A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  Two old warhorses—that is how the more outspoken members of my family refer to my aunts. Not a very flattering description. But they are indeed exceptional creatures. Whenever I read some agonizing essay about our nation's slow demise, I immediately think of them. Because it's hard to decide what sustains them: their infinite adaptability or their uncompromising resourcefulness. They eat little, talk a lot, and their hands and feet never stop moving. In recent years, having aged visibly, they keep saying that constant activity wears you out, and if the body is worn out it's easier to die. The year and a half age difference between them doesn't show. They are so much alike they could be twins. Both of them are tall and large-framed; they cut each other's hair, which they keep very short. They may have been attractive in their youth, the way a plowhorse can be said to be attractive. They must wear size 12 shoes; when they walk, everything shakes and rattles around them. If they were not moved to tears so easily by compassion, or if they didn't show an almost exaggerated understanding of the most varied and peculiar ways of the world, one could say there was nothing feminine about them. But their gentleness is so refined, so discreet, so very caring, they surely meet all the spiritual requirements of the most traditional female ideal.

  At the age of eighteen, my Aunt Ilma had a child out of wedlock. For the family this was no less an outrage than Grandfather's threat to become a dancer if he wasn't allowed to join the army. Ella very decisively defused the impending scandal by having her sister move away from home. The baby died when it was only a few days old. The two of them have been living together ever since. They must have made some final arrangement among themselves. No man has entered their lives since then. Or at least it appears that way. And that's when time must also have stopped for them. They do not subscribe to newspapers, do not listen to the radio; only a few weeks ago did they buy their first television set. They are believers, but do not attach much importance to either church attendance or prayer. They talk about God in the same tone of voice as about the expected yield of their plentiful vegetable garden. As far as they are concerned, battling evil requires no greater passion than does the struggle with, say, plant lice or potato bugs. They sprinkle wood ashes on the former and hunt for the latter, on all fours, in the flowering potato plants, squashing the bugs with their fingers.

  They start the day in the garden. From late May to mid-September they go swimming in the Danube every day, come rain, come shine. They put on their ridiculous, tight-in-the-bust-stretched-out-in-the-buttocks bathing suits made of rubberized cotton whose onetime wildflower patterns have completely faded. They put on white bathing caps and white rubber shoes. That's how they go trekking up the shore, squelching in the silt or crunching on the gravel. Ella leads, Ilma follows. Then comes a charmingly girlish interlude. They wade in waist-deep and with skittish delight let their skin get used to the cold; before long they are squealing and splashing each other. Then suddenly they stretch out in the water, abandoning themselves to the current. On their buttocks, the bathing suits balloon up like rubber tires.

  The two-acre property, a park in which every cultivated plant ever planted as well as weeds of all kinds bloom and perish at will, is separated from the village by a high brick wall, and on the shore another high red retaining wall protects it from flooding. This is how far they swim with the current, then march up the steep, moss-covered stone steps, put on their bathing robes, and go back to the house. It was along this stretch, right by the stone wall, where my friend was killed. It had been a dry summer, and by autumn the river receded to where it was normally the deepest; its water turned a dark brown.

  In the evening, while one of them was busy sewing and mending or perhaps knitting a sweater for me, or crocheting one of her endless lace runners, the other would read out loud. Their friend Vince Fitos, the Protestant minister, lends them books of inspirational literature. They both assume an appropriately serious and solemn expression, but that wouldn't stop them from sniggering at a particularly inane passage.

  I don't know what signals they use to make their judgments, but their ability to see through things is as unerring as if they were the most well-informed people in the world. They pump me regularly about exchange rates on the international financial markets, and from the boys in the village they find out the latest soccer results. Their personal needs are very modest. When I bring them a present, they look around, bewildered: where will they put it, they don't really need it. If, therefore, they want or do not want something, their action will be motivated not by personal interest but by family need or moral consideration. That is how they acted when we were notified of my father's death. We all expected him to return, of course, but they insisted that Mother sign the house over to them. We shouldn't own two houses. In other families such a questionable proposition might open old wounds and sow suspicion and discord. But Mother was cut from the same cloth as her two sisters. She welcomed their suggestion. As a first step, they rented their own house to the village council. Ella is a licensed kindergarten teacher, Ilma an experienced schoolmistress. And the village had neither a suitable building nor a properly trained staff to start a pre-school program, though the need was clearly there. And that's how the two of them opened a nursery school right in their own home. Along with the richly paneled trophy room, they lost the use of all the other rooms on the main floor, but now they had a regular income, received a nominal rent for the premises, the four upstairs rooms remained theirs, and maintenance of the building was also taken over by the village. In the early 1960s, when the threat of nationalization no longer hung over their heads, they began their quiet little scheming. Ostensibly, they were cutting off the branch they were standing on. But in the end the health authorities ruled that the old house was unfit to be used as a school, and when a few years later a new schoolhouse was completed, my aunts announced their retirement. The enemy surrendered unconditionally and left the battlefield with the pleasant feeling of victory.

  After all this, I need not say too much about my two hardy aunts' feeling about me. To them I am perfection incarnate. In my student days I had to give them detailed reports of my progress, and now they are just as interested in my job and the advancement of my career. They are so delighted with my successes, they accept blindly all my decisions as correct. They never voice approval or criticism openly but follow me with glances that tell me that in a similar situation they would have acted exactly the same way. To be sure, I usually regale them with stories I know will please them. Ever since my mother passed away, their doting fondness has become almost too much to bear. I don't have to announce my visits in advance, because in my reckless youth, when I never knew where I would spend the night and therefore roamed the world with a toothbrush in my pocket, they got used to my showing up at the oddest hours, and not always alone. Later on, when I was married, they learned to accept that it wasn't always the wife and the children I brought along to their house. This was the only sensitive area in our otherwise cloudless relationship. They let it be known that they did have reservations about my love life—on moral grounds. For example, they'd always find old girlfriends more charming than the current one. Or they'd list the physical attributes and personality traits of my casual companions and, with an innocent air, present me with their devastating conclusions. It was their way of telling me that, though somewhat proud of my numerous conquests, they didn't think this was right, that more was not necessarily better.

  They still occupy only the upstairs rooms. Except for the kitchen, the ground floor is unused and in the winter unheated. I can come almost unnoticed, I don't have to bother them. In fact, I can stay in the house without letting them know I'm there. We keep a key in the back porch, on a beam under the eaves. And in a small room downstairs the strike of a match can kindle a cozy fire in the tile stove.

  For three years he lived with them in this house. In this room. And if in these reminiscences I've been referring to him as my friend, it is not because of our shared boyhood but because during these three years we
became very close. Even if we spoke mostly in allusions. Whether we talked of our past or our present, we both cautiously avoided total candor. I learned nothing about his life I hadn't already known, or was forced to witness. And I didn't show him a new or different side of myself. But after twenty years we did return to that mutual attraction which had once transcended our dissimilarities and which we didn't know what to make of as children. This reversion may have had to do with the fact that slowly but surely my successes were turning into failures, and that he never again wanted to be united with anyone on any level. Not with me, either. He remained attentive, sensitive, but shut up in himself. Turned cold. If I wasn't familiar with the painful reverse side of this coldness, I'd be tempted to say that he became an accurate, intelligently responding, precisely calibrated machine.

  My experiences in human relations have made me see everything in this world as temporary and ephemeral. What I perceive today as love or friendship can turn out tomorrow to be nothing but the need to gratify a physical urge, or a move prompted by crass or sly self-interest. I acknowledge this with the greatest of equanimity. I have never lied to myself, because I know all about the necessary fluctuations of purposeful action. In the foregoing pages I have already prepared my balance sheet. No loves, no friends. When down in the dumps, I feel the world is nothing but a pile of disappointments. If I could be disappointed, in myself, in something or somebody else, then I could yield to this feeling of disappointment. But in me the absence of this feeling has remained so vivid that it is all I can feel. Which simply means that I haven't yet sunk into total apathy. And that is probably the reason why during those three years it became a vital necessity to have the attentiveness and sensitivity of someone whom I didn't need to, wasn't allowed to, touch. And he himself no longer had such desires. Still, he was closer to me than anyone whose body I could possess.

  My aunts did not communicate their astonishment with so much as a flash of their eyes. Maybe a stiffening in their backs hinted that they didn't quite understand. They were more talkative than usual. For long moments they kept moving and fussing about us as if my friend were not there at all. They completely ignored his two suitcases. They were upset. They both talked at once. Not cutting into each other's words, just rattling on, dwelling on different details of the same story. The day before, two boys from the village had hanged themselves. I knew them, too. To help my memory, they went into detailed physical descriptions. Luckily, they were discovered in time to be cut off the rope. They both survived, they were in the hospital. They did it with a single rope. Tied a sliding loop at both ends and threw the rope over a crossbeam of the barn. They stood on apple crates and kicked them away at the same time. Supposedly they were in love with the same girl, who told each of them she was in love with the other. Now if the neighbor's hens didn't lay their eggs all over the place. If she wasn't looking for eggs just then. If she didn't manage to shove the crates back under their feet. It wasn't easy to put a stop to all this. Quite abruptly I told them we were hungry. They quickly improvised a supper for us.

  Ella holds the power, Ilma is more sentimental. I followed Ilma into the pantry, where she went to get some pickles. While she was poking around in a huge jar, I briefed her on the situation in a few whispered words. For a certain amount of time, I don't know how long, they must keep him here. This one's soft, she said, and threw back a pickle. They must nurse him as they would nurse me if I were sick. She nodded nervously. Why are these pickles so soft this year, she wondered aloud. The two sisters must have a secret system of communication. Because from that point they weren't alone for a second, couldn't exchange a single word in private, yet Ella went ahead and lit the fire in the tile stove. By the time we sat down to eat, they had both gotten over their nervousness, they were relaxed and back to their amiable, good-natured selves. They tried to draw my friend into conversation and did not once mention the two suicidal boys. In the end they had to see the situation for what it was, though my friend kept smiling throughout. The conversation and the continued smiling took so much out of him that when dinner was over I had to put him to bed, literally. Pull off his clothes and shake him into his pajamas. He protested feebly. He couldn't possibly stay here. Felt awful about it. Being a burden to strangers. I should take him back. I covered him up well, because the room was still freezing cold. I said I'd be back to shut the stove when the fire died down.

  The details of his recovery I learned from my aunts. There is a sofa in that room, and in front of the unusually narrow, vaulted windows there's also a walnut table, worn marble-smooth with age, and some old armchairs. Opposite the entrance is a big chest of drawers with a simple mirror above it. The white walls are bare, the beams of the ceiling heavy and dark. He slept for two days. Then he got up, put on his clothes, but for another few days left his room only at mealtimes. On the second day of Christmas, and again shortly after New Year's, I drove out to see him. On both occasions I pretended to be visiting my aunts and exchanged only a few words with him. He lay on his bed. He sat at the empty table. He stared out the window. That's what he did all day. It was quiet. I sat on the bed while he was staring out the window. He was silent for so long that my mind began to wander and I was startled when he finally did speak. He would love to have the mirror covered. Nobody's died here, I said. It seemed we couldn't find the right words. There was a copper candlestick on the table and he kept pushing it back and forth, giving it all his attention. When there are many objects in a given space, he said, our attention is taken up by the relationships among them and we lose sight of the space itself. If there are only a few objects, we look for the relationships among the objects and the space. But it's very difficult to find a permanent, final place for a single object. I can put it here or there. Compared to the whole of the space every possible place seems contingent. It was something like that he said, obviously talking about himself. As if the thinking machine were talking. He was talking about his own situation like that, and it made me laugh, which I did. It wasn't very kind of me to laugh at him, but it was also ridiculous the way he wrapped his confession in transparent abstractions. And then we looked at each other, trying to see where this mutual antagonism would lead. Our eyes were smiling. I was smiling at my own urge to laugh at him, and he at his self-conscious cerebrations.

  In the morning he'd sit at the table. The afternoons he'd spend lying on the bed. At the end of the day he'd be at the table again, staring out the window. His daily routine for the next three years grew out of the rhythm of these three compulsively assumed positions. The recovery itself didn't take very long. At the end of the second week he ventured into the trophy room, where my aunts had put back my grandfather's more or less intact thousand-volume library. It may be an exaggeration to call it a library, as it consisted of turn-of-the-century literary dross, collected with unerring bad taste. He began to work. Papers appeared on the table, finally determining the place of the candlestick.

  Within a few weeks it became clear that my idea of bringing him here wasn't half bad. It proved to be such a good move, in fact, that my aunts were ready to take over for me. On my next visit Ella drew me aside and said she was sure I would have no objection to my friend staying with them for a longer time. It was so restful for him here. And good for them, too. Because, frankly, there were days when they were afraid. She couldn't really say why, but they were scared, and not just at night but during the day, too. They'd never brought it up before, because they didn't want to trouble anyone. They were familiar with every noise in the house; they checked the doors and made sure the gas was turned off. Still, it was as though danger was lurking about, a fire perhaps, or somebody eavesdropping or prowling, and not an animal, either. She laughed, because my friend wasn't exactly a strong lad who could protect them. If anything, he was a weakling; just the same, since his arrival their fears had vanished. But if I needed the house for my own entertainment or if I felt like a little vacation with the family, there were plenty of extra rooms, downstairs or upstairs. Everythi
ng here belonged to me, I must know that. That's why they'd like to have my consent.

  She said something about certain financial advantages. That was laughable, because I knew that my friend's financial situation was worse than hopeless. The rent he offered to pay for the room should be considered symbolic. They didn't even mention food. Anyway, what they ate they grew in the garden. At worst, they'd give my family a little less of their surplus. In short, they grew fond of him and were trying hard to find a material framework and financial assurances for their affection. The unconditional admiration they had for me they now transferred to him. What is more, his conduct fit their ideals better than mine ever did. In three whole years he had no more than five entirely harmless visitors. While they kept busy around the house or in the vegetable garden, he worked silently in his room. Between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon not a sound was heard from that room. He ate little and went to bed early. But a new taste in the kitchen, a winter sunset, a late-blooming plant that defied the season—such little things could make him happy. He helped with the more difficult household chores. He chopped wood, carried manure, could work the chain saw, repaired broken objects. And what was most important, he listened to them, and not just patiently but with genuine interest in what they had to say.

  His stay, assumed by all to be temporary, aroused a mixture of suspicion and curiosity in the village. My aunt reported that some of the villagers asked for permission to peek into his room, through the window, when he was out. What they really wanted to see was what anybody could be doing alone within the four walls of a room. He knew nothing of this specific request, but he felt his situation to be precarious. He was afraid, he once said to me, that my aunts might look at his manuscript one day. If they did, he'd surely lose their trust. He was also afraid, he said another time, that when he got up from the table at three in the afternoon everybody knew what he'd been up to, because he felt he was walking stark naked among them. He was afraid, he said with a laugh, that one day they'd club him to death like a mad dog. And it was true that the villagers didn't know what to make of his long, solitary walks. A few times a ranger followed him from a safe distance, but of course my friend noticed him. The Protestant minister was the first man in the village whom he befriended. The old women called the minister the man with a smile.