A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  He asked me if I recognized him.

  I was watching a red spot on his forehead and saw that although he had wiped his eyes, one of them still had tears in it, and I said no, I didn't recognize him; I didn't want to, and somehow there was something totally unfamiliar about him, though the real reason I said no was that I still wanted to hold on to the lie with which my parents for years had eliminated him from my life; I hoped that insisting on this lie would keep him away from Mother.

  But my adored mother did not or, rather, would not understand my insistence, and she lied again, she felt she had to, and with her lie she pushed me away, crushed me; she pretended to be quite surprised that I didn't recognize this man; she was doing this for his benefit, with this pretended surprise trying to suggest that it was only my forgetfulness, and not them, she and Father, to blame for erasing this man from my memory; the excitement of her own lie dried and choked her voice; it was repulsive to listen to it then; today, however, having recovered from the shame of my powerlessness and from the deep wounds of childhood injuries, I rather admire her self-discipline; after all, I did come in at the most dramatic moment of their reunion; what else could she have done but seek refuge in a familiar role; she felt she ought to play the mother now, a mother speaking to her son; she very quickly wanted to change back into being a mother, her face underwent a complete alteration as a result of this mental exercise: a strikingly beautiful, red-haired woman was sitting in that bed, her cheeks flushed, her slightly trembling, nervous fingers playing with the cord on her bedjacket—she seemed to be choking herself with them; this woman seemed a stranger, her voice phony, as she refused to believe I'd so quickly forgotten this man, the man I hated, but her lovely green eyes, narrowing and fluttering, betrayed how completely defenseless she was in this painful and embarrassing situation.

  And this, in fact, made me happy; I'd have loved to come right out and say she was lying, shout to the whole world that she was lying, deceiving everyone, but I couldn't say anything, because I was stifled by the constant booming in my ears, and tears that wanted to spill from my eyes were trickling down my throat.

  But the stranger, who sensed nothing of what was happening between me and Mother, burst into a loud resounding laugh and, as if coming to my aid and neutralizing the tone of resentment in Mother's voice, said, "It's been five years, after all," which made it clear to me how long had passed since his disappearance, and now I was touched and consoled by his voice and by his laughter, he seemed to be laughing off those five years, making light of it all; as he began walking toward me, he indeed became familiar; I recognized his easy, confident stride, his laugh, the candor of his blue eyes, and, most of all perhaps, the trust I could not help having in him; my defensive and self-protective attitude was gone.

  He embraced me and I had to surrender; he was still laughing and saying that it was five years, not exactly a short time; his laughter was meant more for my mother, who kept on lying, saying they had told me he was abroad, which of course wasn't at all what they had really told me: only once did I ever ask them where János was, and it was she, not Father, who said that János Hamar had committed the greatest possible crime and therefore we must never talk about him ever again.

  She didn't have to tell me, I knew, that the greatest crime was treason, and therefore he was no more, didn't exist, never had, and if by any chance he was still alive, for us he was as good as dead.

  My face touched his chest: his body was hard, bony, thin, and because I automatically closed my eyes, submerging myself in that loud booming, withdrawing into the only refuge my body could provide, I was able to feel a great many things in his body: his tenderness radiating warmly into my body, the excitement of his joy still unable to break free, his lightness, and also a wound-up, convulsive strength that seemed to cling to his sinews, bones, and thin flesh; still, I did not yield completely to his embrace, I could not tear myself away from my mother's lies, and the way I trusted his body seemed much too familiar, harked back to a buried past, spoke to me of the absence of my father's body and, somewhat more remotely, of the pains I'd suffered for loving Krisztián; his body spoke to me of the perfect security provided by a male body and the repeated withdrawal of that security; reopened the past of five years earlier when I could still touch anything with absolute confidence; precisely this excessive openness of feelings made me undemonstrative in his arms.

  I could not deny and absorb time any faster; I couldn't have known that the time of fate cannot be stopped; they began talking above my head.

  Why should they lie, he was saying, he'd been in prison.

  At the same time Mother mumbled something about not being able to explain to me exactly what that meant.

  Then he repeated, more lightly and playfully, that yes, he'd been in jail, that's where he'd come from just now, straight from the slammer, and although he was talking to me, he meant the mischievous undertone for Mother, who, finding some possibility for evasion in this playful tone, assured me that János hadn't stolen or robbed or anything like that.

  But he wouldn't let her have her little detour and retorted that he'd tell me about it, why not?

  But then Mother's voice, deep and filled with hatred, pounced on him, challenged him to tell me if he felt he must, which meant of course that she was forbidding him to say anything; she was trying to protect me and to invalidate him.

  It felt good that she hadn't thrust me away from herself, after all, that her protective voice was lashing about behind my back, even if this odd sort of protection quickly pushed me from the threshold of knowledge back to the dark realm of suppressed information; the stranger made no reply, their argument remained suspended above my head, and though I felt I must know, had the right to know, his eyes told me hesitantly that perhaps now was not the time; gripping my shoulders firmly, he pushed me away from himself so he could see me, take a good look at me, and as I followed his glance sweeping over my face and body, I felt time opening up in my body, because the sight before him, me, with all the changes and growing, made him happy and infinitely satisfied; his eyes seemed to devour the physical changes my body had undergone in five years, with great delight making them his own; he shook me, slapped me on the back, and for a brief moment I, too, could see myself with his eyes, and I was hurting terribly, everywhere, in every part of my body that he now looked at, his glance hurt me, because I felt as if my body were deception itself; he was enjoying it so much yet I was standing before him unclean, and that hurt me, hurt me so terribly that the tears stuck in my throat broke out in a quiet, pitiful whimper; he may not have noticed it, because he planted a loud smacking kiss on each of my cheeks, almost biting me, and then, as if unable to get enough of my sight and touch, kissed me a third time; that's when Mother behind us told us to turn away because she was getting out of bed; by then I was sobbing, making gurgling and rattling sounds, and after the third kiss I clumsily, the clumsiness caused by my emotions, touched his face with my mouth, that musty smell on his face, I was touching this erupting pain of mine to his face; but he didn't care, roughly he yanked me to himself and kept me pressed to his body, and of course he cared, he cared for me because he wanted to drink up my sobbing with his own body.

  The booming seemed to gush out with my sobs; I didn't know why I was crying, I didn't want to cry, I didn't want him to feel, or for the two of them to see, what was happening, because it was my impurity that was flowing out of me in those tears; and while I was still struggling with myself, entrusting my body to him, the turbulence in his body came to an end.

  Tenderness seemed to be carried along by capillary-like tributaries, by swift underground rivulets, and driven out of the honeycombed darkness of the body, it surfaced as inert strength, strength of the arms, the loins, as a trembling of the thighs; nothing more was happening, nothing was changing anymore; he was holding me in his embrace with the gentle strength of his tenderness, and at the same time his sources had dried up, nothing more was flowing from him into me, he became like si
lence itself.

  I don't know how long Father had been standing in the open door.

  I had my back to the door and was the last to notice him—when the vanishing tenderness made me realize that something had happened behind my back.

  Above my head he was looking at Father.

  Mother was standing in front of her bed, about to reach for her robe flung over the back of the armchair.

  Father had his coat on, his soft gray hat was in his hand; his straight blond hair fell over his forehead but he did not push it back as he usually did with his long, nervous fingers; he was pale, looking at us with clouded eyes; he didn't seem to be really looking at us but at something incomprehensible located where our hugging bodies were standing, at an apparition, or at nothing at all, as if he could not possibly understand how this apparition had gotten here; maybe that's why I thought that his always clear, stern gaze was dimmed—his expression made almost idiotic—by his own astonishment; his lips kept trembling and he may have wanted to say something but then changed his mind because the words wouldn't come.

  The cooled-off tear smudges on my face were now superfluous; the silence of the men was so deep and immovable that I could feel my own superfluity in my limbs, or perhaps what an animal feels when escape is made impossible by not only a perfectly constructed trap but its own paralyzed instincts.

  Slowly he let me go, languidly; one lets go of an object with such indifference; Mother did not move.

  A great deal of time must have passed like this; all those five long years must have passed by during that silence.

  What I had learned about Father while rummaging through his papers seemed trivial compared to what was now becoming visible on his face; perhaps once again it was something I should not have seen: his body shrank somehow, his figure—I always thought of him as tall and slender—sagged under the weight of his coat; his comportment, the strength of his proud bearing, seemed to be illusory now; all these changes produced a curved back and stooped shoulders, and he had difficulty holding his head up, it was wobbling, hovering helplessly above his coat, because not only what he would have wanted to say but couldn't made his lips tremble—the trembling radiating to his nostrils, eyelids, and eyebrows, knitting his forehead in deep furrows—but also another force was stiffening his head in a twisted position, and what his mouth wanted to say was stuck in his windpipe, in his shoulders; always an impeccable dresser, Father now looked disheveled, his tie twisted to the side, the tips of his shirt collar standing straight up, his coat and the jacket under it both unbuttoned, part of his shirt slipping out of his pants over his belly, so many signs of frantic, undignified haste, embarrassment, and agitation, but of course he couldn't have been aware of them; I still don't know how he got the news—to all indications János's arrival at our place was completely unexpected—but I imagined that the moment Father heard the news he jumped into his car, he must have been both overjoyed and devastated, his soul, if there is such a thing, silently split in two, while at the command of his instincts he tried to maintain the impression that he was still a whole person; two irreconcilable emotions must have been raging in him with equal force, that's what made his face twitch, his head float and wobble.

  But so far I've spoken only of the strength and rhythm, the dynamics, of emotions, that ebb and flow in which their colors and directions manifest themselves, their pulse and breathing, but by no means the emotions themselves, only one of their many characteristics; what really must have happened in him I can only approximate with a metaphor: he became a child and an old man, as if these two ages had yanked his features in two different directions; he turned into a very offended child whom up to now the world had pampered with false appearances, whose good mind had been nursed into idiotic complacency, and now that this same world had revealed its cruel face to him and he didn't like what was happening, wasn't used to it, the child withdrew from reality into sulking, into hurt-fulness, into hate-filled, sniveling regression, unwilling to see what he saw, hurting to the point where he should have been whining and whimpering with pain, which is why he tried so desperately to force himself back into the world of comforting appearances, wanting to be coddled and nursed again, to be dumb and complacent, to stick his thumb back into his mouth, to have his mother's nipples; consequently everything I had once seen as clear, bright, and pure, the sternness of moral behavior reflected in his face, now seemed to be exposing their sources: inane, childish trust, and the fact that he was holding on to somebody's hand; his mouth and nostrils quivered, his eyelids fluttered, his brows twitched like a child's, and all this superimposed on adult features made his face look malformed and freakish; I glimpsed within the ravaged face of this man the child who had never managed to grow up; at the same time, the child seemed older than his years, his pale face was full of shadows; he had turned into a very old man so utterly shattered, crushed, pulverized by real, cruel, bloody, criminal phenomena hiding behind the world of appearances that nothing in him was still innocent, his life force was barely flickering; now he knew, saw, and understood everything, nothing could catch him unprepared, and anything that did was but the recurrence of something that had happened before, and thus behind the fine veil of his intelligence and insight there was a weary boredom rather than affection or love; he seemed to be thrashing between the extremes of his childhood and old age, between his past and his possible future, and being unable to find the noble expression appropriate to coping with the situation, his face simply fell apart.

  And János Hamar kept looking on, calmly, almost moved, seemed to be peering out at Father from a strength reduced and clinging to his bones, looked at Father as if at the erstwhile object of his love, as if smiling at his lost past, with the soft expression we use when we're trying to help someone, to identify with him, urging him sympathetically to go ahead and say what's on his mind, we'll understand his feelings, or at least we'll try to.

  I was certain, or rather my feelings were certain, that Janos was my real father and not this ridiculous figure in the clumsy, oversized winter coat; that's when I suddenly remembered that János's hair used to be dark and thick, and the only reason I didn't immediately recognize this real and profound inner closeness which I had always carried with me was that the color of his skin had changed, too, having lost its lively brown hue, and was now clinging, white and wrinkled, to the powerful bones of his face.

  Mother's face, the most mysterious of all, confirmed my feelings about the men; without having moved from her place or having picked up her robe, she came and stood with her face between the two men.

  And then the trembling mouth belonging to my father with the winter coat finally thrust the first sentence out into the silence; he said something to the effect of, You've come to see us, then.

  On the other man's face pain rolled over the smile, and when he said he'd come against his will and couldn't help it, the smile and pain united again, and he continued: his mother had died two years ago, as Father must surely know, of course he went home first and found out from the people who in the meantime had taken over his apartment.

  We didn't know, said my winter-coated father.

  But then, in a very sharp, shrill voice, almost like a saw stuck in a knot of wood, Mother shouted, That's enough!

  Again there was silence between the two men, and while my mother added—her voice deep and choked, sounding as if taking revenge on someone—that they did know but hadn't gone to the funeral, I felt all my strength flowing out of me, which is why I couldn't move from my spot.

  Everyone was quiet, as if they all had retreated into themselves and also needed to gather their strength.

  All right, János said a little later, it didn't matter; and the smile vanished completely from his face, only the pain remained.

  This made my winter-coated father feel stronger; he moved finally, started for János, and although he didn't do anything but walk with his hat in his hand, making no other gesture, it still looked as though he was going to embrace János, who,
as if alluding to his pain, apologetically raised his hand, imploring him not to come closer, to stay where he was.

  He stopped, in his winter coat, his hair shone as it caught the slender shaft of sunlight, and I don't know why, maybe because of the unfinished movement, his hat fell out of his hand.

  We must get over this, Mother whispered, as if trying to take the edge off János's rebuff, and then repeated even more quietly that they must get over this.

  They both looked at her, and the way they did showed that both were hoping that she, the woman, would help them.

  And this one look brought them together, made them a threesome again.

  Except that here no one could help anyone; after a little while János turned away, it must have pained him that they were again three; and as soon as they felt János could not see them, the other two exchanged a hateful glance, some kind of signal, behind his back; he seemed to be looking out the window, listening to the water dripping in the drainpipe, watching the bare branches swaying in the wind, and a sob broke from him, a whimper, tears spilling over the brim of his eyes, but just as quickly he pushed it all back, swallowed it down; Yes, all right, he said, I know, he said, and then he broke down completely, and Mother began yelling at me, What was the matter with me, couldn't I see I had no business being there? and like a madwoman she shrieked at me that I should get out!

  I would gladly have obeyed her, but I couldn't, just as they couldn't take another step toward one another but all stood in their places, too far apart to cross over.

  So you want to settle the account, after all, Father said, too loudly, for at last he could say the words he'd been afraid to say earlier.

  No, no, I'm sorry, János said, wiping the tears from his eyes with his fist, but, as before, one eye remained filled; I'm sorry, it's not you I came to see, I did come to this house, but not to see you! and then he said that my father had no reason to be afraid, there wasn't going to be a showdown, why, he couldn't even talk to Father; and if he planned to wipe out Father's family, he would go about it differently, wouldn't he? but either way, from this moment on, no matter how unpleasant it might make their reunion, or however uncomfortable it might be, my father had better get used to the idea that János was here, was alive, hadn't rotted away in jail, and would say whatever was on his mind; Didn't he think, my winter-coated father asked very quietly, that he, too, had something to do with it?