Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

She was right about that, I added, laughing, trying to be funny.

Melchior stopped, turned to me, and he not only did not smile but gave me his gravest, most motionless look.

In embarrassment I continued: she was no fancy lady, only a two-bit whore, she said, but I had nothing to fear, she knew better than anybody what adorable little gentlemen like me liked to have done to them.

With his impassive face Melchior indicated displeasure, but then took both my arms by the elbows, and as his face drew close to mine a tiny smile appeared, not around his mouth but in his eyes, but this had to do not with my evasive little joke but with his determination that right there, in the middle of this floodlit square, in plain sight of people hurrying to the theater, he was going to kiss me, quite passionately, on the mouth.

This soft, warm kiss gave birth to many more tiny kisses, enough of them to cover my closed eyelids, my forehead, and my neck; his lips, with their rapid slides and thrusts, seemed to be groping for something; I don't think anybody noticed, or, having noticed, paid any attention, though I must say they missed a great moment; but then our arms, protectively thrusting us apart, fell to our sides and we stood there looking at each other.

Then I got back that one, single eye.

He laughed, or rather his strong, wild, white teeth flashed from his soft mouth, he motioned to the entrance and said, We don't really have to go in.

No, we don't.

The show could go on without us.

It sure could.

But that single eye, at that moment, in the midst of the crowd, was telling me something very different.

Well, that's the end of the story, I said.

He smiled back at me, mysteriously, calmly, beautifully; I did not fully understand that smile then, for it was not his usual, steady, inescapable smile, the one I at once loved and hated; but I had to obey it, I had no choice; perhaps for the first time in our relationship he fully possessed me.

He must have acquired a part of my personality — a cherished or despised part, it was all the same — that until then he had not encountered or could not account for.

I had the feeling I'd better go on concealing my face with words.

He did not move, making us look as if we were quarreling.

In his smartly tailored dark suit, his clasped hands holding the wings of his open raincoat behind his back, his upper body slightly bent forward, Melchior was standing before me in the harsh bright lights, and as if compelled to entertain serious doubts about something, he narrowed his eyes to mere slits, almost making them disappear.

Several people were looking at us now, but whatever they may have been thinking they were wrong.

Let's go home, I said.

He shrugged his shoulders slightly, seemed ready to go, but that made it impossible for me to move.

I'm sure I have to tell him all this, I said, with an uncertainty caused by feeling powerless, so that he'll understand why I couldn't leave that crowd back then, in Budapest, and go home; the whole thing wasn't so interesting, and it hardly mattered, but I was sure that now he'd understand.

And then I didn't want to say anything else.

He understood, of course he did, he replied impatiently, though he wasn't at all sure that he had understood what I wanted him to understand.

It would have been easy to say something, anything, to break the painful silence that followed, painful because in truth I did want to continue but couldn't, though I did not wish to retrieve that part of my personality he had got hold of and now so eagerly possessed — and this in turn warned me that I couldn't just tell him anything I wanted to; and the reason I couldn't continue was not that I had to utter some terribly important and profound truth but that, on the contrary, an unfamiliar bashfulness was keeping me from recounting perfectly ordinary events, a kind of modesty, more dangerous than that of the naked body, checked the flow of words, for any of my personal experiences would seem hopelessly contingent so many years after the fact, petty, silly, laughable when compared to the events that silent historical memory had endowed with the grandeur of true tragedy.

I certainly didn't feel I should judge the final results of those events, yet it seemed just as wrong to talk only of the drawing board knocking against my legs or the T-square slipping out of my overstuffed briefcase as I kept running.

Still, those objects had been part of my personal revolution, for their weight, bulk, and clumsiness forced me to clarify for myself a question which, from a mundane superficial standpoint, seems silly and insignificant, since in the overall evolution of those events it was then and now unimportant whether one blond high-school student could extricate himself from a crowd of about half a million people or stay where he was; but bluntly speaking, the question for me then was whether I was capable of, or felt the necessity of, patricide; and that was no longer just an insignificant question but, rather, one that, one way or another, must have occurred to everyone in that crowd on that fateful Tuesday evening.

More precisely, if the question had really occurred to people in so crude and oversimplified a form, then none of us could probably have been there, marching side by side, with the commonality created by the heat of our bodies, heading in a direction dictated by an unfamiliar force; instead, horrified by our complicity and denying the power that molded us into a mass, each of us would have fled in panic back to our well-tended, miserable, or plush abodes; we wouldn't have been a crowd, then, but an enraged horde, a reckless mob, rabble bent on senseless destruction; in the final analysis, humans, not unlike animals in the wild, yearn for peace, sunshine, a soft nest, a chance to multiply; man turns warlike only when he cannot ensure the safety of his mate, his home, his food, his offspring, and even then his first thought is not to kill!

That is how it was at that hour, too, in the balmy evening air; we showed our combativeness only in that we were marching together, so many of us; of course our marching was directed against something or some people, but it wasn't yet clear what or who these were, everyone could still think what he wished, bring along his own private grudges, ask his own personal questions without having to come up with definite answers, and if anyone did come up with one, he couldn't know how the others would respond, which is why he spoke in slogans, yelled, or remained silent.

There wasn't a single thing seen or heard that evening that was not in some way significant: every taunt, every slogan, every line of poetry, and even silence itself turned into a mass-scale testing of, and search for, my personal feelings, points of contact, similarity to and possible identification with others.

An object — a T-square, a poem, the national flag — gives us a surface for our thoughts; on such surfaces we conceive of things that otherwise could not be put into words, and in this sense objects are but the tangible symbols, the birthplaces of inarticulate instincts and dark, unformed emotions; they are never the thing or event itself, only the pretext for it.

I couldn't stand the glare of the floodlights any longer.

If I could have talked to him, or at least to myself, about this, I should have said that after we managed to press through the human bottleneck on Marx Square and ran to catch up with the others, something in me changed irreversibly; I simply forgot that moments earlier I'd wanted to go home, and it was the city that made me forget it, turning stones into houses, houses into streets, and streets into well-defined new directions.

And from that point on things followed the course dictated by the law of nature: a spring wells up from the ground, branches into streams, flows into rivers rushing toward the sea; it was this poetic and this simple! obeying the attraction of the larger mass, human bodies propelled themselves out of the noisy, gaily seething side streets toward the boulevard and pressed themselves into the larger crowd there; Verochka must have ended her improvised recitation with the resounding line "Those who never knew, there's no more excuse / Learn now what it's like when the poor cut loose," because with the force of a cork popping free, to the rumble of running feet, people were rushing at us from behind, thrusting us forward, all of us sweeping along in the direction of Margit Bridge; yet even this did not mean that these countless individual wills — all at different temperatures, igniting one another with sheer friction but in the absence of real fuel causing only sparks that flared and quickly died— could heat up to a single common will, yet a change did occur, and everyone must have sensed it, because the shouting ceased, there was no more laughing, recitations, speeches, or flag waving, as if crowding into this one and only possible direction, everyone had retreated into the smallest common denominator of the moment: the sound of their own footsteps.