Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Only half? I asked, surprised.

That's a long and quite amusing story, he said with a laugh and, as if sweeping an unexpected obstacle easily aside, went right on, with the same fervor, asking me if I had had the chance to make these or similar kinds of observations, because if I hadn't yet, I would surely discover in the future that white could be the appropriate symbol for the defeated German people's national character.

I said it was mostly gray I'd been noticing, and because I felt I should somehow be embarrassed for him, for his flippant tone, my gaze drifted away.

But he followed my eyes: ah, the desk, a nice piece, wasn't it? and the armchairs, candelabra, and rugs, too, all brought over from his mother's, just about everything was from there, a kind of family inheritance, all of it, he looted his mother's place, but she didn't mind, mothers never do, and all this was recent; at first he wanted the place to be white and bare, just a bed covered with a white sheet, nothing else… he was blathering away, giving me all this nonsense because he was glad I was there but afraid to say so; shouldn't we rather drink something, he happened to have a bottle of French champagne, chilled, saving it for some special occasion, one never knew when such an occasion might arise, right? how about making our meeting a special occasion and uncorking the bottle?

Taking my bemused silence for acquiescence, he left to get the champagne; the antique clock on the wall struck twelve, I counted the strokes, mechanically, helplessly; So 'tis midnight, I thought, which wasn't too bright but characteristic of my state, for by then my thinking had simply shut down so that pure sensory perception could take control, making me appear as another object in the room without my knowing how it got there, a not unfamiliar sensation, yet never before had I sensed so vividly and thoroughly that the place I was in was as unique as the hour marked by the countable strokes of the clock, because something had to happen here, something that went against all my wishes and that would change the course of my life, and whatever it might turn out to be, I knew I had to yield to it: midnight, the witching hour, never more propitious, I had to laugh at myself, as though I'd never let myself go before, a slight exaggeration, surely, as if I were a young girl debating whether to lose or keep her virginity, as if this room were the last station on a long deferment whose nature and content had been unfamiliar until now; I was fooling myself, still pretending — what pleasure to pretend to ourselves! — that I really had no idea what extraordinary thing might happen or perhaps already had happened here tonight, but what was it?

The candles flickered and crackled, soothingly, beautifully; outside it was pouring, and after the clock struck twelve all one could hear was the even, bubbling rhythm of baroque music and the pelting, pattering sound of the rain, as if somebody had overdirected this scene to be so obviously, so ludicrously beautiful.

Because somebody did stage it, I was sure, not he or I but somebody, or at least it got staged beforehand, as all accidental encounters are; no one plans them or counts on them, and only later, in retrospect, do we realize they were pivotal, fateful; at first it all seems banal, incidental, incoherent, random fragments and flashes to which we needn't attach much significance, and as a rule we don't, for what may be accidentally visible to us from a tangled heap of occurrences, what may hang out and appear as a sign, a warning, is nothing more than some detail belonging to another cluster of happenings we have nothing to do with; a prop in Thea's slightly laughable romantic agony, that's what I thought of him then, because he was the one she spoke to Frau Kühnert about on that dark autumn afternoon in the uncomfortable silence of the rehearsal hall, calling him "the boy," an odd and deliberately derisive appellation, enough to arouse my curiosity; but then it had been more intriguing to try to follow the inner process, the various degrees of transition, that Thea had to follow so that finally she could focus the intense emotions of her just completed scene on some external object, which she ended up calling the boy; as I have already pointed out, Thea, like all great actors, had the special ability to make her inner processes, mixed in with her private life, continually visible and spectacular and, precisely because emotions displayed on the stage are nourished by the actor's so-called private life, one could never be sure when she was in earnest and when she was only playing with something that might mean a great deal to her; in other words, unlike normal mortals, she would toy with deadly serious things and take seriously what was only make-believe, and this interested me more than the seemingly irrelevant question of who the elusive person was whom she labeled "the boy," the person she disdained, hated even, so much so that she wouldn't utter his name, the person she nevertheless didn't dare telephone because for reasons unknown to me, he had asked her never to call him again, for whose closeness, then, right after the erotic desire expressed onstage had become impersonal and objectless, she still yearned so much that she was willing to risk humiliation, and in whose room I would be standing later that same evening — in a sense as her replacement.

In spite of my apprehensions, and they were numerous enough, I had given in to her pleading and nagging and agreed to spend the evening with them: "Come on, don't be such a meanie! why can't you come with us, why play hard to get when I so very much want you to come? oh, you boys drive me mad! you'll get to meet him, at least, he's a remarkable character, and you don't even have to be jealous of him, he's not quite as remarkable as you are, Sieglinde, do me a favor, you ask, too! my asking isn't enough? it's me, me who is asking you, isn't that enough?" she was purring, whispering, playing the girlishly awkward seductress, leaning her light, fragile body against mine and taking hold of my arm; it would have been pretty hard to resist such a playful display of affection, yet what compelled me to go was not curiosity, let alone jealousy — the prospect of observing the two of them in a probably perverse relationship didn't intrigue me either — but because from the moment Thea had managed to avert her lustful and horror-filled gaze from Hübchen's half-naked body and, turning toward us, caught my stare, the almost voyeuristic stare of an overstimulated spectator, I too had been deeply, personally touched by her emotional upheaval, playing itself out in the very sensitive border region of her professional and personal candor: it was impossible to decide whether the scene, interrupted by inveterate directorial rudeness just as it was reaching its climax, might not perhaps continue between the two of us, because to bring it to a halt was impossible, about that there could be no doubt.

Yet ours was a very cool-headed game that no single glance, errant or uncontrolled, was going to derail from its consciously, intelligently charted course; a glance like that could only add spice, introduce another hairpin turn of emotions to make more daring and fiery what was and would continue to be essentially cold, as though haughtily, arrogantly enamored of our intellectual superiority, we had said to each other, No, no! we won't do it! we can easily withstand even these impulsive, involuntary looks, and we won't fall on each other like a couple of animals! we'll stick to the warmest mutual interest, which pays attention to the details of every detail and remains, therefore, in the realm of activities of the conscious mind — unnaturally and anti-lifelike, no matter that it can expose the rawest of instincts — precisely because the interest is so intense that the natural ability to let go, the vulnerability necessary for normal human contact, cannot be realized even for a moment: not so unusual a phenomenon, for we need only think of lovers who, reaching the peak of their mutual attraction with its promise of annihilating fulfillment, cannot achieve physical union until they fall back from that rarefied sphere of inspirited love to a more earthly closeness, until their bodies' pain shrinks the spirit of love to a humiliatingly manageable size; then, in the throes of excruciating pain, they can make their way not to ultimate bliss but to the liberating pleasure of momentary, flashlike gratification, arriving not where they had originally headed but where their bodies will allow them to go.