Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I felt myself blushing all over and could tell from the teary glint in his eyes that the telltale change in my complexion did not escape his notice, though the sudden rush of emotion he unwittingly elicited in me affected him, too; the satisfaction he must have felt at having unmasked me for a moment caused such an abundant welling up of tears in his eyes that if he hadn't quickly pulled out a handkerchief from the pocket of his baggy trousers, with a movement that for him seemed almost too abrupt, the tears would have rolled down his plump, ruddy cheeks.

I must be one of those emotionally weak people, then, I thought to myself, suddenly recalling the moment in that compartment when in the silence punctuated only by the clatter of the train, under the light of the swaying ceiling lamp, she pulled off her gloves, slowly and mercilessly, and, looking deep into my eyes, revealed the secret of her hands to me.

Frozen, without breathing, I stared at the weirdly inhuman sight: on both her hands — nature's cruelty in her was symmetrical! — she had only four fingers; the middle and ring fingers on each hand were fused together in a single, thick digit ending in flat, hard nails; yet I must admit that the peculiar deformity did not really come as a surprise, and the inspector was right: I wasn't repulsed; if anything, the sight gave an attractive if cruel explanation of her delicate and vulnerable beauty, which during the long journey I had kept scrutinizing, entranced and mesmerized, and whose secret I had been unable to puzzle out.

By revealing her defect, she seemed to be telling me that we carry all our physical qualities, abilities, gifts, faults, blemishes, and passions in the features of our face; modesty had but one duty: to cast a gentle veil over what was self-evident; her face, after all, was perfectly formed, exquisite, each of its fine lines and charming curves complemented other, equally fine and charming features, yet even before I saw those awful hands I felt as if all this perfection hung suspended over the chasm of its own uncertainty, at any moment the finely cut features could unravel and become deformed; it seems incredible, but I felt that a law of nature was being embodied right before my eyes, I thought I could almost see how beauty could mature into itself only by going through the malformed and the ugly, that perfection was but the degeneration of the imperfect, and that is why beauty was engaged in a constant game of hide-and-seek with ugliness and degeneration; her lips were full, sensuous, yet quivering with gentle, soft currents, as if she had to stop some terrible violence or pain with them; and her eyes were wide-open and round, penetrating but also haughty, as if with each glance she were challenging, and at the same time trying to forestall, some imminent disaster; on her face I saw the dread of, as well as the longing for, annihilation; it was madness in the guise of beauty that excited me, so the gesture itself, the slowness and cruel dignity of the gesture with which she exposed the secret of her hands and that of her whole body racked with desire and the dread of desire, moved me to respond with a very rash, extreme gesture of my own: I seized the strange hand and, finding the root of my desires in this no doubt repugnant sight, kissed it.

Not only did she tolerate my humble kiss but I could feel that for that brief moment she yielded her hand totally to it and then slowly, savoring the warm touch of my lips, she began to pull it away, yet I felt she did not really want to, she wanted something else, something more cruel, more extreme; in our clumsiness we let the gloves drop to the floor, but then she shoved her unspeakable, hoof-like fingers between my lips, and while we both remained silent, like thieves — with eyes not quite closed, her mother was sleeping right next to her and being bounced around by the moving train — she deliberately bruised my lips and my tongue with the sharp tips of her broad, flat nails, turning my quiet humility into my humiliation.

The smile on her face then was unforgettable, and it was this smile that later Gyllenborg captured in his equally unforgettable photograph.

The picture itself was dominated not by the two intimately familiar bodies but by a heavy, undulant drapery whose folds swept down diagonally from the upper edge of the picture toward its center, where it twisted around, concealing some kind of studio hassock or stool, swung down farther, less ruffled, until its graceful sweep finally vanished from view, giving the viewer the impression that he was looking not at a complete picture but at a random detail of a larger composition, and thus the models assuming their position against the background of the luxurious drapery also looked rather tentative; the young servant's unruly hair was adorned with a laurel wreath; his legs spread apart, his chest puffed out, he sat in the middle of the picture with his work-hardened hands resting on his knees, and though he didn't face the viewer, his body did; as if following the folds of the drapery, he was looking out of the picture, over the head of Fräulein Stollberg, who, down on one knee, positioned herself in front of the young valet in such a way that her slightly bowed head concealed his groin; at the same time her head and her face with a gracefully cruel and voluptuous smile were framed by his two enormous thighs and powerful legs.

But with all this I haven't said anything about the photograph itself, which, naturally, revealed much more about its creator than about the people used as models; following some wise old rule of aesthetics, Gyllenborg uncovered the man's body, keeping the genitalia invisible, while the woman's body, with the exception of one breast, he draped with a sheet, slinging it over her shoulder in a classical manner; however, the sheet he used must have been soaked in water or oil first, because it clung to her, wet and shiny, accentuating even more, almost to the point of disgusting immodesty, what it so modestly covered up.

The picture could have turned out disgusting, ludicrously precious, frighteningly contrived and tasteless, a textbook illustration of a strained, dilettantish performance that, in its attempt to achieve well-balanced proportions, obliterates just those human traits, thought to be imperfect, flawed, and unseemly, that are a natural and inalienable part of any example of human perfection; except that the young lady in the picture— and for this the artist deserves praise — folded her healthy fingers into her palm, and held those awful, hoof-like fused digits before her face, those unnatural, deformed fingers! and as if not even conscious of the warm closeness of the valet's open thighs — heavens, what fragrant warmth must have streamed from those thighs! — she was busy looking at the repulsive, malformed fingers, contemplating them with that cruel smile of hers, yes, a cruel smile that turned everything in the carefully arranged picture, every self-consciously aesthetic and voluptuous detail, into its own diabolical parody; nevertheless, it wasn't the two subjects that were mocked and laughed at but we, the peeping viewers, you and I, and everyone else who looked at the picture, even the person who made it, for what the picture was saying was that with a smile one can accept one's deformities, with a smile one had to accept the objective cruelty of things, that is what real innocence is, the rest is mere decoration, detail, convention, affectation, the smiling acknowledgment of the perverse turned the wreath on the valet's head into a devilish parody, the tense indifference with which he looked out of the drapery folds also had the effect of a parody, as did the raw sensuality which, in spite of their affected aloofness and pensive inwardness, still bound them together; in the final analysis, the gauchely displayed beauty of their bodies also became disillusioningly pathetic.