we can hope for is that the same kinds of things are happening to both of us, there is no difference, always the same things must keep happening, even the feelings are the same, only the pictures change; we understand each other even if we say nothing, that's how it is, and now let's be quiet for a little while, all right? and then go, darling, all right?"