A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  I was wrong, I thought, almost out loud, one could want another person only through that person's sex, except this was not to be, since everyone was more than his or her own sex, or maybe one never really wanted that other person; I was either wrong or crazy.

  Of course, there was nothing to stop me from answering her, from explaining in simple terms what she wanted to know; but then I would have had to describe this relationship, unique and involving my whole being, in purely sexual terms, and that would have been a lie, an act of self-deception, a betrayal.

  Let's go, I said out loud.

  She said it was still early; she wanted to walk some more.

  I could think of nothing except that I was wrong, and in the end things were very simple and she was the one who was right, because she felt the simplicity of things with her body, which I apparently couldn't feel; if she wanted to make soup she'd buy vegetables, meat, and seasonings, she'd put water in a pot which she'd set on the stove, light the stove, yes, that's how obvious it all must have been to everyone else but me; but then I must be wrong or insane.

  And because I couldn't tell her any of this, I simply turned around, ready to walk back.

  I would have started back, but like one just waking up and not knowing where he is, I found no path under my feet, because I had reached the end of a notion, or delusion; it was as though I had no idea what all this was, how and why we had ended up here, who this woman was, or perhaps we weren't at the place I thought we were, because the space around me had shifted and I found myself in an unfamiliar corner of an unfamiliar world, or more precisely, I did not find myself, I was nowhere, I did not exist; and then I must not have been waking from but sinking into an even deeper region of unreality.

  Drained of color, the landscape was exhaling a gentle gray mist; only the edges of the massing clouds were still reflecting the windy red of dusk; down here there were no more curves, edges, or borders, and time itself had run out, though its infinitely divisible content remained inside me, but now it was formless, and what my eyes saw was also a similar formlessness.

  I was making my way through chaos, moving neither forward nor backward, and certainly not along the trail, for a trail is only a concept we invent to help relieve us of our own bothersome physical mass; all right, no trail then, only the ground beaten flat by others before me, and no mist either, only water, and matter, everywhere and in everything only immovable matter.

  Maybe the color of red light around the edges of vaporous clouds, but that, too, was only dust, sand, and smoke, the residue of the earth's matter; or perhaps it was light itself, which I can never see clearly.

  I was quiet, because there was no landscape, only matter, weight and mass; I felt like screaming that I was deprived of beauty, there was no beauty and no form, for that, too, was but a notion with which I hoped to tear myself away from my own formlessness, but my mental exertion was laughable because, if there was still formless matter, if I could feel at least its weight, its chaotic state, then who was depriving me of anything?

  When she opened the car door for me and I got in, I could see that she had calmed down, everything in her had gone silent, and from behind the silence she was listening to me, exclusively, attentively, rather as if she were tending someone very sick or a mental patient; before turning her attention to the always troublesome ignition she looked at me as if she understood something of what had just happened between us.

  Where to, she asked.

  She had never asked that before, I said, why now?

  She released the handbrake and let the car roll down the hill.

  All right, she'd take me home, then, she said.

  No, I said, I was going to Melchior's place.

  The engine coughed, shuddered, the whole contraption jerked violently, but the car started and we turned back onto the highway; the headlights cut a bright piece of the road out of the dusk which the accelerating wheels kept tucking away under them.

  That's what we all do, we tuck the future under us in the front and let the past out in the rear, and we call that progress, but the division is arbitrary; the continuity of recurring elements in time can be checked only with the notion we call speed; and that is what history is, nothing more; that is my own story; I made a mistake, and I kept repeating my mistakes.

  And yet with her silence, her tactful silence, she was now giving me a bit of hope; I felt that, too.

  Later, I asked her if she knew that Melchior at one time had studied to be a violinist.

  Yes, she knew, but let's not talk about him anymore.

  What should we talk about, then? I asked.

  Nothing, she said.

  And did she know why he stopped playing the violin?

  No, she didn't, but right now she didn't care to find out.

  Imagine a seventeen-year-old boy, I said; the fact that I had to raise my voice over the tinny clatter of an ancient two-stroke engine, speaking so loudly, practically shouting into her ears things that would have real meaning only in the tranquillity of the soul, actually enhanced this last of my little performances; I decided to have one more try, really the last one, and by having to raise my voice I'd have my revenge, too, as if to say to her, You wanted to hear it, well, here it is, now you can hear it! and that helped me broach and sully a forbidden subject, and also overcome the shame of my betrayal.

  So imagine a seventeen-year-old boy who, in a quaint old town, recently bombed to smithereens in the war, was admired as a prodigy—I was shouting in a strange voice to drown out the engine, and asked her if she had ever been in that town, because suddenly it seemed very important to me that she know the houses, the street, the air, the fragrant winter apples on top of the cupboard, the wide moat around the old castle now overgrown with shrubs, and the spot on the ceiling over his bed.

  And as I thought of this, I realized that my tone was wrong, wrong as all the others I had used; without the right tone and feelings the story itself could not be told.

  No, unfortunately, she had never been there, but now she would really like me to talk about something else or, better yet, just keep quiet.

  I should have told her about that evening, about the sticky, breezeless evening air as we stepped out of the house on Wörther Platz and just stood there on the street, because deciding on a route for our walk was always important, it had to match our emotional state and our plans for the future.

  Could she imagine the condition, I shouted at her, in which an adolescent boy cannot yet distinguish between the beauty of the body and the power of its abilities?

  Raising her head high to steady her awful glasses, she listened reluctantly, pretending to be interested only in the road ahead; I could just go on, my voice would mean nothing more than the clatter and drone of the engine.

  That evening, or night rather, when Melchior told me the story, we must have been looking for open spaces, because we chose a shorter route, but then ended up taking the longer one to Weissensee, or White Lake.

  On the terrace of the beer hall we took two iron chairs out of the stacked pile; they creaked uninvitingly in the dark; we settled down only long enough to have a smoke before moving on; it was cold.

  It must have been around midnight, only an occasional call of wild ducks could be heard from the lake, otherwise everything was dark and still.

  I was telling him about my little sister, about her death, about the institution my father had taken her to, where I had visited her only once, I hadn't the courage to go back again; I was telling him about that single visit during which, remembering our old game, she wedged herself between my knees, which was a call for me to squeeze her.

  And I did squeeze her, and she laughed, and kept on laughing for an hour and a half, did nothing but laugh, which in her language meant she was anxious to please me, was telling me that if I took her away she'd reward me with her unending happiness, but it was also possible, I told Melchior, that it was the pain of my indifference that made me see it that way.

  He put his elb
ow on the table, leaned his head on his hand, and looked down at me—I had pulled over two chairs and stretched out on them with my head in his lap.

  Two years later, I told him, because I could never go back to that place again, I found a note on my desk: Your sister died, funeral at such and such time.

  There was no light near us, we saw each other's face only in the glow of our cigarettes.

  He listened patiently to the end, but not without a certain aversion.

  Melchior shied away from everything that had to do with my past; whenever I talked about it he would listen, but in spite of his polite or seemingly polite interest, his muscles would grow tense as if to prevent my past from penetrating him; the present, the moment, my presence was more than enough for him.

  I could also say that he was looking down at me with the reservation of a mature man energetically active in his present; he was slightly shocked but indulged this weakness in me, for he did love me; he clearly disapproved of my obsession with certain aspects of my past which normal adult men, done with their past once and for all, find improper to bring up.

  But as he listened to me, a radically different process was also taking place in him: as usual, he kept correcting my grammatically faulty sentences, he did this almost unawares, it had become an unconscious habit between us; in fact, he was the one who shaped my sentences, gave them the proper structure, incorporated them into the neat order of his native language, I had to rely on his expropriated sentences to work my way through my linguistic rubble, had to use his sentences to tell my story, and didn't even notice that some of these jointly produced sentences were repeated two or three times, their place and value reshuffled, before reaching intelligible form.

  It was as if I had to use my own past to coax the story of his past out of him. I didn't think of it then, but now I believe we needed these evening walks not just for the exercise but to relate to the world around us—which we both felt, though for different reasons, to be cheerless and alien—and to do it in a way that this same world would not be aware of what we were doing.

  I also liked the way he smoked his cigarettes.

  There was something solemn and ceremonious about the way he tapped the pack and pulled out a cigarette with his long fingers; the act of lighting it was special, too, as was each puff he took, inhaling voluptuously, long and deep, holding it down for a long time; and then he'd blow out slowly, curling the smoke with his lips; he truly enjoyed the sight of the smoke, reaching after it with his tongue, forming rings and sticking his finger carefully into them; and between puffs he held his cigarette in his hand as if to say, Look, everyone, here is a cigarette, and we now have the rare privilege of being able to smoke in peace; lighting up, for us, was not simply the act of common puffing on a common cigarette but the very essence of smoking pleasure.

  This was neither the frugality of someone trying to deny himself all but the tiniest delights nor a sensualist's wallowing in pleasure; this was Melchior's tendency—doubtless the result of a puritan upbringing—to reflect on things very carefully, and continually to modify his goals as well as the means by which to achieve them; he wanted to be part of every occurrence, never to allow things just to happen to him, to be fully conscious of them, to give meaning and emphasis to his own existence every step of the way, to transcend the here and now with his reflections and ideas, to grasp and hold on to existence itself.

  When I was with Thea, anything could happen, which also meant that nothing ever happened, though of course some things did, whereas with Melchior I had the feeling that whatever happened had to happen just that way, every occurrence was the right one, but it also seemed as though it had been decided beforehand what these occurrences might be.

  I don't know what sentence or minor turning point in my story struck a chord in him, but his body, tense from uneasy attention, moved as if suddenly he had found my head resting on his lap uncomfortable; nothing changed, he did not loosen his muscles or reach out to touch me, he maintained his disciplined composure, but something intensely disquieting lay behind his restrained calm.

  When telling someone about one's life, it's not at all unusual to find similar situations in the other's life, even if, in the intimacy of sharing, our story may appear unique; the reason we tell each other stories in the first place is that we are sure the same story is there, lying dormant in our listener.

  And no matter how mature and content with his present a person may be, no matter how complete and foolproof his isolation from his own past may seem, upon hearing such an apparently unique story he cannot resist: his own similar stories will come to life and demand to be heard, as if he himself had exclaimed, gesticulating like a child, Hey, I've got one of those! and that joyful discovery of kinship is what makes two people in conversation keep cutting into each other's words.

  If we view these stories, submerged in the events of our lives, from another, broader perspective, if we consider telling them as activities indispensable to maintaining our mental health, we could also say that in finding them to be common, even in just the telling of them, we measure the weight and validity of our experiences, and in the similarities appearing in these shared and jointly measured experiences we may find some regularity bordering on prescribed rules; so, telling stories, relating and exchanging events in our lives, any kind of storytelling—whether it's gossiping, reporting a crime, spinning a yarn while having a drink, or gabbing with neighbors on the front stoop—is nothing more than the most common method of ethical regulation of human behavior; to feel my kinship with others I must tell about my uniqueness, and conversely, in kinship and similarities I must find the differences that set me apart from everyone else.

  There was a girl, he said, cutting me off with the kind of impoliteness that is mitigated by the relevance of the comment, I probably remember the house where his violin teacher lived, he pointed it out to me, well, this girl lived across the street; he no longer remembered how the thing had started, but after a while he noticed that the girl knew exactly when he would arrive for his lesson, because at just that moment she would appear in her window and stay until the lesson was over.

  She watched him in an odd pose, or at least it seemed odd to him then, leaning against the window frame with her outturned palms and her tummy, and pulling her shoulders up she rocked back and forth very slowly; he always positioned himself so his teacher wouldn't notice their little game.

  I had the feeling that a tremendous weight shifted in his body as he spoke, and when after a short pause he took a puff on his cigarette I could see in the brightening glow his self-conscious reticence giving way to a lighthearted tenderness, with which he was yielding to his memories.

  And as he spoke, I also thought of his odd-sounding poems, not that in his poems he didn't show the ability for sudden shifts, soaring bravely then plunging to the depths; if anything, he must have been frightened by the force of these abrupt shifts, by the sharpness of his vision, because he'd hurl himself into a linguistic realm so burdened with abstract concepts that neither his past nor his present could appear there in plain, undisguised form; the weight or rarefied air of abstract thinking stifled the language that might have expressed anything simple or based on raw sensual experiences.

  She was a beautiful girl, he went on after a pause, or at least he thought so at the time; since then she'd put on a lot of weight and had two awful children; anyway, she was about his height, which for a girl was pretty tall, and when he had a chance to take a closer look, he noticed that her hair, tied in a ponytail at the top of her head, began as blond fuzz around her forehead; and when he thought about her once in a great while, it was always this blond fuzz he saw; she had a strong, well-shaped forehead; her name was Marion.

  He finished his cigarette, threw it on the ground, and to crush it with his shoe had to lift my head, but he lifted it as if it were a strange, troublesome object; I had to sit up.

  I must excuse him for interrupting me, he said, he really didn't have anything more to say,
it was cold, let's move on; and I should continue my own story, his wasn't important at all, he didn't even know why he'd thought of it.

  On the way home not a word was said; we were listening to the sound of our footsteps.

  Back in the apartment all the lights were on, just as we had left them.

  It was very late, and we both pretended that by being busy, doing routine little things, we could bring to a close this useless day.

  While he was undressing in the bedroom, I cleared off the remnants of our dinner; when I got to the kitchen with the dishes, he was standing naked by the sink, brushing his teeth.

  In the yellow lamplight his body looked pale, colorless, his loins were like a curious bunch of curls, his shoulder blades an exaggerated protrusion; framed sharply by his bony pelvis, his stomach appeared sunken, and his long thighs were thinner than they should have been, that is to say, out of proportion to the rest of his body, at least when measured against some ideal male physique; he looked frail and forlorn next to my still clothed body, though he would have looked just as frail to me even if I, too, had had no clothes on, for he seemed so remote, standing there with his naked body as if he were not present at all, not even in his own body, and I seemed to be observing, from the sympathetic and neutral distance of brotherly feeling for human frailty and fallibility, a body I was otherwise crazy about.

  As usual, the window was open; walls and rooftops seemed jammed together in the darkness of the night; from the lit-up stairwell anyone could have looked in, but this never bothered him.

  Taking the toothbrush out of his mouth he glanced back at me, and with his mouth still foamy with toothpaste he said he'd sleep on the sofa.