Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

If she hadn't said that, if she hadn't blurted out the words and made them public between the two of us, if with her laughter she hadn't exposed this most profound secret of mine, which I so longed to put out of my mind, if with this exposure she hadn't disgraced the bond that was our past, then she probably would have found it much more difficult to leave the country; today I think I understand this better.

But then, as we watched each other's defenseless eyes from the dreadful shelter of our stiffening faces, this new shame made the mutually understood yes of the earlier moment turn into a final, irrevocable no.

Any remaining sense of fellowship would have been too painful; a denied one did not hurt, and could be forgotten.

Later in life it often happened that in the faces of complete strangers I'd see Hédi's, distorted and ugly, as she was saying goodbye; it would happen in the most mundane circumstances when I'd see around me immobile yet vibrant faces that even in their hostility could arouse deeply intimate emotions, and while I felt that no matter how much I might try to listen, to give myself to them, to trust them, some inner aversion, a paralysis brought on by vestiges of true feelings despite all the denial, would hold me back, a painful numbness somehow familiar from the far past, and over the years my face changed accordingly, as if an additional face had grown to cover over my own — distrustful, incapable of giving, frightened, made aggressive by constant fear for itself, trying to appear too hard to hide what was too soft, saying yes and no at the same time and doing even that reluctantly, with neither affirmation nor denial wanting to get entangled in any kind of fellowship— and it was as if I saw my own distorted face in all those selfish, hesitant, hurt, sly, apparently attentive looks, in those craftily conciliatory faces with their feigned joviality, which could attack or snub you at any moment, eyes quickly avoiding a stranger's glance, trying to avoid the shame of being unable to make real contact; later, when I began to think about these matters, I had the impression that everyone, without exception (though variously influenced by this persuasion or that affiliation), carries in his face the events of the past they would like to forget and make others forget by hiding them behind artificially altered, deliberately cryptic features.

For this reason I did not think it an accident that after that all-too-quickly forgotten farewell, whose duly deserved pain was denied us, many many long years had to pass, nearly my entire youth, before I could break the mutually agreed-upon silence and for the first time — not counting this written confession, perhaps for the last time, too — begin talking about it, and talk with the same compulsiveness with which I had been keeping it to myself, and talk to a stranger, a foreigner, someone who could have only the vaguest notion about it, and do this in a foreign language, standing in a Berlin streetcar; and there, once I began, it all came up with raw force, like bloody vomit.

It was Sunday, evening, another autumn, when the warm air was already suffused with a mist you could feel — it had a taste, and a metallic smell — and the lit-up streetcar clattered along in its leisurely way in the dark city already deserted despite the early hour.

As was our custom, we were standing in the empty car, because there, under the pretext of holding on to the straps, we could hold hands without attracting attention; we were on our way to the theater, and — I no longer remember how we got on the subject — Melchior began to talk about the 1953 Berlin uprising, when on the morning of June 16, under overcast skies, two zealous Party workers were proceeding unsuspectingly to Block 40 of Stalin Allee, then still under construction and later renamed Karl Marx Allee, to tell a discontented and of course starving group of bricklayers, carpenters, and roofers why raising the work quota was an absolute economic necessity, but somehow that morning the workers did not seem to comprehend what was so clearly comprehensible — of course it was a nasty morning — and, what's more, demanded that the new quotas be immediately rescinded, and then they chased away the two indignant and angry agitprop men, in fact were close to beating them up, and then about eighty of them began marching in closed ranks toward Alexanderplatz, chanting newly made-up slogans; listen to this one, Melchior said: "We are workers, no more slaves, Berliners to the barricades!"

The emotions erupting in the crude rhyme of the jingle, which Melchior found prosodically flawless, and his evocation of the little group of workers growing into an unstoppable human tidal wave; the open platform of the autumn streetcar bathed in yellow light; Melchior's palm, having lost some of its loving sensitivity, resting more lightly on my hand — and no wonder: any love dipped into history lightens by an amount equal to the weight of the historical moments it displaces, the streetcar's clanging little jolts, the taste on my tongue of the warm yet sharp evening air, the sardonic curl of Melchior's lips smiling to keep his distance from himself and his story, the conspiratorial emotions tempered by sparks of humor in his eyes, the familiar old slogans that sounded even more ominously factual when spoken in a foreign language — phrases like "agitprop," and "production quota," and "economic interests of the people" — all these things stirred something in me, I don't quite know what.

I sensed this as I used to feel the excitement and tension of being constantly on the alert: in my feet and in my hands, and also in my face, as if it had freed itself from its old paralysis.

I was thrust back, moved off dead center, given an unsought, not even consciously desired release; in Melchior's narrative the ever-swelling Berlin crowd had not yet reached Alexanderplatz, but my own Hungarian streetcar was already stalled in the midst of a dark throng on Marx Square in Budapest, at the spot where the tracks, screeching softly under the wheels, curve in a gentle arc onto Szent István Boulevard.

Laborers abandoning their scaffolds, housewives on their shopping rounds, students, street urchins, office workers, shop assistants, ordinary onlookers, loafers, dogs too, probably, the procession caught and swept everybody along, Melchior continued with hushed excitement; having swollen to such an enormous size, the crowd seemed to lose direction and then shouts went up: "To Leipziger Strasse, to Leipziger Strasse!" which suddenly became the common will, the current shifted, and the marchers headed toward the government buildings; then two Party workers appeared in front of them, planted themselves in the middle of the still empty street, and tried pathetically, with their bodies, to hold back the angry human tide, which, by then twelve thousand strong, propelled by its own mass and volition, was spreading calmly: "Bloodshed must be avoided!" yelled one of the Party workers; "Don't go to the Western sector!" shouted the other; and the crowd, as if letting out a collective sigh, came to a momentary halt; "You're not going to shoot at us, are you?" — words heard from the first rows, and "If you cross over, we shall!"; later, people said that only two words, "bloodshed" and "shoot," registered with the crowd and rippled through the square within seconds, and then, with the force of helpless rage they surged forward, because their own words were "bread" and "decent wages" and therefore they had to sweep the Party workers out of the way.

We were holding on to the railing, hungrily taking in the spectacle from the slowly moving streetcar, and could see only the tops of people's heads, a not only unfamiliar but completely incomprehensible sight; it was warm in the big, poorly lit square, though it wasn't only the unseasonably balmy air that generated the heat but also masses of people jostling, swirling, trampling on bits of newspaper and torn leaflets, coming from all directions in pairs or in packed, endless columns, singly or in groups, shouting slogans, waving flags, walking every which way, giving the impression of being in complete chaos and at cross purposes, yet the various clustering and dispersing groups seemed to hinder no one, but on the contrary, as if unafraid of colliding with or being impeded by anyone, people proceeded confidently, even at a leisurely pace, to their goal, a whole city having poured out of its houses, factories, restaurants, schools, and offices; here and there you could see policemen standing at the edge of the sidewalk, quite far apart from one another, looking listless and indifferent but mostly helpless and superfluous, for they wouldn't have known what to do with the flood of people streaming through the freshly opened cracks and probably didn't intend to do anything, which created the strange impression that contradictory goals and intentions are permissive toward one another because in them (or above them) is a guiding principle more powerful than any single one of them, an invisible force unifying everything, just as all the shouting and singing, all the jubilantly chanted slogans and jingles ferociously belted out, all the tapping, pounding, shuffling of thousands of feet turned into one wild yet cheerful rumble, as light as the fine edge of the warm evening mist, though even in the impersonal, uniform hum of the huge mass, in its evenly rising and falling sounds, one could distinguish isolated participants who did not want to be part of anything, who simply stared from the sidelines, considering it their mission to be mere observers, or those who hadn't decided whether to join in or hurry on silently and unobtrusively with their strictly personal business, laden with packages and shopping bags, fumbling with curious, restless children who had to be dragged out of harm's way.