Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

At least three times they said goodbye and then started talking again, so engrossed in each other they couldn't let go; they must have talked for at least forty minutes, and I not only sensed but understood that having retreated behind the protective screen of another language, Melchior was talking about me, gossiping, or, in the squabble going on between the two of them, using me to his advantage — they were jabbering, arguing, fighting, and gabbing like old hags — fuming silently, I huddled under my blanket, hoping that on the waves of his annoying, nasal singsong I might drift off into a light sleep, for I wanted everything to fade away into the distance; if I had to be alone, then let me be really alone.

His arguments seemed persuasive enough, even more so because, unlike me, he never got worked up, never exploded or flew into a rage, not even when his analyses touched on the most sensitive subjects, as if he were short on excitability but long on being cool and reserved, with an uncanny analytical ability, highlighted with ironic overtones, sticking to his own self-chosen matter at hand; but for all that I almost always remained distrustful of his showy theories, for he gave me the impression of a man who talked this way because at each crucial point in his life he had avoided, and still continued to avoid, himself, so that all he did was analyze the evasions with an unerring, seamless logic which he used to conceal his open, bleeding emotional wounds.

True to myself, I paid attention not so much to what he was saying as to the more revealing stylistic elements of his delivery, tried to absorb this emotional block, this ironic, cool, conscious maneuvering with which he distanced himself from himself, tried to understand it by pressing forward to a point where the evasion might occur, gaining a foothold on the slippery soil where his being, the system of his gestures, might be deciphered and he would become touchable, but it was like moving among shadows, for all his gestures remained emphatic allusions to something else, his external features, his smile, his voice, even the people around him were allusions, including Thea, whom he desired yet rejected, and Pierre-Max, whom he no longer desired but was unable to give up, not to mention that I myself was also no more to him than an allusion.

In a foreign city a visitor's eyes, nose, tongue, and ears make extremely curious, and for the natives incomprehensible and hair-raising, connections between the orderly or disorderly layout of streets, between houses — including façades and the feel of the insides of apartments — and their inhabitants' build, dress, behavior, and pace of actions and reactions, because in a strange city the familiarity of routine is absent, the so-called inner and outer natures cannot be separated as sharply as in our home city, where we are used to distinguishing between what we believe to be external constraints and what we assume to be our inner drives; in a foreign city the essential and the trivial merge in an impenetrable blur, a stone façade and a human face, a staircase and the people climbing it become one; colors, smells, lights, kissing, eating, lovemaking — all flash before us, though we cannot know their origins and histories, and their impact is all the stronger, lack of awareness and knowledge transporting you back to the paradisiacal state of a child's urge to observe and discover, a sensual state of unaccountability! perhaps this is the reason why twentieth-century people like so much to be on the move, the comforting, familiar state may be the one they are searching for as they roam about, singly, in pairs, or as part of a herd, in foreign cities all over the world; weighed down by duties and responsibilities, they want out, and this may be the only universally accepted state in which, with no particular danger, they can breach the thick wall erected to isolate the events of one's unconscious childhood from the experiences of what one believes to be conscious adulthood: what infinite joy, what bliss, to be able, once again, to trust oneself to one's nose, taste buds, ears, and eyes, to one's elemental and undeceivable sense organs!

No matter how persuasive his arguments may have been or how self-tormenting and vindictive his theories and assumptions — and therefore apparently not self-hating — according to which he wasn't even German but a fraud who wallowed in his own lies, and since this was the only truth he could squeeze out of himself here, he had to get out, no matter what he said; his apartment, to me at least, exuded the same peculiar style that I felt, for example, in the opera house rebuilt and somewhat remodeled after the war, and not only did the exterior and inner spaces of this opera house evoke in me a mood very close to the one I experienced on Chausseestrasse, in that grand apartment turned workers' flat, but as every important public building in every city is meant to do, it too represented workaday experiences raised to an abstract architectural level.

I knew a few things about this city, but of course no more than one might learn by casually perusing a guidebook: because of my interest in the theater, I knew, for example, something about the history of the opera house, the circumstances in which it was built and then several times rebuilt, I knew that Prince Frederick — Frederick the Great for the historically minded — eagerly sought out the company of his favorite court architect, Knobelsdorf, and while still a young prince presented him with plans to reconstruct the future state capital; when he ascended the throne after the death of his father, Frederick William, often remembered as the Soldier King, nothing could prevent him from embarking on an ambitious building project, which was preceded by the inevitable demolitions and destructions, so in flagrant violation of existing laws, the modest town houses along the Unter den Linden, all different in height and width and architecturally undistinguished — built during the reign of his dour and passionately hated father — were simply erased from the face of the earth to make room for sumptuous, uniform five-story dwellings styled after Venetian palazzi, whose façades nevertheless seemed to look at their surroundings with cold aversion; in the end, all this factual information served no purpose except to enable me, with increasing freedom and abandon, to make connections between things that Melchior found nearly impossible to follow.

I knew that of the public edifices planned for the Unter den Linden and meant to represent the court, the opera house was the first to go up; like all the buildings designed by Knobelsdorf, who followed Palladio's and Scamozzi's principles of architectural forms, it had to be an imposing, well-proportioned structure in the classical style, behind whose simple exterior of geometrical lines and symmetrical proportions every whim and fancy of both builder and patron could explode in the exuberant, lush rococo of the interior, running wild in the white, gold, and purple of its asymmetrical adornments; the site chosen for the theater was a vast open tract, cleared of all former buildings, between the city walls and the old moat (which is now a small winding street still called Festungsgraben).

It was as if someone had accidentally opened an old, dull-gray, squarish, military foot locker, only to find inside it an exquisite music box standing on a jasper base, decorated with sparkling precious stones and dancing figurines, and playing charming little melodies.

The soft, thick, deep-red carpeting on the white floor of Melchior's apartment, the white-lacquered furniture, the heavy folds of the floor-length silk drapes with their gold lilac design, the white wallpaper on the smooth walls, the baroque mirrors, the graceful candelabra, the antique-yellow glow of the tiny flames trembling with each gust of draft, sending up spiraling strips of thin smoke — to me, all this represented the same dazzling strangeness between exterior and interior; in that box of an apartment, originally built for maids and workmen, tucked away on the top floor of a crumbling, turn-of-the-century apartment house that still bore the pockmarks of shelling and the untreated machine-gun wounds of the last war, I felt the presence of that same earnest, constrained aloofness, that same aristocratic aversion to what is external, what is real in the here and now, which I sensed in the historically significant shrine to music and song, the repository of the city's cultural past.