Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Who possesses the divine ability to distinguish the separate times within a single second; yet in who, if not in us humans, do these divine distinctions of time, reduced to the thinness of a hair, weave their gossamer thread?

Yes, it was she, the face of my one and only, whom I saw standing there in the doorway, silent and reproachful, all in black, veiled, one hand still on the door handle ready to shut the door behind her; I wondered why she was dressed in black, she was dead, she couldn't be mourning herself! though in the fraction of the next second I realized it wasn't she but Fräulein Stollberg in the doorway.

And how strange it was that in this immeasurable space of time the terrible pain yielded to an even more intense throb, a pain caused by a loss that was final and eternal, and the Fräulein could see only the twitch of my face that was not meant for her.

She lifted her veil, slipped her gloved hand back into her muff, and waited, hesitantly, not quite sure how one conducted oneself in this situation; her face was pale, like marble, smooth and untouchable; I suppose it was some shock that made her look like that, quite alien and distasteful to me, yet I could see my own pain reflected in her face, perhaps in the timid, exceptionally fragile smile that hovered around her lips and that I also felt around my own mouth.

I had last seen her a few hours earlier in that tumultuous scene when we all rushed out into the corridor, alarmed by the raving screams of a chambermaid, and she, along with the others, ran toward the wide-open door of our friend Gyllenborg's suite, though at that point not knowing, not understanding yet what had happened, she seemed to be enjoying the noisy confusion.

Now her tiny smile served to alleviate her pain, to make it less humiliating; I could see on her face that her cruel little games were over and done with, and a far greater act of cruelty was to follow; the smile was meant to offset this next act but only made it more painful, the shame of it did, the same shame I felt at having to smile, at realizing that I could still smile, and that a smile was perhaps longer lasting than death itself, which of course was still not my own death.

Carrying in her smile the shadows of her offended, proud, humble, and beautiful cruelty, she hurried toward me, and I received her with much the same smile; but in me the weight of that smile was such that I was unable to rise, whereupon she suddenly yanked her hands out of her muff and, letting the fine fur piece drop to the floor, sank both her gloved hands into my hair and face.

"My dear friend!"

The whisper issued from her throat like a choked sob, and shameful though it may be to admit, the touch of her hand gave me painful pleasure.

A sharp pang that finds joy in pain — maybe that is what must have made me spring up from my chair, the terrifying joy of my shame; my face slid along her lacy dress, then up, face touching face, her hard, cool lips grazing my tear-soaked skin; she was searching for something, hesitantly but irresistibly, and she had to find it quickly, and I was also looking for something on the untouchable smoothness of her face, clumsily, greedily, and the moment her lips found mine, in that fraction of a second when I felt the cool outline of her lips, that gentle fold of flesh, that alluring, curved shape, and she, too, found something similar; then, without parting her lips, she let her head sink to my shoulder; though the withdrawal was deliberate, she threw her arms around me and held me tight, so that we wouldn't feel what we both felt: the taste of the dead man's mouth on our lips; without him it was impossible for us to make contact.

We stood like this for a long time, with our arms pressing our bodies against each other's chest, loins, thighs, or at least it seemed like a very long time; and if just a moment earlier pain sought release in tender touches and tiny kisses, in our quickly flaring and immediately fading sensual energy, then this furious but insensate pressing and squeezing was a way of sharing a pain that found its way into our grief and our guilt, a pain that would not let us eject the dead man, we let him squeeze in between us.

It seems we needed just enough time for my body, feverish from sobbing, to warm up her cold one, because then, with her head still on my shoulder, in a very different, sly, conspiratorial, and rather inappropriate tone of voice, she whispered:

"I was a very good little girl," she said, almost laughing, "I lied."

I knew what she was talking about: the very thing I wanted to know more about, for knowledge of these unnamed but important facts meant time and a chance to get away, but I couldn't ask her about them without giving myself away.

But she, too, was in flight, and betraying me would have meant betraying herself as well; still, she would have liked me to be grateful.

I, however, wanted to vanish from my present life without leaving a trace, not even a telltale, breathless, inquisitive question from which those who remained behind could afterward surmise my real intentions; I wanted to leave nothing behind but a traceless void.

She understood all this, though she couldn't really know what she understood, and though I wasn't going to deny her my gratitude, I had to pull away a little to see all this on her face.

Yes, it was all there, but I was wrong about her laughing, in fact she was crying.

With my tongue I lapped up her large teardrops, and was glad I could show my gratitude in such a simple way, and when I drew her to me once more, the strange feeling of a moment ago, that we were not alone, simply melted away.

But this feeling made me realize what deadly silence reigned in the room, indeed in the entire hotel, and that the soundless light streaming through the window came from an infinite silence.

It occurred to me that the valet had already been taken away.

Later she whispered something about having come only to say goodbye, they were leaving.

I'm going home, too, I lied, but it wouldn't look right if we traveled together, I added.

No need to worry about that, she said, breathing hotly down my neck as if we were exchanging words of love; they'll go to Kühlungsbronn first, and will probably spend a few days there before returning to their estate in Saxony.

After so many years, with a very different sort of life behind me, a respectable life free of dangerous passion and excesses, what shame prevents me still from describing our farewell?

It was as if we had to part not from each other — that we wanted to do most anxiously, to get away, and the quicker and farther the better — but from him, we had to take gentle leave of the one who was staying behind.

She didn't give me away, she lied for me, something I'm not at all sure I would have done in her place, and for this reason, even in this situation, in this impossible parting, she had to be the stronger.

She pushed me away and stepped back; I could say we were looking at each other, but what we both did was to look at him in each other.

By drawing apart we left him too big a space between us, it made him loom too large.

Flustered and stammering, not knowing how we could get around him, get around someone who was growing larger and larger between us, not to mention his corpse still lying on the other side of the wall, I said that maybe I ought to go and say goodbye to her mother; I thought that if we left the room together, we could somehow shake off his lingering presence, but in response, something so sharply painful flashed in her eyes that one could justifiably call it hatred, hatred and reproach, reproach for using such a poor alibi to get away from the dead, but hatred, too, because at the same time I'd also be pushing her away, who was still alive; I had to stay.

But staying meant the hopeless intermingling of the living and the dead.