A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  But I didn't, which was a little humiliating, since staying there with this kind of rebuff and indifference made no sense, but I didn't budge.

  And why was I there all the time, why did I keep coming around, anyway? but where should I have gone? and if I hadn't gone over to his house, wouldn't he have come to mine? because whenever I got stubborn and dug in my heels or got really offended, or my humiliation was too deep to get over with just a shrug of the shoulders, then he was sure to show up, grinning as if nothing had happened; and I also knew full well that he showed up not just because of me but somehow to prevent me from going to Maja, and the reverse of this, if not quite so emphatically, was also true: I kept going over to his house to see if he wasn't at Maja's.

  This was the difference between us: he'd put up obstacles, hold inspections, divert and impede my actions; I merely checked things out, wanted to know what was happening, and if I didn't find him at home and his mother couldn't tell me where he was either, and after roaming the forest in the hope that his disappearance was only a mistake and I'd find him but didn't! then jealousy made my whole world turn a little black, not so much because of Maja as because of Krisztián.

  Imagining that while I stood there alone, helpless and miserable, they were playing together, conveniently forgetting about me, making it clear I meant nothing to them.

  But Kálmán couldn't have had any inkling of this.

  Just as it never dawned on him that if he managed to elude my vigilance and slipped over to Maja's, my jealousy wouldn't be nearly so intense as his when I did the same, because it bothered me much less what he might have done with Maja; put more precisely, I wanted to know about it, but it gave me pleasure, painful pleasure to be sure, that in a relationship which didn't mean all that much to me he was my stand-in, and that when I was there I became his substitute—and I found this act of substitution immeasurably exciting.

  It was as if in Kálmán and me Maja loved not two different individuals but a single one who couldn't be fully embodied in either one alone, and so when she talked to me, she was invariably addressing Kálmán as well, and when she was with him, she would also want to be with me a little; whether we liked it or not, we always had to endure the presence of the other, play the role of a stranger for her, a stranger who had become familiar because of these games yet whose strangeness prevented the longed-for consummation and fulfillment, because no matter how provocatively she may have been playing the whore, showing off with the superficial characteristics of one, Maja remained more like a yearned-for object of desire for both of us; and she couldn't be the real Maja either, not for him, not for me, not even for herself, because whatever she was looking for in him or in me, she could find only in the two of us together, yet she was also searching for a one and only, and because she couldn't find him she suffered, and aped Szidónia's unbridled licentiousness; in the process, she became a kind of symbol of femininity for us, which we felt we should measure up to with our budding masculinity—we couldn't have known then that it was precisely with these games of substitutions— experimenting on, learning from and about one another—that she would lead us to where we had to go; all in good time, nature bids us be patient, even if patience must be extracted from a would-be lover's passionate impatience.

  I thought that in this confusing game I, and only I, could come out the winner, because even if something irrevocable happened between the two of them, something more than a kiss—and of course I also wished to have that "more" myself—even then, even beyond that, Maja and I shared a deeper, darker secret: our clandestine searches, and Kálmán couldn't possibly come between us, with his love or with anything else; there was nothing he could do that might disturb our very special relationship.

  And even if that "more" did happen, I would have benefited from it somehow; Maja would have returned some of it to me.

  Kálmán and I kept a hold on each other, cunningly and ardently we held on, wouldn't let go, and compared to this fierce embrace, which pervaded every moment of our lives and in the hours of jealousy seemed deadly, having touched each other's member seemed rather trivial, and if not trivial then only a consequence of our rivalry.

  But after the experience we'd shared the night before, I felt he could do anything to me and I wouldn't be offended, or do something I'd done on other, similar occasions, like telling him, "Up yours, motherfucker," and then taking to my heels, resolving an unpleasant situation by running away; I could outrun him, but had to be sure my words hit him only when I was already in motion, because his reflexes were faster and he might be able to trip me.

  On the other hand, I felt that his moroseness and anger had nothing to do with me, he just felt that way in general because something bad had happened to him, and even if I could not learn the cause of his trouble, I wanted to help, for it occurred to me that he was like this because of Maja; I wanted us to do something that would take his mind off whatever it was.

  I started picking at the dead mouse with my fingers; the bugs immediately stopped moving, waiting to see what would happen next, but didn't run away, were unwilling to let go of such rich booty.

  These bugs brought to mind something else we had in common.

  Sometimes, because of Livia, and with nothing special to set me off, I, too, would be overcome by dejection, gloom, apathy, disgust, feeling as if I were huddling at the bottom of some dark, slimy pit, and if somebody peered inside I'd be enraged, full of hatred, murder in my heart, wishing the intruder dead, out of existence.

  My fingers felt something soft and squishy; death had left the little mouse's eye open; a small incisor protruded from its mouth, and under the tooth there was a tiny drop of clotted blood.

  I was expecting Kálmán to growl at me to stop poking at the dead animal; he didn't like people picking at things.

  Once, he beat up Prém because of a lizard.

  It was a beautiful green lizard, its head turquoise, not too big, pitifully skinny from the winter cold, and young, which you can tell by looking at its scales; it was springtime, when lizards still move lazily, and ours, atop a tree stump, was soaking in the sun; sensing our proximity it moved over a little, which was hard for it, and also it didn't like giving up the warm sun for the cold shade; its wise eyes stared at us for a while, then weighing its need for warmth, it must have concluded that we had no hostile intentions, so it lowered its eyelids, entrusting itself completely to our goodwill, which is when Prém couldn't control himself anymore and grabbed at it; and although enough survival instinct materialized for the lizard to slip through Prém's fingers, the tail remained behind, a watery drop of blood marking the spot where it had snapped off, it was thrashing by itself, writhing on the tree stump; and then a screaming Kálmán pounced on Prém.

  But now, not even my poking could get a rise out of Kálmán, I couldn't get him to say anything to me, and the bugs resumed their labor as the shadow cast by my hand began to recede.

  Whatever I knew about carrion bugs, as about so many other animals and plants, I knew from Kálmán; it's not that I was completely insensitive to the world of nature, but the difference between us, I think, was that he experienced natural phenomena as events of his own nature while I remained an observer, felt excitement, revulsion, disgust, fear, and rapture, which lead directly to the urge to interfere, but Kálmán always remained calm, calm in the deepest, broadest sense of the word, as when someone is overwhelmed by the darkest grief or most radiant joy and instead of protesting gives himself to it, not trying to hinder the expression of his emotions with fears and prejudices; he remained calm with the neutrality of nature, which is neither empathetic nor indifferent but something else: I suppose that is what emotionally courageous people must be like! and maybe this was why nothing ever disgusted him, why he wouldn't want to touch anything that did not touch him, why he knew everything there was to know about the woods, the scene of our daily rovings; he was quiet, slow to move, but his eyes took in everything, his gaze was unerring, in this realm he brooked no oppositio
n of any kind, here he was lord and master, though he did not want to rule; it was this intuitive, sensory awareness that made him irresistible, as on that early Sunday afternoon when he showed up at our house, appearing unexpectedly in the open door of our dining room, looking, from the adults' point of view at least, somewhat hapless and comical, as we sat around the table, in a cozy family setting, over the remains of our midday meal, listening to my cousin Albert: my Aunt Klára's son, a slightly chubby young man with a bald spot, whom I admired for his self-confidence and winning superiority and despised for his slyness and stupidity, was just then in the middle of a story about an Italian writer named Emilio Gadda; Albert was the only so-called artist in the family, an opera singer, who therefore had the chance to travel a lot, a rare privilege in those years, and was full of strange and colorful stories which he was quick to relate in his mighty bass—the pledge of a promising career—though always affecting a measure of modesty; he peppered his anecdotes and off-color witticisms with little melodies, singing while he spoke or speaking while he sang, giving us brief musical quotations, as if to imply with this curious habit that he was so much an artist that he couldn't afford even in pleasant leisure hours to neglect exercising his precious voice; but when Kálmán appeared in the doorway, barefoot and in his flimsy shorts, Albert interrupted his story at once with a loud, affected guffaw: how charmingly ill-mannered can such a grimy ragamuffin be! he said, and the others laughed along with him; I was a little ashamed of my friend and also ashamed of feeling ashamed, but without a word, not even hello, he told me to come with him right away, he was driven by something so strong he paid not the slightest attention to the company present, behaving as if he saw nobody but me, which I have to admit had a certain comic effect.

  The bugs, though hindered now and then by a clump of dirt or a big pebble, quickly bored their way under the carcass; they used their jetblack pointed heads as shovels, spinning in the protection of their armorlike shell, and the dug-up dirt was thrown to the rear by their tiny many-jointed feet; first they dug a proper trench around the dead mouse, then scooped out the soil from under it so that the carrion sank below the surface of the ground, and then, using the dug-out dirt, they carefully buried the animal completely, leaving not a trace; and as I then learned from Kálmán, that's why they are called necrophores, burying beetles; their work is hard, and since the corpses they bury are immovable giants compared to their own bodies, it takes many hours to complete the job; of course, the work is not without profit: even before they begin their labor they lay their eggs inside the carrion, where the eggs will hatch; as the larvae mature, they consume the decomposing body, and eventually chew their way out to the light of day—that's their life.

  That Sunday, when Kálmán came to call for me, they were burying a field mouse, which was a much easier piece of work, despite the field mouse's larger size, since here, around this wood mouse, the ground was not only hard because of the trail but also full of stones.

  Nine carrion beetles were on the job.

  The hard shells of their backs were marked by two red stripes running crosswise, and on their necks and abdomens fine yellowish hairs protected their delicately articulated bodies.

  Each insect worked within a clearly defined area, yet this was clearly a concerted effort; if one of them came up against a stone or a too solid clump, it stopped, as if to summon its mates, and the others also stopped; then they all began scurrying around the object causing the difficulty, touching it with their long, hornlike feelers, appraising the situation, and then, as if to discuss the problem and reach a decision, they touched each other, and several of them got down to work, chewing from different sides, burrowing under the obstacle, making a common effort to remove it.

  While I was watching the beetles and trying to figure out what had got him so upset, Kálmán told me, out of the blue, that Krisztián had knocked the milk out of his hand on purpose.

  I didn't know what milk he was talking about.

  But he kept insisting that Krisztián had done it on purpose, it was no accident, he meant to do it.

  Only I did not understand what had been done on purpose.

  Last night, Kálmán said breathlessly—after he managed to tear himself away from his obsessive insistence on Krisztián's hostile intent and was ready to answer my repeated questions—last night, and he'd forgotten to tell me this before, they decided to camp out—yes, I knew, Prém had this large army tent—-and a little while ago he brought them fresh milk, and then Krisztián did this stupid thing: Look, he said, there's a fly in the milk, and as Kálmán looked down, Krisztián hit the bottom of the jug, knocking it out of his hand, and of course the jug broke, and this was something Kálmán would not forgive him.

  He was serious; in the terrible noise of the strong wind I almost had to read his lips, and he wasn't even looking at me, he was looking off somewhere as if ashamed to speak, or ashamed at not being able to keep this to himself, at complaining; but as I pictured the scene, the crude little trick that works every time, I couldn't help seeing him as the milk hit him in the face, and I burst out laughing.

  It was as if Krisztián had tried to please me with this trick, although I'd never have thought of taking my anger out on Kálmán.

  Yet my laughter, I realized as I heard it, would seem like revenge, pleasantly gratifying revenge, an abuse of Kálmán's trust; still, I could not help myself, I had to laugh: still crouching over the hardworking beetles, I looked up at him; the mark Krisztián had left on his innocent, strong face, in his offended yet still candid gaze was plain to see, and it made me feel so good to be able to read Krisztián's handiwork on his face that I couldn't, and didn't want to, stop laughing—it's a good thing we don't always know what we're doing! grabbing my legs below the knees, I tipped over and dropped on the trail, rolling with laughter as I thought of how Krisztián had knocked the milk into his face, crash! the jug shattering into smithereens, the milk splashing all over; at the same time I saw the shocked and indignant look in Kálmán's eyes as he watched me convulsing with laughter, he couldn't possibly comprehend this, how could he? the only reason Krisztián could manipulate him so cruelly and tyrannically was that this was a language of bullying and cruelty Kálmán could neither speak nor understand, while not only did I speak and understand it but it was my sole common language with Krisztián, the language of achievable superiority, of acquirable power; this was our innately common language, all right, even if we tended to watch from a distance our different means and strategies in using it; and right now it was a delight to be able to communicate with Krisztián in this secret language at Kálmán's expense.

  What was I laughing at, he asked, looking at me with his transparent blue eyes; what's so funny? he repeated somewhat louder, now he'd get it from his mother, it was a fine glazed jug.

  A glazed jug, yet! reveling in the liberating effect of spoiling and destruction, I had to laugh even harder, and precisely because you don't know what you're doing but are free in that you're doing it unknowingly and unintentionally, I had to do something more: my joy was so intense that laughter alone didn't suffice, and his mere existence, the sparkle of his blond, brushlike lashes, could only increase the pleasure of my laughter, now bordering on hysteria, and still this wasn't enough; letting indecency run amok, I needed to draw Kálmán into the merriment, to share my pleasure with him, not to mention that at that moment laughing for me was but kissing Krisztián on the mouth; so as I was rolling around the ground next to the dead mouse, laughing even at my own laughter, I suddenly grabbed his feet, which surprised him so much he toppled onto me.

  That was it: the joking, the laughter, the kissing, the joy of unforeseen revenge all ended when, still falling, he seized my neck with both hands and Krisztián's mark vanished from his face without a trace, and although I quickly locked my arms around his back and arched my body to throw him off with one heave, my laughter had obviously released a current of obstinate and implacable hatred in him so powerful that I had neither
the strength nor the skill to subdue it, and I realized, with the last spark of rational thought in me, that I'd have to resort to more treacherous, baser tactics, though to do so right away would have been shameful—first I'd have to struggle, display courage and resourcefulness, flaunt my manhood, abide by the allegedly civilized rules of properly declared hostilities; but I couldn't shake him; he was squeezing my neck so hard that the sound of the wind began to fade, darkness was descending on me, like a red rainfall, his body was becoming unbearably heavy; I gasped and choked, and I got angry, but what was that compared to the raging hatred directed not only at me or my laughter but also at Krisztián—I could clearly sense this even at the moment when he fell on me—for humiliating him so; his innocent, good-natured, patient, considerate self went haywire, he wanted to choke me! get back at me for the injury received from Krisztián and take revenge on me for Maja, too; no, there was nothing funny about this, he meant to stifle me, to knock the laughter out of me for good, along with Krisztián and Maja; he pressed down on me with every ounce of his body, which was both an advantage and a disadvantage: I couldn't kick him in the balls, couldn't move my legs or move him, but for a moment I could catch my breath, and that loosened his grip on my neck, and I tried to use that favorable moment to break the stranglehold by yanking my head out of his hands, so I began knocking my forehead against his head; the two skulls collided with terrific force—a whole shower of stars—and I couldn't capitalize on the advantage of my desperate counterattack because I was dazed and in pain, and I missed my chance: he still had me pinned down, and to incapacitate my head, he struck my face with his elbow; all I could do was jerk my head sideways; I felt my nose begin to bleed, and my open mouth was touching the dead mouse! do criminal statistics include records of children murdering other children? but I'm sure he wanted to kill me—no, I'd better qualify that, he didn't want to, I don't think he wanted to do anything just then, for raw fighting instincts had displaced will, intention, and premeditation— and if I hadn't felt the dead mouse on my lips, the limp little body all but dangling into my mouth! if this humiliation, which took the fight out of the realm of the usual daily horseplay, hadn't mobilized the deepest, most artful cunning—when, sensing complete physical defeat, one is ready to try anything, seek the most desperate solutions—I'm sure he would have killed me, I don't know how, maybe choking me or bashing in my head with a stone, though that wasn't the uppermost question in my mind at the moment, I had no question at all, there was nothing, everything we might call the controlled function of the conscious mind had vanished, dissolved in the haze of the battle; in a split second, in a flash, the prank, the childish swagger, the game of rivalry and provocation had turned into a life-and-death struggle, an extreme situation in which the mind can summon the body's untapped resources precisely by rejecting all means of moral control as unnecessary, throwing off all restraint, no longer wondering whether what is possible is also acceptable, considering the body's capabilities no longer from the standpoint of conventional moral order, as a supervisor might, but only and exclusively from that of its own survival: in a sense, that's a matchless vantage point, God looks the other way at such moments, a wonderful lookout point for the memoirist, even if the inevitable lapses in conscious functioning keep us from remembering specific decisions, specific questions, and answers from our inner dialogue, and we can recall only random images and chaotic feelings, for in that state the mind has no purpose other than to preserve the body and therefore has no will either, so what is left is a bare shape which, being unaware of itself, is not even our own; more precisely, we are no longer in control of it, and it is making decisions about and for us; it's no accident that poets so delight in singing of the connection between love and death, for never do we experience our body's autonomy so purely as when we fight for our lives or in the moment of love's consummation, when we experience our body in its most primeval form, with no history, no creator, obeying no law of gravity, without contour, able to see itself in no mirror, having no need for any of this, becoming a single, explosive dot of pure light in the infinity of our inner darkness; so I wouldn't want to give the impression that at that moment I was thinking about what I was doing; no, it is only now, out of the shards of pure sensation preserved by memory, that I am trying to assemble this pretty little series of actions—which also happens to reveal some of the dark spots of my character, and of course I realize that as soon as I say dark spots I am exercising the memoirist's inevitable moral judgment, nothing but the moral distortion of the story, after the fact, similar in nature to the way we view great wars in retrospect, ennobling what is ignoble, adding the moral requisites of courage and cowardice, honesty and treachery, steadfastness and dereliction, but then, it is our only chance to retrieve the amoral period of a state of emergency, tame it, refit it into the humdrum morality of our placid daily life; if in my pain I had closed my mouth, I'd have bitten into the mouse, with the blood from my nose dripping on the tiny body, and the possibility of this must have struck him as so bizarre, so repulsive, yet also so sobering that for a fraction of a second he relaxed his grip: there was something odd about this momentary relief, maybe a touch of uncertainty, but it held out no promise of escape, merely opened a crack through which the soul could witness the total defeat of the body; no, in this very short interval I did not think of Maja, although being defeated by Kálmán might also mean I'd be at a hopeless disadvantage with her; when you taste defeat, when the soul is in flight, you grasp at the very thing you had abandoned, which in this case was laughter, and I simply had to laugh, more freely and brazenly than before, but silently, and out of this bubbling, frantic laughter, which mocked his murderous intent, his victory, his strength, and made me feel his skin and the warmth of his bare body, directly out of this perfidious and hideous laughter flowed the movement of my hands: I tickled him, and the joy of seeing his reaction caused me really to bite down on the dead mouse, at the same time as Kálmán grabbed my head with both hands and began banging it against the ground, which didn't bother me, because the treachery of the soul had handed me the key to the situation: I kept laughing and tickling him, I was retching and spitting, he could have held my hand down only by rolling off me, which would have robbed him of his victory, but he couldn't take the tickling; he banged my head hard four times, very quickly, I felt as if a sharp stone had torn into my skull, and then he began to howl; I tickled him and he howled, how he howled! starting out as a cry of victory, exploding out of the deadly force pent up in him, and now feeding on itself, then at its loudest, at the peak of his triumph passing over into a whimpery laugh; his skin, his twitching body, his very flesh tried to repel this laugh, but the howling had become a kind of defense mechanism: on the one hand he tried to scare me with it, and on the other he hoped it would help him get over the unwanted laughter, but as he tried to evade my tickling fingers and abruptly arched his body over me, I was able to complete the move begun but thwarted earlier: I managed to get up, thrusting out my hip and kicking against the ground at the same time, while he, enervated by the tickling, giggled and whimpered and let himself be turned over, and we kept on turning over and over, screaming, laughing, clinging to each other; tugging and pushing each other we rolled off the trail and into the bushes, and by then his dog had turned up, greatly excited, barking and snapping at us, and that definitely determined the kind of outcome our fight would have.