Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

At seven o'clock a knock on my door would wake me again, and "Yes, come in," I'd call out in what sounded like a completely strange voice, a sign that I first wanted to say in Hungarian what in the very next instant I had to say in German, whereupon Frau Kühnert would enter and, humming softly to herself, light the fire in the stove; in the evenings I'd walk to the theater over a soggy carpet of fallen leaves and the soles of my patent-leather shoes would always be soaked through.

But by that time Melchior was gone.

I was left with Berlin, slushy and gray.

After the show I went to the flat on Wörther Platz; it was cold, and the lamp's glare made the purple of the curtain look faded, but I didn't feel like lighting the candles.

It was raining.

The police could arrive any minute and break down the door.

The refrigerator was humming peacefully in the kitchen.

The next day I also left the city.

In Heiligendamm there was bright sunshine, though what happened to me there I still can't explain.

If I treated words lightly, I'd say I felt happy there: the sea, the journey, and the events directly preceding it must have contributed to this feeling, not to mention the pretty little place itself, which they call the "white city on the sea," a slight exaggeration, since the whole place consists of only a dozen or so two-story cottages facing the sea, on either side of the attractive spa, but white it was — the shutters, now closed, the benches on the smooth green lawn, the colonnade, the summer musicians' chairs stacked in neat piles, and the houses themselves surrounded by manicured deep-green shrubs and tall black pines — the most attractive feature of the place may have been its deceptively fair weather, and the silence.

Deceptive I say, because the wind howled here, and the embankment deflected enormous waves, crushed and cleaved them asunder, massive steel-blue waves booming thunderously into white foam; and silence I say, for between two booms one's sense of hearing fell into the trough of the waves, into a rapt anticipation, redeemed by the sounds of force turning into weight, though in the evening, when I set out for a walk, everything had calmed down, a full moon shone low over the open sea.

I began walking on the embankment toward Nienhagen, a neighboring town, with the rumbling sea and its glimmering crests on one side, silent marshland on the other, and I, the only living soul in the midst of the elements; I had run out of cigarettes earlier in the afternoon, and since Nienhagen, a town protected from the western winds by something called Gespensterwald, or Forest of Ghosts, did not seem that far away — I'd used a broken matchstick to measure the distance on the map and was sure I could reach it, because my eyes, though occasionally blinded by the wind, could pick out the flashes of its light tower — I planned to buy cigarettes there, maybe even have a cup of hot tea before returning; I pictured a friendly tavern with fishermen sitting around a table by candlelight and myself, not one of them, walking in; imagined their faces turning toward me, saw my own face looking at them.

I could see myself, clearly, transparently, walking in front of me; stepping lightly yet gravely, I followed behind.

It was as if not I but my body was unable to endure the pain caused by our separation.

The wind got under my loose-fitting coat, pushing, shoving me forward, and although I had put on all my warm clothes I was cold now, without actually feeling cold, and that frightened me, because even if the usually merciful sensory delusion wasn't functioning perfectly, I knew that I ought to feel cold; at another time I might have turned back, let fear win out, and find no difficulty in explaining away my retreat by saying it was too nasty out, and catching a bad cold would have been too high a price to pay for such a nocturnal outing; but this time I could not delude myself, as if something had splintered the image we so painstakingly create of ourselves and wish to see accepted by others, until this distorted image seems real even to us; there was no room for deception: I was this person walking on the embankment, and though all my familiar conditioned responses were functioning, there was something amiss, a gap, more than one gap, distortions, cracks through which it was possible to glance at a strange creature, another someone.

Someone who long ago, yet on this very day, arrived in Heiligendamm and in the evening started out for Nienhagen.

As if what was about to happen took place fifty, seventy, a hundred years ago.

And this was so, even if nothing was about to happen.

It was a new, exciting sensation, rather unsettling, to experience my own disintegration, yet I accepted it with the serenity of a mature person, as if I were fifty, seventy, or a hundred years older, an affable elderly gentleman recalling his youth, but there was really nothing extraordinary or mystical about this, and though I couldn't imagine a more poetic setting for my death neither could I muster the courage to take the sleeping pills I had been carrying with me for years in a little round box; still, just to do something, I again called on my imagination to separate my two selves, liberating myself from my hopelessly muddled emotions, and saw that the future of my strange self was nothing more than the past and present of my familiar self, everything that had already or would still come to pass.

The situation was exceptional only in that I could not identify with either one of my selves, and in this overexcited state I felt like an actor moving about on a romantic stage set, my past being only a shallow impersonation of myself, just as my future would be, with all my sufferings, as if everything could be playfully projected into the past or the future, as if none of it had really happened or could still be altered and it was only my imagination that made sense of these entangled fragments from the various dimensions of my life, arranging them around a conventionally definable entity I could call my self, which I could show off as myself but which was really not me.

I am free, I thought to myself then.

I also thought then that out of this boundless freedom my imagination selected, quite haphazardly and not very adroitly, only potentially tiny possibilities from which to assemble a face that others might like and that I could then consider my own.

Today I no longer think this, but then the realization seemed so powerful and profound, I saw with such clarity that other being, the one who had remained free, untouched by any of my potential selves — he walked with me and I with him, he was cold and I feared for him — that I had to stop, but that wasn't enough, I had to kneel down and give thanks for this moment, though my knees did not like to bend in a show of humility, I would have liked to remain neutral as a stone — no, but even that wasn't enough — and I even closed my eyes: nothing, nothing but a tattered rag flapping in the wind!

The moon hung low, it was yellow and seemed only an arm's length away, but on the horizon its reflection grew pale, too feeble to outline the tremulous crests of the waves; the water seemed perfectly smooth but that, too, was an illusion, I thought to myself, the illusion of distance, just as on the other side of the embankment, in the marsh, where the light had no focus, there was no surface or edge in which it could be reflected and so the light ceased, vanished, and because the straining eye could find nothing to fix on, there was no darkness or blackness there, nothing but nothingness itself.

I had arrived in Heiligendamm in the late afternoon, just before sunset, and I set out for Nienhagen after dark, when the moon was already up.

I couldn't tell what was out there, the map indicated marshland, the guidebook mentioned a swamp, and whatever it was, it lay deep.