A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  It was sunny outside and the flickering, twisting spots of pale yellow made the distant sky even bluer; you could see deep into the mistless blue, as though eyes could distinguish between far and near and one weren't staring into a void that ended somewhere only because it wasn't infinitely transparent.

  It was pleasantly warm in the room, the fire humming quietly in the white tile stove, and with our slightest move the smoke of our cigarettes sank and rose in thick, sluggish layers.

  I was sitting at his desk in his comfortably wide armchair—he always let me have this special corner of his room—working on my notes, which really meant that while staring out the window through the softly curling layers of bluish smoke, I was trying to recall what had happened during rehearsals the day before, superimposing image on image.

  There are gestures and words the meaning and motives behind which we comprehend all at once, and we also notice the minute irregularities that at the moment of occurrence may seem contingent and accidental, cracks and chasms of imperfections that separate the player from the play, the actor from his role, and that the actors, in accordance with the strict rules of their craft, would somehow like to bridge, as if to eliminate the sad truth that total fusion, total identification, does not exist, even if it is the ultimate desire of many a human endeavor.

  Already while jotting down my notes, which I was doing rather mechanically, I had realized that the principle I was really interested in, if there was a principle, was to be found not in the obvious, logical unfolding of events, in describable gestures and meaningful words—although these were very very important, for they embody human events—but rather in the seemingly contingent gaps between the words and gestures, in these irregularities and imperfections.

  He sat a little farther away, typing steadily, lifting his fingers from the keys just long enough to take a quick drag on his cigarette; he couldn't have been writing a poem, for the typing was too even and uninterrupted for that, perhaps it was a script for one of his radio programs, though this wasn't likely either, because I never saw him bring home notes or papers from the studio or take anything back with him from home; he moved empty-handed between the two main locations of his life, as if deliberately isolating one from the other; his legs stuck out from under the table, which must have made for discomfort in sitting, but this way the streak of sunlight slanting in from the tall window could warm his bare feet.

  And when he felt I was staring out the window too long, he said, without looking up, that we ought to wash the windows.

  His toes were long and as attractively articulated as his slender fingers; I liked pushing my fist gently into the arch of his foot and with my tongue touching each toe, feeling the sharp edge of each nail.

  I never took notes right after a rehearsal; I waited until late in the evening or, if I managed to get up early, the next morning; to see more clearly the source of, and reason for, the effect a given scene had on me, to gain a better perspective on it, I had to free myself from the effect itself.

  I didn't answer him, though the idea of a joint window cleaning did appeal to me.

  This note-taking began as a kind of idle diversion, a solitary mental exercise which often filled me with guilt, especially when riding home in the crowded city train, jostled by grim throngs of commuters; I would often think I was enjoying the privileges of the intellectual elite and decide I simply had to stop playing the observer condemned to inaction and should at least try to profit from the bitter fact that for several years I'd been not an active participant in so-called historical events but rather their pathetic victim and in this sense a part of the faceless crowd— significant or insignificant, it hardly mattered which—an alien, self-hating element, maybe just a giant eye with no body to go with it; yet when this mental exercise became a regular routine it did have an effect on my daily life.

  On casually filled pages, out of comprehensible and therefore not wholly uninteresting notes, the picture of a performance in preparation began to emerge; thus, without my noticing the changes occurring within me, I found myself so deep within the labyrinth of my uncertain and risky undertaking, allowing me to experience vicariously the lives of a group of strangers, that it was no longer just a personal obsession to describe the performance down to its minutest details, every word and gesture, each latent and overt connection, to follow the process of realization, to become its chronicler, to respond to their work with my own, which, after all, is the indispensable condition of human fellowship, but within the small community whose activities my notes hoped to follow I also found a place for myself, however peripheral, a role to be played that gave me the joy of having an identity, if only in relation to the people in that theater.

  It was Sunday morning, a day of rest, and since it was his turn to make lunch, every once in a while he would kick the chair out from under him, go into the kitchen, come back, and resume banging on his typewriter.

  I seem to remember dropping a remark to Frau Kühnert about my notes, which she mentioned to Thea, who, in her usual overeagerness, must have passed on to the others, for I began to notice that they were more cautious with me, indeed took precautions, trying to talk to me differently, more coherently and confidentially, as if they each wanted to shape the image I'd create of them.

  I asked him what he was writing.

  His last will, he said.

  The truth is, I hadn't noticed how deeply I was being affected by the seemingly insignificant and uneventful times we spent together, by his place not merely being familiar but becoming a home, and that I no longer asked what home meant but thought I knew.

  He asked me what I was thinking about.

  It was quiet—I didn't remember when but at some point he had stopped typing, which meant he had been staring at me staring out the window at the tree and the sky.

  As I turned to him and told him I wasn't thinking about anything, I could tell from his eyes he'd been watching me for quite some time; a smile had gathered on his mouth.

  You must have been thinking about something, at least about nothing itself, he said, chuckling a little.

  No, really, I wasn't thinking of anything, just watching the leaves.

  It was true, I wasn't thinking of anything worth formulating in words, and in any case, one doesn't think in thoughts; it was a pure sensation to which I was yielding unconditionally, without thinking, with no tension between the peaceful sight and my body's comfortable position, between perception and the perceived object, and this is what he must have noticed on my face, body and soul in a state that might even be called happiness, but his question made this sensation rather fragile, and I felt it needed protecting.

  Because what he'd been thinking, he continued, was that I might be thinking of the same thing, which was that maybe we should stay like this for good.

  How did he mean that, I asked, as if I hadn't understood.

  The smile vanished from his lips, he withdrew his searching glance from my face, lowered his head, and, pronouncing the words with difficulty, as if we had exchanged roles and now it was he who had to speak in a foreign language, he asked if I had ever thought of the two of us in this way.

  Some time had to elapse before I managed to utter the word that in his language makes a deeper, throatier sound: yes.

  He turned his head away and with a delicate, absentminded motion raised the paper in the typewriter, and I looked out the window again, both of us being silent and motionless: as fervent as our shyly voiced confessions had been, so charged with fear was the silence that followed— one would want to hold back one's breathing in this kind of silence, even the beating of one's heart, which is why one hears it and feels it all the more.

  He asked me why I hadn't mentioned it before.

  I said I thought he'd feel it anyway.

  It was good to be sitting far from him and not to look at him, since a glance or physical proximity might have shattered what we had, yet the situation was becoming dangerous because something final and irreversible would
have to be said; the sharp beam of sunshine streaming through the window seemed to raise a wall between us through which the words would have to pass; addressing the other, we were each talking to ourselves; we seemed to be sitting in our separate rooms in the shared warmth of our single room.

  If I had thought about this before, he pressed on, how was it that it had occurred to him only now?

  That I didn't know, I said, but it didn't matter.

  After a short while he got up, but didn't kick the chair out as was his wont, rather he pushed it gingerly out of the way; I didn't look at him and I don't think he looked at me, and he was careful not to cross the beam of light that was now a wall between us as without a word he left for the kitchen, and judging by the weight and rhythm of his steps he was walking in order to reduce the tension generated by our words but, not letting down his guard, taking his caution along with him.

  And the cozy, familial silence became more significant than the allusive words wrapped softly in silence and suppression, because the words alluded to something final, to the possible end of our relationship, while the wrapper of silence alluded to circumstances known to both of us that, contradicting the meaning of our precisely and reticently spoken words, denied the very possibility of an imminent end, and the fact that we could communicate in a language of allusions whose aesthetics we could share gave the impression, at least to me, that of the two options the possibility of our continued relationship was stronger; I think he remained more skeptical and cautious.

  As soon as he left the room, I was overcome by a strange, humiliating restlessness; my movements became independent of me, the compulsion to move and at the same time to restrain movement made me play out, in the covert and overt language of gestures, the emotional struggle unexpressed in our dialogue: I couldn't take my eyes from the poplar tree, kept fidgeting and scratching—all of a sudden every part of me felt like getting out of there, I was itching all over—rubbing my nose and smelling my fingers, sniffing the nicotine on the skin, I didn't light up, though I'd have liked to, in irritation I flung my pen on the desk as no longer needed, but right away started groping for it in the pile of papers, picked it up again, kept pressing and twirling it, hoping it would help me get back to my notes, though at this point I couldn't have cared less about those idiotic notes; I wanted to get up, to see what he was really writing, what sort of last will it was, but I stayed put, didn't want my changing of place to disturb the stillness of some unknown possibility, felt I had to protect something I would be better off getting over, something I should somehow evade or wriggle out of.

  That's when he came back, which immediately reassured me, being on the alert, waiting eagerly to see what else might happen, what else there was in us to be said out loud, to be known only when actually spoken or soon thereafter; but my new calm was only a grotesque mirror image of the earlier restlessness, since I still couldn't turn to him—I wasn't calm enough—wanting him to believe that nothing had changed in me while he was gone.

  The soft patter of his bare feet betrayed the tiny change that had taken place in him, not hesitation or kind consideration, as he had shown earlier, but increased attentiveness, an absorption in his own quickening footsteps, perhaps an objectivity he'd gained in the kitchen when with the help of a dishcloth he lifted the lid off the pot of cauliflower cooking in its salt water; the water had come to a violently bubbling boil, the steam hit his face, and though the cauliflower seemed soft enough, he nevertheless took a fork from the drawer and carefully poked it to make sure that the white rose-like heads did not fall apart—with this kind of cauliflower, if it is overcooked, that can easily happen—and only after that did he turn off the gas under the pot; sitting in his room I'd heard or thought I heard, seen or imagined I saw, every move he made, and in his footsteps I sensed that these routine gestures had taken back some of that emotional effusion which in me had rather unpleasantly intensified.

  He stopped behind my back and lowered his hands to my shoulders; he did not hold my shoulders but simply let the weight of his hands rest on them; I felt not the slightest tension in his muscles, no body weight was communicated through his hands, which made the gesture rather friendly but guarded, too.

  I leaned back and looked up at him; that palm-size area on my skull that so enjoys the caressing softness of another's hand—a spot not sufficiently appreciated for its sensitivity—was touching his belly; he looked down at me, smiling.

  What's going to happen to us? I asked.

  Now he did grip my shoulders just a little, squeezing some of his strength into me; Nothing, he said.

  Just enough strength to take the edge off the meaning of that word.

  This area of the skull with its peculiar nature is called the fontanel in an infant, and even after the bones fuse and harden, the spot continues to respond to stimuli as sensitively as if it were still a piece of throbbing purple-veined tissue, in some respects even more sensitively than our sense organs, because it seems to specialize in reacting exclusively to either friendly or hostile stimuli, perceiving them with unerring accuracy; I wanted to be aware of, wanted to feel, this area of my skull, and I pressed the spot against his stomach with the same force with which he was grasping my shoulders.

  Articulating his words carefully, he said I had to understand, and I certainly mustn't misunderstand, that it was no accident, could not be construed an accident, that until now I'd kept my thoughts to myself about what we mentioned earlier; but he wouldn't want to tell me how to lead my life, wasn't taking back what he'd said before, either, which would be silly; he wouldn't want to influence me in any way.

  Looking up at him I laughed, and said I had to laugh, because if he really meant that, then he should have behaved differently from the beginning.

  The smile moved from the corner of his eyes back to his mouth; for a while he stared into my eyes, then, across the back of the chair, he pressed me to himself.

  It was too late, he said.

  For what? I asked.

  Just too late, he repeated, his voice deeper.

  The position of our bodies, with him looking at me from above and with me looking up at him, as the fragrance of his voice reached me with his every word, seemed to give him more security.

  What did he mean, I asked, he had to tell me.

  He couldn't tell me.

  His white shirt was open to the waist, the gentle warmth his skin exhaled on me was like a memento, its odor containing at least as many meaningful particles as a word or an intonation, a gesture or a glance, except, unlike sight or hearing, smell works in our minds with more insidious and mysterious signals.

  He didn't want to tell me, I said.

  That's right, he didn't.

  Very gently, I peeled his arms away, but now he leaned closer, gripping the armrest of the chair, so the wings of his unbuttoned shirt touched and enclosed my face; in this position our faces came very close, although I would have wanted not his body to speak but his mouth, for him to say not with his body but with his mouth the opposite of what his mouth would have said and what he couldn't say with words.

  And so as not to comply with this impossible demand, he kissed my mouth, angrily almost, and I let him, couldn't do otherwise, and in the soft warmth of his lips, under their hard little grooves, my lips did not move.

  I should go on with my work, he told me, and he'd have to finish his, the meaning of his kiss now matching that of his words earlier, both intended as a conclusion.

  He wouldn't get away so easily, I said as he was about to walk away, and held on to his hand.

  It's no good insisting, he said, much as he would like to tell me, and I must understand that he really did, he couldn't help himself, didn't want to know what the next moment would be like, didn't want to know, wasn't interested, that's the way he was, it would make him sick if we started talking seriously about this, and what did I want from him? should we chat about rearranging the apartment? or should we, now there's an idea, go to City Hall and declare our seri
ous intentions? we'd be a great hit with that! perhaps we should plan for a nice little future together? let this be enough, what we had, why wasn't it enough for me that he was happy, all the time I was with him he was happy? he'd say it, if I wanted to hear it, but that's all there was, he couldn't do more, and I shouldn't spoil things.

  All right, but he had wanted more before, he'd wanted something else; he talked differently, not like this, why was he taking it back now?

  He wasn't taking back anything, that was only my hangup.

  I told him he was a coward.

  Maybe, maybe he was.

  Because he never loved anybody and nobody ever loved him.

  Talking like that wasn't exactly attractive.

  I couldn't live without him.

  With him, without him—these were idiotic phrases, but what he was telling me just a few minutes ago was that he couldn't either.

  Then what did he want?

  Nothing.

  He pulled out his hand from under mine, a movement that perfectly matched his last word; he walked away, to return to what may have been the only secure spot left for him in this room, his typewriter, back to the task that he'd set for himself and that he had to complete, but in the middle of the room he stopped, under the slanting sunbeam, his back to me, and now he, too, looked out the window, up at the sky, as if enjoying the warmth of the light, basking in it, and through the white shirt I could see the outlines of his slender body, whose fragrance was still with me.

  And in that fragrance was the memory of the night before, and in that memory all the morning-after recollections of all previous nights.

  And in the night, the glimmering darkness of the bedroom, and in the darkness the luminous spots of closed eyes, and in the flashing, flickering patches of light the smell of the coverlet, the sheets, the pillows, and in them, too, signs of what had gone on before: the chill of the room being aired, and in the hot, dry clouds of foaming detergent and steaming iron, his mother's hand.