Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

At this point I may as well confess that there was a time when my sister's condition did not depress me too much, when I didn't think about why, following my parents' custom, I never called her by her name or talked about her simply as my sister, when I didn't question the nature of that peculiar game of hide-and-seek which compelled us to indicate, through an exaggerated show of affection, that no matter how much she might have appeared to be at the center of our family, in reality she was all but excluded from it — as our proper sense of maintaining family equilibrium required, when the tension, fear, and revulsion engendered by my own exclusion and strangeness had not yet alienated me from her and from myself; and at that time my experiments with my sister were certainly not confined to mere observation but took more practical, one might say, aggressively, physical forms, and even though they sometimes went beyond certain civilized limits and therefore had to be kept secret, more of a secret than the kiss — some of what happened I had to keep secret even from myself — I still don't believe I acted inhumanely toward her; I became far more inhumane later on, in my revulsion and by the air of indifference I forced myself to assume; I daresay that our earlier relationship was somewhat humane precisely because of my ruthlessly honest curiosity.

Our games took place in the afternoon, winter afternoons mostly, when the postprandial silence of the house melted into the deepest hour of swift-descending dusk, when the big rooms stood with their doors wide-open, when the muffled sounds of clanging, clattering, and soft thuds filtering in from the distant kitchen had slowly died away; it was quiet outside too — rain was falling, or snow, wind blowing, and I could not wander off in the neighborhood or disappear into the garden but lay on my bed or sat at my desk, glancing frequently out the window, my head propped in my hand over some unsolvable homework; the telephone didn't ring; Grandfather was napping in his armchair, his hands pressed between his legs, the kitchen floor was drying in patches; and Mother's head would be sinking deeper and deeper into her pillow, sleep making her head heavier, her mouth would open a crack, and the book she'd been reading would slip out of her hand; these were the unchecked hours of our house, when my little sister was put to bed in hopes that she'd sleep and let us have a bit of peace and quiet, but after dozing accommodatingly for a few minutes, she'd often wake with a start, climb out of her bed, and, leaving her carefully darkened room, come into mine. She stopped in the doorway and we looked silently at each other.

They made her wear her nightgown, because Grandmother wanted her to believe it was nighttime and she had to go to sleep, though whether the room was darkened or not, I doubt my sister could tell the difference between night and day; she was standing in the doorway, blinded by the light, her eyes completely sunken in her puffed-up face; reaching into the light as if she wanted to grasp it, she groped her way toward me, the blue-and-white cotton nightshirt almost completely covering her little body, but you could tell it wasn't just the arms sticking out of the loose-fitting sleeves or her large, almost grown-up feet, but every part of her, her whole body was thick and graceless, small yet heavy; her skin was an unusual white, a lifeless grayish-white, and for some strange reason it seemed to me to be thick and scabrous, as if the visible coarse surface was covering several other layers of finer skin, as if this hard shell, rather like an insect's armor, overlay the real, human skin that was more like mine: smooth, supple, and downy; this skin had such an effect on me that I used every opportunity to touch it, feel it, and the purpose of our games was often nothing more than for me to try to get close, quickly and with no preliminary fuss, to her skin; I could do it, too, without the slightest pretext — I could simply grab her or pinch her — and if a pretext was needed, it was only to elude my own moral vigilance and make what I wanted to do anyway seem more accidental; of course, the most conspicuously disproportionate part of her body was her head: round, full, insidiously large, like a pumpkin stuck on a broomstick, her eyes two gray dots set in narrow slits, her full, drooping lower lip glistening with abundant globs of saliva that, often mixed with snot, kept dripping from her chin onto her chest, leaving eternal wet stains on her dresses; taking a good look up close, one could see that the black of her pupils was tiny and motionless, which may have been the reason her eyes were so expressionless.

This expressionlessness was at least as exciting as her skin, however, and, insofar as it was intangible, even more exciting, for the lack of the usual signs of emotions differed from what could be observed in a normal pair of eyes which, when trying not to betray emotion, become their own mask, revealing to us that they do indeed have something to hide, suggesting the very thing they conceal; in her eyes nothing gained expression or, rather, it was nothing itself that her eyes were continually and relentlessly giving expression to, the way normal eyes express emotion, desire, or anger; her eyes were like objects one never gets used to; they appeared to be a pair of lenses used for seeing, an impassive outer covering, so when one looked into them and watched their mechanical flutter, one naturally assumed there must be another pair of eyes, more lively and feeling, behind these seeing lenses, just as we would want to see the eyes, the human glance, behind sparkling eyeglasses, convinced that without our seeing them a person's words cannot be properly understood.

When she'd stop at the door of an afternoon, she would say nothing, as though she knew that her shrill voice would only give her away, and rousing our grandmother would have meant depriving herself of the joys and agonies of possible games, the games of our secret complicity; she must have known this, though her memory did not seem to function or, if it did, worked most peculiarly, since there was no rational way to account for what she remembered or what she forgot; she could eat only with her hands, and though adults tried at every meal to train her to use utensils, she didn't catch on, forks and spoons simply fell from her hand, she didn't understand why she had to keep holding them; yet our names, for example, she did remember, she called everyone by their right name, and she was also toilet-trained, and if accidentally she wet or made in her pants, she would sit in a corner for hours, whimpering inconsolably, imposing on herself the punishment Grandmother had devised for her long ago, and there seemed to be an act of goodwill in this self-punishment, a great gesture of goodwill toward us all; although I could not make her learn numbers — we'd study them and she'd promptly forget them — and she had problems recognizing and distinguishing colors, she was always very cooperative, always willing to start afresh, and eager to please us; her strained exertions were quite touching to see, as when she looked for an oft-used everyday word and knit her brow in intense concentration, and would at first fail, because her language, after all, was not words, but then, when the sought-after word or expression did come to her lips in the form of a triumphant scream and she herself could hear it and then be able to identify it, her face lit up with her sweetest smile, her happiest laugh, a smile and laugh of utter bliss the likes of which we would probably never experience.

For while there was nothing in her eyes one could take for expressions of feeling or emotion, her smile and laugh may have been the language she used to communicate with us, the only language she spoke; it was hers, a language for the initiated, to be sure, but perhaps more beautiful and superior to our own because its single though endlessly modifiable word conveyed pure joy of being.