Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

Then suddenly, as if he'd changed his mind and decided not to go to the kitchen, he lowered himself next to me on the rug, supporting himself on his elbows; he put his face comfortably into his hand, he was half lying, half sitting, and we looked into each other's eyes.

It was one of those rare moments when he wasn't smiling.

He looked at me as if from very far away, not really at me but at the phenomenon I had become for him at the moment, just as I was looking at him the way we look at an object whose beauty and worth cannot be denied, in spite of our resistance, but nevertheless which isn't identical with what we could love; the beauty we saw was not the one he loved, or the one I thought I'd loved.

And then he said quietly, This is what it's like.

And I asked him what he had in mind.

What he had in mind, he said, was what I must be feeling.

Hatred, I said. I could say it out loud, because it wasn't quite that anymore.

Why hatred? would I tell him? could I?

A shock of curly blond hair, a forest of hair, a luxuriant mane; the smooth skin taut over the high forehead with its two pronounced bulges; the soft hollow of the temples; dense, dark eyebrows adorned with some longer hairs; although thinner and narrower over the ridge of the nose, the brows met and mingled with lighter hairs as they curved up toward the forehead and then descended in an even lighter, downier arch into the shell-like indentation of the temples, at once shading and accentuating the finely cushioned eyelids, themselves divided by long, curled dark lashes, forming a living and moving frame around the black centers of the pupils dilating and contracting smoothly in the blue of his eyes; what a blue that was! how strong and cold! and how strange the blue eyes seemed, framed in black on the milk-white skin; and the black dissolving into blond with the greatest of ease; all these intrusive colors! the nose, its spine descending in a straight line to the flaring base, blended at a steep angle into the low region of the face, but with an elegant flourish, curling back into itself, it also encircled the dark little caves of the nostrils, only to continue, imperceptibly and under the skin, and protrude in the form of two delicate hillocks above the lips, connecting, symbolically almost, the inner lobes of the nostrils with the rim of the upper lip, bringing into harmony total opposites: the vertical line of the nose with the horizontal of the mouth, the oblong face, the perfectly round head, and the lips! those coupling slabs of flesh, their rawness barely concealed.

He shouldn't be angry with me, that's all I was asking.

And the only way I could prove that I meant what I'd said was to kiss him, but this was no longer the mouth but just another mouth, and mine, too, was just a mouth, so this wasn't going to work.

Why should he be angry; he wasn't angry.

Maybe it wasn't even his features but the movements of his lips, parting and closing as they formed words, the mechanical motion itself that, for all his calm, exhaled an infinite coolness, or could I myself have been so cold at the time? or both of us? but everything, everything changed! his face, his mouth, mostly his mouth, opening and closing, and my arm feeling the weight of my body, the strain of being in that position turning it numb, and his hand as he propped himself up, as though all this was but the mechanics of that unfamiliar force manifesting itself in the physical properties of our bodies, we might have possessed this compelling force, but our every move was defined by those properties, everything was determined by them; to put it another way, I may feel God residing in me, yet no motion can be other than what is prescribed by my physical form, every gesture must take place within the limits set by this form, which also sets the patterns for that compelling force; thus, the effect produced by a gesture can be only a signal, an allusion, nothing more than the perception of the purposeful functioning of these physical forms; I may take pleasure in perceiving a familiar pattern realized, and take it to be a real feeling, but it's nothing but self-enjoyment; I am not enjoying him, I merely see a form, a pattern, not him, but a signal, an allusion; the only thing we enjoy in each other is that our bodies function in similar ways, his movements elicit identical patterns in me, immediately making it clear what he is after; amusing ourselves with mirrors, that's all we were doing, the rest was self-deception; and this realization then was as if in the middle of enjoying a piece of music I'd suddenly started paying attention to the physical workings of the instruments, to the strings and hammers, and the musical sounds themselves grew distant.

I said I was sorry, but I didn't understand anything.

Why must I understand, he asked, what was there to understand?

I told him not to be angry with me, but there was nothing else I could say; maybe now I'd be able to tell him what I'd kept quiet about last time because I'd thought it was too sentimental, and although he had been most curious to hear it, I'd feared ruining something then; but now, I hoped, he wouldn't be offended, I could tell him that even his movements were not that important to me, it just didn't matter anymore that he could touch me or I him, because whatever we might do — and there was nothing we couldn't do — it had been arranged this way and that's all there was to it! and somehow we had been together, he and I, long before we became acquainted, only we didn't know it; would he believe it if I told him that we had been together for almost thirty years? that was my obsession, my idée fixe, and now I could say it: I believed he was my brother.

He burst into hearty laughter, he guffawed, and as soon as I said the word I had to laugh, too; to take the edge off his guffaw, he touched my face with the tips of his fingers, gently, patiently; and the reason we had to laugh, I was laughing, too, was not only that what I had said, in a voice charged with emotion, was embarrassingly gauche — not to mention that it was not at all what I had meant to say — but also that the word itself, "brother," in his language, and in our particular situation, did not mean the same thing it did in mine; as soon as the word slipped out, I noticed my error, because one immediately had to think of the little adjective "warm," which had to be attached to the word "brother" if one wanted to say "queer," warmer Bruder, in his language; so what I had said to him, in a voice charged with emotion, was that he was my little faggot, which may have been a witty wordplay, if only I hadn't said it so emotionally, but this way it was like mentioning rope in a hanged man's house, a well-intentioned gesture gone laughably awry, and we did laugh, he in particular laughed so hard his eyes filled with tears, and it was no use explaining to him that in the Hungarian word for brother, testvér, blood and body are linked, and that's what I had in mind.

When he had calmed down a bit, and the little afterbursts of laughter were coming at longer intervals, I realized we had drifted even further apart.

He seemed to have assumed again that air of superiority with which he had looked me over on our first night together.

I told him quietly that what I had said before was not what I'd wanted to say.

He held my face, he forgave my silly slip, but his forgiveness, already past the laughter, made him appear even more superior.

What I wanted to tell him, I said, what I really wanted to tell him was something we hadn't talked about before, because I didn't want to hurt him, but now I felt this whole thing to be hopeless, and please don't be offended, I felt I was locked up in jail.

Why should he be offended; there was no reason to be offended.

Perhaps, I said, we should stop seeing each other for a while.