A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Yes, it was she, the face of my one and only, whom I saw standing there in the doorway, silent and reproachful, all in black, veiled, one hand still on the door handle ready to shut the door behind her; I wondered why she was dressed in black, she was dead, she couldn't be mourning herself! though in the fraction of the next second I realized it wasn't she but Fräulein Stollberg in the doorway.

  And how strange it was that in this immeasurable space of time the terrible pain yielded to an even more intense throb, a pain caused by a loss that was final and eternal, and the Fräulein could see only the twitch of my face that was not meant for her.

  She lifted her veil, slipped her gloved hand back into her muff, and waited, hesitantly, not quite sure how one conducted oneself in this situation; her face was pale, like marble, smooth and untouchable; I suppose it was some shock that made her look like that, quite alien and distasteful to me, yet I could see my own pain reflected in her face, perhaps in the timid, exceptionally fragile smile that hovered around her lips and that I also felt around my own mouth.

  I had last seen her a few hours earlier in that tumultuous scene when we all rushed out into the corridor, alarmed by the raving screams of a chambermaid, and she, along with the others, ran toward the wide-open door of our friend Gyllenborg's suite, though at that point not knowing, not understanding yet what had happened, she seemed to be enjoying the noisy confusion.

  Now her tiny smile served to alleviate her pain, to make it less humiliating; I could see on her face that her cruel little games were over and done with, and a far greater act of cruelty was to follow; the smile was meant to offset this next act but only made it more painful, the shame of it did, the same shame I felt at having to smile, at realizing that I could still smile, and that a smile was perhaps longer lasting than death itself, which of course was still not my own death.

  Carrying in her smile the shadows of her offended, proud, humble, and beautiful cruelty, she hurried toward me, and I received her with much the same smile; but in me the weight of that smile was such that I was unable to rise, whereupon she suddenly yanked her hands out of her muff and, letting the fine fur piece drop to the floor, sank both her gloved hands into my hair and face.

  "My dear friend!"

  The whisper issued from her throat like a choked sob, and shameful though it may be to admit, the touch of her hand gave me painful pleasure.

  A sharp pang that finds joy in pain—maybe that is what must have made me spring up from my chair, the terrifying joy of my shame; my face slid along her lacy dress, then up, face touching face, her hard, cool lips grazing my tear-soaked skin; she was searching for something, hesitantly but irresistibly, and she had to find it quickly, and I was also looking for something on the untouchable smoothness of her face, clumsily, greedily, and the moment her lips found mine, in that fraction of a second when I felt the cool outline of her lips, that gentle fold of flesh, that alluring, curved shape, and she, too, found something similar; then, without parting her lips, she let her head sink to my shoulder; though the withdrawal was deliberate, she threw her arms around me and held me tight, so that we wouldn't feel what we both felt: the taste of the dead man's mouth on our lips; without him it was impossible for us to make contact.

  We stood like this for a long time, with our arms pressing our bodies against each other's chest, loins, thighs, or at least it seemed like a very long time; and if just a moment earlier pain sought release in tender touches and tiny kisses, in our quickly flaring and immediately fading sensual energy, then this furious but insensate pressing and squeezing was a way of sharing a pain that found its way into our grief and our guilt, a pain that would not let us eject the dead man, we let him squeeze in between us.

  It seems we needed just enough time for my body, feverish from sobbing, to warm up her cold one, because then, with her head still on my shoulder, in a very different, sly, conspiratorial, and rather inappropriate tone of voice, she whispered:

  "I was a very good little girl," she said, almost laughing, "I lied."

  I knew what she was talking about: the very thing I wanted to know more about, for knowledge of these unnamed but important facts meant time and a chance to get away, but I couldn't ask her about them without giving myself away.

  But she, too, was in flight, and betraying me would have meant betraying herself as well; still, she would have liked me to be grateful.

  I, however, wanted to vanish from my present life without leaving a trace, not even a telltale, breathless, inquisitive question from which those who remained behind could afterward surmise my real intentions; I wanted to leave nothing behind but a traceless void.

  She understood all this, though she couldn't really know what she understood, and though I wasn't going to deny her my gratitude, I had to pull away a little to see all this on her face.

  Yes, it was all there, but I was wrong about her laughing, in fact she was crying.

  With my tongue I lapped up her large teardrops, and was glad I could show my gratitude in such a simple way, and when I drew her to me once more, the strange feeling of a moment ago, that we were not alone, simply melted away.

  But this feeling made me realize what deadly silence reigned in the room, indeed in the entire hotel, and that the soundless light streaming through the window came from an infinite silence.

  It occurred to me that the valet had already been taken away.

  Later she whispered something about having come only to say goodbye, they were leaving.

  I'm going home, too, I lied, but it wouldn't look right if we traveled together, I added.

  No need to worry about that, she said, breathing hotly down my neck as if we were exchanging words of love; they'll go to Kühlungsbronn first, and will probably spend a few days there before returning to their estate in Saxony.

  After so many years, with a very different sort of life behind me, a respectable life free of dangerous passion and excesses, what shame prevents me still from describing our farewell?

  It was as if we had to part not from each other—that we wanted to do most anxiously, to get away, and the quicker and farther the better—but from him, we had to take gentle leave of the one who was staying behind.

  She didn't give me away, she lied for me, something I'm not at all sure I would have done in her place, and for this reason, even in this situation, in this impossible parting, she had to be the stronger.

  She pushed me away and stepped back; I could say we were looking at each other, but what we both did was to look at him in each other.

  By drawing apart we left him too big a space between us, it made him loom too large.

  Flustered and stammering, not knowing how we could get around him, get around someone who was growing larger and larger between us, not to mention his corpse still lying on the other side of the wall, I said that maybe I ought to go and say goodbye to her mother; I thought that if we left the room together, we could somehow shake off his lingering presence, but in response, something so sharply painful flashed in her eyes that one could justifiably call it hatred, hatred and reproach, reproach for using such a poor alibi to get away from the dead, but hatred, too, because at the same time I'd also be pushing her away, who was still alive; I had to stay.

  But staying meant the hopeless intermingling of the living and the dead.

  And then she smiled, the way a mature woman smiles at the blundering of her child.

  After a little while she took off her hat, slowly pulled off her gloves, threw hat and gloves on the table, stepped closer to me, and with those fingers touched my face.

  "Silly, how very silly you are!"

  I said nothing.

  "It's only natural," she said, and while instinctively responding to her advance, I felt on my hands that the face I was touching was not the face of the woman I loved and to whom I was about to make love; I was holding the woman that he, the dead man, had loved, and would keep on loving; even now he loved her through me, by reaching into me, into my hands and my body, just
as this woman wasn't touching me directly.

  No more words passed between us; what's more, we had no more moves and gestures of our own, everything was his.

  With measured and dignified slowness we consummated his time for him, and for this long hour, whose every minute was sober and serene, even the specter of Hans the murderer had vanished.

  As if responding to some inner upheaval, our pupils widened and narrowed; we were staring at death through the alluring veils of each other's eyes.

  After she got dressed, pulled on her gloves, arranged her hair in front of the mirror, and put on her hat, she turned around once more to look at me, as if to say that if I wished, I could now say goodbye to her mother.

  But after what we had done in that long hour, a polite goodbye would have made no sense; it was best to leave everything just the way it was.

  I may have shaken my head, or she may have guessed my thought and agreed.

  She lowered her veil over her face and walked out.

  The following night, standing at the window of my speeding train, I was looking out to see—for I did want to see—my departure forever from the part of the earth that others, more fortunate or less fortunate than myself, called their homeland.

  It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

  No More

  I am a rational man, perhaps too rational. I am not inclined to any form of humility. Still, I would like to copy my friend's last sentence onto this empty page. Let it help me finish the job no one's commissioned me to do, which should make it the most personal undertaking of my life, the one closest to my heart.

  It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

  I don't think he meant this to be his last sentence. There is every indication that the next day, as usual, he would have continued his life with a new sentence, one that could not be predicted or inferred from the notes he left behind. Because the novel of a life, once begun, always offers an invitation: Come on, lose yourselves in me, trust me, in the end I may be able to lead you out of my wilderness.

  My role is merely that of a reporter.

  I begin, then, my voice choking, with the fact that it must have been around three o'clock in the afternoon. That's when he usually stopped working. It was a bright, cloudless, summerlike late September afternoon. He got up from his desk. Outside, the old garden that had thinned out in the August heat was now slumbering peacefully. Now and then, through the sparsely grown tree branches and bushes, he could catch a glimpse of the shining dark river. The unusually narrow, vaulted windows of the house were framed by creeping vines, their yellow and red berries ripened by the sun at this time of the year. Lizards and the various insects that made their home in the clinging vines were now basking in the sun or cooling themselves under the shady leaves. He described something like this in the first chapter of his memoir, and he must have seen something like this on that day, too. Later, he had a bite to eat, exchanged some pleasantries with my aunts in the kitchen, then tucking the morning paper and the day's mail under his arm and throwing a thick towel over his shoulder, he went down to the Danube.

  Two mangled legs, a crushed-in chest, and a cracked skull. That's all that was left of him, that's what they brought back.

  So, without attaching any symbolic significance to it, the sentence quoted above was the last of an eight-hundred-page manuscript. It was left to me, though I am not his legal heir.

  And now I would like to state most emphatically that by prefacing this report about my ill-fated friend's death with a few words about myself and my own circumstances, I do not wish in any way to push my own person to the foreground.

  One reason for my doing this is that if I were to speak only of him, I'd get stuck too often, my voice would choke and falter.

  My name is Krisztián Somi Tot; if not the last name, my first name should be familiar to those who have gotten as far as that last sentence of this long yet still incomplete life story. Because my poor friend, now through the distorting effects of romantic idealization, now that of romantic disappointment, did record for posterity a boy named Krisztián, the boy I once was but with whom today I feel I have little in common.

  I could almost say he wrote it for me. Which does make me just a little proud. Maybe not proud. Rather a little surprised, childishly, awkwardly surprised, as when somebody suddenly shoves under your nose a secretly taken and therefore completely revealing photograph. In another sense, I'm embarrassed by the whole thing.

  Having read the manuscript, I think that the more desperate the will to live, the larger the gaps memory must leap over. When activities aimed at survival are driven by sheer, ruthless will, the shame evoked later by memory is that much deeper. Nobody likes to be embarrassed, so we'd rather not remember morally deficient times. Repression makes us both winners and losers. In this sense my friend was right: I've also turned out to be a man with a divided soul, and in that I'm not so different from other people.

  To clarify what I have in mind, let me confess that the events of that freezing day in March which were so fateful in his life, my memory simply tossed away. I was there, and I've no doubt it happened as he described it. The overwhelming joy and terrible fear evoked by the tyrant's death, our own long-lasting but uneven attraction to each other, and the deadly fear of being discovered and betrayed—all these were within me, too; I felt them more or less the same way, and I said so. But I never thought about them again. I must have felt that that kiss settled something between us.

  And I did say, while urinating, that the old train robber finally croaked. Or some such silly thing. It gave me such pleasure, like the body's pleasure, to be able to say a sentence like that out loud. Afterward I was terrified he might report me. In those years we lived under the constant threat of being evicted from the capital. Of all the houses of our neighborhood right next to that notorious restricted zone, we were the last original residents. Every official-looking envelope made my mother tremble with fear. Maybe our house was too small or too run-down; to this day I don't know why we were spared.

  My mother I loved with the tenderly domineering, overly solicitous, forgiving yet controlling love that only a fatherless son can have for a mother struggling with loneliness and terrible financial problems, a widow mourning her husband unto death. For her sake I was ready to make any concession, be open to the most humiliating compromises. That's why I hoped we could avoid that reporting business. And if it had already happened, I wanted to know what to expect. I am not inclined to humility, as I've said, but when it comes to compromises I'm willing to go to extremes, even today.

  What should be understood from all this is that no event in my later life could induce me to think that that kiss was really a kiss and not simply the solution to an existential problem I had at the time. I couldn't allow myself to be caught in dangerous psychological predicaments, I had all I could do to ward off tangible external dangers. I came to appreciate the advantages of psychological self-concealment, and with the years I continued to avoid ambiguous situations and judgments that didn't square exactly with my wishes or interests.

  Now that I'm aware of how he perceived me, and what a lasting impression I had made on him—which I never could have sensed—I feel rather sad. As if I had missed out on something I couldn't possibly have wished for. And that, of course, is flattering to me. He could allow himself the luxury of being hypersensitive. And that, of course, is something for which he is to be envied. At the same time, my sadness is free of any kind of reproach, accusation, self-accusation, free of any kind of guilt. I must have been more interesting, more attractive, and also more slippery, rougher, meaner, and altogether more sinister as a child than I am as an adult. It had to turn out like that. I had to push and cajole and continually twist arms just to secure the bare necessities of life, and in this unrelenting struggle, in this ruthlessly pragmatic personal cold war, I must have appeared more resourceful, more pliable, and more versatile than I did later on when, w
earying of the struggle for basics, I could finally carve out what seemed like a secure niche for myself.

  By the age of thirty he turned into a dangerously open person and I into a dangerously closed one, though we both became vulnerable. He found a love he hoped would fill a painful gap in his life, and this hope compelled him to tread on unfamiliar ground. I, on the other hand, recovering from the weariness of constant struggle, had to realize that in my hopelessness I had chosen the most common route to escape my miseries, and having run as far as I could, I was just short of turning into an alcoholic. He told me once, not long after our reunion, that men stuck in their assigned sexual roles were prone to grow fetid, both physically and spiritually.

  Looking at the course of my life and career, I don't feel out of place in this country. If my friend was the exception, then I am the norm; together we make up the rule. And I make this distinction not to flaunt my own ordinariness, my limited perception, my poorly functioning memory, and in this way, somehow, still to place myself above him whom I've called exceptional; no, with my description I don't mean to label either one of us, to shift the blame for my insensitivity and obtuseness; all I want to do, in my own way, is to take a good look at our common life experiences.

  I am an economist, and for the last few years I have been working in a research institute. My work in the main consists of gathering data, analyzing recurring and, on occasion, atypical patterns in one particular sphere of the national economy. I try to isolate the unique features of a specific set of phenomena. I'd like to do the same regarding this manuscript. Creative writing is not my forte. I never tried my hand at poetry. I played soccer, I rowed, I lifted weights. Ever since I stopped spending my evenings drinking, I run considerable distances every morning. The only kind of writing I do is occasional articles for professional journals. I suspect that as a consequence of my social origins and upbringing, my life, from earliest childhood, has been guided by a desire to examine given peculiarities most painstakingly, with the greatest degree of detachment.