Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

It wasn't really a hotel but a quiet, old-fashioned boardinghouse somewhere outside the city, in a secluded valley, with somber little turrets and latticed balconies, like a quaint, forgotten, haunted castle.

They got there by streetcar from the railroad station; their room was large and pleasantly cool, and everything in it was white: the washbowl, the oval mirror, the marble washstand, the pitcher filled with water, the bedspread and the curtains, too; outside their window dense foliage rustled all night long.

He was speaking rather haltingly now, as it ready to break off at any moment, but he couldn't find his way back to silence, because after each word he thought would be the last, there was still another.

He asked me for a cigarette.

I found the pack, gave him a cigarette, and put the ashtray in his lap; I also looked for a position to support myself and something to cover up my bothersome nakedness and to warm my feet, numb with cold, so I moved to the other end of the sofa, leaned against the wall, pulled over the blanket, and slid my ice-cold feet under his thighs; he went on, still speaking haltingly, but compelled to carry on with the story.

Now I probably understood, he said, why he had asked his mother who his father was; his teacher's odd remark must have preyed on his mind.

It was also odd, he said, pausing long enough to take a puff, that three years later, when he was home from the university during a break, his mother still didn't seem to understand anything, and with stupefying innocence told him how his teacher had killed himself, talking about it as if it were a trivial piece of news.

He made no response; instead, he quite casually announced that in a few days they'd have a guest, he'd invited a classmate of his, and to avoid any misunderstanding, he pronounced the guest's name, Mario, very distinctly, in case she thought he said Marion.

And then, as if she finally understood, and this, too, happened while she was standing by the sink, the dish she was drying stopped in her hands.

It doesn't matter, darling, she said; this way you'll always be mine.

Once, long after that day, she repeated the same sentence to me.

Melchior's pauses grew longer, but he couldn't stop.

Some crazy delusion would have you believe that the events of the world happen just for you, he said, everything, including things that happen to other people; his experience, your experience are also mine, all mine.

The reason for this, he went on, may have to do with the fact that the first thing every living thing takes into its mouth is its mother's milk-filled breast; and that's why we want our father's red-veined cock in our mouth, too; everything alive, everything that can be stuffed or poured into it, whether it's sweet or salty, everything that assures life and is essential to it must be ours, we must possess it, make it our own.

I understood well why he couldn't stop; the more forgiving and understanding toward his mother and his teacher, the more he was tempted by a secret, unacknowledged desire to shift the moral burden of his experiences partly onto history, something conveniently intangible, and partly onto the two all-too-tangible people closest to him; but because his moral standards would not allow him simply to hate these two people — one absolved by death, the other his mother, after all — and also because he had no penchant for self-hatred, he had no choice but to see himself as a victim of history.

But a victim that talks is always a little embarrassing, his accusations comical, just because he is talking, whereas real victims of history, as we know, are always silent.

And that is why he could no longer abide this place, I understood that now; that's why he had to risk everything and try to get away, reject and sever all ties with his own history, or die for the hope of a new beginning, even letting himself be shot like a dog while crossing the border.

As we reached the city we both stopped talking, withdrawing into our own silences; side by side, there were two interconnected yet separate silences.

I felt a slight excitement in my stomach, in my bowels, as if my conscience had shifted its activities to those places; I was anxious to calm these rumblings and growlings, to ease the urge to pass wind, which was all the more difficult since Thea remained mysteriously and unpredictably closed and aloof — I couldn't tell what effect my response had had on her.

Her curious comment that she would understand even if I hadn't blasphemed in such an elaborate and roundabout way — if I related the story without making a moral judgment, that is — still stung a little.

Nevertheless, it made me realize that neither Melchior's story nor any other could be traced directly to historical circumstances or biological determinants; the moral onus cannot be shifted onto anybody or anything; to think so would imply a certain narrow-mindedness, a poverty of reason; in every story one ought to accept the power of an indivisible whole that pervades its every detail; this is by no means easy if one is used to focusing on details and one is not even a believer.

I had to look at her, almost as if to check the physical state of the person who put such a question to me.

But she seemed not to have heard the rumbling of my stomach, and appeared untouched by my searching look.

Her comment also struck me as curious because never before or after that day had I ever heard her utter God's name, either in prayer or as a curse.

I could interpret her silent features as impassive and indifferent, or as signs of being sympathetic and deeply touched by Melchior's story.

And the closer we got to Wörther Platz, the more impossible it seemed that this day was drawing to a close and something else was about to begin, something inconceivably different, and that she and I had to part until tomorrow, so terribly far away.

The feeling was not totally unfamiliar, though; when I was with either one of them, I was very much present, and the more I managed to be present in the in-between place, the better I could answer their needs, exactly as they wanted me to, and the harder it became to give up my place.

On such nights, for example, after getting out of Thea's car, I'd walk up to the fifth floor to see Melchior, annoyed by my lateness, open the door, and open it wide, and then not only his controlled, almost impersonal smile would seem strange to me but everything about him: his attractiveness, his smell, his skin, the stubble on his chin, his cool blue eyes peering out of his smile, and — I'd almost be ashamed to admit it — his sex, his maleness, though not his essential self.

It seemed I was always closest to the things and people I had just left and had to leave them to stay close; perhaps that was the source of all my errors, I thought, although it couldn't really be called an error, because it wasn't I but my experiences that went this way: in my stead, my own story was doing my thinking for me; I was alive yet continually kept saying goodbye to life, for at the end of every experience a death loomed; as a result, saying goodbye became more important than life itself.

Some such thoughts were going through my mind when we stopped in front of Melchior's building; with her head thrown back, Thea managed somehow to be looking down at me, then she took off her glasses and smiled.

This fast-spreading, expansive smile must have been lying dormant in the muscles of her mobile face, but she hadn't let it out before, held it back, out of tact perhaps, or guile, so as not to distract me, to be able to absorb the story as an undisturbed whole, the way I'd wanted to present it.

And I asked myself again, delving into the mystery of my cultural conditioning, why I was constantly inching away from the life of my most private self, why this readiness to conform to other people's image of me? was it because death lay in wait at the end of every memory? and wouldn't that be the most primitive historical experience rather than divinely inspired destiny?