A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  By the time I was being rolled toward the operating room, a dozen figures in white were running alongside us. That's when I said goodbye to him. I heard one of the medics say: You wait here for the police, son.

  When I came to, I could peep out with only one eye from the thick bandage on my head. I was in a cast, and my whole body was wrapped in white. A nurse was sitting on my bed. Her face was like a huge, beating white heart. She was humming and mumbling, trying to sing to me; she made me drink, she was stroking me and wiping me with a wet cloth. She was working hard, fussing over me. I must have looked pitiful, in need of comforting, for she kept singing that everything was all right, everything was just fine, and soon everything will heal, get better, be good as new. Only I mustn't move around too much. I should just tell her if I was becoming nauseous or had to pee. She'll stay with me until my mother comes, no need to worry.

  Until then I hadn't thought of my mother. But from that word, just as from the ether-soaked mask they had put on my face in the operating room, everything grew distant and feather-light, though I felt myself very heavy, and then everything went dark.

  As if kicking my way to the surface of some terrible dream, I woke up to realize that my body was cooling off and if that kept up I would definitely die. I was wrapped in wet sheets. I heard the nurse's soft voice: It's all right, it's all right. My temperature had shot up, she was bringing it down. But it seemed that changing the sheets over my naked limbs didn't help much, the fever kept slipping back from under the cast and the bandages. After a while, however, the temperature did subside, and I still remember that when she covered me with a dry sheet, quite pleased with herself, I was sorry I couldn't show off my naked body to her anymore.

  Judging by the lights and by the noises in the ward, it must have been early afternoon. Luckily, my mother hadn't come yet. Later I had another attack of high fever, and by the time she got it under control, it was evening. The nurse told me she had to leave, her shift had ended, someone else was taking over for her. I don't know why she was so touched, she couldn't have seen much of my face. Maybe it was a gesture I made. Or maybe she could sense, even through the thick bandages, that I had never entrusted myself so unconditionally to another human being. Hardly any time went by and she was back. As soon as she appeared in the doorway, I ventured to say that she was right to come back. Why, she asked, was there anything wrong? No, nothing, I said. And I really felt that I was regaining my strength and was seeing clearly with that one eye. Then why did I say it? Because I needed her, I said. We reached for each other's hand at the same time, and she blushed. I was twelve years old and she perhaps ten years older.

  We don't need to imagine how people close to us will behave. Certain situations always bring with them the appropriate form of behavior. Until the end of our lives we keep repeating identical gestures, and this is very reassuring for those around us. With this in mind, I was preparing myself for my mother's arrival.

  The ward was full of white mummies like myself, lying strapped to their beds. I somehow wanted to dissociate myself from them. They wheezed, moaned, snored, groaned, and they stank. I had my back propped up with big pillows. I asked the nurse to turn on the overhead reading lamp, to take the bedpan out from under me, and to bring me a newspaper. I watched her slipping in and out of the room. But I was in too much pain and couldn't read with my one good eye long enough for my mother to arrive while I was still in this position. I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again, to my great surprise, it wasn't my mother I saw at the door but a she-devil dressed in my mother's clothes. Just as she was barging into the room and heading straight for me. This I didn't expect. With her arms outstretched she flew into me, her handbag hit me in the face, she seized my shoulders, and if the nurse hadn't hurled herself between us, she would have given me a thrashing then and there. And she had never raised a finger to me before. Never. Now the two of them were scuffling right on top of me. While in a voice choked with rage the she-devil was screaming, What did you do? What did you do again? the guardian angel, her voice a falsetto, kept shrieking, What are you doing? Don't touch him! You're crazy! Help! It suddenly turned light, blindingly light in the ward, and in an instant everyone was up and yelling, but very quickly it was all over. The she-devil vanished, evaporated, and my mother broke down, sobbing, on my bed. The nurse let go of her. She then checked my cast, felt my healthy as well as my bandaged parts, made everyone go back to bed, giggled nervously, told them everything was all right, turned off the light, and, grinning at me one last time, left the ward.

  In a situation like this, the most sensible thing a child can do is to explain to his parent what he has done and why. He must confess all his sins, reveal at least a third of his secrets, and with a show of contrition gain her forgiveness. Still, it didn't even occur to me to give us away. I was convinced that Prém would tell the police only what was absolutely necessary. Perhaps the reason for my decision was that for the first time in my life I was caught between two women. This stormy scene had made me realize that Mother was not just my mother but also a woman. I had never thought of this before. One woman was sobbing on my bed, the other giggling as she circled my bed. As if she were gloating over my being in the clutches of a madwoman.

  Still sobbing, my mother kept repeating her questions, hovering around the most critical problem of my life. I had to make a decision about my own independence. Using my good hand and the arm in the cast, I turned her crying face toward me. I was angry with her, I wanted to steer her away from this sensitive area, but in a way that wouldn't hurt her too much.

  She could have come sooner, I said.

  But she just got home. A policeman was there, waiting for her. A policeman.

  I've been lying here all day with not a bite to eat.

  She raised her tearful eyes to me.

  I said I wanted some sour-cherry compote.

  Sour-cherry compote? she asked incredulously. Where would I get you sour-cherry compote?

  In the meantime, though, her tear-filled eyes regained their old familiar look: compliant and somewhat frightened, a widow's look. I managed to change her back into my mother.

  Today I know that it was I who killed the woman in her.

  I need not emphasize that this life, our life, was different in every way from my friend's life. Although there was a brief, and for my development decisive, period in our youth when, like him and his girlfriend Maja, we also caught the fever of counter-espionage. Prém and I called it reconnaissance. We had to penetrate enemy territory, then clear out unnoticed. We invariably chose apartments and houses whose occupants we didn't know. We thought it more honest this way. Friends whose houses we may have entered we wouldn't have been able to face afterward. We'd reconnoiter the garden, pick out the deserted room, find the window accidentally left ajar or the shutter that could be forced open, the door that just had to be pushed in, and then select the object to be removed. One of us did the job while the other covered him.

  We never kept anything. The objects we took as evidence of our ability were later slipped back. At worst, we'd throw them back, or place them by the door or on the windowsill. Documents, clocks, paperweights, pens, pillboxes, seals, cigarette cases, the oddest knickknacks went through our hands this way. I remember a lacquered Chinese music box and a very pornographic statuette with movable joints. There isn't a jealously guarded secret of my love life that I can recall more vividly than I can these objects. We violated the defenseless lives of strangers—and exposed, unsuspecting, silent apartments. This was the point at which our community of two passed the boundaries of the permissible. At the very thought of an operation our stomachs would tighten, our eyes glaze over, our hands and feet shake, our insides rumble shamelessly, and in our nervous agitation, not once, we moved our bowels in plain sight of each other.

  I believe that the moral value of an act can he physically measured in one's body. Such measurements are taken by everyone and in every moment. And the unit of measurement is nothing but the peculiar
ratio between urges and inhibitions. For action results not only from urges attributable to instincts but from the relationship of inhibitions, attributable to upbringing, to these urges. Character makeup, social attitude, inherited aptitude, and family origins all look for their proportional share in any action we take. To repeated denial of such proportional sharing, the body reacts with fear, perspiration, anxiety, in more serious cases with fainting, vomiting, or diarrhea, in the most serious cases with actual organic dysfunction.

  Theoretically, society should hold as ideal the person who feels the urge to do only what is not forbidden. And as most dangerous the one who feels the urge to do only what is not permitted. But this seemingly logical principle, like that referring to the asymmetry of beauty and ugliness, does not really follow the laws of logic. There is no person in the world in whose action there would be no tension between urges and inhibitions, just as there is no one who wants to do only what is forbidden. The ideals of social harmony and a well-adjusted life are predicated on the masses of people who manage to keep this tension in themselves to a minimum, yet it wouldn't occur to anyone to call them wise, good, or perfect. They are not the monks, nuns, revolutionaries, inventors among us, and not the madmen, prophets, or criminals either. At best, they are useful in maintaining social tranquillity. But the greatest usefulness can measure itself only in an environment of the greatest uselessness.

  If before, in thinking about beauty and ugliness, I contended that when made to choose between two near-perfect forms we invariably pick the near-perfectly-proportionate form over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one, then now, reflecting on good and evil, I must conclude that in setting the moral standards for our actions, we never choose what is necessarily good or beneficial, never the boringly average, but the disturbing, provocative exceptions, life's necessary evils. Which also implies that for our senses the highest degree of perfection is the standard, while for our consciousness the standard is always the highest degree of imperfection.

  On one page of his manuscript my dead friend claims that I sometimes asked Prém to take off his clothes. I remember no such thing. But I don't wish to cast doubt on his claim. Perhaps I did ask Prém to do that. But if I did, I must have done it for reasons other than those my friend had assumed.

  There's no doubt that boys are greatly interested in the size of their own and others' sexual organs. One of our favorite games was to compare them in either words or deeds. Most men don't get over the effects of such games even in adulthood. Their unalterable physical endowments forever remind them of psychic injuries sustained in childhood. Depending on whether their organs are small or large in these games of comparison, the injury may take two different forms. If it's large, they must feel privileged, even though this privileged status later provides no advantage in their love life. And if it is small, then they must suffer the psychic consequences of feeling inferior, even if in their sexual life no disadvantage results from it. In this matter, everyday experience and scientific evidence are at odds with cultural tradition. I don't know how other cultures deal with the disparities between emotional and mental experiences, but our own barbaric civilization, in awe of the act of creation, does not respect creation at all. I'm sure of this. A childhood hurt does not develop into an emotional scar because of physiological factors but because of the contradiction between individual and cultural perception: an individual, geared to procreation, perceives his endowments as natural and unique, but his culture, disrespectful of creation, uses a different set of criteria—disregarding the limits given and defined by nature—to evaluate individual endowments. And so the individual wants to squeeze more out of what is already a lot, or suffers because what he has, which is not little, cannot be more.

  It is clear to everyone that the quality of one's sex life depends on happiness, however fragile that happiness may be. Although it's true that sexual happiness cannot be separated from the sex organs, it would be foolish to relate it to the size of these organs, if only because the vagina by its very nature is capable of expanding to the size required by the penis. Its expansion is governed exclusively by emotion, as is the erection of the penis. But the cultural tradition of an achievement-oriented consumer society obsessed with the accumulation, use, and distribution of wealth cares not one whit about this mundane, albeit scientifically verifiable sense experience. It suggests to both men and women that something is good only if it's bigger and there's more of it. If you have less than the next person, something's wrong with you. And something is also wrong if you can't squeeze more pleasure out of what you have plenty of. And if there's something really wrong with you, you can either accept it or try to change your whole life. You sow envy and reap pity. That is how a culture bent on self-definition and self-propagation is forced to acknowledge the limits set by creation. All clever revolutionaries eager to change the existing conditions of life are as foolish in practice as the dull conformist is wise in accepting life as it is. When dealing with this delicate question, which touches on all aspects of our lives, we act exactly like those primitive tribes who make no connection between conception and the function of their organs causing sexual pleasure. Our own supposedly highly developed civilization posits a direct relationship between sexual organs and sexual contentment that nature cannot confirm. A precondition of procreation is the regular functioning of the sexual organs, which may result in conception, but sexual happiness is merely a potential gift of nature. Hence the fragility of this happiness.

  After expounding on these ideas, it would be risky for me to claim that I'm neither scarred nor warped in this respect. From my earliest childhood, circumstances have forced me to satisfy not my cultural longings but my natural inclinations. And for this reason I can honestly say that I find the culturally inspired masochism of resignation and the sadism of forced change equally abhorrent. Unlike my poor friend, who ventured into the realm of human desires and turned his body into the object of his emotional experiments, I turned my body into an instrument, a means to an end, and thus my desires have become only the stern supervisors of my natural inclinations. Because my origins were so problematic, I viewed with great hostility anyone who tried to convince me there was something wrong with me, or anyone who considered me exceptional because of my physical attributes. I couldn't accept these judgments. Life for me was not something to accept as inevitable or something that had to be changed; what I wanted was to find, in the only life that was mine, the possibilities congenial to my character. And in pursuing these possibilities I have been, if not passionate, definitely obsessive.

  I have been coaxing out of myself during these lonely nocturnal hours, though I am temperamentally ill suited for it, reflections and confessions. Having desires does point to some sort of suitability, however, and this compels me to become active in an area where I should prove to be inept. But two complementary principles necessarily put into motion a third one.

  Not being filled with longing, I am moved to reflect and to remember. What I want from myself is to eliminate everything that might embarrass me or make me biased. It is true, of course, that bias affected the way my memory obliterated my own image as recorded by my friend. But I've no reason to complain, because my memory neatly preserved another image.

  A seemingly innocuous one. I don't know how often I may have recalled it over the years. Once in a great while, I suppose. It's like a pinprick. The sun is blinding. The grass is green. Prém is squatting in this raging light. From between his closed thighs his prick is dangling. And in thicker, longer, and harder sausages, shit is coming out of his ass. I have more of such images but none of them quite so distinct.

  In the middle of our reconnaissance operation we'd suddenly feel the urge to relieve ourselves. We were not embarrassed in front of each other. Either I would have to go, or he, and sometimes both of us at the same time. And in the most impossible situations, too. We didn't have time to clean up, either, for whether we had reason to be afraid of getting caught or not, we always had a deeper shame
to flee from. I believe that this more serious injury protected us from the other, much milder one.

  Our compulsive shamelessness created a peculiar order of importance. What to others was a titillating sight, reaching into their sensuality and satisfying their curiosity, for us was only a trivial circumstance, though it still reminded us of our shamelessly affected shame. So if I indeed asked Prém to take off his clothes and show his nakedness, I did it not because I was suddenly seized by an uncontrollable desire to see his emblematically significant organ but, on the contrary, because I knew that in the other boys there still lived that inescapable attraction which our shame had already killed in me. This was the feeling I wanted to free myself from, or recapture the feeling of community with the others. That I could never succeed in this is a different matter. Perhaps this is the reason I don't easily tolerate being kissed.