Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

As I had once before, I yielded to the desire to hold it in my hands.

It was summer, a Sunday morning, with sunlight already streaming through the white curtains drawn over the open windows, when I walked into my parents' bedroom to crawl into their bed, as was my custom, not suspecting that this was to be the morning I'd have to give up this pleasant habit for good; the bed, the bed in which Mother later lay alone, wrapped in the heavy odor of her illness, which was so hard to get accustomed to, was wide and somewhat higher than average and seemed to dominate the almost empty room, its headboard and frame polished black wood, as was the other furniture — a plain chest of drawers, a dressing table and mirror, an armchair upholstered in white brocade, and a nightstand — yet these, along with the blank walls all around, made the room neither cold nor unfriendly; their blanket was on the floor as if just kicked there, Mother was gone, fixing breakfast most likely, and Father was still asleep, all curled up with only a thin sheet covering his naked body; I still don't know what possessed me to cast off my natural modesty and inhibitions, not even realizing I was doing so or violating some unwritten law; maybe it was just the carefree morning air, with a fine breeze bringing to us the smell of dew from the cooling earth, the gentle currents carrying a taste of the sizzling heat to come, the birds still chattering, and down in the valley, over the city's hum, a church bell ringing, and in the neighbor's garden sprinklers hissing quietly away, and for no apparent reason I felt delightfully mischievous; without giving it another thought, I threw off my pajamas and, stepping across the blanket on the floor, climbed into the bed next to my father, and snuggled up to him under the sheet, naked.

It's true, I might say today, by way of explaining though by no means excusing what I did, that one of the most important things about these Sunday-morning visits was that they should occur while we were still half asleep, so that when waking for real, when it was really morning, wrapped in the warmth of my parents' bodies, I could experience the pleasantly deceptive feeling of waking someplace other than where I'd gone to sleep, so that I could marvel at this self-created little miracle and, semiconscious, imitate the same commingling of time and place that dreams so effortlessly carry out on their own, but while, as I say, this can serve neither to explain nor excuse, it's not negligible either, especially when we bear in mind that the end of our childhood is generally thought to be at hand when these cruel little games vanish in a benevolent oblivion, when every part of our being has learned to suppress our secret desires and dreams, and with grim determination we adjust to the set of paltry possibilities which the conventions of social existence offer to us as reality, but a child does not have much of a choice, since he's forced to adhere almost like an anarchist to the laws of his own nature — and we're ready to admit that we consider these no less real or reasonable — and at this point perhaps does not yet make a scrupulous distinction between the laws of the night and those of the day, and even now we're very sensitive to this will to keep things whole; the child must feel his way carefully between the acceptable and unacceptable; we remain children as long as we feel the urge to keep crossing this border and to learn, through other people's reactions to us and through our often tragic confrontations with our own nature, the alleged place, time, and name of things; at the same time, we must also master that sacred system of hypocritical lies and deceptions, subterfuges, pleasantly false appearances, subterranean passages, quietly opening and closing doors of secret labyrinths which will allow us to fulfill, besides the so-called real desires, our true, even more real desires; this is what is called a child's education, and we are writing a Bildungsroman , after all, so, without beating about the bush, and it's precisely the sacred ambiguity of the educational process that prompts us to express our secret thoughts, let's say then clearly that sometimes it's by grabbing our father's cock that we can most precisely gauge morality, whose dictates, despite all our compulsions and good intentions, we can never fully obey; when I awakened again that morning, my naked body lying on his, embracing him in his moist sleep and fumbling in his chest hair, I almost felt as if I were deceiving myself, not him, as if I had to deceive myself to believe that by clinging to his back, his buttocks, entwining my legs in his, I could feel the meeting of our nakedness, yet this was in fact what I woke to in that second awakening, and I was surprised and delighted that in this very brief and deep sleep our limbs had gotten so entangled that it took long moments for my senses to sort them out, and at the same time I couldn't help realizing that it was I who had arranged the awakening this way, consciously, though the act also had deeper, hazier elements, which I was trying to explore and indefinitely prolong, since they felt so pleasant and gave me that sense of wholeness in which desire and imagination can mingle harmoniously with deception and crafty manipulation; and then, without opening my eyes, feigning sleep, playing hide-and-seek with myself, I began to slide my fingers slowly, very slowly toward his belly, waiting intently for the skin to quiver under my touch, for the spittle in his mouth to glisten, to see if he would just snort once and go on sleeping, but while I was filching this lovely sensation for myself, it dawned on me that I was lying in the warmth my mother had left behind, taking her place — or, the feeling I was stealing, I was stealing from her.

It was as if I had to touch Mother with my mouth and Father with my hand.

And on his belly my hand had to open if it wanted to press down on his firm protrusion.

From there it was just one more downward slide, hindered momentarily in his pubic hair, and then I was pressing my palm over his genitals.

The moment had two very distinct parts.

When his body moved, not indifferently, willingly even, and he awakened.

And when with a sudden violent jerk he pulled away and let out an ear-splitting scream.

As when one finds a clammy toad in his warm bed.

By morning our sleep deepens, coarsens, and if I hadn't roused him from this deep morning sleep, he might have had a chance to realize that he was the hero of that same Bildungsroman in which nothing that is human can be alien, so that on the one hand what happened was not so unusual as to elicit his most violent feelings, and on the other, if he didn't want his impulsive response to have incalculably serious consequences, if he didn't want to elicit a similarly violent response from me but, as a reasonable educator, wanted to achieve a positive effect, he would have acted with much greater understanding and tactful shrewdness, for he must have known what every human being over forty can be expected to know, especially a man, namely, that everyone must at least once, literally or figuratively, symbolically or with one's bare hands, touch that organ; at least once everyone must violate his father's modesty — to keep it inviolable perhaps? — yes, everyone does it, one way or another, even if the ordeal leaves him no strength to admit the act even to himself, the denial being dictated by natural self-defense and a moral sense that surfaces only in extreme situations; but Father was startled out of sleep and because of his first, instinctive move must have felt betrayed by his own nature and could do little else but scream.

"What's got into you? What are you doing?"

And he kicked me out of bed with such force I landed on the floor on their blanket.

For a long time afterward my inner world was ruled by the silence of criminals, the mute, tense silence of anticipation which, as one waits for consequences and retribution, makes the act seem more irrevocable and therefore somewhat wonderful and thrilling, but no punishment was forthcoming; no matter how closely I watched them, I could detect no indication that he even told Mother about the incident, though in other situations when I was caught in some mischief, they always tried to present a united front, though I must say they never succeeded so well that I couldn't discern some subtle differences in their positions; now, however, they professed complete innocence and seemed truly united, acting as if nothing had happened, as if I had dreamed it all, both the touch and the scream, and while waiting for the spectacular retribution I failed to notice the consequence, far more serious than any punishment could have been; looking back now, as a reasonable adult, I ask myself just what sort of punishment I was expecting: a bloody, merciless beating? what kind of punishment can be invented in a case like this, when it seems that a male child has fallen in love with his own father? isn't the terrible, unrequitable, physically and emotionally devastating love itself the greatest punishment? at any rate, what I failed to notice, maybe couldn't have noticed, or what I had to pretend not to notice, was that after the incident Father became even more aloof, carefully avoiding every occasion that might have called for physical contact; he didn't kiss me, didn't touch me, and, come to think of it, didn't hit me either, as though he felt that even a slap might be construed as responding to my love for him; he withdrew himself from me — but so inconspicuously, his reserve so perfect, lacking all outward signs, no doubt some great fear making it so perfect, that I myself sensed no connection between his behavior and its cause, and maybe he didn't either; I even managed to forget the underlying cause, just as I forgot that I had discovered him in bed with Maria Stein in the maid's room — maybe he forgot that, too; the only threat that remained with me was the unassimilable knowledge that this was the kind of man my father was: not enough of a stranger to leave me unresponsive and not affectionate enough to love me; so when he opened the door to let me into the bathroom, what I could read in his unsmiling face, in the blatant nakedness of his body, was this reserve and mistrust, a well-disguised shyness, a fearfulness, and a reluctance, too, indicating that he was opening the door only at my mother's urging though it didn't sit well with him, he didn't find my peeking and eavesdropping so easily forgivable; instead of this daring family coziness he would have preferred to send me back to my bed—"All right, out!" he might have said, and as far as he was concerned that would have been the end of it, but vis-à-vis Mother he appeared to be at least as vulnerable and defenseless as I was with him, which of course was a source of comfort to me, and if there was the slightest hope of my ever squeezing in between the two of them, it could only be through this tiny opening afforded by his willingness to please Mother, to gain her favor, to satisfy her needs; I had no direct way of reaching Father.