Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

But what she had intended as a final, victorious assault turned into a quiet farewell.

By the time we got to her car for the short ride to the opera house, to catch the new production of Fidelio, it was a subdued Thea who was with us; she rummaged around in the dark for a long time until she finally found in the glove compartment the glasses she needed for driving, and what a sight they were! greasy, dusty, the lenses uncleaned for ages, with one of the sidepieces missing so she had to stretch her slender neck even more, watching every move of her head, carefully balancing the spectacles lest they slide down her nose; it was late evening, the streets were empty, a strong wind was blowing, and in the halos ringing the streetlamps you could see the rain coming down at a slant; none of us was talking; from the back seat where I sat, somewhat discomfited by this silence, I kept watching her.

Now she seemed to be playing no role; it was a rare moment, a welcome intermission, though possibly it was Frau Kühnert's confidential disclosure that made me see her like this, serious, self-absorbed; she was probably dead tired, too, and seemed vaguely distracted, her limbs automatically going through the motions needed to drive, she was paying so little attention that when she was about to turn from the almost completely dark Friedrichstrasse to the better-lit Unter den Linden, she stopped, as she was supposed to, and signaled; the little red light on the dashboard began to flash, but as if an endless stream of cars had filled the avenue and she couldn't cut in, we just sat there waiting as the red light kept flashing and clicking in the dark, fresh gusts of wind whipped the rain against the car door, the wipers squeaked and ticked as they flattened the water running down the windshield; if Frau Kühnert hadn't said, "Maybe we can go now," we might have spent even more time at that intersection.

"Oh yes," she said quietly, more to herself than to us, and then made the turn.

Those few moments, seemingly very long yet also too brief, that dead time before we turned, meant a great deal to me; I had been waiting for it without knowing it, hoping it would come without knowing that I was hoping for such an ordinary moment, a moment of letting go, of imposing no control, and I myself was too tired and too upset to track this moment consciously or even think about it; it was the case of raw and pure senses perceiving raw and pure senses, even though I had only a side view of her face, and her profile, especially with those sorry-looking glasses, wasn't so memorable; still, it seemed that the streetlights reflecting off the wet pavement altered that face or, rather, changed it back to its original form, in part highlighting its surfaces and in part wiping away the fineness of its wrinkles: this was the face I'd been looking for in her, the face I'd seen before but only in flashes because of its mobility; the face in its entirety had always eluded me; the face I now saw was the face behind the mask, the one that belonged to her eyes; this face was even older and uglier, because it had more shadows, and in the color of the streetlights and because of its own inner immobility, it was a dead face, yet the face of a little girl, unformed and taut, whom I had known within myself and loved tenderly for a long time, a beautiful little girl who kept trying out her charms on me; but it wasn't a face out of my childhood or adolescence, even if the moment and the late-autumn downpour did evoke memories and fill me with nostalgia; this little girl was akin to all the little girls I had ever known, yet in her unfamiliarity resembled me more than people I had actually known and only seldom thought of.

This was probably the reason I had been watching Thea for weeks with such reluctance, as well as with a fascinated revulsion, and all the while inexplicably identifying with her, as if without a mirror I could watch myself in her face, and most likely that is why our relationship, for all our eager interest in each other, remained calm and controlled, making us recoil from even the possibility of physical contact — one can never be directly in touch with one's mirror image, however flattering and intimate it is; self-love can be consummated only through indirect means, via secret paths — but at the moment, which I remember more vividly than many subsequent, far more intimate encounters, a seemingly out-of-place image flashed through my mind, blotting out the real image before me: of a little girl, Thea, standing in front of a mirror, serious and deeply studying the features of her face, playing with them, distorting them, not simply clowning but listening to some inner sensation, trying to see what effect her facial tricks would have on her; this was not an actual memory but a fantasy working in visual images that came to my aid; I simply imagined her, and who can say why I had to imagine this particular situation, in which this little girl, opening up the peculiar gap between her inner perception of herself and her own face, struggled really to see herself in the mirror, see herself as somebody else might, anybody, nobody in particular.

What I may have spotted in her then, and I say this now in retrospect, was the creature, or that layer of her personality, on which she built her pretenses, her clowning and hamming, her chameleonlike transformations, her lies as well as her unceasing, ruthless, and self-destructive struggle against them; this was her only secure ground, the nourishing soil to which she could return when tired, insecure, and desperate, the ultimate home front from which she ventured forth with her games and pretenses, a place so safe she could freely abandon it; for her, then, the short ride between the two theaters was but a brief retreat to this hinterland, so that stepping into the lobby of the opera house she could appear before Melchior with her face and body fully restored, offering him her utmost, her true beauty, the picture of her reconstructed self; and her becoming so beautiful again revealed something about the secret roads she had to travel so that onstage she could at will assume and cast off the most wideranging human characteristics.

Perhaps it was not a little girl or boy whom I saw in my imagination but a sexless child who had no doubts or misgivings yet, because it couldn't conceive of not being loved and therefore turned to us with such confidence, such faith — this was the child in Thea whom Frau Kühnert loved, whose mother she was — that one could not help reciprocating, if only to the extent of an involuntary smile — and that's how she appeared in the theater lobby, light, beautiful, slender, a bit like a child, ready to meet Melchior, who was standing on top of the staircase with his French friend, towering over the noisy throng of theatergoers; and if Melchior's face still showed a touch of displeasure at the moment when he noticed us, by the time he was hurrying down the stairs toward Thea he began to bask, almost in spite of himself, in the glow of the smile he was receiving from her, with no hint of the mocking cruelty with which Thea had prepared herself for this meeting, no trace of the raw lust with which she had pointed the tip of her sword at Hübchen's naked chest, or of the dread with which she had sought fulfillment in my eyes afterward; likewise, there was nothing to suggest that Melchior was just another "boy" for her, like Hübchen, for instance, with whom she could romp to her heart's content; Melchior was a proper young man, calm, handsome, well-adjusted, unconnected with the theater, a civilian with no inkling of the raging passions she regularly left behind in the rehearsal hall; a very likable young man, jovial, always ready to smile, his bearing straight to the point almost of stiffness, which may have been the result of good breeding or self-discipline; and in the moment the two were approaching each other, it also became clear that we, witnesses to this meeting, simply did not exist.