A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  I said I understood almost everything, but why did the trains have to slow down at these nonexistent or, rather, existing stations? why the guards? what sort of guards were these, anyway, from here or from there? and since these stations were sealed off, what were they guarding, and how did they get out at the end of their shift? yes, I did understand, more or less, only I found it less than logical, or the logic of it escaped me.

  If I continued to use this sarcastic tone, Frau Kühnert said with a native's offended pride, she wouldn't answer any questions in the future, and that finally shut me up.

  And somehow this was also the style of that fifth-floor apartment on Chausseestrasse: as you walked through its ornately carved massive brown doors into the entrance hall the size of a reception room, you could smell the aroma of that same style; the entrance hall was completely empty now, and the darkened parquet floor, its worn-out strips replaced with ordinary plywood, creaked at every step, yet you could easily imagine a lighter, finer creak, muffled by rich Oriental carpets, while under the bright light of chandeliers a buxom chambermaid hastened to the door to let in elegantly attired ladies and gentlemen; plain-floored, winding passageways connecting the kitchen, the servants' quarters, the pantry and lavatory led to the masters' living space—five spacious interconnecting rooms whose elegantly arched windows now looked out on one of those cheerless new façades; I was put up in what used to be the maid's room.

  From my window I could see only a dividing wall blackened with soot, so close it kept my room almost completely dark even during the day, and my accommodations could be described as extremely modest: an iron bedstead, a creaking wardrobe, the usual table covered with a stained tablecloth, a chair, and on the wall at least twenty neatly framed diplomas that for some reason had ended up in this room.

  If, reclining peacefully on my bed, I stared out the window long enough and let my imagination go, on the map of that black wall I could follow the path of huge flames as they must have swooped down from the burning roof, accompanied by thunderous sounds of crackling, crashing, crumbling, could almost feel the wind, or windstorm, of that day as it was stirred by the fire, the enormous conflagration that left these traces for posterity, for me: protruding, peaked stains, colored by soot, where darting tongues of flame had licked the wall, which survived it all and remained intact.

  I tried to consider this tiny room temporary in every respect, and to spend in it as little time as possible; and if it happened that I had nothing else to do, I undressed, climbed into the tub-like bed, plugged up one ear, and stuck the earphone of my small transistor radio into the other so I wouldn't have to hear the noises of people in the other rooms; four small children lived in the apartment, along with their grandfather, their invalid grandmother, their father, who'd come home drunk almost every night, and their pale-complexioned mother, who seemed heartrendingly young next to them, whose fragility, harried look, warmly expressive brown eyes, and feverish energy reminded me a little of Thea, or rather the other way around; it was as if Thea were telling me, in one of her older roles, who she would really be if, just once, she could give a full account of herself.

  So I ended up listening to radio programs I never intended to tune in to, didn't really listen to them, but stared out the window, and I can't even say that I thought of anything in particular, simply let my body lie suspended in a rootless, transient state, not wanting it to have memories of its own.

  And then slowly, gradually, approaching from afar, a man's voice penetrated my consciousness, still fighting off memories, a deep voice, pleasantly soft, smiling or laughing, which is to say that as the man spoke I could almost sense, almost see, the imperturbable good cheer ruling this unknown face, and after a short while I caught myself listening, not so much to what he said as to how he said it, and wondering who he might be.

  He was interviewing a prewar chanteuse, a real old-timer, chatting with her lightly and amiably, as if they were sitting over a cup of coffee and not in front of a microphone, which the old lady had probably forgotten was there, because she kept giggling and gabbing away at phenomenal speed, at times actually cooing as if to a baby, which made their intimate tête-à-tête almost visible; and it wasn't just superficial chatter either, for they interspersed their conversation with old recordings, and the man seemed to know all there was to know about the songs, the circumstances of their recordings, the period that had become so fragmented and became the past, the real subject of their conversation, the vibrant and captivating, frivolous and cruel metropolis whose life was now being evoked by the old woman's girlish giggling and cooing; the man knew everything but never flaunted this, on the contrary, cheerfully letting himself be corrected, friendly little humming and growling sounds indicating his assent, or openly admitting his mistakes, though with certain intonations holding out the possibility that it might be the elderly lady whose memory was somewhat erratic, but again, there was nothing offensive about this, because his gentle, filial affection and scholarly dedication simply embraced and beguiled her; when the show was over and I learned he'd be back again next week, I felt as if all my physical and intellectual needs had been satisfied; I pulled the earphone out of my ear and quickly turned the radio off.

  The following week at the same time he did come on again, but to my great surprise he didn't talk at all; in this program famous opera singers sang popular songs, he played vintage recordings of Lotte Lehmann, Chaliapin, and Richard Tauber, and all he did was announce names, nothing more; in spite of my disappointment, this made me happy, for he was modest and became talkative only when making his guests talk, I was hoping he wouldn't spoil the first impression, I wanted him to be consistent.

  And he was, but I never heard him again, forgot all about him; one evening I went out to the kitchen, probably to get a drink of water, and the young woman of the house was there, peeling onions—she, too, was away during the day, I seem to remember her saying that she worked in an asbestos factory, and because she had small children she always got the day shift and did her cooking in the evening—so I sat down next to her and we talked quietly, which meant that I was talking and she hesitantly responding, thrusting each word reluctantly out of her mouth, while she went on peeling onions; I went as far as to risk the question whether she'd mind if I took down all those diplomas, just temporarily, while I was using the room.

  The knife stopped in her hand, she glanced at me with her warm brown eyes, and for this brief silent moment her face remained so soft and calm that I returned her glance without any suspicion; I enjoyed looking at her, she was beautiful; the only thing I found odd and not quite comprehensible was the way she pulled up her narrow shoulders, as a cat does with its back when getting ready to purr, and at the same time lowered her hand, with the knife in it, into the bowl of water in front of her; she seemed about to break down and cry, or as if her whole body might begin to convulse, but instead, with her eyes closed, she started screaming at the top of her voice directly into my still unsuspecting face, using words that were strangely literary, stilted, complicated, and, for me at the time, mostly incomprehensible, hurling at me all the hurt that people like myself caused her: Who do these people think they are that they can just come here and do as they damn please and push us around, these filthy foreigners, these shitty little Vietnamese and rotten niggers, that she should have to work even on her Communist Sunday off! they don't care, they've got the nerve to come here, they've got the gall, and expect her to clean up their shit! and now they won't even let her be in her own apartment, not for a moment, they stick their tongues into everything, stink up her pots and pans, just what the hell do they think, who are they anyway, and who are we to them? she'd had enough of not knowing where the hell these people came from, not that she cared, she couldn't care less, but they wouldn't even learn that when they shit into the toilet bowl, the fucking brush is there for a reason, to scrub off the shit coming out of their foreign asses.

  As soon as she mentioned the Vietnamese and the blacks, I stood up
and because I really did want to help her, I would have liked to put my hand on her trembling shoulder in an attempt to calm her, but the mere possibility of physical contact made her body recoil violently, her screaming climbed higher and higher into shrill squeals, and she began groping so frantically for the knife floating in the bowl among the cut-up vegetables that I thought I'd better pull my hand back, and fast; having completely lost my linguistic presence of mind—the words wanted to slip out in my native tongue, and I was literally snatching them back with my tongue—I stuttered, and mumbled that she shouldn't get excited, if she liked I'd move out at once, but my quiet words only added oil to the flames, she kept on screeching, the pitch climbing ever higher; I left the kitchen, she followed me with the knife, and screamed her last words into the blackness of the cavernous hallway.

  Inundated by waves of applause, the conductor finally took his place, looked to the right, looked to the left, arched his back, and, as if getting ready to swim, raised his arms into the light beams over the music stands; silence fell on the theater, a warmly expectant silence; onstage cold dawn was approaching.

  Leaning very close to the Frenchman, I whispered into his ear: As you can see, we are in prison; in the soft dimness his face remained motionless.

  I did catch his surprise, lasting only a split second, before the thunder of the overture's first chords seemed to beat back the surging waves of applause, pound them into us, shatter everything showily theatrical, sweep it all away, silence it, shut it out; the four crashing chords, as the earth split open, seemed to make all our strivings petty and laughable; and then, following a consummate silence, the breath caught at the sight of horror in the gaping abyss was released through the mouth of a clarinet in a soaring melody of longing that began in the depths and rose tenderly, lovingly, yearning for grace, was taken over by gentle bassoons and imploring oboes, still rose, seeking freedom; and though the sigh is thrown back by the craggy walls of the abyss, like a furious thunder, the sigh itself swells, gathers strength, now flows like a river, fills the holes and cracks of evil fate, the whole abyss; but roar and rage as it may, sweep away crags and stones, it is helpless, its strength is that of a mere brook against the powerful force that allowed it to swell, the one that rules it, the one that it can never overcome—until that bugle call; from somewhere, from above, from far away, from outside, the familiar, long-awaited yet unexpected, unhoped-for bugle call is sounded: triumphant redemption itself, the simplest, ludicrously symbolic redeemer, the sound of freedom in which the body can strip itself, as it does with bothersome clothes when making love, down to its bare soul.

  When the overture ended I finally felt free to move; until then it would have seemed improper, but now the Frenchman and I leaned back in our chairs at almost the same time; he grinned at me, pleased; we both approved of what we'd just heard, and with this joint approval peace was restored between us; a thin strip of light fell through the openings of the fortress wall—morning—a thin strip of stage sun lit up the prison yard.

  Later that Sunday morning we didn't have much to say to each other: Melchior was ashamed of his grin, his little acts of cruelty, and we exchanged a few words when we set the table for lunch, but we ate quietly, studiously avoiding each other's eyes.

  We hadn't yet finished our meal, there was still a bit of cauliflower, some mashed potato, and a piece of meat on his plate when the phone rang, and looking annoyed and mumbling under his breath, he dropped his knife and fork, though there was just enough curious anticipation in his quick response, the way he reached back for the phone, pretending to be irritated, to make clear that his grumbling and annoyance were meant for me; he was apologizing to me in advance.

  Still, in all fairness, he didn't like it when our meals were interrupted, because eating together was first of all not the taking of necessary nourishment but the performance of a ritual that gave significance to the time we spent together and dignity to our relationship.

  I never asked him, or myself, how he ate when I wasn't there, but I don't imagine it was very different; most likely he set the table with the same meticulous care, but probably without making such a point of it, or being so demonstrative, a conclusion I came to after our weekend visits to his mother, in his native town, when during those meals among the old furniture of the dining room, I could sense from each gesture, from the tidiness of the table setting and the manner in which food was served, the several-centuries-old Protestant eating habits—frugal, giving each bite its due—that were second nature with them, a tradition that Melchior not only continued but in my presence deliberately exaggerated with his discriminating fastidiousness; but that Sunday, as we ate in silence, I could observe his movements for the first time, the rhythms of his chewing and swallowing, as if through a keyhole, because we were trying so hard to retreat into and isolate ourselves, not disturb the other with our presence, that we were each in separate and complete solitude, and then it became clear to me that his systematic and elaborate ways, his exaggerated decorum and solemnity, which extended to every meal, indeed to every so-called routine activity, were not so much signs of some affectation whose origin and nature I could not fathom and therefore tended to misunderstand as something meant for me, more precisely for us—the exaggeration being there for extra emphasis, that with his ceremoniousness he was marking the time we spent together, measuring and consecrating it, that with every move he made he was gauging our time, counting back from a terminal point that could be ascertained and calculated to the day, down to the hour; and he wanted to celebrate each moment, make it as festive and as aesthetically pleasing as possible, so that when it was all over between us, in a time beyond the terminal point, each moment could become an easy-to-recall, tangible, usable memory.

  A candle was burning in an antique silver candlestick, which he put on the table not only because of its beauty and festive look but to avoid having matches or a lighter on the white damask tablecloth for our afterdinner cigarettes; no mundane object should profane the artificially created flawlessness that meant to shut out this world he felt to be alien and despicable; he put flowers on the table, and we pulled our damask napkins from monogrammed silver napkin rings, he would allow no ordinary wine bottle on the table, and though it was not necessarily good for the wine, before the meal he transferred it into a decorative crystal flask; yet there was nothing stiffly formal about our meals, as one might expect as a consequence of this meticulousness; he ate with gusto, chewing each bite carefully and helping himself to huge portions, and if I left something on my plate he'd polish that off, too, down to the last crumb; and without ever becoming drunk or even tipsy, he guzzled his wine from a tall glass.

  It was Pierre on the phone, and after swallowing my last bit of food and looking for an excuse to leave the room so as not to disturb them, I began collecting the dishes; they were talking in French, which had an electrifying effect on Melchior having nothing to do with Pierre's person; I won't deny the possible influence of my jealousy, but at such moments he looked to me a changed man, became eager and ambitious, gave up his natural attractiveness for an acquired casualness, turned into a kind of model student who in hopes of the teacher's praises is willing to sing a whole octave higher than his own range, and while the whole class is in stitches even holds his neck differently so he can pronounce each word properly, pursed his lips, pushed the words out, not so much pronouncing as thrusting them out, kneading them, motivated by the desire to sound as perfect as he can while speaking a foreign language and by the need to find another potential self that only flawless pronunciation and phrasing could coax out of him; seeing him like this made me feel a bit ashamed for him, but also reminded me of similar behavior of my own; he leaned back comfortably, settling in for a long chat, motioned to me to leave his plate on the table and not to take away his glass either.

  In the kitchen I arranged the dirty dishes on the table next to the sink but didn't wash them—I wasn't so permissive or magnanimous as to leave them completely to themselves—I
could have gone to the bedroom, but didn't, and when I went back, they were still chatting, or more precisely, Pierre was talking for what seemed like a long time, with Melchior listening and smiling and absentmindedly picking crumbs off his plate and licking his fingers.

  I opened the window and leaned out, not wanting to understand even the few French words I did catch, but letting him know I was there.

  In this game, this ambitious linguistic game of his, in which he tried to raise part of his personality and shift it into a different identity, there was a subtle message for me, but after our conversation earlier that morning, my ears registered its subtleties in a new way.

  The more he succeeded in adopting the cadences of the foreign language and losing the intonations and accents of his own, which had eaten themselves into his face, his lips, his throat, his posture, the further he moved from the ease with which one speaks in one's native tongue, which was natural, because one never speaks in perfect sentences or with flawless diction in one's own language but chatters away freely, obeying some strong inner purpose and personal sense of equilibrium, the perfection expressed being rather the innate one of a linguistic community, its infinitely broad yet inviolable consensus; in one's own language even a clumsy sentence includes the extremes of total abandon and strict constraint, freedom within the commonly accepted bondage, and in this sense there's no mistake or false intonation, can be no linguistic error, for every mistake or lapse or false turn is an allusion to something real, a mistake, a falseness; but with him it was different: the more imperfect and unnatural he became in this strange, mimicking perfection, the more perfectly he acted out the message that I, who knew him only in his native tongue and in the gestures and demeanor that were part of it, didn't really know him at all, that he was not to be identified with himself, because here he was, I could see for myself, capable at any moment of this kind of metamorphosis, and I shouldn't trust the person I thought I knew, he was two different persons with two different languages, who could choose at will between the two, so try as I might to pin down his emotions, or blackmail him with myself, and especially with Thea, it wouldn't work, a part of his soul would always be free, off limits to me, in a whole different world, a secret realm I couldn't even glimpse, there was no use being jealous, because if he didn't love this particular Frenchman, he must love the Frenchman within himself who was his real father and in whose language his own soul could and wanted to speak; I might look upon his life as a distant accident of history, but I was too dense to understand anything, didn't understand that this fatal physical and spiritual split was his real story, that over the German father he had to choose the French father killed by the Germans, his soul over his body, his body over his mother tongue, not only because that man was his real father—who could possibly care about the sperm of an unknown man!—but because the justice of the story demanded it, he had to reject the German father whom he hadn't had a chance to know either, whom he loved, whose picture he would stare at for hours, whose name he carried, and who in a trench or in some snow-covered field had frozen to death.