A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  The same summer I got a letter from János Hamar, a very friendly letter mailed from Montevideo; he wrote that if ever I needed anything I should let him know, I should write to him, he'd like to see me as his guest, but I could stay with him permanently if I liked; he was posted there as a diplomat and had a pleasant, easy life; he was staying for another two years and would gladly go on a long trip with me; I should answer him at once for he, too, was all alone and didn't really want anyone anymore; but the letter arrived much too late.

  I continued to believe that everyone who was still alive would eventually return, slip back quietly, cautiously, but I never saw any of them again.

  When years later I came across the little teddy bear, I looked at it; it hurt too much; I threw it away.

  In Which He Tells Thea All about Melchior's Confession

  On our evening or nighttime walks, on whichever of our usual routes we chose, our matching footsteps always resounded like a strange hostile beat in the darkness of the deserted streets, and our conversations or silences were never so all-absorbing that we could free ourselves of the constant, rhythmic beat even for an instant.

  It was as if the city's houses, these sore sights, these war-ravaged façades, had kept close track of our harmless footsteps, but when they echoed them they echoed only what was hollow and soulless in us, and if up there, in that box of an apartment under the eaves, we'd chat freely, then down here on the street, where we had to bridge the gap between the bleak surroundings and the intimacy of our emotions, our conversations tended to become heavy, took on a tone of responsibility that is usually referred to as cool frankness.

  Up there we hardly ever talked about Thea; down here we did so often.

  Prompted by my emotional duplicity, I manipulated these conversations so that I'd never be the first to mention her name, always approaching the subject carefully, circling cautiously around it; when her name had already been mentioned and Melchior was talking about her but got stuck because he became frightened by his own unexpected association of ideas, or recoiled from his too passionate statements about her, then with sly and calculating questions, interjections, and comments, I'd helped us stay on the trail that led back to his murky past, to continue our progress in that foggy landscape from which he tried so adroitly, with all his intellectual resourcefulness, to isolate himself, even at the cost of causing serious emotional harm to himself.

  But on my afternoon or early evening walks with Thea, I had to resort to tactics that were exactly the opposite of those I used with Melchior, because roaming the flat, windswept countryside around the city or sitting on the shore of a good-sized lake or on the banks of a canal running off into the horizon, watching the surface of the water or just staring into space, the very spaciousness of the landscape ensured a free intimacy of expression, a clear separation as well as mutual interdependence of sentiment and passion, for nature is not a stage set, is slightly surreal for eyes used to struggling with unreal surroundings, and does not tolerate petty little human comedies with exclusively urban settings; as I continually diverted and sidetracked Thea, my covert intention was to maintain her feelings for Melchior in a state of tension and at the same time prevent her from being honest with me—that is, talking to me about him openly.

  I found this arrangement just right for achieving my secret goal.

  But we talked about him even when we didn't, and I experienced the suppressed excitement a criminal must feel when getting ready for action, just listening, watching, stalking the scene of his intended crime, convinced he need not do anything, need not interfere in the order of nature, it's enough to have discovered how the system works that has created the prevailing situation; his prey will fall into his lap as a gift from the situation itself; and with both of them I did nothing but continually and consistently maintain this kind of situation with my suggestions and insinuations.

  Drop by drop I infused in Thea the seemingly improbable hope that despite all appearances Melchior was within her reach; in Melchior, with the subtlest of means, I tried to eliminate the blocks that stood in the way of his dormant yet sometimes powerful and aggressive sensual impulses; oddly enough, though understandably, Thea never became truly jealous of me, for in her eyes, indeed in her entire emotional system, she saw me as the only physical, bodily proof of her hope for Melchior, which, however vague, was impossible to abandon; and Melchior was intellectually dazed by the possibility that through me he could get to know something he hadn't known before; what's more, he knew I couldn't be completely his until he possessed this other thing as well.

  Lovers walk around wearing each other's body, and they wear and radiate into the world their common physicality, which is in no way the mathematical sum of their two bodies but something more, something different, something barely definable, both a quantity and a quality, for the two bodies contract into one but cannot be reduced to one; this quantitative surplus and qualitative uniqueness cannot be defined in terms of, say, the bodies' mingled scents, which is only the most easily noticeable and superficial manifestation of the separate bodies' commonality that extends to all life functions; true, the common scent eats itself into their clothes, hair, and skin, and whoever comes into contact with the lovers will enter the sphere of this new physicality, and if the outsider has a sensitive and impartial enough nose not only will he come under the magic spell of the lovers—put more simply, under their influence—not only will he receive a part of their love, but it's also possible that once inside the lovers' private bubble and led by his own olfactory sensations he will become aware of meaningful borrowings, transferences, and displacements in the gestures, facial expressions, and intonations that are the peculiar physical manifestation of the lovers' emotional union.

  The place between Thea and Melchior that I was unable to occupy on our first night together at the opera did in fact become mine later on; all I had to do was let Thea enter a little way into this private bubble of ours and from then on the two of them could communicate with each other with my body as conductor, because without being aware of it I took Melchior with me on my afternoon walks with Thea, and if she took part of me for herself, as she had to if she wanted to maintain her emotional balance, then she took a part of Melchior as well, and this was the same in the other direction, too: if Thea gave me something of herself, then Melchior had to sense the lack or surplus thus created, and he did: when I returned to him from my walks with Thea, he would sniff around me like a dog, making scenes of jealousy that I couldn't lighten with horseplay and joking; we had to restore the upset balance and put things back into their right proportions between us, which of course again meant touching Thea somehow.

  I never found out what happened between them at the opera, the answers they gave later to my questions were evasive, letting me understand that they both thought their encounter a shameful defeat, but I realized that every defeat was a prelude to a new offensive, so if I wanted to help along the disintegration of their relationship—and I did, believing it was the only chance to ensure decent conditions for Melchior and me to survive—then I had to make sure I understood the situation precisely.

  I cannot explain my motives for an honorable retreat in any other way except to say that I was utterly lost in this relationship, both terrified and exhilarated by the knowledge that I, a man, an individual with a specific psychic and sexual makeup, was now intimate with another not of the opposite but of the same sex; and inasmuch as this was so, as it was possible to be so, if in spite of all prohibitions we were allowed to have this relationship, then it must make sense, it must! the idea of love's indivisibility filled me with such excitement that I felt I was reinventing the laws of nature or discovering a deep secret; for if this really was so, then I was really me, I thought triumphantly, a man, a complete being, an indivisible whole, my sex being only one aspect of this whole, and did it follow, then, that this whole could remain whole only in love? and could the ultimate meaning of love be one indivisible whole clinging to another indivisib
le whole? and should my connection to another be the choice only of my irreducible self, whether I chose someone of my own or of the opposite sex? but however comfortingly my questions were leading me on, I still had to contend with the painful realization that though I might have chosen one who was like me, he was not me but someone else, though the same sex as I, still not me; thus the pleasure and revenge of direct contact with sameness hit home forcefully, making clear that even in one of my own sex I could not make my own the otherness of another man, a bitter realization that so intensified the hopelessness and futility of my whole life, my past, and all my strivings that, yielding to the part of myself that yearned for stability rather than confrontation, I decided I'd better run away from the place, go home, and in this case home meant something old, dull, familiar, and safe, everything that home means when one is abroad.

  I wanted to go home, and he knew it; I didn't explain or give reasons, and he didn't ask for any; with the immeasurable superiority of his pain, he let me go, but as if to beat me to my departure, he also wanted to leave, to return to his barely abandoned despair, to escape; I wanted to get back to the safety of my homeland, he to the uncertainties of his desires; and this was as if with a parallel change of locales—which, being parallel, would not allow us to tear ourselves away from one another— we had wanted to take revenge on each other for our own personal stories, and to besmirch each other with the considerable amount of grimy history that met and clashed in us, except that this was no longer a game, a harmless lovers' quarrel; escaping from this place could have dangerous, life-threatening consequences, a prison term at the very least, in those years only a very small percentage of escape attempts ended in success; we didn't talk about this either, Melchior being very mysterious about it, also tense and irritable; he must have been waiting for a sign or message from the other side, and certain indications led me to believe that it was Melchior's French friend, that self-proclaimed Communist, who was making the arrangements for his escape.

  Trusting in Melchior and Thea's mutual attraction, especially in Thea's subtle forcefulness, I figured that if I wanted to hasten the disintegration of their relationship that would enable Melchior to forget his senseless escape plan, which for me was rather unpleasant, since I could not morally support it, then I ought to stay as neutral as a catalyst involved in a chemical process that, having no valence of its own, can never be part of the new compound and falls away.

  Needless to say, my scheme violated their privacy, in a sense was a sort of emotional crime, but since it seemed workable—its feasibility was clear to all of us at our very first meeting—I went on with my schemes and plots, assuaging my guilty conscience by telling myself that it was they who wanted it, I was only helping them; success would prove that I wanted only what was good for them; this was my way of saying to myself that I wanted not only to remain honest but to win.

  Of course I couldn't be sure the plan would work, and I had to keep going back, all too frequently, to our first meeting, and review every moment, every tiny detail of that evening; and the more often I replayed it in my mind, the more it seemed that in the cold, distant space of the stage, in the bodies of singers moved by the music streaming from the orchestra pit, a wild, emotional chaos arose that was closely analogous to the one overwhelming us as we sat in the plush box.

  Without formulating a single thought, then, the events sensed with my shoulders, seen with my eyes, and heard with my ears, occurred in duplicate, becoming their own metaphors, and they affected me in a way I can describe as nothing less than an emotional earthquake; later I could not escape the memory of this profound effect, even if I hadn't intended to exploit it for my own purposes; today I'd say that the smooth, hard ground of my emotions, packed firm in the thirty years of my life, moved under my feet, the magma of instincts was jolted, edifices erected with the stones of mastery and knowledge and self-protecting morality began to crumble during the heartbreaking overture; entire streets of allegedly omnipotent experience suddenly shifted, and almost as if to prove that emotions also had material substance, in the throes of struggling with contradictory emotions arising from a familiar unfamiliarity, I began to sweat so profusely I might as well have been chopping wood, yet I was sitting motionless; as often happens, I pretended I was being carried away by the music, but that did not help either, for like any obvious lie, it made my body, used to self-discipline and self-denial, swim in sweat.

  It would seem that by the age of thirty one achieves a certain deceptive security; it was this security that began to fall apart that evening; but the moment before the collapse, all my edifices held their original forms, although not at their usual places; nothing remained at its original location, and therefore these forms, symbolizing their own emptiness, were unaware of the tectonic forces they were now exposed to; my feelings and thoughts were in their old, cracked forms, squeezed between old borders, wandering on worn paths, and simultaneously were the empty symbols of these very forms; in this landslide I was given a moment of grace: in a single bright flash before the moment of collapse I caught a glimpse of life's, or my own life's, most elementary principles.

  No, I did not take leave of my senses, not then and not now as I grope for a string of metaphors to help me approach my feelings at that moment; I sensed quite clearly that what for me was a real prison, the prison of my senses and ideas, for the Frenchman on my left was merely a stage set smelling of greasepaint; after all, the only thing that was going on was that in that stage prison uncouth Jacquino was pursuing charming Marcellina, who had no use for his bumbling masculine charms because she pined for Fidelio, and this apparently kind and gentle young man—who was really a woman in disguise, working hard to free her beloved husband, Florestan, languishing in an underground dungeon—without too much thought, though with rueful sadness, Fidelio put up with Marcellina's misplaced affection so as to attain her politically and personally commendable goal, thus perpetrating the most outrageous or hilarious fraud of all: pretending to be a boy while she was a girl, which of course proves nothing except that the end justifies the means, since everybody loved or would love to love somebody else, but somehow managed to find their true loves, so we could suspend our moral considerations; in the meantime, my shoulder could not and did not want to break free of feeling the shoulder of the man on my right, whose indecent proximity surprised, humiliated, and frightened me no less than his turning away did, offending my vanity; and though I knew that this turning away was temporary, a transparent love ploy, and that he was using Thea as shamelessly as Fidelio in her male disguise was using charming Marcellina's not altogether pristine sentiments, for she should have noticed that that was no man in those clothes! Melchior, with his convenient bisexual approach, exploited and turned to his own advantage what in all this ambiguity was quite real, Thea's real feelings; by withdrawing attention from me, he was actually calling attention to our closeness, which he could do convincingly only by really turning away, by displaying real or potentially real feelings for Thea, giving her what he took from me; and this was just what was happening onstage, where Fidelio had to become a real man, a perfect prison guard, and pretend to seduce Marcellina, in order to be able to free her true love from captivity.

  I felt, then, that Melchior was showing Thea something surprising and genuine in himself that had been hidden even from himself, and because I sensed his emotional turmoil, his boyish helplessness, I felt what Thea must have felt, and as she responded to his advances the only way one could in such circumstances, with sighs, altered breathing, glances, I felt that what was going on between them was something of complete mutuality.

  In my intricate jealousy I didn't want Melchior, feared him, found his closeness intrusive, or, I should say, I didn't want only him, for I felt that my own desire, mediated by his body, was taking me toward Thea; it would be fair to say that I yielded to Melchior's approach to the extent that it allowed me to approach Thea.

  This went on for the entire length of the performance: the close
r Thea got to Melchior, the closer I got to her and the more and more palpably I felt his physical presence; I kept feeling I should put my hand on his knee, which surprised me, since as far as I knew it had never in my adult life occurred to me that I could put my hand on a man's knee and have the gesture suggest anything other than harmless friendship, yet I had this almost uncontrollable urge to touch him, and thought of this not only as a seductive gesture, a single gesture with a double purpose, to let him know that his advances were being returned, but also, at the moment more important, as a move with which to draw him away from Thea so that I could regain her for myself.

  If then and there I'd thought of anything at all, I'd have thought of my adolescence; of course a great many thoughts crossed my mind, but not that; even if I hadn't thought of my own younger years, I might have reflected in general on the experiences accumulated during adolescence, which one hastens to forget, after one's harrowing initiation into adulthood with its fierce pains and hard-won pleasures.

  I should have recalled that in the dreadful needs of adolescence the only way to escape the paralyzing and frustrating sensual urges; gropings, ignorance, is to choose the communally prepared, sanctioned, and delimiting forms of sexual behavior that, though not coinciding with our own preferences—by definition, predefined practices limit our personal freedom and at that age we find them excessive, burdensome, and morally unacceptable—help us within limits to find an optimal middle ground, ways of loving that enable us, by keeping to accepted sexual roles, to fulfill ourselves in another individual who also is undergoing similar crises in self-control; in return for the loss of our real needs and wants, we offer each other the almost personal, almost physical intensity of a passable sex life, and not even the gulf that opens up moments after physical fulfillment, not even the terrible void of impersonality seems unbridgeable, for the most impersonal union may produce something very personal and organic—a child, and there's nothing more real, organic, or complete than that; a child for us, we say to ourselves, out of the two of us, like and unlike us, to compensate us for all our barrenness until now, a child is duty and care, a source of sadness and joy and concern, all of it real, tangible, instead of motiveless anxiety it brings us purpose and meaning.