A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  It seems, he said calmly but testily, that we were speaking in entirely different languages.

  It seems that way, doesn't it? I said, but since he felt so at home here, I went on, no longer able or willing to contain my irritation, hadn't it occurred to him that while he could freely come here from the other side of the Wall, we weren't allowed to go over there?

  I said this a little too loudly, and the two women stopped, if only because Melchior's arm slipped out of Thea's hand, and they all turned around, Frau Kühnert's eyes flashing with fright behind her thick glasses—careful, they seemed to be saying, every word can be heard—but I couldn't stop, and though I was mortified I went on, he shouldn't be too surprised, I said to him, if our notions of individual freedom made us speak in different languages.

  But then Melchior, with schoolmasterly authority, stepped between us, shaking a finger at me in mild admonition: I should be careful, he said, his friend spoke with the words of a Robespierre, a Marat, and of course I had no way of knowing that I was talking to a fearless revolutionary.

  Completely frustrated with myself, and with the last breath of my ridiculously envious anger, I said that was precisely the reason I was talking to him.

  You mean you're one, too? Melchior asked, cocking his bushy eyebrows in mock alarm and disbelief, having a little fun at his friend's expense.

  Why, yes, of course I am, I said, grinning up at him out of my anger.

  The common ground we found in the intimately conspiratorial tone of his voice promptly relieved me of my shame, for he well understood my feelings, understood my shame, and knew how to dissolve it, with his understanding drew me to himself, distancing himself from his French friend; because of him I could breathe again.

  But now unexpectedly the Frenchman broke into laughter, silent laughter, maintaining his aloofness, standing apart even as he laughed, his aloofness being meant for Melchior: the two of them were no doubt beyond such debates, beyond the point where they could reach a pact or agreement, which itself may have become a pact, but now, regarding Melchior and me, as if he were brushing away the filth of our cynically supercilious common stance and, with it, the disgust we had evoked in him, he waved his hand, dismissing us, shooing us away, rubbing us out of his space, indicating that we were frivolous and irresponsible, unworthy of further debate.

  And there was something of a heroic pose in his bearing, in the way he threw back his handsome head and at the same time turned it away from us, while our carriage somehow remained servile despite our shared victory.

  And then an old, gray-liveried usher, an apparition from a bygone era, with a look of complete attentiveness fixed on and meant exclusively for Thea, flung open for us the doors of the former royal box.

  From there, from a height of nearly four meters, we could look down at the orchestra level with its curving rows of crimson and white seats, at a sea of pink faces, an animated expanse still stirring, rippling, then suddenly coming to rest; beyond the rigidly classical proscenium arch with its Corinthian columns and gilded capitals we could see the huge open stage: under the cyclorama painted steely gray to suggest the dawning of a dreadful day, grimy towers and jagged fortress walls loomed, enclosing a prison courtyard still sunk in the cheerless night; from here, darkly yawning passageways led to an even grimmer world of subterranean dungeons; farther back, in the vaulted caves of barred cells carved into the massive walls, one could sense the shadowy presence of human forms.

  Nothing moved, yet everything seemed to be alive: there was a sudden gleam, perhaps the weapon of a guard, and the clang and rattle of chains heard over the peaceful uniform murmur of the audience and the bright flourishes of musicians tuning their instruments; and a little later, way upstage, deep in the impenetrable shadow cast by the brooding towers, the pink of a woman's dress seemed to swish by, and a breeze appeared to be carrying the snatches of a melodious offstage command, and indeed there was a breeze, because whenever a stage this size is open, and before the audience's warm breath has had a chance to heat up the vast space thus created, one can always feel a kind of cool breeze blowing from the stage, smelling faintly of glue.

  Inside the empty box we engaged in a silent round of politeness over the seating arrangements; from behind a façade of good behavior and courtesy we were sharply observing one another's complicated intentions, indicated by looks and careful gestures—the task was clear: a hard-fought battle had to be brought to a peaceful conclusion, and it was a matter of no small importance who would wind up where—I would have liked to stay near Melchior, which was his intention, too, but I couldn't separate myself from the Frenchman or he from me, for this would have announced too harshly that we were incompatible not only ideologically but physically, found each other's proximity irritating, unpleasant, even repellent, an emphatic mutual rejection that would have hurt Melchior's feelings, which I didn't want to happen, yet at the same time it was so evident that Pierre-Max and Melchior were a couple and that neither Thea nor I had the courage to come between them, though Thea, who had after all organized this whole theater party because of Melchior, wasn't going to yield her place next to him for anyone, while Frau Kühnert, although seemingly unconcerned for the moment, nevertheless let us know in her diffident and unassuming way that we were all just part of the scenery to her and she wanted nothing to do with us: she was most definitely going to sit next to Thea, no discussion about that, which again put me in an awkward position, because sensing Thea's silent displeasure over my loud, tactless, uncooperative behavior, I'd have liked to end up between her and Melchior so that, without having to give up Melchior, I could also somehow mollify her, but of course this was not viable, since I had no right to separate the two of them.

  There it was before us: five chairs made up the front row of the box, and our task seemed to be to take the gently entangled strands of the various relationships and smooth them out according to the positions of these chairs.

  Of course, in situations like this it's always the rawest impulses that go into action: self-interest sets the true proportions of feelings for others, sets the sounds of raw feelings ringing out under the silly cover of "consideration," and sets the center of those feelings around the dominant victorious persons: from our cautious and polite movements two deliberate signals emerged, two brief phrases with the appropriate gestures to go with them: Come on! Melchior said in French to his friend, who until then had been watching the awkward byplay like a neutral bystander, Yes, please, please, an annoyed Thea said coolly to me.

  And now it was perfectly clear that as much as Melchior might have objected to this meeting, Thea was right, after all, or more precisely, her sixth sense did not fail her when she had insisted on it, for she could insist only on something that Melchior must also have wanted.

  It wasn't out of politeness or thoughtful consideration for Thea that Melchior so quickly and unceremoniously gave up being close to his friend but because he was attracted to her; he had to choose, and in choosing he was guided by the realization that he and Thea were the dominant persons here, the rulers, meant to be at each other's side, belonging together.

  Thea also had designs on me, romantic ones with the intent of possession; we were both constantly aware of the other, but what between us remained only groping and sniffing teetered on the verge of fulfillment between the two of them; their relationship was by no means as one-sided as Frau Kühnert would have liked me to believe, not to mention that the age difference between them was not twenty years, as she would have it, but no more than ten, which made them a strange couple but not a ridiculous one; either way, the moment they made their decision, it became clear that to their ruling duet we provided only a royal escort and nothing could make me forget this, not even the pleasant discovery that in the ceremonial lineup I was assigned a slightly better position than the Frenchman.

  Since I wasn't particularly adept at perceiving the subtler signals sent out by another male, I may have been led astray by Frau Kühnert's emotional revelations, and
those streams of attraction I seemed to have sensed with and in my shoulders may have been not for me at all but emanations of Melchior's feelings for Thea; we were both in the same orbit around her.

  This is how we finally took our places: the Frenchman, now locked in his silence, took the inside seat, I sat down next to him, with Melchior on my right, then came Thea, followed by Frau Kühnert, who, by the way, was the only one to get everything she wanted.

  I was careful not to touch even accidentally Melchior's elbow on the armrest we shared; however, as befits wise rulers, he sensed right away that I was ill at ease in the seat he graciously yielded to me, that depriving the Frenchman of his rightful place gave me no satisfaction, and that I also felt the sting of jealousy on account of Thea; it seemed I laid claim to someone who not only wasn't mine but whom I did not even desire as far as I was consciously aware, yet here I was feeling hurt and jealous, I didn't want to lose her yet I was losing her, she was being snatched from me before my very eyes, and I'd have to compete for her with another man; as if wanting to complicate the already painful situation further, Melchior placed his hand on my knee and, smiling, looked into my eyes for a brief second, during which our shoulders touched, then made a face, withdrew his hand, and, as if nothing had happened, rearranged his smile and quickly turned back to Thea.

  With that smile stirring on his lips he was apologizing to me for the unpleasantness of what had just taken place, and this was only an introduction to a deeper meaning of his smile, for he drew me into his huge blue eyes where the smile opened up even more and conveyed to me that the man he was parading here as his friend, his alibi, his protective shield, so he shouldn't be completely at Thea's mercy, that man meant, well, something to him, but nothing serious, I needn't worry or make much of it, and let's consider it settled between us; in other words, with that smile he betrayed his friend, abandoned him, yet managed to dig into me even more deeply, his grimace clearly implying that I should rest assured, yes, this woman was clever and manipulative, she was crazy about him and he found her irresistible, too, when she was being her foxy self, yes, by puckering her shapely lips she was mocking the situation no less than herself, which made her charmingly supercilious, but no reason to get excited about that, either, since he had no intention of seducing her, and let that be settled between us, too, between two men.

  Neither his gesture nor his expression could remain unnoticed by the people they were meant for; all the same, his unabashed openness and falseness—because more than at any other later time when lulling my own jealousy I would believe him, at this moment I felt his confession was false—his brusqueness, crude interference, and betrayal made a very unfavorable impression, yet strangely I had neither the strength nor the emotional wherewithal to reject his unbecoming and unethical confidence but I sat there numb and rigid, disgusted by my position, pretending to be looking at the stage but in fact glancing to the left and to the right, like a thief, to see how much of this the others might have noticed, yet truth to tell, enjoying the riskiness of our situation.

  My guilty conscience was whispering to me that were I to take seriously his silent communication I'd be stealing him from two people, from someone I didn't know and from someone I'd be deceiving despicably in the process, and my anxiety swelled into alarm—needless, because the Frenchman couldn't have noticed anything, he was leaning forward with his chin on the velvet-covered banister, watching the noisy audience below, and as for Thea, even if she did see Melchior's hand on my knee, she couldn't have found it significant; only Frau Kühnert's look issued a kind of warning: I could go ahead and do what I would, there was no way to escape her watchful eyes, she was there to protect Thea's interests.

  Traces of Melchior's smile and grimace stayed with me while I also leaned forward in my chair, wanting to move away from both of them, and put my elbow on the banister; I didn't want to feel the emotional confusion radiating from the warmth of his body, to think he had addressed me with real words in a real voice; his voice seemed to be lost in some echoing space, swirling in a vast, dark, empty hall.

  The applause first broke out in the upper gallery, then directly above us, and became thunderous when the conductor appeared in the little door leading to the orchestra pit, sweeping over the orchestra seats, reaching all the rows, and just then the lights went out in the huge crystal chandelier hanging from the heavily ornamented domed ceiling.

  His voice was familiar, warm and deep, suggesting strength and self-confidence but also knowing not to take itself seriously, to be playful— not for the purpose of putting on a false front, but to keep a sensible distance—deepening to a good-natured growl; I had no idea where I knew that voice from, and I didn't bother to search my memory or explain why it felt so familiar and close, yet it kept streaming and swirling inside me, ringing, rising, grumbling as if testing its pitch and various ranges within, trying to find its place in the grooves of my brain, looking for the very spot, the nerve cells, the tiny space where its previous utterances were stored, a carefully sealed and, for the moment, inaccessible compartment.

  When I had first arrived in Berlin, about two months before this performance, a room had been rented for me near the Oranienburg Gate, in the first corner house on Chausseestrasse, a tiny sublet on the fifth floor of one of those hopelessly grim, gray, and ancient apartment buildings; of course there was no city gate anywhere near, the name alone remained from an old city map, the name of something that history quite literally swept away, knocked off the table and cast into the fire, and if I say grim and gray, I haven't said much, because in that part of the city, at least in the sections where the ravages of war had not destroyed reminders of things as they once had been, this was how all the houses looked, grim and gray, but not without style, provided we do not limit style to mean conventionally decorative but allow that every human construct carries in itself and absorbs into its image the material and spiritual circumstances of the act of building; that is the style of any structure, that and nothing more.

  And style includes destruction as well—like building, destroying also forms a continual chain in human history, and wartime destruction, in this district at least, was not quite so complete as in others, where nothing remained standing and where between the brand-new buildings only winds of emptiness blew, since here the cracks could be filled, the skeletons of fire-gutted houses could be fleshed out with new walls, enough stones were standing to offer crude shelter and protection from inclement weather, so it made sense to pile new stones on them, enough remained of the pre-destruction foundations, which were familiar, reliable, and therefore most attractive, and though the walls raised on them, patched up and reinforced, could not duplicate the prewar look, the old streets and squares kept their spatial configurations, the city's former layout, its spirit, was somehow carried over, even if nothing but mere traces could be detected of its lively, ostentatious, at once frugal and lavish, frivolous and grave, energetic and voracious style.

  The guts of the old style, the principles of yore, the dead visage of the old order showed through the new style of the façades.

  The intersection of Hannoverstrasse, splendid Friedrichstrasse, Wilhelm Pieck Strasse (formerly Alsatian Strasse), and Chausseestrasse, which once had formed a pretty little square, was now in this sad resurrection more dead than alive, nearly always deserted and lifelessly silent, an empty hull of different times piled one on top of another, with only a streetcar rumbling through now and then, in the middle of which an advertising pillar stood, left over from the old days, its belly ripped out by shrapnel; in the filthy plate-glass shop windows, blinded by dust, you could see the clock on the pillar top reflected; its glass cover long smashed in, it defied time by not showing it, or more precisely, it showed time arrested, since it clung to the half past four of a long-ago day.

  And down below, under the pavement's thin crust, subway cars rumbled past at regular intervals, their clatter heard and felt under our feet, roaring in and out, their rumble dying away in the deep tun
nel, but one couldn't get to these trains, since the stations that had escaped destruction were walled off; in the first few days I didn't know what to make of these unused stations on the little traffic islands along Friedrichstrasse, until Frau Kühnert was kind enough to enlighten me: this particular line, she said, connected western sections of the city and didn't belong to us, that's how she put it, so there was no point looking for them on the new maps, they weren't there; I didn't understand, and Frau Kühnert offered to explain, if I'd be willing to listen: Suppose I lived in West Berlin, I was a westerner, all right? say I got on the train at the Kochstrasse station, the train would pass under here, there was a station right under us; it would slow down, but couldn't stop, and simply pass through this part of the city and wind up in the so-called western sector, where I could get off at the Reinickendorf Station—it was that simple, did I understand better now?

  It's our own city that we truly understand; in a strange city, even with the finest sense of direction and a thorough topographical knowledge of the place, street names and locations like east and west remain abstract, the street names conjuring up no images or the images lacking lived experiences, but I did understand—for that I didn't have to be a native—that something was under the streets that really wasn't, or rather, we had to pretend it wasn't, there, something allowed to live only in memories of the city as it used to be, yet part of the entire city's lifeline even today, which meant that it did exist, but only for those on the other side, who couldn't get out at the heavily guarded walled-up stations, if only because phantom trains have no stations, and in this way these people were at least as nonexistent for us as we were for them.