Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I am simply there, along with the garden, the street, and the woods beyond the street; I am holding a large slice of bread smeared thick with lard and covered with slices of green pepper. I cut up the pepper myself, careful to leave the veins that make the pepper hot attached to the stem. When I lift the bread to my mouth, ready to bite, I have to press down on the strips of pepper to make sure they don't slip off — of course they always do — but not too hard, or else I squeeze the fat off the bread and get it all over my face.

The sky has turned hazy gray from the heat, the sun is beating down, it may be the hottest hour of the day, not even insects bother to stir, yet on my skin, still moist from sleep, I seem to sense a breeze, very gentle and cool, that blows nowhere else but on this steep footpath.

The lizards have disappeared, the birds are silent.

The garden path leads to an ornate wrought-iron gate leaning against carved stone pillars, past which, on the street, fine shadows are quivering, and beyond them begins the dense woods where the cooler breeze seems to be coming from; I stand there in a daze, enjoying the breeze playfully tickling my skin, but I am also attentive and, let's be honest, aware that it is my self-esteem making me pretend I'm in a dazed, dreamlike state.

If I weren't pretending, I'd have to admit that I have been waiting for her, just as I was waiting for her when in my comfortably darkened room I pretended to be deeply engrossed in my reading; waiting for her even as I fell asleep and waiting when startled out of sleep, waiting for hours, days, weeks, even in the kitchen when I was spreading lard on my slice of rye bread, cutting the pepper, and looking again and again at the loudly ticking alarm clock — I lost count of how many times I looked, as if by chance, glancing casually at the dial, hoping she would also look at her watch just then, at that very second, and get up and leave; she comes this way every day at this hour, at two-thirty, so it cannot be mere coincidence, but all the same, I cannot erase from my mind the terrifying thought that it's all a mistake, that she's not coming this way because of me, that it is only a coincidence, and that she passes by here only because she feels like it.

A few more minutes and then I might start walking toward the fence as if I had some important business there; I give her a few more minutes, a half hour at most, long enough for her to feign indifference and decide to be late, just as I sometimes, to preserve the appearance of my independence, pretend I'm not standing behind the bushes, waiting; I try to ascertain how much time has elapsed, it could be little or much, although I always hope it's little and passing quickly, ever since that one time when she didn't show up at all and I waited until evening, I couldn't help it, kept waiting by the fence way past dark, but she didn't come, and since then I know how fathomless time can be when one is waiting, when one absolutely must wait.

And then she appears.

Like every moment we want to be significant, this one, too, turns out to be insignificant; we have to remind ourselves afterward that what we have been waiting for so eagerly is actually here, has finally come, and nothing has changed, everything is the same, it's simply here, the waiting is over.

By then I found myself standing among the bushes close to the fence, not far from the gate; this was the place, my post, directly opposite the trail that curved gently, almost surreptitiously, out of the woods and onto the open road, concealed by dense shrubbery and the sagging branches of a giant linden tree, a road that was always empty at this hour, so if I stood guard here at the fence, I couldn't possibly miss her, and I did watch every second, my body cutting a passage in the bushes where I got to know every single twig and branch that kept snapping in my face, where I could follow her until I'd bump into the fence of the neighboring garden, and my gaze could follow her even farther, until the red and blue of her comically swaying skirt disappeared in the green woods, but that took a good long time; the only way she could surprise me was by not coming on the wood trail — and she did make sure that our silent game did not become too regular or predictable: sometimes she made a detour and came up the street, appearing on the left where the street suddenly begins to climb and then, just as sharply, dips, a roadway that had once been paved but by now formed an almost continuous crevice because of cracks and potholes caused by sudden freezes, but her trickery was to no avail, I heard her every time, for in that infinite silence, where beneath such irregular and accidental noises as the rustling of leaves, the twittering of birds, a barking dog, or an indefinable human cry, even the keenest, most sensitive ear had trouble making out the uniform murmur and buzz of the distant city, I was familiar with every last detail of both sound and silence, even with the subtle interplay of the two, a highly developed sensitivity to sound that in no small measure was due to my waiting for her; she might decide to come up the street, but she could not fool me, the crunch of her footsteps gave her away, it could be no one else, I knew those steps too well.

That day she chose the wooded path after all. She stepped out onto the road and stopped. If my memory captures her image precisely, and I think it has, she was wearing a red skirt with white polka dots and a white blouse, both of them heavily starched and ironed to a shine, so that the rigid fullness of the blouse concealed the mounds of her small breasts and the stiff cotton skirt swished against her skinny knees. Each piece of her meager wardrobe displayed or concealed different parts of her body, and for this reason I had to keep track of each item — skirts, dresses, blouses, everything that she herself, while dressing and possibly even thinking of me, must have considered extremely important; craning her uncovered neck, she looked around, slowly, carefully, the only movement she allowed herself; peering out from under the mask of her coy reserve, first she looked to the left, then to the right, and while turning her head, her glance would come to rest on me as if by accident, very often for no more than a fraction of a second, and then I tried in vain to catch her eye; at other times she looked at me more boldly for quite a few seconds, and once in a great while for an absurdly long time, but of this I'll have more to say later — in any case, I knew her eyes were looking for me, because if it happened that I wasn't standing at my usual place, if, say, I dropped down on my stomach or stood behind a tree so she would not notice me right away and I could extract some small advantage thereby, then her gaze grew uncertain, her face showed the deep disappointment which I hoped to wheedle out of her with my little game of hide-and-seek, and which, given her reserve and aloofness, could be considered blatant flirtatiousness; one single glance a day was my due, nothing more, while I stood helpless behind the fence, in the stifling shade of the bushes.

She wasn't beautiful, a statement that needs immediate clarification, for with mixed shame and regret I had to admit this even to myself while, however, she did seem beautiful to me, and once she disappeared in the bend of the street I almost felt I had to be ashamed in front of certain people that the girl I had fallen in love with was not beautiful, was ugly, or, however charitably we'd want to put it, not very beautiful; in any case, the doubt, the inexplicable shame was strong, and since I spent so many days in agonized waiting, I couldn't protest, couldn't prevaricate, in the end had to admit to myself and to say out loud, to shout it to the world— in the hope of regaining my freedom I screamed into the air that I was in love, was in love with her, but only the shouting itself made me happy; when I was through, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that now I would have to start waiting again, and go on waiting until two-thirty, and when she finally did come, I'd have to wait for her to be gone so that I could wait for her the next day, and that really seemed perverse and even more senseless than trying to avoid meeting Krisztián only to lessen the pain of seeing him.