Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Something ripped open with each new burst of his sobbing, and still there was more to be ripped open.

Years were ripping out from under the membrane of time.

In a half-sitting position he leaned toward me as, perched on the edge of the couch, I clumsily pulled him to me, and with his forehead on my shoulder, the hot waves of his sobs flowed down my chest, his nose was pressed to my collarbone, and his lips, wet with snot and saliva, were clinging to my skin, and of course I whispered all sorts of tender nonsense into his ear, trying to calm and console him, and then did just the opposite: sensing not only that my body could give no strength to his but that any show of so-called selfless love would only divert or stifle the pain that had to come out, I told him to cry, yes, he simply had to cry, and with my voice as well as with my enervated body I tried to help him cry.

How ridiculous all our intellectual babble had been.

For the first time I could feel what I already knew, that behind his cool sobriety he was clinging to me with all his might, in the brief pauses between sobs his lips were glued to my skin, his pain turning this contact into bites, though he meant them to be kisses, and for the first time I could feel that there was almost nothing I could give him; with this realization I was actually brushing his hands off me, which he felt was only natural but in turn made me want to try the impossible.

By the time he'd calmed down a little and the pauses of his childish sniveling had grown longer between the fits of sobbing, an aging little boy's face was sitting atop his mature man's body.

I laid him down, tucked him in, wiped off his smudged face, including the snot — this was a face of his I didn't want to see — sat at the edge of the couch, holding his hand, doing what the stronger one is supposed to do, and even enjoyed a little the illusion of being the stronger one, and when he calmed down completely, I picked our clothes off the floor and closed the window.

Like a very sick child who feels the caring presence of his mother, he dozed off and then fell into a deep sleep.

I sat in his chair, at his desk, where in the growing darkness my pen lay untouchable on top of my notes on a performance; I kept staring out the window; by the time he began to stir and opened his eyes, it was completely dark.

The tile stove in the meantime warmed up the room again; both of us were depressed, and quiet.

I didn't turn on the light; my hands found his head in the dark and I said we could go for a walk if he felt like it.

He said he didn't feel like it at all, and didn't know what it was that had happened earlier; what he'd really like to do was go to sleep for the night, but we could go for a walk.

This city in the middle of a well-kept park which is Europe — to continue and amend with my own impressions his fascinating line of thinking — struck me more as a unique memorial to irremediable destruction than a real, living city, as a frighteningly well-preserved ruin of romantic park architecture, because a truly living city is never the mere fossil of an unclarified past but a surging flow, continually abandoning the stony bed of tradition, solidifying and then flowing on, rolling over decades and centuries, from the past into the future, a continuum of hardened thrusts and ceaseless pulses unaware of its ultimate goal, yet it's this irrepressible, insatiable vitality, often wasteful and avaricious, destructive yet creative, that we call, approvingly or disapprovingly, the inner nature or spirituality of a city's existence; but this city, or at least the sector of it I had come to know, showed none of these alluring urban characteristics, neither preserved nor continued its past, at best patched it up, sterilized it out of necessity or, worse, obliterated it, ashamed; it had become a place to live in, a shelter, a night lodging, a vast bedroom, and consequently by eight in the evening was completely deserted, its windows darkened; from behind the drawn curtains only the bluish flickering of TV screens reached the street, the puny light of that small window through which its residents could glimpse another, more lively world across the Wall; as far as I could tell, people preferred programs coming from the other side, thus isolating themselves from the locale of their own existence much as Melchior did or tried to do, and for understandable reasons preferred to peek into that other, improbable and titillating world than take a look at themselves.

And if at such a late hour, or later, in the dead of night, we descended from our fifth-floor nest to the lifeless streets below, our echoing footsteps made us feel our loneliness, isolation, and infinite interdependence more acutely than we did in the apartment, where behind locked doors we could still pretend we lived in a real city and not on top of a heap of stones declared to be a war memorial.

Some more advanced mammals, like cats, foxes, dogs, wolves, and the like, use their urine and excrement to mark out territory they consider their own, which they then protect and rule as their homeland; other less developed and less aggressive animals like mice, moles, ants, rats, hard-shelled insects, and lizards prefer to move about on beaten tracks, in ruts and burrows: we were more like the latter group, compelled by the almost biological conditioning of our cultures, by our reverence for tradition, and by our upbringing, which could be labeled bourgeois; we flaunted our finicky tastes, our penchant for refinement, and, with a hesitant intellectual relish rooted in our affinity for fin-de-siècle decadence, chose only those routes that in this city could still be considered appropriate for a leisurely old-fashioned walk.

When one's freedom of movement is restricted, then in the very interest of maintaining the appearance of personal freedom one is compelled — in keeping with one's needs — to impose further restrictions on oneself within the larger restrictive limits.

In our evening or nighttime walks we made sure never to wander into the new residential areas, where we would have come face-to-face with the palpable form of the coercive principle that lacked all notion of human individuality and that considered people, quite pragmatically, beasts of burden and, mindful only of the bare necessities of rest, procreation, and child care, packed them into grim concrete boxes — No, not that way! we'd cry, and choose routes where one could still see, feel, smell something of the city's ravaged, continually deteriorating, patched-up, blackened, disintegrating individuality.

I might say that we took our walks through the stage set of individuality's Europe-size tragedy, though in the end we could choose only between the bleak and the bleaker — that was the extent of our freedom.

For instance, if we walked down Prenzlauer Allee, an empty streetcar would clatter past now and then, or we might see a Trabant chugging along, its two-stroke engine belching noxious little fumes — and of course Prenzlauer Allee was a tree-lined avenue, an allée in name only — after a good half-hour stroll we'd come to an empty lot as big as a city block, riddled with bomb craters and overgrown with weeds and shrubs, going around which we'd turn into Ostsee Strasse or, better yet, Pistorius Strasse farther up, and pass the old churchyard of the parish named after St. George, and after another twenty minutes through various winding side streets, we'd reach Weissensee, or White Lake.

This small lake in whose murky, polluted water sluggish swans with filthy feathers and attentive wild ducks swam after crumbs thrown by passersby, was surrounded by a cluster of trees, the remains of a formal garden of an elegant summer palace that used to stand there, replaced now by a nondescript beer hall.

That Sunday evening we took a shortcut through Kollowitz, formerly Weissenburger, Strasse, the street where, in my increasingly complicated tale, I had placed the residence of the young man who arrived in Berlin in the final decade of the last century and who, in my imagination, based on Melchior's stories, seemed to resemble me a little, and from Kollowitz Strasse we turned into Dimitroff Strasse.