Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

When she opened the car door for me and I got in, I could see that she had calmed down, everything in her had gone silent, and from behind the silence she was listening to me, exclusively, attentively, rather as if she were tending someone very sick or a mental patient; before turning her attention to the always troublesome ignition she looked at me as if she understood something of what had just happened between us.

Where to, she asked.

She had never asked that before, I said, why now?

She released the handbrake and let the car roll down the hill.

All right, she'd take me home, then, she said.

No, I said, I was going to Melchior's place.

The engine coughed, shuddered, the whole contraption jerked violently, but the car started and we turned back onto the highway; the headlights cut a bright piece of the road out of the dusk which the accelerating wheels kept tucking away under them.

That's what we all do, we tuck the future under us in the front and let the past out in the rear, and we call that progress, but the division is arbitrary; the continuity of recurring elements in time can be checked only with the notion we call speed; and that is what history is, nothing more; that is my own story; I made a mistake, and I kept repeating my mistakes.

And yet with her silence, her tactful silence, she was now giving me a bit of hope; I felt that, too.

Later, I asked her if she knew that Melchior at one time had studied to be a violinist.

Yes, she knew, but let's not talk about him anymore.

What should we talk about, then? I asked.

Nothing, she said.

And did she know why he stopped playing the violin?

No, she didn't, but right now she didn't care to find out.

Imagine a seventeen-year-old boy, I said; the fact that I had to raise my voice over the tinny clatter of an ancient two-stroke engine, speaking so loudly, practically shouting into her ears things that would have real meaning only in the tranquillity of the soul, actually enhanced this last of my little performances; I decided to have one more try, really the last one, and by having to raise my voice I'd have my revenge, too, as if to say to her, You wanted to hear it, well, here it is, now you can hear it! and that helped me broach and sully a forbidden subject, and also overcome the shame of my betrayal.

So imagine a seventeen-year-old boy who, in a quaint old town, recently bombed to smithereens in the war, was admired as a prodigy — I was shouting in a strange voice to drown out the engine, and asked her if she had ever been in that town, because suddenly it seemed very important to me that she know the houses, the street, the air, the fragrant winter apples on top of the cupboard, the wide moat around the old castle now overgrown with shrubs, and the spot on the ceiling over his bed.

And as I thought of this, I realized that my tone was wrong, wrong as all the others I had used; without the right tone and feelings the story itself could not be told.

No, unfortunately, she had never been there, but now she would really like me to talk about something else or, better yet, just keep quiet.

I should have told her about that evening, about the sticky, breezeless evening air as we stepped out of the house on Wörther Platz and just stood there on the street, because deciding on a route for our walk was always important, it had to match our emotional state and our plans for the future.

Could she imagine the condition, I shouted at her, in which an adolescent boy cannot yet distinguish between the beauty of the body and the power of its abilities?

Raising her head high to steady her awful glasses, she listened reluctantly, pretending to be interested only in the road ahead; I could just go on, my voice would mean nothing more than the clatter and drone of the engine.

That evening, or night rather, when Melchior told me the story, we must have been looking for open spaces, because we chose a shorter route, but then ended up taking the longer one to Weissensee, or White Lake.

On the terrace of the beer hall we took two iron chairs out of the stacked pile; they creaked uninvitingly in the dark; we settled down only long enough to have a smoke before moving on; it was cold.

It must have been around midnight, only an occasional call of wild ducks could be heard from the lake, otherwise everything was dark and still.

I was telling him about my little sister, about her death, about the institution my father had taken her to, where I had visited her only once, I hadn't the courage to go back again; I was telling him about that single visit during which, remembering our old game, she wedged herself between my knees, which was a call for me to squeeze her.

And I did squeeze her, and she laughed, and kept on laughing for an hour and a half, did nothing but laugh, which in her language meant she was anxious to please me, was telling me that if I took her away she'd reward me with her unending happiness, but it was also possible, I told Melchior, that it was the pain of my indifference that made me see it that way.

He put his elbow on the table, leaned his head on his hand, and looked down at me — I had pulled over two chairs and stretched out on them with my head in his lap.

Two years later, I told him, because I could never go back to that place again, I found a note on my desk: Your sister died, funeral at such and such time.

There was no light near us, we saw each other's face only in the glow of our cigarettes.

He listened patiently to the end, but not without a certain aversion.

Melchior shied away from everything that had to do with my past; whenever I talked about it he would listen, but in spite of his polite or seemingly polite interest, his muscles would grow tense as if to prevent my past from penetrating him; the present, the moment, my presence was more than enough for him.

I could also say that he was looking down at me with the reservation of a mature man energetically active in his present; he was slightly shocked but indulged this weakness in me, for he did love me; he clearly disapproved of my obsession with certain aspects of my past which normal adult men, done with their past once and for all, find improper to bring up.

But as he listened to me, a radically different process was also taking place in him: as usual, he kept correcting my grammatically faulty sentences, he did this almost unawares, it had become an unconscious habit between us; in fact, he was the one who shaped my sentences, gave them the proper structure, incorporated them into the neat order of his native language, I had to rely on his expropriated sentences to work my way through my linguistic rubble, had to use his sentences to tell my story, and didn't even notice that some of these jointly produced sentences were repeated two or three times, their place and value reshuffled, before reaching intelligible form.

It was as if I had to use my own past to coax the story of his past out of him. I didn't think of it then, but now I believe we needed these evening walks not just for the exercise but to relate to the world around us — which we both felt, though for different reasons, to be cheerless and alien — and to do it in a way that this same world would not be aware of what we were doing.

I also liked the way he smoked his cigarettes.

There was something solemn and ceremonious about the way he tapped the pack and pulled out a cigarette with his long fingers; the act of lighting it was special, too, as was each puff he took, inhaling voluptuously, long and deep, holding it down for a long time; and then he'd blow out slowly, curling the smoke with his lips; he truly enjoyed the sight of the smoke, reaching after it with his tongue, forming rings and sticking his finger carefully into them; and between puffs he held his cigarette in his hand as if to say, Look, everyone, here is a cigarette, and we now have the rare privilege of being able to smoke in peace; lighting up, for us, was not simply the act of common puffing on a common cigarette but the very essence of smoking pleasure.