Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

"Come over later," he said, his voice a little higher and thinner, which meant a great many very contradictory things at once; the unnatural intonation seemed more important than the meaning of the words, suggesting that he was ill at ease, that nothing was as simple as he would have liked to believe, and that no matter how far he had managed to get away from me with his glance, I still had a hold on him, my very silence forcing him to make the kind of concession he otherwise wouldn't have dreamed of making, and also implying that our reconciliation could not be taken seriously, that therefore I shouldn't even think of accepting his vague invitation, in fact should consider it a polite warning that I had no more right to set foot in his house now than I had had before; but the words had been uttered, and they referred to an earlier afternoon when his mother had been shouting from the window and I was holding two walnuts in my hands.

"Krijztian! Krisztián, where are you? Krisztián, why must I keep screaming? Krisztián!"

It was autumn, we were standing under the walnut tree, the garden was glowing yellow and red in the twilight heavy with mist, and he was holding a large flat stone which a moment earlier he had used for cracking walnuts, but because he hadn't even left himself enough time to straighten up, I couldn't be sure if the next moment he wasn't going to bash my head in.

"You people haven't managed to steal our house yet, you got that? And as long as the house is ours, I will kindly ask you not to set foot in it ever again, you got that?"

There was nothing funny about what he said, yet I laughed.

"You were the ones who stole this precious house of yours, from the people you used to live off; it's no sin to steal back from a thief; and that's what you people are, you are the thieves!"

Some time had passed while we weighed the consequences of our words, but no matter how deliciously pleasurable it had been to say them, it was clear from his anger and my calm though abstract satisfaction that all this was nothing but revenge, a reprisal for barely noticeable injuries that had accumulated in us during our brief but all the more passionate and stormy friendship; for months we had spent just about every hour of the day in each other's company, and it was my curiosity that had helped me push past the glaring inequalities between us; so our quarrel was the inevitable reverse of our intimacy, but, plausible explanations notwithstanding, this unexpected outburst took both of us so far afield that turning back was impossible; and as improbable as it may have seemed, I had to drop the two walnuts I was holding and hear them plop down on the wet leaves while his mother went on shouting, calling him, and I started for the gate, quite pleased with myself, as if I had settled something once and for all.

He looked straight into my eyes and waited.

But that final attempt, that ambiguously phrased last sentence, also distanced me from the moment which otherwise I could not and would not want to leave; I had to sense the growing distance not only through his eyes but in myself as well, even if his evasive invitation had no stronger an impact than a fleeting memory does, a sudden flash, no more, a mercurial fish which, thrusting itself above the motionless surface of the moment, takes one breath in the strange environment and, leaving a few quickly subsiding ripples in its wake, sinks back into the world of silence; still, that sentence was a reminder, marked out a turning point, emphatic and compelling enough to be a warning that what was happening to us now was but the consequence of a previous occurrence and would have as much to do with events yet to happen as with those that had occurred earlier; no matter how much I yearned or insisted, it was absurd to think I could remain in the moment that gave me such joy, such pleasure, even happiness; the mere fact that I was forced to experience the quick passing and disappearance of my happiness indicated that, though I may have thought I was bound to it, in truth I was no longer there, had already stepped out of it, and am only now thinking about it; yet I could not answer him, though his posture still suggested a willingness to accept a reply, and at this point I would have liked to, since I thought I could not go on without replying; and he was standing there as if he were about to take the first step, but then, flinging his schoolbag over his shoulders, he suddenly turned around and started for the bushes, going back in the same direction, toward the same spot whence he had first appeared.

My progress was far from steady — each new gust of wind forced me to stop, and it was all I could do to stay upright while waiting for it to subside — so it must have taken me a good half hour of pressing forward on the embankment before I realized that something had changed ominously.

The wind wasn't blowing straight at me but at a slant off the sea, which I countered by moving sideways, head and shoulders thrust into the wind, at the same time using my upturned coat collar to shield as much of my face as I could from the spray sent up by waves crashing on the rocks, though I still had to keep wiping my forehead, where the spray collected into drops and the drops, heavy with salt, formed into rivulets that gushed into my eyes and down my nose into my mouth; I might as well have closed my eyes, for I couldn't see anything, yet I did want to see the dark, as if seeing this particular darkness gave some sense to the otherwise senseless act of keeping them open; at first, only translucent gray splotches and thin strips of wispy clouds rushed past the moon, coming offshore and racing over the open waters on their way to a destination hidden in infinity, their haste, for all the graceful grandeur of their movement, made positively laughable by the impassive calm of the moon; when more massive clouds appeared, denser and thicker but no less agile, it was as if a single projector on a giant stage had been blocked by scenery, and it grew dark, completely dark, the waters had nothing to reflect, and there were no more white streaks drawn in the distance by white foamy crests; but then, just as quickly, it all turned light again, and then dark again, dark and light, always unexpectedly and unaccountably, dark and light and then darkening again; it's no accident that I've mentioned the stage— there was something theatrical, indeed dramatic, in the peculiar phenomenon of the wind above driving the clouds in exactly the opposite direction it was compelled to be blowing down here, a tension between the desires of heaven and earth — but the tension lasted only until some decisive turn occurred in the seemingly unalterable course of events on high — who knows what it was? perhaps the wind changing direction somewhere or, above the waters, getting entangled in the piled-up clouds, turning them into rain and dashing them into the ocean — and then the spells of light grew shorter, those of darkness grew longer, until, abandoning earth and water to their own darkness, the moon vanished altogether.

I could no longer see where I was going.

This way the game seemed even more exciting, for in the meantime, forgetting my fears, I had taken what is usually called the raging of the elements to be a game that embodied or substituted for the opposing forces struggling inside me, and with my own feelings thus projected into a living metaphor, I could pretend to feel secure, as if everything I witnessed were but a delightful spectacle of illusions put on solely for my amusement.

I admit, it was a pretty piece of self-deception on my part, but why shouldn't I have imagined myself to have the major role in this majestically grandiose hurricane when, in fact, for weeks I had been able to think of nothing but that I must put a violent end to my life; what could have been more reassuring now than to see this raging world locked into its own darkness, for all its destructive energies unable not only to extinguish itself but even to harm itself, with no real power over itself, just as I had none over my own self.