A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  The police investigation concluded that three motorcyclists were the likely perpetrators. Because of good visibility that day and unmistakable track marks, the possibility that the death was accidental was all but ruled out. A body lay on the gravelly shore closer to the water than to the retaining wall. When the water recedes as far as it did that autumn, one can see the layout of the riverbed. There is a wide strip of sand, closest to the central channel, above that a narrower band of silt strewn with larger pebbles, and the area nearer the shoreline is covered with fine pebbles. He was lying on his back, on a towel. His head reached the strip of silt. He'd probably fallen asleep. Before that he may have gone for a swim, or at least a dip, because his swimming trunks were still wet. The three cyclists, riding side by side, were approaching at about forty kilometers an hour on the slightly sloping, pebbly, dried-out shore. In principle, it's not possible to ride any faster on such terrain. They were coming upriver. At the same time, from the opposite direction, a tugboat towing barges was heading to the nearby pier. Otherwise the riverfront was in all probability deserted. Vacationers are gone by this time of the year. And the villagers come to the river only to scrub down their horses or to fetch a wayward goose. There was no one at the boat station either. When they were about sixty meters from my friend, two of the cyclists accelerated, though the experts could not agree on the rate of acceleration. The third cyclist followed suit only when he was about forty meters away; perhaps he hesitated, or maybe he was the last one to spot the fallen figure. In any case, he rode over the legs. The middle one rode over the chest, then tipped over. After a long skid upward, he slid into the hardened strip of silt. The third hit a stone, leaped in the air, and then landed on the victim's head. The one who fell over got back on his bike, made a loop around the body, presumably to have a look, and only then did he follow his friends. About ten minutes later death completed the job they had started. While waiting for the third to catch up, the other two apparently kept looking back; for about a thirty-meter stretch the two sets of tire marks showed them circling, weaving in and out. Then the lines became straight again and in parallel formation led to the pier. Here they formed a single file and got on the paved road. And that's when the tugboat reached the pier. From the deck, one of the ship's engineers saw the three cyclists. Although he couldn't give anything approaching a detailed description, he thought they were young men, possibly teenagers. Later, he also saw a man lying on the shore, but thought nothing of it.

  By the time I made it to the village, alerted by my aunt's telephone call, the police had already finished taking pictures and examining the evidence. It was almost dark. His body was brought up from the shore on a makeshift stretcher. I walked alongside him, accompanied him. Once, just once, I cast a glance at what remained. One of his hands hung down and flapped about. The outspread fingers now and then grazed the ground. I would have liked to catch that hand, hold it, put it back in its place. But I didn't dare.

  When the water level was low, local boys often rode their motorcycles along the shore, emulating cross-country competitions. Now each and every motorcycle in the area was thoroughly examined. Nothing substantial turned up, no lead, nothing to build a case on. At the hour in question, the men in the village who owned motorcycles or knew how to ride them had not yet returned from work. One man, a baker, left for work two hours after the murder, but because of other circumstances he had to be considered above suspicion. This late in the season the campground at the edge of the village was no longer open, but some rowing enthusiasts always pitched their tents there. They hadn't seen any cyclists either. The investigation was never officially closed, but with three years gone, nothing is likely to turn up. From the very beginning the inspector in charge thought they should be looking for drunken rowdies who were also quite young. He seemed to be the right man for the job. I don't think anyone in the village knew more about the taverns and pubs of the area than this officer. He was looking for three young men who were clearly drunk when they left one of these taverns. He was looking for three motorbikes parked in front of a pub. Until the day of the funeral I, too, was inclined to believe his theory.

  Vince Fitos, the pastor, eulogized my friend in the village cemetery. While he spoke, dried leaves kept falling from the trees, spinning slowly to the ground. It was a pleasantly mild, breezy autumn day with a faint smell of smoke in the air, and an unusually large number of people came to the funeral. The old peasant women sang psalms at the open grave. I kept looking at the faces around me. At the minister, crushed by the event, struggling hard with his tears. And at the infamous house at the foot of cemetery hill where, to meet the demands of the recent increase in tourist traffic, an inn had opened. The memory of its former inhabitants will live forever, because among themselves the local people insist on calling it the Three-Cunt Inn. We could hear the clatter of dishes and even got whiffs of the heavy kitchen smell.

  And then I thought of something. It was no more than a hunch, but I seized on it eagerly. If it was done by some drunks, it had to have been an accident—a shameful, terrifying accident. And then there would be no explanation for it.

  It couldn't even be called a suspicion. It was too vague a thought to jell into any sort of lead. Besides, I had no desire to play the sleuth. When staring death in the face, one looks for explanations.

  On the other side of the grave, wearing a dark, ill-fitting suit, a young man was standing, his face deathly pale. I knew him well. My aunts had been buying their milk from his folks for years. Now and then his body would tremble, as if shuddering in his fight to hold back his tears. Each time this happened, he would sing a little louder. He was one of the boys who had tried to commit suicide. The other would-be suicide, who wasn't at the funeral, had to undergo a laryngectomy and as a result lost his speech forever. This boy I knew only by sight, as a kind of local celebrity. He was born out of wedlock, his mother was barely four feet tall, a midget. No one knew who his father was. Ever since I can remember, the woman has worked in the same tavern, washing glasses behind the bar, standing on a kitchen chair to reach the sink. Rumor had it that she'd kept experimenting with drunken men in the shed behind the tavern until she got herself pregnant. She had everything going against her, yet her condition, and the fact that she went through with the pregnancy, did not bring down the wrath of the village. To this day people like to tell appreciative anecdotes—well sprinkled with spicy details—about her deft manipulations in that shed. She gave birth to a healthy boy and has been a model mother ever since. And the boy grew into such a big, powerful, attractive young man that, the circumstances of his conception notwithstanding, people have admired him as living proof of the unpredictable forces and wonder of nature. Consequently, no one found it objectionable when he became friends with the son of one of the village's wealthier farmers. They were inseparable. Leaders and trendsetters among the village young. They remained close even when the midget's son began working as a butcher's apprentice while the other boy went on to high school. It was almost as though they decided on a suicide pact, too, just so they wouldn't have to fight each other for the love of the same woman. Two male animals in whom natural love proved weaker than the need for friendship.

  In those years I could gauge the social changes taking place in the village by the changing behavior of my aunts. Until then they had been bent on scrimping and saving. They would rather do without than part with anything that constituted family property. But now, with almost girlish ease, they succumbed to the enticements of the new mercantile spirit. Perhaps they grew tired. Perhaps they feared old age and wanted to keep up with the times.

  The village, isolated as it was from its environs, was fast losing its people. In direct ratio to this loss, the number of abandoned farms around the village began to increase. Part of the working population moved away, and others, as if preparing for the same step, began to commute to the city. Lovely vineyards and orchards, as well as much of the farmland, were sold to city dwellers in the market for vacation property. F
or them this was the only means of converting ill-gotten cash, dubious windfalls, or modest inherited capital—earning next to nothing in state banks—into sound real estate. With their unused capital, city folks bought up the unused land of country folks. Jumping on the bandwagon, my aunts began to sell, too. I tried to convince them that when there is too much money floating around and real estate is the only sensible investment, the thing to do is buy, not sell. First they unloaded a vineyard for a pittance, and later, when my friend was already staying with them, they sold a big slice of the park around the house, in the face of my strenuous objections, of course. They gave me the money and told me to buy a new car. That's how they tried to rationalize an irrational move, but in fact what they were saying was Let everything go, let's lose everything that can still be lost. The new owners weren't much different. They mercilessly uprooted everything. Shrubs, rose gardens, orchards, hundred-year-old lindens and chestnut trees. They wanted to wipe the slate clean; they wanted something of their own. They found great pleasure, after so many years, in doing as they pleased with whatever was their own—even if what they did went against all reason. The long-lasting repudiation of private ownership wreaked havoc not only on state property but on newly repossessed private property as well. Sorry-looking, shoddily built vacation homes sprang up. A large field was turned into a modern campground. The temporary boom prompted people to hold down three different jobs and to break with all forms of traditional activity. The incidence of heart attacks among middle-aged men increased dramatically. And the pastor had to contend with a flock that stayed away from church even on holidays.

  After recovering from their shared suicide attempt, the two friends turned into deadly enemies. The young man in the dark suit who would fight back his tears while singing psalms at the gravesite began to pay visits to the minister. First he went there just to chat, but then stayed for Bible class, where he met my friend, and after a time was attending services every Sunday. A group of village youths followed his example. A small circle formed this way, relentlessly hostile to another group, led by the now mute former friend and partner in suicide. This latter group was made up only of motorcyclists, all of them boys. Not exactly a gentle bunch. They drank heavily and got into fights, chased after girls in the campground, blasted their radios, harassed vacationers, broke into vacant summer cottages for wild parties. My friend, for the first time in his life, received holy communion from the minister.

  I know very little of the circumstances of his religious conversion. But it was around this time that he befriended the meeker suicidal boy, who, after graduating from high school, was studying to be a mechanic. The two met every afternoon. The young man accompanied my friend on his long walks. If the latter's solitary walks had seemed odd to the villagers, the two of them strolling together in rain or in winter snow was even more baffling. The following year the young man applied to divinity school.

  After the funeral I stayed on for almost two weeks. My aunts asked me to. I wasn't conducting an investigation, but I did talk to a number of people. I had no difficulty getting them to open up. After all, they've known me since I was a child. I couldn't be privy to their innermost thoughts, yet my hunch can't be far off the mark. I say this because the young man, who was very modest and shy, and who weighed his words carefully, maintained that, regarding the two of them, my friend had done nothing that would render him impure before God. However, I also found out something the young man had not told me. On one of their winter walks, on the riverbank, the motorcycle gang surprised them from behind. They rode around the two, but as the mute leader roared by, he grabbed my friend by the sleeve and just as quickly let go of him. My friend fell on the stones and bruised his face. As I recall, it must have been shortly after this incident that he said he was afraid one day he might be clubbed to death like a mad dog.

  After his death, it took me a year and a half to muster up enough strength to sit down at his table. I found the individual chapters of his life story in separate folders. Most of my time was taken up with the careful study of his notes. From the general outline covering the entire manuscript I could determine the sequence of the chapters, but even after a thorough review of his notes, I haven't been able to decide in what direction he intended to steer his plot. However, I did find one additional, sketchy chapter, a fragment really, that I could not place anywhere. It doesn't appear in any of the repeatedly revised tables of contents. Yet he may have meant it to be the keystone of the whole story.

  My work is done. The only thing left for me to do is to append to the text this last fragment.

  Escape

  Opening night at last.

  Snow begins to fall in the afternoon, a soft, thick, slow snow, with only an occasional gust of wind buffeting and stirring up the big moist flakes.

  It stuck to the rooftops, covered the grass in the parks, on the roadways and sidewalks.

  Hurrying feet and rushing tires soon soiled it with black trails and tracks.

  This white snow came much too early; true, our poplar had lost the last dry leaves of its crown, but the foliage of the plane trees on Wörther Platz was still green.

  While outside this early snow keeps nicely coming down, in the den one is lying on the narrow sofa, the other is systematically decimating his extensive record collection; squatting in front of the cabinet, he takes every record out of its jacket and, according to some unknown criteria, breaks over his knee the ones he doesn't like.

  He didn't answer any of my questions, and I didn't answer any of his.

  And even later there was no screaming, cursing, and crying from which to escape with a quick, dramatic, tearfully tender embrace; what there was was irritable bickering, fitful mutterings, quiet indignation, all those closely watched opportunities for bloodless scrapes and bruises, as if by causing each other some deceptively minor pain, they could avoid the greater ones.

  So many excuses and pretexts, and not a single word about the things that truly irritated and troubled us both, and made us feel this was too much, more than enough, the very limit.

  A few hours later, when they finally left for the theater, it was clear the snow had won: the city had turned all white; snow sat on the bare branches, slowly covered up all the dirty tracks and trails, and put a glistening white cap on the green domes of the plane trees now glowing in the light of streetlamps; all sounds were muffled in the white softness.

  That's how blood, pulsing quietly through the eardrum, reports good news.

  I thought I was lying to him; I still didn't know then that he was also lying to me.

  It wasn't even deliberate lying but rather a way of mutually and systematically keeping quiet about certain things, which is something that can grow, spread, and stifle any intelligent exchange.

  He was busy, he said, he was waiting for a telephone call, he'd see the play another time, but I should go, he said, he wanted to be alone at last.

  The phone call was true, he was waiting for somebody to call, but I didn't understand what it was he had to be so secretive about.

  Everyone is familiar with the kind of reconciliation that, instead of bringing peace, prolongs hostilities; that's how they are walking, sometime later, in the snow, side by side in their warm coats, with their collars turned up, their hands deep in their coat pockets, just walking, seemingly at ease, stepping softly in the wet snow sloshing under their feet.

  This semblance of smiling calm is forced on them by their own self-esteem, but their strenuous, defensive self-control is making them very tense, and this tension is the only thing they have in common now, it's their only bond, and it cannot be broken, if only because neither of them is willing to name the real cause of his unease.

  They are waiting for the underground at the Senefelderplatz station, and there something very strange happens.

  About ten days were left before I was supposed to leave for home, and we never again mentioned my plans to come back here.

  The station was empty, and one should also know tha
t these echoing, drafty, bleak stations, built around the turn of the century and therefore having a role in the imagined story as well, were very economically lit, which is to say, they were almost completely dark.

  A good distance from them, on the opposite side of the platform, one other passenger was waiting, a lean, shivering figure.

  A grubby-looking, self-absorbed boy, attracting attention only because the way he held his shadow-thin yet sharply outlined body showed how cold he was; he hunched up his shoulders, pulled in his neck, pressed his arms to his trunk, and tried to warm his hands by holding them flat against his thighs; he seemed to be standing on tiptoe to keep his feet from touching the cold stone floor; a burning cigarette was dangling from his lips, its occasional red glow the only reassuring sign in all that dimness.

  The unlighted, vanishing subway tunnel remained silent and empty for a long time; no train, not even a rumble to hint at its coming, and for me every minute counted; if I wanted to describe this performance, including the details of the entire production process, I couldn't very well miss those very moments in which all that preparation was to culminate.