Peter Nadas - A Book of Memories

I won't delude myself; I do not possess the surpassing wisdom of the gods.

Could it have been Mother falling ill?

That was certainly an important turning point, though in an odd way her sickness seems to me to have been the consequence rather than the cause of the prolonged decline; in any case, the family glossed over her illness with the same lies — so vile in their seeming benevolence — they used about my little sister's condition, or Grandfather's asthma attacks, which, according to Grandmother's confidential revelation, no treatment, diet, or medication could remedy because they were simply hysteria.

And all he needed was a bucketful of cold water on his head, she said.

But it would have been as unseemly to talk about the physical manifestations of this slow decay as it would have been to mention why Grandmother never talked to Grandfather, who in turn refused to say a word to Father, the two men passing each other, day after day, without even a greeting, each pretending the other didn't exist, even though Father was living in Grandfather's house.

Maybe it's fortunate, or unfortunate, that to this day I cannot decide what is better, knowledge or ignorance; no matter how much I tried to live their lies and find my place in the system of falsehoods, contributing to the smooth operation of the system's fine mechanism with effective lies of my own, and even if I could not see what had set it all in motion or what was covered up by what, still, over time, I did gain some insight into the layers of deception; I knew, for instance, that Grandfather's illness was real and quite serious, and that any one of his attacks might prove fatal; as Grandmother gravely and passively watched them, I felt she was actually waiting for his death, which could happen any time; and I also knew, of course, that my little sister was incurable, was born braindamaged, and so she'd remain, but the circumstances of her birth or conception — the cause of her condition, if indeed there was one such thing — were shrouded in the conspiracy of my parents' guilty conscience, which is why they were compelled to talk constantly about the hope of finding a cure, as if with their hope they were trying to mask an awful secret which no one must ever find out; it seemed as though every member of my family used lies to hold the other members' lives in his or her hand; and because of an inadvertent gesture of mine, I also knew that what Mother was recovering from was not a successful gallbladder operation.

I was resting on her arm, watching her breathe, and all I wanted to do was touch her neck, smooth my hand over her face — and that's why I'm talking about an inadvertent gesture: she was not asleep, only her eyes were closed, and as I clumsily reached toward her neck, my finger got caught in the cord of her nightgown — it wasn't tied properly or it just came undone — and the light silk material slid off her breast or, more precisely, in that fraction of a second I thought I saw it slide off and saw her breast, that is what I was supposed to see there, but in fact what I saw in place of her breast was a network of ruddy scars, the traces of many stitches.

I heard a clicking sound; someone quickly shut the window above me.

The storm could not have come at a better time; I lay there hoping the downpour would drive me into the ground and I'd be dissolved, absorbed, but instead, the cool rain sobered me up.

I scrambled to my feet, to knock on the window and be let in.

To my astonishment, Grandmother's terrified eyes looked back at me from within the room; on the couch Grandfather was lying on his back with his eyes closed.

While I was waiting at the door, my pants and shirt soaked through, it was pouring, thundering and lightning, and by the time Grandmother finally let me in, my hair was sopping wet.

But she didn't even bother to turn on the light, didn't say a word, and without paying any attention to me hurried back into Grandfather's room.

I followed her.

But she didn't hurry back to help him; she immediately sat back down on the chair she'd risen from a moment earlier; she was in a hurry to be present when the expected finally happened.

The rain sluiced down in great sheets on the large glass panes, in which a continually flashing blue light illuminated the mysteriously blurred images of trees; approaching rumbles made the glass tremble; it seemed that all the heat preceding the storm had been trapped in this room.

Grandfather's chest rapidly rose and sank, a still open book hung from his hand as if ready to drop, but he seemed to be holding on to it, clutching the last object connecting him to this world; his face was white, glistening with perspiration, and more pearly beads were gathered in the stubble over his mouth; his breathing was very fast, whistling, drawn-out, labored.

The light coming from under the waxed-paper shade of the lamp on the wall above Grandfather's head illuminated his face, as if to ensure that there would be nothing mysterious in his struggle; Grandmother sat motionless in the shadow, in the warm and friendly dimness, peering out, a bit tense, full of anticipation.

Her posture was as stiff as the back of the chair she was sitting on.

Grandmother was a tall, straight-backed woman, a dignified elderly lady, though today, as I backtrack in time, I confess I thought her much older than she actually was; she couldn't have been more than sixty at the time, almost twenty years younger than Grandfather, which I characteristically, having a child's concept of time, did not think such a large age difference then; I saw them both as equally ancient, resembling each other in their antiquity.

They were both lean, bony, and taciturn to the point of virtual muteness, and this, too, I saw as an inevitable, concomitant sign of old age, although they must have become taciturn for very different reasons and their separate silences did not have the same quality: Grandmother's implied a slight hurt, a constantly and emphatically communicated hurt, suggesting that she remained silent not because she had nothing to say but because she was deliberately depriving the world of her words, and would continue to deprive it, this was her way of punishing it, and I dreaded this punishment; I don't know what she was like in her youth, but in searching for the causes of her resentment, I had to conclude that she could not have coped with the fundamental changes that affected their way of life if she hadn't been able at least to flaunt her sense of having been wronged — the changes were simply too great for her — and as a young girl she had been much too pretty not to have believed that she'd be the world's pampered child until the day she died; for a few years after the war they used to be taken into town in a black Mercedes; always gleaming like a mirror and reminding me of a large comfortable coach, it was driven by a solemn-looking chauffeur, properly uniformed, his cap complete with ribboned visor, but of course they had to sell the car, and for years I covered my school texts and notebooks in now worthless stock certificates; once you removed the perforated coupons, the snow-white reverse side was ideally suited for this purpose; and then, unexpectedly, Grandfather closed his law office on Teréz Boulevard, as a consequence of which they had to let their maid go, and for a time after that Maria Stein moved into the maid's room until she, too, disappeared from our lives; finally, to complete the disaster, in the year when most private property was nationalized, Grandfather voluntarily, and without previously consulting Grandmother, surrendered all claims of ownership to their house; Grandmother was so unprepared for this, as Mother once laughingly told me, that when she found out, several weeks after the fact and quite by accident, she simply fainted — after all, the house had been her entire inheritance — and when they finally managed to revive her (it was Mother's older sister Klara who managed to slap some life into her) she imposed the worst possible punishment on both herself and the family: she refused to say another word to Grandfather, ever; what was most ludicrous about this was that Grandfather kept on talking to her, as if unwilling to acknowledge her silence; and in truth, her wounded feelings had to be taken seriously, because she wasn't born to be maid and nurse to three hopelessly ill and two mentally unhinged people — she was convinced that Father and I were not completely normal, and no doubt there was some truth in that; she was not cut out for such tasks, having neither the feeling nor the strength for them, even if she did carry out all her duties efficiently, conscientiously, with all the dignity of her wounded pride, while Grandfather's situation was just the opposite: he may have been silenced by his own inexhaustible patience and uncanny sense of humor; with him it wasn't a matter of wounded pride; more precisely, he did not consider himself the wounded party, it was just that he came to look upon the business of the world as so absurd, crazy, trivial, dull, and transparent that out of sheer consideration he didn't want to offend anyone with his opinions; to such an extent did he dismiss as not serious things others considered dead serious that he learned to hold back his natural responses in order to avoid dispute, and from that, I imagine, he suffered at least as much as Grandmother did from her wounded pride.