A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  So we remained silent, not because we didn't have anything to say, but because the indescribable number of things that needed to be said became incommunicable in our shared despair and shame at our hopelessness; only by severing the bonds of mutual understanding could we escape the shame of our common fate and make an effort to forget.

  That living taciturnity became our common future; for her it lay where she was fleeing to, for me here, where I was staying, a not very significant difference; our features were locked into themselves, self-protective and tactfully hiding their own pain, and our eyes, which even in their indifference were caressing and soothing one another, despite their understanding were now forbidden to find the common ground that glances can share; this was going to be our new bond: the will to end it all, even though we were still alive! all this we still had in common, in spite of everything, and we knew we did.

  It wasn't just her, it was impossible for me to tell anything to anybody, I couldn't, and I didn't want to.

  What died in me was the need to talk to others, rotting away along with the bodies of my dead friends, and she was going away.

  The chairs were there, standing around the table in the darkening room, four forlorn chairs around the table, and it occurred to me that I ought to ask her to sit down, as was proper, except that along with those chairs—on which she had never sat, by the way—there also stood between us all those afternoons when she would fly into my room and, without stopping her flow of words, throw herself on my bed and lie there stretched out on her back or stomach.

  I asked her, as if this was the most important of all questions, about Krisztián, what would happen to him now that she was leaving, and we both knew this was only my effort to spare us from dealing with the truly crucial questions.

  A tiny wry smile appeared around her immobile mouth, wise and sardonic; she must have thought my evasion too crude, too sentimental, superfluous, and she said she had taken care of all that, a supercilious smile on her arching lips; they hadn't seen each other for a long time, she continued, shrugging her shoulders, letting me know she would not say goodbye to Krisztián—another thing, I thought, that would remain unfinished and painful; she would write to him from the free world, she said sarcastically, quoting the phrase so familiar from radio programs broadcasting messages from refugees; besides, the thing they had between them was rather childish anyway, though Krisztián was no doubt handsome, and then suddenly, openly, emerging for a moment from behind her cynical look, she flashed her teeth in a harsh, coarse smile and said I could have him! uglier boys now appealed to her more, which meant, she was sorry to say, that I was also out of the running.

  If she hadn't said that, if she hadn't blurted out the words and made them public between the two of us, if with her laughter she hadn't exposed this most profound secret of mine, which I so longed to put out of my mind, if with this exposure she hadn't disgraced the bond that was our past, then she probably would have found it much more difficult to leave the country; today I think I understand this better.

  But then, as we watched each other's defenseless eyes from the dreadful shelter of our stiffening faces, this new shame made the mutually understood yes of the earlier moment turn into a final, irrevocable no.

  Any remaining sense of fellowship would have been too painful; a denied one did not hurt, and could be forgotten.

  Later in life it often happened that in the faces of complete strangers I'd see Hédi's, distorted and ugly, as she was saying goodbye; it would happen in the most mundane circumstances when I'd see around me immobile yet vibrant faces that even in their hostility could arouse deeply intimate emotions, and while I felt that no matter how much I might try to listen, to give myself to them, to trust them, some inner aversion, a paralysis brought on by vestiges of true feelings despite all the denial, would hold me back, a painful numbness somehow familiar from the far past, and over the years my face changed accordingly, as if an additional face had grown to cover over my own—distrustful, incapable of giving, frightened, made aggressive by constant fear for itself, trying to appear too hard to hide what was too soft, saying yes and no at the same time and doing even that reluctantly, with neither affirmation nor denial wanting to get entangled in any kind of fellowship— and it was as if I saw my own distorted face in all those selfish, hesitant, hurt, sly, apparently attentive looks, in those craftily conciliatory faces with their feigned joviality, which could attack or snub you at any moment, eyes quickly avoiding a stranger's glance, trying to avoid the shame of being unable to make real contact; later, when I began to think about these matters, I had the impression that everyone, without exception (though variously influenced by this persuasion or that affiliation), carries in his face the events of the past they would like to forget and make others forget by hiding them behind artificially altered, deliberately cryptic features.

  For this reason I did not think it an accident that after that all-too-quickly forgotten farewell, whose duly deserved pain was denied us, many many long years had to pass, nearly my entire youth, before I could break the mutually agreed-upon silence and for the first time—not counting this written confession, perhaps for the last time, too—begin talking about it, and talk with the same compulsiveness with which I had been keeping it to myself, and talk to a stranger, a foreigner, someone who could have only the vaguest notion about it, and do this in a foreign language, standing in a Berlin streetcar; and there, once I began, it all came up with raw force, like bloody vomit.

  It was Sunday, evening, another autumn, when the warm air was already suffused with a mist you could feel—-it had a taste, and a metallic smell—and the lit-up streetcar clattered along in its leisurely way in the dark city already deserted despite the early hour.

  As was our custom, we were standing in the empty car, because there, under the pretext of holding on to the straps, we could hold hands without attracting attention; we were on our way to the theater, and—I no longer remember how we got on the subject—Melchior began to talk about the 1953 Berlin uprising, when on the morning of June 16, under overcast skies, two zealous Party workers were proceeding unsuspectingly to Block 40 of Stalin Allee, then still under construction and later renamed Karl Marx Allee, to tell a discontented and of course starving group of bricklayers, carpenters, and roofers why raising the work quota was an absolute economic necessity, but somehow that morning the workers did not seem to comprehend what was so clearly comprehensible—of course it was a nasty morning—-and, what's more, demanded that the new quotas be immediately rescinded, and then they chased away the two indignant and angry agitprop men, in fact were close to beating them up, and then about eighty of them began marching in closed ranks toward Alexanderplatz, chanting newly made-up slogans; listen to this one, Melchior said: "We are workers, no more slaves, Berliners to the barricades!"

  The emotions erupting in the crude rhyme of the jingle, which Melchior found prosodically flawless, and his evocation of the little group of workers growing into an unstoppable human tidal wave; the open platform of the autumn streetcar bathed in yellow light; Melchior's palm, having lost some of its loving sensitivity, resting more lightly on my hand—and no wonder: any love dipped into history lightens by an amount equal to the weight of the historical moments it displaces, the streetcar's clanging little jolts, the taste on my tongue of the warm yet sharp evening air, the sardonic curl of Melchior's lips smiling to keep his distance from himself and his story, the conspiratorial emotions tempered by sparks of humor in his eyes, the familiar old slogans that sounded even more ominously factual when spoken in a foreign language—phrases like "agitprop," and "production quota," and "economic interests of the people"—all these things stirred something in me, I don't quite know what.

  I sensed this as I used to feel the excitement and tension of being constantly on the alert: in my feet and in my hands, and also in my face, as if it had freed itself from its old paralysis.

  I was thrust back, moved off dead center, given an unsought, not even consc
iously desired release; in Melchior's narrative the ever-swelling Berlin crowd had not yet reached Alexanderplatz, but my own Hungarian streetcar was already stalled in the midst of a dark throng on Marx Square in Budapest, at the spot where the tracks, screeching softly under the wheels, curve in a gentle arc onto Szent István Boulevard.

  Laborers abandoning their scaffolds, housewives on their shopping rounds, students, street urchins, office workers, shop assistants, ordinary onlookers, loafers, dogs too, probably, the procession caught and swept everybody along, Melchior continued with hushed excitement; having swollen to such an enormous size, the crowd seemed to lose direction and then shouts went up: "To Leipziger Strasse, to Leipziger Strasse!" which suddenly became the common will, the current shifted, and the marchers headed toward the government buildings; then two Party workers appeared in front of them, planted themselves in the middle of the still empty street, and tried pathetically, with their bodies, to hold back the angry human tide, which, by then twelve thousand strong, propelled by its own mass and volition, was spreading calmly: "Bloodshed must be avoided!" yelled one of the Party workers; "Don't go to the Western sector!" shouted the other; and the crowd, as if letting out a collective sigh, came to a momentary halt; "You're not going to shoot at us, are you?"—words heard from the first rows, and "If you cross over, we shall!"; later, people said that only two words, "bloodshed" and "shoot," registered with the crowd and rippled through the square within seconds, and then, with the force of helpless rage they surged forward, because their own words were "bread" and "decent wages" and therefore they had to sweep the Party workers out of the way.

  We were holding on to the railing, hungrily taking in the spectacle from the slowly moving streetcar, and could see only the tops of people's heads, a not only unfamiliar but completely incomprehensible sight; it was warm in the big, poorly lit square, though it wasn't only the unseasonably balmy air that generated the heat but also masses of people jostling, swirling, trampling on bits of newspaper and torn leaflets, coming from all directions in pairs or in packed, endless columns, singly or in groups, shouting slogans, waving flags, walking every which way, giving the impression of being in complete chaos and at cross purposes, yet the various clustering and dispersing groups seemed to hinder no one, but on the contrary, as if unafraid of colliding with or being impeded by anyone, people proceeded confidently, even at a leisurely pace, to their goal, a whole city having poured out of its houses, factories, restaurants, schools, and offices; here and there you could see policemen standing at the edge of the sidewalk, quite far apart from one another, looking listless and indifferent but mostly helpless and superfluous, for they wouldn't have known what to do with the flood of people streaming through the freshly opened cracks and probably didn't intend to do anything, which created the strange impression that contradictory goals and intentions are permissive toward one another because in them (or above them) is a guiding principle more powerful than any single one of them, an invisible force unifying everything, just as all the shouting and singing, all the jubilantly chanted slogans and jingles ferociously belted out, all the tapping, pounding, shuffling of thousands of feet turned into one wild yet cheerful rumble, as light as the fine edge of the warm evening mist, though even in the impersonal, uniform hum of the huge mass, in its evenly rising and falling sounds, one could distinguish isolated participants who did not want to be part of anything, who simply stared from the sidelines, considering it their mission to be mere observers, or those who hadn't decided whether to join in or hurry on silently and unobtrusively with their strictly personal business, laden with packages and shopping bags, fumbling with curious, restless children who had to be dragged out of harm's way.

  With a slight jolt the streetcar came to a stop, the conductor signaled the end of the run by turning off all the lights, and we jumped off; I was there with two of my classmates whom I had very little to do with before (or after) this evening: a tall, strong boy with a beautiful face, István Szentes, who for some reason was always angry and pouting, often hitting out before thinking, and Stark, who kept blinking his sad, deep, dark eyes, and who wanted to be in on everything but was always afraid of retaliation, who seemed to be driven by an unquenchable thirst for experience.

  Listen, fellas, he kept repeating now, I think I'll go home, I guess I'll be going home, he said, and then he stayed with us.

  But this is what made the situation so wonderful, so great, so extraordinary: the moment we jumped off the streetcar we were caught up by the irresistible force of the crowd and joined a group of young workers who were singing "Red Csepel Island, lead the struggle, Váci Road, jump in the fray!" and their "Váci Road" became a full-throated, tuneless roar, as if they were eager to let everyone know, not just the crowd but, via the dark autumn sky, the whole world, that that is where they were coming from: straight from dingy, industrial Váci Road, in fact straight from the showers, with their hair still wet; now that we were in the thick of things, no longer watching from above or outside, there was no question as to where we were going or why, and it wasn't as if we couldn't extricate ourselves from the crowd, for no familiar force kept us there; of all possible routes we chose the crowd's precisely because in those hours its exhilarating sense of liberation left open all possibilities, allowed for everything, and with all possibilities thus open, one is free to choose anything, even what occurs accidentally, at random, the only condition being to keep moving, and by satisfying this most elemental need, the body's natural impulse to move, I associate myself with everyone around me, I am coming with them just as they are coming with me.

  And so it happened that my two classmates, with whom I yielded to the dictates of chance and found myself in this enormous crush, suddenly became very close to me, defined and helped express my own feelings as if discarding all my old inhibitions and resistance, making them useless and laughable, became my friends, lovers, and brothers, as if they, and only they, could make all these other faces familiar, faces that, even without my knowing them, were no longer strange to me.

  It was this peculiar, curiously stirring feeling that Stark put into words: he was scared of something he liked, he wanted to run away from feeling good about being there, so Szentes, to let us know that he, too, was in tune with these feelings, and also to stifle Stark's inevitable second thoughts, grinned broadly and slapped Stark on the back, and though it was a hard slap, all three of us acknowledged it with a burst of laughter.

  In those early evening hours the crowd had not yet swallowed me up, made me disappear within it, trampled me underfoot, or taken away my personality as it did so often afterward, but generously allowed me to experience—in the most elementary condition of my body's life, in the act of movement—my kinship with others, what is common to us all, let me feel that we were part of one another and that, all things considered, everyone is identical with everyone else, and rather than all this making the crowd faceless, as crowds are usually described, I received my own face from the crowd just as I gave it one myself.

  I was neither stupid nor uninformed, knew well where I was and had a good notion of what was happening around me, was so involved that in the next few moments I experienced the movement and emotions of the crowd as something intimate and familial, and thus we were marching and laughing when from the direction of Bajcsy-Zsilinkszky Road the open-hatched turret of a tank appeared, accompanied by the deafening grind and screech of its tracks and the deep rumble of its engine; at first it seemed as if the steel barrel trained on us was being floated above us by the heads in the crowd, though quickly enough bodies pulled aside, cutting a wide path for it; steps slowed down or quickened, and silence prevailed, the ambiguous silence of wary anticipation; yet the tank's approach, like that of a huge wave that might engulf us all, was greeted by a triumphant roar from the crowd, because in the bluish-brown cloud of fumes we saw that unarmed soldiers were standing inside the open turret or sitting around its rim, waving to convey peaceful intentions, and in the overwhelming noise we could
pick out individual words, fragments of sentences stumbling over one another: "brothers," "boys," "the army's with us," "Hungarians"; Szentes was also catching some of the words and roared them back so fiercely it was as if for the first time in his life he could tear out his anger by the roots, as if he had been finally liberated, cleansed; "Don't shoot!" he cried, and just a few steps away we saw the soldiers waving and grinning, I didn't shout and had good reason not to, but grinned back just the same, and around us young workers with wet hair responded with similar grins, blaring in unison at the soldiers: "If you're a Magyar, you're with us!" to which unseen heads replied from a distance: "Petőfi's and Kossuth's people, all together, hand in hand!"

  In those days Marx Square was still laid out with sparkling dark cobblestones, and as the tank changed direction with a cumbersome yet graceful quarter turn, heading for a space between two stranded streetcars in the middle of the square, the stones threw off sparks under the grating tracks; there was an earsplitting crunch, and then silence, though this time it was the silence of excited anticipation, as when on a soccer field everyone's favorite center forward manages to pull out of a hopeless situation and let loose with a powerful kick, the crowd was holding its breath of collective excitement, for it was unclear whether the space between the two streetcars was big enough for the tank; eyes were involuntarily measuring the gap, both dreading and wishing for the possible clash of the two masses of metal, as if they sensed what was still to come that evening and would surely happen—the inevitable—but as the delicate operation was accomplished successfully, the silence turned into an even more jubilant victory cry, a release of primal joy, and now I found no reason to withhold my own shouts; the tank clattered off toward Váci Road.