A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  And under the covers our bodies, and in our bodies our desire for each other, and in the afterglow of sated desire our sprawled bodies on the crumpled bedding, the skin, the vapor of the skin pores, and in the pores the moisture of secretions, the cooling perspiration settling in body hair, the pungent sweat in curves and bends, the smell of vehicles, offices, and restaurants trapped in the tangled strands of wet hair, and in the accumulated smells of the city the sea-salt taste of odorless semen, the bitter taste of tobacco in sweet saliva, food dissolving in saliva in the warm cave of the mouth; decaying teeth, and scraps of meat, fruit skins, and toothpaste stuck between the teeth, and from the depth of the stomach, alcohol reverting to yeast, the cooling fervor of the body in the solitude of sleep, and the fluids of dreams' indefinable excitements, the cool awakening, bracing water, soap, mint-scented shaving cream, and, in yesterday's shirt flung on the back of the chair, the day that's just past.

  All right, then, I said, at least now there'll be something we won't be able to talk about, I like that.

  Oh, I should shut up.

  A little girl was yelling in the courtyard, calling her mother, who of course didn't hear her or didn't want to, and I envied the little girl, perhaps because she was born here and therefore didn't have to leave, or for her desperate and innocent stubbornness, with which she refused to accept being ignored; her high-pitched shouts became more and more hysterical and nerve-racking, then stopped as suddenly as if somebody had strangled her, and only a bouncing ball could be heard.

  He sat down at his desk and I knew I mustn't look at him anymore, for he was getting ready to speak, and if I looked he might not.

  I picked up my pen and found the last word of my manuscript; it was on page 542, which is where I'd have to continue.

  He hit a few keys; in the silence we decidedly missed the little girl's screams, I had to wait until he typed a few more lines when, just as I'd expected, he began to fill the silence, speaking softly, saying we had two months left, and I couldn't possibly be serious about not going home.

  I kept staring at the image evoked by the two last words on the paper— "empty stage"—and asked him why he was so damn defensive, what was he afraid of? a question that of course couldn't hide the fact that I could not or would not give him a straightforward answer.

  He'll keep in mind what I just said, he continued, as one who'd finally hit upon tangible proof of my true intentions, won't forget it and will try to live with it.

  With malicious pleasure we eyed each other from across the shaft of sunlight separating us; he was smiling triumphantly at having exposed me, and I borrowed some of his smile.

  Then I'll come back, I said, without being in the least sarcastic, because I didn't want to let him off the hook.

  I'd find the apartment empty, then, since I should know by now he had no intention of staying in it.

  Idle fancies, I said, how could he possibly leave this place?

  Maybe he wasn't as much of a coward as I thought he was.

  So he had been making plans for a nice little future, except not with me.

  To be frank, he had been planning something; he was going to vanish before my departure, so I'd have to leave without saying goodbye.

  A wonderful idea, I said—maybe it was his smile, flashing ever more sharply from his eyes with every spoken word, or maybe it was the fear or joy evoked by this smiling emotion bordering on hatred, but I found myself laughing out loud and saying, Congratulations.

  Thanks.

  Grinning, we looked into each other's eyes, distorted by grinning, a look that we couldn't escape, so ugly we couldn't make it worse either.

  It was odd that he didn't seem ugly and distorted to me as much as I did to myself, seeing myself with his eyes.

  There was nothing remarkable about this moment, hour, or day, it was like all the others we'd spent together, except this was the first time we had put into carefully chosen words what we had been looking for ever since that evening when, led there by fate, we wound up sitting next to each other at the opera, although what we felt as so extraordinary that evening kept on presenting and formulating itself always as if for the first time; perhaps one might say that what we were looking for in each other was the ultimate in feeling at home, and every word and gesture seemed to be a form of new discovery in the course of our search, but we couldn't possibly find what we were looking for, because the true home of our longing was the search itself.

  It was as though we were trying to deepen and somehow make permanent an already extreme emotion, a bond which can and does exist between two human beings but with which there is not much more that can be done, and perhaps the reason was, as he once had tried to explain, that we were both men, and the law of the sexes may be stronger than those of individual personalities; at the time I wasn't ready to consider or accept this, if only because I felt the freedom of my individuality was at stake, my selfhood.

  That first moment encompassed all our subsequent moments, which is to say that in all that followed something of that first moment persisted.

  As he stood with his French friend in the dimly lit lobby of the opera house, in the midst of the milling theatergoers on the stairs, I felt I knew him, and knew him from long ago, not just him but everything about him: not just his well-cut suit, his loosely knotted tie, his tiepin, but also his casually dressed friend, and even the relationship that so clearly bound them together, although at the time I had only the vaguest notion of what a love relation between two men might be like; yet the sense of familiarity gave the meeting a quick lightness, an inexplicable closeness we feel only when everything seems so natural that we ask no questions, just let down our guard and don't even know what is happening to us.

  When he slipped out of Thea's embrace, which his friend obviously found too effusive and not at all to his liking, we shook each other's hand, not any differently than any two people would in such circumstances; I told him my name and he told me his, while I heard his friend introducing himself to Frau Kühnert and Thea—in the manner of a tough guy, giving only his double first name, Pierre-Max—repeating it twice in succession; only much later did I find out that his family name was Dulac.

  After that handshake we didn't pay much attention to each other, yet the inner compulsion of our feelings so shaped the situation that while walking up the red-carpeted gleaming white staircase—I was conversing with his friend and he was chatting with Frau Kühnert and Thea—we seemed to be steering each other with our shoulders; though our bodies did not touch, from that moment on they became inseparable, they wanted to stay close to each other, that's how they proceeded up those stairs, our bodies doing their job so assuredly that we didn't have to pay special attention to our closeness, which was neither surprising nor controllable, setting itself immediately on the right course, with aims and possibilities of its own—about which, as it turned out later, only I had certain misgivings—so he was free to go on chatting without having to look at me, and I didn't have to look at him either, because by then I had gained so much confidence from being close to his body and to its fragrance that I could also converse freely with the young Frenchman walking on my left.

  But I wouldn't call this a collusive or complicitous feeling, being much darker and deeper; to use an analogy, I'd say it was as if one was arriving in the present after a quick journey from one's own faraway past, and the present is as improbable and dreamlike as a city that at the moment of arrival one moves about in dazed—no, the meeting had none of the excited cheerfulness and joy peculiar to erotically charged little conspiracies, unless it was the much deeper joy of a long-awaited homecoming.

  Actually, what made the moment special for me, and perhaps that's the reason I remember it so well, was the stir Thea created, being a well-known and celebrated personality who attracted the audience's curiosity, which was extended to us as well in the form of furtive, sidelong glances, everybody being eager to see, to know, in whose company and with what sort of men the famous actress was mak
ing her appearance here, and we, four very different non-celebrities, must have seemed rather unusual, almost scandalous in this formal, overdisciplined setting.

  Thea was onstage here, too, playing the offstage role of famous and notorious actress; and let it be said to her credit that with the most economical means she managed to pretend she noticed none of the eager, respectful, sometimes envious and contemptuous glances, since she devoted all her attention to Melchior—behold, this is the man! she declared by her gesture as she leaned lightly on Melchior's arm, rewarding him with almost the same adoring look she was getting from her admirers, and adjusting her own face—bony, Oriental-looking, no makeup—to look just as pretty as her audiences were used to and always expected to see, of course looking for some protection as she gazed with those narrowed, impishly smiling eyes into his, protection to help her stay incognito—make it so she wouldn't have to look anywhere else! no, she didn't want to mind her steps, she'd go anywhere she was led—though all along she was leading him, in her long, tight black skirt slit to her knees, her dainty spike-heeled shoes, her slightly translucent lead-gray silk blouse, more fragile and vulnerable, altogether more shy and modest-looking than she was in any of her other roles.

  She spoke in a voice deep and warm with feeling, softly but volubly, her hushed tones keeping the content of her words from the earshot of the curious, spoke only with her mouth, while her smile, perfectly disciplined, mimicked flawlessly the artless mimicking of social banter, smuggling into her act some of the tension we'd left behind in the rehearsal hall, thriftily using her unexpended energies to reduce and deflect the elemental joy and passion evoked by Melchior's mere presence, by the proximity of his body, but however sparing her histrionic means, or because they were so masterfully pared down to perfect proportions, no one could ignore her presence; people stopped, turned, followed her with their looks, whispered behind our backs, clandestinely or quite openly stared into her face, jabbed each other, pointed fingers, the women checking out her clothes, ogling her supple walk, the men affecting cold indifference, imagining kneading her breasts gently or wondering what it would be like to feel her slender waist or slap her shapely round behind; in a word, they all had her; while she was walking up the stairs, seemingly fully absorbed in her man, her audience, each in his or her way according to his or her taste, made as though she were their exclusive property, their lover, their younger sister, and we, too, gained attention, becoming in the spectators' eyes professional extras in this little scene of Thea's procession.

  Prompted more by the situation than by genuine curiosity, and feigning ignorance and surprise, I inquired of the lanky, dark, tousled young Frenchman how he happened to be here; we were still walking up the stairs as he leaned over to me with an expression at once friendly, reticent, and condescending, with his surprisingly narrow, flatly cut eyes in which there didn't seem to be much room for the eyeballs to move freely, which is perhaps why his gaze was so rigid and piercing, but what I really wanted to know was what Thea was buzzing so lullingly into the ear of the man whose closeness my shoulder, arm, and side were registering.

  The Frenchman answered in perfectly idiomatic though heavily accented German that he didn't live here, at any rate not in this part of the city, but liked to hop over, and did so frequently; our invitation couldn't have come at a better time, because he'd meant to see this performance, but frankly, he didn't quite understand why I was surprised, why shouldn't he be here? for him this world was not nearly so alien as I might think, on the contrary, he felt more at home here than in the western part of the city, for he was a Marxist and a Communist Party member.

  The cleverly manipulated rhetoric of his reply, the unmistakably antagonistic edge on his assertion, the touchiness with which he discovered in me a possible adversary, his self-righteous tone, his flippantly insolent though hardly lighthearted demeanor, his rigid and provocative stare radiating both narrow prejudices and something attractive, youthful, combative—all this I found so remarkable that I took up the challenge right away, though a heated political debate in these coolly, lifelessly formal surroundings seemed out of place: teased by contradictory impulses, I had a strong urge to laugh: what kind of drivel was he trying to palm off on me? his statements struck me as a pleasantly irreverent joke might, an impression only intensified by the childishly defiant expression on his handsome face and the animated elegance which another culture gave his appearance, which, judged by local standards, was rather slovenly: a thick, soft, slightly threadbare sweater, not quite clean, a fire-engine-red woolen scarf wrapped twice around his neck and tossed over his shoulder, attire that the gathering audience, scrubbed to the required level of festive cleanliness and therefore looking pitiful and lacking style, scrutinized with such shock and disapproval you could almost hear the indignant groans, but I didn't want to offend him, if only because I, too, scrutinized by the same audience, felt obliged to remain collected, and so I smiled politely, somewhat superciliously, and without bothering to take the sting out of my words replied that he must have misunderstood my surprise, since no rebuke or calling to account was intended and I considered it a privilege to meet him, it was just that in this eastern hemisphere during the last six years—and, I emphasized, for at least six years—I hadn't met anyone who'd call himself a Communist and claim careful personal consideration as the reason for being one.

  Just what was I getting at?

  With the superior air of a native I said I wasn't getting at anything, but he could check the arithmetic.

  If I was referring to the spring of '68, he said somewhat less confidently—I, enjoying my advantage, nodded that that's exactly what I'd had in mind—and he stared into my eyes, waited for me to stop nodding, and then continued all the more vehemently, he did not believe that the lesson to be learned from those events was to give up the struggle.

  The ringing, slogan-like phrase issued so innocently from his youthfully soft lips, so engagingly, strongly, and therefore convincingly—Thea was meanwhile vilifying her director to Melchior—despite the implied question of what sort of struggle he was talking about, struggle against whom or what? that I lost the presence of mind for a proper answer, staggered by the humor of the situation, and in the lull, at once comic and serious, I could hear Thea's unceasing chatter—Langerhans would make a splendid ambassador in, say, Albania, or maybe only a good stationmaster somewhere, well, all you had to do was look at him, the way he kept pushing his glasses up and down his pug nose, the way he dug his stubby fingers into his greasy hair, he reminded you of a large sheet of white paper with nice round stamps on it, he could bang away all day with his official-looking stamps, blues and reds and who knows what other colors, but for God's sake he shouldn't be directing! and this was no exaggeration, no joke; Melchior knew the scene, yes, Act III, Scene 2, the one with the privy council, now that scene had become the only one worth watching in the whole production, that awful council session, with six impossible characters sitting around this huge table, he'd had this impossibly long table made especially and picked six of his lousiest actors for this scene, and Melchior could just imagine how much those poor suckers must enjoy doing it, how grateful they were to Langerhans for the opportunity, but that's what made the scene! the way they sat there shuffling their documents and scratching themselves, and stammering, and chewing their nails, Langerhans chewed his nails all the time, too, disgusting!—and these six weren't even eager to go home like everyone else, it made no difference to them, they'd been waiting thirty years for these tiny parts, for thirty years they hadn't understood a thing, and now it was certain they never would, and just try to imagine, but he'll see it for himself, the whole thing was so incredibly, stupefyingly boring you could fall off your chair, and this was the only thing Langerhans could come up with, this boredom, because what a woman was really like or what she could want from a man he hadn't the foggiest, this bloodless theater bureaucrat.

  After a slight hesitation the young Frenchman said he was sure we were thinking ab
out and talking about two entirely different things; he was thinking, naturally, about the Paris of 1968 and I, just as naturally, of the Prague Spring.

  Or if Langerhans did have the foggiest about such matters, it was bound to be common, indecent, gross, she'd tell Melchior a little story about that, a racy little adventure, actually.

  It wasn't the first time he'd encountered this kind of unpleasant, though from a historical perspective quite insignificant skepticism, the Frenchman continued, and he refused to believe that the Russians' clumsy military action could cast any doubt on the incontrovertible truth that this part of the world was the home of socialism, and then he mumbled something irrelevant about ownership of the means of production.

  The thing happened between the two of them—she had to blush about it in retrospect—when they finally reached the point of not knowing what to do with each other, and she decided that she was going to tease the man out of Langerhans, wanting to see what he was like, whatever happened.

  To me, this kind of demagoguery was at least as amusing as my skepticism was unpleasant for him, and I didn't really think, I said, that he'd be talking about "clumsy military action" if a foreign army had crushed the student riots in Paris.

  It was usually mindless aristocrats who referred to revolutions as riots, the Frenchman said.

  Just as it was usually obtuse ideologues who believed that the end justifies the means, I replied.

  We both stopped on the staircase while they continued on, though Melchior, as if I were holding him back with my shoulder, quickly turned around before taking the next step, and I could see that the Frenchman, however irritated, was still enjoying what I not only did not enjoy but found disgracefully painful, ludicrously unnecessary, having let myself be dragged into a conversation like this in which I wasn't even expressing my own opinion or, rather, was mouthing a fraction of my own nonexistent opinion, since I had no whole opinion, since the all-too-thin membrane of self-discipline had been ripped open by the seething of raw, deeply repressed emotions, by my willful blindness, by something that knows only the language of the senses, which we ought to hide rather than show, and consequently I was angrier at myself than at him, while he seemed to feel so comfortable with his impossibly lanky body and impossible views that he didn't even notice these people staring at him so indignantly, so enviously! people among whom he supposedly felt at home but who saw him with his uncombed hair and dirty red scarf as a buffoon, as a living mockery of their lives and miserable ambitions, though the real clown, I knew, was not he but I.