Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

But in all fairness, for the sake of truth and completeness, I should correct any impression that my life at that time consisted solely of blank despair, shameful cruelties and defeats, and unbearable, yes, unbearable suffering; to counteract the admittedly one-sided nature of my account I must stress that it wasn't so, really wasn't, because joyful, pleasurable experiences were just as much part of my life, and perhaps the reason suffering leaves a deeper mark is because suffering, relying on the mind's ability to think and therefore brood and mull things over, stretches out time, while true joy, avoiding conscious reflection and confining itself to sensory impulses, grants itself and us only the time of its actual existence, which makes it seem fatefully accidental and contingent, always separate and wrenched from suffering, so that while suffering leaves long, complicated stories behind in our memory, happiness leaves but flashes in its wake — but away with this analysis getting bogged down in the details of details, and away, too, with the philosophy that seeks the meaning of details, though we may need it if we want to ascertain the richness of our inner life, if it is rich why not take pleasure in observing it? yet precisely because this richness is infinite, and the infinite belongs among the incomprehensible things of this world, we are tempted, in our hasty analysis, to pronounce a perfectly ordinary, ultimately natural event to be the root cause of all our injuries, obsessions, mental illness — let's say it, the cause of our disabilities — and we do this because we lose sight of the totality of an event in favor of certain arbitrarily chosen details, and terrified by the abundance of these, we call a halt to our search at just the point where we should go further, our terror creating a scapegoat, erecting little sacrificial altars for it and stabbing the air in mock ceremony, causing more confusion than if we hadn't thought about ourselves at all; happy are the poor in spirit! — so let's not think, let's submit freely and without preconceived notions to the pleasant sensation of sitting on the floor next to Mother's sickbed, our head leaning on the cool silk counterpane so that our lips can rest on the bare skin of her arm; we can feel her delicate fingers in our hair, a slight tremble, a pleasant tingle of our scalp, because in her embarrassment she's dug her other hand into our hair as if to console us, to see if she can lessen the impact of her words with this idle gesture, and though the tingling slowly takes possession of our entire body, what she has said cannot be taken back so easily, since we, too, have suspected that our father may not be our father, and if she couldn't decide between the two men, this suspicion may become a certainty, but about that, understandably, nothing further can be said, so let us be quiet, and then we may feel precisely that everything her words evoked in us as memories — and that have already subsided, however important and decisive they may be — are only in the background of our emotions and true interests, because in the space where we are trying to grasp them and reflect on them, where real events are taking place, there we are completely alone, and they — those two men and Mother — do not and cannot have anything to do with it.

And if what she said didn't leave me cold, it wasn't because it was important for me to know which of the two men was my father, a question that was exciting, to be sure, teasing, titillating in its immodesty, above all, a delicious secret, like the picture I kept in mind of the man I knew to be my father with that other woman in the maid's room, but still, I'd say the question itself was not of primary importance, it could be dismissed, forgotten, relegated to the background, like the broad sweep of the horizon in a painting of a quiet, misty meadow at dusk, in other words, a mere frame that fades away, undeniably part of the picture, but the picture itself, our picture, begins and ends where we are, where we assume our position in it: our view of existence can have only one center, and that is our body, the pure form of being that makes this view possible and provides strength, authority, and security, so that ultimately — I emphasize, ultimately — nothing else should interest us but our body in all its possible aspects and manifestations; Mother's last sentence silenced me and ruled out further questions, mainly because it was like a not quite inadvertent allusion to everything that had been preoccupying me; I couldn't make decisions, yet felt compelled to decide, just as she did— only from her sentence it was already a guilty conscience staring back at me, stemming from an inability to decide, which, I knew, would last a lifetime: I was facing my own future filled with threatening chaos and confusion, though viewing it with the serenity of one who already knew he couldn't hope to decide what is undecidable, in which regard her confession was quite liberating, as if she had sensed that she was going to die soon and, as her last will, meant to warn me not to experiment with making decisions when no solutions were possible and to allow uncontrollable events to be my only joy, as if real freedom consisted of nothing but letting ourselves be affected, without protest, by occurrences that choose to manifest themselves in us; consequently, for me, then, she wasn't like a mother, whom we expect to shield us with the warmth of her body from the rigors of the real world, but like an experienced person who has returned to herself after many adventures and indulgences and is therefore necessarily cruel and cold, a person with whom I had very little to do because common ties are defined by warmth, yet with whom I was in every way identical because, regardless of differences in age and sex, the occurrences within us were identical.

It was as though she was talking about something she could not have known anything about.

Our silence spoke of this, too.

And then I did manage to tell her something about which I had never spoken to her before.

It wasn't real speaking, of course, not a single word being formed or articulated in the deep silence, and lasted only as long as it took my mouth, breathing tiny kisses, to inch its way from the soft curve of her arm up to her shoulder, but "Girls like me very much," I would have whispered in the choked voice of a lover's confession meant just for her, "they like me more than any of the other boys," I would have whispered, as if to prove something, and also a bit ashamed of this surprising, inappropriate, ever boastful declaration, because everything we say out loud about ourselves, even if only to ourselves, needs immediate, disappointingly ambiguous amplification, so I would have said this, because they didn't like me that way—"I know, and I'm ashamed that they like me not the way girls like boys but as if I were a girl, too, which I'm not, of course, I'm a boy, but this difference, this thing that separates me from other boys, I can't help being proud of," and I would have asked her to help me, because I was saying it all wrong and desperately wanted to say it right, and the plural didn't mean girls in general — there is no such thing anyway — but the three of them, Hédi, Maja, and Livia, they were the girls, and in the same way, when I thought about boys I saw Prém, Kálmán, and Krisztián as belonging together; if I had to decide which sex I was more attracted to, buffeted between these two dependent yet separate trinities of the sexes and trying to find my place, I'd have to have said that women and girls were dearer to me though men and boys attracted me more.

I'd have said all this, if it had been possible to talk openly of such matters.

But leaning on Mother's shoulder I remembered what it was like to come from the garden and silently step into the Prihodas' spacious dining room, where their maid, Szidónia, was clearing the table, and to watch for a while, without a sound, as she got down on her knees, her buttocks thrust toward me, to pick bread crumbs off the floor.