Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

"Close the door," he said, and turned around to sit back in the tub, words that for me, still unable to decide whether to go in and still standing motionless in the doorway, were an ambiguous gift but a gift nonetheless, and even the reluctance in his voice, intended more for Mother than for me, could not completely spoil my happiness, because I had won without hoping for victory; and the sight of his body turning sideways was yet another new experience, a striking flash, to be enjoyed and suffered only until he lowered himself into the water; if earlier I said that from the front his body looked perfect, well-proportioned, attractive, and beautiful, I now have to add something that natural modesty makes even more difficult to articulate, or could it be that it isn't modesty at all but the strange desire to see our parents, in both body and mind, as the most perfect creatures on earth, even when they are not? is that the reason that experience forces us to see beauty in ugliness or, if we cannot abandon our inextinguishable yearning for perfection, at least to be more forgiving and understanding of imperfection, learning from the human form that everything seemingly perfect also contains a tendency for the distorted, the twisted, and the deformed? is this, after all, what gives our feelings their unique character and flavor? and not only because no single human being can embody perfect harmony of form but also because perfect and imperfect always go hand in hand, are inseparable, and if, disregarding the most obvious imperfections, we still try to worship a person as perfect, is it simply our imagination playing tricks on us?

When I looked at my father sideways, it turned out that whatever had seemed perfect from the front now appeared misshapen: his shoulder blades protruded prominently from his bent back, he looked stooped even when standing straight, and if I weren't afraid of the word, I'd say he was only a breath away from being a hunchback, yes, a hunchback, which we usually find exceedingly repulsive; I'm convinced it was pure accident that he wasn't, as if halfway through its work nature could not decide whether to fashion an ideal or a grotesque human form and left him to his fate, and he, recognizing this fate, tried to blot out or at least correct the effects of this dark hoax of nature, though his efforts were only partially successful, despite his undoubtedly very real suffering and almost unseemly industriousness and zeal: the body, the human form, however devoutly we may expound in our Christian humility on the externality of the flesh and the primacy of the soul, is so potent a given that already at the moment of our birth, it becomes an immutable attribute.

But with the utter partiality of a lover, I loved this, too, liked inhaling beauty and ugliness in the same breath and experiencing with equal sensitivity and intensity both attraction and repulsion; his imperfections made him perfect to me — nothing could better account for his obstinate seriousness, his formidable alertness, the eagerness with which he went after everything he judged wayward, unlawful, criminal, and therefore ugly and perverse than his slight flaw, his tiny would-be hump, in the absence of which he would have become just another pretty face and no more; but this way he was a man forever on guard, emotionally rather dour, physically somewhat cold (for all his sexual excesses), and very intelligent, as if in the retreat forced on him by his physical attributes, his attentiveness longing for but unable to cope with tenderness had grown so acute that no plan or motive, however cunningly concealed, could escape his scrutiny, and the energy lost in that retreat returned most aggressively in his sensitivity and intellect, enabling him to uncover the subtlest of connections; he was perfect then in trusting his intuition to let his abilities and natural gifts complement one another; one could only rarely discover in him an insincere attempt to be what he was not, and though then I knew very little about what the work of a state prosecutor actually entailed, I couldn't imagine a more appropriate setting for that body; I liked to see him encased in the severity of his dark gray suit, his long fingers gathering up his papers from a gleaming desktop under the glare of chandeliers turned on even during the day, the cut of his suit being perhaps only a slight deception, in the cleverly placed shoulderpads that compensated for the irregular curve of his back; in the long marble-faced courthouse corridors there were usually very few people around, now and then a messenger hurrying past with heavy file folders, and sometimes small clusters of people standing about in front of one of the huge doors, taking not the slightest notice of one another; dignified, dusty boredom prevailed except when clanking footsteps broke the silence and grew louder until in one of the bends in the winding corridor a handcuffed prisoner appeared led by two guards, only to disappear behind one of those huge brown doors and then enter the courtroom; I liked to see his back receding down the dim corridor, in his back rather than in the more ordinary beauty of the rest of his body, where everything that I felt was refined, distinguished, and intelligent in him seemed to be concentrated — to complete the picture, I should say something about his shapely and muscular backside, whose graceful curve was quite feminine, and his firm thighs, and the protuberant veins branching off under the golden hairs of his leg, and the arching foot with its long, delicate toes — but still, it was his back; his walk was soft, supple, vigorous, like that of a beast delighted to feel in the soles of its feet the limber, ready weight of its body, but Father seemed to carry his intellectual burdens and worries, which I imagined had to do with pursuing justice, not in his feet but on his back, as if his strength lay in the curvature of his back, and I so very much wanted to be like him, to possess his imperiousness, his strength, not just the beauty and symmetry leading to and radiating from his loins but his rarefied spiritual ugliness, too, so for a while I tried to imitate his stoop as I walked down the far less impressive corridors of my school the way I had seen him walk in the courthouse.

But then I decided to walk into the bathroom, after all, and I closed the door just as he told me.

He sat back in the tub, and Mother, who just then re-emerged from the water, started laughing; their movements spilled more water onto the floor.

"Just throw off your pajamas and join us," she said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world.

And when I climbed into the tub and positioned myself between their drawn-up knees, the water overflowed again, the bathroom was awash, slippers began to float, which made all three of us laugh.

It was one of those sudden outbursts of laughter, a spontaneous eruption that dissolved the residue of suspicion and fear and timidity in us, canceling out every warranted and unwarranted anxiety, tore that scrim, that veil between external reality and the more powerful inner verities to which I alluded earlier, seemed to liberate our bodies from the confines of their weight and inertia, lifting us into a higher sphere where there is free passage between the reality of the body and that of our desires; there we were, in a tubful of cooling, lukewarm water, three naked bodies— though only a single mouth seemed to do the laughing, as though the rollicking laughter with its undertones of sly devilry had burst forth from the same giant mouth, as if the identity of our liberated senses endowed us with one common mouth! — and caught between Father's outspread knees, I had my feet between Mother's open thighs under the sudsy and murky water that was gently lifting her large breasts, making them float and bob on the surface; then Father pushed me, and Mother pushed me back, and with each push the water sloshed and overflowed, that's what made us laugh actually, this bit of silliness; at the same time, the giant mouth seemed to be swallowing the three naked bodies, devouring them, disgorging them, and sending them down a dark gullet of pleasure, only to bring them up again in tune with the rhythm of laughter as the laughter burst, rippled, and soared, only to dip and scoop up from still deeper layers of the body the hidden and hitherto unimagined treasures of its pleasure and then, with even greater lung efforts and from an even greater height, to let loose its indigestible joy just as the water kept running over and out of the tub.