Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I might have blushed more deeply and longer had the inspector not had the tact, or calculated cleverness, to wipe his eyes for a long time, dabbing them carefully with the corner of his handkerchief wrapped around the tip of his little finger, making sure he removed every bit of the yellow discharge which prolonged tearing always leaves in the corners; but his delicate little activity was nothing but pretense; rather than exploiting my momentary embarrassment, he wanted me to regain my composure; there was no hurry, he seemed to be saying, we had plenty of time, if not now, then later, and if not later, then I would tell him now what I had to tell, it was all the same to him; but in truth, his apparent tactfulness was his somewhat cruel way of making me nervous.

And not without results, for at the moment, though still overjoyed at being able to suppress the outward signs of my inner turmoil, I did become unsettled, I felt I had lost my bearings, the ability to control the situation, and that he had gotten me to the point where he wanted me to be, more or less; so be it, I suddenly thought to myself, I shall tell him everything, if only to be done with it.

It seemed so simple to tell everything, for it was really nothing: four people had been engaged in erotic games, and one of them wanted out, but another began to blackmail him with scandalous photographs he took of the two of them; if I could have found the first, simple little word needed to tell this nothing of a story, to formulate the first all-meaningful sentence, I could have told him the whole thing.

Fortunately for me, a quiet knock on the door came just then; I know I gave a start, not because of the three soft raps, but because they brought me back to my senses.

Thinking clearly again turned out to have a jolting effect; something inside me was trying to expand, shout out, and at the same time it fell back into itself; the battle of conflicting impulses, like an intermittent fever, made me turn so pale and faint that, while through the haze of my helplessness I watched the hotelier approaching us — his portly figure especially obsequious now because of the murder case — the inspector was ready to grasp my arm and help me into a chair; summoning the last remnant of my strength, I declined, and as if completing the same gesture, I took the letter from the tray offered to me, because I saw immediately whom it was from.

I must have looked a pitiful wreck of a man, trying with every move to convince those present that I was in control of my actions, yet in this situation, in this room, nothing surprising enough could happen anymore that would justify such desperate behavior.

Strangely, it wasn't the situation itself but certain details that stunned me: the sharp shadow the inspector's figure cast on me seemed more important than the words spoken or suppressed; how close and how loud the sea sounded to me, even though the windows were closed; the cold winter light flooding through the windows, witness to the frenzied floundering of my soul.

Although I knew perfectly well what had happened, I did not comprehend why the hotel manager himself and not the valet brought me my letter, yes, the valet, Hans, whom I had just moments earlier banished publicly from my heart, no, from someplace deeper than that, from all my senses; and I didn't understand where he was, where he could be, if his absence hurt me so much; it was my betrayal of him that hurt.

And I didn't understand why this stranger standing before me, folding his arms across his chest again, was telling me to read the letter, and saying it as if somebody else in the room also had to read a letter; I didn't understand why he was saying out loud what at that moment was going through my mind; the servile cowardice with which I obeyed his command, put to me in the guise of a polite request, hurt me so much that in my pain I had the feeling it was a stranger acting the coward in my place, a stranger who nevertheless had to be me.

Even now, as I write these lines, so many years after the event, I don't quite understand what happened to me then; the magnitude of the danger alone cannot explain my behavior; to be more precise, I do understand but am deeply ashamed of those little scenes of falling to pieces, of insanity, buffoonery, betrayal, and cringing, in which I hoped to find refuge; my shame is like a stuck blood clot, and no justifiable motivation or elaborate explanation can be the pill to dissolve it; the painful clot has remained proof positive of my fall from grace.

It was a short letter, barely a page, conceived no doubt in a sudden paroxysm of happiness: My darling, my dearest, my one and only, it began, and this salutation, brimming with joy, caught my eyes immediately; I went over it twice, thrice, and again; I wanted my eyes to comprehend what they were seeing, because with this salutation, suddenly it was a ghost speaking to me from this letter, the ghost of a woman whom I've already mentioned on an earlier page of these recollections, a woman who even as a ghost is more alive in me than anyone living but about whom I mustn't talk, for I cannot; and it was her image, no, not her image but her smell, the smell of her mouth, of her secret parts, of her armpits, that wafted toward me from that opening line, a fragrance I could never quite reach, only she could write to me like this, only she loved me and called me tender names in this way, only she — even though I knew very well that I was reading Helene's letter.

It was during that fraction of a second, while longing for that evanescent fragrance, that I made up my mind: I can't stay with her, I must run away from Helene.

It was ten long years of my life which I had rejected and wished to forget that stared back at me from the salutation; Helene may have expropriated them, but they couldn't have been hers, I couldn't let her have them; thinking of this just then could not have been an accident, for I knew that the police had detailed and creditable data about my ten-year association with secret anarchist societies; if, therefore, I did not act with animal cunning, I'd have to pay for those ten years, and my attempts at finding refuge from the subversive, even murderous activities of those years in Helene's arms would have been in vain.

Death spoke to me from that letter, death multiplying itself and still unique, death lurking at every turn, in every corner, death desired and death dreaded, the death of that one special sweet-smelling woman, rising from the bloody corpse of my now publicly rejected and abandoned friend; but every other murder and death also called out from that letter: my mother's unspeakably slow and painful wasting away at my father's side, and Father's own ignominious death under the wheels of a speeding train between Görlitz and Lebau, at Signal Station 7, and the mutilated body of the girl he had violated, that hideous lye-soaked sack oozing sweat, piss, shit, and snot; all deaths of the body, and yet Helene's letter was in fact sending blissful waves toward me, the prospects of a wonderful life: "That achingly beautiful morning," she wrote, "when we had to part, has become a morning of consummation whose fruit I now carry under my heart"; we had to move up the date of our wedding, she said, and therefore I should hurry back to her without fail, and that was her parents' wish as well; this was followed only by her initial, the first letter of her Christian name.

If fate chose to stage a scene such as this, having me read this letter while a detective investigating a murder keeps his moist eyes on me, then everything but everything is but an illusion and a bunch of lies — so thought one half of my split self, while the other half of course couldn't help being dizzy with joy, thrilled at the mere thought of life's relentless continuation, and the more it felt that this, too, was but an illusion, a deception, a false hope, the more it let itself go in absurd jubilation.