Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Perhaps it was the heavy fragrance of Mother's skin that made me reveal all my secrets to her, things I experienced independently but which still had to do with her, somehow.

And when the maid finally noticed me I put my finger to my lips, warning her to be quiet, say nothing, nobody should know I was here, not yet, I wanted to be able to surprise Maja, and she stayed as she was, motionless, fortunately unaware of the deeper meaning of my precaution, thinking it was a prank, some innocent prank, after all I was such an amusing fellow, wasn't I? and my smile, my playful plea, made her my accomplice; very carefully then, not to make the floor creak, I started walking toward her — Here comes that rascal again, her beaming eyes seemed to say — and, watching me approach, she burst out laughing.

I always had to think of something new; old tricks were good for starters, but I had to devise something extraordinary to heighten the effect, which was not so hard as it first seemed; I had to remain refined in my little acts of rudeness, gauge precisely the opportunities afforded by the given moment.

And in this silence I went as far as not saying hello to her, knew that only the most extreme gestures were effective, sometimes would only nod, but another time would suddenly grab her hand and kiss it, she'd slap me lightly on the back of my head: that is how our contacts remained silent, even when free of playful smacks and cuffs, still more expressive than words could have made them: we were giving, exchanging signals, a form of communication that suited us perfectly, why spoil it with mere words?

No need to concentrate on anything else: I had only to look at the yellow flecks in her gray cat's eyes — I knew that every premeditated and self-conscious move was too artful, therefore patently false — to establish contact between those flecks and my instinctive gestures in order to learn whether I was on the right track or not; now, for example, her loud laughter was a kind of revenge for my imposing silence on her, but she laughed out loud, and that called for reprisal; our furtive pleasures demanded these little reprisals, which gave us a chance silently to kick, bite, scratch, and furiously pummel each other, and then, very slowly, I too went down on my knees — no need to mimic her openly, she got the message! — simply replicating, mirroring, the funny, somewhat humiliating position her body had assumed; I knelt next to her, among the legs of a couple of chairs, as if to say, You are like a dog here, yes, that's what you are, a dog.

Szidónia was a fat girl, her thick brown hair pinned up in a braid, her oily skin glistened, her eyes were bright, and every move she made was disarmingly, awkwardly childlike; there were dark stains of perspiration on her white blouse under her arms; I knew I had to do something with this penetrating, enduring odor: but I am your dog, I intimated, and, sniffing noisily, stuck my nose into her armpit.

Her body dissolved in silent pleasure, she rolled under the table, and I followed the moist, wet smell until she bit into my neck, hard; it hurt.

Now this way, now that, whichever way we played these little games, they were only the antechamber of pleasure.

Because in the inner sanctum, deep inside her room, poring over her books and notes and resting her head on her hand and chewing on the end of her pencil, sat Maja, her bare legs crossed under the table, and she kept swinging them, shuffling them in an irritatingly unpredictable, nervous rhythm.

Thick shrubs grew tall outside her window, old trees lowered their branches like a curtain, the air in her room was always filled with green stirrings, green flickers on the wall, as the leaves outside floated and fluttered.

"Livi isn't here yet?" I asked quietly, making sure I opened with a crucial question, a confession really, letting her know right away that she wasn't that important to me: she may have been waiting for me, and now pretending not to be, but I hadn't come because of her.

She didn't look at me; she always made as though she didn't catch my words the first time, always sat in some contorted position, and not so much read her book as scrutinized the pages from afar, with a certain revulsion and wariness, keeping them as far away as she could, as another person might look at a painting, taking in both the details and the composition as a whole, furrows of concentration creasing her brow, her dark brown eyes round with a constant, level astonishment, all the while chewing and twisting her pencil with her beautiful white teeth, chewing and twisting it again; and if my presence registered in her consciousness this was indicated only by a slowing in the shuffle of her feet under the chair, a less active nibbling on her pencil, but needless to say, these were signs not of inattention but of the most concentrated attention — these monotonous, mechanical motions enabled her to absorb knowledge far removed from her physical being — and if she finally managed to tear herself away from what she'd been so intent upon, she looked at me with the same deep, astonished interest; I must have seemed like another object to her, every object being remarkable in its own way, as slowly, very slowly, she lifted her head, the furrows of her brow disappeared, she had to pull the pencil from between her teeth, her mouth stayed open, and her eager, attentive look did not change.

"You can see for yourself," she said casually, but she didn't fool me, I knew she enjoyed reporting painful news.

"She's not coming today?" I asked, needlessly, only to emphasize that I hadn't come to see her, let there be no misunderstanding about that.

"I'm getting a little tired of Livi, maybe she won't show up today, but Kálmán said we'd see her anyway, because Krisztián is doing some kind of theater."

She might as well have stuck a thorn in me; of course nobody had told me about this, and she knew they meant to leave me out of it.

"We'll see them, then?"

"I guess so," she said innocently, as though the plural included me as well, and for a moment I almost believed it.

"Did she say that I should go? That you should invite me?"

"Why, didn't she tell you?" With just a touch of mock indulgence, she savored my embarrassed silence.

"She did mention something," I said, knowing well she could see through my lie; she seemed to feel a little sorry for me.

"Why shouldn't you come if you feel like it?"

But I wanted no part of her pity. "Then our whole day is shot again," I said angrily, inadvertently betraying myself, which of course pleased her no end.

"Mother is out."

"And Szidónia?"

She shrugged, which she did with inimitable charm, raising a shoulder just a little, but somehow this made her whole body sag, reaching the limits of its inertia, and after an indefinable moment of transition she relaxed again, flung her pencil on the desk, and stood up.

"Come on, let's not waste any more time."

She acted as if she really wasn't interested in anything else, but I couldn't shake my anger so easily, and besides, I wasn't quite sure what she was getting at, since all I knew was that once again something had happened behind my back which I had to scream out of my system.

"Just tell me this one thing, will you: when did you talk to Kálmán?"

"I didn't," she said with a gleam in her eye, almost singing the words.

"You couldn't have, because he walked home with me."

"You see — so why don't you just leave it at that?" she said, grinning pertly, eager to let me know she was enjoying my annoyance.

"But may I ask how you found out about their plans, then?"

"That's my business, don't you think?"

"So that means you have your own little plans, right?"

"Right."

"And of course that's where you want to go."

"Why not? I haven't decided yet."