Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

We don't need to imagine how people close to us will behave. Certain situations always bring with them the appropriate form of behavior. Until the end of our lives we keep repeating identical gestures, and this is very reassuring for those around us. With this in mind, I was preparing myself for my mother's arrival.

The ward was full of white mummies like myself, lying strapped to their beds. I somehow wanted to dissociate myself from them. They wheezed, moaned, snored, groaned, and they stank. I had my back propped up with big pillows. I asked the nurse to turn on the overhead reading lamp, to take the bedpan out from under me, and to bring me a newspaper. I watched her slipping in and out of the room. But I was in too much pain and couldn't read with my one good eye long enough for my mother to arrive while I was still in this position. I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again, to my great surprise, it wasn't my mother I saw at the door but a she-devil dressed in my mother's clothes. Just as she was barging into the room and heading straight for me. This I didn't expect. With her arms outstretched she flew into me, her handbag hit me in the face, she seized my shoulders, and if the nurse hadn't hurled herself between us, she would have given me a thrashing then and there. And she had never raised a finger to me before. Never. Now the two of them were scuffling right on top of me. While in a voice choked with rage the she-devil was screaming, What did you do? What did you do again? the guardian angel, her voice a falsetto, kept shrieking, What are you doing? Don't touch him! You're crazy! Help! It suddenly turned light, blindingly light in the ward, and in an instant everyone was up and yelling, but very quickly it was all over. The she-devil vanished, evaporated, and my mother broke down, sobbing, on my bed. The nurse let go of her. She then checked my cast, felt my healthy as well as my bandaged parts, made everyone go back to bed, giggled nervously, told them everything was all right, turned off the light, and, grinning at me one last time, left the ward.

In a situation like this, the most sensible thing a child can do is to explain to his parent what he has done and why. He must confess all his sins, reveal at least a third of his secrets, and with a show of contrition gain her forgiveness. Still, it didn't even occur to me to give us away. I was convinced that Prém would tell the police only what was absolutely necessary. Perhaps the reason for my decision was that for the first time in my life I was caught between two women. This stormy scene had made me realize that Mother was not just my mother but also a woman. I had never thought of this before. One woman was sobbing on my bed, the other giggling as she circled my bed. As if she were gloating over my being in the clutches of a madwoman.

Still sobbing, my mother kept repeating her questions, hovering around the most critical problem of my life. I had to make a decision about my own independence. Using my good hand and the arm in the cast, I turned her crying face toward me. I was angry with her, I wanted to steer her away from this sensitive area, but in a way that wouldn't hurt her too much.

She could have come sooner, I said.

But she just got home. A policeman was there, waiting for her. A policeman.

I've been lying here all day with not a bite to eat.

She raised her tearful eyes to me.

I said I wanted some sour-cherry compote.

Sour-cherry compote? she asked incredulously. Where would I get you sour-cherry compote?

In the meantime, though, her tear-filled eyes regained their old familiar look: compliant and somewhat frightened, a widow's look. I managed to change her back into my mother.

Today I know that it was I who killed the woman in her.

I need not emphasize that this life, our life, was different in every way from my friend's life. Although there was a brief, and for my development decisive, period in our youth when, like him and his girlfriend Maja, we also caught the fever of counter-espionage. Prém and I called it reconnaissance. We had to penetrate enemy territory, then clear out unnoticed. We invariably chose apartments and houses whose occupants we didn't know. We thought it more honest this way. Friends whose houses we may have entered we wouldn't have been able to face afterward. We'd reconnoiter the garden, pick out the deserted room, find the window accidentally left ajar or the shutter that could be forced open, the door that just had to be pushed in, and then select the object to be removed. One of us did the job while the other covered him.

We never kept anything. The objects we took as evidence of our ability were later slipped back. At worst, we'd throw them back, or place them by the door or on the windowsill. Documents, clocks, paperweights, pens, pillboxes, seals, cigarette cases, the oddest knickknacks went through our hands this way. I remember a lacquered Chinese music box and a very pornographic statuette with movable joints. There isn't a jealously guarded secret of my love life that I can recall more vividly than I can these objects. We violated the defenseless lives of strangers — and exposed, unsuspecting, silent apartments. This was the point at which our community of two passed the boundaries of the permissible. At the very thought of an operation our stomachs would tighten, our eyes glaze over, our hands and feet shake, our insides rumble shamelessly, and in our nervous agitation, not once, we moved our bowels in plain sight of each other.

I believe that the moral value of an act can he physically measured in one's body. Such measurements are taken by everyone and in every moment. And the unit of measurement is nothing but the peculiar ratio between urges and inhibitions. For action results not only from urges attributable to instincts but from the relationship of inhibitions, attributable to upbringing, to these urges. Character makeup, social attitude, inherited aptitude, and family origins all look for their proportional share in any action we take. To repeated denial of such proportional sharing, the body reacts with fear, perspiration, anxiety, in more serious cases with fainting, vomiting, or diarrhea, in the most serious cases with actual organic dysfunction.

Theoretically, society should hold as ideal the person who feels the urge to do only what is not forbidden. And as most dangerous the one who feels the urge to do only what is not permitted. But this seemingly logical principle, like that referring to the asymmetry of beauty and ugliness, does not really follow the laws of logic. There is no person in the world in whose action there would be no tension between urges and inhibitions, just as there is no one who wants to do only what is forbidden. The ideals of social harmony and a well-adjusted life are predicated on the masses of people who manage to keep this tension in themselves to a minimum, yet it wouldn't occur to anyone to call them wise, good, or perfect. They are not the monks, nuns, revolutionaries, inventors among us, and not the madmen, prophets, or criminals either. At best, they are useful in maintaining social tranquillity. But the greatest usefulness can measure itself only in an environment of the greatest uselessness.

If before, in thinking about beauty and ugliness, I contended that when made to choose between two near-perfect forms we invariably pick the near-perfectly-proportionate form over the near-perfectly-disproportionate one, then now, reflecting on good and evil, I must conclude that in setting the moral standards for our actions, we never choose what is necessarily good or beneficial, never the boringly average, but the disturbing, provocative exceptions, life's necessary evils. Which also implies that for our senses the highest degree of perfection is the standard, while for our consciousness the standard is always the highest degree of imperfection.