Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

He had first hung it on the wall back then, in that boy's room of his, because it was beautiful! he didn't want it to be anything else, anything more than a shapely object, let it hang there undisturbed, content, that's why he hung it on the wall here, too, let his violin, at least, remain what it was; though now that he had told me the story, and this was the first time he had ever told anyone, it seemed that what he had so lovingly cherished in his memory might not even be completely true; perhaps he only used it to justify his despair, his cynicism, his frustration, his cowardice, feelings akin to the sudden attack of nerves, the paralysis evoked by an even earlier revelation that he'd also told me about, which happened when he once asked his mother, quite casually, playfully even, whether it was possible that he was not the son of the dead man whose name he carried, since on photographs he had never been able to discover the slightest family resemblance, maybe he was someone else's son, and as his mother she ought to know, he was a big boy now, she could tell him; How did you know? she cried — she happened to be washing dishes and swung around, her face suddenly looking as though it were full of long, wriggling worms; he knew nothing, nothing at all, what should he know? it was as if his own death were staring back at him, his end was literally in sight; and from her cry he understood that, unexpectedly and quite senselessly, the two of them were thrown into a state of mortal danger when, in anticipation of rigor mortis and before any decisive action is possible, limbs and sense organs turn stiff and numb, only the skin quivers a little; he was staring into dead eyes; for the longest time they couldn't escape each other's presence, and until late in the evening they didn't even move from the kitchen sink, because it was there she told him the story of the French prisoner of war who was his real father, a story he'd already told me once; it was after this incident that he got sick, though he didn't think his illness had anything to do with the shock of finding out, or at least that was unlikely; you see, he said, when you don't have a father you make one up; then it turns out you don't even have the made-up one, the only thing you've got is his absence, as with God; and now he knew that this was the reason it had been so important for his mother that he not be like the others — hence the violin! — that he be exceptional, which he wasn't, that he not be German, even if he was; but what he hadn't told me yet — he suddenly thought of it now — was what happened after the hospital: for two months he lay in the ward for the terminally ill where patients kept changing so rapidly that in fact he was the only one who remained terminally ill, no one else was left alive; he enjoyed his rare status while his stomach kept filling up with pus; the doctors saw no reason to perform another operation and just stuck a tube in his stomach to drain the pus, he still had a bump there, I should look at it sometime; they simply didn't know what to do with him; he was a goner, but not the proper kind, because he couldn't even die properly, so after two months they asked his mother, who in the meantime had been going insane and gray with guilt, to take him home; she was wasting away, trembling constantly; she kept dropping things, and her eyes seemed to be asking for mercy, but he, no matter how much he would have liked to, could not forgive her; she hovered over him like a ghost, as though every sip of water she got him to swallow was an acquittal, as if that sin she had committed long ago — I must remember, a German woman with a Frenchman! and though at the time, luckily, she had been spared the punishment for criminal miscegenation, "she did rot in jail for three months with me in her belly" — as if that sin came back to haunt her after all those years, but this, too, was a story for another day; anyway, their family doctor, who visited him twice a week, once on an impulse asked him to open his mouth, let's see those teeth, young man; a couple of weeks after they extracted two of his molars he was fit as a fiddle and he'd never had a problem since, as I could see for myself, so, thanks to those two rotten teeth, maybe we could finally extricate ourselves from the slimy depths of his soul; but all joking aside, he must honestly tell me that he was grateful, yes, profoundly grateful to me, because for the first time he dared say out loud all the things he had learned about himself; to him, I was a little like that dentist who had pulled those tiny Adolf Hitlers from his mouth; I had wrenched something from him, and also solved something for him; while talking to me he began to see things more clearly, things he'd never been aware of before, even if he still couldn't talk about them properly; and since he was by nature incredibly self-centered, he believed this to be the reason I had to enter his life, because all the things he'd told me he could share only with a foreigner; yes, he will go away, that much is certain, he has had enough of being a stranger here, and it's better to leave with a clear head, without reproach and hatred, and perhaps he can thank me for that, because I am also a stranger here.

I must have said something to the effect that he was exaggerating again, I didn't believe I could be so important to him, that wasn't the way major decisions were made.

He said he wasn't exaggerating at all; when thanks were due, one must be properly thankful; and his eyes filled with tears.

Maybe that's when I touched his face and gently reminded him that Pierre was also a foreigner.

But with him he didn't speak in his native language, he said, Pierre was French, and in a way he was French, too, even if his native tongue was German.

French, my foot, I said; he was being overly nice, which was flattering, of course, but I wasn't asking for any kind of proof, he must believe me, I simply felt… but what I really felt I could not say out loud.

So I just said that I'd be ashamed to say it out loud.

I held his face in my hands, and he held my face in his, the gestures were identical, yet our intentions seemed to be at odds; it's possible that I didn't even mention my shame, didn't say it out loud, afraid that if I went further and said the word, I would have to be truly ashamed, because he would respond the only way he knew, with cold reserve and suggestive irony, with his perennial, exasperatingly beautiful smile, and then my own embarrassment would spoil something that must not be spoiled at any cost, I would deprive my hand of the warmth of his face, of its smoothness, of the stubble's crackle under my fingers, which I especially liked, though on our first night it had still elicited resistance from me, caused by the dread of the familiarly unfamiliar, a resistance that was also an attraction enticing me to cross the border between smoothness and coarseness on the face of a man, with my mouth to touch another mouth that was also ringed with stubble, to feel the same kind of strength from it that I was imparting to it, as if receiving back not his strength but my own; "Why, it's my father's mouth!" someone shouted in my voice on our first night when he leaned over to kiss me on the lips, and I could hear the scraping and blending of whiskers on our chins, the stubble on our father's chins touching the smooth skin of our forgotten childhood selves! I sank pleasurably into the loathsomeness of self-love and self-hatred, yes, I can see clearly now that we had to stop talking, although we hardly noticed that this was no longer talking; I began to love the self-loathing I had left behind; what I loved about it was that it blotted out everything that would still make me fearful and anxious; with him, I literally stepped over my father's corpse, I could finally forgive him, and although I couldn't be entirely sure which of the two was my father, I was cleansed; they were together now, fused, and there was silence now, only our bodies were talking; a profusion of words was still droning in my ears, because it takes a while for the brain to process verbal stimuli and to store them in their proper compartments and receptacles, and even after the buzz of this sorting operation abated, there remained scraps and fragments that somehow didn't fit in the large storehouse of received information; oddly enough, these strays were unimportant details of some communication: