Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

In the kitchen I arranged the dirty dishes on the table next to the sink but didn't wash them — I wasn't so permissive or magnanimous as to leave them completely to themselves — I could have gone to the bedroom, but didn't, and when I went back, they were still chatting, or more precisely, Pierre was talking for what seemed like a long time, with Melchior listening and smiling and absentmindedly picking crumbs off his plate and licking his fingers.

I opened the window and leaned out, not wanting to understand even the few French words I did catch, but letting him know I was there.

In this game, this ambitious linguistic game of his, in which he tried to raise part of his personality and shift it into a different identity, there was a subtle message for me, but after our conversation earlier that morning, my ears registered its subtleties in a new way.

The more he succeeded in adopting the cadences of the foreign language and losing the intonations and accents of his own, which had eaten themselves into his face, his lips, his throat, his posture, the further he moved from the ease with which one speaks in one's native tongue, which was natural, because one never speaks in perfect sentences or with flawless diction in one's own language but chatters away freely, obeying some strong inner purpose and personal sense of equilibrium, the perfection expressed being rather the innate one of a linguistic community, its infinitely broad yet inviolable consensus; in one's own language even a clumsy sentence includes the extremes of total abandon and strict constraint, freedom within the commonly accepted bondage, and in this sense there's no mistake or false intonation, can be no linguistic error, for every mistake or lapse or false turn is an allusion to something real, a mistake, a falseness; but with him it was different: the more imperfect and unnatural he became in this strange, mimicking perfection, the more perfectly he acted out the message that I, who knew him only in his native tongue and in the gestures and demeanor that were part of it, didn't really know him at all, that he was not to be identified with himself, because here he was, I could see for myself, capable at any moment of this kind of metamorphosis, and I shouldn't trust the person I thought I knew, he was two different persons with two different languages, who could choose at will between the two, so try as I might to pin down his emotions, or blackmail him with myself, and especially with Thea, it wouldn't work, a part of his soul would always be free, off limits to me, in a whole different world, a secret realm I couldn't even glimpse, there was no use being jealous, because if he didn't love this particular Frenchman, he must love the Frenchman within himself who was his real father and in whose language his own soul could and wanted to speak; I might look upon his life as a distant accident of history, but I was too dense to understand anything, didn't understand that this fatal physical and spiritual split was his real story, that over the German father he had to choose the French father killed by the Germans, his soul over his body, his body over his mother tongue, not only because that man was his real father — who could possibly care about the sperm of an unknown man! — but because the justice of the story demanded it, he had to reject the German father whom he hadn't had a chance to know either, whom he loved, whose picture he would stare at for hours, whose name he carried, and who in a trench or in some snow-covered field had frozen to death.

And if up to that time even the moments of tension between us had been pleasant, this drawn-out telephone conversation excluding me in more ways than one managed to render them unpleasant; for a few more minutes I let my face be warmed by the feeble winter sun — it had been receding since midmorning and was now only a thin strip of light on Melchior's eyes and hair and on the wall over his head — then I withdrew into the study, took out the blanket from under the pillow, lay down on the sofa, turned to the wall, and, like someone who has finally found rest and solace, wrapped myself in the soft blanket, for perhaps he was right: I didn't take his story quite seriously, and considered his undying hatred for Germans a form of self-hatred stemming from very different causes, just as he shut himself off from the heartrending story of my life, at times shedding real tears over it but in the end making the cold remark that he saw in it nothing but merely the personal, and of course in that sense moving, consequence of the final collapse of anarchistic, communistic, socialistic mass movements caught in the struggle between two superpowers, we were both unfortunate products of that same collapse, two odd mutants, he said, and laughed.

Slightly offended, I reminded him of the special aspects of Hungarian history, offended because of course nobody likes his entire existence to be seen as the symptom of a disease, even an aberration of European proportions, but all my arguments proved futile, he stuck to his guns and launched into a comprehensive geopolitical analysis in which he elaborated on his theory that the 1956 Hungarian uprising — he said uprising, not revolution — was the first and most substantial symptom, one might even call it a turning point in contemporary European history, signaling the collapse and liquidation, the practical demise, of all traditionally motivated struggles, and while at the time the Hungarians appealed very heroically but just as foolishly to a traditional European ideal, that ideal, as it turned out, no longer existed, all that was left of it were a few slogans and a few Hungarian corpses.

Several thousand dead and executed people, I put in reproachfully, my own friend among them.

These ideals and principles, he continued as if he hadn't even heard me, had ceased to be viable with the end of World War II, except that Europe, ashamed at having been unable to defend itself but also euphoric in victory, failed to notice that at the Elbe River the soldiers of the two great powers were already representatives of two superpowers, embracing over the charred corpse of Hitler.

Whatever the aim of the struggle — national self-determination or social equality — to the new world powers it was all the same, he said, because in their respective spheres of influence, reshaped in their own image, they both strove to thwart independent development.

What on the one side meant a return to pre-democratic conditions, suppressing all attempts at democratization or national independence, and to which, I should please note, the other superpower, espousing principles of freedom and self-determination, gave its ready blessing, that very same thing meant on the other side keeping in check all practical achievements stemming from and spread by the movement of bourgeois emancipation, denying them room to grow and flourish, forcing all radical initiatives inspired by the principles of equality before the law, of social justice, into the Procrustean bed of conservatism, to which the superpower on the other side, championing the cause of social justice, gave equally ready blessing, because, for one thing, it too was basically conservative, and also because it felt that any social transformation based on ideals of equality would threaten its own hierarchical practices.

That's how it is, he said, somewhat amused by his own political philosophizing; taking advantage of a momentary, hesitant pause in which he seemed to gather further strength from his own thinking and self-mockery, I expressed my doubts about so crudely equating the two superpowers, whether in intention or practice.

And I shouldn't think, he went on, ignoring me again, that he hadn't heard our little debate as we were walking up the stairs in the theater; he was listening to Thea but heard it just the same, and thought that in our little verbal duel the breakdown of traditional European aspirations was even more evident than it was in the so-called political arena, where crude rhetoric and overcautious diplomatic phraseology tended to blunt the edge of real conflict or push it to absurd extremes; we were being ridiculous, we didn't need a Wall, we kept snarling like mad dogs, not interested in guessing or inquiring what really was happening on the other side, forgetting completely that the Wall was erected to make us bark at each other.