A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  As I had once before, I yielded to the desire to hold it in my hands.

  It was summer, a Sunday morning, with sunlight already streaming through the white curtains drawn over the open windows, when I walked into my parents' bedroom to crawl into their bed, as was my custom, not suspecting that this was to be the morning I'd have to give up this pleasant habit for good; the bed, the bed in which Mother later lay alone, wrapped in the heavy odor of her illness, which was so hard to get accustomed to, was wide and somewhat higher than average and seemed to dominate the almost empty room, its headboard and frame polished black wood, as was the other furniture—a plain chest of drawers, a dressing table and mirror, an armchair upholstered in white brocade, and a nightstand—yet these, along with the blank walls all around, made the room neither cold nor unfriendly; their blanket was on the floor as if just kicked there, Mother was gone, fixing breakfast most likely, and Father was still asleep, all curled up with only a thin sheet covering his naked body; I still don't know what possessed me to cast off my natural modesty and inhibitions, not even realizing I was doing so or violating some unwritten law; maybe it was just the carefree morning air, with a fine breeze bringing to us the smell of dew from the cooling earth, the gentle currents carrying a taste of the sizzling heat to come, the birds still chattering, and down in the valley, over the city's hum, a church bell ringing, and in the neighbor's garden sprinklers hissing quietly away, and for no apparent reason I felt delightfully mischievous; without giving it another thought, I threw off my pajamas and, stepping across the blanket on the floor, climbed into the bed next to my father, and snuggled up to him under the sheet, naked.

  It's true, I might say today, by way of explaining though by no means excusing what I did, that one of the most important things about these Sunday-morning visits was that they should occur while we were still half asleep, so that when waking for real, when it was really morning, wrapped in the warmth of my parents' bodies, I could experience the pleasantly deceptive feeling of waking someplace other than where I'd gone to sleep, so that I could marvel at this self-created little miracle and, semiconscious, imitate the same commingling of time and place that dreams so effortlessly carry out on their own, but while, as I say, this can serve neither to explain nor excuse, it's not negligible either, especially when we bear in mind that the end of our childhood is generally thought to be at hand when these cruel little games vanish in a benevolent oblivion, when every part of our being has learned to suppress our secret desires and dreams, and with grim determination we adjust to the set of paltry possibilities which the conventions of social existence offer to us as reality, but a child does not have much of a choice, since he's forced to adhere almost like an anarchist to the laws of his own nature—and we're ready to admit that we consider these no less real or reasonable—and at this point perhaps does not yet make a scrupulous distinction between the laws of the night and those of the day, and even now we're very sensitive to this will to keep things whole; the child must feel his way carefully between the acceptable and unacceptable; we remain children as long as we feel the urge to keep crossing this border and to learn, through other people's reactions to us and through our often tragic confrontations with our own nature, the alleged place, time, and name of things; at the same time, we must also master that sacred system of hypocritical lies and deceptions, subterfuges, pleasantly false appearances, subterranean passages, quietly opening and closing doors of secret labyrinths which will allow us to fulfill, besides the so-called real desires, our true, even more real desires; this is what is called a child's education, and we are writing a Bildungsroman, after all, so, without beating about the bush, and it's precisely the sacred ambiguity of the educational process that prompts us to express our secret thoughts, let's say then clearly that sometimes it's by grabbing our father's cock that we can most precisely gauge morality, whose dictates, despite all our compulsions and good intentions, we can never fully obey; when I awakened again that morning, my naked body lying on his, embracing him in his moist sleep and fumbling in his chest hair, I almost felt as if I were deceiving myself, not him, as if I had to deceive myself to believe that by clinging to his back, his buttocks, entwining my legs in his, I could feel the meeting of our nakedness, yet this was in fact what I woke to in that second awakening, and I was surprised and delighted that in this very brief and deep sleep our limbs had gotten so entangled that it took long moments for my senses to sort them out, and at the same time I couldn't help realizing that it was I who had arranged the awakening this way, consciously, though the act also had deeper, hazier elements, which I was trying to explore and indefinitely prolong, since they felt so pleasant and gave me that sense of wholeness in which desire and imagination can mingle harmoniously with deception and crafty manipulation; and then, without opening my eyes, feigning sleep, playing hide-and-seek with myself, I began to slide my fingers slowly, very slowly toward his belly, waiting intently for the skin to quiver under my touch, for the spittle in his mouth to glisten, to see if he would just snort once and go on sleeping, but while I was filching this lovely sensation for myself, it dawned on me that I was lying in the warmth my mother had left behind, taking her place—or, the feeling I was stealing, I was stealing from her.

  It was as if I had to touch Mother with my mouth and Father with my hand.

  And on his belly my hand had to open if it wanted to press down on his firm protrusion.

  From there it was just one more downward slide, hindered momentarily in his pubic hair, and then I was pressing my palm over his genitals.

  The moment had two very distinct parts.

  When his body moved, not indifferently, willingly even, and he awakened.

  And when with a sudden violent jerk he pulled away and let out an ear-splitting scream.

  As when one finds a clammy toad in his warm bed.

  By morning our sleep deepens, coarsens, and if I hadn't roused him from this deep morning sleep, he might have had a chance to realize that he was the hero of that same Bildungsroman in which nothing that is human can be alien, so that on the one hand what happened was not so unusual as to elicit his most violent feelings, and on the other, if he didn't want his impulsive response to have incalculably serious consequences, if he didn't want to elicit a similarly violent response from me but, as a reasonable educator, wanted to achieve a positive effect, he would have acted with much greater understanding and tactful shrewdness, for he must have known what every human being over forty can be expected to know, especially a man, namely, that everyone must at least once, literally or figuratively, symbolically or with one's bare hands, touch that organ; at least once everyone must violate his father's modesty—to keep it inviolable perhaps?—yes, everyone does it, one way or another, even if the ordeal leaves him no strength to admit the act even to himself, the denial being dictated by natural self-defense and a moral sense that surfaces only in extreme situations; but Father was startled out of sleep and because of his first, instinctive move must have felt betrayed by his own nature and could do little else but scream.

  "What's got into you? What are you doing?"

  And he kicked me out of bed with such force I landed on the floor on their blanket.

  For a long time afterward my inner world was ruled by the silence of criminals, the mute, tense silence of anticipation which, as one waits for consequences and retribution, makes the act seem more irrevocable and therefore somewhat wonderful and thrilling, but no punishment was forthcoming; no matter how closely I watched them, I could detect no indication that he even told Mother about the incident, though in other situations when I was caught in some mischief, they always tried to present a united front, though I must say they never succeeded so well that I couldn't discern some subtle differences in their positions; now, however, they professed complete innocence and seemed truly united, acting as if nothing had happened, as if I had dreamed it all, both the touch and the scream, and while waiting for the spectacular retribution I failed to notice the cons
equence, far more serious than any punishment could have been; looking back now, as a reasonable adult, I ask myself just what sort of punishment I was expecting: a bloody, merciless beating? what kind of punishment can be invented in a case like this, when it seems that a male child has fallen in love with his own father? isn't the terrible, unrequitable, physically and emotionally devastating love itself the greatest punishment? at any rate, what I failed to notice, maybe couldn't have noticed, or what I had to pretend not to notice, was that after the incident Father became even more aloof, carefully avoiding every occasion that might have called for physical contact; he didn't kiss me, didn't touch me, and, come to think of it, didn't hit me either, as though he felt that even a slap might be construed as responding to my love for him; he withdrew himself from me—but so inconspicuously, his reserve so perfect, lacking all outward signs, no doubt some great fear making it so perfect, that I myself sensed no connection between his behavior and its cause, and maybe he didn't either; I even managed to forget the underlying cause, just as I forgot that I had discovered him in bed with Maria Stein in the maid's room—maybe he forgot that, too; the only threat that remained with me was the unassimilable knowledge that this was the kind of man my father was: not enough of a stranger to leave me unresponsive and not affectionate enough to love me; so when he opened the door to let me into the bathroom, what I could read in his unsmiling face, in the blatant nakedness of his body, was this reserve and mistrust, a well-disguised shyness, a fearfulness, and a reluctance, too, indicating that he was opening the door only at my mother's urging though it didn't sit well with him, he didn't find my peeking and eavesdropping so easily forgivable; instead of this daring family coziness he would have preferred to send me back to my bed—"All right, out!" he might have said, and as far as he was concerned that would have been the end of it, but vis-à-vis Mother he appeared to be at least as vulnerable and defenseless as I was with him, which of course was a source of comfort to me, and if there was the slightest hope of my ever squeezing in between the two of them, it could only be through this tiny opening afforded by his willingness to please Mother, to gain her favor, to satisfy her needs; I had no direct way of reaching Father.

  "Close the door," he said, and turned around to sit back in the tub, words that for me, still unable to decide whether to go in and still standing motionless in the doorway, were an ambiguous gift but a gift nonetheless, and even the reluctance in his voice, intended more for Mother than for me, could not completely spoil my happiness, because I had won without hoping for victory; and the sight of his body turning sideways was yet another new experience, a striking flash, to be enjoyed and suffered only until he lowered himself into the water; if earlier I said that from the front his body looked perfect, well-proportioned, attractive, and beautiful, I now have to add something that natural modesty makes even more difficult to articulate, or could it be that it isn't modesty at all but the strange desire to see our parents, in both body and mind, as the most perfect creatures on earth, even when they are not? is that the reason that experience forces us to see beauty in ugliness or, if we cannot abandon our inextinguishable yearning for perfection, at least to be more forgiving and understanding of imperfection, learning from the human form that everything seemingly perfect also contains a tendency for the distorted, the twisted, and the deformed? is this, after all, what gives our feelings their unique character and flavor? and not only because no single human being can embody perfect harmony of form but also because perfect and imperfect always go hand in hand, are inseparable, and if, disregarding the most obvious imperfections, we still try to worship a person as perfect, is it simply our imagination playing tricks on us?

  When I looked at my father sideways, it turned out that whatever had seemed perfect from the front now appeared misshapen: his shoulder blades protruded prominently from his bent back, he looked stooped even when standing straight, and if I weren't afraid of the word, I'd say he was only a breath away from being a hunchback, yes, a hunchback, which we usually find exceedingly repulsive; I'm convinced it was pure accident that he wasn't, as if halfway through its work nature could not decide whether to fashion an ideal or a grotesque human form and left him to his fate, and he, recognizing this fate, tried to blot out or at least correct the effects of this dark hoax of nature, though his efforts were only partially successful, despite his undoubtedly very real suffering and almost unseemly industriousness and zeal: the body, the human form, however devoutly we may expound in our Christian humility on the externality of the flesh and the primacy of the soul, is so potent a given that already at the moment of our birth, it becomes an immutable attribute.

  But with the utter partiality of a lover, I loved this, too, liked inhaling beauty and ugliness in the same breath and experiencing with equal sensitivity and intensity both attraction and repulsion; his imperfections made him perfect to me—nothing could better account for his obstinate seriousness, his formidable alertness, the eagerness with which he went after everything he judged wayward, unlawful, criminal, and therefore ugly and perverse than his slight flaw, his tiny would-be hump, in the absence of which he would have become just another pretty face and no more; but this way he was a man forever on guard, emotionally rather dour, physically somewhat cold (for all his sexual excesses), and very intelligent, as if in the retreat forced on him by his physical attributes, his attentiveness longing for but unable to cope with tenderness had grown so acute that no plan or motive, however cunningly concealed, could escape his scrutiny, and the energy lost in that retreat returned most aggressively in his sensitivity and intellect, enabling him to uncover the subtlest of connections; he was perfect then in trusting his intuition to let his abilities and natural gifts complement one another; one could only rarely discover in him an insincere attempt to be what he was not, and though then I knew very little about what the work of a state prosecutor actually entailed, I couldn't imagine a more appropriate setting for that body; I liked to see him encased in the severity of his dark gray suit, his long fingers gathering up his papers from a gleaming desktop under the glare of chandeliers turned on even during the day, the cut of his suit being perhaps only a slight deception, in the cleverly placed shoulderpads that compensated for the irregular curve of his back; in the long marble-faced courthouse corridors there were usually very few people around, now and then a messenger hurrying past with heavy file folders, and sometimes small clusters of people standing about in front of one of the huge doors, taking not the slightest notice of one another; dignified, dusty boredom prevailed except when clanking footsteps broke the silence and grew louder until in one of the bends in the winding corridor a handcuffed prisoner appeared led by two guards, only to disappear behind one of those huge brown doors and then enter the courtroom; I liked to see his back receding down the dim corridor, in his back rather than in the more ordinary beauty of the rest of his body, where everything that I felt was refined, distinguished, and intelligent in him seemed to be concentrated—to complete the picture, I should say something about his shapely and muscular backside, whose graceful curve was quite feminine, and his firm thighs, and the protuberant veins branching off under the golden hairs of his leg, and the arching foot with its long, delicate toes—but still, it was his back; his walk was soft, supple, vigorous, like that of a beast delighted to feel in the soles of its feet the limber, ready weight of its body, but Father seemed to carry his intellectual burdens and worries, which I imagined had to do with pursuing justice, not in his feet but on his back, as if his strength lay in the curvature of his back, and I so very much wanted to be like him, to possess his imperiousness, his strength, not just the beauty and symmetry leading to and radiating from his loins but his rarefied spiritual ugliness, too, so for a while I tried to imitate his stoop as I walked down the far less impressive corridors of my school the way I had seen him walk in the courthouse.