Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I closed my eyes, and I thought that now I must kill myself.

I had no other thought.

It wasn't so bad to think about it; no, it was rather nice.

I'll go home, pry open my father's desk, sneak out into the garden, to my private place, and simply do it.

I saw the gesture, saw myself doing it.

I put the barrel of the revolver into my mouth, pulled the trigger.

And the thought that nothing would follow this act for me illuminated, harshly yet benevolently, everything that did follow.

So that I could see it.

As if for the first time I could see, simply and free of any weakening emotions, what my life was really like.

Everything hurt, in my chest and in my neck, there were moments when the top of my head hurt so much it was as if someone had pulled a round hat of pain over it; I shivered, I quaked; this was nothing like the pleasurable pain of self-pity but every part of the body hurting at once with a pain independent of the body, moving around, each stab stronger than the one before, each one making the previous seem like child's play; I wanted to scream and scream and keep on screaming, but I didn't dare, and that's also why I couldn't endure it anymore.

There was nothing new in the thought that I might not be normal, that I was just as sick as my sister, though in a different way, and that she may have been the only person with whom, in our sickness, I had something in common; what was new was the realization that I could once and for all put an end to the pain of trying to be like other people, to these completely futile attempts, since I could never resemble anyone strongly enough to be just like them and there was always a difference, and ultimately I always found myself alone; no one, myself included, ever wanted this difference or whatever it was; and though I may have hated myself for it, with every effort to identify with someone and at the same time lure him into my orbit, I only called attention to this difference, to my illness, to the very thing I wanted to annihilate; with my enticements I only revealed what I wanted hidden; and the realization that this unbridgeable gulf within me could be done away with by simply killing my body first occurred to me then and there.

She didn't look at me after that.

Yet it seemed to me that only her look might still save me.

If only it could be made to last, if only time wouldn't pass without it, because that look of hers, that ultimate self-revelation, and the way she gazed, the way we looked at each other, might clear up the confusion within me, explain my unfulfilled yearnings, my sins, committed yet irredeemable, my endless lies — for I had to lie all the time to protect myself, which was petty and humiliating, and I was terrified, too, of being found out; I was suffering and saw no way to be free of suffering, because it wasn't only that I had to lie, deny myself everything that could give me pleasure, no, none of this: I could never have what I liked, and I had to live as if carrying a heavy, burdensome stranger with me, hiding my real self under this dead weight; in my infinite desperation I did try to share some of my pain with my mother, but so much had accumulated I couldn't possibly tell her everything, wouldn't even know where to begin, and anyway, I couldn't be that open with her, since she had plenty of complaints about me having to do with the very secrets I was hiding from the world, mainly out of consideration for her, a consideration I felt was justified because despite her irritation, her anger, complaints, and even disgust with me, she wished to see in me some unattainable perfection and for this reason was even stricter with me, at times more cruel, than with anyone else; the only thing that relieved the harshness and made it acceptable was that I had my private language with Mother, just as with my little sister, in which we could avoid words we judged irrelevant or meaningless, a language of touching, at times touching with our very tongues, the language of our warm skin, of our bodies; if I earlier mentioned a sickness of mine, I might risk another guess: that perhaps it was her sickness, and my sister's, which in some mysterious way penetrated and permeated my own being; these two disparate yet to me closely related illnesses might have been the consequence of the pervasive imbalance and uncertainty in my immediate surroundings, the physical manifestation of the fact that everyone was sick, which for a long time didn't bother me, which I accepted as the inevitable condition of my life, indeed finding my mother's illness rather beautiful and loving it; she must have infected me with that sense of grandeur one finds in illness while I was holding her hand or gently sliding my own over her bare arm, when I'd sit on the floor by her bed, put my head on her lap, or simply rest it on the sheet and breathe in the smell, the mixture of febrile warmth, sweat, and medicine emanating from her body, from her silken nightgown, a smell that was always there no matter how frequently the room was aired, and listen to her breathing, letting her hover between sleep and wakefulness, until my own breathing took over her strange, soft, fluttering rhythm, the rapid rises and slow falls; I got used to the smell to the point of no longer finding it repellent; sometimes she would speak to me softly, opening her eyes just a little, then closing them again: "You are beautiful," she would say, and I was always as astonished by this phenomenon in the bed as she must have thought my presence most pleasing; there was her white face sunk deep in the white pillows, her thick auburn hair neatly spread out, with strands of gray flashing through around the temples, and her smoothly rounded forehead, fine nose, and, above all, the heavy eyelids with long lashes which she would lift lazily as if in a daze, so that for a fraction of a second her crystalline green eyes appeared, looking at me so brightly and intently that her illness seemed a mistake, an illusion, a game, but when the lashes were lowered and the green eyes were once again covered by the blue-veined flesh of the eyelids, their color an ever-darkening brown, something, I don't know what, seemed to make her sick again, though the gaze remained on her sick face, along with a wan smile on her lips, which was meant for me, a mere hint of a smile, and "Tell me," she'd say at moments like this, "tell me what's been happening," and if I didn't reply, because I couldn't or didn't want to, she would continue by herself: "Should I tell you what I've been thinking about just now? did your sister eat her dinner all right? at least I didn't hear your grandmother yell; I'd rather you didn't stay long today, I feel weak, maybe that's why I thought of the meadow again, I wasn't asleep, I was standing in a great big beautiful meadow and wondering why it looked so familiar, I distinctly remembered having seen it before, and that's when you walked in," and she would stop, take a quick breath, as I watched the blanket on her breast rising and falling; "I probably would never have thought about it otherwise, because when you live, new images take the place of old ones all the time, but for some time now I've had the feeling that nothing's ever happened to me, never, though of course lots of things have, and you know I've told you much of it already, still, it's almost as if they didn't happen to me, they're only so many pictures, and while I'm in the pictures, somehow it's more important, or it says more about me, or it's more like me that I lie here in this bed, that this picture doesn't change, I lie here the same way, and if I look out the window I see the same things, now it's getting dark, now it's getting light, always the same picture, and in the meantime I can traipse around in my old pictures because there are no new pictures to disturb the old ones," sighing deeply, the rising air breaking the rhythm of her words: "I don't even know why I'm telling you all this; you should be able to understand it, still I feel a little guilty telling such things to a child, I'm philosophizing, I guess, which is kind of ridiculous, but I don't think there's anything sad or tragic or serious that should be kept from you, it's simply natural, and I never denied myself anything I thought was natural and I should do it"; laughing at this and opening her eyes for a moment, she would take my hand as if telling me to go ahead and do everything I felt to be natural: "Let's just stay like this now, quiet, all right? I'm tired, and I can't get that picture out of my mind, the one I wanted to tell you about but couldn't, just as you don't tell me much, either, though I always ask you, beg you to tell me things, and I understand perfectly when you'd like to tell me this or that but feel you must keep quiet, I even know what those things are that you keep quiet about, because all we can hope for is that the same kinds of things are happening to both of us, there is no difference, always the same things must keep happening, even the feelings are the same, only the pictures change; we understand each other even if we say nothing, that's how it is, and now let's be quiet for a little while, all right? and then go, darling, all right?"