Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

All right, but he had wanted more before, he'd wanted something else; he talked differently, not like this, why was he taking it back now?

He wasn't taking back anything, that was only my hangup.

I told him he was a coward.

Maybe, maybe he was.

Because he never loved anybody and nobody ever loved him.

Talking like that wasn't exactly attractive.

I couldn't live without him.

With him, without him — these were idiotic phrases, but what he was telling me just a few minutes ago was that he couldn't either.

Then what did he want?

Nothing.

He pulled out his hand from under mine, a movement that perfectly matched his last word; he walked away, to return to what may have been the only secure spot left for him in this room, his typewriter, back to the task that he'd set for himself and that he had to complete, but in the middle of the room he stopped, under the slanting sunbeam, his back to me, and now he, too, looked out the window, up at the sky, as if enjoying the warmth of the light, basking in it, and through the white shirt I could see the outlines of his slender body, whose fragrance was still with me.

And in that fragrance was the memory of the night before, and in that memory all the morning-after recollections of all previous nights.

And in the night, the glimmering darkness of the bedroom, and in the darkness the luminous spots of closed eyes, and in the flashing, flickering patches of light the smell of the coverlet, the sheets, the pillows, and in them, too, signs of what had gone on before: the chill of the room being aired, and in the hot, dry clouds of foaming detergent and steaming iron, his mother's hand.

And under the covers our bodies, and in our bodies our desire for each other, and in the afterglow of sated desire our sprawled bodies on the crumpled bedding, the skin, the vapor of the skin pores, and in the pores the moisture of secretions, the cooling perspiration settling in body hair, the pungent sweat in curves and bends, the smell of vehicles, offices, and restaurants trapped in the tangled strands of wet hair, and in the accumulated smells of the city the sea-salt taste of odorless semen, the bitter taste of tobacco in sweet saliva, food dissolving in saliva in the warm cave of the mouth; decaying teeth, and scraps of meat, fruit skins, and toothpaste stuck between the teeth, and from the depth of the stomach, alcohol reverting to yeast, the cooling fervor of the body in the solitude of sleep, and the fluids of dreams' indefinable excitements, the cool awakening, bracing water, soap, mint-scented shaving cream, and, in yesterday's shirt flung on the back of the chair, the day that's just past.

All right, then, I said, at least now there'll be something we won't be able to talk about, I like that.

Oh, I should shut up.

A little girl was yelling in the courtyard, calling her mother, who of course didn't hear her or didn't want to, and I envied the little girl, perhaps because she was born here and therefore didn't have to leave, or for her desperate and innocent stubbornness, with which she refused to accept being ignored; her high-pitched shouts became more and more hysterical and nerve-racking, then stopped as suddenly as if somebody had strangled her, and only a bouncing ball could be heard.

He sat down at his desk and I knew I mustn't look at him anymore, for he was getting ready to speak, and if I looked he might not.

I picked up my pen and found the last word of my manuscript; it was on page 542, which is where I'd have to continue.

He hit a few keys; in the silence we decidedly missed the little girl's screams, I had to wait until he typed a few more lines when, just as I'd expected, he began to fill the silence, speaking softly, saying we had two months left, and I couldn't possibly be serious about not going home.

I kept staring at the image evoked by the two last words on the paper— "empty stage" — and asked him why he was so damn defensive, what was he afraid of? a question that of course couldn't hide the fact that I could not or would not give him a straightforward answer.

He'll keep in mind what I just said, he continued, as one who'd finally hit upon tangible proof of my true intentions, won't forget it and will try to live with it.

With malicious pleasure we eyed each other from across the shaft of sunlight separating us; he was smiling triumphantly at having exposed me, and I borrowed some of his smile.

Then I'll come back, I said, without being in the least sarcastic, because I didn't want to let him off the hook.

I'd find the apartment empty, then, since I should know by now he had no intention of staying in it.

Idle fancies, I said, how could he possibly leave this place?

Maybe he wasn't as much of a coward as I thought he was.

So he had been making plans for a nice little future, except not with me.

To be frank, he had been planning something; he was going to vanish before my departure, so I'd have to leave without saying goodbye.

A wonderful idea, I said — maybe it was his smile, flashing ever more sharply from his eyes with every spoken word, or maybe it was the fear or joy evoked by this smiling emotion bordering on hatred, but I found myself laughing out loud and saying, Congratulations.

Thanks.

Grinning, we looked into each other's eyes, distorted by grinning, a look that we couldn't escape, so ugly we couldn't make it worse either.

It was odd that he didn't seem ugly and distorted to me as much as I did to myself, seeing myself with his eyes.

There was nothing remarkable about this moment, hour, or day, it was like all the others we'd spent together, except this was the first time we had put into carefully chosen words what we had been looking for ever since that evening when, led there by fate, we wound up sitting next to each other at the opera, although what we felt as so extraordinary that evening kept on presenting and formulating itself always as if for the first time; perhaps one might say that what we were looking for in each other was the ultimate in feeling at home, and every word and gesture seemed to be a form of new discovery in the course of our search, but we couldn't possibly find what we were looking for, because the true home of our longing was the search itself.

It was as though we were trying to deepen and somehow make permanent an already extreme emotion, a bond which can and does exist between two human beings but with which there is not much more that can be done, and perhaps the reason was, as he once had tried to explain, that we were both men, and the law of the sexes may be stronger than those of individual personalities; at the time I wasn't ready to consider or accept this, if only because I felt the freedom of my individuality was at stake, my selfhood.

That first moment encompassed all our subsequent moments, which is to say that in all that followed something of that first moment persisted.

As he stood with his French friend in the dimly lit lobby of the opera house, in the midst of the milling theatergoers on the stairs, I felt I knew him, and knew him from long ago, not just him but everything about him: not just his well-cut suit, his loosely knotted tie, his tiepin, but also his casually dressed friend, and even the relationship that so clearly bound them together, although at the time I had only the vaguest notion of what a love relation between two men might be like; yet the sense of familiarity gave the meeting a quick lightness, an inexplicable closeness we feel only when everything seems so natural that we ask no questions, just let down our guard and don't even know what is happening to us.

When he slipped out of Thea's embrace, which his friend obviously found too effusive and not at all to his liking, we shook each other's hand, not any differently than any two people would in such circumstances; I told him my name and he told me his, while I heard his friend introducing himself to Frau Kühnert and Thea — in the manner of a tough guy, giving only his double first name, Pierre-Max — repeating it twice in succession; only much later did I find out that his family name was Dulac.