Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

They were standing facing each other again, and then the girl asked him to come to her place because she'd like him to play once just for her.

He thought that was a terribly dumb thing to say; these things couldn't be mixed up in such a crude way, so all he said was "Idiot yourself."

The girl shrugged her shoulders and said, All right, then, in that case he could kiss her right there.

And from then on she waited for him every day, even though they decided each day that she wouldn't do it again; with arguments and intonations borrowed from his teacher he tried to explain that this competition was an awfully important thing in his life and they shouldn't be doing this now.

Actually, no; it happened just the other way around.

He recalled that on the first day, when they were both so excited they didn't know what to do with one another and talked instead to hide their excitement, they were standing in the old, dry moat, in the midst of garbage, bushes, debris of all kinds, it was all very smelly, and the girl was telling him how much she loved him and was willing to wait for him for the rest of her life, and since this competition was now more important than anything else, they should just break up and she would wait for him, and they both felt that this was a terribly beautiful sentiment, yet she was there every day, waiting for him.

And there was one more thing he had to confess.

Though at the moment he had no idea how to talk about it sensibly.

We were sitting motionless, but his gaze was running headlong inside me, and I was backing away and stumbling with my own blinking glances, trying to get away, jump out of the way of his words, as if we were blindfolded and chasing around an elusive object that slipped away just as one of us touched it.

The capacity of our modesty was at issue now, and the laws of spiritual modesty are far stricter than those of physical bashfulness, which is as it should be, since the body is perishable matter, but once it starts revealing itself as not matter, then suddenly its limited, finite nature becomes frighteningly infinite; in panic I fled from this boundless thing, not wanting to see the thing I myself had forced into existence.

His words remained sharp and deliberate, so many thrusts and parries, but no coherent sentence emerged, nothing more than so many powerful unfinished allusions, statements, exclamations, as well as their negations; questions and doubts that only I could understand, inasmuch as one can understand modestly fluttering scraps of words stirred by the repressed mental energies of another human being.

These confused, clipped, suppressed, and still meaningful words referred to the relationship between a long-buried memory now springing to life and another, prudently unspecified recent experience — that of meeting Thea, whose name he couldn't bring himself to say; there was, after all, a huge gap of ten years between the two experiences.

I was lucky enough to have heard two versions of how they got to know each other.

No more of that, he said.

Not even with me, he said.

He said that comparisons never made any sense.

And still, he said.

With her… the guilty silence now had to do with Thea; this whole unfortunate mess started with that.

He didn't want to be tactless or ridiculous, yet he couldn't be anything else.

He didn't want to hurt her, but that's exactly what he was doing.

He just didn't want those kinds of feelings anymore, it seemed.

This state of affairs lasted about a week, he said pensively, and I could tell by looking at him that he was referring to two different times at once, one ten years and the other only a few months earlier, more correctly, the events of ten years ago coming aglow in those of a few months ago.

There is no memory without the recurrence of emotions, or conversely, every moment of lived experience is also an allusion to a former experience — that is what memory is.

The two recollections converged on his face and settled down, one superimposed on the other, each fueling the other, and that made me feel such relief and satisfaction, as if at long last we had hit upon the true topic of our conversation, the one we had been blindly groping for until then.

Needless to say, this little digression I did not mention to Thea in the car.

But he did want to tell me the end of the story, because one day his teacher opened the door, and though he tried to look very solemn, his expression was so desperate that Melchior knew right away that the end he'd always feared was at hand.

He indicated that he should put the violin down, they wouldn't be needing it, and led him into another room.

The teacher sat down but let Melchior stand.

He then asked how Melchior had been spending his evenings.

For once he stood firm and wouldn't say anything, but then his teacher calmly enumerated the days of the week and told him precisely, to the minute, when he had come home each night.

He made no mention of the girl, not even a hint, simply ran down the list: Monday, 9:42; Tuesday, 10:28; and so on, like that, very slowly, without comment. Melchior, wearing his short pants, was standing in the middle of a rug, and when he heard the list he just passed out, right there, in the middle of the rug.

What made him faint was the sudden thought that this respectable, horrible, worshipped, old, handsome, gray-haired, unfortunate man had been following him — a mere child, an untalented nobody — sneaking after him, tailing him day after day, and he must have seen everything, everything.

It was probably just a dizzy spell, a blackout lasting no more than a few seconds.

He came to, smelling his teacher's familiar scent from very close up; he was kneeling over him, and his face remained an unforgettable image: a spider at the moment the longed-for green fly is caught in its web.

The teacher was hugging and kissing him, so distraught with fear that he almost cried, whispering, begging him, imploring him to trust him, for if he didn't he would surely die, he was already dead, they had killed him, and amid these frantic whispers he also blurted out that no one really knew who Melchior's real father was, so why not consider him his father and trust him like a father.

Melchior cried, protested, trembled; after he managed to calm down somewhat and his teacher thought it safe to let him go out on the street, he saw the girl waiting for him, but he ran off without a word.

Luckily, his mother came home very late that night.

By then he had managed to pull himself together; he told her that they should move somewhere else, anywhere, and look for another teacher, any teacher, because this one was no good; he didn't say anything else; he couldn't think of anything else except that his teacher was an evil man, but this he didn't dare say out loud, so in response to his mother's every question he kept repeating that he was a rotten teacher, as if they were talking about his musical education and not about his life.

His mother's lack of suspicion was the last straw, the final proof that no one was there to help him, not even his mother, and everything that really mattered in his life had to be kept secret.

He let himself be comforted, tucked in, and put to sleep; in spite of his misgivings, he let her go through the motions with which an uncomprehending mother can show her love in such a situation.

Having listened to all these minor details, Melchior said, I could no doubt guess what happened next.

Occasionally the girl appeared in the window, cautiously, timidly, because she meant to show him that she understood and was willing to wait for him, but the waiting caused so much pain it was best to block it out.

The day before the competition he and his teacher took the train to Dresden; he wasn't going to reveal what happened that night in the double bed of the hotel room, he'd say only this, that not before or since had he seen a man struggle so mightily with himself, and that his strength held out as long as it could.