Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

And then she smiled, the way a mature woman smiles at the blundering of her child.

After a little while she took off her hat, slowly pulled off her gloves, threw hat and gloves on the table, stepped closer to me, and with those fingers touched my face.

"Silly, how very silly you are!"

I said nothing.

"It's only natural," she said, and while instinctively responding to her advance, I felt on my hands that the face I was touching was not the face of the woman I loved and to whom I was about to make love; I was holding the woman that he, the dead man, had loved, and would keep on loving; even now he loved her through me, by reaching into me, into my hands and my body, just as this woman wasn't touching me directly.

No more words passed between us; what's more, we had no more moves and gestures of our own, everything was his.

With measured and dignified slowness we consummated his time for him, and for this long hour, whose every minute was sober and serene, even the specter of Hans the murderer had vanished.

As if responding to some inner upheaval, our pupils widened and narrowed; we were staring at death through the alluring veils of each other's eyes.

After she got dressed, pulled on her gloves, arranged her hair in front of the mirror, and put on her hat, she turned around once more to look at me, as if to say that if I wished, I could now say goodbye to her mother.

But after what we had done in that long hour, a polite goodbye would have made no sense; it was best to leave everything just the way it was.

I may have shaken my head, or she may have guessed my thought and agreed.

She lowered her veil over her face and walked out.

The following night, standing at the window of my speeding train, I was looking out to see — for I did want to see — my departure forever from the part of the earth that others, more fortunate or less fortunate than myself, called their homeland.

It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

I am a rational man, perhaps too rational. I am not inclined to any form of humility. Still, I would like to copy my friend's last sentence onto this empty page. Let it help me finish the job no one's commissioned me to do, which should make it the most personal undertaking of my life, the one closest to my heart.

It was a dark, foggy winter night, and of course I couldn't see anything.

I don't think he meant this to be his last sentence. There is every indication that the next day, as usual, he would have continued his life with a new sentence, one that could not be predicted or inferred from the notes he left behind. Because the novel of a life, once begun, always offers an invitation: Come on, lose yourselves in me, trust me, in the end I may be able to lead you out of my wilderness.

My role is merely that of a reporter.

I begin, then, my voice choking, with the fact that it must have been around three o'clock in the afternoon. That's when he usually stopped working. It was a bright, cloudless, summerlike late September afternoon. He got up from his desk. Outside, the old garden that had thinned out in the August heat was now slumbering peacefully. Now and then, through the sparsely grown tree branches and bushes, he could catch a glimpse of the shining dark river. The unusually narrow, vaulted windows of the house were framed by creeping vines, their yellow and red berries ripened by the sun at this time of the year. Lizards and the various insects that made their home in the clinging vines were now basking in the sun or cooling themselves under the shady leaves. He described something like this in the first chapter of his memoir, and he must have seen something like this on that day, too. Later, he had a bite to eat, exchanged some pleasantries with my aunts in the kitchen, then tucking the morning paper and the day's mail under his arm and throwing a thick towel over his shoulder, he went down to the Danube.

Two mangled legs, a crushed-in chest, and a cracked skull. That's all that was left of him, that's what they brought back.

So, without attaching any symbolic significance to it, the sentence quoted above was the last of an eight-hundred-page manuscript. It was left to me, though I am not his legal heir.

And now I would like to state most emphatically that by prefacing this report about my ill-fated friend's death with a few words about myself and my own circumstances, I do not wish in any way to push my own person to the foreground.

One reason for my doing this is that if I were to speak only of him, I'd get stuck too often, my voice would choke and falter.

My name is Krisztián Somi Tot; if not the last name, my first name should be familiar to those who have gotten as far as that last sentence of this long yet still incomplete life story. Because my poor friend, now through the distorting effects of romantic idealization, now that of romantic disappointment, did record for posterity a boy named Krisztián, the boy I once was but with whom today I feel I have little in common.

I could almost say he wrote it for me. Which does make me just a little proud. Maybe not proud. Rather a little surprised, childishly, awkwardly surprised, as when somebody suddenly shoves under your nose a secretly taken and therefore completely revealing photograph. In another sense, I'm embarrassed by the whole thing.

Having read the manuscript, I think that the more desperate the will to live, the larger the gaps memory must leap over. When activities aimed at survival are driven by sheer, ruthless will, the shame evoked later by memory is that much deeper. Nobody likes to be embarrassed, so we'd rather not remember morally deficient times. Repression makes us both winners and losers. In this sense my friend was right: I've also turned out to be a man with a divided soul, and in that I'm not so different from other people.

To clarify what I have in mind, let me confess that the events of that freezing day in March which were so fateful in his life, my memory simply tossed away. I was there, and I've no doubt it happened as he described it. The overwhelming joy and terrible fear evoked by the tyrant's death, our own long-lasting but uneven attraction to each other, and the deadly fear of being discovered and betrayed — all these were within me, too; I felt them more or less the same way, and I said so. But I never thought about them again. I must have felt that that kiss settled something between us.

And I did say, while urinating, that the old train robber finally croaked. Or some such silly thing. It gave me such pleasure, like the body's pleasure, to be able to say a sentence like that out loud. Afterward I was terrified he might report me. In those years we lived under the constant threat of being evicted from the capital. Of all the houses of our neighborhood right next to that notorious restricted zone, we were the last original residents. Every official-looking envelope made my mother tremble with fear. Maybe our house was too small or too run-down; to this day I don't know why we were spared.

My mother I loved with the tenderly domineering, overly solicitous, forgiving yet controlling love that only a fatherless son can have for a mother struggling with loneliness and terrible financial problems, a widow mourning her husband unto death. For her sake I was ready to make any concession, be open to the most humiliating compromises. That's why I hoped we could avoid that reporting business. And if it had already happened, I wanted to know what to expect. I am not inclined to humility, as I've said, but when it comes to compromises I'm willing to go to extremes, even today.

What should be understood from all this is that no event in my later life could induce me to think that that kiss was really a kiss and not simply the solution to an existential problem I had at the time. I couldn't allow myself to be caught in dangerous psychological predicaments, I had all I could do to ward off tangible external dangers. I came to appreciate the advantages of psychological self-concealment, and with the years I continued to avoid ambiguous situations and judgments that didn't square exactly with my wishes or interests.