Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

At the age of eighteen, my Aunt Ilma had a child out of wedlock. For the family this was no less an outrage than Grandfather's threat to become a dancer if he wasn't allowed to join the army. Ella very decisively defused the impending scandal by having her sister move away from home. The baby died when it was only a few days old. The two of them have been living together ever since. They must have made some final arrangement among themselves. No man has entered their lives since then. Or at least it appears that way. And that's when time must also have stopped for them. They do not subscribe to newspapers, do not listen to the radio; only a few weeks ago did they buy their first television set. They are believers, but do not attach much importance to either church attendance or prayer. They talk about God in the same tone of voice as about the expected yield of their plentiful vegetable garden. As far as they are concerned, battling evil requires no greater passion than does the struggle with, say, plant lice or potato bugs. They sprinkle wood ashes on the former and hunt for the latter, on all fours, in the flowering potato plants, squashing the bugs with their fingers.

They start the day in the garden. From late May to mid-September they go swimming in the Danube every day, come rain, come shine. They put on their ridiculous, tight-in-the-bust-stretched-out-in-the-buttocks bathing suits made of rubberized cotton whose onetime wildflower patterns have completely faded. They put on white bathing caps and white rubber shoes. That's how they go trekking up the shore, squelching in the silt or crunching on the gravel. Ella leads, Ilma follows. Then comes a charmingly girlish interlude. They wade in waist-deep and with skittish delight let their skin get used to the cold; before long they are squealing and splashing each other. Then suddenly they stretch out in the water, abandoning themselves to the current. On their buttocks, the bathing suits balloon up like rubber tires.

The two-acre property, a park in which every cultivated plant ever planted as well as weeds of all kinds bloom and perish at will, is separated from the village by a high brick wall, and on the shore another high red retaining wall protects it from flooding. This is how far they swim with the current, then march up the steep, moss-covered stone steps, put on their bathing robes, and go back to the house. It was along this stretch, right by the stone wall, where my friend was killed. It had been a dry summer, and by autumn the river receded to where it was normally the deepest; its water turned a dark brown.

In the evening, while one of them was busy sewing and mending or perhaps knitting a sweater for me, or crocheting one of her endless lace runners, the other would read out loud. Their friend Vince Fitos, the Protestant minister, lends them books of inspirational literature. They both assume an appropriately serious and solemn expression, but that wouldn't stop them from sniggering at a particularly inane passage.

I don't know what signals they use to make their judgments, but their ability to see through things is as unerring as if they were the most well-informed people in the world. They pump me regularly about exchange rates on the international financial markets, and from the boys in the village they find out the latest soccer results. Their personal needs are very modest. When I bring them a present, they look around, bewildered: where will they put it, they don't really need it. If, therefore, they want or do not want something, their action will be motivated not by personal interest but by family need or moral consideration. That is how they acted when we were notified of my father's death. We all expected him to return, of course, but they insisted that Mother sign the house over to them. We shouldn't own two houses. In other families such a questionable proposition might open old wounds and sow suspicion and discord. But Mother was cut from the same cloth as her two sisters. She welcomed their suggestion. As a first step, they rented their own house to the village council. Ella is a licensed kindergarten teacher, Ilma an experienced schoolmistress. And the village had neither a suitable building nor a properly trained staff to start a pre-school program, though the need was clearly there. And that's how the two of them opened a nursery school right in their own home. Along with the richly paneled trophy room, they lost the use of all the other rooms on the main floor, but now they had a regular income, received a nominal rent for the premises, the four upstairs rooms remained theirs, and maintenance of the building was also taken over by the village. In the early 1960s, when the threat of nationalization no longer hung over their heads, they began their quiet little scheming. Ostensibly, they were cutting off the branch they were standing on. But in the end the health authorities ruled that the old house was unfit to be used as a school, and when a few years later a new schoolhouse was completed, my aunts announced their retirement. The enemy surrendered unconditionally and left the battlefield with the pleasant feeling of victory.

After all this, I need not say too much about my two hardy aunts' feeling about me. To them I am perfection incarnate. In my student days I had to give them detailed reports of my progress, and now they are just as interested in my job and the advancement of my career. They are so delighted with my successes, they accept blindly all my decisions as correct. They never voice approval or criticism openly but follow me with glances that tell me that in a similar situation they would have acted exactly the same way. To be sure, I usually regale them with stories I know will please them. Ever since my mother passed away, their doting fondness has become almost too much to bear. I don't have to announce my visits in advance, because in my reckless youth, when I never knew where I would spend the night and therefore roamed the world with a toothbrush in my pocket, they got used to my showing up at the oddest hours, and not always alone. Later on, when I was married, they learned to accept that it wasn't always the wife and the children I brought along to their house. This was the only sensitive area in our otherwise cloudless relationship. They let it be known that they did have reservations about my love life — on moral grounds. For example, they'd always find old girlfriends more charming than the current one. Or they'd list the physical attributes and personality traits of my casual companions and, with an innocent air, present me with their devastating conclusions. It was their way of telling me that, though somewhat proud of my numerous conquests, they didn't think this was right, that more was not necessarily better.

They still occupy only the upstairs rooms. Except for the kitchen, the ground floor is unused and in the winter unheated. I can come almost unnoticed, I don't have to bother them. In fact, I can stay in the house without letting them know I'm there. We keep a key in the back porch, on a beam under the eaves. And in a small room downstairs the strike of a match can kindle a cozy fire in the tile stove.

For three years he lived with them in this house. In this room. And if in these reminiscences I've been referring to him as my friend, it is not because of our shared boyhood but because during these three years we became very close. Even if we spoke mostly in allusions. Whether we talked of our past or our present, we both cautiously avoided total candor. I learned nothing about his life I hadn't already known, or was forced to witness. And I didn't show him a new or different side of myself. But after twenty years we did return to that mutual attraction which had once transcended our dissimilarities and which we didn't know what to make of as children. This reversion may have had to do with the fact that slowly but surely my successes were turning into failures, and that he never again wanted to be united with anyone on any level. Not with me, either. He remained attentive, sensitive, but shut up in himself. Turned cold. If I wasn't familiar with the painful reverse side of this coldness, I'd be tempted to say that he became an accurate, intelligently responding, precisely calibrated machine.