Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Already while jotting down my notes, which I was doing rather mechanically, I had realized that the principle I was really interested in, if there was a principle, was to be found not in the obvious, logical unfolding of events, in describable gestures and meaningful words — although these were very very important, for they embody human events — but rather in the seemingly contingent gaps between the words and gestures, in these irregularities and imperfections.

He sat a little farther away, typing steadily, lifting his fingers from the keys just long enough to take a quick drag on his cigarette; he couldn't have been writing a poem, for the typing was too even and uninterrupted for that, perhaps it was a script for one of his radio programs, though this wasn't likely either, because I never saw him bring home notes or papers from the studio or take anything back with him from home; he moved empty-handed between the two main locations of his life, as if deliberately isolating one from the other; his legs stuck out from under the table, which must have made for discomfort in sitting, but this way the streak of sunlight slanting in from the tall window could warm his bare feet.

And when he felt I was staring out the window too long, he said, without looking up, that we ought to wash the windows.

His toes were long and as attractively articulated as his slender fingers; I liked pushing my fist gently into the arch of his foot and with my tongue touching each toe, feeling the sharp edge of each nail.

I never took notes right after a rehearsal; I waited until late in the evening or, if I managed to get up early, the next morning; to see more clearly the source of, and reason for, the effect a given scene had on me, to gain a better perspective on it, I had to free myself from the effect itself.

I didn't answer him, though the idea of a joint window cleaning did appeal to me.

This note-taking began as a kind of idle diversion, a solitary mental exercise which often filled me with guilt, especially when riding home in the crowded city train, jostled by grim throngs of commuters; I would often think I was enjoying the privileges of the intellectual elite and decide I simply had to stop playing the observer condemned to inaction and should at least try to profit from the bitter fact that for several years I'd been not an active participant in so-called historical events but rather their pathetic victim and in this sense a part of the faceless crowd— significant or insignificant, it hardly mattered which — an alien, self-hating element, maybe just a giant eye with no body to go with it; yet when this mental exercise became a regular routine it did have an effect on my daily life.

On casually filled pages, out of comprehensible and therefore not wholly uninteresting notes, the picture of a performance in preparation began to emerge; thus, without my noticing the changes occurring within me, I found myself so deep within the labyrinth of my uncertain and risky undertaking, allowing me to experience vicariously the lives of a group of strangers, that it was no longer just a personal obsession to describe the performance down to its minutest details, every word and gesture, each latent and overt connection, to follow the process of realization, to become its chronicler, to respond to their work with my own, which, after all, is the indispensable condition of human fellowship, but within the small community whose activities my notes hoped to follow I also found a place for myself, however peripheral, a role to be played that gave me the joy of having an identity, if only in relation to the people in that theater.

It was Sunday morning, a day of rest, and since it was his turn to make lunch, every once in a while he would kick the chair out from under him, go into the kitchen, come back, and resume banging on his typewriter.

I seem to remember dropping a remark to Frau Kühnert about my notes, which she mentioned to Thea, who, in her usual overeagerness, must have passed on to the others, for I began to notice that they were more cautious with me, indeed took precautions, trying to talk to me differently, more coherently and confidentially, as if they each wanted to shape the image I'd create of them.

I asked him what he was writing.

His last will, he said.

The truth is, I hadn't noticed how deeply I was being affected by the seemingly insignificant and uneventful times we spent together, by his place not merely being familiar but becoming a home, and that I no longer asked what home meant but thought I knew.

He asked me what I was thinking about.

It was quiet — I didn't remember when but at some point he had stopped typing, which meant he had been staring at me staring out the window at the tree and the sky.

As I turned to him and told him I wasn't thinking about anything, I could tell from his eyes he'd been watching me for quite some time; a smile had gathered on his mouth.

You must have been thinking about something, at least about nothing itself, he said, chuckling a little.

No, really, I wasn't thinking of anything, just watching the leaves.

It was true, I wasn't thinking of anything worth formulating in words, and in any case, one doesn't think in thoughts; it was a pure sensation to which I was yielding unconditionally, without thinking, with no tension between the peaceful sight and my body's comfortable position, between perception and the perceived object, and this is what he must have noticed on my face, body and soul in a state that might even be called happiness, but his question made this sensation rather fragile, and I felt it needed protecting.

Because what he'd been thinking, he continued, was that I might be thinking of the same thing, which was that maybe we should stay like this for good.

How did he mean that, I asked, as if I hadn't understood.

The smile vanished from his lips, he withdrew his searching glance from my face, lowered his head, and, pronouncing the words with difficulty, as if we had exchanged roles and now it was he who had to speak in a foreign language, he asked if I had ever thought of the two of us in this way.

Some time had to elapse before I managed to utter the word that in his language makes a deeper, throatier sound: yes.

He turned his head away and with a delicate, absentminded motion raised the paper in the typewriter, and I looked out the window again, both of us being silent and motionless: as fervent as our shyly voiced confessions had been, so charged with fear was the silence that followed— one would want to hold back one's breathing in this kind of silence, even the beating of one's heart, which is why one hears it and feels it all the more.

He asked me why I hadn't mentioned it before.

I said I thought he'd feel it anyway.

It was good to be sitting far from him and not to look at him, since a glance or physical proximity might have shattered what we had, yet the situation was becoming dangerous because something final and irreversible would have to be said; the sharp beam of sunshine streaming through the window seemed to raise a wall between us through which the words would have to pass; addressing the other, we were each talking to ourselves; we seemed to be sitting in our separate rooms in the shared warmth of our single room.

If I had thought about this before, he pressed on, how was it that it had occurred to him only now?

That I didn't know, I said, but it didn't matter.

After a short while he got up, but didn't kick the chair out as was his wont, rather he pushed it gingerly out of the way; I didn't look at him and I don't think he looked at me, and he was careful not to cross the beam of light that was now a wall between us as without a word he left for the kitchen, and judging by the weight and rhythm of his steps he was walking in order to reduce the tension generated by our words but, not letting down his guard, taking his caution along with him.