Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

"Why go on lying? I've been in jail."

"I told you that story only because we couldn't really explain."

"That's right, in jail."

"Don't worry, he didn't steal or rob or anything like that."

"I'll explain it all to you. Why can't I tell him about it?"

"If you feel you must."

He let this last remark pass unanswered and, as if slowly breaking away from Mother, and focusing entirely on me, he firmly grasped my shoulders, pushed me away a little, took a good look at me, fairly devouring me with his eyes; what he saw, the sight I must have presented to him, not only made his eyes brighter but turned his smile into a laugh, and this laugh was meant entirely for me, meant that he was pleased with me; he even shook me a little, slapped me on the back, planted loud, smacking kisses on both my cheeks, almost biting me; and then, as if he couldn't get enough of my sight and my touch, he kissed me once again, and this time I succumbed to this emotional outburst — I knew by now who he was, I knew it well, because his aggressive closeness pried open heavy locks within me, and suddenly, unexpectedly, I remembered everything, and of course he himself was right there, kissing me, holding me in a tight embrace; I'd never known that the locks were within me; after all, he had disappeared and we had stopped talking about him, he had ceased to exist, and I even forgot about that dark little corner of my memory that had been keeping alive the feeling of his closeness, his looks, his gait, the rhythms of his voice and touch; and now he was here, at once a memory and reality itself; so after that third kiss, with a clumsiness induced by my emotions, I also touched his face with my mouth, but he again pulled me over, almost roughly, once again pressed me against his body and held me there.

"Please turn around, I'm getting up."

When I finally came to on the rocky embankment of Heiligendamm, I may have known where I was and in what condition, yet I'd have to say that this was nothing more than sensing existence in pure, disembodied form, because my consciousness was lacking all those inner flashes of instinct and habit that, relying on experience and desires, evoke images and sounds, ensure the unbroken flow of imagination and memory that renders our existence sensible and to an extent even purposeful, enables us to define our position in the world and establish contact with our surroundings, or to relinquish this connection, which in itself is a form of contact; during the first and probably very brief phase of my returning to consciousness I felt no lack of any kind, if only because experiencing that senseless and purposeless state filled the very void I should have perceived as a lack; the sharp, slippery rocks did make me sense my body, water on my face did make my skin tingle, therefore I had to be aware of rocks and water and body and skin, yet these points of awareness, so keen in and of themselves, did not relate to the real situation which, in my normal state, I would have considered very unpleasant, dangerous, even intolerable; precisely because these sensations were so acute, so intense, and because I now felt what a moment ago I couldn't yet have experienced, which meant that consciousness was returning to its customary track of remembering and comparing, I could not expect to absorb everything my consciousness had to offer, but on the contrary, what little I did perceive of water, stones, my skin and body, wrenched as it was from a context or relationship, alluded rather to that intangible whole, that deeper, primeval completeness for which we all keep yearning, awake or in our dreams but mostly in vain; in this sense, then, what had passed, the total insensibility of unconsciousness, proved to be a far stronger sensual pleasure than the sensation of real things, so if I had any purposeful desire at that point, it was not to recover but to relapse, not to regain consciousness but to faint again; this may have been the first so-called thought formed by a mind becoming once again partially conscious, comparing my state of "some things I can already feel" not with my state prior to losing consciousness but with unconsciousness itself, the longing for which was so profound that my returning memory wanted to sink back into oblivion, to recall what could no longer be recalled, to remember the void, the state in which pure sensation produces nothing tangible and the mind is in limbo with nothing to cling to; it seemed that by coming back to consciousness, by being able to think and to remember, I had to lose paradise, the state of bliss whose fragmentary effects might still be felt here and there but as a complete whole had gone into hiding, leaving behind only shreds of its receding self, its memory, and the thought that I had never been, and would never again be, as happy as I had been then and there.

I also knew that awareness of water, skin, body, and stones was not the first sign of this familiarly tangible world; a sound was.

That peculiar sound.

But as I lay among the rocks, once again blessed with the unpleasant ability to think and remember, I wasn't thinking at all about changing my dangerous situation or weighing my chances of escaping it, though that would have been the sensible and timely thing to do, since I could clearly feel waves washing over me, keeping me under icy water for long seconds; the possibility of drowning didn't even occur to me; what I wanted was to have that peculiar, strong, yet distant sound again within my reach, to luxuriate in the dim weightlessness of pure sensation where, banging, crashing, like some peremptory signal, that sound had first informed me I was still alive.

To this day I cannot decide how it all happened; later, it was quite a surprise to see my bruised and bloody face in the hotel-room mirror; I also have no idea how long I must have lain there, on the embankment, for hard as I tried, I couldn't recall the last moment before fainting, and the fact that I got back to the hotel at two-thirty in the morning meant hardly anything except that it was very late; the night porter, barely awake, opened the large glass door and didn't even notice my condition; there was only one small light in the lobby, I could see the clock on the wall: half past two, no doubt about it, but I had no way of relating the hour to anything that might have happened. I can't be sure, but in all probability a massive, very high wave picked me up — it's so pleasurable to imagine being carried along by it; maybe I lost consciousness in that very first moment — and it must have slammed me down on the rocks like some useless object, but by then, gone were the early afternoon and my arrival in the hotel, the last references that, in spite of temporal confusion and dislocation, I could still locate in time with some certainty.

But the sound I never found again.

Of getting back to the hotel I can give only as poor an account as I have of how I wound up on the rocks; both had occurred independent of my will, though I was undoubtedly the sole participant and victim of each: while in the first I had been entrusted to the water, to an entire chain of lucky accidents and, thanks to it got away with only a few bruises, scratches, and black-and-blue marks, not cracking my skull or breaking my arms and legs, in the second instance the force which we like to call the survival instinct must have been operating in me, its determination as raw and violent as the elements; if we were to take what we proudly call self-awareness or ego and, applying a little mathematics, examine what remains of it when it is caught between the forces of nature and those of our inner nature, both of them so immense and independent, the result would be pitiful if not ridiculous, I'm afraid. We would discover how arbitrary it is to separate things: the fact that in an unconscious state we are one with trees and rocks: a leaf stirs only when, and in the direction, the wind blows on it — we may be unique but not superior! — when my hands and feet (not me, mind you, but my hands and feet) were searching for something solid to hold on to among those loose, slippery rocks and my brain, a soulless automaton, was calculating precisely the intervals between the breaking waves, when my body, adjusting each move for a possible escape, knew by itself that for safety it must first slide farther down the embankment and only then straighten up, when all this was taking place, what was left of the haughty, inflated pride with which I had set out for a walk in the afternoon? in those critical moments what was left of the pain and joy the ego can provide, the ego that's busy chasing its memories and toying with its imagination?