Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

With the superior air of a native I said I wasn't getting at anything, but he could check the arithmetic.

If I was referring to the spring of '68, he said somewhat less confidently — I, enjoying my advantage, nodded that that's exactly what I'd had in mind — and he stared into my eyes, waited for me to stop nodding, and then continued all the more vehemently, he did not believe that the lesson to be learned from those events was to give up the struggle.

The ringing, slogan-like phrase issued so innocently from his youthfully soft lips, so engagingly, strongly, and therefore convincingly — Thea was meanwhile vilifying her director to Melchior — despite the implied question of what sort of struggle he was talking about, struggle against whom or what? that I lost the presence of mind for a proper answer, staggered by the humor of the situation, and in the lull, at once comic and serious, I could hear Thea's unceasing chatter — Langerhans would make a splendid ambassador in, say, Albania, or maybe only a good stationmaster somewhere, well, all you had to do was look at him, the way he kept pushing his glasses up and down his pug nose, the way he dug his stubby fingers into his greasy hair, he reminded you of a large sheet of white paper with nice round stamps on it, he could bang away all day with his official-looking stamps, blues and reds and who knows what other colors, but for God's sake he shouldn't be directing! and this was no exaggeration, no joke; Melchior knew the scene, yes, Act III, Scene 2, the one with the privy council, now that scene had become the only one worth watching in the whole production, that awful council session, with six impossible characters sitting around this huge table, he'd had this impossibly long table made especially and picked six of his lousiest actors for this scene, and Melchior could just imagine how much those poor suckers must enjoy doing it, how grateful they were to Langerhans for the opportunity, but that's what made the scene! the way they sat there shuffling their documents and scratching themselves, and stammering, and chewing their nails, Langerhans chewed his nails all the time, too, disgusting! — and these six weren't even eager to go home like everyone else, it made no difference to them, they'd been waiting thirty years for these tiny parts, for thirty years they hadn't understood a thing, and now it was certain they never would, and just try to imagine, but he'll see it for himself, the whole thing was so incredibly, stupefyingly boring you could fall off your chair, and this was the only thing Langerhans could come up with, this boredom, because what a woman was really like or what she could want from a man he hadn't the foggiest, this bloodless theater bureaucrat.

After a slight hesitation the young Frenchman said he was sure we were thinking about and talking about two entirely different things; he was thinking, naturally, about the Paris of 1968 and I, just as naturally, of the Prague Spring.

Or if Langerhans did have the foggiest about such matters, it was bound to be common, indecent, gross, she'd tell Melchior a little story about that, a racy little adventure, actually.

It wasn't the first time he'd encountered this kind of unpleasant, though from a historical perspective quite insignificant skepticism, the Frenchman continued, and he refused to believe that the Russians' clumsy military action could cast any doubt on the incontrovertible truth that this part of the world was the home of socialism, and then he mumbled something irrelevant about ownership of the means of production.

The thing happened between the two of them — she had to blush about it in retrospect — when they finally reached the point of not knowing what to do with each other, and she decided that she was going to tease the man out of Langerhans, wanting to see what he was like, whatever happened.

To me, this kind of demagoguery was at least as amusing as my skepticism was unpleasant for him, and I didn't really think, I said, that he'd be talking about "clumsy military action" if a foreign army had crushed the student riots in Paris.

It was usually mindless aristocrats who referred to revolutions as riots, the Frenchman said.

Just as it was usually obtuse ideologues who believed that the end justifies the means, I replied.

We both stopped on the staircase while they continued on, though Melchior, as if I were holding him back with my shoulder, quickly turned around before taking the next step, and I could see that the Frenchman, however irritated, was still enjoying what I not only did not enjoy but found disgracefully painful, ludicrously unnecessary, having let myself be dragged into a conversation like this in which I wasn't even expressing my own opinion or, rather, was mouthing a fraction of my own nonexistent opinion, since I had no whole opinion, since the all-too-thin membrane of self-discipline had been ripped open by the seething of raw, deeply repressed emotions, by my willful blindness, by something that knows only the language of the senses, which we ought to hide rather than show, and consequently I was angrier at myself than at him, while he seemed to feel so comfortable with his impossibly lanky body and impossible views that he didn't even notice these people staring at him so indignantly, so enviously! people among whom he supposedly felt at home but who saw him with his uncombed hair and dirty red scarf as a buffoon, as a living mockery of their lives and miserable ambitions, though the real clown, I knew, was not he but I.

It seems, he said calmly but testily, that we were speaking in entirely different languages.

It seems that way, doesn't it? I said, but since he felt so at home here, I went on, no longer able or willing to contain my irritation, hadn't it occurred to him that while he could freely come here from the other side of the Wall, we weren't allowed to go over there?

I said this a little too loudly, and the two women stopped, if only because Melchior's arm slipped out of Thea's hand, and they all turned around, Frau Kühnert's eyes flashing with fright behind her thick glasses — careful, they seemed to be saying, every word can be heard — but I couldn't stop, and though I was mortified I went on, he shouldn't be too surprised, I said to him, if our notions of individual freedom made us speak in different languages.

But then Melchior, with schoolmasterly authority, stepped between us, shaking a finger at me in mild admonition: I should be careful, he said, his friend spoke with the words of a Robespierre, a Marat, and of course I had no way of knowing that I was talking to a fearless revolutionary.

Completely frustrated with myself, and with the last breath of my ridiculously envious anger, I said that was precisely the reason I was talking to him.

You mean you're one, too? Melchior asked, cocking his bushy eyebrows in mock alarm and disbelief, having a little fun at his friend's expense.

Why, yes, of course I am, I said, grinning up at him out of my anger.

The common ground we found in the intimately conspiratorial tone of his voice promptly relieved me of my shame, for he well understood my feelings, understood my shame, and knew how to dissolve it, with his understanding drew me to himself, distancing himself from his French friend; because of him I could breathe again.

But now unexpectedly the Frenchman broke into laughter, silent laughter, maintaining his aloofness, standing apart even as he laughed, his aloofness being meant for Melchior: the two of them were no doubt beyond such debates, beyond the point where they could reach a pact or agreement, which itself may have become a pact, but now, regarding Melchior and me, as if he were brushing away the filth of our cynically supercilious common stance and, with it, the disgust we had evoked in him, he waved his hand, dismissing us, shooing us away, rubbing us out of his space, indicating that we were frivolous and irresponsible, unworthy of further debate.