Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Through the slats of lowered blinds, the hot afternoon sun streamed into the completely empty apartment. A slight breeze was also blowing in through the open windows and doors. In the long hallway and three large interconnecting rooms there was not a single piece of furniture. Except for a couple of mattresses thrown on the floor of the largest room, with pink and not altogether clean bedding: a turned-up blanket, wrinkled sheets, just as he must have left it in the morning. On picture hooks left on the wall hung a pair of pants, a shirt, and in a corner there was a pile of shoes. I knew we were beyond all rules and conventions. I was ignorant of what was to follow, yet I made the first move. I flung myself on the mattress, lay on my back, and closed my eyes. Showing them just how inexperienced I was — not that they could have had any doubt about that — whereas they seemed to be familiar with the ritual. During the time I spent in that apartment not a single word was spoken. But no explanations were needed. I knew I was in one of those flats whose occupants had left the country the previous December, or early January at the latest. And the man had to be a squatter. He couldn't have been a friend or relative of the former tenants, because then they would have left him something: a chair, a bed, a cabinet. He must have broken into the abandoned apartment, for if he had bribed the caretaker and got the key to the apartment, then he would have let us laugh freely in the stairway.

I have no way of figuring how long I may have stayed in that apartment. Perhaps an hour, maybe two. The three of us were sprawled out in three different positions on the mattress, two of us on our back, the woman on her stomach, when at one point I sensed that I was in the way. The feeling just came over me, even though neither of them gave a signal or made a move. Perhaps they began radiating a different sort of calm, and the energies passing so evenly between the three of us until then simply changed course. As if with their special calmness they were detaching themselves from me. They both seemed to want it this way, and I knew that with my more restless repose I could no longer find my place between them. Very gingerly I slipped my finger into the inside curve of her drawn-up knee. I was hoping she might be asleep. If she was not, she'd squeeze my finger by closing her knee. She stirred. First she turned her head toward the young man, and then she drew her knee up even higher so as to escape my finger. The man slowly opened his eyes and with his look said what the woman had told him with hers. There was no mistaking their message. It would have made no sense to experiment further. I should have felt very hurt, but what made the rejection bearable was that in the young man's eyes there lurked an almost paternal encouragement. I lay on the mattress, quite defenseless, yet my fiercely persistent erection could not have been offensive, as it was alluding to our joint endeavor up to that point. Nevertheless, standing in that state would have been awkward. I waited a little; I closed my eyes. But this way I sensed even more strongly what they had hinted at just before, that they wanted to be alone. I gathered up my scattered clothes, and while I was pulling on my shirt, my shorts, my pants, and buckling my sandals, they both fell asleep — I didn't think they were feigning.

They did nothing to offend me. Still, for the next two days I felt as if I had been cast out of paradise for having committed a mortal sin. It wasn't the expulsion itself that was so hard to bear. After all, I left of my own free will, doing what I felt was best for me. Still, I would have liked to hold on to my newfound bliss. The following noon I went back to the house on Szinva Street. The blinds of the second-story windows were still drawn. I was hoping the woman would open the door. I imagined her being alone in the flat. The little brass disk moved in the peephole, and the man could see my face. Slowly, very considerately, he let the disk swing back into place.

I dragged myself down the stairs, trying not to make any noise. I didn't understand what he could have meant by the encouraging look he'd given me before. Feeling cheated, I roamed the neighborhood for two days, waited, hung around the house. Had I given myself completely over to my pain, I suspect many things in my life would have turned out differently. Pain would have given me a chance to think through what had really happened in there. And if I had thought it through, I might have reached the frightening conclusion that I had learned to make love from the body of a man — not exclusively, but from the body of a man also— and this despite the fact that I have never, not then or at any other time, touched another man's body. And except for a bashful curiosity I have no desire to do so. Nevertheless, through the woman's body we did communicate. In trying to possess the woman, the other male body instinctively sought a common channel in which all our bodies could flow in a common rhythm. And that was the experience they deprived me of, but they also deprived themselves and each other of it. Something did happen, but what they took from me they could make use of only between themselves. Just as later, when I was with others, I made good use of what I'd learned from the two of them. The paternal encouragement in the young man's look referred to future times — it wasn't an invitation for me to come back.

Of course I didn't think all this through, I couldn't have. I found diversions, I avoided my pain. My urge to return to that place I sublimated in much more conventional ways. I formulated a code of behavior for myself. I never again indulged in pawing, grabbing, kissing, or running after girls; no courtship, no pining, no writing of love letters for me. Be smart, I said, with the encouraging paternal glance I had acquired from that stranger. I may not have been fully conscious of the origin of this high-handed, knowing glance, but I used it all the time. In some ways, I still do. And the girls, at least the ones I've wanted something to do with, have always proved to be smart.

I became part of an open world in which the laws of exclusive possession and appropriation do not apply, in which I enter into a mutual relationship not with a single chosen individual but with everybody. Or nobody, if you like. At the same time, my mother, ever since I can remember, all but forbade me to return her affection, which was, now that I think of it, a clever and instinctively cautious move on her part. In me she loved the man she had lost, but only through a tragic deception could my emotions have compensated her for that loss. She spared me from the pangs of love, and that is why it took me a very long time to understand that suffering is as much a part of a human relationship as pleasure is. I resisted tooth and nail every form of suffering. And it didn't occur to me that anyone expected me to reciprocate intense feelings; after all, my good looks earned me special privileges. Not that my looks could in any way make up for the indignities I had to endure on account of my family origins. But the tension between my social situation and my physical looks was enough to make me want to take root in a world that, whether it adored me or rejected me, did not lay claim to the whole of my life.

The devotion and admiration were meant for my physical attractiveness, the rejection for my social position. Unlike my friend, whose greatest ambition was to get to know, conquer, comprehend, bond another human being to himself and make that person his own, my own need to know and possess was fueled not by an overwhelming, self-effacing desire to understand, to identify totally with another being, but by the ambition to create order in my own affairs. We each lacked half of ourselves. I had a home, but not a homeland. He had a homeland, but not a home.